A Life in Men: A Novel (16 page)

She hears a sob in Kathleen’s throat. Even that is not for Nix, Mary suspects, but for Fiona and Liam—for Kathleen imagining herself trying against all hope to shield her children with her body as they plummet through a Scottish sky. Somehow, though, it is enough.

“Liam’s so cute,” Mary says, trying to smile. “I want to have a baby. But I guess going home and leaving the guy who wants to marry me isn’t going to help me get pregnant, huh?”

Kathleen snorts. “Well, if you’re looking for advice on pregnancy,” she says, her voice brassy with relief at being back on stable ground, “I’m the wrong person to ask. By the time I was your age, I’d had three abortions. Once I married Walt, my body was done. I couldn’t get pregnant if they dipped me upside down in a vat full of sperm.”

Now it is Mary’s turn to act speechless. In the past two years, she has lived surrounded by junkies, dealers, thieves, and circus freaks, yet it is entirely possible that she has never been so shocked. Kathleen starts giggling, first a delicate snorting and then, when Mary looks down, embarrassed, a full on cackle, like a witch. She covers her mouth to keep in the sound, and the smoke from her cigarette wafts into her eyes; Mary watches her wave it away, her wide blue eyes tearing. “Oh, Jesus,” Kathleen gasps. “That was priceless. The look on your face. You must be more straight-laced than I took you for—sorry.”

“It’s not that,” Mary manages.

And then Kathleen isn’t laughing anymore. She shuffles her manicured feet. “Oh, I know,” she says, sighing. “I know what it’s because of.”

“But wait,” Mary says. “You mean Fiona and Liam aren’t your children?” The minute the words are out of her mouth, at the expression on Kathleen’s face, she understands. It is what everyone asked her constantly in grade school, in high school:
What happened to your real parents?
When Mary would come home crying, her mother would smooth back her hair.
You tell them that the people who raise you are your real parents,
Mom said.
You tell them that anybody can make a baby with their body, but your parents are the ones who take care of you forever.
But when Mary tried that at school, her friends rolled their eyes.
No
, they explained, as if she were special needs,
your real mother is the one whose
stomach you grew in, and if everyone could make a baby with their body, your adopted mom would have made one of her own—obviously she couldn’t and that’s why they bought you.
Only Nix never talked this way. Nix’s father left when she was seven or eight—Mary can’t remember exactly—and years later Nix would say,
I wish I’d been adopted so I wouldn’t have been here for my father to leave us and my mother to hate me for it—I
wish somebody better had come along when I was born and taken me away.

“I’m adopted, too!” she blurts to Kathleen. “I didn’t mean it that way. I was adopted when I was, like, a couple weeks old. My parents were awesome—they
are
awesome, I mean.”

Kathleen stubs her cigarette out on the wall of the bungalow, tosses it far from the porch, where—Mary suspects—Walt will not see it. “When I was your age,” she says, “I was a Studio 54 girl. Do you even know what that is? Do kids still know about Studio 54 and Andy Warhol?”

“Uh,” Mary says. “Campbell’s soup and stuff.”

“Mmm, and stuff all right,” Kathleen says. “I was a model. Not a very successful one—I wasn’t tall enough for the runway, so I had to mainly do catalogs. I did a few album covers, too. When I met Walt, I was so coke-addled that I’d started having seizures . . . I’d gone to look at an apartment to rent because the guy I lived with had broken my jaw, and while I was there I had a seizure and fell down a flight of stairs. The law student showing me the place had to call an ambulance. That was Walt.” She shrugs. “I still had a couple stints of rehab even after we moved to Minneapolis. Then we adopted Fiona, and that was that.”

Mary settles on, “Wow. He must have really loved you. It sounds like you were a bad bet—no offense.”

“None taken. I was no kind of bet. I don’t know what the hell he was thinking.”

“He saved you, though.”

Kathleen’s fingers work the spot on the wall where she’s left a smudge of ash, wiping the stain away. “You’re a lot of different people over the course of a lifetime. Sometimes, who you need to be at a given moment intersects with what somebody else needs. There are no princes on white horses. Nobody saves anyone from anything.” And suddenly she smooths back Mary’s hair with her ashy fingers—later, in the mirror, Mary will see the smudge on her forehead. “You couldn’t save your friend, honey. You need to live your own life. You need to let her go.”

