A Life in Men: A Novel (2 page)

The House of Reinvention

(LONDON: YANK)

For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.

Places where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives—far from anything that was ever imagined for them.

—
SIMON VAN BOOY,
Everything Beautiful Began After

Arthog House exists so far off the tourist grid it is not accessible by Tube. The fact that Mary ends up living there will later seem nothing short of implausible. Desperate for funds, she answers an ad run across in a transient newspaper,
TNT,
for a bartending job at the Latchmere Pub. Despite her lack of either a Blue Card or experience, she is hired on the spot, because who else would bother to come all this way, especially a blond American girl? At first she doesn’t live in the same neighborhood as the pub, but then she does. Arthog House claims her as one of its own. It is not what she intended for herself when she came to London, but it is what happens. She will never even see Buckingham Palace. She will never take a single photograph of Big Ben.

The house—one step above a squat, in that it comes with electricity, crap furniture, and a hairy-eared landlord called Mr. D. who appears every Sunday to collect the rent—is located on a residential street just north of sprawling Battersea Park Road, but south of the Thames and even of the green park proper. It is a park where someday gentrification will give birth to quaint cafés lining the small lake, but during the fall of 1990 it boasts only derelicts kipping on benches. Like a backpacker’s Tara, Arthog House bears a plaque proclaiming its name, embedded just to the left of the front door. If the two-story white stone building bears a clear identity, the small pocket of neighborhood in which it resides does not. According to residents of posh Chelsea to the north, anything south of the Chelsea Bridge falls within the domain of Battersea. To the on-the-dole islanders occupying the estates, however, Battersea begins on
their
street, Battersea Park Road. Mary’s black pub customers deride their shabby white Lower Chelsea neighbors to the north: laborers, hairdressers, wantonly racist old ladies perpetually pushing shopping trolleys, a United Nations of drug dealers who revolve in and out by the season. Though the clientele of the Latchmere Pub is mostly white, fights regularly break out, its white underbelly majority not at true peace in Battersea, but clearly unfit for Chelsea.

Arthog House has four bedrooms, one bath, a basement kitchen, and a kitchenette on the upper floor in the sitting room. The three downstairs bedrooms are occupied by a constantly rotating parade of Kiwi males who all work as laborers at a nearby construction site. Every time one of them leaves for Mallorca or Turkey, another takes his place so quickly that Mary has found it pointless to endeavor to learn each new name. The Kiwis also dominate the basement kitchen, although they never seem to actually cook. Since they each share a bedroom with at least one other man, the kitchen, the only place for privacy, has been informally dubbed The Brothel, because it is where the Kiwis go when making it with some local girl, and so its door is usually closed.

Upstairs at Arthog House, four residents share one bedroom and a sitting room. Three of those four are male, too: a South African, a Dutchman, and an American southerner. Mary, then—the fourth—is the only female in the entire house, a Wendy among Lost Boys. Because she does not realize that here at Arthog House she holds no monopoly on the desire for reinvention, she plays her cards close to her chest. Or maybe that is not even her reason. The truth is, taken outside her habitual environs of the American Midwest, she has little idea who she is. Unmoored from her history, she feels dangerously blank, like a hologram of herself walking around. The reason for this is twofold. First, of course, is the universal principle of unformed youth, which does not even occur to her because twenty-two-year-olds do not
feel
as unformed as they are. The second reason is more individual, more unique, in that at home she had grown used to feeling important, larger than life, because of the illness that has wormed its way into her previously ordinary existence, bestowing what passes for character on even the most banal of daily activities. Here in London, however, without the manacle of her tragedies, divorced even from her name, her identity feels so light it might simply float away.

Dearest Nix,

The lie has grown beyond my control. Like a double agent, I am asked to prove my identity daily, answering to your name even in bed. Weirdly, this is proving much easier than it sounds . . .

Mary hears her lover’s voice booming into the hallway pay phone outside their bedroom. “Mum, Dad, I’ve joined the circus!” It is six-something in the morning, London time. What time this makes it in South Africa is beyond her ken. Joshua’s voice is unnaturally loud, as though he and his parents are speaking via tin cans on a string from opposite sides of a playground. She envisions his parents (she has no idea what they look like—Joshua has brought no photos) as more elderly than befits their son: the mother with snow-white hair, both parents pressing ears to one old-fashioned wall telephone, though surely they have cordless in Johannesburg. “The flying trapeze,” Joshua cries, his jubilance belying the bruises on the backs of his knees. “No, Dad, it’s not really like that, there aren’t any animals, not how you think of the circus—not, like, fat ladies with beards or three-armed midgets. No derelict drifter types either—practically everyone’s an ex-gymnast like me.”

