Away from Home (13 page)

“So are we,” Helen said. “Thank you.”

“Listen to the orchestra,” Baby said. “They’re going to play all American tunes tonight. I bought the sheet music for them. And we’re having American food later. I love America.”

“We love Brazil,” Bert said.

“You do?” he asked happily. “You too, Helen? Do you like Brazil?”

“I love it.”

“You love it! It’s a wonderful country. I’m glad you love it.” Baby beamed at her. “Everyone at this party is Brazilian, but most of them speak English very well. You won’t have any trouble.”

“I speak Portuguese,” Helen said.

“You speak Portuguese! How wonderful! It’s a very difficult language for Americans.”

“Yes,” Helen said. “It is hard, at first.”

“Very difficult,” Baby said. “You must be a very intelligent woman. Come, I’ll introduce you to some of my friends. You must speak to them in Portuguese.”

Helen glanced at Bert as they followed Baby to the first knot of people. Bert already had that avid expression on his face, like a cub reporter at his first fire, and she knew he was going to have a good time. She smiled at him lovingly and he winked at her.

“This is Leila Silva e Costa, Helen and Bert Sinclair.” Baby went on, introducing members of the group, but Helen was lost in the maze of Brazilian names. Everyone seemed to have at least three names, many of them combinations of the same names and most of them unpronounceable. She looked at the first woman she had met. How extraordinarily beautiful she was! There was something more Parisian than Latin about upper-class Brazilian women—their hair styles, their clothes, even their finely cut profiles. And something about the light eyes many of them had seemed almost Egyptian.

“Excuse me,” Helen said in Portuguese. “Please tell me your name again.”

“Leila, And you?”

“Helen.”

“You are American.”

Helen laughed. “You can tell immediately, of course.”

“Oh, please speak English,” Leila said, in English. “I want to learn to improve my English. My English is too bad.”

“No, it isn’t bad at all.”

“No? You don’t think it’s funny? I am taking lessons now.”

A waiter came by with glasses of champagne. They each took one. “Do you want to sit down?” Leila asked. “It’s very hot in this patio. Let’s sit in the garden.”

“Wonderful idea.”

They sat in small white wrought-iron chairs beside the lighted pool. Helen looked down at the water longingly. “I’d like to jump in.”

“We will, later. Do you have your bikini?”

“No. I never thought—”

“They will find one for you,” Leila said. “Don’t worry.” When she smiled, her remarkable cat’s eyes did not crinkle half shut the way most people’s did but, rather, they opened wider, glittering, giving her an expression that was mischievous and young. Helen guessed Leila was about the same age as she was, perhaps younger. “Later we’ll dance in the pool.”

“My lord,” Helen said. “It’s like Hollywood.”

“Have you been to Hollywood?”

“No. I’ve only read about it.”

“I would like to go to New York,” Leila said. “I know I would love New York. I want to go there to go to college. Perhaps I will someday.” She lowered her voice and looked at Helen with concern. “Tell me—am I too old to go to college in the United States?”

“Too old?” Helen said. “Of course not. Grandmothers go to college in America, after their children are grown. Anybody can go.”

“They won’t laugh at me?”

“Not at all.”

Leila looked pained, but she did not try to drop her gaze from Helen’s face. “I never had any education,” she said. “I was married at seventeen and I was so ignorant. The women here marry too young, I think. It’s not good. I think that’s why my marriage failed. I didn’t know you have to work for a good marriage, and even if I had known, I wouldn’t have known what to do.”

“You’re very honest,” Helen said.

“Maybe too much?”

“No. Could we see each other sometime? Have lunch together one day?”

“Of course!” Leila said. “Tomorrow I can’t, because I go up to the
favellas
. But after tomorrow. You come to my house for lunch.”

“You go up to the
favellas?
” Helen asked. “To those shacks on the mountain?”

“It’s a kind of social work,” Leila said. “Some of the women do it. The people who live there are so poor, it’s something terrible. The police won’t let them build any more houses because there are too many already. So during the night when it’s very dark the people put up a house, very quickly, all in one night. And in the morning if the police come, they just say, What house? This house was here always.”

“How can anyone put up a house overnight?”

Leila opened her eyes wide. “They’re something terrible, those houses. Old pieces of wood, old gasoline tins, cardboard. When there is a big rain they disappear and the people drown, their chickens drown and float in the rain water, the—how you say—big black birds come—”

“Buzzards?”

“Yes. The black birds that eat people. So I go up there one day every week and bring clothes and food and sometimes medicine if the people need it.”

“You’re not afraid?” Helen said.

“Afraid? In the daylight?
No!
Not so many people can do this,” Leila added rather proudly, “because you have to be a very good driver to go up those roads. Most of the time there aren’t even any roads.”

“Could I go with you tomorrow?” Helen asked. “Please.”

“You want to go?”

“Yes. I do.”

“With pleasure,” Leila said. “I’ll come for you in the morning. Around eleven o’clock.” She began to search through her small purse. “Give me your address and telephone number. And if you have some old things, some clothing, maybe clothes for children, you could bring them.”

“I’m sure I do.” She thought of the clothes the children had outgrown, put away in a box on top of a closet, and of all the things she had which, although she never seemed able to wear them out, seemed old to her and worn and tiresome. In her mind she was already categorizing all this booty and was filled with a rising excitement. Perhaps we’ll become friends, she thought. I’d like to have a Brazilian friend in Brazil. And then it struck her for an instant how somehow ridiculous it was that although she had been living in this country for almost a year now the only Brazilians she knew well were maids and shopkeepers and her
massagista
and her hairdresser. And she only knew them as well as one knows people with whom one has lengthy discussions about the weather.

