A Life in Men: A Novel

by Gina Frangello

  He puts his head down on his arms. He has lost it. Is Mary to blame for noticing—just as he had—the pastel-colored women at the neighboring tables? Is she responsible for the fact that the people of Santa Cruz run around enacting some strange death ritual about a fish?

  “Geoff?” Mary says, and he hears a hint of her intensity returning—but this time tinged with fear. He knows he should look up; he knows his behavior is inappropriate. “Geoff, what’s wrong?

  “Nothing,” he says into his arms, but then he raises his head to face her. She is just a girl, just his wife. What was he so afraid of? He can’t tell. Her eyes are her eyes, nothing more. Inside her chest, her lungs are working, doing their job for now. Under that sundress, her ovaries are producing eggs. Look on the bright side, her OB had said. At least you know you can get pregnant.

  “I think I’ve been drinking too much today,” Geoff says. “Do you mind if tonight we skip the wine?”

  Nix,

  I knew I should leave it alone, but I asked our waiter in Spanish what the deal was with the fish. Entierro de la Sardina, he says it’s called. Basically they bury the fish at the water the night before Ash Wednesday. He didn’t speak any English and my Spanish is rusty, so I wasn’t able to sort out exactly why. Why a burial, why a sardine? Is it their symbol for Jesus? Somehow my lack of comprehension made it all feel even more like magic. When I found out I’d missed the burial, I felt like throwing things, but Geoff doesn’t deserve that, so I just smiled.

  And what the hell would you know about it anyway?

  I guess since I keep defying my life expectancy, this was bound to happen eventually. I have finally gotten old enough to understand how young you were when you died. If you, the you of my memory, were alive today, I would not be telling my secrets to a twenty-year-old college student. If the ticking time bomb in my lungs counts for anything, then I am already past middle age, already an old woman. But even if you don’t grant me that jump in maturity, still I have passed those places we shared. I am a married woman. For all of six weeks, I was a mother of a baby girl named Nicole Rebecca. I shouldn’t have named her after you, I know. I keep making that same fucking mistake. But what can I say? She is my Nicole now.

  When you left me at the Athens Airport, like when you left me alive in this world, you were the “traveler” among us simply because you were going to an American college in English-speaking London. Now I have lived all over the world. What possible reason can I have for still writing to a girl I met in kindergarten, to my “best friend always” from high school? I outgrew you long ago.

  Your death was tragic, but if life has taught me anything, it’s that tragedy is cheap. You were a force of nature, Nix, I’ll give you that. Unlike me, where my own body seems to attack me at every turn, it took an enemy of the whole free world to fell you. But what of it?

  I remember all the times you said you would never be your mother, some dumb twit knocked up young and spending her life changing diapers and getting fat. I remember you wanted to be Anaïs Nin. I remember that you hated children—that when we passed a baby on the street and I would coo, you’d roll your eyes, plug your nose, and laugh that throaty laugh I found so intoxicating.

  You were just a dumb kid yourself. I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.

  M

  RAIN AGAIN.

  On the last day of their honeymoon, and for the third day running, drizzle piddles down onto the villa’s low roof, small, staccato explosions of sound that Mary alternately tunes out, then thinks will drive her mad. Geoff lounges on the king-size bed in striped boxer shorts, his olive skin against the shocking white of the duvet like a J.Crew underwear ad. Though she has never thought this before, he seems too clean to be exactly sexy, his perfection utterly incompatible with the turmoil she feels. On TV, CNN is covering the third anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and wounded more than a thousand. They’re showing footage from that day, and already Mary knows that it will loop around continuously, so that if the weather does not let up, this is what she will be stuck with on her last day on the island. She imagines Mom home in Ohio, watching similar coverage, perhaps calling Nix’s mother, Sandy, and asking her to dinner after work so that Sandy will not sit home and obsess over the television, over the bodies of those dead from terrorism. Mary’s mother is considerate that way, knowing something about dead daughters even though her daughter is still alive.

