A Life in Men: A Novel (42 page)
L
ESS THAN THIRTY
seconds after exiting CMN Airport in Casablanca—a city more French than Arab, more cosmopolitan than Old World, more generic than not, worthy only of a stopover in their minds—Leo grabs his sister by the arm, his spindly fingers tight like a vice.
“What the hell,” he demands in a stage whisper, “is that freaking guy
doing
here?”
Mary tosses her head and ignores him.
L
EO’S BODY FEELS
so alert he is almost sick. Maybe it’s the fumes. They’re sitting above what seems to be an exhaust leak. Leo thanks God (the god of exotic scenery and surprisingly lucrative painting sales) that Mary is sleeping, because even if she’s breathing this foul exhaust, at least she doesn’t know it and can’t feel anxious the way he does on her behalf. They are the only tourists on the bus, though it’s crammed with people. Leo is no stranger to foreign bus rides, having visited his father in Mexico, but this is something else entirely. Outside his smudged window it’s like a biblical scene is unfolding. Young girls give water to mules; men herd cattle on expanses of brown land; dryness and more dryness. Small communities are walled in by smooth sandstone, and another lone wall stands—crumbling and rocky in more the English fashion—amid an isolated field, its purpose now long lost.
If I saw a painting of that wall I would think it was sentimental crap,
Leo thinks.
So why do I feel so moved?
Next to Leo, Sandor is reading a book about Moroccan history but not actually looking out the window at the country itself. That is Sandor to a tee. Sandor and all his damaged dead from the history books, but in real life he keeps it light, things seem to roll right off his back; he’s oblivious to anything truly unsettling. It is a gift, Leo has come to believe. It keeps a person sane, and Sandor is very sane, almost alarmingly so.
That fucking bartender’s sleeping, too. Leo cringes, imagining what nocturnal activities might have this asshole and his sister so tired out. He hasn’t had any luck getting Mary alone to find out what the fuck’s going on. When he talked to her a week before her flight to Barcelona, he told her to wait for him in Sitges, lie on the beach; he even gave her some phone numbers of friends she could look up if she wanted someone to take her to dinner or if, God forbid, she got sick. But the night he arrived in Paris, she e-mailed him, saying she was already in Tangier. Then when they landed in Casablanca,
this.
The bus rolls up to a tiny, fly-ridden café, all male clientele of course. The bus must be a hundred degrees; Leo is experiencing a hot flash, veering dangerously close to claustrophobia. He has to get off this thing, out into the world.
“Let’s go get some tea,” he tells Sandor.
“Excellent idea,” Sandor says, not looking up. “Wait, just let me fetch my
Lonely Planet’s Guide to Sodom.
Then we should make out a little bit, too, at that café, Leo, so Mary and the Yankee have a most exciting story about their trip—how they watched us get killed.”
Leo tries to kick Sandor’s leg, but they’re sitting too close together and he can’t get a decent angle. “Come on,” he says, waiting.
“You think I jest? Seriously, what are we
doing
in this country? Those crazy villagers out there, they may start pounding on the door and ask that we be given up for the crowd to rape. And we, we are not angels, nobody will sacrifice their daughters instead.”
Leo stares at him, confused. Commie-junkie-shaman fathers, it should be stipulated, rarely make their sons read scripture.
“This coach ride,” Sandor explains, “—I feel like we have not just traveled miles, we have traveled
time.
Those robed men squatting in the fields, you keep pointing to say,
Oh, look, aren’t they quaint?
Those same men would stone us in the town square, just you remember that!”
Leo sighs. “So does this mean you’re not gonna blow me on that Jimi Hendrix beach in Essaouira?” But before Sandor can answer, he leans across the aisle, grabs Mary’s shoulder, and shakes her awake.
“Come on.” He’s whispering, too, but for fear of waking the godforsaken cowboy. Mary blinks rapidly, then follows gamely. He notices with some trepidation that she brings her entire day pack, and that at the café, mint tea in front of them in the suffocating heat, she pulls out her inhaler. “Look, they have an outlet,” she says. “Do you think anyone would be freaked out if I did my DNase here? You know, the thing with the mask?”
