Primitive People (26 page)

“Every egg a health threat! What’s truly sick is this culture.” Rosemary juggled the yolk between shells, letting the slimy gel loop down and catching it at the last moment. “This could be a pleasure, a very Zen thing to do, but I keep thinking that I should be able to look at the eggs and see the teensy spirochetes wriggling around or whatever. You can’t even have Christmas Eve without wondering which doctor’s on call. I’m proceeding on the theory that enough rum will kill anything bad.”

Rosemary vigorously whipped the cream with an old-fashioned rotary beater that shot shrapnel flecks of red paint into the stiffening peaks. “You’ll like this, Simone. It’s the New England piña colada. Like something I imagine being served in Port-au-Prince. If only we’d gone there instead of trying to tough out Christmas up here. I realize that Haiti is no longer the vacation paradise it was. The other day, in the bookstore, I was skimming a travel guide to the Caribbean, reading about all the idyllic places the children and I aren’t going. I noticed that the Haiti entry was three-quarters of a page. They reprinted the state department advisory and let that speak for itself.”

Rosemary talked about Haiti just as she had when Simone first came to work here. She had learned nothing, nothing at all about Simone’s country. But Simone couldn’t blame her; she had never tried to teach her. Miss McCaffrey used to quiz Simone about every aspect of Haitian life, and Simone tried to provide thoughtful answers to even the silliest questions. With Rosemary it was different—you gave up on her before you started. Only Geoffrey had tried to tell Rosemary a lot of truth very fast, but he had only hate in his heart, and he had gone way too far.

As Rosemary mixed the eggs and rum and cream in a huge cut-glass punch bowl, Simone thought uneasily of the necklace in its box. Rosemary said, “It looks like this recipe was for a hard-drinking party of twenty. We’ve got our work cut out for us, Simone. I suppose we’d better get started.”

She ladled Simone’s glass full of lumpy liquid that separated into a cloudy brownish fluid with pods of yellow cream floating on top. Simone held the cream back with her teeth and strained the rum from underneath it.

“Drink the eggnog part,” ordered Rosemary. “It’s a Christmas present for your arteries. Though Christmas isn’t the time for dreary subjects like arterial circulation. Come into the living room and see my brilliant idea—the remarkable
object
I found for decorating the tree.”

On the living-room floor was a crystal chandelier that appeared to have crashed there. Nervously Simone looked up; the old chandelier was still there.

“I found it in the attic,” Rosemary said. “It was a stroke of genius. We unhook the crystals and fasten them on the tree, and when this baby catches the light, we get dazzled by the full megaforce of High Victorian Christmas glitter.”

Lots of jangling and cursing ensued as Rosemary untangled the chandelier and unhooked the teardrop pendants. She wielded the pliers so carelessly that she kept nipping her hand. Eventually she had a pile of crystals and tied them onto the tree. But gravity was against her; the weight of just one crystal dragged down a branch till it hung perpendicular to the ground. Under the pull of a dozen or so, the tree closed up like an umbrella. Rosemary experimented, attaching the wires at different points on the branches, but at last she removed all the crystals and the tree limbs sprang up as if the winter had ended and it had shed its great load of snow.

Rosemary said, “Well, it was a good idea. Thank heaven, we’ve got the chains.” She went into the kitchen and came back with red-and-white ropes over her forearms: skeins for someone planning to knit a popcorn-and-cranberry sweater. “I strung the cranberries last night,” she said. “From racial memory.”

Rosemary looped and cast the ropes with a singular lack of direction, and the tree looked unhappy again—an evergreen in bondage with a few glass teardrops still weeping from its limbs. She said, “George and Maisie will go nuts with joy when they see this tree. Next Christmas you’re going to read about this in some decorating magazine. You’ll be in line at the supermarket, paging through some piece of trash, and you’ll see a photo of this tree of ours, the latest tree-trimming sensation.”

After they had tortured the tree to the limits of its endurance, Rosemary directed Simone’s attention to how much eggnog remained. They brought the level in the punchbowl down a couple of inches. Rosemary put on
A Christmas Carol
and tossed Simone a blanket and cuddled up on the facing couch.

The screen was frosted with static from the old videotape. No amount of tracking could clear the fog from those London streets. Rosemary said, “My favorite part is the ghost of Christmas Past. Our Anglo-Protestant zombie droning on with his little lesson in business ethics …”

Simone must have fallen asleep. She awoke curled up on the couch. Snow drifted past the windows and on the screen of the buzzing TV.

