A Life in Men

by Gina Frangello

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The friendship between Mary and Nix had endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women embarked on a summer vacation in Greece. It was a trip initiated by Nix, who had just learned that Mary had been diagnosed with a disease that would cut her life short and who was determined that it be the vacation of a lifetime. But by the time their visit to Greece was over, Nix had withdrawn from their friendship, and Mary had no idea why.

Three years later, Nix is dead, and Mary returns to Europe to try to understand what went wrong. In the process she meets the first of many men that she will spend time with as she travels throughout the world. Through them she experiences not only a sexual awakening but a spiritual and emotional awakening that allows her to understand how the past and the future are connected and to appreciate the freedom to live life adventurously.

Release date: February 4, 2014

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 432

Sample

Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?

(GREECE: ZORG)

Pretend I’m not already dead. That isn’t important anyway. It’s just that, from here, I can see everything.

There we are, see? Or should I say, There they are? Two girls sitting at a café off Taxi Square, eating anchovies lined up in a small puddle of oil on a white plate. Both girls are obsessed with salt. Since arriving in Mykonos, they have ordered anchovies every day, lunch and dinner. As a result, they are constantly thirsty. They carry large bottles of water with them everywhere, written on in Greek lettering, the blue caps peeking out the tops of their beach bags along with their rolled-up beach mats. The curly-haired blond girl, Mary, jokes to the straight-haired blond girl, Nix, that this influx of salt is going to be a turnoff should they pick up any hot men. Mary has cystic fibrosis, and sometimes one of the first clues parents get that their baby has CF is that the child’s sweat is especially salty, so much so that the baby tastes salty on the parents’ lips. Apparently Mary’s parents (who are not her biological parents, so this is particularly strange) share her affinity for salt, because no one noticed that Mary was an odd-tasting baby, and for this reason, along with a variety of other factors, like her ability—unusual in CF patients—to digest her food, the disease was not diagnosed until she was seventeen. Today as they sit at the tiny sidewalk café, Mary places an anchovy on her long pink tongue and lets it lie there while she savors its taste.

Several postcards lie strewn on the tabletop between them, and Nix picks one up without looking at the photo on the front. Hand trembling slightly from her caffeine-and-nicotine buzz, she begins doodling idly, sketching a box inside another box. Inside the outer box, Nix writes:

Anonymously Tragic Story of Terminal Illness in Boring Midwest

Then, inside the smaller, inner box she scribbles in tiny lettering:

Glamorous Story of Young Women on Holiday in Sunny Greece

=

Story Suitable for Chick Flick

“Who are you writing to?” Mary asks, her hand reaching across the marble tabletop, but Nix withdraws the postcard quickly, abruptly aware that there is no one on earth to whom she could send such a card except, of course, to Mary herself. She knows that if she showed her doodle to Mary, Mary would laugh, and yet Nix finds herself tucking the card into the book inside her beach bag instead.

“Nobody,” she says.

THE GIRLS LOITER at this café for quite some time. It is early still to hit the beach, and they have no particular agenda. Mary reads James Michener’s novel The Drifters, which seems a weird choice to Nix, something their mothers might bring on holiday. Nix takes out her novel, too—Couples by John Updike—but instead of reading she stares at the picture on her hidden postcard, tucked between Updike’s pages. She stares at the outer edges of the larger frame until its lines become shimmery and transparent, until its text begins to blur. Then she focuses on the inner frame, the one involving romantic outdoor cafés, bright sun amplified by azure water, beach mats, and banter. Next to their now-empty plate of anchovies, Nix’s English cigarette box rests like a prop to signal that she is the “bad girl” of that narrative. Even Greece itself seems a prop for stories featuring nubile young blonds in sunny locales, generally involving sexual intrigue, female bonding, and madcap adventures. Nix sits, not reading Updike, content to wait for the next reel of this vacation movie to begin spinning. If the encroaching shadow of their usual story—the one involving Mary’s shortened life span and Nix’s thrashing inadequacy to its weight—nags at her, she is relieved to pretend otherwise, basking in the Grecian sun of reinvention.

She does not yet realize, of course, that neither movie frame scribbled on a postcard will prove large enough to contain them, or shatterproof against everything about to happen. How could she realize, after all? Let the living enjoy their illusions while they can.

