A Life in Men: A Novel (45 page)

Nawar guides them up a wooden ladder to the second floor of the house, the one designated for human residents rather than the sheep that dwell on the ground floor. Each story comprises one room, equally unfurnished but for the straw sleep mats. Almost instantly, their hostess retreats outside to prepare tea, leaving them alone, sitting on the wooden slats of the floor. Her kitchen isn’t part of the house, and the one window faces in the wrong direction to allow them to see her outdoors, cooking.

Alias lounges easily on a straw mat smoking a cigarette and dropping the ashes into the cup Nawar supplied. Kenneth first launched into French when he greeted Nawar, thinking she would understand, but it turns out she speaks only Arabic. There’s no school in this village, Alias explains, and even if there were, she would not have gone forty years ago, being a girl. Once she comes back inside bearing her teapot, Alias begins translating whatever is said—in English, in French—into Arabic for her, and then translating her Arabic back only once, into English. Kenneth has noticed that though the kid is what people call “fluent” in English, when he speaks French his words flow faster, with more quirk, more personality. Now when he makes conversation of his own, he’s been lapsing automatically into French, directing his words at Kenneth as though the others are not there, and the cacophony of overlapping languages feels like a jam session back at the De Engelbewaarder: wild, messy, beautiful.

Since Alias is smoking, Leo and Sandor light up, too, and Cystic says she’ll go outside. Kenneth stands and says, “I’ll go with you,” even though he too wants a smoke. His head brushes the ceiling. They descend the ladder to the first floor of the house and weave their way through the sheep until they reach the door. There are two doors actually: one leading toward the outdoor kitchen and the other to the front of the house, which faces the road, eclipsed by the village now. Kenneth maneuvers to the front door, where a handful of village children cluster and stare. Finally outdoors, he lights a cigarette, the still, hot air dispersing the smoke only marginally better than the trapped air inside the house.

Mary says, “I counted the sheep. There are nine.”

Kenneth mutters, “Bet you anything there’s more out in the fields just ain’t come home for supper yet.”

Low and furtive, they laugh.

“This is magnificent,” Mary says.

“Sure,” Kenneth agrees. “Long as you don’t have to live here.” But his body has lost its languid laziness, all its “I don’t give a shit” bravado. He’s tuned to attention, to a fine pitch, and it shows and he knows it. He has seen nothing like this in all his forty-seven years. He has seen a lot, but it has mostly been a lot of the same. This is something else entirely, wholly off the radar of his life. It is perhaps the first thing he has ever experienced that being stoned would in no way improve.

He will not realize until later that they spent four hours at the house and it never once occurred to him to take a picture.

Mary says quietly, as though the village children may overhear, “If you go back to Georgia, then maybe this isn’t the last time we’ll see each other. There isn’t any law against being friends with someone you’ve slept with before. Georgia isn’t that far from New Hampshire, so who knows?”

In an instant the world he has been drinking in seems to disappear. Her words and their mixture of condescension and promise obliterate everything else. Last night, they slept in the same bed together again. Nothing happened. Nothing but their bodies commingling in sleep and desire, her voice against his skin in the dark. Nothing.

“You can’t get me to see my son by dangling yourself like a carrot.” And he hates her for the way she just made the landscape narrow, for the way he held on to her last night, no longer even questioning her terms. The hating feels good, feels better. “Don’t try to save me and I won’t try to save you, and we’ll keep getting along fine.”

“I wasn’t trying to—” She looks shocked. “That isn’t what I meant! I just know we’ve both been . . . I’ve been sad about never seeing you again, and I can tell you’re sad, too, no matter what you say. I was just trying to talk to you like a human being.”

“There’s your first mistake.”

She takes the cigarette out of his hand. “You’re not human, huh? Why didn’t you smoke this upstairs, then? Why don’t you blow smoke in my face like my sweet brother does? Who’s trying to save who, Mr. Bad Man?”

He grabs her wrist, so quickly the cigarette flies out of her fingers and sails in an arc, landing still lit on the ground a few feet away. One of the little boys scurries to pick it up and the children run away with it. Now that they’re alone, however—the thing Kenneth’s wanted all day—he is at a total loss for what to say. He lets go of her wrist, but even that he does too roughly, almost throwing it away from him, so that it bounces off her body. She takes it between the fingers of her other hand, holds it against her chest like a wounded bird.