She took one shallow breath and was on her feet and running for the bathroom. Whatever was inside her, her system wanted it out and ejected it in a series of convulsions so violent that, even in mid-attack, Simone had to admire her body’s power of refusal. It was strange how little she had to do for her stomach to empty—just lean down over the toilet and brace herself against each new assault. In between spasms she observed that she was frothing at the mouth. She thought of rabies, then of epilepsy, then of Rosemary’s warnings about the eggnog. Burning liquid rose up behind her nose and she choked and cried out.

Simone stayed on the bathroom floor until she thought she could stand, then washed her face and rinsed her mouth and returned to the living room. On the way she was nearly knocked down by Rosemary running past her.

By the time Rosemary got back from the bathroom Simone was sitting up, wrapped in a blanket. She had tried lying down again, but that had made her feel worse. Rosemary sat on the opposite couch, shivering in her fur coat.

“It’s probably not salmonella,” Rosemary said. “If it were salmonella we’d be hospitalized by now. It’s probably something less serious—God knows what sort of microorganisms were living in that old punchbowl.”

Simone remembered the chips of red paint that had sprinkled from the eggbeater. “Merry Christmas,” said Rosemary. “In fact, it’s a perfect merry Christmas. How very much in the holiday spirit to start the day off barfing.”

The digital clock on the VCR was flashing 5:45. Rosemary said, “I read somewhere about digital clocks wrecking our sense of time. Digital shows us only the present minute and not the past or future. I must say, though, there are times when I
like
not seeing a clock face and confronting how far the hands must travel to get through Christmas Day.”

Eleven, when the children were due home, did seem a long time away. A bubble of nausea rose in Simone’s throat but subsided on its own.

Rosemary said, “Not to worry. You are now experiencing a real American Christmas, families all over America freaking—how are they going to survive the day? The vomiting is an extra, but it’s essentially the same story. I suppose we could exchange presents. That’s always good for ten minutes of bliss.”

Simone said, “Don’t you think we should wait for George and Maisie?” She was afraid she sounded guilty, as if she were stalling for time in which to run out and buy Rosemary a last-minute present. Even though Rosemary had forbidden Simone to buy her a gift, Simone had distinctly just heard her say “exchange.”

Simone went to her room and got Rosemary’s present from the same drawer in which she kept her uncashed checks. When she got back, the living room was empty. Some time later she heard the toilet flush, and Rosemary returned, looking pale.

Rosemary gave Simone two presents. One seemed to be a heavy book, the other a large stone basketball, which, to judge from the crumpled gift paper, had been a challenge to wrap. Simone unwrapped it and found, as she’d feared, not a basketball at all but one of Rosemary’s sculptures. Two flat breasts and a globular belly were carved into a rough pumice sphere that gently abraded Simone’s fingers as she turned it over.

“Swamp Witch Number I,”
Rosemary said. “The first of my new series. Supposedly there is a tribe of swamp dwellers outside Damascus, I think, who believe in a race of female djinns who can roll themselves into balls and skim like phosphorescent missiles on the surface of the marshes. The phosphorescence is a problem. I’ve been considering neon.”

“Thank you,” Simone said.

“This is the first time I’ve given away work. I thought it would be therapeutic for me to learn to let things go.” Rosemary sounded like a child shamed into sharing a favorite toy, but instead of feeling irritated, Simone thought once more of Shelly and of how much Rosemary might soon be required to let go. Unexpected, affectionate tears welled up in Simone’s eyes.

Mistaking them, apparently, for tears of gratitude, Rosemary modestly averted her gaze and attended to Simone’s present. She gave a little cry of pleasure and wound the scarf around her neck. But now the floral pinks and oranges that were so pretty in Glenda’s store seemed instead cruel and mocking; they made Rosemary look like a woman who had been vomiting since dawn.

Rosemary cried, “I’ll never take it off.” Simone imagined she saw a shudder disturb the fur of Rosemary’s coat, as if it knew how literally Rosemary might mean this.

“I feel so Isadora Duncan,” Rosemary said. “A model for us all. Raising those children on her own and living her life in art. I just learned the most amazing fact. Did you know that the woman who gave Isadora Duncan the fatal scarf was Preston Sturges’s mother? Isadora Duncan? Preston Sturges? I can never tell for certain, Simone, how much of this cultural stuff you are getting. I assume you catch everything. Stop me if I’m wrong. But speaking of art—Simone, you haven’t opened your other present.”

