You Don't Have to Live Like This (2 page)

R
obert James was one of the exceptions. I ran into him at our ten-year reunion—outside Zapatas, a Mexican dive bar we used to go to for the cheap sangria. His friends were leaving while mine were going in, but they had to wait for a girl to come out of a bathroom, and I stood around with Robert for a while, catching up.

We’d been drinking since four in the afternoon, and the street lamp light gave me a headache. My jet lag was pretty intense, it left me open to strong impressions. All these people I hadn’t seen in years, these people who knew me, or knew what I used to be like. And here I was again, seeing them again. It was like a big chemical experiment, where you took these known quantities, these guys you used to live with and eat with and sit in class with, and poured them out into the world, to see what they turned into. Of course at the same time you were trying to work out what the chemical reaction had done to you.

“I hear you made a lot of money,” I said to Robert.

You wouldn’t know it by the way he dressed: North Face jersey, loafers, a pair of clean blue jeans belted high. But it didn’t matter anyway, with his looks. In college we called him the Greek God—he had the face of one of those statues. There was something imper
sonal about it. You could never tell what he was thinking, not that this meant he was particularly smart.

“I did okay.”

“So what do you do with yourself all day? Kick back?”

He began to explain himself very carefully. Lately he’d been working on a couple of political campaigns, mostly fund-raising—fund-giving, too, he said. There was a guy we both knew in college, a law student at the time, who lived in the dorms and used to play squash with us occasionally in the steam-tunnel squash courts. A big barrel-chested black guy named Braylon Carr, with a football background and postgraduate degrees from Cambridge and Stanford. Anyway, Robert had helped him run for mayor of Buffalo. These Rust Belt towns were having a hard time—American cities all over the place were dying out. But if Braylon could make a difference in Buffalo, it would turn him into a major Democratic player.

“I’ll let you in on something. He’s going to be the first black president of the United States.” For some reason this mattered a lot to Robert. “Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing to be a part of?”

“It doesn’t sound like a full-time job.”

But he’d started a hedge fund, too—a hedge of hedges. Basically, he went around the world picking funds to invest in.

“Does that keep you busy?” I said.

“I just got back from two weeks in China.” He had to repeat himself, because of the noise inside, and leaned towards me with his hand on my elbow. “You get to a point,” he said, “after a few days, when you know the routine. You’ve got two pairs of shorts and socks, a spare shirt, another pair of pants. The hotel takes care of the washing—they fold it up nicely and hang it outside your door in the morning. You’ve got passport and tickets. And you think, I could just keep going. I could go on like this as long as I wanted to.”

“Somebody said you got married.”

But he didn’t seem to hear me; he was drunker than he looked. “I take two percent of the capital and twenty percent of the profit. Even if we lose money, I make money. It’s not very hard to make money. You just need to be able to work out what two percent is.”

“Is that right.”

We stood there in the street while people went out and in. Everybody we saw was thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three years old. There were bald guys with guts and desk-chair asses, wearing suits and looking like your parents’ friends when you were a kid. I recognized some of them, too—like those Escher pictures, where the real image hovers under the surface. If you screwed your eyes up right, you could see the guy you knew. At least I still had my hair, I weighed what I weighed in high school. But I also thought, something has happened to them that hasn’t happened to me.

“Maybe I should move to Buffalo,” I said.

“Tell me why.”

“Or Detroit or Cleveland. It doesn’t matter. Somewhere you can buy a house on eBay for a few hundred bucks.” He looked at me and I said, “We could all buy houses. You could probably buy up a neighborhood. I still have roommates.”

“I thought you were teaching somewhere.”

“That’s right. At some Podunk college in Wales. I don’t know how much you know about the academic rat race. There’s a window of time to get on the ladder, but if the window closes, they don’t kick you out, they keep you on. They make you teach so much you have no time to write, and unless you publish you can’t get a permanent job. So this two-tier system develops. I’m on the wrong tier.”

“Why don’t you come home?”

