Primitive People (17 page)

A few nights later they went back to the bar. It was as if they expected something to be continued or concluded, and every small act felt significant and as heavy as moving through water. Just riding around in Inez’s car required enormous effort. A bottle of rum went around and the three of them kept drinking and finished it as they got to the bar and went in and ordered more.

At one point Simone awoke from an abstracted moment and saw Inez out on the dance floor dancing with a Dominican whore. Both women had slight, boyish bodies, though the whore was much darker; both were concentrating hard, rubbing their bellies together to the music but otherwise hardly moving. Finally Inez sat down and leaned over and whispered to Joseph. Her mouth kept moving against his ear until Joseph laughed and got up and danced the same way with the same whore—just as close, just as absorbed, just a little bit taller.

That night as Inez drove Simone and Joseph home in her convertible sports car, Simone half hoped for a roadblock—for someone to line the three of them up and shoot them in the head. It seemed so much less painful and tedious than what she sensed coming next. Why was she even surprised when a few days later she saw Inez and Joseph together in the café? Simone thought of Shelly and Kenny dancing at Shelly’s house. She thought: This is how I am spending my life—watching other people dance.

While they waited for their food, Kenny said, “We had a high-school science teacher, a real genetics nut. He was breeding sixtoed bunnies. He started out with one normal and one freak rabbit and allowed the sixtoes to live and eighty-sixed the rest, and by spring every student got to take home a sixtoed Easter bunny. The whole school knew what was going on—no one said a word. Amazing, the outrageous shit you could pull in those days.

“Not that it’s so different now. It’s all a big breeding experiment organized by the rich. All those bitches at the wedding checking out the horses, doing quick little chromosome counts, calculating the market price to console themselves as they watched Betsy court major bloodline pollution. Those people didn’t come over on the
Mayflower
to marry Sufi homeopaths. It makes you understand how slavery could exist, pricing your fellow humans by the state of their dental health.”

Kenny shook his head. “I can’t believe myself. Jesus. Simone, forgive me. I am heartily sorry for comparing WASP wedding etiquette with the historical tragedy of your race … Hey. You know what these tiny jukeboxes always make me think of?”

Before Kenny could tell her, the waitress brought their meals: platters of mysterious, crusty items garnished with apple rings bleeding onto the lettuce. Simone took a bite of what appeared to be a potato and a thin film of fishy oil evenly coated her mouth.

“Salty,” said Kenny. “I don’t need my blood pressure taken to know this is sending it through the roof.”

Simone ate a shrimp shell by mistake and raggedly cleared her throat. She realized it was her turn to continue the conversation, an obligation she had rarely felt since coming to this country. Finding herself so rusty at simple adult chat made her clutch at anything relevant to blood pressure or salt.

She said, “Salt is very important to the Haitian people. In Haiti many people believe that salt will bring a zombie back to life. That is why sorcerers who are said to have private armies of zombies are extremely careful about what their zombies eat.”

Kenny said, “Simone, you are the most interesting woman I have ever met. Not every chick you take out has the scoop on zombie diet. I’m so used to these boring, predictable women. When I’m with them I don’t have to listen—we could be doing a movie I wrote the script for myself.”

Predictable would not have been Simone’s word for American women, though maybe if this were her country their train of thought might seem more on track. Simone had given up trying to follow Rosemary and Shelly as they switchbacked and careened from one topic to the next. Still, she liked it that Kenny had made a distinction between her and boring women.

“Many people believe in spirits,” she said. “Some Haitian people believe in devils who prey only on children. The
loup-garou
is our werewolf; it has red eyes and red hair. When a child gets sick, they say a
loup-garou
is drinking its blood.”

“God,” said Kenny. “Don’t little kids have enough problems without their own designer vampires?”

“George and Maisie do,” Simone said.

Kenny said, “Worry not. George and Maisie will grow up and marry Mom and Dad. Respectively. Or maybe they’ll both grow up and marry Dad. They’ll fight about the estate and the inheritance and reconcile and clone themselves and repeat it the next generation. I’m sure there’s a zillion Haitian kids who would trade lives with George and Maisie, get that good food and the rich guilty dad and the mansion up on the river.”

