A Life in Men

by Gina Frangello

  “Well done, man,” Kenneth says. “You’re going to be sharing digs with Guernica. Shit.” But his eyes are already on the gate, ready to move on.

  From: mrgrace@yahoo.com

  Subject: Marrakech

  Date: August 28, 2001

  To: >geoffreyjs@hitchcock.org

  We got some unbelievable news today. Leo’s going to have a painting in an exhibition at the Reina Sofia in Madrid! He insisted on staying here for my birthday, though, so he doesn’t leave until the 31st. We want to do a small hike to celebrate (I promise: small!) before heading into the desert.

  So for now we’re here only for a night. Leo and Sandor have sprung for the most expensive hotel in town, La Mamounia, where apparently the Clintons and Winston Churchill have stayed. Out in the gardens there’s an entire wall of purple flowers so dense that you can’t see a speck of rock, and the bathrooms are so colorful and ornate that they look like enlarged versions of the intricate boxes sold in the medinas. It’s kind of a freaky combo of art deco and Moorish, not very “authentic.” But wow, it sure is a relief to be somewhere cosmopolitan enough that the concierge acted like storing my DNase in a fridge was no big deal, instead of acting like I was a drug smuggler, and to walk into the room to find a bottle of clean water I could use for my neti pot. I don’t have to pull out the hand sanitizer in this place, it’s cleaner than a hospital.

  We even have a phone in our room! If you want to call, this would be the time. Geoff, I thought I’d celebrate every birthday with you for the rest of my life. I’m having an amazing time. But I never wanted it to come to this.

  Love, me (still 32 for 2 more days . . . )

  FUCK TANGIER. MARRAKECH is the place. Kenneth sits on the terrace of Café Argana overlooking the Jemaa el-Fna, waiting for Cystic and the other two. She’s been in the business center at their palatial hotel, no doubt sending e-mails to her husband, and while the other two wanted to eat at the hotel restaurant, where you sit on pillows and watch a belly dancer (Christ!), at least Cystic backed him up and insisted on hitting Jemaa el-Fna. They agreed to meet at the conspicuous restaurant overhanging the square, and Kenneth left La Mamounia right away, the ostentatious bustle of the place making him cagey in a way Le Mirage, with its vast emptiness, hadn’t. He thought an hour alone would clear his head, but his head is already too clear, clear to the point of stupidity—he’s too sober to boot. Nothing he’s thought in the past week feels even remotely sane.

  He said that thing to Cystic about his son, about finding him. It hangs now, heavy as a rope.

  What he should do, he knows, is wait till it’s time for them to meet him, and while they’re out, sneak back to La Mamounia, use his room key and retrieve his rucksack and disappear into the medina and never see any of them again. He knew it even before he headed down to Spain; he knew it in Tangier; he knew it at Le Mirage. Why, then, won’t he leave?

  The view is good at this tourist-trap restaurant, but still. He’d rather be down on the street where the action is. Down there is a bedlam that makes his skin buzz. Unlike in Tangier, where it was every man for himself, this place has a community vibe that intrigues him, draws him in. You could live in this square and want for nothing, never leave; it’s like a walled city of old. Earlier today it felt like a movable circus, bursting with bare-chested acrobats with chestnut skin, casually defying gravity, while nearby, snakes slithered to the sound of music played by bored, fat men. Women wore shorts or burkas or anything in between, and through some of the veils you could see the shadow of a feminine jaw and it was sad and erotic at once. But just when you think you have the frenzy of Jemaa el-Fna figured out it shape-shifts after dark, so that the bright stalls of fat, fire-bright oranges and embroidered fez hats are gone. By night, the square has transformed into one cohesive, makeshift restaurant, full of the smells of human consumption. Beneath the giant cloud of barbecue smoke, the noise of the crowd rumbles with a sense of danger even more seductive than its daylight incarnation.

