A Life in Men: A Novel (19 page)

With sincerity,

Your biological father, Daniel Becker

With sincerity, his ass.

As Eli rereads the letter for the fifth time, Mary jabbers on the phone to her adoptive mother in Kettering. Usually he and Mary don’t talk to people from their real lives when they’re together, but today Mary seems to have forgotten he’s in the room. Eli’s hoping the mother will forbid Mary’s going to Mexico, get hysterical, and guilt-trip Mary into burning the letter, but no, from what Eli can follow, her mother seems to be
encouraging
her crazy daughter. “No!” Eli hears Mary squeak with sudden alarm. “I mean, thanks for offering, you’re being
really
cool about this, Mom, I totally appreciate it—but I think it’d be too awkward if you guys came . . . don’t you?”

The mother doesn’t seem to agree, so they debate while Eli feigns great interest in his coffee, picked up on the way over, since Mary has an appalling ineptitude with regard to any domestic task whatsoever. This, too, is part of why Eli likes her, if
like
is quite the right word for his feelings, and if
feelings
ever had much to do with his behavior. Still, if it is only his dick that’s involved, why is he thinking about going to Mexico with her, since she won’t let her father accompany her? Why, if it is only that he wants to bang her young, undomestic brains out, is he already plotting what he will tell his wife so he can get on the plane?

I
HAVE TO GO
check this Daniel guy out, even though part of me is afraid of being disappointed. At least something is finally happening, right? Otherwise, what are my options? Just more of the same. Yeah, this is what I left Joshua and his marriage proposal for. A married man nearly twenty years my senior. A lover I can’t even pretend offers me a future. This is what I got instead of the majesty of Kenya: a studio in fucking Columbus, Ohio. A job that I believe in but that doesn’t pay even enough for me to afford car payments without my parents’ help—that doesn’t offer health insurance, so that my dad has to pay extra to keep me on his company’s policy. Three years past my median life expectancy, and here is where I am: underemployed in the frigid midwestern winter, balling a balding father of three because he is the first man I’ve met since I landed in Ohio who can actually carry on a conversation, and that level of desperation can make any ridiculous moral error feel like love. Too often, having downed more than my share of wine alone in my studio, I’ve called my old phone number in Nairobi, hoping to hear Joshua’s voice, but nobody ever picks up and it’s ridiculous to imagine he would live there after all this time. If I really wanted to reach him I would have to call Gavin’s company, but it’s a longing without purpose: what would I say? I don’t even want to rush back to him, exactly; it’s more that he’s the only one who might understand my pathetic, misguided arrogance in assuming I could so easily find a “better” life. It’s only that I have come to realize that a dying woman, least of all, should ever treat love as a disposable fruit that grows on every tree. It’s only that, however
much I believe in my Somali grant or starting my master’s in education in the fall, there is no substitute for having someone who puts you first, who does not put his pants back on at ten thirty and head home to his wife.

So now. Daniel Becker, this father who went looking for me without even knowing I was on the registry. An expat himself, who is welcoming me into his home. I should be thrilled. It should be what I have been waiting for and craving . . . but Nix, I’m not sure, really, that it isn’t just “something to do.”

T
HE ADDRESS IS
18 Hidalgo. Eli has it on a scrap of paper, though he and Mary are both more than well versed enough in Spanish to communicate successfully with the cab driver. It is night. They drive a long stretch of highway from the airport, past the kind of billboards and tufts of dying grass that could be anywhere, before things go all colonial, before the streets narrow into the kind of Mexico Eli recognizes. They drive past a square lit up with Christmas decorations, and Mary grows animated, begins interrogating the cab driver about the holiday festivities, which seem to boil down to about 150 different parades and performances put on by the various churches—all Catholic, of course—outdoors, where it is still a temperate sixty degrees at night in late December. Eli can only thank God they skipped Christmas by a day, or probably the girl would have dragged him to Mass. In this moment, he would like to smack her. She’s just
passing
—doesn’t she know that? Then he feels like an idiot. He is an atheist, for God’s sake, or at least agnostic. Where is all this righteous Jewish indignation coming from? He married a Jew largely by accident, because he was a radical—or posing as one—and so many other radicals were Jews. He and Diane have never been inside a synagogue together unless it involved somebody’s wedding or funeral. If anyone’s the fraud inside this cab, it’s him.

