“It’s Africa. In Nigeria, women get stoned for adultery, don’t they?”
“I don’t know about that,” he says casually, but then abruptly the recognition hits his face. “Oh. So you are married?”
“Yes,” she says. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five. Time to marry, too, have some babies. You have children?”
“No.” She gestures at the plethora of medical equipment littering her primitive room. “Because,” she says, “I can’t. I’m sick.”
He stands. A kind of panic washes over her that she has frightened him. She’s not sure she likes him even. The gulf between them feels enormous: a chasm of age, of nation, of culture. How did Nix ever bridge it? How could she, who had traveled not nearly as much as Mary has now, have fallen in love with an Indian Muslim in London? What did they have to talk about? She wonders again—with her usual pang of treason—if Hasnain truly existed, or if he was a salve Nix spoon-fed Mary to make her believe everything was just fine, to distract her from the truth of the rape, the way parents distract children with tales of Santa Claus. Maybe Nix casually met a boy named Hasnain somewhere, at a restaurant or a launderette, and got it in her head to spin an exotic fairy tale Mary would never think to question. But why? Why, when she could have claimed to love a fellow American student, when she could have claimed anything—why that? No, he must have been real. Mary isn’t dizzy anymore, but still she feels her sense of visual perception is off, foggy. She can feel Nix on the other side of a veil. Mary is thirty-three; she has lived a full decade longer than her life expectancy at the time of diagnosis. And she may never turn thirty-four. She both believes and does not believe this. The possibility lurks on the other side of the veil, Nix egging her on, telling her that ordinary codes of ethics do not apply to her: that she could kiss this boy and it would not be a betrayal either of Geoff or of Kenneth. That she cannot be held responsible because she will soon be gone.
She thought that he was bolting—that her admission scared him off—but instead Alias is in front of her. The door to her room is still open, and he reaches out and closes it with the confidence of a man, not a boy. He has the most arched eyebrows she has ever seen, hooded like a cobra’s despite his boyish face—mysterious, seductive. He says, “I think you are very pretty, yes. Not for a Jewish woman. For any woman.”
He kisses her softly. Her mouth still feels foul from the mists of her medication, from coughing everything out, but he doesn’t seem to notice or care. She lets him kiss her the way she would not let Kenneth kiss her just last night, and she tries to think of Hasnain, to feel a oneness with Nix, but instead she thinks of Alias’s girlfriend, brash and veilless and probably the age Mary was when she lived at Arthog House. Instead, at the feel of Alias’s arms encircling her, she thinks of Geoff’s more substantial, more mature embrace—the way he held her at Logan Airport with a tight agitation, his anger at her departure surrendering to fear. There is in her the antithesis of arousal, and she pulls away from the boy and looks into his dark eyes, beautiful and perfect in the way of her brother. Yes, he was right about Arab and Jew: he and Leo could be related. In the biblical milieu of Nawar’s village, Leo might even be the father of this young man. She pulls away to his murmurs of, “I’m sorry, please excuse me!” and she is not looking at Hasnain, who would be a middle-aged man now, but just at a hopeful, confused, intelligent, sheltered Moroccan boy who speaks at least three languages and believes in the Koran and who wants to touch an older, married, sick Jewish American because she is an experience, because she is as exotic as it gets. She doesn’t hate him for his behavior because she has been there: collecting people, collecting experiences. Someday Khalid will be a man, but not yet. His manhood will be his own journey, his girlfriend’s journey, and she will not be a part of it, will not be a story he can take out of the drawer of his mind and examine, even though some part of her wishes she could be.
Tomorrow she will go as far as the pass, take in the view, celebrate her birthday with three of the men she loves. And then she will go back down. It will be the perfect symbol of her completion. Then she will catch a ride back to Marrakech with Leo—let Sandor and Alias and Kenneth go on into the desert without her. She will fly back to Europe and call Geoff and ask him to come and meet her for Leo’s show, but if he cannot—if he will not—she will go back home. It is over. She has no business here. She opens the door, and Alias, confused and perhaps relieved, steps out into the hall.