MEANWHILE, THE IMAGINARY camera, abetted by the very real script, has established that Nix is the wilder of the two. What of it, though? Her weakly blinking pride in this fact is perpetually diminished by the chronic illness of the other, so that ordinary acts like going to Greece for two weeks before the start of their junior year of college take on—for Mary—a kind of heroism that all Nix’s wild antics pale beside, as she is not sick, just nineteen and reckless and normal, with all the luxurious frustrations normalcy affords. In two weeks, Mary will return home to her parents’ house in Kettering, Ohio, whereas Nix will spend the first semester of her junior year at Regent’s College in London. Yet even though Nix has been away from home for two years, at Skidmore College in New York, and will not be in Ohio again until winter break, Mary was the one their parents—both mothers and Mary’s father—clucked over when they said their good-byes at the airport, anxiety narrowing their eyes and raising their voices.

Such moments bring out the bitch in Nix, even though no one, not even Mary’s own parents, could possibly want Mary to stay healthy more than she does. If anything bad happened to Mary on this trip, Nix would die not only of guilt but of misery. Mary is like her sister: a handpicked twin. Several of Nix’s friends from Skidmore are already in London or traveling elsewhere in Europe right now, but Nix was overjoyed when Mary wanted to go to Greece, and so she canceled plans with other, more sophisticated friends so she could travel with Mary. And yet. It is not easy, living in the shadow of someone’s Tragic Illness, so that everything you do seems insubstantial by comparison. Other people in the world would have to agree that this is true.

Only Mary seems to find Nix’s adventures—or “mistakes,” as Nix’s mother would say—worthwhile. “I can’t believe how worldly you’ve gotten,” Mary says, setting Michener aside and guilelessly taking Nix’s hand across the table. “While I’ve been cloistered in Ohio spitting into Dixie cups, you’ve been, like, having affairs with rich East Coast men and jaunting off for weekends in Manhattan—now you’re off to live in England like some modern-day E. M. Forster heroine, for God’s sake! It’s crazy—all the stuff we talked about when we were little, you’re actually doing it!”

Nix carefully blows the smoke of her Silk Cut in the opposite direction of Mary’s damaged lungs. Exactly half of her best friend’s imagined scenario is true: indeed, Mary has spent the better part of her freshman and sophomore years of college consumed by learning to deal with her disease, since she’d never learned the ropes as a kid. The other half of the scenario goes more like this: while Mary has been spitting into Dixie cups, Nix has been sleeping with a married English professor who doesn’t remotely love her and developing a coke habit she cannot economically afford.

Mary’s grip on Nix’s hand tightens. “What I need,” Mary whispers urgently, “is an adventure.”

Nix says, “Retard, we’re in Greece. This is an adventure.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Ahhh,” Nix drawls. “I see. We need to get you devirginized.”

“For starters, hell yeah.”

With calm certainty, Nix surveys the crazy white buildings of Mykonos, the glare of the midday sun off the water, thinking how the humidity complements Mary’s curls and that, for a blond, Mary has an uncanny ability to tan instead of burn. At this moment, just to look at her, no one would ever know Mary was sick—though if they did, Nix figures, here in Greece it might only make her sexier, because men love damsels in distress as long as they don’t have to actually rescue them.

“That won’t be difficult,” she promises.

THERE ARE MANY beginnings to any story. Maybe the real beginning was the day Nix—then still known as Nicole—bit Mary in kindergarten, during a dispute over a yellow crayon, and they were forced to sit in the Naughty Chair together. They emerged best friends. Maybe it was the night of high school graduation, when Nix assured Mary’s continued virginity by allowing Mary’s boyfriend, Bobby Kenner, to screw her, under the pretext of their shared grief over Mary’s newly realized death sentence, this grief only gauzily covering more violent emotions like jealousy, anger, and fear. Maybe the beginning was Nix’s phone call from Skidmore to Kettering, in which she first uttered the phrase “Greek Islands,” like a siren call, into the ear of her isolated, lonely friend. Or maybe the beginning—on this bright August morning in 1988—has not even happened yet and is still to come, to result from one of the myriad miscalculations made by one or the other of the girls once Zorg and Titus make their entrance.

But all stories have to start somewhere, so for the sake of simplicity it shall begin here, in two girls’ small pact made over a small café table on a small island, and it will prove to be the beginning of everything.

