A Life in Men: A Novel (14 page)

Mary shakes her head. “That’s not true,” she says. “We talk to
everyone
else. Circus people. Travelers. Clients. Our lives are full of random strangers.”

For the first time since she has known him, the irritation that clouds his eyes is directed at her. “You’re clearly upset about something,” he says, “but I don’t know what it is. I
did
love Kaya, all right? Maybe, if things had worked out differently, I could have seen a life with her. But as it turns out, that was just a delusional mistake. She could have run off with me—I had the money. It’s not Communist Russia, for fuck’s sake, you can leave the godforsaken shithole country if you like, if you can afford it. I told her to come, but she was too afraid. She said that we’d never be accepted no matter where we went, that we’d always be in danger. You can see for yourself that isn’t true—you’re American, you know London, you saw Europe, even
here,
for God’s sake, there are people who do it. But she preferred to go back to work for a man who’d been raping her since she was a girl, some cult leader whose followers nearly killed her. She lost her eye, did Yank tell you that part? . . . Fuck it, I’m sure he did. If I’d have known he was nothing but an old grandmother gossiping on the front lawn, I’d have kept my fucking mouth shut. I’d have stayed with Kaya even if she had no eye, no education, I didn’t care what anyone said, I wanted to run away together but she wouldn’t. What else do you want me to say about that, Mary?” He narrows his eyes at her. “
Nicole
. When I asked you to come with me, you said yes. It turned out you were a liar, but at least you had courage. There’s nothing to understand about me. My past is over. I’m here with you, now.”

Mary blinks in the sun. She is openly crying, but this seems to frustrate him more. He paces, kicking the short brown grass.

“You want me to marry you to prove that I love you? Do you think I give a shit about some official piece of paper? It won’t change anything. All I care about is what’s between us in the moment—the church and the government can kiss my ass.”

“But what if we wanted to have a baby?” she blurts out. “It’s good to be married, for legal reasons, for that.”

“A
baby
?” he mutters incredulously. “How could we have a fucking baby?” But instantly his pacing slows, and when he turns to her, his eyes are softer, pitying, and Mary’s tears stop falling with something like shock, something like shame. “You’re not well,” he reminds her softly. “Wouldn’t that be selfish of us? You’re the one—I’m not trying to be cruel. You’re the one who says you might not have long to live. What about the child, then? What about
me
? I’d be saddled the rest of my life—I couldn’t bring a baby on safari, could I? Or to circus rehearsal, or a gym if I were coaching? How would I be meant to handle a baby if you were gone?”

“I don’t know,” she admits.

“Can you even
do
that?” he persists, and though his voice is gentle, quiet, it feels relentless, as though he is slapping her. “Could your body handle a pregnancy?”

She shakes her head numbly. “I’m not sure. Women with cystic fibrosis . . . a lot of times there are fertility problems, and not everyone lives long enough to try. I think it’s . . . maybe it’s discouraged. But people have
done
it. Women have had children. Some adults with CF live way longer than the norm, into their forties, and my lung functioning is still really high for someone my age. If I were to have a baby young, like this—our child could be a teenager by the time I died. Even older.”

He puts his hands on her arms. She wants, desperately, to go back inside the tent, to forget everything she started in her fit of half-awake madness, but his grasp holds her steady. “That’s quite a game of roulette,” he says, smiling like a father. “Those stakes are pretty high.”

“You’re the one who said Kaya wouldn’t take a chance,” she fires back. “You’re the one who said you chose me because I wasn’t afraid!”

“Fair enough.” He drops his hands but still she does not move. “Here’s the truth, then. After I found out you’d lied to me—I was angry, yeah. But in another way it confirmed that we were right for each other. I figured this kind of shit, this middle-aged settling-down-and-having-a-family business wouldn’t apply. That it wasn’t our fate, and that was fine with me. It still is.”

“If it were left to fate, I’d still be in Ohio—you’d still be in South Africa!”

