A Life in Men: A Novel

by Gina Frangello

  She has never done a PT in front of Eli—he does not even have a clue that she has CF. As usual, she has admitted to her asthma, has even used her inhaler in front him, and has a few times pressed him not to smoke in her presence when she’s “having a bad day.” But truthfully, in the time they have known each other, Mary has been almost freakishly healthy. Living alone, she has plenty of time to do three PTs a day; she works only at night, and her days are mainly spent lying around in sweatpants practicing Spanish tapes, then going to swim at the YMCA pool. Once, shortly after she and Eli first slept together, she had to go on antibiotics for a PA infection, but like a miracle the drugs cleared things right up and she never landed in the hospital. She missed only two classes. Eli came over with chicken soup, and though she was coughing continually, he seemed to think nothing of it.

  This dementedly large house, this castle owned by her birth father the count, has a chapel in it, of all things. The chapel, Daniel and Gabriella explained, came with the house. Gabriella is, of course, Catholic. “We were going to nix the graphic crucifix,” Daniel joked to Eli that first night, “but when Gabriella’s family drop by, it cheers them up to see Jesus watching over our house to make sure she’s not going to hell for living with a Jew.” Eli, who has been doing a good impression of a humorless stiff, did not laugh. At home, nobody can tell a Jewish joke as well as Eli, yet here he didn’t even crack a smile. Later he told Mary, “I can’t believe he has a crucifix on his wall!” Mary swears that in the past forty-eight hours, whenever Daniel has said anything of which Eli disapproves, she’s heard Eli mutter, “Oy.”

  And so it is in the chapel where she finally hides, late in the afternoon on their second full day. Sitting on the floor next to the altar laden with unlit candles, she uses her Flutter device to expel the mucus from her chest for as long as she can, listening to Eli, spurred on by the sound of her coughs, roaming the halls calling her name. The Flutter makes for a quieter therapy than the chest-pounding, spitting, and gagging sessions of her teen years, but it still is loud. Eli would never look for her in the chapel, though, so even when his footsteps approach, she only quiets down and gulps back her coughs until she hears his voice growing farther away. He does not know that Mary was once an altar girl at her family’s progressive Catholic church and used to stand below Father Corbo holding the heavy, ornate Bible open on her head while he read from it during funerals. This was before funerals started to freak her out. This was when she believed, like all children, that she would never be dead.

  THAT EVENING, WHEN they return from dinner in the biblical square, Mary rushes back to the chapel to do her evening PT under the pretext of suffering from Montezuma’s revenge and having to use the toilet, where at least Eli will not follow. Once the heavy doors shut behind her, she reclines on the chapel’s cold floor without bothering to turn on the lights and begins to breathe into the device, watching the little ball rise, noting with a boulder of dread that her breath is weaker already just from one skipped day, or maybe from the stress of being here, or maybe from the constant cigarette smoke Daniel and Gabriella have been blowing in her face. She breathes, trying to calm herself, running the Lord’s Prayer through her head like a mantra, but the prayer itself makes her nervous instead of calming her as it did as a girl. If Eli heard her, he would not like it.

  Of course, why should she have to please Eli? But the rage she wants to feel, just like the breath she cannot summon, fails her. Eli is someone who came with her to Mexico. He is someone who spoons her body, at least when he can sneak away to do so. He is someone who understands a life of perpetual movement, of living hard and fast, and of the gaping, escape-shaped hole left in a life once that motion has stopped. He is someone who doesn’t judge her for sleeping with a married man, since he is the married man in question, so she does not have to explain that morality is something she simply has run out of time for: her body needs what it needs while it can get it.

  The door jerks, knocks, swings open. Mary bolts upright in the dark room like a teenager caught with her pants around her ankles in her boyfriend’s bedroom, tossing the Flutter device randomly, so that it clanks into one of the candlesticks on the altar and knocks it over, and she listens with horror as they all begin to topple like dominoes. She jumps to her feet, blinking at the light.

