A Life in Men: A Novel

by Gina Frangello

  From: mrgrace@yahoo.com

  Subject: Re: Re: Re: Safely in Spain

  Date: August 16, 2001

  To: geoffreyjs@hitchcock.org

  Hey.

  Gibraltar is full of English pubs, like the boardwalk in Tenerife. Obviously I don’t care for it. The weather’s good but I got a little burned from the antibiotics, so now I’m hiding from the sun and waiting, just reading a lot. Leo and Sandor will be here soon, and then we’ll head to Tangier.

  Geoff, I’m sorry. I wish you were here but I understand why you wouldn’t come. It’s just that I need this trip for closure on what has been a defining part of my life. The time has come to nest, take it easy, drag out my time for as long as I can . . . I know that, I swear I do. Since I’ll miss the start of this school year, I’ll see how my health is holding up come spring, and IF it’s advisable (according to Dr. Fox, according to you), I’ll put in applications for a new position then. I hope I can go back to work and keep that measure of normalcy in our lives, even if it’s only for one more year.

  Please, Geoff, please understand. I didn’t want my last trip to be something I’d taken without intent, without knowledge of its significance. I couldn’t face the prospect of going so quietly into the night. This does not mean I take your love lightly.

  M

  THEY ARRIVE BY dusk. The first thing to hit Mary is the smell. Under her feet, discarded trash has become a gray, sticky paste from the rain and the trodding of travelers’ feet. The port teems with hustlers, vendors, Islamic women shouting at boisterous children in Arabic while the self-proclaimed “guides” accost those off the ferry in English, French, or Spanish. Kenneth pushes through, declining offers to help them find hotels, to drive them where they want to go. She is surprised to hear him bark in French at one of the hustlers, though since she doesn’t speak the language herself she isn’t sure whether perhaps he just threw out a curse word picked up from some French lover, or if he’s spoken with authority. The air smells like a carcass. Impulsively Mary puts her pashmina up to her mouth to inhale the scent of her own body and perfume, as though this will save her lungs from the air, and almost immediately a man shouts at her in English, “The problem is not Tangier, the problem is you!” She drops the pashmina before Kenneth can notice the provocation for the man’s verbal assault. To their right, another man sings the praises of America. Though they turn up the rue du Portugal, heading in the direction of the medina, he follows them, talking of his American friends and ignoring their insistence that they need no guide. When Kenneth at last successfully shakes the man off, he is replaced almost instantly by another, this one shouting, “You are as bad as the Israelis!” at their rebuttal of his services. The man taunts, “You don’t want help, okay, maybe someone stabs you and you are better off dead.” Still he follows. Kenneth turns onto a quieter street (Mary questions the wisdom of this, given their stalker) and, as soon as they appear to be alone, turns on the man and pushes him up against a wall. Mary’s heart races, waiting for a group of the stalker’s friends to materialize, but the man merely skulks off, shouting obscenities as he leaves.

  They stand on a corner with their rucksacks, unsure of where they are.

  Kenneth says, “You have a guidebook, right? Girls like you always bring guidebooks.”

  “Girls like me? You mean girls who leave their husbands to travel with lunatics who attack the locals? I didn’t realize that was a type.”

  “Whatever, Cystic. I didn’t attack that guy, I just got rid of him. Where’s the book?”

  She winds her pashmina around her neck high enough to breathe into it with her mouth and takes her Fodor’s from her pack.

  “Rue Magellan,” Kenneth pronounces. “Here, this way. We’ll go have a drink.”

  “Shouldn’t we find a place to stay first?”

  But she follows. His legs are so long that it’s hard to keep up. A couple of streets in, he stops wordlessly and takes off his pack, takes hers (a small hospital contained within) off her shoulders, puts it on, and hands her his, which is immensely lighter. Probably, she thinks, he has two changes of clothes and that’s it.

