A Life in Men: A Novel (18 page)

Footsteps jarred her, and when she spun around she expected to find Zorg right behind her. But Zorg was still on the sofa, a plush white throw rug under his feet; the sound had come from Titus, who stood on the hardwood floor across the room. As she gaped at him, he quickly approached Zorg and began whispering in animated Spanish. From the zeal of Titus’s tone, Mary expected that Titus must be lecturing him. Nix had gotten through to Titus, and he had come away from their . . . conversation? . . . tryst? . . . to intervene. Then the two men laughed and Mary’s heart dropped with fear that she had misunderstood—why, if Titus were reprimanding Zorg, would they be chuckling together? Tears congested her sinuses. She stared at the balcony again.

Suddenly Zorg stood. From his greater height, he looked down at Mary with a soft look in his slitted eyes. Mary mistook the softness for an attempt at seduction, and bile rose in her throat as though she might vomit involuntarily after all. But instead Zorg pointed to the other hallway, away from where Titus and Nix had gone. He said gently, “Why don’t you go to lie down? There is a bedroom for guests down this hall. Maybe you feel better after some sleep, and later, we can go to town for drinks and dinner.”

Her exhalation came so fast and hard she gagged on it. Then, understanding overcame her, and she composed herself, embarrassed.
Of course
. Nix had gotten Titus alone so that she could tell him about Mary’s disease—so she could turn Mary into a pitiable object without being overheard by the object herself. In the end, even an asshole doesn’t want to molest the terminally ill. Sweat broke out all over Mary’s body but cooled instantly from the excessive air-conditioning of the villa. She turned to retreat, eager to get away from Zorg and even Titus now, to take her pathetic, unfuckable body away from them, to remind herself to feel grateful rather than humiliated. But where was Nix? Taking her own nap in Titus’s bed? More likely now that Titus had proved himself a decent guy, Nix was going to fool around with him after all, as a reward. Nix, the beautiful one, the healthy one, who had only to take off her clothes and the world bent to her will. Mary’s heart vibrated like a wild bird from the extra doses of albuterol she’d sucked in for show. She scurried down the hall to the first bedroom she saw, closed the door, and hurled herself onto the fluffy white duvet. In contrast to the surge of energy she’d felt in the living room, her body now was exhausted, to the point of panting.

Dizzy from booze and hours of fear, she fell instantly asleep.

W
HEN
M
ARY WOKE,
the sky was darkening. Zorg and Titus were in the living room, still drinking as though no time had elapsed. When they saw her, Titus went to retrieve Nix, and they all climbed into the car within mere minutes, as though everyone had been waiting for Mary, her slumber delaying their departure. Now here they are: Nix and her magic turned sour, a bad taste left (perhaps literally) in her mouth. Did she get
any
enjoyment from Titus? Mary can’t help wondering. Sex still looms like a distant island, half-shrouded in mist and lapped by dark water. Until Zorg’s unwelcome grope, she hadn’t even felt a guy’s hand between her legs since Bobby Kenner. Bobby, that coward. Yet another thing Nix was right about.

Well, this time Mary’s not going to make Nix think of everything—she has her own plan. Titus, with his new bravado, keeps talking as though after “dinner” (there’s no food in this bar, but who knows where he next plans to abscond with them), Nix will be spending the night at his villa. Mary is uncertain where this leaves
her
—dropped off back in their rented room, or dragged along for the ride—but either way she requires no eye contact with Nix to know neither of them is ever going back to that hillside hellhouse, and if Nix isn’t speaking up for herself, it’s up to Mary to get them out of this. The only problem is that her plan requires something of a crowd, and this early in the evening the disco is not providing it. But patience is a virtue, and so she will wait.

“You are hungry now,” Titus says. “You like to eat?”

“Oh, not yet!” Mary cries. She knows she is supposed to have pneumonia, but her objective is to avoid getting back in the rental car at all costs, and she can’t think of another way to achieve this, so she jumps to her feet and cries, with exaggerated animation, “Order another round of drinks—I feel like dancing!” She flashes her eyes at Nix, signaling,
Come with me
, but Nix only averts her gaze. Mary rushes out to the dance floor alone. Zorg and Titus do not dance—she learned this the first night they met at the all-Greek bar. Flushed with wine and the enthusiasm of going native, Mary and Nix had whirled around that bar, which had no dedicated dance floor, but Zorg and Titus never joined in, just smoked and drank, stationary at the bar. At the time, their aloofness had seemed sophisticated, but now, as Mary shimmies around the empty disco, they seem instead two guarding sentries. To her frustration, Nix remains at the table with them, one foot out of her sandal and kicking aimlessly at the table’s wobbly center leg. Abruptly Zorg puts a hand on Nix’s knee to still her. His hand rests too long; a chill pricks down Mary’s back, so that her body involuntarily shivers like a bad dance move. No, there is no way in hell Mary is getting back in that car. She will run for it if she has to, but if it comes to that she will have to somehow give Nix a sign.

