A Life in Men: A Novel (20 page)

He comes to her. He does not seem to see Eli. His arms are outstretched, but he does not embrace her, rather takes her by the shoulders and holds her at arm’s length, studying her until she begins to blush.

“You look,” he says, “exactly like your mother.”

Then he leans forward, kisses her quickly on the hairline, and whispers into her ear, “If you’d told me you were going to bring your pops, I’d have put on a better shirt.”

T
HAT NIGHT,
M
ARY
tosses and turns in an elaborate four-poster bed, listening to Eli snore. Only once before have they spent an entire night together, when his wife and children were visiting Diane’s parents on Long Island. That night, Mary had been so happy to finally not be alone in her chilly bed that she dropped to sleep instantly in Eli’s arms, immune to any sounds of the night. Now, her head feels like it is vibrating off the pillow. Despite his rumbling-thunder sound, Mary has been huddled close to Eli’s body for warmth, and when she flips back the bedspread, she shivers before she can pull his sweater over her gooseflesh and find her Nix notebook among her luggage.

Jesus Christ, where
am
I, girl? What am I doing here? Nothing feels like it should. This weirdly sexy, disheveled old guy in his freakishly gigantic house doesn’t feel like my
father.
And Eli’s only making things worse by serving as an audience to this whole absurdist play. In no reunion scenario I ever imagined would there have been a role for my “married lover,” masquerading to Daniel and Gabriella as merely my “inappropriately old boyfriend.” This is not how it was supposed to be. This is not how it was supposed to turn out.

The moonlight illuminates the courtyard from above, but the temperature has dropped, and Mary has to huddle, knees under the sweater. She can see the white of the notebook’s pages but can’t make out her own words once written, as though already they’ve been enveloped by the night. In her mind she frames a picture of herself, a lost girl in a giant house writing invisible letters to a ghost. But lately, imagining herself from the outside, conjuring a poetic picture, doesn’t offer the comfort it once did, and instead the hollow space under her ribs seems to widen. As she slides back under the bedspread next to Eli, finally not alone in a bed and at last in a house owned by her actual kin, tears run onto her pillow at how
badly
she wanted Daniel to be a woman. The realization pains her: yet another betrayal of Mom, whom Mary has already put through so much. But although she barely knows Daniel, already she understands that what she is looking for is nothing he can offer, that what she needs could only have come with a woman’s skin.

Nix,
she whispers, urgent, futile.
Nix, I wish you were here with me, in this crazy-ass house. I wish it
could be you and not just another fucking man
.

Eventually her pillow is wet and she flips it over. Eventually she falls under the house’s quiet, black spell.

I
N THIS ENTIRE
palace, there is somehow nowhere to hide to do PTs. For the first full day of their stay, Mary and Eli obligingly follow Daniel and Gabriella from town square to town square, drinking ceaseless
cafés con leche
at endless cafés until their hands shake, then return home to mellow out with Napoleon cognac swilled in the elaborate sitting room, its French doors open to the balcony, noise from the street below drifting in. Mary is a mass of anxiety and phlegm, plotting how to sneak away. They have walked all over the city “centro,” listening to Daniel and Gabriella talk about Querétaro’s history, about their courtship, about the wonders of San Miguel de Allende, an expat haven and artist colony they will visit during their stay. Mary waits patiently for them to stop talking and go to bed, but despite being the youngest, she is the first in the group to tire and escape to the bedroom. Of course, Eli retires immediately after, so that even in the privacy of their room she cannot be alone, and finally falls into another agitated sleep, PT undone.

The next day, Daniel has to work (he describes himself as “a kind of grief counselor”), and he leaves them to their own devices. Crazily, despite her subtle suggestions that she’d like to just hang out in the majestic house and read quietly—
alone
—Eli trails her like a stalker. She has no idea what to make of him. In Columbus she often feels herself to be clingy and servile, begging him to come over to her place, imploring him to stay one extra hour. At the meetings for the American Languages Department’s part-time faculty, it takes all her power to act as though everything is normal in front of their colleagues—to not stare shamelessly at Eli as he runs the meetings, to not laugh too raucously at his jokes, to not find some excuse to steal a drink from his coffee cup, just to feel her lips where his have been. Somehow, here, everything has been reversed.

