Primitive People (11 page)

Geoffrey steered Simone nearer the music and paused there, admiring the elaborate chrome-and-neon jukebox until Simone caught on and shouted in his ear, “Oh, how beautiful!”

“C’est très belle,
no?” said Geoffrey. “The kids and I picked it out.” Simone saw him wink over her shoulder—at the children, she guessed.

The music stopped, but before she could escape, Geoffrey punched a button. A violin played an introduction and another song began.

“This ma-a-gic moment,”
Geoffrey sang along, and gathered Simone in another dance. “The best thing about having your own jukebox is you can program it yourself. This one is stocked exclusively with songs about ecstasy, desperation, and heartbreak.”

Ecstasy, desperation, and heartbreak? Simone found Geoffrey’s chattiness reassuring, regardless of its content. At embassy parties she’d often seen dancing couples jabbering away, presumably to signal that all this had nothing to do with sex but was just conversation to music. She couldn’t remember ever seeing Haitians talk while they were dancing, and last night Shelly and Kenny had stopped talking soon after the dancing began.

Geoffrey said, “This song comes as close as anything to describing falling in love.” Simone tensed and it seemed to her that Geoffrey felt it and tightened his hold. Men so rarely said “falling in love.” Just uttering those three words changed the terms between you.

“The pity,” Geoffrey went on, “is that for twenty years these guys have been playing roadhouses on the strip, being rediscovered and doing nostalgia tours, and then going back to roadhouses. Is this how we treat our poets?”

At once relieved and let down that Geoffrey had dropped the subject of love, Simone decided that he reminded her endearingly of George chattering to mask his desire for Simone to tuck him in at night. For a moment she could see something of George in Geoffrey, or something of Geoffrey in George: Geoffrey with the edges rubbed off or as yet undeveloped. How rarely she noticed any trace of Rosemary and Geoffrey in their children. Often she forgot and was shocked to recall that they were George and Maisie’s parents.

Simone’s limbs loosened slightly, but not to a point that anyone might confuse with grace or compliance. Then she saw George and Maisie watching her dance with Geoffrey, their mouths and eyes forming little round o’s of betrayal and confusion. It was plain to her: this wasn’t neutral to them. No matter what Simone thought she was doing, she was dancing with their father.

The children were living witnesses to the history of their parents’ marriage: what their father did, what their mother said, how their father answered. Who knew what attention George and Maisie had seen their father pay other women? Who knew if, as a survival technique, they’d attuned themselves to the distant early-warning signals of adult lassitude and enchantment? Perhaps as they watched Simone and Geoffrey, they were detecting traces of pleasure, attraction, even desire—emotions too risky and volatile for Simone to consider right now.

She remembered the rainy parking lot on Halloween night, George asking if she’d told Rosemary about his Eskimo tape. The children’s confidence could still be lost—that is, if she’d ever had it. Suddenly it struck Simone with the force of a revelation that the secrets the children entrusted her with were only decoy secrets. George’s Eskimo tape, Maisie’s climbing the walls—they were the bait they threw Simone to lure her off the track.

The important, inviolate secrets were those they kept on the grownups’ behalf. Those secrets were caustic and had the power to burn them and disfigure their lives. Simone might have been annoyed at the children, who, she now believed, had withheld the truth and tricked her into feeling trusted and valued—if it hadn’t seemed so childish to be angry at children for knowing things so dangerous they couldn’t risk telling her.

Simone’s body took over and extricated her from the dance. Every muscle locked at once. Geoffrey couldn’t budge her. “What’s wrong?” he said, as his gaze followed Simone’s to the children. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Bingo!”

He bowed and told Simone, “Thank you,” and glided over to the jukebox. He pushed a button and the music gagged to a stop.

“Oops! I meant to do that!” Geoffrey grinned. He hunkered down by the children and gathered them in his arms.

“Huddle time,” he whispered. “Urgent bulletin from central command. Do not, I repeat, do not under any circumstances tell your mother that Simone and I were dancing. Obviously you could see for yourselves that it was perfectly innocent and no different in any way from me dancing with you. But you know your mother and her history of insanity and paranoia.”

“We know Mom, all right,” George agreed, rapidly cheering up.

