A Life in Men: A Novel (11 page)

“Thank you for the offer,” Nix says, and her voice sounds normal, not fake like Mary’s and Zorg’s. Her voice sounds utterly convincing. “Of course we’d be happy to go to the villa. That would be fine.”

In the Month of Jacaranda

(KENYA: JOSHUA)

You can’t hide.

Here you are, under that burning sun, exposed. You realize that all you can rely on now is your body. Nothing you have learned in school, from television, from your clever friends, from the books you have read, will help you here.

—
FRANCESCA MARCIANO
,
Rules of the Wild

The drive from Nairobi to Maasai Mara is always the roughest. The Mara has no paved roads, or any roads at all, just tire tracks worn into the ground, a brand the intrepid have finally imprinted into the earth. Like a foxhound on the hunt, Joshua stalks these tracks. Mary’s head leans against the window, knocking into the glass with each bounce, so she rolls her sweater into a protective cushion. Sometimes, when the vibrations lull her into a stupor, Yank’s words play in her ears like a beating drum:
Darlin’. Let me tell you a story
.
Darlin’.
It’s approximately ninety kilometers between the end of the proper road and the better lodges of the Maasai Mara National Reserve. Joshua slows and swerves constantly so as to avoid boulders, craters, dips. In no time, everyone is nauseated. The ground is so dusty that the clients slide their windows closed despite the heat, and Mary finds herself gulping air out of a narrow crack in the passenger’s side window, coughing conspicuously until she has to field questions from the clients as to whether she’s “getting sick.”

It takes three hours to traverse ninety kilometers, bouncing violently all the way. She imagines it’s like driving on the surface of the moon.

When they finally arrive at the Keekorok Lodge, Mary and Joshua have two hours before the clients’ first game drive at 4 p.m. No matter how weary clients are, they are
always
raring to go on that first excursion of their safari, cameras blazing, fresh deodorant applied. Joshua’s simple guide quarters await, but Mary cocks her head to the side and says, “Bar, baby, bar.” Two double G&Ts later, her stomach settling from the false comfort of alcohol, the clients—parents Walt and Kathleen, and children Fiona and Liam—can be seen trotting down the path from their room. At their approach, Mary stands from the large cushioned seat she’s been sharing with Joshua; his hand slides down her back gently in parting. And for a moment she sees herself as these American clients must: leading some
National Geographic
fantasy life, tooling around with her accented boyfriend, the two of them making a sexy picture amid the lodge’s romantically African decor.

She has been doing this a lot lately. Drifting away from her body to survey the image of herself as if from above. The picture looks so much as she had
hoped
it would that she can scarcely believe it. Sometimes she feels she is being followed by an invisible camera crew, is tempted to turn and wink at the audience to say,
Can you fucking believe this?
The audience would consist of her anxious parents; of Bobby Kenner; of all those fair-weather high school friends who quietly removed themselves following her diagnosis; of Yank, as she lives the life he all but orchestrated when he urged her to reconsider spending her remaining time in Dullsville, Ohio, and to instead let Joshua show her the world. But mostly her audience would be Nix, always Nix: speechless, shocked, proud.

T
HEY ARRIVED IN
Kenya from Japan—perhaps its polar cultural opposite—where Joshua’s circus was making an extended appearance, and Mary was fresh off two weeks in the hospital in Osaka. Joshua’s cousin Gavin had written from Nairobi to say he’d started a safari company and would give Joshua a job, and just like that, presto, their circus life was over, after nine months on the move and nearly a dozen European cities that had dazzled Mary with their beauty and promise initially, but that she’d wandered through alone, increasingly frustrated as Joshua spent his days in rehearsals and his nights performing the same show she’d seen twenty, fifty, seventy times, until near the end she’d spent most of Austria and Germany in dinky hotel rooms reading novels about other people, other places, not even bothering to see the sites, numb with living out of a suitcase and with northern Europe’s relentless rain.

