A Life in Men: A Novel (27 page)

“Come on!” Mary cries again. It may be only the second or third time she’s said it, but it feels to him like the hundredth. “Hurry up, we won’t be able to see what happens next.”

He wants to give her this. He wants to hand it to her the way he did the familiar parking-lot carnival—the way he handed her this
luna de miel
as a substitute honeymoon when, at the last minute, they had to cancel their original wedding plans on New Year’s Day at Daniel’s majestic courtyard in Querétaro, sending notes to guests that Mary had an “infection” and couldn’t travel. Only Mary’s parents knew the truth about the miscarriage—knew that Mary had been pregnant at all after seven months of trying, or knew that, in mid-December, they had seen the baby’s heartbeat on an ultrasound, Mary’s pregnancy being treated as “high risk” because of her CF and so early ultrasounds being standard. They went in, then, for their next appointment on the day before Christmas Eve, holding hands and referring—like naïfs begging fate to smite them—to their baby as their “Christmas present,” but the heartbeat was gone.

In the dark room, after the ultrasound machine was turned off and Mary was instructed to get dressed and proceed to her doctor’s office, Geoff burst into tears, crying loudly in a fashion he couldn’t remember doing since childhood, since before his parents’ divorce. He went to embrace Mary, the way he had the day they were reunited and she told him about Nix, but instead she gave him a withering look and rose to put on her clothes. The fertility specialist explained to them that miscarriages at this stage were common—that in all probability the fetus suffered from a chromosomal abnormality that prohibited development, that most likely this had nothing to do with Mary’s CF and they would go on to have another healthy pregnancy just like “normal” couples. Geoff watched Mary stare straight ahead with eyes blank as a fish’s. The doctor suggested they schedule a D & C immediately to spare Mary the pain of waiting for her body to expel it, but Mary said she would wait and let her body do the job on its own. She waited for three weeks, but nothing happened except she developed back pain so severe that by the end she could barely walk, until she had to call her doctor back in defeat and ask for the procedure. “My body can’t even miscarry properly,” she said bitterly, and after the surgery, which her doctor said they had put off longer than was ideal, she bled for two weeks, wearing thick Kotex to her classes and only finally, near their wedding day, being able to brave a white dress. She’d chosen a Mexican-style peasant dress, off the shoulder, for their grand Querétaro affair, but Geoff stood helplessly by as she tossed it in the trash, its fabric overflowing the crowded, plastic bin. Without her mother’s help, she went out and returned with a stunning red gown embroidered with gold Chinese patterns, its bustier top and curve-clinging skirt a sophisticated antithesis to the innocence of the Mexican dress. She had her hair blown out on the snowy day of their ceremony, and it shimmered long and slick; at the dinner reception afterward all Geoff’s relatives and colleagues raved, but to Geoff the bridal Mary seemed a glossed and polished shell of her usual self: cold, regal, and frightening.

Tonight is the first time Geoff has seen Mary exhibit excitement since the miscarriage. Even at their consolation prize of a wedding held on Valentine’s Day in Ohio because Mary didn’t feel up to dealing with Daniel anymore, Geoff felt her going through their vows on autopilot: a numbed-out zombie bride. He knows that he should offer her this night as the
true
beginning of their marriage—that he should follow wherever she leads now—but his senses are overwhelmed; he’s drunk and tired and can’t stop seeing himself at a great distance, shirking from the executioners and ghouls, cowering beneath the giant fish that looks as if it could topple and crush a dozen men. The procession has moved on and still he remains static. Confusion spreads across Mary’s firelit eyes.

“I feel like we might be an intrusion.” The words come out false—there are other tourists, many of them, in the crowd. He offers instead, “I know it’s a performance, but there seems something private about it, too, something sacred, like they’re putting it on for us but they hate our presence at the same time. Don’t you feel it?”