  Mary gets up to shower, though breakfast in bed does not require such hygiene and she will need to shower again in only a few hours, since once Geoff tires of CNN, they will surely be engaging in sex. Mary came prepared for frequent honeymoon copulation (though in truth, before the rain, they’d made love only once), her luggage crammed with Monistat 7 and some stronger prescription cream, since even in bed her body has become mutinous lately. Although the frequency of sex that first year with Joshua sometimes reached epic proportions, it is only now, since she has been trying to conceive, that she has become plagued by the infamous yeast infections to which women with cystic fibrosis are prone. The brochures will tell you that this is because women with CF have thicker mucus. Mary will tell you it is because Geoff has a gargantuan dick, which does not sound like something she would ever have filed under the category of “problem,” but when your vagina is itching and discharging like a motherfucker because you and your faulty mucus have been rubbed raw by a purple-red flagpole that pulses with its own heartbeat, your vantage point tends to change. Thus far, she has had a yeast-free honeymoon. Compulsively she showers, as though this will keep her that way.

  There is little point to sex today anyway. She isn’t likely to conceive again until her menstrual cycle returns to normal. Thus far, although she effectively hemorrhaged between the legs for fourteen days straight following her D & C, losing so much blood she had to take iron pills and got dizzy standing up, she has yet to have a real period. When they first arrived at the resort, they had not made love since losing the heartbeat, and Geoff seemed afraid to touch her. The bleeding is over, though; there is no reason not to resume her normal life. Under the steaming water, indistinguishable from the patter of rain on the little pastel roofs and dripping from the million insipid palm trees, Mary tries not to feel as though she will claw her own face off if the downpour doesn’t end.

  She reenters the bedroom naked. She should go to Geoff. Even among healthy women, one in four first pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Mary knows she is expected to understand that having CF or being adopted or having a dead friend does not “exempt” her from the ordinary trials and heartbreaks of life, like some karmic system in which her dues are already paid. And Geoff does not blame her for what happened. Half the women at this resort have probably struggled with infertility or lost pregnancies. Still, standing naked while her new husband fails to turn in her direction, his eyes glued to the repetitive loop of CNN, she feels like an imitation bride, and Geoff some one-man Make-A-Wish Foundation who was assigned to make her time-limited dreams come true, and as though they have both failed, proved their marriage a sham before it even began.

  She goes to the closet to dress but instead pulls out her Vest. She hasn’t used it much on vacation, relying more on her Flutter device. She didn’t want to bring the Vest at all—it weighs as much as a toddler!—but finally allowed Geoff to pack it in his suitcase to avoid a fight. Now she puts it on like a suit of armor that cancels out the invitation of her nudity. Geoff cannot touch her while she’s wearing it. It would be like trying to make love to a vibrating carburetor. She switches it on, and finally, at the sound of it, Geoff looks away from the TV.

  “Awesome!” he says, giving her a thumbs-up from the bed.

  Sometimes doctors can be a little bit crazy.

  Geoff bought her the Vest for her birthday in late August. It cost something like fifteen thousand dollars. He is already in debt from med school and could not afford such a lavish gift, especially one Mary did not want. Yet he claimed that wearing this would increase her lung fu
nctioning. He put her on a regimen in which she wore it every evening while they watched reruns of Thirtysomething together. On that show, which Mary had never watched during its original run, yuppies have parties and gossip and go to therapy. Bad things happen, too. The main female character has a miscarriage, in fact. And another character, Nancy—played by an un-Hollywood-looking actress named Patricia Wettig—gets ovarian cancer. Nancy is married with two children. She gets better, but her friend Gary, who was never sick, dies. This, of course, is how life goes. Nix did not live to get married, but Mary has. Maybe Mary will yet have a child or two, and she and Geoff will spread out on a big bed with them, reading elaborately illustrated children’s books and sleeping in a huddle. After turning twenty-eight, she wore the Vest religiously at home, so as to assure Geoff he hadn’t wasted his money. Six weeks went by in that fashion. Then, at her next visit to the CF center, her lung functioning was up from its usual 80 to 85 percent to 102 percent. Her lungs were functioning better than the average person’s without CF! Something wild pulsed in her chest. She felt dizzy, infected with a new bacteria called hope. That night, when she went to put on her Vest to watch Thirtysomething, she began to cry. Television shows are all about healthy people; a sick person watches them like a tourist or an alien ambassador. Yet Mary felt the invisible wall between herself and the ordinary world crumbling. She was just a woman watching TV with her husband, watching a show about young couples just like them. Geoff had given her that—had believed in a vision of her until it came true.

