You Don't Have to Live Like This (9 page)

I
had seen Walter Crenna maybe two or three times since leaving Yale. Once over Christmas break several years ago, when I hung out with Beatrice and Bill Russo at Walter’s place in Washington Heights.

It was just good luck that I happened to be in town—because of the AHA conference. My supervisor at Oxford, who was chairing a panel, invited me to give a paper on it, so Aberystwyth paid my flight. I say good luck because Walter had been having a hard time. Bill heard about it first and recruited me and Beatrice to cheer him up.

“Or at least make sure he doesn’t kill himself,” Bill said. The three of us met at Penn Station and took the subway up together.

“Don’t be melodramatic,” I told him.

“Well, judge for yourself.”

This is the story. After graduation, Walter lived at home for several years, helping out his mother. His father had Parkinson’s and needed a lot of care, and Walter, who was very close to his father, made himself useful: driving him to his medical checkups, shopping and cooking. His mother needed to keep working for the sake of their health insurance—she taught English at a local
private school. Walter was supposed to be writing a play or, failing that, studying for the GRE and applying to grad school. In fact, he mooched around the house all day, reading his high school yearbook, playing piano, picking up novels and putting them down again. Cooking elaborate meals and leaving the kitchen a mess for his mother when she got back from work. They argued a lot, Bill said. She was pushing him to do an MFA or find a job, but the closest he came to either was substituting sometimes at her school.

When his father died, she kicked him out. Bill knew Mrs. Crenna fairly well. She even called him at the time to ask his advice.

“What did you tell her?” I said.

“I didn’t tell her anything, I listened.”

“What did she do?”

“She called in a favor with a friend of hers at Dalton. Anyway, he ended up getting a part-time job helping out in the theater program. Teaching a couple of classes, putting on shows. So Walter moved to New York—she found him an apartment, too. For these reasons, and a few others I won’t go into, she blames herself for what happened. I had her on the phone last week in tears. Go see him, she said, he doesn’t want to see me. He’s ashamed. Which is why I called you guys.”

“So what happened?”

“You can guess. He got mixed up with one of the students. His job involved a lot of contact with students, which he liked; they liked him, too. Then he took things too far with one of them, and the parents got wind of it. For a while there was talk of a criminal prosecution, but I think that’s died down. Anyway, he’s lost his job and can’t afford to keep up the rent and doesn’t want to go home anymore to face his mother.”

“How old was the kid?”

“Sixteen.”

“A he-kid or she-kid?”

“I thought you’d ask that. Turns out he’s into girls.”

“So what did he sound like when you talked to him?”

“We haven’t talked. He’s not answering his phone. I only heard about what happened from his mother, who called me on Christmas Day. But we had an email exchange.”

It was snowing when we came out of the station, new snow on top of old—snowing and almost windless. The flakes held up in the glare of the street lamps. Aberystwyth never gets very cold, and I had on only my ordinary winter jacket, a thin fleece from Gap. I was shivering badly by the time we got to Walter’s place, a ten-block slippery march over half-cleared sidewalks. Beatrice, thinking maybe of our night on the clock tower, said, “I don’t care why we’re here, it’s fun to be out with you guys again,” and put her arms through each of ours. In her boots, she was taller than me; Bill came up to her ear. So we walked like that, the three of us in step, through the snow-muffled streets of Washington Heights.

Walter wasn’t feeling the least bit tragic or ashamed. I could tell that much as soon as he opened the door. But he didn’t look well, either. He looked heavier than in college, when he was already heavy enough; and in the heat of the apartment his face had a red sweaty shine. There was a smell of onions coming from the kitchen. “I’m making tomato sauce,” he said, “excuse me,” and came back a minute later with glasses and a bottle of wine.

