A Life in Men

by Gina Frangello

  Then it is over again, just as suddenly as it started. That nightmare slips back inside some fissure in the universe and she’s breathing again, the gurgling sound of her air filling the shell-shocked car.

  “Sandor,” she says, and he turns full on to hear, Alias still driving like mad and shouting, “We’re almost there, we’re almost there!” though they are nowhere near. Sandor thinks of what Leo would do and climbs over the seat, large gaps of vacant space on either side of the bundle that is Mary and Kenneth. He puts his arms around Mary’s carpeted shoulders, too, so that he and Kenneth are holding each other by proxy.

  “When Geoff asks what happened,” she rasps, “say I passed out right away. Tell him I had no idea what was going on.”

  Sandor sobs. Christ, why didn’t he force Leo to take her back to Europe—why didn’t he stand his ground? This is un-fucking-believable. This cannot be happening. He holds her shaking shoulders inside the blanket and weeps. She pushes at him with her hands.

  “Tell him I loved the trip. Tell him I missed him but I understood. Why he couldn’t. I . . .” She fades for a moment, as though she is asleep, and Sandor makes an involuntary noise and shakes her to see if she’s dead. “Tell him I understood why I wasn’t mad,” she says, and he knows what she means but the incoherence is terrifying. He looks at Kenneth, who turns his face to the window as though trying not to witness. But when Sandor says, “Stop this talking, you are going to be fine, they’ll fix you up and you can tell him yourself anything you like,” Kenneth looks back at the huddle inside the carpet, her blood on his face, and says clearly, “He hears. He’ll remember what you said.”

  She is unconscious when they reach the hospital. There follows a frenzy of activity, only the basics of which Sandor understands. Blood clotters, an IV antibiotic. Mary wakes, incoherent, belligerent, tries to get out of bed over the protests of nurses. She seems to recognize no one. She’s lugging her IV line behind her when the blood starts again, though by now, Sandor no longer feels faint at the sight of it. He can touch her without recoiling, the way Kenneth did from the first. Perhaps it is not so much old hat as that he assumes its temporary nature. She will bleed to death, and when she is dead, then the blood will stop.

  She is drowning. Spitting blood into cups faster than the nurses can hand them her way. She leans against a sink filled with red. Her skin is the color of the graying porcelain. When they try to get a nasal cannula on her, the blood spurts toward it like a geyser; Sandor lies down on the floor, hyperventilating a little. Then they are both lying there, her head in the crook of his numb arm, the flow of her having stopped again as inexplicably as the last two times. Other than her raspy breath she could be a corpse, she’s so cold.

  The doctor, Boutell, is French, but Kenneth doesn’t know French medical terms, so he switches to English, and the words Sandor hears could stop his heart: bronchoscopy, emergency surgery, cauterization. Kenneth has dug through her bag for the letters from her physician at home. When she is too groggy to sign consent forms, Sandor blurts out, “I am her brother, I will sign.” All blonds look alike. They pass him the forms.

  She sleeps. She’s on oxygen, on morphine, IVs sticking out. When she wakes, she groans, “Don’t tell Geoff until it’s all over.” She begs, “Don’t let him see me this way.” Other times she seems to have no idea they are in the room.

  Leo knows nothing; Geoff knows nothing; Mary’s widowed mother at home remains uncalled. Sandor stands at the hallway phone box. The hospital corridor is full of cats. He does not want to have this conversation—he does not, but if he fails to call, there is a chance Leo will never forgive him. He rests his forehead against the cool wall tiles, cats rubbing up against his legs as if they’re in one of Leo’s psychedelic paintings.

  This hospital is mainly normal. Wealthy Moroccans, tourists, expats. Sure, there are these scrawny feral things roaming around as though they have the run of an abandoned building, but otherwise things seem all right here. Mary is in a private room even. Kenneth says her copious bleeding must have scared the hell out of them—they must not have wanted her anywhere near the other patients—but maybe it’s merely a sign of civilization? She did not die on the mountain, after all. Tomorrow she will have surgery. Maybe it is as simple as that. Crisis averted.

