A Life in Men: A Novel (31 page)

“You will,” she promises. Tourist buses roll past, racing toward the final ferry of the night, unmindful of the storm. “Nix died on me, and look at me now. I’m a mess. I’ll go, and I’ll ruin everything.”

“I don’t care,” he insists again. “I want to be ruined.”

Here is what I have left of you that you never meant to give me. The feel of your foot through the back of my seat in Zorg’s car, your will to live overriding my temptation to just lie down and be done with it. A terror of winding roads. The rushing of the ground, coming for me, too. Yet also, the will not to just survive but to
live,
rushing hard in my ears like the inexplicable roar of the sea inside a fragile, finite seashell.

Here is what I have tried to give back to you, best friend, blood sister, fellow adventurer. A vow to keep moving, keep going, as you always told me you were going to.

Soon Mary and Geoff will have to get back on the scooter. At the speed Geoff will drive, they will never make it back in time for the boat. They will spend the night in town, will walk the dark, narrow streets looking for a place nothing like their Tenerife resort. At last they will find a little room, and later that night while her husband sleeps, Mary will finish her letter.

All this time I’ve viewed your life as some wild freedom jaunt, cut short by random tragedy. But you faced your own isolating hell, a secret that cut you off from me. Everything, from your failure to scream to the fact that you ushered me back to the States without explanation, points at some effort to protect, to keep this ugliness from me. Even your strange letters from London, so curiously devoid of your spark, your soul, make a dark kind of sense now. What can I say? As usual, you succeeded in your aims. All these years, and still I’ve looked at you the way you wanted me to, with awe and envy and even (lately) disdain. But your life was not a child’s, though you died too soon. All this time, you faced a woman’s sorrows, no differently than I.

In those months between August and December 1988, you somehow refused to give up or lose sight of beauty. You could easily have run home to the haven of your childhood bedroom, but instead you forged on, beyond Kettering or Skidmore, to London alone. Where does a courage like that come from? How can it be that even now, when I am almost thirty, you are teaching me still, inspiring me? Maybe I conjured you on that ferry, on the winding roads, as a reminder that I cannot just lie down and die either. Whether I have four months or four years, I have to find the strength to make my time count.

Someday it will be here, to the Canary Islands, that Geoff will return alone to scatter Mary’s ashes. First, though, long before death, before sleep, before lovemaking and a whispered renewal of vows, Mary and Geoff will simply need to eat. And so they will wander in the rain to find an open door, plunking wet into folding chairs at a small table, the storm still raging outside. Afterward, they will always call it “our little place” because they never learned its name. The food will be nothing special, but they will eat as though famished. They will fill themselves with the sound of water pouring from the sky, the taste of the chicken’s crispy skin, the tiles on the floor slippery beneath their shoes, the beating of their hearts in their ears. They will try to remember every last detail as though their lives depend on it.

I hear you, Nix, I hear you always. Urging me on.

Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?

(GREECE: ZORG)

T
he first ferry to Ios leaves Mykonos at 6 a.m. This has been their goal. Nix walks with Mary and the two Harvard men through the empty streets until they reach the open port. Mary and the men keep turning to see if they are being followed, but Nix does not turn. Her attention is focused on the small adjustments to her movements she must make—on the way she would normally walk and use her limbs in the absence of pain. Before sleep, she had not yet realized the pain. This, she thinks numbly, is what somebody referring to injured victims of a roadside accident would call shock:
She’s still in shock. The shock is wearing off
. She wants to wave her hand to an imaginary waitress and say,
I’ll have another order of shock, please
. It is hard not to laugh and never stop; it is hard not to scream and never stop; it is hard to walk. She urinated into the sea last night at Plati Yialos so as not to have to touch herself, but now she has to go again badly.

Sandpapery Greek toilet paper is wadded up inside her underpants to catch the blood. She brought tampons, of course, in her rucksack, but she is aware from some distant place that if she uses them the way she would have to now, she will never be able to use them again. This is what her day has come to: preserving the sanctity of tampons. Mary kisses the good-looking Harvard one good-bye, and the other one waits for Nix’s kiss, but Nix pretends that she is alone, that he does not exist.

