A Life in Men: A Novel (15 page)

It is building a
life
here that’s proving more difficult.

T
HE NIGHT AFTER
Christmas, when Mary slides her body around Joshua’s, whispers, “Please don’t be mad, please,” his arms encircle her right away, but his dick is temperamental. Even after she’s blown him for a while, he still doesn’t have his usual perpetual hard-on. “I chewed some
miraa
earlier,” he finally confesses, though she’s not sure she believes him. She didn’t
see
him do it, and usually he’ll try to share it with her, though
miraa
makes her feel like she’s sucked down an entire canister of albuterol, heart hammering inside her chest, mind manic, the exact opposite of the cloak of beautiful numbness she’s felt on hash cakes or gulps of cough syrup. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks, and Joshua shrugs his naked, rippling shoulders, says simply, “I was pissed off,” so Mary goes back down on him, but there’s something ugly in it now. She has to perform tricks to finally get him hard, and her heart isn’t in it; she doesn’t feel the pitching in her gut that used to come with his raw, uncovered skin. If she wants him inside her, it is only as a survival tactic, only so their Christmas drama can be
over,
not because she wants her body fucked. She keeps gliding her mouth until Joshua’s body responds.

“Shit,” he moans, “you’re so good, you feel so great, baby.” He laughs, throws his head back. “Remember the time I ate speed in London? I was so wired you had to work on me till, like, five in the morning, then we rutted like animals with poor Yank right in the next bed—Christ, we were such assholes.” Strong fingers twirling through her tangle of hair, he doesn’t know she wants to disappear, he doesn’t know anything about her, she has opened her body so wide for him that her entire self has disappeared and he doesn’t know she’s missing. His prick hard as a biceps now, one more muscle. “I couldn’t keep my hands off you, I couldn’t help myself.”

He’s getting on top. Around them, the poetic mosquito net shimmers in the twilight, which usually gets her going, but not now. She thinks of Yank in the next bed. She thinks of Joshua and the magic of their lovemaking in the days before Osaka, before her hospital stay, before his scrubbing bedsheets stained with the blood of her IVs, before the weeks upon weeks when sex was nothing she could want, when all she craved was air, when mere kissing winded her even before her fever finally shot up. By the time it was all over, the bubble of constant, infatuated fucking had burst. Now, like so many couples, they often just fall asleep companionably. If she is his whore, his traveling geisha, then she sure is a shitty, inconvenient one. Neither Gavin’s glamorous Swede nor the decadent expat beauties of Hemingway stories, she is just a sick former virgin, a woman who used to want her lover’s body with the intensity of religion but now wants a baby, wants to be able to walk on a public street past nightfall without the threat of murder and plunder, wants to be able to rely on the bloody electricity, wants her mother. London feels mythic in memory: Yank in the next bed, listening to them, wanting her. She doesn’t know if that’s true, but she thinks it is; she wants it to be. Yank’s body against hers the night of the circus, the way he kissed her, the way his hands trembled against her throat—though that may have been the drugs, not her. Joshua’s dick inside her now could be his. Outside their guide quarters at the Samburu Lodge, alligators swim in the shallow river. Lately geography has been her aphrodisiac. In new places, the first night in a new lodge or in their tent staked in front of a fresh, intoxicating view, her libido shoots up almost as though she could fuck the land and Joshua is its conduit. Or maybe that is a story she tells herself. He feels better inside her than she wants him to. She wants to be in control, using her body to get back into his good graces, manipulating him, but it’s not like that. There are monkeys in the trees outside, even on the front porches of the guests’ rooms, monkeys running on the roof, alligators in the river. Joshua’s dick, Yank’s dick, could split her body open, her soul flying right up through her mouth. She is screaming for him now. “Harder,” she screams, “harder,” and his body is built for pushing beyond limits, in gymnastics, on the trapeze, he can always obey, he can fuck her so hard lights flash in her head. No shame. Flipping her over on hands and knees, his fingers working her clit like a gear shift. No control. She’s just a machine, her body,
Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.

After, they lie on the bed side by side and she’s not angry at him anymore. He is just Joshua. Not a river, not Yank, not any kind of villain or pimp. He has never meant her any harm. Her anger is at herself. He wasn’t lying; he must have really chewed
miraa
earlier, otherwise he would be dead asleep after sex and he’s not.