Mary muffles a laugh with her pillow. It’s true enough. His circus, composed mainly of Russian and Chinese acrobats who do not speak much English, is a clean-cut, hardworking bunch. Which no doubt accounts for why Joshua rarely
sees
them outside rehearsal, preferring the “derelict drifter types” of Arthog House.

“The last male trapeze artist got married and went back to China,” Joshua is saying, “so the girl was looking for a new partner—she came by Covent Garden, and I just happened to be doing my act—” Silence. “I told you this already—” More quiet, the halls reverberating with the concentrated quiet of people trying to sleep. “Street performance isn’t like that here,” he says, voice dropping. “Loads of talented people do it, the tourists come round purposefully to watch—it’s expected, they
want
it. It’s not charity.”

Mary rolls onto her side, pulls the chilly sheet over her skin. The bed across the room is empty; Yank must not have come home last night.

“I am an
ex
-gymnast,” Joshua says louder, transforming himself with one sentence from a competitive athlete to a circus performer:
poof
! In her hazy half sleep, Mary imagines him with giant purple shoes, a bulbous nose, even though the circus in which he performs has no clowns either; it’s not that sort of show. “Oh, that’s a brilliant idea, Mum, why didn’t I think of it? English girls are just queuing up round the corner to marry some foreigner whose been doing flips at Covent fucking Garden for spare change! Let’s see, I’ve got a list of some right here, maybe you can help me narrow it down—would you prefer a blond or brunet daughter-in-law? Don’t worry, I won’t ask your preference for skin color, that’s a fucking given!”

The phone slams into the receiver, so hard she can feel vibrations in the mattress.

In the times she’s eavesdropped alone, Joshua has said the word “fuck” to his parents at least two dozen times. Other than that, his phone conversations are not so different from the ones she has with her parents back in Ohio. In essence, they follow the same pattern. The parents demand a return home, and their demand is met with increasingly strident refusal. Whereas his parents get angry, hers tend to cry. Phones are slammed. The routine has ceased to be inherently interesting.

For this reason, she does not immediately rush into the hallway to comfort her lover. And also, of course, because she is naked in a house full of men.

Joshua reenters the bedroom. Mary was sleeping when he left, so only now does she realize, peeking through shut eyes, that he, too, is nude—apparently having carried on the entire phone call with his bare ass facing the staircase leading downstairs. His body, darker skinned than most strawberry blonds, permanently colored by the African sun, is lean from his “poverty diet,” but muscles still ripple like waves just beneath the surface of his skin. It strikes her, not for the first time, that only the utter dearth of women in this traveler’s subculture could account for her having scored such a magnificent specimen with absolutely no effort: Joshua courted
her
at the Latchmere, coming in night after night while she was tending bar, offering to walk her back to her B & B across the Chelsea Bridge after her shift, until dire loneliness finally prompted her to go home with him instead, despite not having touched a male body since high school. The albatross of her held-too-long virginity had become stranglingly heavy, and she longed to be rid of it so fervently that Joshua’s hotness barely factored in—she scarcely
noticed
it, even, until she was on the kitchen floor of Arthog House, crumbs stuck to her bare back, his serpentine penis striking with a jolt that switched on all her internal lights.

Joshua had no clue she was a virgin, and thus he felt no compulsion to be gentle. If anything, he fucked like a man running for his life, the electric-eel frenzy of him proving a wordless match to the puzzle of Mary’s own desperate flight. Though they had barely conversed beyond light banter across the bar of the Latchmere, the very next morning she moved into Arthog House.

Now, returning from his phone call, he tiptoes so as not to wake her. Mary is conscious of telling herself he wouldn’t want her to have overheard his family drama, but really she is afraid to open her eyes. His heightened emotional state might necessitate some response she has no ability to provide. They have been together two and a half months. The fact of their couplehood has seemed to her from the first unlikely, surreal, and temporary. A compilation of ingredients adding up to
safe.