All at once, people enter the bar. Four guys! Their Harvard sweatshirts and baseball caps shine under the ricocheting strobes. There is something so awesomely American about them, in their unfashionable garb, with their too-short hair, that Mary nearly starts to weep with relief. Of the four, only one is good looking, as muscular and dark as a Greek, whereas the others exhibit various degrees of wimpy shoulders and visible freckles, with dumb white sneakers on their feet. Oh, joy! The makeup Mary applied this morning has all been rubbed off by sunscreen and seawater and her face’s pressing against Titus’s cool guest-room pillowcase; she has lipstick in her beach bag but is afraid that if she were to scurry to the bathroom to put some on, these men would be gone by the time she returned. So instead she does what she can. Her hair has been wound in its usual beach do: two tightly coiled knots on the sides of her head. Until now, it has not occurred to her to release her hair from its trap, but all at once she does so . . .

The impact on the Harvard boys is akin to that of Rapunzel letting down her long mane. Perhaps this is because she is the only woman in the disco—aside from the sullen, slumping Nix, half-hidden by Titus’s bulky form—but still Mary feels buoyed by their gawking. Fuck it—she may be a clueless virgin, her lungs damaged goods, but her
hair
is something to behold, curly and thick, flowing wildly past her shoulders and down her tanned back. She is still dressed in a skimpy bikini top, since she didn’t bring a shirt to Plati Yialos, and is thus doomed to live out the rest of this drama in a powder-blue bikini with red strawberries littering it like so many miniature nipples. Never mind—lack of lipstick and silly strawberries be damned! The American boys elbow one another, forming low whistles under their breath.

(For the boys, this bar is suddenly looking better than they thought it would. If only there were three more of her, one for each. But then, the sport of competition is fun, too. Who will take her home for the night? The choice might appear obvious, but that is the beauty of these situations: in a mysterious bar on a Greek island, who can tell which man a bikini-top-clad woman dancing alone on a dance floor may go for? Clearly she is nothing like the girls at Harvard! For all they know, she may even be foreign: Swedish or some other blond race known for their sexual liberation. They take a table nearest the dance floor, send the most nebbishy among them to get the beers. As for the other three: game on.)

For the rest of her life, Mary will think of Mykonos as having a sound track, and the first song on the sound track goes like this: “Boom, boom, boom, let’s go back to my room.” This song is blaring now, and without even looking at one another or conferring, all at once the three men not getting the drinks are out on the dance floor, boogying it up the way she remembers the boys in middle school dancing, when
Saturday Night Fever
was all the rage. It would be fair to say that she has never seen three men trying so hard. They move steadily closer to her, and it strikes her that if she were at home in Kettering, and three men began to stalk her around a dance floor with the clear intention of simultaneously putting on the moves, she would feel invaded, indignant at their presumption and aggressiveness. Here, however, she remembers Zorg’s meaty hand grasping her crotch and lingering on Nix’s knee, and instantly her arms float over her head, swaying provocatively. She swings her hips in a slow circle. She is Guinevere; she is Maid Marian; she is that actress in the stylishly tattered clothes from
Against All Odds
; and these men are her saviors. They just don’t know it yet.

The handsome one reaches her first. It is a shame because of the three, she trusts him least. But he is clearly their leader, and she needs this to be a team effort. He dances around her and says, with such an astounding lack of originality that she almost fears he does not possess the intellect to complete this arduous mission, “Hey.”

To which she responds, “I want you to listen very carefully.” She speaks with a smile on her face, not looking at him directly. “I am an American and I have been kidnapped by those two men in the corner. Don’t look! You need to pretend that you know me from home. Do not leave me. If you do, I could end up dead.”

The guy stops dancing. “Jesus Christ. Do you want me to go say something to them? Wait—are you messing with me?”

