A Life in Men

by Gina Frangello

Mary hears her lover’s voice booming into the hallway pay phone outside their bedroom. “Mum, Dad, I’ve joined the circus!” It is six-something in the morning, London time. What time this makes it in South Africa is beyond her ken. Joshua’s voice is unnaturally loud, as though he and his parents are speaking via tin cans on a string from opposite sides of a playground. She envisions his parents (she has no idea what they look like—Joshua has brought no photos) as more elderly than befits their son: the mother with snow-white hair, both parents pressing ears to one old-fashioned wall telephone, though surely they have cordless in Johannesburg. “The flying trapeze,” Joshua cries, his jubilance belying the bruises on the backs of his knees. “No, Dad, it’s not really like that, there aren’t any animals, not how you think of the circus—not, like, fat ladies with beards or three-armed midgets. No derelict drifter types either—practically everyone’s an ex-gymnast like me.”

  Mary muffles a laugh with her pillow. It’s true enough. His circus, composed mainly of Russian and Chinese acrobats who do not speak much English, is a clean-cut, hardworking bunch. Which no doubt accounts for why Joshua rarely sees them outside rehearsal, preferring the “derelict drifter types” of Arthog House.

  “The last male trapeze artist got married and went back to China,” Joshua is saying, “so the girl was looking for a new partner—she came by Covent Garden, and I just happened to be doing my act—” Silence. “I told you this already—” More quiet, the halls reverberating with the concentrated quiet of people trying to sleep. “Street performance isn’t like that here,” he says, voice dropping. “Loads of talented people do it, the tourists come round purposefully to watch—it’s expected, they want it. It’s not charity.”

  Mary rolls onto her side, pulls the chilly sheet over her skin. The bed across the room is empty; Yank must not have come home last night.

  “I am an ex-gymnast,” Joshua says louder, transforming himself with one sentence from a competitive athlete to a circus performer: poof ! In her hazy half sleep, Mary imagines him with giant purple shoes, a bulbous nose, even though the circus in which he performs has no clowns either; it’s not that sort of show. “Oh, that’s a brilliant idea, Mum, why didn’t I think of it? English girls are just queuing up round the corner to marry some foreigner whose been doing flips at Covent fucking Garden for spare change! Let’s see, I’ve got a list of some right here, maybe you can help me narrow it down—would you prefer a blond or brunet daughter-in-law? Don’t worry, I won’t ask your preference for skin color, that’s a fucking given!”

  The phone slams into the receiver, so hard she can feel vibrations in the mattress.

  In the times she’s eavesdropped alone, Joshua has said the word “fuck” to his parents at least two dozen times. Other than that, his phone conversations are not so different from the ones she has with her parents back in Ohio. In essence, they follow the same pattern. The parents demand a return home, and their demand is met with increasingly strident refusal. Whereas his parents get angry, hers tend to cry. Phones are slammed. The routine has ceased to be inherently interesting.

  For this reason, she does not immediately rush into the hallway to comfort her lover. And also, of course, because she is naked in a house full of men.

  Joshua reenters the bedroom. Mary was sleeping when he left, so only now does she realize, peeking through shut eyes, that he, too, is nude—apparently having carried on the entire phone call with his bare ass facing the staircase leading downstairs. His body, darker skinned than most strawberry blonds, permanently colored by the African sun, is lean from his “poverty diet,” but muscles still ripple like waves just beneath the surface of his skin. It strikes her, not for the first time, that only the utter dearth of women in this traveler’s subculture could account for her having scored such a magnificent specimen with absolutely no effort: Joshua courted her at the Latchmere, coming in night after night while she was tending bar, offering to walk her back to her B & B across the Chelsea Bridge after her shift, until dire loneliness finally prompted her to go home with him instead, despite not having touched a male body since high school. The albatross of her held-too-long virginity had become stranglingly heavy, and she longed to be rid of it so fervently that Joshua’s hotness barely factored in—she scarcely noticed it, even, until she was on the kitchen floor of Arthog House, crumbs stuck to her bare back, his serpentine penis striking with a jolt that switched on all her internal lights.

