A Life in Men: A Novel (40 page)
“No,” Kenneth said, “I don’t get it. I don’t care about the health insurance shit. How could he let you come here alone? He sure as hell doesn’t know you’re with me.”
“He thinks I’m with Leo and Sandor. Leo agreed to come, but then all of a sudden he got offered some fabulous show in Paris. It’s a big deal—a one-man show at some really prestigious gallery. I mean, he’s forty years old and he’s waited his entire life for this. He got this grant—did I tell you about that when I saw you last year? Twenty thousand dollars. His paintings have been selling, his career is taking off. He couldn’t say no, but he’s only staying for the opening and then he’s coming here.”
The four tourist kids have gotten up to leave. On the walls, Kerouac and Ginsberg stand watch like bemused sentries.
“You could have waited,” Kenneth says. “A week in Spain’s no hardship. I’ve seen you, what, three times in two years for one night apiece? Why did you call me?”
“I shouldn’t have called,” she admits.
“Let’s leave,” he says, and for a moment she thinks he means leave Tangier, get back on the morning ferry, and give up, and the tears do spill over hot and fast before she can banish them. But then he says, “We should get us a room. We should fuck our brains out. What do either of us have to lose?”
“I told you,” she says wearily. “I
told
you.”
“I don’t give a shit what you told me.”
“We’re getting two rooms,” she says. “If it’s too expensive for you, I’ll pay.”
“What the fuck, girl,” he says. “I’m not taking your money. I can afford my own damn room. But you’re the one who turns up at my bar or my place every time you come visit your brother. You’re the one who called
me
and said ‘quit your job.’ Don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m good for in your eyes, and how it’s not what you want.”
“It’s not,” she says. “I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t care about sex right now. Maybe I’ve moved beyond it.”
“Oh, Christ,” he says. “Your lung falls down and now you’re beyond sex. You’re not Joan of Arc, baby. Get over yourself.”
She starts laughing. “This—” she says, “this is why I invited you. Not the fucking. This.”
“Well,” he says, “it ain’t why I came.”
“Leave, then. Go, and I’ll wait here until it’s time to meet Leo and Sandor.”
“Right. Like you didn’t tell me that whole sad story so I couldn’t cut out. Like you didn’t say all that shit to make sure I’d know it’s not safe to leave your fifty-percent-lung-capacity, cystic ass on your own.”
“Do what you want,” she says. “I thought you’re such a Bad Man anyway—isn’t that your shtick? What do you care if I end up dead in Tangier, Mr. Bad Man?”
He stands and throws some bills on the table, and she’s shocked to see that he changed guilders for dirhams before he came, in anticipation of the trip. She thought she’d have to charge their drinks; surely Kenneth does not own a credit card. “Come on,” he says. “You want your own room so bad, then cut out the foreplay.” He lifts her rucksack, but when she stands to grab his, he’s already slung it over his shoulder like a duffel, like it is nothing at all.
W
ALKING BACK TO
the hotel on his third morning in Tangier, Kenneth thinks maybe he’ll just stay on here. In their room, Cystic is still asleep. He’s got to see her through meeting her brother, but then he’ll be free. He’s been in Amsterdam longer than anywhere except Georgia, longer even than his time in London, which seemed like forever when it was happening. Time to move on.
Tangier could be the place. Since he’s been here he’s been taking photos like a motherfucker; he’s feeling an old hunger he hasn’t known in years, eager for the next thing. This city is the kind of place that could fuel him. Seedy, dirty, teeming with people and odors and sounds—but something beautiful underneath the filthy facade, something old and eternal. Yesterday he and Cystic took a taxi ride up to the top of the hill the city’s built on and looked down. The taxi driver said it’s one of the only places in the world where you can view two continents at once, and Kenneth felt almost dizzy, a sense of the world’s simultaneous vastness and accessibility overwhelming him. When he was young, he left home to see the world, and he
believed
in it, that goal—he thought himself on an honorable quest. But all that time in New Orleans, Taos, Los Angeles, London, the Caribbean, then back around Europe before he settled in A’dam—something was lost early on, before he even hit British soil and things got really bad. The journey itself had ceased to be the point of anything, and instead he was always on the make, looking for a buck, looking for somebody to take advantage of, looking to score. He was already a junkie when he left home, but a junkie could still have a soul, at least for a while. Finally, though, the drugs ate out anything left in him of the noble wanderer, turning him into a grifter, a dealer, a con man, an enforcer, whatever he needed to be.
