A Life in Men: A Novel (3 page)

J
OSHUA AND
N
ICOLE
are in the common room eating breakfast before any sane person is even awake—Yank cannot get the hell away from them wherever he goes. Last night, when he came in around 3 a.m., they were already asleep in the room he once shared only with Joshua, and Yank could tell they were naked under their flimsy sheet, its floral pattern almost worn away from the years the sheet has no doubt resided in Arthog House. Yank lay awake, pondering the sheet. For the piddly twenty-seven pounds per week Mr. D. collects (from everyone but Nicole, who never kicks in), he bet his ass the landlord didn’t
buy
the cutlery, sofas, refrigerators—everything must’ve been here when he bought the joint. Yank wondered how often this old sheet had been washed—how many people had shot their wads on it over the years, how many tits it might have touched. He knew he’d never sleep, then. He’d be up half the night, listening for movements, for anything sharp or sudden enough to have bucked the sheet off Nicole’s body so he could get a look. Instead of playing that game, he went to the common room to crash on the futon, across the room from the sofa where the Flying Dutchfag was snoring.

He’d gotten maybe two hours’ sleep, tops, when here the happy couple was again, making tea and munching Weetabix cross-legged on the dirty carpet like children playing picnic. Nicole, at least, is dressed now, in the Harvard sweatshirt and ripped Levi’s that’ve been her uniform since the air turned cold. Joshua is already smoking a fatty, so Yank sits up in time for the kid to pass it his way. On the other sofa, Sandor is still snoring, that crazy porkpie hat of his over his eyes, revealing sunflower-colored stubble.

“You on at the Latchmere tonight?” Joshua asks Nicole.

“Not until seven. You guys coming in?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Joshua says. He nods at Yank. “Would we, mate?”

“Money to be made, kiddies,” Yank says back.

“Don’t go on your own,” Joshua tells Nicole. “I’ll be back from rehearsal by six—wait for me and I’ll walk you over. After what happened to Yank . . .”

He is referring to Yank’s recent mugging on Battersea Park Road. Some little shits from the estates tried to take his camera off him; when he wouldn’t let it go, they kicked him a few times in the head. Since then, though he hasn’t been dizzy like with the concussions he’s had in the past, something’s not quite right: he keeps walking into rooms and forgetting why he came, and his head’s been hurting nearly nonstop for two weeks. He still has his camera, though.

“What’ve you got on today?” Joshua asks him.

Yank sniffs the air. “Hmm. Think I detect a whiff of baking for tonight’s entrepreneurial endeavors.”

Joshua laughs appreciatively. The hash cakes were Joshua’s brainstorm, though he has scant time to bake them anymore. Joshua and Nicole even thought up a perfect slogan, “Pixie Dust Bars will make you fly,” and made little flyers they distribute at the Latchmere’s weekend after-parties, when at closing time the pub’s owner chases out the prats who have wandered down from Chelsea, before locking in the regulars to party until dawn. Pixie Dust Bars are Yank’s only foray into dealing these days—something about Nicole’s cheerful involvement and bubble-lettered adverts diminishes the sense of risk. It doesn’t even bring in much cash, but Yank likes the ritual of it: the measuring and mixing of batter and hash oil. It’s the first time he’s regularly used an oven in more than a decade.

“My bag’s getting a mite heavy, too,” he tells Joshua, holding up the duffel that bears all his worldly goods and shaking it for good measure so the loose coins inside clink. “Some of us ain’t in the prime of our lives anymore. Maybe time for some coin-swap action so I can switch to bills and lighten my load.”

Nicole starts bouncing up and down on her knees. “Oooh, I love coin swap!” she cries. “Can I come?”

Yank has to stop himself from barking at her to shut up. He’s assumed the fact that she helps him out sometimes with his schemes to be an unspoken secret between them, not something she mentions to Joshua, though he cannot say why, and obviously he was mistaken.

Joshua, though, chuckles. “How’d
this
happen, mate? My old lady’s become your protégé for a life of crime.” Before Yank can even answer, the kid has crushed out his hash cigarette and gulped the last of his tea and is kissing Nicole good-bye, quipping, “Have fun, you two outlaws.” Then he’s down the stairs. Everything else around here moves in slow-mo, but Joshua is so fast he could leave a trail of light behind him.

