That weekend Beatrice had arranged a launch party at Bill Russo’s house on the shores of Lake St. Clair. A publicity stunt. There was a big barbecue on Saturday, with a band and a marquee, as the English call it. Basically a large tent. The idea was, so people moving in could meet a few representative members of “old” Detroit—community leader types, priests, schoolteachers, artists, businessmen. WDIV, the local NBC affiliate, had promised to send a van. The house was grand enough for some of Robert’s “closer” friends to stay over, which included me, and Sunday afternoon was supposed to be a chance for us to hang out quietly before things got crazy. Robert’s wife planned to fly in, with their son. Clay Greene was also bringing his family.
It’s about an hour in the car from Detroit, and I drove up with Bill Russo and Johnny Mkieze and Beatrice, in Bill’s old Cadillac, his father’s car, a 1963 DeVille. Johnny and Beatrice squeezed in the back. I was kind of jealous of them, sitting on top of each other like that, with their legs pushed to the sides and their knees knocking. Johnny was a small guy, but physically strong and very dark-skinned—attractive to women. His accent was almost perfectly American, but he had a way of talking to women that no straight American man could pull off, like he was one of them, but in a flirty way, too. He made them laugh.
I said to Beatrice, “You gotta have a woman up front,” but she insisted: “You get carsick in the back.” Which is true, I’ve got no stomach for tight spaces. So I said to Bill, “I guess you’re stuck with me.”
After five minutes, with the window down, I forgot about the two kids behind me, who couldn’t hear us anyway with the noise from the road, and talked to Bill. Everyone seemed in a good mood. It was the first really warm day of the year, what I would call southern warm, where you don’t have to worry about a little wind or shade. The air felt like an old towel fresh out of the dryer. I didn’t know Bill very well though I’d known him for almost fifteen years. We had one of those funny relationships, intimate-flavored, kidding, natural, but also formal, polite and distantly friendly at the same time. There were basic facts about his life I was ignorant of, and vice versa. Like the fact that his sister was married to one of the producers of One Tree Hill, and lived in Hollywood, in Beverly Hills, in a house with a small Picasso in it.
“A small Picasso,” Bill said again.
I was suddenly very happy to be there, with this young state rep, in a classy old car, driving out to some beachfront mansion, which he’d been going to since he wore diapers. It was great to hear him bitch about that Picasso.
In college I thought he was a spoilt little rich kid—one of those kids who compensates by digging latrines in Ecuador over summer vacation. But his friends were still private school friends and he wore his varsity wrestling jacket all over campus. Somehow, he hadn’t changed but I didn’t mind. It was also true that he spent his days doing good in the world, and rubbing shoulders with the kind of people I don’t even like to shake hands with when they ask me for change outside the lobbies of heated buildings. He visited the Boys & Girls Clubs, talked to drug counselors (mostly reformed addicts), pushed their case in the House, sometimes gave out of his own pocket. Prison reform was his hobbyhorse. “People think I’m a crazy fucking liberal, but I’m basically a practical guy. Most of those bums deserve to rot in jail but it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.”
He had passionate political feelings but also liked to chase women and get drunk. Sometimes he used his political earnestness to chat up girls—this was the sort of thing I used to dislike him for. He missed doing “fun drugs,” stuff like mushrooms, marijuana, ecstasy and cocaine. We talked about all that in the car. In a couple of years if he wanted to get serious about politics, he was going to have to marry some nice girl. But not yet. You have no idea, he said to me, what a turn-on it is, political power. I can get girls these days who I couldn’t even kiss without standing on a step. (He’s about five foot seven, a pink-faced, clean-shaven guy who still looks like the boy next door.) The girls get turned on, aides, interns, secretaries (never his own), he gets turned on, everybody gets turned on together, by his access to committee meetings and the governor’s cell phone number.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” he said. “I’ll tell you something else. There’s a story that Matt Damon’s coming tonight.”
“What do you mean, a story?”
“Maybe Beatrice told me, I can’t remember. My sister knows his agent and Matt’s in Detroit filming. I got my eye on him.”
“For what?”
“To play me in a movie, what do you think. When I’m president.”
