A Life in Men: A Novel (12 page)

It turns out, however, that he was right. No sooner do the clients depart—back to the States, to England, to Canada, to Italy—than she has already forgotten their names.

T
HE SKY IS
darkening fast, Liam asleep with his head on Kathleen’s lap, when Walt booms, “Hey, before we head back, let’s check on our hippo one more time!”

Our
hippo. Mary knew this was coming. If Walt hadn’t mentioned it, Joshua would have, and she has spent the past two hours trying to come up with some plausible excuse to deter him. Her stomach lurches. Fiona moans, “Eew, gross,” but without conviction, and already Joshua is grinning, turning the truck toward the river. He tosses a look over his shoulder, and in that moment he appears no older than Fiona, a trickster elf somehow entrusted with the safety of an entire upper-middle-class American family. “I should’ve brought some nose plugs, eh?” he says. “Our hippo friend will be getting ripe.”

Mary closes her eyes, resolving to skip tomorrow’s 7 a.m. game drive. No doubt they’ll all be hot to return bright and early to watch the vultures and hyenas war over the hippo’s stenchy remains. She pictures herself instead cocooned under the mosquito net, curtains drawn against the vigilant morning sun, Keekorok waiters bringing her a little metal pot of Nescafé and hot milk, since despite the international fame of “Kenyan coffee,” nobody in the actual nation of Kenya seems to consume anything except crappy instant.
She
will spend her morning reading at the pool, wearing only a little black bikini, confident that even if she is not exactly a “guest,” nobody will care, since her young, shapely body makes for a fine poolside ornament. No, she will not trot around at the crack of dawn, trailing Joshua like a faithful dog. Not this time.

True to Joshua’s prediction, they smell the hippo before they see it. At times on safari, the air seems like something you could touch: so thick with animal urine or decomposing flesh that it’s hard to believe such a scent carries no shape, no
color
to mark its presence. The scratches on the hippo’s hide are already losing their pink rawness, browning in the heat and sun. There, at its mammoth belly, are the lion brothers Mary and Joshua have come to know, one (the larger, with his darker mane) feasting on the hippo’s tough flesh, his younger brother lying insouciantly behind.

“Oh my God,” Kathleen mutters. “I can’t believe this! We’ve hit the jackpot on our very first drive!”

“Shut up, Mom,” Fiona snaps. “The guidebook says we’re supposed to be quiet around the animals.”

“Your mother doesn’t know how to be quiet,” Walt says, barking a laugh.

“Dad,” Fiona pleads nervously, “you’re making it worse!”

The feeding lion does not even look up at their nasally twangs. The lounging brother stares at them, but with the kind of disinterest with which an infant surveys his own reflection in a mirror.

Joshua moves in closer. Mary is amazed, almost dumbfounded, by what a natural he is: Before they arrived in Nairobi, she had never even seen him pet a dog or drive a car. He was an urbanite, of Johannesburg and London, a peddler of hash cakes, a street performer. Now it turns out that in Johannesburg Joshua’s father owns a driveaway business, and Joshua spent his entire youth—when not training at the gym—working with cars. While their truck has never broken down entirely, they have twice blown tires Joshua switched without batting an eye, and they once got stuck in a flash flood so that the vehicle floated downstream, and Joshua and two African guides who’d seen the mishap literally
pushed
the car against the river tide back onto the gravelly bank, where Joshua then did mysterious things under the hood until the waterlogged truck started again.

As close to the lion as they can get without hitting the hippo with their tires, Joshua kills the engine. This is his seventh solo safari, but Mary knows that on his fiftieth his eyes will have lost none of their rapture. He lives more in the moment than anyone she will ever meet, a chameleon in his ability to change colors and inhabit, fully and utterly, the role in which he has suddenly found himself. You can learn the lay of the Kenyan land, but you cannot learn
this,
this lack of being anywhere other than where you are in a given instant; this complete surrender to watching a lion eat a hippo; this absence of wanting or wondering about anything except the spectacularly commonplace miracle before your eyes.