In the dim light of her room, she sits down at the small blue table. There is no computer access here, so she opens her Nix notebook. She has not written in it since her first visit with Leo, with whom she soon began engaging in such a passionate and high-maintenance exchange of letters, e-mails, and phone calls that her old notebook—to a correspondent who never answered—went untouched, forgotten. This, she supposes, is what they call closure. Still, she could not bring herself to travel without it, and even now she does not rip out a page, merely continues where she left off. She does not intend to mail this letter, so in a way it belongs with those old missives to Nix, as though she is writing to Geoff’s future ghost—to whatever essence of him will remain, from whatever essence of herself. She begins:
You are the man of my life. You have tolerated more than any lover should ever be asked to bear and I can only hope that we can move on from here and instead of worrying about healing my body instead heal what distance has been between us because of me. I am placing myself in your hands because that is what love demands of everyone in the end: surrender. For too long I’ve confused the narrowing of the world that comes with commitment with the narrowing that comes with physical decline, and only now that I am truly facing the latter can I tell the difference. Maybe I would forge on further out into this feast of the senses that is the world if it were only my choice. But I want more to return to you, to stake our own piece of the earth and live fully on it for however long I have.
She does not mention Kenneth. She will never mention Kenneth.
There is never only one Truth.
There is only one truth at a time.
THE HOTEL IN Imlil is terrible, and everyone is angry. At one another, at the surroundings, at Mary for being too sick to hike and spoiling their last day together, at Leo for having to leave. The pillowcases at this dive are nonremovable, sewn on so that they cannot be washed. The toilets—a row of stalls in the hall—are overflowing with brown fecal water and don’t flush. In the shower room, giant insects congregate on the tile walls, yet Mary and the others are all so filthy they had to shower, and Leo is furious at Sandor not only for all the henna cracks but because Sandor would not come into the shower with him and made him face those insects alone. The altitude is giving Leo a headache and kicking Mary’s ass, but when they retired to Leo’s room together to nap (safety in numbers), they were both afraid to turn out the lights, and when they finally tried, pulling the flimsy curtains, Mary kept bolting up and saying she felt bugs crawling on her, and this has Leo in a state of hypervigilant hysteria.
This is crazy. Even now Merel is boxing up Still Life, with Men to move it to Madrid, and meanwhile Leo is sleeping in a vat of African shit and bugs on a probably lice-infested pillow and all of it is rapidly increasing his count of gray hairs. Tomorrow he has to leave. He will not be able to make the hike with the others, and this is not the way he wanted to end his trip: his last trip with Mary, or so she claims. She told him this morning that she was leaving with him, but once they postponed the hike she changed her plans. She needs to make the trek, she says: it’s like a symbol. Tomorrow Leo will get a ride back to the city without her and she’ll remain with Kenneth and Alias.
“You have to stay and watch her,” Leo begged Sandor the moment Mary was out of earshot. “We can’t leave her here alone with them. Just stay a couple more days, go back to La Mamounia after the hike, and chill out by the pool. Then get her on a fucking plane and bring her back with you. Don’t let her go running into the desert or have an orgy or whatever
plan she has in her head. Come meet me and we’ll call her lame-ass husband and get him out for the preview party, okay? We’ll be shopping for party clothes in seventy-two hours.”
Sandor has been difficult this entire trip. He folded his long arms in a way that made his chest look too narrow for the job. “I want you to admit this is madness,” he said, too loudly. “I want you to admit that we should never have gone along with her big Morocco plan. What is she doing here, Leo? Your sister has a terrible disease, and she is going to climb the fucking mountain? This is crazy, and you talk about party clothes! How can you leave me here to cope with her alone?”
“It’s only one more day,” Leo insisted. “She’s doing fine—she’s holding up great! Everybody treats her like an invalid and that’s exactly what she hates, don’t you see? Just stay with her, Sandor, please. We’ll meet up in Spain.”
And so Leo will be flying home alone.
Sandor feels excluded, Leo suspects, by what’s going on in Paris, in Madrid. His big show of worrying about Mary is to avoid admitting other, more personal resentments. Leo understands; he would be jealous if he were the one left out in the cold. He’s seen this happen with other artist couples in their circle: one partner becoming envious, bitter. Sometimes, the relationship does not survive . . .
The thought of Sandor’s leaving him is too awful. Leo dwells, instead, on the bugs.
