A LIFE IN
MEN
A NOVEL
Gina Frangello
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2014
Also by Gina Frangello
My Sister’s Continent
Slut Lullabies
For Sarah B., 1968–1998, for inspiration.
And for Kathryn K., 1968–2011, for those sad, sad times when life imitates art. I miss you, girl.
In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.
—MARILYNNE ROBINSON, Gilead
Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together.
—MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM, The Hours
Contents
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
The House of Reinvention
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
In the Month of Jacaranda
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
In the Company of Fathers
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
Three Honeymoons
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
Red Light
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
The Moroccan Book of the Dead
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Reader's Guide
Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
(GREECE: ZORG)
Pretend I’m not already dead. That isn’t important anyway. It’s just that, from here, I can see everything.
There we are, see? Or should I say, There they are? Two girls sitting at a café off Taxi Square, eating anchovies lined up in a small puddle of oil on a white plate. Both girls are obsessed with salt. Since arriving in Mykonos, they have ordered anchovies every day, lunch and dinner. As a result, they are constantly thirsty. They carry large bottles of water with them everywhere, written on in Greek lettering, the blue caps peeking out the tops of their beach bags along with their rolled-up beach mats. The curly-haired blond girl, Mary, jokes to the straight-haired blond girl, Nix, that this influx of salt is going to be a turnoff should they pick up any hot men. Mary has cystic fibrosis, and sometimes one of the first clues parents get that their baby has CF is that the child’s sweat is especially salty, so much so that the baby tastes salty on the parents’ lips. Apparently Mary’s parents (who are not her biological parents, so this is particularly strange) share her affinity for salt, because no one noticed that Mary was an odd-tasting baby, and for this reason, along with a variety of other factors, like her ability—unusual in CF patients—to digest her food, the disease was not diagnosed until she was seventeen. Today as they sit at the tiny sidewalk café, Mary places an anchovy on her long pink tongue and lets it lie there while she savors its taste.
Several postcards lie strewn on the tabletop between them, and Nix picks one up without looking at the photo on the front. Hand trembling slightly from her caffeine-and-nicotine buzz, she begins doodling idly, sketching a box inside another box. Inside the outer box, Nix writes:
Anonymously Tragic Story of Terminal Illness in Boring Midwest
Then, inside the smaller, inner box she scribbles in tiny lettering:
Glamorous Story of Young Women on Holiday in Sunny Greece
=
Story Suitable for Chick Flick
“Who are you writing to?” Mary asks, her hand reaching across the marble tabletop, but Nix withdraws the postcard quickly, abruptly aware that there is no one on earth to whom she could send such a card except, of course, to Mary herself. She knows that if she showed her doodle to Mary, Mary would laugh, and yet Nix finds herself tucking the card into the book inside her beach bag instead.
“Nobody,” she says.
THE GIRLS LOITER at this café for quite some time. It is early still to hit the beach, and they have no particular agenda. Mary reads James Michener’s novel The Drifters, which seems a weird choice to Nix, something their mothers might bring on holiday. Nix takes out her novel, too—Couples by John Updike—but instead of reading she stares at the picture on her hidden postcard, tucked between Updike’s pages. She stares at the outer edges of the larger frame until its lines become shimmery and transparent, until its text begins to blur. Then she focuses on the inner frame, the one involving romantic outdoor cafés, bright sun amplified by azure water, beach mats, and banter. Next to their now-empty plate of anchovies, Nix’s English cigarette box rests like a prop to signal that she is the “bad girl” of that narrative. Even Greece itself seems a prop for stories featuring nubile young blonds in sunny locales, generally involving sexual intrigue, female bonding, and madcap adventures. Nix sits, not reading Updike, content to wait for the next reel of this vacation movie to begin spinning. If the encroaching shadow of their usual story—the one involving Mary’s shortened life span and Nix’s thrashing inadequacy to its weight—nags at her, she is relieved to pretend otherwise, basking in the Grecian sun of reinvention.
She does not yet realize, of course, that neither movie frame scribbled on a postcard will prove large enough to contain them, or shatterproof against everything about to happen. How could she realize, after all? Let the living enjoy their illusions while they can.
MEANWHILE, THE IMAGINARY camera, abetted by the very real script, has established that Nix is the wilder of the two. What of it, though? Her weakly blinking pride in this fact is perpetually diminished by the chronic illness of the other, so that ordinary acts like going to Greece for two weeks before the start of their junior year of college take on—for Mary—a kind of heroism that all Nix’s wild antics pale beside, as she is not sick, just nineteen and reckless and normal, with all the luxurious frustrations normalcy affords. In two weeks, Mary will return home to her parents’ house in Kettering, Ohio, whereas Nix will spend the first semester of her junior year at Regent’s College in London. Yet even though Nix has been away from home for two years, at Skidmore College in New York, and will not be in Ohio again until winter break, Mary was the one their parents—both mothers and Mary’s father—clucked over when they said their good-byes at the airport, anxiety narrowing their eyes and raising their voices.
