A Life in Men: A Novel

by Gina Frangello

  He averts his gaze. He goes quiet, flips through the cards.

  Nicole rests her head against the glass, water dripping from her wet hair. She looks different wet. Generally, despite his natural urge to see her naked since she sleeps in his goddamn room, Yank finds her appearance uninspiring. He was surprised when Joshua took such an interest in her—even more so when he moved her in after one lay. She looks pretty much like a small-town American cheerleader, which he guesses is exactly what she was at home. Since Joshua—with his mismatched clothing and patches sewn onto his jeans, his straggly hair and onyx earring, and his inability to go ten minutes after waking without lighting a hash cigarette—is the type any American cheerleader’s mother always warned her about, Yank knows he ought to feel at least a mild pleasure at seeing these two shacking up together, thumbing their noses at society. He can’t manage it, though. He knew plenty of Suburban Princesses like Nicole once upon a time; he even married one when he was a young Rebel Without a Clue like Joshua. He thought Hillary could balance him, tame him, all those old jokes. Even after Will came home from Nam junked up and twitchy and mean, still he thought he could have both worlds, follow Will’s fire wherever it led, the way he had since they were boys, and then Hillary would put out the flames with cool pitchers of sweet tea, her hands on her hips with expectation, her belly swollen with their child.

  That turned out real well.

  Albeit Hillary was never like this one in bed. Yank’s been privy to quite the show, waiting it out night after night in the common room for the fucking to die down so he can crawl into his own bed instead of bunking with the Flying Dutchfag. Though you wouldn’t think it to look at her, Nicole’s the kind who moans “fuck me” things, who begs for it, then yells like she’s being beaten or transported to heaven. Listening to her in Sandor’s company has robbed the experience of considerable luster, but when Sandor’s not around (where does he go?), sure, Yank’s gotten off good a few times. Once or twice he’s even been roused from sleep by her gasps, sharp with each of Joshua’s thrusts, their furtive, urgent sex six feet away on the next mattress. But by morning, the girl’s drinking tea again in the common room, wearing some cashmere cardigan with pearly buttons, and he barely registers her presence: it wasn’t her he was jerking off to, just a universal sound in the darkness.

  That wild hair is definitely her best feature. When it’s plastered flat, her face is more angular than befits a girl her age. In the train’s window, her profile reflects back at him, sharp and bony without the volume of her curls, mascara runny under her eyes. In Joshua’s too-big biker jacket, she seems a drowned waif. She is, he decides, not even that pretty.

  Yet for the first time, she looks like something he recognizes: something raw and hollowed out enough to match her nocturnal sounds.

  “So they must’ve taught you some math at Harvard, huh?”

  She looks at him at last, but her eyes are glassy like an addict’s, blank. It takes a moment before she seems able to connect to herself what he’s said.

  “I didn’t go to Harvard,” she says edgily, and she turns back to the window, nothing but the blackness of a tunnel outside.

  He snorts. “Figures.”

  He watches her lips move in the glass. “This sweatshirt belonged to some random guy I met in Greece. I never lied about going there—I can’t help it if you made assumptions.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me, baby.”

  “They teach math at other colleges, too,” she snaps, twisting to face him head-on.

  “Really?” Yank says. “I wouldn’t have known that.”

  The rolling of the train. From the corner of his eye, Yank sees the people in their car watching him with caution. Obviously the girl’s all too aware that their stares are not meant for her. No, she’s got somewhere else to go, someone else to be anytime she wants, a college degree even if it’s not from the Ivy League, parents, a home—and though he had those things, too, once upon a time, he could smack her face for it and feel no remorse. She’s just slumming here with them, a fraud like the damn Harvard sweatshirt.

  She coughs, a small hack at first, and then it seizes her body so that her tiny frame jerks back and forth, banging into him as she shakes with the spasms. Like someone living near a Tube station that drives him crazy at first, Yank barely notices the rumble of her anymore. But now he turns to look at her and smiles a little, the smile tight on his face like something new he is trying out. “Bet you start doing that every time poor Joshua tries to put his dick in your mouth, don’t you?” He laughs.

