A Life in Men: A Novel (33 page)

It is Sandor.

“Pascal is young,” Leo is explaining, “and naive—”

“Jesus Christ,” Mary says in an outdoor voice. “I used to live with that guy.”

“What?”

But across the room, Mary has caught Sandor’s eye. “Sandor,” she mouths without sound, and though they are separated by half a room, he sees her, and his eyes go narrow and then, in seconds, wide with surprise. “Oh God,” he says. She can hear him from where he stands. “Wow! It’s you!” He is striding across the room on his long, skinny legs, and she remembers at once, in his movements, in his face, the secret of his strange charisma.

In a flash, Sandor has her by the arms—one of which was still in Leo’s grasp, so Sandor wrested it away as though Leo were not even present—and embraces her American-style, long and hard and without the cheek-bobbing kisses.

“This is my brother,” Mary says numbly, gesturing ineffectually in Sandor’s arms.

“Your brother! Unbelievable!” Sandor exclaims. “I never thought I would see you again, Nicole!”

Leo actually snatches her arm back, so that her body whirls around. “Who the hell is Nicole?” he demands.

To her surprise, Mary sees not indignation but terror on Leo’s face. Then she remembers: When Daniel first contacted her, Eli was so suspicious . . . Now, at Sandor’s calling her Nicole, Mary sees in Leo’s eyes the fear that he’s been
had
—that Mary is not really his sister but some weirdo masquerading as family to scam him for a shadowy but ominous end. Panic welling in her throat, Mary takes Leo’s hands. “No,” she says, “no. I was lying to
him
—to all the people I knew then—about my name.”

“Why would you do that?” Leo asks, still unsure, but before Mary can answer, Sandor slaps Leo on the back. It is a very heterosexual gesture and both Mary and Leo jump a bit in alarm. “Brilliant!” Sandor proclaims. “A double life! Your sister, Leo, she is like the spy with a secret identity. Very glamorous.” He laughs aloud.

“We barely knew each other,” Mary tells Leo guiltily.

Sandor looks perplexed, as does Leo.

“I thought you lived together,” Leo says.

“Well, yes,” Mary admits.

“Ah, Leo, my boy,” says Sandor, patting Leo’s arm less violently now. “Nicole, you see your big brother thinks I was fucking you. He is thinking we lived together in the biblical sense. Your brother does not like me, so this makes him sad. No, Leo, it was not like that! She was fucking some other boy, not me. That one, a very dear boy, very sweet, with him she ran off and joined the circus! It was spectacular.” He beams.

“We all lived in the same house,” Mary adds, unable to improve on this strange explanation.

“Yes,” Sandor concurs. “This very strange house in London, full of very strange people. We all knew each other quite well there, I think. Except we lied all the time, everyone there. We knew nothing about each other. But it was very intimate.”

Leo looks horrified. Mary, though, feels tears well up in her eyes.

“Yes,” she whispers. “That was it exactly.”

“Leo!” Sandor cries out again, and Mary fears her spindly, delicate brother will actually deck him. “Pascal is not here, as you see. Fuck him, yes, let’s fuck him and go out for a drink.”

Leo sighs petulantly. “I’d rather not,” he admits.

“Look,” Sandor says. “Come on. Don’t be that way. You don’t really love that little boy toy, do you? Don’t waste your time! I want to catch up with your sister.” Sandor gestures widely around the gallery, and abruptly Mary recalls sitting with him and Joshua on the floor of the small, underground kitchen, waiting for the first batch of hash brownies to bake and arguing over whether the Holocaust could have happened in Britain. Joshua, seeing England as a bastion of liberalism compared to his homeland, maintained it could not have, whereas Sandor insisted that all of the European continent suffered from both rabid anti-Semitism and potentially militant nationalism. In that conversation, Sandor flung his arms around like a mad puppeteer, and Mary—oblivious to her own Jewish blood—grew bored and weary of their stoned, hypothetical debate. She remembers longing not for sleep but for Sandor to finally shut up and make himself scarce so that Joshua could fuck her. In those days, her body ran on the fuel of Joshua’s semen; for a time it had truly seemed that, so long as she got laid, neither sleeplessness nor hash fumes nor lack of funds nor illness nor even the clawing grief she carried inside her chest for Nix could touch her.

Abruptly the air inside this cavernous gallery feels thin.

“Fine,” Leo consents. “Let’s go dance our fucking asses off, then.”