Leo envisions his sister being mistaken for a biological terrorist wearing a face mask while releasing deadly poison onto the rest of them. “Hmm,” he offers, not wanting to give Sandor the satisfaction of their collective murder. “Maybe they have a toilet?”
“It takes about twenty minutes.”
“Oh.”
Apparently deterred, Mary drinks her tea. She makes a few snorting sounds with her nose as though trying to clear it. She gets these nasal polyps; she used to have them removed, she says, but now she just deals with them because surgery poses a danger, a risk of infection. Even her fingers on the small glass look different than they did only a couple of years ago. They’re wider at the ends near her fingernails and slightly curled under, as if she were a child playing dragon. It must be part of the disease, though he’s not sure why and doesn’t want to ask. Her physical attractiveness is like a constant high-wire act: a balancing between feminine charms and the harsh facts of the disease. Leo would tell her you can barely notice this finger deformity, but that isn’t true, not anymore; she can’t wear all those chunky silver rings she used to wear, and he thinks he might start to cry. They both stare out at the orange-brown world surrounding them.
Mary says, “If I lived here, I’d be dead.”
“God, absolutely,” Leo says. “Me, too.”
It is true. The world from which they come is one of absurd luxury. A world in which you can be born with a disease that once killed children in infancy and instead live to be past the age of trustability according to the old hippie creed. A world in which you can be born with the mad urge to kill yourself and try several times, and it turns out that you can just take a pill and suddenly you are walking a perpetual high-wire act yourself. They are indulged. Even now they are here, soaking up this timeless land, but without any purpose to their trip other than to expand their own horizons, delight their own senses. This is decadence: the ability to live long past the point when nature tried to rule you out; the ability to turn the world into your playground rather than your burden or job.
“Honey,” he says, “does Geoff know? Does he know that man is here?”
She almost drops her cup. “Of course not!” Then angrily: “Not that he’d care.”
“Did you split up?”
She laughs mirthlessly. “I don’t even know what that means anymore.”
“Do you want me to call him?” Leo says. “Do you want me to get him to come and meet us?”
“Oh, Leo,” she says. “You’re so sweet. That’s total nonsense, though.”
The colorful Berber passengers, the men in their monochromatic Arab garb, are getting back on the bus. Leo settles the bill and he and Mary get back on board. Sandor is sitting with his nose still in his book, not even sweating. The bartender is still asleep. It is as if he and Mary have simply stopped time, stepped out, and had some magical interlude, and now everything is as it was. Leo is full of an intense sense that no one on earth except Mary is cognizant of where he is, and Mary does not count, when in any world except their absurdly rich and modern one, neither of them would even exist.
They sit across the aisle from each other as the bus starts up again. Mary takes out her little inhaler and Leo refuses to react, tells himself to behave normally. She sticks it in her mouth, then suddenly withdraws it with her nose wrinkled theatrically. “Holy shit,” she says, “it smells like exhaust. Something must be wrong with the bus.”
From:
[email protected]
Subject:
checking in
Date:
August 25, 2001
hi mom!
sorry i haven’t written much, there aren’t that many internet cafés around compared to europe. everything’s fine. essaouira is gorgeous. it’s this cool beach town where jimi hendrix and bob marley used to hang out, and is famous for its woodwork and spice market. all the colors are on fire in this country. there are these old, shriveled merchants in brown hooded robes who sit out on blankets, and they’re surrounded by sprigs of every spice you can imagine, so it’s like an explosion of color around these plain brown men. the medina is blue and white like so much here, charming and friendly compared to the aggression of tangier (don’t worry—by “aggression” i don’t mean we were mugged or anything, please don’t panic, ha-ha). the air smells fresh and fishy, except by the port, where they grill out so much fish that it’s like a perpetual smoke cloud—i’ve been avoiding it there even though the most famous restaurant in town is right there and leo and sandor say it’s really awesome. today we went to buy a carpet for geoff . . .
