A Life in Men: A Novel (7 page)

What if he had stayed behind? Or maybe that is only a story I’m telling myself.

Lately Joshua has taken to regaling me with South African fables. When he returned from the pub, drunk and smelling of a world of men, he twined his body around mine on our sunken mattress and whispered, “In South Africa, this bed could be dangerous.” Then told me the legend of the Takoloshe, a demon some superstitious blacks in his country think sneaks into homes at night to steal souls. In reality, he said, the deaths are caused by gas leaks in
faulty, old-fashioned stoves, which is why believers say the demon is tiny. His eyes were bright as he explained, his hand trailing circles on my stomach. Yank had not returned to the flat with him, though I heard Sandor puttering around next door. Joshua kissed my neck over and over again, and I knew he was apologizing even though he didn’t need to. He whispered to me as if telling me an urgent secret, “The ones who die are always those closest to the ground.”

But Nix, I already know that is a lie.

I
T HAS BECOME
a matter of now or never. Clutching
London A to Z
(zed!), Mary rides the Tube to West Kensington and disembarks, an excited dizziness overtaking her the way it might a devotee of Virginia Woolf upon arriving at Bloomsbury Square. Turning left out of the station, she walks the few blocks to one of the places she crossed an ocean to see. Ten Archel Road, the flat where Nix lived for four short months. The building is white stone, not so different from Arthog House, unremarkable. Mary cannot go in because she has no key, but she stands outside imagining Nix rushing up and down its steps on crisp fall nights, buzzed and smelling of pub smoke, perpetually searching for her keys. Nix being Nix, in high-heeled boots and her swingy camel coat, hair flattened by London rain.

Mary sits on the steps. There should be more to do here, but what? She avoided coming for so long that the coming itself has taken all her reserves, leaving nothing for gesture or ceremony. Through her tights, the December cement is cold on the backs of her thighs. She gets up.

Around the corner she looks for the Indian restaurant, and there it is. There it is! She expected a takeaway joint (Nix mentioned getting her meals to go), but no, the place is upscale if also gaudy, decorated in heavy reds and golds. Through the window, the woman at the hostess stand is unexpectedly beautiful, elegant, serene. She can see the woman returning her stare, so she nervously rushes inside.

“Hi!” The word comes out too loudly and the woman jumps, as though Mary may be concealing a gun. “Is Hasnain around?”

The woman’s sphinx face is blank. “No.”

“Oh! Well, I’m a friend of his—can you tell me when he’ll be working?”

The woman says, “There is no Hasnain who works here.”

By the way the woman has said it, it is clear what she means, but Mary cannot let the smile of anticipation off her face. She cannot admit what she is hearing. If it is not
this
Indian restaurant, then which one can it be? There are hundreds in London, and this one is around the corner from Nix’s flat, just as Nix specified in her letters. She says brightly, “Hasnain doesn’t work here anymore? Do you know where he works or how I can get in touch with him?”

The woman looks very young, really, no more than her early thirties. Suddenly Mary realizes how delusional she was when she walked in—she had assumed herself face-to-face with Hasnain’s mother. There is no way this woman could be the mother of someone older than Nix. She feels unhinged. The woman is right not to trust her.

The woman says, “There is no Hasnain.” She has not spoken slowly, but Mary hears her as though through underwater.

Later there will be no memory of leaving the restaurant. She will ride the Tube, transferring at Earl’s Court and heading to the Baker Street Station, then veering right (past the shop where Nix purchased cappuccino every morning on her way to class?) until she reaches Regent’s College, inside the majestic Regent’s Park. There is a zoo in here somewhere, but Mary does not see it. She watches swans wandering around, wondering if they are the same swans Nix mentioned in her first letter describing the school.
Ah, the magic of London!
Nix wrote with the irony of a traveler more experienced than she really was. Once, Nix climbed a fence into the college grounds after hours, when the gate was locked. Mary is not sure what Nix was doing that for; she cannot remember if she ever knew. She was with her flatmates, girls who have graduated by now and are home with their own memories of Nix—of
Nicole
—and no memories of Mary, whom they have never met.

