A Life in Men: A Novel (50 page)

Yes, if only things can improve
before
he calls Leo, then he will avoid the fallout. They will be locked in secrecy forever—the old Arthog House trio—and Leo and Geoff need never know how close things came.

By morning she is already in surgery. There was more bleeding during the night, her oxygen levels dipping so low she required a ventilator. These words conjure apocalyptic images in Sandor’s mind, but when Mary comes out of the operating theater, the doctor pronounces her bleeding “fini.” They found the source: both lungs at once. In recovery the ventilator is scaled down, so by the time Sandor and Kenneth are permitted to see her, she wears only an ordinary oxygen mask.

“Luke,” she rasps through her ravaged throat, “I am your father.” Then she giggles on anesthesia as they wheel her back to her room.

Crisis averted.

Kenneth rings Alias at La Mamounia to tell him the news. Mary still won’t give them Geoff’s number in New England, but Sandor tries Leo’s cell, Merel’s cell, even the Paris gallery. It is still early and every call goes straight to voice mail. He leaves no message other than
It’s urgent, call
. If they hadn’t given her medical paperwork to Boutell, they could track down her American physician and get word to her family, but those papers are gone, the French doctor seems to be missing, the nurses know nothing of the forms. Sandor rings Leo every half hour, to no avail. He isn’t sure where Leo is staying, and last year Leo dropped his cell phone into a urinal by accident and just left it there. Mary goes by her maiden name; Sandor doesn’t know Geoff’s; Leo is the keeper of such things. Leo, her brother, who cannot be trusted with anything. They wait, more bored now that she isn’t bleeding. Sandor and Kenneth bullshit about the London jazz club Vortex for a while, how excellent it was. Mary asks them to find her a
Herald Tribune
.

Crisis averted
.

Except that suddenly she is spiking a fever. Except that when Boutell finally reappears, face more worried than it was yesterday, he says he looked up cystic fibrosis on the Internet because they have never had a CF patient here. Except the nurses clear her room and stick a central line into her chest, and when Kenneth reenters he says, “She doesn’t like that, she doesn’t want that there,” and Sandor says, “I’m sure the doctors know what they’re doing,” though clearly this may not be true at all, and Mary says nothing now; she seems detached from her body. Her skin is no longer supernaturally white but flushed from fever. “I shouldn’t have left her last night. I knew I shouldn’t’ve left,” Kenneth says over and over again until Sandor looks at him hard and says, “
I
left her, too. Just shut up.”

IV-administered antibiotics can take as much as twenty-four hours to work. Just over twenty-four hours ago they were drinking coffee from toxic plastic bottles; Mary was crooning at Moroccan children; Leo had not yet boarded his plane. What if Sandor reaches Leo and Leo falls apart? There is something unspeakably fragile in him—what if this news is the thing that does him in? And how could Leo be
expected
to bear this when Sandor can hardly take it himself and he is the stable one, the sane one, the one who is not connected by blood to this woman they both love? Leo’s phone goes to voice mail again and Sandor hurls his cell across the room so that its insides fall out. In the toilet his stomach retches but nothing comes up. Twenty-four hours.

Kenneth is waiting in the hall when he returns. “I’m telling that doc to call her husband,” he says. “This circus has gone on long enough.” But as he leaves to find the doctor, word comes that Geoff
is
on the line: he must have been alerted by Mary’s home physician. A nurse comes to collect Sandor, the husband’s alleged brother-in-law, saying, “Son mari pour vous.”

Sandor has met Geoff only once, at Mary’s father’s funeral. He remembers him as exceptionally handsome in an entirely different vein than Leo. Tall, sturdy, masculine, well groomed. He and Mary looked vaguely wrong together, but Leo made more of it than it was.

“Leo.” Geoff’s voice is all business yet strangely intimate—the sound of his wife’s brother’s name in his mouth. “Is it as bad as that Dr. Boutell says? Why won’t they give her the phone?”

Sandor clears his throat. “No,” he says, “it’s just me. Sandor. Leo had to go back to Paris, and then this happened. I told them she was my sister, I hope you don’t—”

“I’m getting on the next plane. You do not let anything happen before I get there, Sandor. No one touches her—no more surgeries, do you understand? I’ll be there in less than twenty-four hours.
Nothing
happens, promise me.”

