A Life in Men: A Novel (44 page)
“Shh,” she says. “Shhh, baby, shhh.”
“I don’t wanna
shhh,
” he says, jerking a little, but he does, and soon his breath is calm again and he is sleeping in her grasp.
She is the one awake till morning.
N
OBODY’S CELL PHONE
worked in Essaouira, but the moment they get off the bus in Marrakech, Leo’s starts beeping like a banshee. Mary waits in the shade with Kenneth and Sandor while Leo retrieves messages, pacing back and forth in front of them like a panther, narrating as he goes along. “Merel,” he proclaims, grinning. She owns the gallery that represents him, and promised to apprise him of Paris sales. By the second message he’s laughing aloud and saying, “Darlings, we will be finding ourselves some swank digs tonight.” Mary high-fives Sandor, and they wait while Leo continues to play art diva, holding the phone to his ear and reporting, “Oooh, Merel again, she sounds pissed off that I haven’t been at her beck and call—” But abruptly he stops dead in his tracks, a look of horror crossing his eyes. Mary’s stomach jumps. “What’s wrong?” she blurts out. “Is it Daniel?” Though her biological father is never sick, for some reason he has always seemed to her a marked man. Leo doesn’t answer, merely passes Sandor the phone. “Her Dutch is too fast,” he murmurs. Then: “The Reina Sofia? I shouldn’t have smoked the last of that hash, it’s giving me delusions of grandeur.” He puts his hands up over his face and leans against a mildly slimy wall. He is shaking.
Mary puts her arm on his back to try to steady him. To her relief, Sandor, holding Leo’s phone and listening to the messages, is making an eyes-bugged-out, half-smiling, half-disbelieving expression that would not be suitable to Daniel’s untimely demise. He is nodding. He starts to cry, and Mary is taken aback and sharply embarrassed; Sandor is not usually prone to outbursts of emotion other than sarcasm. He hugs Leo, who still has his head in his hands. The phone has been flung onto a train station bench, and Sandor is embracing Leo right in front of all the Arabs and discombobulated tourists, whacking Leo upside the head a little and saying, “Cut it out, the lightning is not going to strike, you stupid boy, this is it, this is
it,
it’s true!”
Leo says, “It can’t be true. Stop looking at me. Oh God.”
“It is only a
temporary
exhibition,” Sandor says at last, withdrawing from Leo’s arms. “It’s not like you get to stay there, Leo. Calm down.”
They sit on a bench, except for Kenneth, who nonetheless hovers close enough to hear what is going on.
“I have to go home,” Leo says. “Or to Paris, or Madrid, I’m not sure.” He starts laughing hysterically. “Sandor, holy shit. Did she even say where I’m supposed to
go
?”
“You don’t need to leave today,” Sandor explains calmly. “We will go back to Casablanca tomorrow and you can be in Madrid in an hour and a half if Merel wants you to kiss somebody’s ass. We’ll call her and work all of it out, no problem.”
All at once it hits Mary: she should never have run off to Morocco! If she had only saved this trip, she could have gone to see her brother’s work exhibited at one of the great art museums of the world! Or wait—maybe she can still go? They could all head back to Casablanca together. It’s like Sandor said: only an hour and a half. She can call Geoff, and for something like
this,
surely he will fly out to join her? She imagines herself shopping in Madrid for something suitable to wear to Leo’s museum debut . . . imagines her arm linked through Geoff’s, flutes of champagne in their hands. Her mind lingers too long on the picture of her own hand holding the glass, and at once nausea roils in her stomach. For thirty-one years her fingers were normal—not just normal but lovely, thin, and tapered. Now she would be E.T. in a cocktail dress—now her fingers against a crystal flute would expose her new truth.
“Well done, man,” Kenneth says. “You’re going to be sharing digs with
Guernica.
Shit.” But his eyes are already on the gate, ready to move on.
From:
[email protected]
Subject:
Marrakech
Date:
August 28, 2001
We got some unbelievable news today. Leo’s going to have a painting in an exhibition at the Reina Sofia in Madrid! He insisted on staying here for my birthday, though, so he doesn’t leave until the 31st. We want to do a small hike to celebrate (I promise: small!) before heading into the desert.
