With Eli, that is what would have happened.
And with Geoff? With Geoff, nothing that had transpired in the past forty-eight hours would be even remotely within his frame of reference.
Treat me like something that couldn’t possibly break.
Kenneth jolts awake next to her, sitting upright like someone waking from a nightmare. His eyes are open, but he does not seem to see her. She is sitting up, too, too restless to lie down anymore. It takes a moment for his eyes to focus, to seem to take her in. The room is cold; Mary is shivering; even her breasts have goose bumps.
“I shouldn’t have done this,” she begins.
“Girl,” Kenneth says deadpan, “If you thought you shouldn’t’ve done it, you’d have put some clothes on for the conversation.”
In the half darkness, she feels herself blush.
“Come on,” Kenneth says, prodding her with his foot. “Stop looking at me like I want something from you. There’s nothing I want. I’m done with all that. Relax.”
“Done with all of what?” she asks.
He gestures at her. For a moment she doesn’t know what he means, but then she sees he is sort of pointing at her ring. “That,” he says. “Re-la-tion-ships. That ship, if you’ll pardon the pun, has sailed. I don’t mean because of Agnes. Way, way before her.”
He stands up. Naked, his gray hair long and mangy, he looks like a hungry animal. “So your brother lives in town,” he says, pulling on his jeans. “Say you come over and see him now and then.” He reaches to the floor and finds the belt he extracted the night before, and Mary’s legs feel hot. “I’ve run enough in my life. This is where I am now. You want to find me, I’ll be here. Or if not here, here,”—he gestures at the apartment—“then around.”
Four hours ago he pushed into her so hard the sheets sprang loose from the mattress. Electricity seemed to ride through her skin and shoot from her fingers and toes; she felt cracked open, obliterated, no room for the anger anymore. Afterward, he’d put a hand out to her and said, Look, I’m no expert on marriage, but you said you’ve been with your husband, what, five years? If he knows you, really gets you, there’s no way he’d be as shocked by what just happened here as you think. So probably you can let yourself off the hook. She knew he meant the words as comfort, but they chilled her. She couldn’t begin to guess whether Geoff did know her—her core and what she was capable of. It seemed a fifty-fifty crapshoot.
Abruptly she pulls the humid sheet up around herself and stands. “You always used to call Sandor a faggot,” she says. “Like it was an insult, like the problem was him and not you.”
Kenneth, though, doesn’t even look in her direction. He is heading for the kitchen. “You ain’t gonna believe this, but I’ve got coffee. Want some?”
She gets up and follows him, annoyed.
“You thought he stole your jazz tapes, but it was me—I took them. I don’t even remember why.” Mary is not sure what she’s waiting for. Anger? An apology? If anything, she feels buoyed by his flagrant lack of guilt. Where is she going with this?
He still doesn’t look her way, but says low, “You stole the tapes.” His exhalation comes out as a whistle. “Baby, you sure know how to make an old man’s day.”
Her eyes fill inexplicably. Some flood of trust welling up in her: unstoppable and potentially lethal. She does not know how to slow it, how to stick her finger in the leak. This man is like no one she has spoken to in a decade; he is like an alien. Yet she has never in her life slept with anyone who felt so much like kin.
Still, she repeats stubbornly, “You were always calling him a faggot.” Then finally: “What in God’s name am I doing here?”
Soon he will say, You and your buddy Sandor keep talking about Arthog House like it was some utopia on earth, but it was just another place I lived and not real long. The only thing worth remembering about that place was you, that day, those pictures. Be a real bad girl for me and maybe I’ll dig ’em up and show you next time. Soon she will vow that there won’t be a next time, and he will stride over and lay her out on the dirty kitchen floor, and she will think momentarily of the floor on which she lost her virginity; she will think of Leo and how in the span of one night she has come to understand everything he said to her about what it takes, sometimes, to hold a person in place. Then they will begin, and she will not think of Joshua or Eli or Leo, or even Geoff anymore.
