A Life in Men: A Novel (17 page)

“Everything you’re saying is physical,” Mary told Joshua. “My ass, my hair, my taste. That’s not me.”

“Who says?” He swatted her ass, tickled her until she laughed despite herself. “You feel that, don’t you?
Maybe the separation between body and mind is just girly rubbish.”

“But body isn’t everything,” she insisted. “Do I believe in God? What do I think about my mother?” It was on the tip of her tongue to ask,
Who was my best friend in childhood?
but that would be a trick question because she had purposely never mentioned Nix and so what he knew of her was absolutely nothing. “What’s my favorite book?”

“What’s
my
favorite book?” he countered.

She opened her mouth, but there was nothing. “I’ve never seen you read a book,” she said at last.

“It’s
Cry, the Beloved Country
.” He sighed. “I’ve read it a half-dozen times. I used to take it with me into the bath at Arthog House even, when Sandor wasn’t hogging the tub—I lost my copy, though, a while back.”
He flung his head back violently against the pillow. They had spent so long on the road in hotels that every conversation they’d ever had, it seemed to Mary, had taken place in a bed. “That’s the only book that ever spoke to me, the only one I bought on my own since I left school, so fine, I don’t read much, maybe it was a stupid question. So what? We have the rest of our lives to learn all these things about each other. That’s the whole point.”

After the truck is unloaded, the orphanage director calls the children out. She is a pretty woman, smartly dressed, urbane and educated, clearly from somewhere other than here. While Walt stands by with his camera, giant zoom lens protruding, the director arranges the orphans around their donated supplies: another photo op. One of the children is in a wheelchair, so they simply wheel him close to the sacks of rice and gesture to the others to cluster around. None of the children are smiling, despite all the goods. They are cleaner than the children at the Samburu village—they all have underpants—but they are even more somber in the face of tourists in their house. Unlike the Samburus, they are not proud of their traditions, cannot charge a fee; they are simply charity. Joshua helped the workers unload the truck, but now he is waiting in the driver’s seat of Gavin’s truck, sunglasses on, ready to roll. They are more than an hour behind schedule, thanks to the time spent in the grocery store, and it will be nightfall by the time they reach Nairobi. He is impatient, foot bobbing up and down, the muscles of his thigh visible through his pants; he runs his fingers through his hair the way he once did in London when his hair was long and straggly, only now there is nothing to fiddle with, so his hands come back to his lap, restless.

Mary wanders away from where all the orphans have gathered with the family, their white faces beaming as Walt snaps a picture. She heads deeper into the orphanage complex, hoping to find a toilet, since she desperately has to pee. Soon enough she locates it, past the girls’ and boys’ dorms, just a little wooden outhouse with two doors, segregated by gender. The stench inside would be overpowering except that she has been in Africa for nearly four months. A hole in the ground, though there is toilet paper at least. She squats, she wipes, she tosses in her squares, she tries not to breathe. Roughly forty girls, sharing this hole. Does the smartly dressed director use it, too, or does she have her own accommodations somewhere hidden? Mary wanders onward, toward an open door in the back through which she sees a crib.

As she enters the room, more cribs emerge into sight, like a flower slowly blooming: there must be ten or twelve in all. Inside most, children sleep, though a few are empty, their occupants perhaps with the other kids outside. It must be nap time for the babies. On the wall, several roaches crawl freely. Nanyuki isn’t tropical, not like Lamu or Mombasa, where the roaches are the size of small rodents; these are normal, American-style roaches, and Mary knows she would be a fool to think that children’s homes in American cities aren’t riddled with them, too. Still, she feels like screaming with something akin to impotent rage. Under a web of netting, one infant sleeps; she cannot be more than three months old, her worn-out Onesie pink. The other babies do not have nets over their cribs, but the staff must be making some effort to shield this one, owing to age or illness.

“Are these the babies with no mommies?”

Mary whirls around. It is Liam, jumping at the doorway, obviously having broken free of the photo shoot. “Where did their mommies go?”

