Drives Like a Dream (20 page)

"So I have this idea that I wanted to run by you," he said as the train pulled into Michigan station. "I've been studying this place for years—it's one of the reasons I moved to Windsor. Let's face it, there's no more devastated city in America. Newark is bad, but Detroit is hopeless. I mean, look out there; it's like Dresden after the firebombing."

"You could keep your voice down," Lydia whispered. The elderly woman still smiled, a few seats away. She held an aluminum cane in front of her, both hands resting on top.

"I was listening to Click and Clack on
Car Talk,
" Norm continued, a bit softer. "Click asked Clack in his funny accent: What's the cushiest job in America? Answer: Working for the Detroit Bureau of Tourism. Well, they had a big laugh at that, and I guess it must have been funny, though I was thinking at the time, if it weren't for Detroit, you two wouldn't be on the radio. But I wondered: What if Detroit actually
did
reinvent itself as a tourist town?" Norm held his finger up as if anticipating a response. "I know it sounds outrageous, but hear me out."

A trio of teenagers got on at Joe Louis Arena, which did nothing to deter Norm. He talked about black empowerment and economic pragmatism, the different approaches of the city's mayors, and he said downtown didn't stand a chance unless someone did something radical. "Making Detroit a tourist mecca—now that would be dramatic. And not just a tourist town, but an environmental wonderland. So—" He clapped his hands. "I'm devoting the next issue of Nuplan to something I'm calling the Emerald City Project."

Lydia looked around, as if for support. The old woman still seemed lost in her own world, and the security guard focused on the teenagers, who were laughing and talking among themselves.

"Mayor Young was halfway there with this People Mover. It's like a toy train tootling around a war zone," Norm continued. "But he was trying to lure traditional business. As I see it, the only way to use these abandoned buildings is to turn them into greenhouses. Look." He pointed to a high rise with moss and ivy growing on its walls. "The earth's already taking Detroit back. Why not showcase the organic city?"

"The organic city?" Lydia asked, incredulously.

"Let's face it. The most successful tourist destinations find a way to create fun for their visitors and along the way shake them down for a few dollars. Look at Orlando, Anaheim, Las Vegas. I'm no fan of kitsch, but people spend money there and that money goes into the city's coffers."

A computer-generated voice announced the approach of the Renaissance Center. Lydia stood up but Norm stayed where he was. "Let's go for another loop," he said. "I haven't told you my plan yet."

"I doubt I want to hear your plan." She began to move toward the doors.

"Oh, come on." Norm grabbed her hand and squeezed it.
He hadn't touched her since the beginning of the date, but now she felt like pulling away. This was not the beginning of something, as she'd actually believed it might be. "Am I embarrassing you?" he asked.

"There's a time and place."

He gave her a look that seemed to say
What, you don't like me?

She had liked him on the Internet—a crusader on the message board, a charmer over e-mail—but in person he had the balance all wrong, at turns noisy and dispassionate. "It was different on the message board," Lydia whispered. It was all she could say.
You
were different. She'd built him up, just like Cy, let him grow in her mind into an ideal. She wondered how she'd set herself up for this.

The teenagers got off at the Renaissance Center, replaced by a policeman and a young couple who seemed to lean into each other to keep upright. The woman with the cane stayed on. Perhaps she would ride all afternoon.

Norm let go of Lydia's hand. She sat back down and half-listened with increasing agitation as he pointed out the dilapidated buildings they passed. "There's beauty in wreckage—just look at Rome," he said as they passed Greektown and the boarded up windows of the Book-Cadillac Hotel. "I've always believed that one person's trash can be another's treasure. I love eBay," he said. "And I still check the papers every Saturday, get up early to go looking for yard sales. One of my favorite things to do is to take something old and give it a new life."

He talked about the way Disneyworld and Las Vegas combined the past with the future. "Nostalgia has never been more chic than it is today, but I see domes of glass and steel, too, futuristic sculptures with moving parts and lights dancing all around them, geometric shapes juxtaposed with the rubble in strange and beautiful ways. And all of it would run completely clean. No pollution. Solar power. Everything that goes out comes back in. It would be the perfect closed system. And what a symbol! Imagine making Detroit—birthplace of the car and highway—the new ecological model for the world."