But for now, Kenneth keeps digging in a kitchen cabinet. “Yep,” he says, voice muffled. “I always knew that boy was a faggot. Can I call it or what?”
“You are,” she tells him slowly, “the complete opposite of gezellig.” She thinks of a line from The Unbearable Lightness of Being and smiles. “In the world of gezellig, you would be a monster.”
Like a present, he turns around, holding up coffee in a dirty glass jar.
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
(GREECE: ZORG)
Here, then, is what Geoff will remember: The way sea foam clung to Mary’s skin as she emerged from the surf, her arm around Nix, whose pubic hair was covered in foam, too, so that she seemed a pornographic mermaid, and the way his dick got hard at the sight, and the shame of that, and how he jumped up to gather her clothing and hand it to her before Irv could see her nakedness, too, and only afterward realized he should have turned away, should not have touched her clothing or looked at her at all, though neither girl reprimanded him or really seemed to notice; he had become invisible. How he believed they had reached a clear “crisis point” at which it made obvious sense to leave Plati Yialos, to find a way back to town somehow, but instead as soon as Nix had her clothes on she headed straight to the lounge chair where Irv was still gawking in the distance, her eyes so big she reminded Geoff of a junkie or a prisoner, even though he had never met either a junkie or a prisoner, and leaned over and kissed Irv with a force that seemed to knock Irv onto his back. Later Irv would claim her skin trembled—really fucking vibrated—under his hands as though she were an overcharged electric blanket, as though she could send off sparks and shock him, and how that really got him going. Geoff stood at the surf watching them make out and he felt like he should wave some kind of flag and call a time-out, but nobody else seemed to be in the same place in which he’d found himself; they were all still playing a different game, Mary coming over and putting her wet hand on his arm. How he kissed her mainly to avoid looking at Irv and Nix, and though only a moment before he’d believed himself in love with her, at the touch of her cool, small tongue he felt little of anything. Then she pushed her breasts up against him, and he slid his hands up the back of his own sweatshirt to feel her prominent spine and the gooseflesh of her nipples still damp from the sea, and his body’s pendulum swung wildly again, so that he ground his groin up against her like an animal without conscience. How out of nowhere, like a sound track to his conflicted desire, these yowling cats materialized, running along the beach, and the sound of them was like someone being tortured, a pain so big it could drive the humanity from a person, though that made no sense because these weren’t people; they were just skinny, half-hairless cats, probably howling not with agony but because they were in heat, their feral bodies close to an explosion that had nothing to do with morality, just like Geoff’s. Still, at their approach Nix leaped up on her beach chair and screamed, short and loud, over and over again. Geoff heard the muffled, intermingled-with-the-waves sound of Irv trying to talk her down off the chair like it was a ledge, but she continued screaming with a pain so singular she drowned out the cats. And Mary saying, “She must think they have rabies. You don’t think they do have rabies, do you? You don’t think they’re going to attack us or something?” Geoff heard himself say no, then strode over to the chaise longes, past Irv’s pleading form, and picked Nix up and carried her in the opposite direction of the screeching cats. How he carried Nix’s body across the sand and felt for himself the vibrations of which Irv would later boast, as though they had anything to do with Irv at all, and how later, at Irv’s
bragging, Geoff would secretly resolve never to hang out with him again once they were back on American soil, and with a couple of exceptions like friends’ weddings and shit where they ran into each other accidentally, he kept to that resolve, though who knows why, Irv was a pretty good guy, and who knows where he is now? How three years later, when it came time to decide on a specialization in medical school, Geoff, to the shock of his mother and his stepfather the hotshot cardiologist, announced his intentions to focus on respiratory medicine, in particular cystic fibrosis, though he had always intended to be a heart surgeon, those glamorous cowboys of medicine. How he had no photos of Mary, but from the moment he dissected his first pair of lungs, he felt, under his hands, every individual knobby bone of her spine; he felt her hair pouring into his hands like his own private ocean; and he never, ever looked back.