T
HE CARPET MERCHANT
had served them mint tea. Berber whiskey, he called it. Mary sat in the shade while he spread rug after rug on top of one another for her perusal, and Sandor and Leo pelted her with questions about her house’s color scheme, pronouncing most of the carpets “too blue” until at last one with the right prominence of green in the weave emerged. “You should know better than to take artists shopping with you,” Kenneth said, as though he wasn’t an artist, too, as though he hadn’t been taking pictures nonstop since his arrival in Morocco. Did he just not like the task of buying a gift for another man? Mary wondered—let herself wonder. But if he was jealous, he didn’t show it, had come along gamely, just like the others. He sat next to her on the ground with his long legs crossed Indian-style, effortlessly for a man of his height and age, then moved farther away to smoke, flicking the ashes into the ornate ashtray and taking such a shine to it that abruptly, as she bargained with the merchant, Mary threw the ashtray in with the deal. Afterward, presented with the option of shipping her purchase home, Kenneth had balked, saying who knew if it would arrive, and if it didn’t and she’d already have paid up, so the merchant proceeded to roll the rug in front of their eyes so tightly, so small, that when it was finished, though it would spread across Mary and Geoff’s dining room, it had been reduced to the size of a baby in a blanket, so tiny that when Mary took it in her arms, its weight shocked her and she had to hand it over to Sandor to carry.
They had been at the shop for two hours. By the time they left, Mary felt spent, vaguely depressed that she had not shipped the rug after all. In her imagination she saw Geoff receiving it while she was still gone, spreading it out under the table where they usually ate, knowing she was thinking of him and forgiving her somehow for everything: all he knew and all he didn’t. For the nights in Amsterdam screaming and writhing under Kenneth; for the fact that their knees had touched casually while she chose this gift.
For the fact that she was weak and selfish when the ill were supposed to be strong and heroic. For the fact that she was squandering what time they had left to be together by running . . .
for our dining room i mean, it was for me too, mom. i really like it here. essaouira has almost a european vibe, in spite of the random camels and cows lying around the beach . . .
She had not planned to windsurf. Essaouira was the windsurfing capital of Africa, people said, but it wasn’t until Mary hit the beach that she decided to try, dragged Sandor and Leo with her, though Leo kept claiming that he couldn’t swim, that nobody who grew up in New York ever learned to swim and he was bound to be killed. Kenneth didn’t own a swimsuit, hadn’t touched the water since the day he’d rolled up his new trousers at the water’s edge at Le Mirage, and Mary thought he would wander away without a word, the way he’d periodically been doing since their last night in Tangier and even more since Leo and Sandor’s arrival. But instead he stayed and watched. Her lungs felt better than they had in weeks—maybe months—and she fantasized it was from the air rushing in them as her sailboard picked up speed. You could take lessons right on the beach. The salt seemed to have scoured her lungs the way it did her nasal passages, even though she hadn’t coughed it all out afterward. She felt clean and replenished, her skin browning the way it always did when it came in contact with saltwater. She’d grown tired after an hour and had to stop, but even then the exhaustion felt good, pure, the way it had when she used to swim at meets in high school. Leo and Sandor were still going strong in the water, Leo’s graceful, olive-skinned body blending in perfectly and Sandor’s lanky paleness nearly glowing, but they were laughing and strong and young, still young—even Leo at forty seemed young, and why not? He could live another fifty years, and if that wasn’t youth, then what the hell was? When she emerged from the surf, Kenneth looked so happy it took her aback. He smiled so infrequently, his smile usually inseparable from a laugh that was sardonic or irreverent, but now he was just plain smiling, looking like he had done something wonderful though he had done nothing but sit on the sand.
They walked along the beach. He said, “I might have to buy me a pair of shorts and try that shit, it looked crazy fun,” and she felt inexpressibly glad and wasn’t sure why. They walked a long stretch. Farther down the beach were rock formations that looked like a sunken castle sticking out of the water, but Mary hadn’t consulted her guidebook since they’d arrived in Essaouira and she didn’t know what it was. Nobody was around now. She and Kenneth walked over to some porous brown boulders and sat on them, though the sharp rock poked into her skin. She felt vibrant.
“I didn’t expect to love it here so much.”
Kenneth looked genuinely confused. “Why would you leave your husband and run off here when everyone told you not to if you didn’t think you’d dig it?”
She shrugged. “Same old. I keep thinking I’m done with the exorcism, but I never am.”