Mary is exhausted. Since her “major hemoptysis” (as Dr. Narayan called it on the phone), there has been no more blood in her sputum. Still, she does not feel the same. All week she’s been afraid to use her inhalers, to thin anything out lest she start bleeding again. She found herself making excuses to Dr. Narayan: how smoggy London was, how smoky the air of Arthog House and the Latchmere. At last, she ended up blurting out, as if to a priest in a confessional, “I’ve been skipping my PTs—the house where I live is so crowded, it’s just hard to find the privacy to do them.” She pronounced “privacy” the English way. Silence expanded on the other end of the line, and her cheeks burned. Dr. Narayan sighed. “I thought you were smarter than this,” he said, his clipped accent not unlike the mysterious woman’s in the Indian restaurant. “I thought you understood there is no way we can help you unless you’re willing to help yourself.”

Until the night of blood, Mary had not felt truly
ill
since the infection that led to her diagnosis at seventeen. Now, heading back to the Baker Street Station from Regent’s Park, her ragged breath and clammy skin shame her, her body revealing its ugly truth. Waiting for the Tube, she leans against a wall, trying to stay out of the way of flextime commuters, when an announcement comes on the PA system that the Bakerloo line has been delayed owing to a “body on the tracks.” Mary looks around in disbelief, but no one else seems to have registered the news. Londoners calmly read newspapers or munch a Cadbury. Soon the train comes anyway, the body no doubt having been unceremoniously removed.

Next to her in the crowded car is a trendy boy, hair dipping deeply over his left eye, jaw sharp as a knife beneath the curtain. “Does this happen often?” she asks him. “Delays because of . . . uh, bodies on the tracks?”

The boy laughs, one short bark. His breath smells of smoke, and momentarily Mary imagines burying her face in his chest. “You have no idea!” he proclaims, almost proudly.

Apparently, all over London, commuters are hurling themselves to be electrocuted and run over, but nobody minds. It would be in bad form to make a fuss.

She changes trains at Earl’s Court, rides back to West Kensington. Outside, the sky is dark now. She needs to go back to the Indian restaurant to ask the
real
questions. Were there former owners? Has Hasnain died? Moved away? She has to find him.

Outside the station, the Three Kings pub dwarfs one corner, beckoning as it did the day she rode here with Yank. Nix would have seen this pub every time she went to and from the Tube, which would mean—though none of the letters mention it—that she went there at least occasionally or, let’s face it, probably a lot. The Three Kings is the antithesis of the Latchmere, the crowd well heeled, sparkling clean. Girls drink wine and half pints of cider. Guys are loud but in a good-natured way, so familiar in their bland good looks that Mary doesn’t feel strange entering alone. The pub is gigantic; nobody will notice her amid the commotion. If people look her way at all, they will think her friends are at the bar getting drinks; they will think she is waiting for a date. She sits at a table with her cider.

She is on her second drink, wishing cider were more carbonated so that it might help break up the mucus in her plugged chest, when the bartender makes an announcement. “We’ve had a bit of a bomb threat,” he explains, laughing. “Er, better evacuate, yeh?”

Mary jumps up as though her seat is on fire. Again, though, it is as though she imagined the words. Brits sit at their tables casually finishing drinks. Some laugh. The roar of the pub makes individual sounds indistinguishable. A few people head lackadaisically to the door. This, Mary realizes, is their idea of “evacuation.” She races for the exit. Only a handful of the vigilant—probably American students—cluster on the sidewalk.

She heads back in the direction of the Indian restaurant, but the moment she sees the mouth of the Tube station gaping at her, yawning its smell of train exhaust and escape, she runs in and swipes her pass, bolting down the steps. As if fated, the train is waiting, doors slung open, a clipped British voice reminding commuters to “mind the gap.” In the car, Mary grips the silver pole in front of her, hands slick against its surface.

On the wall is a sign warning passengers not to open or touch any unattended parcels, but to notify the Underground staff immediately and leave the train car.

