You Don't Have to Live Like This (26 page)

I
n the morning, I checked the
Free Press
website for news about Meacher, but there wasn’t much. Then I started googling around. I found something on the
Voice of Detroit
, an “independent” news site set up by ex–
Free Press
journalists, former city administrators, union organizers, etc. A lot of their content came from citizen reportage. They ran a story about Larry Oh and Robert James. Apparently these two had had lunch together over the weekend, at Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor. Some law student took a picture of them on his phone and wrote it up for the
VoD
. (One of the comments asked, “So what did they order?” It turns out that Robert had a “Dinty Moore.”)

I also found an op-ed piece in
The New York Times
about the history of the citizen’s arrest. The byline said Anthony Carnesecca. This is how it finished:

Let’s imagine that Tyler Waites intended to impede Dwayne Meacher, even at the cost of running into him. Could this constitute a justifiable
arrest
under Michigan law? Arrest is defined as the “stopping or restraint of a person,” and the law establishes three conditions for the just use of this power: that
a felony has actually occurred; that the fleeing suspect against whom force is used must be the person who committed the felony; and that the use of force must be necessary to ensure his apprehension. In Waites’s case, all of these conditions have been met. In a city like Detroit, whose tax base has been decimated by population flight,
taking the law into your own hands
is not just a phrase from some Lee Van Cleef movie, but a necessary feature of a citizen’s obligations, to himself and his neighbors. You may not like it, but you don’t live in Detroit.

About an hour later, Tony himself stopped by. He had his Number One son with him, as my father used to call it. Michael stood a little behind his dad and tried to reach a hand into his pocket. If I didn’t see him every couple of weeks he turned shy with me. Relations with kids take work, I had to keep starting over.

“Is it too early for a treat?” I said to Tony. “I don’t know what I’ve got in the house. Maybe ice cream in the freezer.”

It was already about eighty-five degrees outside, and the shade of the porch didn’t make any difference. The sun couldn’t beat the clouds but the heat got through anyway, a kind of damp heat. I was tempted to switch on the AC just to clear the air.

“Let me take you to lunch,” Tony said. “I want to celebrate.”

“I saw your piece in the
Times
.”

“That’s what I mean, I’m in a good mood.”

But it was only eleven a.m. and we swung by Robert’s house on the way. “I’m touching all the bases,” Tony said. We took his car, I didn’t have anything else to do. I said to myself, you’re turning into the go-along guy. The gates stood open when we got there. Some guys were working on them, and we had to park in the road. Tony rang the doorbell several times, and eventually Robert’s wife, Peggy, answered it.

“Sorry,” she said. “We were just coming in from the garden. It’s too sweaty out there. Robert bought Ethan this inflatable pool. He buys it, but we have to blow it up.”

We followed her into the kitchen, where her son was playing.

“How long are you in town for?” I said.

“Just this week. We’re having work done on the apartment, so I thought, let’s get out of here.”

She had brought the nanny with her, one of those women who puts makeup on her face to look unhappy. Maybe because she’s not pretty enough. Her coloring was dark; you could see sweat on the hairs around her lips. But she seemed perfectly nice. Peggy said she was studying at the Tisch School but needed a break—she was two years into a PhD in cinema studies.

“What’s your subject?” I asked her.

“Contemporary Scottish film, Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, those kinds of people. But I’m not in any hurry. I mean, they keep making movies. It’s hard to get them in focus, they won’t sit still.”

Peggy said, “It’s intense having a nanny. I mean you’re around these people all day, just you and the kid. I couldn’t do it with somebody who didn’t have a brain.”

“We have fun,” the woman said. Her name was Fran. She picked up the boy and carried him to the sink to get water.

Michael said, “I’m thirsty.”

“Well, ask the lady,” Tony told him. “You’ve got a tongue.”

The kid walked over and Tony turned to Peggy. “Is Robert around?”

“In his office. He’s talking to Zwecker.”

“Do you mind looking after this guy for a minute?”

“Sure.”

“What are you doing to the apartment?” I said.