  She shoots him a dirty look, the lower half of her face buried in the leather elbow of the jacket. The cough has subsided, and she inches toward the window, away from the places where their limbs have been in contact. He is aware of her suddenly not knowing what to do with her skin, the way girls act when they’ve gotten close to a man without considering the implications. He suspects that if she were not wedged between him and the window, she would jump up and move to another seat to avoid touching him. In his lap he still holds the box of currency cards; in his hand he still wields the blade.

  Fuck her.

  All at once, her back shakes in a violent convulsion that wracks her body deep as her hand fumbles blindly in her purse for that inhaler—he sees her skinny wrist flicking back and forth to prime it. But when the next cough takes hold, rather than bringing her hand to her mouth so she can suck the medicine in, she gropes in the air like somebody who’s drowning. Her head snaps up as her fingers search madly to stick the mouthpiece of the inhaler where it’s supposed to go. Yank’s eyes travel with the hand and then he sees it.

  Blood.

  Running down her chin, spotting the fragile white of the palm that peeks out from under her leather sleeves. Not more than a few seconds have passed but she is fucking covered in blood all down the front of her body. Yank notices, from the corner of his eye, a woman about his age dressed in office attire jumping to her feet in alarm; hears several passengers gasp. Nicole, too, gasps breaths of blood. “Oh God, oh God,” she sputters in between the bursts, and no one, no one approaches, no one moves forward to help her, because of him, because of Joshua’s jacket, because of his goddamn knife.

  She’s slumped forward, fetal, closing in on herself. He pulls the lapels of her jacket toward him to get her body upright, and the look in her eyes is like that of an animal just shot, not yet dead: hopeless and mad with fear, whites visible above the top of her irises, bugging from strain. He whispers, “Holy shit, girl. What’s going on?” but nothing—she doesn’t even seem to see him. Around them, passengers murmur to one another and a man calls out, “You’d best get her to hospital!” but from a good distance. Blood is dangerous. They look like a couple of killers, a couple of junkies. She could have AIDS.

  It may be the first time in the history of the world that fate has been on his side. The train wheezes to their stop, its doors creaking open in a puff of movement. Jumping to his feet, he grabs Nicole under one arm, the box of currency cards under the other. But in the throes of her cough she’s writhing, can’t walk normally. The box of cards thuds out of his grasp, hitting him in the knee and crashing onto his boots, so that he has to kick it away, cursing, and half drag Nicole to the door fast before it closes. The Evening Standard box rides off with the train, his get-rich-quick dreams with it.

  And then they are on the platform, not captive on a Twilight Zone train car of blood and suspicious stares. Beside him, she coughs and gulps air, blood gushing from her mouth in sporadic spurts like water from a fountain. Battersea is a sleepy station, a “nobody who lives here goes anywhere” kind of place, just the kind of gateway to invisibility and anonymity Yank was looking for when he returned to London. They are on the platform alone, her slumped on the ground. His heart races like a bullet.

  “Nicole.” Higher than his usual voice. “What do you need? An ambulance?”

  She waves her arm at him in agitation, and he doesn’t know if she’s dismissing the idea,
if she’s even trying to communicate with him or just flailing around. Who knows how long an ambulance might take to arrive anyway? She could bleed out before it got here, if that’s what’s happening—what the fuck is happening? Another cough overtakes her and she spews a fresh, dark handful. He feels his body inch back involuntarily, like a kid recoiling from a bug, and when she looks up, her expression is venomous, transforming her more profoundly than did the rain. Though he has heard her climax, though he has seen her bare limbs in the dark thrashing out from under Joshua’s duvet, though he has her blood on his hands, he has never seen her before this moment.

  “Go,” she commands, no geyser following the words. “Fuck off, leave me alone.”

  And he turns. Not the answer he was expecting, but yeah, in his vast experience with bodies spewing blood, leaving is always the best course of action. He can call an ambulance from the pay phone in the hallway at Arthog House, and if no Good Samaritan has come along by the time it arrives, the medics will take care of it. Take care of her. He pictures himself explaining to Joshua—not that he owes the kid any explanations, not that Joshua will be around much longer anyway—how he came home to make the call, to get help. That Nicole told him to go.

