A Life in Men: A Novel

by Gina Frangello

  Leo doesn’t know what to say. He knows nothing about mothers. He keeps stroking his sister’s hair, and she sighs like the purr of a cat, and he feels happy again, the way he did when she held his hand, so happy his skin could burst. She is his sister. His sister! She is his.

  “What,” she begins, rolling onto her back, “is going on between you and Sandor? I thought you couldn’t stand each other. Are you guys a couple now? What about Pascal?”

  “It’s complicated,” Leo says. “I have no idea what’s going on.”

  Mary laughs. “Oh yes,” she says. “Yes, you do.”

  All at once, Leo notices that his dick is stiffening a little at the mention of Sandor—at the memory of Sandor still on his sofa bed. He wishes he had put on his sweatpants instead of being a goof and not thinking things through. He bunches the duvet a little around his crotch to hide it, says, “Sandor is completely in his body. I’m not in my body at all. Sometimes I forget I even have a body. I get so caught up in my head, I can’t feel sensations, like I’m painting and later I’ll realize I threw my back out and can barely walk, but I didn’t notice at the time because I was somewhere else. I have a hard time with sex—I mean . . .” He pauses, embarrassed. “I don’t mean a hard time like a soft time, that’s not what I—”

  “I know what you mean,” she says. “A hard time just being there, in the moment. I have that sometimes, too.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s the same thing,” she says. “It’s just like, sometimes I want to have sex so badly, I feel so hungry for it, and then when I get it—I mean, I come or whatever, and if you’re a woman that’s supposed to be feat enough—but it’s never as pivotal as I think it’s going to be. When it’s over, I still feel separate, like my body is cased in glass and no one can reach me.”

  Leo closes his eyes. “No,” he says. “It’s not the same thing. I mean, I feel separate, too, I feel what you’re talking about, but it’s more than that. It’s like my body is there, but I’m not in it. It’s like my body has nothing to do with me, like it’s some kind of trinket I bought at a store and can give people as a gift, but I’m not inside the box, I’m over in the corner watching them open it.” He thinks of earlier, of Sandor. “Sometimes,” he says, “if it’s painful enough, then I can feel it, I can snap into my body and be there. But that’s a tightrope walk—I mean, pain can get me there, but if I’m not careful, if I don’t choose carefully, it’s like snapping awake to find myself in the middle of a horror flick. With Sandor . . . I don’t know. I guess he seems like he can keep me grounded but not kill me in the process. Does that make sense?”

  “Leo,” Mary says, “no. No, it doesn’t. Or maybe it does, but I don’t like what I’m hearing. Are you saying Sandor is hurting you—that you want him to hurt you?”

  He doesn’t answer. In truth, Sandor hasn’t really hurt him, not yet. All they’ve done is fuck, which was risky enough, Mary in the next room and all. Plus, in Leo’s experience, most sadists are fetishists, not hedonists; Sandor’s sexuality isn’t narrow enough to fit that bill. Suddenly he doesn’t know how to explain himself. He is anxious that his straight, married sister will think he’s some “beat me, beat me” weirdo who wants to wear a dog leash and get shit on, yet agitated that she doesn’t understand the fundamental truth of how hard it is to stay in the present fucking moment, how easy it is to drift away, and how it takes a strong hand, a commanding hand, to pull you back and hold you in place. He isn’t sure Sandor can manage it, but Sandor’s smart, he’s manipulative, he’s ruthless, he’s a natural top—so much so he’ll even do it with a woman, for God’s sake!—and that’s all a reasonable start. And yet with Sandor . . . so far, he doesn’t feel afraid. He thinks Sandor could actually be a friend.

  “What I meant,” he tries again, “is just that Sandor is this cool combination of Dutch and Spanish, you know, from his parents. He’s got that Spanish aggression and sensuality, but mixed with the Dutch irreverence, the Dutch way of being so casual in your physicality. And that funny Dutch mannerism—like he’s gezellig, even when he’s trying to be all assertive.”

