A Life in Men: A Novel (23 page)

Daniel isn’t sure he wants to know, yet his mouth says, “What the hell’s a
hemo
—?”

“Hemoptysis is the medical term for coughing up blood,” Dad says smoothly, over the small noise of terror Mary makes in her throat, like the early warnings of a growl from a dog. “It’s not uncommon for people with cystic fibrosis, though when it happens to Mary it tends to be a
lot
of blood—a massive hemoptysis, they call it. She hasn’t had an episode like that in over a year that I know of—but she hides things from us. She tries not to worry us and doesn’t understand that her omissions make us worry more.”

Daniel gapes at Mary, dimly aware of Eli’s doing the same. “You have cystic fibrosis?”

Dad shakes his head, a pantomime of disappointment. “Well, sweetheart, I see why you didn’t want me to come. You had no intention of getting your birth family’s health history from this man, did you? Here we’ve been given the opportunity of a lifetime, and you came all this way . . . all this way”—his voice cracks—“without even telling him you’re sick.”

“I don’t know what you want from me!” Mary cries, jumping to her feet. “You’re being stupid and unrealistic. It takes a gene from
each
parent—he probably didn’t even know he was a carrier, for God’s sake! We’re not the royal family, where there’s been inbreeding for generations and everyone in the family would have the same genetic makeup that I do, Dad! Daniel’s fiftysomething years old,
look
at him—he’s perfectly healthy! It’s my
mother
who’s dead! It was her family where CF had already appeared—she died of an infection in the hospital just after I was born. I probably
killed
her. Should I have told him
that,
too? There, are you happy now?”

“Honey,” Dad gasps. “Honey, you didn’t kill anyone!”

“She should never have had a baby!” Mary screams. “Not that she’d have lived much longer, with or without me. She was twenty—she probably only had a couple years left if she was lucky. And so
what
if Daniel’s family has it, too, Dad, then
what
? Do you think he’s concocted some secret cure here in Mexico? What
difference
does it make? What the hell difference does it make to me, when I’ll be dead in a few years no matter what anyone does—no matter what
you
do?”

Daniel watches Mary’s father as he holds his hands over his eyes. With his slightly protruding ears and chimp-like comb-over, he makes a great model for See No Evil. The sight is painful.

“Mary,” Eli says, his voice one of quiet authority, “stop yelling at your father. His concern is perfectly appropriate. You’re acting like a complete brat. Shut up and sit down.”

Daniel thinks, for a brief moment, that she will do it. But she whirls on her heels and pushes Eli square in the chest. She shouts, “You traitor,” and storms from the room.

Daniel lowers his head into his hands. Something in him that felt vibrant and brimming with life just this morning is broken. Gabriella’s hand is still there on his knee, but he finds that he can barely feel it—that even
she
does not feel like a haven anymore from all that he’s wrought.

“She’s not dead,” he mutters. “Rebecca Channing, Mary’s biological mother—they’d changed their name from Chenowitz. As far as I know, she’s still alive and well and living on Long Island, or someplace like Long Island. She ditched us. I just didn’t know how to tell Mary. It seemed so harsh. I didn’t know the stakes.” He cannot look at Mary’s father, cannot peer into that fun-house mirror. “For the record, Rebecca was healthy as a horse. But she had a sister who died young and she talked about it all the time—she was obsessed with her dead sister. She died of a breathing problem. Her name was Linda.” He shakes his head, suddenly clearer. “No. No, it wasn’t. It was Susan. She was eleven or twelve, and their parents took all her pictures down. That’s the kind of people they were. They were monsters.”

Mary’s father looks at him then, his eyes stripped down to something Daniel will try, years from now, to write about, in yet another novel he will never finish—after he has left Gabriella and gone with Esther to Santa Fe to exist as a shaman, dwelling in a simple but luxurious adobe compound frequented by his followers. He will describe the look as
that of a human body peeled of its skin to show its painful, hideous essence
, and Esther, who patiently reads all his work, will write in the margins,
What the hell!?
but Daniel will keep the phrase stubbornly in place until the half-completed manuscript is found in the compound with him when his body is discovered, naked and shot through the heart, murdered by the husband of one of his followers, with whom he had been having an affair, with Esther’s permission, of course.