He nods, his calm infuriating. “You’re right. And there was nothing I saw there that made me want to bring more life into the world. Every day growing up, I saw human cruelty, mindless conformity, people pushing one another down. You can say South Africa’s fucked up, and that’s true, but look at it here, too. Moi torturing people, animals driving the wounded members out of the herd, giraffe mothers forgetting and rejecting their own offspring if they’re separated for twelve days. It’s not just South Africa that’s brutal, it’s
nature
. And now you want to have a baby when you could die before it’s even old enough to remember you? Fuck, woman! I’m just trying to live without hurting anyone, trying to find some scraps of beauty under all this shit and have a bit of fun. Why would anyone bring a child into this sick world just to set it up for more pain than usual—that sounds obscene, don’t you see?”

“Obscene,” she whispers. “My wanting a baby is obscene.”

“I’m sorry.” He takes her into his arms, radiating heat already in the sun, though Mary’s teeth are chattering, knocking against one another nakedly. “Look, I’m not trying to hurt you. If you really want to get married—I think it’s bullshit, Mary, but if it’s honestly important to you, then we’ll do it, all right? You think it over, and if you still want to, maybe we can manage it in Nairobi over the New Year, before I’ve got to go out again—I’m sure Gavin would set something up.”

“Oh, excellent.” Her voice is acidic against his chest, though she doesn’t mean it to be, though she knows that between them he is the ethical one, and she is a selfish woman who would saddle Joshua with a burden he never wanted, all so she can fill her desperate arms. She pushes off against his solid chest, flings her body as far away as she can get. “Then you and Gavin can both have your imported white wives, but no children to get in the way of your good time.”

The flash of rage sparks in him like lightning. He pulls back his hand as if to strike her, and she flinches, though all he does is wave his arm futilely in the air for a moment, confused, a look almost of fear on his face before he, too, begins to cry. They stand opposite each other, not making eye contact, weeping in the blazing morning sun beneath Mount Kenya, their audience of one giraffe disappearing on the horizon.

“You said you wanted me to tell you about Kaya,” he says through his tears, “just so you could throw it in my face that I should marry a black woman on
principle
? But no, wait—let me get this straight—I should have a baby with
you
first? What’s the matter with you? I don’t know what you’re talking about! I don’t even know who you are!”

When he reenters the tent, he zips the flap up behind him, closing her out. Mary spins round dizzily, hands over her eyes, fighting the impulse to sit down on the grass, willing her body to move in some direction away from the tent—perhaps to the main house, where guests take their meals, where she can find coffee to clear her head. She staggers a few inches forward, coughing from the phlegm in her throat, which tears always summon, humiliated to think that Joshua, on the other side of the zipped flap, may believe she is hacking for sympathy. Forcibly, she lowers her hands, swallows furiously, stares out into the brightness, longing for her sunglasses. Turns toward the path.

It is only then that she sees Kathleen, sitting on the canvas chair outside her own tent, smoking a cigarette, though Mary has never seen her smoke before. She wears only a white robe, her tanned, skinny legs poking out beneath the plush fabric like a young girl’s. She stares at Mary unabashed, in a way that strikes Mary as distinctly un-American, lacking politeness and discretion. For a moment their eyes lock across the empty African land, across the dehydrated grass, across the gulf of their separate womanhoods. Then Kathleen smiles slowly, less with kindness or comfort than with simple recognition, before she stands and disappears back through the flap of her own tent, to her children and her man, leaving Mary on the path.

The problem of Africa is one of trash.

On CNN, you hear about the AIDS crisis, genocides, starvation. In politically correct novels by award-winning American writers, you can find out all you ever wanted to know about clitorectomies. But when you
live
in Africa, when you drive its roads for a living or sit day after day in the rumbling passenger’s seat of a man who does, when you are not a war hack or an NGO worker but just an unheroic woman whose mucus and earwax happen to turn green and then black when surrounded by dirt and pollution, Africa’s singular, most defining characteristic will come to be its piles of uncollected trash. By the side of the road. Piled into hills atop which donkeys graze and barefoot children play. Under the wobbly heels of sadly beautiful young women walking home from church.

