A Life in Men: A Novel

by Gina Frangello

  Except that, apparently, to Mary it doesn’t. The expression on her face is caught between nostalgia and longing, which Geoff interprets as an affront. If you like hippies, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you shouldn’t marry a doctor. Plus, if Mary took to smoking hash and sleeping on the beach, she would probably be dead in a matter of months. Perhaps this is why she is sitting here with him? His beer tastes warm and sour now.

  Mary has stopped looking at the hippies. She turns to him and says, “That’s all we do, isn’t it? Look at things and try new drinks.”

  Geoff jumps a little in his chair. It seems bizarre and apocalyptic, her saying this.

  But Mary laughs. “You know,” she says. “ ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’ ” And slowly Geoff feels his body relax. He has never read the story, but has heard of it, of course. It’s unclear now why he reacted so badly. Even in light of the hippies, the quote obviously isn’t true of him and Mary at all. “Remember?” Mary says, as though the possibility that Geoff may not have read the story is inconceivable. “How the girl says everything tastes like licorice? We should order a pastis—have you ever tried one? I used to drink them in France. And in London, there was this derelict old geezer who used to come into the Latchmere every morning at eleven and stay until closing. Everyone called him Pernod because that was all he ever ordered. Except me. I called him Norm.”

  Geoff does not, thank God, ask Mary if the guy’s name was Norm. This reference he understands.

  Mary signals the waiter. But Geoff doesn’t want a fancy French aperitif now. He wants to go back to the room and retreat behind the Herald Tribune and forget about Mary for a while, even though it is the first day of their honeymoon and he has no choice but to take her with him. He pulls out some money, claiming exhaustion, to which Mary says, “If you didn’t wake up so damned early to run around,” but fondly, unaware of his mood shift, and they head back to the resort.

  It isn’t until dinnertime, however, that Geoff remembers about Santa Cruz and the carnival. Back at the resort, Mary sucked his dick without his having to ask her to, and so he liked her again. Liked her again? But of course he likes her all the time, loves her too much—that is the problem. Of course he wouldn’t mind about the stupid hippies (to whom she didn’t even speak) otherwise. He came in her mouth, and she dashed off into the bathroom to spit it into the sink, but he forgave her because that is just what girls are like after you get serious with them, even if they swallowed in the beginning. Geoff is no Casanova, but he is old enough to understand such a simple thing and not be offended by it anymore. Once, the girlfriend who later dumped him for moving to Ohio asked how he would like it if she shot a wad of menstrual blood into his mouth and told him to swallow it, and he had to admit he wouldn’t like it much, though he isn’t convinced the two things are exactly comparable when you come down to it. Nonetheless, his dick sucked and drained, he forgave Mary the hippies and fell asleep without the Herald Tribune, and later when he woke and found her poolside in her boy-shorts bikini, reading Justine by Lawrence Durrell, his dick got hard again and he remembered the carnival and offered it to her, like a fancily wrapped candy, a reward.

  So here they are. They have ridden the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Scrambler, and everything feels happy, exciting, and light. Mary leans against him as they walk, her hand in the back pocket of his shorts. As in Greece, she stands out here with her blond hair. She has on the batik dress and flip-flops again, while all the Spanish women wear leather heels. Mary, a world traveler, must understand the footwear customs of Spanish women, but she never wears heels, even though she is short. She dresses, Geoff thinks, like a girl in junior high, though her breasts, clearly braless behind the dress’s gauzy fabric, are nothing a father of a junior high girl would be thrilled to see his daughter parading around at a foreign carnival. Against his body, she feels lithe and fragile, as though he could rip the dress off with one hand and leave her standing, abandon her to the crowd, with her gaping, pale titties and tiny underpants and the flip-flops still on her feet. Not that this is something he would ever do, or even the kind of thing he fantasizes about—though it strikes him as something Mary might whisper to him suggestively while he is fucking her, during one of her stretches of sexual intensity, when her drive borders on the desperate or depraved, and after long hours on call Geoff can barely keep up with her: a predicament both alarming and thrilling. Although she has not been in one of those periods since the fall, Geoff thinks that maybe later, when they make love in the hot tub, he will tell her about this fantasy that is not his fantasy quite, and he imagines her wetness gliding over his dick and how, even if she doesn’t say so, he will know she is turned on. He has forgotten the hippies now.

