A Life in Men: A Novel (39 page)
Abruptly she pulls the humid sheet up around herself and stands. “You always used to call Sandor a faggot,” she says. “Like it was an insult, like the problem was him and not you.”
Kenneth, though, doesn’t even look in her direction. He is heading for the kitchen. “You ain’t gonna believe this, but I’ve got coffee. Want some?”
She gets up and follows him, annoyed.
“You thought he stole your jazz tapes, but it was
me
—I took them. I don’t even remember why.” Mary is not sure what she’s waiting for. Anger? An apology? If anything, she feels buoyed by his flagrant lack of guilt. Where is she going with this?
He still doesn’t look her way, but says low, “You stole the tapes.” His exhalation comes out as a whistle. “Baby, you sure know how to make an old man’s day.”
Her eyes fill inexplicably. Some flood of trust welling up in her: unstoppable and potentially lethal. She does not know how to slow it, how to stick her finger in the leak. This man is like no one she has spoken to in a decade; he is like an alien. Yet she has never in her life slept with anyone who felt so much like kin.
Still, she repeats stubbornly, “You were always calling him a faggot.” Then finally: “What in God’s name am I doing here?”
Soon he will say,
You and your buddy Sandor keep talking about Arthog House like it was some utopia on earth, but it was just another place I lived and not real long. The only thing worth remembering about that place was you, that day, those pictures. Be a real bad girl for me and maybe I’ll dig ’em up and show you next time.
Soon she will vow that there won’t be a next time, and he will stride over and lay her out on the dirty kitchen floor, and she will think momentarily of the floor on which she lost her virginity; she will think of Leo and how in the span of one night she has come to understand everything he said to her about what it takes, sometimes, to hold a person in place. Then they will begin, and she will not think of Joshua or Eli or Leo, or even Geoff anymore.
But for now, Kenneth keeps digging in a kitchen cabinet. “Yep,” he says, voice muffled. “I always knew that boy was a faggot. Can I call it or what?”
“You are,” she tells him slowly, “the complete opposite of
gezellig.
” She thinks of a line from
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
and smiles. “In the world of
gezellig,
you would be a monster.”
Like a present, he turns around, holding up coffee in a dirty glass jar.
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
(GREECE: ZORG)
H
ere, then, is what Geoff will remember: The way sea foam clung to Mary’s skin as she emerged from the surf, her arm around Nix, whose pubic hair was covered in foam, too, so that she seemed a pornographic mermaid, and the way his dick got hard at the sight, and the shame of that, and how he jumped up to gather her clothing and hand it to her before Irv could see her nakedness, too, and only afterward realized he should have turned away, should not have touched her clothing or looked at her at all, though neither girl reprimanded him or really seemed to notice; he had become invisible. How he believed they had reached a clear “crisis point” at which it made obvious sense to leave Plati Yialos, to find a way back to town somehow, but instead as soon as Nix had her clothes on she headed straight to the lounge chair where Irv was still gawking in the distance, her eyes so big she reminded Geoff of a junkie or a prisoner, even though he had never met either a junkie or a prisoner, and leaned over and kissed Irv with a force that seemed to knock Irv onto his back. Later Irv would claim her skin trembled—
really fucking vibrated
—under his hands as though she were an overcharged electric blanket, as though she could send off sparks and shock him, and how that really got him going. Geoff stood at the surf watching them make out and he felt like he should wave some kind of flag and call a time-out, but nobody else seemed to be in the same place in which he’d found himself; they were all still playing a different game, Mary coming over and putting her wet hand on his arm. How he kissed her mainly to avoid looking at Irv and Nix, and though only a moment before he’d believed himself in love with her, at the touch of her cool, small tongue he felt little of anything. Then she pushed her breasts up against him, and he slid his hands up the back of his own sweatshirt to feel her prominent spine and the gooseflesh of her nipples still damp from the sea, and his body’s pendulum swung wildly again, so that he ground his groin up against her like an animal without conscience. How out of nowhere, like a sound track to his conflicted desire, these yowling cats materialized, running along the beach, and the sound of them was like someone being tortured, a pain so big it could drive the humanity from a person, though that made no sense because these
weren’t
people; they were just skinny, half-hairless cats, probably howling not with agony but because they were in heat, their feral bodies close to an explosion that had nothing to do with morality, just like Geoff’s. Still, at their approach Nix leaped up on her beach chair and screamed, short and loud, over and over again. Geoff heard the muffled, intermingled-with-the-waves sound of Irv trying to talk her down off the chair like it was a ledge, but she continued screaming with a pain so singular she drowned out the cats. And Mary saying, “She must think they have rabies.