In contrast to her few months at Arthog House, to the strange intimacy she had forged with both Yank and Sandor, she and Joshua managed to spend the better part of a year in the company of his fellow circus performers without making any close friends. For starters, he was the only native English speaker in the show, but somehow it wasn’t only that. When Mary wrote letters home to her mother, she was aware of her life’s sounding eccentric and glamorous—a traveling circus!—but in practice she was often bored, a hanger-on like the unnecessary mascot of a single-minded sports team. Japan had been a relief. They would set up shop for a year, or so the plan went. Long enough to have some kind of life. Mary had even gotten a job teaching English and purchased a bicycle on which to ride to school. But her hospital stay derailed all that, frightening even the usually fearless Joshua with the language barrier and strange customs: family members washing the patients’ laundry on the roof of the hospital; food served family-style in communal rooms, with stronger patients pouring the weaker patients’ tea. Joshua had to bring Mary’s nightclothes and towels, since such things weren’t provided, and he’d missed performances while tending to her, and they were both still mortified at not having realized that, on Mary’s release, they were supposed to leave her doctor a
tip
. Her legs so swollen from IVs of antibiotics that she couldn’t even fit into her own shoes, they’d been back with the circus for only a few days when the letter from Gavin arrived. Like a sign.

J
OSHUA IS LOST.
How easy this is to hide from clients never ceases to amaze Mary, but she’s learned to read the signs. He’s scanning, using his binoculars, but instead of game she knows he’s searching for other safari vehicles. Heedlessly he whizzes past the zebras that dot the landscape more plentifully than cows do the American Midwest, ignoring cries of glee from four-year-old Liam, on the bench seat in the back, who has missed most of the earlier zebras while poring over pictures of birds in Joshua’s wildlife book. Smoothly claiming to be on the lookout for a lion, Joshua doesn’t slow the truck, not even for a herd of gracefully loping giraffes, not even when Walt and Kathleen stand up in the moving vehicle to photograph receding wildlife as their cameras bob up and down from the rocky earth, whacking them rudely in the eyes.

Gavin has offered to throw some money at a local Maasai to sit shotgun in the truck until Joshua gets the lay of the Mara down pat, but Joshua repeatedly refuses because then Mary would have to sit in the back with the clients instead of beside him. Getting lost is no problem, he assures Gavin—the clients get excited when you seem to be looking wildly for something anyway. Just claim you’ve seen tracks of a lion stalking an impala, and they’re near orgasm while you race around trying to figure out where the hell you are. And the beauty of it is that the lie is without consequence, because in the Mara you never leave clients high and dry. Of the Big Five, three practically hurtle themselves at you here. Leopards are always most elusive, and black rhino are more plentiful elsewhere, but on the Mara, elephants, buffalo, and even lions are simply everywhere, in addition to all the “lesser” (Mary often thinks “more beautiful”) game. The challenge would be to spend a day
without
spotting at least a few lionesses dozing in the shade, or a lone lion king surveying his kingdom, poetically staring off across the plains.

On their first few safaris, Mary’s heart would race when Joshua lost his bearings. She pictured them driving until they ran out of petrol, never encountering another human being, rationing the clients’ Hobnobs and bad potato crisps, big cats circling as the pitch-black African night fell. But of course this never happened. Tourism has exploded in Kenya. Though at one moment they can seem alone in the wild, nothing else visible on any horizon, in truth, almost as with the animals, they never have to travel
that
far before seeing a cluster of safari vehicles parked, khaki-clothed travelers inside with cameras covering their faces, the sound of snapshots firing louder than the inexplicably silent footfalls of the elephants being photographed. In the beginning, Joshua (talking a blue streak about birds, for distraction) would sometimes end up trailing another guide—some
actual
Kenyan, usually Kikuyu—as he ferried his charges back to the Keekorok. Now, though, it never takes nearly that long. One glimpse of the river, one particular rock formation or cluster of trees, one memory of the way the tire tracks diverge near the overhang where they first saw the two lion brothers even Mary has come to recognize after repeated sightings, and Joshua is on his own again, trying harder and harder to keep
apart
from the fray.

“And there he is,” Joshua says smoothly, pulling up alongside a straggling river, navigating the tires cleanly through knee-deep water to park on the other side. Around everyone’s craned necks, Walt and Kathleen standing, the children on top of their seats, Mary sees what he is talking about: a hippo, its chocolate-gray skin still shiny with life, lying dead at the water’s edge just under a small overhang of grassy earth. The hippo is on its side, fresh molten-pink scratches crisscrossing its hide, part of its head caved in, missing. Over the whirling in her ears, Mary hears the clients’ oohs and aahs, their intakes of breath, their cameras maniacally clicking, and suddenly she glimpses the lion dozing on the overhang, his mane a darker brown than the dry grass, guarding his kill.

