A Life in Men: A Novel (32 page)

Nix sits, gingerly, like an arthritic old woman. She takes the can. She begins to chug, as though it were a bottle of water. Mary holds her own beer, and though it does not take a great deal of worldliness to conclude that beer and hunger and vomit and waves do not make good company, she does the same.

They drink. The cans are almost empty. Back home, neither girl cares for beer. The past two years at Skidmore, Nix actually took to carrying a flask (usually vodka, she said, but she liked to mix it up) to parties where only beer would be served—she wrote about this to Mary in her letters. Nix claimed not to care if she seemed pretentious; she had not fled Kettering to be stuck still drinking beer out of plastic cups. She wrote this as though Mary understood, since the maddening nature of Kettering with its myriad shortcomings had always been a favorite topic of theirs. Since Nix left for college, however, Mary rarely attends parties anymore.

It is possible Nix may have enough drachmas to buy two more cans. The beer has pleasantly gone to Mary’s head, and she would like to continue this pursuit of oblivion.

“Do you have money?” she asks.

“I’ll check,” Nix says, but she does not move to do so.

Across from them, the candy woman is speaking Greek, her box of repulsive treats stored away now. In the bright sun, Nix’s skin looks translucent; Mary sees thin blue veins along her sharp jaw. Nix’s nose is pink. Although nothing in her limp hair, her thin skin, her shiny, sunburned face, her arthritic movements, should add up to beauty, Nix looks luminous, like a wounded, exotic bird. Often enough, Mary has resented the common knowledge (among their peers, even among their mothers) that although the girls look surprisingly alike, given that they are not related, Nix is the “pretty one” of the pair. At times Mary has stared into a mirror, thinking,
She’s just a bigger flirt, that’s why people think she’s so hot
, but suddenly she can see, in the ruins of their day, the raw, elemental beauty that clings to Nix, not like a costume carefully applied, not like some dumb accident of nature, but like a soul. She bites her lip.

“Why are you mad at me?” she asks quietly, as though the Greek people around them would understand or care. “What did I do?”

Still, Nix doesn’t look at her. Mary is stuck tracing the map of veins along her jaw.

“There are just two things that are important in life,” Nix says, staring out at Athens approaching on the horizon. “You have to be honest with yourself, and you have to be really mellow about harsh things.”

Mary gapes at her. In the old world order, she would have demanded,
But what about being
honest with
me
, your best friend?
Somehow, though, they have both moved irrevocably outside that old world, and not together. So instead she, too, only looks away, toward the last city where she will ever see her best friend alive.

Red Light

(AMSTERDAM: LEO)

In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

—
MILAN KUNDERA
,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Only minutes after meeting Leo at Schiphol Airport, Mary sees that the bohemian lifestyle she abandoned long ago is alive and well, with her half brother smack in the middle of it. Leo, who is a younger, even more handsome version of Daniel, is dressed in a pair of leather pants, Chuck Taylors, and a ratty wool sweater under a clearly expensive blazer Mary would bet her ass is Armani or Prada, rolled up at the cuffs so the frayed wool of the sweater pokes out. He is, for God’s sake, ridiculously beautiful! His hair is shoulder length and crazy sexy, and his fingers are long, slender, and graceful. Mary isn’t sure what she expected exactly, but it wasn’t
this
. Yes, their shared father is a wolfishly handsome, sexually charismatic man, but somehow she always imagined her older brother—the product of Daniel’s dysfunctional child rearing—as mildly overweight and nebbishy, like a character played in a movie by Albert Brooks.

The first thing he says to her is, “I was going to hold up a little sign that said
BECCA BECKER
and see if you got it—God, how relieved are you to have escaped
that
name? Not like Mary
Grace
is any better. You were fucked either way.” Like a singer ruined by smoke and whiskey, he has a laugh that is deeper than his voice. And that fast, Mary is smitten, crushing on the big brother she never had.

She and Leo could have met easily, dozens of times, during the years she was in Cincinnati and he in Brooklyn. At the time, though, the thought appealed to her not at all. She was still adjusting to
Daniel
. Then just over a year ago, Leo moved to Amsterdam in tandem with Mary and Geoff’s relocation from moderately dull Cincinnati to positively mind-numbing Lebanon, New Hampshire, where Geoff has joined the pulmonary medicine staff at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Wasting away in a town so small that their street was literally called Rural Route 1, Mary began to feel the pull of Leo’s life in Amsterdam like a Siren’s call. What kind of fool fails to visit her long-lost brother if it means a free stay in Europe?

“I may not have given you two much else, but your hunger to see the world, that you get from me,” Daniel boasted on the phone. “I know you and Leo will enjoy each other. You have a lot in common.”

It seemed a crazy thing to say in reference to one’s actual
brother
.