Mary shouts, “Jeff!” and throws her arms around the man while his comrades stand, mouths agape. Swiftly Zorg and Titus jump to their feet at their table on the other end of the bar. Nix begins to bite her lip, something like hope visibly rising in her vacant eyes. Mary pulls away and stands clutching the man’s warm, solid arms as she exclaims, “How’s Lisa? What are you doing here? Why didn’t she tell me you were coming?” She waves maniacally toward Zorg and Titus’s table, crying out, “Nix! Look who’s here! It’s Jeff, from Ohio!”

A
ND JUST LIKE
that, the world begins to spin madly off its axis. The Harvard man’s knees buckle at this strange girl’s words; he almost collapses right out of her grasp. His body could easily be hurtled right off the earth’s surface into deep space. For you see, his name
is
Geoffrey, and his younger sister’s name is Lisa, and although he grew up near Chicago, his father and grandparents all reside in Ohio and he has spent every summer of his life in its boring confines. He has never seen this foamy-haired vixen before, but in this moment, the earth pulsing with the sound of pop music and fate, he has become weightless yet determined, like a man infused with destiny.

In the Company of Fathers

(QUERÉTARO: DANIEL)

Come back again,

come to the edge of the garden and look into the flesh and bone

of this house where you can’t come in.

—
SANDRA M. GILBERT
, “Invocation”

She’s a little drunk when she first notices the letter.

The blue envelope stands out amid the stack of white-enveloped bills in Mary’s tiny foyer. She picks it up, the return address in Mexico, a city she’s never heard of called Querétaro. She knows no one in Mexico, has never been there—it makes no sense. It makes no sense, and she has downed a bottle of cheap red wine, alone, in her cheap furnished studio, so for a moment the only logical possibility seems to be that the letter must be from Nix. Nix, somehow not dead after six long years, but hiding out in colonial Mexico like war criminals once did in Buenos Aires. Mary clutches the blue envelope and bursts into tears. Tori Amos rasps on the CD player—“so you can make me cum, / that doesn’t make you Jesus,” she screams. If Mary were any more of a cliché, slamming wine alone and listening to a sexed-up, pissed-off female vocalist, she’d need three cats curled up on her lap and a pint of Häagen-Dazs. The handwriting on the envelope doesn’t even resemble Nix’s, looks male and vaguely illegible, and then at once it hits her: Yank. She rips open the envelope, hands shaking. Yellow legal paper falls out, and this jibes so closely with the movie reel turning in her head that for a moment she does not understand the salutation.
Dear Daughter.
She has to read it again.
Oh God, oh my fucking God.
Mary jumps to her feet, runs around her glass-topped coffee table, reading words she cannot comprehend in her excitement. And then—then she sees it, there at the very end of the letter.
Your biological father.
His signature:
Daniel Becker.

It is not her dead friend back from the grave. It is not even Yank. Most of all, it is not her birth mother—no, just the bozo who fucked her birth mother more than a quarter century ago. Mary stares down again at the messily scrawled page.
What
is she supposed to do with this?

P
EOPLE TO CALL:

Mom. But Mom will freak. Mom does not even know Mary put her name on the adoption registry; it’s been languishing there for nearly three years. Mom will cry, though she may try to hide it. Mom will say,
I don’t understand why we aren’t enough for you
, even throw in,
Is this why you spent years running all over the world and neglecting your health, because you don’t think of us as your real family?
No, there simply isn’t a polite way to explain how some stranger could justify Mary’s existence in a way her parents—who have made every sacrifice for her—cannot. There is no “gratitude” in her feeling like an unmoored boat, wanting to lay down anchors of heredity. Okay, so she won’t call Mom.

Eli. Her boss, also her lover. She could call him. Except for the small matter that, right now, Eli is home with his wife, Diane, and their three kids, which if she is perfectly honest is probably why Mary was listening to Tori Amos and drinking alone and hallucinating letters from Nix and thinking of Yank. Except that if Mary were to call Eli, she would be treading into
Fatal Attraction
territory, and it is bad enough that her sheets smell like his semen and that she puts her face against them and inhales deeply, even though she does not remotely love the motherfucker. No, definitely not Eli.

Joshua.
Oh, Joshua
. If the number worked anymore, she’d use it. If in truth they could never quite talk to each other, even in person, Mary has forgotten that part, and why the hell shouldn’t she? She dials, knowing in advance the futility, but this time quits midattempt, hangs up.

It always comes to this. Mary goes to her Nix notebook, on the bookshelf next to her photo albums from her travels. It always ends this way, Mary and her imaginary friend, her dead confidante. Mary, alone, talking to the ether.

