A Life in Men: A Novel (37 page)

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 little 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.”

“I didn’t realize you were so obsessed with war and carnage,” she says cautiously. All at once, though, she remembers again the argument with Joshua in the Arthog House kitchen: Sandor’s insistence that World War II could have happened anywhere, even in civilized England. He must have been fascinated by war, a student of it, even then. An idea suddenly strikes her. “You don’t have any paintings of the victims of the Lockerbie disaster, do you?” she asks, but he is shaking his head no before the question is even out. She isn’t sure why she asked. Was she planning to give him a photograph of Nix and ask him to paint her, broken and mangled, still strapped to her airplane seat, dead in a Scottish field? Jesus, talk about high treason. Better she should just take Sandor into the other room and fuck him than
that.
Her eyes fill with fresh tears. What is wrong with her?

“You can’t call me Nicole anymore,” she blurts out. And realizes with a bolt of relief that she has
time
—not for everything, but for this. Someday she will tell him why, but it does not have to be today. “I’m not asking for Leo’s sake,” she says simply. “I’m asking for mine.”

He doesn’t answer. “I love your brother,” he begins instead, quietly. He is next to her now, arms at his sides still. “I have loved him for a long time, I think, from the time I first knew him. Then all of a sudden
you
are here . . .” Before she can blink, both her hands are clutched in his, as if they are a couple making wedding vows. “I’ll look after him for you if he lets me. I’m better than that pretty little
aarsridder
Pascal, so I think Leo lets me stick around, but who knows, maybe you can put in a good word. You don’t have to worry about him, Mary.”

She sniffs. “That’s good.” Even though Leo is the last thing on her mind, and she is certain Sandor knows it, she manages to look up, to face the canvases around them full of human wreckage, and say to the man who painted them, surprised to find how much she means it, “I feel better knowing Leo’s in your hands.”

T
HE CASE IS CLOSED
: your life remains a mystery. The blank shell of you running into the water at Plati Yialos, your cold rejection at the Athens Airport, your impersonal travelogues from London, culminating in that giddy final letter that defies all my dark imaginings. I can never know the truth of what happened inside that room. I will never know if you were impacted the way
I
would have been. I will never know if Hasnain was proof of your “recovery,” or even if he existed at all. I can never ask if you faced Zorg and Titus alone in an effort to save me, or look deeply enough into my own heart to predict whether I could have done the same for you. The only thing I know for sure is that you aimed, in some way, to spare me. Because I was sick, because you thought me damaged or tragic—maybe. But also because you loved me. Your protection was an act of love, and if you could see how far I’ve come you would beam your glowing smile, and then, at my continued hand-wringing, smack me upside the head.

And so, Nix, what does it mean to heal? To heal while my body simultaneously attacks from within? To heal in the absence of answers, here at the end of an incoherent, schizophrenic trail? What does it mean to trust unconditionally? What would it mean to finally—finally—let go?

A
GNES IS DEAD.
Kinga doesn’t speak English or Dutch, but it’s not hard to figure out what she’s saying. Kenneth stands in his doorway watching the girl—she can’t be more than twenty-four—pantomime Agnes’s death for him like he’s going to guess the name of a flick in a game of charades. She’s in the hall, junkie eyes bugging, acting out Agnes’s snorting coke and shooting H in tandem, though he figures it didn’t happen exactly like that, more like Kinga doesn’t know how to convey the lapse of time, whatever it was. The fucking insufficient lapse of time. He’s spoken to Agnes about it over and over again: that a real heroin overdose is rare, it’s mixing drugs that can get you killed. Agnes didn’t drink. They knew too many people who’d OD’d mixing H with booze or tranquilizers, so Agnes avoided the combo. She was a damn vegan, wouldn’t touch eggs or milk. Coke, though—that was a different story. Coke went with everything. Even her addiction to heroin couldn’t quell her craving for that old friend completely. Kinga’s mouth pours out a facsimile of an ambulance siren, mimes a sheet pulled over Agnes’s head.

“Zaterdag?” he asks, and she nods, points at her wrist as though it contains an invisible watch, says, “Zondag,” to indicate it was Sunday morning, of course—past midnight. He doesn’t know how to ask the rest: What took her so long to come and tell him? Did she tell anyone who Agnes was, or did she disappear into the crowd the minute the ambulance or police showed up? Was this at the club, or later, at some party, and where?

Is she certain Agnes is really dead?

Of course. That much he knows. If she weren’t dead, she’d have gotten word to him. He’s been telling himself all week that she ran off with some guy, but he’s known it was bullshit. She never came back for any of her things. It took Agnes years to acquire anything of her own; she’d never leave it all behind, not for some new man. Christ, she didn’t even
like
men.

He’s talking himself down in his head. He wants to scream at Kinga, but it’s not her fault, she’s just some young junkie, someone Agnes wouldn’t even have been out with if he were any kind of man. Agnes never carried ID with her, in case she got into any trouble: she wanted to be able to lie her way out of it. And even if the cops or the morgue or who-the-fuck-ever knew who she was, they wouldn’t connect her to him. Agnes’s address on all her paperwork was still in some backwater Czech town. She had no legal Dutch address; they didn’t share the same last name; Kenneth doesn’t even own a telephone; and
his
paperwork puts him at the address he shared years ago with his ex-wife, who doesn’t even live in A’dam anymore. He and Agnes both existed off the grid, and if Kinga hadn’t shown up now to tell him, he’d never have known shit.

He watched Agnes leave, knowing exactly what she was going out to do. She asked him to come, called him “baby” in English, and he called her a heroin whore. He sent her off with his blessings, to kill herself.

Kinga stands in the hallway pretending to cry—she’s the worst actress he’s ever laid eyes on, and he’s seen some bad ones. “I not come to now for I more upset,” Kinga tells him.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “We’re all fucking upset.” He shuts the door in her face.

Now what? Should he go to a local police station with Agnes’s passport, try to track down her body? It’s been nearly a week; surely it wouldn’t still be lying around? He has, he realizes, no idea. If this were Atlanta, he’d know what to do; if it were London, and he weren’t hiding from the cops himself, he’d even have a clue. But he’s a foreigner here, after all these years. The cops would speak better English than Kinga, but who knows the real story of Agnes’s death, and if there’s something fishy going on and he starts sniffing around, maybe they’ll start sniffing
him
. He’s got less to hide than usual, less to hide than in a long, long time, but
less
doesn’t translate to
nothing
. The cops aren’t his friends, not in any language. His hands are tied.