  It is not Eli, however, but Daniel. His eyes are narrowed, confused. He says, “Um. What are you up to in here?”

  And she says, “What are you up to? I thought you were Jewish!” She has said it in a tone like a snotty teenager’s that she instantly thinks he must be glad to have gotten rid of her and spared himself this nastiness on a daily basis.

  He stares back at her incredulously. “Don’t tell me you were praying.”

  “No. I just . . . wanted to be alone.”

  “I heard you coughing. Are you sick?”

  Are you sick? Here it is: the simple opportunity to tell the truth. Mary can feel her parents sitting on her shoulders like a cartoon parody of her conscience, whispering in her ear, urging her to tell him, to ask where this mutant gene came from, to find out at what age the various afflicted members of his family dropped dead. It has not escaped Mary that it seems to have entirely escaped her parents that the CF gene needs to be contributed by both birth parents, and that it is therefore likely that no one in Daniel’s family even knows it exists, and she will be the one to break this cheery news of his legacy. She gropes frantically behind her for her Flutter device, which she cannot see beneath the clutter.

  Daniel steps forward, like a father or a highly competent museum tour guide, and ushers her by the shoulder out of the room.

  THE PORCELAIN DOLL is cracked. His daughter doesn’t seem, to Daniel, like the type of woman who collected dolls as a little girl, but it is all he has left of Rebecca, his ex, Mary’s mother, and he cannot help thinking that all he really has to offer her—Mary—is this relic. It was the only thing Rebecca didn’t take with her when she packed her bags and left the baby and Daniel’s son, Leo, alone in the apartment while Daniel was at the police station being roughed up for having smashed the window of his own car in a lunatic, drug-fueled rage, and for generally disturbing the peace of Greenwich Village circa 1968. As if any such peace existed, with or without Daniel to disturb it.

  He says to their daughter now, “I kept it all these years. I always knew I’d track you down, once you were old enough to understand.” He is aware that he sounds like a parody of the Father Who Gave Up His Child and does not know how to infuse the words with any essence of himself. He says again, now sounding like the Pathetic Has-Been Still Carrying a Torch for the Woman Who Left Him, “I can’t get over how much you look like your mother.”

  His daughter clutches the doll. Mary’s eyes have the look of fever, of someone who has glimpsed something she didn’t know she wanted or needed and now cannot live without. She has an unquenchable thirst about her, a madness Daniel recognizes as more his own than Rebecca’s. He doesn’t like it, this infusion of himself into her features.

  “Where is she now? Rebecca?” He notices she does not say my mother. Of course. She already has a mother—a father, too. What is the matter with him, using language like that? He wants to bang his head into the wall, but his daughter is looking at him with naked expectation. What would that imaginary self-help book call for in such a situation? Is he about to say the wrong thing? If so, what the hell should he say instead?

  Your mother left you alone in a shithole apartment in a crap neighborhood, with an unstable older brother. Your mother left you in an open dresser drawer and ran for her life, away from me, because that was the kind of asshole I was, and nobody on earth could blame her—nobody except you. Your mother didn’t like the way you cried and coughed and didn’t latch onto her tit properly; your mother could have taken you with her, back to her respectable parents on Long Island, but she didn’t, and apparently they were all glad as hell ’cause none of them ever came back sniffing around looking for you—believe me, I waited eight lo
ng days expecting them to show up in their snazzy black car; I waited for Rebecca’s frigid mother to stand imperiously in the doorway with her ice-queen arms open for the baby; I waited to toss you into those arms and be rid of you and dared to hope they’d buy me off with a bit of cash not to come around, and I wondered how much they’d offer and how much smack I could score with it. But the knock on the door never came, they all forgot you, they went on with their Long Island lives, and I was the only one who did you any favors by calling my father’s lawyer buddy and letting him take you off my incompetent, junked-up hands. Where is she, your mother, with her sexy ass and that wild hair and the way she used to stare at me like I was something? Fuck if I know, honey, fuck if I know where that bitch is now. Not waiting for you to call, that’s for sure. Hey, here’s something I kept because I must be God’s biggest loser—who knows why I kept it, who the hell knows—hey, here’s a broken fucking doll!