“They’re waiting for them,” Mary says around the lump in her throat. “Their mommies just haven’t come yet.”

“I waited for my mommy,” Liam proclaims loudly. “I waited in Romania. I waited and waited, but my mommy was late.”

He is
Romanian
? Christ, who knew?

Filthy plastic toys are piled underneath a crib in the corner, a blanket tossed over them. Liam takes one look and hits the cruddy floor, crawling around, pulling off the blanket. Mary holds her breath, anticipating what he may find under there, but no, it is just the ridiculous cluster of toys: broken stuff it would not seem anyone on earth would want to touch much less play with, except that this curious little American (Romanian?) boy—who no doubt has an entire playroom full of the latest gadgets back home—apparently does. He bangs on some crusty red button, which yields a weak squeak. Delighted, he bangs some more.

Inside one of the cribs, a small girl—maybe two years old—stares at Mary, wordless. Most of the children in Kenya speak Swahili; even though the older ones learn English at school, Mary rarely hears them use it. She goes to the little girl, the toddler’s face a sharp triangle, eyes huge, and holds out her arms. The girl, amazingly or not so amazingly, reaches back, so Mary picks her up. Her bottom is soaked with urine, although Mary can feel a thick, squishy diaper under her clothes. Her thin legs circle Mary’s rib cage. How long has she been lying here?

Liam continues to bang and push around the toys. “This is ridiculous, you know,” Mary says to him, though he doesn’t even look up. “I’m supposed to be clean, like the girl in the plastic bubble. I’m supposed to avoid germs and rotten onions. I’m not supposed to be here, in Africa, holding a baby covered in pee. If I want to live long enough to have a baby of my own, I’m not allowed to do this.” She laughs out loud, buries her face in the little girl’s head, crying now, although Liam doesn’t seem to notice. If she were somebody else—if she were Nix—maybe she would march right outside to the director and volunteer to stay here, to work, to care for the children. Maybe she would forge her own life in Africa, independent of Joshua. But her illness demands narcissism, demands more care than she has granted it, and she is just being stupidy sentimental anyway—Nix didn’t even like kids. No, if she were Nix, she would march out to the truck and bum one of Joshua’s cigarettes; she would blow smoke in his face and say,
You’re beautiful, but I’m leaving
. She would say,
I love you, but not enough for it to be all my life means
. And so Mary carefully files this under the list she is starting to tally, the list of who she is:
I confuse cowardice with kindness.

Instead she will wait until he departs for his next safari. Just past the New Year, while he believes they are saving up for tickets to America, where they will have a wedding. Instead she will leave behind nothing but a new copy of
Cry, the Beloved Country,
with an inscription that reads,
Thank you,
because that is all it makes sense to say. She will wait at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the only white woman at the tiny, overcrowded café, but long enough in Kenya to no longer be bothered by the lack of space between bodies, to have stopped noticing her own deficiency of pigment. She will drink a coffee to quell the scraping in her stomach, to soothe the knowledge that she will never again touch him. Finally a woman alone in Africa, she will marvel at just how much fragile hope it takes to hurtle your body into the sky and across the ocean, back to a place called Home, when you no longer remember what waits for you on the other side.

Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?

(GREECE: ZORG)

T
wo blond girls stand on the balcony of a beautiful cliffside Greek villa. They are perched too high above the winding road to escape by jumping, and any passerby would probably not understand English if they shouted,
Help!
Nix and Mary would appear simply to be admiring the pretty view—which is exactly what they are pretending to do while Titus and Zorg mix cocktails in the kitchen. The two men are evidently unconcerned about leaving them alone, confident that there is no means of escape.

