A Life in Men: A Novel

by Gina Frangello

  THE WAVES MAKE Mary’s stomach ill. She attempts to hide her nausea from Nix, who is treating her like some combination of a sick baby and a mental patient, thereby rendering any admission of nausea impossible. She reclines farther on her rucksack, the sun beginning to seem oppressive already. Dramamine helps on these ferries, fellow travelers on the way to Mykonos advised them, but she and Nix did not think to take such precautions. Such precautions had seemed for other people then.

  The old woman across from Mary prods her with a twisted finger. It is not an unfriendly gesture, yet Mary jerks in alarm. The woman is smiling. She clutches her own stomach in a pantomime of seasickness, then points at Mary, and Mary feels exposed, irritated. The woman sports a babushka on her head, as though this is an amateur high school production of a Greek ferry instead of the actual thing, where people ought to know better than to look like such clichés. The babushka woman bears a box of candy and extends it to Mary, still smiling (in the high school production, she would be missing teeth, but in real life her teeth all seem accounted for). She shakes the box of candy a little bit, the way one might a bag of cat treats, and Mary understands instantly that while the woman pities her sour stomach, she nonetheless assumes Mary to be stupid, her intelligence on par with that of a domestic animal at whom shiny or tasty things must be shaken for the animal to understand the connection of such things to itself. For some reason this knowledge makes her want to bury her head in the woman’s lap. Instead she surveys the box, stuffed with plump, powdered-sugar-covered candies, and her stomach roils. She has not truly eaten since midday yesterday, when she and Nix feasted on wine and freshly killed fish with Zorg and Titus at the hillside restaurant overlooking their own windswept beach mats below on the sand. She is ravenous and snatches up one of the candies, smiling gratefully at the old woman and nodding vigorously, happy to feign simplemindedness if it will help her score candy and sympathy. She pops the sugared square into her mouth whole and bites down.

  It is like chewing a rose-scented, gelatinous bath cube, more disgusting than anything she has ever tasted. Mary’s stomach rushes into her throat; her hand covers her mouth. This distress must be glaringly visible, because Nix, hidden behind dark sunglasses, not even facing Mary’s direction, says under her breath, “You can’t spit it out. She’s watching. You have to eat it now.”

  Slowly Mary chews. The woman’s smile tentatively returns; she keeps nodding. Although the cube tastes poisonous, Mary understands that it is meant to taste this way—that nothing is wrong other than her own lapse in knowledge, her own assumption that the candy would taste like candy she understands, instead of like the candy of this world in which she’s found herself, where none of the usual rules apply. She should have known better, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Nix’s shaded gaze on her and realizes this is punishment for something. Though she is still not precisely clear on her crime, she accepts the ruling—Nix’s ruling. She swallows the sticky cube in partially chewed lumps, as quickly as she can, but already her stomach is rebelling. The moment that enough of the candy is down her throat so she can speak, she stands, mutters, “Efharisto,” to the babushka woman, and dashes from the ferry’s front deck toward the rear, where a cluster of passengers stand at a rail watching the hilly white buildings of Mykonos fade until they resemble geometric children’s blocks in the distance. Mary leans into the back rail, hoisting her body as far over as it will go without diving into the sea, and pukes all the alcohol and mucus and terror of the past twenty-four hours into the water, a bit scattering at her feet. She wipes her mouth ruthlessly on the sleeve of the Harvard sweatshirt, only at that moment realizing she forgot to return the garment to Geoff, who is already disappearing into the ether of her past. Just six hours ago, she was kissing him at Plati Yialos, his hands beneath the sweatshirt warm on her back, but now he is gone, clearly never to be seen again. She is not a seasoned traveler, yet some of travel’s laws are apparent even to her.

  The world seems terrifyingly huge. A small speck on the giant blue earth, Mary hugs the rail of the back deck of a rickety ferry to Athens, the other anonymous passengers who once stood nearby having retreated from her.

  Something pokes at the skin of her abdomen. Still hunched over the railing, Mary searches with her fingers and plucks several strands of straw out of the fleecy underside of Geoff’s sweatshirt: relics of the ride they hitched from Plati Yialos back to Mykonos in the open flatbed of a truck that had reeked of wet sheep’s wool. Because Mary does not know what is to come, she flicks the straw away thoughtlessly. After all, who would save a handful of dirty straw as any kind of memento?