His apartment was nicer than I thought it would be, but messy. The rooms had high ceilings; the windowsills were big enough for flowerpots. In fact, Walter had several green plants lined up on each, but since the radiators sat under the windows, their leaves had turned brittle and gray. There were leaves scattered on the floor. Most of the furniture seemed to be left over from his college dorm room. Bill had to sit on a beanbag and I pulled over the stool for
his keyboard piano. Walter clearly wasn’t used to entertaining, but there were several empty bottles boxed up by the front door, for recycling. We all got drunk before dinner, which he didn’t serve till half past nine.

I thought we might have a hard time getting him to talk, but in fact all he wanted to do was talk about this girl. He was still in love with her. She was in love with him, and once she turned eighteen and became completely independent of her parents, they planned to move in together. At one point he stood up to look for some paper she’d written for him. “An extremely precocious piece of work,” he said. But there were papers, newspapers and books everywhere. He couldn’t find it, and this was the first time he showed any nerves or strain.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bill said. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“I’m not worried about it,” Walter snapped. “It’s just that I can’t find anything these days. I spend all day in this apartment
losing things
.”

What
did
worry him was money. Her parents were loaded, but he didn’t expect or even want to take a cent off them, and his own mother was struggling just to help him keep up the rent on his apartment. Dying is expensive, he said. His dad had put a certain amount by, but most of it got used up in hospital and funeral expenses.

“There’s not much I can do to make a living,” Walter said. “As it happens, I’m an excellent high school teacher, but I might have a hard time getting a job.”

A quiet joke, which reminded me of the guy I knew in college. But most of the time his irony deserted him. Beatrice started questioning him about this girl. Somewhere along the way she had lost her temper.

“What’s she like?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“I mean, is she tall, blond, dark, what? Is she jocky or nerdy or preppy? What’s she into?”

“I don’t recognize her from any of those descriptions.”

“You mean, you don’t know her very well. You haven’t been paying attention.”

“I know her intimately.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Did you sleep together?”

“I did not.”

“Then what’s the big deal about?”

“We did other things.”

“You fingered her, she sucked you off, what?”

“I don’t like thinking about any of this the way you describe it.”

“But you don’t mind doing it to a sixteen-year-old girl?”

“Honestly, when it comes to what you are talking about, she was enormously more experienced and mature than I was.”

“I don’t doubt that.” And so on. When we finally sat down to eat, at a foldout table in the kitchen, Beatrice asked, “So what’s her name?”

“Susie Grabel,” he said, and for some reason we all laughed.

Dinner was better tempered, and once we got off the subject of Walter’s delinquencies, we talked about what you’d expect us to talk about: our bright college days. But I preferred the other conversation, it seemed to matter more. Around midnight, with nothing decided on or resolved (no plan of action, I mean), we stood up to go.

“I’ll give you a call next week,” Bill said. “And this time, answer the phone.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Walter told him. Then he turned to me: “Are you having a gay time of it in England? We haven’t talked about you all night.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m ready to come back home. I miss you guys.”

“Nobody’s living at home,” he said.

After that Walter and I communicated mostly by email. The last time I saw him in the flesh was our reunion. He had booked a room at Mory’s for four o’clock on the Saturday afternoon. That gave us a couple of hours’ drinking time and we could head over to the cocktail party in a big group. It was one of those paneled backrooms with a large table in the middle and too many high-backed chairs, so that you had to squeeze behind several of them just to sit down. For the first half hour Walter and I had the place to ourselves. That was fine with me—I wanted to hear his news.

At that point Susie Grabel was just finishing up her junior year at Oberlin College. Walter had moved out there to be near her. She lived on campus; he had a room in some professor’s house about a five-minute walk away. He made a little extra cash by tutoring students in composition but still depended mostly on handouts from his mom.

None of this embarrassed him; he had become unembarrassable. There was something very likable about his straightforward and essentially disastrous infatuation with this girl. I wondered whether Susie ever felt torn between her new exciting undergraduate life and her relationship with an older man, who could have no part in it. But apparently Walter had been embraced by most of her friends. He went to the movies with them, sometimes driving small groups in his car to one of the strip mall cinemas dotting the highways outside of town. He went to their parties, too, and was particularly useful in being old enough to buy alcohol.