Nicole continues picking at her cereal, taking dainty sips of tea, like she’s barely noticed his departure. Joshua is always running out of doors these days. He’s got a real salary now, long hours of training. Not that swinging around on a flying trapeze is much of a proper job (though in travelers’ London, it barely registers on the Richter scale of weird), and with the circus full of foreigners, who knows if it’s even strictly legal? But it’s not exactly
illegal,
which is more than Yank can say for anything he’s done to make money since the mideighties.

“You’re not leaving this minute, are you?” Nicole asks, eyes darting to the door of the common room. “I have some things I need to take care of first. I could go in about an hour—forty-five minutes if you’re in a hurry.”

Some things I need to take care of.
Like the girl’s got an appointment with the goddamn Queen. “Cool your jets, darlin’,” Yank says. “I’m gonna crash a few more hours. We’ll go when we go.”

When he gets to their shared room, he closes the door hard. If the rickety old thing had a lock, he’d use it.

After my diagnosis (A.D., my parents have taken to calling it), sure, I was still encouraged on the surface to do the things a normal middle-class girl should do. Finish college, get a job, even date. But the unpredictable, wilder possibilities of life instantly disappeared, got shoved to another side of a wall and categorized as “too risky” for me. I was to follow the simple, linear trajectory of the terminally ill. No wasted time, nothing that would tax me too much
(ah, the mantra of the education major: “Short days, summers off!”). Maybe, if any man would have me, knowing I
was damaged goods, I could someday leave my parents’ house for my husband’s. But that was as big as any of us
dared to dream for me. The safest route, the life not quite lived.

The one time I got anywhere close to real adventure, in Greece, you aborted our mission, sent me home like a child who had lost her way in a dangerous woods. But look, Nix,
look
—here I still am.

M
ARY’S
F
LUTTER DEVICE
is in the bedroom. Yank’s slammed the door, and even though Mary lives in there, too—Yank and Joshua have crammed their scant clothing into the dresser drawers and given her the entire wardrobe—Mary pauses at the threshold, intimidated, an intruder in her own home. An intruder in their home. She stands in the hallway, near the foot of the staircase across from the pay phone, waiting.

In a little while, when Yank has fallen asleep, maybe she can sneak in and get her giant purple rucksack without looking like she is
following
him or something. Already she’s embarrassed about having invited herself on his outing. She should have held her tongue; then he might have asked her, as he sometimes has lately. She hears jazz playing on the other side of the door, and she knows there’s no reason she can’t just open it, but she stands frozen. She needs to get her rucksack to the toilet like she does every morning after Joshua leaves. Over the running of the bath, she will sit on the floor and blow into her Flutter device, her coughing muffled by the sound of the gushing tap. Most days, she doesn’t stop until the tub is almost overflowing.

Before arriving in London in August, she’d completed three chest physiotherapies daily to loosen her stubborn mucus, lying half-upside-down while her mother played percussion on her chest and back with a practiced cupping motion, handing her Dixie cups to spit into. Initially, her mother’s tentative touches just mirrored the fear her parents displayed constantly in the year following her diagnosis: walking on eggshells, giving in to spells of covert weeping. For the first time, Mary had felt hyperconscious of her adoption, of the fact that her parents had intended to adopt a normal child but had instead gotten stuck with her, a defective model who would ruin all their lives. In their shell-shocked faces she saw constant evidence of their regret. Slowly, however, this passed, as all heightened states of vigilance do. The past couple of years, Mary’s daily treatments had become casual—Mom gossiping idly about her colleagues with the TV on in the background—even though they still dominated each day’s routine and made her mother endlessly, relentlessly necessary: a partner in the crime of her illness.

As Mary’s departure for London approached, Mom had begged her not to go, demanding, “But who will
help
you over there?” Still, it was her mother who’d written out, in her almost calligraphic cursive, a list of pulmonary specialists in London and insisted Mary call one immediately upon arrival. And it was that doctor who introduced her to her Flutter device—not yet approved stateside—and rendered manual chest physiotherapy a thing of her past.

Who rendered her need for her mother’s help a thing of her past.