“Brilliant!” Sandor hooks one arm through hers and the other through Leo’s (he is, Mary realizes, at least as intent on annoying her brother as on “catching up” with an old flatmate). “Let’s take her to April, yes, Leo? Who knows, maybe we’ll even see our boy Pascal there posing for some other poof. Ah, Nicole, don’t you just love Amsterdam?” His arms, locked with hers and Leo’s, twitch like small, trapped animals with the apparent desire to gesture again. “Everyone passes through here eventually—even all the Arthog House companions!”

Mary’s heart thuds up through her esophagus. “What?” Her voice comes out so weak she clears her throat, tries again. “What do you mean? Has Joshua come back here? Oh my God, Sandor—have you seen him?”

“Oh.” Sandor laughs, “No, no, I’m sorry, I don’t mean him, the nice musketeer. But you’ll never guess who I saw playing the saxophone at this fabulous shitty little bar in the middle of a Sunday afternoon—what, only one, two months ago? That bastard Yankee!”

“
Yank
?” Now her voice is strong, almost violent. “You saw Yank—playing a
sax
?—here?”

“Well,” Sandor drawls, “I think it was him. I certainly didn’t go up and say hello. This guy”—he turns to Leo with a roll of his eyes—“was a piece of shit.”

“No,” Mary interjects. “He wasn’t!” Leo looks at her, and he seems now to be trying to follow the story—to be filling in the missing episodes in his mind so that he can watch the new season unfold. The look on his face as he actually exchanges a conspiratorial glance with Sandor indicates that he assumes they are talking about the man who was Mary’s Arthog House lover. Agitation washes over her, and she pushes at Sandor’s arm. “He just didn’t like you because he thought you were stealing his tapes.”

“He thought I was a fag,” Sandor intones flatly. “Oops, he was right—I am!” At this, Leo actually laughs. “I should have snuck into his bed sometime,” Sandor continues, “and stuck my dick up his ass just so he could stop wondering. Did you ever see that film—Nicole, Leo, you’re Americans, you must know it—
Deliver Us,
something like that?
Squeal like a pig
—that one. Can’t you just see Yankee squealing!” Now Sandor and Leo are both cackling, and at last Sandor shrugs. “Except, well, he was big—skinny, but very tall—and mean, like, you know, Leo, like the cowboys. He was like a real cowboy, ridiculous but mean. He was like,
Punk, make my day
—like that badass Clint Eastwood, not the fat little squeal like a pig actor. Plus, probably he would have given me a social disease. He was a junkie, wasn’t he?” He looks to Mary for verification.

“Take me to that bar,” she says. “Let’s go there now, for our drink.” She knows she sounds deranged. “Maybe we can find him—it’ll be a real Arthog House reunion.”

“Oh, that place is too far,” Sandor says, shrugging. “We can’t go there now. Who knows if they’re even open?”

Desperation wells in Mary’s chest. It seems preposterous that a place with live music on a Sunday afternoon would not be open during typical bar hours. But already Leo’s eyes are glazing. He no longer cares about the Clint Eastwood junkie and whether he was Mary’s lover. Mary notices that Sandor’s arm is still linked through Leo’s even though she herself has disengaged. Her emotions feel runny and nonsensical, her needs impossible to articulate. She tries to remember the last time she ate.

“Let’s go to April,” Leo says. “You’re here without your husband, so we might as well take you somewhere your husband would never, ever go.” He and Sandor both chuckle. Mary surmises that April must be a gay bar, glamorous and decadent. Half an hour ago, nothing would have pleased her more than to continue this illusion of walking on the illicit side, surrounded by steamy men. Now, though. Sandor is steering them toward the door. Outside, the breeze is chillier than it should be, and Mary longs for New Hampshire, where the seasons know what they are supposed to be, and you are not cold and wet all the fucking time, and for reasons she cannot pin down, even to herself, Sandor has already come to seem a consolation prize.

