A Life in Men: A Novel (26 page)

“Hey,” Geoff says, standing quickly, discreetly, before the other restaurant patrons start to stare, “maybe we should come here again on our honeymoon.”

“I can’t believe it,” Mary whispers. “I was just thinking that.”

T
HEN IT IS
1996.

Geoff first sees the carnival on his morning run, when he impulsively hops in a cab and gets out in Santa Cruz, Tenerife’s proper city, instead of just running along Playa de las Américas.
Spanish carnies,
he thinks, surprised by how eerily identical the carnival is to one you might find in a school parking lot in rural Ohio. An old-fashioned menagerie of cheaply constructed, unsafe metal rides. He jogs right past it—he did not particularly like carnivals, even as a boy—increasing his stride, relishing the sun. It was snowing when they left Cincinnati.

Mary is still asleep. At home, she leads a borderline nocturnal schedule. She’s in her second semester of pursuing her master’s in education, and many of her classmates teach full-time by day, so most grad classes begin after 3 p.m. Geoff, Laxmi, and Mary’s parents all agreed that, although Mary has her certification to teach high school English, having her own classroom in addition to her course load would be “too much.” Last summer, when Mary was offered a teaching job that they all urged her to decline, she put up quite a fight. Even after turning down the opportunity, she was usually up at the crack of dawn, running off to swim at the YMCA or study at the library. On the days she had no class, she tutored ESL kids in an after-school program. Since Christmas, though, Mary’s been sleeping in past noon, struggling to make it to class on time as the sun goes down.

She’s awake on Geoff’s return, and he feels instantly guilty. It’s the first morning of their honeymoon, and he shouldn’t have just disappeared without her. She doesn’t seem taciturn, but still, he omits mention of having run anywhere other than down the touristy Playa de las Américas boardwalk, since he knows Mary hates it there. Somehow, though, they end up wandering, by mutual unspoken consent, beyond the boundaries of their resort and “back” to the boardwalk (Geoff is grateful to have, in fact, not seen it twice in one day). Clearly Mary is as restless as he, though they have only just arrived. Within the walls of the resort, it feels strangely as though they are on a
Twilight Zone
train car from which they can never disembark, and with relief Geoff beholds the fat German and English retirees waddling around Playa de las Américas: proof of the world outside.

Although he jogged through breakfast and Mary presumably slept in and missed it, they sit together at a café table on the boardwalk and order beers. “Beer only tastes good when I’m hungry,” Mary says, proclaiming the carbonation “too filling.” Normally Geoff would find this adorable, but today he doesn’t comment. They sit drinking their beers on empty stomachs at eleven in the morning, surrounded by tourists, most of them unattractive.

Mary looks pretty. Warm weather becomes her. Already her face is flushing with sun and drink, and she wears a skimpy batik sundress that shows off her swimmer arms, her flip-flops kicked off under the table. In the humidity her hair winds itself into golden corkscrews. After one beer, she begins making fun of the passing tourists, inventing dialogue for them and having them talk to one another about inane things like where to find a proper sausage roll. Her British accent is spot on. The mania of her spiel makes Geoff anxious, but he also likes that she’s trying so hard to perform for him and laughs appreciatively. He wants to be allies again.

Some hippies walk by—a ragtag bunch, six or seven men, two women among them. They seem a natural choice for some of Mary’s funny dialogue, so Geoff waits expectantly.

“I smell their hash on the breeze,” Mary says, and her voice is so nostalgic, so unmocking, that for a moment Geoff thinks she is about to break into an improvised poem (earnest in a tongue-in-cheek way) on the joys of hashish, still for his amusement. But no, no such riff is forthcoming, only Mary staring longingly at the receding backs of the hippies.

Indignation rises in Geoff’s esophagus like a bad meal returning to haunt him. Obviously Mary never smoked pot, even when she was younger, not with her lungs. The hippies are about their age, late twenties. Their women are unattractive, which surprises Geoff not at all—why would a beautiful woman settle for such a life? He finds them all ridiculous. To clarify: he doesn’t begrudge them their lifestyle or wish them ill. He is as liberal as the next guy, after all; he voted for Clinton even though both his parents, who can agree on nothing else, are staunch Republicans. Geoff prides himself on being nonjudgmental. But come on! Walking around in ratty, mismatched clothing, smoking drugs in public, and sleeping on the beach when you are pushing thirty seems absurd to him. Would seem absurd to anyone.

