A Life in Men: A Novel (36 page)

“Is that always true?” she asks. “Or are you having a hard time right now—is something new going on? Because you seem a little different even from a few days ago. You seem . . . younger maybe? Scared.”

“It’s just the sex,” he explains. “I’m great at all the other stuff, the parties and the restaurants and the putting flowers in a vase and picking the right outfit so it looks like I didn’t think about my outfit. God, I love that shit—I’m the Daisy fucking Buchanan of Amsterdam.” He sighs. “My therapists tell me I’m not good with real intimacy.
Not
that getting fucked is real intimacy.”

With her free hand, she strokes his hair. His lovers have done this—they love his hair, they always love his hair—but no woman has ever stroked his hair before. It feels foreign and frightening and good.

“So what was my mother like?” she asks. “You lived with her. Are we anything alike?”

“I was just thinking about that,” he says. He speaks quietly so that his head won’t move too much—so that she won’t stop the stroking. Then all of a sudden he is mad at himself. He is the older brother. He sits up, the duvet falling back. “Don’t worry about her,” he says. “Rebecca. She wasn’t that great. She used to tie me to a radiator so she could go downstairs and get cloves of garlic stuck up her ass by the quack doctor who was our landlord.”

“Jesus Christ!” Mary squeaks. She sits up, too. “Are you fucking serious?”

Leo shrugs. “Well, it was the sixties, everyone was weird. After she ran off and Daniel gave you away, the landlord’s girlfriend used to babysit me. She was awesome! Her name was Denise and she was Indian—as in Native American, not from India—and had that fabulous hair. You would have loved her. I wished she could be our mom.” He pauses, then reaches out and touches Mary’s eyes to see if they are still crying, though they feel the degree of wet where he can’t be sure if it’s old or new tears. “She wouldn’t like how I’m relating this,” he admits. “She respected your mom. She thought she was right to save her own ass. I don’t want you to like Rebecca, though. Even if you were better off without us, I don’t like what she did to you.”

“What about what she did to you?” Mary asks.

Leo thinks about this. “I gave her reasons,” he concludes. “But you didn’t do anything wrong. You were just a baby.”

“Leo,” Mary says, and the way she says his name kills him; he wants her to stop and he wants her never to stop. “
You
were just a baby too.”

He doesn’t like to hear this. It makes him uncomfortable. “She was hot, though,” he concedes. “Your mother. What’s your other mother like? Is she pretty?”

Mary smiles in the dark. “No. I mean, she’s not ugly, but she’s not hot either. Pretty wasn’t a big deal in our house. You and Daniel—everyone around you guys is really beautiful and flamboyant and fucked up.” She laughs out loud. “At my house it was just the opposite. Nobody had any special talent, and everyone was kind of plain and ordinary. But they were all . . . solid people. Stable people. They did the best they could for me.”

“You make it sound like what they did didn’t work,” Leo says.

“I don’t know.” She leans back again, and now, finally, he can reach her hair easily, without suspending his own arm awkwardly in the air, so he strokes her head the way he should have before, the way a big brother is supposed to. His lovers stroke his hair, but he does not stroke theirs. He is not a stroker of hair. Not until now.

“My mother and I were really close,” she tells him quietly. “Then I got diagnosed, and it just . . . she was terrified. Something snapped in her—she could hardly look at me without crying. There’d be this panic in her eyes, and I was totally humiliated, like she was looking through my skin and could see all
my
fears. I felt naked and pathetic, but I needed her—she had to help me with my physiotherapies and medications, I was totally fucking clueless at first. And the more I needed her, the more I resented her. I was too afraid to go away to college, and I hated her for that, too, like it was her fault, like she’d infected me with her fears. Once I finally left home, God, it was like”—she laughs again—“it was like
breathing
again. We get along fine now—I mean, I know intellectually that she had every right to grieve for the fact that her daughter was terminally ill or whatever. But it just never ends. At every stage—like now, she keeps doing research, trying to get me to have a heart-lung transplant when the time comes . . . There’s this hospital in Toronto that does transplants on people with my kind of lung bacteria. After a transplant they put you on immunosuppressant drugs so you don’t reject your new organ, and that makes you susceptible to infections so they put you on antibiotics to fight those, but the antibiotics typically don’t work on us, so we die anyway. My mother just can’t accept it. I feel responsible for her grief, and I just want to run.”

Leo doesn’t know what to say. He knows nothing about mothers. He keeps stroking his sister’s hair, and she sighs like the purr of a cat, and he feels happy again, the way he did when she held his hand, so happy his skin could burst. She is his sister. His sister! She is his.

