A Life in Men: A Novel (13 page)

“Let it go,” she tells him. It occurs to her that Joshua, who according to Yank saw his first love almost killed and had no power to retaliate, may have “let go” enough things to last a lifetime—that his quotient may be prematurely expired. If he chases after the bag, they could be waiting here an hour, baking in the greenhouse heat of the truck. Plus, there is the chance he will happen on an animal who does not welcome his presence. Theirs is a
driving
safari, and Joshua does not carry a gun.

“Please,” Mary begs. “For me. Let it go for me.”

Joshua climbs back into the driver’s seat, his eyes still off in the distance. He revs the motor and they jolt forward with a lurch. Mary puts her hand on Joshua’s leg, which vibrates from the bumps, shaking her off. In the back, she hears Fiona saying, “Like I’m ever going to wear that shirt again. You should have just stuck it in the trash bag.” Mary wipes her hands on her sundress, trying to remove invisible germs that may be a danger to her lungs. She is meant to avoid things like sick people, like rotting onions; she is not supposed to wipe up vomit and traipse around the third world. She is meant to believe that caution
matters,
but she has come to believe that the things meant to save you—like the barbed-wire fence intended to keep wealthy expats shielded from poor Africans—can often kill you, too.

T
HE NIGHT
M
ARY
agreed to travel with Joshua and the circus, she took out her medical equipment and laid it out for him on their dilapidated mattress. “I have asthma, like I told you,” she said, “but it’s almost just a side effect of another, more serious condition called cystic fibrosis. It’s not a terminal illness, exactly, but it’s progressive, and I don’t have a normal life expectancy. Eventually I’ll be on oxygen all the time, and either I’ll get an infection they can’t get rid of, or I’ll pretty much drown on my own mucus and die that way.” She didn’t look at him but fiddled with the equipment on the bed, conscious of the fact that Yank had once touched it. “Do you still want me to come?”

He said only, “Nobody knows what the future holds, right? I could fall off the trapeze tomorrow and become a quadriplegic or get a brain injury and end up daft and eating through a straw. Does that mean you don’t want to be with me now?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“Right, then,” he said, and he kissed her. “So you’re coming.”

Mary might easily have told him everything then. Instead she continued the unpacking of her rucksack until she could pass him her passport in silence and watch his face absorb the shock. Then she offered, “When I came to London, I changed my name, almost like a joke—but we ended up living together, and it stuck longer than I ever meant it to. It was just . . . a game, I guess. I know it’ll be weird, but once we leave here, you shouldn’t call me Nicole anymore.”

“Why would you lie to me all this time?” he asked, childish confusion on his face, the pitch of his voice more distraught than at the revelation of her illness. “You were having a laugh? I don’t understand. We . . .
I
was some kind of joke to you?”

There were many ways to address this, she knew. She could throw her arms around him and claim to be madly in love with him, but she was afraid he would see through that, that such a claim would undermine her real—if gentler—feelings for him. So she said, “It had nothing to do with you. It was all about me, always being the sick girl, wanting to escape that for a while.” She peered into his face, the water-paleness of his eyes. “Haven’t you ever wanted to get away from yourself ? Haven’t you ever wanted to become someone else?”

“Yeah,” he said quietly, “I have,” though he did not speak of the girl Yank told her about, just as she did not speak of Nix. The very day they left Arthog House, he began to call her Mary with surprisingly little effort. They never spoke of her deception again.

I
N
A
FRICA, YOU
oscillate like a schizophrenic,
she scribbles in her Nix notebook by lantern light.
If you have come here on a journey to “find yourself,” good luck. Here, you vary with the landscape
. . .

In Nairobi, your lover will buy a cheap Jeep and get carjacked before he has owned it a week. When you ask why he did not call for help, he will explain that if you shout “thief” in Nairobi, a mob is likely to beat your assailant to death right there in the street, so if you don’t want blood on your hands, just hand over your wallet, just get out of the car. Though your city apartment complex will be considerably shabbier than Gavin’s suburban home, it will be equally surrounded by barbed wire. You will be warned repeatedly not to exit the complex by foot after nightfall.
To never, ever venture farther than River Road.

