A Life in Men: A Novel (9 page)

“I bought a ticket on British Air the morning after all that blood. I wanted to see Joshua’s opening night, but I leave tomorrow.” She is still smiling. “My parents, my doctors, are waiting for me. Joshua’s sweet, but we both know he doesn’t even know me—we both know I’m not what he bargained for. I’m heading to Heathrow so early no one will even be awake to hear the door.”

It’s not clear what he feels. A roiling in his gut, insides jumping from the touch of her fingers. And under that a powerful wash of relief through his veins, numbing him like he just shot up.
She’s gone.
It doesn’t matter anymore. After tonight, she’s gone. Now that he knows this, he could do it. Push her against the pole again, grab her under the thighs to hoist her in the air, shoving her girlie underwear out of his way, and slide her down on his cock, ramming into her until those “fuck me” things she screams would all be for him. She’s leaving; he’s safe. All the better then if she throws some “fuck you” things in as a parting shot—hey, he likes it that way, too.

A stampede of footsteps shakes the stairs above their heads. Yank drops his hand, feeling her heartbeat still strumming on his palm. Without warning, his head fills—like lining up a shot in the lens of his mind’s eye—with the image, again, of the coach’s maid, the star gymnast’s lover, that girl he will never see, never know. Just another girl in the body count of men, like the many he himself has stepped over to get to nowhere. Where are those women now? Instead there is only one girl in front of him, only Nicole, who is not even really
Nicole,
but though she’s not what he thought, she is still whole enough that she would never sneak out on her lover under cover of night if she understood the full weight of Joshua’s stake—of their goddamn shared stake and how much holding fast to each other might matter to both of them, in a way so little in the world matters to anybody. With every electric fiber of his body, Yank believes that he
needs
this girl to disappear—that he wants never, ever to see her again way more than he wants to help Joshua—yet still he finds his body leaning in close one last time. Her eyes transform at his approach, her lips parting slightly, this time anticipating the kiss. But the circus is over, they’ve missed the finale, the house lights are on, and instead Yank finds his lips grazing only her ear as he whispers, “It ain’t morning yet, darlin’. Let me tell you a story.”

Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?

(GREECE: ZORG)

T
he girls wake up hung over from sweet wine. Even with the shutters drawn, Nix notices Mary’s lips, swollen and red from kissing her movie star, an airline pilot named Zorg. Zorg isn’t Greek after all, as Nix originally assumed amid boisterous bar noises that drowned out the nuances of his accent, but a Spaniard, here on holiday, too, visiting his fellow pilot, the shorter Titus, a certifiable Greek who owns a villa in Mykonos. In the clarity of morning, Nix is embarrassed by the absurdity of the language associated with their evening:
Zorg, Titus, villa
. Who has names like Zorg and Titus? Who refers to their house as a “villa”? It is as though she has wandered by mistake into a romance novel, the cover featuring Zorg shirtless, his tanned, muscular arms encircling petite Mary. She rolls her eyes in the semidarkness. This eye-rolling is all for her own benefit, of course, since Mary—who would normally be laughing with her (they might repeat, “Zorg,
Zorg
!” in increasingly freaky tones until they were hysterical)—is so horny she has lost her sense of humor.

Nix’s lips are not swollen, because she did not kiss Titus, but her breath and stomach are sour and her skin is sensitive from the sun and her hangover. Mary keeps barking at her to “get ready” or “they’ll think we’re not coming,” so she drags herself to the shower in the dinky bathroom adjoining the bedroom she and Mary have rented in a private home. No sooner has she shampooed her hair, however, than the water backs up, brown and smelly. She tries to outrace it, rinsing her hair quickly, but the backup soon overtakes the short lip of the shower stall and the room begins to flood. Mary, already dressed, scurries to get the woman who rented them the room, while Nix sits on her mussed twin bed, white towel matching white bedspread matching white walls, shampoo drying on her hair. On Mary’s return, the woman hollers at them in Greek for a good five minutes before roughly gesturing at Nix to get dressed. Nix puts her bikini on under her cutoffs, figuring her morning will now entail having to finish rinsing her hair at the beach once they’ve been evicted; however, the Greek woman only leads them around the corner and down the block, into another room furnished almost identically to the first. There—though not before demonstrating how to turn the shower faucet on and off several times—she takes her leave of them.

