“I’m worried about you,” he said, kissing her hand. “I shouldn’t have let you stay up so long at a stretch—it isn’t good for the baby.”
“You’re good for the baby,” she said, and in her smile he saw truth, the only truth he had ever recognized, and knew she would come back—come home to him. “I’ll sleep on the plane.”
FOR ONE MOMENT then, like students hiding out in the hallway in the middle of a church dance, these two not-friends, not-lovers, in-New-York-merely-acquaintances will kiss. Hasnain and Rebecca, he just barely conscious again and wandering back from having had his injuries checked out; she waiting for him so as to tell him that the men who jumped him have been relocated and he doesn’t need to worry about them now. For one moment, this is all there is: the dark night of a small town invaded by shell-shocked foreigners; the pain in his ribs, his groin, his back; the hunger in her to feel something life-affirming, to remember desire; the crumpled bulk of Nicole’s letters stuffed deep into his pocket, and this—this kiss. It doesn’t last long. In Hasnain’s broken condition it escalates to nothing else, though maybe it would not have anyway: he has never cheated on Leslie and suspects, though he is not sure why, that Rebecca has never cheated on Alan. Still, for the moment there is the taste of her in his mouth intermingled with his blood: her blond hair—streaks of white gray at the temples—inside his hands. Her Jewish American blood as devoid of the history of her people as he is removed from the nuclear stalemate between India and Pakistan, playing itself out on the soil of his father’s kin. Yet for that moment he savors in her the taste of another exile for the first time in many years—the taste of another woman who has known irrevocable loss.
Then it is over, and Rebecca turns and walks back into the church basement, where she has a cot, and Hasnain heads back upstairs to his pew and sleeping bag.
HAD SHE SLEPT on the plane? Had she been, then, asleep when it happened—blown to oblivion while under the deep cloak of dreams? He has heard the stories: tornado winds tearing the clothes right off passengers’ bodies; lungs expanding to four times their normal size; passengers still alive as they fell from the sky; mothers found clutching their babies’ corpses. He has spent the nights writhing in his bed imagining her eyes—her hands reaching out for him, only to come back empty, then rushing to her stomach to shield the child she loved already, the baby she could never possibly protect from this world. Please, please, let her have been sleeping, let it have been fast. Let the dream of their improbable, magical future have been the last thing ever to float through her head.
And for lack of anything else left to give him, let us agree that we will leave it at that.
FOR A FEW brief hours, he plans how he will finally send the letters to her mother. He will find out, somehow, if she still lives at that address and deliver these last remains of her daughter, maybe even in person. He will finally explain. He rehearses conversations in his head all day, waiting in the crowded solitude of the church basement or gazing out at the isolated vastness from the town’s rocky shore. The baby he planned to raise shared the same blood as that bereaved woman, and only now, thinking of his sons, can he bring himself to face his youthful arrogance in resenting her. Only now can he see that they are partners on an eternal journey: his boys, himself, and the grandmother of his child who never was, the woman whose womb ferried Nicole to life’s shores. But by nightfall, already, he has abandoned his plan. He was right, all those years ago—if for the wrong reasons. Nicole’s mother is better off unaware. If he could somehow find the Mary of the letters without notifying anyone else first, that would be one thing, but he has no surname or address and the task seems impossible. He was right to bear the burden and the treasure alone all these years. It is too late to find Nicole’s long-gone girlhood friend now.
On September 11, 2001, all over the world people went about their ordinary business of being born and dying. Time waits for no media loop. Mere hours before the towers fell, before Hasnain’s flight was grounded, in a Johannesburg hospital Joshua’s wife, Kaya, gave birth to their third child. At daybreak in Columbus, Eli woke stiff on a plastic couch in Diane’s room on the oncology ward, her breasts now part of a long past they shared and would never see again. In the twilight of peacetime America, Kenneth stood on the manicured lawn of an affluent northern Atlanta suburb and summoned the courage to ring a doorbell, unaware that by November his son would be deployed to Afghanistan. In Querétaro, Gabriella raced to help her aging mother to the toilet, while in their new home in Santa Fe, Daniel and Esther slept through a ringing phone, having debated in hushed tones late into the night about whether to comply with Esther’s sister’s wishes and send their thirteen-year-old son to live with her in Spain. So it happened then that their son was the one to take the call from his middle-aged not quite brother Leo’s boyfriend, Sandor, phoning from Marrakech to report that Daniel’s biological daughter, Mary Rebecca Grace, had died in the arms of her husband, her mother and brother gathered bedside.