Such moments bring out the bitch in Nix, even though no one, not even Mary’s own parents, could possibly want Mary to stay healthy more than she does. If anything bad happened to Mary on this trip, Nix would die not only of guilt but of misery. Mary is like her sister: a handpicked twin. Several of Nix’s friends from Skidmore are already in London or traveling elsewhere in Europe right now, but Nix was overjoyed when Mary wanted to go to Greece, and so she canceled plans with other, more sophisticated friends so she could travel with Mary. And yet. It is not easy, living in the shadow of someone’s Tragic Illness, so that everything you do seems insubstantial by comparison. Other people in the world would have to agree that this is true.
Only Mary seems to find Nix’s adventures—or “mistakes,” as Nix’s mother would say—worthwhile. “I can’t believe how worldly you’ve gotten,” Mary says, setting Michener aside and guilelessly taking Nix’s hand across the table. “While I’ve been cloistered in Ohio spitting into Dixie cups, you’ve been, like, having affairs with rich East Coast men and jaunting off for weekends in Manhattan—now you’re off to live in England like some modern-day E. M. Forster heroine, for God’s sake! It’s crazy—all the stuff we talked about when we were little, you’re actually doing it!”
Nix carefully blows the smoke of her Silk Cut in the opposite direction of Mary’s damaged lungs. Exactly half of her best friend’s imagined scenario is true: indeed, Mary has spent the better part of her freshman and sophomore years of college consumed by learning to deal with
her disease, since she’d never learned the ropes as a kid. The other half of the scenario goes more like this: while Mary has been spitting into Dixie cups, Nix has been sleeping with a married English professor who doesn’t remotely love her and developing a coke habit she cannot economically afford.
Mary’s grip on Nix’s hand tightens. “What I need,” Mary whispers urgently, “is an adventure.”
Nix says, “Retard, we’re in Greece. This is an adventure.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Ahhh,” Nix drawls. “I see. We need to get you devirginized.”
“For starters, hell yeah.”
With calm certainty, Nix surveys the crazy white buildings of Mykonos, the glare of the midday sun off the water, thinking how the humidity complements Mary’s curls and that, for a blond, Mary has an uncanny ability to tan instead of burn. At this moment, just to look at her, no one would ever know Mary was sick—though if they did, Nix figures, here in Greece it might only make her sexier, because men love damsels in distress as long as they don’t have to actually rescue them.
“That won’t be difficult,” she promises.
THERE ARE MANY beginnings to any story. Maybe the real beginning was the day Nix—then still known as Nicole—bit Mary in kindergarten, during a dispute over a yellow crayon, and they were forced to sit in the Naughty Chair together. They emerged best friends. Maybe it was the night of high school graduation, when Nix assured Mary’s continued virginity by allowing Mary’s boyfriend, Bobby Kenner, to screw her, under the pretext of their shared grief over Mary’s newly realized death sentence, this grief only gauzily covering more violent emotions like jealousy, anger, and fear. Maybe the beginning was Nix’s phone call from Skidmore to Kettering, in which she first uttered the phrase “Greek Islands,” like a siren call, into the ear of her isolated, lonely friend. Or maybe the beginning—on this bright August morning in 1988—has not even happened yet and is still to come, to result from one of the myriad miscalculations made by one or the other of the girls once Zorg and Titus make their entrance.
But all stories have to start somewhere, so for the sake of simplicity it shall begin here, in two girls’ small pact made over a small café table on a small island, and it will prove to be the beginning of everything.
THEIR PLAN PROCEEDS smoothly enough. The girls meet two men precisely as such men are usually met: at a bar. Though Mykonos is full of tourists, this bar is predominantly Greek, and so two blond girls stand out as though illuminated by a spotlight. If it had not been these two men, it would have been another two, or another two after that. It is a bar where the likelihood of two blond American girls’ entering alone is slim, but the chances of their exiting alone nonexistent. The girls call this kind of place “authentic.”
The first two men to speak to them are dark haired and olive skinned, like every other man in the bar. There are, in fact, almost no women in the bar. In that way it is like one of those old-man bars at home in Kettering, where occasionally Nix and Mary and girls like them wander in to make change for a dollar to feed a parking meter, and see man after man on barstools and at the pool table, reeking of smoke and hopelessness. In Kettering, no girl would go to such a bar on purpose because in Ohio there is nothing glamorous about men drinking alone. In Mykonos, however, Nix and Mary feel a thrill at the lack of female presence.
The preponderance of men is so extreme, however, that Nix is about to poke Mary and quip that maybe they have come to a gay bar by mistake (it being Mykonos, after all). Before she can do so, two dark-haired men are standing in front of them, offering to buy them drinks. The men are both in their late twenties or early thirties and handsome—not just “all right” but certifiably hot. One is taller than the other and good looking enough to be a movie star, at least in the bar’s dim light. Already Nix is thinking that as soon as possible they will have to excuse themselves to go to the bathroom and do rock, paper, scissors over which one of them gets this man.