“They’ll think we blew them off!” Mary whines again, so Nix hurries through her hair-rinsing in the new, unflooded bathroom, skips applying makeup, and dresses again in the clothes she hastily threw on moments before. She knows she looks unfit for the cover of Mary’s romance novel, but this suits her just fine.

Although the girls are more than forty minutes late, Zorg and Titus are still waiting in Taxi Square, calmly sipping espresso, which Greeks simply call “coffee.” By night, their olive skin and dark eyes had seemed nocturnal (“like melted pools of chocolate,” Mary drunkenly rhapsodized), but in the daylight, their suave European handsomeness looks shiny and conspicuous, as though it has been painted on and scrubbed with a brush. Even Titus is considerably better looking than Nix took him for in the bar. The moment they see the girls approach, the men stand, Titus scattering some coins on the table. In quick succession, Mary and Nix have their cheeks kissed, one-two, one-two, and for a brief, frozen moment, Nix sees herself for exactly what she is: a terribly young midwestern girl who has grossly mistaken Skidmore for sophistication. For the first time, she begins to feel giddy: today is just the beginning, the prelude to her semester in London, the onset of her Education. Zorg has a rental car, but Titus mounts his scooter, and Nix is happy to climb on behind him while Mary has to get into the boring old car, which looks like the one Mary’s father drove when they were in grade school.

Nix’s hair dries quickly on the winding road to Plati Yialos, a resort area a couple of miles away from Mykonos proper. By the time she dismounts the scooter, she has forgotten she is not wearing lipstick or mascara; she has forgotten her tomboyish jean shorts; she feels infused with the sun and breeze of the scooter ride, as though her limbs and hair and skin are all aglow. Plati Yialos is
nothing
like Paradise Beach in Mykonos, where the girls went yesterday, which was like a trip to the zoo: full of naked, hairy, drunken animals, some splendid and some just annoying. Tranquil and romantic, Plati Yialos is a curved golden beach with hazy hills in the background and a plethora of tavernas in which pretty, civilized people drink coffees and chat and read. Although Zorg and Titus have already had coffee, the girls have only had a flood in the bathroom, so they stop and join the strangers at a sheltered taverna for their morning caffeine. Zorg and Titus are fully dressed in pleated linen pants and button-down cotton shirts that are miraculously unwrinkled. They sit with their legs crossed at the knee like a parody of European style and worldliness, smoking cigarettes and sipping from their tiny cups. Nix watches Mary, who has on a tie-dyed miniskirt and string bikini top, her wild hair wound tightly into two coiled knots on the side of her head so that she looks like a messy Princess Leia, and finds to her astonishment that her best friend appears not at all out of place amid the glamour of the morning, despite her goofily informal attire. Mary is pretty. Mary is blond. Mary is young. This triad of powerful currency radiates from her, a passport to anywhere. Nix feels tingly—she, too, is in possession of this passport. When she catches Mary’s eyes, they are shining.

The day is looking up.

For some reason, however, they do not remain at this tropical paradise but, as soon as the coffee has been ingested, pile back onto scooter and into car and take off once more. Nix is not sure where they are headed. The road has grown higher now, snaking around sharp cliffs that plunge downward alarmingly to the blue sea. Wind whips Nix’s hair, tangling it; neither she nor Titus is sporting a helmet. Her heart beats fast, like the exuberant Greek music pouring from the open window of Zorg’s car.