On the Plati Yialos beach chair, she would have let Irv fuck her right in front of Mary and Geoff if those yowling cats had not materialized. This seems a sick joke now, not entirely possible. Her body is barely a thing that can walk. Yet it had seemed briefly possible that Irv’s innocuous dick could be a scouring pad, erasing traces of what was there before. It had seemed briefly logical that one should immediately get back on the horse or one would be doomed.

It had seemed briefly conceivable that she was not already doomed.

There is another ferry, headed for Athens. “We’re getting on that one,” Nix says. “Forget Ios, we’re going back to the airport and getting the fuck out of this country.”

Mary begins to protest. Mary says things. Mary talks, gesturing with her hands.

“Look,” Nix says, to make Mary stop. “You should never have come. You were a fucking wreck yesterday on that balcony. You’re lucky you didn’t drop dead from all that albuterol you were shoving down your throat. I should have known better—this is no place for you.”

The two Harvard men hang back. They are headed to Athens tomorrow themselves, then to Boston or someplace, though Nix reminds herself that is also entirely possible that they are only real in this context, and after she and Mary leave Mykonos, they will evaporate. At one point Mary says, “This is crazy, you’re acting like a total bitch. Fine, you want to go back to Athens, then go, I’ll stay with Geoff and Irv and their friends!” and just for an instant Nix feels a spark of life inside her, a fight-or-flight adrenaline injection at the prospect of Mary’s remaining on this island with Zorg and Titus, but no, the Geoff one comes over and says, “Look, you two, don’t fight. After a night in Athens, things may seem different. You need to stick together.”

Nix watches Mary fold her arms across her chest like a betrayed child. She watches Mary storm onto the ferry without giving the Harvard man her address in Kettering, her body rigid with confusion and fury. Once Mary is safely on the ferry to Athens, Nix, too, boards.

N
OTE HOW OUT
 of place they are among the other passengers: locals commuting for business, or families—tourist and Greek—with young children. Other backpackers of their ilk are all still in rented rooms rendered dark by drawn curtains, sleeping off the island merriments of the night before. Wordlessly the girls find a bench in the sun, in their exhaustion mistaking the air for chilly, though already the sun beats down relentless. If they were thinking straight, they would find seats inside, away from the glare, but instead they sit on a white painted bench out in the open, jean jackets clutched around their shoulders, hair piled up in disheveled knots atop their heads, rucksacks on the bench between them so as to have something on which to lean or a barrier to deter each other from sitting too close. The ferry sets off into rocky waves, and still the two are silent.

T
HE WAVES MAKE
Mary’s stomach ill. She attempts to hide her nausea from Nix, who is treating her like some combination of a sick baby and a mental patient, thereby rendering any admission of nausea impossible. She reclines farther on her rucksack, the sun beginning to seem oppressive already. Dramamine helps on these ferries, fellow travelers on the way to Mykonos advised them, but she and Nix did not think to take such precautions. Such precautions had seemed for other people then.

The old woman across from Mary prods her with a twisted finger. It is not an unfriendly gesture, yet Mary jerks in alarm. The woman is smiling. She clutches her own stomach in a pantomime of seasickness, then points at Mary, and Mary feels exposed, irritated. The woman sports a babushka on her head, as though this is an amateur high school production of a Greek ferry instead of the
actual
thing, where people ought to know better than to look like such clichés. The babushka woman bears a box of candy and extends it to Mary, still smiling (in the high school production, she would be missing teeth, but in real life her teeth all seem accounted for). She shakes the box of candy a little bit, the way one might a bag of cat treats, and Mary understands instantly that while the woman pities her sour stomach, she nonetheless assumes Mary to be stupid, her intelligence on par with that of a domestic animal at whom shiny or tasty things must be shaken for the animal to understand the connection of such things to itself. For some reason this knowledge makes her want to bury her head in the woman’s lap. Instead she surveys the box, stuffed with plump, powdered-sugar-covered candies, and her stomach roils. She has not truly eaten since midday yesterday, when she and Nix feasted on wine and freshly killed fish with Zorg and Titus at the hillside restaurant overlooking their own windswept beach mats below on the sand. She is ravenous and snatches up one of the candies, smiling gratefully at the old woman and nodding vigorously, happy to feign simplemindedness if it will help her score candy and sympathy. She pops the sugared square into her mouth whole and bites down.