Mary is tipsy from her long flight: her usual combination of wine, extra hits of albuterol, and the thinner oxygen of air travel. She hasn’t eaten since before boarding in Boston, and her stomach is crawling with the scraping emptiness of meds and lack of food. Leo lives in the artsy Jordaan neighborhood, on Keizersgracht, directly across from the canal and around the corner from a hole-in-the-wall that cranked out the red-curry tofu on which Mary and Joshua subsisted in the winter of 1991. That joint—at least where Mary thinks it used to be—seems gone, the neighborhood gentrified to postcard prettiness. On Leo’s street, everyone’s shutters are open, so that you can see into their apartments, which tend to be dimly lit in a soft, gold glow and brimming with flowers and books. Leo explains this phenomenon as
gezellig,
which is not translatable into English but means something like cozy or quaint.

“
Gezellig
is the national pastime,” he quips like a jaded native. “Even the sex shows here are
gezellig.
The people onstage wear Batman capes and smirk and wave and give these cutesy little shrugs if someone goes soft—it’s like a naked cartoon. It’s the least sexy thing I’ve ever seen. Thank God everyone here is tall and gorgeous, or it’d be like living in Munchkinland.”

A young blond woman rides by on a battered bicycle, flowers and bread poking from a basket on her handlebars. “See what I mean?” Leo says. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m into it—I’m such a poser, I love it really. Everything here is relentlessly pretty and comfortable. But it’s oppressive all the same. It’s a form of fascism.”

Mary blinks. Their father makes frequent, casual references to fascism, too.

Leo’s ground-floor apartment opens onto an overgrown garden, and they sit in rusting (
gezellig
) wrought-iron chairs and drink a pitcher of Pimm’s, which Leo has made with carbonated lemonade instead of ginger ale, and into which he has sliced apples and oranges like a sangria. Mary eats the apples and oranges from her glass and finds to her astonishment that this works wonders on her hunger. She feels better already, her buzz beginning anew.

Leo is thirty-eight. In the gray daylight, lines crinkle around his eyes. He smokes, offering her a cigarette even though she is certain Daniel will have told him she has CF, but instead of being offended, she relishes the offer like a token of camaraderie above safety. She knows it may be carelessness on Leo’s part, or a lack of awareness of what cystic fibrosis even
is,
but still she receives the offer as though he is trusting her to make her own choices, and in that moment she realizes it has been a long time since she has been so trusted—since she has not been treated with kid gloves and supervision. At home she is fairly certain that Geoff has taken to counting her birth control pills to make sure she isn’t skipping any; she nearly grabs the cigarette, but she fears she would make a fool of herself by going into a coughing jag. She is entirely drunk already, and it feels magnificent. Leo’s untended garden, enclosed by a crumbling stone wall, seems to hum with magic.

She leans forward. “I can’t smoke anything with my lungs, but when I lived in London right after college, we made cakes with hash oil so I could finally experience being stoned.”

Leo blows his smoke away from her, the way Nix always used to do. “For a long time I wouldn’t touch drugs,” he says. “I was so afraid I’d turn out like Daniel. He was such a pathetic sack of shit when I was a kid. I’d come home and find him with his face in a plate of food, or OD’d. I was calling nine one one when I was eight, giving them our address, like, every other month. All through high school, I wouldn’t touch weed or speed or coke. I was popping Ritalin like candy, mind you!” He laughs, and his Adam’s apple bobs in his thin neck just like their father’s. “Your mother, Rebecca, was the one who kept telling Daniel I was hyperactive, but he didn’t drag me to a doctor until after she was long gone. Then he pretty much diagnosed me to the clinic doctor, and the guy just wrote out the prescription and sent us away. My whole childhood is a fog of Ritalin. I thought it was like magic and it’d keep me safe. Daniel stopped shooting up by the time I started high school, and then he got all psycho vegan and kept trying to take my pills away from me, saying the chemicals would kill me. I went after him once with a knife when he’d hidden them and I couldn’t find them anywhere, and he kept saying,
I’m saving you, I’m saving you
, and I stabbed him in the shoulder and then called nine one one again. He told them it was an accident, but after that we just kinda stayed out of each other’s way.”

Mary does not know what to do with this story. She wants to ask whether Leo still avoids drugs—it seems by the start of his story that he was intending to tell her about how he changed his mind about that—and whether he still takes Ritalin, though she thinks maybe it isn’t used on adults. Instead she manages, “When did you move out?”

Leo shrugs. “Dear old Dad took off my senior year of high school—he was living out in Eugene for a while. We had a dirt-cheap apartment in Brooklyn, and I had a job waiting tables, so I just paid the rent until I graduated, then got a scholarship to RISD and declared myself independent. After art school, Daniel and I didn’t really talk until I wound up in the hospital half-dead . . . they had to track him down as next of kin. He told you
all
about that, I’m sure.”

Mary stays quiet, digesting. It has been a long time since someone has told her so much about himself so quickly; that it is her brother makes it all the stranger, all the more loaded. No, Daniel never mentioned Leo’s being sick. She does not talk to her biological father often, but considering that she herself has a life-shortening disease, the fact that Daniel’s other child was near death might have organically come up. Clearly he does not have CF, so what can he mean? AIDS? She’s ashamed of the thought—just because he is gay? Then she realizes, with further self-recrimination, that the thought of Leo’s being ill excites her: it would make them seem like real siblings. Mary puts her arms around her own shoulders. The decrepit stone wall casts a long, chilly shadow. She thinks of Leo’s sofabed, her body alone in it later tonight.

