A Life in Men: A Novel (41 page)

You asked when I’m coming home. A fair question and I wish I could answer fairly but I don’t know. A month, I think? We’re making our way down the coast, Casablanca after this and then farther south to a hippie beach town called Essaouira, and finally inland to Marrakech and the High Atlas. Don’t worry, I won’t hike (as if I could). I’ll stay at some little hammam or something and wait for Leo and Sandor to come back for me. We want to make a trip into the desert and camp (don’t worry, I’ve got salt tablets, I’ll stay hydrated), and after that we’ll head back to Spain by way of Fez, where the medina is supposed to be like going back in time. ALL of Morocco feels that way so far to me. I wish it were still possible to say that we’ll come back here together someday, but I know that isn’t going to happen now, so I can only ask you one more time to be patient.

Me

KENNETH L
OOKS
CLEAN
for the first time she has ever witnessed. On the endless stretch of sand, he wears a linen shirt in a color she has come to think of as Moroccan blue and a pair of lightweight trousers. He completely surprised her this morning by going into a store in Asilah—not a tourist shop but an ordinary clothing store where the few other customers were Arab men—and speaking to the shopkeeper in a French already less halting than it was on their arrival five days ago. He carried his small parcel back to their noisy little hotel on the beach, where he took a shower and changed into his new outfit, combing out his long hair. For a moment she thought he would produce a razor and shave his beard, but perhaps he doesn’t own one, because the beard remains intact.

Mary did not know what to make of this transformation, but she took the opportunity of his cleanliness to suggest that they go and see the nearby resort their driver told them about, Le Mirage. She wanted to see it yesterday but was embarrassed to bring Kenneth along: a fact that shamed and annoyed her at once. It is not in her guidebook, but no taxi driver or guide has failed to offer to take them. And so, Kenneth sparkling clean and looking more like a shaggy Hollywood producer than his usual cross between an old Deadhead and a too-skinny biker, they arrived by taxi with all their luggage. The plan was to stay for lunch and then head back to Tangier in time to have a drink at the Tanger Inn.

Instead, Mary took one look at Le Mirage and announced that they would stay the night. The simplest suite was two hundred dollars. Before Kenneth could even weigh in, she plunked down her credit card.

A boy helped them carry their luggage out of the lobby into the open air, the panorama of sea stretched out below their hilltop. He led them to one of the individual villas, each with its own sitting room and private patio with lounge chairs. Mary immediately imagined herself and Geoff lying on the chairs in their bathing suits, Geoff’s skin growing dark as an Arab’s. She doubted Kenneth had owned swim trunks since boyhood. Years of drugs and nocturnal habits have left him looking like he might be allergic to the sun. When she imagined him lying on a lounge chair, she saw him still in the cowboy boots he wore in London and Amsterdam. She wasn’t sure why she even wanted to stay at a place that so clearly didn’t suit her traveling companion. No doubt Kenneth would think her materialistic, a typical American, always looking for luxury over authenticity. Well, fuck him. He could endure one night.

She tipped the boy before Kenneth could. She knew she was emasculating him and didn’t care. Perhaps he didn’t even
know
about tipping at hotels. Who could say what ordinary customs he might not be privy to?

Kenneth said noncommittally, “I’m gonna go down and see the beach.”

She followed . . .

Now, splashes of purple and pink flowers burst everywhere. Mary catches a glimpse of giant sunflowers set back from the water, taller than she is, moving gently in the wind. Sand and rockless sea stretch as far as her eyes can discern. Though there have to be other guests at the hotel, the beach is completely deserted, as is the terrace of the small restaurant looming above. It reminds her of the place where she and Nix lunched with Zorg and Titus, the way it overlooks the beach below, the perfect isolation. She imagines herself here with Nix, the two of them in their shorts and flip-flops hounding the woman at the front desk to arrange an in-room massage, maybe nude sunbathing at the foot of the sunflowers. She envisions Nix’s silver toe ring, crusted with sand.

But no. She is here with
Yank,
of all people!

Self-destructive,
Geoff maintained on their way to Logan Airport.
I can’t support this, I can’t assist you in your suicidal mission
. And she put her head on her knees in the car and muttered,
Why do you have to be so dramatic? Why are you trying to take all the joy out of this for me?

