“I didn’t realize you were so obsessed with war and carnage,” she says cautiously. All at once, though, she remembers again the argument with Joshua in the Arthog House kitchen: Sandor’s insistence that World War II could have happened anywhere, even in civilized England. He must have been fascinated by war, a student of it, even then. An idea suddenly strikes her. “You don’t have any paintings of the victims of the Lockerbie disaster, do you?” she asks, but he is shaking his head no before the question is even out. She isn’t sure why she asked. Was she planning to give him a photograph of Nix and ask him to paint her, broken and mangled, still strapped to her airplane seat, dead in a Scottish field? Jesus, talk about high treason. Better she should just take Sandor into the other room and fuck him than that. Her eyes fill with fresh tears. What is wrong with her?
“You can’t call me Nicole anymore,” she blurts out. And realizes with a bolt of relief that she has time—not for everything, but for this. Someday she will tell him why, but it does not have to be today. “I’m not asking for Leo’s sake,” she says simply. “I’m asking for mine.”
He doesn’t answer. “I love your brother,” he begins instead, quietly. He is next to her now, arms at his sides still. “I have loved him for a long time, I think, from the time I first knew him. Then all of a sudden you are here . . .” Before she can blink, both her hands are clutched in his, as if they are a couple making wedding vows. “I’ll look after him for you if he lets me. I’m better than that pretty little aarsridder Pascal, so I think Leo lets me stick around, but who knows, maybe you can put in a good word. You don’t have to worry about him, Mary.”
She sniffs. “That’s good.” Even though Leo is the last thing on her mind, and she is certain Sandor knows it, she manages to look up, to face the canvases around them full of human wreckage, and say to the man who painted them, surprised to find how much she means it, “I feel better knowing Leo’s in your hands.”
THE CASE IS CLOSED: your life remains a mystery. The blank shell of you running into the water at Plati Yialos, your cold rejection at the Athens Airport, your impersonal travelogues from London, culminating in that giddy final letter that defies all my dark imaginings. I can never know the truth of what happened inside that room. I will never know if you were impacted the way I would have been. I will never know if Hasnain was proof of your “recovery,” or even if he existed at all. I can never ask if you faced Zorg and Titus alone in an effort to save me, or look deeply enough into my own heart to predict whether I could have done the same for you. The only thing I know for sure is that you aimed, in some way, to spare me. Because I was sick, because you thought me damaged or tragic—maybe. But also because you loved me. Your protection was an act of love, and if you could see how far I’ve come you would beam your glowing smile, and then, at my continued hand-wringing, smack me upside the head.
And so, Nix, what does it mean to heal? To heal while my body simultaneously attacks from within? To heal in the absence of answers, here at the end of an incoherent, schizophrenic trail? What does it mean to trust unconditionally? What would it mean to finally—finally—let go?
AGNES IS DEAD. Kinga doesn’t speak English or Dutch, but it’s not hard to figure out what she’s saying. Kenneth stands in his doorway watching the girl—she can’t be more than twenty-four—pantomime Agnes’s death for him like he’s going to guess the name of a flick in a game of charades. She’s in the hall, junkie eyes bugging, acting out Agnes’s snorting coke and shooting H in tandem, though he figures it didn’t happen exactly like that, more like Kinga doesn’t know how to convey the lapse of time, whatever it was. The fucking insufficient lapse of time. He’s spoken to Agnes about it over and over again: that a real heroin overdose is rare, it’s mixing drugs that can get you killed. Agnes didn’t drink. They knew too many people who’d OD’d mixing H with booze or tranquilizers, so Agnes avoided the combo. She was a damn vegan, wouldn’t touch eggs or milk. Coke, though—that was a different story. Coke went with everything. Even her addiction to heroin couldn’t quell her craving for that old friend completely. Kinga’s mouth pours out a facsimile of an ambulance siren, mimes a sheet pulled over Agnes’s head.
“Zaterdag?” he asks, and she nods, points at her wrist as though it contains an invisible watch, says, “Zondag,” to indicate it was Sunday morning, of course—past midnight. He doesn’t know how to ask the rest: What took her so long to come and tell him? Did she tell anyone who Agnes was, or did she disappear into the crowd the minute the ambulance or police showed up? Was this at the club, or later, at some party, and where?
