A Life in Men: A Novel (30 page)

“Listen,” he says, his voice low and angry, though the anger isn’t at her, not anymore. “You told me you took a nap. You said you fell asleep at the villa, and Nix was left alone with Zorg and Titus. Did you or did you not tell me that?”

She takes off her glasses and looks at him with transparent confusion. “Yeah,” she says, “right. She wasn’t alone with them, exactly—I mean, she was
already
with Titus before I went to the guest room. I think she probably fucked him, though we never talked about it. Why are you asking me about that—what, do you think I slept with that psycho Zorg and never told you or something?” She looks away, out toward the children playing, and Geoff sees her focus shifting instantly, the way it always does when she looks at children, the way it always will, now that pregnancy is a risk well outside the boundary of what is possible for her anymore, in their new
B. cepacia
world. He wants to snatch her focus back, but he watches it dissipate, away from Nix, away from him, off in the direction of those small footsteps in the sand. When she looks back at him, she is smiling, but oddly, like a ghost herself.

“I probably
should
have,” she says, and it takes him a moment to realize she means that she should have fucked sociopathic Zorg. Geoff has no concept of why she would say such a thing; his entire body flinches at the thought. “Then maybe she’d have known I was capable of helping. Then maybe she wouldn’t have sent me away like a useless child.
I’m
the one who snagged you and Irv, aren’t I, and got us out of that bar? She never even gave me credit for that. I worshipped her, and she acted like I was nothing.”

Then her head turns again, watching a brother and sister chase each other along the shore, some innocent parody of the way she chased Nix on the sand that night at Plati Yialos. This time, Geoff holds his tongue.

T
HE SUN HIDES
behind a cloud. Mary feels an encroaching chill in the air and shivers as she picks up her bag, slips the straps over her shoulders for the ride back to the port. The black volcanic sand looks more ominous than beautiful, biting into her bare feet as she crosses it, so that she has to stop and put on her flip-flops. Geoff waits on the scooter, his square jaw set in a kind of irritation that reminds Mary of the way her mother sometimes looked in the supermarket when Mary was a child and pestered her to buy junk food: as though he knows Mary is going to be difficult and is steeling himself to rise above it. Shamed, she shuffles over to the scooter and gets on.

Geoff revs up. All at once, the scooter shoots forward and knocks into a palm tree, clunking over some island resident’s bicycle. Geoff mutters, “Shit, shit!” and kills the motor, gets off, and rights the bike.
Mr. Nice Guy
. Mary would have left the bike lying there. They have bigger problems.

He starts the scooter again, driving shakily upward toward the treacherous cliffs.

Mary’s heart pounds in her ears; the sound is deafening, oppressive. It has ceased to be lost on her that what is happening is irrational. Geoff is driving slowly. Teenage kids—illiterate or revved up on hormones—drive these scooters worldwide, whereas her husband is a thirtysomething, Harvard-educated pulmonary specialist, for fuck’s sake. Still, her head spins. She hears the echo of complicit male laughter—Titus leaning over and whispering something to Zorg, the deadened slits that were Zorg’s eyes suddenly sparking to life as the two begin to laugh. She can hear their chuckling as though their exhaled breath is right there on her shoulder—that shared joke that never fit into any of her scenarios of that day. Not with the revelation of her terminal illness, which Mary has always assumed prompted Zorg to turn gentle, to send her off to bed like a sick child. Later, that moment in the disco when Zorg’s hand lingered too long on Nix’s knee, yet Titus didn’t even flinch. Finally Geoff’s voice, all those years ago, at the water’s edge of Plati Yialos:
You said you took a nap
.

Mary’s hand shoots up, irrespective of her will, desperately pushing the helmet off her head. Coughing, she gasps for breath. The helmet soars behind her, crashes onto the highway, rolling.

Geoff screams, “What the fuck!”

Mary is hacking hard now, clutching his waist. There are tears. Shit. Maybe if he just keeps driving, he will not see them. But no. Of course he will stop the scooter—he is stopping the scooter. Of course he has to get the fucking stupid-ass helmet, just as he had to right that bicycle. Yeah, Mr. Nice Guy—he was never a match for Zorg and Titus, never a match for what happened that day. Mary lets go of his waist, almost loses her balance, clutches the back of the scooter until it comes to a halt, then pushes Geoff’s body away from hers futilely. She has started to shake.

