She leans forward. “I can’t smoke anything with my lungs, but when I lived in London right after college, we made cakes with hash oil so I could finally experience being stoned.”
Leo blows his smoke away from her, the way Nix always used to do. “For a long time I wouldn’t touch drugs,” he says. “I was so afraid I’d turn out like Daniel. He was such a pathetic sack of shit when I was a kid. I’d come home and find him with his face in a plate of food, or OD’d. I was calling nine one one when I was eight, giving them our address, like, every other month. All through high school, I wouldn’t touch weed or speed or coke. I was popping Ritalin like candy, mind you!” He laughs, and his Adam’s apple bobs in his thin neck just like their father’s. “Your mother, Rebecca, was the one who kept telling Daniel I was hyperactive, but he didn’t drag me to a doctor until after she was long gone. Then he pretty much diagnosed me to the clinic doctor, and the guy just wrote out the prescription and sent us away. My whole childhood is a fog of Ritalin. I thought it was like magic and it’d keep me safe. Daniel stopped shooting up by the time I started high school, and then he got all psycho vegan and kept trying to take my pills away from me, saying the chemicals would kill me. I went after him once with a knife when he’d hidden them and I couldn’t find them anywhere, and he kept saying, I’m saving you, I’m saving you, and I stabbed him in the shoulder and then called nine one one again. He told them it was an accident, but after that we just kinda stayed out of each other’s way.”
Mary does not know what to do with this story. She wants to ask whether Leo still avoids drugs—it seems by the start of his story that he was intending to tell her about how he changed his mind about that—and whether he still takes Ritalin, though she thinks maybe it isn’t used on adults. Instead she manages, “When did you move out?”
Leo shrugs. “Dear old Dad took off my senior year of high school—he was living out in Eugene for a while. We had a dirt-cheap apartment in Brooklyn, and I had a job waiting tables, so I just paid the rent until I graduated, then got a scholarship to RISD and declared myself independent. After art school, Daniel and I didn’t really talk until I wound up in the hospital half-dead . . . they had to track him down as next of kin. He told you all about that, I’m sure.”
Mary stays quiet, digesting. It has been a long time since someone has told her so much about himself so quickly; that it is her brother makes it all the stranger, all the more loaded. No, Daniel never mentioned Leo’s being sick. She does not talk to her biological father often, but considering that she herself has a life-shortening disease, the fact that Daniel’s other child was near death might have organically come up. Clearly he does not have CF, so what can he mean? AIDS? She’s ashamed of the thought—just because he is gay? Then she realizes, with further self-recrimination, that the thought of Leo’s being ill excites her: it would make them seem like real siblings. Mary puts her arms around her own shoulders. The decrepit stone wall casts a long, chilly shadow. She thinks of Leo’s sofabed, her body alone in it later tonight.
“You’re shivering,” Leo says, standing up. “Did you bring a jacket? I can loan you something. You have great hair.” He shoots his arm forward and touches her curls contemplatively. “Perfect for the humid weather in Amsterdam. I fucking hate the cold, but Daniel passed us good hair for rain. The curl’s so thick and tight it doesn’t even frizz. You don’t have to brush it, right? You just leave it, and it always looks good.” His hand moves down and touches her nose now, as if he might be if inspecting a sculpture by a fellow artist. “You have our Jewy nose, too. Daniel says you didn’t even know you were a member of the tribe until you got his letter. Shit, how could you have missed it with this thing?” He laughs, and his Adam’s apple bobs again. Mary’s face burns pink.
“So let’s go out,” he says, jumping to his feet. “Hey”—and it feels almost as though he is interrupting himself, he has changed tracks so fast—“I’ve just been talking about myself on and on. Christ, I hate it when men do that, I hate that about being a man, we’re all totally self-important. I’m sorry. I want to hear all about you, too.” If Mary is not mistaken, his eyes are full of tears. “I’m just too excited. You’re married and all that, and you have your nice square parents in Ohio—Daniel told me all about them. But I don’t have anybody, you know? He didn’t get me any new parents. I never had anybody but him. Until you.”
Oh . . . oh! Things snap into place so fast Mary blurts out without thinking, “Shit—you mean the psychiatric hospital! God, what a relief!”