Is she certain Agnes is really dead?
Of course. That much he knows. If she weren’t dead, she’d have gotten word to him. He’s been telling himself all week that she ran off with some guy, but he’s known it was bullshit. She never came back for any of her things. It took Agnes years to acquire anything of her own; she’d never leave it all behind, not for some new man. Christ, she didn’t even like men.
He’s talking himself down in his head. He wants to scream at Kinga, but it’s not her fault, she’s just some young junkie, someone Agnes wouldn’t even have been out with if he were any kind of man. Agnes never carried ID with her, in case she got into any trouble: she wanted to be able to lie her way out of it. And even if the cops or the morgue or who-the-fuck-ever knew who she was, they wouldn’t connect her to him. Agnes’s address on all her paperwork was still in some backwater Czech town. She had no legal Dutch address; they didn’t share the same last name; Kenneth doesn’t even own a telephone; and his paperwork puts him at the address he shared years ago with his ex-wife, who doesn’t even live in A’dam anymore. He and Agnes both existed off the grid, and if Kinga hadn’t shown up now to tell him, he’d never have known shit.
He watched Agnes leave, knowing exactly what she was going out to do. She asked him to come, called him “baby” in English, and he called her a heroin whore. He sent her off with his blessings, to kill herself.
Kinga stands in the hallway pretending to cry—she’s the worst actress he’s ever laid eyes on, and he’s seen some bad ones. “I not come to now for I more upset,” Kinga tells him.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “We’re all fucking upset.” He shuts the door in her face.
Now what? Should he go to a local police station with Agnes’s passport, try to track down her body? It’s been nearly a week; surely it wouldn’t still be lying around? He has, he realizes, no idea. If this were Atlanta, he’d know what to do; if it were London, and he weren’t hiding from the cops himself, he’d even have a clue. But he’s a foreigner here, after all these years. The cops would speak better English than Kinga, but who knows the real story of Agnes’s death, and if there’s something fishy going on and he starts sniffing around, maybe they’ll start sniffing him. He’s got less to hide than usual, less to hide than in a long, long time, but less doesn’t translate to nothing. The cops aren’t his friends, not in any language. His hands are tied.
He sits on their bed. Reclines all the way back. The more his mind wanders, the worse this gets. Agnes had people in her hometown. Shouldn’t somebody let her family know? But Agnes’s old lady isn’t married to her daddy. She’s with some other man, and Kenneth doesn’t even know his last name, probably never would’ve met any of them even if he and Agnes had been together ten more years. Where were they when Agnes was walking the street, getting her face bashed in by johns? Where were they when Agnes was picking up him, a man more than fifteen years her senior, and letting him tie off her arm? Yeah, he’s sure they’d welcome him into their home like a hero, if he could even find it. Take one look at him and kill the messenger, more likely, and he’d sure as hell deserve it. No, Agnes will lie in an unmarked Dutch grave, and her people back home will be happier for it, sitting round their kitchen table bemoaning how she wrote them off, thought she was so high and mighty with her pretty face and big tits, went off to Holland, and never looked back. They’ll take some joy in the story, in rehashing it
over their Eastern European booze and inbred hardships, passing it around so that its implicit end is Agnes somewhere else living high on the hog, thumbing her nose at them. Not a bad fantasy, if you can hold on to it. He wishes someone could have given his mother that, with Will.
He should cry. He doesn’t feel like crying. He should call somebody, tell somebody, but this is his life now, clean or what passes for it: there’s nobody left to call. He should go out and pick up a girl, but if he got some stranger in front of him right now, some hole with a language barrier and no common past, God help him, he’s not sure he could trust himself, he’s not sure he could stand it, he’s not sure he wouldn’t just hurt her for the sport of it. It should have been him. Not because Agnes was any better than he is, or because she wouldn’t have followed suit soon after even if he’d died first, but because then he wouldn’t have to lie here anymore and tally up the body count. Will first, his mother not long after, and then he ran, so that Hillary and his baby son, they might as well be dead, too: dead to him, just like his father. And all at once he is crying, but it’s not for Agnes. It’s because it spooked him: thinking his son’s as good as dead just because he’s not around. The boy’s better off without him. He’s gotta be in college by now; he won’t even remember Kenneth, won’t remember having just learned to say “Daddy” when Kenneth ran. Still, knowing that his boy is out there somewhere, living a normal life, a life without him around to taint it, is the only thing that’s kept him from putting a barrel to his head, from loading the dose to turn it lethal all these years. Please, God, he prays, don’t let my boy be dead.