  Sandor feels drunk, dizzy. He can’t remember exactly when he last ate. These cats remind him of the film Betty Blue, when at the end the male lead has euthanized his girlfriend and sits at home in their kitchen conversing to the cat as though she is the dead lover. The unreal seems, here, as though it could be real, and Mary seems as though she could be a dream. How has she possibly come back into his life after all those years? How has she come and with her arrival given him a window to Leo and changed everything? It has all been one elaborate hallucination. The real girl who played Nicole in the film of Arthog House (whose name really is Nicole, of course) is somewhere else entirely, and he will never see her again. Leo Becker is not his lover, just a man he desperately wants to fuck, whose work, the first time he saw it, struck him as the love child of Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon, full of hyperprecision and dream and beautiful perversion. Leo is no one whose body he has tasted, no one who claims to love him, and this sick girl is not his Nicole and did not facilitate it. Sandor has done more crying today than in the past fifteen years. He has cried himself dry.

  He does not pick up the phone. Instead he goes with Alias and Kenneth to get something to eat. Hunger and fear make them stagger. They are complicit. Out on the streets, people stare at Kenneth, cluck and hiss at him about his bloodstains.

  “I will go to my place and fetch fresh clothes,” Alias says, leaving them at a café. Everything Sandor and Kenneth own is still in Imlil; they will never see those things again. Even after Alias has proved a genie on this trip, pulling vehicles and functional medical facilities and race-car driving out of his firm little ass, Sandor wonders if they will ever see him again either. Kenneth voices the same, but half an hour later Alias is back with fresh-smelling powder-blue shirts, one for each of them, and trousers for Kenneth that fit in the waist but are too short. Cats prowl the café, too; they seem inescapable. Sandor tosses them scraps of bread, though Alias tells him not to and the cats don’t appear interested.

  Back at the hospital, visiting hours are over. They are told Mary is “resting comfortably.” In the morning she will be cauterized. This sounds official.

  “It’ll stop the bleeding and we’ll load her on a plane and go home,” Sandor tells Kenneth, who has fallen silent as a stone. Sandor isn’t sure what “home” entails. Leo will be there somehow, and Geoff, too, and definitely not Kenneth or the emaciated cats.

  Kenneth paces the hospital corridor. Sandor wants to leave, wants it perhaps more desperately than he has ever wanted anything in his life, but can’t admit it in the face of the damn Yankee’s vigil. He steps outside for a smoke and sobs a bit more, then curses himself until self-anger replaces the tears. On his return, Kenneth is sleeping standing up against a wall. Sandor prods him with a foot until he jerks alert. On the street, walking to Alias’s apartment, Kenneth starts tossing out titles for their predicament. “The Unbearable Lightness of Breathing,” he says. “Death and the Maiden,” Sandor counters. They riff. “Got My Invitation to a Beheading,” concludes Kenneth, which doesn’t quite make sense to Sandor. Still, they laugh, punch drunk, and have to stop walking. Then the rest of the way they can’t look at each other.

  The sky is black. It seems impossible that at Jemaa el-Fna tourists are scarfing down food, musicians playing. That in the little rooms above courtyards, couples are fighting, having sex. Alias lives in one bare room with a small kitchenette. His girlfriend does not live there; Sandor had automatically assumed she did. They crash on Alias’s floor in borrowed clothing, the sleep of the just or the dead. No one even mentions a phone.

  Yes, if only things can improve before he calls Leo, then he will avoid the fallout. They will be locked in secrecy forever—the old Arthog House t
rio—and Leo and Geoff need never know how close things came.

  By morning she is already in surgery. There was more bleeding during the night, her oxygen levels dipping so low she required a ventilator. These words conjure apocalyptic images in Sandor’s mind, but when Mary comes out of the operating theater, the doctor pronounces her bleeding “fini.” They found the source: both lungs at once. In recovery the ventilator is scaled down, so by the time Sandor and Kenneth are permitted to see her, she wears only an ordinary oxygen mask.

  “Luke,” she rasps through her ravaged throat, “I am your father.” Then she giggles on anesthesia as they wheel her back to her room.

  Crisis averted.

