Primitive People (19 page)

Simone had known two women who lived with Joseph before her. Why hadn’t she asked them what went wrong, how the romance ended? She was less circumspect than she would be standing in line for a movie, asking people who came out: How did you like the film? Would this make Rosemary think that Simone was a careless person? But Americans, she’d noticed, liked seeming reckless, wild, even foolish; they believed that admitting these qualities made them seem sexy and brave.

“I bought six of his paintings,” Simone said. “We had just been friends before that, though once at a bar he asked me to dance—but his girlfriend was with us. His girlfriend was a friend of mine, and I tried to resist. But when I was with him it was so strange: everything else just vanished.”

“Didn’t I just
say
that?” Rosemary said. “That’s what I meant about Geoffrey.”

Simone said, “He took me to a café for a drink, his previous girlfriend found us.” For a moment this seemed so real that Simone imagined the scene. But when she looked in the cafe’s mirrors she saw Inez with Joseph. She was horrified at herself for appropriating Inez’s story. One reason she’d always feared voodoo was the idea of possession—a state that always seemed so unsafe, so perilously out of control. Now she knew she had been right, you had to be clear about who was speaking or something might creep into you and force you to tell a lie and then a second lie and a third to cover the first and the second.

In Haiti she had stolen—just that once—but she had never lied, except at the very end. Miss McCaffrey was so upset about leaving and about being replaced by Bill Webb that she used to sit in her office and cry, and Simone had to protect her and say she was on the phone. But in this new life small lies came easily, you told them without blinking, with no more thought than it took to jump out of the path of a speeding car.

“Oh, I adore love stories,” said Rosemary. “But I have a dopey question. I thought your
boyfriend
was the painter in Haiti—and your husband lived in Brooklyn. Didn’t we go through this? I’m always getting them confused.”

Simone looked at her in amazement. So Rosemary
had
been listening. So much of the time here, Simone felt she was talking to air. But how could you tell when people here heard you? They so rarely answered or expected you to respond. Simone had read that two Australian Aborigines meeting in an empty desert would stand for a while in silence and then continue on their way.

Simone frowned at the bourbon bottle. “I meant my fiancé. I’ve had a little to drink.”

“Un petit peu,”
said Rosemary. “And we are about to have
un petit peu
more.”

After that drink she asked Simone, “Why wasn’t it enough? I let him have the video trollops, we had the house and children—a life! But he had to wreck even that. Slash and burn, take no prisoners. I refuse to believe that what motivated Geoffrey was some insane notion of honesty!

“He couldn’t go on living this way, he said. That phrase sticks in my mind, perhaps because I’d already heard it in so many grade-Z movies. What strikes me is that it wasn’t totally coincidental that it was around this exact same time that I was finding myself as a sculptor.

“I could tolerate Geoffrey seeking, shall we say, other outlets. But Geoffrey couldn’t allow me the equivalent, even though you might think art would have been less of a threat than beer salesgirls and pizza slingers under the age of consent. I can still see the look he’d get on his face when I’d try to show him my work!

“So the man set out to destroy me. One night we sat in this very room and he just lasered my psyche. I can’t remember how it began, I didn’t know where it was leading. I assumed we were having the standard vicious exchange.

“But before long Geoffrey had shot past the usual boundaries and was working his way from a devastating critique of my art to a soul-destroying assessment of my very being. I can’t tell you all he said that night. I’ve blocked most of it, thank God.

“He began with my work or, as he said, my delusional art pretensions. He said my Venus series was basically a celebration of cellulite and that I shouldn’t be surprised if not many other celebrants joined me. He accused me of using my so-called art as a social gambit, torturing every conversation till it died an unnatural death and I could drag its corpse around to the subject of my work.”

Rosemary was getting red in the face, hissing with righteous outrage. “From there, I believe, he went on to my talents as a mother, a role for which he said I had the gifts of a hamster, and if he’d been smarter earlier he would have removed George and Maisie from my cage. He said the children were fortunate I hardly knew they existed; every time I noted their presence, I did them permanent psychic harm. He said that in my dealings with George I was no better than a sadist and that George’s tears and timidity were completely my fault.