“It’s very boring. Painting the walls.”

“It’s not boring, it’s your life, it’s where you live. All these stupid decisions.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Colors are tricky if you don’t stick with white.”

“We’ve got these big windows in every room, it’s not a loft, but loft-style windows. But they’re north-facing. It makes me depressed on sunny days, so I want to splash some color around the place.”

We went on like this and eventually I said, “Do you have any aspirin? I’ve got like a weather headache.”

“Sure,” she said and went out. I watched her legs. She had these teenage legs, skinny and tanned and loose at the knees. Whenever I saw her she had shorts on, but like fashion shorts. Somehow it hurt me to look at her. My high school was full of girls with legs like that, but I never did anything about it. Then she came back with a pill and a glass of water.

“I know, it’s terrible until it rains,” she said.

“It’s not always much better after it does. You guys are lucky, this is real air-conditioning. All I got is a window unit.”

“We have to with Ethan, otherwise he can’t sleep.”

So we stared at each other a bit, two likable people, being likable, without much to say. There was no point of contact between us. This always amazes me about human beings—we become such specialists. Even the essentials get filtered through our particular interests. But I didn’t want to talk about kids or paint jobs, and Robert seemed off-limits. I said, “Tony promised to take me out to lunch. I’m going to make him pay for once.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe I’ll go find out what they’re up to.”

At the bottom of the stairs I ran into this Zwecker guy. I hadn’t seen him since the fund-raiser. It was hard to say what he dressed like these days, somewhere between a wise man in
Star Trek
and
a medical orderly. He wore loose trousers and a tight mandarin-collared shirt made of synthetic material. He was a big guy; it showed his weight.

“So what are you and Robert cooking up?” I said.

“Virtual policing. We’re working on an app right now. The idea is that people can use technology to police each other. It’s already happening with journalism, but we want to take it a step further. People these days carry phones that do everything you need to do, from a policing point of view. They track your position, they take photographs and videos, they record sound. The guy who filmed Rodney King getting beat up is everywhere right now, he’s you and me.”

“I have one of these cheap convenience-store phones.”

“Show it to me. It probably does more than you think.”

“I’m not that interested. It sounds a little spooky.”

“Look,” he said. “You can make it out to be a police-state issue if you want to. But this isn’t the state I’m talking about, it’s the people. What we’re really harking back to is the idea of the small town, where everybody looks out for everybody else but keeps an eye on them, too. What do you think the Pilgrims did to keep law and order, they didn’t have a police force.”

“Of course they did.”

“That’s not my understanding. They had a witness system. You needed two witnesses to get a conviction.”

“I don’t think any of us wants to live in Plymouth Colony.”

“That’s not my field. What it really comes down to is money. You can talk about rights all you want, but the fact is, everything costs something, even rights, we have a limited budget, and have to figure out what to spend it on. Right now the policing in this city can’t get the job done, the tax base just isn’t there to pay for it. So we’ve come up with a cheap way to fill the gaps.”

“You could call it the Stasi app.”

“All right.”

“I’m not trying to give you a hard time. A good friend of mine pretty much lives by the E-change.”

“You mean he uses it for sex.”

“More or less.”

“The trouble is people don’t use this technology to make them happier. They use it for pleasure. Whenever you get an advance like this, the first thing it appeals to is the lowest common denominator. We have to evolve with the technology and that takes time.”

“What do you mean?”

