A Life in Men: A Novel
Page 6
She changes trains at Earl’s Court, rides back to West Kensington. Outside, the sky is dark now. She needs to go back to the Indian restaurant to ask the real questions. Were there former owners? Has Hasnain died? Moved away? She has to find him.
Outside the station, the Three Kings pub dwarfs one corner, beckoning as it did the day she rode here with Yank. Nix would have seen this pub every time she went to and from the Tube, which would mean—though none of the letters mention it—that she went there at least occasionally or, let’s face it, probably a lot. The Three Kings is the antithesis of the Latchmere, the crowd well heeled, sparkling clean. Girls drink wine and half pints of cider. Guys are loud but in a good-natured way, so familiar in their bland good looks that Mary doesn’t feel strange entering alone. The pub is gigantic; nobody will notice her amid the commotion. If people look her way at all, they will think her friends are at the bar getting drinks; they will think she is waiting for a date. She sits at a table with her cider.
She is on her second drink, wishing cider were more carbonated so that it might help break up the mucus in her plugged chest, when the bartender makes an announcement. “We’ve had a bit of a bomb threat,” he explains, laughing. “Er, better evacuate, yeh?”
Mary jumps up as though her seat is on fire. Again, though, it is as though she imagined the words. Brits sit at their tables casually finishing drinks. Some laugh. The roar of the pub makes individual sounds indistinguishable. A few people head lackadaisically to the door. This, Mary realizes, is their idea of “evacuation.” She races for the exit. Only a handful of the vigilant—probably American students—cluster on the sidewalk.
She heads back in the direction of the Indian restaurant, but the moment she sees the mouth of the Tube station gaping at her, yawning its smell of train exhaust and escape, she runs in and swipes her pass, bolting down the steps. As if fated, the train is waiting, doors slung open, a clipped British voice reminding commuters to “mind the gap.” In the car, Mary grips the silver pole in front of her, hands slick against its surface.
On the wall is a sign warning passengers not to open or touch any unattended parcels, but to notify the Underground staff immediately and leave the train car.
In Kettering, Ohio, if you find an unattended handbag or parcel, you are taught to open it, looking for a wallet with ID. In Kettering, you would call the owner up and offer to drive over with the lost items. Perhaps in New York City, you look for the wallet intending to steal it, but you open the parcel just the same! It is 1990. Nowhere in America would anyone think an unattended package might contain a bomb.
During her time in London, Nix sent exactly four letters. In none did she mention that the city was dangerous, littered with bodies on the tracks, bombs on the Underground, pubs on the verge of explosion. She wrote only that she could walk alone at night without fear. Nix bragged, like recent expats are wont to do of their new environs, that nobody owned a gun.
As though everyone they knew in Kettering possessed firearms!
Nix’s last letter was different from the others, which had an impersonal quality, like a travelogue. The final installment, by contrast, was breathless and giddy, if paradoxically the briefest. In it, she announced that she was in love. Though her mother had no idea, she was not returning to Skidmore for the spring semester but coming back to London immediately after the New Year. She had “big news” to share, which Mary feared might be her engagement to the mysterious Hasnain, whose surname Mary never learned. Nix wrote, I’m sorry for how I’ve acted, though it had felt impossible, during the anxious months before, to pinpoint precisely how Nix was acting—exactly what seemed off. I can’t wait to see you again, she ended, signing that final letter in their childhood code, BFA, for “best friends always,” which the other letters had mysteriously withheld, employing the far more impersonal sign-off, Love.
Mary holds her face into her A to Z, hot tears darkening and buckling its pages. The vibrations of the train make her heaving shoulders shake unevenly. Her mother was right. Though she initially came to London like a detective to follow a trail, after two years, whatever she hoped to find has evaporated. Nix is gone.
And all around her, London is burning, but nobody else has noticed. Even Nix.