It is like chewing a rose-scented, gelatinous bath cube, more disgusting than anything she has ever tasted. Mary’s stomach rushes into her throat; her hand covers her mouth. This distress must be glaringly visible, because Nix, hidden behind dark sunglasses, not even facing Mary’s direction, says under her breath, “You can’t spit it out. She’s watching. You have to eat it now.”

Slowly Mary chews. The woman’s smile tentatively returns; she keeps nodding. Although the cube tastes poisonous, Mary understands that it is
meant
to taste this way—that nothing is wrong other than her own lapse in knowledge, her own assumption that the candy would taste like candy she understands, instead of like the candy of this world in which she’s found herself, where none of the usual rules apply. She should have known better, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Nix’s shaded gaze on her and realizes this is punishment for something. Though she is still not precisely clear on her crime, she accepts the ruling—Nix’s ruling. She swallows the sticky cube in partially chewed lumps, as quickly as she can, but already her stomach is rebelling. The moment that enough of the candy is down her throat so she can speak, she stands, mutters, “Efharisto,” to the babushka woman, and dashes from the ferry’s front deck toward the rear, where a cluster of passengers stand at a rail watching the hilly white buildings of Mykonos fade until they resemble geometric children’s blocks in the distance. Mary leans into the back rail, hoisting her body as far over as it will go without diving into the sea, and pukes all the alcohol and mucus and terror of the past twenty-four hours into the water, a bit scattering at her feet. She wipes her mouth ruthlessly on the sleeve of the Harvard sweatshirt, only at that moment realizing she forgot to return the garment to Geoff, who is already disappearing into the ether of her past. Just six hours ago, she was kissing him at Plati Yialos, his hands beneath the sweatshirt warm on her back, but now he is gone, clearly never to be seen again. She is not a seasoned traveler, yet some of travel’s laws are apparent even to her.

The world seems terrifyingly huge. A small speck on the giant blue earth, Mary hugs the rail of the back deck of a rickety ferry to Athens, the other anonymous passengers who once stood nearby having retreated from her.

Something pokes at the skin of her abdomen. Still hunched over the railing, Mary searches with her fingers and plucks several strands of straw out of the fleecy underside of Geoff’s sweatshirt: relics of the ride they hitched from Plati Yialos back to Mykonos in the open flatbed of a truck that had reeked of wet sheep’s wool. Because Mary does not know what is to come, she flicks the straw away thoughtlessly. After all, who would save a handful of dirty straw as any kind of memento?

N
IX STARES UP
into the sun, provoking her eyes to water. If her eyes will only water, like a signal, then maybe the tears will come. If tears come, then maybe she will do what she is supposed to and reach out to Mary, tell her everything, spill her guts like some silly child who’s skinned her knee as a result of her own recklessness, and accept comfort. The sun bores into Nix’s sleepless eyes until she sees spots, but still she feels nothing like crying. Nothing like doing anything except falling under the blanket of waves back at Plati Yialos and never coming out. Why, why did Mary come after her? And Nix, some shadow of a good midwestern girl clinging to her skin, had not wanted to make a scene and cause the men to dive into the water, too, so she swam back to shore, her limbs on automatic pilot.
Pilot
, ha-ha: All the words that will be loaded now. All the things she will have to fear, now that fear knows where to find her.

