A Life in Men: A Novel (10 page)

Poor Titus has his head on his own towel now. He gestures up at the tranquil taverna high above the beach with his hairy hand and says, “They have the nice fish. We eat later the fish at there.”

Jesus Christ. Nix stands, shaking her mat out again, movements terse with memories of her past shittiness. A smattering of sand flies in Titus’s face. From behind her sunglasses she watches him swipe at his eyes foolishly, those thick knuckles surely only further grinding in the sand.

But girls are capricious. Only two hours later, in a complete twist of moods, Nix sits at the tavern thinking,
This is what life is all about.
Yes: the beautiful and the terrible intermingled. This thatched awning, whistling in the wind over this tiny restaurant—a heavy storm would pound it down to nothing, scatter its sticks to the sea. The rickety wooden legs of the chair sway under her slight weight, while below the looming cliffs lie rocks like so many sharp teeth that could tear a body apart. And wine. Three bottles of crisp white, nothing like the syrupy red of the night before, a slightly acidic cold bite that chases away the heat of midday with each sip. Ah. Yes. All days should be like this.

They have eaten a fresh fish they selected from a tank while it still lived. A thrill of murder swims in them. The fish was served still wearing its head, delicious, in a puddle of oil, like nearly everything Nix and Mary have eaten here in Greece. They dipped fresh bread into the oil once the fish was gone. Nix is wearing her top now (Mary, so impatient to get naked altogether, forgot to bring one), and it billows, a thin yellow cotton, in the wind. Titus’s head is where it belongs, atop his shoulders, atop his torso, with his ass resting in his own chair.
Hallelujah,
Nix thinks. “Pass the wine,” she says. Obligingly, Titus tries, but the bottle is empty.

It seems Mary and Zorg are bickering, though Nix is gazing at the horizon and not really paying attention. Zorg’s English is pretty good, and since Titus’s is so inferior, the burden of conversation is not on Nix; she need only smile now and then. Mary and Zorg have been talking intently about politics, a subject about which Nix is certain Mary knows little and cares less, but Nix has been in college long enough to know that sexy men bring out political opinions in otherwise disinterested girls, so she does not question this shift. The horizon is like an endless, glowing light saber, Nix thinks, and dissolves into giggles, happily drunk.

Mary’s voice snaps. “At least everyone in America doesn’t live with their parents until they’re thirty-five! At least we go to college and get real jobs instead of having a twenty-five percent unemployment rate like Barcelona!”

What
? Did Mary really say that? How on earth would
she
know?

Zorg, however, seems nonplussed. He leans back in his rickety chair, waving a cigarette as if to shoo off Mary’s words like flies. “You are so isolated,” he says. “Barcelona is not Spain. It is where silly girls like you go to see Europe on your backs with the Catalan men.”

“I’ve never even been to Spain!” Mary shouts back.

Zorg shrugs. “Barcelona, Mykonos, it is the same. Americans are so ignorant.”

Nix has not been to Barcelona either but is pretty certain it is not indistinguishable from a Greek party island, so she’s not sure she’s following Zorg’s argument. She looks at Titus for his take, but he, too, shrugs and says, “What I can say? He is right. American women, they are whores. What one can do?”

It is the best grammatical showing he has made all day. Nix gasps.

Mary straightens, composing her face. She is a well-mannered girl. The kind whose well-mannered mother passed along to her daughter the knowledge that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, something Nix is not sure she will ever learn. Mary says calmly, “Well, that’s a generalization, Titus. Not all American women are promiscuous, though I can see where if you only meet them on vacation you might get that impression. There are all kinds of people everywhere—every place is the same when you get down to it. Nation is just an illusion anyway, but it doesn’t stop people from believing in their own country.”

Nation is just an illusion?
What has Mary been
doing
while Nix has been at Skidmore snorting coke and coaxing the temperamental dick of her fortysomething professor?

Zorg, however, is unimpressed. “You do not have to believe in your imperialist country!” he shouts, banging his fist on the table, so that droplets of oil scatter. “You choose to be like the sheep!” Aggressively he throws back his head, his neck thick with tendons, like a horse’s. “Baaa!” he shouts. “American sheep!”

“Well, okay,” Mary says tentatively. “I’m not sure I even
do
believe in my country . . . you know, that strongly. But it’s been a pretty good place to live, and I was raised there, so what else am I supposed to believe in?”

“You should believe in
my
country! And you will!”