Back when I put myself on the registry, I was just bursting with plans of action, wasn’t I? I can just see you looking down on me and laughing at my naive idealism (oh, Nix, do you “look down,” do you look anywhere?). Fresh back from Kenya and chomping at the bit to pursue my new and perfect life. Sorting out where I’d come from was only part of that picture—I’d also get a job where I could make a difference, and whip my health into the best possible shape so that when the time came I could withstand fertility drugs and pregnancy without my health going to hell. Oh, yeah, and of course I would meet a man. A stable guy who had never been a circus performer or drug dealer or safari leader or Olympic hopeful, just a regular person with whom I would fall in regular love. In my fantasies, most of these things would already be in place by the time my biological mother materialized like a final puzzle piece, and when she and I looked into each other’s faces, we would recognize everything. For the first time, I would be able to place myself in both a mirror and the wider world. My birth mother
and
my baby would both be my history, so that even when I was gone, parts of me would remain—I’d have contributed to a circle of life that is valuable without requiring justification, like art for art’s sake.

Three years, though, and no one came sniffing around, until Mary felt vindicated about not working her parents up for naught. Three years, and until tonight, that had seemed to be that.

Meanwhile, Mary spent those years watching her other goals of marriage and family chase each other down the tubes. What is there to say about a woman’s hoping to find love and failing? It is the oldest story of the contemporary world. Her friends from high school either had left Ohio or were already immersed in domestic bubbles that did not include her. Her new colleagues at Columbus State were interesting, but mainly older and married, though a few were single women who liked to barhop after class. Unlike the traveler’s subculture of London, however, Columbus bars boast young, blond, corn-fed beauties galore. Competition was stiff for a prize that seemed depressingly less appealing than it had from faraway Kenya, and when push came to shove, Mary could not seem to meet a man in Ohio who evoked any passionate impulses. She seldom met a guy who had traveled farther than Fort Lauderdale for spring break, who had more serious aims than getting laid at the end of the evening and someday buying a luxury loft condo with a Euro kitchen. It was
normal
, she knew; they were the normal ones, and she the freak. Why should a man in his twenties be fixated on marriage and children? Why should mere boys understand matters of life and death? How could she hold never having lived in Kenya or Japan against anyone?

Soon enough, she had gone twenty months without sex.

Enter Eli the Married Man.

W
HEN HIS YOUNG
lover shows him the letter, what Eli says is, “This is bullshit. Jews don’t put their kids up for adoption. It’s some kind of hoax.”

Mary snorts. Dressed in her XL Harvard sweatshirt (she didn’t go to Harvard), she looks like she could be all of thirteen. “Right,” she drawls. “Because I’m Princess Diana and everyone wants to be related to me. Because I’m an heiress, and this guy’s trying to scam me by claiming to be my biological father.” She turns away from him derisively, shifting toward the edge of the bed. “A hoax,” she says, almost pityingly.

She has no panties on under her oversize getup, and he sees her ass, so he doesn’t say what pops into his mind next: that maybe she wrote the letter
herself,
because she wanted to appear to be at the center of the kind of tumult some of their students have been going through. Their Somali students are particularly dramatic, shell-shocked with tales of medieval rape and pillage, of biblical stonings set against modern-age bombs. This past year, the Somalis have arrived in Columbus by the thousands, and Mary has taken a special interest in them, devising an ESL class geared toward Muslim women and girls. She even wrote a grant to get funding for outreach to Somali immigrants, who, as Mary wrote, are “without a sense of community or representation.” If the grant is approved, it will bring a nice chunk of money into the American Languages Department, which would give Eli an excuse to offer her a real adjunct position, a step up from the nondegree evening classes she teaches now. Mary’s firm ass cheeks nudge his hip, and even though he doesn’t exactly want to fuck anymore, he keeps his mouth shut.

“Jewish,” she says, and her delicate little fingers rush up to feel her nose, as though expecting it to have morphed into Barbra Streisand’s. “Do I look Jewish to you?”

Eli sighs. “Judaism’s a religion, not a race. If some Jews share physical characteristics, that has to do with having similar ethnic ancestry, but there are Jews all over the world, with different physical traits. It’s impossible to tell if someone has Jews in their lineage by looking at them.”