The hotel is called Étoile; there’s a little subheading on the sign in front that says STAR OF THE ATLAS like a Vegas strip show. There is a small terrace café in front, which is the most sanitary place to hang out if you don’t dwell on what the kitchen must be like inside, where they’re making your food. Sandor took off for a hike alone, and Mary has taken one of Leo’s Xanaxes and is finally crashing. At the terrace café, Kenneth sits reading. Leo doesn’t remember seeing Kenneth with a book earlier; he must have gotten it from one of those exchanges these traveler joints have in the lobby. James Michener’s The Drifters—Leo starts cackling. He isn’t Kenneth’s biggest fan, but he has to admit that the guy, despite his penchant for incorrect grammar (obviously a pose he has held so long he’s forgotten it’s bogus) seems well read. Sometimes he reminds Leo of his father: the whole literate ex-junkie thing. This is, of course, part of why Leo dislikes him. And part of why Mary is screwing around with him: girls and their Oedipus complexes. Geoff and Kenneth, like a competition between Mary’s straight-and-narrow adoptive father and her deranged biological deadbeat one. Sure, he gets it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t dumb.
“Ever read this?” Kenneth asks. “It’s actually pretty good. Not good good, but for what it is. The bible of my tribe. Or what used to be my tribe once upon a time.”
Leo sits down, motions to get someone’s attention. “I don’t read stories,” he says. “I mean, I read history, biographies, art magazines, that kind of thing. Not fiction.”
“Whatever,” says Kenneth.
He seems a little drunk. Leo’s not sure how much Moroccan beer a man like Kenneth would have to drink to achieve that state, but it seems true nonetheless. Maybe when nobody was looking he procured more hash?
“Where’s my sister?” he says, even though he knows.
Kenneth gestures toward the wider world with his beer can. “Hell if I know,” he says. “Ask the Arab kid.”
At first Leo doesn’t get what he means. He thinks briefly of a one-eyed kid from back in Nawar’s village but then realizes Kenneth means Alias. “Huh?” he says. His voice rises to a squeal. “Holy shit! You don’t mean she’s run off with him?”
Kenneth raises an eyebrow. “Well, they didn’t run nowhere. But she kissed him last night.”
“What!” Leo stomps his feet a little. “How the hell did that happen? Shit! I thought that kid was gay! Closeted, of course, but gay.”
Kenneth snickers under his breath. “Man, you people think everyone is gay.”
“Don’t ‘you people’ me,” Leo says.
“Why shouldn’t I? You think I don’t see how you look at me, like I’m some trailer-park redneck? What’s good for the goose, Kemo Sabe.”
“Hmmph,” Leo says. “I take it I’m the goose in this equation. Fine, the gander buys the beer.”
Kenneth doesn’t protest, only mutters, “Take it from me, that kid ain’t gay.”
“Well,” Leo says with a deep sigh. “Quite a loss for our team. He’s stupid but pretty.”
“He ain’t stupid either,” Kenneth says. “He’s just young.”
“What’d she kiss him for?” Leo gratefully accepts his own squat can of shitty beer. “And why would she tell you about it?”
“Why shouldn’t she tell me?” On the terrace Leo notices several insanely large beetles lounging in the sun, fatter and even more repulsive than the leggy insects of the shower. “You and Sandor got it all wrong about us. We’re just old friends.”
“Old friends my ass,” Leo says.
Kenneth signals for another beer. “You ever read a biography of Lawrence Durrell? ’Cause he wrote that once you view somebody as a confessor or a savior, they’re outside the bounds of love to you.”
Leo gawks, stupified. “What the hell would that have to do with you?”
“Good question, buddy. Good question.”
Leo gulps his beer. He should have gone on the hike with Sandor even though Sandor’s been skittish like some closeted kid himself, constantly fearing being “discovered” and stoned in the town square. As though they are truly an anomaly here any more than anywhere else. As though they are truly an anomaly anywhere.
“So are you saying Mary can’t love Geoff? Are you saying—you don’t want her to leave him or something, do you? I thought you were just here for the”—sex, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it—“pigeon pastilla. For the bugs and the delightful aroma of sheep.”
Kenneth doesn’t answer. Leo waits for a moment, thinking he is considering his reply, but after a while he concludes that Kenneth has simply decided to pretend he hasn’t spoken, that he isn’t there, so he stands and leaves the table and heads inside the hotel, up to Mary’s room. He knocks on her door but nobody answers. He knocks again and sees her wandering from the shower room fully dressed even though she already showered earlier that day.