  “Oh God.” Mary giggles now. “Don’t tell him that, he’ll die.”

  “I know.” Leo joins her laughter. “He’s trying to be all hot and commanding, and it’s like he’s this adorable little doily on top of an antique wooden table. He’s like an adorable doily with a big dick!” Even as he says it, he is imagining the painting he will make: a doily with a dick in its center. He will call the painting Amsterdam, and two years from now, shortly after Mary’s death and when New Yorkers are dragging around their PTSD like invisible albatrosses in the wake of 9/11, the painting will be commissioned for an exhibition called The New Surrealists at MoMA, though such a confluence of events—such awesomeness and terribleness—seems wholly inconceivable now.

  All at once, Sandor stands at the bedroom door. He, unlike Leo, had the presence of mind to put on his pants. He takes one look at the bed and quips, “So, I am sorry to interrupt this lovely scene of brother-and-sister incest, but Leo, I think maybe this girl needs to go to sleep, and I know I need to go to sleep, so shut up, yes?”

  Leo looks from Sandor to Mary. He doesn’t want to leave Mary, exactly, but he thinks Sandor has done the right thing in coming to claim him—coming to rein him in and make him behave normally—and he appreciates it, so he stands. At his nudity, Sandor shakes his head with exaggerated dismay, clucking his tongue and saying, “Leo, Leo, do you want to scar your sister for life? She is American and they are very afraid of naked people, you know that—what are you doing?” and Mary starts laughing all over again, and Sandor puts his arm loosely around Leo’s shoulders and ferries him back to the sofa bed, lying him down, putting the blanket over him. Before climbing in beside him, Sandor takes off his own pants.

  MOVING IN A single-file line at the Anne Frank House, she finds it impossible not to think of being herded like cattle—of people during World War II crammed into train cars shoulder to shoulder, hardly able to breathe, the shorter ones like Anne (like Mary herself) unable to even see over the heads of the others. The aisles in Anne’s annex are narrow, and Mary can look only to her side at whatever object, photograph, or letter is on display. She stares at a child’s phonograph, which Anne and Margot must have played records on before their lives became enshrouded in silence. It is painted yellow, bright and flagrantly innocent, and Mary’s eyes fill with tears.

  The world is a terrible place. She does not need the Anne Frank House to tell her this. Young girls have been paying the price for the violence of men for as long as the world has existed. German soldiers, Spanish pilots, Libyan terrorists: all the same. Some men are driven by hatred, as though little girls they have never met are their enemies. She thinks of Anne’s final hours at Bergen-Belsen, dying of typhus. Who is she—a thirtysomething American woman—to fear death? Hers will be sanitary, civilized, full of morphine and machines and relatives gathered at the bedside. Not like Anne’s. Not like Nix’s. She knows nothing of suffering. She cannot breathe.

  Out on the street, on Prinsengracht, she gulps air, cries a little more. If she had lived in Holland during the war, she would have been a Jew, would have met a fate similar to Anne’s. Would have been a Jew. Well, of course she is a Jew, according to the rules delineated by the Nazis at least. Judaism is in the blood, not in the practice. Many of those who died in the camps were secular, products of mixed marriages, even practicing Christians. She is a Jew. Just like her brother, Leo, the bipolar atheist homosexual, who could have been sent to Bergen-Belsen several times over, if such a thing were possible, for his “crimes.” Just like Daniel, the new age American shaman. Just like her biological mother, Rebecca, the hot blond who tied Leo to a radiator and had cloves of garlic stuck up her ass by a quack. Jesus Christ.

  (Or not, as the case may be.)

  Mary walks along Prinsengracht, heading to Sandor’s apartment, quite a walk away, near Vondelpark, or Needle Park, as Leo say
s it’s called after hours. Leo is finishing a grant application on a deadline, compiling slides and filling out forms, so she is without him for the first time and already missing him in preparation for her imminent departure. She doesn’t want to leave Amsterdam. This is causing her significant guilt. She is supposed to miss her husband.