“I’d love to, but there aren’t any jobs. And I don’t have health insurance. That’s the trouble with Europe—the welfare state sucks
you in. I tell you, this is not how I figured things would pan out. I don’t mean to embarrass you, but my plane ticket out here cost me more than I can afford. I didn’t come over to put up a front. I wanted to have some real conversation.”

“You haven’t changed much, Marny,” he said.

Marnier’s my last name, pronounced in the French fashion, which my college friends refused to do. So I got called Marny. Greg is my Christian name, but at Yale only my professors used it.

“That’s not how it seems to me. Or maybe I should have changed more. I don’t know.”

The girl came out of the bathroom and waved—I recognized her, short hard curly hair, freckles, she used to be a gymnast. Robert and I once drove out to the beach together. He borrowed his roommate’s car, there were four or five of us and she sat in the backseat. This was freshman year. She wanted to be a vet, I remembered trying to talk to her, and she stood in the street now calling, “Come on, Robert, I’m hungry.” The rest of their friends started drifting away, but one thing I always liked about Robert is that he never hurried anywhere for the sake of girls.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

“One of the dorm rooms. I think I’m sharing with somebody.”

“Listen,” he said, “you’re drunk, you’re tired. Get some sleep.”

“I’m embarrassing you.”

“You’re not, but they’re playing my song. I’ll see you later.”

Robert likes to joke that this is where it all started, because of some half-drunk conversation. But that’s just one of his stories. In college he was the kind of guy who would ask you about some writer, some class assignment,
okay, so what’s his deal, what’s his line, what do I need to know
. As if you could break a book down into two or three usable ideas. He was famous for walking out of a three-hour philosophy exam after sixty minutes. He strolled to the front
of the class, he laid down his paper, and he looked up at the rest of us. “Good luck, folks,” he said. I think he did fine, not great but fine. What I mean is, he made quick decisions, but he was very deliberate, too. And when I saw him that day he was already getting restless, he had backseat political ambitions, he had money to spend, he was looking for something new.

W
hen I woke up the next morning, I had ten or twenty seconds of real confusion. Partly because of jet lag. It didn’t feel like waking up, it felt like being hit on the head and slowly coming back to consciousness. I was lying on the bottom half of a bunk bed and looking out, through an arched window, at a sycamore tree full of campus sunshine. It took me a while to get my bearings, to realize where I was. But even after I did, for ten or twenty seconds, I couldn’t remember what I was doing there—how old I was, or if I had to make a class. Then I remembered and the hangover kicked in, but that didn’t matter because the years were gone anyway.

After breakfast in dining hall, I caught a train to New York. This gave me two hours to screw my head on straight. It’s not a bad journey. I liked looking at the waterside mansions, the poky harbors, the bays, and later on, the big industrial views of Bridgeport and the row houses of Queens. Some of my classmates rode that train to work; some of them had summerhouses on the water. At Grand Central, I transferred to Penn Station and bought a Greyhound ticket to Baton Rouge.

I wasn’t going back to Europe, that much was clear. Something had shifted in me over the last twenty-four hours, like back pain.
You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs. I guess I might have stayed with friends in New York, but I was tired of imposing myself. If you’re going to be a bum, I thought, you might as well bum around at home.

The Greyhound ticket cost two hundred bucks and the whole journey took under three days. We stopped in Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Richmond, Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, Montgomery. Staring out the window hour after hour kind of concentrates and expands the mind at the same time; but it’s also somehow liberating, it eases the heart, to realize that you don’t need anything but a few hundred dollars and a backpack to move home.

I kept thinking about what Robert said to me, about the two sets of clothes and the laundry routine. Every time the bus pulled over, I stepped out to stretch my legs and thought, this looks like a good place to live, maybe I should live here. Then I got back on the bus. From a gas station phone box I called my mom, who promised to clear the stationary bike from my old bedroom.

A colleague took care of my affairs in Wales—packing my room up (I didn’t have much) and selling or throwing away what I didn’t want shipped. It amazed me how little effort was required to dismantle ten years of my life. Nobody cared if I came back or not. There was still some grading left to do for the summer term, but the department secretary as a personal favor sent my exam papers to Baton Rouge. Basically, I felt grateful for the work; it kept me occupied. My dad had retired and I spent too much time that summer playing golf with him in the morning and watching the afternoon baseball game on TV.