Now, however, the engineer father explains simply, “Watching your child die could turn anyone into a monster. If you’re lucky, you figure out how to become just monstrous enough to survive it.”

M
ARY’S BODY IS
rigid when Eli enters the bed, her back to him. She is still too warm, he thinks, though maybe less so than on the bus. Her bottle of antibiotics and her inhaler are on the bedside table, along with her chunky silver thumb ring, the only of her rings that she takes off to sleep. It occurs to him that her father will never let her get on that plane with him the day after tomorrow—that he will whisk the feverish Mary away to the airport come morning and bring her home. Eli senses that somehow he will never see her again.

He does not know what is in his mind and body. His emotions have been in such flux these past few days that if he feels anything it is a thin layer of resentment over a bottomless pond of numb. Just over a week ago, he was a lucky stiff sleeping with a pretty young colleague behind his wife’s back, a wife he had no particular problems with—not counting the lack of density in her skin, the loss of her collagen to age, the fact that she sometimes acts like his mother (well, not his
actual
mother, thank God, who before being ravaged by dementia was a viper and also, incidentally, a drunk). Suddenly it turns out his young plaything is a Jew, a member of his own tribe, and he has been trespassing on his unwritten rule, held fast to for twenty years, not to shit where he eats. Okay, that was a shock, but really, who’s he kidding? Eli is a secular guy and the girl’s name is
Mary
and her ass is something else and whatever,
what the fuck ever.
But now. It’s like a bad dream. Now she has some terminal disease? Now her biological father turns out to be a channeler for the dead, a keeper of two households like some Hasidic Mormon!
And
a pathological liar to boot, claiming to Mary that her mother was dead—no wonder the poor woman went running for the hills, to escape Daniel. Of course, she could have taken the baby with her. But fine, she left. Now somebody will have to tell Mary the truth, and it will be all the more appalling in the wake of Daniel’s palatable lie. Well, screw it, that somebody won’t be him.

He tries to spoon Mary. She’s always receptive to affection; she’s all woman that way, loves to be held. Thankfully this extends, as is not the case with all women, to a healthy appetite for sex. Eli doesn’t let himself question, in the light of everything he’s learned, whether this sexual voraciousness was born of desperation, a frantic fight to cheat death, to not be alone in what short time she may have left. Well, okay, yes, he does. He does question it. He just doesn’t want to know the answer. Fuck the answer. The answer isn’t his fault. If she doesn’t want to be alone, she shouldn’t have hooked her sail to a man married two decades. What’s he supposed to do, now that she’s a Jew, now that she’s ill? Leave his wife, for God’s sake? He’s always assumed that, sometime
soon,
they’ll just part ways, clean, with their stockpile of dirty memories to take into their respective futures. But what kind of man leaves a lover who might drop dead at any moment—a woman barely more than a girl who should have her whole life ahead of her, a life in which to relish and then forget him? Should he just say,
Hey, it’s been fun,
and ride into the sunset with his family and his middle-aged good health and his cultural agnostic Judaism and leave her to her fate? Didn’t he think just this morning that he could imagine staying here with her, making a life with her? Oh, sure, he thought that—that was
before
he knew she was sick. That was before her ballbusting father came around to shine a big fat light on everything that, like all secrets and perversions, like anything worth having, looked better in the dark.

She’s letting him hold her—that’s good. Though
letting
would be the operative term; she’s still not moving. Eli wants to shake her. He’s flooded with the irrational fear that maybe, despite her feverish skin, she is, in fact, already dead. He scoops her tighter, curling his knees up into hers, his cock against her ass. Still, she doesn’t speak, doesn’t respond. The numbness he thought he felt is evaporating, and what’s left behind is something like a simmering cocktail of confusion and rage. She’s a liar, just like her father. Why did she let him come here? She must have known truths would come out. Maybe she’s been trying to trap him all along.

