A Life in Men

by Gina Frangello

  Under the worn-thin bedspread, she barely stirs. She sleeps like an infant, scary deep. Maybe he’ll walk up the hill today. She can hang at the bar downstairs and read—she picked up a copy of On the Road from the hotel lobby, where someone else had left it—and he’ll go on his own. Even though he did more sightseeing yesterday than in his entire life, he’s having a hard time sitting still. He got some great shots at the Caves of Hercules. The silhouette of the caves looked like the bust of an old hag, mouth agape to cackle, dark and crazy water looming beyond. And they trolled the Kasbah, walking under all those Moorish archways, photographing a bright green Matisse door with Cystic standing in front of it, looking skinny and hollowed out. In the past she used to look healthy, almost objectionably so, like some cheerleader or TV sitcom wife. Now there’s a sharpness to her that makes her look like a bird of prey. Under her gauzy shirts her elbows are bigger than the tops of her arms. Eating tires her out. She looks like a breeze could knock her down. Pared down, like everything else here. Like something elemental and pure. Like his hands could snap her bones.

  At the medina, she bought gifts. A hookah, of all things, for a fellow teacher in that small New England town. A hanging drum with a hennaed hand decorating one side of the sheer skin—this she said she’d keep herself. Some bowls with that blue mosaic design for her just-widowed mother. She likes to barter. A couple of times he had to get involved when someone wanted to speak French, but for the most part the merchants are fluent in English just like the young Dutch. She’s asked him twice how he knows French and he just said he used to live in Louisiana and left it at that, though he didn’t know any real Creoles there and never heard French there except in the jazz bars.

  He hasn’t bought anything except more film. Well, and a hooker.

  At night they’ve been sleeping in side-by-side twin beds like he and Will used to when they were boys. She goes to the toilet down the hall to change, as though he hasn’t seen every inch of her from the inside out, each of the three times she’s come to A’dam. The first night at the Hotel Muniria he lay awake, having consumed not nearly enough booze to put him out, wishing for some hash at least to help him unwind, thinking about crawling into her bed. He imagined just getting on top of her and pinning her down, letting her wake to his dick pushing its way in. He was about 50 percent sure this was what she expected. There was only one room left at the hotel, a double, and she consented to it saying they could find another place with two rooms in the morning, but then they went sightseeing and gift buying and mint tea drinking and no new hotel was procured. The second night she must’ve wanted him to push things, to just not take no for an answer. She was pulling that girl shit where it would all be his idea, his fault, like he’d forced her. They’re both too damn old for that game, so when she came back to the room in her sweatpants and T-shirt ready for bed, he just stood and said, “I’m going out.”

  He expected her to grill him at the very least, but she said, “Good. You should.”

  He has hash now from the taxi driver. Soon she will get on the train to Casablanca and head to meet her brother and he will be done with her. Game-playing, cock-teasing bitch.

  At the Caves of Hercules she said, “If I were here with Geoff I’d take off all my clothes and make him take my picture. He used to love it when I did things like that. Now I think it just makes him uncomfortable.”

  “It won’t make me uncomfortable,” he said, laughing. “Here’s the camera.”

  But she stayed dressed.

  He imagines the way her rib cage would protrude, the shading underneath it like the shadows the rock formations cast on the water. He can’t decide if she would look more close to death naked, or less so. Her clothes, exactly the kind of gauzy, concealing cotton shit a good American girl would wear in an Arab country, give her the airy appearance of a ghost. He’d like to see the shock of her pubic hair, darker than what’s on her head, against her wan skin. He’d like to hear her scream with an energy that shows she’s still kicking. He’d like to smell her up close instead of the perfume she dots onto her wrists and throat, which could be the bouquets around a coffin. When he puts her on the bus, it’s the last he’ll see of her. There won’t be any more trips overseas, she’s said. She won’t show up again at Mulligan’s (where he might still be able to get his job back—or maybe he’ll just stay on in Tangier). She will disappear into the void with Will and Hillary and his mother and his bastard father and his now-grown son, with Shane and Agnes and the legions of others just like them, some of whom he can almost taste like it was yesterday, and some whose faces he can’t even conjure anymore.