After all this, the house, when we finally pulled up the drive, turned out to be sweeter, smaller and quainter than I imagined. Mud-gray shingles and crooked chimneys, with a screen porch at the back. A couple of loose steps pointed down the garden path to the beach. His great-grandfather built it in 1913 when his shares in Ford Motor took off. He was one of the first people to pick this particular spot along the shoreline of Lake St. Clair. But the garden was large and beautifully, wildly kept, with rose hips and blackberry bushes, plum trees and tulips leading down to sandy grass. There was also a short rotting dock and a speedboat in the water.
Inside it was bigger than it looked, with lots of small bedrooms sharing bathrooms and corridors. From the bed my room had a view of the water, and I lay down and took a nap while people tramped around downstairs. I could hear men in the garden hammering in the stakes for the marquee. When I woke up it was maybe four o’clock, a very clear lakeside windy afternoon. I put on a jacket and tie and went out the back into the garden, where somebody in black tails handed me a champagne cocktail. There were maybe thirty people standing around; the women had to hold on to their hats.
The first person I recognized was Michael Carnesecca, Tony’s kid. He hugged me around the knees and made me spill my drink. I like this kid; Cris let me give him a sip of what was left in the glass. He made a face and said “More,” and then we played chase with the glass for a while—he jumped up and I held it out of his reach. He was a little violent; it got out of hand. At the same time I was looking around at the other guests, looking for Matt Damon, and Cris, misunderstanding me, said, “Go ahead, Marny, go find some pretty girl.” But she had to pull him off me in the end, by force, and took him aside into the bushes to bawl him out—in undertones. It was the first time I saw her lose her temper.
So I refilled my glass at one of the white-clothed tables and ended up standing next to a woman with flowers, real flowers in her hat. Roses and petunias, I don’t know. She was a ripe-colored black woman, almost eggplant-colored. Her lips were painted some glossy shade that made them look freshly licked. In her summer dress she stood the way a man stands in jeans—I could see her plump strong legs under the material. She was short, too, and looked about fifteen years old.
It was difficult to hear so we walked down towards the water, towards the sandy grass. The band was starting to set up by the back porch. Her name was Gloria Lambert and she taught art and computers at Kettridge High School—about five minutes by car from Johanna Street. In fact, she knew Johanna Street well. A good friend of hers lived on Johanna Street, and I started to laugh.
“I guess you met Nolan,” she said.
“Yeah, I met him.”
“His bark is worse than his bite.”
“That doesn’t mean he don’t bite,” I said, though why I said don’t I don’t know. “Is he a boyfriend of yours?”
“You ask questions. How many you think I got?”
“So how come you know him?”
“There’s a program I run where local artists come in to talk to the kids.”
“Is that what he is? So why did you get invited to this thing?”
“I won the Eliza Curtis Hubbard Memorial Award.”
“Which is for what?”
“Teaching art. Let me ask you a question. This is what I don’t understand. Those are some nice houses on Johanna Street, but what are you going to do when you get there?”
“I don’t know. I’m drifting a bit right now.”
“Well, what are you good for?” she said.
In the windy sunshine, everything looked very beautiful and real. Maybe I fell a little in love. I said to her, “You’ve got the most amazing skin I’ve ever seen on a human being. Do people say that to you?”
“White men. Usually they put it a little different.”
I had just drunk two champagne cocktails on an empty stomach. There was a flagpole in the garden, about twenty feet high and made of painted wood. The paint was peeling but the Stars and Stripes hung out straight in the wind and sometimes dipped suddenly and folded over itself. That’s how I felt all afternoon, coming and going.
Then someone said, “George,” and pulled at my elbow. It was the German girl, Astrid, the hitchhiker, with a camera in her hand. She took my picture with Gloria, who afterwards moved away.
“How did you get here?”
“Your friend Robert likes blondes. Don’t you remember, you sent me his email address?”
“What happened to Ernst?”
“He wanted to go, I wanted to stay.”
This is how the afternoon went on. If I wanted to get out of a conversation, I said, “Have you seen Matt Damon? He’s supposed to be here,” and pretended to look for him. A video guy pushed his way through the crowd, with his face hidden by the machine. Whenever I saw him I carefully finished my sentences. There were speeches, too. Robert James said a few words; the wind made rough kissing noises and squeaks against the microphone. Bill Russo talked. “This is the house my great-grandfather built with money put in his pocket by the men who worked the line at the old Ford Motor factory in Highland Park.” For maybe an hour, around six o’clock, I played quietly inside with some of the kids. Clay Greene had showed up with his two boys, and I met his wife, Helen, a very tall, handsome, likable, not at all graceful woman, who was trying to make macaroni and cheese. “There isn’t any butter,” she said. “Can you run to the shops to get butter?”
