A Life in Men: A Novel (43 page)

“You mean Nix? What, she wanted to come to Morocco and never got the chance?”

Mary looked up at the sun until her eyes felt raw. “Her boyfriend in London had a cousin in Morocco. They were thinking of coming here, I think to live. I don’t even know how seriously they considered it—she might have only written that to impress me. Actually, I’m not even sure her
boyfriend
was real. She might have made him up, too.”

“What the hell for?”

“It’s complicated. To throw me off the scent of something else, maybe. She would have had her reasons.”

They sat in silence.

“I watched that trial on TV, you know,” Kenneth said at last. “I watched everything about it and thought about you watching in Vermont or wherever the hell you live. A lot of people in Amsterdam said it was all rigged, they said the US rigged the whole deal, but then other sides were saying how
more
people should’ve been convicted, how that Libyan didn’t act alone. I thought about what you would think and how no matter who took the fall it wouldn’t bring back your friend. They talk about deterrents, but there’s no such thing as convincing someone bent on hate not to hate. In the whole wide history of the world, nobody ever talked anybody out of anything by stringing someone else up.”

Mary watched minuscule fish swimming in and out of the holes in the rock. It seemed unfathomable that they looked exactly the same as the tiny fish in Ohio creeks. How could anything live both in Ohio and here and be so unchanged?

“I came to town right after the verdict,” she said at last. She found his eyes and held them. “I showed up at your door and you fucked me and you never said anything.”

“What’d you want me to say?” he asked, but she didn’t know. She started to cry a little bit, but it wasn’t because of Nix, or Lockerbie, or Kenneth’s silence (she would have expected nothing else). It was only because her lungs felt so deceptively clean and she wished Geoff could have seen her on the sailboard, and the thought of his carpet bound so tightly and small and yet so heavy back in her room made her heart feel it could slam right out of her chest. And it did no good to talk about the fucking circus of the Lockerbie trial and all the justice never done in the world and all the families still haunted in a way even she could never fully touch—it did no good at all.

“Stand up. I want to photograph you.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

He smiled, but a different smile from when she came out of the water. “Doesn’t your brother talk to you about his work, Cystic? Nothing’s any good unless it burns.”

“Fine,” she said. “Do me here then. I’m not getting up.”

He took his lens cap off, started setting up the shot, took a test. When he kept waiting, she finally reached up and pulled down her suit, still not standing, wriggled it off under her, and threw it to the side, so that the sharp rocks were even more pronounced against her ass. She looked away from the camera, said, “There’s a picture of me Geoff took in the Canary Islands on a rock like this. We had it framed for a while in our bathroom until my poor father came to visit and freaked out.”

He kept clicking. She leaned back against the rock. Her back hurt in a way she hadn’t noticed when she was sailing across the water, and what had felt clean in her lungs just a moment before started feeling too scoured now: raw.

She said, “You’re never going to show me these, are you?”

“Sure,” he said, “I’ll show you. I’ll show you the next time you come to Amsterdam.”

“I told you,” she said. “I’m not coming again.”

He lowered the camera, squinted at the sky. “The light’s changed,” he said. “It’s no good anymore. We should get back.”

i miss dad even more since i’ve been here. not because he’d ever set foot in morocco (can you imagine?!), but because i never even thanked him for following me all the way to mexico to interrogate daniel and confront eli. i don’t like to think of you sleeping without him, worrying about me. i know he used to talk you down, just like geoff does for me. i’m coming to understand lost time in a different way since dad died. i’ve been a completely crappy daughter and now i live far away even when i’m home and maybe i can never rectify all the inconsideration, all the times i’ve held you at a distance, all the resentment for things that were never even for a moment your fault. mom, please don’t worry. i know i said when i left that i didn’t know when i’d be coming home, but i’ve decided on a month, no longer. i’ll be home by late september. i don’t like sleeping alone either. i wish i could say that coming here has been solely a mistake, but that would be a lie.