  Kenneth rings Alias at La Mamounia to tell him the news. Mary still won’t give them Geoff’s number in New England, but Sandor tries Leo’s cell, Merel’s cell, even the Paris gallery. It is still early and every call goes straight to voice mail. He leaves no message other than It’s urgent, call. If they hadn’t given her medical paperwork to Boutell, they could track down her American physician and get word to her family, but those papers are gone, the French doctor seems to be missing, the nurses know nothing of the forms. Sandor rings Leo every half hour, to no avail. He isn’t sure where Leo is staying, and last year Leo dropped his cell phone into a urinal by accident and just left it there. Mary goes by her maiden name; Sandor doesn’t know Geoff’s; Leo is the keeper of such things. Leo, her brother, who cannot be trusted with anything. They wait, more bored now that she isn’t bleeding. Sandor and Kenneth bullshit about the London jazz club Vortex for a while, how excellent it was. Mary asks them to find her a Herald Tribune.

  Crisis averted.

  Except that suddenly she is spiking a fever. Except that when Boutell finally reappears, face more worried than it was yesterday, he says he looked up cystic fibrosis on the Internet because they have never had a CF patient here. Except the nurses clear her room and stick a central line into her chest, and when Kenneth reenters he says, “She doesn’t like that, she doesn’t want that there,” and Sandor says, “I’m sure the doctors know what they’re doing,” though clearly this may not be true at all, and Mary says nothing now; she seems detached from her body. Her skin is no longer supernaturally white but flushed from fever. “I shouldn’t have left her last night. I knew I shouldn’t’ve left,” Kenneth says over and over again until Sandor looks at him hard and says, “I left her, too. Just shut up.”

  IV-administered antibiotics can take as much as twenty-four hours to work. Just over twenty-four hours ago they were drinking coffee from toxic plastic bottles; Mary was crooning at Moroccan children; Leo had not yet boarded his plane. What if Sandor reaches Leo and Leo falls apart? There is something unspeakably fragile in him—what if this news is the thing that does him in? And how could Leo be expected to bear this when Sandor can hardly take it himself and he is the stable one, the sane one, the one who is not connected by blood to this woman they both love? Leo’s phone goes to voice mail again and Sandor hurls his cell across the room so that its insides fall out. In the toilet his stomach retches but nothing comes up. Twenty-four hours.

  Kenneth is waiting in the hall when he returns. “I’m telling that doc to call her husband,” he says. “This circus has gone on long enough.” But as he leaves to find the doctor, word comes that Geoff is on the line: he must have been alerted by Mary’s home physician. A nurse comes to collect Sandor, the husband’s alleged brother-in-law, saying, “Son mari pour vous.”

  Sandor has met Geoff only once, at Mary’s father’s funeral. He remembers him as exceptionally handsome in an entirely different vein than Leo. Tall, sturdy, masculine, well groomed. He and Mary looked vaguely wrong together, but Leo made more of it than it was.

  “Leo.” Geoff’s voice is all business yet strangely intimate—the sound of his wife’s brother’s name in his mouth. “Is it as bad as that Dr. Boutell says? Why won’t they give her the phone?”

  Sandor clears his throat. “No,” he says, “it’s just me. Sandor. Leo had to go back to Paris, and then this happened. I told them she was my sister, I hope you don’t—”

  “I’m getting on the next plane. You do not let anything happen before I get there, Sandor. No one touches her—no more surgeries, do you understand? I’ll be there in less than twenty-four hours. Nothing happens, promise me.”

  “You don’t get it,” Sandor begins, using the expression Leo often feeds him. “She was bleeding, there was no choice—”

  “Listen very carefully,” Geoff says with grave authority, so that even before he continues, Sandor is struck by the full impact of what he and Kenneth have wrought in hiding the truth: that they have been errant, disorganized children playing a man’s game. “There is not a single cystic fibrosis center in Morocco. There are something like four on the entire African continent. Mary had no business even setting foot in that country—she has colonized bacteria that can attack her system and kill her just from forgetting to wash her hands in her own house. I begged her not to go, I refused to have any part of it, and maybe that could have been the end of it, but no, you and her irresponsible, oblivious brother were all for it and ran down to meet her with fucking bells on and took her hiking at nine goddamn thousand feet. Now my wife has been bleeding and cut open and intubated in the middle of Bumblefuck. Do you realize more people get pneumonia in the hospital than anywhere else, and that’s in fucking America? If she’s septic, nothing will help her—nothing. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Sandor chokes out. “I’m sorry—”

  “You tell her I’m coming. You tell her I love her and I’ll fix—” Geoff’s voice breaks. “You tell her I’m going to get her the hell out of there.”