  They conceived on her next ovulation.

  She switches off the Vest. CNN is still rehashing the developments in the World Trade Center bombing, discussing the trial of the two masterminds. Mary hasn’t followed the details of this case, but she remembers four men being put in prison in the early days of her courtship with Geoff, and it provoking her to tell Geoff, rather stridently, that she wanted to go to Lockerbie to see where everything had happened to Pan Am Flight 103, to Nix. At first he seemed shocked that, for all her travel, she had not already been there. Then he said simply, “I don’t think it’s a great idea,” and Mary was surprised to find that she didn’t really think it was either and that she was grateful he had said it—grateful he had named this truth so that it would seem less her own cowardice and more as though she were following his recommendation to appease him. She didn’t write Nix much after that either. Her grieving felt processed at last, her life ready to move forward.

  How soon, how unacceptable, to be stuck again. Her lungs are still thriving. Her husband is still kind and gorgeous and devoted. Here they are, in a luxurious paradise. Enough. Enough.

  “I don’t think you kept that on long enough, Mar,” Geoff says, turning his head in response to the Vest’s silence. “Were you timing yourself?” He clicks “off” on the remote control, and her heart abruptly soars.

  “Come on,” she says. Beneath the Vest, her pubic triangle looks out of place, disconnected from the whole, sexy in a macabre way. “It’s our last day—screw the rain, let’s go for a walk.”

  Geoff, though, doesn’t stand. According to the patter on their roof, the pelting has slowed to a trickle, but he doesn’t even go to the window to investigate. He simply pats the space next to him on the enormous bed, his palm hitting the duvet several times, as if he were calling a dog.

  “You don’t need to go wandering in the rain getting sick. No trips to the ER to practice your Spanish, okay? Let’s just stay here where it’s warm and dry. Do you want me to read to you?”

  At home, like watching Thirtysomething reruns, this is one of their rituals. Already he has read her The Age of Innocence, Tender Is the Night, and The Sun Also Rises, classics that they both somehow managed never to tackle on their own. At home, this strikes Mary as incredibly romantic. When she mentions it to her mother, Mom all but swoons.

  Now she thinks that she may bolt for the door, fling it open, and race outside, still undressed, before he can stop her. If the rain does not touch her face soon, her skin may just harden like plaster and crack in two. The Vest, however, weighs her down. Mary waits and waits, but nothing happens; her face does not crumble or disintegrate, and even now the tears will not come. So finally she merely stands and holds her arms out wide, an actor pantomiming a hug, and waits for Geoff to come undo the contraption and release her.

  SOMEHOW IT IS 1997.

  Mary and Geoff take the overnight ferry from Tenerife to La Gomera. Because, bizarrely, the last ferry on which Mary set foot was the one that shuttled her and Nix away from Mykonos, she cannot help thinking of that interminable ride. They were supposed to be moving onward to the party island of Ios, but at the last second Nix insisted on going back to Athens instead, then would not even consent to find a civilized, urban hotel in which to think things over but bounded straight for the airport to get herself to London and Mary back to the cloister of Ohio. By that point Mary was furious, confused, and weeping, saying irrational things such as that Nix couldn’t force her onto a plane and that she would just stay and travel the Greek Isles alone. How little Nix even pretended to believe her threats only added to Mary’s frustration.

  These memories do not appeal, so Mary spreads a beach mat on the floor of the La Gomera ferry and reclines on it, hoping the rocking motion will soon cure her of consciousness. Geoff gazes down at her from his small seat, which he dwarfs. The smile on his face is half-aroused, half-paternal. “My Mary,” he playfully chides. “You’ll still be lying on floors when you’re forty, I bet.”

  Mary lets her eyes stay closed. “Who’s going to be forty?” she says.