  “She’s dead,” Daniel says. “She died only about a week after you were born. It was an infection she caught in the hospital. They tried to save her but they couldn’t. The antibiotics didn’t work. After she died, no one on her side of the family ever talked to me anymore. They didn’t like me. I had a drug problem, like I said, and they held me responsible. I got her pregnant when I had no way of supporting a child. But we were happy. We were happy while it lasted. She loved being pregnant. She told her parents to go screw themselves. We had a good thing going, for what it was. You have to understand, the drugs, our problems—that shit was common for the time period. It’s not an excuse. Or maybe it is an excuse. We weren’t so bad. At least we weren’t over there raping village girls in Vietnam. Your mother was a real looker. You look just like her.”

  His daughter’s eyes pool over. Her mother is dead. No, her mother is back in Ohio, but the owner of this doll (which Daniel knows Rebecca didn’t even buy, though he’s not sure where it came from) is dead, and this makes his daughter sad. She stares at him, and the longer it lasts, the more he sees himself—Leo, too—in her. This is it, he thinks, this is the moment. He did not have twenty-six years with her; he does not have much to carry forward into his old age, but he has this: his daughter standing in woolly socks on these cold, formidable tiles, clutching a doll to her chest and crying for the loss of her mother. This is the moment he will remember whenever he thinks of her from here on out. In the remaining years before his death, he will never think of his daughter again without conjuring this image in his mind. Soon enough—within the next twenty-four hours—the memory will be tainted by the discovery of its falseness. Still, it will remain a moment frozen in time, and as such it is beautiful; it is perfect. Her grief for his tall tale. Her resemblance to Rebecca, who was always too good for him and finally figured that out. And to him, reflecting back out to the world like a piece of history, like the living, breathing pages of a book. Like something that will carry into the future.

  HE DOES NOT yet know that he will outlive her. Why would he know this? She is duplicitous, like the woman who bore her, and she has not yet told him.

  He does not know, either, that out of his bullshit tale she has constructed one of her own. An infection. Yes, she has had plenty of these. The antibiotics didn’t work, and no, of course they didn’t, for this, too, is what will happen to her someday; it is what happens to almost all of them in the end, as the bacteria in their lungs grows ever more aggressive and drug resistant. She knows that of course women with CF are generally advised against having children because of what it can do to their health, the stress on an already broken system. Of course her mother’s family would have blamed Daniel for knocking her up—her very life was at stake! And she—she killed her own mother! Tears roll down her face, and Daniel stands wrapped in his touching moment which is already becoming a memory, and she cannot speak, cannot break the news to him: that she is sick, too, that her life is equally doomed. She cannot tell him that her mother died for nothing.

  And so they stand, cold footed and lying and both lost in their own beautiful myths. Daniel watches the emotion on his daughter’s face, and he feels love and swells with pride at himself, with the thrill of watching himself from the outside as he watches his poetically weeping daughter and experiences love for her. If he had never given her up, she would probably be a ridiculous crack whore by now. Instead, he has this moment, this shimmery moment to cherish forever. It is transcendent.

  ELI COULD GET used to this. Every morning, no matter what time he rises, Gabriella has empanadas laid out on the tiled kitchen counter and coffee brewing in the percolator. She is like a hotter Latina version of Diane. Eli can understand the attraction, why a man like Daniel—only seven years older than he is—would chuck everything and move to Mexico (not exactly a hardship with this house!) for a babe like that. He grudgingly has to admit that Daniel is a pretty decent-looking old guy, no hair loss, no sign of a gut, Jewy in that feral way women find sexy instead of in the nebbishy way that plagued Eli’s youth. Plus, Daniel has money and a taste for the good life.