“I’m sorry for the things I said.” He doesn’t sit up, doesn’t look at her, but his voice is louder than usual. “It was stupid of me to talk about marriage that way. I was an idiot. I’ve loved you from practically the minute I saw you at the Latchmere, and . . .” Now he does sit up, gazes down on her, and she has to fight the urge to look away, to cover her body with the sheets. “I’m honored that you want to spend your time with me. I would be honored to marry you. We don’t have to do it straightaway, like I said—we don’t have to involve Gavin, I know you don’t like him. We can invite your parents. We could even do it in the States once we can afford tickets, maybe by spring. A woman should never have to ask her man to marry her. I wasn’t acting like a proper man. I’ll try to do better, Mary, I promise.”

Sometimes, things simply happen too late. Sometimes, beautiful things are simply not what we want, no matter how badly we want to want them.

She knows he takes the tears in her eyes for
yes
. Why wouldn’t he? She proposed the day before. She has followed him all over the world. Her yes is implicit.

“What do you say we go to the bar and have a drink to celebrate?” He prods her under her ass with his foot, bouncing on the bed a bit with excitement. No, he has never meant her one bit of harm. He is just a boy, really—a muscular, damaged, beautiful boy with an almost ridiculous prowess in bed, and a tender, ricocheting heart. She sits up, strokes the pale skin around his eyes, trying to memorize it.

“I’m exhausted,” she pleads. “I don’t think I’m up to the bar.”

He kisses her cheek. “Do you mind if I go, then? Maybe some of the other guides are there. I’m still a bit wired.”

“It’s fine,” she says. “I’ll be asleep before my head hits the pillow.”

He pulls on his discarded clothes, a beautiful boy on his way to make an announcement of his engagement to an assortment of half-drunk Kikuyu guides, who like him as everyone seems to like Joshua, who have embraced him as a kind of white kid brother / mascot and will probably buy him drinks and toast his pretty blond fiancée and tell him horror stories about their demanding wives to frighten him in a good-natured way.

As soon as he is out the door, Mary stands, too, and begins to dress.

S
HE ISN’T SURE
why she thought Kathleen would be on the front porch of their family bungalow smoking again, as though she smokes every minute of the day, when in truth they have spent six days now in each other’s company and Mary has witnessed her smoking only that one cigarette, possibly bummed from a member of the staff at the last lodge. Still, Mary approaches the bungalow, dark but for a lantern, and sits on one of the chairs on the porch. The Samburu Lodge has more wildlife on the premises than most of the lodges, and hotel staff tends to patrol the main pathway well into the night, bearing torches and chasing off any wayward animals that have come up from the river. Mary sits on the dark porch, waiting. After some time, the man with the torch comes by, dressed in his Samburu garb and carrying no weapon other than a large walking stick. He and Mary nod at each other. Possibly he was walking this path while she was screaming her stupid head off for Joshua to fuck her harder, and for a second her heart races, but no, she is sitting on Kathleen’s porch, wearing her white skin and yellow hair, and she has learned enough in just a few months of safaris—the way Joshua’s clients already blend in to one another, their features and names indistinct—to know that this Samburu man has seen too many of “her” to care about
her
. She is all the same to him. Mary waits long enough so that he comes back again, and still she is sitting on the porch. He says, “Lady, you like me to bring you a drink while you look at the stars?” and she says, “No,
asante
.” Joshua has not come back yet from the bar. There is only one main path, and when he finally does he will see her sitting here and she is not sure what she will say. But for now, he has not come, and so she waits.

The man has walked by with his torch three times by the time the door to the bungalow opens and Kathleen steps out, again in her robe, a cigarette and lighter in her hand. When she sees Mary on the porch, she jumps, yells, “Holy shit,” the lighter scattering to the stone steps.

Mary says, “I just came by to see if you were out here. I figured I’d wait.”

