A Life in Men: A Novel (38 page)

He sits on their bed. Reclines all the way back. The more his mind wanders, the worse this gets. Agnes had people in her hometown. Shouldn’t somebody let her family know? But Agnes’s old lady isn’t married to her daddy. She’s with some other man, and Kenneth doesn’t even know his last name, probably never would’ve met any of them even if he and Agnes had been together ten more years. Where were they when Agnes was walking the street, getting her face bashed in by johns? Where were they when Agnes was picking up
him,
a man more than fifteen years her senior, and letting him tie off her arm? Yeah, he’s sure they’d welcome him into their home like a hero, if he could even find it. Take one look at him and kill the messenger, more likely, and he’d sure as hell deserve it. No, Agnes will lie in an unmarked Dutch grave, and her people back home will be happier for it, sitting round their kitchen table bemoaning how she wrote them off, thought she was so high and mighty with her pretty face and big tits, went off to Holland, and never looked back. They’ll take some joy in the story, in rehashing it over their Eastern European booze and inbred hardships, passing it around so that its implicit end is Agnes somewhere else living high on the hog, thumbing her nose at them. Not a bad fantasy, if you can hold on to it. He wishes someone could have given his mother that, with Will.

He should cry. He doesn’t feel like crying. He should call somebody, tell somebody, but this is his life now, clean or what passes for it: there’s nobody left to call. He should go out and pick up a girl, but if he got some stranger in front of him right now, some hole with a language barrier and no common past, God help him, he’s not sure he could trust himself, he’s not sure he could stand it, he’s not sure he wouldn’t just hurt her for the sport of it. It should have been
him.
Not because Agnes was any better than he is, or because she wouldn’t have followed suit soon after even if he’d died first, but because then he wouldn’t have to lie here anymore and tally up the body count. Will first, his mother not long after, and then he ran, so that Hillary and his baby son, they might as well be dead, too: dead to him, just like his father. And all at once he
is
crying, but it’s not for Agnes. It’s because it spooked him: thinking his son’s as good as dead just because he’s not around. The boy’s better off without him. He’s gotta be in college by now; he won’t even remember Kenneth, won’t remember having just learned to say “Daddy” when Kenneth ran. Still, knowing that his boy is out there somewhere, living a normal life, a life without him around to taint it, is the only thing that’s kept him from putting a barrel to his head, from loading the dose to turn it lethal all these years.
Please, God,
he prays,
don’t let my boy be dead
.

The number is on the back of a Mulligan’s coaster, right on the floor next to his bed. Her cell and e-mail, exchanged as the bar was closing and she went off with her brother and Sandor into the night, leaving him to clean up. He’d thought she would stay. He believed all night that they were going to hook up; he hadn’t questioned it; it seemed a given—and then suddenly she was gone.
Mary,
the coaster reads, but he can’t think of her that way and noticed Sandor was calling her Nicole still. Kenneth wouldn’t stoop. It’d make her feel too important, like something he’d held on to all these years, which isn’t exactly true. He hadn’t thought of her at all really. But then there she was across the bar, and something old reignited between them, with a life all its own. It isn’t some lost innocence. He was already ruined when he knew her back then, already beyond repair. He can’t put his finger on it. Something like recognition.

He doesn’t have a phone anymore. He pitched his cell when he kicked H; he didn’t want calls from anyone, didn’t want to make any either. There’s nobody he’s wanted to talk to. He has no computer, no e-mail account. The fact that this American wife gave him a bloody e-mail address, of all things, just indicates the gulf between them, how ridiculous the whole thing is.

There is a phone in the Indonesian restaurant downstairs.

She answers in this normal voice, this “English is my native language and I am a normal person and nobody I know just OD’d” voice, and he does not, for the first time he can recall in his entire life, know what to say to a girl. When he doesn’t answer, she says, “Babe, is that you?” and for one fucking insane elated moment he thinks she means
him,
but then he realizes she must mean her husband—her husband at home in America, waiting for her.

“It’s me,” he says. He doesn’t know how to refer to himself. She never called him by his proper name, but he hasn’t gone by Yank since his thirties. “My, uh . . .” Nothing in his life, nothing that he is, makes sense in words. “My girlfriend just died. I was wondering . . .” He is a crazy person; he will scare the living fuck out of her. “Do you think you could maybe come over?”