Nix titters awkwardly. (
What the . . . ?
) But before she can jokingly ask whether Zorg plans to hypnotize them using the leftover fish carcass, Mary lurches forward and grabs her wrist, causing Nix to bang into the table, so that her breasts skim the oily surface of her empty plate. When she gets to her feet, she has two grease nipples staining her yellow shirt.
Fish and tits
, she thinks, trying to remember to remember the joke to repeat for some occasion in London.

“Come on!” Mary shouts, jerking her arm again. “We’re going to the bathroom!”

The toilets are around the corner, behind small wooden doors in a rocky wall. Nix is surprised to find Mary crying, her breath rising and falling in crescendos. “He’s crazy,” she hisses into Nix’s ear. “Holy shit. We’ve got to get out of here.”

Nix is buzzing, a glorious afternoon-in-the-sun kind of drunk. “Chill out,” she says in her best “I know all about men” drawl. “European guys are all machismo, big deal. Don’t worry about him. If you don’t like him anymore, we can find you someone better to lose your virginity to—plenty of tourists in town.”

Mary swats Nix in the head. “No, lush, I mean it—he’s out of his freaking mind. He told me in the water that he’s bringing me back to Spain! I thought he was just trying to be romantic, you know, woo me and make me think he was into me or whatever, so I was all,
Oh, that’d be great except I can’t really do that because I go to college at home
, and he stopped dead still in the water and looked at me”—she grabs Nix’s face for emphasis, by the jaw—“like this, he looked at me like this, and he goes,
You will come to Spain with me, or I will come to America and I will find you and I will kill you
. And you heard him just now! He said I
will
believe in Spain! He’s planning to kidnap me!”

“Oh, he was just being melodramatic.” Nix laughs. “Don’t be such a gullible American. He was probably kidding.”

“He was
not
kidding! He has no sense of humor.”

“Fine, whatever,” Nix says, letting the cool stone chill her sweaty back. “They’re planning to abduct us, they just figured they’d spend a lot of money on fish and wine first and be seen in public with us in as many cafés as possible.” She sighs.

Mary crosses her arms tight across her small breasts, creating the illusion of cleavage. “I have to get out of here,” she insists. “You need to tell them you have a huge headache and want to leave, okay? Say your headache’s too bad for the scooter and you want to lie down on the backseat of Zorg’s car on the way home—I can’t be alone with that psycho.”

“Great,” Nix says dully. She liked the
Splendor in the Grass
scenario much better, even if she
was
the spinster friend. This is quickly turning into a buzz kill.

A
ND SO IT
comes to pass that two girls end up climbing—each sullen for a different reason—into a rental car with a Spanish man they have known for less than twenty-four hours, who may or may not be an airline pilot, whose last name they have not learned and will never learn. So it comes to pass that the man called Zorg guns the engine and takes off, not even bothering to wait for his friend Titus, still starting up his scooter. So it happens that the threesome in the car swerve together, at the speed of agitation, around the winding cliffs of Mykonos, the girls both too drunk and bothered to even realize they are not heading back in the direction of Plati Yialos, but onward.

M
ARY SITS UP
front, impervious as a queen. In the backseat, like a naughty child who has eaten (drunk) too much, Nix reclines, head resting in the crook of her arm. The treacherous curves, around tightly wound cliff roads, feel like bed spins. Zorg is driving too fast. In the scenario they no doubt all envisioned, there would have been hours at the beach still for the three bottles of consumed wine to wear off. Instead, Zorg is pink in the face from climbing all the way down to the beach to retrieve their things, just to turn around and climb back up to the car at the insistence of Nix, who has claimed a “killer headache.” Only now, as she grows dizzy from the car’s lurching, has it occurred to Nix that it might not be the best idea to drive some of Greece’s most hairpin turns with a drunken, pissed-off man at the wheel.

Well, okay, to be honest, she and Mary drank most of the wine. They are good for that, even at home. Not just the Ass sisters but the Lush sisters, too. Probably Zorg, who weighs almost as much as she and Mary combined, is not even
that
drunk. No doubt it will occur to him any moment that he should slow down—he is an airline pilot, after all. Nix closes her eyes, tries to sleep.

But no. Instead of settling into the rhythm of the road, Zorg seems to be only accelerating. When Nix sits up, she sees that his jaw is set, the muscles in his right thigh twitching, his broad hands clutching the wheel. The car rims the curves of the road like a darting tongue, teasing. Somewhere below, the restaurants, discos, hotels of Mykonos wait nestled at sea level, the rest of the island straining upward; they are caught in an elevated web of cliffs.