She has never done a PT in front of Eli—he does not even have a clue that she has CF. As usual, she has admitted to her asthma, has even used her inhaler in front him, and has a few times pressed him not to smoke in her presence when she’s “having a bad day.” But truthfully, in the time they have known each other, Mary has been almost freakishly healthy. Living alone, she has plenty of time to do three PTs a day; she works only at night, and her days are mainly spent lying around in sweatpants practicing Spanish tapes, then going to swim at the YMCA pool. Once, shortly after she and Eli first slept together, she had to go on antibiotics for a PA infection, but like a miracle the drugs cleared things right up and she never landed in the hospital. She missed only two classes. Eli came over with chicken soup, and though she was coughing continually, he seemed to think nothing of it.

This dementedly large house, this castle owned by her birth father the count, has a
chapel
in it, of all things. The chapel, Daniel and Gabriella explained, came with the house. Gabriella is, of course, Catholic. “We were going to nix the graphic crucifix,” Daniel joked to Eli that first night, “but when Gabriella’s family drop by, it cheers them up to see Jesus watching over our house to make sure she’s not going to hell for living with a Jew.” Eli, who has been doing a good impression of a humorless stiff, did not laugh. At home, nobody can tell a Jewish joke as well as Eli, yet here he didn’t even crack a smile. Later he told Mary, “I can’t believe he has a crucifix on his wall!” Mary swears that in the past forty-eight hours, whenever Daniel has said anything of which Eli disapproves, she’s heard Eli mutter, “Oy.”

And so it is in the chapel where she finally hides, late in the afternoon on their second full day. Sitting on the floor next to the altar laden with unlit candles, she uses her Flutter device to expel the mucus from her chest for as long as she can, listening to Eli, spurred on by the sound of her coughs, roaming the halls calling her name. The Flutter makes for a quieter therapy than the chest-pounding, spitting, and gagging sessions of her teen years, but it still is loud. Eli would never look for her in the chapel, though, so even when his footsteps approach, she only quiets down and gulps back her coughs until she hears his voice growing farther away. He does not know that Mary was once an altar girl at her family’s progressive Catholic church and used to stand below Father Corbo holding the heavy, ornate Bible open on her head while he read from it during funerals. This was before funerals started to freak her out. This was when she believed, like all children, that she would never be dead.

T
HAT EVENING, WHEN
they return from dinner in the biblical square, Mary rushes back to the chapel to do her evening PT under the pretext of suffering from Montezuma’s revenge and having to use the toilet, where at least Eli will not follow. Once the heavy doors shut behind her, she reclines on the chapel’s cold floor without bothering to turn on the lights and begins to breathe into the device, watching the little ball rise, noting with a boulder of dread that her breath is weaker already just from one skipped day, or maybe from the stress of being here, or maybe from the constant cigarette smoke Daniel and Gabriella have been blowing in her face. She breathes, trying to calm herself, running the Lord’s Prayer through her head like a mantra, but the prayer itself makes her nervous instead of calming her as it did as a girl. If Eli heard her, he would not like it.

Of course, why should she have to please Eli? But the rage she wants to feel, just like the breath she cannot summon, fails her. Eli is someone who came with her to Mexico. He is someone who spoons her body, at least when he can sneak away to do so. He is someone who understands a life of perpetual movement, of living hard and fast, and of the gaping, escape-shaped hole left in a life once that motion has stopped. He is someone who doesn’t judge her for sleeping with a married man, since he is the married man in question, so she does not have to explain that morality is something she simply has run out of
time
for: her body needs what it needs while it can get it.

The door jerks, knocks, swings open. Mary bolts upright in the dark room like a teenager caught with her pants around her ankles in her boyfriend’s bedroom, tossing the Flutter device randomly, so that it clanks into one of the candlesticks on the altar and knocks it over, and she listens with horror as they all begin to topple like dominoes. She jumps to her feet, blinking at the light.

It is not Eli, however, but Daniel. His eyes are narrowed, confused. He says, “Um. What are you up to in here?”