“There aren’t any shops here. I’m too drunk to drive. I don’t have a car.”
Beatrice came in, looking for something, and saw Helen. The two big, good-looking women embraced, leaning over each other.
“I need to get a few things from the shops,” Helen said. “Do you mind staying here with the boys? They’re perfectly happy. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Beatrice said, “No, that’s fine. Of course. Go.”
“Are you sure? I can’t face wrestling them into the car.”
“Go.”
So she went. One of the boys, the smaller one, started crying and going after his mother, so Beatrice with a certain rough familiarity picked him up in her arms. She was wearing a linen pants suit—working dress. The boy kicked and she dropped him and stood kind of flat-footed and unhappy while he cried.
“I’m no good with kids. These kids don’t like me.”
“They can hear you,” I said.
“Fuck you, Marny,” she said and walked out.
So I got some pots and wooden spoons from the kitchen and sat down on the floor, banging them together. The older one was reading books. After a while, they both got bored and tried to go into the garden, but I reached the door in time and shut it. The small one started to cry again and Clay Greene came in with Peggy James, Robert’s wife. She had a baby wrapped around her middle in a kind of cloth.
Clay said, “Quiet, son, you’ll wake the baby.”
“He won’t,” Peggy said, “and anyway, it doesn’t matter.” She was pretty, too, less handsome than Clay’s wife but more attractive and noticeably younger than us. She had a button nose and very expressive mouth—big clean healthy gums that kept her mouth open and smiling. Also, she was skinny as a boy, even after childbirth, and wore shorts, because of the hot weather, and her legs were tanned and smooth and strong and thin. She wore pull-up stripy sports socks and sneakers. She was like a sexy kid sister. Everything was okay with her, and when Helen Greene came back Peggy woke up her baby to give Helen a cuddle.
“You look fantastic,” Helen said. “God, how do you do it. I bet you even get some sleep.” And I went outside to find another drink.
The band was a sort of Supremes look-alike act, but shorter, older and fatter, and with bigger hair. They played an afternoon set and an evening set. Around seven o’clock the first bus arrived, to take the guests with kids back to Detroit. Then the lights came on, in strings, hung across branches and bushes and the undercarriage rope work of the marquee. Another round of champagne made its way among us, in bright groups, on the waiters’ trays. Astrid and I went walking into the trees, glasses in hand.
“I’ve had a very bad time,” she said. “It’s only beginning to get better.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk. I talk about it too much.”
We started making out a little. There was another wooden jetty farther along the shore, mostly hidden by reeds, which kids probably used for diving off. We sat on the wet wooden boards at the end, letting our legs hang and kissing, which isn’t easy. I had a crick in my neck. Eventually she said, “I should tell you, I’m in a project at the moment where I’m filming everything, about me and my life here. So even if we end up going to bed together I want to film it. I don’t know if you are comfortable with that.”
“But you’re not filming this now.”
“I’m not stupid. Everything isn’t possible.”
“Where are you staying tonight?”
“I don’t need to stay with you, if that’s what you mean.” Then: “Do you want to go swimming?”
“It’s too cold for me.”
A few minutes later we stood up (the seat of my pants had gotten wet) and walked back to the party. I kept looking out for Gloria but couldn’t find her. I had never kissed a black girl and wondered if they tasted different. But maybe she had caught the seven o’clock bus. I had another drink. There were things to eat, too, but I wasn’t hungry and had a kind of surging important feeling that it was possible to be more simple and honest with people than I usually was. I could say to Gloria, I want to kiss you and I could also admit that I had never kissed a black girl. Astrid was very honest, and even though she was also pretentious and I didn’t like her much, I admired her for it. She was very pretty anyway. I hadn’t had sex since coming back to America, over a year ago. The way all this frustration built up inside me is to make me think, nobody is very kind to me, and nobody knows me well, either. But I couldn’t find Gloria, she had probably caught that bus. Beatrice walked past me, almost pushed past me, with a red face. I said, “Hey!”
“I need the bathroom,” she said.
“I want to talk to you.”
“You can watch me pee.”