  By the time they get there, Mary is exhausted. This is the sort of thing to which she cannot adjust: how tiring things are now, ordinary things that for thirty-two years she did without thought. This is how it begins. One day, you can stroll aimlessly around for hours without thought; you can take hikes with your husband and swim laps. Then abruptly you cannot even sing along with the radio without getting winded. The infection is gone, but your lungs are not the same. Suddenly you spend more time lecturing your students from your desk than pacing the room with the restless energy you have possessed all your life. Suddenly you cannot carry your own rucksack for more than a few blocks. Suddenly you do not dare travel alone, and when your capricious brother bails on you at the last moment, instead of changing your plans, you stick to your guns and call another man.

  “Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, they all stayed here,” Kenneth is saying. They have to step over thick trash on the slanted street to get to the slightly dilapidated white building bearing the sign HOTEL MUNIRIA. Mary’s relief at the word hotel is palpable. “You teach lit,” Kenneth says. “Well, this is it—this is where it happened for real.”

  “I don’t teach the Beats,” Mary says. She does not add that she has never understood their appeal exactly, that they always seemed to her some posturing dick club.

  The hotel’s bar, the Tanger Inn, is like a shrine. Photos of Beat writers litter the walls, and even some pages of their manuscripts are tacked alongside. It is heady, she has to admit: the life they led, touching it like this. Regardless of whether the art that emerged is her thing, these were men who lived life on their own terms. Of course, from what she understands, women were often the casualties. She and Kenneth sit under a photograph of Burroughs. “I always wanted to come here,” he says, a rare excitement in his voice. “I worshipped these cats when I was young. Even built my own Dream Machine.”

  Mary is not sure what this means.

  The bourbon burns going down, but its burn is good. She imagines it dissolving everything in its tracks like acid, eating the mucus inside her. “I hear these guys beat their wives.”

  Kenneth snorts. “They were all fags anyway,” he says. “Too bad your buddy Sandor’s not here—him and your brother could ask for the room where Kerouac and Ginsberg shacked up together. It could be like their honeymoon suite.”

  This is it, then: the chance to say what she has been waiting to tell him. “They’ll be here in a week. They’re meeting us in Casablanca.”

  He stares. She puts her head down on her arms. The bar is not crowded, but everyone inside is a foreigner: a traveler or expat. The bourbon is starting to scramble her brain and she would like to walk around the room and study the photos and pages more closely, emerge with a clearer picture of these howling men and what they stood for—the ways in which adventure is necessarily lawless, the ways in which freedom always demands a price and someone else is left footing the bill.

  “What’re you playing at?” Kenneth says, so quietly she can barely hear him through the filter of her arms. “I didn’t come for a reunion with those boys.” He takes the top of her arm so that she sits up to face him. “Don’t give me any shit either about how I hate queers—I don’t care who they fuck. But if I wanted to get together with Sandor, all I had to do was cross town. Where’s your husband, girl? What am I doing here?”

  Across the room, a bald man in a white linen suit sits alone at the bar. Something in his dapper attire strikes Mary as out of another time. At a nearby table, four kids in their twenties laugh over beers. They look like a poster for the United Colors of Benetton: One girl is Asian and drop-dead gorgeous; one of the men is Latino and equally beautiful. The remaining girl and boy are white, less splendid, but full of a young vitality. They cannot be more than five or six years younger than she is, but she feels as if they are another species.

  “Eight months ago,�
� Mary begins, “my lungs were working at ninety percent. That’s probably better than your lungs. I was one of those weird case studies. My lungs have been colonized with two of the deadliest bacteria someone with CF can get, but for some reason it barely seemed to be impacting me. Other than tune-ups, I hadn’t been in the hospital since 1994.” She drains the rest of her bourbon, picks up his, and takes a sip. “Then in January, a month after my dad’s heart attack, things just went to shit. Maybe it was the stress, but I got pneumonia for the first time in years. I’d pretty much just gone back to work when one day I’m sitting there in class, talking about The Crucible—you know, Arthur Miller?—and all of a sudden I have this pain in my chest like I’m going to die, and I can’t breathe, every time I try it’s like my chest is on fire, I can feel it burning all the way into my back. I was gasping for air, I thought I was having a heart attack, too, and would die right in front of my poor students.” She laughs, and she can hear how her own laugh—with its hollowness, its bitterness—is different from that of the four young travelers at the next table. “I wasn’t that lucky. I just had a collapsed lung.”

