She walks toward the bar. She was afraid she would not recognize Yank, but now that she sees him, she realizes how impossible this would have been. Sometimes—in airports, mostly—she has wondered whether travelers from her past have walked right by her and she has failed to notice, ravaged as they have all been by time. Yank, though, had an old quality to him even when she knew him at thirty-five or thirty-six. He had a ridden-hard-and-put-away-wet vibe that made him seem a haggard, dangerous old man, though in retrospect she realizes he was still quite young. He was strikingly attractive then, in the spooky, half-dead way of an outlaw on the lam. She still has photographs of him, too, of course. In most, he is reading or looking elsewhere—like many photographers, he did not like having his picture taken. But in one, he looks straight at the camera, and in it Mary was able to capture the ghostly, haunted quality of his dark blue eyes. From the distance, as she approaches him tonight, his eyes seem the same these nine years later. His hair has gone from mostly brown to entirely gray, but there was enough gray in it back then that they all ribbed him about it. His body is still rangy-skinny, but as she comes closer, Mary can see that he moves with a stiffness she doesn’t recognize, as though he is aggravating some injury with his motions behind the bar. When she’s close enough to speak to him, two women cut in front of her and begin ordering drinks in Dutch, and Yank wordlessly goes to pour. Mary notices Leo and Sandor behind her now, Sandor starting in with, “Squeal like a pig!” and Leo breaking into peals of inebriated laughter. The women ordering drinks move aside.
Mary is right in front of Yank now. He catches her eye and waits for her order. She scans his face, smiles tightly, waits for the recognition Sandor exhibited, the sound of her own former alias, “Nicole!” from his lips, for he called her that to the end despite knowing otherwise. Instead, when she fails to speak, he asks her a question; the words seem hazy, and only once the buzzing in her ears stops does she realize he is speaking Dutch. “What can I get you, darlin’?” he says, on her silence. Mary can hear English spoken, mainly in Irish accents, around Mulligan’s, and he has apparently inferred that she, too, is Irish.
He does not recognize her at all.
Sandor steps forward and stands face-to-face with Yank, equally tall. Yank looks at him just as impassively, as cluelessly, still waiting for their orders. For a moment, Mary fears he will give up and turn away.
“It’s really you,” Sandor says in English.
“Oh,” Yank says back, “yeah, it’s me. Hey, buddy. I thought I’d seen you around here and there. You’re like the portrait of Dorian goddamn Gray—you ain’t aged a bit.”
Sandor doesn’t smile, but he seems mildly disarmed. He glances at Mary, whose body is burning with an angry heat. How can this be happening, right in front of Sandor—in front of her own brother? She has led them on what seemed like an impossible mission, only to catch their prey more easily than she could have imagined, and now he remembers Sandor—Sandor, whom he couldn’t stand—and not her.
“Look, buddy,” Sandor says, his voice dripping with vitriol. “Don’t you remember Nicole?”
Her first impulse is to run—to duck and crawl along the floor of the bar until she is out of the range of his gaze. Instead she stands rooted while Yank’s eyes move abruptly in her direction, scanning her up and down. The motion is lazy and indifferent, and it occurs to her that he may not only fail to recognize her but fail to remember the existence of a Nicole at all—that she may have made not even a ripple of impact on him. While she has stared after hippie travelers even when on romantic getaways with Geoff, hungering for what Yank represented to her—a lost tribe of drifters living outside conventional law, even the law of her own body—their brief time together at Arthog House meant nothing to him. And why should it, really? The truth of their shared past clicks into place in the instant it takes his eyes to take her in: He was not her lover. He was close to Joshua, but even Joshua was something of a little brother figure, not an equal exactly, perhaps not even a “friend.” This is a man who was wanted for murder! What impact could she honestly have expected to make on a man like that?
“I figured,” he says after a moment, his eyes still revealing nothing, “you’d be long dead by now.”
Instantly something in her body is released. Not happiness exactly, not vindication, but some distant cousin of these. Something messier that she is suddenly unsure why she ever wanted to touch—something she fears.
“Right back at you,” she says.
He smiles. In the smile, something old is transmitted between them. Or does she only imagine this? No matter: her realization of a moment before—the truth that their lives have been entirely disparate—is gone before she can even remember it.