“You don’t get it,” Sandor begins, using the expression Leo often feeds him. “She was bleeding, there was no choice—”

“Listen very carefully,” Geoff says with grave authority, so that even before he continues, Sandor is struck by the full impact of what he and Kenneth have wrought in hiding the truth: that they have been errant, disorganized children playing a man’s game. “There is not a single cystic fibrosis center in Morocco. There are something like four on the entire African continent. Mary had no business even setting foot in that country—she has colonized bacteria that can attack her system and kill her just from forgetting to wash her hands in her own house. I begged her not to go, I refused to have any part of it, and maybe that could have been the end of it, but no, you and her irresponsible, oblivious brother were all for it and ran down to meet her with fucking bells on and took her hiking at nine goddamn thousand feet. Now my
wife
has been bleeding and cut open and intubated in the middle of Bumblefuck. Do you realize more people get pneumonia in the hospital than anywhere else, and that’s in fucking
America
? If she’s septic, nothing will help her—nothing. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“I’m sorry,” Sandor chokes out. “I’m sorry—”

“You tell her I’m coming. You tell her I love her and I’ll fix—” Geoff’s voice breaks. “You tell her I’m going to get her the hell out of there.”

He hangs up the phone.

T
IME’S MOVING TOO
fast. Too fast when Cystic’s alert and can talk, and while at first the hours in between dragged, now those are speeding toward Kenneth, too, hurtling him along. It’s like snaking up the incline of a roller coaster real slow and you think the wait will kill you, but once the descent starts there’s no time for anything anymore, not even the dread. It’s all over before you know it. Three days, that’s it. Three days they’ve been here and nothing’s the way it was, as if that time before was a shadow life, a book he read long ago. There’s never been anything but this. The hours he spent in agonized anticipation of the end of their trip, of the day she went back to her husband and he never saw her again, seem like an elaborate scam now, a children’s story they were feeding themselves. It could never have played out any other way than this.

She’s living in the in-between place, waiting to be ferried across. The doctors don’t say it like that; Dr. Boutell doesn’t say much—he’s way over his head. Every time they see him, he has a phone in his hand, calling somebody to consult, even bringing Cystic his own cell a few minutes ago so that she could talk to her mother at Logan Airport, where her mom’s hooking up with the husband, the two of them flying over together.

Turns out getting a flight to Casablanca isn’t such a simple matter. Even JFK doesn’t offer the flight every day, so it’s turned into a scramble, Sandor says, as they compare flying to Europe first and then hopping some Iberia or Air Maroc flight down with waiting for the next day’s flight out of Logan direct. In the end it must’ve been a wash: the husband’s flying out tonight, will be in Casablanca by morning and in Marrakech later that day. Leo, too, is coming back, landing in Casablanca separately, but ultimately waiting for the same flight to Marrakech so that they will all descend together, a stampede of righteous family members demanding answers from Boutell, and hoping for a miracle Kenneth knows in his bones won’t come.

When they arrive he will already be gone. A given. He will not be around to see the end, not be permitted any space at the bedside for final good-byes. Once that flight from Casablanca lands, even Alias will have more rights than he. No matter, her bedside isn’t
territory;
no pissing contest can make this go any different. Her husband is coming and Kenneth is glad. The man is a doctor and at least this three-ring circus will end. The husband will arrive and see the truth of it and that will be that. They’ll medevac her out of this joint, bring her somewhere high tech and gleaming. Then settle down to watch her die.

Who knows how long they’ll have to wait, though? A body, even a body that’s been through what hers has, can take a long time shutting down. He thinks of Cystic and how her eyes will twitch. How the morphine will stop the way she sometimes just starts gasping, the panic of her air hunger, the outrage of Boutell’s saying that they
can’t
turn the oxygen up any higher or she’ll stop breathing on her own—this makes no sense to him, this makes no goddamn sense—that if it goes any higher she could end up on a ventilator, and the way she fought it the first time they might have to induce a coma just to get it in her, and then you’re talking life support. Right now she’s still breathing on her own, just with bursts of terror and biting at air that won’t go down. As if this is a favor to her; as if torture is a treatment plan.