Sometimes I went out with high school buddies. One of them took me duck hunting in his boat, out at Pointe-aux-Chenes. This was later in the year, early November. He worked in real estate but had recently lost his job; both of us found the days and weeks hard to fill. I held a gun in my hands for the first time but there wasn’t much to shoot at. Which didn’t bother me, I had fun anyway. “This is really a long way from Aberystwyth,” I said, kneeling down in the boat, on wet knees. There were little hummocks of what looked like floating grass all over the bayou. The air on my neck felt as cold as a used towel. It was pretty early in the morning and the light grew up around us like something spilling over the rim of a bowl.

The fact is, I don’t know where I felt more at home. Nowhere. And once we finished catching up we ran out of things to say. I called him a couple of times but was relieved when he didn’t call back. Similar things happened with other people.

I didn’t have much luck finding a job. I started out applying for university gigs all over the country. My mother was reluctant to let me go. She said, “I’ve just got you back”—a coded way of saying she didn’t trust my state of mind. But it didn’t matter, nobody wanted an unpublished historian five years out of grad school anyway. So I lowered my sights and sent out letters to every private high school in commuting distance from Baton Rouge. No dice.

In January, after a New Year’s resolution, I moved to New Orleans for a couple of months. My dad put me in touch with some friends of his who had a big house on one of those gated roads out by Audubon Park. Their daughters were all grown up. I rented one of the empty bedrooms and slept in a cast-iron bed, with these old film postcards Blu Tacked to the wall beside it: Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, Gloria Grahame. The girl whose room it used to be was now a resident oncologist at the Tulane Medical Center.

Every day I took the streetcar into the Quarter, where I cleaned tables at CC’s Coffee House. But it became clear to me that I wasn’t coping very well, and I moved back home.

What saved me is the election. My dad is a Clinton man and I volunteered for Hillary in the primaries, which put me in touch with a lot of interesting people and gave me something to do. My parents didn’t mind that it wasn’t paid. Probably I put too much of my time and energy into the nomination, I cared too much, and needed to set my own life in order. When she came to Louisiana, some of the volunteers got credentialed to hear her speak at a grim corporate event at the downtown Omni. But afterwards she said to one of the organizers, “I know you can have a better time than this in New Orleans,” and somehow I ended up in one of the cabs taking people over to the Acme, which was surrounded by Secret Service and fully booked. I managed to station myself by the door when she made her getaway.

“You from around here?” she said, shaking my hand.

“Baton Rouge.”

“Go Tigers,” she said. “And what are you doing with yourself these days?”

“Biding my time.”

Whenever I couldn’t sleep, I replayed this conversation in my head. It took me about a month to forgive Obama—for beating her. But then some friends of mine from the campaign persuaded me to volunteer at MoveOn. There were people who thought they could use the Katrina disaster to turn Louisiana blue. Well, we got within twenty points. But when the votes started tightening in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, I decided to fly out one weekend to New Haven. MoveOn was sending everyone from Yale up to Claremont for a couple of days, and it seemed like a good excuse for seeing old friends.

I knew that Robert James grew up in Claremont, or near enough, in the countryside around it. His dad had a law office in town—he represented a lot of farmers. Robert mentioned once that he went to Claremont High, which surprised me, because I figured him for a private school kid. But that’s probably just the kind of place it is, I thought. A rich man’s village. In fact, it looked tougher than that. There was a bookshop and a coffee shop on the main square, but the rest of the commercial units were either boarded up or fronting pizza chains or dime stores or pharmacies with the cigarettes prominent in the window.

Our job was to rustle up votes in the first neighborhood you drove into coming north off the highway. Mountains surrounded us; it all looked pretty picturesque above the roofline. But the houses were cheap and run down, and we had to negotiate some ugly angry dogs before knocking on doors. The kind of people who lived there were the kind of people who wouldn’t vote for a black guy, even a half-black guy. I heard a lot of talk in the media about Obama’s slick grassroots operation, but the main thing we accomplished was to piss people off. A carful of Yalies going around saying, What are the issues for you in this election? Is there anything I can help you understand?

