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?”
“I don’t think you have a chance now.”
“I want to know what lawyers you’re talking to — where you get your information. Did Robert James talk you into this? Because he doesn’t want to see me in court, I can tell you that. A trial gives me a platform, it gives me a voice.”
“Nolan, you know what it’s like in there. Everything gets twisted. You never get to say what you want to say, and even if you do it won’t come out the way you want it to.”
“We’ll see about that. This is really just a game of chicken. Larry Oh says four years or life, but they can do better than that. Robert James won’t let this get to trial.”
“I don’t think Robert has anything to do with it.”
“Please, Marny. He sent you here, didn’t he?”
“No,” I said.
But afterwards Gloria told me, this is one of the things that made up her mind. Not because of what Nolan said. He was going crazy, she could see that, he didn’t make sense, he was fighting all kinds of battles he didn’t need to fight. It’s hard when you go through something like this to pay attention to what matters. But for her it was simple. We were all sitting around the kitchen table, and she realized (about me), he’s not helping, I wish he wasn’t here.
Everything had an effect. There was a lot of unpleasantness in the news. Somebody picked up on Walter’s story, too, on the situation with Susie, and the fact that we were living in the same house turned into another couple of paragraphs on Gawker. What had happened to Meacher and Waites and Nolan and Tony was happening to me — when the news cycle spins you around, everything gets dirty. Then one Saturday morning a photographer papped Gloria coming out of my house and she just started running, crying and running until the end of the block. She knocked on Mrs. Smith’s door, and they talked and then she came back for her car. That was the last time she came to my apartment. When I saw her again that night, at her apartment, I carried over a shopping bag of her stuff.
Breaking up is one of those dramatic things you do, it brings out a lot of grandstanding. It’s like a license to say things. So I said some things I half regret.
My dad once told me, you’ve got this confessional streak, but no real desire to explain yourself. (A friend of mine broke the garage window by kicking a soccer ball against it, and I went straight in to take the blame.) Gloria was leaving me anyway, so I told her about my one-night stand with Astrid. I didn’t want to give her the impression I had nothing to be ashamed of. It was complicated. The video was stupid and pointless, and I told her it didn’t mean anything, but if she found out later what had happened, it could do real damage — I mean, after all that protested innocence. So I told her now. I said to her, look, this is over, you’ve made that clear, but I want a clean break, because I plan to win you back, that’s my plan. I figured she was already disgusted with me; a little more couldn’t hurt.
But I miscalculated. “Why are you telling me this?” she said. “I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know.” And later, “I made myself very vulnerable to you.” That seemed a weird way of putting it — it stuck in my mind for a long time.
35
Christmas was next, and this time my mother came to stay. To cheer me up, she said. A year ago everything looked better, everything was starting out. I had a girlfriend, I had a job, and my mother was married to my father. Of course, she had her own reasons for getting out of Dodge. She couldn’t face Brad’s family, Christmas with his wife in Houston, waking up in the spare bedroom, and watching her son go through what we all went through together, when she had a central role to play. So she came to me.
I gave her my bedroom and slept on the couch. But we got in each other’s hair. Mom was scared to go out in Detroit by herself, even sightseeing, even in the afternoon. Nothing will happen to you at the Institute of Arts, I said. But she answered, “I’ve heard the stories.” So she dragged me along with her, because the truth is, I didn’t have anything else to do. We saw the Rivera murals, the Moscow Ballet was in town, so we went to The Nutcracker at Caesars Windsor, I took her around Belle Isle. Being a tourist is tiring, but when you go with your mom you kind of reenact the old relationship, even if it isn’t true or real anymore. Anyway, none of this lightened my mood.
While she was staying I got another letter from my father. It was mostly about himself, this was turning into his big subject; he wanted to explain himself again. In the past six months, ever since moving out, he had realized the burden my mother placed on him. She’s a very negative person, he said, and he hadn’t realized until it was pointed out to him, by a very smart younger person, what family life had done to his personality. Young people these days, he went on, don’t have the hang-ups I did, they don’t feel any false obligations. And so on.
“What’s he say?” my mother asked.
“Nothing much, just day-to-day stuff.”
“If he’s unhappy I want you to tell me, I want to know.”
“I think he’s all right,” I said.
One night I went to see Astrid — I had to get out of the house. I’d been trying to call her for several weeks, but she didn’t answer her phone. Finally, I sent her an email, and she wrote back. Her phone was dead; she had closed out the contract. She was leaving in the morning, flying to Germany for Christmas and not coming back. But I could watch her pack up if I wanted to. So my mom made me supper, and afterwards I drove over to Astrid’s apartment, in one of those survivor row houses by the old train station.
All night long there was this stream of people coming through. It was a very unsatisfying visit. I guess I was hoping to pick a fight but she wasn’t in the mood. So I just sat on her two-seater couch, drinking red wine and offering the bottle to newcomers when they walked in. Astrid was stressed out but also clearly on a kind of high, kissing everybody, crying lightly, giving things away — paintings, DVDs and CDs, bottles of alcohol and clothes. “I want to go home with what I can carry in a duffel bag,” she said, again and again and again. I’m sure that some of the people coming through recognized me from the video link. It was embarrassing and depressing and every time I saw this woman she annoyed me and attracted me at the same time.
“I don’t understand how you can just leave,” I said to her at one point.
“I have had my experience here. It’s like when you work on a picture, and then you say it’s done, you have to do something else.”