“What,” she begins, rolling onto her back, “is going on between you and Sandor? I thought you couldn’t stand each other. Are you guys a couple now? What about Pascal?”

“It’s complicated,” Leo says. “I have no idea what’s going on.”

Mary laughs. “Oh yes,” she says. “Yes, you do.”

All at once, Leo notices that his dick is stiffening a little at the mention of Sandor—at the memory of Sandor still on his sofa bed. He wishes he had put on his sweatpants instead of being a goof and not thinking things through. He bunches the duvet a little around his crotch to hide it, says, “Sandor is completely in his body. I’m not in my body at all. Sometimes I forget I even have a body. I get so caught up in my head, I can’t feel sensations, like I’m painting and later I’ll realize I threw my back out and can barely walk, but I didn’t notice at the time because I was somewhere else. I have a hard time with sex—I mean . . .” He pauses, embarrassed. “I don’t mean a hard time like a
soft
time, that’s not what I—”

“I know what you mean,” she says. “A hard time just being there, in the moment. I have that sometimes, too.”

“You do?”

“Well, I don’t know if it’s the same thing,” she says. “It’s just like, sometimes I want to have sex so badly, I feel so hungry for it, and then when I get it—I mean, I come or whatever, and if you’re a woman that’s supposed to be feat enough—but it’s never as pivotal as I think it’s going to be. When it’s over, I still feel separate, like my body is cased in glass and no one can reach me.”

Leo closes his eyes. “No,” he says. “It’s not the same thing. I mean, I feel separate, too, I feel what you’re talking about, but it’s more than that. It’s like my body is there, but I’m not in it. It’s like my body has nothing to do with me, like it’s some kind of trinket I bought at a store and can give people as a gift, but I’m not inside the box, I’m over in the corner watching them open it.” He thinks of earlier, of Sandor. “Sometimes,” he says, “if it’s painful enough, then I can feel it, I can snap into my body and be there. But that’s a tightrope walk—I mean, pain can get me
there
, but if I’m not careful, if I don’t choose carefully, it’s like snapping awake to find myself in the middle of a horror flick. With Sandor . . . I don’t know. I guess he seems like he can keep me grounded but not kill me in the process. Does that make sense?”

“Leo,” Mary says, “no. No, it doesn’t. Or maybe it does, but I don’t like what I’m hearing. Are you saying Sandor is hurting you—that you want him to hurt you?”

He doesn’t answer. In truth, Sandor hasn’t really hurt him, not yet. All they’ve done is fuck, which was risky enough, Mary in the next room and all. Plus, in Leo’s experience, most sadists are fetishists, not hedonists; Sandor’s sexuality isn’t narrow enough to fit that bill. Suddenly he doesn’t know how to explain himself. He is anxious that his straight, married sister will think he’s some “beat me, beat me” weirdo who wants to wear a dog leash and get shit on, yet agitated that she doesn’t understand the fundamental truth of how hard it is to stay in the present fucking moment, how easy it is to drift away, and how it takes a strong hand, a commanding hand, to pull you back and hold you in place. He isn’t sure Sandor can manage it, but Sandor’s smart, he’s manipulative, he’s ruthless, he’s a natural top—so much so he’ll even do it with a
woman,
for God’s sake!—and that’s all a reasonable start. And yet with Sandor . . . so far, he doesn’t feel afraid. He thinks Sandor could actually be a friend.

“What I meant,” he tries again, “is just that Sandor is this cool combination of Dutch and Spanish, you know, from his parents. He’s got that Spanish aggression and sensuality, but mixed with the Dutch irreverence, the Dutch way of being so casual in your physicality. And that funny Dutch mannerism—like he’s
gezellig,
even when he’s trying to be all assertive.”

“Oh God.” Mary giggles now. “Don’t tell him that, he’ll die.”

“I know.” Leo joins her laughter. “He’s trying to be all hot and commanding, and it’s like he’s this adorable little doily on top of an antique wooden table. He’s like an adorable doily with a big dick!” Even as he says it, he is imagining the painting he will make: a doily with a dick in its center. He will call the painting
Amsterdam,
and two years from now, shortly after Mary’s death and when New Yorkers are dragging around their PTSD like invisible albatrosses in the wake of 9/11, the painting will be commissioned for an exhibition called
The New Surrealists
at MoMA, though such a confluence of events—such awesomeness and terribleness—seems wholly inconceivable now.

All at once, Sandor stands at the bedroom door. He, unlike Leo, had the presence of mind to put on his pants. He takes one look at the bed and quips, “So, I am sorry to interrupt this lovely scene of brother-and-sister incest, but Leo, I think maybe this girl needs to go to sleep, and I
know
I need to go to sleep, so shut up, yes?”