He drew shapes on the train window with his fingers, as if to superimpose his blueprint over the city. His voice rose with excitement. "The roofs would be made of grass, all the parking lots would be porous. There'd be wetlands over there by the Cobo Arena that would filter into the Detroit River and make it run as clear as rainwater. I see canals with tourist boats crisscrossing the city, trains like roller coasters running in wild patterns underground, in the air, through tunnels, into buildings, sweeping through the streets like benign demons. Come on, Lydia. Don't be a skeptic. Imagine the rides, the thrill spaces. People will flock here, as if it's the new Eden."

Lydia looked for an escape. The policeman and the young couple were staring at them now.

"I see indoor stages and amphitheaters," Norm went on. "Detroit would become more than just a stop for the major acts. It would be a northern home for long-run shows."

"People
live
in Detroit," she said now. "Have you considered that in your crazy scheme?" And right away she regretted asking another question.

"I'm talking about jobs here. The Emerald City would lower unemployment dramatically. The people of Detroit would make decent salaries at the restaurants and stores, work on grounds crews tending all the greenery, and I guarantee that when a critical mass occurs, other businesses would open up downtown: a coffee bar in place of that old wig shop, an organic clothier over there at Jefferson and Woodward. The trickle-out theory at work. Tell me, how is that not a benefit?"

Once again the People Mover pulled up to the Renaissance Center. "Excuse me," Lydia said. She couldn't go another loop or stand another minute. The train felt like an airless capsule, and Norm's voice positively boomed. How in the world had he turned out this way?
Nostalgia is chic. Everyone loves a ruin.
She wondered if he'd even noticed her, or if he saw her as nothing more than an audience.

"Where are you going?" he called out. But Lydia had already stepped onto the platform. She moved briskly in the slit skirt that she had bought for her own humiliation. Her heart raced as she hurried into the tunnel, then rounded the corner.

At the darkened window, Lydia stopped and looked back toward the train. Norm was still standing at the open doors, a confused look on his face. From a distance, with his odd Prince Valiant haircut, he looked less the mad scholar than the lost boy. As the doors began to close, he stepped off the train, and Lydia rushed into the labyrinth of the Renaissance Center.

T
HE CAB DROPPED
Lydia off at the tapas restaurant, where she picked up her rental car and drove home. She had walked inside the house and put her keys on the kitchen table when the doorbell rang. For a moment she worried that Norm had followed her, but when she opened the door, there was M.J. "I was in the neighborhood," she explained, stepping into the foyer.

Lydia was not surprised to see her. She wondered how long M.J. had been staking her out, awaiting a full report. "Well, it could not have been worse," Lydia began. "He's just awful. I can't tell you how angry he made me. He wants to bring earth movers into Detroit and turn the city into an ecological Disneyworld."

"What exactly are you wearing?" M.J. asked.

"I can't explain it. I just had to get out of there. I left him on the People Mover."

"Running away isn't the worst strategy." M.J. followed Lydia into the living room, and sat on the couch.

Lydia sat down on an ottoman. "It wasn't a strategy."

M.J. offered a butterscotch candy to Lydia, who shook her head. "Let's talk about your outfit," M.J. said. "Do I see a Peter Pan collar and flats? What happened to that beautiful scarf?"

"I couldn't tie it."

"You should have called me."

"I panicked. It hardly matters now."

"You look like an airline stewardess, Lydia. And no offense, but the old kind that sues for age discrimination."

Lydia ignored this comment. "You should have heard him go on. He was practically yelling inside the train, insulting the city, dismissing self-government."

"He's an academic. Isn't that his job, to come up with schemes that never amount to anything?"

"He was completely ignoring me, lost in his own stupid fantasies."

"It's your life," M.J. said. She seemed irritable, and not in her characteristic bantering way. Was she upset that Lydia had ditched the Parisian clothes? "I don't need to tell you how difficult it is for a woman in late middle age, even one as smart and attractive as you, to find a suitable man," M.J. continued. "I know a number of such women, professionals mostly. Intelligent, independent mothers of grown children. In a couple of years they'll be at retirement age, so they're looking at a future with no company at all. These women try, Lydia. They go on dates and stick it out for a while with men a lot worse than your urban planner. You can't imagine the aging Lotharios some of my friends put up with. Players and obsessives, the kind that fancy themselves potbellied sex objects or, worse yet, the ones that label their socks, wash their hands forty-five times a day and make a great fuss in the checkout line."