  He thinks about blowing off Café Argana altogether, but Cystic can’t eat street food. She has to be careful what she touches, what she lets inside. Some kind of bug that’s nothing to him could wipe her out. Jemaa el-Fna is a virtual cesspool of germs, like those buses they’ve taken, like every square inch of Tangier, like all the toilets she’s squatted over since they’ve been here, just holes in the ground, sometimes with nothing but a trickle of water running from some rock in the wall, or a dirty bucket next to your feet, which you’re supposed to slosh on yourself with your left hand, as if using only one particular hand will make the slop inside clean. Her husband was right: she has no business here. A well of anger surges up his throat. Any real man would’ve smacked her face, taken the credit card away, told her to sit the hell down, that she wasn’t going anywhere. Simple.

  Except of course it’s not that simple. Except that, of course, Cystic would never marry a man like that, and so her Good Man, her liberated Twenty-First Century Man, let her go traipsing around the third world with the likes of him.

  Here they come now. The Flying Dutchfag, the Rising Artist, and the Fatally Ill Damsel. Walking across the square below him, they look like characters in a film: all shiny and clean, their cotton clothes billowing. They look young, even Leo, who’s not that much younger than he is. They look too young to be anything he should touch, though he’s touched a lot younger. He can hear their laughter all the way up here, and for a moment, panic rises in him: he was supposed to flee but he didn’t. Abruptly he thinks of how easy it must be to score in this wild place, how it was a mistake to leave heroin behind, it left too many spaces inside him in its wake, and try though he has to leave those spaces in peace, they’re still hungry and squirming and looking for something to fill them, and how stupid he is to think that it might be her. Under the table his legs twitch. He has his camera, and if he misses the H so much, it wouldn’t be hard to find. He has his camera and his money, what’s left of it, so who gives a shit about the rucksack? He wouldn’t even need to go back to La Mamounia, to the room they’re supposed to share because neither of them had the balls to require Leo to plunk down an extra four hundred bucks. Those boys must assume they’re fucking anyway. Why else would he be here?

  Run, you stupid fucker. Run.

  They have reached the table. There is another man with them—barely more than a boy really, maybe his early twenties. Kenneth noticed the boy walking close to them in the square but thought nothing of it, since the square is teeming with people. Now he gawks as though maybe Cystic and the other two don’t realize the boy is there—as though maybe he is stalking them without their awareness. Cystic, though, puts her hand on the boy’s arm and says, “Kenneth, this is Tommy from La Mamounia. He has the next few days off at the hotel, so we snagged him to be our guide to the Atlas Mountains—he has friends there.”

  Leo and Sandor grin broadly. The boy is good-looking in that Arab way, and they must be enjoying the eye candy.

  They all sit. It is a table for four, so an extra chair has to be procured.

  “Tommy,” Kenneth says slowly. “What kind of name is that for a Moroccan?”

  “Oh,” the kid says, “my real name is Khalid. Tommy is my name for La Mamounia.” He speaks with less of an accent than Sandor. It’s unnerving.

  Kenneth snorts a little. “So Tommy is your alias?” Now the kid appears confused. “You know,” he clarifies, “your alter ego, your code name, like that. The name you give fat Americans ’cause they’re too stupid to pronounce Khalid.”

  “Khalid isn’t hard to pronounce,” the kid says agreeably, “but sometimes the guests at La Mamounia have a hard time remembering it, so Tommy is my nickname.”

  “Why Tommy, though?” Kenneth persists. He feels antagonistic, though he knows there is no reason. If the others wouldn’t find out, he would kick the kid’s ass just for fun. “It doesn’t even start with the same letter as your real name.”

  Cystic shoots him a dirty look. Yes, there are moments when this is who
she is: a polite girl from the heartland suburbs, the kind who—if she weren’t damaged goods—would have grown up to be somebody’s mother, saying shit like, Is that how I taught you to speak to our guests? Christ. This ordinary suburban girl is what all his internal chaos is about? This thirtysomething doctor’s wife putting her hand on the Arab kid’s arm maternally as if to deflect Kenneth’s impropriety?

  But what she says is, “Don’t worry, we all have aliases around here, so you’ll fit right in.” And just like that, the mother has vanished and she is something else again.

  “Okay then, Alias,” Kenneth says, gesturing at his menu. “So have you eaten at this place? What’s good?”

  The kid shrugs, not deferentially but boldly now. “I’ve eaten here, yes, but nothing is good. There are other places—I’ll take you if you like.”

