A Life in Men: A Novel by Gina Frangello

would fall, my heart goes too fast!” He places Nicole’s hand on his chest.
    “Oh, Sandor! To think when I first met you”—she giggles, and something in her tone, in the phrasing, is already nostalgic—“I thought you were a Nazi.”
    “Oh, I
am
the big Nazi,” Sandor says agreeably. “In Holland, we are all Nazis, this is just how it is, no offense. Nazis who decriminalize drugs and prostitution—it is a very fun country, you must come visit!” He falls against her and they chortle, clutching each other’s arms, Sandor’s hat falling to reveal his shockingly yellow stubble.
    Joshua is no longer on the stage. Nicole has turned to watch a Russian man swallowing fire, her eyes alight and riveted, but Yank takes her by the upper arm and says, “I need to talk to you. Come on, girl. Now.”
    She looks over at Sandor apologetically. “We’ll be right back,” she tells him, and Sandor’s mouth opens slightly, but they are already moving through the stands as Sandor calls out, “Hey! Bring back more beer!”
    Yank leads her under the bleachers. There’s no big top here; it’s just a gymnasium where sports events are held, reinvented for the circus, visually transformed. He hears the clamoring of feet overhead, dramatic music piped in to heighten the danger of the performance, and he backs her slowly—his limbs moving with the mindless fluidity of a trapeze—against a pole and kisses her with the kamikaze force of his own confession.
    Her body seems taken utterly by surprise. She loses her balance, topples against the pole, so that he has to catch her, her arms darting out to steady herself like a high-wire acrobat. He kisses her again, and this time she does not stumble, does not resist, though she does not quite kiss him back either. He’s had to bend over to reach her—she’s almost a foot shorter than he is—and he stands back up to his full height, his body not touching hers anymore. He lays one hand up lightly against her throat. Says, “If I pulled your skirt up right now and fucked your brains out against that pole, would you try to stop me?”
    And she says, “No.”
    It’s not enough. “Because you think you owe me?” he persists. “Or ’cause you’re collecting experiences and it’s one more way to slum before you go home and forget us?”
    “I don’t know.” Then, with genuine surprise, “I’m not going to forget you!”
    He laughs. Her eyes still look wild, but he suspects it might be the trapeze—her fear that Joshua would break his neck—and not him at all. “No,” he says, “it’s all right. Forget me. You don’t owe me anything.”
    “That’s what you dragged me down here to say? Okay. In that case, you buy Sandor’s pint.” It’s on the tip of his tongue to retort that he’s not buying that cheap ass a beer, especially since Sandor’s been rifling through his bag again and stealing his tapes, though he’s not sure where they could be hidden, because all Sandor’s stuff is out in the open. It’s in his throat to pretend that the girl isn’t leaving at all, that they can still banter this way about slumming, pretending nothing is a matter of life and death, that nothing’s going to change. But
everything
changes, and though Yank doesn’t know it yet, just before Christmas he will wake to a phone call asking if he knows where Sandor may have fled to after embezzling four thousand pounds’ worth of sales revenue from his employer, an art reproduction company in Reading, and Yank will mutter that (although Sandor’s been “gone” for a couple of days) he didn’t realize he had moved
out
—that he doesn’t even know the guy’s last name, though they have lived together for six months. When the voice on the other end of the phone tells him that the police have been notified of Sandor’s crime and may be coming around, Yank will go back upstairs and pick up his bag of tricks and walk straight out the door into a bleak December rain, never to return, so