A Life in Men: A Novel (47 page)

He kisses her softly. Her mouth still feels foul from the mists of her medication, from coughing everything out, but he doesn’t seem to notice or care. She lets him kiss her the way she would not let Kenneth kiss her just last night, and she tries to think of Hasnain, to feel a oneness with Nix, but instead she thinks of Alias’s girlfriend, brash and veilless and probably the age Mary was when she lived at Arthog House. Instead, at the feel of Alias’s arms encircling her, she thinks of Geoff’s more substantial, more mature embrace—the way he held her at Logan Airport with a tight agitation, his anger at her departure surrendering to fear. There is in her the antithesis of arousal, and she pulls away from the boy and looks into his dark eyes, beautiful and perfect in the way of her brother. Yes, he was right about Arab and Jew: he and Leo could be related. In the biblical milieu of Nawar’s village, Leo might even be the father of this young man. She pulls away to his murmurs of, “I’m sorry, please excuse me!” and she is not looking at Hasnain, who would be a middle-aged man now, but just at a hopeful, confused, intelligent, sheltered Moroccan boy who speaks at least three languages and believes in the Koran and who wants to touch an older, married, sick Jewish American because she is an experience, because she is as exotic as it gets. She doesn’t hate him for his behavior because she has been there: collecting people, collecting experiences. Someday Khalid will be a man, but not yet. His manhood will be his own journey, his girlfriend’s journey, and she will not be a part of it, will not be a story he can take out of the drawer of his mind and examine, even though some part of her wishes she could be.

Tomorrow she will go as far as the pass, take in the view, celebrate her birthday with three of the men she loves. And then she will go back down. It will be the perfect symbol of her completion. Then she will catch a ride back to Marrakech with Leo—let Sandor and Alias and Kenneth go on into the desert without her. She will fly back to Europe and call Geoff and ask him to come and meet her for Leo’s show, but if he cannot—if he
will
not—she will go back home. It is over. She has no business here. She opens the door, and Alias, confused and perhaps relieved, steps out into the hall.

In the dim light of her room, she sits down at the small blue table. There is no computer access here, so she opens her Nix notebook. She has not written in it since her first visit with Leo, with whom she soon began engaging in such a passionate and high-maintenance exchange of letters, e-mails, and phone calls that her old notebook—to a correspondent who never answered—went untouched, forgotten. This, she supposes, is what they call closure. Still, she could not bring herself to travel without it, and even now she does not rip out a page, merely continues where she left off. She does not intend to mail this letter, so in a way it
belongs
with those old missives to Nix, as though she is writing to Geoff’s future ghost—to whatever essence of him will remain, from whatever essence of herself. She begins:

You are the
man of my life. You have tolerated more than any lover should ever be asked to bear and I can
only hope that we can move on from here and instead of worrying about healing my body instead heal what distance has been between us because of me. I am placing myself in your hands because that is what love demands of everyone in the end: surrender. For too long I’ve confused the narrowing of the world that comes with commitment with the narrowing that comes with physical decline, and only now that I am truly facing the latter can I tell the difference. Maybe I would forge on further out into this feast of the senses that is the world if it were only my choice. But I want more to return to
you,
to stake our own piece of the earth and live fully on it for however long I have.

She does not mention Kenneth. She will never mention Kenneth.

There is never only one Truth.

There is only one truth at a time.

T
HE HOTEL IN
Imlil is terrible, and everyone is angry. At one another, at the surroundings, at Mary for being too sick to hike and spoiling their last day together, at Leo for having to leave. The pillowcases at this dive are nonremovable, sewn on so that they cannot be washed. The toilets—a row of stalls in the hall—are overflowing with brown fecal water and don’t flush. In the shower room, giant insects congregate on the tile walls, yet Mary and the others are all so filthy they
had
to shower, and Leo is furious at Sandor not only for all the henna cracks but because Sandor would not come into the shower with him and made him face those insects alone. The altitude is giving Leo a headache and kicking Mary’s ass, but when they retired to Leo’s room together to nap (safety in numbers), they were both afraid to turn out the lights, and when they finally tried, pulling the flimsy curtains, Mary kept bolting up and saying she felt bugs crawling on her, and this has Leo in a state of hypervigilant hysteria.