The number is on the back of a Mulligan’s coaster, right on the floor next to his bed. Her cell and e-mail, exchanged as the bar was closing and she went off with her brother and Sandor into the night, leaving him to clean up. He’d thought she would stay. He believed all night that they were going to hook up; he hadn’t questioned it; it seemed a given—and then suddenly she was gone. Mary, the coaster reads, but he can’t think of her that way and noticed Sandor was calling her Nicole still. Kenneth wouldn’t stoop. It’d make her feel too important, like something he’d held on to all these years, which isn’t exactly true. He hadn’t thought of her at all really. But then there she was across the bar, and something old reignited between them, with a life all its own. It isn’t some lost innocence. He was already ruined when he knew her back then, already beyond repair. He can’t put his finger on it. Something like recognition.
He doesn’t have a phone anymore. He pitched his cell when he kicked H; he didn’t want calls from anyone, didn’t want to make any either. There’s nobody he’s wanted to talk to. He has no computer, no e-mail account. The fact that this American wife gave him a bloody e-mail address, of all things, just indicates the gulf between them, how ridiculous the whole thing is.
There is a phone in the Indonesian restaurant downstairs.
She answers in this normal voice, this “English is my native language and I am a normal person and nobody I know just OD’d” voice, and he does not, for the first time he can recall in his entire life, know what to say to a girl. When he doesn’t answer, she says, “Babe, is that you?” and for one fucking insane elated moment he thinks she means him, but then he realizes she must mean her husband—her husband at home in America, waiting for her.
“It’s me,” he says. He doesn’t know how to refer to himself. She never called him by his proper name, but he hasn’t gone by Yank since his thirties. “My, uh . . .” Nothing in his life, nothing that he is, makes sense in words. “My girlfriend just died. I was wondering . . .” He is a crazy person; he will scare the living fuck out of her. “Do you think you could maybe come over?”
The girl, though, doesn’t miss a beat. “Well, that depends,” she says. “Do I have to bring a shovel?”
He starts laughing. Falls against the wall of the phone booth, cracking up, and can’t stop—he is too relieved by her almost sociopathic irreverence. Yes, he remembers now. She looks normal, but she’s not normal. She’s wrecked, too, just not by him.
“Nah,” he says. “I didn’t kill her or anything. I mean, I sorta did, but not the way you’re talking about.”
“Okay,” she says. “Then I guess I’ll come.”
He says, “Did you keep my address?”
She says, “I’m not sure,” and he does not for a moment believe her now, and feels better, better than he has any right to ever feel, with all he’s done. “Give it to me again just to be safe.”
“Bullshit,” he says. “You’ll find it.” And he hangs up.
MARY’S HEAD THROBS like a heart. Kenneth’s sheets feel vaguely wet, as though the humidity in this city never allows anything to truly dry. Her body hums with the exhaustion of a wounded athlete. There is energy under the fatigue, a current that jolts her muscles and renders sleep an impossibility. The night is still black, but a weak, murky black that hints at daylight.
She guesses it must be around 5 a.m., though Kenneth does not seem to have a clock in his apartment. His bed is just a mattress on the floor. Nothing in the whole place looks anything like what she has come to think of as “home.” His shower curtain is made up of laminated postcards from places he has been, pinned together with safety pins; the effect is stunning, like something they’d charge hundreds of dollars for in some chic boutique, yet the rest of the bathroom is unkempt, uncoordinated, even dirty. The walls of the apartment are covered, ceiling to table level, with photographs. All the photographs are black and white and are held on the walls with tape, unframed; she recognizes some from years ago, though none are of her. His kitchen is so small it could pass as a foyer. It appears to be used as storage for his photography equipment and musical instruments; a sax case sits propped up against the refrigerator as though it would never occur to him that he might need to access anything inside.