Then abruptly she changes her mind. After all, she is off to England to fuck legions of Sting look-alikes who will say sexy things to her in their delicious accents. Therefore, why not give Mary this man, this Greek? The girls sip the wine the shorter man ordered for them, which is thick and sweet, like sherry. Nix thinks of the boy who devirginized her on her senior high school trip to the Bahamas, a boy with hips so slim she could have crushed them between her gymnast thighs, who had a pimple on his jawline, and how, when he thrust, the zit was exactly at her eye level because he kept flinging his head back. She did not have a movie-star Greek on hand to take her virginity, so she did things the usual way. But she is still near the beginning. She will have years of zitless men, British and otherwise, with whom to dilute that memory, whereas for Mary, the beginning and the end will be too close.
Nix drains her wine.
In foreign countries, time does not operate the way it does at home. Service in restaurants is slower, and falling into bed with a man is faster. Within minutes of awkward introductions, Mary and the movie star are already holding hands. Mary leans against the solid trunk of him as they listen to a Greek band. A mild buzz beginning to tingle her legs, Nix watches approvingly, smiling. The shorter man reaches for her hand, but she moves it away.
I mean, really: Just because she’s given Mary the Adonis doesn’t mean she plans to spread her legs for shorty over there. Jeez. Nix holds up her empty glass in a universal gesture, and the short Greek scurries off to get her more wine. This may prove to be a long night.
The House of Reinvention
(LONDON: YANK)
For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.
Places where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives—far from anything that was ever imagined for them.
—SIMON VAN BOOY, Everything Beautiful Began After
Arthog House exists so far off the tourist grid it is not accessible by Tube. The fact that Mary ends up living there will later seem nothing short of implausible. Desperate for funds, she answers an ad run across in a transient newspaper, TNT, for a bartending job at the Latchmere Pub. Despite her lack of either a Blue Card or experience, she is hired on the spot, because who else would bother to come all this way, especially a blond American girl? At first she doesn’t live in the same neighborhood as the pub, but then she does. Arthog House claims her as one of its own. It is not what she intended for herself when she came to London, but it is what happens. She will never even see Buckingham Palace. She will never take a single photograph of Big Ben.
The house—one step above a squat, in that it comes with electricity, crap furniture, and a hairy-eared landlord called Mr. D. who appears every Sunday to collect the rent—is located on a residential street just north of sprawling Battersea Park Road, but south of the Thames and even of the green park proper. It is a park where someday gentrification will give birth to quaint cafés lining the small lake, but during the fall of 1990 it boasts only derelicts kipping on benches. Like a backpacker’s Tara, Arthog House bears a plaque proclaiming its name, embedded just to the left of the front door. If the two-story white stone building bears a clear identity, the small pocket of neighborhood in which it resides does not. According to residents of posh Chelsea to the north, anything south of the Chelsea Bridge falls within the domain of Battersea. To the on-the-dole islanders occupying the estates, however, Battersea begins on their street, Battersea Park Road. Mary’s black pub customers deride their shabby white Lower Chelsea neighbors to the north: laborers, hairdressers, wantonly racist old ladies perpetually pushing shopping trolleys, a United Nations of drug dealers who revolve in and out by the season. Though the clientele of the Latchmere Pub is mostly white, fights regularly break out, its white underbelly majority not at true peace in Battersea, but clearly unfit for Chelsea.
Arthog House has four bedrooms, one bath, a basement kitchen, and a kitchenette on the upper floor in the sitting room. The three downstairs bedrooms are occupied by a constantly rotating parade of Kiw
i males who all work as laborers at a nearby construction site. Every time one of them leaves for Mallorca or Turkey, another takes his place so quickly that Mary has found it pointless to endeavor to learn each new name. The Kiwis also dominate the basement kitchen, although they never seem to actually cook. Since they each share a bedroom with at least one other man, the kitchen, the only place for privacy, has been informally dubbed The Brothel, because it is where the Kiwis go when making it with some local girl, and so its door is usually closed.
Upstairs at Arthog House, four residents share one bedroom and a sitting room. Three of those four are male, too: a South African, a Dutchman, and an American southerner. Mary, then—the fourth—is the only female in the entire house, a Wendy among Lost Boys. Because she does not realize that here at Arthog House she holds no monopoly on the desire for reinvention, she plays her cards close to her chest. Or maybe that is not even her reason. The truth is, taken outside her habitual environs of the American Midwest, she has little idea who she is. Unmoored from her history, she feels dangerously blank, like a hologram of herself walking around. The reason for this is twofold. First, of course, is the universal principle of unformed youth, which does not even occur to her because twenty-two-year-olds do not feel as unformed as they are. The second reason is more individual, more unique, in that at home she had grown used to feeling important, larger than life, because of the illness that has wormed its way into her previously ordinary existence, bestowing what passes for character on even the most banal of daily activities. Here in London, however, without the manacle of her tragedies, divorced even from her name, her identity feels so light it might simply float away.
Dearest Nix,
The lie has grown beyond my control. Like a double agent, I am asked to prove my identity daily, answering to your name even in bed. Weirdly, this is proving much easier than it sounds . . .
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 1