Mary is meant to use the Flutter three times daily, twenty minutes a shot. Instead she uses it once, during the time it takes to run a bath. This is the only time she is alone, and even then there are obstacles, such as getting inside her room in the first place. While Joshua’s work schedule is intense, and Sandor leaves five mornings weekly to sell art in the suburbs, Yank is a nocturnal beast. During the day when she’s not tending bar, he is almost always in the house.

Sandor staggers past her in the hallway, muttering, “Morning,
schatje,
” which Mary takes to mean something like sweetheart or sugar in Dutch. Although half-Spanish, Sandor could scarcely look more Aryan with his near-translucent skin, blue eyes, and yellow hair—at least what’s left of it. He takes great pains to hide his pattern baldness, shaving his head and then, bizarrely, for good measure, wearing a bandanna around his skull and covering it with a black bowler. This head gear, combined with his extreme paleness and height, gives him a menacing, neofascist look that his Dutch accent only exacerbates, so that during the early weeks of their acquaintance, Mary was constantly expecting him to utter some phrase such as,
Damn, I hate the Jews.
In fact, he has become her closest friend in London, confiding in her things he would never disclose to the men, such as the way his father savagely beat him after discovering him—aged thirteen—with his mouth around his best friend’s cock (“We were literally inside the closet, as they say!”), prompting his parents’ divorce. Such as his regrets over dropping out of art school in Amsterdam, and the corresponding fact that he is now, slowly and he believes without a trace, embezzling funds from the art reproduction company for which he works, all in the hopes of going back to school. Last night, Sandor slept in his leather pants, and between that and the morning joint Joshua and Yank smoked in his “bedroom,” he smells like he’s emerged from a nest of testosterone and hash chips. He pads barefoot down the stairs to the toilet, which sits between the first and second stories of the house, and blithely shuts the door behind him.

Just fucking great.
Now even if Mary does retrieve her Flutter, she’ll have to wait to use it. Sandor can soak in a tub for hours, using all the hot water they’ll have that day. But at least the common room is empty now. Mary dashes back to its kitchenette, searching for something carbonated. Brits love carbonation; even their lemonade is bubbly, and she usually stocks the minifridge with it. Carbonation will start loosening her mucus, a preliminary to her eventual PT. She flings back the fridge door. Bare. Nothing but the empty box of milk she and Joshua used on their cereal and some cases of film Yank can’t afford to get developed.

Shit, shit.
She kicks the minifridge, hurting her toes. Nothing lasts a minute in this place. Tears of frustration prickle in her eyes, irrational because Joshua will not let her contribute one penny toward rent—she does not even buy groceries, other than the one time she made eggplant parmesan for Sandor’s birthday—so how could she possibly explain to these men that their casually consuming her lemonade feels like grand theft? Desperation mounting, she races downstairs to the real kitchen. Owing to some tic of British architects, it, like the kitchen in her old B & B, is on the lower level. This room technically belongs to everyone in the house, but protocol has established that she, Yank, Joshua, and Sandor use the common room kitchenette exclusively. As quietly as possible, she pries open the door of the refrigerator and peers inside.

Predictably, it is full of beer. Although beer is indeed carbonated, she detests it. Never mind: Mary pulls out a can of Foster’s and pops the tab, chugging. She remembers when one beer used to rush to her head like a row of tequila shots, but these days she is a bartender whose customers buy her drinks as “tips”; these days she lives in a house over which a perpetual hash fog dwells; these days she makes it her business to be numb as much as possible.

Eventually she hears Sandor’s combat-booted feet stampeding down the stairs. “Parting is such sweet sorrow!” he singsongs loudly from the front door. This is their morning routine: He always bids her an elaborate farewell, ignoring Yank as he departs. She is supposed to continue the game by rushing to the front door and kissing his cheek, like a 1950s housewife. Today, though, she cannot see the front door, and doesn’t answer, lest he peer downstairs to find her downing Foster’s before 9 a.m. Somehow her beer seems less acceptable than the fact that Joshua and Yank were smoking hash an hour ago. Sandor of the deranged fashion aesthetic, a semicloseted homosexual and secret embezzler, is clearly in no position to judge her alcohol intake, but when she hears the front door close she exhales relief.