This square, though, is something else. The cab driver stops on a corner so that Mary can ooh and aah over it. There is a life-size Garden of Eden, with papier-mâché mannequins of Adam and Eve, in sultry fig-leaf fashion, and another section Eli assumes must signify Christ’s descent into Hell, as it’s populated by devils that flash red lights, carry pitchforks, and leer menacingly. Another area of the square boasts an elephant with a moving trunk; Eli has no idea where the elephant fits into the Jesus story. And of course, the crèche. Baby Jesus and the Holy Family, who in this setting look appropriately Mexican. In the distance, Eli can see three guys dressed up like the Wise Men, one in full blackface, posing with children for a photographer, for money of course. The camera’s flash is just another bolt of light in the extravagantly illuminated square.

“He says on New Year’s Eve the women from the town set up booths and cook in this square, and it’s a big party,” Mary says breathlessly, as though he doesn’t speak Spanish better than she does. “There’s a local drink—
ponche
—he says we have to try.”

“I’ve had
ponche
before,” Eli says in his best jaded older man. “It tastes like Sprite with cinnamon floating on top. It sucks.”

Mary falls silent and Eli feels stupidly glad. She leans back into the seat of the taxi. Her blond hair stands out so sharply against the night sky that it is almost as though she glows. Her body is small and angular, her shoulders deceptively broad for her size, as though she is a competitive swimmer, though Eli has never known her to exercise. She is hot, there’s no denying that, if not
beautiful
. He isn’t sure what exactly it is that keeps her from beauty, though it seems to him now, in the dim light of the taxi, that her flaws are all synonymous with her hidden Judaism. Her nose
is
just a bit too large for her face; she is short; her hair, though fair, is so kinky it lends her an exotic appearance, as though she has just rolled out of bed. She looks
dirty
, he thinks, not clean and fresh like other blonds he’s admired and occasionally fucked over the years. Clearly, there is something wrong with him. He is too old and too well traveled to be some proverbial self-loathing Jew. If anything, he has never slept with a Jew outside of marriage, because he holds his wife—and other Jewish women—in too high a regard to disrespect them that way. Guilt weighs on him. Diane thinks he is in Longboat Key visiting his mother, whose senility makes spending extra money on tickets for Diane and the kids unnecessary. He has never deceived his wife so elaborately. To him, that he is doing it for a Jew in Christian clothing makes it all the more galling.

The driver drops them on a dark corner, in front of a building that takes up half a city block in each direction. It looks like an apartment complex or a hotel, and Eli wonders if they are in the wrong place. For some reason he pictured the biological father in some quaint adobe house, going native, as it were. The man claimed to have an inheritance, and property in Mexico is notoriously cheap. If he’s living in some one-room apartment, even Mary will have to realize he’s a scam artist, and they can get out of this neon Christian town before Diane has the chance to catch his lying ass.

There are no doorbells to the various apartments, only a single knocker, larger than a human head. The door itself is gigantic, made of wood and peppered with round metal studs. Mary sounds the knocker. They wait. Nothing happens. They wait some more.

Eli says, “There’s got to be a hotel back near the square. We’ll go find it, down a few margaritas, and worry about this shit tomorrow.”

Mary grips his arm tightly. It is the first time she’s touched him in several hours. “Hold on,” she says, and he believes he hears disappointment in her voice, as though she, too, would like to escape to some anonymous, margarita-doling hotel. “I hear something.”

And then the door swings back. The woman standing inside is a knockout, Eli can’t help thinking, despite
her
short stature, largish nose, curly hair. She wears a man’s robe, the belt wrapped around her waist twice. Her feet are bare. She is maybe forty years old, but could be fifty. Her eyes are lined, and there is a telltale cord of skin stretched between her neck and her chin that Eli remembers not seeing on Diane until she reached forty, but the symmetry of the woman’s features achieves a kind of Sophia Loren agelessness, and her breasts, clearly braless under the robe, seem unnervingly high and firm. She is smiling hugely: she knows who they are. They are not in the wrong place. She begins to jabber in Spanish, and for a moment Eli is so dazed by her that he forgets he knows the language. Then it becomes clear what she is saying. Daniel is upstairs. Daniel is waiting for them. No, not
them
—her
you
is singular. She has no idea who Eli is. He looks at Mary, and next to the dazzling woman at the door she appears wan and insubstantial, her youth taking on a characterless blandness that seems to scream,
I have not lived!
It isn’t true, Eli realizes: Mary is not your usual sheltered punk. Still, he wants to take her wan-ness under his wing and protect it. She seems something that, for lack of belonging to anything else in the picture, must belong to him.