  Kenneth is still watching her. He hasn’t done the things the teachers at Hanover High do when she talks to them about her health: make faces, gasp. He hasn’t asked questions like Geoff’s doctor friends. She’s not sure if this is because nothing can faze him at this point or if it’s because he doesn’t really care, though if he doesn’t give a shit, she isn’t sure why he’s here.

  “Next thing you know, I’m back in the hospital with a tube in my chest. It was almost spring by the time I went back to work, but it wasn’t the same. I was tired a lot, coughing more than usual. They put me on this antibiotic called minocycline—one of the few that works pretty well for the bacteria I’ve got. Anyway, I started feeling really crappy. I had stomach pain, and no matter what I did, trying to take the medicine with food or whatever, it got worse. So I go to the ER and they give me every fucking test under the sun. Finally they said I was having an attack of acute pancreatitis. You have to understand, you can only even get pancreatitis if you have a functioning pancreas, which most people with CF don’t. It was just ridiculous, the one thing you don’t expect. They think maybe the antibiotic was causing it, so they took me off it, jammed me full of IV fluids, I’m home in a few more days. By now, it’s May. And over a four-month period, my pulmonary function has fallen from ninety to less than sixty percent. Geoff doesn’t want me to finish the year out teaching, he wants me to rest, focus on getting my numbers back up, right? So I just leave—I take a leave of absence for May and June, and all I’m doing is sleeping, eating, wearing my Vest, doing my therapies. I’m spending maybe four hours a day on therapies and meds. That’s my summer. But the numbers don’t go up. In fact, they fall further, not much, but enough to put me on the brink of being classified with severe lung disease for the first time in my life—to have gone from literally numbers that were normal to severe, skipping right the fuck over mild and moderate. I always was an all-or-nothing kind of girl.”

  She stops. She is not sure what she’s supposed to do now. She wishes she could cry to demonstrate to him the gravity of what she’s saying, because she’s not sure he gets it, but she doesn’t feel like crying. She just feels like ordering another drink.

  “It’s over,” she says at last. “I can’t fake it anymore. I used oxygen to fly to Spain, which I’ve never done on a plane before in my life. At home, Geoff had me sleeping with oxygen just to give me a boost, because it made my sleep better. I don’t need it—I don’t need it yet—but I won’t deny that it helped.”

  Kenneth says, “Where is he now?”

  “It’s complicated,” Mary says.

  “Did you leave him?”

  She cackles a little. “Well, obviously as you can see I left him physically, yes.” Abruptly the tears are in her eyes, but she doesn’t want them anymore, blinks them away. “I came because I needed to, and he didn’t think I should. He didn’t have time off anyway—he took a ton of personal days when I was in the hospital all those times. Who knows if I’ll ever go back to work, so we need Geoff’s health insurance. He couldn’t sabotage his career to come even if he wanted to. Which”—she chortles again—“he definitely did not.”

  “No,” Kenneth said, “I don’t get it. I don’t care about the health insurance shit. How could he let you come here alone? He sure as hell doesn’t know you’re with me.”

  “He thinks I’m with Leo and Sandor. Leo agreed to come, but then all of a sudden he got offered some fabulous show in Paris. It’s a big deal—a one-man show at some really prestigious gallery. I mean, he’s forty years old and he’s waited his entire life for this. He got this grant—did I tell you about that when I saw you last year? Twenty thousand dollars. His paintings have been selling, his career is taking off. He couldn’t say no, but he’s only staying for the opening and then he’s coming here.”

  The four tourist kids have gotten up to leave. On the walls, Kerouac and Ginsberg stand watch like bemused sentries.

  “You could have waited,” Kenneth says. “A week in Spain’s no hardship. I’ve seen you, what, three times in two years for one night apiece? Why did you call me?”

  “I shouldn’t have called,” she admits.

  “Let’s leave,” he says, and for a moment she thinks he means leave Tangier, get back on the morning ferry, and give up, and the tears do spill over hot and fast before she can banish them. But then he says, “We should get us a room. We should fuck our brains out. What do either of us have to lose?”

  “I told you,” she says wearily. “I told you.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you told me.”