Kathleen’s fine strawberry-blond hair is up in a loose ponytail atop her head. In the dark, the lines around her eyes and mouth less visible than in the intense sun, she could be Mary’s age. She bends to pick up the lighter and Mary sees a glimpse of her small breasts inside the robe, taut and close to her chest, not what Mary imagined the breasts of a woman who has borne two children would be. Kathleen leans against the doorframe and lights her cigarette, inhaling greedily. “Okay,” she says. “That’s a little weird, but all right. Uh. How long have you been here?”

She sounds different without her children, without Walt. Her voice is less loud, but stronger, almost rude, the way her stare was on Christmas morning. Mary isn’t sure why, but she prefers this version of Kathleen, even though she suspects Kathleen thinks she’s crazy.

“Joshua is in the bar telling everyone we just got engaged,” Mary says.

“Great,” says Kathleen. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. We’re not really engaged, though. He just thinks we are.”

Kathleen narrows her eyes, and now Mary can see them, the lines. “Why would he think that?”

“Because I proposed to him yesterday.” Mary laughs, shrill to her own ears. “But it was just a mistake. I think I’m going home soon, actually.”

“Oh, well, I don’t blame you,” Kathleen says. “You’ll probably regret it, though.” Mary nods. She wishes she could ask for a cigarette, but that is out of the question.

“You have a beautiful family. My best friend back in Ohio, Nix—she used to act just like Fiona when we were twelve or thirteen. She pretended like everything her mother said was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard. She had an attitude a mile long. She was an amazing person, though. It was just a stage, I mean. You probably already know that . . . Fiona is your daughter, I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t know.”

“Honey,” Kathleen says. She blows smoke at Mary’s face. “Honey, do you need to get out of here? Do you need help getting back to Nairobi? Do you need to borrow money?”

Mary coughs. “No, no—it’s nothing like that. I just . . . I haven’t talked to a woman in a long time. I hardly even know any.” And there it is. The end of a certain road, right here at Kathleen’s door, though Mary did not know until this moment that
this
was why she came. She had believed herself here to make excuses for her embarrassing Christmas morning behavior, had believed herself here to ask an older woman’s advice about Joshua. Had believed herself here, even, for a drag of Kathleen’s cigarette: anything, anything but this.

Kathleen is so silent that Mary can hear her own raggy breath. She closes her eyes.

“My friend Nix died in 1988. She was killed on Pan Am Flight 103—the Lockerbie disaster. Libyan terrorists did it, they say. A whole bunch of American college students were killed, trying to come home for Christmas break. She was one of them.”

“That’s awful,” Kathleen says, though of course Mary realizes it is no more awful to her than anything you can hear on the news any night of the week. “I’m sorry.”

“It was supposed to be me.”

Now Kathleen’s eyes flare with alarm. “Honey, don’t say that!” she reprimands. “That’s crazy—why would you be supposed to explode in a plane? Your friend wouldn’t want that! You didn’t do anything wrong. Those terrorists are lunatics, they hate everybody—
you
have nothing to feel guilty about.”

Mary nods, feels her head bobbing senselessly. There is no energy left to explain: How Nix, the bravest girl she ever knew, had a whole life stretched out before her, whereas Mary was already doomed to debility and an early death. How in any “fair” world, Mary should have been able to take one for their team of two and sacrifice her own, less valuable life for Nix’s rich, exciting future. How now, through some perverse twist of fate,
she
is the one left standing, compelled to live for both of them, to pick up where Nix left off and conquer the world in her best friend’s stead, even though she is clearly not up to the task. She chews on her lower lip until Kathleen comes closer and embraces Mary’s head with her free, cigaretteless arm, holding it to her stomach, since Mary is sitting in the chair and can’t be properly hugged.

“Some of them were still alive when they hit the ground,” she says into Kathleen’s robe. “This report I read, it explained how there were about fifteen seconds inside the plane when all the passengers must have known something was wrong—before the explosion. I don’t really understand how they could estimate that, but sometimes I just start counting, to see how long she was afraid.” She removes herself from Kathleen’s body—nothing like Mom’s, too narrow, too hard—and starts swiping at her eyes before realizing there are no tears left. “The lucky ones died from the blast. But some people only passed out from the altitude, and as the air got
thicker
they woke up. Woke up falling. They found people in the fields—friends holding hands. Somebody was clutching a patch of grass. Mothers with babies still in their arms.”