“Maybe I already know the things you think I don’t,” she says, voice thick, though he isn’t sure if it’s anger or pain or just her fucked-up lungs. “Why won’t you let yourself believe that? Do you think it would shock me if you tell me you hooked Agnes on drugs? Jesus, I’m not an idiot. Do you think I’d be surprised if you said you hit her? What else did you do, Kenneth? Did you rape women? I hate rapists more than just about anything in the world, but even if you tell me you raped somebody, I’m not going to run into the mountains screaming. Maybe that means I’m stupid. But I know you
now.
If that’s who you used to be, then you’ve changed.”

If he feels anything, it is not reassurance, not even anger anymore, just a bottomless weariness, as though the heat, the stink of the sheep, the borderline dehydration and withdrawal from booze, have all finally caught up with him and laid their burden on his back. His sigh is heavy. “It’s not black and white like you’re talking, girl. You make evil sound like a cartoon decked out in a trench coat and lurking around corners. You don’t know the first thing about it.”

“Oh, I don’t know anything about evil? Is that so? You’re the only one with a past, are you? You’re the only one who knows what men are capable of?”

Too late he thinks of Lockerbie. He sees the pulse throb fast in her throat just before she turns and storms back into the house, and too late he wonders why she brought up
rape
among the spectrum of crimes he may have committed. But she is gone and he cannot ask her. He cannot ask if it is still rape if the woman never said no, never tried to get away. Is that the right word if someone owes you money, and you could have beaten or killed her for it, but instead you let her pay you back with the only thing she has? Is it the same if the men whose blood you’ve drawn have drawn other blood themselves, or do only crimes against the innocent count? Does it matter less if the body you dump in the Thames isn’t someone you killed, only someone you called your best friend and wished dead in the same passive way you wished it for your own sorry ass?

And what he wants to know most is whether he is more afraid Cystic
would
run like hell if she knew his past—or whether he couldn’t view her quite the same if she knew and still stayed.

E
NTERING THE TINY
house alone, Mary catches the end of Alias’s announcement that Nawar is baking bread and it will be ready soon. Instantly her mouth begins to water. She’s famished from the morning’s long walk; Nawar’s hot tea seems an abomination, but the water has cooled and its minty sweetness is surprisingly refreshing. Mary closes her eyes briefly, senses overwhelmed.

All the things she saw on the bus ride to Essaouira that seemed so picturesque from their moving vehicle seem to have expanded so that
they
are a part of the picture, so the picture is everywhere around them. And this—not the chaos of the medinas, not the fiery sunset over a beach, not the photos of Ginsberg or even Kenneth’s body against hers—
this
is why she came. She feels lucky in such myriad ways it almost hurts.

Alias and Nawar are chatting in Arabic. After a spell, Alias explains that her son is working at a hotel in Erfoud and hasn’t been home in three months. He writes down the name of the hotel on a book of La Mamounia matches and hands it to Mary, saying, “When you get there you ask for him as your guide and tell him I said hello!” Nawar’s husband is at the market, getting supplies, Alias explains. He will be home tomorrow. The floor has only two sleep mats now, but Mary imagines the years when it must have contained three—maybe more. Where, in a home where every family member sleeps lined up on the floor of one small room, do married couples escape to have sex? Do they rely on sleeping children? Do they sneak downstairs and copulate amid the strongly aromatic sheep? Or do couples search out growing wheat in the fields and make love out in the open in order to escape the confines of family?

Nawar comes in with the bread. Dressed in the usual colorful Berber weavings, her hair hidden under a bright orange scarf, her face round and flat, bones close to the surface, she seems old: not just old-fashioned but actually
aged.
She is probably Leo’s age, younger than many of the women teachers Mary goes for after-work drinks with, who joke that forty is the new thirty and still wear their hair flowing and get alpha hydroxy peels in Boston. Here, in this world, forty is the new eighty. Nawar is already an old woman, skin leathered, back slightly bent, no doubt from carrying enormous piles of firewood as Mary saw women doing when she was on the exhaust-filled bus. Here, as in Kenya, death is cheap. No hospital for miles across rough terrain, and surely no one with any real medical training would live in such a village.
Here I would be an old woman already; here nobody would think twice at my death or even mourn me
. Though of course, as Leo said, here she would have died long ago, probably undiagnosed.

