A Life in Men

by Gina Frangello

  As Mary’s departure for London approached, Mom had begged her not to go, demanding, “But who will help you over there?” Still, it was her mother who’d written out, in her almost calligraphic cursive, a list of pulmonary specialists in London and insisted Mary call one immediately upon arrival. And it was that doctor who introduced her to her Flutter device—not yet approved stateside—and rendered manual chest physiotherapy a thing of her past.

  Who rendered her need for her mother’s help a thing of her past.

  Mary is meant to use the Flutter three times daily, twenty minutes a shot. Instead she uses it once, during the time it takes to run a bath. This is the only time she is alone, and even then there are obstacles, such as getting inside her room in the first place. While Joshua’s work schedule is intense, and Sandor leaves five mornings weekly to sell art in the suburbs, Yank is a nocturnal beast. During the day when she’s not tending bar, he is almost always in the house.

  Sandor staggers past her in the hallway, muttering, “Morning, schatje,” which Mary takes to mean something like sweetheart or sugar in Dutch. Although half-Spanish, Sandor could scarcely look more Aryan with his near-translucent skin, blue eyes, and yellow hair—at least what’s left of it. He takes great pains to hide his pattern baldness, shaving his head and then, bizarrely, for good measure, wearing a bandanna around his skull and covering it with a black bowler. This head gear, combined with his extreme paleness and height, gives him a menacing, neofascist look that his Dutch accent only exacerbates, so that during the early weeks of their acquaintance, Mary was constantly expecting him to utter some phrase such as, Damn, I hate the Jews. In fact, he has become her closest friend in London, confiding in her things he would never disclose to the men, such as the way his father savagely beat him after discovering him—aged thirteen—with his mouth around his best friend’s cock (“We were literally inside the closet, as they say!”), prompting his parents’ divorce. Such as his regrets over dropping out of art school in Amsterdam, and the corresponding fact that he is now, slowly and he believes without a trace, embezzling funds from the art reproduction company for which he works, all in the hopes of going back to school. Last night, Sandor slept in his leather pants, and between that and the morning joint Joshua and Yank smoked in his “bedroom,” he smells like he’s emerged from a nest of testosterone and hash chips. He pads barefoot down the stairs to the toilet, which sits between the first and second stories of the house, and blithely shuts the door behind him.

  Just fucking great. Now even if Mary does retrieve her Flutter, she’ll have to wait to use it. Sandor can soak in a tub for hours, using all the hot water they’ll have that day. But at least the common room is empty now. Mary dashes back to its kitchenette, searching for something carbonated. Brits love carbonation; even their lemonade is bubbly, and she usually stocks the minifridge with it. Carbonation will start loosening her mucus, a preliminary to her eventual PT. She flings back the fridge door. Bare. Nothing but the empty box of milk she and Joshua used on their cereal and some cases of film Yank can’t afford to get developed.

  Shit, shit. She kicks the minifridge, hurting her toes. Nothing lasts a minute in this place. Tears of frustration prickle in her eyes, irrational because Joshua will not let her contribute one penny toward rent—she does not even buy groceries, other than the one time she made eggplant parmesan for Sandor’s birthday—so how could she possibly explain to these men that their casually consuming her lemonade feels like grand theft? Desperation mounting, she races downstairs to the real kitchen. Owing to some tic of British architects, it, like the kitchen in her old B & B, is on the lower level. This room technically belongs to everyone in the house, but protocol has established that she, Yank, Joshua, and Sandor use the common room kitchenette exclusively. As quietly as possible, she pries open the door of the refrigerator and peers inside.

  Predictably, it is full of beer. Although beer is indeed carbonated, she detests it. Never mind: Mary pulls out a can of Foster’s and pops the tab, chugging. She remembers when one beer used to rush to her head like a row of tequila shots, but these days she is a bartender whose customers buy her drinks as “tips”; these days she lives in a house over which a perpetual hash fog dwells; these days she makes it her business to be numb as much as possible.