The bar is loud, exploding with the incongruous sounds of spoon playing and laughter, with nothing that matches the silent thudding in Mary’s body. The man in front of her does not ask any of the questions she anticipated. He does not ask whether she and Sandor have somehow kept in touch all this time. He does not ask what she is doing in Amsterdam. He does not ask if they knew he’d be here or have run into him by accident. He does not ask, even, if she is married, if she is a mother. He keeps looking at her. Sandor says to Yank’s silent smile, “Ah, I remember it well—all the stimulating conversation of Arthog House.” His voice is ironic, yet the joke falls flat. If the conversation at Arthog House perhaps mirrored conversations of nomads all over the world, riddled with tales of stoned misadventures and pseudophilosophical clichés . . . well, maybe it did, but it was stimulating to them at the time, and they all know this.
“Sit down,” Yank says to Mary, ignoring Sandor. He pulls out a bottle of Southern Comfort. Mary has not tasted Southern Comfort in nine years. He pours one for Sandor and passes it to him, then one for Leo, who says, “This stuff is crap—this stuff is like cough syrup,” then one for himself, and finally one for Mary, which he passes to her slowly. “To life,” he says, and Sandor says, “To old times,” and Mary says simply, “Proost,” strangely determined to avoid nostalgia. They are in Amsterdam; it is 1999. They are not dead, not ghosts, not living in the past. There is now; there is even a future, maybe, both she and Yank having already defied overwhelming odds. Here they are, and what they will do about it is up to their bodies and the liquor and the night. She intones her Dutch toast, and they all three, without waiting for Leo, slam back their Southern Comforts in unison, while Leo takes a dainty sip of his and passes it over to Sandor, saying, “Jesus Christ, I can’t possibly drink this, help me, please.”
It could easily end here. The warmth of the shot in their bellies, then a hug, a chaste kiss, kiss, kiss, on alternating cheeks (like all good nomads, “When in Rome” would be their credo), a good to see you again. Then off, back into the cold knife air and her brother’s apartment, back on the plane in two days, back to the normal life she has painstakingly forged, back to Geoff. If there were ever a moment to stand up and leave, this would be it.
Instead she leans over a little, close enough to smell the boozy, wet-rag aroma of the area behind the bar, no doubt permeating Yank’s already less-than-clean clothes. “So,” she says, “you’re pretty old by now—did you ever get married?” She does not ask about kids. She doesn’t want to be asked in turn.
“Yep, I was married again,” he says. “Dutch girl, that’s why I’m here. Not for long, though. I live with someone now.”
Mary persists: “How long have you lived with your girlfriend?”
At this, he looks confused. “I’m not sure,” he says. “Maybe six, eight months. She’s not my girlfriend exactly. Neither one of us can speak Dutch better than a six-year-old, and she can’t speak English either, so the communication’s pretty limited.” He looks at her so straight-on that Mary suddenly becomes aware that Leo and even Sandor have started to look elsewhere. “She’s real fine, but she’s had some serious shit go down in her life,” he says low, “so she doesn’t like to fuck. We help each other out in other ways.”
For reas
ons clearly inappropriate, Mary feels enormous relief.
“So you and this fine woman can’t talk and you can’t have sex. What do you do, just do drugs together?”
Yank eyes her with a kind of overt disappointment. “Ten years is a long time, sweetheart,” he says, but Mary isn’t sure whether by this he means he no longer uses, or whether the lapse in time since they last saw each other disqualifies her from asking such personal questions. “And I didn’t say we can’t have sex,” he clarifies. “I said she doesn’t care for it. I implied it was an infrequent activity. Now, in my old age, I actually kinda dig it if the woman wants to be there. Funny thing, I don’t remember caring about that much in my youth. Middle age takes all the fun out of everything—don’t worry, you ain’t gonna be missing much.”
A cold shiver runs down Mary’s back, right in the middle of the hot, crowded bar. In the fourteen years since her diagnosis, every single person she has ever spoken with, even Laxmi Narayan, has acted as though it is somehow possible that she will live to ripe old age. In all that time, no one has ever spoken of her imminent death unless she badgered him (usually Geoff) into it, and then the topic has been broached in a state of high drama and afterward never spoken of again. This drifter is certainly not up to date on the latest cystic fibrosis treatments; for all she knows, he does not even remember the name of her disease. Yet he speaks as though Death is simply a friend of his whose approaching shadow he recognizes on her face. No one has ever casually remarked on the ticking time bomb in her lungs as though it were merely a given, not worth getting worked up about—perhaps even a relief.