Then she sees it: A secluded cove of a beach below. Zorg and Titus slow the vehicles, easing them off to the side of the road. Though Nix has never considered the fact before, this is the first time she has ever seen an entirely empty beach and the desolation feels magical. Her body is overrun with an electric joy. It is all she can do not to run madly down the sand hills and plunge into the water. How can it be that anyone in the world lives in Kettering—even in Manhattan—when there are places like
this
on the planet? How can this beach be empty? Why isn’t everyone alive as excited about it as she is, and why are they not all here?

Nix silently thanks her mother’s Catholic God—in whom she herself stopped believing the day her father walked out the door—that everyone else is apparently brain-dead, thereby granting her the grace of this beach, empty but for her surrogate sister and two unwrinkled, straight-from-the-pages-of-a-resort-catalog men.

S
HE HAS ONLY
just arranged her straw mat and towel neatly on the pristine golden sand, slathered sunscreen onto her already tender back, and reclined artfully on her arrangement, when Titus flops like a fish from his own towel, sand splattering everywhere, to rest his gelled head on her shoulders.

The weight knocks her off her elbows, her chin hitting her towel. Uh . . . what is he
doing
? Until this moment, other than her clutching his waist tightly on the scooter, they have had no physical contact. When Nix goes to the beach with her friends, even the longest-term couples don’t lie on top of each other in the sand. It is common sense to know that sand is messy. It is common sense to know that’s a man’s large, gelled head on your shoulder for an undetermined period of time is likely to result in an uneven tan. Titus’s warm head, bearing down on her, makes her feel she can’t breathe.

“Hey,” she says, “you’re blocking my sun.”

Titus contorts his face to look at her, confused. Really, he
is
a pretty specimen. If she had met him at Skidmore, she would be all over him. She thinks again of the boy she lost her virginity to, and how after the sex she worked herself up to believing she liked him, simply because he immediately seemed to have lost all interest in her. Back home in Kettering, she drove by his house at night with her girlfriends, giggling and squealing if his bedroom light was on. Mary was not on those endless car rides; she was in the hospital by then, on IV antibiotics and steroids, having just been diagnosed with CF. Nix did not know what to do. When she visited the hospital, Mary’s mother was always there, on her face an expression of frozen cheer that Nix kept expecting to melt away into Munch’s
The Scream.
Outside the hospital, there were keg parties and fake IDs and bands playing in Dayton’s Oregon District, and foreign films at the Neon, and thrashing around to Siouxsie and the Banshees on precarious platforms at dance clubs. There was Bobby Kenner, the cute guy Mary used to lifeguard with at the country club and had been dating since the previous summer, who kept turning up at parties and crying on Nix’s shoulder, saying how sad he was and how much he loved Mary, though Nix knew Bobby barely called Mary anymore. Nix had always been the “impulsive” one, but the complicated, toxic alchemy of why her impulses led her to fuck Bobby Kenner’s brains out at one such party, on somebody’s parents’ bed, still feels elusive to her. That night, she wept theatrically into her pillow until she couldn’t breathe, worked herself up until she wondered whether
this,
this gasping, was what Mary felt like when she was in the hospital coughing, though she knew deep down that it was not, that she was just a hysterical teenage girl trying to understand a situation too big and too sad for her to grasp.

Her best friend was terminally ill. They had, since kindergarten, loved each other with the symbiotic, if sometimes competitive, ferocity of two only children who did not have sisters of their own onto whom they could project all their desires and fears. Their relationship was balanced on constantly shifting scales. Nix was slightly prettier, infinitely bolder, more popular among their shared girlfriends for her bawdy humor and sense of adventure, and for years it had seemed undisputed that she was their leader, Mary her faithful sidekick. Mary, though, had the better family: a reliable dad who would never abandon his daughter; a mom who taught at their old grade school and was loved by her students. Though the Grace family was hardly rich, they were more comfortable than Nix and her divorcée mother, who could not have continued living in affluent Kettering at all had their mortgage not already been paid off. And somehow, in late high school the balance started to shift in Mary’s favor, so that she had become the kind of girl guys fell for without her having to
do
anything, even lose her precious virginity.