Leo looks from Sandor to Mary. He doesn’t want to leave Mary, exactly, but he thinks Sandor has done the right thing in coming to claim him—coming to rein him in and make him behave normally—and he appreciates it, so he stands. At his nudity, Sandor shakes his head with exaggerated dismay, clucking his tongue and saying, “Leo, Leo, do you want to scar your sister for life? She is American and they are very afraid of naked people, you know that—what are you doing?” and Mary starts laughing all over again, and Sandor puts his arm loosely around Leo’s shoulders and ferries him back to the sofa bed, lying him down, putting the blanket over him. Before climbing in beside him, Sandor takes off his own pants.

M
OVING IN A
single-file line at the Anne Frank House, she finds it impossible not to think of being herded like cattle—of people during World War II crammed into train cars shoulder to shoulder, hardly able to breathe, the shorter ones like Anne (like Mary herself) unable to even see over the heads of the others. The aisles in Anne’s annex are narrow, and Mary can look only to her side at whatever object, photograph, or letter is on display. She stares at a child’s phonograph, which Anne and Margot must have played records on before their lives became enshrouded in silence. It is painted yellow, bright and flagrantly innocent, and Mary’s eyes fill with tears.

The world is a terrible place. She does not need the Anne Frank House to tell her this. Young girls have been paying the price for the violence of men for as long as the world has existed. German soldiers, Spanish pilots, Libyan terrorists: all the same. Some men are driven by hatred, as though little girls they have never met are their enemies. She thinks of Anne’s final hours at Bergen-Belsen, dying of typhus. Who is
she
—a thirtysomething American woman—to fear death? Hers will be sanitary, civilized, full of morphine and machines and relatives gathered at the bedside. Not like Anne’s. Not like Nix’s. She knows nothing of suffering. She cannot breathe.

Out on the street, on Prinsengracht, she gulps air, cries a little more. If she had lived in Holland during the war, she would have been a Jew, would have met a fate similar to Anne’s.
Would have been a Jew.
Well, of course she
is
a Jew, according to the rules delineated by the Nazis at least. Judaism is in the blood, not in the practice. Many of those who died in the camps were secular, products of mixed marriages, even practicing Christians. She is a Jew. Just like her brother, Leo, the bipolar atheist homosexual, who could have been sent to Bergen-Belsen several times over, if such a thing were possible, for his “crimes.” Just like Daniel, the new age American shaman. Just like her biological mother, Rebecca, the hot blond who tied Leo to a radiator and had cloves of garlic stuck up her ass by a quack. Jesus Christ.

(
Or not, as the case may be
.)

Mary walks along Prinsengracht, heading to Sandor’s apartment, quite a walk away, near Vondelpark, or Needle Park, as Leo says it’s called after hours. Leo is finishing a grant application on a deadline, compiling slides and filling out forms, so she is without him for the first time and already missing him in preparation for her imminent departure. She doesn’t want to leave Amsterdam. This is causing her significant guilt. She is supposed to miss her husband.

She does miss her husband. She does.

Just not enough to want to go home yet.

Their life in rural New Hampshire is peaceful. They rent a wooden house that opens in the back onto a wooded area. Sometimes they see bears in the yard. They do their shopping at a funky, organic grocery store called the Co-op, and Mary and Geoff have gotten into the vibe, started baking their own bread and making yogurt from scratch, cooking while listening to Geoff’s jazz albums on a vintage turntable and sipping Bordeaux. Mary teaches at Hanover High School, in the same town as Dartmouth College, and her students are the well-bred, Aryan-looking offspring of professors and Dartmouth alumni. The girls mostly have eating disorders. Geoff works far longer hours, so after work she comes home to an empty house and grades papers or watches TV while wearing her Vest. On the weekends they hike Mount Cardigan or Mount Tom; they have picnics and sometimes rent a canoe. Every once in a while, Mary goes to dinner with the other teachers at Hanover High. She cannot complain about her colleagues, who are nice people and, just as her mother used to do with her teacher friends, tell funny stories about their students. Sometimes (less frequently) they get together with Geoff’s colleagues, but many of his fellow doctors are Chinese or Indian and have their own communities, and those who aren’t tend to make Mary feel self-conscious. Word has gotten out that Geoff’s wife is a former patient of his, and Mary feels like a specimen, as if they are all waiting to see how this experiment turns out: the doctor and the sick girl. They are waiting to see if Geoff’s heroism will pay off, or if, like a Peace Corps volunteer who goes too native and starts letting flies collect on his open wounds, he will be saved by somebody who swoops in and helicopters him out when the going gets too rough.