“Hey,” she says. “I just peed in the shower. The drain is way more sanitary than the toilets.”
“Oh, I know,” Leo says. “I did that this morning.”
He goes into her room. They sit on the bed and she does another hit of her inhaler. Leo wonders if there’s a limit to how much she’s supposed to use, and he’s guessing she’s reached it.
“I just talked to your . . . um, lover? Paramour? Cowboy for hire? About how you’re apparently some Mrs. Robinson putting the moves on our young Alias. I thought maybe I’d find him with you in here.”
“I didn’t put the moves on him,” Mary says. “He put the moves on me. Sort of—I’m not sure his heart was in it. We kissed a little—very little.” She stops. “Kenneth told you that? Why?”
“The question, sweetheart, is why you told him.”
“I just wanted to be honest,” she says.
At this, Leo is dumbfounded.
“Look,” Mary says. “I’m leaving soon, I’ll never see him again. I didn’t want to leave with secrets between us.”
“Oh, shit,” Leo says. “That Durrell thing was applicable, then.”
“What Durrell thing?”
“Never you mind.” Leo puts his legs up on the bed. “Look, honey, what are you doing? Alias is a little boy. You have a husband—and a lover. What’s going on?”
“I told you,” Mary says. “Nothing happened.”
“But what’s going on?”
She’s quiet then. She leans forward and wraps her arms around her bony knees. “I was just trying to live every day like it might be my last,” she says finally. “Let’s face it, I’m not a UN ambassador or a prima ballerina or a doctor who saves lives. I’m nothing special. You—you paint and that’s your passion, rig
ht? Well, the rest of us, if we want to experience a high like that, we take drugs or have sex. I’m too sick for drugs, so that’s it: I fuck.”
“Funny,” Leo muses. “If this were my last day on earth, I’d be careful. I wouldn’t go pissing people off. I wouldn’t make out with some inconsequential child even if he does have eyes to die for. I wouldn’t betray Sandor or tell my lover truths that were only sure to hurt him, even if the guy was kind of an asshole. I’d only be that reckless and selfish if I had a long, long time to make amends and repair the damage. I think you’ve got things backward.”
“Yep.” She flicks a bug off the window with her hennaed fingers, and together they lean off the bed’s edge and watch the bloated thing floundering on its back. “Step on it,” Mary commands. “You have shoes on, you’re the boy!”
And Leo does. He jumps off the bed and lands on the bug with a crunch, picks up his foot and stares at the mess.
“This is,” he says, “the absolute most disgusting place on earth. It is a crime against nature to spend your birthday here. When you get to Paris or Madrid or whenever I see you next, I’m going to take you out for an amazing dinner and we’ll get completely shit-faced drunk and wear inappropriately fancy clothes and celebrate properly.”
“I don’t know,” Mary says. “We’ll probably have to do that in boring New England. I doubt Geoff will really come to Madrid, so I’m probably going home.”
“Oh,” Leo says, “you’ll be back.”
“I really don’t think I will, sweetie. You have to come visit me now.”
Her face right then looks just like it does in the painting that will hang in the Spanish museum, haunted and hollow: the painting he wants her to see, and also never wants her to see. Her dismembered head surrounded by all their heads: their father, Daniel; her other father, the just-dead Paul; himself; Geoff; even Kenneth the way he looked that night at Mulligan’s two years ago, hair straggly and eyes hard. The view is from above, heads arranged in a cavernous bowl like so many pieces of fruit piled atop one another, sideways and upside down with Mary’s in the middle, alight with a glow, like the old paintings of saints. Still Life, with Men, he called it. He did not dare paint Sandor then—he wasn’t yet sure he’d be around long enough and didn’t want to be humiliated if their friends saw the piece at Merel’s gallery. For Mary’s lovers whose faces he couldn’t approximate, he painted heads in profile or from the back, to create the appearance of clutter. “You said still,” Merel pronounced at the time, “but this looks like a parade.” Leo hadn’t meant the word that way, though. He didn’t mean not moving. He meant for now. Mary’s hair falls in yellow strands over some of the faces, electric the way he remembers it in his garden the first day they met. The fruit bowl is lined in satin, with handles like a casket.
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 39