Four months doesn’t sound like a long time, but for me it has been another world. In this world, I’ve been to the Tate after eating a slice of hash cake, where I listened to Yank and Sandor argue over Dalí for hours. I’ve made love with Joshua on the sloping concrete of an underpass where part of Pink Floyd’s The Wall was filmed, where they now hold drag races. I’ve been to a reggae pub in Lambeth where Yank had his pocket picked by a tattooed prostitute who gives him freebies sometimes but must have decided she wanted back pay. I’ve danced on the Latchmere bar during “afters” so wildly that I fell, giving myself a bruise on my thigh the size of a grapefruit, while the regulars cheered. I’ve watched fireworks for the Queen Mum’s birthday and braved the notorious Notting Hill Carnival (no riots this year!), and I’ve come to understand that British toilet tissue is too rough for use after sex and the myriad things this implies about England. I’ve attended parties where the guests were from at least eight different countries but basically everyone was a dealer, and when an old geezer from the West Indies asked, “Love, what are you doing here, who’s looking after you?” I was set to protest that I am an independent American woman who requires no looking after, but Joshua came forward and said, “Thank you, umkhulu, I’m keeping her safe,” and I realized all at once that I don’t know the first real thing about him. It’s too much work being you, Nix, but maybe I am not quite me anymore either. I’ve done nothing I came here to do, met no one I came here to meet, and still I’ve become someone new.
YANK AND JOSHUA are on the floor of the sitting room passing a hash cigarette back and forth. Tomorrow is opening night. For the first time, Joshua will do his trapeze act in public; he has gotten them free tickets, and after the show there will be a party for the circus members’ family and friends, though most have no people in London. Yank was not particularly hot to attend, but Joshua pleaded, “You’ll dig it, high-wire acts and the Chinese swing—just your speed, all high risk,” until he shrugged his helpless consent. Lately he feels weirdly connected to Joshua, a strange sense of responsibility for the kid. He always liked him fine—better than he liked most people—but there’s more to it now. Like he and Nicole are conspiring somehow to protect him.
Joshua inhales, holds.
Yank says, “Buddy, this here’s an intervention. You’re gonna drop that flying Chink on her head, you keep this shit up.”
Joshua laughs appreciatively. “Oh, plenty of people at the circus smoke,” he says, as though Yank were alluding to the health of his lungs. “Just like gymnasts.”
“You ever afraid you’ll fall?” Seriously this time: he really wants to know.
Joshua chokes on his next drag. “Fuck, yeah! I’m always scared shitless on my way to work. I think, What the hell am I doing, eh? Gymnasts are constantly injuring themselves—everyone has surgery all the time, we’re all scarred and stitched up like Frankenstein. But I was never worried. I’ve been doing it since I was small; it’s like riding a bicycle to me. But the trapeze, bloody hell! The thing is, though, once I’m up there I can’t focus on anything but what I’m doing, what comes next. It’s the same as gymnastics that way—there’s no room for fear. Like, nothing else exists.”
Yank ticks off things in his life that have ever offered such primacy of experience. Taking photos when he was younger, in New Orleans, New Mexico, California. The kind of fucking that comes after a hot-and-heavy pursuit. In other words, not a damn thing he’s done lately, except heroin. Even now, his heart is not in the passing of this joint. He would like to go into the toilet and shoot up, but he has to wait until Joshua fucks off to the Latchmere to pick Nicole up from her shift. Other than her, no one here knows he is using again. Even among circus freaks and skinheads, a junkie is a liability, and who knows, he
might be asked to leave. So he hides his habit, though like the girl with her disease he no doubt leaves clues; no doubt the others suspect. He pulls the hash into his lungs hard, but it will never do enough.
“I’m going to ask Nicole to come with me,” Joshua says, grinning behind the smoke. “You’ll have the room to yourself in a month. Cheers for putting up with us, mate; I know we’ve been a pain in your ass.”
This, then, may be the last of the man he has been: his past put on notice. Since he started using again, he’s been telling himself daily to split, just disappear, but his body won’t obey. When Nicole and Joshua leave London, though, whatever it is that’s holding him here will be broken, and he can leave, too. Yank will at last recede into travelers’ subculture lore: who knows whatever happened to that cat, a hard-ass dealer up Camden Town way who was thought to have snuffed his best mate? One more month to keep hiding his habit in the bathroom. Another month more to listen to the sounds of their lovemaking from the other side of the wall.