  “We’re getting two rooms,” she says. “If it’s too expensive for you, I’ll pay.”

  “What the fuck, girl,” he says. “I’m not taking your money. I can afford my own damn room. But you’re the one who turns up at my bar or my place every time you come visit your brother. You’re the one who called me and said ‘quit your job.’ Don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m good for in your eyes, and how it’s not what you want.”

  “It’s not,” she says. “I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t care about sex right now. Maybe I’ve moved beyond it.”

  “Oh, Christ,” he says. “Your lung falls down and now you’re beyond sex. You’re not Joan of Arc, baby. Get over yourself.”

  She starts laughing. “This—” she says, “this is why I invited you. Not the fucking. This.”

  “Well,” he says, “it ain’t why I came.”

  “Leave, then. Go, and I’ll wait here until it’s time to meet Leo and Sandor.”

  “Right. Like you didn’t tell me that whole sad story so I couldn’t cut out. Like you didn’t say all that shit to make sure I’d know it’s not safe to leave your fifty-percent-lung-capacity, cystic ass on your own.”

  “Do what you want,” she says. “I thought you’re such a Bad Man anyway—isn’t that your shtick? What do you care if I end up dead in Tangier, Mr. Bad Man?”

  He stands and throws some bills on the table, and she’s shocked to see that he changed guilders for dirhams before he came, in anticipation of the trip. She thought she’d have to charge their drinks; surely Kenneth does not own a credit card. “Come on,” he says. “You want your own room so bad, then cut out the foreplay.” He lifts her rucksack, but when she stands to grab his, he’s already slung it over his shoulder like a duffel, like it is nothing at all.

  WALKING BACK TO the hotel on his third morning in Tangier, Kenneth thinks maybe he’ll just stay on here. In their room, Cystic is still asleep. He’s got to see her through meeting her brother, but then he’ll be free. He’s been in Amsterdam longer than anywhere except Georgia, longer even than his time in London, which seemed like forever when it was happening. Time to move on.

  Tangier could be the place. Since he’s been here he’s been taking photos like a motherfucker; he’s feeling an old hunger he hasn’t known in years, eager for the n
ext thing. This city is the kind of place that could fuel him. Seedy, dirty, teeming with people and odors and sounds—but something beautiful underneath the filthy facade, something old and eternal. Yesterday he and Cystic took a taxi ride up to the top of the hill the city’s built on and looked down. The taxi driver said it’s one of the only places in the world where you can view two continents at once, and Kenneth felt almost dizzy, a sense of the world’s simultaneous vastness and accessibility overwhelming him. When he was young, he left home to see the world, and he believed in it, that goal—he thought himself on an honorable quest. But all that time in New Orleans, Taos, Los Angeles, London, the Caribbean, then back around Europe before he settled in A’dam—something was lost early on, before he even hit British soil and things got really bad. The journey itself had ceased to be the point of anything, and instead he was always on the make, looking for a buck, looking for somebody to take advantage of, looking to score. He was already a junkie when he left home, but a junkie could still have a soul, at least for a while. Finally, though, the drugs ate out anything left in him of the noble wanderer, turning him into a grifter, a dealer, a con man, an enforcer, whatever he needed to be.

  But that’s too easy. These past few years, even before Agnes’s death, he’s been clean (or clean enough), and it hasn’t changed him much. All that time in Amsterdam, a city overrun with tourists sucking up its quaint beauty and amusement park of vice, he wasn’t ever moved. Here his eyes are like a camera lens again, and there are two visions: the messy, cacophonous one he and Cystic are traipsing through in the flesh, and the one he can frame just so, cutting out anything extraneous and boiling things down to their surprisingly harmonious essence.

  He wanted to walk up that hill, but she couldn’t. They had to take the taxi up, and Cystic insisted on paying because it was her “fault” they couldn’t walk like normal people. At the top there were four other travelers. Kenneth recognized them from the first night at the bar. They were just kids, but they’d taken a car, too, with a guide. He wanted to say, See, most tourists don’t walk it, there’s nothing to feel guilty about, but she wouldn’t have liked that. She doesn’t like him to be nice, and he’s no good at it anyway, so he steers clear.