Of course, your antilittering, nature-loving lover will claim not to notice, to take no offense. He will shrug, smoke his hand-rolled cigarette, and tell you South Africa was this way, too. It is all pretention anyway, he will say: to feign that civilization can eradicate trash when in fact the opposite is true. In the United States and Europe, the government tries to pretend that life isn’t dirty, but in Africa, ugliness is in your face along with splendor.

The Maasai, however, and all those who practice the old ways,
bury
their garbage, with or without the
government’s help. Their villages may lack running water or electricity or hospitals or schools, but they are pristine, as clean as the dry, white animal bones lying in neatly stacked piles for reuse . . .

“I
HEARD A
lion growling outside our tent last night!” Kathleen gushes too loudly as they drive around the Ol Pejeta black rhino conservancy. “Everyone else was asleep, and at first I thought I was dreaming, but I heard it at least six or seven times. At one point I literally got up to feel the canvas of the tent, to see if it was strong enough to withstand an attack. I was terrified to go back to sleep—what if the kids woke up and left the tent, and it was still out there?”

“Yep,” says Fiona. “Liam and I usually get up in the middle of the night and wander around in the pitch dark in, like, Africa. That makes total sense, Mom. That’s a completely rational fear.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Joshua says, ignoring Fiona. “It couldn’t have been a lion—they’ve got an electric fence around the camp.”

“Well, you know, there
were
three power outages last night,” Walt drawls in a smooth, mocking tone. “
I
didn’t hear any lion, mind you, but apparently one
could
have been lying in wait until the moment the electric fence was on the fritz so it could storm the joint.”

“I’m not crazy,” Kathleen says, voice wounded. “I’m not making this up. I heard it.”

“I’ve heard big cats at night around here,” Mary says quietly. It is true. She heard one last night also. It’s just that she has stopped finding it noteworthy by now. It’s just that she has stopped getting up in the dark to check the thickness of the canvas. “That fence is in a shallow trench—almost any animal out here could jump it. It’s more for keeping the tourists in than for keeping the animals out, frankly. We’ve found tracks before, right outside our tent, haven’t we, Joshua?”

She sees Walt roll his eyes toward Joshua, some attempt at male camaraderie, but Joshua doesn’t take the bait, doesn’t answer anyone. His pale eyes, shielded once more by his usual dark glasses, stay firmly on the road, both hands on the steering wheel while Mary’s leg, usually sweaty under the palm of his left hand, rests free in the hot breeze, alone.

Without him, you are a woman alone in the African bush. Without him, you have the equivalent of a couple of hundred American bucks, sent by your parents for your twenty-third birthday. Without him, you have no vehicle to get back to Nairobi, and though you are the sort of woman and he the sort of man who would understand your shared apartment to be “yours” were you to separate, within a month you couldn’t pay the rent.

This is the life you have wrought in Africa. For more than a year you have followed a man. To Europe, to Japan, to Nairobi, where you cannot even sit still but traipse after him on safari after safari, trailing his adventures without bothering to stake anything of your own beyond
him.
You are a middle-class American with a BA in education, supportive parents, health still stable enough to withstand nonstop travel in rough terrain, and scant excuse to have not held a stable job since London. How have you become this woman?

Before you met him, you were a frightened girl. In his athletic arms, under his competent hands, with his miraculous electric eel of a cock, you became someone else, someone traversing the world. But you have traveled this world on your back, on hands and knees, on rugs and floors and mattresses and beds, under mosquito nets, and against the walls of hotel showers. You have seen the world via rumpled sheets and the peeling paint of ceilings and the dust under beds.

Kenya is approximately the size of Texas, yet within its perimeter exist mountain peaks, the second-largest slum on the African continent, Muslim villages on the Indian Ocean where everyone still travels by donkey, majestic waterfalls, sprawling bush, five-star resorts, tin-shanty food stalls, tea plantations of fluorescent green, icons of world literature, missionaries, more than sixty spoken languages. In an hour’s drive, you can go from a landscape as lush as Ireland’s to earth so hot and dry you could not survive a few hours without the roof of your truck to shield you.

I’ve gotta say, Nix, this diverse and primal land is as good a place as any to die.