“Or,” Mary says, starting to cry, so that she has to turn her back to the balcony door, “once he tells Zorg that we said he kidnapped us, Zorg will become even more furious and rape me for your freaking viewing pleasure.”
“Jesus Christ! You’re not being helpful.”
“That’s because you’re going to get us killed!”
Nix and Mary gape at each other. The alarm on Mary’s face is so intense that Nix immediately whips out her camera, says loudly, “Smile!” and starts clicking it in Mary’s direction. Mary glares at her, not smiling, not playing along, but at least irritation has replaced the terror in her expression. Through her peripheral vision, Nix sees Zorg and Titus fashionably arranged on the sofa just on the other side of the balcony’s glass door. She whispers into Mary’s ear, “You need to hold it together. Don’t let them see you crying. We don’t want them to know we’re upset. I’m serious—now laugh like I just said something funny.”
Mary spins around and performs as instructed, though her teeth look bared. Nix laughs back. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. They throw their heads back, necks exposed. Girls laughing. See?
“We have to go back in,” Nix says. “I want you to listen to me, Mary. I’m going to get us out of this, okay? Please just keep your mouth shut. If you have to be with Zorg when I’m not around, just cough a lot, cough something up! Use your inhaler. Freak him out a little.”
Mary nods. Nix doesn’t trust her—she has an awful suspicion that Mary wouldn’t dream of lowering herself—but to her relief, Mary says, “Fine, I’ll spit mucus at his feet if I have to,” and Nix can breathe again. Then Mary’s eyes narrow. “But,” she begins, “if you aren’t with me and Zorg, where would you be?”
TIME IN FOREIGN countries doesn’t work the way it does at home. Service in restaurants is slower, and world-changing decisions are faster. Mary and Nix will probably remain on that balcony for another fifty seconds at most, before Nix slides open the balcony door and leads the way inside. In that time, this is approximately what transpires:
Where would you be? Nix considers the question. She has never known a moment of truth, so sure, maybe this is one of them. One of those moments when you have to decide who you are, who you will be.
And Nix: Who has she been? A cute midwestern girl, an abandoned daughter, a spelling-bee champion, a betrayer of friends, a lazy student at a boutique college, a professor’s mistress. Who will she become? A traveler, she hopes, Greece and London just the beginning. Okay, but beyond that? Will her legacy be one series of self-gratifications followed by another, just another American life, another female life on humanity’s swarming anthill? Of course. Yes, of course it will; she knows that already, though she is not sure how any more than she knows how Mary knew unemployment statistics from Barcelona, or how her body instinctively understood what it would feel like to go off a cliff. She is not an Immortal. Her pretty American face will not launch a thousand ships; men will not (thank God!) wage war over her. She is neither Mother Teresa nor Gandhi, nor even, on the smaller scale, a selfless Peace Corps volunteer who can live with mice nesting in her pillow. She is an English-lit major with no real skills. This world is enormous and she is a small speck on it, awed by her own anonymity and insignificance, yet knowing that inside her, life positively pulses and surges like an exposed wire, bursting to get out, to spark.
She thinks again of Connie from “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” She and Mary are just Connies, after all, only Mary has been elevated in meaning by having a fucking death sentence on her head, and Nix realizes, perhaps fully for the first time, how mind-bendingly happy she is not to be the Tragic Heroine of their story. To be able to wonder who she will be at forty, at sixty-five, even at ninety-three like her maternal grandmother. Will she travel the world collecting lovers, like Anaïs Nin? Will her journals be published someday, her life an exotic inspiration to other women? Or will she eventually marry, even if she does not desire it now? Will love render her weak as a newborn kitten, longing for domestication? Will her hard, flat stomach someday swell and then deflate, bringing forth children—God’s wildest and most daring creation? Is there a God, and does it matter, when he will not save them now?