THEIR PLAN PROCEEDS smoothly enough. The girls meet two men precisely as such men are usually met: at a bar. Though Mykonos is full of tourists, this bar is predominantly Greek, and so two blond girls stand out as though illuminated by a spotlight. If it had not been these two men, it would have been another two, or another two after that. It is a bar where the likelihood of two blond American girls’ entering alone is slim, but the chances of their exiting alone nonexistent. The girls call this kind of place “authentic.”

The first two men to speak to them are dark haired and olive skinned, like every other man in the bar. There are, in fact, almost no women in the bar. In that way it is like one of those old-man bars at home in Kettering, where occasionally Nix and Mary and girls like them wander in to make change for a dollar to feed a parking meter, and see man after man on barstools and at the pool table, reeking of smoke and hopelessness. In Kettering, no girl would go to such a bar on purpose because in Ohio there is nothing glamorous about men drinking alone. In Mykonos, however, Nix and Mary feel a thrill at the lack of female presence.

The preponderance of men is so extreme, however, that Nix is about to poke Mary and quip that maybe they have come to a gay bar by mistake (it being Mykonos, after all). Before she can do so, two dark-haired men are standing in front of them, offering to buy them drinks. The men are both in their late twenties or early thirties and handsome—not just “all right” but certifiably hot. One is taller than the other and good looking enough to be a movie star, at least in the bar’s dim light. Already Nix is thinking that as soon as possible they will have to excuse themselves to go to the bathroom and do rock, paper, scissors over which one of them gets this man.

Then abruptly she changes her mind. After all, she is off to England to fuck legions of Sting look-alikes who will say sexy things to her in their delicious accents. Therefore, why not give Mary this man, this Greek? The girls sip the wine the shorter man ordered for them, which is thick and sweet, like sherry. Nix thinks of the boy who devirginized her on her senior high school trip to the Bahamas, a boy with hips so slim she could have crushed them between her gymnast thighs, who had a pimple on his jawline, and how, when he thrust, the zit was exactly at her eye level because he kept flinging his head back. She did not have a movie-star Greek on hand to take her virginity, so she did things the usual way. But she is still near the beginning. She will have years of zitless men, British and otherwise, with whom to dilute that memory, whereas for Mary, the beginning and the end will be too close.

Nix drains her wine.

In foreign countries, time does not operate the way it does at home. Service in restaurants is slower, and falling into bed with a man is faster. Within minutes of awkward introductions, Mary and the movie star are already holding hands. Mary leans against the solid trunk of him as they listen to a Greek band. A mild buzz beginning to tingle her legs, Nix watches approvingly, smiling. The shorter man reaches for her hand, but she moves it away.

I mean, really: Just because she’s given Mary the Adonis doesn’t mean she plans to spread her legs for shorty over there. Jeez. Nix holds up her empty glass in a universal gesture, and the short Greek scurries off to get her more wine. This may prove to be a long night.

The House of Reinvention

(LONDON: YANK)

For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.

Places where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives—far from anything that was ever imagined for them.

—SIMON VAN BOOY, Everything Beautiful Began After

Arthog House exists so far off the tourist grid it is not accessible by Tube. The fact that Mary ends up living there will later seem nothing short of implausible. Desperate for funds, she answers an ad run across in a transient newspaper, TNT, for a bartending job at the Latchmere Pub. Despite her lack of either a Blue Card or experience, she is hired on the spot, because who else would bother to come all this way, especially a blond American girl? At first she doesn’t live in the same neighborhood as the pub, but then she does. Arthog House claims her as one of its own. It is not what she intended for herself when she came to London, but it is what happens. She will never even see Buckingham Palace. She will never take a single photograph of Big Ben.