  Eli shares that taste. He loves shit like this. Drinking coffee with a group—coffee should be legally mandated as a group activity, as should smoking weed. It’s just not as pleasurable alone. In a rocking chair on the back patio, surrounded by pots filled with exuberantly blooming purple flowers, he and Gabriella and Daniel smoke cigarettes while Mary sits, one leg tucked under her, in her robe, the sinews of her bare foot breathtaking as she uses that one foot to push off the ground again and again, rocking. He stares at that foot and feels blood rush to his head, like a stroke coming on. She has some crazy magnetic beads wound around her ankle several times like an African princess. The bones of her foot stand out; her blackberry toenail polish is beginning to chip. Oh, the pleasure! Who are these people, Gabriella and Daniel and even Mary? Why should it feel so perfect here at one moment, at a moment like this, and so foreign the next?

  Gabriella has family obligations on their fourth day, so Daniel is taking them alone to San Miguel de Allende. In freaky expat logic, although he is a count and lives in a virtual castle, the man has no car, so they take a taxi to the bus station (replete with shrine to the Virgin Mary next to the ticket booths) and eat knockoff Ritz crackers while they wait to pile onto a crowded bus, stifling hot and full of squalling babies and backed-up exhaust fumes. Somehow Mary falls asleep, like the near child that she is, then wakes in a coughing fit, grabbing that asthma inhaler out of her cheap bag and shaking it with a bony, floppy wrist, sucking its fumes down like a bong hit. It makes Eli stiff just watching her suck on that little apparatus, her silver-ringed fingers clutching it like she might a lover’s prick. If the exhaust fumes weren’t nauseating him, he’d try to slip his hand under her skirt when her father wasn’t looking.

  San Miguel de Allende looks like a painting. All terra-cotta and cathedral spires and old men peddling cartoon-character-shaped balloons and beggars hiding small, weary children under their shawls and Americans everywhere, tanned, trendily dressed American twentysomethings and older artist types, old bohos who look like Daniel, that hiply rumpled look Eli can never quite achieve, even though he’s an old boho if anyone is. Eli would like to wander the shops and galleries, maybe pick up some Day of the Dead art for Diane, who is into skeletons and Frida Kahlo and all feminine dead things. Except how could he pass off some handmade dead figurines in a brightly painted wooden box as something he picked up in Longboat Key? Diane is not a part of this day’s agenda. He’s never—in two decades—spent this long in the company of another woman; usually he can barely stand to spend an hour with a mistress after sex without rushing back to familiar, smart Diane, who can talk politics with the big boys, who can still blow him with the best of them, even if her breasts sag some with wear and tear. Yeah, being with Diane isn’t so rough. But—forgetting the kids for a minute—he can, maybe for the first time in his life, imagine what it might be to lead a life without Diane. There are Dianes everywhere; look at Gabriella. You could lead a life, a comfortable life with coffee and
warm bread and good sex and love—yes, love—anywhere, couldn’t you? You could lead it with Mary. Something about her is harder to place, though, less dime-a-dozen in both good ways and bad, and this makes her less reliable. He can imagine staying here, staying with her, traveling around Central America all summer with his kids instead of wasting his dad hours chauffeuring them all over bland Columbus, going to Little League and soccer games. Who can say the quality of their relationship would be less if he gave them something like that to remember instead of just being the body behind the wheel of a minivan? But if he did anything that rash, who can say how long it would be before he woke one day to find Mary gone?

  Daniel ushers them right away to a café. It’s on the main square, and Eli suspects they’ll charge too much, but what the hell, a margarita will do everybody good. They sit at a small purple table on a shaded terrace, and Eli thinks that they make a glamorous enough entourage of three, that Mary’s young presence adds an air of illicit mystery. He feels like a spy, and this sensation, mixed with the tequila, is pleasing. They fend off vendors selling foam-rubber puzzles and cheaply strung necklaces with waves of their hands and “No, gracias,” but hand pesos to a few ragged children who seem numb and not at all grateful. It is strange that solicitors are permitted on the actual terrace, but that’s what they get for eating on the main square. They order another round of margaritas.