A Life in Men: A Novel (29 page)

I
T TAKES ONLY
a minute for Geoff to infer that his plan may not have been a stellar one. He has never driven a scooter before, and it’s more difficult than he imagined. Twice, trying to get the thing started, he loses control and sputters right onto the sidewalk and into the wall of a building outside the rental place. Mary yelps, “Maybe we’d better switch to a car,” but Geoff brushes her off with, “Don’t worry, I’ll get the hang of it.” Meekly Mary gets on the back. Her helmet is gigantic above her slender neck, lending her an E.T. resemblance. Rigid with determination, Geoff takes off.

This could be our last vacation. Today could be the last time she ever does something this adventurous
. This is what the narrative loop in his mind sounds like now.

The roads aren’t that bad, considering. Geoff has driven Independence Pass (albeit in a car) to get to Aspen, where his stepfather the hotshot cardiologist has a time-share.
That
is a road to give you nightmares: unpaved, no guardrail, narrow enough for only a single car, the occasional shell of a ruined vehicle below on the rocks. You snake along the whole way, white knuckled, listening to the stones splattering under your tires, never sure if the earth below is where it seems or if suddenly your car will just pitch. You’d better hope you die fast, too, because nobody would find you.

This
, despite La Gomera’s being the second smallest of the Canary Islands, is a proper highway. Two lanes, smooth pavement, with a civilized guardrail more than solid enough to hold back this piddly scooter should Geoff happen to lose his grip somehow. He’s still smarting with embarrassment over Mary’s suggestion that they throw in the towel and take a car. He speeds up a little, hoping to demonstrate his increased confidence—he’s got this puppy under control now—but Mary’s grip on his waist tightens like a vice and she hollers in his ear, “Slow down! Slow down!”

He was going maybe fifty miles per hour, tops: nothing on this highway populated by Europeans. Great. She doesn’t trust him. This is a plot twist he hadn’t anticipated. The instant he saw the scooters in the shop, he pictured them taking the curves slightly faster than caution might suggest. His wife is a risk junkie, and a scooter seemed a risk he could live with. Mary is no more likely to die on a La Gomera highway than anyone. A scooter isn’t going to give her an infection or worsen her FEV values; she’s safer on this road than she is using a public restroom. He’s tired of hovering over her like an overprotective mother lion. He wanted today to be perfect, exciting. The air is sweet and fragrant with laurel trees. Geoff has never smelled a laurel tree before and is surprised by its intoxicating fragrance. Banana plantations decorate the landscape below.

But what difference does it make? What difference, when the love of his life has colonized the most dreaded bacterium known to CF patients, and he’s running into freaking walls and can’t get a damn thing right?

M
ARY’S HEAD THROBS
under her heavy black helmet. In the highway’s other lane, heading back to the port, tour buses whiz by at an astronomical speed. One skid, and Geoff could send the scooter careering under the wheels of one of those monsters. Violent air whips her scantily clad body, but inside the helmet she feels she might suffocate, trapped, peering at the world through the narrow prism of a camera lens.

She is trapped in Greece, circa 1988.

Nix’s terror had been palpable from the backseat, but Mary cannot remember feeling terribly afraid as Zorg hugged the cliff-side turns. She did not think of what it would feel like to be eaten alive by the teeth of the rocks, her head and bones smashed before she hit the sea. No, she was pissed off, with no intention of giving Zorg the satisfaction of begging him to slow down. He had chosen the wrong girl, she remembers thinking, to challenge to a game of chicken. Though he didn’t know it, his own stakes were much higher than hers: he had more years to lose than she did. If he wanted to sacrifice himself to the Aegean Sea to teach her a lesson, let him. He would be saving her parents years of pain and hospital bills. He would be saving her from drowning in her own mucus.
Go on
, she thought.
Do it. I dare you
.

She relented only because of Nix. She didn’t want her best friend’s death on her head. It had been at her insistence that Nix agreed to ride with her in this psycho’s car, so she swallowed her pride and let Zorg touch her knee, apologized to him to save Nix’s life. Ha-ha, very funny, since it turned out that Nix’s life was even cheaper than her own.
Drive faster,
she should have told Zorg.
Get it the fuck over with
.

I dare you.