  She does miss her husband. She does.

  Just not enough to want to go home yet.

  Their life in rural New Hampshire is peaceful. They rent a wooden house that opens in the back onto a wooded area. Sometimes they see bears in the yard. They do their shopping at a funky, organic grocery store called the Co-op, and Mary and Geoff have gotten into the vibe, started baking their own bread and making yogurt from scratch, cooking while listening to Geoff’s jazz albums on a vintage turntable and sipping Bordeaux. Mary teaches at Hanover High School, in the same town as Dartmouth College, and her students are the well-bred, Aryan-looking offspring of professors and Dartmouth alumni. The girls mostly have eating disorders. Geoff works far longer hours, so after work she comes home to an empty house and grades papers or watches TV while wearing her Vest. On the weekends they hike Mount Cardigan or Mount Tom; they have picnics and sometimes rent a canoe. Every once in a while, Mary goes to dinner with the other teachers at Hanover High. She cannot complain about her colleagues, who are nice people and, just as her mother used to do with her teacher friends, tell funny stories about their students. Sometimes (less frequently) they get together with Geoff’s colleagues, but many of his fellow doctors are Chinese or Indian and have their own communities, and those who aren’t tend to make Mary feel self-conscious. Word has gotten out that Geoff’s wife is a former patient of his, and Mary feels like a specimen, as if they are all waiting to see how this experiment turns out: the doctor and the sick girl. They are waiting to see if Geoff’s heroism will pay off, or if, like a Peace Corps volunteer who goes too native and starts letting flies collect on his open wounds, he will be saved by somebody who swoops in and helicopters him out when the going gets too rough.

  She feels sicker since landing in Amsterdam than she has felt in years. Than she has, in fact, felt since the Mexico City Airport in 1994. It’s her proximity to cigarettes, her constant diet of alcohol, her lack of sleep. In only a week, these things can build up, smack her in the face. If she were here much longer, she would end up hospitalized. As it is, Geoff will make sure she goes in for a “tune-up” the moment she gets home. It will be her first hospitalization in New Hampshire, and she isn’t looking forward to it. She would feel like the new kid at school, except that she’ll be quarantined anyway. Geoff will hover and make sure her pulmonary numbers swing up again.

  Unless, of course, they don’t.

  Vondelpark is huge. She would like to wander around in it, get herself lost. According to her guidebook, there are free concerts in the park, and playgrounds. She would like to go to one of the playgrounds and watch the children. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe that falls under the category of Not a Good Idea Anymore. She remembers a story her mother told her once, about how when Mom miscarried for the sixth and final time, her father ran up and down their old block, shouting at the sky and cursing God, until a neighbor brought him home. Mary tries to imagine herself here in Vondelpark, losing control and wailing, running amok and raging at the sky, but she cannot picture it. Maybe she does not deserve a baby if her grief is less than her sense of decorum.

  The baby she lost would have been a Jew, too. In Hitler’s Europe, her child would have been dragged from Geoff’s Gentile arms and loaded with Mary into the train cars. Mary thinks of Sophie’s Choice. She barely remembers the plot other than that scene. She sinks down on a bench, crying again. Sophie should have refused to give up either child. Then they would all have been shot on the spot, and that would have been preferable to the guilt, to the separation from her son, who died alone in the camp like Anne Frank, like Nix died alone in the sky. Go ahead, Mary almost told Zorg in the car that day in Greece. I dare you. No, she will not die alone, despite not having a baby. She has her parents; she has Geoff. There is no need to stay in Amsterdam and abuse her lungs and pretend to be twenty-one again with her damaged brother and Sandor. There is no need to rage at the sky, at a God in whom she’s not sure she even believes.

  She has the address of Kenneth’s apartment in her pocket. She doesn’t know how to get there. It’s not central, not in a touristed area, not on her guidebook map.