So I followed her inside (she was using the house toilet, not one of the porta-potties lined up by the air-conditioning units) and stood by the door. I could hear the loud stream against the porcelain and water, then it stopped and I could hear the contact of the toilet paper. She came out with wet hands.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I’m worried about you.”
“I’m worried about me, too. I’m worried about you.”
I tried to kiss her and she pushed me off. We stood looking at each other, combatively. Good-naturedly, too. It was kind of fun, like playing squash and wanting to win. I tried to kiss her again and this time she let me and we kissed for maybe a minute before she pulled away.
“Marny,” she said, “please, don’t force it,” and walked out into the garden again. Eventually I followed her, feeling pretty tremendously sad and drunk.
There were maybe fifty people still standing around, under the lights, though the second bus idled in the narrow roadway at the front of the house. I could hear it, and see it through the trees: “RedLine Motor Company, You’re Halfway There.” But the band sang “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” and the microphone magnification made it sound like it was coming from somewhere else. Maybe the shore. The wind had died down; the night was clear, not very hot. The stars looked about as far away as the lights of a house across a lake.
I hadn’t talked to Robert James all night, but I’d seen him. His wristwatch strap had broken, so whenever he wanted to check the time he had to take the watch out of his pocket and hold it softly in his hands. For some reason this was very endearing. But I caught him now alone, looking at a broken champagne flute in the grass.
“You wondering if you should pick it up?” I said.
“I don’t want anyone to step on it. One of the kids, tomorrow morning.”
“It’s starting to get messy, isn’t it?”
“What?” he said, and I waved behind us at the party. There were people dancing on the plastic parquet laid down under the marquee, but not many. Maybe five or six couples. There were also a few tables scattered underneath and people sitting around those. A queue outside one of the porta-potties—the other one had overflowed.
“You want to walk down to the water with me?” Robert said. “How are you doing anyway?” We reached the foot of the pier and stepped out onto it, and then Robert climbed down suddenly into the speedboat. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to turn it on. I just want to feel the water.”
“I’m thirty-four years old. I have no job or wife or kids or girlfriend. For some reason I’ve moved here, on your dime.”
“Don’t worry about that. I got a lot of dimes.”
“I don’t know, Robert. I’m having anxiety-sadness.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a hundred things I’m worried about, but what really worries me is that even if they all turned out okay I wouldn’t be any happier.”
“I’m a little caught up in temporary concerns myself,” Robert said.
“What kind of concerns?”
He didn’t answer for a while. Even in the half-light coming from the garden and reflected in different ways off the water I could see he was a very good-looking guy. Without making any particular effort. He wore chinos and a shirt and no tie. But he looked comfortable in boats and like the kind of guy a woman could trust to pay for their kids’ private schooling. “You know,” he said eventually, “my father, before he died, started exposing himself. Mostly to his nurses, young women.”
“I didn’t know he was dead. I’m sorry.”
“Partly it was just one of these mental degenerative things. Alzheimer’s, whatever you want to call it. And nobody got hurt. He wasn’t threatening or anything. But it was like, all his life what he really wanted to do was take down his pants. And just show people, I don’t know. You never met him or maybe this would mean something to you. But when I was a kid, Jesus, this guy had all the answers.”
“So he was old. He had a brain thing.”
We sat there feeling the waves underneath us. “When was this?” I said.
“Maybe it started three years ago. He died last fall.”
“So what are these temporary concerns?”
But he was done talking. “They’re not important. They’ll go away.”
After a while he got out and I followed him (I kept following people) and we walked back up the faint slope into the garden.
“Listen,” I said, taking his arm, “I just want to say good-bye to someone,” because I had seen Gloria in the line of people making their way onto the bus. She was standing and waiting her turn.
“You going?” I said to her. “I want to talk to you. I’ve thought of a better answer to your question.”
“I can’t even remember it anymore. I don’t remember your name.”
“Marny,” I said. “Can I give you a call?”
“You’re drunk. If you can remember it you can call me.”
And she told me her number and got on the bus. For several minutes I wandered around in a daze, repeating it, until I found a pencil in the kitchen and wrote the numbers down on the back of a Sports Illustrated subscription card, which was lying by the telephone. When I came out again Tony Carnesecca was standing in the porch light.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he said. “You were mumbling like a crazy man. Anyway, there’s something I want to tell you. Cris is pregnant.”
“That’s terrific.”