HERE, THEN, IS what Mary will remember: That this was supposed to be the night she would lose her virginity. How a gorgeous Harvard grad fell straight into her lap, but even after they got back to their room in the middle of the night, and that poor guy Irv was lurking around confused and demoralized in the shadows because Nix had pulled the blanket up over her head in her twin bed, when Mary whispered to Geoff, “We could go somewhere, the two of us. We could find someplace quiet—” he cut her off, said, “I don’t think you should leave your friend,” and the shock of the rejection almost knocked her down. Her cheeks burned; she was thankful for the dim room, and although her overwhelming desire was for Geoff not to witness her embarrassment, some base impulse in her could not take no for an answer, could not believe that the way he’d tenderly held her hand in the flatbed of the truck or taken off his sweatshirt when she was cold meant nothing but politeness. Could not believe she would so misread the signs on which the adult world hinged. She tilted her head toward the door and quipped, “Well, thanks for saving our asses. Have a nice life,” and the way Geoff’s face fell surprised her yet again, as though he had expected something else entirely—as though it really mattered to him. How she found herself saying, “It’s okay, I have cystic fibrosis anyway,” as though to console him, as though it were a social disease he was fortunate not to have the opportunity to catch. She closed the door in his face, regretting the loss of him even before the lock clicked. But within only a minute, Geoff and Irv were back, rapping at the door, and when Mary answered, Geoff said, “They’re right around the corner—Zorg and Titus and those two other guys! I don’t think they saw us, but they’re standing outside some door, all four of them. They must be waiting for another friend, and then planning to come here! We’ve got to get you out of here before they show up!” Later, Mary will not remember the way her heart began to race, only that it was Nix who sat up quietly, static from her blanket causing strands of her hair to stand on end, and said in a weary voice, “That was our room last night, when they walked us home. We changed rooms this morning because that one flooded. They have no idea where we are now. They’ll probably wait there all night.” And so Mary will remember Geoff and Irv standing guard at the door, listening, as Nix retreated again under the gray blanket and made not a sound until dawn. Sometime past 4 a.m., when Irv had fallen asleep sitting up, Geoff got in Mary’s twin bed alongside her, and though it’d been hours since Nix had even twitched, and Irv was snoring, still Geoff did nothing but kiss her, never trying to go further, though she gave him every silent hint of her willingness. The first ferry to Ios was at 6 a.m., and they intended to be on it, creeping in the opposite direction of Zorg and Titus’s vigil, leaving money on Mary’s bed and not even telling the proprietress they were leaving, grateful she had not held on to their passports as some of the less haphazard room renters did. Later, even when it becomes imperative that she remember everything, Mary will never fully recall Geoff’s lips, chapped from the wind and the long night, or the way his breath felt warm and smelled human but not sour, or even his face: too classically handsome for her taste, and yet there was something solid and kind about him that transcended his handsomeness. For years afterward, she will know only that the Harvard sweatshirt is dear to her, if not solely because of the man to whom it once belonged.
