You Don't Have to Live Like This (30 page)

Gloria asked me this, too. She said, “I have to ask you. I get it from all sides. It’s what everybody wants to know.”

“Trying not to make things worse.”

“How much worse could they have been?”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too. Worse.”

“Marny, I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to think about it. You find out things, and you think, who is this person, do I know you?”

“You know me. You know me better than these people who write these stories.”

“That’s what you keep telling me. But I’m not sure. How come they knew about the guns and I didn’t?”

“They weren’t important.”

“They seem important to me.”

All of this might have been easier if she weren’t living with me. Sometimes she came out the front door to find photographers in the street. You sort of get used to that but not really. She needed somewhere else to go, she needed to go home, but her home was a construction site. I guess she might have stayed with her mother, but she never got along with her mother, and these days they got along even worse because of me. Her mother was an unusually socially conscious person. She cared what strangers thought of her, and her daughter’s association with a guy who was in the news for the reasons I was in the news upset her sense of family class. But look, this is all from my point of view. Maybe Eunice just thought I’m an asshole, that’s possible, too. Either way, Gloria didn’t really want to stay with her, at least while we were still together.

The other problem, and this seems petty in the general context, but I think it mattered, too, was just that damn kitchen. Gloria was under a lot of stress, and she took some of it out on the contractor, who was a likable and basically hardworking guy, but not very well organized, and not very good at communicating with clients. So, for example, she ordered a stained beech worktop, but there was a problem with the distributor. It was going to put the job back weeks, so he cut a deal on a stained oak worktop instead, and started cutting it down to size. And told her about it afterwards. This is the kind of thing. Gloria made him go back to square one and refused to reimburse him either for costs or labor. Then there was an issue with the gas supply. Her apartment was in an unmodernized and badly maintained building from the 1930s, held together by spit and plaster. When he took out the old oven he started a leak that meant he had to shut down the supply in the whole building to fix it. Which pissed a lot of people off—at Gloria, not at him. After a while he started taking a tone with her, the tone of a reasonable man doing his gentlemanly best with
an unreasonable woman, which drove her crazy. And as I say the whole thing dragged on and on.

I don’t want to take sides here, maybe I should have taken sides. Workingmen, contractors and plumbers and carpenters, carry a kind of male threat and appeal, which makes it difficult for some men to insist on terms and conditions. I guess I’m one of those men. Also, it wasn’t my kitchen, and maybe some part of me felt that Gloria was building her escape hatch or something, I don’t know. But you can’t stand around watching a guy working hard and competently, doing things you don’t know how to do, and then start complaining to him about the difference between stained beech and stained oak, and quibbling over prices. At least I can’t.

Gloria wanted from me a little more interest and cooperation, but that’s not really what the problem was. The problem ran deeper and didn’t have anything to do with the kitchen. People always liked Gloria, she got along with everybody, and suddenly here she was fighting battles on all sides, with people who clearly considered her a difficult personality. With her mother, herself a real professional piece of work. Sniping back and forth with Mrs. Sanchez at school, mostly for my sake. And now she heard herself nagging away at Kevin the Contractor, the kind of slightly shifty good-natured overweight man who usually flirts with her. Somehow she had backed herself into a corner where just to go anywhere in any direction she needed to get her claws out. And I can’t help thinking that at a certain point it occurred to her that the corner she was stuck in she was stuck in because of me.

But I don’t want to paint everything in bleak and dismal. And the truth is, when I look back on our relationship, these two months stand for what I miss—I mean the months we were living together, in the house I shared with Walter and Susie. At first, over the summer vacation, we all had time on our hands. But later, when Gloria
started going back to school, I used to walk her part of the way just to make sure I got out of bed in the morning. When the weather was nice; otherwise she drove. We kissed on a street corner and I watched her go, my working woman, dressed in her own version of a school uniform, the simple skirts and high socks, clean shoes, a collared shirt or blouse. I say uniform because I knew her well enough by this point to realize that even her natural modesty, good humor and kindness were a form of protection, against strangers and kids, against the world, against anybody who didn’t love her, which makes up a high percentage of the total. So my heart went out to her as she kicked through the leaves.

On my short walk home I thought about what to make for dinner and sometimes picked up a few things on the way—from Annie’s Corner Store, some hippie-dippie hole-in-the-wall grocer that had just sprung up. Or I got in the car and drove out to Greenfield Market, which was more of a hassle but cheaper and took up more of my day. That was the main benefit. Money didn’t worry me much at that time. I had put a lot by from teaching the previous year. And I also had some vague sense that the way we were living couldn’t last. So I thought about money like it was food on a plate, something you enjoy and finish off.