The husband will come in and speak medicalese and stop this; he’ll make them increase the morphine and then either she won’t know anything anymore or the things she knows, the things she sees behind her eyes, will be inaccessible, so at least everyone else will feel better with her doped up like that, they’ll sit round the bed and say,
At least she isn’t suffering,
like they have any fucking idea what goes on behind a person’s eyes when the sweet, vicious knife of the drug claims your days.

He waits in the hall. She talks to her mother, and her voice has a hysterical edge but comes slow and groggy like a hiss. She says the usual things; he can hear this from the hall. The
I’m sorry
s, the
I love you
s. He and Sandor have slunk out into the hall so she can have her privacy, but maybe there’s nothing private left anymore; things are too far gone for private. He wants this
over,
wants her free of it; he doesn’t want to be sent away to imagine the end rather than bear witness with his own eyes. He doesn’t want to abandon her to their civilized grief and pretty lies.

He has no right to her. He isn’t trying to believe he has a right.

She keeps saying she doesn’t want her husband here, but Kenneth knows this is just her own pretty lie—her fear talking. As long as the husband isn’t here, she can keep some core of bravado up, some face she needs to keep in place to get through this, but the minute she sees him, the minute he walks in the room, Kenneth knows she’ll fall. He’s got no illusions about this. She’s got no kids; if she had wanted to walk out on her marriage, she would’ve done it. She loves the man: simple as that. She loves him enough to have fought every impulse she had, to have beaten herself up every time she couldn’t win. She loves him enough that even though she was going to have to lie anyway about Kenneth being on the goddamn continent with her—about the fact that he existed at
all
—she still wouldn’t fuck him the moment it became something more than a game, more than a same-time-next-year thrill. And that kind of love is dangerous. She’ll see the man and she’ll fall apart, she will become abject regret and naked fear and then the morphine will come and Kenneth will be on a plane by then, so who knows, who knows?

She’s so quiet.

There’s so little left in her now that it takes a while to notice what’s going on. Takes a while to notice that she’s not talking anymore, that her bedclothes are covered in red. Maybe she was
trying
to scream but no sound, no air came. He and Sandor cry out and all at once there is a frenzy of activity: they rush the room, these dark nurses in their starched white uniforms, they shout to one another in French and when Kenneth and Sandor get too close they’re shooed away. Christ, how much is one body supposed to take? Where is all this blood even coming from? He kicks the wall, but it is centuries-old stone, and there is no crash, only pain.

The last thing he sees before they pull the curtain is her mouth clutched against her own blood like a kiss, as a nurse strides and snatches Boutell’s phone from her hand, snapping it shut.

S
HE’S TOO SICK
to operate on now. Her fever’s still raging after twenty-four hours, the antibiotics ineffectual, like so much water flowing into her veins. They cannot cauterize and so it’s just back to more blood clotters through her central line. Even the cough suppressant would depress her breathing too much now to risk it. The scenario in Kenneth’s mind revises itself: No medevac. This is her final destination. Now there is nothing to do but wait it out.

“D
O YOU EVER
think about Joshua?” she says. She is sitting elevated to help her breathe, her face so white there is no contrast between her skin and her pillows except for the blood still dried on her lips. She stares beyond him at the curtains, pale and stark like nothing else in this country, nothing like the blues of Asilah and Essaouira, as if those colors no longer exist.

“No,” he says.

He’s never before realized how boldly he’s felt entitled to air.

“Will you think about me?”

“Not if I can help it, darlin’.”

Her small laugh is a wheeze; it takes her time to recover. Soon, an hour, maybe less, she will start the alternation of chills and burning again, the cycle she’s riding between pushing off her bedclothes and begging for more blankets, between lying limp and sweating on her bed and shaking so much that they thought at one point she was having a seizure. “Now’s the time to start lying to me,” she instructs, putting her hennaed hand on his, always the teacher.

He regards the winding lines, faded from black to brown and leading nowhere except back into one another like a labyrinth. How fitting it turned out to be that Nawar decorated her hands and those of her brother for her own funeral.