HERE, THEN, IS what Nix will remember: The way the flatbed of the truck they hailed going back to town bounced violently on the bumpy road, sending shocks of pain between her legs as she sat on the straw-strewn metal of the truck’s cab with Mary and the two Harvard men. The way it made her bark a laugh thinking what her mother would say if she could see her hitchhiking on a deserted road past midnight with two strangers in Greece, and how eerily unafraid she actually felt—how nothing seemed dangerous anymore. The way Mary’s hand kept reaching out to touch her, and how hard it was to care that shrugging it off was hurtful, but something in Mary’s touch stung, and the two Harvard men felt safer. How the bland, yielding lips of the boy she’d kissed on the lounge chair had seemed almost inanimate, though not comforting, and that sexy British men did not hold the promise they had less than twenty-four hours ago, and suddenly Nix was not sure why she was going to London at all, but the thought that she had been doing so primarily to sleep with accented hotties incensed her, made her wonder who she was and what she was doing on this earth. That when the door to Titus’s bedroom first reopened as she sat primly on his bed, wondering whether it was even necessary to sleep with him to seal the deal, or if a few kisses and gropes had proved sufficient for her plan’s execution, she genuinely believed for a moment that the tall frame of Zorg in the doorway was a mistake—that Zorg had gone into the wrong door looking for the bathroom or something. Then she saw Titus coming in behind him, and all at once, she knew. How in the seconds it took them to approach the bed, speaking Greek to each other as they would throughout, she had to choose: to scream and fight and hurtle down a road of explicit struggle and escalating tempers that could end with her and Mary buried under the house, or to grit her teeth when they approached in tandem, one pulling her shirt over her head as the other tugged her shorts down. How she was not certain Zorg would murder them if she resisted, but she was sure it was not impossible, since men’s killing was a fact of life, just like girls’ sometimes opening their legs to a man who might be a killer, in order to get out alive. How she believed, in that brief instant before things really began, that if she could do this for Mary, it would make everything all right about Bobby Kenner, that they would be even—and then, in the brutal hours that followed, the way that neat little story she had told herself shattered and shattered and shattered again. Until part of her hated Mary, sick Mary who had to be protected at all costs, whom she was protecting still with her silence, as though admitting what she had done on Mary’s behalf would endanger Mary, napping in the spare room, her stupid precious virginity intact. All that, Nix would remember, plus the cats, wailing like refugees from an underworld, straggly and sick and mad as demons, and how the sound played something inside her gut like the strings of a cello, humming, bringing up her own screams like her body was a helpless instrument.
AND THIS: THAT the world was full of airplanes, and I could get on one and go home, to safety and refuge and boredom—that no one was making me go through with anything. Yet knowing I would not, that something more powerful than the sound of the cats, or the feel of Zorg’s knees grinding into the backs of my calves, drove me on, not only to London but beyond—that I would keep going, that already I was past the point of return to Ohio. That even then, I did not wish to change places with Mary, my best friend, whom I loved and wanted with an urgent totality never to see again. Mary, who was trapped.
The Moroccan Book of the Dead
(MOROCCO: KENNETH)
The body is a tidal flat. Wave after wave washes—or pounds—across. You stay open to the world as long as you can. Then blood draws the line.
—MARK CUNNINGHAM, “Blood”
She calls from Gibraltar. It takes three tries before he answers his cell. She tells him, “I don’t want to land in Tangier alone. Come down and take the ferry with me.”
He says, “
I can’t just take off work like that.”
“No,” she says. “I mean quit work. I don’t know when we’re coming back.”
“Well,” he says. “Now you’re talking.”
She exhales hard. “Two rules. First, no drugs.”
“Jesus,” he says, “when’re you gonna stop that? I’ve been clean three years.”
“Let me clarify something to you. Not being a sniveling junkie isn’t the same thing as being clean. I don’t just mean no heroin, I mean nothing, don’t bring anything with you, and if you get something here, you do it when I’m not with you, and don’t bring it back around me. You might think acting out Midnight Express would be some big adventure, but a Moroccan prison would kill me. Do you understand?”
“Fine,” he says amicably. “Shit’s cheap there. Disposable drugs. Done.”
“Two,” she continues. “No sex. Wait, I don’t mean no sex exactly. I mean no sex with me.”
It is his turn to sigh. “Get real, girl. You’re inviting me to give up my cushy life for the third world, and I’ve gotta be some poster boy for clean and sober living in the deal . . . all for the promise of, what, your legs glued together? Some incentive.”
“I’m inviting you,” she says, “for the company. Something I think we both could use. I’m inviting you.” She stops. “It’s been a long time since I traveled with a friend.”
A Life in Men Page 32