“I like George and Maisie,” said Simone. She couldn’t have said this to Joseph. All he would see was their money and the color of their skin. But at least he talked about color—it was a permissible topic. No one here ever talked about race unless they were mindlessly rattling on, and if they caught themselves, it was a social mistake and they quickly changed the subject.

“That’s a problem,” said Kenny. “George and Maisie are screwed. The mom’s a cross between Tinker Bell and the Bride of Frankenstein, the dad’s the son Peter Pan would have if he’d had a baby with Jack the Ripper. Wait. What’s your damage, Simone? You
do
know who Jack the Ripper is? Or do you not know how I can say such nasty things about handsome young Geoffrey Porter? I mean, is that bewildered look cultural or specific?”

Simone realized it was useless to ask Kenny more about the children. They were obviously not a subject he could keep his mind on for very long.

“Don’t explain,” Kenny said. “I understand the confusion. You haven’t seen Geoffrey’s sadistic side, just the boyish charm. This is a common temporary blindness affecting only females.”

In fact, it did confuse Simone, the discrepancy between her vision of Geoffrey and the monster others painted. Ever since they had danced in his office, she had thought about him often. She liked to think about him before she fell asleep. She looked forward to seeing him; he was nice to her and flirtatious enough to make her feel briefly more cheerful. Sometimes she imagined scenes in which she confessed to being an illegal alien; instinct told her that Geoffrey was the one to ask for help. Here, just as in Haiti, money and family counted. Clearly she had stopped seeing Geoffrey as the threat Rosemary described, the evil destroyer who could on a whim dismantle their entire lives. Even now, the thought of him seemed like a secret charm that made Simone feel less nervous about saying the right thing to Kenny.

Still, there remained the mystery of why Geoffrey didn’t want Simone at his house. He always picked up the children at his office and returned them there on Sunday. Simone had offered to come to his house, but he said finding it was tricky, it would take forever just to give her directions. Once, he’d told her that Rosemary was capable of having his house watched; it was better if women, even Simone, weren’t observed dropping by. Simone knew this was unlikely—how could Rosemary afford a detective? Maybe the place was a mess, or maybe women stayed overnight and left embarrassing evidence.

“Look at them,” Kenny was saying; he meant the elderly couple. “You can never tell about people’s secret sexual lives. Behind closed doors Mr. Joe Average may be into all manner of weirdness. Take the Count. On the surface he’s your basic Eurotrash queen. But give the guy a mask, a whip, a couple of pretty boys, sheep—well, it’s a heady combination, anything could go down.”

Simone was eager to pursue this, to learn more about the Count. But just then the waitress brought their coffee and lingered at their table until the moment passed for asking about sex with ritually slaughtered animals.

Kenny watched Simone stir sugar into her coffee. He said, “I’ve never seen anyone use so much sweet stuff in my life. It confirms what I’ve come to think about you, Simone—you’re a liberated person. No one here is free enough to use that much white sugar. You know, Simone, if some time you and I were to make it, it would be the first time I ever slept with a woman my own height.”

How was Simone supposed to respond to this? Was Kenny serious or joking? She stared down at the table, not even knowing, herself, exactly what Kenny might read on her face—encouragement or dismissal.

Kenny put three spoons of sugar in his coffee and stirred it meditatively. He said, “I have the little house and the little car. Now I need the little wife and the little kids to go with it. I’d really be there for my kids, not like my own dad, that type-B lump of protoplasm we saw only at dinner and Sunday lunch, not like that scumbag Geoffrey wrecking every good thing he had. I still have the instincts for being with kids that most guys today have lost—it’s a de-evolutionary thing, it went out with the mating instinct. Tell me that George doesn’t walk out of my shop feeling better than when he walked in! I’d be the Dad of the Century. Am I right or what?