Fall came late and mild. Detroit always has a summer mosquito problem, but Gloria and I kept getting bitten deep into October. At night the street lamps shone like sunshine in the yellow leaves. We left our bedroom window open, but the reading lamp attracted bugs, and Gloria had sweet blood—she got bitten more than I did. At least the mosquitoes still like me, she said. She got bitten once on her chest, just where a pendant might hang, on the visible skin between her breasts. Gloria didn’t want to scratch it because the scab would show, but sometimes when we were in bed together, making out, she got this unbearable wriggly kind of itch. She made
me scratch it for her, and it was kind of a sensual delight, and also kind of not. It was more childish than that and a distraction from the other thing. So when I tried to kiss her she just said, no, don’t stop, scratch it there, there, there. I mention this just as an example. We didn’t always fight.

And even our fights felt like the real thing. We were living together, we were lovers, and we were working out some deep strife between us, which is what lovers should do. Gloria wanted me
not
to testify against Nolan. She wanted me to take sides—against the whole idea, against the rest of us. Let Tony and Nolan fight it out; it’s their fight. I said the only thing I can do is tell the truth, anything else will get me into trouble. “It’s not that simple,” she said, “and don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not that worried about you.” It wasn’t just a question of what had happened. There was a context, there were consequences. “You have to work out what
you
want to happen,” she said. “Because what you say is going to have an effect on that. You have to work out what you think Nolan deserves.”

“This is too complicated for me, Gloria. They’re going to ask me some questions, I’m going to give them some answers. That’s all. It’s really not up to me.”

“Excuse me, no. That’s like a Yalie’s point of view, because you basically trust the system. You think, all I have to do is tell the truth, so help me God. But the system doesn’t work, so it’s a question of getting from it something you can live with. I mean, what’s Nolan looking at? Life with parole. Ten years. Four years. Think about Clarence. Because whatever it is, he’ll have to live with it, too.”

“You want me to lie for him.”

“I want you to make the right thing happen.”

“That’s not my job. They’ve got judges and lawyers working this thing out.”

“You mean, the people who let Tyler Waites hit a young black man with his
car
. For stealing his
phone
.”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” I said. “You’re identifying me with people I’ve got nothing to do with.”

“These are the people asking you questions. I just want you to think very carefully about your answers.”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

“Think harder,” she said.

I told myself, this is just the friction that produces the heat. We were working out whether to align ourselves. It’s supposed to be painful, like a slipped disk—you have to learn how to move again. I said this to Gloria, too, but she wasn’t convinced.

N
olan’s trial moved from the district court to the circuit court. There was a motion hearing, to determine admissible evidence, and I went along to see what everyone had to say. The Frank Murphy Hall of Justice looks a little like a parking garage built in the 1970s, concrete with horizontal windows and those broad courthouse steps you need in the movies, to show the defendant tumbling down them into freedom or trapped halfway up by reporters.

Inside the place was done up in brown and beige. Everything was carefully coordinated, brown tables and chairs, beige walls, brown carpeting, nothing that shows stains. I guess the idea is to depress people into submission. The judge was an overweight black woman; her accent ranged from sonorous to nitpicky. A placard on the table in front of her had her name on it: Judge Liz Westinghouse. It seemed funny to me that she used her nickname—I tried to work out what that meant. Maybe her full name didn’t fit. But she had also clearly acquired what the self-improvement gurus try to sell you, strength of personality. When she came in people rose, when she sat down people sat.

Mostly what happened was procedural stuff, and not very interesting. There wasn’t much evidence in dispute. Nolan’s lawyers wanted to argue that the kid was in the street, wandering around—not in the house or
the garden or the driveway. Apparently one of the cops overheard Nolan in hospital saying something about the guys working on the front gate, which seemed at least an indication of his general vicinity. But his lawyers wanted to rule these comments inadmissible—the guy had been kicked in the head, he was just waking up. There was also some dispute about whether or not the cop had read him his Miranda rights before or after Nolan said what he said or what he was alleged to have said.

I found the whole business both depressing and impressive. All this attention to detail. You realize pretty quickly that you are in the hands of massive but at the same time small-scale forces. It’s like being overrun by ants. Afterwards what you get is not facts exactly or truth or anything like that—there’s no reason to think that the real facts or the real truth is best adapted to surviving this process. I mean, I was there, I saw a lot of what happened, but I don’t know how much of what I saw or thought would have counted with these people, the lawyers. But there are certain kinds of information that do survive. It’s like those urban myths about nuclear holocaust, the only thing left is cockroaches. But that’s not quite what I mean either. There’s a kind of reproach you feel, in seeing firsthand these competent, expensively trained people do their work. Like, on what basis do I live my life? Can it withstand this kind of scrutiny? No, not really. But I also heard in the back of my mind what my brother might have said if he were watching—that some of these guys were second-rate.

