A Life in Men

by Gina Frangello

  It had never occurred to Mary not to accompany him. If in Japan she had developed an obsessive taste for sushi, so she had also found a budding awareness that she could not rely on her health to permit stable breadwinning—that her life, no matter how she sliced it, would have to involve either protracted reliance on her parents or a long-term liaison with a man. Someone who cared enough whether she lived or died to put his money where his mouth was. Via a bad connection from Dayton to Osaka, Dr. Narayan had insisted that she needed a regular, English-speaking physician, not random doctors on the run. She needed, Dr. Narayan said, a cystic fibrosis center, and while Nairobi didn’t have one, the city offered plenty of private pulmonary specialists for those who could pay. “Don’t worry, darling,” Gavin quipped on another long-distance phone call. “England’s left its mark here. Nairobi serves up Western-style medicine to its expats along with their high tea.” His safari company was raking in the Kenyan shillings, the pounds, the American dollars. The movie Out of Africa was still fresh in everyone’s mind; the Cold War was newly over; Americans were booking safaris year-round, even in the rainy season. And so Mary and Joshua packed alarmingly scant bags and boarded more than a day’s worth of flights, and Joshua, who had been toting hash on his circus world tour inside deodorant containers to mask the smell, finally threw away his stash entirely, assured that Gavin would help him procure a new dealer in Nairobi along with a doctor for Mary, and made the flights stone-cold straight, as if to symbolize their new life.

  Joshua even has short hair now, so as not to worry the clients. The shearing of her lover has made an almost uncanny difference in his appearance, and for the first time Mary can imagine the boy he was in South Africa, the serious athlete whose equally serious devotion to pot somehow failed to diminish his clean-cut charm. He’s lost the underfed, shaggy vibe he gave off in London, and though Mary never aspired to date a hippie—never even met one before Arthog House—she misses the desperate, rebellious, hungry version of him more than she would have expected. This Joshua, close cropped and filled out, suntanned muscles rippling freely and nourished by goat nyama choma and piles of heavily salted ugali, seems strangely foreign to her, though she suspects that 99 percent of women would say he looks “better” now.

  ON THE WAY out of the Mara, heading for one night at Lake Nakuru, Fiona and Liam throw up in tandem. Literally the moment Liam starts to barf, Fiona takes one look at him and starts spewing, too. They gush like geysers, stench filling the car. Kathleen shoves a plastic bag under Liam’s mouth, and the flow of him continues, his puke hitting whatever cookie wrappings or melted Cadbury bars litter the bottom of the bag. Fiona, no longer in an active state of throwing up but mouth stained with vomit, barks at her mother, “Gee, thanks, Mom! Give him the bag. He doesn’t care about his clothes anyway — what about me?”

  Joshua has stopped the truck. He looks at Mary pointedly, but she realizes she isn’t sure what he’s signaling. Amusement? Irritation? He goes round to the trunk and flips it open.

  “Okay, kids, out,” Walt says sharply. “Let’s get you changed.”

  Liam whines, “Fiona says we can’t go outside—the lions will eat us!”

  Walt snaps, “Do you see any lions?”

  “Maybe we should change him inside the truck.” Kathleen is picking at Liam’s clothing, pulling his shirt over his head daintily, trying to keep from actually touching the puke, which is futile. By the time she’s gotten his T-shirt off, gooey chunks of vomit dot Liam’s hair.

  “It really is safe,” Mary says, though she has no idea if it is safe or not. “If you saw any animals, you could get right back in.”

  Fiona starts crying, a kind of smoldering rage bubbling over into tears. “I’m not taking my clothes off out in the open! Can’t we wait until we get to a restroom?”

  “Are you kidding?” Walt barks. “That’s an hour away! We’ll asphyxiate from the smell!

  Liam is trying to climb Kathleen’s body, but she holds him at arm’s length, leading him gingerly out into the sun. Fiona crosses her arms over her chest in irritation, but her shirt is covered with barf, and Mary sees her give up and flop her arms down to her sides as she skulks after them, disappearing round the back of the truck to rummage through their bags for fresh clothes.