“She wanted me to explain why Michael’s been acting up. She’s weaning him. They’ve all gone to bed.”
“That’s terrific,” I said again. “I think I’m gonna go to bed, too.”
I felt a little sick, walking up the stairs, but then I saw a light under Beatrice’s door and knocked. She had the room next to mine—we shared a bathroom. When there wasn’t any answer I got undressed and went for a piss, but after brushing my teeth I couldn’t help myself, and knocked again on the bathroom door.
“What is it, Marny?” she said. “What do you want.”
“I want to come in.”
“I’m trying to go to sleep.”
“Why can’t you sleep? I don’t want to be alone.”
“Just come in for Christ’s sake and stop shouting. It isn’t locked.”
So I went in. She was lying in bed with her hair spread out against the pillow. The bedside lamp put half her face in shadow. Her skin in the light looked tired. I thought, she’s thirty-four years old.
“What do you want?” she said.
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing, staring. I forgot my book.”
“I want to sleep here.”
“What are you, twelve.”
I felt weird standing there in my pajamas while she lay flat on her back, covered in bedclothes. I said, “I don’t think you’re very happy either.”
“I don’t want to have one of your talks. I’m not in the mood. I don’t want to explain anything about myself and I don’t want to hear your explanations either.”
“Beatrice, this is what I’m like. You used to like me. You used to like me for being like this. So I like to talk. Sometimes I don’t even know if other people have intimate conversations with themselves in their own heads or if what they talk about to themselves is the same shit they talk about to me. What time their babies wake up and how much their fucking kitchen is going to cost. For example, I have no idea what you talk about to yourself. No idea. If that’s just adult life, count me out. There are things that became very clear to me tonight.”
She didn’t say anything so I went on. “I used to be in love with you. You probably know that but I thought I should tell you anyway.”
“God, Marny. Is this how you talk a woman into bed?”
Suddenly she seemed in a good mood, she looked cheered up. “Come here,” she said and I sat down next to her. “You can lie down if you want to. I’m not going to sleep with you, but you can lie down here if you want.”
So, feeling dutiful, I climbed under the sheets beside her and lay on my back. Beatrice rolled over and switched off the bedside lamp.
“Come here,” she said, rolling back, and held me. Her eyes looked right into mine, too close for me to see her properly. She kissed me on the face a little and then kissed my mouth. I kissed her back, trying not to kiss too hard.
“You’re going to be okay. We’re all going to be okay. Anyway, I’m not unhappy, just in the dumps. There’s a difference.”
“What’s the difference.”
“The dumps doesn’t matter.”
“Was it seeing his wife?”
“I’ve seen his wife before.”
“But is that what it was?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and turned over again on her back. Then she said, “I don’t mind if you stay all night, but I want to sleep.”
I don’t think she fell asleep right away, she couldn’t have, but I didn’t get another word out of her. I just lay there, not moving. I didn’t want her to kick me out. This funny phrase came into my head: you must be so happy. I meant me. But the truth is, I couldn’t sleep at all like that and the night stretched ahead. I got that feeling I sometimes got as a kid of looking at myself through the wrong end of a telescope. Eventually she started breathing softly, one breath after another, and the fact that this big warm female animal, almost six feet big, was lying next to me and not wearing much started to take effect. An erection climbed up my pajama pants and wouldn’t go away. I don’t know how long I lay there, not sleeping—several hours. Sometimes my erection went down a little, but this made it touch my thigh so it came back up. Jesus, I wanted to rub it against her like a dog. But I also wanted to show her, Look what I got, what am I supposed to do with it. All kinds of crazy thoughts came and went. I thought about Robert’s dad. I thought about Gandhi. I read once that he liked to sleep naked with naked girls, to test his chastity. And it occurred to me that all this sexual pressure, which had been building up all day, and not just all day but for months and years it seemed, wasn’t building towards anything. It was just there and maybe what you did was learn to ignore it. I don’t know how to put this without seeming crazy, but I started to have kind of saintly fantasies, I mean fantasies about a life of chastity and repression and so on, and this was the first test of it. I was doing okay. If you can get through tonight you’re going to be okay, you might make it through to the other side of all that stuff.
Eventually I tried to sneak out of bed and she half woke up.
“Are you going, Marny?” she said and pulled at me a little so that she could kiss me. Her breath was warm, almost hot. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry,” and let me go.