You
don’t think they do have rabies, do you? You don’t think they’re going to attack us or something?” Geoff heard himself say no, then strode over to the chaise longes, past Irv’s pleading form, and picked Nix up and carried her in the opposite direction of the screeching cats. How he carried Nix’s body across the sand and felt for himself the vibrations of which Irv would later boast, as though they had anything to do with Irv at all, and how later, at Irv’s bragging, Geoff would secretly resolve never to hang out with him again once they were back on American soil, and with a couple of exceptions like friends’ weddings and shit where they ran into each other accidentally, he kept to that resolve, though who knows why, Irv was a pretty good guy, and who knows where he is now? How three years later, when it came time to decide on a specialization in medical school, Geoff, to the shock of his mother and his stepfather the hotshot cardiologist, announced his intentions to focus on respiratory medicine, in particular cystic fibrosis, though he had always intended to be a heart surgeon, those glamorous cowboys of medicine. How he had no photos of Mary, but from the moment he dissected his first pair of lungs, he felt, under his hands, every individual knobby bone of her spine; he felt her hair pouring into his hands like his own private ocean; and he never, ever looked back.
H
ERE, THEN, IS
what Mary will remember: That this was supposed to be the night she would lose her virginity. How a gorgeous Harvard grad fell straight into her lap, but even after they got back to their room in the middle of the night, and that poor guy Irv was lurking around confused and demoralized in the shadows because Nix had pulled the blanket up over her head in her twin bed, when Mary whispered to Geoff, “We could go somewhere, the two of us. We could find someplace quiet—” he cut her off, said, “I don’t think you should leave your friend,” and the shock of the rejection almost knocked her down. Her cheeks burned; she was thankful for the dim room, and although her overwhelming desire was for Geoff not to witness her embarrassment, some base impulse in her could not take no for an answer, could not
believe
that the way he’d tenderly held her hand in the flatbed of the truck or taken off his sweatshirt when she was cold meant nothing but politeness. Could not believe she would so misread the signs on which the adult world hinged. She tilted her head toward the door and quipped, “Well, thanks for saving our asses. Have a nice life,” and the way Geoff’s face fell surprised her yet again, as though he had expected something else entirely—as though it really
mattered
to him. How she found herself saying, “It’s okay, I have cystic fibrosis anyway,” as though to console him, as though it were a social disease he was fortunate not to have the opportunity to catch. She closed the door in his face, regretting the loss of him even before the lock clicked. But within only a minute, Geoff and Irv were back, rapping at the door, and when Mary answered, Geoff said, “They’re right around the corner—Zorg and Titus and those two other guys! I don’t think they saw us, but they’re standing outside some door, all four of them. They must be waiting for another friend, and then planning to come
here
! We’ve got to get you out of here before they show up!” Later, Mary will not remember the way her heart began to race, only that it was Nix who sat up quietly, static from her blanket causing strands of her hair to stand on end, and said in a weary voice, “That was
our
room last night, when they walked us home. We changed rooms this morning because that one flooded. They have no idea where we are now. They’ll probably wait there all night.” And so Mary will remember Geoff and Irv standing guard at the door, listening, as Nix retreated again under the gray blanket and made not a sound until dawn. Sometime past 4 a.m., when Irv had fallen asleep sitting up, Geoff got in Mary’s twin bed alongside her, and though it’d been hours since Nix had even twitched, and Irv was snoring, still Geoff did nothing but kiss her, never trying to go further, though she gave him every silent hint of her willingness. The first ferry to Ios was at 6 a.m., and they intended to be on it, creeping in the opposite direction of Zorg and Titus’s vigil, leaving money on Mary’s bed and not even telling the proprietress they were leaving, grateful she had not held on to their passports as some of the less haphazard room renters did. Later, even when it becomes imperative that she remember everything, Mary will never fully recall Geoff’s lips, chapped from the wind and the long night, or the way his breath felt warm and smelled human but not sour, or even his face: too classically handsome for her taste, and yet there was something solid and kind about him that transcended his handsomeness. For years afterward, she will know only that the Harvard sweatshirt is dear to her, if not solely because of the man to whom it once belonged.