But she doesn’t mean it; maybe she never did. Even now, she wants too badly to live, when one miscalculation by Geoff could put her out of her misery just as surely as Zorg’s antics could have nine years ago. They are racing downhill, on the downward slope from the mountain’s peak, and soon they will reach their destination. The black sand beach; the oxygen tanks and hospital beds and air hunger that await Mary at the bottom. Those “fifteen seconds” Mary read about in one of the Pan Am Flight 103 reports: that narrow window in which its passengers would have known something was wrong before they exploded into the airless air. Mary
knows
what those seconds were like for Nix because Nix had experienced them already in Zorg’s car: an anticipation of death, in that case briefly deferred. When Geoff stops the scooter, she practically throws herself off its vibrating back, wobbles on shaky legs, and collapses under the weight of her helmet, clattering to the ground and blinking up at the too-bright sky.

G
OD, THIS ISLAND
is a postcard. Geoff feels drunk with beauty, his body heavy and languid. Mary finally settled down on the scooter, and once he could relax and take in the scenery, there were no more episodes of driverly incompetence: he just needed to get a feel for the thing. This little beach is—there’s no other word for it—
sexy
. The black sand; the palm trees and tiny
tiendas
across the street; the water a violent blue. It’s the antithesis of the whitewashed beaches of Playa de las Américas on Tenerife; of the fat Brit tourists wearing socks with their sandals and wide straw hats above their burned, Porky Pig faces. Geoff doesn’t see a single tourist on this beach. There’s hardly anyone at all except for a few families with running, splashing brown kids. He wishes he’d brought a bottle of wine, but then even that wish evaporates—they can get one across the street somewhere, he’s sure. A perfect day after all. He can’t smell the laurel tree forest anymore, but already he’s looking forward to its drug-like infusion on the ride home. He’ll have only a little of the wine, give most of it to Mary, since he has to drive.

They find a patch of beach. Some women on the beach have kept their bathing suit tops on, but Geoff loves how Mary never lets this stop her: if it is legally permissible, she will go topless. Chaise longues litter the rocky black sand, and Mary gets right on one and stretches out, not tentative, not looking around to see if it might belong to someone else or if she has to pay a fee. Her sense of entitlement about such things baffles and bewitches him. She suffers, he has told her, from the disease of not giving a shit. She laughed at that.
Yep,
she said.
It’s a secondary disease brought on as a side effect of my primary disease
.

In Geoff’s experience, though, that’s not quite it. To be fair, he knows far more people with CF than Mary ever has, and yeah, they tend to be different from other pulmonary patients in that they grew up with their condition—they’ve never known a life without it. Some even seem attached to it, have a sense of pride in the identification and community. This isn’t true of Mary, though, since she was diagnosed so late (something he doesn’t let himself think about much—all those wasted years when she could have been treated). In fact,
many
of the things that usually plague his patients have never bothered her because of her pancreatic sufficiency. She doesn’t have to take enzymes to digest her food, much less face the prospect of feeding tubes. He isn’t sure why, though her stellar lung functioning must help, but her fingers, littered with thick, silver rings, show no sign of clubbing.

The truth, Geoff thinks, is that Mary’s entitled hedonism seems less a commonality among the
sick
than among smart, pretty, sexy girls—girls who have it all and know it. Sure, he’s seen the phenomenon of sick people believing themselves “special” because of their illness, and maybe that is part of it. But here, as she lies with her breasts upturned to the sun, head thrown back and curls spiraling out on the chaise behind her, ultradark sunglasses shielding her eyes, and hipbones rising up slightly from her flat pelvis, one knee bent, it is hard to believe she is anything other than healthy and invincible.

He struggles to imprint this idea in his memory. When he treats her as though she is frail—ministers to her like a doctor or a father—she hates it, chafes against it. He needs to hold on to this, the colder, glittering truth of her, and not let himself fall under the sway of spending every moment enacting a private
Camille
, turning her into a heroine whose sole purpose is to die.

“I’ll go to one of the little restaurants,” he says, this resolved. “I can get us a picnic lunch and a bottle of wine.”

Mary bolts upright, her sunglasses falling askew, and in an instant the image of her carefree brazenness is gone. “Wine?” Panic floods her voice. “You can’t drink wine—you have to drive that contraption all the way back to the other side of the island!”

“Don’t worry,” Geoff says smoothly. “I’ll only have one glass. You can get drunk, and I’ll take advantage of you on the ferry. We’ll find a quiet corner.” He chuckles.

