A Life in Men: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

can’t just open it, but she stands frozen. She needs to get her rucksack to the toilet like she does every morning after Joshua leaves. Over the running of the bath, she will sit on the floor and blow into her Flutter device, her coughing muffled by the sound of the gushing tap. Most days, she doesn’t stop until the tub is almost overflowing.
    Before arriving in London in August, she’d completed three chest physiotherapies daily to loosen her stubborn mucus, lying half-upside-down while her mother played percussion on her chest and back with a practiced cupping motion, handing her Dixie cups to spit into. Initially, her mother’s tentative touches just mirrored the fear her parents displayed constantly in the year following her diagnosis: walking on eggshells, giving in to spells of covert weeping. For the first time, Mary had felt hyperconscious of her adoption, of the fact that her parents had intended to adopt a normal child but had instead gotten stuck with her, a defective model who would ruin all their lives. In their shell-shocked faces she saw constant evidence of their regret. Slowly, however, this passed, as all heightened states of vigilance do. The past couple of years, Mary’s daily treatments had become casual—Mom gossiping idly about her colleagues with the TV on in the background—even though they still dominated each day’s routine and made her mother endlessly, relentlessly necessary: a partner in the crime of her illness.
    As Mary’s departure for London approached, Mom had begged her not to go, demanding, “But who will
help
you over there?” Still, it was her mother who’d written out, in her almost calligraphic cursive, a list of pulmonary specialists in London and insisted Mary call one immediately upon arrival. And it was that doctor who introduced her to her Flutter device—not yet approved stateside—and rendered manual chest physiotherapy a thing of her past.
    Who rendered her need for her mother’s help a thing of her past.
    Mary is meant to use the Flutter three times daily, twenty minutes a shot. Instead she uses it once, during the time it takes to run a bath. This is the only time she is alone, and even then there are obstacles, such as getting inside her room in the first place. While Joshua’s work schedule is intense, and Sandor leaves five mornings weekly to sell art in the suburbs, Yank is a nocturnal beast. During the day when she’s not tending bar, he is almost always in the house.
    Sandor staggers past her in the hallway, muttering, “Morning,
schatje,
” which Mary takes to mean something like sweetheart or sugar in Dutch. Although half-Spanish, Sandor could scarcely look more Aryan with his near-translucent skin, blue eyes, and yellow hair—at least what’s left of it. He takes great pains to hide his pattern baldness, shaving his head and then, bizarrely, for good measure, wearing a bandanna around his skull and covering it with a black bowler. This head gear, combined with his extreme paleness and height, gives him a menacing, neofascist look that his Dutch accent only exacerbates, so that during the early weeks of their acquaintance, Mary was constantly expecting him to utter some phrase such as,
Damn, I hate the Jews.
In fact, he has become her closest friend in London, confiding in her things he would never disclose to the men, such as the way his father savagely beat him after discovering him—aged thirteen—with his mouth around his best friend’s cock (“We were literally inside the closet, as they say!”), prompting his parents’ divorce. Such as his regrets over dropping out of art school in Amsterdam, and the corresponding fact that he is now, slowly and he believes without a trace, embezzling funds from the art reproduction company for which he works, all in the hopes of going back to school. Last night, Sandor slept in his leather pants, and between that and the morning joint Joshua and Yank smoked in his “bedroom,” he smells like he’s