The house—one step above a squat, in that it comes with electricity, crap furniture, and a hairy-eared landlord called Mr. D. who appears every Sunday to collect the rent—is located on a residential street just north of sprawling Battersea Park Road, but south of the Thames and even of the green park proper. It is a park where someday gentrification will give birth to quaint cafés lining the small lake, but during the fall of 1990 it boasts only derelicts kipping on benches. Like a backpacker’s Tara, Arthog House bears a plaque proclaiming its name, embedded just to the left of the front door. If the two-story white stone building bears a clear identity, the small pocket of neighborhood in which it resides does not. According to residents of posh Chelsea to the north, anything south of the Chelsea Bridge falls within the domain of Battersea. To the on-the-dole islanders occupying the estates, however, Battersea begins on their street, Battersea Park Road. Mary’s black pub customers deride their shabby white Lower Chelsea neighbors to the north: laborers, hairdressers, wantonly racist old ladies perpetually pushing shopping trolleys, a United Nations of drug dealers who revolve in and out by the season. Though the clientele of the Latchmere Pub is mostly white, fights regularly break out, its white underbelly majority not at true peace in Battersea, but clearly unfit for Chelsea.

Arthog House has four bedrooms, one bath, a basement kitchen, and a kitchenette on the upper floor in the sitting room. The three downstairs bedrooms are occupied by a constantly rotating parade of Kiwi males who all work as laborers at a nearby construction site. Every time one of them leaves for Mallorca or Turkey, another takes his place so quickly that Mary has found it pointless to endeavor to learn each new name. The Kiwis also dominate the basement kitchen, although they never seem to actually cook. Since they each share a bedroom with at least one other man, the kitchen, the only place for privacy, has been informally dubbed The Brothel, because it is where the Kiwis go when making it with some local girl, and so its door is usually closed.

Upstairs at Arthog House, four residents share one bedroom and a sitting room. Three of those four are male, too: a South African, a Dutchman, and an American southerner. Mary, then—the fourth—is the only female in the entire house, a Wendy among Lost Boys. Because she does not realize that here at Arthog House she holds no monopoly on the desire for reinvention, she plays her cards close to her chest. Or maybe that is not even her reason. The truth is, taken outside her habitual environs of the American Midwest, she has little idea who she is. Unmoored from her history, she feels dangerously blank, like a hologram of herself walking around. The reason for this is twofold. First, of course, is the universal principle of unformed youth, which does not even occur to her because twenty-two-year-olds do not feel as unformed as they are. The second reason is more individual, more unique, in that at home she had grown used to feeling important, larger than life, because of the illness that has wormed its way into her previously ordinary existence, bestowing what passes for character on even the most banal of daily activities. Here in London, however, without the manacle of her tragedies, divorced even from her name, her identity feels so light it might simply float away.

Dearest Nix,

The lie has grown beyond my control. Like a double agent, I am asked to prove my identity daily, answering to your name even in bed. Weirdly, this is proving much easier than it sounds . . .

Mary hears her lover’s voice booming into the hallway pay phone outside their bedroom. “Mum, Dad, I’ve joined the circus!” It is six-something in the morning, London time. What time this makes it in South Africa is beyond her ken. Joshua’s voice is unnaturally loud, as though he and his parents are speaking via tin cans on a string from opposite sides of a playground. She envisions his parents (she has no idea what they look like—Joshua has brought no photos) as more elderly than befits their son: the mother with snow-white hair, both parents pressing ears to one old-fashioned wall telephone, though surely they have cordless in Johannesburg. “The flying trapeze,” Joshua cries, his jubilance belying the bruises on the backs of his knees. “No, Dad, it’s not really like that, there aren’t any animals, not how you think of the circus—not, like, fat ladies with beards or three-armed midgets. No derelict drifter types either—practically everyone’s an ex-gymnast like me.”

Mary muffles a laugh with her pillow. It’s true enough. His circus, composed mainly of Russian and Chinese acrobats who do not speak much English, is a clean-cut, hardworking bunch. Which no doubt accounts for why Joshua rarely sees them outside rehearsal, preferring the “derelict drifter types” of Arthog House.

“The last male trapeze artist got married and went back to China,” Joshua is saying, “so the girl was looking for a new partner—she came by Covent Garden, and I just happened to be doing my act—” Silence. “I told you this already—” More quiet, the halls reverberating with the concentrated quiet of people trying to sleep. “Street performance isn’t like that here,” he says, voice dropping. “Loads of talented people do it, the tourists come round purposefully to watch—it’s expected, they want it. It’s not charity.”

Mary rolls onto her side, pulls the chilly sheet over her skin. The bed across the room is empty; Yank must not have come home last night.