And she says, “What are
you
up to? I thought you were Jewish!” She has said it in a tone like a snotty teenager’s that she instantly thinks he must be glad to have gotten rid of her and spared himself this nastiness on a daily basis.

He stares back at her incredulously. “Don’t tell me you were praying.”

“No. I just . . . wanted to be alone.”

“I heard you coughing. Are you sick?”

Are you sick?
Here it is: the simple opportunity to tell the truth. Mary can feel her parents sitting on her shoulders like a cartoon parody of her conscience, whispering in her ear, urging her to
tell
him, to ask where this mutant gene came from, to find out at what age the various afflicted members of his family dropped dead. It has not escaped Mary that it seems to have
entirely
escaped her parents that the CF gene needs to be contributed by both birth parents, and that it is therefore likely that no one in Daniel’s family even knows it exists, and she will be the one to break this cheery news of his legacy. She gropes frantically behind her for her Flutter device, which she cannot see beneath the clutter.

Daniel steps forward, like a father or a highly competent museum tour guide, and ushers her by the shoulder out of the room.

T
HE PORCELAIN DOLL
is cracked. His daughter doesn’t seem, to Daniel, like the type of woman who collected dolls as a little girl, but it is all he has left of Rebecca, his ex, Mary’s mother, and he cannot help thinking that all he really has to offer her—Mary—is this relic. It was the only thing Rebecca didn’t take with her when she packed her bags and left the baby and Daniel’s son, Leo, alone in the apartment while Daniel was at the police station being roughed up for having smashed the window of his own car in a lunatic, drug-fueled rage, and for generally disturbing the peace of Greenwich Village circa 1968. As if any such peace existed, with or without Daniel to disturb it.

He says to their daughter now, “I kept it all these years. I always knew I’d track you down, once you were old enough to understand.” He is aware that he sounds like a parody of the Father Who Gave Up His Child and does not know how to infuse the words with any essence of
himself
. He says again, now sounding like the Pathetic Has-Been Still Carrying a Torch for the Woman Who Left Him, “I can’t get over how much you look like your mother.”

His daughter clutches the doll. Mary’s eyes have the look of fever, of someone who has glimpsed something she didn’t know she wanted or needed and now cannot live without. She has an unquenchable thirst about her, a madness Daniel recognizes as more his own than Rebecca’s. He doesn’t like it, this infusion of himself into her features.

“Where is she now? Rebecca?” He notices she does not say
my mother
. Of course. She already
has
a mother—a father, too. What is the matter with him, using language like that? He wants to bang his head into the wall, but his daughter is looking at him with naked expectation. What would that imaginary self-help book call for in such a situation? Is he about to say the wrong thing? If so, what the hell should he say instead?

Your mother left you alone in a shithole apartment in a crap neighborhood, with an unstable older brother. Your mother left you in an open dresser drawer and ran for her life, away from me, because that was the kind of asshole I was, and nobody on earth could blame her—nobody except you. Your mother didn’t like the way you cried and coughed and didn’t latch onto her tit properly; your mother could have taken you with her, back to her respectable parents on Long Island, but she didn’t, and apparently they were all glad as hell ’cause none of them ever came back
sniffing around looking for you—believe me, I waited eight long days expecting them to show up in their snazzy black
car; I waited for Rebecca’s frigid mother to stand imperiously in the doorway with her ice-queen arms open for the baby; I
waited to toss you into those arms and be rid of you and dared to hope they’d buy me off with a bit of cash not to come around, and I wondered how much they’d offer and how much smack I could score with it. But the knock on the door never came, they all forgot you, they went on with their Long Island lives, and I was the only one who did you any favors by calling my father’s lawyer buddy and letting him take you off my incompetent, junked-up hands. Where
is
she, your mother, with her sexy ass and that wild hair and the way she used to stare at me like I was something? Fuck if I know, honey, fuck if I know where that bitch is now. Not waiting for
you
to call, that’s for sure. Hey, here’s something I kept because I must be God’s biggest loser—who knows why I kept it, who the hell knows—hey, here’s a broken fucking doll!