Leo waves his cigarette. “Oh, sure,” he says casually. “I’m an artist. We’re all bipolar, right? Hey, my friend’s having an opening tonight. We’ve been sleeping together, but I think he’s in love with this other prick who’s not even a real fag—want to come and meet him and give me your opinion? You’re normal, right? I can trust you.”
“I’m not so sure how normal I am,” Mary says—and while bipolar may not be quite as good as AIDS, she thinks she can love Leo a little for this, too.
SO HOW CAN it be that just this morning she was kissing Geoff good-bye at Logan Airport, and now she is here feeling like Alice in Wonderland, the dramatic gallery—high ceiling, huge windows, splashes of vibrant, almost menacing color—enhancing her feeling of surrealism as she trots about arm in arm with a virtual stranger she feels she has known all her life, ridiculously inebriated, dressed in a slinky black dress she does not remember having packed, and surrounded by huge canvases and tall, gorgeous men?
Well, there are women at the gallery, too. But Leo’s world is a male one, and he introduces Mary to a stream of handsome Dutch art fags, each more fashionable and sexy than the last. Mary’s body hums with pleasant, safe arousal. The crowd is mainly Dutch, but they all speak fluent English. Leo’s lover is missing. Though it is a group show, all the other artists seem to be there—Mary has met them all. To each, Leo has said, “This is my long-lost sister, Mary. I’ve just met her today for the first time.” Some of the men have squealed when Leo said this, and all have kissed her three times on alternating cheeks, the way Leo greeted Mary when he saw her at the airport, and it took her by surprise, so that when she went to pull away after the first cheek peck, Leo had to almost yank her back to finish the cycle. Now Mary knows to remain in place and peck back, though she keeps getting the starting cheek wrong. The lover’s absence from his own show seems to confirm Leo’s statement that he is “trouble.” Mary finds herself anxious, hoping the man will not appear and wreak some kind of havoc. Leo, she believes (perhaps irrationally—he survived their father, after all), is fragile. Though she is younger by seven years, she feels it her duty to protect him.
“Look over there!” Leo says abruptly. Then, grabbing her arm, he stage-whispers, “No, sweetie, don’t really look—he’ll see you. There, the guy in the pompous little boho scarf. That’s my nemesis!”
Mary glances out of the corner of her eye. She can see the man only from behind, but the scarf is visible because the man has a nearly shaved head. He looks, even from the back, quite Germanic. The stubble of his head is sharp yellow, and he is tall and lanky in an awkward, straight-spined way that differs from Leo’s languid grace. If you put a little hat on him, Mary thinks, he would look like a server in a Disney World version of a German restaurant. Though she has not seen his face, she finds it extremely difficult to believe that this gawky, yellow-stubbled man could possibly compete with Leo in any arena. Leo has her tightly around the upper arm and is breathing a fast stream of talk into her ear. “This guy is un-fucking-believable. He’s a complete whore, he’ll sleep with anyone, even women, if it’ll get his art anywhere. Pascal”—this is Leo’s lover—“claims he’s bisexual, but what the hell does that mean, bi-fucking-sexual, have you ever known anyone who was truly bisexual?”
Mary has to admit that she has not.
“He’s just trying to position himself as the bad boy of the Dutch art world,” Leo continues. “He’s more serious about his reputation than he is about his art
itself. He has all these affairs with gallery owners and collectors, and now that Pascal is up and coming, well, he deigns to fuck him. Before that, he would never have looked at him.”
Mary is curious why beautiful Leo would be involved with Pascal if this balding faux German would not even have looked at him, but she does not get a chance to ask. The nemesis turns around, and Mary inhales sharply, coughs, and drips wine on her mercifully black dress.
It is Sandor.
“Pascal is young,” Leo is explaining, “and naive—”
“Jesus Christ,” Mary says in an outdoor voice. “I used to live with that guy.”
“What?”
But across the room, Mary has caught Sandor’s eye. “Sandor,” she mouths without sound, and though they are separated by half a room, he sees her, and his eyes go narrow and then, in seconds, wide with surprise. “Oh God,” he says. She can hear him from where he stands. “Wow! It’s you!” He is striding across the room on his long, skinny legs, and she remembers at once, in his movements, in his face, the secret of his strange charisma.
In a flash, Sandor has her by the arms—one of which was still in Leo’s grasp, so Sandor wrested it away as though Leo were not even present—and embraces her American-style, long and hard and without the cheek-bobbing kisses.