“The idea is not to slander your poor tormented mother. Even if the torment originates in demonic fantasies from her own brain. The idea is to save all of us additional trials and tribulations.”

Poor Rosemary, indeed! thought Simone. What defense did she have against this onslaught of articulate, conspiratorial, fatherly charm?

“Get it?” Geoffrey said.

“Got it!” George saluted.

“I get it.” Maisie drew the words out, projecting extreme irritation and boredom.

Geoffrey looked up at Simone. “Maisie wants the world to know how tiresome she thinks this has gotten—all the times these martyred children have had to keep their father’s non-secrets.”

He put his face up close to the children’s. “All right, men. Back to the trenches. Fortitude. Be brave. In case of enemy capture, what and how much do you disclose?”

“Name, rank, and serial number?” said George.

“Report for action!” Geoffrey said.

M
AISIE AND GEORGE INTRODUCED
Simone to the addictive pleasure of hickory nuts, small wild nuts with a vein of sweet meat you had to dig out with a pin. Partly it was the labor itself, the minuscule reward, the disproportionate joy of prying loose a slightly larger crumb—it kept you hungry and desirous in ways a bag of shelled walnuts could never. How wasteful that the difficult should seem so much more precious, so that the practically unattainable was valued most of all. In that way shelling hickory nuts was like being in love, Simone thought. Rosemary had called it a triumph to show up as a blip on Geoffrey’s radar screen, and Simone had never loved Joseph so much as when she knew she had lost him.

Simone and the children spent evenings at the kitchen table picking at the hickory nuts with catatonic concentration. Their lives took on a squirrel motif that persisted to bedtime, when Maisie insisted Simone read aloud from a book in which talking squirrels discoursed tediously about the acorn supply. Simone and the children were hoarding, too, stockpiling nuts for the winter whose approach they felt in the wet chill wind already slapping at them from the Hudson. They had grocery bags full of nuts stored up—but suppose they ran out, and snow fell, and they couldn’t find more? This seemed, as the autumn wound down, an unendurable prospect.

Often Simone thought of how Joseph imagined America: a land of white people with black servants bringing them cellular phones by the pool. Where in Joseph’s vision was the celestial peace of being with the children in the drafty kitchen, digging out nutmeats with safety pins? Joseph had imagined California, where it was always warm and never damp and icy, as it was now in Hudson Landing.

One afternoon the children came home from school and the sky was so blue and bright that it tricked Simone into forgetting how short the days had grown. She and the children decided to hunt for hickory nuts in the woods, and as they crossed the lawn Simone said, “Look up. What do you see?”

“Clouds,” George said.

“What do you see in the clouds?” Simone asked.

Maisie was wearing large heart-shaped sunglasses she’d got as a present from Shelly, and now she tilted them forward to better see the sky.

“Seafood,” George said finally. “An octopus and a lobster.”

“A horse’s head,” said Maisie.

They walked on in silence until they reached the trees. Maisie said, “I can make clouds move by concentrating on them.”

“Sure you can,” said George.

“Let’s talk about our fears,” Maisie said.

“Let’s not,” said George. “She always wants to talk about her fears.”

Ordinarily Simone might be curious about what Maisie was afraid of, but it was the last thing she wished to discuss walking through the woods with the children. She had been frightened of the forest since she found the dead sheep.

“My worst fear is horses,” Maisie said.

“We found a dead horse,” George said.

Before Simone could decide whether or not to pursue this subject, Maisie said, “I mean live horses. The most beautiful thing in the world. I wish Mom would let me take riding lessons. I would be scared that I’d get trampled. But that would be a good way to die. Not like the guinea pig baby at school where the guinea pig mother ate it.”

“Hamster,” said George. “Don’t you know anything?”

“Guinea pig,” said Maisie.

“Hush,” said Simone. Absurdly she was seized with fear that Maisie’s talking about horses would somehow cause them to find another dead one dangling from a tree. She looked around for the shaggy bark that would mean nuts had fallen nearby.