“I am an ex-gymnast,” Joshua says louder, transforming himself with one sentence from a competitive athlete to a circus performer: poof ! In her hazy half sleep, Mary imagines him with giant purple shoes, a bulbous nose, even though the circus in which he performs has no clowns either; it’s not that sort of show. “Oh, that’s a brilliant idea, Mum, why didn’t I think of it? English girls are just queuing up round the corner to marry some foreigner whose been doing flips at Covent fucking Garden for spare change! Let’s see, I’ve got a list of some right here, maybe you can help me narrow it down—would you prefer a blond or brunet daughter-in-law? Don’t worry, I won’t ask your preference for skin color, that’s a fucking given!”

The phone slams into the receiver, so hard she can feel vibrations in the mattress.

In the times she’s eavesdropped alone, Joshua has said the word “fuck” to his parents at least two dozen times. Other than that, his phone conversations are not so different from the ones she has with her parents back in Ohio. In essence, they follow the same pattern. The parents demand a return home, and their demand is met with increasingly strident refusal. Whereas his parents get angry, hers tend to cry. Phones are slammed. The routine has ceased to be inherently interesting.

For this reason, she does not immediately rush into the hallway to comfort her lover. And also, of course, because she is naked in a house full of men.

Joshua reenters the bedroom. Mary was sleeping when he left, so only now does she realize, peeking through shut eyes, that he, too, is nude—apparently having carried on the entire phone call with his bare ass facing the staircase leading downstairs. His body, darker skinned than most strawberry blonds, permanently colored by the African sun, is lean from his “poverty diet,” but muscles still ripple like waves just beneath the surface of his skin. It strikes her, not for the first time, that only the utter dearth of women in this traveler’s subculture could account for her having scored such a magnificent specimen with absolutely no effort: Joshua courted her at the Latchmere, coming in night after night while she was tending bar, offering to walk her back to her B & B across the Chelsea Bridge after her shift, until dire loneliness finally prompted her to go home with him instead, despite not having touched a male body since high school. The albatross of her held-too-long virginity had become stranglingly heavy, and she longed to be rid of it so fervently that Joshua’s hotness barely factored in—she scarcely noticed it, even, until she was on the kitchen floor of Arthog House, crumbs stuck to her bare back, his serpentine penis striking with a jolt that switched on all her internal lights.

Joshua had no clue she was a virgin, and thus he felt no compulsion to be gentle. If anything, he fucked like a man running for his life, the electric-eel frenzy of him proving a wordless match to the puzzle of Mary’s own desperate flight. Though they had barely conversed beyond light banter across the bar of the Latchmere, the very next morning she moved into Arthog House.

Now, returning from his phone call, he tiptoes so as not to wake her. Mary is conscious of telling herself he wouldn’t want her to have overheard his family drama, but really she is afraid to open her eyes. His heightened emotional state might necessitate some response she has no ability to provide. They have been together two and a half months. The fact of their couplehood has seemed to her from the first unlikely, surreal, and temporary. A compilation of ingredients adding up to safe.

He flips back the sheet and climbs in beside her, their bodies immediately sinking into the middle of the bed. Thanks to their combined weight (and vigorous sex), the mattress collapsed in its center a while back, so that lying at either edge gives the precarious feeling of balancing on a ledge. The bed is uncomfortable for one person; for two it verges on ridiculous. Mary and Joshua fall together, arms and legs crowding, not fitting right. Wordlessly Joshua adjusts her limbs as a nurse might the pillows of a hospital bed, intertwining them with his own until they fit. He has an ease with bodies that no doubt comes from years of being prodded, poked, and spotted by his coach and teammates; though he is not a smooth talker, physically he lacks any of the self-consciousness typical in young men. This preternatural physical authority has become the touchstone of her London life. The smells of his skin—smoke, sex—reassure her, lull her back to a place where she can sleep again, anesthetized.

But if they make love, the drug will be even stronger.

Still not opening her eyes, Mary guides his callused hands over the swell of her ass—You bent down to pick up a broken glass behind the bar, and I fell in love with your ass, he has told her on a number of occasions. Then, not trusting even that, she moves his hand between her legs.