Kenneth has rolled up his trouser legs and taken off his sandals, water spilling over his ankles. In three years, he will be fifty. Fifty: for Mary an inconceivable age. One more serious infection and her lung function could plummet to 30 percent almost overnight, heralding the end stage of her disease, of her life. It is more a question of whether she will ever return to work; whether she will celebrate her thirty-fifth birthday in two years. No, fifty is not even a pipe dream. After all he’s done to himself, all his years of self-abuse, Kenneth is walking in territory she will never chart.

She reaches his side and he looks down at her, face grave. He is going to reprimand her for bringing him here, for paying, for tipping that luggage boy. He is going to say he’s calling a taxi, waiting for it outside the gates of the resort with his dusty rucksack alongside all the sleeping camels, heading back to Tangier, leaving her here.

“I’ve never been anyplace like this in my whole damn life. Thanks.”

She almost jumps. “You
like
it here?”

He looks surprised. “You see something not to like?”

She stares at the water. There have been times she has felt almost symbiotic with this man—sometimes when they’re talking, usually when he’s fucking her. But now he seems an utter mystery.

“Mary,” he says. He never, ever calls her that. “Honestly, girl. This has been fun, it’s been . . .” He hesitates, smiles. “It’s been goddamn awesome. But tomorrow, you’re gonna get on that four o’clock train to meet your brother. That’s what you told your man you were doing, and that’s what you should do. I’ll go with you to the station, but once Sandor and Leo come on the scene, you don’t need me. This is as far as I go.”

She doesn’t say anything. It is only two o’clock; there will be hours of sun left before they go to dinner. It still seems, here, impossible that Tangier even exists, that tomorrow will ever come.

“If I sleep with you”—she lifts her chin to him—“will you change your mind?”

He takes one step closer, his hand moving slightly as though to touch her, and she doesn’t know what kind of touch it will be. Sometimes he can be tender, almost sweet, and she can glimpse the southern boy he once was, a college student who wanted to study art but whose father insisted on something “practical” that would help him go into the family business—that boy who was obsessed with D. H. Lawrence and played the piano and married his high school sweetheart. Other times . . .

His hand, though, falls to his side. “No,” he says. “It won’t.”

But he’s lying.

T
HEY DINE ON
the terrace, against a sunset backdrop unlike anything Kenneth has ever seen even in the Caribbean: a giant ball of molten lava, red as a blood orange trickling toward the horizon. He snaps some shots, though sunsets rarely come out right, and he and Cystic watch it fall, taking their drinks to the edge of the wall as if to get as close as possible.

On the way back to their villa, Cystic carries her sandals in her hand, walking barefoot. The effect is sexy as hell until she steps on a sharp rock and cries out, hopping around on her one good foot while blood drizzles onto the ground. The restaurant is higher up the hill than their room, so Kenneth scoops her up and carries her, though at first she protests. She is a woman, he has noticed, who requires a lot of maintenance but always chafes at its offer, as opposed to the kind of girls he grew up around: girls who expected bucketfuls of chivalry even though they could run the world. She’s alarmingly light now, must be under a hundred pounds. He’s used to skinny girls, to how they waste away from within; he’s seen that plenty. Still, he holds her carefully, afraid that if he trips and falls, the weight of his own body will crush her.

In their fancy bathroom with the ornate tiled sink and big tub, she sits on the edge of the toilet washing her foot. The gash is impressive. They have no Band-Aids, but she says the concierge will procure one for them; it’s always that way at hotels like this. Still, she doesn’t call. She sits with a washcloth on her foot turning red fast. Kenneth feels stupid hovering over some little flesh wound; he starts to leave the bathroom, go put some music on the stereo (he’s never been in a hotel with its own stereo system before), but she calls out, “Hey. Do you want to take a bath?”

