A Life in Men: A Novel

by Gina Frangello

  She has been doing this a lot lately. Drifting away from her body to survey the image of herself as if from above. The picture looks so much as she had hoped it would that she can scarcely believe it. Sometimes she feels she is being followed by an invisible camera crew, is tempted to turn and wink at the audience to say, Can you fucking believe this? The audience would consist of her anxious parents; of Bobby Kenner; of all those fair-weather high school friends who quietly removed themselves following her diagnosis; of Yank, as she lives the life he all but orchestrated when he urged her to reconsider spending her remaining time in Dullsville, Ohio, and to instead let Joshua show her the world. But mostly her audience would be Nix, always Nix: speechless, shocked, proud.

  THEY ARRIVED IN Kenya from Japan—perhaps its polar cultural opposite—where Joshua’s circus was making an extended appearance, and Mary was fresh off two weeks in the hospital in Osaka. Joshua’s cousin Gavin had written from Nairobi to say he’d started a safari company and would give Joshua a job, and just like that, presto, their circus life was over, after nine months on the move and nearly a dozen European cities that had dazzled Mary with their beauty and promise initially, but that she’d wandered through alone, increasingly frustrated as Joshua spent his days in rehearsals and his nights performing the same show she’d seen twenty, fifty, seventy times, until near the end she’d spent most of Austria and Germany in dinky hotel rooms reading novels about other people, other places, not even bothering to see the sites, numb with living out of a suitcase and with northern Europe’s relentless rain.

  In contrast to her few months at Arthog House, to the strange intimacy she had forged with both Yank and Sandor, she and Joshua managed to spend the better part of a year in the company of his fellow circus performers without making any close friends. For starters, he was the only native English speaker in the show, but somehow it wasn’t only that. When Mary wrote letters home to her mother, she was aware of her life’s sounding eccentric and glamorous—a traveling circus!—but in practice she was often bored, a hanger-on like the unnecessary mascot of a single-minded sports team. Japan had been a relief. They would set up shop for a year, or so the plan went. Long enough to have some kind of life. Mary had even gotten a job teaching English and purchased a bicycle on which to ride to school. But her hospital stay derailed all that, frightening even the usually fearless Joshua with the language barrier and strange customs: family members washing the patients’ laundry on the roof of the hospital; food served family-style in communal rooms, with stronger patients pouring the weaker patients’ tea. Joshua had to bring Mary’s nightclothes and towels, since such things weren’t provided, and he’d missed performances while tending to her, and they were both still mortified at not having realized that, on Mary’s release, they were supposed to leave her doctor a tip. Her legs so swollen from IVs of antibiotics that she couldn’t even fit into her own shoes, they’d been back with the circus for only a few days when the letter from Gavin arrived. Like a sign.

  JOSHUA IS LOST. How easy this is to hide from clients never ceases to amaze Mary, but she’s learned to read the signs. He’s scanning, using his binoculars, but instead of game she knows he’s searching for other safari vehicles. Heedlessly he whizzes past the zebras that dot the landscape more plentifully than cows do the American Midwest, ignoring cries of glee from four-year-old Liam, on the bench seat in the back, who has missed most of the earlier zebras while poring over pictures of birds in Joshua’s wildlife book. Smoothly claiming to be on the lookout for a lion, Joshua doesn’t slow the truck, not even for a herd of gracefully loping giraffes, not even when Walt and Kathleen stand up in the moving vehicle to photograph receding wildlife as their cameras bob up and down from the rocky earth, whacking them rudely in the eyes.

  Gavin has offered to throw some money at a local Maasai to sit shotgun in the truck until Joshua gets the lay of the Mara down pat, but Joshua repeatedly refuses because then Mary would have to sit in the back with the clients instead of beside him. Getting lost is no problem, he assures Gavin—the clients get excited when you seem to be looking wildly for something anyway. Just claim you’ve seen tracks of a lion stalking an impala, and they’re near orgasm while you race around trying to figure out where the hell you are. And the beauty of it is that the lie is without consequence, because in the Mara you never leave clients high and dry. Of the Big Five, three practically hurtle themselves at you here. Leopards are always most elusive, and black rhino are more plentiful elsewhere, but on the Mara, elephants, buffalo, and even lions are simply everywhere, in addition to all the “lesser” (Mary often thinks “more beautiful”) game. The challenge would be to spend a day without spotting at least a few lionesses dozing in the shade, or a lone lion king surveying his kingdom, poetically staring off across the plains.