“You take good care of her out there on the road,” he tells Joshua. It is not all he wants to say, yet even this much is a transgression in his world: telling another man how to treat his woman. But no, Joshua’s not that kind, not the type to rankle.
“I lost the first girl I ever loved because of my own careless stupidity,” Joshua says solemnly. “Believe me, I won’t make that mistake again.”
The cigarette is dying, just smoke between Joshua’s fingers. Yank takes a deep swig of Southern Comfort. What a fucking name. There is not one damn thing he can remember that was comforting about the South.
“In my country,” Joshua continues, “relationships between blacks and whites are illegal, you know. Of course it’s only the blacks who actually get arrested. Which is, like, pretty much a euphemism for killed, everyone with a brain knows that. Except fucking me.”
On the tape player, “Ramble On” blares. Yank looks at Joshua, at his fresh, unlined skin, and realizes to his surprise that he knows this story already, though he has never heard it before. This story has been the subtext every time Joshua looks at Nicole with such singular devotion, with a gratitude that belies his age and chick-magnet physique. This story has hovered in the shadows every time Joshua mixes Nicole’s Southern Comfort and soda before his own; every time he has served her a larger portion of vegetables and rice than she can truly eat and waited until she pushes it away before finishing her food himself. Somehow, this story has even been implicit in the freaky way Joshua addresses the old, strung-out, toothless geezers from the estates with respectful Zulu greetings, as though they know what the fuck he is saying—as though he is atoning for something, proving something wrong in the absence of the thing itself, as though those black faces have anything to do with him. Already—all along—Yank has imagined Joshua’s youthful body twined around the willowy, darker limbs of that other girl. He can see that girl in his mind right now, and he wants the needle even more than before.
Still he asks: “They killed her, man? She’s dead?”
“Nah, she got off lucky.” Joshua looks down. “She just lost an eye.” He stares at the cigarette burning into his fingers. “I’d known her forever, like, since we were fifteen—my coach’s maid. Who knows, once she could walk again she might even have gone back to work, if he still wanted her with the eye and all. He was fucking her, too, but that was all right, see, because she didn’t want to fuck him. Rape is perfectly acceptable. Just not love.”
“I hear you,” Yank says simply. “The year you were born, what, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, I was a teenager in goddamn Georgia. It ain’t South Africa, but I remember those days, too.”
And absurdly it strikes him that this is the most he’s said about his own past in years—that this whole conversation is a transgression of sorts. Because the men of his worldwide pack have come here (wherever here is—Taos, Marseille, London) devoid of pasts, searching for new lovers, siblings, and comrades, all at once. If they ever strike anything, it is only fool’s gold. He who cannot learn from the past is condemned to repeat it, or some such shit. He waits, afraid of what may come out of his mouth next.
Joshua, though, is nodding fiercely. “The guys who did it, they were my teammates. Our coach was like our god. It was like I’d broken God’s windows and pissed on his bed. I did that to her, you understand—it was my carelessness, my ego. I thought I could trespass on God, and they taught me a lesson.”
“Buddy,” Yank says, or maybe he is not Yank anymore, “you ever tell Nicole this story?”
To his surprise, Joshua laughs; the sound makes Yank jump. “Fuck, no,” Joshua breathes. “Some romantic story, eh? What girl wants to hear a story like that?”
Once, a couple of months back, Yank walked in on Joshua and Nicole jumping up and down on their shitty mattress chanting, “Ah-so, jump!” over and over again, giggling and holding hands. Nicole seemed embarrassed, but Joshua had cheerfully explained that they were wondering whether, if the entire country of China jumped simultaneously, the earth would move. It was late, but still Yank had stormed to the common room, growling, “You better tone it down or I’m gonna kick both your dumb asses,” slamming the door hard. How could anyone be so damn young they’d never even seen a cheesy kung fu flick, didn’t know the saying was from Japan, not China? These kids were too young to know jack shit about anything. “Grouch!” they called after him, undeterred. “Scrooge! Cranky old man!”