Signs of the dead Czech girlfriend are everywhere and nowhere in the apartment. Her clothing—small and black and often made of fabric that looks like netting—is littered on almost every conceivable surface. That shower curtain and the photographs and the saxophone, though, reveal nothing of the dead girlfriend. There is only one toothbrush on the bathroom sink, although Kenneth says the girlfriend took nothing with her before she died, so Mary is not sure what to make of that. Maybe they shared?
Next to her, Kenneth snores faintly and steadily. She remembers him, the still-young Yank, as a silent sleeper, quiet as the dead. Now, the middle-aged man who has just become her lover snores beside her into the night.
Mary is ravenous, but there is nothing in the refrigerator—she has already gotten up and moved the sax case to investigate. Literally nothing, save some film. He does not even own, as she would have expected, a bottle of alcohol. It seems preposterous. Why would anyone invite a woman to his apartment if he couldn’t even offer her a glass of wine, a shot of whiskey, a fucking cracker? Was it that certain, that preordained, that they would have sex?
Of course. Of course it was. She wanted him from the moment Sandor told her he was in the city. Even now, in the soreness and familiarity following their copulation, Mary feels a damp embarrassment under her arms at the memory: He did not recognize her! She tracked him all over the city, and he did not even know her! He would never have contacted her again but for the death of his lover, or nonlover, or whatever she was. Whoever she was, Mary has fucked Kenneth on the dead girl’s grave. For this, this grave fucking, she has betrayed Geoff. For this.
Treat me, she told him when he was tearing off her clothes, like something that couldn’t possibly break.
She is not a neophyte. She has been the other woman; she has been a wife. And yet. Through it all, the men in her life have felt distinctly separate from her: other. It was true from the first. She and Joshua were entirely different continents, their liaison a tiny island between two worlds, kept tenuously afloat through omissions and lies. With Eli, too, attraction was a carefully orchestrated dance in which deception played no small role, until she became merel
y a looking glass in which he could see his own fantasies shining back at him.
Now, with Geoff these past five years . . .
Until tonight, she has had no secrets from Geoff. He knows her; he even knew Nix. Still, her mind’s unlit, off-road paths, down which he cannot follow, seem to multiply by the day the closer she gets to the finish line. While he is the most intelligent and responsible man she has ever met—mature beyond his years, her mother says—there is a lightness to him as incompatible with her weight, with her darkness, as Joshua’s South Africanness was with her Americanness years ago.
Next to her lies a man whose life has been lived mainly in darkness. On the surface, he and Mary have nothing in common. Jesus, that’s an understatement. Nix was the one who liked the bad boys, but if Nix met this man, she would run. No, worse than that. She would turn her nose up and not even give him a second thought. The Man Formerly Known as Yank would be, in Nix’s or any reasonable girl’s estimation, a lowlife. The opposite of a good catch, naturally, but not even the kind of “walk on the wild side” that would appeal to most women like them. He is past his prime; he has no money. Unlike the bad boys of soap operas and prime time—glamorous mobsters or decadent playboys—he exists in a poverty-ridden underbelly of society: a subculture Mary would not even know existed had she not stumbled onto Arthog House.
He has called out her death as if it were nothing. He has bitten her mouth, grabbed her by the back of her hair, and when the coughing took over, he pinned her to the mattress while her body shook, shoving himself inside her and fucking her right through the spasms until she was thrashing like a fish, pushing at him in fury and confusion, and then, when her lungs stilled and she had grabbed his discarded shirt and covered her mouth with it, spit into it, immediately Kenneth’s mouth was on hers again, as though nothing had happened. Her face is scraped raw by his stubble. Oh God. Eli used to talk dirty to her, but it was never like this. Get down on your belly, he ordered, pulling out. I’m going to fuck your ass until you howl like a dog. His face was older, wilder than it’d been in the bar. For a moment she felt herself falling—Eli’s body pressed into her back their last night at Daniel’s house—and an old anger rose, stiffened her limbs. Kenneth kept looking at her straight-on; she felt her eyes widen like a startled bird’s. Then she remembered Sandor’s squeal like a pig, and for another moment she believed she would laugh, would explain it to Kenneth, and he would chuckle, too, so that the moment, the danger, would be shattered: they would be back on safer ground.
A Life in Men Page 31