  Eventually she hears Sandor’s combat-booted feet stampeding down the stairs. “Parting is such sweet sorrow!” he singsongs loudly from the front door. This is their morning routine: He always bids her an elaborate farewell, ignoring Yank as he departs. She is supposed to continue the game by rushing to the front door and kissing his cheek, like a 1950s housewife. Today, though, she cannot see the front door, and doesn’t answer, lest he peer downstairs to find her downing Foster’s before 9 a.m. Somehow her beer seems less acceptable than the fact that Joshua and Yank were smoking hash an hour ago. Sandor of the deranged fashion aesthetic, a semicloseted homosexual and secret embezzler, is clearly in no position to judge her alcohol intake, but when she hears the front door close she exhales relief.

  If she doesn’t complete her PT before Yank’s ready to leave, she shouldn’t go with him. She should take advantage of her privacy and stay back, do a morning treatment and then another a few hours later to make up for lost time. The pollution of London and the smoke inside Arthog House have collaborated so that her mucus has darkened—a sign of a serious infection, though she doesn’t feel ill. Still, the thought of all those meandering, silent hours alone terrifies her more than being busted with beer by Sandor, even more than going into the room to find Yank awake and perhaps in some state of undress, looking at her like he knows she’s a liar. She marches back to the second floor and opens the door, not timidly but with purpose.

  Yank is dead to the world. The ratty blanket pulled up as protection from the weak London sunlight barely reveals hair already graying—unlike Joshua and Sandor, still in their early to mid twenties, Yank is past thirty-five. Too old to be here without it implying something more shady, pathetic, and irrevocable than it does for the rest of them, who are really just kids. Yank’s long legs hang off the edge of his bed, which of course is nothing more than a mattress on the floor. Heat rushes to Mary’s face. This—this sad, aging man—is what she found so intimidating? A jazz tape is still playing, and she presses “stop” to see if he’ll stir, but he doesn’t. She takes the tape out and holds it for a moment in her hand. Jack Teagarden, another artist she’s never heard of. She puts it back where she found it, though she does not press “play” again, merely grabs her rucksack and hurries once more out the door.

  There are so many things I forgot to ask you at the Athens Airport. Like how much of being a woman is synonymous with having to lie. Like why adulthood is a house of mirrors, and every time I turn another corner, collect another experience, the walls just seem to multiply with more versions of me, more secret passageways I don’t understand. Like why I crossed an ocean to meet the man you loved, but haven’t had even half the nerve to look for him now that I’m here. Like why, once today becomes important, “the future” is automatically fucked.

  EARL’S COURT ISN’T one of Yank’s favorite Tube stations because it tends to be crowded and well manned, which increases his chance of getting busted. On days when Nicole runs the coin scam with him, though, they’ve got to hit bigger stations, ones with more than one ticket machine, so today they’ll start out here—at least the machines are close to the exit, in case they have to run. At the stations he usually haunts, where sometimes no one’s even on duty and he can stand for half an hour at one ticket machine, milking it until it runs out of change, he and Nicole couldn’t tag-team. Theoretically they can make twice the money between them, and the girl hands all the cash over to him anyway, so why not use her? Of course in truth, since they have to spend time moving around from big station to big station, Yank suspects the bottom-line earnings are a wash.

  He has to admit, though, Nicole’s great at prep. Her delicate fingers move quick and efficient as a child’s in a
sweatshop, wrapping and unwrapping the coins, preparing them for the swap. With Joshua rarely around anymore, sometimes Yank just gets the scale out first thing after he wakes, and he and Nicole pass hours that way: diligently wrapping ten-pence coins in aluminum foil, then weighing the coins and unwrapping or wrapping more accordingly, until each ten pence weighs exactly the same as a fifty-pence piece on the scale. Yank’s always prepared now, keeping the coins jammed in his duffel bag wherever he goes. Even if he trusted everyone at Arthog House not to steal the coins (which he certainly does not), there is no way to know when he may have to make a break for it, so anything important Yank keeps on him, in what Nicole calls his “bag of tricks.”