Nix feels as though she has landed in the middle of a play, one of those old-fashioned ones in which the characters are all in disguise and are saying things that don’t mean what they seem to mean. Zorg is playing the part of cohost, smiling and mixing drinks as though he has not brought two women here against their will. For their part, the girls are acting like gracious guests, oohing and aahing at the view, asking for drinks they do not want so that they can have a moment alone together. Only Titus, who actually
lives
here in this ultramodern, hiply gorgeous abode indeed worthy of being called a villa, seems unsure of his role, wandering around with a look of resigned tolerance on his face. Is his resignation to the fact that Nix has shown him no affection, and that in addition to footing the bill at lunch he is now forking over his alcohol to a girl who doesn’t plan to give him any? Or is he resigned to some more ominous plan of Zorg’s? Nix keeps a smile plastered on her face, heart hammering.

What seems clear to her above all else is that if one side or the other gives up the pretense of Nix and Mary being willing guests, things will quickly descend to a place to which none of the four really wishes to venture, and so they pretend, though Mary keeps pulling her inhaler out of her beach bag to forestall an asthma attack and an unraveled look has crept into her eyes.

“Okay, so I have to get Titus alone.” Nix hears her voice like some leader in a heist film, all strategy and verve. “He didn’t see what Zorg was like in the car. Titus doesn’t seem deranged—he seems like a normal guy. He’s not going to want his friend to fucking hold us hostage at his house! I have to ask him to talk to Zorg and calm him down. Titus doesn’t really understand what’s happening. Once he does, everything will be fine.”

“Or,” Mary says, starting to cry, so that she has to turn her back to the balcony door, “once he tells Zorg that we said he kidnapped us, Zorg will become even more furious and rape me for your freaking viewing pleasure.”

“Jesus Christ! You’re not being helpful.”

“That’s because you’re going to get us killed!”

Nix and Mary gape at each other. The alarm on Mary’s face is so intense that Nix immediately whips out her camera, says loudly, “Smile!” and starts clicking it in Mary’s direction. Mary glares at her, not smiling, not playing along, but at least irritation has replaced the terror in her expression. Through her peripheral vision, Nix sees Zorg and Titus fashionably arranged on the sofa just on the other side of the balcony’s glass door. She whispers into Mary’s ear, “You
need
to hold it together. Don’t let them see you crying. We don’t want them to know we’re upset. I’m serious—now laugh like I just said something funny.”

Mary spins around and performs as instructed, though her teeth look bared. Nix laughs back. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. They throw their heads back, necks exposed. Girls laughing. See?

“We have to go back in,” Nix says. “I want you to listen to me, Mary. I’m going to get us out of this, okay? Please just keep your mouth shut. If you have to be with Zorg when I’m not around, just cough a lot, cough something up! Use your inhaler. Freak him out a little.”

Mary nods. Nix doesn’t trust her—she has an awful suspicion that Mary wouldn’t dream of lowering herself—but to her relief, Mary says, “Fine, I’ll spit mucus at his feet if I have to,” and Nix can breathe again. Then Mary’s eyes narrow. “But,” she begins, “if you aren’t with me and Zorg, where would you
be
?”

T
IME IN FOREIGN
countries doesn’t work the way it does at home. Service in restaurants is slower, and world-changing decisions are faster. Mary and Nix will probably remain on that balcony for another fifty seconds at most, before Nix slides open the balcony door and leads the way inside. In that time, this is approximately what transpires:

Where would you be?
Nix considers the question. She has never known a moment of truth, so sure, maybe this is one of them. One of those moments when you have to decide
who
you are,
who
you will be.

And Nix:
Who has she been?
A cute midwestern girl, an abandoned daughter, a spelling-bee champion, a betrayer of friends, a lazy student at a boutique college, a professor’s mistress.
Who will she become
? A traveler, she hopes, Greece and London just the beginning. Okay, but beyond that? Will her legacy be one series of self-gratifications followed by another, just another American life, another female life on humanity’s swarming anthill? Of course. Yes, of course it will; she knows that already, though she is not sure how any more than she knows how Mary knew unemployment statistics from Barcelona, or how her body instinctively understood what it would feel like to go off a cliff. She is not an Immortal. Her pretty American face will not launch a thousand ships; men will not (thank God!) wage war over her. She is neither Mother Teresa nor Gandhi, nor even, on the smaller scale, a selfless Peace Corps volunteer who can live with mice nesting in her pillow. She is an English-lit major with no real skills. This world is enormous and she is a small speck on it, awed by her own anonymity and insignificance, yet knowing that inside her, life positively pulses and surges like an exposed wire, bursting to get out, to spark.