Kathleen and Walt and Fiona click their cameras—they each have one!—at the speed of light, hungry for documentation. But Joshua, Mary suddenly realizes, has never taken a photo on safari.
She
owns a camera—she is an American, after all—and has brought it with her on their trips, and at first she was no different than Kathleen and Walt, taking forty-seven pictures of the same giraffe, mystified and half-afraid she was dreaming, desperate to prove she had really been here, really seen that. By now she knows that photos of animals lose their power in the retelling; it is looking back on the photo of Joshua and the guides pushing their floating truck, or of Joshua asleep in the morning light on their first morning in Samburu, that gives her pleasure. A photo of a lion loses its magic once you yourself are no longer in the scene, because a lion is supposed to be on the Mara, supposed to be eating a hippo—it is
you
who were never meant to be here.

“Sawa sawa,” Walt says after a while, lowering the camera that, for this generation of safarigoers, has replaced the guns of old. Joshua has taught the family this Swahili term, which in this context means “I’m ready to go” or “It’s all good” or “Cool,” and signals a waning fascination with a given sight. But Joshua does not immediately start the car, and Mary notices that he is not looking at the lion and hippo anymore but at Liam, awake now and wide-eyed, rapt. Liam, who does not own a camera. Liam, who is not speaking anymore, not tormenting his sister, not eating his brought-from-home granola bar, but watching the animals with reverence, spellbound.

Joshua turns to her, eyes inscrutable. “He won’t even remember this trip,” he whispers. “Sawa sawa,” Fiona says, and her father chuckles at how she is catching on.

N
O SOONER HAD
Gavin’s letter arrived than Joshua began to wax rhapsodic about the African sky. He had grown up “going to the bush,” and despite the enormity of the African continent—the geographic, political, and cultural gulfs between South Africa and Kenya—the move was clearly a homecoming to him. South Africa had made itself unlivable, but here was Kenya, with a kinder and gentler residual colonialism, with a smiling African population that had never been exactly enslaved, even with a spanking-new plan for democracy through multiparty elections, some ploy Moi had pulled out of his ass at the eleventh hour to appease the international community. Kenya, with the same endless sky and nearly red earth as Joshua’s homeland. From the first it was clear that he felt more at home amid its landscape than he ever could have in the cities of Europe.

It had never occurred to Mary
not
to accompany him. If in Japan she had developed an obsessive taste for sushi, so she had also found a budding awareness that she could not rely on her health to permit stable breadwinning—that her life, no matter how she sliced it, would have to involve either protracted reliance on her parents or a long-term liaison with a man. Someone who cared enough whether she lived or died to put his money where his mouth was. Via a bad connection from Dayton to Osaka, Dr. Narayan had insisted that she needed a regular, English-speaking physician, not random doctors on the run. She
needed,
Dr. Narayan said, a cystic fibrosis center, and while Nairobi didn’t have one, the city offered plenty of private pulmonary specialists for those who could pay. “Don’t worry, darling,” Gavin quipped on another long-distance phone call. “England’s left its mark here. Nairobi serves up Western-style medicine to its expats along with their high tea.” His safari company was raking in the Kenyan shillings, the pounds, the American dollars. The movie
Out of Africa
was still fresh in everyone’s mind; the Cold War was newly over; Americans were booking safaris year-round, even in the rainy season. And so Mary and Joshua packed alarmingly scant bags and boarded more than a day’s worth of flights, and Joshua, who had been toting hash on his circus world tour inside deodorant containers to mask the smell, finally threw away his stash entirely, assured that Gavin would help him procure a new dealer in Nairobi along with a doctor for Mary, and made the flights stone-cold straight, as if to symbolize their new life.

Joshua even has short hair now, so as not to worry the clients. The shearing of her lover has made an almost uncanny difference in his appearance, and for the first time Mary can imagine the boy he was in South Africa, the serious athlete whose equally serious devotion to pot somehow failed to diminish his clean-cut charm. He’s lost the underfed, shaggy vibe he gave off in London, and though Mary never aspired to date a hippie—never even
met
one before Arthog House—she misses the desperate, rebellious, hungry version of him more than she would have expected. This Joshua, close cropped and filled out, suntanned muscles rippling freely and nourished by goat
nyama
choma
and piles of heavily salted
ugali,
seems strangely foreign to her, though she suspects that 99 percent of women would say he looks “better” now.

O
N THE WAY
out of the Mara, heading for one night at Lake Nakuru, Fiona and Liam throw up in tandem. Literally the moment Liam starts to barf, Fiona takes one look at him and starts spewing, too. They gush like geysers, stench filling the car. Kathleen shoves a plastic bag under Liam’s mouth, and the flow of him continues, his puke hitting whatever cookie wrappings or melted Cadbury bars litter the bottom of the bag. Fiona, no longer in an active state of throwing up but mouth stained with vomit, barks at her mother, “Gee, thanks, Mom! Give
him
the bag. He doesn’t care about his clothes anyway — what about me?”