There are other stories of Nairobi that Mary cannot tell. Though she is not aware of it, in late 1991 the torture chambers in the basement of Nayoyo House are still operational. As she struggles with her daily resentment at not being able to roam freely, meanwhile prisoners, including journalists, are being whipped, burned, held underwater, molested, and not infrequently killed right in the city center. Likewise, there is a sophisticated, cosmopolitan side to Nairobi: a rising, educated African middle class and a decadent expat community still playing a glamorous game of
White
Mischief
make-believe. But Mary and Joshua are alien to the former and too broke to buy entry into the latter, and so to these complex societies they are not privy. During the months Mary makes this mile-high city her home base, she will know only that its air is thin and that she is quickly winded even from a simple trip to buy groceries. That her yellow hair assures her of constantly being harassed by black Kenyans aiming to sell her things, so that she is perpetually fending off street vendors and small-time hustlers. That when she wants to go shopping, she is urged by Gavin—and Joshua, too—to frequent bland (“safe”) malls that look like they could be in Los Angeles. She knows only that, while the Indian food in Nairobi surpasses even that in London, here in this city she will entertain more than one discussion with her pacifist lover about whether they should purchase a gun.

Approaching Lake Nakuru just days before Christmas, driving through the city’s tree-lined boulevards, you are bombarded by the purple splendor of jacaranda. These trees bloom for only one month, forming vibrant, arched awnings over the road as you whiz by a gaggle of young boys, shoeless and rolling a tire alongside them as they run. When you finally reach the lake itself, a blanket of flamingos covers the water in pink motion, feathers rolling like waves, the sky alive with wings. Here, you dance with wildly gyrating hips alongside the local dance troupe that entertains tourists at the lodge. Here, instead of cursing the constant power outages in Nairobi, you are grateful for small mercies when the lodge permits your room additional hours of electricity for your medical devices while the rest of the rooms are temporarily powerless, to conserve energy. Here, your body entwining with your lover’s beneath the romantic mosquito net can make up for any inconvenience of this country’s unbelievably slow restaurant service, for the way everyone from the plumber to the hotel laundry service to the freaking police runs a perpetual hour (if not several days!) behind on “Kenya time.” In the morning you are ravenous, pile your plate with mango slices, and drink several small glasses of passion juice, resolve to begin anew, still refusing to acknowledge that your moods here change with the extremity of Kenya’s terrain. That all your resolutions are useless before this land.

W
HEN HE CLIMBS
into the truck for their Christmas Eve game drive, Liam hands Mary a sheet of paper. On it, he has written
Heart of Love
in dark ink, smeary from being colored over with a pink crayon.
Dear Mary
, the back of the paper says,
Mary Christmas I love you! Love Liam.

Mary does not expect to burst into tears, but before she even registers it, Kathleen is cooing, “How sweet! Aren’t you lovely! Look, Liam, Mary is crying because she likes your card so much!” Kathleen even wraps her arms around Mary, exhibiting less hesitance than she did when touching her puke-stained son. Mary wipes her nose on the sleeve of her peasant blouse, tries to extract herself from Kathleen’s perfumed, bony embrace without appearing rude.

“Thank you,” she says to Liam. “It’s a beautiful card.”

Fiona rolls her eyes, smirking. “Yeah,” she says sarcastically. “He made one just like it for the lady who sat behind us on the airplane, and the maid who cleaned our room in Mombasa.”

Mary bites her lip. She touches Liam on the head, his blond curls wispier, less substantial than her own: the hair of a human being not fully formed. He smiles wildly, half bangs his head into her stomach so that she can hug him, and though she believes she has lost the heart for it, she goes ahead with the embrace because Kathleen, Fiona, and Walt are all watching. His body is warm and pliant, and though she felt pressured into the hug, it is hard to force her arms to let go.