Nolan was there, too. I saw his shaved head. Even he seemed cowed. Sometimes he turned and whispered something in his lawyer’s ear. And afterwards, on our way out, I caught his eye, and he gave me a look like, here we go, buddy.

A FEW DAYS LATER THE
aluminum story broke in the business pages of
The New York Times
:

Hundreds of millions of times a day, thirsty Americans open a can of soda, beer or juice. And every time they do it, they pay a fraction of a penny more because of a shrewd maneuver by Goldman Sachs and other financial players that ultimately costs consumers billions of dollars.

The story of how this works begins in a complex of warehouses in Detroit where a Goldman subsidiary stores customers’ aluminum. Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again.

This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by
The New York Times
has found. The back-and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which charges rent to store the metal.

The writer was a guy called Kocieniewski; I looked him up. A Buffalo kid, he used to work at
The Detroit News
. Most of his article was about the London Metal Exchange, its corporate structure (Goldman used to be on the board), and the protocols for storing precious metals. “Industry rules require that metal cannot simply sit in a warehouse forever,” Kocieniewski wrote. “At least 3,000 tons must be moved out each day. But most of the metal stored in Detroit is not being delivered to customers; instead, it is shuttled from one warehouse to another.”

Two days later someone at the National desk picked up the story and connected it to Robert James. The headline was gently tongue-in-cheek: “Detroit Scheme Makes Profit, by Sitting on Its Assets.”

Robert James describes it as the “Groupon model” for gentrification. “We take a virtual community and make it real,” he said last year at the shiny new Wayne Conner Server Farm, at a fund-raiser attended by President Obama. There were questions from the beginning about how the economics stacked up, but now it appears that Goldman Sachs, one of James’s “team of investors,” has been buying warehouses in the developed neighborhoods to store aluminum. . .

So Steve Zipp was right. Maybe he was crazy but he was right. Then
Time
magazine ran an article on us, “Utopian Vision Faces Real-world Politics and Problems,” which covered not only the aluminum scandal but also the Meacher incident and Nolan’s trial. The journalist wanted to know whether the Goldman deal was funding the neighborhood project or whether the neighborhoods were just window dressing for a commodities scam. Beatrice didn’t worry much about the difference—the article quoted her. “This maybe matters to you people,” she said, “but I don’t have time for philosophical distinctions. We’re trying to do something good here. If Goldman broke the law, then the law should step in. Otherwise, I don’t see what the problem is.”

The problem was, as she explained to me herself one afternoon, that regulators planned to change the law and close one of the loopholes—three thousand tons turns out to be a pretty low minimum for the amount of metal warehouses have to shift each day. “Goldman’s one of our biggest investors,” she told me. “If they lose their financial incentive, we’re screwed.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

She hadn’t stopped by the house in months, I figured she had given up on me. So if she came by now there was probably a motive—she wanted something. “I’m just keeping you in the picture,” she said. “It’s your picture, too.”

“Look, I should tell you something. I knew about this beforehand. I may have mentioned it to Nolan.”

It was a cold prewinter day. I like this time of year, two weeks before Thanksgiving. The trees were leafless, the sun came in from every angle. Through my kitchen window, you could feel the light being translated into heat. Gloria had lent me her Gaggia, until the work was finished in her apartment, and I made some coffee. Beatrice looked important and attractive, a busy person, while I stood around in my jogging shorts.

“Nolan’s not the problem here,” Beatrice said. “But we need this money. If Goldman backs out, we have to make up the difference somewhere. And that will probably mean selling houses—speeding up the process. Which takes away control, it turns the whole thing into an open market. People will start selling, they’ll start buying, you’ll be living on a street with real estate signs in the yard.”

“Is that a problem?”

“It depends what you want. But I don’t think it’s what you want. This place isn’t ready yet. You need a culture—markets depend on cultures. But markets don’t make cultures, you have to engineer them. That’s what we’ve been trying to do. The health care, the ratio of shops and houses, the parks and schools, but you know all that. Handpicking tenants, different kinds of people, getting commitments from them. If they sell up now, in two years’ time we’ll be back where we started. At least, that’s my best guess. There’s also concern about what happens if this case goes to trial.”

“What do you mean, if?”

“The only thing that makes sense, and I mean that from Nolan’s point of view, is a plea bargain. Otherwise he’s looking at some very scary possibilities.”

“So he should make a deal.”

“His lawyers say he doesn’t want to—he wants his day in court.
And we’ve got our own concerns about that. This case has already attracted a lot of bad publicity. The last thing anybody wants is a courtroom drama.”

“Except for Nolan.”

“In that case, Nolan has a very limited conception of his self-interest.”