The girl, though, doesn’t miss a beat. “Well, that depends,” she says. “Do I have to bring a shovel?”

He starts laughing. Falls against the wall of the phone booth, cracking up, and can’t stop—he is too relieved by her almost sociopathic irreverence. Yes, he remembers now. She looks normal, but she’s
not
normal. She’s wrecked, too, just not by him.

“Nah,” he says. “I didn’t kill her or anything. I mean, I sorta did, but not the way you’re talking about.”

“Okay,” she says. “Then I guess I’ll come.”

He says, “Did you keep my address?”

She says, “I’m not sure,” and he does not for a moment believe her now, and feels better, better than he has any right to ever feel, with all he’s done. “Give it to me again just to be safe.”

“Bullshit,” he says. “You’ll find it.” And he hangs up.

M
ARY’S HEAD THROBS
like a heart. Kenneth’s sheets feel vaguely wet, as though the humidity in this city never allows anything to truly dry. Her body hums with the exhaustion of a wounded athlete. There is energy under the fatigue, a current that jolts her muscles and renders sleep an impossibility. The night is still black, but a weak, murky black that hints at daylight.

She guesses it must be around 5 a.m., though Kenneth does not seem to have a clock in his apartment. His bed is just a mattress on the floor. Nothing in the whole place looks anything like what she has come to think of as “home.” His shower curtain is made up of laminated postcards from places he has been, pinned together with safety pins; the effect is stunning, like something they’d charge hundreds of dollars for in some chic boutique, yet the rest of the bathroom is unkempt, uncoordinated, even dirty. The walls of the apartment are covered, ceiling to table level, with photographs. All the photographs are black and white and are held on the walls with tape, unframed; she recognizes some from years ago, though none are of her. His kitchen is so small it could pass as a foyer. It appears to be used as storage for his photography equipment and musical instruments; a sax case sits propped up against the refrigerator as though it would never occur to him that he might need to access anything inside.

Signs of the dead Czech girlfriend are everywhere and nowhere in the apartment. Her clothing—small and black and often made of fabric that looks like netting—is littered on almost every conceivable surface. That shower curtain and the photographs and the saxophone, though, reveal nothing of the dead girlfriend. There is only one toothbrush on the bathroom sink, although Kenneth says the girlfriend took nothing with her before she died, so Mary is not sure what to make of that. Maybe they shared?

Next to her, Kenneth snores faintly and steadily. She remembers him, the still-young Yank, as a silent sleeper, quiet as the dead. Now, the middle-aged man who has just become her lover snores beside her into the night.

Mary is ravenous, but there is nothing in the refrigerator—she has already gotten up and moved the sax case to investigate. Literally nothing, save some film. He does not even own, as she would have expected, a bottle of alcohol. It seems preposterous. Why would anyone invite a woman to his apartment if he couldn’t even offer her a glass of wine, a shot of whiskey, a fucking cracker? Was it that certain, that preordained, that they would have sex?

Of course. Of course it was. She wanted him from the moment Sandor told her he was in the city. Even now, in the soreness and familiarity following their copulation, Mary feels a damp embarrassment under her arms at the memory: He did not recognize her! She tracked him all over the city, and he did not even know her! He would never have contacted her again but for the death of his lover, or nonlover, or whatever she was.
Whoever
she was, Mary has fucked Kenneth on the dead girl’s grave. For this, this grave fucking, she has betrayed Geoff. For
this
.

Treat me,
she told him when he was tearing off her clothes,
like something that couldn’t possibly
break
.

She is not a neophyte. She has been the other woman; she has been a wife. And yet. Through it all, the men in her life have felt distinctly separate from her:
other
. It was true from the first. She and Joshua were entirely different continents, their liaison a tiny island between two worlds, kept tenuously afloat through omissions and lies. With Eli, too, attraction was a carefully orchestrated dance in which deception played no small role, until she became merely a looking glass in which he could see his own fantasies shining back at him.

Now, with Geoff these past five years . . .

Until tonight, she has had no secrets from Geoff. He knows her; he even knew Nix. Still, her mind’s unlit, off-road paths, down which he cannot follow, seem to multiply by the day the closer she gets to the finish line. While he is the most intelligent and responsible man she has ever met—
mature beyond his years,
her mother says—there is a lightness to him as incompatible with her weight, with her darkness, as Joshua’s South Africanness was with her Americanness years ago.