  In one synchronized movement, they all stand.

  ANOTHER UNRESOLVED MORNING. Under a merciless blue sky, the sun shining lustrous on their shoulders, the four of them plus the Arab kid head for the Kik Plateau. Alias’s friend’s village isn’t accessible by car, so they’ve got to hoof it. Leo keeps asking Cystic if she remembered her salt pills, until she thrusts a skinny arm out at him and snaps, “Here, lick me if you don’t believe it!” Kenneth can taste her from memory. Finally, he stops on the hot dirt road and strips his jeans off, hacking at the legs with his knife to make shorts. Everyone laughs; for a minute he’s all right with being here; for a minute he can make it through this day. What passes for trees are tiny and pushed back so far from the road—amid fields of wheat and wildflowers—that they offer no shade. “The sweltering sky,” he jokes. Ha fucking ha.

  They arrive to find Alias’s friend gone, no one but the boy’s mother, Nawar, at home. They’ve come unannounced, but now that they’re here, it’s clear there probably isn’t one phone in the whole village. They stand in the blinding sunlight, water bottles depleted and the midday temperature climbing past one hundred degrees. Silently, the small Berber woman moves from the doorway to usher them in, and so they step, sweaty and blinking in the sudden darkness, into another world.

  Nawar guides them up a wooden ladder to the second floor of the house, the one designated for human residents rather than the sheep that dwell on the ground floor. Each story comprises one room, equally unfurnished but for the straw sleep mats. Almost instantly, their hostess retreats outside to prepare tea, leaving them alone, sitting on the wooden slats of the floor. Her kitchen isn’t part of the house, and the one window faces in the wrong direction to allow them to see her outdoors, cooking.

  Alias lounges easily on a straw mat smoking a cigarette and dropping the ashes into the cup Nawar supplied. Kenneth first launched into French when he greeted Nawar, thinking she would understand, but it turns out she speaks only Arabic. There’s no school in this village, Alias explains, and even if there were, she would not have gone forty years ago, being a girl. Once she comes back inside bearing her teapot, Alias begins translating whatever is said—in English, in French—into Arabic for her, and then translating her Arabic back only once, into English. Kenneth has noticed that though the kid is what people call “fluent” in English, when he speaks French his words flow faster, with more quirk, more personality. Now when he makes conversation of his own, he’s been lapsing automatically into French, directing his words at Kenneth as though the others are not there, and the cacophony of overlapping languages feels like a jam session back at the De Engelbewaarder: wild, messy, beautiful.

  Since Alias is smoking, Leo and Sandor light up, too, and Cystic says she’ll go outside. Kenneth stands and says, “I’ll go with you,” even though he too wants a smoke. His head brushes the ceiling. They descend the ladder to the first floor of the house and weave their way through the sheep until they reach the door. There are two doors actually: one leading toward the outdoor kitchen and the other to the front of the house, which faces the road, eclipsed by the village now. Kenneth maneuvers to the front door, where a handful of village children cluster and stare. Finally outdoors, he lights a cigarette, the still, hot air dispersing the smoke only marginally better than the trapped air inside the house.

  Mary says, “I counted the sheep. There are nine.”

  Kenneth mutters, “Bet you anything there’s more out in the fields just ain’t come home for supper yet.”

  Low and furtive, they laugh.

  “This is magnificent,” Mary says.

  “Sure,” Kenneth agrees. “Long as you don’t have to live here.” But his body has lost its languid laziness, all its “I don’t give a shit” bravado. He’s tuned to attention, to a fine pitch, and it shows and he knows it. He has seen nothing like this in all his forty-seven years. He has seen a lot, but it has mostly been a lot of the same. This is something else entirely, wholly off the radar of his life. It is perhaps the first thing he has ever experienced that being stoned would in no way improve.

  He will not realize until later that they spent four hours at the house and it never once occurred to him to take a picture.

  Mary says quietly, as though the village children may overhear, “If you go back to Georgia, then maybe this isn’t the last time we’ll see each other. There isn’t any law against being friends with someone you’ve slept with before. Georgia isn’t that far from New Hampshire, so who knows?”