“Then he finished me off with a neat
coup de grâce
about my hopelessness as a person, my general failure to notice any other human but myself as I dangled by my fingernails from the edge of reality. He went on to insult my scatty mind, my distractedness, my reasoning ability, the impossibility of following my illogic from one stupid idea to the next … Oh, Simone,” Rosemary wailed. “Tell me it isn’t true!”

“Of course it isn’t,” said Simone, though its truth was precisely what had made her feel such overpowering sympathy for Rosemary. The cruel accuracy of Geoffrey’s analysis had left Simone slightly giddy.

Rosemary brightened a little. “After that, there was no going back. There’s no unsaying things like that, no I’m sorry, no excuse me. Not that Geoffrey was apologizing. He’d got some important things off his chest for my benefit and edification. He just radiated a job well done as he went off to stay in his office. Couldn’t he just have ditched me without the free character analysis? And the first time I saw him after that he—”

The phone rang and kept ringing till Rosemary answered. Simone knew who it was before Rosemary covered the mouthpiece and stage-whispered, “Speaking of the devil!”

Frantic writing motions signaled Simone to find a pencil and paper. “That noise?” she heard Rosemary say. “That’s Simone bumping into the table.”

Rosemary scribbled directions over several notebook pages. Finally she said, “I can’t promise that. You know I can’t promise that,” and slammed down the phone. She read over the directions. “Oh, this is just unreadable dogshit! Take this down, Simone, please, before my short-term memory fails completely.”

Simone’s hand was unsteady, too, but she wrote what Rosemary dictated: “South on 9, left on Cold Brook, go two miles past a white barn, right at the fork, right at the next fork, then three miles straight ahead. So there! One thing Geoffrey deconstructed that night was my power of recall.

“Simone, you have to do me the most gigantic favor. You know that I have been very conscious not to make you feel like a servant. I never ask for overtime or any little extras. Actually, I have a problem asking for
anything
at all. But now there’s a kind of crisis, I guess, and I need you to do this for me.

“Geoffrey’s jeep is stuck on the road in the snow, and he and the kids need to be rescued. So Geoffrey hiked to the nearest house and, as he went out of his way to tell me, phoned everywhere in the county before in desperation he called me.

“I told him I couldn’t promise that I could stand to see him today. In fact, I feel certain that it would be positively lethal to drive through this vile weather with him waiting for me at the other end. But on the other hand, I cannot see leaving my children out there to freeze and die. So if you could do this for me, Simone—if you could drive over and pick them up—I would be eternally grateful. I would never, ever forget.”

T
HE GLITTERY LATTICE OF
branches made the landscape unrecognizable, a monochrome, petrified, magical world, at once dangerous and narcoleptic. It would have been pretty, Simone thought, had someone else been driving. A new world required she take it slowly and on faith and not get discouraged by the sight of cars buried in snow, abandoned by far better drivers.

Suddenly a clump of snow broke and slid down the windshield. Simone thought she had struck something and for a moment couldn’t breathe. She hit the brakes, and the car slid and fishtailed behind her. As she turned the wheel, with no effect, a high whimper of fear escaped her.

The car stopped when it wanted, by which point her heart was pounding so hard she had to put the car in park and rest her head on the wheel. It was safe to do this; no other vehicles were on the road. She could barely see the road or tell if she was on it.

Before leaving, Simone had asked Rosemary if there were any special tricks to driving in the snow. Rosemary said, “I cannot fathom my own depths of self-involvement. Do I think they have blizzards in Haiti? I suppose the special trick is not going out at all. But when you can’t escape it, the best thing is to go two miles an hour, max. Everyone says steer into a skid, but no one ever does it. People say when you see a grizzly bear you should open your arms and walk toward it. Fortunately, the car is a Volvo, and I find it a comfort to know that it’s made in a country where, if we’re to believe Ingmar Bergman, people need to be able to drive through the snow in mid-hallucination. The car makers know that, believe me. It’s built into the machine. But why am I assuming you know about Ingmar Bergman?”

It was hard, not trusting the brakes; they had always been Simone’s friend. Only now did she wonder why Rosemary wasn’t more worried about her children. Which was riskier—being stranded in the snow or being rescued by Simone? She felt like the fairy-tale character who must learn certain rules for the journey—Don’t look back, don’t drink from the stream, don’t steal the crocodile’s mango. But out here there were only two rules: Don’t go fast. Don’t stop. The pace gave Simone ample time to get watery-kneed with terror and calm down and collect herself and then get dizzy again.