Yet the bread smells like heaven!

Kenneth reenters the house quietly, bowing his head to walk in the low-ceilinged room until he reaches the mats on the floor, where he sits next to Sandor and away from her. Nawar brings a bowl of fresh water in which they all wash; then with their right hands they tear off hunks of bread. There is honey for dipping, and Mary thinks that despite Kenneth’s outburst she is fully content right here, listening to the French and Arabic she cannot understand, her eyes meeting Leo’s as if to say,
See, see, isn’t this better than Paris?
Downstairs, sheep occasionally bleat, the smell of them wafting up and competing with the aroma of the bread. Outside, children titter under the window.

She goes and looks down on them. One small boy has his penis out and is dangling it at them, sticking up his middle finger as he must have learned somehow, somewhere, even in the absence of TV. She feels keenly chastened. She had allowed herself to imagine that all the villagers were happy they were here, that they were welcome in the most biblical sense, where the traveling stranger passing through town is a treasured guest and hospitality an imperative. It occurs to Mary for the first time that she has no idea what her brother and Sandor are
paying
Alias to accompany them on such a long trip—that she has forgotten he is not here just for the fun of it. She looks at Alias with a new suspicion. He is sweet and charming, but he is not their friend. Maybe they cannot trust him.

As if on cue, Alias smiles and says, “I told Nawar it’s your birthday tomorrow! She would like to henna your hands.”

Without even thinking, Mary’s hands dash behind her back.

The men are in a circle on the floor mats, munching their bread, the small Berber woman smiling expectantly at her. Mary is familiar enough with the custom of hennaing to know that she should receive the offer as an honor—that unlike at the beauty shops in Boston’s ethnic neighborhoods, here henna isn’t something you get just on a whim as decoration but is reserved for special occasions like weddings, for rituals like warding off the evil eye. God knows she could use a healthy dash of warding off evil. She thinks of Geoff and of how, if it were the two of them here alone with Nawar, she would hold out her hands in an instant, succumb to this honor, and hoard it in her memory to pull out later and savor. Geoff, for all her fury at him for not accompanying her, has never made her feel anything but wholly beautiful; it would never occur to her to be embarrassed in front of him about the shape of her fingers, or anything else. But now, after her spat with Kenneth outside, she feels vulnerable. And Alias. She can’t help thinking of Hasnain and his phantom cousin in his presence. Hasnain was about Alias’s age, and Nix said he was handsome and—asinine or not—Alias is the first young Muslim man she has ever known, handsome or otherwise (and he is handsome). She cannot imagine going to the center of this male circle and holding out her flawed hands and letting them watch while Nawar decorates them. What if Nawar has not noticed their misshapenness before now and recoils? Mary would die of shame.

She says, “Can I do my feet instead?”

Alias asks Nawar and then responds, “No, no, she says the feet won’t dry in time for you to put your shoes on and make the walk back. Your sandals will ruin the feet. To do the feet, you have to have time to leave them bare. She says the hands.”

“All right,” Mary says. To refuse would be worse. She thinks for a moment of the ferry to Athens and the woman who offered her what she now knows was a rose-flavored Turkish delight, and how Nix commanded her to swallow the thing rather than spit it out. How she took it as a punishment, but how Nix was right. To refuse Nawar would be unthinkable.

Leo says, “Can I get my hands done, too?”

Sandor elbows him. “It’s for girls. What, you want them to find you a husband here in the village while they’re at it?”

“Why is it for girls?” Leo demands. “It’s like a tattoo, and ink isn’t gender specific.” He turns to Alias. “Is that true? I thought in this culture a man can get whatever he wants, so if I want henna, why shouldn’t I have it?”

Alias shrugs. “The men use henna for their hair and beard sometimes. But you have no gray yet, so there’s no need.”