This is crazy. Even now Merel is boxing up
Still Life, with Men
to move it to Madrid, and meanwhile Leo is sleeping in a vat of African shit and bugs on a probably lice-infested pillow and all of it is rapidly increasing his count of gray hairs. Tomorrow he has to leave. He will not be able to make the hike with the others, and this is not the way he wanted to end his trip: his last trip with Mary, or so she claims. She told him this morning that she was leaving with him, but once they postponed the hike she changed her plans. She
needs
to make the trek, she says: it’s like a symbol. Tomorrow Leo will get a ride back to the city without her and she’ll remain with Kenneth and Alias.

“You have to stay and watch her,” Leo begged Sandor the moment Mary was out of earshot. “We can’t leave her here alone with them. Just stay a couple more days, go back to La Mamounia after the hike, and chill out by the pool. Then get her on a fucking plane and bring her back with you. Don’t let her go running into the desert or have an orgy or whatever plan she has in her head. Come meet me and we’ll call her lame-ass husband and get him out for the preview party, okay? We’ll be shopping for party clothes in seventy-two hours.”

Sandor has been difficult this entire trip. He folded his long arms in a way that made his chest look too narrow for the job. “I want you to admit this is madness,” he said, too loudly. “I want you to admit that we should never have gone along with her big Morocco plan. What is she
doing
here, Leo? Your sister has a terrible disease, and she is going to climb the fucking mountain? This is crazy, and you talk about party clothes! How can you leave me here to cope with her alone?”

“It’s only one more day,” Leo insisted. “She’s doing fine—she’s holding up great! Everybody treats her like an invalid and that’s exactly what she hates, don’t you see? Just stay with her, Sandor, please. We’ll meet up in Spain.”

And so Leo will be flying home alone.

Sandor feels excluded, Leo suspects, by what’s going on in Paris, in Madrid. His big show of worrying about Mary is to avoid admitting other, more personal resentments. Leo understands; he would be jealous if
he
were the one left out in the cold. He’s seen this happen with other artist couples in their circle: one partner becoming envious, bitter. Sometimes, the relationship does not survive . . .

The thought of Sandor’s leaving him is too awful. Leo dwells, instead, on the bugs.

The hotel is called Étoile; there’s a little subheading on the sign in front that says
S
TAR OF THE
A
TLAS
like a Vegas strip show. There is a small terrace café in front, which is the most sanitary place to hang out if you don’t dwell on what the kitchen must be like inside, where they’re making your food. Sandor took off for a hike alone, and Mary has taken one of Leo’s Xanaxes and is finally crashing. At the terrace café, Kenneth sits reading. Leo doesn’t remember seeing Kenneth with a book earlier; he must have gotten it from one of those exchanges these traveler joints have in the lobby. James Michener’s
The Drifters
—Leo starts cackling. He isn’t Kenneth’s biggest fan, but he has to admit that the guy, despite his penchant for incorrect grammar (obviously a pose he has held so long he’s forgotten it’s bogus) seems well read. Sometimes he reminds Leo of his father: the whole literate ex-junkie thing. This is, of course, part of why Leo dislikes him. And part of why Mary is screwing around with him: girls and their Oedipus complexes. Geoff and Kenneth, like a competition between Mary’s straight-and-narrow adoptive father and her deranged biological deadbeat one. Sure, he gets it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t dumb.

“Ever read this?” Kenneth asks. “It’s actually pretty good. Not
good
good, but for what it is. The bible of my tribe. Or what used to be my tribe once upon a time.”

Leo sits down, motions to get someone’s attention. “I don’t read stories,” he says. “I mean, I read history, biographies, art magazines, that kind of thing. Not fiction.”

“Whatever,” says Kenneth.

He seems a little drunk. Leo’s not sure how much Moroccan beer a man like Kenneth would have to drink to achieve that state, but it seems true nonetheless. Maybe when nobody was looking he procured more hash?

“Where’s my sister?” he says, even though he knows.

Kenneth gestures toward the wider world with his beer can. “Hell if I know,” he says. “Ask the Arab kid.”

At first Leo doesn’t get what he means. He thinks briefly of a one-eyed kid from back in Nawar’s village but then realizes Kenneth means Alias. “Huh?” he says. His voice rises to a squeal. “Holy shit! You don’t mean she’s run off with him?”