  NIX STARES UP into the sun, provoking her eyes to water. If her eyes will only water, like a signal, then maybe the tears will come. If tears come, then maybe she will do what she is supposed to and reach out to Mary, tell her everything, spill her guts like some silly child who’s skinned her knee as a result of her own recklessness, and accept comfort. The sun bores into Nix’s sleepless eyes until she sees spots, but still she feels nothing like crying. Nothing like doing anything except falling under the blanket of waves back at Plati Yialos and never coming out. Why, why did Mary come after her? And Nix, some shadow of a good midwestern girl clinging to her skin, had not wanted to make a scene and cause the men to dive into the water, too, so she swam back to shore, her limbs on automatic pilot. Pilot, ha-ha: All the words that will be loaded now. All the things she will have to fear, now that fear knows where to find her.

  She has to be nice to Mary. She cannot punch Mary in the face. She cannot shout at her, not only here on this ferry but anywhere. It is not normal; it is not acceptable. Mary has done nothing wrong. It is Nix’s own fault, all of it, her own.

  She will put Mary on a plane, back to Ohio, back to her doting parents, back to safety. Mary will never know what really happened at the villa. Some blind, guiding impetus that keeps echoing in Nix’s head: She will never know, she will never know. People “get over” things. That is how life is. Awful events occur, and somehow time flattens them out, stops the flow of blood, stills the jumping of your skin. Nix did not disappear under the waves, and so this is what will happen, clearly. She will get over it. Everyone knows Mary has no time to get over anything. Mary needs to get the fuck home before Nix’s mouth begins to leak, before it becomes impossible for the dam of her body to hold back the torrent of truth.

  Still she stares at the sun, willing it to swoop down and incinerate her whole, like a moth that dared to get too close to its flame. Can it be just yesterday, on the winding cliffside roads, that she feared for her own life so intensely—that her life mattered to her so? But a moth has the gift of wings with which to achieve its own merciful destruction, whereas Nix, wingless, nothing but the weight of her rucksack on her back, is grounded here, all gritted teeth and calm the fuck down get a grip it is not her fault act normal, awaiting Mary’s return.

  ALSO CLINGING TO the ferry’s railing, Mary notices a kid—pale haired, mildly sunburned —puking, too. This little girl, who cannot be older than nine, is too small to propel her body far enough over the rails, and so she mainly throws up straight onto the deck, on her own pink shoes, crying. Mary darts her eyes around in alarm: Where are the girl’s parents? What kind of world is this, where little girls are left to vomit on themselves unattended, holding on tight so as not to be knocked over by the waves? Mary thinks to reach out to the girl—to ask whether she needs help—but all at once she is sobbing, too, huge, phlegmy sobs, her back shaking, the mixture of her body’s spasms and the bumpy ferry ride causing her to knock her forehead a couple of times into the rail. What the fuck is the matter with her? What, does she think Zorg and Titus and their posse are going to follow them all the way back to Athens or something? Maybe Nix is right about what a weak basket case she is. Still, she cries violently into her arms for a little while. When she finally composes herself, pulls her head from her sweaty arms, the little girl is gone.

  I really know how to clear a deck, she would quip
to Nix, if Nix were the same Nix of yesterday, if those old rules still applied.

  First she lost her mother, to that look of grief and horror Mom wore on her face for at least a year following her diagnosis. Simultaneously she lost Bobby Kenner, to whom she was apparently never a real person, only the idea of a girlfriend, and once she failed to resemble his idea, he was gone. But no, no—even that isn’t right. Long before her diagnosis, before those losses, there were others. Her original parents, who perhaps suspected the dark genetic secret in her lungs and who may have thrown her away for that reason. Nix is the only one who never flinched, who never viewed her as less. Now her illness has somehow driven Nix away, too, although she does not understand precisely how. What is happening makes no sense.