H
ERE, THEN, IS
what Nix will remember: The way the flatbed of the truck they hailed going back to town bounced violently on the bumpy road, sending shocks of pain between her legs as she sat on the straw-strewn metal of the truck’s cab with Mary and the two Harvard men. The way it made her bark a laugh thinking what her mother would say if she could see her hitchhiking on a deserted road past midnight with two strangers in Greece, and how eerily unafraid she actually felt—how nothing seemed dangerous anymore. The way Mary’s hand kept reaching out to touch her, and how hard it was to care that shrugging it off was hurtful, but something in Mary’s touch stung, and the two Harvard men felt safer. How the bland, yielding lips of the boy she’d kissed on the lounge chair had seemed almost inanimate, though not comforting, and that sexy British men did not hold the promise they had less than twenty-four hours ago, and suddenly Nix was not sure why she was going to London at all, but the thought that she had been doing so primarily to sleep with accented hotties incensed her, made her wonder who she was and what she was doing on this earth. That when the door to Titus’s bedroom first reopened as she sat primly on his bed, wondering whether it was even necessary to sleep with him to seal the deal, or if a few kisses and gropes had proved sufficient for her plan’s execution, she genuinely believed for a moment that the tall frame of Zorg in the doorway was a mistake—that Zorg had gone into the wrong door looking for the bathroom or something. Then she saw Titus coming in behind him, and all at once, she
knew.
How in the seconds it took them to approach the bed, speaking Greek to each other as they would throughout, she had to choose: to scream and fight and hurtle down a road of explicit struggle and escalating tempers that could end with her and Mary buried under the house, or to grit her teeth when they approached in tandem, one pulling her shirt over her head as the other tugged her shorts down. How she was not certain Zorg would murder them if she resisted, but she
was
sure it was not impossible, since men’s killing was a fact of life, just like girls’ sometimes opening their legs to a man who might be a killer, in order to get out alive. How she believed, in that brief instant before things really
began,
that if she could do this for Mary, it would make everything all right about Bobby Kenner, that they would be even—and then, in the brutal hours that followed, the way that neat little story she had told herself shattered and shattered and shattered again. Until part of her hated Mary, sick Mary who had to be protected at all costs, whom she was protecting still with her silence, as though admitting what she had done on Mary’s behalf would endanger
Mary,
napping in the spare room, her stupid precious virginity intact. All that, Nix would remember, plus the cats, wailing like refugees from an underworld, straggly and sick and mad as demons, and how the sound played something inside her gut like the strings of a cello, humming, bringing up her own screams like her body was a helpless instrument.
A
ND THIS: THAT
the world was full of airplanes, and I could get on one and go home, to safety and refuge and boredom—that no one was making me go through with anything. Yet knowing I would not, that something more powerful than the sound of the cats, or the feel of Zorg’s knees grinding into the backs of my calves, drove me on, not only to London but beyond—that I would keep going, that already I was past the point of return to Ohio. That even then, I did not wish to change places with Mary, my best friend, whom I loved and wanted with an urgent totality never to see again. Mary, who was trapped.
The Moroccan Book of the Dead
(MOROCCO: KENNETH)
The body is a tidal flat. Wave after wave washes—or pounds—across. You stay open to the world as long as you can. Then blood draws the line.
—
MARK CUNNINGHAM
,
“Blood”
She calls from Gibraltar. It takes three tries before he answers his cell. She tells him, “I don’t want to land in Tangier alone. Come down and take the ferry with me.”
