A Life in Men: A Novel (8 page)

Joshua chokes on his next drag. “Fuck, yeah! I’m always scared shitless on my way to work. I think,
What the hell am I doing, eh?
Gymnasts are constantly injuring themselves—everyone has surgery all the time, we’re all scarred and stitched up like Frankenstein. But I was never worried. I’ve been doing it since I was small; it’s like riding a bicycle to me. But the trapeze, bloody hell! The thing is, though, once I’m up there I can’t focus on anything but what I’m doing, what comes next. It’s the same as gymnastics that way—there’s no room for fear. Like, nothing else exists.”

Yank ticks off things in his life that have ever offered such primacy of experience. Taking photos when he was younger, in New Orleans, New Mexico, California. The kind of fucking that comes after a hot-and-heavy pursuit. In other words, not a damn thing he’s done lately, except heroin. Even now, his heart is not in the passing of this joint. He would like to go into the toilet and shoot up, but he has to wait until Joshua fucks off to the Latchmere to pick Nicole up from her shift. Other than
her,
no one here knows he is using again. Even among circus freaks and skinheads, a junkie is a liability, and who knows, he might be asked to leave. So he hides his habit, though like the girl with her disease he no doubt leaves clues; no doubt the others suspect. He pulls the hash into his lungs hard, but it will never do enough.

“I’m going to ask Nicole to come with me,” Joshua says, grinning behind the smoke. “You’ll have the room to yourself in a month. Cheers for putting up with us, mate; I know we’ve been a pain in your ass.”

This, then, may be the last of the man he has been: his past put on notice. Since he started using again, he’s been telling himself daily to split, just disappear, but his body won’t obey. When Nicole and Joshua leave London, though, whatever it is that’s holding him here will be broken, and he can leave, too.
Yank
will at last recede into travelers’ subculture lore: who knows whatever happened to that cat, a hard-ass dealer up Camden Town way who was thought to have snuffed his best mate? One more month to keep hiding his habit in the bathroom. Another month more to listen to the sounds of their lovemaking from the other side of the wall.

“You take good care of her out there on the road,” he tells Joshua. It is not all he wants to say, yet even this much is a transgression in his world: telling another man how to treat his woman. But no, Joshua’s not that kind, not the type to rankle.

“I lost the first girl I ever loved because of my own careless stupidity,” Joshua says solemnly. “Believe me, I won’t make that mistake again.”

The cigarette is dying, just smoke between Joshua’s fingers. Yank takes a deep swig of Southern Comfort. What a fucking name. There is not one damn thing he can remember that was comforting about the South.

“In my country,” Joshua continues, “relationships between blacks and whites are illegal, you know. Of course it’s only the blacks who actually get arrested. Which is, like, pretty much a euphemism for killed, everyone with a brain knows that. Except fucking me.”

On the tape player, “Ramble On” blares. Yank looks at Joshua, at his fresh, unlined skin, and realizes to his surprise that he
knows
this story already, though he has never heard it before. This story has been the subtext every time Joshua looks at Nicole with such singular devotion, with a gratitude that belies his age and chick-magnet physique. This story has hovered in the shadows every time Joshua mixes Nicole’s Southern Comfort and soda before his own; every time he has served her a larger portion of vegetables and rice than she can truly eat and waited until she pushes it away before finishing her food himself. Somehow, this story has even been implicit in the freaky way Joshua addresses the old, strung-out, toothless geezers from the estates with respectful Zulu greetings, as though they know what the fuck he is saying—as though he is atoning for something, proving something wrong in the absence of the thing itself, as though those black faces have anything to do with him. Already—all along—Yank has imagined Joshua’s youthful body twined around the willowy, darker limbs of that
other
girl. He can see that girl in his mind right now, and he wants the needle even more than before.

Still he asks: “They
killed
her, man? She’s dead?”

“Nah, she got off lucky.” Joshua looks down. “She just lost an eye.” He stares at the cigarette burning into his fingers. “I’d known her forever, like, since we were fifteen—my coach’s maid. Who knows, once she could walk again she might even have gone back to work, if he still wanted her with the eye and all. He was fucking her, too, but that was all right, see, because she didn’t
want
to fuck him. Rape is perfectly acceptable. Just not love.”