“I don’t feel like drinking. I’m not hungry either—just sit down. We’re not staying here long, right?”

He feels, not for the first time, as if Mary is testing him, though he isn’t sure to what end. “But we don’t have to take the ferry back for hours,” he reminds her, taking a deep breath to keep calm. “It doesn’t leave until sunset. What’s the hurry? We’ll get back to the port in time for dinner and eat at one of those local restaurants on the waterfront. They’re more your style than the ones on Tenerife anyway, right?”

Mary just looks worried. Her hands knit together, twisting her rings.

“Come on,” Geoff says, and he can’t keep the edge out of his voice this time. “You’re not still upset about the scooter, are you? You have to admit, I did pretty well in the end, didn’t I? Are you going to hold one mistake against me for the rest of our lives?”

“Two,” Mary says, as if on autopilot. “You slammed into that building
twice
.”

“Jesus!” Two of the pretty Spanish children stare at Geoff in shock, though he has used the English pronunciation. He lowers his voice. “We haven’t eaten since dinner last night, Mary—I’m starved and I’m getting us some lunch. If you don’t want wine, fine, don’t have any, but I’m going to have
one glass
. What’s with you today?”

“I don’t like winding roads,” she says quietly, and though he can’t see her eyes through the dark lenses of her sunglasses, he watches tears spill out from under the frames, down her cheeks. “They remind me of Mykonos.”

Her words stun him like a punch. He stares, dumbfounded. All this time, he thought she didn’t
know
. She has never mentioned it to him, anything about what those guys did to Nix, and Geoff has never brought it up. Not that it’s been on his mind all that much. Nix, after all, is dead, no longer living with the ramifications of whatever may have happened at that villa, and he and Mary . . . well, they’ve had plenty on their own plates, haven’t they? Still, in some small way the secret he’s held about Nix and that night has weighed on him like a boulder forever in his shirt pocket, creating a barrier between him and Mary. Is it possible that, all this time, she has been carrying it, too.

“You never told me you still think about Mykonos,” he begins. “Did you and Nix talk about it much—what happened with Zorg and Titus? After you left Greece, I mean?”

Mary snorts, her hands swiping away under her glasses frames. “Oh, she blamed me,” she says hotly. “She thought it was all my fault because I was too weak and too sick. She couldn’t wait to run off to London and be with her normal friends, her sophisticated East Coast friends, and leave me by the side of the road, because I was a liability—I wasn’t any fun.”

Geoff doesn’t know what shes means; this doesn’t make any sense in his scenario. He tries to fit the puzzle pieces of her words into the picture in his mind, but they just won’t click—they seem of an entirely other context. “Wait,” he begins, and he moves to Mary’s chaise, nudging her legs over with his ass so that he can speak in a lower tone of voice and not startle the children again. “She thought it was your fault because you took a nap, you mean?”

“Nap?” Mary says. “What nap?”

A shiver runs up Geoff’s back.
What nap?
She told him that night, when they were moving from bar to bar—she
told
him that she’d taken a nap, which implied that Nix was left alone with Zorg and Titus. In all the years since, while she has never mentioned that incident again, she
has
spoken of Nix, many times. The portrayal she gives is . . . well, of a girl much the way Geoff was perceiving Mary herself only a few moments ago. A brazen, vibrant, slightly lawless girl sure in the power of her own youthful beauty—a seeker who wanted to devour the world. But the Nix Geoff met that night in Mykonos bore no resemblance to that portrait. Mary seems to have been talking about
herself,
whereas the Nix Geoff met barely spoke, jumped at shadows, ran into the surf, not out of any impetus for adventure, but as though trying to outrun a demon—maybe even trying to end her life—so that when Mary told him, all those years later, that Nix had died, his first thought was
suicide
, and thank Christ he didn’t say as much, because immediately afterward Mary told him the truth about Lockerbie. He feels suddenly unmoored, dizzy, wishing he had saved this conversation for after he had some food in his stomach, maybe some of the wine for fortitude. Because if Mary never took a nap, is it possible . . . did those assholes hurt his future wife, too, and Geoff let them simply get away with it? He can’t decide, in the blinding sun, watching Mary wipe her hidden eyes, whether this hypothesis would explain a lot about Mary or whether it is merely redundant in the face of everything else she has borne. His hands curl into fists.