“Okay,” Mary says. “But if it’s not a race, then how can it be passed down genetically? This guy says I’m Jewish because my birth mother was a Jew. Religion is a matter of practice, not biology.” She turns to face him. “Anyway, I must be the first Jewish girl in the world named
Mary
.”

“Actually, you’d be at least the second,” Eli says. Then he closes his eyes, a pounding beginning in his temples.

B
Y THE TIME
Eli gets home, he’s decided out that he’s never going to see Mary again. Well, he’ll see her at work, of course, although truth be told, he doesn’t have to be around much at night when she’s teaching; he’s just gotten in the habit of working late so that they can screw in his office, the halls empty and spooky, Mary bent over his desk like a naughty schoolgirl—no, he won’t think about that now. When he enters the kitchen, his wife kisses him hello and he feels himself recoil, has to backtrack by claiming he’s getting a fever and she should keep her distance. This gets him sent straight to bed so he won’t infect the kids, and it’s only minutes before he’s flipping through channels on the TV, unable to focus, kicking himself because he wanted to get back to Mary’s little studio apartment.

Confusion floods his throat like bile. Already he knew he was more attached to Mary than to his usual flings. She is the ideal mistress: completely discreet, demanding only in a sexual way. She lives in her own universe, that girl—he doesn’t know what she’s thinking about most of the time and he doesn’t ask. Not that they don’t talk—they talk all the time. About the plight of the Somalis, about all the places they used to live. Mainly it’s their shared nostalgia for travel that drew them together. Daily, during the ten months of their affair, Eli has wondered when Mary will figure out that
she
doesn’t have three kids or a spouse she’s been with for more than twenty years; that she can take off anytime she wants, ditch her Somali grant and the Spanish classes she takes to better communicate with her Mexican students, ditch Eli’s forty-five-year-old ass, and get on a plane. It’s only a matter of time, and this knowledge of her impending departure heightens his desire. The perfect mistress is one who is sure to leave you before you tire of her. Sometimes Eli grows nauseated with the knowledge that Mary will loom even larger in his erotic memory than she does in the flesh. Not all men get so lucky.

The next morning, claiming a full recovery and making his escape to Mary’s, he is able to read the letter again, this time more slowly, looking for proof. Of what, he is not precisely sure. Only that somewhere the guy must have tripped up, revealed his true intentions, which are surely seedy. On paper, Eli already doesn’t like the letter writer.

Dear Daughter,

I can’t bring myself to call you Mary, though this is what I understand they named you. During the eight days I cared for you after your mother was no longer with us, I called you Rebecca, which was your mother’s name. She wanted to name you something else, Linda or Lisa, I think it was, but I refused for reasons I no longer remember. Since they named you Mary, I wonder if they have told you that you are Jewish. I don’t even know if they knew. In Judaism, it is the mother’s religion that counts, and your mother was a Jew like me. What should I say? Congratulations? Sorry? Surprise?

You have an older brother, a half brother by my first wife. His name is Leo and he lives in New York, where you were born, as you have probably been told (though maybe not). He was already old enough to be somewhat self-sufficient after your mother was gone, and I raised him the best I could. I was in no shape for a baby. A friend of my father’s was a lawyer, and he was able to help arrange for your adoption without ever telling my parents you’d been born. That was pretty easy, since they were not speaking to me at that time, or at most times. The lawyer was a good man, and he helped me even though I hadn’t seen him in years and had always been rude to him when we’d known each other in the past. The people he found for you were not people he knew but a couple someone he knew had heard about, and it was all done privately and quickly. That’s how it was done in those days. Sometimes the kid was never told. I’m glad this was not the case with you. I’m not trying to do anything wrong here. If anything, I’m trying to atone, because life has been good to me even though I never deserved it.

The father who gave you up was a basket case. He was shooting heroin and couldn’t work and lived like an animal. Your brother lived through the worst of those years, and he doesn’t think well of me for them now. Because you were spared my bullshit, I’m hoping you will give me a chance. I’ve been clean now for eighteen years. After my parents passed away and I unexpectedly came into some money, I headed down to Mexico, to San Miguel de Allende, when it was hip for artistic types to do that (I believed myself a writer back then). Here, I fell in love with a Mexican woman and we made a life together. We live now in the city of Querétaro. I helped her raise her four children, but I never had any more children of my own.

I would like to know you. I don’t want to infringe or make assumptions. But after the PI I hired to locate you told me you had actually already put yourself on the adoption registry hoping to be found, I got the courage to make contact. If you would like to see where you come from, you will always be welcome in our home.