“I hear you,” Yank says simply. “The year you were born, what, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, I was a teenager in goddamn Georgia. It ain’t South Africa, but I remember those days, too.”

And absurdly it strikes him that this is the most he’s said about his own past in years—that this whole conversation is a transgression of sorts. Because the men of his worldwide pack have come here (wherever
here
is—Taos, Marseille, London) devoid of pasts, searching for new lovers, siblings, and comrades, all at once. If they ever strike anything, it is only fool’s gold.
He who cannot learn from the past is condemned to repeat it,
or some such shit. He waits, afraid of what may come out of his mouth next.

Joshua, though, is nodding fiercely. “The guys who did it, they were my teammates. Our coach was like our god. It was like I’d broken God’s windows and pissed on his bed.
I
did that to her, you understand—it was my carelessness, my ego. I thought I could trespass on God, and they taught me a lesson.”

“Buddy,” Yank says, or maybe he is not Yank anymore, “you ever tell Nicole this story?”

To his surprise, Joshua laughs; the sound makes Yank jump. “Fuck, no,” Joshua breathes. “Some romantic story, eh? What girl wants to hear a story like that?”

Once, a couple of months back, Yank walked in on Joshua and Nicole jumping up and down on their shitty mattress chanting, “Ah-so, jump!” over and over again, giggling and holding hands. Nicole seemed embarrassed, but Joshua had cheerfully explained that they were wondering whether, if the entire country of China jumped simultaneously, the earth would move. It was late, but still Yank had stormed to the common room, growling, “You better tone it down or I’m gonna kick both your dumb asses,” slamming the door hard. How could
anyone
be so damn young they’d never even seen a cheesy kung fu flick, didn’t know the saying was from Japan, not China? These kids were too young to know jack shit about anything. “Grouch!” they called after him, undeterred. “Scrooge! Cranky old man!”

And he has just been too long without a woman is all. He has been too long on the run, even when he stays in one place. It has simply been too damn long since he’s made jokes holding someone’s hand, since he laughed into the night instead of getting up fast and putting on his pants—too long since he’s made anything but war, since anyone on this earth was truly
his
.

“Nicole’s not just any girl,” he tells Joshua. “I think she might surprise you.”

But the joint is no longer smoking, has died out right against Joshua’s skin, become ash. “I came here to start fresh,” Joshua says vehemently. “Me and Nicole, we can go anywhere we want. We’ll be moving from country to country, so that shit about having to go home after six months won’t apply. We can see the whole world, and someday, when I get too old for the circus, we’ll just pick the place we liked best, someplace quiet where we can have a garden.”

Yank says, “That’s some plan.”

Joshua’s shoulders shake. His breath comes shuddery. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

“I really hope you get it.” Yank stands.

Because this is a case of mistaken identity. He is just a man who leaves rooms, closes doors. Every pivotal moment in his life, in fact, has ended just this way: him poised at a doorway, set to run. Hell, if you think about it, right now doesn’t even qualify.
This
was someone else’s moment all along. He is only around for the ride.

A
ND SO FINALLY
there is this: the way her body tenses when Joshua first grabs hold of the metal bar and ascends, the trapeze beginning to move as if by magic, without any visible sign of a struggle as he swings through the air. The way the kid who, getting high first thing in the morning in his jeans with those clashing floral and plaid patches, is just another dime-a-dozen hippie, up
there
becomes something else: something animal and pure, possessing absolute authority. He wields his body like a knife. When Yank pulls his eyes away and looks at Nicole, she is visibly holding her breath as Joshua, hanging upside down in a unitard, extends his arms toward a black-haired girl who does not speak his language, and the girl—some crazy fucking chick who never learned there’s nothing in the whole damn world
that
worthy of trust—lets go and soars into nothingness, catching his hands. They swing, they fly. Her leg touching Yank’s on the bleachers, Nicole exhales loudly enough for it to pass for a sob.

“Kak!” Sandor exclaims, on Nicole’s other side as he always seems to be—Christ, what if he’s not even a queer at all and is in love with her, too?—“I thought maybe he would fall, my heart goes too fast!” He places Nicole’s hand on his chest.