She has to be nice to Mary. She cannot punch Mary in the face. She cannot shout at her, not only here on this ferry but anywhere. It is not normal; it is not acceptable. Mary has done nothing wrong. It is Nix’s own fault, all of it, her own.

She will put Mary on a plane, back to Ohio, back to her doting parents, back to safety. Mary will never know what really happened at the villa. Some blind, guiding impetus that keeps echoing in Nix’s head:
She will never know, she will never know
. People “get over” things. That is how life is. Awful events occur, and somehow time flattens them out, stops the flow of blood, stills the jumping of your skin. Nix did not disappear under the waves, and so this is what will happen, clearly. She will get over it. Everyone knows Mary has no
time
to get over anything. Mary needs to get the fuck home before Nix’s mouth begins to leak, before it becomes impossible for the dam of her body to hold back the torrent of truth.

Still she stares at the sun, willing it to swoop down and incinerate her whole, like a moth that dared to get too close to its flame. Can it be just yesterday, on the winding cliffside roads, that she feared for her own life so intensely—that her life
mattered
to her so? But a moth has the gift of wings with which to achieve its own merciful destruction, whereas Nix, wingless, nothing but the weight of her rucksack on her back, is grounded here, all gritted teeth and
calm the fuck down get a grip it is not her fault act normal,
awaiting Mary’s return.

A
LSO CLINGING TO
the ferry’s railing, Mary notices a kid—pale haired, mildly sunburned —puking, too. This little girl, who cannot be older than nine, is too small to propel her body far enough over the rails, and so she mainly throws up straight onto the deck, on her own pink shoes, crying. Mary darts her eyes around in alarm: Where are the girl’s parents? What kind of world
is
this, where little girls are left to vomit on themselves unattended, holding on tight so as not to be knocked over by the waves? Mary thinks to reach out to the girl—to ask whether she needs help—but all at once she is sobbing, too, huge, phlegmy sobs, her back shaking, the mixture of her body’s spasms and the bumpy ferry ride causing her to knock her forehead a couple of times into the rail. What the fuck is the matter with her? What, does she think Zorg and Titus and their posse are going to follow them all the way back to Athens or something? Maybe Nix is right about what a weak basket case she is. Still, she cries violently into her arms for a little while. When she finally composes herself, pulls her head from her sweaty arms, the little girl is gone.

I really know how to clear a deck
, she would quip to Nix, if Nix were the same Nix of yesterday, if those old rules still applied.

First she lost her mother, to that look of grief and horror Mom wore on her face for at least a year following her diagnosis. Simultaneously she lost Bobby Kenner, to whom she was apparently never a real person, only the
idea
of a girlfriend, and once she failed to resemble his idea, he was gone. But no, no—even
that
isn’t right. Long before her diagnosis, before those losses, there were others. Her original parents, who perhaps suspected the dark genetic secret in her lungs and who may have thrown her away for that reason. Nix is the only one who never flinched, who never viewed her as less. Now her illness has somehow driven Nix away, too, although she does not understand precisely how. What is happening makes no sense.

The bar offers some illusion of clarity. It is not yet 7 a.m., but they are selling beer, as though the ferry itself might serve as an after-party for those tourists, like Mary, who have yet to sleep. Numbly she walks to the concession stand and orders two beers, paying with her last drachma. She opens hers quickly and takes a huge gulp so that her breath will be hoppy rather than sour, should Nix get close enough that their scents might comingle in the old, familiar way. She takes no pains to clean her sandaled feet, which she will blame on the little girl if it comes to that, but walks straight back to where Nix is lying on the brilliantly sunny bench, staring up into the sky. Although Mary is sometimes envious of Nix’s straight, smooth hair, right now it looks dank and insubstantial, as though it has failed in fulfilling some animal, evolutionary purpose and left Nix naked and defenseless. Mary cannot see Nix’s eyes behind sunglasses but understands she is not asleep. She sits as close to Nix’s head as their rucksacks will allow, and holds the can of beer above Nix’s face, as if to shield her from the sun.