  Mary sits shotgun, surveying the scene in the back. The seats where Liam was lying with his head on his mother’s lap, and where Fiona antisocially listened to her Walkman, are both soiled. Joshua keeps napkins in their cooler, so Mary opens it—thinks about flipping the top off a Tusker for fortification—and climbs into the back to start wiping up the vomit. This kind of thing would be part of her job if she were a waitress, a flight attendant . . . a mother. She scrapes the lumps of puke into the already warm and heavy plastic bag, feeling something like penance or gratitude, thinking of the night Yank cleaned her, of Joshua scrubbing her dirty bedsheets and nightclothes on the hospital roof in Osaka. It is not often she gets to play nurse instead of patient, and the turnabout is oddly reassuring. This is the truth of the matter: they are all a mass of bodily fluids, of stenches, just like the rotting hippo. Fiona and Liam just don’t know it yet.

  She has the bag tied up at the top, the seats visually—if not olfactorily—clean by the time Joshua wanders over to the open door, where Walt, too, is waiting while Fiona changes clothes.

  “Here,” she says, holding out the bag.

  “We’ll keep that until we reach the gate,” Joshua says. “Remember, we stopped at the toilets there on the way in—they’ve rubbish bins, too, and the kids can clean up.”

  Walt takes the plastic bag. “We don’t want this inside with us,” he says, and faster than Mary would have guessed possible, he winds his arm back and tosses the bag. He must have been a pitcher in high school; it arcs into the air like a rocket, off toward distant acacia trees.

  Joshua gapes at Walt. He is, in this moment, extremely easy to read. “You can’t just throw plastic onto the reserve!” He isn’t shouting, but Walt looks taken aback. “This is a national reserve. You’re not permitted to litter here.”

  Walt’s face recovers quickly. He smiles mildly back at Joshua. “We weren’t going to drive in a stuffy truck full of vomit,” he says calmly. He must be twenty years older than Joshua. He is a gangly man, paradoxically paunchy in the middle, losing his hair. He is not so much ugly as utterly nondescript, in the exact midwestern way of Mary’s father. Joshua could put him down with one punch, though Mary has never known Joshua to hit anyone. Walt seems to fear Joshua not at all, seems entirely clear on the fact that he is the one paying Joshua and confident this payment covers his right to litter the Mara if he so chooses. Kathleen, Fiona, and Liam climb back into the truck, and despite Mary’s best efforts to clean up, they all avoid the vomit seats, cramming together on the bench in the back. Walt enters after them, sitting on a clean seat up front, his legs casually splayed with masculine authority. Joshua stares after the bag, though they can no longer see it. It would be physically impossible to navigate the truck up in that direction, across that rough terrain, but Mary knows Joshua is thinking of making the journey by foot—of making them all wait in the truck while he goes to retrieve the bag.

  “Let it go,” she tells him. It occurs to her that Joshua, who according to Yank saw his first love almost killed and had no power to retaliate, may have “let go” enough things to last a lifetime—that his quotient may be prematurely expired. If he chases after the bag, they could be waiting here an hour, baking in the greenhouse heat of the truck. Plus, there is the chance he will happen on an animal who does not welcome his presence. Theirs is a driving safari, and Joshua does not carry a gun.

  “Please,” Mary begs. “For me. Let it go for me.”

  Joshua climbs back into the driver’s seat, his eyes still off in the distance. He revs the motor and they jolt forward with a lurch. Mary puts her hand on Joshua’s leg, which vibrates from the bumps, shaking her off. In the back, she hears Fiona saying, “Like I’m ever going to wear that shi
rt again. You should have just stuck it in the trash bag.” Mary wipes her hands on her sundress, trying to remove invisible germs that may be a danger to her lungs. She is meant to avoid things like sick people, like rotting onions; she is not supposed to wipe up vomit and traipse around the third world. She is meant to believe that caution matters, but she has come to believe that the things meant to save you—like the barbed-wire fence intended to keep wealthy expats shielded from poor Africans—can often kill you, too.