Simone unwrapped the heavy book. She looked at it for a while, and before she could blink them back, more tears came to her eyes. “My, my,” she heard Rosemary say. “What an emotional morning we’re having.”

The naked young woman stared out at Simone, as did her black maid and black cat, almost as if they recognized her, remembered watching her from Joseph’s wall. Simone struggled to recall how much she had told Rosemary. Was it possible that in a drunken, unguarded moment she could have mentioned this painting and what Joseph had done to it? She’d had a few drunken moments here but none, she believed, that unguarded.

“This book had your name on it,” Rosemary said, “though I know it says Manet. For years I’ve been intending to buy it for myself. But in the store, when I looked through it, I knew it was meant for you. I assume you realize I don’t mean the
Olympia.
That would be just too insulting and humiliating to
consider.”

Rosemary took the book from Simone and leafed through the pages until she found a large color reproduction of a portrait of a woman. The woman had on an ermine hat and cloak, a white gown trimmed with black lace. She wore one glove and held the other and seemed on the verge of weeping. It sent shivers up and down Simone’s spine—the woman could have been her twin.

“Isn’t she gorgeous?” Rosemary said. “Manet’s portrait of Madame Brunet. The story is, she hated it and went storming out of his studio. She didn’t think it made her look pretty, compared, I guess, to those simpy cherubs everyone was painting. But I always thought that maybe no one until then had realized that she was—wouldn’t you say?—part black or Latino. And when she saw the painting she suddenly thought: Now everyone will know. Isn’t she the most beautiful woman practically anyone ever painted? This feeling I’d had since I met you that I’d seen you before—I was thinking of this painting. Isn’t that amazing!”

Shouldn’t it have pleased Simone that a great and famous artist had thought it worth his while to paint a woman who looked like her? In fact, it made her feel diminished, robbed of herself, reduced to one of many: it was how she’d felt when Kenny tried to comfort her by mentioning all the other women he’d hurt.

Rosemary said, “Isn’t it fascinating to know that people just like us existed before?”

Simone shut the book and turned its cover to face Rosemary. She said, “My fiancé had a copy of this painting on his studio wall.” It was the one true detail she had revealed about her past since she had come to this country. She caught herself and with a sharp intake of breath sank down on the couch.

“I’m not surprised,” Rosemary said.
“Olympia
is the most famous naked girl in the history of art. One can hardly imagine the scandal this innocent creature created—more than you could generate these days with public live sex with a donkey. Then the feminists got hold of it with all that blather about female self-determination, when you only have to look at it to see that poor girl’s scared to death.”

“He mutilated it,” said Simone. “He painted slashes and blood and dirt all over the woman’s body. He made it look as if she’d had her throat cut and her breasts sliced off.”

“My goodness!” exclaimed Rosemary. “Why did he do that?”

“He hates white people,” Simone said. “Especially white women. Especially colonial white girls with black mammies and black cats.” She simply wanted Rosemary to know that there were people who had such feelings. It was a little like wanting to warn Rosemary about Shelly, the urge to protect combined with the urge to shake her and force her to look. Willed innocence did that to you, it made you want to stomp it, or maybe it was real innocence and what you wanted was to corrupt.

Rosemary said, “That’s ridiculous. I mean, I can see his point. But it would have scared the hell out of me. If I’d caught my fiancé defacing a painting of, I don’t know, a
black
woman, a green woman, I don’t care what color woman, I would have been out of there in two seconds flat. Though I’m not exactly the expert on self-protection or survival, or even on jumping ship before the whole thing goes down in flames. But I would rather have had a husband fucking the entire video store than a fiancé slashing master paintings of reclining female nudes.”

Simone noted how neatly Rosemary had transformed this into a contest over which of them had had to put up with the most terrible man. But if it were a contest, how easily Simone could win, stunning Rosemary into surrender with the truth about Geoffrey and Shelly.
Then
she and Rosemary could decide who had chosen the worse man. Which was crueler: a man who slept with your best friend and let your children know or a man who defaced a painting … Or a man who defaced a painting
and
slept with your best friend? There was no reason to tell Rosemary the part about Inez. It would not console Simone that she and Rosemary had this in common, that they had both lost their men to their so-called good friends.