But Mary finds she can’t talk about Nix anymore; she has exhausted her reserves and feels cleaner, lighter, yet aware that if she dips her foot back in, she will fall into something deeper and messier, beyond Kathleen’s powers of purification. Instead she says, “You don’t regret it, do you? Moving to the
Midwest,
settling down? Do you ever miss New York and all that adventure?”

Kathleen rummages inside the pockets of her robe, maybe for another cigarette, but her pale, fluttery hands come up empty. “I got my jaw broken. I got my insides vacuumed out. I wasn’t having a whole lot of fun. My kids are my life now. I’m president of the PTA. I bake cookies. I go to church and get down on my knees and thank God I’m still alive.” She sighs, looks at the door to the bungalow, stares at it hard as if she’s trying to figure out if it belongs to her, though Mary knows she’ll open it soon. She says, “I miss it every day.”

So, Nix, this is it. You are dead, and I am the one who is now
23
. So what am I doing still alive? How long will my luck hold? What if it holds another ten years, another twenty? Is this how I want to live, or
only how I wanted to die, pretty and poetic among the wildlife, a flash of
glory moving too fast to catch, like you? What if, after everything, I am permitted an actual
adulthood?
What if I actually have to get a life?

A
T THE
S
AMBURU
village where Walt and Kathleen pay the village elder for a tour, Liam crawls into one of the many huts too short for Joshua or Walt to stand inside, scoots his body onto the animal skin rugs that cover the dirt floor of the sleeping area, the entire hut otherwise empty except for a fire pit, and rests from the heat of the sun. While the Samburu warriors hand Walt a spear and make him dance with them; while Fiona, laughing, takes a video; while the three older members of the family and Mary listen to the Samburu children—heads shaved in the fashion of this tribe, and most of those under five not wearing pants or underwear—reciting their numbers in English and French, their “chalkboard” nothing but the smooth side of a long strip of tree bark, their teacher hitting them upside the head with a long stick if they seem not to be paying attention, Liam naps. As Kathleen and Fiona try to navigate the makeshift open-air market the Samburu women have set up for their arrival, struggling to figure out which mama to buy a beaded necklace or carved impala from, when every woman’s goods are nearly identical, Liam begins to run around, pantomiming a game of chase with the nearby Samburu children, waving his arms until a few, first staring at him warily behind their dusty eyelids, begin to giggle and join in. As Fiona passes out to the children the cookies that she bought from their own village elder for five times what they would cost at the grocery store in town, Mary wanders back to the truck to sit with Joshua, who never bothered to get out to begin with.

If there is any truth to Africa, it is this: when you witness a demonstration of two warriors making fire, afterward they will try to sell you the sticks they used to strike the spark.
These sticks are special,
they will tell you.
We go all the way to the mountains to get them
. Africa is yours for a price. If authenticity is defined by a lack of economic exchange, forget it. You are a consumer and Africa is your photo op.

Afterward Kathleen and Fiona sit close together in the truck, knees touching, giant, beaded collars around their necks, admiring the amateurishly constructed jewelry and carvings they’ve acquired. Despite perpetually wearing sun hats, they are both tan by now, radiant. “That was the best thing we’ve done!” Fiona gushes to Joshua. “That was so cool!” Mary simmers in a stew of contradictory emotions. Who is she, of all people, to put a price tag on “experience”? The Samburu village is not a scam—it is not taken down and replaced with modern brick buildings and television screens the moment the tourists depart. It is
real,
it exists with or without anyone to pay admission. Who is anyone to judge Fiona for being moved by it, to judge the Samburus for benefiting from money they truly need? Liam sleeps again, his head against the windowpane. To him, Africa could be downtown Minneapolis, could be a playdate, could be his new house. He is the only one among them able to experience this place purely, and he is the one who will not remember it.

I have been writing to you about Africa, but the truth is that I am speaking from one small spot on the globe, one tiny hotel room, one finite body. I cannot pin down a continent. I have been talking to you about what this land can do to you, but here is the simple truth of what it can do to you: anything you let it.