  Joshua had no clue she was a virgin, and thus he felt no compulsion to be gentle. If anything, he fucked like a man running for his life, the electric-eel frenzy of him proving a wordless match to the puzzle of Mary’s own desperate flight. Though they had barely conversed beyond light banter across the bar of the Latchmere, the very next morning she moved into Arthog House.

  Now, returning from his phone call, he tiptoes so as not to wake her. Mary is conscious of telling herself he wouldn’t want her to have overheard his family drama, but really she is afraid to open her eyes. His heightened emotional state might necessitate some response she has no ability to provide. They have been together two and a half months. The fact of their couplehood has seemed to her from the first unlikely, surreal, and temporary. A compilation of ingredients adding up to safe.

  He flips back the sheet and climbs in beside her, their bodies immediately sinking into the middle of the bed. Thanks to their combined weight (and vigorous sex), the mattress collapsed in its center a while back, so that lying at either edge gives the precarious feeling of balancing on a ledge. The bed is uncomfortable for one person; for two it verges on ridiculous. Mary and Joshua fall together, arms and legs crowding, not fitting right. Wordlessly Joshua adjusts her limbs as a nurse might the pillows of a hospital bed, intertwining them with his own until they fit. He has an ease with bodies that no doubt comes from years of being prodded, poked, and spotted by his coach and teammates; though he is not a smooth talker, physically he lacks any of the self-consciousness typical in young men. This preternatural physical authority has become the touchstone of her London life. The smells of his skin—smoke, sex—reassure her, lull her back to a place where she can sleep again, anesthetized.

  But if they make love, the drug will be even stronger.

  Still not opening her eyes, Mary guides his callused hands over the swell of her ass—You bent down to pick up a broken glass behind the bar, and I fell in love with your ass, he has told her on a number of occasions. Then, not trusting even that, she moves his hand between her legs.

  “My fucking mum, the stupid cow.” His words come hot onto the back of her neck. “She wants to know why I don’t just marry a British girl and get dual citizenship so I can join the Olympic team for England. She wants to know what I’m waiting for, I’m not getting any younger, you know.” The venom in his voice seems to be traveling through his veins, his muscles, making his fingers rough. She tries to concentrate on the sensation, to not become derailed by individual words, though abruptly it occurs to her that Joshua’s parents clearly have no idea she exists. This knowledge elicits no particular feelings, despite the fact that she, on the other hand, uses Joshua as a constant excuse to her parents. Staying in England for a man is a paradigm that might make sense to them. Her parents still send letters to her old B & B in Chelsea; she stops by regularly to pick up her mail. They know nothing of Arthog House or why she cannot risk their envelopes addressed to her sliding through its mail slot.

  “I’m never going back there, Nicole,” Joshua swears, fingers still moving, each stroke a morphine pump. “Never.” But Mary already knows this. He is set to leave London on New Year’s Day, departing for Amsterdam, the circus’s home base and first stop on their world tour. “I’m writing my brother and telling him about the stash I buried in the yard—he might as well enjoy it.”

  Were she nursing any doubts about Joshua’s sincerity, this would put them to rest: if he is voluntarily relinquishing his drugs, he must mean business.

  He tosses her onto her back, his body poised over h
ers. When they make love, Mary often thinks of him shedding his skin, the essence of him remaining intact and whole beneath. Though he refuses, she sometimes begs him to discard the condom, fantasizing about the way his healthy semen would invade her insides, pumping her full of his youthful vitality like a golden, dirty petrol. The Super Athlete and the Dying Girl. That she keeps this irony to herself only increases its erotic power. Her body arches up to meet his; moans form in her throat despite the fact that Joshua’s phone antics must have woken the entire house. Still, noise leaks from her mouth like smoke drifting out from under the cracks of their bedroom door: a warning, a dare.

  Like everything else, the salve of him is running out of time.