“This is my brother,” Mary says numbly, gesturing ineffectually in Sandor’s arms.
“Your brother! Unbelievable!” Sandor exclaims. “I never thought I would see you again, Nicole!”
Leo actually snatches her arm back, so that her body whirls around. “Who the hell is Nicole?” he demands.
To her surprise, Mary sees not indignation but terror on Leo’s face. Then she remembers: When Daniel first contacted her, Eli was so suspicious . . . Now, at Sandor’s calling her Nicole, Mary sees in Leo’s eyes the fear that he’s been had—that Mary is not really his sister but some weirdo masquerading as family to scam him for a shadowy but ominous end. Panic welling in her throat, Mary takes Leo’s hands. “No,” she says, “no. I was lying to him—to all the people I knew then—about my name.”
“Why would you do that?” Leo asks, still unsure, but before Mary can answer, Sandor slaps Leo on the back. It is a very heterosexual gesture and both Mary and Leo jump a bit in alarm. “Brilliant!” Sandor proclaims. “A double life! Your sister, Leo, she is like the spy with a secret identity. Very glamorous.” He laughs aloud.
“We barely knew each other,” Mary tells Leo guiltily.
Sandor looks perplexed, as does Leo.
“I thought you lived together,” Leo says.
“Well, yes,” Mary admits.
“Ah, Leo, my boy,” says Sandor, patting Leo’s arm less violently now. “Nicole, you see your big brother thinks I was fucking you. He is thinking we lived together in the biblical sense. Your brother does not like me, so this makes him sad. No, Leo, it was not like that! She was fucking some other boy, not me. That one, a very dear boy, very sweet, with him she ran off and joined the circus! It was spectacular.” He beams.
“We all lived in the same house,” Mary adds, unable to improve on this strange explanation.
“Yes,” Sandor concurs. “This very strange house in London, full of very strange people. We all knew each other quite well there, I think. Except we lied all the time, everyone there. We knew nothing about each other. But it was very intimate.”
Leo looks horrified. Mary, though, feels tears well up in her eyes.
“Yes,” she whispers. “That was it exactly.”
“Leo!” Sandor cries out again, and Mary fears her spindly, delicate brother will actually deck him. “Pascal is not here, as you see. Fuck him, yes, let’s fuck him and go out for a drink.”
Leo sighs petulantly. “I’d rather not,” he admits.
“Look,” Sandor says. “Come on. Don’t be that way. You don’t really love that little boy toy, do you? Don’t waste your time! I want to catch up with your sister.” Sandor gestures widely around the gallery, and abruptly Mary recalls sitting with him and Joshua on the floor of the small, underground kitchen, waiting for the first batch of hash brownies to bake and arguing over whether the Holocaust could have happened in Britain. Joshua, seeing England as a bastion of liberalism compared to his homeland, maintained it could not have, whereas Sandor insisted that all of the European continent suffered from both rabid anti-Semitism and potentially militant nationalism. In that conversation, Sandor flung his arms around like a mad puppeteer, and Mary—oblivious to her own Jewish blood—grew bored and weary of their stoned, hypothetical debate. She remembers longing not for sleep but for Sandor to finally shut up and make himself scarce so that Joshua could fuck her. In those days, her body ran on the fuel of Joshua’s semen; for a time it had truly seemed that, so long as she got laid, neither sleeplessness nor hash fumes nor lack of funds nor illness nor even the clawing grief she carried inside her chest for Nix could touch her.
Abruptly the air inside this cavernous gallery feels thin.
“Fine,” Leo consents. “Let’s go dance our fucking asses off, then.”
“Brilliant!” Sandor hooks one arm through hers and the other through Leo’s (he is, Mary realizes, at least as intent on annoying her brother as on “catching up” with an old flatmate). “Let’s take her to April, yes, Leo? Who knows, maybe we’ll even see our boy Pascal there posing for some other poof. Ah, Nicole, don’t you just love Amsterdam?” His arms, locked with hers and Leo’s, twitch like small, trapped animals with the apparent desire to gesture again. “Everyone passes through here eventually—even all the Arthog House companions!”
Mary’s heart thuds up through her esophagus. “What?” Her voice comes out so weak she clears her throat, tries again. “What do you mean? Has Joshua come back here? Oh my God, Sandor—have you seen him?”