  There is alcohol for sale at the carnival, so they get drunk. In Cincinnati, Geoff is not a big drinker, Mary even less so, given all the meds she takes, but here, why not? Here for one week, why not be the people from her Hemingway story? The twirling Octopus, in combination with liquor, makes them ill. And yet there is a thrill in the air. They dance in the open lot to Madonna booming “Holiday,” just as in Greece nearly eight years ago: in any country in the world, “Holiday” is playing. They take this carnival for all it is worth, and Mary’s hand caresses Geoff’s ass inside his back pocket, and everything feels right and fresh and good, even though they have both been to makeshift carnivals and danced to eighties songs and touched each other’s asses a hundred times before, and that saved them from nothing.

  When they leave, it is as though they are simply being led onward, to something else. They still haven’t eaten dinner, and Geoff napped through lunch, just munching some Pringles out of the honor bar, so not only is he famished but his intoxication level is teetering on the brink of dangerous. They planned to eat dinner at “their” restaurant—the one where he proposed—but they’ve remained in Santa Cruz too long and missed the seating. And Geoff finds, really, that all he wants to do is meander until he and Mary find another place—the kind without set seatings, a place concierges do not recommend and that is not in any guidebook—and wander inside. He will know the right place when he sees it. They will drink red wine and eat seafood or paella, and years from now they will still talk about the restaurant, though they may not remember its name.

  “Look,” Mary says, jerking his hand. “What’s going on?”

  Up front, a parade seems to be blocking the street, though this seems an odd hour for it. The audience, rather than standing on the sidelines watching, follows the procession. Geoff tightens his grip on Mary’s hand as they rush forward to see.

  Ah, okay, yes. This is part of Carnaval—the real Carnaval—because tonight is the day before Ash Wednesday. Geoff isn’t Catholic, isn’t really anything, although he and Mary share a common later-in-life addition of Jews to their family, since Geoff’s WASP mother is now married to one. If there is some hidden Catholic meaning to the fact that the procession is composed of men dressed in drag, then Geoff isn’t savvy to what it is. Or wait—not just in drag but as widows in mourning, all in black but for red flowers on their hats, or a red shirt beneath a jacket or cloak of black. They shriek in falsetto, dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs in a mock sorrow Geoff doesn’t understand. Is it a parody of the Inquisition, perhaps? He looks at Mary for some Catholic insight, but though her eyes are shiny and aroused, she shrugs at him and shouts above the din, “I have no idea!” as though she’s read his mind. Suddenly Geoff catches sight of a giant macramé fish being carried atop a float—he cannot work a fish into the Inquisition—and Mary begins to hop up and down, her airy dress flapping around her legs.

  “Come on!” she shouts. “Let’s follow them!”

  They race along on the sidelines, trying to catch up, but the crowd is thick and they can’t quite penetrate into its center. From where they are, Geoff can see that both men and women dressed as nuns and priests are part of the procession. Several of the nuns pretend to faint dead away as they move through the narrow streets, and this splinters
the crowd a bit so that Geoff and Mary can finally get in closer. Just as they do, priests anoint the onlookers with buckets of holy water, which splatters onto Geoff’s face. Beer.

  Then come the ghouls. Masked and ominous, followed by clowns with white, ringleted wigs. Three girls dressed as prostitutes dash up to an older tourist couple nearby and fan their ruffled skirts, babbling in Spanish; the older couple laughs, but Geoff notes that the man backs up in a series of small, quick steps, knocking into the people behind him.