Except that, apparently, to Mary it doesn’t. The expression on her face is caught between nostalgia and longing, which Geoff interprets as an affront. If you like hippies, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you shouldn’t marry a doctor. Plus, if Mary took to smoking hash and sleeping on the beach, she would probably be dead in a matter of months. Perhaps this is
why
she is sitting here with him? His beer tastes warm and sour now.

Mary has stopped looking at the hippies. She turns to him and says, “That’s all we do, isn’t it? Look at things and try new drinks.”

Geoff jumps a little in his chair. It seems bizarre and apocalyptic, her saying this.

But Mary laughs. “You know,” she says. “ ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’ ” And slowly Geoff feels his body relax. He has never read the story, but has heard of it, of course. It’s unclear now why he reacted so badly. Even in light of the hippies, the quote obviously isn’t true of him and Mary at all. “Remember?” Mary says, as though the possibility that Geoff may not have read the story is inconceivable. “How the girl says everything tastes like licorice? We should order a pastis—have you ever tried one? I used to drink them in France. And in London, there was this derelict old geezer who used to come into the Latchmere every morning at eleven and stay until closing. Everyone called him Pernod because that was all he ever ordered. Except me. I called him Norm.”

Geoff does not, thank God, ask Mary if the guy’s name was Norm.
This
reference he understands.

Mary signals the waiter. But Geoff doesn’t want a fancy French aperitif now. He wants to go back to the room and retreat behind the
Herald Tribune
and forget about Mary for a while, even though it is the first day of their honeymoon and he has no choice but to take her with him. He pulls out some money, claiming exhaustion, to which Mary says, “If you didn’t wake up so damned early to run around,” but fondly, unaware of his mood shift, and they head back to the resort.

It isn’t until dinnertime, however, that Geoff remembers about Santa Cruz and the carnival. Back at the resort, Mary sucked his dick without his having to ask her to, and so he liked her again.
Liked
her again? But of course he likes her all the time, loves her too much—that is the problem. Of course he wouldn’t mind about the stupid hippies (to whom she didn’t even speak) otherwise. He came in her mouth, and she dashed off into the bathroom to spit it into the sink, but he forgave her because that is just what girls are like after you get serious with them, even if they swallowed in the beginning. Geoff is no Casanova, but he is old enough to understand such a simple thing and not be offended by it anymore. Once, the girlfriend who later dumped him for moving to Ohio asked how he would like it if she shot a wad of menstrual blood into his mouth and told him to swallow it, and he had to admit he wouldn’t like it much, though he isn’t convinced the two things are exactly comparable when you come down to it. Nonetheless, his dick sucked and drained, he forgave Mary the hippies and fell asleep without the
Herald Tribune
, and later when he woke and found her poolside in her boy-shorts bikini, reading
Justine
by Lawrence Durrell, his dick got hard again and he remembered the carnival and offered it to her, like a fancily wrapped candy, a reward.

So here they are. They have ridden the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Scrambler, and everything feels happy, exciting, and light. Mary leans against him as they walk, her hand in the back pocket of his shorts. As in Greece, she stands out here with her blond hair. She has on the batik dress and flip-flops again, while all the Spanish women wear leather heels. Mary, a world traveler, must understand the footwear customs of Spanish women, but she never wears heels, even though she is short. She dresses, Geoff thinks, like a girl in junior high, though her breasts, clearly braless behind the dress’s gauzy fabric, are nothing a father of a junior high girl would be thrilled to see his daughter parading around at a foreign carnival. Against his body, she feels lithe and fragile, as though he could rip the dress off with one hand and leave her standing, abandon her to the crowd, with her gaping, pale titties and tiny underpants and the flip-flops still on her feet. Not that this is something he would ever do, or even the kind of thing he fantasizes about—though it strikes him as something Mary might whisper to him suggestively while he is fucking her, during one of her stretches of sexual intensity, when her drive borders on the desperate or depraved, and after long hours on call Geoff can barely keep up with her: a predicament both alarming and thrilling. Although she has not been in one of those periods since the fall, Geoff thinks that maybe later, when they make love in the hot tub, he will tell her about this fantasy that is not
his
fantasy quite, and he imagines her wetness gliding over his dick and how, even if she doesn’t say so, he will know she is turned on. He has forgotten the hippies now.