But of course, Hasnain knows nothing of this.
ON THE FLIGHT back to New York, the airline crew will stay out of their way. All the passengers will know one another’s names by then, will walk up and down the aisles boldly, drinking and laughing as if on a charter flight to a tropical island. On the flight back to New York, Hasnain will see neither his bathroom assailants nor the three Muslim women, but the two fellows in their Islamic dress and long beards will still be present, smiling through their language barrier, friendlier than before. Over the next days and months, tales will continue to filter in from Gander: how one American family arrived at their Canadian host’s home to find a full Thanksgiving dinner prepared for them; how others arrived at an evacuated school to find the high school band playing “God Bless America”; how countless residents of Newfoundland approached the “plane people,” as they were called that week, thanking them for—despite anything Leslie believes—all America has “done for the world.” Though Hasnain and Rebecca will have seen each other over their remaining days in Gander, they will not have shared another kiss, and now Rebecca is on a different flight entirely. Once they land separately, Hasnain knows that, New York not being Gander, it is entirely possible—probable, even—that they will not cross paths again. Susan’s lessons are on a day he no longer teaches, and soon enough she will be a teenager, consumed no doubt by other less beautiful, more urgent pursuits than studying piano. On the flight, Hasnain does not drink the champagne the other passengers have brought on board and dispensed with the help of the crew, but he will meet the eyes of the two men with their long beards and say to them, “Assalamu alaikum,” and they will respond in kind without taking him for an imposter or even registering surprise. And in New York, Leslie will be waiting for him with open arms, into which he will all but collapse as she gasps over his limping and his injuries, and his boys will try to hang on to his arms and Leslie will admonish, “No, careful, Baba is hurt, can’t you see?” but he will hold his arms out to them and let them swing from them like from the branches of a tree, resolving fruitlessly, pointlessly in a world such as this, never to lose them, never to let them scatter as he did from his parents, his brother, even though if he had it to do over again he would do exactly the same thing. And so here, at last, he is home: my beloved Hasnain standing in the middle of JFK Airport, thirty-seven and twenty-four years old at once, remembering me with the echo of Rebecca still on his lips, and with all the faith and hope he once believed irrevocably stolen from him, holding on to his family and looking ahead.
I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you about the baby sooner. But within only a matter of hours you’ll see me for yourself and then you will know. Then your hand will touch my stomach, touch her life inside me, and I will begin, if you’ll let me, to explain how the worst of all possible fortunes can somehow turn into something beautiful. I will start my campaign to get you to come back here with me and find a beauty of your own—to where these letters are waiting for you, to where the world is scary and huge and witho
ut limits. I hope so badly you will come. I can’t wait to tell you everything.
Acknowledgments
During the years of writing A Life in Men and then waiting for it to come into print, I visited most of the countries where chapters of the book are set, in one instance for the first time (Kenya), and in other instances for my first return in more than a decade (Amsterdam, London). If I were to make a list of all I am grateful for regarding this novel, the list would read something like: the Cyclades, London, Kenya, Querétaro, La Gomera, Amsterdam, Morocco. If I were to try to draw a circle around the places that made this novel possible, it would grow too sprawling to make digestible sense. A Life in Men is a book as much about travel as it is about friendship, about the body, about hope; a comprehensive acknowledgments list could go on and on (thank you, Battersea Park Road!) before ever reaching a single person with whom I spoke.