And yet, it seemed, if one followed its rules, this snow-world kept its promises. The Cold Brook Road sign was legible. Trees marked crucial forks in the road.

Covered with such a thick layer of snow that it might have been buried all winter, Geoffrey’s red Land Rover was parked, or abandoned, sticking out into the road. The engine wasn’t running. Simone panicked. Where were the children?

Her arrival seem to wake the vehicle, which emitted a cough of exhaust. She pulled up in front and got out. A small part of the Land Rover’s windshield was clear, and through it she could see Geoffrey watching her stagger through the snowdrift.

Geoffrey grinned and waved broadly, but with a certain chagrin, like a shipwreck victim signaling a boat that he knows would rather keep going. Then he jumped out of his car and ran over and took Simone’s elbow. As he guided her forward he whispered, “Come sit in the car a minute while we reconnoiter. But please don’t assume things are how they look. You should know better by now.”

There was someone in the passenger seat, but that part of the windshield was iced over, so that it wasn’t until Geoffrey opened the back door that Simone saw that it was Shelly.

Simone slid into the back seat and got between the children. George and Maisie looked tense and drawn but otherwise unharmed. George pressed up against Simone; Maisie flung herself into Simone’s lap and squirmed against her for solace and warmth.

For a long time no one spoke. Shelly and Geoffrey were lovers, that was entirely apparent. And they hadn’t been lovers for long—that was obvious, too. A kind of sexual crackle popped in the air between them, and Simone didn’t have to think too hard about where she had last felt that buzz: anywhere there was music, Joseph and Inez. And now it seemed so painfully clear—of course, the children had known.

Shelly twisted around in her seat. “Simone, I have never been happier to see you in my life.” The tip of Shelly’s nose was pink, enhancing her delicate beauty with the hint of a fever raising her body temperature to something approaching low normal. She wore jeans and a heavy tailored wool jacket in a muted pine-tree green. Simone thought of Rosemary and her sad mouton coat.

Geoffrey watched in his rearview mirror till he caught Simone’s eye. Then he shrugged and grimaced at her, miming a clownish admission of guilt.

“What a killer,” Geoffrey said. “It’s not as if I haven’t driven in weather like this all my life. I assume one hundred percent of the blame. I should have known better, suggesting we take this baby out to test its four-wheel drive.

“Simone, driving over here must have been a bitch! I never would have called Rosemary if I hadn’t tried every towing service in this and three neighboring counties. The one poor hungry sucker working today said he’d put me on a list. I told him I had
kids
in the car. By then I’d hiked three miles to some old lady’s house. She barely let me in the door. It was either the Long March for George and Maisie or leave them here to freeze. You may notice Rosemary didn’t think to provide the kids with boots.”

All five of them lapsed into silence. Then very softly George said, “Are we going to freeze?”

Shelly said, “Good God, George, you’ve asked that question every five minutes for the last two hours. The answer is: No, we are not going to freeze. Freezing was never an option.”

“He couldn’t have been asking for two hours,” Geoffrey said. “We’ve only been here an hour.” Even the way he corrected Shelly revealed their erotic attachment. He wouldn’t have spoken like that to a friend he had just picked up for a drive. Didn’t he care if Simone knew? Maybe that was what he wanted. Geoffrey’s arm crept, as if on its own volition, around Shelly’s shoulders.

How could he have telephoned Rosemary and asked her to pick them up? What if it had been Rosemary who came and found Shelly in the car? He must have assumed—correctly—that Rosemary would send Simone. Simone always forgot or could never believe that Rosemary and Geoffrey were once married.

The jeep was tropical inside. Breath flowered on the windows. Outside, a wet snow fell. No one made a move to leave or improve their situation. Possibly they all intuited that their situation could not be improved. Sitting here, suspended in time, was tolerable, even pleasant. After this something would change—even the children knew it. Simone’s finding Shelly with Geoffrey would rearrange everything. A caregiver was nominally an adult, and when an adult knew something it was different from when a child did. You could go from month to month not worrying about what a child knew, but adult knowledge counted as a fact in the world. Perhaps if they sat here and never moved, the future could be forestalled, its damage contained and the safe static present indefinitely continued.