“Is that what you want to talk to me about?”

“Marny, we’re talking because we’re talking. I’m worried about the trial, but I didn’t come here with motives. I’m proud of you. You’re one of the success stories, you’re one of the people holding this thing together. Teaching at a local high school, living with Gloria.”

I looked at her and she said, “You know what I mean.”

“Well, I haven’t been teaching this year.”

“I heard that, too.”

Afterwards I went for a run and tried to work out what she wanted from me—that I should talk to Nolan. Or maybe she didn’t want anything, I was just being paranoid. Running gives you a mild high, thoughts dislodge themselves, things occur to you, and it occurred to me that I had come a long way from the kid I was, that I was doing all right. Beatrice had spotted this and pointed it out. Either way that’s what she meant. I had become a point of contact between opposing views, somebody she could turn to for help. And maybe she was right about Nolan’s self-interest, too. You can’t dismiss an argument just because you don’t trust or share the motive of the person who makes it. Also, I basically
did
trust Beatrice. She always left a scent behind in a room, not just her perfume. She was somebody you naturally wanted to please, and that had a kind of aftereffect.

GLORIA TRIED TO BREAK UP
with me as soon as her kitchen was ready. “You just used me for my appliances,” I joked. But
that’s not really what was going on. There was a coincidence of events. Without telling me Astrid had uploaded the video of us having sex onto her website, along with a lot of other stuff: more of her videos, photographs of Detroit, etc. Maybe she told me, maybe I knew, I don’t know. Later she said, which was true, that the deal always was, whatever I video, I can use. Anyway, I stopped thinking about it. In some ways I’m not a very private person. There’s a lot of stuff you’re supposed to care about that I don’t. But somebody found the link and tweeted it, at which point the video went twittering around—a really inexplicable number of people watched it. I could write down a number but it keeps changing, even now. Gloria came home from school one day and showed it to me. Some of her kids had seen it.

“I don’t know if I’m more embarrassed or upset,” she said.

“I think you’re more upset.”

“That’s a very stupid thing to be a part of. Don’t tell me what I feel. You don’t want to know what I feel. I’ll tell you what I feel. You spend all day trying not to shout at the kids and then I come home and try not to shout at you. When I got in the car I just thought, that’s enough. Nobody’s happy anymore. What’s the point.”

“I’m happy,” I said. “This is my happy face.”

“Don’t play games, Marny, I’m not.”

We talked a lot more than that, we said stupid things. She started packing up to go home. Just give me a couple of weeks to get my head on straight, she said. But she kept thinking about that video—she wanted to know when it was shot.

“Listen, Gloria. Don’t think about it. It’s upsetting, but it’s got nothing to do with us. I know you’ve had sex with other people, you know I’ve had sex with other people, but we don’t want to think about it. This makes you think about it, I understand that. But it’s not important.”

“It’s not just this, it’s Nolan, it’s everything. I just need a break. I don’t want to fight you all the time.”

We held on a little longer after that. She stayed the night and left in the morning and moved back into her apartment. But we kept seeing each other—a little less often than before.

The last thing we did as a couple was try to talk Nolan out of standing trial. It’s strange that on this major source of conflict and disagreement, we ended up briefly on the same side. It was like an intervention; his mother was there, too, and we sat in their kitchen and one by one we said, please don’t do this thing. Everybody (except for Nolan) was extremely emotional. I felt very close to Gloria, to all of them. I was really at the heart of something, sitting in that family kitchen and debating with these people something so important and intimate, where the decisions you reach collectively have real consequences. But we didn’t reach any collective decisions because Nolan shut us out. He sat there, he took it, but he didn’t say much.

The best deal he could get was four years, which might mean closer to two in practice. That’s what Larry Oh was offering him. If the case went to trial, he could end up with a life sentence—maybe he gets out on parole after fifteen years. Nolan was pissed off, among other things, that Oh had decided not to press charges against Tony for assault. He planned to sue Tony, after the criminal case resolved itself, for medical damages and general psychological suffering. But he was having a hard time finding a litigator to take on the case—Nolan saw a conspiracy in this, too.

Gloria was often in tears; Mrs. Smith was in tears. She brought out cake and coffee, but I was the only one who ate anything. Nolan made his own coffee.

“I don’t need to tell you this,” I said, “but there’s a big difference between two years and fifteen years. Right now every option looks bad. I know it must be hard to choose between outcomes you don’t
want and can’t even really imagine. But that’s what you have to do. Two years means Clarence is nine when you get out. Fifteen years means he’s twenty-two. The difference is basically his whole childhood.”

“You haven’t been reading the papers,” Nolan said. “Clarence is in Arizona. And seriously, what chance do you think I have to get him back if I go to jail?”