  By the time she arrives at Sandor’s, her mascara is no doubt smeared. He ushers her in, does the Dutch cheek-kissing thing; she gets the impression that he would stoically observe ritual and peck her on alternating cheeks even if she were on a ventilator, and it makes her laugh, which makes her cough. His apartment is all clean lines and modern Germanic furniture—the total opposite of Leo’s cozy, bohemian lair. To her immense relief, instead of pulling out a bottle of liquor he puts on a kettle for tea. She sits in an offensively bright red chair, pressing her knees together.

  She knew Sandor first, but he is Leo’s now. No matter what we tell ourselves in an effort to be sophisticated and free, there are bonds in this world created nowhere else but in bed.

  “Now this is how I remember you,” Sandor says, sitting across from her, not too close. “This is the Nicole I knew, not so much with these grown-up clothes and the grown-up smile.”

  “You remember me crying?” she says, and she laughs shrilly.

  “No.” He doesn’t smile. “No, but always looking like you might. Like you had lost something and were looking room to room, hoping to find it.”

  “That’s a good observation,” she says. “Yeah, I’d lost something. I certainly had.” He goes to pour the tea, and she thinks, But life is loss. So what? It isn’t an excuse for anything.

  When he sits down across from her, she says, “Do you ever want to have kids, Sandor?”

  His face registers visible surprise, much more so than at finding her teary eyed and trembling on his doorstep. After a moment he says, “I don’t think I want that, no. My mother was a good mother, you know, not like what Leo says about his childhood, nothing like that. And children are very happy, very beautiful things, sure. But until you just said this, I think I never considered about it before in my life!” He opens his arms wide, a teacup held precariously in one hand. “So that means probably it isn’t for me, don’t you think?”

  He leads her toward a closed door. For a moment it occurs to her that he may be taking her into a bedroom to seduce her. She imagines herself lying back, letting her brother’s lover do whatever he wants to her body even though she’s not attracted to him and never was. Is this what she’s come to, then? That she would betray her husband and her brother all in one fell swoop, for a man she doesn’t even desire, whom she’s fairly certain doesn’t desire her? No, she resolves. If he touches me, I’ll refuse him, even though my body is aching right now for some kind of comfort, some kind of release. She is so caught up in her resolution that when she finds herself surrounded by Sandor’s canvases, she feels dizzy, drunk somehow, despite the tea.

  The canvases are huge, with life-size human figures on them, each—Mary realizes with a sharp intake of breath—supposed to be dead from some kind of violence. The paint on the canvas is so thick that the knife wounds, the bullet holes, the decapitations, are deep enough to stick your fingers into. Quite a few of the figures wear soldier’s uniforms, of various nations. Others are civilians, mostly male, but there are girls’ bodies, too—some naked, with bright, open wounds of red paint gashed into their sides, across their breasts. She has never seen anything like it. They are like the paintings of a serial killer. She stands gaping, momentarily afraid.

  “I have different series,” Sandor explains animatedly. “For different wars, regimes in different countries. I just finished the Mirabal sisters—you want to see them? For years I have wanted to make them but I was too in love with them to do it. Finally, you know, I think about them for so long that we become like an old married couple and I get a litt
le sick of them, and then I see their flaws, and then finally I can paint them, once the infatuation is gone. Now, now that they are out there, out of my head, I love them again. They’re beautiful, don’t you think?”

  The three dead Mirabal sisters don’t have gunshot or knife wounds like so many of the others, but they are bleeding in places from their beatings, and their necks are bruised. Mary puts her hand up to her mouth. Sandor has painted the girls’ skin so that she can see the network of veins underneath. Their hair is splayed out messily, some individual strands matted to their faces with blood.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mary says. “Sandor, these are incredible. You’re unbelievably talented. God, they’re horrible to look at! Does anyone actually buy them and hang them in their house?”

  Sandor looks around him. “That has been a serious problem,” he admits. “They’re good for shows, but not so much for the cozy little Dutch house.”