Mary’s parents were among a new pro-adoption generation, the kind who, instead of treating Mary’s adopted status as a dark secret, wore it as a badge of pride, calling her their “chosen” child, saying she was “special.” Nix’s very
existence,
in contrast, was an accident, her mother having gotten knocked up in college, her father graduating literally days before her birth while his dropout new bride stayed home to elevate her swollen ankles. True to these beginnings, Mary’s staid, engineer dad doted on her, whereas Nix’s charismatic, restless father had loved his music career (and, Nix’s mother said, other women and booze) more; Mary had grown into “serious girlfriend” material, while Nix had become the kind of girl who drove past the houses of guys who weren’t calling her, who was starting to rack up one-night stands at the dance clubs, who fought with her often-depressed mother nonstop over broken curfews and coming home drunk. Now Mary was ill, and Nix was terrified of losing her. But amid it all was a horrible, creeping jealousy, as though Mary’s dramatic disease and the grief it inspired actually
verified
her virtue, her preeminence over whatever slutty irrelevance Nix possessed. Once Nix slept with Bobby Kenner, he stopped calling Mary altogether and started calling Nix, but only for sex. They would meet in secret, after Bobby had been out with his friends, and by midsummer Nix heard he was going out with a girl from another school, but still when he called she snuck out to meet him. “Nobody’s going to want me now,” Mary, out of the hospital now, would say during the long summer days while they lounged on chairs in Mary’s yard. “Look how Bobby disappeared the minute he found out—like I was contagious.” And Nix would say, “He’s just a pussy, he couldn’t deal with it, not everyone will be that way, he’s nothing, he’s no great loss, I promise you that.”

Though Nix had long aspired to go to Oberlin, as her father had, which would also have kept her in reasonable proximity to Mary, at the last minute she accepted a place at Skidmore, a small East Coast school, fleeing Ohio like her house was on fire. She resigned herself to the fact that Mary could be dead before they reached college graduation—that she was abandoning her best friend even if Mary was secretly better off without her. On that first winter break from Skidmore, when Nix reread her journal from the previous summer (
It’s like she’s the virginal, tragic heroine of a Victorian novel, and I’m just an expendable ho in a B horror flick
), she was so consumed with shame she burned the entire book in the fireplace one day while her mother was out, its plastic-and-calico cover stinking up the house.

Next to Zorg’s overwhelming good looks, even next to Titus’s swarthy masculinity, Bobby Kenner, with his ruddy cheeks and the shaved legs of a competitive swimmer, would look like a joke.

Yet Nix flips her shoulder hard, trying to toss off Titus’s heavy head.

Meanwhile, Mary and Zorg are frolicking in the water. Mary was on the swim team in high school, so these water scenes, à la 1950s movies about young love, become her. She has broad swimmer’s shoulders, incompatible with the rest of her tiny frame, though complemented by a curvy bottom the boys have always liked. Mary is, you might say,
known
for her ass, though few have ever seen it without covering. Nix has a pretty fine ass, too, if she does say so herself. This is one of the ways in which the two girls look alike, in addition to their blond hair, their similar height. Back home, people often asked if they were sisters.
The ass sisters.
Nix laughs to herself. Mary is topless here on this secluded beach, her small breasts pale in the sun. She and Nix both went topless on Paradise Beach, and Mary is planning to lose her virginity to Zorg tonight or tomorrow night, before leaving Mykonos for Ios, so why not show her boobs as a preview? Nix, however, has left her bikini top on. Her breasts are larger and rounder than Mary’s; they’ve been known to attract attention. But today she is playing the part of the spinster friend in whatever 1950s movie would feature Mary and Zorg splashing each other in the surreal blue waves. Or better yet, the ugly, older sister in that Joyce Carol Oates story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” which she read at Skidmore and loved so much she xeroxed it and sent it home to Mary. For once, Mary gets to be Connie, the hot-to-trot one, and she will be the plain, responsible older sister whose name she cannot recall. She owes Mary that much, though Mary does not know it. That much and far more.