“The problem is, I keep getting involved with killer Amazons from hell like Shelly. Not what any sane person would exactly call mother material. You’d have to be a lunatic to do that to a kid. The world is full of nice women, genuinely good-hearted humans, but the ones I’m attracted to are bigger slimeballs than me. And it isn’t only white chicks. I used to see this black girl in Brooklyn. You remember that movie where Pam Grier played the psycho whore who gave guys blowjobs with a razor blade in her mouth? This chick had razor blades in her soul, it was just slower-acting …”

Kenny winked at Simone over his coffee cup. “Speaking of Shelly … We’ll take a Godfather oath of silence about this afternoon.
Cosa nostra,
right? We don’t even have to repeat how much sugar we put in our coffee. I’ll go nuts if I hear Shelly call sugar ‘white death’ one more time.”

On the way home Kenny drove past his house, a white vinyl-sided bungalow next to a satellite dish so large the house looked like its maintenance shack. It was neither the city apartment nor the gritty cave in which Simone had pictured Kenny dwelling.

Kenny said, “When I was in high school I had a crush on my Spanish teacher. She lived in an apartment on a corner by a dry cleaner’s. I worked weekends at the A & P so I could afford to get my jeans dry-cleaned. I could get a hard-on just hanging out in front of her house. Once, I actually ran into her in the street outside her door. I said hello in this strangled voice—total humiliation. But now when I drive past my
own
house I get that same weird hard-on. It’s almost as if I’m thinking I’ll come out of the house and see
me.
And I know it’s crazy—I mean, this time I know no one’s home.”

G
EORGE AND MAISIE WERE
deeply alarmed that Rosemary might forget Christmas. Of all the worries plaguing them, this was one they would admit, perhaps because it seemed relatively safe or especially urgent. They must have heard the lack of conviction in Simone’s reassurances, because one evening Maisie was driven to ask, “Are we having a tree?”

“A tree?” Rosemary glanced up from her plate of hot dogs and Cheez Doodles. Her eager, uncomprehending smile confirmed the children’s worst fears.

“A Christmas tree,” said Maisie.

“Christmas?” Rosemary repeated. “When exactly is it?”

George burst into tears.

“Oh, George, loosen up,” Rosemary had said. “Of course we’re having Christmas.” But as yet she had given no sign of holiday awareness.

By contrast, the neighborhood around Geoffrey’s office was giftwrapped with bows and holly berries and clumps of bulbous Styrofoam bells. When the children saw this, the weekend after Thanksgiving weekend, they flung themselves on their father as if he had decorated the storefronts himself.

“Cool Christmas stuff,” George said.

“Thank you,” Geoffrey said. “Now you guys go into the office. I have top-secret matters to discuss with Simone.”

Maisie asked, “Is this about our presents?”

George said, “Shut up, stupid.”

Geoffrey said, “Your sister is not stupid and don’t tell her to shut up.”

The children were happy to leave Simone conferring with their father, for this was the only season when adult conspiracy was encouraged, even required. When they were out of earshot, Geoffrey said, “Simone, I need your help.”

She knew that Maisie was probably right: he meant consumer advice. But his asking for her help was confusing and seductive. If only he didn’t look at her as if he were
interested
in who she was, as if there were a chance that what she said might amuse or delight him.

“Christmas is less than three weeks away and I have no idea what to get them.” Geoffrey’s wry smile was at once superior and sheepish, the grimace of a young boy compromised into good behavior. “I can’t believe how every year I fall in the same trap. Everyone knows the holiday’s lost whatever meaning it had. It’s a manifestation of our acquisitive materialist values. I know this must sound disingenuous coming from the guy who just blew three grand on a Wurlitzer so his kids could see it bubble. But buying things is enjoyable, at least in this culture, and it’s the culture we live in, I can’t fight it alone. And if I held my ground and said no, who would suffer? George and Maisie—that’s who!

“Meanwhile, I go through Purgatory like clockwork each December. I feel I’m being tested on how well I know my kids. Have I noticed how they’ve changed since last Christmas? Have I registered their desires, their passions and hungers and fears? And no matter what, I fail the test; I buy too much or too little—some stupid toy that’s too old or too young, too complex or too simple.”

Yet just weeks before, Simone recalled, Geoffrey had bought George the computer game and Maisie the book—gifts they both enjoyed. He had gotten the jukebox, too, and the children had loved it. Buying things for George and Maisie was what Geoffrey did best. Had he forgotten or lost the skill? Had something happened in between? Or was it the fact of Christmas that made him lose confidence in what he knew?