That was the line we’d been told to spin by the heavily bearded and buttoned dude at Obama HQ. HQ makes it sound too grand, it was a defunct Honey Dew Donuts in downtown Claremont. The place was full of Yalies, wearing overpriced pseudo-workingman’s clothes: leather boots, tough khakis and plaid shirts. After each run we reported back; they wanted a house-by-house account of the swing-vote situation. At one point I bumped into Robert James.

He said, “Marny, there’s something I want to talk to you about.” So he turned to the bearded guy and told him, “Phil, I’m taking
off,” and led me to his car, which was parked in the square, and we drove out to his parents’ house in the woods.

I’d heard about this place in college. Robert sometimes invited a few friends back when his folks were out of town, though I wasn’t one of them. Sometimes he just came with Beatrice, his college girlfriend. She was a friend of mine, too, she was my friend first, and maybe that’s why I didn’t make the cut. Anyway, I never got invited. It was a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse set back off a dirt road, with a one-step stoop and brightly painted shutters beside the windows. Rosebushes lined the path to the front door, and I could see around the side of the house an apple orchard falling away to a pond at the bottom of the garden. The rest of the land was covered in trees.

Robert’s mom was as handsome as her son. Steely-haired and unmade-up, she limped around the house in a boot cast. But a broken foot didn’t stop her from bringing us coffee and slices of Bundt cake to the screened-in back porch.

“Where’d you get that?” I said, and she smiled at me. There was still something left of the way a good-looking woman looks at a man.

“That’s sweet. I made it.”

“No, I mean the foot.”

“Oh, it was stupid. We were hiking out by Ripley Falls and I slipped on some gravel. Five years ago I would have finished the hike, but I’ve got old-lady bones. One of them broke. A very small one, but it hurt.”

When she banged her way out again, he said, “I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you. What are you doing with yourself these days?”

“Not much.”

“Because I’ve been thinking of taking you up on that Detroit idea.”

Obama’s success, though he wouldn’t say so, had wrong-footed him. He was late to get on the bandwagon and didn’t have the right Chicago connections anyway—he didn’t know anyone from the inner circle. Braylon Carr, the mayor he backed in Buffalo, had a difficult relationship with Obama. Bill Clinton had campaigned for him, and Carr had put his neck out for Hillary in the New York primaries. Robert knew the Clintons fairly well. He admired Obama and was trying to make up lost ground, but he wanted something to do in the meantime, something high profile, that would get the right kind of attention. Detroit was all over the news. Chrysler, Ford and GM, the Big Three, had just asked for a $50 billion bailout, and Congress was negotiating a package.

Robert wanted to talk me through the idea.

“I can’t buy up the city, but I can put some investors together and buy up sections of it. Nobody wants to move there alone, but you can use the Internet, you can use Facebook—what I’m talking about is a kind of Groupon model for gentrification. The question is,” he said, “who would go there and what would they do when they got there? These neighborhoods are in bad shape. It’s basically a war zone—I mean that, in the middle of America. People are burning down houses, and not just for the insurance. My friend Bill Russo took me around. It’s like driving through London after the Blitz. The city has given up on certain blocks; the fire service won’t come out to them anymore. But there are still some beautiful big houses standing empty. You could do whatever you want with them, set up any kind of society. There’s a guy who talks about plowing the land into farms. But you’d need a critical mass of people to make it work. People like you, but would people like you move to Detroit? I mean, would
you
?”

“Yes,” I said.

Afterwards, he drove me back to Claremont and I went out again with another carload of volunteers. The sun set around half
past six, the temperature dropped, and the sky between the mountains turned a very bright evening shade of dark blue. I had that feeling you get when you’re a kid out playing in the yard and you see the lights turn on at home—outside looking in. The shape and movements of people, closing curtains and sitting down to watch TV. All these private lives. It seemed a shame to make them open their front doors. Then we drove back to HQ and Phil ordered pizza; later a few of us walked out into the cold country night looking for a bar.