But of course that would tell such a lesser story. Our worlds are made up of those with whom we share some manner of intimacy—transient or otherwise—the people who make us need to tell stories. And so:
Thank you to my onetime fellow nomads of Arthog House, wherever they may be: Jude, Heath, Terry, Roger, Greg, and especially Anthony Blair and William Milne. When my recurring dream of flying through that upstairs window, like Wendy searching for my Lost Boys, finally stopped visiting me at night, I guess I knew it was time to commit some version of our old world to the page. Thanks for taking care of me when I needed it badly.
Thank you to the first reader of this novel, Tom Johnson, who saw me through a turbulent creative period mostly intact. To my tribe of trusted readers and collaborators over A Life in Men’s many drafts: Rob Roberge, Zoe Zolbrod, Emily Tedrowe, Rachel DeWoskin, Thea Goodman, Betsy Crane, Patrick Somerville, Laura Ruby, Cecelia Downs, Karen Schreck, Allison Amend, and Tom Hernandez. Thanks to my best girls at Other Voices Books and The Nervous Breakdown, Stacy Bierlein and Leah Tallon, who somehow prevented our many endeavors from crashing and burning when I was so preoccupied I didn’t know my own name. Eternal appreciation for my husband, David Walthour, who, as he has done with every book I have written, welcomed these characters into his life and home, and held down the fort with grace when I was away, either literally or in the wilds of my mind.
Thank you to the editors at F Magazine, who ran the very first excerpt of the novel; to Summer Literary Seminars and Mary Gaitskill for sending me to Kenya and changing its course; and to Ellen Levine for her wise guidance in the early stages of A Life in Men’s journey. A thrilled shout out to one of my very favorite people on the planet, my agent, Alice Tasman, with whom I fell in blissful literary-love at first sight—Alice, you are never freaking allowed to retire.
It’s been my honor to work with one of the greatest editors in the business, Chuck Adams, and to have the whole Algonquin team watching my back. You are all simply an old-school, close-knit, smart-as-hell, dedicated, high-integrity pleasure in a world where not all publishing rides roll this way anymore.
I am in great debt to many people—most of whom I have never met—who have written medical articles, self-help books, blogs, and other resource material on cystic fibrosis. Although I took certain fictional liberties with Mary’s condition, it would have been wholly impossible to write this novel without these knowledgeable guides, who enabled me to form a picture of the world of someone with CF. Part of the proceeds of the book will be donated to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and anyone who wishes to learn more about global organizations working with CF can find a list at en.wikipedia.org/wiki /List_of_cystic_fibrosis_organizations.
Finally, I have been fortunate to know a handful of astounding, courageous people who inspired this novel—and me—in ways impossible to quite pin down. A Life in Men is, above everything, an exploration of the human drive to live as large as possible despite limitations that may be imposed by the body or from the outside. And so, to the fighters and dreamers and questers in my life, who have not had an easy run of it but whose unstoppable hope, heart, and will could power planets, in particular Amy Sue Chandler, Jennifer Nix, Emily Rapp, and Rob Roberge. In different ways, each one of you has taught me the vital difference between “surviving” and “living,” and has changed me, as a writer and a person.
A Life in Men
Life Imitates Art: Notes on (Not) Writing the Dead
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Questions for Discussion
Life Imitates Art: Notes on (Not) Writing the Dead
BY GINA FRANGELLO
A year ago, my lifelong friend and surrogate sister, Kathy, was found dead in her apartment by her fiancé. She had metastatic ovarian cancer, and we knew that her chances of ever reaching old age were slim. At the time of her death, however, she was almost finished with her first round of chemo and was on the verge of remission, which could have bought her healthy, symptom-free years. Then, while getting ready for work, she threw a blood clot— a side effect of cancer, which is a thrombotic disease—and died, hopefully instantly. We’d been friends since we were sixteen—since she cornered me in a bathroom at school and confessed her passionate, unrequited love for the guy who sat behind me in Physics. In the nearly thirty years that followed, I had remained her confidante—a kind of emotional big sister, although to describe it that way would be reductive. We were also partners in crime, sneaking flasks of Jameson into booze-free events, or wearing our leather pants to children’s birthday parties. She was also the first “nanny” my twin daughters ever had, and ten years later, the loss of her hit my three children almost as hard as it did me. She had visited me in every country I’d ever lived in, including several that appear in my new novel, A Life in Men. After her death, there was not a bar, a restaurant, a bookstore, a vintage clothing shop, a nail salon, or even a European city I seemed able to enter without her ghost accompanying me. We had been everywhere together. We had lived a sprawling, messy, intertwined life, and now I was set with the task of navigating this ghost town alone.