  The swapping today proceeds routinely, as Yank drops the first carefully wrapped ten-pence coin into a ticket machine, presses “cancel,” and watches a shiny new fifty-pence piece fall into the coin-return slot.

  Repeat.

  At a return of forty pence a shot, doing this a hundred times a day, he’s made a forty-pound profit—a neat two hundred a week with weekends off. More than enough money for basics like food, drink, tobacco, and hash, with a tidy sum left over for luxuries like rent.

  Not heroin.

  It goes without saying that he could make a better living if he went back to dealing, but for over a year he’s steered clear. Most of that time he was on the run, keeping out of London altogether until a particular police investigation died down, and on the lam he found creative ways to put food in his belly if not always a roof over his head. He killed time in Marseille, bummed his way up to Paris and around Belgium, before judging it safe to return to London, so long as he keeps a low profile and steers clear of his old haunts. It isn’t just the cops, but some former associates, too, who might still like to fry his ass for him. Dealing is no longer safe.

  Earl’s Court is proving easier than Yank expected. Still, he nudges Nicole—you’ve got to fold your hand at the peak of luck, before things turn sour—and gestures toward the back of the station, where they quickly swipe their Tube passes in the turnstiles and disappear into the crowd of commuters, jumping onto an approaching train.

  “So I think our resident faggot’s making off with my jazz tapes,” Yank announces conversationally, lingering near the door despite plenty of open seats. “They’re disappearing one every couple of weeks, like I’m not gonna notice. He took my Stan Robinson the other day. Cheap little fucker—he oughta be paying more rent, since he’s got his own room.”

  “But it’s a common room,” Nicole protests. “You and Joshua practically ash your cigarettes on poor Sandor while he’s sleeping on the couch.”

  “Still,” Yank says, hoping to send the girl a message, “he can afford more, he’s got a job.” Then he chuckles to himself. “Least he says he does. I don’t know about you, but I never heard of door-to-door art salesmen where I come from. You ask me, the Flying Dutchfag’s just a few blocks over from where we’re standing right now, in some public toilet with a dick up his ass, calling it commission.” He snorts. “Art salesman. Art of bending over, more like it.”

  “Can we go to West Kensington?” Nicole asks, interrupting.

  They’re on the District line anyway.

  “What for?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what for’?” she says back. “For the same thing we’re going to be doing all day.”

  He knows she can be this way: bristly and smart assed. She’s not a big talker, which suits him fine, but unlike most quiet girls she seems to keep her mouth shut not out of docility but out of an intense secretiveness. She’s also better at keeping her guard up than most of those who actually should, probably because she’s not high all the time—or maybe because her secrets aren’t that interesting.

  “Whatever, Kemo Sabe,” Yank says, rising to get off at the West Ken stop.

  They stand there on the platform. He’s been here before: it’s a sleepy station, often unmanned. Today, though, there’s a guy on duty. It’s not the kind of place you can operate out in plain sight—since they’re the only ones here, the guy’s got nothing else to look at but them. Yank turns to Nicole and says, “Well, better move on.”

  She says, “I just want to look around.”

  To say this seems crazy would be an understatement. Look at what? Even if she were one of those London history buffs, he’s not aware of this station’s having any kind of interesting history. He gives her a look: She is wasting his time. Doing some kind of female thing, acting out with inexplicable petulance to sabotage his agenda. Without another word, she disappears into the station, wandering out toward the road, out of his range of vision. Yank walks back toward the platform. Whatever. Not his problem.

  The next train is approaching by the time Nicole comes running back. “Yank, wait!” she calls, and his eyes dart around automatically to see if anyone’s paying attention, feels for the hundredth time like kicking himself for failing to make up a new alias when he met Joshua and Sandor. “Come on,” Nicole pleads, catching up with him and tugging his arm. “There’s a pub next door—we should toast to the Pilgrims! Yesterday was Thanksgiving at home, you know.”