  He spoke to his whore in French. He wore a condom. Afterward they smoked hashish together and it was fine. The whore had a pockmarked face but he didn’t mind. Her tits were big, and he liked to sample the local flavor. There were plenty of North African whores in Amsterdam, but he’d never gone to one. Will had come home from Nam with a taste for prostitutes—back in Atlanta, they became goddamn connoisseurs. It was good to screw the Tangier whore; it gave him a sense of nostalgia and new beginnings at once. Better than to fuck a pale skeleton of a woman, a woman who didn’t want him. Not that the whore wanted him exactly, but she wanted his money and he was glad to pay and everybody was happy in a simple way that made the world go round. Nothing new in that game, nothing personal. Sometimes Will used to rough up the whores, but Kenneth never did. Later, of course, there were girls who’d paid their debts to him on their backs, junkie girls who had only one thing with which to barter. Yes, it’s better for her to take her gauzy clothes, her clean hair and flowery perfume and wedding band, and get on the train.

  He stands up, goes over to her bed, low to the ground and rickety like all beds in these kinds of places, like every bed he’s slept in for twenty years. The fact that she is comfortable enough around him to lie there sleeping in the bright sunlight irks him. He didn’t ask for this intimacy. He didn’t ask for this comfort.

  He prods her with his foot. She sits up with a sharp gasp like someone choking. She’s sweaty from the stale heat, but her lips, without the gloss she usually wears, seem a little blue.

  “What’s going on?” she asks. “You’re dressed. Have you already been out?”

  “I just got home,” he says. “About an hour ago.”

  He catches that he has said “home” and wants to amend it, but that would just draw more attention to the mistake. This isn’t home. There is no home.

  “Are you hungry?” she says

  “No. Let’s get out of the city.” Suddenly he doesn’t want her here anymore. He doesn’t want to spend the rest of his time in Tangier, after she leaves, bumping into her ghost. “Let’s go see something on the coast.”

  Her face lights up like a little girl’s, suddenly beautiful. He can’t look at it. He fusses in his bag.

  “Awesome!” He remembers sometimes hearing her use that expression with Joshua when she first moved into Arthog House, and the way he’d cringe—how easily dismissal came then. He motions at the door with his chin.

  “There’s a beach town an hour away, Asilah. We’ll check it out. Get dressed.” It’s only once she has left for the toilet that he can breathe normally again.

  From: mrgrace@yahoo.com

  Subject: You would love this place

  Date: August 20, 2001

  To: geoffreyjs@hitchcock.org

  Hey babe.

  I’m in Asilah at an Internet café. This town is so spectacular. Everything’s awash in white, almost like Mykonos, with the blue ocean, the blue sky, blue tiles everywhere, as though the entire world is white and blue. There are funky murals on the walls and a summer jazz fest that apparently attracts people from all over Europe. You would love this place. It’s nothing like Tangier, which I loved, too, but you would hate. Here, cute little kids run around at the beach with their huge, dark eyes and skinny legs—they look innocent but try to get you to give them coins to take their photographs, ha. In the town there are still places where you c
an go watch old men baking bread for the villagers in a giant brick oven. There are camels everywhere, walking on the beach, dozing at entrances of buildings. The Berber women don’t like having their photographs taken (even for coins); they think, we’ve been told, that the camera will steal their souls. But I can’t resist zoom-lensing to try to catch them, they’re so mysterious and beautiful. Geoff, I just want to eat this place whole. The air is so much cleaner than in Tangier—everything smells like flowers and the sea and the leather of the marketplace, the mint of the tea. I know it isn’t true, but it feels impossible to be ill in a place like this. My energy is higher than in Tangier. There are things I love that are no good for me now, and it breaks my heart but I know I have to accept it. Everything that Tangier is falls into that category now.

  You asked when I’m coming home. A fair question and I wish I could answer fairly but I don’t know. A month, I think? We’re making our way down the coast, Casablanca after this and then farther south to a hippie beach town called Essaouira, and finally inland to Marrakech and the High Atlas. Don’t worry, I won’t hike (as if I could). I’ll stay at some little hammam or something and wait for Leo and Sandor to come back for me. We want to make a trip into the desert and camp (don’t worry, I’ve got salt tablets, I’ll stay hydrated), and after that we’ll head back to Spain by way of Fez, where the medina is supposed to be like going back in time. ALL of Morocco feels that way so far to me. I wish it were still possible to say that we’ll come back here together someday, but I know that isn’t going to happen now, so I can only ask you one more time to be patient.