He says, “I can’t just take off work like that.”
“No,” she says. “I mean quit work. I don’t know when we’re coming back.”
“Well,” he says. “Now you’re talking.”
She exhales hard. “Two rules. First, no drugs.”
“Jesus,” he says, “when’re you gonna stop that? I’ve been clean three years.”
“Let me clarify something to you. Not being a sniveling junkie isn’t the same thing as being clean. I don’t just mean no heroin, I mean
nothing,
don’t bring anything with you, and if you get something here, you do it when I’m not with you, and don’t bring it back around me. You might think acting out
Midnight Express
would be some big adventure, but a Moroccan prison would kill me. Do you understand?”
“Fine,” he says amicably. “Shit’s cheap there. Disposable drugs. Done.”
“Two,” she continues. “No sex. Wait, I don’t mean no sex exactly. I mean no sex with me.”
It is his turn to sigh. “Get real, girl. You’re inviting me to give up my cushy life for the third world, and I’ve gotta be some poster boy for clean and sober living in the deal . . . all for the promise of, what, your legs glued together? Some incentive.”
“I’m inviting you,” she says, “for the company. Something I think we both could use. I’m inviting you.” She stops. “It’s been a long time since I traveled with a friend.”
From:
[email protected]
Subject:
Re: Re: Re: Safely in Spain
Date:
August 16, 2001
Hey.
Gibraltar is full of English pubs, like the boardwalk in Tenerife. Obviously I don’t care for it. The weather’s good but I got a little burned from the antibiotics, so now I’m hiding from the sun and waiting, just reading a lot. Leo and Sandor will be here soon, and then we’ll head to Tangier.
Geoff, I’m sorry. I wish you were here but I understand why you wouldn’t come. It’s just that I need this trip for closure on what has been a defining part of my life. The time has come to nest, take it easy, drag out my time for as long as I can . . . I know that, I swear I do. Since I’ll miss the start of this school year, I’ll see how my health is holding up come spring, and IF it’s advisable (according to Dr. Fox, according to you), I’ll put in applications for a new position then. I hope I can go back to work and keep that measure of normalcy in our lives, even if it’s only for one more year.
Please, Geoff, please understand. I didn’t want my last trip to be something I’d taken without intent, without knowledge of its significance. I couldn’t face the prospect of going so quietly into the night. This does not mean I take your love lightly.
M
T
HEY ARRIVE BY
dusk. The first thing to hit Mary is the smell. Under her feet, discarded trash has become a gray, sticky paste from the rain and the trodding of travelers’ feet. The port teems with hustlers, vendors, Islamic women shouting at boisterous children in Arabic while the self-proclaimed “guides” accost those off the ferry in English, French, or Spanish. Kenneth pushes through, declining offers to help them find hotels, to drive them where they want to go. She is surprised to hear him bark in French at one of the hustlers, though since she doesn’t speak the language herself she isn’t sure whether perhaps he just threw out a curse word picked up from some French lover, or if he’s spoken with authority. The air smells like a carcass. Impulsively Mary puts her pashmina up to her mouth to inhale the scent of her own body and perfume, as though this will save her lungs from the air, and almost immediately a man shouts at her in English, “The problem is not Tangier, the problem is you!” She drops the pashmina before Kenneth can notice the provocation for the man’s verbal assault. To their right, another man sings the praises of America. Though they turn up the rue du Portugal, heading in the direction of the medina, he follows them, talking of his American friends and ignoring their insistence that they need no guide. When Kenneth at last successfully shakes the man off, he is replaced almost instantly by another, this one shouting, “You are as bad as the Israelis!” at their rebuttal of his services. The man taunts, “You don’t want help, okay, maybe someone stabs you and you are better off dead.” Still he follows. Kenneth turns onto a quieter street (Mary questions the wisdom of this, given their stalker) and, as soon as they appear to be alone, turns on the man and pushes him up against a wall. Mary’s heart races, waiting for a group of the stalker’s friends to materialize, but the man merely skulks off, shouting obscenities as he leaves.
They stand on a corner with their rucksacks, unsure of where they are.