Joshua has stopped the truck. He looks at Mary pointedly, but she realizes she isn’t sure what he’s signaling. Amusement? Irritation? He goes round to the trunk and flips it open.

“Okay, kids, out,” Walt says sharply. “Let’s get you changed.”

Liam whines, “Fiona says we can’t go outside—the lions will eat us!”

Walt snaps, “Do you see any lions?”

“Maybe we
should
change him inside the truck.” Kathleen is picking at Liam’s clothing, pulling his shirt over his head daintily, trying to keep from actually touching the puke, which is futile. By the time she’s gotten his T-shirt off, gooey chunks of vomit dot Liam’s hair.

“It really is safe,” Mary says, though she has no idea if it is safe or not. “If you saw any animals, you could get right back in.”

Fiona starts crying, a kind of smoldering rage bubbling over into tears. “I’m not taking my clothes off out in the open! Can’t we wait until we get to a restroom?”

“Are you kidding?” Walt barks. “That’s an hour away! We’ll asphyxiate from the smell!

Liam is trying to climb Kathleen’s body, but she holds him at arm’s length, leading him gingerly out into the sun. Fiona crosses her arms over her chest in irritation, but her shirt is covered with barf, and Mary sees her give up and flop her arms down to her sides as she skulks after them, disappearing round the back of the truck to rummage through their bags for fresh clothes.

Mary sits shotgun, surveying the scene in the back. The seats where Liam was lying with his head on his mother’s lap, and where Fiona antisocially listened to her Walkman, are both soiled. Joshua keeps napkins in their cooler, so Mary opens it—thinks about flipping the top off a Tusker for fortification—and climbs into the back to start wiping up the vomit. This kind of thing would be part of her job if she were a waitress, a flight attendant . . . a mother. She scrapes the lumps of puke into the already warm and heavy plastic bag, feeling something like penance or gratitude, thinking of the night Yank cleaned her, of Joshua scrubbing her dirty bedsheets and nightclothes on the hospital roof in Osaka. It is not often she gets to play nurse instead of patient, and the turnabout is oddly reassuring. This is the truth of the matter: they are all a mass of bodily fluids, of stenches, just like the rotting hippo. Fiona and Liam just don’t know it yet.

She has the bag tied up at the top, the seats visually—if not olfactorily—clean by the time Joshua wanders over to the open door, where Walt, too, is waiting while Fiona changes clothes.

“Here,” she says, holding out the bag.

“We’ll keep that until we reach the gate,” Joshua says. “Remember, we stopped at the toilets there on the way in—they’ve rubbish bins, too, and the kids can clean up.”

Walt takes the plastic bag. “We don’t want this inside with us,” he says, and faster than Mary would have guessed possible, he winds his arm back and tosses the bag. He must have been a pitcher in high school; it arcs into the air like a rocket, off toward distant acacia trees.

Joshua gapes at Walt. He is, in this moment, extremely easy to read. “You can’t just throw plastic onto the reserve!” He isn’t shouting, but Walt looks taken aback. “This is a national reserve. You’re not permitted to litter here.”

Walt’s face recovers quickly. He smiles mildly back at Joshua. “We weren’t going to drive in a stuffy truck full of vomit,” he says calmly. He must be twenty years older than Joshua. He is a gangly man, paradoxically paunchy in the middle, losing his hair. He is not so much ugly as utterly nondescript, in the exact midwestern way of Mary’s father. Joshua could put him down with one punch, though Mary has never known Joshua to hit anyone. Walt seems to fear Joshua not at all, seems entirely clear on the fact that he is the one paying Joshua and confident this payment covers his right to litter the Mara if he so chooses. Kathleen, Fiona, and Liam climb back into the truck, and despite Mary’s best efforts to clean up, they all avoid the vomit seats, cramming together on the bench in the back. Walt enters after them, sitting on a clean seat up front, his legs casually splayed with masculine authority. Joshua stares after the bag, though they can no longer see it. It would be physically impossible to navigate the truck up in that direction, across that rough terrain, but Mary knows Joshua is thinking of making the journey by foot—of making them all wait in the truck while he goes to retrieve the bag.