He runs the water. This is something he hasn’t done since Hillary, taking a bath with a woman. It has to be like riding a bike—it has to be like using a needle: you never forget how. They did this on their wedding night, and afterward whenever Hillary wanted to reach out to him, she’d run a bath. By the end, though, their tub was full of baby toys, crowded and usually with a ring of dried bubble bath around the edges, because Hillary didn’t always scrub it out when she was done bathing the baby. By the end, Kenneth showered fast in the mornings and didn’t get home until after the boy was already in bed, so he missed those times when his son splashed in the bubbles and Hillary carried him, dripping and pink, in a towel to the nursery. On the morning Kenneth left, he didn’t shower at all. He didn’t want to look at anything of the boy’s, didn’t want to step over any of his shit. He just got up and threw on his jeans and left.

There’s bubble bath here in the fancy Le Mirage bathroom, but since he has never used it before and doesn’t know the protocol, he leaves it be. She’s perched on the closed toilet seat with her red washcloth, watching him test the water with his hand. “I like it hot,” she says, and he responds, “That’s gonna make the blood start up again,” but cranks it hotter anyway. When the water reaches halfway up the tub, he doesn’t look at her, just strips and gets in.

It is the first time in memory he’s bathed twice in one day. There is something humiliating in this knowledge, though it would have seemed all right, just fine, until a few days ago. He has to stop thinking like this, the way he’s thinking about himself—it makes him want, not to kiss her, not to lick her tits and feel her ass, but to do something
else,
something to punish her for his feelings. Soon he will put her on the train to Casablanca and she will become Somebody Else’s Problem. Tonight he doesn’t want to go overboard if it’s the last time he’s ever going to fuck her—he doesn’t want her to remember him only that way.

She removes her white sundress in one fluid motion. Under it she wears no bra, which is often the case. Her breasts are small and still girlish, the nipples translucent pink like the inside of a seashell. They are not the kind of breasts he usually prefers, but they look all right on her. She steps out of her lacy blue panties, and she looks different down there than he remembered: her ass less full, her hip bones pushing against the skin, the hair waxed or shaved down to a landing strip perhaps in anticipation of a holiday in a warm climate, though he hasn’t seen a skimpy bikini yet. She lowers herself into the water and immediately her body becomes distorted as if viewed through a funhouse glass. He wishes he’d used the bubble bath so he couldn’t see her at all.

He wants to kiss her; he wants to wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze; he wants to put her on her knees in front of him; he wants to run.

She says, “Will you wash my hair?”

It is a relief to laugh. “My first wife used to always want me to do that, too. What’s with you girls and somebody washing your hair?”

“Robert Redford,” she says. “Ralph Fiennes.” But he doesn’t know what that means.

He cups the water in his hands. Her hair is porous like a sponge; it soaks up more water than makes sense. He turns her around in the tub so that her back is to him and he can bend her backward a little to keep the water from falling all over her face. He’s no good at this, probably. He should have bathed the boy at least once or twice when he had the chance; then he would know what to do, how to control the water’s direction. He lathers her head, not using enough shampoo at first (her hair soaks that up, too!), and rubs the bony shape of her skull. Her head and neck seem bumpy and too small. It seems crazy that she is actually
in
there, in a space so small.

He rinses her hair with a water glass from the sink. Her foot must not be bleeding anymore; the water isn’t pink. She leans against him, and his cock presses hard against her spine. He isn’t sure what it’s thinking exactly; he isn’t sure he can go through with its plan. Yet he obeys his body—puts a hand on her breast.

“No,” she murmurs, almost a purr. “Don’t. Just stay like this.”

He pushes himself back away from her, water sloshing on the floor. He thought he might feel
relieved
if she refused, but no. She turns to face him, the knobs of her spine twisting as she contorts her torso. The tub is too small for a man his size to share, and though the water fills the space where her body was, he is still too damn close.

“This isn’t a slumber party,” he says coldly. “I’m not your dead friend.”

She contemplates him for a long time. He meant to make her mad, but she doesn’t look mad. If she were mad he could push her against the cold tile of the tub and cover her mouth with his; he could let his body do what it knew. He keeps still, the water quiet now.

“You’re certainly not,” she says. “She wouldn’t like you, I don’t think.” She is smiling, though oddly. “But I do.”

“Yeah.” He says it quietly. “I like you, too.” Then he gets up to crash on the couch before he can get himself into any more trouble.