She stares. Clearly she does not. And he’s not sure that’s precisely
it
anyway, what he means. He knows only that he wanted a small, quiet restaurant after the frenetic Tilt-A-Whirl and Octopus, after the nausea of the rickety Ferris wheel and dancing with her braless, rhythmic body, no trace left of a pregnancy that had never shown anyway. He wanted intimacy, privacy, a renewal of romance after loss, but instead he got strangers in drag shouting in his face, and bodies pushing up against his, and a roar so deafening he cannot, still, make out whether there was music playing or the racket was all human-generated. The crestfallen look on Mary’s face makes him all at once remember the hippies, and he wonders irrationally whether they are in this crowd, whether now they have disappeared down some winding, narrow street to hump one another like dogs against the old buildings’ crumbling walls—whether this is what Mary wanted from
him,
too. They are standing outside a tiny restaurant, Geoff notices, and he could almost cry: it is exactly what he had in mind. Its pink awning reads
L
A
F
ORTUNA
, and the small outdoor café is full, but inside there are several empty tables. He takes Mary by the hand and almost pleads, “Let’s stay here. You must be starving—let’s just eat.”

Inside La Fortuna, all the other patrons are women. The women occupy three separate tables on far ends of the matchbox restaurant and do not appear to be together, yet each (there are seven in total) is dressed in a different-colored pastel dress: pink, blue, green, yellow, orange, lavender, and another pink that is more like dusty rose. The dresses are not all of the same cut, but they are, to a one, solid colored and old-fashioned in effect, so the women appear like scoops of bright ice cream in a surreally Technicolor 1960s sitcom. Something about their presence in the restaurant is both comic and creepy. In the cramped room, Geoff can tell that they all have English accents. Is this some kind of
club
? But no, the women at the various tables do not even glance at one another or interact in any way.

Geoff looks at Mary and says, “This has been a very strange night.”

“It was unbelievable!” she gushes. “I wish we knew where they were taking the fish! I wonder if it was to the water—if they were going to let it drift out to sea.”

Geoff feels beaten down. He feels as though he has been punched. The word
relentless
pops into his mind. This is what she is: relentless. And yet she has done nothing. She is sitting here, at the table across from him, not complaining, not berating him. She is compliant, but the fervor still sparks in her eyes. Back at Carnaval, she looked like Joan of Arc. Like a zealot: someone who saw visions. Slowly, right in front of him, she is transforming back into his wife, just a woman who has suffered one too many losses and is trying to outrun pain with stoicism, secrecy, and parades—and who the hell can blame her? What does he want from her anyway? On the night he fell in love with her, she was a zealot, an apparition from the sea. When he saw her again, she was aflame with fever—
genuine
fever—fresh from the brink of death and bringing him news of a plane that had exploded in the sky, and he loved her again, wildly, like a sailor loves a siren. Now, though, he just wants a normal dinner companion, not a visionary. But how can he expect her to turn her fervor on and off like a light switch when it suits him? She is racing for a finish line, and sometimes the romance of it blinds him, and other times he simply cannot keep pace.

“I wonder how late they stay out in the streets,” Mary says, and it takes him a moment to realize she is still speaking of Carnaval, of the procession. “Maybe we’ll see them again on our walk home.”

All he wants is a wife who will cry over their lost baby, who will let him hold her and comfort her, but she will not give him this, instead darting her restless eyes around the restaurant. “Jeez,” she says breezily, “have you noticed all the crazy-looking chicks in this place?”

He puts his head down on his arms. He has lost it. Is Mary to blame for noticing—just as he had—the pastel-colored women at the neighboring tables? Is she responsible for the fact that the people of Santa Cruz run around enacting some strange death ritual about a fish?

“Geoff?” Mary says, and he hears a hint of her intensity returning—but this time tinged with fear. He knows he should look up; he knows his behavior is inappropriate. “Geoff, what’s wrong?

“Nothing,” he says into his arms, but then he raises his head to face her. She
is
just a girl, just his wife. What was he so afraid of? He can’t tell. Her eyes are her eyes, nothing more. Inside her chest, her lungs are working, doing their job for now. Under that sundress, her ovaries are producing eggs.
Look on the bright side,
her OB had said.
At least you know you can get pregnant
.

“I think I’ve been drinking too much today,” Geoff says. “Do you mind if tonight we skip the wine?”