  Me

  KENNETH LOOKS CLEAN for the first time she has ever witnessed. On the endless stretch of sand, he wears a linen shirt in a color she has come to think of as Moroccan blue and a pair of lightweight trousers. He completely surprised her this morning by going into a store in Asilah—not a tourist shop but an ordinary clothing store where the few other customers were Arab men—and speaking to the shopkeeper in a French already less halting than it was on their arrival five days ago. He carried his small parcel back to their noisy little hotel on the beach, where he took a shower and changed into his new outfit, combing out his long hair. For a moment she thought he would produce a razor and shave his beard, but perhaps he doesn’t own one, because the beard remains intact.

  Mary did not know what to make of this transformation, but she took the opportunity of his cleanliness to suggest that they go and see the nearby resort their driver told them about, Le Mirage. She wanted to see it yesterday but was embarrassed to bring Kenneth along: a fact that shamed and annoyed her at once. It is not in her guidebook, but no taxi driver or guide has failed to offer to take them. And so, Kenneth sparkling clean and looking more like a shaggy Hollywood producer than his usual cross between an old Deadhead and a too-skinny biker, they arrived by taxi with all their luggage. The plan was to stay for lunch and then head back to Tangier in time to have a drink at the Tanger Inn.

  Instead, Mary took one look at Le Mirage and announced that they would stay the night. The simplest suite was two hundred dollars. Before Kenneth could even weigh in, she plunked down her credit card.

  A boy helped them carry their luggage out of the lobby into the open air, the panorama of sea stretched out below their hilltop. He led them to one of the individual villas, each with its own sitting room and private patio with lounge chairs. Mary immediately imagined herself and Geoff lying on the chairs in their bathing suits, Geoff’s skin growing dark as an Arab’s. She doubted Kenneth had owned swim trunks since boyhood. Years of drugs and nocturnal habits have left him looking like he might be allergic to the sun. When she imagined him lying on a lounge chair, she saw him still in the cowboy boots he wore in London and Amsterdam. She wasn’t sure why she even wanted to stay at a place that so clearly didn’t suit her traveling companion. No doubt Kenneth would think her materialistic, a typical American, always looking for luxury over authenticity. Well, fuck him. He could endure one night.

  She tipped the boy before Kenneth could. She knew she was emasculating him and didn’t care. Perhaps he didn’t even know about tipping at hotels. Who could say what ordinary customs he might not be privy to?

  Kenneth said noncommittally, “I’m gonna go down and see the beach.”

  She followed . . .

  Now, splashes of purple and pink flowers burst everywhere. Mary catches a glimpse of giant sunflowers set back from the water, taller than she is, moving gently in the wind. Sand and rockless sea stretch as far as her eyes can discern. Though there have to be other guests at the hotel, the beach is completely deserted, as is the terrace of the small restaurant looming above. It reminds her of the place where she and Nix lunched with Zorg and Titus, the way it overlooks the beach below, the perfect isolation. She imagines herself here with Nix, the two of them in their shorts and flip-flops hounding the woman at the front desk to arrange an in-room massage, maybe nude sunbathing at the foot of the sunflowers. She envisions Nix’s silver toe ring, crusted with sand.

  But no. She is here with Yank, of all people!

  Self-destructive, Geoff maintained on their way to Logan Airport. I can’t support this, I can’t assist you in your suicidal mission. And she put her head on her knees in the car and muttered, Why do you have to be so dramatic? Why are you trying to take all the joy out of this for me?

  Kenneth has rolled up his trouser legs and taken off his sandals, water spilling over his ankles. In three years, he will be fifty. Fifty: for Mary an inconceivable age. One more serious infection and her lung function could plummet to 30 percent almost overnight, heralding the end stage of her disease, of her life. It is more a question of whether she will ever return to work; whether she will celebrate her thirty-fifth birthday in two years. No, fifty is not even a pipe dream. After all he’s done to himself, all his years of self-abuse, Kenneth is walking in territory she will never chart.