In Kettering, Ohio, if you find an unattended handbag or parcel, you are taught to open it, looking for a wallet with ID. In Kettering, you would call the owner up and offer to drive over with the lost items. Perhaps in New York City, you look for the wallet intending to
steal
it, but you open the parcel just the same! It is 1990. Nowhere in America would anyone think an unattended package might contain a bomb.

During her time in London, Nix sent exactly four letters. In none did she mention that the city was dangerous, littered with bodies on the tracks, bombs on the Underground, pubs on the verge of explosion. She wrote only that she could walk alone at night without fear. Nix bragged, like recent expats are wont to do of their new environs, that nobody owned a gun.

As though everyone they knew in Kettering possessed firearms!

Nix’s last letter was different from the others, which had an impersonal quality, like a travelogue. The final installment, by contrast, was breathless and giddy, if paradoxically the briefest. In it, she announced that she was in love. Though her mother had no idea, she was not returning to Skidmore for the spring semester but coming back to London immediately after the New Year. She had “big news” to share, which Mary feared might be her engagement to the mysterious Hasnain, whose surname Mary never learned. Nix wrote,
I’m sorry for how I’ve acted
, though it had felt impossible, during the anxious months before, to pinpoint precisely
how
Nix was acting—exactly what seemed off.
I can’t wait to see you again
, she ended, signing that final letter in their childhood code,
BFA,
for “best friends always,” which the other letters had mysteriously withheld, employing the far more impersonal sign-off,
Love
.

Mary holds her face into her
A to Z,
hot tears darkening and buckling its pages. The vibrations of the train make her heaving shoulders shake unevenly. Her mother was right. Though she initially came to London like a detective to follow a trail, after two years, whatever she hoped to find has evaporated. Nix is gone.

And all around her, London is burning, but nobody else has noticed. Even Nix.

Four months doesn’t sound like a long time, but for me it has been another world. In this world, I’ve been to the Tate after eating a slice of hash cake, where I listened to Yank and Sandor argue over Dalí for hours. I’ve made love with Joshua on the sloping concrete of an underpass where part of Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
was filmed, where they now hold drag races. I’ve been to a reggae pub in Lambeth where Yank had his pocket picked by a tattooed prostitute who gives him freebies sometimes but must have decided she wanted back pay. I’ve danced on the Latchmere bar during “afters” so wildly that I fell, giving myself a bruise on my thigh the size of a grapefruit, while the regulars cheered. I’ve watched fireworks for the Queen Mum’s birthday and braved the notorious Notting Hill Carnival (no riots this year!), and I’ve come to understand that British toilet tissue is too rough for use after sex and the myriad things this implies about England. I’ve attended parties where the guests were from at least eight different countries but basically everyone was a dealer, and when an old geezer from the West Indies asked, “Love, what are
you
doing here, who’s looking after you?” I was set to protest that I am an independent American woman who requires no looking after, but Joshua came forward and said, “Thank you,
umkhulu,
I’m keeping her safe,” and
I realized all at once that I don’t know the first real thing about him. It’s too much work being you, Nix, but maybe I am not quite
me
anymore either. I’ve done nothing I came here to do, met no one I came here to meet, and still I’ve become someone new.

Y
ANK AND
J
OSHUA
are on the floor of the sitting room passing a hash cigarette back and forth. Tomorrow is opening night. For the first time, Joshua will do his trapeze act in public; he has gotten them free tickets, and after the show there will be a party for the circus members’ family and friends, though most have no people in London. Yank was not particularly hot to attend, but Joshua pleaded, “You’ll dig it, high-wire acts and the Chinese swing—just your speed, all high risk,” until he shrugged his helpless consent. Lately he feels weirdly connected to Joshua, a strange sense of responsibility for the kid. He always
liked
him fine—better than he liked most people—but there’s more to it now. Like he and Nicole are conspiring somehow to protect him.

Joshua inhales, holds.

Yank says, “Buddy, this here’s an intervention. You’re gonna drop that flying Chink on her head, you keep this shit up.”

Joshua laughs appreciatively. “Oh, plenty of people at the circus smoke,” he says, as though Yank were alluding to the health of his lungs. “Just like gymnasts.”

“You ever afraid you’ll fall?” Seriously this time: he really wants to know.