  THE NIGHT MARY agreed to travel with Joshua and the circus, she took out her medical equipment and laid it out for him on their dilapidated mattress. “I have asthma, like I told you,” she said, “but it’s almost just a side effect of another, more serious condition called cystic fibrosis. It’s not a terminal illness, exactly, but it’s progressive, and I don’t have a normal life expectancy. Eventually I’ll be on oxygen all the time, and either I’ll get an infection they can’t get rid of, or I’ll pretty much drown on my own mucus and die that way.” She didn’t look at him but fiddled with the equipment on the bed, conscious of the fact that Yank had once touched it. “Do you still want me to come?”

  He said only, “Nobody knows what the future holds, right? I could fall off the trapeze tomorrow and become a quadriplegic or get a brain injury and end up daft and eating through a straw. Does that mean you don’t want to be with me now?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “Right, then,” he said, and he kissed her. “So you’re coming.”

  Mary might easily have told him everything then. Instead she continued the unpacking of her rucksack until she could pass him her passport in silence and watch his face absorb the shock. Then she offered, “When I came to London, I changed my name, almost like a joke—but we ended up living together, and it stuck longer than I ever meant it to. It was just . . . a game, I guess. I know it’ll be weird, but once we leave here, you shouldn’t call me Nicole anymore.”

  “Why would you lie to me all this time?” he asked, childish confusion on his face, the pitch of his voice more distraught than at the revelation of her illness. “You were having a laugh? I don’t understand. We . . . I was some kind of joke to you?”

  There were many ways to address this, she knew. She could throw her arms around him and claim to be madly in love with him, but she was afraid he would see through that, that such a claim would undermine her real—if gentler—feelings for him. So she said, “It had nothing to do with you. It was all about me, always being the sick girl, wanting to escape that for a while.” She peered into his face, the water-paleness of his eyes. “Haven’t you ever wanted to get away from yourself ? Haven’t you ever wanted to become someone else?”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly, “I have,” though he did not speak of the girl Yank told her about, just as she did not speak of Nix. The very day they left Arthog House, he began to call her Mary with surprisingly little effort. They never spoke of her deception again.

  IN AFRICA, YOU oscillate like a schizophrenic, she scribbles in her Nix notebook by lantern light. If you have come here on a journey to “find yourself,” good luck. Here, you vary with the landscape . . .

  In Nairobi, your lover will buy a cheap Jeep and get carjacked before he has owned it a week. When you ask why he did not call for help, he will explain that if you shout “thief” in Nairobi, a mob is likely to beat your assailant to death right there in the street, so if you don’t want blood on your hands, just hand over your wallet, just get out of the car. Though your city apartment complex will be considerably shabbier than Gavin’s suburban home, it will be equally surrounded by barbed wire. You will be warned repeatedly not to exit the complex by foot after nightfall. To never, ever venture farther than River Road.

  There are other stories of Nairobi that Mary cannot tell. Though she is not aware of it, in late 1991 the torture chambers in the basement of Nayoyo House are still operational. As she struggles with her daily resentment at not being able to roam freely, meanwhile prisoners, including journalists, are being whipped, burned, held underwater, molested, and not infrequently killed right in the city center. Likewise, there is a sophisticated, cosmopolitan side to Nairobi: a rising, educated African middle class and a decadent expat community still playing a glamorous game of White Mischief make-believe. But Mary and Joshua are alien to the former and too broke to buy entry into the latter, and so to these complex societies they are not privy. During the months Mary makes this mile-high city her home base, she will know only that its air is thin and that she is quickly winded even from a simple trip to buy groceries. That her yellow hair assures her of constantly being harassed by black Kenyans aiming to sell her things, so that she is perpetually fending off street vendors and small-time hustlers. That when she wants to go shopping, she is urged by Gavin—and Joshua, too—to frequent bland (“safe”) malls that look like they could be in Los Angeles. She knows only that, while the Indian food in Nairobi surpasses even that in London, here in this city she will entertain more than one discussion with her pacifist lover about whether they should purchase a gun.