Then the woman moves aside to let them in. They step together into the dark stone foyer, move forward to get inside the building. And then, they
see
. The small foyer opens up like the mouth of a cave into an enormous dome: a stone courtyard itself as large as one of the mansions in Bloomington, Indiana, where Eli was raised. The house seems to explode into monstrous proportions—yes, Eli realizes abruptly, this is not an apartment building but a
house,
owned by the letter writer! The courtyard is chilly, an indoor-outdoor space with some strange kind of plastic ceiling so high above them that Eli can barely see it. And all around the courtyard are rooms shut off from view by elaborate antique wooden doors. He cannot count them from where he stands, but there are at least ten rooms on the first floor alone, part of which is taken up by a wide stone staircase shielded by a wrought-iron gate and by this foyer. Upstairs, there may be almost twice as many rooms overlooking the courtyard, and Eli knows from his Central American days that inside these rooms will be passages, connections to other hidden quarters. He and Mary stand gaping.

The woman, who has introduced herself as Gabriella, moves toward the stairway, presumably to take them to Daniel. But Mary stops in the middle of the courtyard, at a fountain encircled with mosaic tiles. She stands, one hand over her mouth, and begins to laugh.

F
IRST,
G
ABRIELLA GIVES
Mary the grand tour, Eli trailing after them—though it had not occurred to her before, Mary is suddenly unsure how to explain his presence. Each room possesses a chandelier the size of a king-size bed, as well as vintage furniture the likes of which she has never seen except in photographs. Velvet settees, elaborate canopy beds, marble-topped dressers, a dining room table that seats perhaps twenty with the chairs well spaced. Mary thinks of her parents’ dining room table in Kettering, which seats six, and how they would drag kitchen chairs and cram them around to get ten people at the table when extra guests came. Gabriella chatters like a guide, a mix of Spanish and English, talking about how “we” had to get the furniture out of storage, “we” spent years antique hunting, and “we” bargained with the previous owner about the chandeliers, which were not meant to come with the home until Daniel walked away from the negotiating table, and the real-estate agent called and said the chandeliers could stay. Still, “we had to spend months restoring them,” Gabriella says. “They were not in good condition.” The house, she explains, “came with count papers”—a title for Daniel. No title for her, apparently, or if there is one, she doesn’t mention it. Mary’s legs feel leaden. Her father.
Count Daniel
. She feels like a character in a teen movie who turns out to be royalty.

When they finally meet Daniel, it is in hidden quarters on the first floor, near the very back of the house. First they pass through a media room with a large TV and new couches that—unlike the antiques—actually look comfortable; this room then leads to a bedroom, the only lived-in one, with a larger, less formal bed. Finally, heavy wooden doors swing back to reveal an office, and at the desk a man has fallen asleep on a stack of papers, with several books open and balanced precariously on top of one another. Gabriella moves toward the man, her feet making no noise on the mosaic tiles of the floor, and touches his shoulder, so that he jolts upright with a small cry of alarm. The left side of his face is creased from the edge of the paper stack pressing into it. His hair, near black without any visible gray, is thick and disheveled like a lion’s mane. His face is thin, body sinewy and compact as a high school boy’s. He wears a sweatshirt too large for him, with an Irish cable-knit cardigan over it. His pants are quasi army fatigue, with a missing pocket that looks like it was ripped off, perhaps by a dog. Like the woman’s, his feet are bare. Despite the disarray and lack of dignity of his various parts, the whole picture is one of handsomeness. With a bookish virility, his nose slightly hooked, his smile startled and wolfishly charming, he looks nothing like a count. He also looks nothing like Mary’s
father
.