But that’s too easy. These past few years, even before Agnes’s death, he’s been clean (or clean enough), and it hasn’t changed him much. All that time in Amsterdam, a city overrun with tourists sucking up its quaint beauty and amusement park of vice, he wasn’t ever moved. Here his eyes are like a camera lens again, and there are two visions: the messy, cacophonous one he and Cystic are traipsing through in the flesh, and the one he can frame just so, cutting out anything extraneous and boiling things down to their surprisingly harmonious essence.
He wanted to walk up that hill, but she couldn’t. They had to take the taxi up, and Cystic insisted on paying because it was her “fault” they couldn’t walk like normal people. At the top there were four other travelers. Kenneth recognized them from the first night at the bar. They were just kids, but they’d taken a car, too, with a guide. He wanted to say,
See, most tourists don’t walk it, there’s nothing to feel guilty about,
but she wouldn’t have liked that. She doesn’t like him to be nice, and he’s no good at it anyway, so he steers clear.
Under the worn-thin bedspread, she barely stirs. She sleeps like an infant, scary deep. Maybe he’ll walk up the hill today. She can hang at the bar downstairs and read—she picked up a copy of
On the Road
from the hotel lobby, where someone else had left it—and he’ll go on his own. Even though he did more sightseeing yesterday than in his entire life, he’s having a hard time sitting still. He got some great shots at the Caves of Hercules. The silhouette of the caves looked like the bust of an old hag, mouth agape to cackle, dark and crazy water looming beyond. And they trolled the Kasbah, walking under all those Moorish archways, photographing a bright green Matisse door with Cystic standing in front of it, looking skinny and hollowed out. In the past she used to look healthy, almost objectionably so, like some cheerleader or TV sitcom wife. Now there’s a sharpness to her that makes her look like a bird of prey. Under her gauzy shirts her elbows are bigger than the tops of her arms. Eating tires her out. She looks like a breeze could knock her down. Pared down, like everything else here. Like something elemental and pure. Like his hands could snap her bones.
At the medina, she bought gifts. A hookah, of all things, for a fellow teacher in that small New England town. A hanging drum with a hennaed hand decorating one side of the sheer skin—this she said she’d keep herself. Some bowls with that blue mosaic design for her just-widowed mother. She likes to barter. A couple of times he had to get involved when someone wanted to speak French, but for the most part the merchants are fluent in English just like the young Dutch. She’s asked him twice how he knows French and he just said he used to live in Louisiana and left it at that, though he didn’t know any real Creoles there and never heard French there except in the jazz bars.
He hasn’t bought anything except more film. Well, and a hooker.
At night they’ve been sleeping in side-by-side twin beds like he and Will used to when they were boys. She goes to the toilet down the hall to change, as though he hasn’t seen every inch of her from the inside out, each of the three times she’s come to A’dam. The first night at the Hotel Muniria he lay awake, having consumed not nearly enough booze to put him out, wishing for some hash at least to help him unwind, thinking about crawling into her bed. He imagined just getting on top of her and pinning her down, letting her wake to his dick pushing its way in. He was about 50 percent sure this was what she expected. There was only one room left at the hotel, a double, and she consented to it saying they could find another place with two rooms in the morning, but then they went sightseeing and gift buying and mint tea drinking and no new hotel was procured. The second night she must’ve
wanted
him to push things, to just not take no for an answer. She was pulling that girl shit where it would all be his idea, his fault, like he’d forced her. They’re both too damn old for that game, so when she came back to the room in her sweatpants and T-shirt ready for bed, he just stood and said, “I’m going out.”
He expected her to grill him at the very least, but she said, “Good. You should.”
He has hash now from the taxi driver. Soon she will get on the train to Casablanca and head to meet her brother and he will be done with her. Game-playing, cock-teasing bitch.
At the Caves of Hercules she said, “If I were here with Geoff I’d take off all my clothes and make him take my picture. He used to love it when I did things like that. Now I think it just makes him uncomfortable.”
“It won’t make me uncomfortable,” he said, laughing. “Here’s the camera.”
But she stayed dressed.