  Already she is no longer looking at him. Her head rests on her knees, so that he cannot see her eyes, only the pale, tender zigzag of the part separating thickets of her hair. Through the rips in her jeans, blood dots the rough skin of her knees like Rorschach splotches. A breeze starts up—could be another oncoming train, more passengers to help her out, or could just be the onslaught of winter. He goes to her, pulls her resistant body up under the arms, and picks her up like a baby, starts carrying her toward the exit though she resists, pushes at his chest.

  “Cut that the fuck out,” he says low. His hands shake. And remarkably her arms, crackly in the leather on which her blood is drying cold, encircle his neck, holding on.

  When the gene for cystic fibrosis was finally isolated last year, the form of the disease I have was classified as a “mild” genetic mutation. I guess that accounts, among other things, for my functioning pancreas, that Holy Grail among CF patients, an organ that, by failing to fail, kept me from being diagnosed for so long. Even before I came here, when my mom was freaking out about how I shouldn’t travel alone, Dr. Narayan kept telling her that my lungs were in “remarkably good shape” for someone who’d gone seventeen years with no treatment. He said I was “entitled to sow some wild oats” and that she should let me go, not that she could have stopped me. He told me to enjoy myself.

  See, mild, get it?

  MARY HAS LOST track of time. Forever, it seems, she and Yank have been on this street, heading back from the train station, as though Battersea Park Road is a treadmill that never ends. At first, Yank tried to put her down to walk on her own, muttering, “My back hasn’t been the same since those goddamn park benches in Marseille,” but her legs felt floppy and her steps so tentative and frightened that he scooped her up again, taking long strides like a short-distance runner who knows he’ll give out soon and is trying to cover as much ground as possible, fast. Sometimes she’s conscious of his grip on her—leather on leather—but other times he recedes so that she’s only floating, dizzy, the sky spinning above. Every now and then the blood sets off in a violent spurt, metallic and hot in her mouth, and if she panics and tries to inhale too fast after the cough’s grip loosens, she breathes the blood straight back in, and it feels like drowning. Even when no blood comes out, she and Yank jerk at each isolated hack like shell-shocked vets starting at distant fire.

  Outside the front door, he finally sets her down on her feet, leaning into her with his hip as though expecting her to crumple. Mary thinks of her mother balancing grocery bags while searching for house keys in her purse. This, then, is what the body comes to: an inanimate object to be balanced between stone and hip. Yank flings back the door, catching her fast before she can topple into the foyer. The place is a ghost town by day, no sound. The staircase beckons menacingly as Yank guides her, one hand under her armpit. Her hands, gripping the wall for balance, leave bloody fingerprints behind them.

  Then here they are. In the room they share, though they are strangers. Already her mind is reeling, calculating the damage. Joshua’s jacket, which thank God is leather and can be wiped clean—she can run it under the tap if she has to, claim the jacket got drenched in the rain. The stains on the stairwell can be removed simply enough. She shrugs the jacket off, voice ruined, rasping, “Hold this,” and once Yank takes hold of the jacket, the imperative of hiding the evidence seizes her, sends a jolt of energy through her muscles even though she’s still seeing stars. Recklessly she pulls her sweatshirt off, turns it inside out so that the blood is still visible but less wet, and lays the inside-out garment on the carpet like a tarp. She tries to strip off her jeans, too, before she dares to sit on her bed, but she loses her balance, falls backward in her underpants and bloodstained bra, legs flying skyward, still tangled in the pants. Yank is staring at her with naked confusion. She jerks her legs in his direction, less dizzy now that she’s horizontal, mumbles, “Help,” and he steps forward and pulls the tangled Levi’s off her feet along with her boots. Underneath, her socks remain remarkably free of blood, still tan and pristine. She dares not touch the bed with her hands.

  “We’ve got to get rid of this,” she orders, aware of the hysteria creeping through her hoarseness. It is on the tip of her tongue to beg him to find a trash bag in the Kiwi kitchen and just dispose of her bloodstained clothing, but then she remembers the sweatshirt. The fucking Harvard sweatshirt. Her hands lower to her face. “Oh God,” she whispers. “I’ve got to get to a launderette.”