In the story, Connie opens the door and goes out to Arnold Friend to prevent the murder of her entire family upon their return from some boring barbecue. Connie is just an ordinary, superficial girl, an airhead full of boys and the drive-in and judgments at her fat, staid sister, with a smart mouth and a nowhere town clinging to her skin. But in that moment of swinging open the door and walking toward her own abduction and possible death, she is a hero, too, and it occurs to Nix that this brand of heroism—a practical, “what else can you do?” heroism—comes naturally to her. She will let Titus inside her because, in doing so, she can gain his trust and get him to call off Zorg. She simply cannot let Mary be raped, Mary who has borne enough, including Nix’s own treason. She will wrap her arms around Titus and whisper, My friend has a terminal disease, she’s a virgin, you can’t let him take advantage of her, please, talk to him—do it for me. Yes, but Mary, a good girl who gets flies with honey, would never approve—would turn to vinegar before ever permitting herself to become a whore. For a moment Nix’s heart somersaults and she falters, unsure. But fear is an essential ingredient of heroism, isn’t it? A lack of fear leads not to nobility but to indifference. Okay then: she will moan just right, she will say the things a courtesan would say if she were just an ordinary girl from Kettering. Every courtesan has been just an ordinary girl from somewhere. Every hero is a speck on a giant, uncaring planet, just like Nix.
“Do not do anything,” she says to Mary with the urgency of a suitor’s promise, and she slides open the glass door, smiling at her waiting drink.
WAIT, CAN WE back up here? Can we make it all turn out differently? As it turns out, not even the dead can accomplish that.
It is a mere three and a half hours later when they drive away from the villa and back down to Mykonos proper, to a small disco just opening for the night. Look. In walk four people: two smartly dressed, dark-haired men, and two young blond women in inappropriately beachy garb. They have their choice of tables, but the men select a dark one in the corner. A round of tequila sunrises is ordered. Here, take a long gulp for fortification. All right. Let us proceed.
To Mary’s dismay, they are the only ones in the disco. It’s not the same, all-Greek bar of their first evening, but out of the way enough not to be popular with tourists, especially so early in the evening. Titus tells the waitress to run a tab, beaming and confident like a man who has gotten a raise. Nix, next to him, seems cowed, Titus’s arm slung around her sometimes, then at other times withdrawn disdainfully. Mary keeps trying to meet Nix’s eyes, to communicate in some wordless fashion, but Nix won’t cooperate, looks elsewhere, mainly down at her lap. Mary has never seen Nix wear this body language. It is as though some alien force has inhabited her friend’s skin, and although Nix’s big blue eyes appear the same as ever, some other being lurks behind them.
Mary, however, cannot help feeling giddy. She was so skeptical about Nix’s mysterious plan, but look, it worked! Here they are, down from the menacing hills, out of that isolated villa, and in a disco with a waitress, a bartender, a DJ—other actual human beings! Sure, maybe they are Greek humans who don’t understand English, and maybe there are not that many of them, but still, halle-fucking-lujah. Who knew how long Titus and Zorg might have kept them prisoner? Titus could have gone out for provisions for days—forever!—without anyone being the wiser. They could have been turned into sex slaves; they could have been tortured and murdered.
But no, here they are sitting at a small table, drinking with strobe lights pulsing and American pop music pounding. Here they are, very much alive.
THINGS HAD BEEN tricky for a while, back at the villa. Nix had strutted inside from the balcony and whispered something to Titus, resting her small palm against his chest as she leaned toward his ear, and just like that they were gone, disap
pearing down a hallway toward what Mary guessed was Titus’s bedroom, leaving her alone with the crazy one. Some plan! Zorg, his eyes already narrowing with drink, patted the white sofa until Mary obligingly sat down; then he placed his hand on her thigh just as he’d done in the car. Mary’s body pulsed with wanting to jump up and run, but to what end? Zorg’s hand, which had seemed so debonair when holding his tiny espresso cup in Taxi Square or smoking at Plati Yialos, now looked meaty and animalistic, rubbing hot circles onto her thigh, his thick fingers slipping under the fringy bottom of her tie-dyed skirt. Oh God. For the first time in her life, Mary began to cough on purpose, violently pounding her chest and hocking up mucus on cue. She spit the phlegm into the already wet napkin under her cocktail. The instant revulsion in Zorg’s eyes simultaneously gave her strength and made her want to hide.
“You are coughing all day—what, you are sick?”
