Free A Life in Men: A Novel by Gina Frangello Page A

past put on notice. Since he started using again, he’s been telling himself daily to split, just disappear, but his body won’t obey. When Nicole and Joshua leave London, though, whatever it is that’s holding him here will be broken, and he can leave, too.
Yank
will at last recede into travelers’ subculture lore: who knows whatever happened to that cat, a hard-ass dealer up Camden Town way who was thought to have snuffed his best mate? One more month to keep hiding his habit in the bathroom. Another month more to listen to the sounds of their lovemaking from the other side of the wall.
    “You take good care of her out there on the road,” he tells Joshua. It is not all he wants to say, yet even this much is a transgression in his world: telling another man how to treat his woman. But no, Joshua’s not that kind, not the type to rankle.
    “I lost the first girl I ever loved because of my own careless stupidity,” Joshua says solemnly. “Believe me, I won’t make that mistake again.”
    The cigarette is dying, just smoke between Joshua’s fingers. Yank takes a deep swig of Southern Comfort. What a fucking name. There is not one damn thing he can remember that was comforting about the South.
    “In my country,” Joshua continues, “relationships between blacks and whites are illegal, you know. Of course it’s only the blacks who actually get arrested. Which is, like, pretty much a euphemism for killed, everyone with a brain knows that. Except fucking me.”
    On the tape player, “Ramble On” blares. Yank looks at Joshua, at his fresh, unlined skin, and realizes to his surprise that he
knows
this story already, though he has never heard it before. This story has been the subtext every time Joshua looks at Nicole with such singular devotion, with a gratitude that belies his age and chick-magnet physique. This story has hovered in the shadows every time Joshua mixes Nicole’s Southern Comfort and soda before his own; every time he has served her a larger portion of vegetables and rice than she can truly eat and waited until she pushes it away before finishing her food himself. Somehow, this story has even been implicit in the freaky way Joshua addresses the old, strung-out, toothless geezers from the estates with respectful Zulu greetings, as though they know what the fuck he is saying—as though he is atoning for something, proving something wrong in the absence of the thing itself, as though those black faces have anything to do with him. Already—all along—Yank has imagined Joshua’s youthful body twined around the willowy, darker limbs of that
other
girl. He can see that girl in his mind right now, and he wants the needle even more than before.
    Still he asks: “They
killed
her, man? She’s dead?”
    “Nah, she got off lucky.” Joshua looks down. “She just lost an eye.” He stares at the cigarette burning into his fingers. “I’d known her forever, like, since we were fifteen—my coach’s maid. Who knows, once she could walk again she might even have gone back to work, if he still wanted her with the eye and all. He was fucking her, too, but that was all right, see, because she didn’t
want
to fuck him. Rape is perfectly acceptable. Just not love.”
    “I hear you,” Yank says simply. “The year you were born, what, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, I was a teenager in goddamn Georgia. It ain’t South Africa, but I remember those days, too.”
    And absurdly it strikes him that this is the most he’s said about his own past in years—that this whole conversation is a transgression of sorts. Because the men of his worldwide pack have come here (wherever
here
is—Taos, Marseille, London) devoid of pasts, searching for new lovers, siblings, and comrades, all at once. If they ever strike anything, it is only fool’s gold.
He who cannot learn from the past is condemned to repeat it,
or some such shit. He waits, afraid of what may come out of his mouth next.
    Joshua, though, is nodding fiercely.