  Yank crouches down on his haunches, at her level now.

  “I hate to break it to you,” he says, almost cautious, “but you ain’t going anywhere. Listen, girl, you think this joint’s never seen a little blood? Calm the fuck down—you oughta keep still.”

  As if on cue, she bolts up in a cough, blood flowing both out of her mouth and down her throat at once, choking her. Too late, the fresh spurt spills down her fingers onto Joshua’s faded floral sheets. And then tears are running down her face, sobs wracking her back, even though they’re lubricating everything and making it worse—she can’t calm down, can’t stop.

  “Okay,” Yank says, loud. “I get it. You don’t want Joshua to see all this—whatever this is. But listen to me—” When she doesn’t look up, doesn’t respond, he takes her chin and lifts it to him. “Baby, you gotta get a grip. First, we stop the blood. Is there some way—you say you don’t want a hospital, but if you don’t want to go bleeding all over your boyfriend’s bed, maybe the ER would’ve been a better —”

  “My bag,” she says, gesturing toward the wardrobe with only her wrist, afraid to move again, afraid to breathe. Yank releases her chin, goes to the wardrobe. Above her purple rucksack, her clothing hangs, clean and orderly on hangers, like the clothes of a normal person. Yank pays them no mind, pulls the pack out roughly, and tosses it at her feet. She holds up her bloody hands, and he moves forward again, and with one motion he unzips the main compartment. She watches his eyes take in the minihospital inside, and slowly he begins to extract the contents. Her Flutter device. Albuterol inhaler, locked and loaded. A plastic bowl, like one that might be used to pour water over a baby in a tub. A stash of antibiotics in their orange prescription bottles, endless vitamins. Dr. Narayan’s typed certification of Mary R. Grace’s fitness to fly, though she notes with relief that Yank’s not taking time to inspect the fine print. His eyebrows arch questioningly, though, as he holds up a plethora of Dixie cups, as if when she packed she thought cups were unobtainable in England . . .

  Then finally, what she is looking for. She grasps it with greedy red fingers: a large container of codeine cough syrup.

  Yank whistles low. “Damn. That looks like the kind of wicked shit I’d like to get my hands on under better circumstances.”

  Her fingers shake; she can’t get
the childproof cap off the bottle. Yank opens it for her and hands it over, but even then she can’t swallow, coughs the sticky red-orange liquid and more of her own blood all over his hands. He is covered in her blood, of course. He’s long since stopped recoiling from it the way he did at the Battersea train station, though she hadn’t noticed until just now how he’s not even flinching as it hits him, how he’s treating it like water. Wordlessly he holds the bottle to steady it and puts his other hand on the back of her head to keep her still, too, and in this way they manage to dump some of the liquid down her throat.

  Twice more, each swallow bigger than a whole recommended dosage.

  She closes her eyes. Though it’s too soon for anything to have taken effect, her lungs already feel less spastic, less desperate to contract. Minutes pass, the world receding behind her shut lids, and when she opens them again she is for the first time conscious of sitting there in her underwear, conscous of Yank’s hand still tangled in the back of her hair. Almost violently, she jerks her head, flicking off his hand. He stays crouched, still watching her with those ice-blue, serial-killer eyes.

  She should stand up to dress now while she still can, but what’s the point? The jig is up. Already the cough syrup is at work to sedate her, rendering a rapid cleanup of her bodily crime scene ever more out of reach. You should’ve seen it, Yank will say when Joshua and Sandor get home. She was like that scene from Carrie, man, a goddamn bloodbath. And Sandor, who is something of a pussy, will pucker his face in disdainful concern, while Joshua, kind and at ease with bodies, will want to help, will say, Why didn’t you tell me? But to any extent that illness can be romantic in concept, at the end of the day mucus and blood are the opposite of sexy. Joshua will pity her now, not desire her—will be repulsed that he has been making love to a walking corpse. Balancing the baby-bath bowl on her knees, Mary gives up, coughs some blood and phlegm inside.

  Yank says, “What do we do now?”