I
T SEEMS LIKE
every letter I begin to you lately starts, “I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written.” As though I believe you can even
hear
me—as though I believe you would care if you could. Probably it’s safe to say that, if the dead could think, you’d have other things on your mind. Nix, I would never have described my old feelings about you as “clean” or “easy,” but looking back, they seem that way. I remember my survivor guilt, that sense that I was the one who should have died so that you could continue your healthy, indomitable life. Now, instead, there have been nights of tossing and turning, imagining what two men might find to do with one girl for nearly three hours in an isolated villa . . . and finding that my female body can imagine it all too well, as though I carry an unwitting genetic knowledge of what it is to be violated. Instead, there is awe and confusion about your silence, both as it was happening and later: Would you ever have told me? Did you simply run off to London and “forget” it—is anybody on earth really that
strong? Instead, there are nights I pore over the four letters you sent me during your semester abroad, looking for traces of trauma, but I find only the implacable distance that had sprung up between us in Mykonos. Now, I find myself feeling guilty not only for
living,
but for failing to save you, for remaining un-raped, for my pretty life in New Hampshire with the same man who once carried your body across the sand, away from those screaming cats. I find myself more inspired than ever by your bravery, yet more than ever, too, ashamed of my fear.

F
OR
K
ENNETH, THERE
has been no consolation, no prize. Across town, in the doorway of a fourth-floor walk-up, he stands with his lover’s wrist grasped too tightly in his fist as she berates him.

“Sukkel!” Agnes shouts, trying to jerk her arm back. “Watje!”

“Fine,” Kenneth says. “I’m a pussy—I’m a whatever the fuck you just said. Come back inside.” He knows he’s holding her too tight and loosens his grip to take her sleeve instead, but like most of her clothes, Agnes’s sleeve is purposely frayed, and the strips slide through his fingers loosely, a few breaking off as she yanks back—he can hear the cheap fabric ripping. She stands a foot away from him in the hallway, hip jutting out like a chicken bone, a taunting look on her face.

Then, all at once her mouth grows serious. She shrugs, looks at him pleadingly. “Baby,” she begs. “Kom met mij.”

“Fuck off,” Kenneth says, turning his back to the doorway. “Uitgewoonde heroinehoer.”

“It know one to take one!” Agnes retorts, and Kenneth gives up, heads through the kitchen into the rest of the apartment, where he can no longer see her.
It know one to take one
. Yeah, that about sums up their whole fucking relationship, doesn’t it? Nothing more to say.

From the window, he watches her emerge onto the street: a bony figure clad in black, skin so pale she’s almost indistinguishable from the washed-out white gray of the buildings across the street. Later, when she gets home, she’ll be high, but it’s impossible to say whether that’ll make things better or worse. He can hardly tell the difference anymore; her brain is going, so that she always seems twitchy and dangerous and a little stupid in a way he used to find sexy but now finds increasingly frustrating.

Ruined beauty, that’s his specialty. He is forty-five years old and exhausted by ruin.

He’s been clean for seven months.

Pussy,
she called him.
Wimp
. He’s not a man to her, clean. His needles were the phalluses she craved. His cock’s in way better shape clean, but that doesn’t even factor. She’d rather run off with her girlfriends to some club and shoot up in the toilet, zoning out like the zombies in
Night of the Living Dead.
Then, once she’s run back to the toilet to puke, she’ll come out looking horny and fine, dancing wild, and making all the men who see her crazy with desire, because Agnes has something raw and lit in her when she’s just the perfect degree of high—has it even now that her looks are going to seed. Used to be that coke was her thing at clubs, but now she’s all about the H; she can’t get enough.

She has him to thank for that.

He should have run out on her before he kicked it himself. Then she wouldn’t be his responsibility; you can’t blame one junkie for walking out on another. Now he’s stuck. He came out of the blissful cocoon of his own addiction to find her living in his apartment, spending his money, smoking his cigarettes, crashing in his bed, and refusing to put out. Fuck it. Agnes doesn’t need him. She got herself all the way from some backwater Czech town to A’dam on her own, survived picking up tricks illegally on the street before getting taken in by a bordello; then all on her own she left that life behind and got a real job waiting tables, even dancing at RoXY’s dyke-themed night, “Pussy Lounge,” for extra cash, a gig any hot girl would covet. She was something then, beating out all those trendy wannabes. Lately, though, RoXY won’t have her with her protruding ribs and bruises. Kenneth’s not sure even a bordello would take her, or whether she’d end up back on the street should he walk. He’ll give this to Amsterdam: when you put the governmental stamp of approval on whoredom, you get a better class of dames. In some cities, a desperate bitch like Agnes might be the best you could get, but here you can have your cock sucked by a gorgeous, multilingual, twenty-one-year-old Dutch college girl and sip champagne while you’re at it, all aboveboard. Agnes’s non-English-speaking junkie ass need not apply.