A
ND SO, WHEN
he shows up at her door, she is still somehow surprised. Dinner has been had, the four of them together, a fountain gurgling as background music. Sandor and Leo have retired to their shared room (with two beds, given automatically without any request to that effect), and Mary is in her own room reading Paul Bowles, as one is supposed to do in Morocco, and feeling horny and virtuous and filthy and ruined and hopeful, assuming Kenneth is out trolling for sex just like Port in the novel. He is not secretive about his activities and she is in no position to give even her blessing to his forays, much less anything else. It is possible that he loves her, but what of it? She lies on her woven bedspread, the glaring white of the walls blurring her vision, the tile of the floor chilly despite the heat outside. On the bed she is safe and warm and consumed with Port and Kit and their travails, until there is a knock on her door and she automatically assumes Leo, there for a postsex chat once Sandor has fallen dead asleep, Leo in some crazy silk smoking jacket with his hair a mess and looking hyperbolically beautiful, and maybe he will crawl into her bed and stay until morning, the two of them cocooned as though they come from the same womb.

But no, it is Kenneth fully dressed, the sand of the beach still clinging in spots to his jeans. He steps inside the room before she can invite him in or ask him to leave.

Not that she would ask him to leave.

She says, “Are you going out?”

For a moment he doesn’t respond and she wonders if maybe he isn’t going out but is instead leaving altogether, the way he said he would at Le Mirage. She tells herself that she shouldn’t try to persuade him to stay, that she has to let him go this time, that not only is trying to hold on to him selfish and wrong (because she is willing to be selfish, willing to be wrong), but it also simply makes no sense. He is not a thing that can be held on to. It is like trying to grab smoke. It is the way he has described trying to recapture that first heroin high, which never returns again no matter how far you chase it. What there is between them does not translate into any coherent language. Even if Geoff did not exist—even if she had never married—she would not have a future with this man. Fine, then, let him go: to his brothel, to his plane back to Amsterdam, or to his train to a new life in Tangier that could never include her. Where is Leo? Why couldn’t it be Leo at her door?

“I thought I’d—” Kenneth begins, then stops. “Can I sleep here tonight?”

She wants to ask,
Did you check out of your room because you’re leaving?
She wants to ask,
Have you run out of money?
She wants to say,
I hope you didn’t really quit your job at Mulligan’s, because I’m not going to be here as long as I planned.
She wants to offer,
I’m sorry I misled you,
though she isn’t sure if she would be referring to Mulligan’s or to something else. He sits on her bed, removes his sandals, a sprinkling of sand scattering on her floor. She is not sure she wants him here, his sand and the smell of his smoke and his bourbon and his skin. It is possible she cannot bear his being here, possible she will strike him and push him toward the door. Except that if she did so, they would inevitably end up in bed. Her hands stay at her sides.

He is taking off his clothes. Her senses start returning; he doesn’t have his rucksack, so he can’t be leaving for good. No, he has left his room, the room he paid for, to come here. They have had sex a total of seven times on three different occasions, and each time they fucked, it began almost instantaneously, a frenzy of bodies pushing together, a feast of hungry mouths. Nothing like this, this quiet removal of clothing down to his underwear and slipping between sheets. He enters her bed like a husband of many years, soundless and without fanfare, yet he looks all wrong in the prettiness of her hotel bed. She turns out the light and realizes that in their times together, other than when they slept in separate beds in Tangier, the lights have never been off. They have never shared the ceremonies of sleep. She is already in her pajamas and doesn’t undress further but gets into bed beside him, his body radiating heat like every man’s body since Joshua’s, so that her fresh white sheets are no longer cool.

He holds her in the darkness. The room has only a tiny window, too high up on the wall, as though they’re in a basement, and the darkness around them is total. They have embraced in the past, of course, even on this trip, but he has never held her like this, gently, silently, with a tentativeness and need she is not sure how to decipher. He is holding her, she thinks, as though her entire body is bleeding.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says through the excessive blackness of the room, “about going back to Atlanta and looking up my son.”