  Home. Her use of the word doesn’t sit right.

  “Fuck the Pilgrims,” he says. “This isn’t a social outing, girl. I don’t want a goddamn drink.”

  Though, of course, he does. Every day without H is a complex juggling act of filling his body with substitute substances to quell the craving just enough to make it to the day after that. Alcohol is crucial to the mix: so necessary and so absolutely the lesser of two evils that it has not really dawned on Yank that he has become a drunk.

  “I’ll buy,” she offers.

  He sighs. “What,” he says, following her back into the station, out onto the road, “you two-timing Joshua with some bartender from the pub next door or something? I’m not coming along to play your beard if you’re trying to pick up some guy.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she snaps. “Why are you acting like such a lunatic? What’s wrong with you?”

  He blinks. This may be a fair question. He is not sure what’s wrong with him.

  The pub is called the Three Kings, and it’s the kind of overly boisterous, studenty joint he hates. Since Nicole is his regular bartender, she knows what he drinks and goes to the bar and orders them both bourbons. At Arthog House, they always drink Southern Comfort and soda. It’s a habit he, Joshua, and Sandor already had before Nicole came around. Sandor had a bottle of the shit when the three of them met, all stowing away on the same ferry from Amsterdam. After they found themselves cheap digs to share in Battersea, Southern Comfort became “their” drink. They never buy anything else at the off-license, except that one time when Nicole and Joshua got it into their heads to try sherry, which had a creamy, nausea-provoking quality none of them could stomach. At bars, though, no matter where he’s lived, Yank drinks bourbon like he did in Atlanta—like Will taught him to—even if after all his years in London he still can’t get over how meticulously small the pours are, which means he always has to spring for a double.

  Nicole slams back her drink. Her hands are shaky, her face slightly red. Maybe the guy she’s looking for snubbed her. Maybe she’s going to have some attack from whatever’s wrong with her that makes her take so many pills and hide in the bathroom every morning to cough her lungs out. She claims she’s got asthma, and that would explain the inhaler she carries everywhere, but Yank’s known other people with asthma. Even though he lives in a virtual cave now, that doesn’t mean he always has; it doesn’t mean he doesn’t know shit about anything. Asthma doesn’t cover it.

  She stands up abruptly, her drink gone, his still half in his glass. “Okay,” she says. “We can leave now.”

  “Honey,” he tells her, “you are acting pretty damn loony yourself.”

  “I know,” she says. “I know.”

  They walk out of the pub.

  THEY’VE GOT TO go all the way to Victoria Station so they can catch a real train back to Battersea, since Nicole balked
at having to walk across the Chelsea Bridge in a little rain. Turns out not to have been such a bad move, though: Right outside a Victoria Station newsstand, Yank sees a sealed box marked Evening Standard sitting unattended. He just has this feeling about it, so he picks it up and carries it onto their train. Once seated, he opens the box with his knife while Nicole half watches.

  It’s full of currency cards. “Whoa,” he mutters under his breath. These sweepstakes pay big, maybe ten grand, to whoever picks the winning number for the next day. Unlike in a lottery, the numbers are not random: the Standard lists clues along with the winning numbers from the past few days, almost like a serialized mystery novel. Americans, Yank has learned, prefer blind luck, whereas Brits like to solve shit.

  “All we need to do,” he explains to Nicole, who is looking out the window now instead of at the cards, “is spread these babies out in numerical order and figure out the pattern. We better get a newspaper, to check out the most recent clues.”

  She says, “Do you ever get tired of the way, everywhere you go, people look at you suspiciously like you might kill them?”

  Yank feels his legs twitch. Maybe the girl got some speed off Joshua and ate it this morning while he was crashing? She is in rare form.

  “How do you know who’s looking? You’re staring out that window in a trance.”

  “The window’s like a mirror.” She meets his eyes in the glass.