Geoff runs after the helmet. It takes him a while—it has rolled pretty far. A bus whizzes by, almost knocking Mary over with its gust. She stands close to the guardrail, sobbing.

“Okay,” Geoff says. “Okay, I get it. You don’t like the scooter. I will drive very slowly, I promise—I’m sorry, Mar, I’m not trying to scare you. Come on, let’s just get back to the other side of the island and return this thing, and then we’ll be done with it.”

“You think they raped her,” Mary accuses, not looking at him.

Geoff steps closer to her, though he holds the helmet like a shield between them. “Yeah. I do.”

“You don’t understand.” She shakes her head. “It’s my fault. They were already
planning
it—that’s why they sent me to bed. And I just went. I slept for something like two hours, maybe three. I just abandoned her to them.”

Geoff sets the helmet very carefully on the scooter’s seat, like something breakable and precious. He goes to Mary, his large hands on the sides of her arms, but his touch feels wrong and she jerks away.

“Listen,” he says. “Be realistic. What could you have done? You were two girls in an isolated house with men who were older and stronger than you were. You didn’t speak the language—you didn’t even know where you were. Do you really think you could have stopped those sons of bitches from doing whatever they had a mind to do?”

“I didn’t even try! I could have stayed with her, and maybe they would have reconsidered—maybe . . .”

“Do you really believe that? Isn’t it more likely that they would just have raped you, too?”

She starts to walk, mindlessly, uphill. Geoff stays rooted on the highway’s curb, not following, waiting for her, but she can’t bring her body to turn around and reapproach him. Her hands are still trembling, her tears still falling, but something about all this feels wrong, as if she is acting something out, reciting lines that don’t belong to her. How is it
possible
that Geoff would know all this time what happened to Nix and she would not? Nothing makes sense. He wasn’t there. How could she have slept through the kind of gang-rape scenario he obviously imagines? He didn’t even
hear
Titus and Zorg laugh. Mary’s legs move numbly, her knees buckling, so that she has to hold on to the guardrail. They were all a little shit-faced—okay, really, really fucking sloshed, from the wine at the restaurant, the barrage of cocktails at the villa. The moment her head hit the blindingly white pillow, Mary was out cold. But was she really so drunk, so deep in slumber, that she wouldn’t have heard her best friend scream?

Nix never screamed. On this, Mary would bet her life. But how does this fit into the rest of the scattered truths of that day? How does this reconcile with what Geoff thinks he understands?

He pulls up alongside her, on the scooter, helmet hanging from its handlebars. “Mary,” he begs, “please get on.”

Nature is in collusion with all manner of trouble. Just as she feared back at the beach when the chilly air teased her arms, a drizzle of rain begins to fall from the sky.

“We have no choice,” Geoff begs. “Look at the sky—it’s going to storm.”

Nix’s face on the villa’s balcony, set with some kind of blind resolve.
I will get us out of this,
she promised.
Don’t do anything,
she warned. Nix, the reckless one, always too brave for her own damn good. But how far could any girl be willing to go? Afterward, Nix was a shell of herself, nothing resembling victorious. What was the line between rape and a premeditated scheme? What was the possibility that
anyone
could so calmly orchestrate and carry out her own annihilation?

And what sense would such a sacrifice make, if both of them were only going to die anyway? What difference all the feelings Mary has had for Geoff, when after everything, love is just nowhere near enough?

“I don’t care!” Mary screams at the idling scooter. “Go ahead, leave me here—it doesn’t matter!”

Like everything else, Geoff’s stare contradicts itself. There is anger, unmistakably, but also confusion, also fear, and she understands in a brief flash of clarity that he, too, has reached the end of some kind of rope. That he is summoning all the calm and generosity he can muster from a place very far away, a place he cannot feel. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” he mutters, low. “I’m not going to leave you. If you make me push this scooter all the way down this damn mountain in the middle of a rainstorm and it takes all night, then that’s what I’m going to do. But I will not be happy about it, Mary. You can’t ask me to be happy about it anymore.”