She thinks again of Connie from “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” She and Mary are just Connies, after all, only Mary has been elevated in meaning by having a fucking death sentence on her head, and Nix realizes, perhaps fully for the first time, how mind-bendingly happy she is
not
to be the Tragic Heroine of their story. To be able to wonder who she will be at forty, at sixty-five, even at ninety-three like her maternal grandmother. Will she travel the world collecting lovers, like Anaïs Nin? Will her journals be published someday, her life an exotic inspiration to other women? Or will she eventually marry, even if she does not desire it now? Will love render her weak as a newborn kitten, longing for domestication? Will her hard, flat stomach someday swell and then deflate, bringing forth children—God’s wildest and most daring creation?
Is
there a God, and does it matter, when he will not save them now?

In the story, Connie opens the door and goes out to Arnold Friend to prevent the murder of her entire family upon their return from some boring barbecue. Connie is just an ordinary, superficial girl, an airhead full of boys and the drive-in and judgments at her fat, staid sister, with a smart mouth and a nowhere town clinging to her skin. But in that moment of swinging open the door and walking toward her own abduction and possible death, she is a hero, too, and it occurs to Nix that this brand of heroism—a practical, “what else can you do?” heroism—comes naturally to her. She will let Titus inside her because, in doing so, she can gain his trust and get him to call off Zorg. She simply cannot let Mary be raped, Mary who has borne enough, including Nix’s own treason. She will wrap her arms around Titus and whisper,
My friend has a terminal disease, she’s a virgin, you can’t let him take advantage of her, please, talk to him—do it for me.
Yes, but Mary, a good girl who gets flies with honey, would never approve—would turn to vinegar before ever permitting herself to become a whore. For a moment Nix’s heart somersaults and she falters, unsure. But fear is an essential ingredient of heroism, isn’t it? A lack of fear leads not to nobility but to indifference. Okay then: she will moan just right, she will say the things a courtesan would say if she were just an ordinary girl from Kettering. Every courtesan has been just an ordinary girl from somewhere. Every hero is a speck on a giant, uncaring planet, just like Nix.

“Do not
do
anything,” she says to Mary with the urgency of a suitor’s promise, and she slides open the glass door, smiling at her waiting drink.

W
AIT, CAN WE
back up here? Can we make it all turn out differently? As it turns out, not even the dead can accomplish that.

It is a mere three and a half hours later when they drive away from the villa and back down to Mykonos proper, to a small disco just opening for the night. Look. In walk four people: two smartly dressed, dark-haired men, and two young blond women in inappropriately beachy garb. They have their choice of tables, but the men select a dark one in the corner. A round of tequila sunrises is ordered. Here, take a long gulp for fortification. All right. Let us proceed.

To Mary’s dismay, they are the only ones in the disco. It’s not the same, all-Greek bar of their first evening, but out of the way enough not to be popular with tourists, especially so early in the evening. Titus tells the waitress to run a tab, beaming and confident like a man who has gotten a raise. Nix, next to him, seems cowed, Titus’s arm slung around her sometimes, then at other times withdrawn disdainfully. Mary keeps trying to meet Nix’s eyes, to communicate in some wordless fashion, but Nix won’t cooperate, looks elsewhere, mainly down at her lap. Mary has never seen Nix wear this body language. It is as though some alien force has inhabited her friend’s skin, and although Nix’s big blue eyes appear the same as ever, some other being lurks behind them.

Mary, however, cannot help feeling giddy. She was so skeptical about Nix’s mysterious plan, but look, it
worked
! Here they are, down from the menacing hills, out of that isolated villa, and in a disco with a waitress, a bartender, a DJ—other actual human beings! Sure, maybe they are Greek humans who don’t understand English, and maybe there are not that many of them, but still, halle-fucking-lujah. Who knew how long Titus and Zorg might have kept them prisoner? Titus could have gone out for provisions for days—forever!—without anyone being the wiser. They could have been turned into sex slaves; they could have been tortured and murdered.