  The bar offers some illusion of clarity. It is not yet 7 a.m., but they are selling beer, as though the ferry itself might serve as an after-party for those tourists, like Mary, who have yet to sleep. Numbly she walks to the concession stand and orders two beers, paying with her last drachma. She opens hers quickly and takes a huge gulp so that her breath will be hoppy rather than sour, should Nix get close enough that their scents might comingle in the old, familiar way. She takes no pains to clean her sandaled feet, which she will blame on the little girl if it comes to that, but walks straight back to where Nix is lying on the brilliantly sunny bench, staring up into the sky. Although Mary is sometimes envious of Nix’s straight, smooth hair, right now it looks dank and insubstantial, as though it has failed in fulfilling some animal, evolutionary purpose and left Nix naked and defenseless. Mary cannot see Nix’s eyes behind sunglasses but understands she is not asleep. She sits as close to Nix’s head as their rucksacks will allow, and holds the can of beer above Nix’s face, as if to shield her from the sun.

  Nix sits, gingerly, like an arthritic old woman. She takes the can. She begins to chug, as though it were a bottle of water. Mary holds her own beer, and though it does not take a great deal of worldliness to conclude that beer and hunger and vomit and waves do not make good company, she does the same.

  They drink. The cans are almost empty. Back home, neither girl cares for beer. The past two years at Skidmore, Nix actually took to carrying a flask (usually vodka, she said, but she liked to mix it up) to parties where only beer would be served—she wrote about this to Mary in her letters. Nix claimed not to care if she seemed pretentious; she had not fled Kettering to be stuck still drinking beer out of plastic cups. She wrote this as though Mary understood, since the maddening nature of Kettering with its myriad shortcomings had always been a favorite topic of theirs. Since Nix left for college, however, Mary rarely attends parties anymore.

  It is possible Nix may have enough drachmas to buy two more cans. The beer has pleasantly gone to Mary’s head, and she would like to continue this pursuit of oblivion.

  “Do you have money?” she asks.

  “I’ll check,” Nix says, but she does not move to do so.

  Across from them, the candy woman is speaking Greek, her box of repulsive treats stored away now. In the bright sun, Nix’s skin looks translucent; Mary sees thin blue veins along her sharp jaw. Nix’s nose is pink. Although nothing in her limp hair, her thin skin, her shiny, sunburned face, her arthritic movements, should add up to beauty, Nix looks luminous, like a wounded, exotic bird. Often enough, Mary has resented the common knowledge (among their peers, even among their mothers) that although the girls look surprisingly alike, given that they are not related, Nix is the “pretty one” of the pair. At times Mary has stared into a mirror, thinking, She’s just a bigger flirt, that’s why people think she’s so hot, but suddenly she can see, in the ruins of their day, the raw, elemental beauty that clings to Nix, not like a costume carefully applied, not like some dumb accident of nature, but like a soul. She bites her lip.

  “Why are you mad at me?” she asks quietly, as though the Greek people around them would understand or care. “What did I do?”

  Still, Nix doesn’t look at her. Mary is stuck tracing the map of veins along her jaw.

  “There are just two things that are important in life,” Nix says, staring out at Athens approaching on the horizon. “You have to be honest with yourself, and you have to be really mellow about harsh things.”

  Mary gapes at her. In the old world order, she would have demanded, But what about being honest with me, your best friend? Somehow, though, they have both moved irrevocably outside that old world, and not together. So instead she, too, only looks away, toward the last city where she will ever see her best friend alive.

  Red Light

  (AMSTERDAM: LEO)

  In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

  —MILAN KUNDERA, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  Only minutes after meeting Leo at Schiphol Airport, Mary sees that the bohemian lifestyle she abandoned long ago is alive and well, with her half brother smack in the middle of it. Leo, who is a younger, even more handsome version of Daniel, is dressed in a pair of leather pants, Chuck Taylors, and a ratty wool sweater under a clearly expensive blazer Mary would bet her ass is Armani or Prada, rolled up at the cuffs so the frayed wool of the sweater pokes out. He is, for God’s sake, ridiculously beautiful! His hair is shoulder length and crazy sexy, and his fingers are long, slender, and graceful. Mary isn’t sure what she expected exactly, but it wasn’t this. Yes, their shared father is a wolfishly handsome, sexually charismatic man, but somehow she always imagined her older brother—the product of Daniel’s dysfunctional child rearing—as mildly overweight and nebbishy, like a character played in a movie by Albert Brooks.

