A Life in Men: A Novel by Gina Frangello

Author:Gina Frangello [Frangello, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Retail
ISBN: 9781616203498
Google: mMQ69TVhoREC
Amazon: 1616201630
Barnesnoble: 1616201630
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2014-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?

(GREECE: ZORG)

The first ferry to Ios leaves Mykonos at 6 a.m. This has been their goal. Nix walks with Mary and the two Harvard men through the empty streets until they reach the open port. Mary and the men keep turning to see if they are being followed, but Nix does not turn. Her attention is focused on the small adjustments to her movements she must make—on the way she would normally walk and use her limbs in the absence of pain. Before sleep, she had not yet realized the pain. This, she thinks numbly, is what somebody referring to injured victims of a roadside accident would call shock: She’s still in shock. The shock is wearing off. She wants to wave her hand to an imaginary waitress and say, I’ll have another order of shock, please. It is hard not to laugh and never stop; it is hard not to scream and never stop; it is hard to walk. She urinated into the sea last night at Plati Yialos so as not to have to touch herself, but now she has to go again badly.

Sandpapery Greek toilet paper is wadded up inside her underpants to catch the blood. She brought tampons, of course, in her rucksack, but she is aware from some distant place that if she uses them the way she would have to now, she will never be able to use them again. This is what her day has come to: preserving the sanctity of tampons. Mary kisses the good-looking Harvard one good-bye, and the other one waits for Nix’s kiss, but Nix pretends that she is alone, that he does not exist.

On the Plati Yialos beach chair, she would have let Irv fuck her right in front of Mary and Geoff if those yowling cats had not materialized. This seems a sick joke now, not entirely possible. Her body is barely a thing that can walk. Yet it had seemed briefly possible that Irv’s innocuous dick could be a scouring pad, erasing traces of what was there before. It had seemed briefly logical that one should immediately get back on the horse or one would be doomed.

It had seemed briefly conceivable that she was not already doomed.

There is another ferry, headed for Athens. “We’re getting on that one,” Nix says. “Forget Ios, we’re going back to the airport and getting the fuck out of this country.”

Mary begins to protest. Mary says things. Mary talks, gesturing with her hands.

“Look,” Nix says, to make Mary stop. “You should never have come. You were a fucking wreck yesterday on that balcony. You’re lucky you didn’t drop dead from all that albuterol you were shoving down your throat. I should have known better—this is no place for you.”

The two Harvard men hang back. They are headed to Athens tomorrow themselves, then to Boston or someplace, though Nix reminds herself that is also entirely possible that they are only real in this context, and after she and Mary leave Mykonos, they will evaporate.

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