“My fucking mum, the stupid cow.” His words come hot onto the back of her neck. “She wants to know why I don’t just marry a British girl and get dual citizenship so I can join the Olympic team for England. She wants to know what I’m waiting for, I’m not getting any younger, you know.” The venom in his voice seems to be traveling through his veins, his muscles, making his fingers rough. She tries to concentrate on the sensation, to not become derailed by individual words, though abruptly it occurs to her that Joshua’s parents clearly have no idea she exists. This knowledge elicits no particular feelings, despite the fact that she, on the other hand, uses Joshua as a constant excuse to her parents. Staying in England for a man is a paradigm that might make sense to them. Her parents still send letters to her old B & B in Chelsea; she stops by regularly to pick up her mail. They know nothing of Arthog House or why she cannot risk their envelopes addressed to her sliding through its mail slot.

“I’m never going back there, Nicole,” Joshua swears, fingers still moving, each stroke a morphine pump. “Never.” But Mary already knows this. He is set to leave London on New Year’s Day, departing for Amsterdam, the circus’s home base and first stop on their world tour. “I’m writing my brother and telling him about the stash I buried in the yard—he might as well enjoy it.”

Were she nursing any doubts about Joshua’s sincerity, this would put them to rest: if he is voluntarily relinquishing his drugs, he must mean business.

He tosses her onto her back, his body poised over hers. When they make love, Mary often thinks of him shedding his skin, the essence of him remaining intact and whole beneath. Though he refuses, she sometimes begs him to discard the condom, fantasizing about the way his healthy semen would invade her insides, pumping her full of his youthful vitality like a golden, dirty petrol. The Super Athlete and the Dying Girl. That she keeps this irony to herself only increases its erotic power. Her body arches up to meet his; moans form in her throat despite the fact that Joshua’s phone antics must have woken the entire house. Still, noise leaks from her mouth like smoke drifting out from under the cracks of their bedroom door: a warning, a dare.

Like everything else, the salve of him is running out of time.

When I walked into the Latchmere for the first time, every single person in the pub was male, from the owner to all the customers. Right away I thought of that old-man bar in Dayton where we went to make change before the Prince concert—do you remember the sad energy of that bar, how it looked like no one inside had seen a woman or sunlight in ages? I thought of the way you sashayed to the bar with your five-dollar bill sticking out between your fingers, your nails painted black and the polish chipping, but you could always carry that kind of thing off, you could wear tights with holes in them and make it look like art. And then of course I thought of Mykonos, and it was like the ground beneath me got wavy, and when they asked me my name I blurted out, “Nicole,” without planning it. Just with that one word, though, right away everything felt different. Like you had opened up your skin for me to step inside and I could be you, brave and sexy and free instead of sick and scared. Of course I was still me, so for a moment I panicked, thinking they would catch me in the lie, but nobody blinked. It wasn’t like I’d claimed my name was Diamond or Madonna, some outrageous alias girls would run all the way to London to assume. They pay me cash at this under-the-table job, so I could have told them anything. I could have been anyone new, but instead I am constantly reminded of you . . .

JOSHUA AND NICOLE are in the common room eating breakfast before any sane person is even awake—Yank cannot get the hell away from them wherever he goes. Last night, when he came in around 3 a.m., they were already asleep in the room he once shared only with Joshua, and Yank could tell they were naked under their flimsy sheet, its floral pattern almost worn away from the years the sheet has no doubt resided in Arthog House. Yank lay awake, pondering the sheet. For the piddly twenty-seven pounds per week Mr. D. collects (from everyone but Nicole, who never kicks in), he bet his ass the landlord didn’t buy the cutlery, sofas, refrigerators—everything must’ve been here when he bought the joint. Yank wondered how often this old sheet had been washed—how many people had shot their wads on it over the years, how many tits it might have touched. He knew he’d never sleep, then. He’d be up half the night, listening for movements, for anything sharp or sudden enough to have bucked the sheet off Nicole’s body so he could get a look. Instead of playing that game, he went to the common room to crash on the futon, across the room from the sofa where the Flying Dutchfag was snoring.

He’d gotten maybe two hours’ sleep, tops, when here the happy couple was again, making tea and munching Weetabix cross-legged on the dirty carpet like children playing picnic. Nicole, at least, is dressed now, in the Harvard sweatshirt and ripped Levi’s that’ve been her uniform since the air turned cold. Joshua is already smoking a fatty, so Yank sits up in time for the kid to pass it his way. On the other sofa, Sandor is