  On their first few safaris, Mary’s heart would race when Joshua lost his bearings. She pictured them driving until they ran out of petrol, never encountering another human being, rationing the clients’ Hobnobs and bad potato crisps, big cats circling as the pitch-black African night fell. But of course this never happened. Tourism has exploded in Kenya. Though at one moment they can seem alone in the wild, nothing else visible on any horizon, in truth, almost as with the animals, they never have to travel that far before seeing a cluster of safari vehicles parked, khaki-clothed travelers inside with cameras covering their faces, the sound of snapshots firing louder than the inexplicably silent footfalls of the elephants being photographed. In the beginning, Joshua (talking a blue streak about birds, for distraction) would sometimes end up trailing another guide—some actual Kenyan, usually Kikuyu—as he ferried his charges back to the Keekorok. Now, though, it never takes nearly that long. One glimpse of the river, one particular rock formation or cluster of trees, one memory of the way the tire tracks diverge near the overhang where they first saw the two lion brothers even Mary has come to recognize after repeated sightings, and Joshua is on his own again, trying harder and harder to keep apart from the fray.

  “And there he is,” Joshua says smoothly, pulling up alongside a straggling river, navigating the tires cleanly through knee-deep water to park on the other side. Around everyone’s craned necks, Walt and Kathleen standing, the children on top of their seats, Mary sees what he is talking about: a hippo, its chocolate-gray skin still shiny with life, lying dead at the water’s edge just under a small overhang of grassy earth. The hippo is on its side, fresh molten-pink scratches crisscrossing its hide, part of its head caved in, missing. Over the whirling in her ears, Mary hears the clients’ oohs and aahs, their intakes of breath, their cameras maniacally clicking, and suddenly she glimpses the lion dozing on the overhang, his mane a darker brown than the dry grass, guarding his kill.

  “A lion!” Liam shouts. “My favorite!”

  His sister, Fiona, imperiously elbows him, half knocking him off the perch of his seat. “Shut up, do you want it to forget about that hippo and come eat you?”

  Liam—Mary can’t tell if he’s hamming it up or sincere—begins to cry, shrieking, “Eat me? Eat me!” until Kathleen looks away from the hippo and takes her son in her arms, and Walt shoots Fiona a dirty look from behind his camera lens and mutters, “You want that phone in your room? Then knock it off.”

  Dearest Nix,

  Here is what I know so far. Death is cheap in Africa. People come here for one of two reasons: (1) to recognize, even celebrate their own insignificance amid the heartless, beautiful vastness, or (2) to convince themselves of their mastery of Africa’s majesty and malevolence by taking its picture, pinning it down on a page, assuring themselves it is something wholly separate from them.

  Sometimes, a person who arrives in Africa for one of these two reasons ends up remaining for the other reason entirely. Africa can change your mind, and whatever you thought you knew of life and death can easily be switched around. You cannot choose whether this land will inhabit you, change everything you thought you knew. You can only arrive and do your best to keep an open mi
nd.

  The problem is, everything Africa has to teach involves a body count. All roads here lead to something dead. So, if you were hoping not to think of Death at all, not to let him learn your address, not to enter into either friendship or battle with his forces but, rather, to trick him into not recognizing your name, then you are in the wrong place entirely. You should have stayed home.