“You think you understand so much,” she accuses. “You didn’t see Nix in that car, when Zorg was speeding on the cliffs. We really believed we were going to die. She was . . . so afraid.”

“But babe,” Geoff says, killing the motor, “Nix
didn’t
die in that car. Whatever happened at that villa isn’t what killed her. She died on an airplane, but you’re not afraid to fly. Your best friend died because some militant extremists bombed a plane—because the world is a fucked-up, terrible place, with terrorists and rapists, okay? But you can’t help her anymore, Mary. This all happened almost ten years ago. What’s done is done.”

“Maybe she should have died on that car ride,” Mary says icily. “We both should have.”

“I’m not going to listen to this.”

At the airport in Athens, when Nix pulled away first, Mary thought,
I will never see her again
. All these intervening years, that moment of fear has seemed prophetic, when really it was too late: Nix was already gone.

Cars blur past. Rain pours down.

“Oh, sure!” Mary shouts at Geoff through a rising mist. “Don’t listen to anything you don’t want to hear! You’ve been living in a dream world anyway! Like we were going to have babies and ride into the sunset. Like that was
ever
going to happen! You should never have married me.”

“Why?” He leaps off the scooter to approach her, then turns abruptly and kicks it so it falls, hard and clean, to the ground. “Jesus, this is ridiculous! You’re right here in front of me, aren’t you? Nix is the one who’s dead—you’re not her. She was, like, a
person,
okay? She wasn’t just some symbol for your own doomed life. Her death wasn’t
about
you! Stop hiding behind her already!”

Mary wraps her arms around herself to keep out the rain. Her hair is damp in her eyes. She glares at Geoff, but she can’t even see him for the drops of water, the wet strands. “I wish sometimes,” she says, “that you had kissed her that night instead of me. Then every time I tasted you, I’d taste her, too. You think I didn’t know something had happened? It was . . .” She sinks to the ground, legs finally surrendering. “It was fucking obvious, even to
you,
and you were nothing but a stranger. From the minute I woke up at the villa and Titus went to get Nix out of that room, she was a ghost already. There was nothing left of the person I’d known. I must’ve always suspected—but that’s not fucking true either. It
never
occurred to me. Still, it was always there. I’d have done anything to bring her back—if I could have given you to her, if I thought that would have made her feel better, I would have.”

He pulls her to her feet with a roughness she has never felt in his touch, and she thinks, for one crazy moment, that he will strike her, and finds she is wild with anticipation—that she is eager for the blow. But instead he clutches her to him hard. He holds her, whispering, “Stop it, stop it, don’t say anything more.”

Her legs, though, will not hold. She and Geoff sink to their knees together in the downpour, red dirt staining their bare skin like paint. Geoff rummages inside his pack, still holding fast to Mary’s arm with one hand so that she cannot escape. He roots around until he finds a can of Coca-Cola Light, extracts it, and flips off the top. He tosses the can to the side—Mary is surprised, even amid everything, by his blatant act of littering. Grasping the tab of the can in his fingers tightly, he holds it out to her and slips the oblong opening uncomfortably onto her ring finger.

Can I say “My Dearest Nix”?

You do not fit into the narrative of my life anymore. I am a grown woman with
B. cepacia
and a husband I love but who wants to keep me in a beautiful cage, and I long for a child even more than I did the night I fled Kenya or the morning Geoff first walked into my hospital room like the answer to all my deepest questions, but there will be no baby now, and that has become an immovable, irrevocable fact. So here I am, trapped inside my own skin, waiting for my body to finish its unromantic assault on itself. But what, suddenly, is
this?
Everything I have believed about you turns out to be wrong.

He says, “I’m not going to let you do this. If you want to get away from me, you’re going to have to get on that scooter and ride it back to town and leave
me
here on the road. Because I’d marry you all over again, and I don’t care if you think that makes me an idiot. I accept you for who you are, whether or not you can accept yourself. I don’t care if we can’t have a baby. I don’t care if you die—I, Christ, that’s not what I . . .” But he stops. He clings to her hand, pressing its aluminum soda tab into the delicate flesh between her fingers. Under the rain, his eyes are leaking, too. “I know you’re going to die,” he says, his voice steady. “And I have no regrets.”