“A lion!” Liam shouts. “My favorite!”

His sister, Fiona, imperiously elbows him, half knocking him off the perch of his seat. “Shut up, do you want it to forget about that hippo and come eat you?”

Liam—Mary can’t tell if he’s hamming it up or sincere—begins to cry, shrieking, “
Eat
me? Eat me!” until Kathleen looks away from the hippo and takes her son in her arms, and Walt shoots Fiona a dirty look from behind his camera lens and mutters, “You want that phone in your room? Then knock it off.”

Dearest Nix,

Here is what I know so far. Death is cheap in Africa. People come here for one of two reasons: (1) to recognize, even
celebrate
their own insignificance amid the heartless, beautiful vastness, or (2) to convince themselves of their mastery of Africa’s majesty and malevolence by taking its picture, pinning it down on a page, assuring themselves it is something wholly separate from them.

Sometimes, a person who arrives in Africa for one of these two reasons ends up remaining for the other reason entirely. Africa can change your mind, and whatever you thought you knew of life and death can easily be switched around. You cannot choose whether this land will inhabit you, change everything you thought you knew. You can only arrive and do your best to keep an open mind.

The problem is, everything Africa has to teach involves a body count. All roads here lead to something dead.
So, if you were hoping not to think of Death at all, not to let him learn your address, not to enter into either friendship or battle with his forces but, rather, to trick him into not recognizing your name, then you are in the wrong place entirely. You should have stayed home.

J
OSHUA PARKS ON
a hilltop so the family can photograph the Serengeti, the invisible dividing line between Kenya and Tanzania, and obediently Walt, Kathleen, and Fiona rise, snapping where he points. Mary watches Liam kicking the chair in front of him, bored. It’s weird, she thinks, for Walt and Kathleen to have brought him along. Most of the English- and American-based safari companies don’t even permit children under ten, or seven, or something like that, nor will the treetop lodges on Mount Kenya or the more exclusive tented camps. Gavin’s company, however, has opted for
quantity
by keeping to the more mainstream lodges (lots of African kids stay at Keekorok, too: school groups and middle-class Kikuyu families). These lodges provide amenities like indoor showers and swimming pools but cater to big crowds, favor lukewarm buffets, and cannot be called truly “luxurious.” Fiona is technically of an acceptable safari age at twelve—with breasts already bigger than Mary’s—but just because she’s allowed to be here doesn’t mean she’s mature enough to appreciate it. On the whole, this family seems the sort Mary traveled across the world to avoid; she would bet money that, at home in Saint Paul, they have matching “Kiss me, I’m Irish” T-shirts, and are prone to attend parades.

It doesn’t matter, though. Mary has been here only since early fall, but already, just shy of Christmas, the clients are becoming a bit of a blur with their identical questions, their cocktail-party small talk. “Think of yourself as the social director of a cruise ship,” Gavin told Mary the first time she accompanied Joshua on safari. “They think they’re here for a walk on the wild side, but in reality the minute they see a blond American girl, they’ll almost piss themselves with relief. If you like the circuit—if you don’t tire of the endless smell of lion piss—I’ll start paying you to go along, to chat them up, reassure them.” He offered this while they drank Tuskers around the swimming pool outside his swank cottage in the rich—and overwhelmingly white—suburb of Karen, the picturesque stone wall surrounding his idyllic home topped with far less picturesque razor wire intended to keep out the “natives” who might aspire to steal his possessions or slit his throat. His leggy Swedish wife (or maybe they were not married) smiled a cocaine-numb smile, her eyes shielded by dark Chanel glasses. Her English was impeccable, yet she and Mary rarely spoke. She could not have been more than five or six years Mary’s senior, but she seemed a whole separate breed.
What assholes,
Mary thought. She could hardly believe that Gavin, with his pleated linen pants and sharkish politician’s smile, was related to Joshua. She felt disinclined to take his advice on anything.