  Abruptly the procession shrieks together, screaming in voices that sound indicative of real pain, and a chill runs down Geoff’s back as it has on occasion in the hospital, when a patient’s agony or fear becomes unbearable and restraints must be used. He knows this is theater, merely an improvised performance, but something in the collective hysteria frightens him. The people carrying the fish wear executioner’s masks and black robes, and every so often they spin around and chase the crowd, the onlookers shooting off to opposite sides of the narrow streets. Mary is right there with them, caught up in the excitement, letting go of Geoff’s hand, so that he has to bolt forward to keep up or lose her in the crowd. He thinks he hears the beating of drums, though over the voices and shrieks it’s hard to be sure. Members of the procession are so disguised that several times, when Geoff sees friends meeting up with each other, both parties seem astounded at the recognition. A man dressed as a widow bats his false eyelashes at Geoff, and suddenly there is Mary again, whipping a brightly colored Mexican shawl out from her straw bag and wrapping it around Geoff’s head, nudging him, but by the time he catches on and tries to bat his eyelashes back, the “widow” is gone. The procession moves on, but Geoff remains still.

  “Come on!” Mary cries again. It may be only the second or third time she’s said it, but it feels to him like the hundredth. “Hurry up, we won’t be able to see what happens next.”

  He wants to give her this. He wants to hand it to her the way he did the familiar parking-lot carnival—the way he handed her this luna de miel as a substitute honeymoon when, at the last minute, they had to cancel their original wedding plans on New Year’s Day at Daniel’s majestic courtyard in Querétaro, sending notes to guests that Mary had an “infection” and couldn’t travel. Only Mary’s parents knew the truth about the miscarriage—knew that Mary had been pregnant at all after seven months of trying, or knew that, in mid-December, they had seen the baby’s heartbeat on an ultrasound, Mary’s pregnancy being treated as “high risk” because of her CF and so early ultrasounds being standard. They went in, then, for their next appointment on the day before Christmas Eve, holding hands and referring—like naïfs begging fate to smite them—to their baby as their “Christmas present,” but the heartbeat was gone.

  In the dark room, after the ultrasound machine was turned off and Mary was instructed to get dressed and proceed to her doctor’s office, Geoff burst into tears, crying loudly in a fashion he couldn’t remember doing since childhood, since before his parents’ divorce. He went to embrace Mary, the way he had the day they were reunited and she told him about Nix, but instead she gave him a withering look and rose to put on her clothes. The fertility specialist explained to them that miscarriages at this stage were common—that in all probability the fetus suffered from a chromosomal abnormality that prohibited development, that most likely this had nothing to do with Mary’s CF and they would go on to have another healthy pregnancy just like “normal” couples. Geoff watched Mary stare straight ahead with eyes blank as a fish’s. The doctor suggested they schedule a D & C immediately to spare Mary the pain of waiting for her body to expel it, but Mary said she would wait and let her body do the job on its own. She waited for three weeks, but nothing happened except she developed back pain so severe that by the end she could barely walk, until she had to call her doctor back in defeat and ask for the procedure. “My body can’t even miscarry properly,” she said bitterly, and after the surgery, which her doctor said they had put off longer than was ideal, she bled for two weeks, wearing thick Kotex to her classes and only finally, near their wedding day, being able to brave a white dress. She’d chosen a Mexican-style peasant dress, off the shoulder, for their grand Querétaro affair, but Geoff stood helplessly by as she tossed it in the trash, its fabric overflowing the crowded, plastic bin. Without her mother’s help, she went out and returned with a stunning red gown embroidered with gold Chinese patterns, its bustier top and curve-clinging skirt a sophisticated antithesis to the innocence of the Mexican dress. She had her hair blown out on the snowy day of their ceremony, and it shimmered long and slick; at the dinner reception afterward all Geoff’s relatives and colleagues raved, but to Geoff the bridal Mary seemed a glossed and polished shell of her usual self: cold, regal, and frightening.

  Tonight is the first time Geoff has seen Mary exhibit excitement since the miscarriage. Even at their consolation prize of a wedding held on Valentine’s Day in Ohio because Mary didn’t feel up to dealing with Daniel anymore, Geoff felt her going through their vows on autopilot: a numbed-out zombie bride. He knows that he should offer her this night as the true beginning of their marriage—that he should follow wherever she leads now—but his senses are overwhelmed; he’s drunk and tired and can’t stop seeing himself at a great distance, shirking from the executioners and ghouls, cowering beneath the giant fish that looks as if it could topple and crush a dozen men. The procession has moved on and still he remains static. Confusion spreads across Mary’s firelit eyes.