And he has just been too long without a woman is all. He has been too long on the run, even when he stays in one place. It has simply been too damn long since he’s made jokes holding someone’s hand, since he laughed into the night instead of getting up fast and putting on his pants—too long since he’s made anything but war, since anyone on this earth was truly his.
“Nicole’s not just any girl,” he tells Joshua. “I think she might surprise you.”
But the joint is no longer smoking, has died out right against Joshua’s skin, become ash. “I came here to start fresh,” Joshua says vehemently. “Me and Nicole, we can go anywhere we want. We’ll be moving from country to country, so that shit about having to go home after six months won’t apply. We can see the whole world, and someday, when I get too old for the circus, we’ll just pick the place we liked best, someplace quiet where we can have a garden.”
Yank says, “That’s some plan.”
Joshua’s shoulders shake. His breath comes shuddery. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”
“I really hope you get it.” Yank stands.
Because this is a case of mistaken identity. He is just a man who leaves rooms, closes doors. Every pivotal moment in his life, in fact, has ended just this way: him poised at a doorway, set to run. Hell, if you think about it, right now doesn’t even qualify. This was someone else’s moment all along. He is only around for the ride.
AND SO FINALLY there is this: the way her body tenses when Joshua first grabs hold of the metal bar and ascends, the trapeze beginning to move as if by magic, without any visible sign of a struggle as he swings through the air. The way the kid who, getting high first thing in the morning in his jeans with those clashing floral and plaid patches, is just another dime-a-dozen hippie, up there becomes something else: something animal and pure, possessing absolute authority. He wields his body like a knife. When Yank pulls his eyes away and looks at Nicole, she is visibly holding her breath as Joshua, hanging upside down in a unitard, extends his arms toward a black-haired girl who does not speak his language, and the girl—some crazy fucking chick who never learned there’s nothing in the whole damn world that worthy of trust—lets go and soars into nothingness, catching his hands. They swing, they fly. Her leg touching Yank’s on the bleachers, Nicole exhales loudly enough for it to pass for a sob.
“Kak!” Sandor exclaims, on Nicole’s other side as he always seems to be—Christ, what if he’s not even a queer at all and is in love with her, too?—“I thought maybe he would fall, my heart goes too fast!” He places Nicole’s hand on his chest.
“Oh, I am the big Nazi,” Sandor says agreeably. “In Holland, we are all Nazis, this is just how it is, no offense. Nazis who decriminalize drugs and prostitution—it is a very fun country, you must come visit!” He falls against her and they chortle, clutching each other’s arms, Sandor’s hat falling to reveal his shockingly yellow stubble.
Joshua is no longer on the stage. Nicole has turned to watch a Russian man swallowing fire, her eyes alight and riveted, but Yank takes her by the upper arm and says, “I need to talk to you. Come on, girl. Now.”
She looks over at Sandor apologetically. “We’ll be right back,” she tells him, and Sandor’s mouth opens slightly, but they are already moving through the stands as Sandor calls out, “Hey! Bring back more beer!”
Yank leads her under the bleachers. There’s no big top here; it’s just a gymnasium where sports events are held, reinvented for the circus, visually transformed. He hears the clamoring of feet overhead, dramatic music piped in to heighten the danger of the performance, and he backs her slowly—his limbs moving with the mindless fluidity of a trapeze—against a pole and kisses her with the kamikaze force of his own confession.
Her body seems taken utterly by surprise. She loses her balance, topples against the pole, so that he has to catch her, her arms darting out to steady herself like a high-wire acrobat. He kisses her again, and this time she does not stumble, does not resist, though she does not quite kiss him back either. He’s had to bend over to reach her—she’s almost a foot shorter than he is—and he stands back up to his full height, his body not touching hers anymore. He lays one hand up lightly against her throat. Says, “If I pulled your skirt up right now and fucked your brains out against that pole, would you try to stop me?”
And she says, “No.”
It’s not enough. “Because you think you owe me?” he persists. “Or ’cause you’re collecting experiences and it’s one more way to slum before you go home and forget us?”