  JOSHUA PARKS ON a hilltop so the family can photograph the Serengeti, the invisible dividing line between Kenya and Tanzania, and obediently Walt, Kathleen, and Fiona rise, snapping where he points. Mary watches Liam kicking the chair in front of him, bored. It’s weird, she thinks, for Walt and Kathleen to have brought him along. Most of the English- and American-based safari companies don’t even permit children under ten, or seven, or something like that, nor will the treetop lodges on Mount Kenya or the more exclusive tented camps. Gavin’s company, however, has opted for quantity by keeping to the more mainstream lodges (lots of African kids stay at Keekorok, too: school groups and middle-class Kikuyu families). These lodges provide amenities like indoor showers and swimming pools but cater to big crowds, favor lukewarm buffets, and cannot be called truly “luxurious.” Fiona is technically of an acceptable safari age at twelve—with breasts already bigger than Mary’s—but just because she’s allowed to be here doesn’t mean she’s mature enough to appreciate it. On the whole, this family seems the sort Mary traveled across the world to avoid; she would bet money that, at home in Saint Paul, they have matching “Kiss me, I’m Irish” T-shirts, and are prone to attend parades.

  It doesn’t matter, though. Mary has been here only since early fall, but already, just shy of Christmas, the clients are becoming a bit of a blur with their identical questions, their cocktail-party small talk. “Think of yourself as the social director of a cruise ship,” Gavin told Mary the first time she accompanied Joshua on safari. “They think they’re here for a walk on the wild side, but in reality the minute they see a blond American girl, they’ll almost piss themselves with relief. If you like the circuit—if you don’t tire of the endless smell of lion piss—I’ll start paying you to go along, to chat them up, reassure them.” He offered this while they drank Tuskers around the swimming pool outside his swank cottage in the rich—and overwhelmingly white—suburb of Karen, the picturesque stone wall surrounding his idyllic home topped with far less picturesque razor wire intended to keep out the “natives” who might aspire to steal his possessions or slit his throat. His leggy Swedish wife (or maybe they were not married) smiled a cocaine-numb smile, her eyes shielded by dark Chanel glasses. Her English was impeccable, yet she and Mary rarely spoke. She could not have been more than five or six years Mary’s senior, but she seemed a whole separate breed. What assholes, Mary thought. She could hardly believe that Gavin, with his pleated linen pants and sharkish politician’s smile, was related to Joshua. She felt disinclined to take his advice on anything.

  It turns out, however, that he was right. No sooner do the clients depart—back to the States, to England, to Canada, to Italy—than she has already forgotten their names.

  THE SKY IS darkening fast, Liam asleep with his head on Kathleen’s lap, when Walt booms, “Hey, before we head back, let’s check on our hippo one more time!”

  Our hippo. Mary knew this was coming. If Walt hadn’t mentioned it, Joshua would have, and she has spent the past two hours trying to come up with some plausible excuse to deter him. Her stomach lurches. Fiona moans, “Eew, gross,” but without conviction, and already Joshua is grinning, turning the truck toward the river. He tosses a look over his shoulder, and in that moment he appears no older than Fiona, a trickster elf somehow entrusted with the safety of an entire upper-middle-class American family. “I should’ve brought some nose plugs, eh?” he says. “Our hippo friend will be getting ripe.”

  Mary closes her eyes, resolving to skip tomorrow’s 7 a.m. game drive. No doubt they’ll all be hot to return bright and early to watch the vultures and hyenas war over the hippo’s stenchy remains. She pictures herself instead cocooned under the mosquito net, curtains drawn against the vigilant morning sun, Keekorok waiters bringing her a little metal pot of Nescafé and hot milk, since despite the international fame of “Kenyan coffee,” nobody in the actual nation of Kenya seems to consume anything except crappy instant. She will spend her morning reading at the pool, wearing only a little black bikini, confident that even if she is not exactly a “guest,” nobody will care, since her young, shapely body makes for a fine poolside ornament. No, she will not trot around at the crack of dawn, trailing Joshua like a faithful dog. Not this time.

  True to Joshua’s prediction, they smell the hippo before they see it. At times on safari, the air seems like something you could touch: so thick with animal urine or decomposing flesh that it’s hard to believe such a scent carries no shape, no color to mark its presence. The scratches on the hippo’s hide are already losing their pink rawness, browning in the heat and sun. There, at its mammoth belly, are the lion brothers Mary and Joshua have come to know, one (the larger, with his darker mane) feasting on the hippo’s tough flesh, his younger brother lying insouciantly behind.