He imagines the way her rib cage would protrude, the shading underneath it like the shadows the rock formations cast on the water. He can’t decide if she would look more close to death naked, or less so. Her clothes, exactly the kind of gauzy, concealing cotton shit a good American girl would wear in an Arab country, give her the airy appearance of a ghost. He’d like to see the shock of her pubic hair, darker than what’s on her head, against her wan skin. He’d like to hear her scream with an energy that shows she’s still kicking. He’d like to smell
her
up close instead of the perfume she dots onto her wrists and throat, which could be the bouquets around a coffin. When he puts her on the bus, it’s the last he’ll see of her. There won’t be any more trips overseas, she’s said. She won’t show up again at Mulligan’s (where he might still be able to get his job back—or maybe he’ll just stay on in Tangier). She will disappear into the void with Will and Hillary and his mother and his bastard father and his now-grown son, with Shane and Agnes and the legions of others just like them, some of whom he can almost taste like it was yesterday, and some whose faces he can’t even conjure anymore.
He spoke to his whore in French. He wore a condom. Afterward they smoked hashish together and it was fine. The whore had a pockmarked face but he didn’t mind. Her tits were big, and he liked to sample the local flavor. There were plenty of North African whores in Amsterdam, but he’d never gone to one. Will had come home from Nam with a taste for prostitutes—back in Atlanta, they became goddamn connoisseurs. It was good to screw the Tangier whore; it gave him a sense of nostalgia and new beginnings at once. Better than to fuck a pale skeleton of a woman, a woman who didn’t want him. Not that the whore
wanted
him exactly, but she wanted his money and he was glad to pay and everybody was happy in a simple way that made the world go round. Nothing new in that game, nothing personal. Sometimes Will used to rough up the whores, but Kenneth never did. Later, of course, there were girls who’d paid their debts to him on their backs, junkie girls who had only one thing with which to barter. Yes, it’s better for her to take her gauzy clothes, her clean hair and flowery perfume and wedding band, and get on the train.
He stands up, goes over to her bed, low to the ground and rickety like all beds in these kinds of places, like every bed he’s slept in for twenty years. The fact that she is comfortable enough around him to lie there sleeping in the bright sunlight irks him. He didn’t ask for this intimacy. He didn’t ask for this comfort.
He prods her with his foot. She sits up with a sharp gasp like someone choking. She’s sweaty from the stale heat, but her lips, without the gloss she usually wears, seem a little blue.
“What’s going on?” she asks. “You’re dressed. Have you already been out?”
“I just got home,” he says. “About an hour ago.”
He catches that he has said “home” and wants to amend it, but that would just draw more attention to the mistake. This isn’t home. There is no home.
“Are you hungry?” she says
“No. Let’s get out of the city.” Suddenly he doesn’t want her here anymore. He doesn’t want to spend the rest of his time in Tangier, after she leaves, bumping into her ghost. “Let’s go see something on the coast.”
Her face lights up like a little girl’s, suddenly beautiful. He can’t look at it. He fusses in his bag.
“Awesome!” He remembers sometimes hearing her use that expression with Joshua when she first moved into Arthog House, and the way he’d cringe—how easily dismissal came then. He motions at the door with his chin.
“There’s a beach town an hour away, Asilah. We’ll check it out. Get dressed.” It’s only once she has left for the toilet that he can breathe normally again.
From:
[email protected]
Subject:
You would love this place
Date:
August 20, 2001
Hey babe.
I’m in Asilah at an Internet café. This town is so spectacular. Everything’s awash in white, almost like Mykonos, with the blue ocean, the blue sky, blue tiles everywhere, as though the entire world is white and blue. There are funky murals on the walls and a summer jazz fest that apparently attracts people from all over Europe. You would love this place. It’s nothing like Tangier, which I loved, too, but you would hate. Here, cute little kids run around at the beach with their huge, dark eyes and skinny legs—they look innocent but try to get you to give them coins to take their photographs, ha. In the town there are still places where you can go watch old men baking bread for the villagers in a giant brick oven. There are camels everywhere, walking on the beach, dozing at entrances of buildings. The Berber women don’t like having their photographs taken (even for coins); they think, we’ve been told, that the camera will steal their souls. But I can’t resist zoom-lensing to try to catch them, they’re so mysterious and beautiful. Geoff, I just want to eat this place whole. The air is so much cleaner than in Tangier—everything smells like flowers and the sea and the leather of the marketplace, the mint of the tea. I know it isn’t true, but it feels impossible to be ill in a place like this. My energy is higher than in Tangier. There are things I love that are no good for me now, and it breaks my heart but I know I have to accept it. Everything that Tangier is falls into that category now.