“You’re shivering,” Leo says, standing up. “Did you bring a jacket? I can loan you something. You have great hair.” He shoots his arm forward and touches her curls contemplatively. “Perfect for the humid weather in Amsterdam. I fucking hate the cold, but Daniel passed us good hair for rain. The curl’s so thick and tight it doesn’t even frizz. You don’t have to brush it, right? You just leave it, and it always looks good.” His hand moves down and touches her nose now, as if he might be if inspecting a sculpture by a fellow artist. “You have our Jewy nose, too. Daniel says you didn’t even know you were a member of the tribe until you got his letter. Shit, how could you have missed it with this thing?” He laughs, and his Adam’s apple bobs again. Mary’s face burns pink.

“So let’s go out,” he says, jumping to his feet. “Hey”—and it feels almost as though he is interrupting
himself,
he has changed tracks so fast—“I’ve just been talking about myself on and on. Christ, I hate it when men do that, I hate that about being a man, we’re all totally self-important. I’m sorry. I want to hear all about you, too.” If Mary is not mistaken, his eyes are full of tears. “I’m just too excited. You’re married and all that, and you have your nice square parents in Ohio—Daniel told me all about them. But I don’t have anybody, you know? He didn’t get
me
any new parents. I never had anybody but him. Until you.”

Oh . . .
oh
! Things snap into place so fast Mary blurts out without thinking, “Shit—you mean the
psychiatric
hospital! God, what a relief!”

Leo waves his cigarette. “Oh, sure,” he says casually. “I’m an artist. We’re all bipolar, right? Hey, my friend’s having an opening tonight. We’ve been sleeping together, but I think he’s in love with this other prick who’s not even a real fag—want to come and meet him and give me your opinion? You’re normal, right? I can trust you.”

“I’m not so sure how normal I am,” Mary says—and while bipolar may not be quite as good as AIDS, she thinks she can love Leo a little for this, too.

S
O HOW CAN
it be that just this morning she was kissing Geoff good-bye at Logan Airport, and now she is here feeling like Alice in Wonderland, the dramatic gallery—high ceiling, huge windows, splashes of vibrant, almost menacing color—enhancing her feeling of surrealism as she trots about arm in arm with a virtual stranger she feels she has known all her life, ridiculously inebriated, dressed in a slinky black dress she does not remember having packed, and surrounded by huge canvases and tall, gorgeous men?

Well, there
are
women at the gallery, too. But Leo’s world is a male one, and he introduces Mary to a stream of handsome Dutch art fags, each more fashionable and sexy than the last. Mary’s body hums with pleasant, safe arousal. The crowd is mainly Dutch, but they all speak fluent English. Leo’s lover is missing. Though it is a group show, all the other artists seem to be there—Mary has met them all. To each, Leo has said, “This is my long-lost sister, Mary. I’ve just met her today for the first time.” Some of the men have squealed when Leo said this, and all have kissed her three times on alternating cheeks, the way Leo greeted Mary when he saw her at the airport, and it took her by surprise, so that when she went to pull away after the first cheek peck, Leo had to almost yank her back to finish the cycle. Now Mary knows to remain in place and peck back, though she keeps getting the starting cheek wrong. The lover’s absence from his own show seems to confirm Leo’s statement that he is “trouble.” Mary finds herself anxious, hoping the man will not appear and wreak some kind of havoc. Leo, she believes (perhaps irrationally—he survived their father, after all), is fragile. Though she is younger by seven years, she feels it her duty to protect him.

“Look over there!” Leo says abruptly. Then, grabbing her arm, he stage-whispers, “No, sweetie, don’t really look—he’ll see you. There, the guy in the pompous little boho scarf. That’s my nemesis!”

Mary glances out of the corner of her eye. She can see the man only from behind, but the scarf is visible because the man has a nearly shaved head. He looks, even from the back, quite Germanic. The stubble of his head is sharp yellow, and he is tall and lanky in an awkward, straight-spined way that differs from Leo’s languid grace. If you put a little hat on him, Mary thinks, he would look like a server in a Disney World version of a German restaurant. Though she has not seen his face, she finds it extremely difficult to believe that this gawky, yellow-stubbled man could possibly compete with Leo in any arena. Leo has her tightly around the upper arm and is breathing a fast stream of talk into her ear. “This guy is un-fucking-believable. He’s a complete whore, he’ll sleep with anyone, even
women,
if it’ll get his art anywhere. Pascal”—this is Leo’s lover—“claims he’s bisexual, but what the hell does that mean, bi-fucking-sexual, have you ever known anyone who was truly bisexual?”

Mary has to admit that she has not.

“He’s just trying to position himself as the bad boy of the Dutch art world,” Leo continues. “He’s more serious about his reputation than he is about his art itself. He has all these affairs with gallery owners and collectors, and now that Pascal is up and coming, well, he deigns to fuck him. Before that, he would never have looked at him.”

Mary is curious why beautiful Leo would be involved with Pascal if this balding faux German would not even have looked at him, but she does not get a chance to ask. The nemesis turns around, and Mary inhales sharply, coughs, and drips wine on her mercifully black dress.