Kenneth, she remembers abruptly. Yank’s given name. It does not suit him.
And she wants to kiss him, this namer of her death.
It would be fair to say she has never wanted to kiss anyone so badly.
THE CLOCK NEXT to the sofa says 3:49. Leo gingerly lifts Sandor’s arm and slides out from under it; the motion is familiar, one he has been engaging in for two decades now—he has it down to an art. Most men fall asleep so easily, such a careless surrender, but to Leo, sleep has always been an elusive beast, threatening and seductive at once, a monster he has alternately hunted and been hunted by in return. Under the thin sheet, Leo is naked, which makes sleep come none the easier. Like his father, he is usually cold, and when alone he sleeps in sweat pants and a fleece sweatshirt, sometimes two pairs of socks. Long ago, though, he began staying naked for his lovers. They enjoy it, and there is so much Leo feels unable to give, unable to summon within himself, that he tries not to skimp on the easy things.
Barefoot and still nude, he pads down the hall to his bedroom. He feels the need to check on Mary. It is less that he fears she has died in the night (though as with an infant, he fears this may be possible: that he may open his bedroom door to find her simply not breathing anymore) and more that she may have been gripped by insanity and escaped, scaled the garden wall, and run the streets to find that man, Kenneth, who means something to her, and who Leo can tell is dangerous. The entire night, waiting for Mulligan’s to close, Leo worried that Mary would not come home with him and Sandor, that she would stay with Kenneth and become lost to him—lost to her husband and her decent life, all because of him, because of having come to stay with him and having accidentally been infected by all the things that ail him, that ail their father. The things she escaped. Now, though, in the dark of the night, he understands that these things have ailed her, too, even without their proximity. She is already infected. He and Daniel run through her veins, and this makes him love her insanely and fear for her and want to protect her even though he is not up to the task.
He sits on the edge of his bed. She is asleep. Her mouth is open and she snores, unladylike, probably from her disease. She is less pretty in her sleep, but even more childlike, tinier under the blankets than she looks in regular life, her face scrubbed of makeup, without defense. He stares at her, trying to remember whether she looks like Rebecca. She is blond like Rebecca, that much he remembers—the opposite of him, of Daniel. But the rest of her seems like Daniel to him: her thinness and her nose, that unruly hair and slightly feral beauty. She is not as beautiful as he is, and he wonders if she minds. Leo’s looks have served him very well, but perhaps Mary has not needed them, not the way he has, given she had normal parents and didn’t have to fight for every scrap of luck. Perhaps what beauty she has is enough.
Her eyes are open. She surveys him, sitting naked on the bed, but doesn’t jump, doesn’t say, What the hell are you doing?, does not seem alarmed. She receives him as Leo imagines a mother would receive her little boy, woken by a nightmare and standing at the bedside. She pulls back the covers, murmurs, “Are you all right?”
Leo gets in. He doesn’t touch her with his body—he doesn’t want to be creepy, even though he would like to snuggle up to her—but takes her hand in the dark and holds it. He is so happy holding her hand that it takes a moment to notice that she is crying.
“No,” he says, half pleading. “Don’t cry. I’m sorry.”
She scoots closer to him, wiping her eyes with his knuckles. “Why are you sorry?” she says, and she sounds slightly snotty and slightly not—he isn’t sure. “What did you do?”
“You shouldn’t have come to visit me,” he explains. “Things go wrong around me. I’m bad luck.”
“Leo,” she says, “don’t take this the wrong way, but not everything is about you. You’ve been totally nice to me. I’m wild about you, I wish I never had to leave you.” She laughs a little, though she is still crying. “Sweetie, do you have a doctor here?”
“Yeah.” He laughs a little, too. “Don’t worry, I take my meds. I take them better than you do what you’re supposed to, I bet. It’s just not enough. Nothing’s enough for me, Mary.”