There is alcohol for sale at the carnival, so they get drunk. In Cincinnati, Geoff is not a big drinker, Mary even less so, given all the meds she takes, but here, why not? Here for one week, why not be the people from her Hemingway story? The twirling Octopus, in combination with liquor, makes them ill. And yet there is a thrill in the air. They dance in the open lot to Madonna booming “Holiday,” just as in Greece nearly eight years ago: in any country in the world, “Holiday” is playing. They take this carnival for all it is worth, and Mary’s hand caresses Geoff’s ass inside his back pocket, and everything feels right and fresh and good, even though they have both been to makeshift carnivals and danced to eighties songs and touched each other’s asses a hundred times before, and that saved them from nothing.

When they leave, it is as though they are simply being led onward, to something else. They still haven’t eaten dinner, and Geoff napped through lunch, just munching some Pringles out of the honor bar, so not only is he famished but his intoxication level is teetering on the brink of dangerous. They planned to eat dinner at “their” restaurant—the one where he proposed—but they’ve remained in Santa Cruz too long and missed the seating. And Geoff finds, really, that all he wants to do is meander until he and Mary find another place—the kind without set seatings, a place concierges do not recommend and that is not in any guidebook—and wander inside. He will know the right place when he sees it. They will drink red wine and eat seafood or paella, and years from now they will still talk about the restaurant, though they may not remember its name.

“Look,” Mary says, jerking his hand. “What’s going on?”

Up front, a parade seems to be blocking the street, though this seems an odd hour for it. The audience, rather than standing on the sidelines watching, follows the procession. Geoff tightens his grip on Mary’s hand as they rush forward to see.

Ah, okay, yes. This is part of Carnaval—the
real
Carnaval—because tonight is the day before Ash Wednesday. Geoff isn’t Catholic, isn’t really anything, although he and Mary share a common later-in-life addition of Jews to their family, since Geoff’s WASP mother is now married to one. If there is some hidden Catholic meaning to the fact that the procession is composed of men dressed in drag, then Geoff isn’t savvy to what it is. Or wait—not just in
drag
but as
widows
in mourning, all in black but for red flowers on their hats, or a red shirt beneath a jacket or cloak of black. They shriek in falsetto, dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs in a mock sorrow Geoff doesn’t understand. Is it a parody of the Inquisition, perhaps? He looks at Mary for some Catholic insight, but though her eyes are shiny and aroused, she shrugs at him and shouts above the din, “I have no idea!” as though she’s read his mind. Suddenly Geoff catches sight of a giant macramé fish being carried atop a float—he cannot work a fish into the Inquisition—and Mary begins to hop up and down, her airy dress flapping around her legs.

“Come on!” she shouts. “Let’s follow them!”

They race along on the sidelines, trying to catch up, but the crowd is thick and they can’t quite penetrate into its center. From where they are, Geoff can see that both men and women dressed as nuns and priests are part of the procession. Several of the nuns pretend to faint dead away as they move through the narrow streets, and this splinters the crowd a bit so that Geoff and Mary can finally get in closer. Just as they do, priests anoint the onlookers with buckets of holy water, which splatters onto Geoff’s face. Beer.

Then come the ghouls. Masked and ominous, followed by clowns with white, ringleted wigs. Three girls dressed as prostitutes dash up to an older tourist couple nearby and fan their ruffled skirts, babbling in Spanish; the older couple laughs, but Geoff notes that the man backs up in a series of small, quick steps, knocking into the people behind him.

Abruptly the procession shrieks together, screaming in voices that sound indicative of real pain, and a chill runs down Geoff’s back as it has on occasion in the hospital, when a patient’s agony or fear becomes unbearable and restraints must be used. He knows this is
theater,
merely an improvised performance, but something in the collective hysteria frightens him. The people carrying the fish wear executioner’s masks and black robes, and every so often they spin around and chase the crowd, the onlookers shooting off to opposite sides of the narrow streets. Mary is right there with them, caught up in the excitement, letting go of Geoff’s hand, so that he has to bolt forward to keep up or lose her in the crowd. He thinks he hears the beating of drums, though over the voices and shrieks it’s hard to be sure. Members of the procession are so disguised that several times, when Geoff sees friends meeting up with each other, both parties seem astounded at the recognition. A man dressed as a widow bats his false eyelashes at Geoff, and suddenly there is Mary again, whipping a brightly colored Mexican shawl out from her straw bag and wrapping it around Geoff’s head, nudging him, but by the time he catches on and tries to bat his eyelashes back, the “widow” is gone. The procession moves on, but Geoff remains still.