Kenneth raises an eyebrow. “Well, they didn’t
run
nowhere. But she kissed him last night.”

“What!” Leo stomps his feet a little. “How the hell did that happen? Shit! I thought that kid was gay! Closeted, of course, but gay.”

Kenneth snickers under his breath. “Man, you people think everyone is gay.”

“Don’t ‘you people’ me,” Leo says.

“Why shouldn’t I? You think I don’t see how you look at me, like I’m some trailer-park redneck? What’s good for the goose, Kemo Sabe.”

“Hmmph,” Leo says. “I take it I’m the goose in this equation. Fine, the gander buys the beer.”

Kenneth doesn’t protest, only mutters, “Take it from me, that kid ain’t gay.”

“Well,” Leo says with a deep sigh. “Quite a loss for our team. He’s stupid but pretty.”

“He ain’t stupid either,” Kenneth says. “He’s just young.”

“What’d she kiss him for?” Leo gratefully accepts his own squat can of shitty beer. “And why would she tell you about it?”

“Why shouldn’t she tell me?” On the terrace Leo notices several insanely large beetles lounging in the sun, fatter and even more repulsive than the leggy insects of the shower. “You and Sandor got it all wrong about us. We’re just old friends.”

“Old friends my ass,” Leo says.

Kenneth signals for another beer. “You ever read a
biography
of Lawrence Durrell? ’Cause he wrote that once you view somebody as a confessor or a savior, they’re outside the bounds of love to you.”

Leo gawks, stupified. “What the hell would that have to do with
you
?”

“Good question, buddy. Good question.”

Leo gulps his beer. He should have gone on the hike with Sandor even though Sandor’s been skittish like some closeted kid himself, constantly fearing being “discovered” and stoned in the town square. As though they are truly an anomaly here any more than anywhere else. As though they are truly an anomaly anywhere.

“So are you saying Mary can’t love Geoff? Are you saying—you don’t want her to
leave
him or something, do you? I thought you were just here for the”—
sex
, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it—“pigeon pastilla. For the bugs and the delightful aroma of sheep.”

Kenneth doesn’t answer. Leo waits for a moment, thinking he is considering his reply, but after a while he concludes that Kenneth has simply decided to pretend he hasn’t spoken, that he isn’t
there
, so he stands and leaves the table and heads inside the hotel, up to Mary’s room. He knocks on her door but nobody answers. He knocks again and sees her wandering from the shower room fully dressed even though she already showered earlier that day.

“Hey,” she says. “I just peed in the shower. The drain is way more sanitary than the toilets.”

“Oh, I know,” Leo says. “I did that this morning.”

He goes into her room. They sit on the bed and she does another hit of her inhaler. Leo wonders if there’s a limit to how much she’s supposed to use, and he’s guessing she’s reached it.

“I just talked to your . . . um, lover? Paramour? Cowboy for hire? About how you’re apparently some Mrs. Robinson putting the moves on our young Alias. I thought maybe I’d find him with you in here.”

“I didn’t put the moves on him,” Mary says. “He put the moves on me. Sort of—I’m not sure his heart was in it. We kissed a little—very little.” She stops. “Kenneth told you that? Why?”

“The question, sweetheart, is why you told
him
.”

“I just wanted to be honest,” she says.

At this, Leo is dumbfounded.

“Look,” Mary says. “I’m leaving soon, I’ll never see him again. I didn’t want to leave with secrets between us.”

“Oh, shit,” Leo says. “That Durrell thing was applicable, then.”

“What Durrell thing?”

“Never you mind.” Leo puts his legs up on the bed. “Look, honey, what are you doing? Alias is a little boy. You have a husband—and a lover. What’s going on?”

“I told you,” Mary says. “Nothing happened.”

“But what’s going
on
?”

She’s quiet then. She leans forward and wraps her arms around her bony knees. “I was just trying to live every day like it might be my last,” she says finally. “Let’s face it, I’m not a UN ambassador or a prima ballerina or a doctor who saves lives. I’m nothing special. You—you paint and that’s your passion, right? Well, the rest of us, if we want to experience a high like that, we take drugs or have sex. I’m too sick for drugs, so that’s it: I fuck.”