He flips back the sheet and climbs in beside her, their bodies immediately sinking into the middle of the bed. Thanks to their combined weight (and vigorous sex), the mattress collapsed in its center a while back, so that lying at either edge gives the precarious feeling of balancing on a ledge. The bed is uncomfortable for one person; for two it verges on ridiculous. Mary and Joshua fall together, arms and legs crowding, not fitting right. Wordlessly Joshua adjusts her limbs as a nurse might the pillows of a hospital bed, intertwining them with his own until they fit. He has an ease with bodies that no doubt comes from years of being prodded, poked, and spotted by his coach and teammates; though he is not a smooth talker, physically he lacks any of the self-consciousness typical in young men. This preternatural physical authority has become the touchstone of her London life. The smells of his skin—smoke, sex—reassure her, lull her back to a place where she can sleep again, anesthetized.

But if they make love, the drug will be even stronger.

Still not opening her eyes, Mary guides his callused hands over the swell of her ass—
You
bent down to pick up a broken glass behind the bar,
and I fell in love with your ass,
he has told her on a number of occasions. Then, not trusting even that, she moves his hand between her legs.

“My fucking mum, the stupid cow.” His words come hot onto the back of her neck. “She wants to know why I don’t just marry a British girl and get dual citizenship so I can join the Olympic team for England. She wants to know what I’m waiting for, I’m not getting any younger, you know.” The venom in his voice seems to be traveling through his veins, his muscles, making his fingers rough. She tries to concentrate on the sensation, to not become derailed by individual words, though abruptly it occurs to her that Joshua’s parents clearly have no idea she exists. This knowledge elicits no particular feelings, despite the fact that she, on the other hand, uses Joshua as a constant excuse to her parents. Staying in England for a man is a paradigm that might make sense to them. Her parents still send letters to her old B & B in Chelsea; she stops by regularly to pick up her mail. They know nothing of Arthog House or why she cannot risk their envelopes addressed to her sliding through its mail slot.

“I’m never going back there, Nicole,” Joshua swears, fingers still moving, each stroke a morphine pump. “Never.” But Mary already knows this. He is set to leave London on New Year’s Day, departing for Amsterdam, the circus’s home base and first stop on their world tour. “I’m writing my brother and telling him about the stash I buried in the yard—he might as well enjoy it.”

Were she nursing any doubts about Joshua’s sincerity, this would put them to rest: if he is voluntarily relinquishing his drugs, he must mean business.

He tosses her onto her back, his body poised over hers. When they make love, Mary often thinks of him shedding his skin, the essence of him remaining intact and whole beneath. Though he refuses, she sometimes begs him to discard the condom, fantasizing about the way his healthy semen would invade her insides, pumping her full of his youthful vitality like a golden, dirty petrol. The Super Athlete and the Dying Girl. That she keeps this irony to herself only increases its erotic power. Her body arches up to meet his; moans form in her throat despite the fact that Joshua’s phone antics must have woken the entire house. Still, noise leaks from her mouth like smoke drifting out from under the cracks of their bedroom door: a warning, a dare.

Like everything else, the salve of him is running out of time.

When I walked into the Latchmere for the first time, every single person in the pub was male, from the owner to all the customers. Right away I thought of that old-man bar in Dayton where we went to make change before the Prince concert—do you remember the sad energy of that bar, how it looked like no one inside had seen a woman or sunlight in ages? I thought of the way you sashayed to the bar with your five-dollar bill sticking out between your fingers, your nails painted black and the polish chipping, but you could always carry that kind of thing off, you could wear tights with holes in them and make it look like art. And then of course I thought of Mykonos, and it was like
the ground beneath me got wavy, and when they asked me my name I blurted out, “Nicole,” without planning it. Just with that one word, though, right away everything felt different. Like you had opened up your skin for me to step inside and I could be
you,
brave and sexy and free instead of sick and scared. Of course I was still me, so for a moment I panicked, thinking they would catch me in the lie, but nobody blinked. It wasn’t like I’d claimed my name was Diamond or Madonna, some outrageous alias girls would run all the way to London to assume. They pay me cash at this under-the-table job, so I could have told them anything. I could have been anyone new, but instead I am constantly reminded of you . . .