  She reaches his side and he looks down at her, face grave. He is going to reprimand her for bringing him here, for paying, for tipping that luggage boy. He is going to say he’s calling a taxi, waiting for it outside the gates of the resort with his dusty rucksack alongside all the sleeping camels, heading back to Tangier, leaving her here.

  “I’ve never been anyplace like this in my whole damn life. Thanks.”

  She almost jumps. “You like it here?”

  He looks surprised. “You see something not to like?”

  She stares at the water. There have been times she has felt almost symbiotic with this man—sometimes when they’re talking, usually when he’s fucking her. But now he seems an utter mystery.

  “Mary,” he says. He never, ever calls her that. “Honestly, girl. This has been fun, it’s been . . .” He hesitates, smiles. “It’s been goddamn awesome. But tomorrow, you’re gonna get on that four o’clock train to meet your brother. That’s what you told your man you were doing, and that’s what you should do. I’ll go with you to the station, but once Sandor and Leo come on the scene, you don’t need me. This is as far as I go.”

  She doesn’t say anything. It is only two o’clock; there will be hours of sun left before they go to dinner. It still seems, here, impossible that Tangier even exists, that tomorrow will ever come.

  “If I sleep with you”—she lifts her chin to him—“will you change your mind?”

  He takes one step closer, his hand moving slightly as though to touch her, and she doesn’t know what kind of touch it will be. Sometimes he can be tender, almost sweet, and she can glimpse the southern boy he once was, a college student who wanted to study art but whose father insisted on something “practical” that would help him go into the family business—that boy who was obsessed with D. H. Lawrence and played the piano and married his high school sweetheart. Other times . . .

  His hand, though, falls to his side. “No,” he says. “It won’t.”

  But he’s lying.

  THEY DINE ON the terrace, against a sunset backdrop unlike anything Kenneth has ever seen eve
n in the Caribbean: a giant ball of molten lava, red as a blood orange trickling toward the horizon. He snaps some shots, though sunsets rarely come out right, and he and Cystic watch it fall, taking their drinks to the edge of the wall as if to get as close as possible.

  On the way back to their villa, Cystic carries her sandals in her hand, walking barefoot. The effect is sexy as hell until she steps on a sharp rock and cries out, hopping around on her one good foot while blood drizzles onto the ground. The restaurant is higher up the hill than their room, so Kenneth scoops her up and carries her, though at first she protests. She is a woman, he has noticed, who requires a lot of maintenance but always chafes at its offer, as opposed to the kind of girls he grew up around: girls who expected bucketfuls of chivalry even though they could run the world. She’s alarmingly light now, must be under a hundred pounds. He’s used to skinny girls, to how they waste away from within; he’s seen that plenty. Still, he holds her carefully, afraid that if he trips and falls, the weight of his own body will crush her.

  In their fancy bathroom with the ornate tiled sink and big tub, she sits on the edge of the toilet washing her foot. The gash is impressive. They have no Band-Aids, but she says the concierge will procure one for them; it’s always that way at hotels like this. Still, she doesn’t call. She sits with a washcloth on her foot turning red fast. Kenneth feels stupid hovering over some little flesh wound; he starts to leave the bathroom, go put some music on the stereo (he’s never been in a hotel with its own stereo system before), but she calls out, “Hey. Do you want to take a bath?”

  He runs the water. This is something he hasn’t done since Hillary, taking a bath with a woman. It has to be like riding a bike—it has to be like using a needle: you never forget how. They did this on their wedding night, and afterward whenever Hillary wanted to reach out to him, she’d run a bath. By the end, though, their tub was full of baby toys, crowded and usually with a ring of dried bubble bath around the edges, because Hillary didn’t always scrub it out when she was done bathing the baby. By the end, Kenneth showered fast in the mornings and didn’t get home until after the boy was already in bed, so he missed those times when his son splashed in the bubbles and Hillary carried him, dripping and pink, in a towel to the nursery. On the morning Kenneth left, he didn’t shower at all. He didn’t want to look at anything of the boy’s, didn’t want to step over any of his shit. He just got up and threw on his jeans and left.