  “I feel like we might be an intrusion.” The words come out false—there are other tourists, many of them, in the crowd. He offers instead, “I know it’s a performance, but there seems something private about it, too, something sacred, like they’re putting it on for us but they hate our presence at the same time. Don’t you feel it?”

  She stares. Clearly she does not. And he’s not sure that’s precisely it anyway, what he means. He knows only that he wanted a small, quiet restaurant after the frenetic Tilt-A-Whirl and Octopus, after the nausea of the rickety Ferris wheel and dancing with her braless, rhythmic body, no trace left of a pregnancy that had never shown anyway. He wanted intimacy, privacy, a renewal of romance after loss, but instead he got strangers in drag shouting in his face, and bodies pushing up against his, and a roar so deafening he cannot, still, make out whether there was music playing or the racket was all human-generated. The crestfallen look on Mary’s face makes him all at once remember the hippies, and he wonders irrationally whether they are in this crowd, whether now they have disappeared down some winding, narrow street to hump one another like dogs against the old buildings’ crumbling walls—whether this is what Mary wanted from him, too. They are standing outside a tiny restaurant, Geoff notices, and he could almost cry: it is exactly what he had in mind. Its pink awning reads LA FORTUNA, and the small outdoor café is full, but inside there are several empty tables. He takes Mary by the hand and almost pleads, “Let’s stay here. You must be starving—let’s just eat.”

  Inside La Fortuna, all the other patrons are women. The women occupy three separate tables on far ends of the matchbox restaurant and do not appear to be together, yet each (there are seven in total) is dressed in a different-colored pastel dress: pink, blue, green, yellow, orange, lavender, and another pink that is more like dusty rose. The dresses are not all of the same cut, but they are, to a one, solid colored and old-fashioned in effect, so the women appear like scoops of bright ice cream in a surreally Technicolor 1960s sitcom. Something about their presence in the restaurant is both comic and creepy. In the cramped room, Geoff can tell that they all have English accents. Is this some kind of club? But no, the women at the various tables do not even glance at one another or interact in any way.

  Geoff looks at Mary and says, “This has been a very strange night.”

  “It was unbelievable!” she gushes. “I wish we knew where they were taking the fish! I wonder if it was to the water—if they were going to let it drift out to sea.”

  Geoff
feels beaten down. He feels as though he has been punched. The word relentless pops into his mind. This is what she is: relentless. And yet she has done nothing. She is sitting here, at the table across from him, not complaining, not berating him. She is compliant, but the fervor still sparks in her eyes. Back at Carnaval, she looked like Joan of Arc. Like a zealot: someone who saw visions. Slowly, right in front of him, she is transforming back into his wife, just a woman who has suffered one too many losses and is trying to outrun pain with stoicism, secrecy, and parades—and who the hell can blame her? What does he want from her anyway? On the night he fell in love with her, she was a zealot, an apparition from the sea. When he saw her again, she was aflame with fever—genuine fever—fresh from the brink of death and bringing him news of a plane that had exploded in the sky, and he loved her again, wildly, like a sailor loves a siren. Now, though, he just wants a normal dinner companion, not a visionary. But how can he expect her to turn her fervor on and off like a light switch when it suits him? She is racing for a finish line, and sometimes the romance of it blinds him, and other times he simply cannot keep pace.

  “I wonder how late they stay out in the streets,” Mary says, and it takes him a moment to realize she is still speaking of Carnaval, of the procession. “Maybe we’ll see them again on our walk home.”

  All he wants is a wife who will cry over their lost baby, who will let him hold her and comfort her, but she will not give him this, instead darting her restless eyes around the restaurant. “Jeez,” she says breezily, “have you noticed all the crazy-looking chicks in this place?”