So for now we’re here only for a night. Leo and Sandor have sprung for the most expensive hotel in town, La Mamounia, where apparently the Clintons and Winston Churchill have stayed. Out in the gardens there’s an entire wall of purple flowers so dense that you can’t see a speck of rock, and the bathrooms are so colorful and ornate that they look like enlarged versions of the intricate boxes sold in the medinas. It’s kind of a freaky combo of art deco and Moorish, not very “authentic.” But wow, it sure is a relief to be somewhere cosmopolitan enough that the concierge acted like storing my DNase in a fridge was no big deal, instead of acting like I was a drug smuggler, and to walk into the room to find a bottle of clean water I could use for my neti pot. I don’t have to pull out the hand sanitizer in this place, it’s cleaner than a hospital.
We even have a phone in our room! If you want to call, this would be the time. Geoff, I thought I’d celebrate every birthday with you for the rest of my life. I’m having an amazing time. But I never wanted it to come to this.
Love, me (still 32 for 2 more days . . . )
F
UCK
T
ANGIER.
M
ARRAKECH
is the place. Kenneth sits on the terrace of Café Argana overlooking the Jemaa el-Fna, waiting for Cystic and the other two. She’s been in the business center at their palatial hotel, no doubt sending e-mails to her husband, and while the other two wanted to eat at the hotel restaurant, where you sit on pillows and watch a belly dancer (Christ!), at least Cystic backed him up and insisted on hitting Jemaa el-Fna. They agreed to meet at the conspicuous restaurant overhanging the square, and Kenneth left La Mamounia right away, the ostentatious bustle of the place making him cagey in a way Le Mirage, with its vast emptiness, hadn’t. He thought an hour alone would clear his head, but his head is already
too
clear, clear to the point of stupidity—he’s too sober to boot. Nothing he’s thought in the past week feels even remotely sane.
He said that thing to Cystic about his son, about finding him. It hangs now, heavy as a rope.
What he should do, he knows, is wait till it’s time for them to meet him, and while
they’re
out, sneak back to La Mamounia, use his room key and retrieve his rucksack and disappear into the medina and never see any of them again. He knew it even before he headed down to Spain; he knew it in Tangier; he knew it at Le Mirage. Why, then, won’t he leave?
The view is good at this tourist-trap restaurant, but still. He’d rather be down on the street where the action is. Down there is a bedlam that makes his skin buzz. Unlike in Tangier, where it was every man for himself, this place has a community vibe that intrigues him, draws him in. You could live in this square and want for nothing, never leave; it’s like a walled city of old. Earlier today it felt like a movable circus, bursting with bare-chested acrobats with chestnut skin, casually defying gravity, while nearby, snakes slithered to the sound of music played by bored, fat men. Women wore shorts or burkas or anything in between, and through some of the veils you could see the shadow of a feminine jaw and it was sad and erotic at once. But just when you think you have the frenzy of Jemaa el-Fna figured out it shape-shifts after dark, so that the bright stalls of fat, fire-bright oranges and embroidered fez hats are gone. By night, the square has transformed into one cohesive, makeshift restaurant, full of the smells of human consumption. Beneath the giant cloud of barbecue smoke, the noise of the crowd rumbles with a sense of danger even more seductive than its daylight incarnation.
He thinks about blowing off Café Argana altogether, but Cystic can’t eat street food. She has to be careful what she touches, what she lets inside. Some kind of bug that’s nothing to him could wipe her out. Jemaa el-Fna is a virtual cesspool of germs, like those buses they’ve taken, like every square inch of Tangier, like all the toilets she’s squatted over since they’ve been here, just holes in the ground, sometimes with nothing but a trickle of water running from some rock in the wall, or a dirty bucket next to your feet, which you’re supposed to slosh on yourself with your left hand, as if using only one particular hand will make the slop inside clean. Her husband was right: she has no business here. A well of anger surges up his throat. Any real man would’ve smacked her face, taken the credit card away, told her to sit the hell down, that she wasn’t going anywhere. Simple.
Except of course it’s not that simple. Except that, of course, Cystic would never marry a man like that, and so her Good Man, her liberated Twenty-First Century Man, let her go traipsing around the third world with the likes of him.
