Chapter 20

1:20 p.m.

Susan did a double take behind the wheel of her gold Honda Accord. She thought she saw Michael’s Ford Focus in the driveway as she drove past Ilios Lane. Why wasn’t Michael at work? His commissions had gotten so small that he hadn’t received a bonus in five years, and Susan had had to go full-time at the Oak Park Community Housing Office. The month before, he was passed over for promotion to a guy who’d been with Lowry Brothers only three years. There was talk of layoffs, but then the talk flittered away, and Michael, chastened, continued in the same job with the same title and territory he’d had for years.

“Ilios Lane!” the client in Susan’s car yelled. “I didn’t know we were so close!”

Susan had just shown her an apartment on Austin and Augusta. “Well, the next property is a good four, five blocks away still.”

“I mean, you must be able to practically see Ilios Lane from the apartment, no?”

“No.”

“It seems like you could. Like you should be able to see it.” The girl was looking at Susan suspiciously, the diamond in her nose sending strobe flashes across the dashboard. The two had just finished looking at a mint-condition, rehabbed one-bedroom on Austin Boulevard with parking, and Susan was annoyed that the young woman had not immediately recognized this as a rare find.

“No,” Susan said, a little more firmly than she should have. “Really, you can’t.” Susan knew what always sealed the deal for her clients was her own life. “I’ve lived on the east side for sixteen years,” she’d tell them. “I raised my kids here,” she’d add, even though her own street did not have a single black family and never had in the years she’d lived there.

They used to work, these aphorisms of hers. The family, the kids on the east side. But things had been tough lately. There were the assaults by the three black boys who’d come over from the west side, there were the muggings, first in the bank parking lot on Madison, and then in the alleyway behind Ace Hardware. And now these burglaries on her very street, in her very house. Already, she’d had two clients today and the burglaries had concerned them both.

Now this twentysomething girl, with the pierced nose. The kind of funky young adult who’d have moved into the east side without a second thought back in the nineties. Today, driving through the neighborhood, she was vacillating, eyeing Ilios Lane in the passenger side mirror as it fell behind them.

Susan had fallen into her job at the Housing Office largely by accident. Almost to the day after she graduated college she met Michael at a Jessie and the Jawbreakers concert at the Hideout. They waited eight years to marry, waited so long that it seemed in equal proportions both inevitable and entirely unlikely. Yet a month into their marriage, she found herself pregnant, and when Thomas was born, she’d had to quit grad school and her job as a social worker’s assistant to care for him. From that moment, she recognized in her own life a cliché she’d always worked hard to avoid. She vowed to return to school, but of course never did. After a few years with Tommy, just when a return to grad school seemed possible, she got pregnant with Mary and kissed away another four years. Eventually she found work at the Housing Office as an escort, taking people around the town, showing the highlights: the Lake Theatre and Barbara’s Bookstore, the little diners and gift stores, Petersen’s Ice Cream parlor and Erik’s Deli. Lately, it had gotten harder and harder with all the chain stores moving in—the Gap and Borders and Trader Joe’s. But mostly her job was to show them apartments on the east side, encourage them to be part of Oak Park’s diversity, be part of the wonder of this unusual village.

Susan had loved her job. She believed in the program and loved meeting all the different new people who came to look at the apartments. In the dozen years she’d been at the Housing Office, she’d seen tenants become lifelong friends, seen a few meet each other and marry and have children. Dan Kowalski, her neighbor, had been an early tenant on Austin Boulevard, until he married Alicia and moved to Ilios Lane. She’d shown the Cambodians the downstairs apartment in the two-flat just two doors down from her and they’d lived there for years now.

Michael tolerated her work, but didn’t think what she was doing was all that innovative or would ultimately change much of anything.

“Human nature,” he’d tell her, “wants to be with its own.”

“You’re wrong,” she’d insisted. “We are changing things. We have changed them.”

“Just wait,” he’d scoff. He’d nod sarcastically. “Just wait. You’ll see.”

But she’d use her own life to refute him. In college she’d dated a black classmate of hers named Harley, who would go on to be a brilliant sociologist at Northwestern University, but back when they were nineteen, his world was a revelation to Susan. He’d grown up in Milwaukee, a black among whites. He was more comfortable, he told her once, in a room full of whites rather than blacks because he’d grown up around white people, and this, he believed, was the defining sadness of his life. It left him feeling groundless, floating above everyone else, standing at doorways knocking, his whole life, knocking. “It’s what I’ll always do,” he’d said. “I’ll always be knocking at doors. I’ll never be inside anywhere.”

“Not mine,” she’d told him. “My door’s open.”

He’d smelled like warm tea and coconut. They dated for six months and he told her stories about being on the bus and having all the seats taken except the one beside him. He’d tell her of walking through campus at night and hearing the footsteps of the young women in front of him speed up. He’d tell her things she’d later read in books by Richard Wright and the Steele brothers, the clichés in which white fear manifests itself. She’d listen to Harley talk about his life, and then, later, she’d read about that same kind of life, that same experience, in every African-American narrative put to paper, and it would make her want to break off the high heels of the women who scurried more quickly before him, pour water down the gas tanks of taxis who refused to stop for him.

The afternoon he finally ended it with her, she cut him off, said, “This is the part where you tell me it’s not me, it’s you, right?”

“It’s not so small,” he told her, “as to be about me.”