Kathy was not the inspiration for the character Mary. The novel sold, in fact, just weeks before her shocking cancer diagnosis. Prior to that she had no symptoms of illness, and I had never known her to be sick. In fact, I was the one always being hospitalized for one thing or another, and before she met her fiancé, she often joked that she would marry my husband when I kicked the bucket.
Tragedy is hard—maybe impossible—to define. Kathy was forty-three at the time of her death. She had traveled the world, had many friends, had worked and lived independently for years, and was madly in love. Surely her death was premature, and devastating to those who loved her. To call it “tragic” might be a stretch in light of so many who, like Mary in A Life in Men, live daily with the reality of terminal illnesses, or who, like Mary’s best friend, Nix, meet chilling fates born of human violence. Still, like Mary and Nix in the novel, I have found myself quite literally haunted by the absent presence of my friend, speaking aloud to Kathy on empty streets late at night, trying to figure out what it means to be, as Faulkner wrote, “one of those who is doomed to live,” with all the privileges and burdens it entails to carry the dead with us, to live for ourselves as well as them.
When I was twenty years old, I arrived in London for a semester abroad only weeks after the Lockerbie disaster of 1988. Many of my new friends in London had lost friends in the plane explosion, but it had not touched me directly. I did, however, find myself living that semester with a beautiful, whip-smart, fearless woman named Sarah who read Updike and worshipped the band Miracle Legion. We traveled together; we picked up guys together; we swapped our sometimes-boyfriends’ ripped jeans. Sarah had cystic fibrosis. The man she fell in love with in London, in fact, called her “Cystic” as a pet name, which I found so irreverently tender that it may be the only direct detail about Sarah to have survived in the pages of my novel. After our semester ended, we didn’t keep in close touch, but some five years later I saw her again in Boston. Her health had deteriorated, but she had continued to travel, as had I. Five years after that re
union, Sarah died, at age thirty, while living in Jordan among the Bedouin people. She had been pursuing a degree in cultural anthropology. Considering that I had seen Sarah only once in the past decade, her death hit me perhaps bizarrely hard. I am a hard sell about admiring people, but I had admired the hell out of her. She was, in the least cheesy possible application of the word, inspirational. She lived large and hard, often against the counsel of doctors and friends. She never let her illness define or confine her. She also loved as hard and recklessly as she had lived. In a fit of nostalgia and sadness, I wrote to Sarah’s mother, whom I did not even know, and asked if I might write her biography. I never heard back from her, which does not, in retrospect, surprise me. Likely this grieving woman had never even heard of me. Sarah’s story was not mine to tell.
It would be ten years before I would begin A Life in Men—a fictional novel centered around a woman traveler with cystic fibrosis. I purposely gave Mary an unusual genetic mutation of the disease, because I did not want this to be a novel about CF, a condition I don’t personally have, so much as about what it is to struggle to live on a large canvas despite physical—and psychological—limitations. The countries Mary travels to are not based on Sarah’s life but my own; in all cases except for Gander, Newfoundland, the book became autobiographical when it comes to geography, and in other, more unexpected, ways, too. I wrote the novel to honor Sarah’s memory, but in many senses the more I wrote, the more anything based on her receded from its pages. By the time it sold to Algonquin, it had become the most deeply personal work of fiction I’ve ever written.
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