  When I walked into the Latchmere for the first time, every single person in the pub was male, from the owner to all the customers. Right away I thought of that old-man bar in Dayton where we went to make change before the Prince concert—do you remember the sad energy of that bar, how it looked like no one inside had seen a woman or sunlight in ages? I thought of the way you sashayed to the bar with your five-dollar bill sticking out between your fingers, your nails painted black and the polish chipping, but you could always carry that kind of thing off, you could wear tights with holes in them and make it look like art. And then of course I thought of Mykonos, and it was like the ground beneath me got wavy, and when they asked me my name I blurted out, “Nicole,” without planning it. Just with that one word, though, right away everything felt different. Like you had opened up your skin for me to step inside and I could be you, brave and sexy and free instead of sick and scared. Of course I was still me, so for a moment I panicked, thinking they would catch me in the lie, but nobody blinked. It wasn’t like I’d claimed my name was Diamond or Madonna, some outrageous alias girls would run all the way to London to assume. They pay me cash at this under-the-table job, so I could have told them anything. I could have been anyone new, but instead I am constantly reminded of you . . .

  JOSHUA AND NICOLE are in the common room eating breakfast before any sane person is even awake—Yank cannot get the hell away from them wherever he goes. Last night, when he came in around 3 a.m., they were already asleep in the room he once shared only with Joshua, and Yank could tell they were naked under their flimsy sheet, its floral pattern almost worn away from the years the sheet has no doubt resided in Arthog House. Yank lay awake, pondering the sheet. For the piddly twenty-seven pounds per week Mr. D. collects (from everyone but Nicole, who never kicks in), he bet his ass the landlord didn’t buy the cutlery, sofas, refrigerators—everything must’ve been here when he bought the joint. Yank wondered how often this old sheet had been washed—how many people had shot their wads on it over the years, how many tits it might have touched. He knew he’d never sleep, then. He’d be up half the night, listening for movements, for anything sharp or sudden enough to have bucked the sheet off Nicole’s body so he could get a look. Instead of playing that game, he went to the common room to crash on the futon, across the room from the sofa where the Flying Dutchfag was snoring.

  He’d gotten maybe two hours’ sleep, tops, when here the happy couple was again, making tea and munching Weetabix cross-legged on the dirty carpet like children playing picnic. Nicole, at least, is dressed now, in the Harvard sweatshirt and ripped Levi’s that’ve been her uniform since the air turned cold. Joshua is already smoking a fatty, so Yank sits up in time for the kid to pass it his way. On the other sofa, Sandor is still snoring, that crazy porkpie hat of his over his eyes, revealing sunflower-colored stubble.

  “You on at the Latchmere tonight?” Joshua asks Nicole.

  “Not until seven. You guys coming in?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Joshua says. He nods at Yank. “Would we, mate?”

  “Money to be made, kiddies,” Yank says back.

  “Don’t go on your own,” Joshua tells Nicole. “I’ll be back from rehearsal by six—wait for me and I’ll walk you over. After what happened to Yank . . .”

  He is referring to Yank’s recent mugging on Battersea Park Road. Some little shits from the estates tried to take his camera off him; when he wouldn’t let it go, they kicked him a few times in the head. Since then, though he hasn’t been dizzy like with the concussions he’s had in the past, something’s not quite right: he keeps walking into rooms and forgetting why he came, and his head’s been hurting nearly nonstop for two weeks. He still has his camera, though.

  “What’ve you got on today?” Joshua asks him.

  Yank sniffs the air. “Hmm. Think I detect a whiff of baking for tonight’s entrepreneurial endeavors.”

  Joshua laughs appreciatively. The hash cakes were Joshua’s brainstorm, though he has scant time to bake them anymore. Joshua and Nicole even thought up a perfect slogan, “Pixie Dust Bars will make you fly,” and made little flyers they distribute at the Latchmere’s weekend after-parties, when at closing time the pub’s owner chases out the prats who have wandered down from Chelsea, before locking in the regulars to party until dawn. Pixie Dust Bars are Yank’s only foray into dealing these days—something about Nicole’s cheerful involvement and bubble-lettered adverts diminishes the sense of risk. It doesn’t even bring in much cash, but Yank likes the ritual of it: the measuring and mixing of batter and hash oil. It’s the first time he’s regularly used an oven in more than a decade.

  “My bag’s getting a mite heavy, too,” he tells Joshua, holding up the duffel that bears all his worldly goods and shaking it for good measure so the loose coins inside clink. “Some of us ain’t in the prime of our lives anymore. Maybe time for some coin-swap action so I can switch to bills and lighten my load.”

  Nicole starts bouncing up and down on her knees. “Oooh, I love coin swap!” she cries. “Can I come?”