She wanted to ask if it was about her then, if he was too ashamed to say so, if it was he who couldn’t get past the idea of her. She didn’t understand the barriers weren’t about her, about any one person. He had taken on the philosophies of the young and idealistic, those who, for the first time perhaps, were suddenly able to place themselves in the larger framework of the world, people beyond the homes they grew up in, the parents and neighborhoods who’d raised them. For Harley, Susan thought, it seemed as if this idea hadn’t freed him, as it had her, but had further imprisoned him.

“This is not solvable by us,” he told Susan. “I’m sorry. I can’t be with someone I have to explain my world to every day.”

“That’s not fair!” she cried. She’d stopped just short of begging.

“You’re right. Not fair to either of us.”

She thought she had begun to understand now, the exhaustion of it all, being with someone like her. Even someone with good intentions, even someone with an open mind, with all the right beliefs, still lacked the tangible, corrosive evidence of experience. That gap was impossible to fill.

Her husband, Michael, had always told her the whole Oak Park program was racist, trying to get white people to live among black people. He believed in free markets, even in the field of sociology, that you rehab the buildings, raise the rent, and see who comes. Stay out of nature and you’ll see how nature really works. Look at our own damn street if you need evidence.

Now, some small part of her feared Michael might have been right. September 11th Syndrome, they called it at the Housing Office. People were skeptical in the same way they’d been skeptical in the early and mid-eighties. They were scared. The fear brought out their worst tendencies, tiny kernels of bigotry and racism. It wasn’t just white people who began to voice these fears. It was anyone with a middle-class income. Indians from Delhi, Chinese from Shanghai and Hong Kong. The only universal in all of this was that everyone’s fear found the same targets: poor blacks. If they were poor and they were black, then they were sure to live in crime-infested neighborhoods no matter how much the gardens were kept up, no matter how full the recycling bins were. Susan was not too big to admit that she was scared. Scared for the program, scared for the neighborhoods she’d worked so hard to transform, and scared—she had to admit—for her family. For herself.

Later, back in her office, she pulled a lease for the girl with the pierced nose. She’d found a place on Oak Park Avenue, the top floor of a six-floor flat where the five other apartments housed thirtysomethings with urban sensibilities and decent salaries. And white skin. The girl was coming back in the morning to give her deposit and sign the lease. Susan couldn’t help but feel slightly deflated.

Her boss, Evan, came in to chat. Evan was hardly a boss. He was one of her closest friends. He and his wife, Viv, often came to Michael and Susan’s for dinner parties or vice versa. The families’ children went to school together. They ran into each other at Unity Temple occasionally, though Susan was admittedly a halfhearted Unitarian—more interested in the community than the message. They’d known each other twelve years, since Susan’s first day on the job. She turned around in her metal folding chair. The entire office was reminiscent of a church basement, tiled floor and cheap, secondhand furniture, leaky ceilings.

Evan told her he was surprised she came to work. Said they’d all have understood if she’d wanted to stay home. “Is there anything you need, Suze?”

Susan sighed, shrugged. “A stereo.”

He laughed. They sat together for a moment without talking, the kind of silence that might have been awkward with lesser friends.

“Really. If you need some time . . .”

“I’m fine, Evan. It’s a burglary, not a death.”

He pursed his lips and nodded, his eyes glancing out the storefront window as the elevated train passed their office.

“What?” she said.

“What?”

“You’re doing that thing with your cheek. You’re here for something. I know that look.”

He laughed, picked up a blue lead pencil from the table, and began to roll it between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s just that the robberies—”

“Burglaries,” she corrected.

“Burglaries?”

“We all had a semantic lesson from the detective yesterday.”

“Well, you know, it’s only been a day. Maybe you want to take some time? Take a little vacation.”

“Work is good for my constitution,” she said, smiling.

Evan put down the pencil and leaned toward her. “Things have been tough around here, Susan. You know that. I don’t have to tell you that. All of you escorts have it rough.”

“What is it, Evan?”

He drummed his fingertips on the table. “The burglaries have come up today.”

“I know. My clients asked about them, too.”

“They’ve come up a lot, actually. The clients, the other escorts. Everyone’s talking about what happened. Everyone just feels awful.”

Suddenly, she began to understand what he was saying. She felt her heart begin to sag. “Twelve years, Evan. I’ve been here twelve years!”

He waved his hands at her to stop. “It’s not that. You’ll always have a place here. Always. I want to stress that, Susan. You will always be like family to every one of us.”

She was aware, only now, that no other escorts were in the room. Evan must have planned this moment, this talk. They must’ve all been in on it. She felt captive in that wide-open space.

“We just think with things the way they are, it might be good for you to take some time off. To take care of things.”

“What things? There’s nothing to take care of, Evan. You want me to take care of things?” She felt her voice rising, wondered if clients in the front waiting room could hear her. “You want me to go shopping or something? Because that would take care of things. Shopping would be the only fucking thing I could do in this situation.”

“You’ll still be on the payroll,” he offered in such a quiet voice, Susan had to strain to hear him.

Her body seemed warm. Was she overheating? Was the thermostat turned up? “The payroll? You think I work here for the payroll, Evan? For the lucrative benefits package?”

“Calm down, Susan.”

“You calm down!”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes for a moment. “Susan, it’s very difficult for everyone here. And with the burglaries, the other escorts think it might be good to try and lay low for a while. You know, everyone sees you on the news, and . . .”

“The news? It’s my newfound celebrity status? Jesus, Evan. I’m here. I’m still here. I live this program. I am this program. What better advertising do you need than a victim who’s still a believer?”