M.J. recalled one older man, the owner of a Ferndale photography studio, whom a friend of hers had been dating for a few months. One evening, after a romantic dinner at his apartment, he unveiled his life's great project. He had taken more than a thousand photographs of people's feet—eleven by seventeen close-ups, nearly always without shoes. The feet of the famous, like Aretha Franklin, Lee Iacocca, and Detroit Tiger legend Mickey Lolich. The feet of the infamous, like Jack Kevorkian and Leonard Tyburski, the one-time dean of students at Mackenzie High School in Detroit who hid his wife's body in a freezer for three years. Most of the subjects were unaware they were being photographed; a few had consented. Over the course of thirty years the man had taken pictures of celebrities, civic leaders, ordinary citizens, the old and the young, strangers, friends, and former lovers. "After showing the woman a series of toe-tag photographs that he had shot at the Dearborn morgue," M.J. said, "the creep asked my friend if she wouldn't mind removing her shoes."

"Why are you telling me this story?" Lydia asked. "First you say I have to make an effort, and now you seem to be scaring me off men for life. Some decent ones must still be out there." But as soon as she said this she had her doubts.

"I don't know." M.J. sat back in the couch. "I'm flummoxed by the math. Every divorce involves one man and one woman. Why, then, is the ratio of middle-aged singles one lonely man for every ten lonely women? Where do the worthwhile men go, the ones who have no feet in their closets? Do they walk into some river and disappear?"

Lydia knew where they all went, and she nearly said so. They had married younger women. They'd all gone, not into the Detroit River but to the altar with thirty-five-year-olds, to the suburbs of Phoenix to start new lives. Lydia considered for the first time the real possibility that Ellen and Cy would have children. She would be thirty-six soon, and he would be sixty-two, pushing eighty by the time the first child—who knew how many Ellen wanted?—would go off to college. Suddenly she felt a chill sitting in the living room with M.J., the mother of her ex-husband's wife, an only child. Of course M.J. would want grandchildren. She was in her seventies, and deserved grandchildren. Cy and Ellen were her only chance.

Lydia stood up and went to the window. "Did they happen to buy a big house?" she asked without thinking.

M.J. sounded confused. "Who are you talking about, dear?"

"Cy and Ellen," she said, and then unconvincingly, "I'm trying to figure out how many rooms were flooded."

"It's only the downstairs. They have three bedrooms upstairs. What an odd question to ask."

"Well, I appreciate your stopping by. You really didn't have to."

M.J. seemed to get the hint, standing up from the couch. "I'd love to take a look around," she said. "You've never shown me your house."

Lydia resisted. "Oh, I don't want to keep you."

"You're not keeping me. I'd love to see where you live."

Reluctantly, Lydia gave her a tour of the downstairs. M.J. complimented her garden, the daffodils and magnolia, the crabapple tree, the potted pansies on the back patio, and the scattered blue hydrangeas.

"I miss having a garden," M.J. said. "I used to love the endless projects around the house. I imagine it must be difficult without someone around to help."

Lydia would not allow herself to be provoked. "I manage."

At the foyer she went to open the front door, but M.J. insisted on looking upstairs. "I'm sure it's a mess," Lydia said.

"I doubt that." M.J. already had one foot on the steps.

They went into every room, even the bathrooms. Lydia found herself standing in front of closets, worried that this nosy woman would open them and start pulling out her clothes and shoes. In Jessica's room, M.J. picked up one of the floppy dolls now lined up on the bed. "Adorable." She stroked its orange hair.

"My daughter calls them my substitute children," Lydia said automatically.

"I don't know. I think
we're
the dolls, all ragged and diminished. I remember when Ellen was a girl she was my mirror. I saw myself in her eyes. When she was proud of me, I was proud of me. When she looked at me as larger than life,
I was
larger than life. But over time, I guess I've realized I'm not quite the figure I'd thought myself to be. And now with Ellen gone it feels as if she's taken part of me with her. So I want her back, though I know it's not right. I want
myself
back because I'm too old to start over. Do you know what I'm talking about?" M.J. returned the doll to the bed.