This is not about Africa. This is about the scraps of me lost along the way, left behind in the wardrobe of Arthog House, in the hostel shower in Paris, under the low wooden bed in Osaka, along the Kenyan roadside like discarded trash. It’s not about sex either. If anything, that primal language of bodies has been the one space where Joshua and I have needed no translator, where we have always met as equals. It’s the rest of the time that we struggle with a language barrier, though we both speak English. It’s the
rest
of the time that I have been waiting around to be defined by him, by Kenya and Japan and Europe and London, by your death, by my illness. And still I don’t know who I am.

W
HEN YOU LEAVE
the Samburu National Reserve, the elephants always appear, as if to say good-bye. Here, it is nothing to find your vehicle surrounded by twenty, forty of them, going about their silent, peaceful business as you ferry your charges out of the park. Joshua, who knows elephants from home, says that they have tempers, that sometimes they charge, but Mary has never seen the Kenyan elephants be anything but gentle. Their eyes are huge compared to a person’s, but look minuscule set into those mammoth gray heads, the way stars look small in the vast sky. There are several calves among them, one baby so small it cannot be more than a few weeks old. “Elephants make excellent mothers,” Joshua tells his family of human charges, whom he will soon never see again. “They’re not like giraffes. They’ll take in a calf, even from another herd, if it’s lost—and they’ll never forget their own child. Elephants are highly intelligent and compassionate.” Walt begins to take a battery of photos, but Kathleen, Fiona, and Liam merely look out the open top, quiet as the elephants, watching. They have enough photos, and maybe they have seen enough elephants and no longer care. Or maybe they have seen enough elephants that they can finally see.

“How would you describe me?” Mary asked Joshua the night before, under their net. “When I’m gone, how will
you remember me?”

“Gone?” he said. “I don’t want to think about that. Look at the way I smoke—my lungs could give out before yours. There are no guarantees.” But she knew that for all his words about living in the moment, the fact of her death was imprinted on him. Otherwise there would have been children, where now there will be none.

“Humor me,” she begged. “When you think of me, what do you see?”

Joshua grinned. “You’ve got a sexy ass. How’s that?”

“Good. What else?”

“You’re a great dancer. You’re the only white woman I’ve ever seen dance with African people and not look like a prat. You’re a strong swimmer. You don’t look strong, but you are.”

“More,” Mary murmured, her head on his lap. “More.”

“You make that little huffing noise with your nose. Like a small bull. When your sinuses act up.”

She bolted up to face him. “I make a huffing noise with my nose? That sounds disgusting!”

“No,” he said seriously. “It’s cute. Oh—and you never brush your hair but it always looks amazing. Your skin tastes like pretzels, but down here”—he touched her not for the last time, she reminded herself, not the last time yet—“you taste like orange squash.”

On the long drive back to Nairobi, where their safari will come to an end, they stop at the Nanyuki Children’s Home. This is something Kathleen set up from home, in Minneapolis, on the phone with Gavin, who must have had to scramble to find something to satisfy her, who left to his own devices would surely know nothing about an orphanage off the main road in an untouristed city. Kathleen, Walt, and Fiona spend two hours in a tiny grocery store buying supplies to bring as a gift. The store is the size of a small apartment in downtown Dayton and seems to have all of three people working at it; it is not remotely equipped to sell enough diapers, tampons, rice, sugar, notebooks, shoe polish, toothpaste, to supply eighty orphans for a month. Joshua plays ball with Liam in the parking lot, chases away peddlers who come with their shoddy metal bracelets, their postcards, trying to show Liam toys, thinking Joshua is his father and will buy their loot if his little boy whines. Joshua dismisses them in his pidgin Swahili with the unintentional but unmistakable authority of one who spent his formative years assured that those with black skin would do his bidding, even if he drinks with them now. He casually tosses the ball back to Liam, who cannot catch but tries, squealing, and every now and then, he yanks the boy by his shirt to keep him away from cars pulling in and out. It takes an extra truck—the store has one—to load all the goods Walt and Kathleen have purchased. Kathleen leans against Mary for a moment, watching the workers load sacks of flour. “This whole thing,” she says, “cost about what it would to buy three weeks of groceries for a family of four in Minneapolis.”