But no, here they are sitting at a small table, drinking with strobe lights pulsing and American pop music pounding. Here they are, very much alive.

T
HINGS HAD BEEN
tricky for a while, back at the villa. Nix had strutted inside from the balcony and whispered something to Titus, resting her small palm against his chest as she leaned toward his ear, and just like that they were gone, disappearing down a hallway toward what Mary guessed was Titus’s bedroom, leaving
her
alone with the crazy one. Some plan! Zorg, his eyes already narrowing with drink, patted the white sofa until Mary obligingly sat down; then he placed his hand on her thigh just as he’d done in the car. Mary’s body pulsed with wanting to jump up and run, but to what end? Zorg’s hand, which had seemed so debonair when holding his tiny espresso cup in Taxi Square or smoking at Plati Yialos, now looked meaty and animalistic, rubbing hot circles onto her thigh, his thick fingers slipping under the fringy bottom of her tie-dyed skirt. Oh God. For the first time in her life, Mary began to cough on purpose, violently pounding her chest and hocking up mucus on cue. She spit the phlegm into the already wet napkin under her cocktail. The instant revulsion in Zorg’s eyes simultaneously gave her strength and made her want to hide.

“You are coughing all day—what, you are sick?”

Mary hacked again, vigorous enough to make her throat scrape. “I’m afraid it’s pneumonia,” she said, then worried she was not supposed to speak—Nix had told her to say nothing, and what if pneumonia contradicted what Nix was telling Titus? Then, rebellion surged: if Nix wanted to write her lines,
she
should have stayed here with the weirdo. “I get pneumonia sometimes, from my asthma,” she elaborated. “I might be contagious. I hope I didn’t get you sick last night, at the bar.”

Zorg flung his legs out in front of him in an agitated fashion, making a clicking noise. “I am supposed to fly in three days,” he said. “You run around putting your mouth on people when you should be in a hospital? You better not have made me sick. I have other things to do, real work, not just running around fucking like the rich little American girls. You understand, little girl? You think I should fly a plane while I spit this shit up on my lap, like you?” He made a noise again at the back of his throat, a hiss. “Disgusting.
Morí,
what is the matter with you?”

“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t realize yesterday that I was so sick. You’d better stay away from me, I don’t want to infect you.”

He took a long swig of his drink. “It is too late for that. Last night you are all over me. Any germ you have, I already have. Now, I just don’t kiss you.” He laughed an angry laugh. “Eh, but your
mouni
doesn’t cough, sí?” Before she could even wonder what the word meant, his hand was there, wedging its way between her thighs to cup her vagina. This time she did jump to her feet, but she stumbled across his arm, yelped as she tripped and fell into the glass coffee table, and then cried out when its round edge slammed hard into her shin. On the sofa, Zorg watched with bemusement, his eyes nearly slits. Terror and pain pulsed in Mary like twin amphetamines; her body felt like it was charged with voltage; it was all she could do to remind herself that the superhuman strength she felt was illusory, that there was no way she could win against Zorg in a physical struggle. She thought of advice her PE teacher had given back in seventh grade when the girls were separated from the boys to talk about sex. She couldn’t recall the specifics of the sex talk, but she remembered her gym teacher saying, “If any man ever tries to rape you, pee on him. Vomit, do something disgusting, crap your pants if you have to.” The gym teacher was a soft-spoken woman with a pockmarked face. Mary and her peers were embarrassed and shocked; they began to titter behind their hands. Now, all at once, Mary remembered the look the woman had given their laughter: a gaze so withering Mary could still feel its sting. Would she have to resort to literally pissing in her pants, or on Zorg if it came to that?
Could
she? She looked at the balcony outside, beckoning, and thought of simply sliding open the door and jumping with a running leap, but her legs kept still.