  Yank has to stop himself from barking at her to shut up. He’s assumed the fact that she helps him out sometimes with his schemes to be an unspoken secret between them, not something she mentions to Joshua, though he cannot say why, and obviously he was mistaken.

  Joshua, though, chuckles. “How’d this happen, mate? My old lady’s become your protégé for a life of crime.” Before Yank can even answer, the kid has crushed out his hash cigarette and gulped the last of his tea and is kissing Nicole good-bye, quipping, “Have fun, you two outlaws.” Then he’s down the stairs. Everything else around here moves in slow-mo, but Joshua is so fast he could leave a trail of light behind him.

  Nicole continues picking at her cereal, taking dainty sips of tea, like she’s barely noticed his departure. Joshua is always running out of doors these days. He’s got a real salary now, long hours of training. Not that swinging around on a flying trapeze is much of a proper job (though in travelers’ London, it barely registers on the Richter scale of weird), and with the circus full of foreigners, who knows if it’s even strictly legal? But it’s not exactly illegal, which is more than Yank can say for anything he’s done to make money since the mideighties.

  “You’re not leaving this minute, are you?” Nicole asks, eyes darting to the door of the common room. “I have some things I need to take care of first. I could go in about an hour—forty-five minutes if you’re in a hurry.”

  Some things I need to take care of. Like the girl’s got an appointment with the goddamn Queen. “Cool your jets, darlin’,” Yank says. “I’m gonna crash a few more hours. We’ll go when we go.”

  When he gets to their shared room, he closes the door hard. If the rickety old thing had a lock, he’d use it.

  After my diagnosis (A.D., my parents have taken to calling it), sure, I was still encouraged on the surface to do the things a normal middle-class girl should do. Finish college, get a job, even date. But the unpredictable, wilder possibilities of life instantly disappeared, got shoved to another side of a wall and categorized as “too risky” for me. I was to follow the simple, linear trajectory of the terminally ill. No wasted time, nothing that would tax me too much (ah, the mantra of the education major: “Short days, summers off!”). Maybe, if any man woul
d have me, knowing I was damaged goods, I could someday leave my parents’ house for my husband’s. But that was as big as any of us dared to dream for me. The safest route, the life not quite lived.

  The one time I got anywhere close to real adventure, in Greece, you aborted our mission, sent me home like a child who had lost her way in a dangerous woods. But look, Nix, look—here I still am.

  MARY’S FLUTTER DEVICE is in the bedroom. Yank’s slammed the door, and even though Mary lives in there, too—Yank and Joshua have crammed their scant clothing into the dresser drawers and given her the entire wardrobe—Mary pauses at the threshold, intimidated, an intruder in her own home. An intruder in their home. She stands in the hallway, near the foot of the staircase across from the pay phone, waiting.

  In a little while, when Yank has fallen asleep, maybe she can sneak in and get her giant purple rucksack without looking like she is following him or something. Already she’s embarrassed about having invited herself on his outing. She should have held her tongue; then he might have asked her, as he sometimes has lately. She hears jazz playing on the other side of the door, and she knows there’s no reason she can’t just open it, but she stands frozen. She needs to get her rucksack to the toilet like she does every morning after Joshua leaves. Over the running of the bath, she will sit on the floor and blow into her Flutter device, her coughing muffled by the sound of the gushing tap. Most days, she doesn’t stop until the tub is almost overflowing.

  Before arriving in London in August, she’d completed three chest physiotherapies daily to loosen her stubborn mucus, lying half-upside-down while her mother played percussion on her chest and back with a practiced cupping motion, handing her Dixie cups to spit into. Initially, her mother’s tentative touches just mirrored the fear her parents displayed constantly in the year following her diagnosis: walking on eggshells, giving in to spells of covert weeping. For the first time, Mary had felt hyperconscious of her adoption, of the fact that her parents had intended to adopt a normal child but had instead gotten stuck with her, a defective model who would ruin all their lives. In their shell-shocked faces she saw constant evidence of their regret. Slowly, however, this passed, as all heightened states of vigilance do. The past couple of years, Mary’s daily treatments had become casual—Mom gossiping idly about her colleagues with the TV on in the background—even though they still dominated each day’s routine and made her mother endlessly, relentlessly necessary: a partner in the crime of her illness.