Mary hacked again, vigorous enough to make her throat scrape. “I’m afraid it’s pneumonia,” she said, then worried she was not supposed to speak—Nix had told her to say nothing, and what if pneumonia contradicted what Nix was telling Titus? Then, rebellion surged: if Nix wanted to write her lines, she should have stayed here with the weirdo. “I get pneumonia sometimes, from my asthma,” she elaborated. “I might be contagious. I hope I didn’t get you sick last night, at the bar.”
Zorg flung his legs out in front of him in an agitated fashion, making a clicking noise. “I am supposed to fly in three days,” he said. “You run around putting your mouth on people when you should be in a hospital? You better not have made me sick. I have other things to do, real work, not just running around fucking like the rich little American girls. You understand, little girl? You think I should fly a plane while I spit this shit up on my lap, like you?” He made a noise again at the back of his throat, a hiss. “Disgusting. Morí, what is the matter with you?”
“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t realize yesterday that I was so sick. You’d better stay away from me, I don’t want to infect you.”
He took a long swig of his drink. “It is too late for that. Last night you are all over me. Any germ you have, I already have. Now, I just don’t kiss you.” He laughed an angry laugh. “Eh, but your mouni doesn’t cough, sí?” Before she could even wonder what the word meant, his hand was there, wedging its way between her thighs to cup her vagina. This time she did jump to her feet, but she stumbled across his arm, yelped as she tripped and fell into the glass coffee table, and then cried out when its round edge slammed hard into her shin. On the sofa, Zorg watched with bemusement, his eyes nearly slits. Terror and pain pulsed in Mary like twin amphetamines; her body felt like it was charged with voltage; it was all she could do to remind herself that the superhuman strength she felt was illusory, that there was no way she could win against Zorg in a physical struggle. She thought of advice her PE teacher had given back in seventh grade when the girls were separated from the boys to talk about sex. She couldn’t recall the specifics of the sex talk, but she remembered her gym teacher saying, “If any man ever tries to rape you, pee on him. Vomit, do something disgusting, crap your pants if you have to.” The gym teacher was a soft-spoken woman with a pockmarked face. Mary and her peers were embarrassed and shocked; they began to titter behind their hands. Now, all at once, Mary remembered the look the woman had given their laughter: a gaze so withering Mary could still feel its sting. Would she have to resort to literally pissing in her pants, or on Zorg if it came to that? Could she? She looked at the balcony outside, beckoning, and thought of simply sliding open the door and jumping with a running leap, but her legs kept still.
Footsteps jarred her, and when she spun around she expected to find Zorg right behind her. But Zorg was still on the sofa, a plush white throw rug under his feet; the sound had come from Titus, who stood on the hardwood floor across the room. As she gaped at him, he quickly approached Zorg and began whispering in animated Spanish. From the zeal of Titus’s tone, Mary expected that Titus must be lecturing him. Nix had gotten through to Titus, and he had come away from their . . . conversation? . . . tryst? . . . to intervene. Then the two men laughed and Mary’s heart dropped with fear that she had misunderstood—why, if Titus were reprimanding Zorg, would they be chuckling together? Tears congested her sinuses. She stared at the balcony again.
Suddenly Zorg stood. From his greater height, he looked down at Mary with a soft look in his slitted eyes. Mary mistook the softness for an attempt at seduction, and bile rose in her throat as though she might vomit involuntarily after all. But instead Zorg pointed to the other hallway, away from where Titus and Nix had gone. He said gently, “Why don’t you go to lie down? There is a bedroom for guests down this hall. Maybe you feel better after some sleep, and later, we can go to town for drinks and dinner.”