Here they come now. The Flying Dutchfag, the Rising Artist, and the Fatally Ill Damsel. Walking across the square below him, they look like characters in a film: all shiny and clean, their cotton clothes billowing. They look
young,
even Leo, who’s not that much younger than he is. They look too young to be anything he should touch, though he’s touched a lot younger. He can hear their laughter all the way up here, and for a moment, panic rises in him: he was supposed to flee but he didn’t. Abruptly he thinks of how easy it must be to score in this wild place, how it was a mistake to leave heroin behind, it left too many spaces inside him in its wake, and try though he has to leave those spaces in peace, they’re still hungry and squirming and looking for something to fill them, and how stupid he is to think that it might be her. Under the table his legs twitch. He has his camera, and if he misses the H so much, it wouldn’t be hard to find. He has his camera and his money, what’s left of it, so who gives a shit about the rucksack? He wouldn’t even need to go back to La Mamounia, to the room they’re supposed to share because neither of them had the balls to require Leo to plunk down an extra four hundred bucks. Those boys must assume they’re fucking anyway. Why else would he
be
here?
Run, you stupid fucker. Run.
They have reached the table. There is another man with them—barely more than a boy really, maybe his early twenties. Kenneth noticed the boy walking close to them in the square but thought nothing of it, since the square is teeming with people. Now he gawks as though maybe Cystic and the other two don’t realize the boy is there—as though maybe he is stalking them without their awareness. Cystic, though, puts her hand on the boy’s arm and says, “Kenneth, this is Tommy from La Mamounia. He has the next few days off at the hotel, so we snagged him to be our guide to the Atlas Mountains—he has friends there.”
Leo and Sandor grin broadly. The boy is good-looking in that Arab way, and they must be enjoying the eye candy.
They all sit. It is a table for four, so an extra chair has to be procured.
“Tommy,” Kenneth says slowly. “What kind of name is that for a Moroccan?”
“Oh,” the kid says, “my real name is Khalid. Tommy is my name for La Mamounia.” He speaks with less of an accent than Sandor. It’s unnerving.
Kenneth snorts a little. “So Tommy is your alias?” Now the kid appears confused. “You know,” he clarifies, “your alter ego, your code name, like that. The name you give fat Americans ’cause they’re too stupid to pronounce Khalid.”
“Khalid isn’t hard to pronounce,” the kid says agreeably, “but sometimes the guests at La Mamounia have a hard time remembering it, so Tommy is my nickname.”
“Why
Tommy,
though?” Kenneth persists. He feels antagonistic, though he knows there is no reason. If the others wouldn’t find out, he would kick the kid’s ass just for fun. “It doesn’t even start with the same letter as your real name.”
Cystic shoots him a dirty look. Yes, there are moments when this is who she is: a polite girl from the heartland suburbs, the kind who—if she weren’t damaged goods—would have grown up to be somebody’s mother, saying shit like,
Is that how I taught you to speak to our guests?
Christ. This ordinary suburban girl is what all his internal chaos is about? This thirtysomething doctor’s wife putting her hand on the Arab kid’s arm maternally as if to deflect Kenneth’s impropriety?
But what she says is, “Don’t worry, we all have aliases around here, so you’ll fit right in.” And just like that, the mother has vanished and she is something else again.
“Okay then, Alias,” Kenneth says, gesturing at his menu. “So have you eaten at this place? What’s good?”
The kid shrugs, not deferentially but boldly now. “I’ve eaten here, yes, but nothing is good. There are other places—I’ll take you if you like.”
In one synchronized movement, they all stand.
A
NOTHER UNRESOLVED MORNING.
Under a merciless blue sky, the sun shining lustrous on their shoulders, the four of them plus the Arab kid head for the Kik Plateau. Alias’s friend’s village isn’t accessible by car, so they’ve got to hoof it. Leo keeps asking Cystic if she remembered her salt pills, until she thrusts a skinny arm out at him and snaps, “Here, lick me if you don’t believe it!” Kenneth can taste her from memory. Finally, he stops on the hot dirt road and strips his jeans off, hacking at the legs with his knife to make shorts. Everyone laughs; for a minute he’s all right with being here; for a minute he can make it through this day. What passes for trees are tiny and pushed back so far from the road—amid fields of wheat and wildflowers—that they offer no shade. “The sweltering sky,” he jokes. Ha fucking ha.
They arrive to find Alias’s friend gone, no one but the boy’s mother, Nawar, at home. They’ve come unannounced, but now that they’re here, it’s clear there probably isn’t one phone in the whole village. They stand in the blinding sunlight, water bottles depleted and the midday temperature climbing past one hundred degrees. Silently, the small Berber woman moves from the doorway to usher them in, and so they step, sweaty and blinking in the sudden darkness, into another world.