“That’s wonderful,” she says. “You should absolutely do that.”

“Nah. I shouldn’t really. But I might anyway.”

“Kenneth,” she says, “I think that’s seriously the best idea you’ve ever had.”

“Okay,” he says softly. “Okay.”

She is aware that she thinks of touching his dick now, as a kind of reward for his good idea. She is aware that she is almost thirty-three years old and is still not sure what comes next, what she has to offer if not sex.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here.” In the darkness, the words feel like a time long ago, waiting with Nix in the somber, incense-filled church for their separate turns inside the confessional, where they would make up sins:
I lied to my mother; I cheated on a test at school.
Were they so without sin then, or were they just lazy?
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,
she thinks, her eyes closed.
It has been seventeen years since my last confession
. Now she would not have to make things up. “In Morocco, I mean. I’m like that Hemingway story where all I ever do is look at new things and try new drinks.” She laughs. “I’ve never contributed anything anywhere I’ve gone. I taught English for about five minutes in Osaka. I should have
done
something, joined the Peace Corps, built a fucking house or gone to an ashram or volunteered at a refugee camp. I haven’t made any impact. I drink mint tea and buy carpets. It’s all been meaningless, and now it’s all going to be over.”

“Guess so,” he says, and it feels like she’s been slapped. She wanted him to argue, to tell her it was all worthwhile, to compare her life to his and judge it meritorious by contrast. Next to him, she has been Mother Teresa! The places where their bodies fit together are moist under her nightclothes and she knows his cock is hard though she cannot see or feel it. He chuckles and says, “I guess you could’ve gone over to Bosnia or Rwanda or something like that and caught some bug and died real noble on a stretcher for CNN and that would’ve looked prettier than being here with me.”

She is aware that she is rubbing herself against him slightly, that her body cannot keep still now, is humming and tingling with a voltage she can’t stop. In the past all their thrashing and shoving against walls and biting and screaming has been so much theater—genuine in the moment, but only noise.
This
—she could die of this. This desire could short-circuit her heart.

“Baby,” he says. His hands have started traveling down her body, shocking the electric places. “I told myself I could make it through the night. I told myself I’d kiss you, that maybe you’d let me kiss you and I could be that guy who would be happy with a kiss—that it would be the first time I just
kissed
a woman since you in London. It sounded real good in my head. I don’t want to leave, but I think I’d better.”

“No.” He tries to sit up, but she holds on to his biceps, hot like fever. “We don’t have to sleep. We can just stay here like this and know we won’t sleep and that we want something we can’t have and it will be okay. We won’t die of it. Don’t go. Please.”

“
I
want something I can’t have,” he says. “At least say what you mean.”

“That’s not true. I swear it’s not.”

“You can have it, then.” He laughs, the sound slicing the room. “Christ, this is stupid, you can have it already.”

“No,” she whispers. “I can’t.” She is holding him now, cradling his head like a child’s, wrapping her legs around him. It will happen, fine, it will happen and she doesn’t care. She will go back to Geoff and lie about this just as she already has to lie about so much else. At least Kenneth will be happy then and she will only be torturing one man. She presses her body into his and feels his hard-on against her bladder, the tangle of his hair against her hands. They push against each other, but her clothes are still on and it’s like pushing against a wall that sways but doesn’t yield. She kisses his eyes, his hair, but when his mouth searches hers she keeps moving, eluding him, pulling him back down to the bed to lie flat, spooning his body, which feels in the dark like the skeleton of some large animal, like excavated bones. She thinks and thinks that he will turn around, that he will pin her down and pull off her pants and that she will let him, but he doesn’t, and finally his breath begins to come more evenly, slow as though he may already be asleep.

“Cystic,” he says finally, and she realizes that
she
was sleeping, that his voice startled her awake. “The things I’ve done. I know you think I’m just telling tales, but if you knew what I’m capable of, you wouldn’t be here. I promise you that.”

“I already know,” she murmurs, forehead against his back.

“No,” he says. “You have no fucking clue. You just think you do.”