Nix,

I knew I should leave it alone, but I asked our waiter in Spanish what the deal was with the fish. Entierro de la Sardina, he says it’s called. Basically they bury the fish at the water the night before Ash Wednesday. He didn’t speak any English and my Spanish is rusty, so I wasn’t able to sort out exactly why. Why a burial, why a sardine? Is it their symbol for Jesus? Somehow my lack of comprehension made it all feel even more like magic. When I found out I’d missed the burial, I felt like throwing things, but Geoff doesn’t deserve that, so I just smiled.

And what the hell would
you
know about it anyway?

I guess since I keep defying my life expectancy, this was bound to happen eventually. I have finally gotten old enough to understand how
young
you were when you died. If you, the you of my memory, were alive today, I would not be telling my secrets to a twenty-year-old college student. If the ticking time bomb in my lungs counts for anything, then I am already past middle age, already an old woman. But even if you don’t grant me that jump in maturity, still I have passed those places we shared. I am a married woman. For all of six weeks, I was a mother of a baby girl named Nicole Rebecca. I shouldn’t have named her after you, I know. I keep making that same fucking mistake. But what can I say? She is my Nicole now.

When you left me at the Athens Airport, like when you left me alive in this world, you were the “traveler”
among us simply because you were going to an American college in English-speaking London. Now I have lived all over the world. What possible reason can I have for still writing to a girl I met in kindergarten, to my “best friend always” from high school? I outgrew you long ago.

Your death was tragic, but if life has taught me anything, it’s that tragedy is cheap. You were a force of nature, Nix, I’ll give you that. Unlike me, where my own body seems to attack me at every turn, it took an enemy of the whole free world to fell you. But what of it?

I remember all the times you said you would never be your mother, some dumb twit knocked up young and spending her life changing diapers and getting fat. I remember you wanted to be Anaïs Nin. I remember that you hated children—that when we passed a baby on the street and I would coo, you’d roll your eyes, plug your nose, and laugh that throaty laugh I found so intoxicating.

You were just a dumb kid yourself. I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.

M

R
AIN AGAIN.

On the last day of their honeymoon, and for the third day running, drizzle piddles down onto the villa’s low roof, small, staccato explosions of sound that Mary alternately tunes out, then thinks will drive her mad. Geoff lounges on the king-size bed in striped boxer shorts, his olive skin against the shocking white of the duvet like a J.Crew underwear ad. Though she has never thought this before, he seems too clean to be exactly
sexy
, his perfection utterly incompatible with the turmoil she feels. On TV, CNN is covering the third anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and wounded more than a thousand. They’re showing footage from that day, and already Mary knows that it will loop around continuously, so that if the weather does not let up, this is what she will be stuck with on her last day on the island. She imagines Mom home in Ohio, watching similar coverage, perhaps calling Nix’s mother, Sandy, and asking her to dinner after work so that Sandy will not sit home and obsess over the television, over the bodies of those dead from terrorism. Mary’s mother is considerate that way, knowing something about dead daughters even though her daughter is still alive.

Mary gets up to shower, though breakfast in bed does not require such hygiene and she will need to shower again in only a few hours, since once Geoff tires of CNN, they will surely be engaging in sex. Mary came prepared for frequent honeymoon copulation (though in truth, before the rain, they’d made love only once), her luggage crammed with Monistat 7 and some stronger prescription cream, since even in bed her body has become mutinous lately. Although the frequency of sex that first year with Joshua sometimes reached epic proportions, it is only now, since she has been trying to conceive, that she has become plagued by the infamous yeast infections to which women with cystic fibrosis are prone. The brochures will tell you that this is because women with CF have thicker mucus. Mary will tell you it is because Geoff has a gargantuan dick, which does not sound like something she would ever have filed under the category of “problem,” but when your vagina is itching and discharging like a motherfucker because you and your faulty mucus have been rubbed raw by a purple-red flagpole that pulses with its own heartbeat, your vantage point tends to change. Thus far, she has had a yeast-free honeymoon. Compulsively she showers, as though this will keep her that way.