  Approaching Lake Nakuru just days before Christmas, driving through the city’s tree-lined boulevards, you are bombarded by the purple splendor of jacaranda. These trees bloom for only one month, forming vibrant, arched awnings over the road as you whiz by a gaggle of young boys, shoeless and rolling a tire alongside them as they run. When you finally reach the lake itself, a blanket of flamingos covers the water in pink motion, feathers rolling like waves, the sky alive with wings. Here, you dance with wildly gyrating hips alongside the local dance troupe that entertains tourists at the lodge. Here, instead of cursing the constant power outages in Nairobi, you are grateful for small mercies when the lodge permits your room additional hours of electricity for your medical devices while the rest of the rooms are temporarily powerless, to conserve energy. Here, your body entwining with your lover’s beneath the romantic mosquito net can make up for any inconvenience of this country’s unbelievably slow restaurant service, for the way everyone from the plumber to the hotel laundry service to the freaking police runs a perpetual hour (if not several days!) behind on “Kenya time.” In the morning you are ravenous, pile your plate with mango slices, and drink several small glasses of passion juice, resolve to begin anew, still refusing to acknowledge that your moods here change with the extremity of Kenya’s terrain. That all your resolutions are useless before this land.

  WHEN HE CLIMBS into the truck for their Christmas Eve game drive, Liam hands Mary a sheet of paper. On it, he has written Heart of Love in dark ink, smeary from being colored over with a pink crayon. Dear Mary, the back of the paper says, Mary Christmas I love you! Love Liam.

  Mary does not expect to burst into tears, but before she even registers it, Kathleen is cooing, “How sweet! Aren’t you lovely! Look, Liam, Mary is crying because she likes your card so much!” Kathleen even wraps her arms around Mary, exhibiting less hesitance than she did when touching her puke-stained son. Mary wipes her nose on the sleeve of her peasant blouse, tries to extract herself from Kathleen’s perfumed, bony embrace without appearing rude.

  “Thank you,” she says to Liam. “It’s a beautiful card.”

  Fiona rolls her eyes, smirking. “Yeah,” she says sarcastically. “He made one just like it for the lady who sat behind us on the airplane, and the maid who cleaned our room in Mombasa.”

  Mary bites her lip. She touches Liam on the head, his blond curls wispier, less substantial than her own: the hair of a human being not fully formed. He smiles wildly, half bangs his head into her stomach so that she can hug him, and though she believes she has lost the heart for it, she goes ahead with the embrace because Kathleen, Fiona, and Walt are all watching. His body is warm and pliant, and though she felt pressured into the hug, it is hard to force her arms to let go.

  IN THE FILM Out of Africa, Meryl Streep’s voice-over as Baroness Karen Blixen—known in the literary world as Isak Dinesen—says of her lover, Denys Finch Hatton, “I’ve written
about all the others, not because I loved them less, but because they were clearer.” In time, Mary will come to wonder if this lack of clarity is elemental to all love affairs in Kenya, at least among such expats as Blixen and Finch Hatton—as herself and Joshua. Those presumptuous enough to imagine their lives writ large, to pit their paltry individuality against a land they can never hope to understand or call their own.

  HE WAKES HER on Christmas morning, though they do not have a game drive this day. “Come,” he says, breath warm against her ear, the smell of sleep still on him, not yet overtaken by cigarettes, coffee, weed. The air is chilly and she takes with her the tasseled wrap they bought together at a market in Granada, winding it around her body as they step together outside their tent.

  The sun, just beginning to rise above the peak of Mount Kenya, halos the rock of the mountain, creating a holographic effect. She stares into its golden-gray glow, blinking as if to adjust double vision. She thinks, This might be my last Christmas. She thinks, There could not be anywhere better to spend it. She thinks, If I were to die tomorrow, I have had enough, it would be all right.

  Then she remembers Liam’s card. Instantly she is blinking again, but this time the tears spill over. Here, then, is how it strikes: the sudden and devastating longing for a child of one’s own. Mary is fully aware that nobody—no educated, world-traveling girl like herself—has a baby at twenty-three anymore. Yet there it is, the desire to fill her arms with baby, slithering around her body like an invisible snake and strangling her with wanting. Nearby, close enough that she and Joshua could reach it within a minute’s sprint, a giraffe strolls awkwardly in the pale light. It is a strange sight at this hour, but animals separated from their herds are unpredictable: it may be hungry; it may be sick. It does not look troubled, however, from here. From a distance, it gives the impression of beauty, of perfection. Like us, Mary muses. Like me.