“Is that always true?” she asks. “Or are you having a hard time right now—is something new going on? Because you seem a little different even from a few days ago. You seem . . . younger maybe? Scared.”
“It’s just the sex,” he explains. “I’m great at all the other stuff, the parties and the restaurants and the putting flowers in a vase and picking the right outfit so it looks like I didn’t think about my outfit. God, I love that shit—I’m the Daisy fucking Buchanan of Amsterdam.” He sighs. “My therapists tell me I’m not good with real intimacy. Not that getting fucked is real intimacy.”
With her free hand, she strokes his hair. His lovers have done this—they love his hair, they always love his hair—but no woman has ever stroked his hair before. It feels foreign and frightening and good.
“So what was my mother like?” she asks. “You lived with her. Are we anything alike?”
“I was just thinking about that,” he says. He speaks quietly so that his head won’t move too much—so that she won’t stop the stroking. Then all of a sudden he is mad at himself. He is the older brother. He sits up, the duvet falling back. “Don’t worry about her,” he says. “Rebecca. She wasn’t that great. She used to tie me to a radiator so she could go downstairs and get cloves of garlic stuck up her ass by the quack doctor who was our landlord.”
“Jesus Christ!” Mary squeaks. She sits up, too. “Are you fucking serious?”
Leo shrugs. “Well, it was the sixties, everyone was weird. After she ran off and Daniel gave you away, the landlord’s girlfriend used to babysit me. She was awesome! Her name was Denise and she was Indian—as in Native American, not from India—and had that fabulous hair. You would have loved her. I wished she could be our mom.” He pauses, then reaches out and touches Mary’s eyes to see if they are still crying, though they feel the degree of wet where he can’t be sure if it’s old or new tears. “She wouldn’t like how I’m relating this,” he admits. “She respected your mom. She thought she was right to save her own ass. I don’t want you to like Rebecca, though. Even if you were better off without us, I don’t like what she did to you.”
“What about what she did to you?” Mary asks.
Leo thinks about this.
“I gave her reasons,” he concludes. “But you didn’t do anything wrong. You were just a baby.”
“Leo,” Mary says, and the way she says his name kills him; he wants her to stop and he wants her never to stop. “You were just a baby too.”
He doesn’t like to hear this. It makes him uncomfortable. “She was hot, though,” he concedes. “Your mother. What’s your other mother like? Is she pretty?”
Mary smiles in the dark. “No. I mean, she’s not ugly, but she’s not hot either. Pretty wasn’t a big deal in our house. You and Daniel—everyone around you guys is really beautiful and flamboyant and fucked up.” She laughs out loud. “At my house it was just the opposite. Nobody had any special talent, and everyone was kind of plain and ordinary. But they were all . . . solid people. Stable people. They did the best they could for me.”
“You make it sound like what they did didn’t work,” Leo says.
“I don’t know.” She leans back again, and now, finally, he can reach her hair easily, without suspending his own arm awkwardly in the air, so he strokes her head the way he should have before, the way a big brother is supposed to. His lovers stroke his hair, but he does not stroke theirs. He is not a stroker of hair. Not until now.
“My mother and I were really close,” she tells him quietly. “Then I got diagnosed, and it just . . . she was terrified. Something snapped in her—she could hardly look at me without crying. There’d be this panic in her eyes, and I was totally humiliated, like she was looking through my skin and could see all my fears. I felt naked and pathetic, but I needed her—she had to help me with my physiotherapies and medications, I was totally fucking clueless at first. And the more I needed her, the more I resented her. I was too afraid to go away to college, and I hated her for that, too, like it was her fault, like she’d infected me with her fears. Once I finally left home, God, it was like”—she laughs again—“it was like breathing again. We get along fine now—I mean, I know intellectually that she had every right to grieve for the fact that her daughter was terminally ill or whatever. But it just never ends. At every stage—like now, she keeps doing research, trying to get me to have a heart-lung transplant when the time comes . . . There’s this hospital in Toronto that does transplants on people with my kind of lung bacteria. After a transplant they put you on immunosuppressant drugs so you don’t reject your new organ, and that makes you susceptible to infections so they put you on antibiotics to fight those, but the antibiotics typically don’t work on us, so we die anyway. My mother just can’t accept it. I feel responsible for her grief, and I just want to run.”
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 29