Kenneth says, “You have a guidebook, right? Girls like you always bring guidebooks.”
“Girls like me? You mean girls who leave their husbands to travel with lunatics who attack the locals? I didn’t realize that was a type.”
“Whatever, Cystic. I didn’t attack that guy, I just got rid of him. Where’s the book?”
She winds her pashmina around her neck high enough to breathe into it with her mouth and takes her Fodor’s from her pack.
“Rue Magellan,” Kenneth pronounces. “Here, this way. We’ll go have a drink.”
“Shouldn’t we find a place to stay first?”
But she follows. His legs are so long that it’s hard to keep up. A couple of streets in, he stops wordlessly and takes off his pack, takes hers (a small hospital contained within) off her shoulders, puts it on, and hands her his, which is immensely lighter. Probably, she thinks, he has two changes of clothes and that’s it.
By the time they get there, Mary is exhausted. This is the sort of thing to which she cannot adjust: how tiring things are now, ordinary things that for thirty-two years she did without thought. This is how it begins. One day, you can stroll aimlessly around for hours without thought; you can take hikes with your husband and swim laps. Then abruptly you cannot even sing along with the radio without getting winded. The infection is gone, but your lungs are not the same. Suddenly you spend more time lecturing your students from your desk than pacing the room with the restless energy you have possessed all your life. Suddenly you cannot carry your own rucksack for more than a few blocks. Suddenly you do not dare travel alone, and when your capricious brother bails on you at the last moment, instead of changing your plans, you stick to your guns and call another man.
“Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, they all stayed here,” Kenneth is saying. They have to step over thick trash on the slanted street to get to the slightly dilapidated white building bearing the sign
HOTEL MUNIRIA
. Mary’s relief at the word
hotel
is palpable. “You teach lit,” Kenneth says. “Well, this is it—this is where it happened for real.”
“I don’t teach the Beats,” Mary says. She does not add that she has never understood their appeal exactly, that they always seemed to her some posturing dick club.
The hotel’s bar, the Tanger Inn, is like a shrine. Photos of Beat writers litter the walls, and even some pages of their manuscripts are tacked alongside. It is heady, she has to admit: the life they led, touching it like this. Regardless of whether the art that emerged is her thing, these were men who lived life on their own terms. Of course, from what she understands, women were often the casualties. She and Kenneth sit under a photograph of Burroughs. “I always wanted to come here,” he says, a rare excitement in his voice. “I worshipped these cats when I was young. Even built my own Dream Machine.”
Mary is not sure what this means.
The bourbon burns going down, but its burn is good. She imagines it dissolving everything in its tracks like acid, eating the mucus inside her. “I hear these guys beat their wives.”
Kenneth snorts. “They were all fags anyway,” he says. “Too bad your buddy Sandor’s not here—him and your brother could ask for the room where Kerouac and Ginsberg shacked up together. It could be like their honeymoon suite.”
This is it, then: the chance to say what she has been waiting to tell him. “They’ll be here in a week. They’re meeting us in Casablanca.”
He stares. She puts her head down on her arms. The bar is not crowded, but everyone inside is a foreigner: a traveler or expat. The bourbon is starting to scramble her brain and she would like to walk around the room and study the photos and pages more closely, emerge with a clearer picture of these howling men and what they stood for—the ways in which adventure is necessarily lawless, the ways in which freedom always demands a price and someone else is left footing the bill.
“What’re you playing at?” Kenneth says, so quietly she can barely hear him through the filter of her arms. “I didn’t come for a reunion with those boys.” He takes the top of her arm so that she sits up to face him. “Don’t give me any shit either about how I hate queers—I don’t care who they fuck. But if I wanted to get together with Sandor, all I had to do was cross town. Where’s your husband, girl? What am I doing here?”
Across the room, a bald man in a white linen suit sits alone at the bar. Something in his dapper attire strikes Mary as out of another time. At a nearby table, four kids in their twenties laugh over beers. They look like a poster for the United Colors of Benetton: One girl is Asian and drop-dead gorgeous; one of the men is Latino and equally beautiful. The remaining girl and boy are white, less splendid, but full of a young vitality. They cannot be more than five or six years younger than she is, but she feels as if they are another species.