I
N THE FILM
Out of Africa
, Meryl Streep’s voice-over as Baroness Karen Blixen—known in the literary world as Isak Dinesen—says of her lover, Denys Finch Hatton, “I’ve written about all the others, not because I loved them less, but because they were clearer.” In time, Mary will come to wonder if this lack of clarity is elemental to all love affairs in Kenya, at least among such expats as Blixen and Finch Hatton—as herself and Joshua. Those presumptuous enough to imagine their lives writ large, to pit their paltry individuality against a land they can never hope to understand or call their own.

H
E WAKES HER
on Christmas morning, though they do not have a game drive this day. “Come,” he says, breath warm against her ear, the smell of sleep still on him, not yet overtaken by cigarettes, coffee, weed. The air is chilly and she takes with her the tasseled wrap they bought together at a market in Granada, winding it around her body as they step together outside their tent.

The sun, just beginning to rise above the peak of Mount Kenya, halos the rock of the mountain, creating a holographic effect. She stares into its golden-gray glow, blinking as if to adjust double vision. She thinks,
This might be my last Christmas.
She thinks,
There could not be anywhere better to spend it
. She thinks,
If I were to die tomorrow, I have had enough, it would be all right
.

Then she remembers Liam’s card. Instantly she is blinking again, but this time the tears spill over. Here, then, is how it strikes: the sudden and devastating longing for a child of one’s own. Mary is fully aware that
nobody
—no educated, world-traveling girl like herself—has a baby at twenty-three anymore. Yet there it is, the desire to fill her arms with baby, slithering around her body like an invisible snake and strangling her with wanting. Nearby, close enough that she and Joshua could reach it within a minute’s sprint, a giraffe strolls awkwardly in the pale light. It is a strange sight at this hour, but animals separated from their herds are unpredictable: it may be hungry; it may be sick. It does not look troubled, however, from here. From a distance, it gives the impression of beauty, of perfection.
Like us,
Mary muses.
Like me
.

“I was thinking,” she begins. Joshua’s arm around her shoulders feels impeccably strong, and she uses it to bolster herself. In all this time, though she is anything but a convenient partner, he has never mentioned the possibility of their separating, has never been anything but surprisingly responsible, loyal, adventurous, brave. “Maybe—maybe we should get married.”

Joshua barks a short laugh. “What would we do something like that for?”

She stares at his face, guileless, even innocent. Despite his perpetual tan, the skin around his eyes, which live behind habitual sunglasses, remains pink like that of a white mouse. It is the one space on his body that is vulnerable. The sun breaks free of the mountain, and Mary has to shield her own eyes from its sudden glare. Joshua lets out a contented sigh, kisses her hair.

“We don’t have to play by those old rules,” he tells her. “Marriage is the death of romance. We’re writing our own story—the things they think we aren’t allowed to do can’t touch us here.”

Water pools in her eyes again. “I feel that, too,” she admits. “I mean, I think about it all the time—what people don’t think I can do because I’m sick. What nobody thought I was capable of. But Joshua . . .” She isn’t sure why she can’t find her voice—why his words fall so completely in line with her own beliefs, and yet they scrape inside rather than caressing. She wants to say,
I’m not
sure that proving “them” wrong is the best impetus for a life.
She wants to say,
Who are “they” anyway? Your “they” and my “they” don’t even know one another.
Instead, she watches the giraffe bobble in the distance, its small head and sloping neck mimicking the curve of the mountain, nature in perpetual tandem. She tries, “Yank told me about your old girlfriend in South Africa. About what happened to her. You never talk about it. I don’t even know her name.”

For a moment, Joshua looks disoriented. He looks as though he may be trying to remember who Yank is. They have not spoken his name between them in months, though at times Mary has, irrationally, found herself wondering what it would be like to be here in Kenya with him instead of Joshua, imagining the different nature of their conversations in the still darkness of their tent. “I don’t see what she’s got to do with marriage,” Joshua says at last. “Her name was Kaya, but I’m not still in love with her, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“No . . . that’s not what I meant at all. It would be
okay
with me if you were, actually. That’s not why I brought up marriage—because I was jealous. I . . . I just want to know you.”

He laughs again. “Know me? Don’t be daft. You’ve spent every day with me going on two years. We barely even talk to anyone save each other.”