Next to her lies a man whose life has been lived mainly in darkness. On the surface, he and Mary have nothing in common. Jesus, that’s an understatement.
Nix
was the one who liked the bad boys, but if Nix met this man, she would run. No, worse than that. She would turn her nose up and not even give him a second thought. The Man Formerly Known as Yank would be, in Nix’s or any reasonable girl’s estimation, a lowlife. The opposite of a good catch, naturally, but not even the kind of “walk on the wild side” that would appeal to most women like them. He is past his prime; he has no money. Unlike the bad boys of soap operas and prime time—glamorous mobsters or decadent playboys—he exists in a poverty-ridden underbelly of society: a subculture Mary would not even know existed had she not stumbled onto Arthog House.

He has called out her death as if it were nothing. He has bitten her mouth, grabbed her by the back of her hair, and when the coughing took over, he pinned her to the mattress while her body shook, shoving himself inside her and fucking her right through the spasms until she was thrashing like a fish, pushing at him in fury and confusion, and then, when her lungs stilled and she had grabbed his discarded shirt and covered her mouth with it, spit into it, immediately Kenneth’s mouth was on hers again, as though nothing had happened. Her face is scraped raw by his stubble. Oh God. Eli used to talk dirty to her, but it was never like this.
Get down on your belly,
he ordered, pulling out
. I’m going to fuck your ass until you howl like a dog
. His face was older, wilder than it’d been in the bar. For a moment she felt herself falling—Eli’s body pressed into her back their last night at Daniel’s house—and an old anger rose, stiffened her limbs. Kenneth kept looking at her straight-on; she felt her eyes widen like a startled bird’s. Then she remembered Sandor’s
squeal like a pig,
and for another moment she believed she would laugh, would explain it to Kenneth, and he would chuckle, too, so that the moment, the danger, would be shattered: they would be back on safer ground.

With Eli, that is what would have happened.

And with Geoff? With Geoff, nothing that had transpired in the past forty-eight hours would be even remotely within his frame of reference.

Treat me like something that couldn’t possibly break.

Kenneth jolts awake next to her, sitting upright like someone waking from a nightmare. His eyes are open, but he does not seem to see her. She is sitting up, too, too restless to lie down anymore. It takes a moment for his eyes to focus, to seem to take her in. The room is cold; Mary is shivering; even her breasts have goose bumps.

“I shouldn’t have done this,” she begins.

“Girl,” Kenneth says deadpan, “If you thought you shouldn’t’ve done it, you’d have put some clothes on for the conversation.”

In the half darkness, she feels herself blush.

“Come on,” Kenneth says, prodding her with his foot. “Stop looking at me like I want something from you. There’s nothing I want. I’m done with all that. Relax.”

“Done with all of what?” she asks.

He gestures at her. For a moment she doesn’t know what he means, but then she sees he is sort of pointing at her ring. “That,” he says. “Re-la-tion-ships. That ship, if you’ll pardon the pun, has sailed. I don’t mean because of Agnes. Way, way before her.”

He stands up. Naked, his gray hair long and mangy, he looks like a hungry animal. “So your brother lives in town,” he says, pulling on his jeans. “Say you come over and see him now and then.” He reaches to the floor and finds the belt he extracted the night before, and Mary’s legs feel hot. “I’ve run enough in my life. This is where I am now. You want to find me, I’ll be here. Or if not
here,
here,”—he gestures at the apartment—“then around.”

Four hours ago he pushed into her so hard the sheets sprang loose from the mattress. Electricity seemed to ride through her skin and shoot from her fingers and toes; she felt cracked open, obliterated, no room for the anger anymore. Afterward, he’d put a hand out to her and said,
Look, I’m no expert on marriage, but you said you’ve been with your husband, what, five years? If he knows you, really gets you, there’s no way he’d be as shocked by what just happened here as you think. So probably you can let yourself off the hook.
She knew he meant the words as comfort, but they chilled her. She couldn’t begin to guess whether Geoff
did
know her—her core and what she was capable of. It seemed a fifty-fifty crapshoot.