“For example, dating services. We have at our disposal this incredible tool for arranging marriages, but people are still using it in this unbelievably basic way. Even the people who aren’t just after sex, who want committed relationships, who invest a lot of serious time in finding a partner, treat the search capacity of the Internet the way Jane Austen would. They look at education, they look at looks, they look at hobbies and interests. But we’re starting to find out so much more about people. For example, we make incredibly short-term decisions about attraction. We act like attraction is something that can only be measured in the moment, as if the window of attraction that matters is a couple of years. The number two reason for the breakdown of marriage is sexual infidelity, and the truth is, this can be predicted, this can be guarded against. We’re starting to get DNA information about the way people age, about their sex drives, that should form the basis of any serious decision about compatibility. I know from my own experience that I’m attracted to pale-skinned, black-haired women, Irish types. I also know that pale skin tends to suffer sun damage over time, that pale-skinned women who don’t take enormous care of their appearance turn either reddish or look bleached-out,
and that neither of these qualities is attractive to me, that pale skin and blue eyes is a recipe for skin cancer, etc. All of this is a matter of medical record, you can look at the photographs if you want to. So I adjust my attitudes towards attraction. I know about myself that I have a moderate sex drive, probably in the bottom half of the range, somewhere in the second quartile. And we’re learning to connect sex drive to genetics and make predictions over time about, let’s say, the expected sex drive of a twenty-two-year-old woman when she reaches her fifties. But this is only one aspect of what I’m talking about.”

Tony came down and I said, “Are you ready for lunch?”

“You coming?” he said to Zwecker.

“Is Robert coming?”

“No.”

“Then I think I’ll pass. I’ve talked this guy’s ear off already.”

Outside the house I said to Tony, “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

“Oh, Jesus. Maybe we can leave him here.”

So we rang the bell again, and this time Robert answered. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows; he had bare feet.

“I forgot my son,” Tony said. “Marny and I are going out to lunch. Do you mind if I leave him here for a couple of hours?”

“This is not my department,” Robert said. “Talk to Peggy.”

Tony went into the kitchen and Robert said to me, “Come inside. The air condition’s getting out.” So we waited in the entrance hall, with the piano and the fireplace and the twenty-foot ceilings. There was a vent by my feet, and I could feel the cold air blowing up the legs of my jeans.

“We should go for a run sometime,” I said.

“I’d like to. My back isn’t great. When it feels better.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing you can really fix. At some stage you realize, you don’t have to fix it, you don’t have to make it right, you just hope it lasts—it sees you through.”

“Well, let me know. What do you think Larry Oh’s going to say?”

“We’ll have to wait until he says it.”

“Didn’t he tell you anything at lunch?”

Robert looked genuinely surprised. “What are you talking about?”

“I thought you guys had lunch together in Ann Arbor over the weekend.”

“Who told you that?”

“I read it online somewhere. You’re like a famous man.”

“Not that famous,” he said. I tried to wait him out, but he changed the subject. “I hear your brother was in town. I’m sorry I missed him.”

“He didn’t stay long.”

“But you had a good time?”

“He’s a brother. It’s like an old marriage. A lot of familiarity, a lot of contempt, no sex.”

“Marny,” he said.

“I don’t know. I feel kind of weird, I feel a little drifty.”

“What’s going on?”

“Not much. Gloria took off for a week. She’s got some camp thing.”

“So you’re batching it. This is why you’re hanging out with Tony.”

“I guess. I don’t know how you do it, going back and forth. You’ve got to be two people, one with them and somebody else on your own.”

“You get used to it. They blend after a while.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. But then Tony came back, followed by Fran and Peggy and Ethan and Michael.

“Just give him a ball to kick around,” Tony said. “He’ll be happy.”

Peggy picked Michael up. He was an armful, but she swung him around on her hip, the way mothers do, and stuck out a leg. “You want to wave bye-bye to Daddy? Wave bye-bye.”

Fran asked Tony what his son liked for lunch, but then Ethan started complaining. He didn’t like seeing Mommy with another boy. So Fran scooped
him
up, but that didn’t help much; he squirmed and pushed against her face. Peggy kept holding Michael, who looked quietly at his father. “He’ll eat what you give him,” Tony said. “Come on, Marny, let’s get out of here. Before the shock wears off.”

“You go ahead.” There was something in the air making me sneeze, so I went to the bathroom and tore off a few sheets of toilet paper. Tony was waiting for me in the car.

“
Wave bye-bye
,” he said, when I got in. “What the fuck is that about? He’s four years old.”

“What’s Cris doing?” The leather seat felt hot on my back, where the shirt rides up.