He’s hard. If they could only fuck. Sex would restore familiarity, safeness, something that would make them feel good. Then her father can tuck her under his arm come morning and shuttle her away and it’ll all be fine. By the time she returns to work, her nice Kettering parents will no doubt have convinced her that he’s no good for her, and Eli won’t have to do the dumping after all. So: a good-bye fuck. One for the road. Her hot skin is making him sweat. She needs more than whatever’s in that little orange bottle by the bed, anyone can see that. Her father must know it, too. She’s not his anymore to let go of; soon enough, she’ll just be
gone.

He whispers into the nape of her neck, “I want you.” He knows he should apologize for reprimanding her in front of her fathers back in the sitting room; he knows she’s pissed, but for some reason her anger only makes him want her more, and he doesn’t want to soften her, doesn’t want her forgiveness now. His hands go to work, lowering the black leggings she’s sleeping in, the same ones she wears to work under her miniskirts in Columbus. Her ass pops out at him like a secret present. He thinks of this ass cold and inert, lifeless in a box lowered into the dirt. He envisions himself fucking the life right out of her and it makes him want to shout at her, to call her names. How could she do this to him? How could she come to him wrapped in beauty and youth and careless, adventurous freedom and then make a monster out of him by turning into something else entirely, something he
still
has to leave? Her body in his embrace is stiff and furious. He growls at her, “Have you ever been fucked up the ass?”

He doesn’t think she’ll respond. Clearly she’s not speaking to him. It comes as a shock, then, her voice like a jolt even though it’s a whisper, her “No.”

He finds he doesn’t like the answer, though. Irrationally he feels as though, had he asked this question in Columbus, in her single-girl apartment, in the early morning when he’s pretending to be out jogging, snuggled deep under her duvet whispering pervy come-ons to each other—he feels that there, in that setting, before the things he now knows, her answer would have been yes. It’s crazy—she’s either been fucked up the ass or not, it’s not a gray question, and if the answer is no, it’s no. But wait, that’s not it. Had he asked in Columbus, when she was wearing her mistress disguise, it wasn’t always the truth he got, and he knew that and liked it. There, her role was to be the antithesis of a wife. Her role was that of the younger, sexually liberated woman. The answer might have
been
no, but she’d have
said
yes in that other lover’s skin. And it would have driven him wild, wondering who else had ever had her that way, how this young slip of a girl had done so much in so short a time, and whether he could teach her anything new, leave a mark on any untouched space, make some indelible impression inside her to leave behind. The knowing he
couldn’t
would have made him sick, and the sickness was part of his desire.

He tries to make her play along. “Sure,” he whispers at the back of her ear. “I’ll bet you’ve been taking it up the ass for years. I’ll bet ten men have been there before me.”

She twitches violently, jolts around to face him. “I’m not lying!” And the lover’s game between them, the game on which the sexuality of the world hinges, the game of approach and retreat and interrogation and erotic deceit, evaporates, so that the bed feels cold but for the patches of sheet touched by her feverish skin. “What’s the
matter
with you?” she demands, pushing her feet off against his legs to distance her body from his. “Are you fucking blind? Can’t you see I’m
sick
?”

“I—” Dear God, his lover is dying. His sweet, young lover, who rumples his hair, whose taut, skinny thighs are as shapeless and innocent as a child’s. She may not even be alive by the time her Somali grant money comes through, those refugees from a world of horror outlasting her. He sits up, and his old, arrogant back twinges with the sharpness of his movement. His arms reach out to hold her, to rectify, but too late.

She’s standing, pulling on an old sweater Eli distantly realizes belongs to him, right over her pajamas. Layered up this way, she looks like something to peel, right down to the skeleton. “I’m sleeping in another bedroom,” she tells him, and her voice has changed, everything about her has changed. “God knows there are enough of them.”

He should run after her.

The man playing his role in the movie would pursue her, flinging back doors until he found the girl and gathered her up in his arms. But the real Eli knows that the script for the scenes ahead is already written and offers no such happy ending. Why should he pursue her, force her to let him hold her? So he can get on the plane on New Year’s Day and go home to Diane? So that he and Mary can go back to avoiding each other’s eyes at staff meetings? Who is he kidding? He has already been removed from the world of romance, and without the possibility of being the romantic hero, what’s the point? He feels like a woman, abruptly, wondering this, but without the possibility of love, exactly what is the point?