  In an instant the world he has been drinking in seems to disappear. Her words and their mixture of condescension and promise obliterate everything else. Last night, they slept in the same bed together again. Nothing happened. Nothing but their bodies commingling in sleep and desire, her voice against his skin in the dark. Nothing.

  “You can’t get me to see my son by dangling yourself like a carrot.” And he hates her for the way she just made the landscape narrow, for the way he held on to her last night, no longer even questioning her terms. The hating feels good, feels better. “Don’t try to save me and I won’t try to save you, and we’ll keep getting along fine.”

  “I wasn’t trying to—” She looks shocked. “That isn’t what I meant! I just know we’ve both been . . . I’ve been sad about never seeing you again, and I can tell you’re sad, too, no matter what you say. I was just trying to talk to you like a human being.”

  “There’s your first mistake.”

  She takes the cigarette out of his hand. “You’re not human, huh? Why didn’t you smoke this upstairs, then? Why don’t you blow smoke in my face like my sweet brother does? Who’s trying to save who, Mr. Bad Man?”

  He grabs her wrist, so quickly the cigarette flies out of her fingers and sails in an arc, landing still lit on the ground a few feet away. One of the little boys scurries to pick it up and the children run away with it. Now that they’re alone, however—the thing Kenneth’s wanted all day—he is at a total loss for what to say. He lets go of her wrist, but even that he does too roughly, almost throwing it away from him, so that it bounces off her body. She takes it between the fingers of her other hand, holds it against her chest like a wounded bird.

  “Maybe I already know the things you think I don’t,” she says, voice thick, though he isn’t sure if it’s anger or pain or just her fucked-up lungs. “Why won’t you let yourself believe that? Do you think it would shock me if you tell me you hooked Agnes on drugs? Jesus, I’m not an idiot. Do you think I’d be surprised if you said you hit her? What else did you do, Kenneth? Did you rape women? I hate rapists more than just about anything in the world, but even if you tell me you raped somebody, I’m not going to run into the mountains screaming. Maybe that means I’m stupid. But I know you now. If that’s who you used to be, then you’ve changed.”

  If he feels anything, it is not reassurance, not even anger anymore, just a bottomless weariness, as though the heat, the stink of the sheep, the borderline dehydration and withdrawal from booze, have all finally caught up with him and laid their burden on his back. His sigh is heavy. “It’s not black and white like you’re talking, girl. You make evil sound like a cartoon decked out in a trench
coat and lurking around corners. You don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know anything about evil? Is that so? You’re the only one with a past, are you? You’re the only one who knows what men are capable of?”

  Too late he thinks of Lockerbie. He sees the pulse throb fast in her throat just before she turns and storms back into the house, and too late he wonders why she brought up rape among the spectrum of crimes he may have committed. But she is gone and he cannot ask her. He cannot ask if it is still rape if the woman never said no, never tried to get away. Is that the right word if someone owes you money, and you could have beaten or killed her for it, but instead you let her pay you back with the only thing she has? Is it the same if the men whose blood you’ve drawn have drawn other blood themselves, or do only crimes against the innocent count? Does it matter less if the body you dump in the Thames isn’t someone you killed, only someone you called your best friend and wished dead in the same passive way you wished it for your own sorry ass?

  And what he wants to know most is whether he is more afraid Cystic would run like hell if she knew his past—or whether he couldn’t view her quite the same if she knew and still stayed.

  ENTERING THE TINY house alone, Mary catches the end of Alias’s announcement that Nawar is baking bread and it will be ready soon. Instantly her mouth begins to water. She’s famished from the morning’s long walk; Nawar’s hot tea seems an abomination, but the water has cooled and its minty sweetness is surprisingly refreshing. Mary closes her eyes briefly, senses overwhelmed.

  All the things she saw on the bus ride to Essaouira that seemed so picturesque from their moving vehicle seem to have expanded so that they are a part of the picture, so the picture is everywhere around them. And this—not the chaos of the medinas, not the fiery sunset over a beach, not the photos of Ginsberg or even Kenneth’s body against hers—this is why she came. She feels lucky in such myriad ways it almost hurts.