A lump rises in Nix’s esophagus, signaling danger. Beneath her legs, the car’s seat trembles, unsteady; she pitches to the other side of the car at each turn, clings tight to the door handle to keep herself still, as if clutching the rails of a roller coaster. Her hands are slick with sweat. She thinks of having to powder them before gripping the parallel bars, and even though she is not on a gymnastics team at Skidmore—has not done gymnastics since leaving Kettering more than two years ago—she is gripped by a terror that she will never touch a parallel bar again, a fear that this seat is the last thing she will ever hold before they plunge off a cliff to certain death below. She cannot imagine . . . oh, but yes, she finds she
can
imagine it: the weightlessness before her body begins to fly upward against the car’s roof, the pitching in her stomach, so that she might vomit before she hits earth. It is in our DNA to be able to feel such scenarios in our bodies, like archetypes of fear: possible ways the human body can meet its end. With scraps of yellow hair, white and red flesh, torn to bits by the very teeth of the jagged cliffs she’d mused on earlier in her foolish, drunken rhapsody.

From what she can tell, Mary is utterly immune to Zorg’s efforts to kill them. Serenely, Mary gazes out the window, impassive as though she wouldn’t jump if someone tossed a snake in her lap. The tires hit a bump, perhaps no more than a stone in the road, but Nix’s head bounces against the car’s ceiling. Zorg doesn’t slow the car. Dry dirt and rocks crunch and scatter beneath the wheels. Nix tastes blood, realizes she must have been biting her lip when her head hit the roof. How long before Zorg misjudges, one tire, one flick of the wrist, one crumbling piece of earth too far? Or maybe it is what he sincerely
intends,
only wants to make them suffer first for being American whores, for embarrassing him in front of his friend. Nix kicks the back of Mary’s seat. Hard, in hopes of eliciting a response. Mary does not look back.

Shit, bitch, just because your life is cheap doesn’t mean mine is!
Then,
No, please, I don’t mean that,
Mary, Mary, we have to get out of this.
She kicks Mary’s seat again, hard enough so that her toes feel damaged, tears welling in her eyes. This is it.
Oh god, oh Mom, hold on, we’re going to die . . .

“Zorg, honey.” It is Mary’s voice and not Mary’s voice, all at once. “I’m really sorry I acted so badly at the restaurant. Do you think you can ever forgive me?”

And in a split second, the speed of the car has reduced by at least half, and Zorg’s large, meaty paw is on Mary’s tanned, slim thigh. “Now, now,” he says, the grandmotherly Americanism strange from his lips. “There is nothing to forgive.”

The relief flooding Nix, the tears leaking from her eyes, are invisible to the two in the front seat, locked in their private dance. Nix finds that her hands are shaking uncontrollably; she sits on them, afraid that if Zorg catches on to her fear, he will catch on, too, to Mary’s ploy to calm him. Mary has not turned to catch Nix’s eye, but it no longer matters. In this car, they have already shared the instant of their deaths and then, in the same instant, been granted a reprieve.

“So, we go to Titus’s villa, sí?” Zorg says, his voice a mask, too, he and Mary speaking from behind layers of masks. “We will give to your friend some headache medicine there.”

“Zorg,” Mary ventures, her voice so meek that Nix closes her eyes and wishes there were some way she could avoid the raw intimacy of witnessing Mary’s fear. “It’s been a long day. We’ve had a lot of sun and a lot of wine. I would really like to rest.”

“You may rest at the villa,” Zorg says, nodding, and Nix finds herself praying that Mary will not react, will not refuse, lest they be doomed once more to possible death on the rocks. Already the speed of the car has increased slightly—a test? If she were Mary, would
she
protest? Nix’s mind reels; objectively, there is no way that venturing farther from town, farther from the public eye, can be a wise idea. There is only one thing that any man, in any language, wants from any girl at a Greek villa. The smarter thing, Nix knows, would be to call Zorg’s bluff: to insist on being taken back to their rented room right now, to dare him to kamikaze himself off the winding cliffs, to hold his life as cheaply as one girl’s rejection. Because once they get behind closed doors with him, Zorg will no longer be in any danger himself; the danger will all be Mary’s. Still Nix finds, to her shock, that her body cannot process her mind’s logic—that her body would do
anything
to survive this car ride, anything to postpone risk just one more minute. Mary has not responded, but her shoulders bear a dangerous stiffness, the body language of refusal. And all at once, Nix lunges forward, puts a hand on Zorg’s shoulder, his shirt wrinkled now and stained with tanning oil, the heat of his skin radiating through the fabric. He jerks slightly, as though even in discussing her imaginary headache, he had forgotten Nix was there.