  He hangs up the phone.

  TIME’S MOVING TOO fast. Too fast when Cystic’s alert and can talk, and while at first the hours in between dragged, now those are speeding toward Kenneth, too, hurtling him along. It’s like snaking up the incline of a roller coaster real slow and you think the wait will kill you, but once the descent starts there’s no time for anything anymore, not even the dread. It’s all over before you know it. Three days, that’s it. Three days they’ve been here and nothing’s the way it was, as if that time before was a shadow life, a book he read long ago. There’s never been anything but this. The hours he spent in agonized anticipation of the end of their trip, of the day she went back to her husband and he never saw her again, seem like an elaborate scam now, a children’s story they were feeding themselves. It could never have played out any other way than this.

  She’s living in the in-between place, waiting to be ferried across. The doctors don’t say it like that; Dr. Boutell doesn’t say much—he’s way over his head. Every time they see him, he has a phone in his hand, calling somebody to consult, even bringing Cystic his own cell a few minutes ago so that she could talk to her mother at Logan Airport, where her mom’s hooking up with the husband, the two of them flying over together.

  Turns out getting a flight to Casablanca isn’t such a simple matter. Even JFK doesn’t offer the flight every day, so it’s turned into a scramble, Sandor says, as they compare flying to Europe first and then hopping some Iberia or Air Maroc flight down with waiting for the next day’s flight out of Logan direct. In the end it must’ve been a wash: the husband’s flying out tonight, will be in Casablanca by morning and in Marrakech later that day. Leo, too, is coming back, landing in Casablanca separately, but ultimately waiting for the same flight to Marrakech so that they will all descend together, a stampede of righteous family members demanding answers from Boutell, and hoping for a miracle Kenneth knows in his bones won’t come.

  When they arrive he will already be gone. A given. He will not be around to see the end, not be permitted any space at the bedside for final good-byes. Once that flight from Casablanca lands, even Alias will have more rights than he. No matter, her bedside isn’t territory; no pissing contest can make this go any different. Her husband is coming and Kenneth is glad.
The man is a doctor and at least this three-ring circus will end. The husband will arrive and see the truth of it and that will be that. They’ll medevac her out of this joint, bring her somewhere high tech and gleaming. Then settle down to watch her die.

  Who knows how long they’ll have to wait, though? A body, even a body that’s been through what hers has, can take a long time shutting down. He thinks of Cystic and how her eyes will twitch. How the morphine will stop the way she sometimes just starts gasping, the panic of her air hunger, the outrage of Boutell’s saying that they can’t turn the oxygen up any higher or she’ll stop breathing on her own—this makes no sense to him, this makes no goddamn sense—that if it goes any higher she could end up on a ventilator, and the way she fought it the first time they might have to induce a coma just to get it in her, and then you’re talking life support. Right now she’s still breathing on her own, just with bursts of terror and biting at air that won’t go down. As if this is a favor to her; as if torture is a treatment plan.

  The husband will come in and speak medicalese and stop this; he’ll make them increase the morphine and then either she won’t know anything anymore or the things she knows, the things she sees behind her eyes, will be inaccessible, so at least everyone else will feel better with her doped up like that, they’ll sit round the bed and say, At least she isn’t suffering, like they have any fucking idea what goes on behind a person’s eyes when the sweet, vicious knife of the drug claims your days.

  He waits in the hall. She talks to her mother, and her voice has a hysterical edge but comes slow and groggy like a hiss. She says the usual things; he can hear this from the hall. The I’m sorrys, the I love yous. He and Sandor have slunk out into the hall so she can have her privacy, but maybe there’s nothing private left anymore; things are too far gone for private. He wants this over, wants her free of it; he doesn’t want to be sent away to imagine the end rather than bear witness with his own eyes. He doesn’t want to abandon her to their civilized grief and pretty lies.