“I’m having a great time,” he said. “I’m in the best shape of my life.”

That was last summer. Susie was graduating in a couple of weeks and planned to teach summer school, but after that they needed
somewhere to live. Something to do as well. Walter had persuaded her to come to Detroit—they wanted to set up a theater workshop for kids. His background was playwriting, and she could handle the music side of things. We were all going to live together. I had the upstairs apartment, which had its own door. The only shared space was the driveway, the front porch, and the entrance hall; they got the run of the garden. I had never met Susie.

SUNSHINE WOKE ME UP EARLY
that first morning—I hadn’t yet put up curtains. There were trees in the street, but they didn’t cast much shade; the leaves just meant that the light on my bedroom floor seemed to move with the wind. It was the first time I had slept in my own bed, in my own empty home, in years, and I spent a large part of the morning going from room to room and enjoying the loneliness. But I was also glad to know it would end pretty soon; Walter was coming.

He pulled up around lunchtime, in a rusty red Ford F-150 pickup truck with everything he owned tarped in and tied down by cords. I thought this was terrific. I helped him unpack and we had something to eat afterwards, standing at my kitchen counter, then walked around the neighborhood together.

Already about half the houses looked lived in, and there was work being done on most of the rest. Even though it was Monday afternoon, there were people gardening in their front yards, talking on porches, messing around with cars. A guy called Joe Silver had set up a grocery store in his downstairs living room. He made cakes and sandwiches, too, and served coffee in dime-store mugs, which he brewed himself, in one of those Italian coffeemakers that looks like a 1950s scooter. Since the weather was nice, blowy but sunny, people sat and ate on his front steps. Joe came round in an apron
afterwards and took their money. There were also several sets of tables and chairs in his front yard, and people seemed to hang around all day, chipping away at their laptop computers.

Walter and I walked out past East Jefferson to see the water. I really was very glad to see him and had a kind of almost gay reaction to his physical presence, just the fact that he was there and talking to me, and not over the phone either, but with his body, too. He’s a big guy and sweats easily, he has these childish meaty thick hands, and at one point he stopped suddenly without saying anything to tie his shoes, and this took him a minute, he wasn’t very quick at it. I waited for him, then we walked on. There was a list of things in my head I wanted to tell him, things I wanted him to ask me about because I couldn’t tell him otherwise, and of course he never asked me what I wanted him to. But probably he had the same feeling about me.

There’s a park at the waterfront by the bridge, and we sat under one of the trees, with our backs against the trunk. The wind was strong enough that we ended up shuffling round to the other side of the tree, for shelter. But the temperature was somewhere in the eighties; the warm dry air was full of dust.

“Is your mother still giving you money?” I said.

“Not anymore. That’s part of what this is about—I want to get clear of all that. When you accept people’s money you have to listen to their opinions about you. The last time I went home, I was sitting around with nothing to do, and my mother said to me, why don’t I ever hear you playing the piano? You used to play so beautifully. It just sits there all the time and doesn’t get any use. We had this argument about it. I found myself taking the position that I was never particularly good at the piano and didn’t have any more talent for that than for anything else, which is probably true. But then I thought, what are you doing, why are you having this argument
with her. She’s your mother. What do you care if she thinks you used to have talent. Let her think it. I’m still too caught up in all that stuff, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“What stuff?”

“You know, the precocities of youth.”

“I’m glad you’re here. You’ve put me in a completely different frame of mind.”

“Robert told me you were in bad shape.”

“That’s not quite right,” I said. “I go through these swings, and right now I’m feeling everything pretty intensely. But that can be good, too. You look well.” In fact, he looked like he always looked, tired and overweight, and pimply around the mouth and by the side of his nostrils. His sneakers were white and very dirty. We walked back against the sunset, and when we passed Joe Silver’s place, people were helping him carry the tables inside. So we helped, too.