  DEPENDING ON THE part of the world, on the hospital doing the study, anywhere between 3 and 15 percent of all cystic fibrosis patients colonize Burkholderia cepacia, the most antibiotic resistant of all the bacteria to which their damaged lungs are susceptible. Though Geoff swore she was imagining it, Mary saw the accusation in her parents’ eyes—even in Laxmi’s—as though she had only herself to blame. Rather than washing her hands after touching any foreign object like a good CF patient, Mary was freshly back from a winter-break trip to Mexico, where she’d gobbled food from street vendors on New Year’s Eve and frolicked glibly with primitive toilet germs at small Querétaro cafés. She had all but sent an engraved invitation to the cepacia syndrome that might now invade and ravage her lungs at any moment, so that death could blindside her within a matter of weeks, even days.

  Even if cepacia syndrome never strikes, the increase in morbidity associated with the bacterium is clear: everybody knows B. cepacia heralds the beginning of the end. In the larger CF community, Mary has become an overnight leper. She has to schedule her visits to the CF center at the end of the day so that the non – B. cepacia patients will not be endangered by her presence. If she had any friends with CF, she would be told to substitute phone calls for visits. As it is, from now on when she is hospitalized she will be quarantined from others with cystic fibrosis, since even those also positive for B. cepacia might have a different strain of the bacterium than she. She will never see any of her old hospital acquaintances again.

  As a white girl from Ohio, Mary has found herself for the first time part of a minority it is far safer to discriminate against than to include. What does it matter, she sometimes thinks the reasoning goes, when the lot of them will be dead almost before they can complain?

  Of course B. cepacia is of no threat to the general, healthy population, and Geoff is nothing if not healthy, so Mary is not a leper to him. He can go on licking the inside of her mouth, her armpits, her clitoris, her toes, with impunity. When she coughs until her face turns purple, Geoff doesn’t need her to cover her mouth. He fetches napkins and Dixie cups, leaves the room only because she is afraid the coughing will bring on an episode of incontinence that will be terminally unsexy, not because her bacteria can actually be terminal to him.

  “I shouldn’t have let you go to Mexico,” he said, only hours after the diagnosis. Unlike her parents and Laxmi, Geoff’s blame is reserved for
himself. “I shouldn’t have let you have surgery,” he continued. “The biggest risk of infection is in the actual hospital.” He was referring to a fibroid cyst she’d had removed just before the Mexico trip, because their fertility specialist thought it the culprit in her failing to conceive since the miscarriage. She had only just finished healing from that minor surgery when she and Geoff rushed off to visit Daniel. In his castle, they made love in a different bed every night, making bets about under which canopy their baby might be conceived.

  When they came home, Mary’s lung functioning and sputum tests had seemed a mere formality. Her FEV values had been out of the park for over a year. Geoff and Laxmi joked that they should write case studies about her: the model CF patient, nearly thirty and healthier than the general population.

  Then they got the news.

  THEY DISEMBARK ON La Gomera by early morning sunlight. Their plan is to rent a car and drive to the other side of the island, where the guidebook says there is a black sand beach and a little town. The ride over the mountains will take them through a protected laurel tree forest as well as banana plantations. They will dine on La Gomera and return by sunset, to take the ferry back to their resort. “It’ll be like stepping inside a Gauguin painting,” Geoff promises. “Look how much more quaint this place is than Tenerife, Mar—we should have been coming here all along!”

  It is late February, a couple of weeks past their one-year anniversary. On Valentine’s Day, Geoff brought home diamond earrings, and Mary’s hands trembled as she held the box. She envisioned the square-cut studs in her ears while Geoff stood over her casket, even though she planned to be cremated. She wondered if diamonds could be burned down to ash, or if afterward somebody would merely pluck them out from her remains and give them a wash. “Please,” she said in a whisper. “I don’t want jewelry. Just take me someplace beautiful, someplace I can remember.” Geoff was resistant at first: she needed to avoid risks like that now, foreign germs that might attack her immune system. But neither of them had ever been sick in the Canary Islands, and they often talked about how sad it was that all the rain on their honeymoon had prevented them from island hopping, and so, although the little blue earring box remained exactly where Mary had left it, Geoff came home a week later with airline tickets and told her to pack her bags.