  The first thing he says to her is, “I was going to hold up a little sign that said BECCA BECKER and see if you got it—God, how relieved are you to have escaped that name? Not like Mary Grace is any better. You were fucked either way.” Like a singer ruined by smoke and whiskey, he has a laugh that is deeper than his voice. And that fast, Mary is smitten, crushing on the big brother she never had.

  She and Leo could have met easily, dozens of times, during the years she was in Cincinnati and he in Brooklyn. At the time, though, the thought appealed to her not at all. She was still adjusting to Daniel. Then just over a year ago, Leo moved to Amsterdam in tandem with Mary and Geoff’s relocation from moderately dull Cincinnati to positively mind-numbing Lebanon, New Hampshire, where Geoff has joined the pulmonary medicine staff at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Wasting away in a town so small that their street was literally called Rural Route 1, Mary began to feel the pull of Leo’s life in Amsterdam like a Siren’s call. What kind of fool fails to visit her long-lost brother if it means a free stay in Europe?

  “I may not have given you two much else, but your hunger to see the world, that you get from me,” Daniel boasted on the phone. “I know you and Leo will enjoy each other. You have a lot in common.”

  It seemed a crazy thing to say in reference to one’s actual brother.

  Mary is tipsy from her long flight: her usual combination of wine, extra hits of albuterol, and the thinner oxygen of air travel. She hasn’t eaten since before boarding in Boston, and her stomach is crawling with the scraping emptiness of meds and lack of food. Leo lives in the artsy Jordaan neighborhood, on Keizersgracht, directly across from the canal and around the corner from a hole-in-the-wall that cranked out the red-curry tofu on which Mary and Joshua subsisted in the winter of 1991. That joint—at least where Mary thinks it used to be—seems gone, the neighborhood gentrified to postcard prettiness. On Leo’s street, everyone’s shutters are open, so that you can see into their apartments, which tend to be dimly lit in a soft, gold glow and brimming with flowers and books. Leo explains this phenomenon as gezellig, which is not translatable into English but means something like cozy or quaint.

  “Gezellig is the national pastime,” he quips like a jaded native. “Even the sex shows here are gezellig. The people onstage wear Batman capes and smirk and wave and give these cutesy little shrugs if someone goes
soft—it’s like a naked cartoon. It’s the least sexy thing I’ve ever seen. Thank God everyone here is tall and gorgeous, or it’d be like living in Munchkinland.”

  A young blond woman rides by on a battered bicycle, flowers and bread poking from a basket on her handlebars. “See what I mean?” Leo says. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m into it—I’m such a poser, I love it really. Everything here is relentlessly pretty and comfortable. But it’s oppressive all the same. It’s a form of fascism.”

  Mary blinks. Their father makes frequent, casual references to fascism, too.

  Leo’s ground-floor apartment opens onto an overgrown garden, and they sit in rusting (gezellig) wrought-iron chairs and drink a pitcher of Pimm’s, which Leo has made with carbonated lemonade instead of ginger ale, and into which he has sliced apples and oranges like a sangria. Mary eats the apples and oranges from her glass and finds to her astonishment that this works wonders on her hunger. She feels better already, her buzz beginning anew.

  Leo is thirty-eight. In the gray daylight, lines crinkle around his eyes. He smokes, offering her a cigarette even though she is certain Daniel will have told him she has CF, but instead of being offended, she relishes the offer like a token of camaraderie above safety. She knows it may be carelessness on Leo’s part, or a lack of awareness of what cystic fibrosis even is, but still she receives the offer as though he is trusting her to make her own choices, and in that moment she realizes it has been a long time since she has been so trusted—since she has not been treated with kid gloves and supervision. At home she is fairly certain that Geoff has taken to counting her birth control pills to make sure she isn’t skipping any; she nearly grabs the cigarette, but she fears she would make a fool of herself by going into a coughing jag. She is entirely drunk already, and it feels magnificent. Leo’s untended garden, enclosed by a crumbling stone wall, seems to hum with magic.