“A lot of times I’m afraid of old people,” said George. “Sometimes you don’t know what they’re going to say and—”

Just then something whistled past and smacked Simone on the side of the head. In fact, it had not hit her, just hit the air near her face, hit the air with the violent crack of a diver cannonballing into water. It felt like someone blowing into her ear through a long thin metal pipe. Pressure galloped in her skull and swelled inside her throat. Then something struck a birch tree, and splinters exploded off the bark.

The last yellow leaves showered down like a hail of coins. Afterward the tree kept shaking for a very long time.

“Was that a gun?” asked George.

The answer was a crackle of gunfire, the delicate pop of a shot. Simone threw the children to the ground and covered them with her body.

“What’s going to happen?” said George.

“Nothing’s going to happen,” snapped Simone. Another bullet streaked overhead. Maisie buried her head in Simone’s shoulder and began to cry.

A minute passed, then another. There were no more shots. “Stay down,” said Simone. “Stay down until I tell you to get up.”

“What’s going to happen?” repeated George.

“Nothing. Nothing,” answered Simone, and this time nothing did. In a while they lifted their heads and looked at each other. They squirmed around till they lay with their heads together, their legs like the spokes of a wheel. All three of them could have been children playing in the dead leaves.

“Are we allowed to talk?” George whispered.

Simone said, “I guess. Don’t move.”

“There’s this kid?” said George. “In our school? His dad grew up around here? And one year when his dad was in high school there was this squirrel population explosion and kids got paid fifteen cents for every dead squirrel they brought in?”

“Cheap,” said Maisie.

“So this kid’s dad took his gun and popped fifty squirrels and took them home in a bag? But his dad, I mean, the dad’s dad got mad and made the mom skin the squirrels and put them in the freezer? The mom—the dad’s mom—had to figure out all different ways to cook them? The kid’s dad still eats squirrel. He takes the squirrel legs to work and cooks them in the microwave.”

“Gross,” pronounced Maisie. Then she said, “Maybe hickory nuts have feelings. Maybe God was punishing us for eating them.”

“Yeah, sure,” said George.

Maisie whispered, “The shooting stopped.”

“Who
was
that, anyway?” asked George. “Who was shooting at us?”

“I don’t know,” said Simone. Why did the children think she had answers? “Not
at
us. Just
near
us. Maybe it was a hunter.”

Maisie said, “Hunting season starts Monday. It’s all Mom’s talked about for weeks.”

“Or a serial killer?” suggested George.

“What’s that?” Maisie asked, and then said quickly, “I don’t want to hear.”

“They go around killing people?” said George. “It’s what they do on vacation? They’ll stab somebody in Florida and then take a car ride up the coast and strangle somebody in Maine?”

“Kids, too?” Maisie said.

“Some specialize in kids,” said George. “I think they’re called something else. Did you hear about that kid whose dad set him on fire with a can of gasoline?”

Simone tried to listen through their talk to the sounds of the forest. She felt somehow that they were alone, that the danger had passed, though before the shooting started she hadn’t felt anything special, either. How strange, she thought, that she’d grown up in a country where killings were a daily occurrence, and she’d had to come to this peaceful American forest to nearly get herself shot.

“Be quiet for five minutes,” she said. “Then we will very quietly and slowly get up and go home.”

Maisie said, “I don’t think we should go home. I don’t think we should tell Mom.”

Some instinct signaled Simone and the children: Rosemary must not be told. If she found out she might forbid them to leave the house ever again, or she might even fire Simone for having put George and Maisie at risk. Alternatively, perhaps more likely, Rosemary might not react at all. Then Simone and the children would feel cheated of their experience, with no excuse for the tremors that still shook their legs and shocked them into functioning as one creature with three heads and a single brain that knew they needed to get away—go somewhere and tell someone.

“Let’s go see Kenny,” Maisie said, and they piled into the car. Simone had never driven at dusk; the prospect was unnerving. But whatever spared them this afternoon would just have to save them again.

Everything about driving to Short Eyes tested the limits of Simone’s courage. She could never have managed if she hadn’t so recently been so afraid. The only route she knew was the one she took that first day, small roads into larger roads and finally onto Route 9. She wondered if she would always have to recapitulate the beginning; in Port-au-Prince there was a crazy woman who used to get stalled on the street and had to go all the way back to her house to get herself going again.