“Oh.” Sandor laughs, “No, no, I’m sorry, I don’t mean him, the nice musketeer. But you’ll never guess who I saw playing the saxophone at this fabulous shitty little bar in the middle of a Sunday afternoon—what, only one, two months ago? That bastard Yankee!”
“Yank?” Now her voice is strong, almost violent. “You saw Yank—playing a sax?—here?”
“Well,” Sandor drawls, “I think it was him. I certainly didn’t go up and say hello. This guy”—he turns to Leo with a roll of his eyes—“was a piece of shit.”
“No,” Mary interjects. “He wasn’t!” Leo looks at her, and he seems now to be trying to follow the story—to be filling in the missing episodes in his mind so that he can watch the new season unfold. The look on his face as he actually exchanges a conspiratorial glance with Sandor indicates that he assumes they are talking about the man who was Mary’s Arthog House lover. Agitation washes over her, and she pushes at Sandor’s arm. “He just didn’t like you because he thought you were stealing his tapes.”
“He thought I was a fag,” Sandor intones flatly. “Oops, he was right—I am!” At this, Leo actually laughs. “I should have snuck into his bed sometime,” Sandor continues, “and stuck my dick up his ass just so he could stop wondering. Did you ever see that film—Nicole, Leo, you’re Americans, you must know it—Deliver Us, something like that? Squeal like a pig—that one. Can’t you just see Yankee squealing!” Now Sandor and Leo are both cackling, and at last Sandor shrugs. “Except, well, he was big—skinny, but very tall—and mean, like, you know, Leo, like the cowboys. He was like a real cowboy, ridiculous but mean. He was like, Punk, make my day—like that badass Clint Eastwood, not the fat little squeal like a pig actor. Plus, probably he would have given me a social disease. He was a junkie, wasn’t he?” He looks to Mary for verification.
“Take me to that bar,” she says. “Let’s go there now, for our drink.” She knows she sounds deranged. “Maybe we can find him—it’ll be a real Arthog House reunion.”
“Oh, that place is too far,” Sandor says, shrugging. “We can’t go there now. Who knows if they’re even open?”
Desperation wells in Mary’s chest. It seems preposterous that a pl
ace with live music on a Sunday afternoon would not be open during typical bar hours. But already Leo’s eyes are glazing. He no longer cares about the Clint Eastwood junkie and whether he was Mary’s lover. Mary notices that Sandor’s arm is still linked through Leo’s even though she herself has disengaged. Her emotions feel runny and nonsensical, her needs impossible to articulate. She tries to remember the last time she ate.
“Let’s go to April,” Leo says. “You’re here without your husband, so we might as well take you somewhere your husband would never, ever go.” He and Sandor both chuckle. Mary surmises that April must be a gay bar, glamorous and decadent. Half an hour ago, nothing would have pleased her more than to continue this illusion of walking on the illicit side, surrounded by steamy men. Now, though. Sandor is steering them toward the door. Outside, the breeze is chillier than it should be, and Mary longs for New Hampshire, where the seasons know what they are supposed to be, and you are not cold and wet all the fucking time, and for reasons she cannot pin down, even to herself, Sandor has already come to seem a consolation prize.
IT SEEMS LIKE every letter I begin to you lately starts, “I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written.” As though I believe you can even hear me—as though I believe you would care if you could. Probably it’s safe to say that, if the dead could think, you’d have other things on your mind. Nix, I would never have described my old feelings about you as “clean” or “easy,” but looking back, they seem that way. I remember my survivor guilt, that sense that I was the one who should have died so that you could continue your healthy, indomitable life. Now, instead, there have been nights of tossing and turning, imagining what two men might find to do with one girl for nearly three hours in an isolated villa . . . and finding that my female body can imagine it all too well, as though I carry an unwitting genetic knowledge of what it is to be violated. Instead, there is awe and confusion about your silence, both as it was happening and later: Would you ever have told me? Did you simply run off to London and “forget” it—is anybody on earth really that strong? Instead, there are nights I pore over the four letters you sent me during your semester abroad, looking for traces of trauma, but I find only the implacable distance that had sprung up between us in Mykonos. Now, I find myself feeling guilty not only for living, but for failing to save you, for remaining un-raped, for my pretty life in New Hampshire with the same man who once carried your body across the sand, away from those screaming cats. I find myself more inspired than ever by your bravery, yet more than ever, too, ashamed of my fear.
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 27