“Eight months ago,” Mary begins, “my lungs were working at ninety percent. That’s probably better than your lungs. I was one of those weird case studies. My lungs have been colonized with two of the deadliest bacteria someone with CF can get, but for some reason it barely seemed to be impacting me. Other than tune-ups, I hadn’t been in the hospital since 1994.” She drains the rest of her bourbon, picks up his, and takes a sip. “Then in January, a month after my dad’s heart attack, things just went to shit. Maybe it was the stress, but I got pneumonia for the first time in years. I’d pretty much just gone back to work when one day I’m sitting there in class, talking about
The Crucible
—you know, Arthur Miller?—and all of a sudden I have this pain in my chest like I’m going to die, and I can’t breathe, every time I try it’s like my chest is on fire, I can feel it burning all the way into my back. I was gasping for air, I thought
I
was having a heart attack, too, and would die right in front of my poor students.” She laughs, and she can hear how her own laugh—with its hollowness, its bitterness—is different from that of the four young travelers at the next table. “I wasn’t that lucky. I just had a collapsed lung.”
Kenneth is still watching her. He hasn’t done the things the teachers at Hanover High do when she talks to them about her health: make faces, gasp. He hasn’t asked questions like Geoff’s doctor friends. She’s not sure if this is because nothing can faze him at this point or if it’s because he doesn’t really care, though if he doesn’t give a shit, she isn’t sure why he’s here.
“Next thing you know, I’m back in the hospital with a tube in my chest. It was almost spring by the time I went back to work, but it wasn’t the same. I was tired a lot, coughing more than usual. They put me on this antibiotic called minocycline—one of the
few
that works pretty well for the bacteria I’ve got. Anyway, I started feeling really crappy. I had stomach pain, and no matter what I did, trying to take the medicine with food or whatever, it got worse. So I go to the ER and they give me every fucking test under the sun. Finally they said I was having an attack of acute pancreatitis. You have to understand, you can only even
get
pancreatitis if you have a functioning pancreas, which most people with CF don’t. It was just ridiculous, the one thing you don’t expect. They think maybe the antibiotic was causing it, so they took me off it, jammed me full of IV fluids, I’m home in a few more days. By now, it’s May. And over a four-month period, my pulmonary function has fallen from ninety to less than sixty percent. Geoff doesn’t want me to finish the year out teaching, he wants me to rest, focus on getting my numbers back up, right? So I just leave—I take a leave of absence for May and June, and all I’m doing is sleeping, eating, wearing my Vest, doing my therapies. I’m spending maybe four hours a day on therapies and meds. That’s my summer. But the numbers don’t go up. In fact, they fall further, not much, but enough to put me on the brink of being classified with severe lung disease for the first time in my life—to have gone from literally numbers that were normal to
severe
, skipping right the fuck over mild and moderate. I always was an all-or-nothing kind of girl.”
She stops. She is not sure what she’s supposed to do now. She wishes she could cry to demonstrate to him the gravity of what she’s saying, because she’s not sure he gets it, but she doesn’t feel like crying. She just feels like ordering another drink.
“It’s over,” she says at last. “I can’t fake it anymore. I used oxygen to fly to Spain, which I’ve never done on a plane before in my life. At home, Geoff had me sleeping with oxygen just to give me a boost, because it made my sleep better. I don’t
need
it—I don’t need it
yet
—but I won’t deny that it helped.”
Kenneth says, “Where is he now?”
“It’s complicated,” Mary says.
“Did you leave him?”
She cackles a little. “Well, obviously as you can see I
left
him physically, yes.” Abruptly the tears are in her eyes, but she doesn’t want them anymore, blinks them away. “I came because I needed to, and he didn’t think I should. He didn’t have time off anyway—he took a ton of personal days when I was in the hospital all those times. Who knows if I’ll ever go back to work, so we need Geoff’s health insurance. He couldn’t sabotage his career to come even if he wanted to. Which”—she chortles again—“he definitely did
not
.”