  “Oh my God,” Kathleen mutters. “I can’t believe this! We’ve hit the jackpot on our very first drive!”

  “Shut up, Mom,” Fiona snaps. “The guidebook says we’re supposed to be quiet around the animals.”

  “Your mother doesn’t know how to be quiet,” Walt says, barking a laugh.

  “Dad,” Fiona pleads nervously, “you’re making it worse!”

  The feeding lion does not even look up at their nasally twangs. The lounging brother stares at them, but with the kind of disinterest with which an infant surveys his own reflection in a mirror.

  Joshua moves in closer. Mary is amazed, almost dumbfounded, by what a natural he is: Before they arrived in Nairobi, she had never even seen him pet a dog or drive a car. He was an urbanite, of Johannesburg and London, a peddler of hash cakes, a street performer. Now it turns out that in Johannesburg Joshua’s father owns a driveaway business, and Joshua spent his entire youth—when not training at the gym—working with cars. While their truck has never broken down entirely, they have twice blown tires Joshua switched without batting an eye, and they once got stuck in a flash flood so that the vehicle floated downstream, and Joshua and two African guides who’d seen the mishap literally pushed the car against the river tide back onto the gravelly bank, where Joshua then did mysterious things under the hood until the waterlogged truck started again.

  As close to the lion as they can get without hitting the hippo with their tires, Joshua kills the engine. This is his seventh solo safari, but Mary knows that on his fiftieth his eyes will have lost none of their rapture. He lives more in the moment than anyone she will ever meet, a chameleon in his ability to change colors and inhabit, fully and utterly, the role in which he has suddenly found himself. You can learn the lay of the Kenyan land, but you cannot learn this, this lack of being anywhere other than where you are in a given instant; this complete surrender to watching a lion eat a hippo; this absence of wanting or wondering about anything except the spectacularly commonplace miracle before your eyes.

  Kathleen and Walt and Fiona click their cameras—they each have one!—at the speed of light, hungry for documentation. But Joshua, Mary suddenly realizes, has never taken a photo on safari. She owns a camera—she is an American, after all—and has brought it with her on their trips, and at first she was no different than Kathleen and Walt, taking forty-seven pictures of the same giraffe, mystified and half-afraid she was dreaming, desperate to prove she had really been here, really seen that. By now she knows that photos of animals lose their power in the retelling; it is looking back on the photo of Joshua and the guides pushing their floating truck, or of Joshua asleep in the morning light on their first morning in Samburu, that gives her pleasure. A photo of a lion loses its magic once you yourself are no longer in the scene, because a lion is supposed to be on the Mara, supposed to be eating a hippo
—it is you who were never meant to be here.

  “Sawa sawa,” Walt says after a while, lowering the camera that, for this generation of safarigoers, has replaced the guns of old. Joshua has taught the family this Swahili term, which in this context means “I’m ready to go” or “It’s all good” or “Cool,” and signals a waning fascination with a given sight. But Joshua does not immediately start the car, and Mary notices that he is not looking at the lion and hippo anymore but at Liam, awake now and wide-eyed, rapt. Liam, who does not own a camera. Liam, who is not speaking anymore, not tormenting his sister, not eating his brought-from-home granola bar, but watching the animals with reverence, spellbound.

  Joshua turns to her, eyes inscrutable. “He won’t even remember this trip,” he whispers. “Sawa sawa,” Fiona says, and her father chuckles at how she is catching on.

  NO SOONER HAD Gavin’s letter arrived than Joshua began to wax rhapsodic about the African sky. He had grown up “going to the bush,” and despite the enormity of the African continent—the geographic, political, and cultural gulfs between South Africa and Kenya—the move was clearly a homecoming to him. South Africa had made itself unlivable, but here was Kenya, with a kinder and gentler residual colonialism, with a smiling African population that had never been exactly enslaved, even with a spanking-new plan for democracy through multiparty elections, some ploy Moi had pulled out of his ass at the eleventh hour to appease the international community. Kenya, with the same endless sky and nearly red earth as Joshua’s homeland. From the first it was clear that he felt more at home amid its landscape than he ever could have in the cities of Europe.