Her exhalation came so fast and hard she gagged on it. Then, understanding overcame her, and she composed herself, embarrassed. Of course. Nix had gotten Titus alone so that she could tell him about Mary’s disease—so she could turn Mary into a pitiable object without being overheard by the object herself. In the end, even an asshole doesn’t want to molest the terminally ill. Sweat broke out all over Mary’s body but cooled instantly from the excessive air-conditioning of the villa. She turned to retreat, eager to get away from Zorg and even Titus now, to take her pathetic, unfuckable body away from them, to remind herself to feel grateful rather than humiliated. But where was Nix? Taking her own nap in Titus’s bed? More likely now that Titus had proved himself a decent guy, Nix was going to fool around with him after all, as a reward. Nix, the beautiful one, the healthy one, who had only to take off her clothes and the world bent to her will. Mary’s heart vibrated like a wild bird from the extra doses of albuterol she’d sucked in for show. She scurried down the hall to the first bedroom she saw, closed the door, and hurled herself onto the fluffy white duvet. In contrast to the surge of energy she’d felt in the living room, her body now was exhausted, to the point of panting.
Dizzy from booze and hours of fear, she fell instantly asleep.
WHEN MARY WOKE, the sky was darkening. Zorg and Titus were in the living room, still drinking as though no time had elapsed. When they saw her, Titus went to retrieve Nix, and they all climbed into the car within mere minutes, as though everyone had been waiting for Mary, her slumber delaying their departure. Now here they are: Nix and her magic turned sour, a bad taste left (perhaps literally) in her mouth. Did she get any enjoyment from Titus? Mary can’t help wondering. Sex still looms like a distant island, half-shrouded in mist and lapped by dark water. Until Zorg’s unwelcome grope, she hadn’t even felt a guy’s hand between her legs since Bobby Kenner. Bobby, that coward. Yet another thing Nix was right about.
Well, this time Mary’s not going to make Nix think of everything—she has her own plan. Titus, with his new bravado, keeps talking as though after “dinner” (there’s no food in this bar, but who knows where he next plans to abscond with them), Nix will be spending the night at his villa. Mary is uncertain where this leaves her—dropped off back in their rented room, or dragged along for the ride—but either way she requires no eye contact with Nix to know neither of them is ever going back to that hillside hellhouse, and if Nix isn’t speaking up for herself, it’s up to Mary to get them out of this. The only problem is that her plan requires something of a crowd, and this early in the evening the disco is not providing it. But patience is a virtue, and so she will wait.
“You are hungry now,” Titus says. “You like to eat?”
“Oh, not yet!” Mary cries. She knows she is supposed to have pneumonia, but her objective is to avoid getting back in the rental car at all costs, and she can’t think of another way to achieve this, so she jumps to her feet and cries, with exaggerated animation, “Order another round of drinks—I feel like dancing!” She flashes her eyes at Nix, signaling, Come with me, but Nix only averts her gaze. Mary rushes out to the dance floor alone. Zorg and Titus do not dance—she learned this the first night they met at
the all-Greek bar. Flushed with wine and the enthusiasm of going native, Mary and Nix had whirled around that bar, which had no dedicated dance floor, but Zorg and Titus never joined in, just smoked and drank, stationary at the bar. At the time, their aloofness had seemed sophisticated, but now, as Mary shimmies around the empty disco, they seem instead two guarding sentries. To her frustration, Nix remains at the table with them, one foot out of her sandal and kicking aimlessly at the table’s wobbly center leg. Abruptly Zorg puts a hand on Nix’s knee to still her. His hand rests too long; a chill pricks down Mary’s back, so that her body involuntarily shivers like a bad dance move. No, there is no way in hell Mary is getting back in that car. She will run for it if she has to, but if it comes to that she will have to somehow give Nix a sign.
All at once, people enter the bar. Four guys! Their Harvard sweatshirts and baseball caps shine under the ricocheting strobes. There is something so awesomely American about them, in their unfashionable garb, with their too-short hair, that Mary nearly starts to weep with relief. Of the four, only one is good looking, as muscular and dark as a Greek, whereas the others exhibit various degrees of wimpy shoulders and visible freckles, with dumb white sneakers on their feet. Oh, joy! The makeup Mary applied this morning has all been rubbed off by sunscreen and seawater and her face’s pressing against Titus’s cool guest-room pillowcase; she has lipstick in her beach bag but is afraid that if she were to scurry to the bathroom to put some on, these men would be gone by the time she returned. So instead she does what she can. Her hair has been wound in its usual beach do: two tightly coiled knots on the sides of her head. Until now, it has not occurred to her to release her hair from its trap, but all at once she does so . . .
A Life in Men Page 14