“Oh, Sandor! To think when I first met you”—she giggles, and something in her tone, in the phrasing, is already nostalgic—“I thought you were a Nazi.”

“Oh, I
am
the big Nazi,” Sandor says agreeably. “In Holland, we are all Nazis, this is just how it is, no offense. Nazis who decriminalize drugs and prostitution—it is a very fun country, you must come visit!” He falls against her and they chortle, clutching each other’s arms, Sandor’s hat falling to reveal his shockingly yellow stubble.

Joshua is no longer on the stage. Nicole has turned to watch a Russian man swallowing fire, her eyes alight and riveted, but Yank takes her by the upper arm and says, “I need to talk to you. Come on, girl. Now.”

She looks over at Sandor apologetically. “We’ll be right back,” she tells him, and Sandor’s mouth opens slightly, but they are already moving through the stands as Sandor calls out, “Hey! Bring back more beer!”

Yank leads her under the bleachers. There’s no big top here; it’s just a gymnasium where sports events are held, reinvented for the circus, visually transformed. He hears the clamoring of feet overhead, dramatic music piped in to heighten the danger of the performance, and he backs her slowly—his limbs moving with the mindless fluidity of a trapeze—against a pole and kisses her with the kamikaze force of his own confession.

Her body seems taken utterly by surprise. She loses her balance, topples against the pole, so that he has to catch her, her arms darting out to steady herself like a high-wire acrobat. He kisses her again, and this time she does not stumble, does not resist, though she does not quite kiss him back either. He’s had to bend over to reach her—she’s almost a foot shorter than he is—and he stands back up to his full height, his body not touching hers anymore. He lays one hand up lightly against her throat. Says, “If I pulled your skirt up right now and fucked your brains out against that pole, would you try to stop me?”

And she says, “No.”

It’s not enough. “Because you think you owe me?” he persists. “Or ’cause you’re collecting experiences and it’s one more way to slum before you go home and forget us?”

“I don’t know.” Then, with genuine surprise, “I’m not going to forget you!”

He laughs. Her eyes still look wild, but he suspects it might be the trapeze—her fear that Joshua would break his neck—and not him at all. “No,” he says, “it’s all right. Forget me. You don’t owe me anything.”

“That’s what you dragged me down here to say? Okay. In that case, you buy Sandor’s pint.” It’s on the tip of his tongue to retort that he’s not buying that cheap ass a beer, especially since Sandor’s been rifling through his bag again and stealing his tapes, though he’s not sure where they could be hidden, because all Sandor’s stuff is out in the open. It’s in his throat to pretend that the girl isn’t leaving at all, that they can still banter this way about slumming, pretending nothing is a matter of life and death, that nothing’s going to change. But
everything
changes, and though Yank doesn’t know it yet, just before Christmas he will wake to a phone call asking if he knows where Sandor may have fled to after embezzling four thousand pounds’ worth of sales revenue from his employer, an art reproduction company in Reading, and Yank will mutter that (although Sandor’s been “gone” for a couple of days) he didn’t realize he had moved
out
—that he doesn’t even know the guy’s last name, though they have lived together for six months. When the voice on the other end of the phone tells him that the police have been notified of Sandor’s crime and may be coming around, Yank will go back upstairs and pick up his bag of tricks and walk straight out the door into a bleak December rain, never to return, so that Joshua and Nicole, who were supposed to be the first to take off come January, will ironically end up the last ones standing upstairs at Arthog House.

Now he says simply, “Joshua already ask you to go with him on his big world tour? ’Cause he’s gonna, girl, so you better get your answer ready.”

She shakes her head slowly no, but says, “Yeah, I thought he might.”

“There’s worse ways I can think of to kill a year. Who knows—” The music from above has heightened—something big must be going on. “I think you two have more in common than either of you was banking on. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but maybe you oughta give it a roll and find out.”

She smiles. It is the kind of smile his mother used to give, the kind only women know how to dole out: sad and generous at once. She puts her hand over his, which is still around her neck, and her fingers are soft, as if she’s never worked a day, never known pain, though he knows that isn’t true and wishes he could still think it was.