“I’m glad we met,” Helen said.

“I too,” Leila said warmly. “In Rio you always see the same people, every day, all the time, all your life from the time you are children. You go to parties and it’s always the same people. Whatever you do, they know it before you know it yourself! And they are always gossiping. They call you on the telephone: ‘Ah, I saw your husband on the street talking to a woman!’ It’s something terrible, this gossip. I’m glad I met you, too.”

Although it was late it was still too hot for anyone but the most energetic to try to dance. The orchestra played, and people strolled by the pool, looking longingly at the electrically lighted blue water. Helen and Leila walked through the crowd, all of whom Leila knew and none of whom Helen had ever seen before. “That girl over there was Miss Brazil a few years ago,” Leila said. “And that girl is engaged. To the man next to her. And that woman—isn’t she beautiful?—is married to the tall man next to her. She’s very intelligent too.”

“It’s funny,” Helen said, “people actually standing with the people they’re married to. At our parties, the first thing you do is get away from your husband or wife.”

“Really?”

“In fact, when there’s a dinner party with place cards you never sit next to the person you’re married to.”

Leila laughed mischievously. “The husbands and wives in Brazil are very polite to each other,” she said. “When they are in public they never look at anyone else. But most of the men here have mistresses, and most of the women have had lovers.”

Helen looked around her, not able to restrain herself from feeling shocked. How carefree all these women looked, and how poised. She had been friendly with a married woman in Westport who had been having an affair, but this woman had always looked harried, as if the strain of furtive meetings and a grand passion of the heart were too much for her to handle along with the running of a home and the care of a husband and two children. And she had another neighbor who suspected her husband was having an affair with someone in the city, and Helen remembered a horrible evening when she and Bert had sat with this wife waiting for her husband to come home for a dinner to which she and Bert had been invited. The husband had missed a train, and then telephoned, and then missed another; harmless enough; but Helen had watched the wife get herself systematically drunk on five martinis, and then she had known. Finally the three of them had sat down to the table in order that the roast not dry to a crisp. The conversation had been strained, full of forced gaiety and pointedly innocuous anecdotes. At moments like that everything you say seems to take on a terrifying unintended double meaning. Finally the husband had appeared, all humble thirty-five-year-old boyish charm. Helen remembered thinking at the time, Who would want to go to bed with
him?
But evidently at least two women did.

“The wives know about the husbands’ mistresses?” Helen said.

“In time the wife always knows,” Leila said. “You can’t help finding out.”

“But what do they do then?”

Leila shrugged. “Nothing. Sometimes take a lover and say nothing. Sometimes accuse the husband; and then he buys her a new bracelet or something she has been wanting and she forgives him. They fight and make up. A married woman has no rights in Brazil. We have no legal divorce. If a husband leaves his wife he doesn’t have to give her any money, even for the children. So what can a wife do? It’s better to be married than to be alone.”

“How awful!”

“Yes,” Leila said grimly. “It is.”

Helen saw Bert standing against the bar in the patio talking to some men, and she went to him and took hold of his hand, feeling gratitude and tenderness toward him. He turned for an instant and gave her a brief smile. She felt Leila’s fingers lightly on her arm.

“I must go and speak to that man over there,” Leila whispered. “I like him
very
much.” She smiled, this time a smile full of radiance that altered her entire appearance. She seemed like a child bursting with the secret of some forbidden trick she is going to play. She disappeared into the crowd.

Helen looked after her, wondering which one was the man, but he was evidently at the other side of the crowd, over by the shrubbery, and she could not see either him or Leila. She wondered if the man was Leila’s lover, and if he was married. Now she looked at all these people with a new interest, realizing how little she knew about any of them. At home, on the few occasions when she and Bert went to a night club or to a bar in New York, she had been able to look at all the people and imagine she knew exactly what they were like. You could see a lovely young girl dancing with a wealthy-looking older man and you could say to yourself, feeling like an analyzer of life, He’s married. She isn’t. Or you could look at a young couple and think, He’s in love with her and thinks she’s in love with him, but she really doesn’t like him very much. But here, in this strange place, Helen looked at the engaged girl with her fiancé and she had no idea whether or not they were in love with each other, or whether the girl was marrying only for security or escape from her governess. Or perhaps the man thought she would make a good mother for his future children. Would he have a mistress, or even several? Would she take a lover? In the early days of their marriage, when Helen and Bert still had unmarried friends, they could go to a party and Helen could tell which girl was working in an office and now wearing her only good black dress, and if she had come to the party only because she knew it would be a free meal. She could tell which girls had come because they were desperately looking for new men to give them love, or even friendship. Their searching chatter and round eyes that looked as if they could draw someone in to their depths by physical force alone gave them away. She had been able to look at a girl sitting with her elbow on a bar, leaning her chin on her palm and listening to a man talk, and Helen had imagined she even knew how many perfume bottles that girl had at home on her dressing table. But here—she didn’t know anything. She had never even been inside the bedroom of a Brazilian woman like herself, and she had never seen the inside of the homes in which they had grown up and become what they were at this moment.

“I feel like a stranger,” she said to Bert.

“Why?” he asked, surprised. “Aren’t you having fun? Haven’t you met people?”

“I don’t mean at this party; I mean in Brazil.”

“Well,” he answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “we
are
strangers.”

But somehow, for some reason, the words hurt her.

A young woman with a beautiful body, dressed in a tiny bikini, ran out of the bathhouse and jumped into the pool. Another woman followed her, and then two men, all in bathing suits. The women swam and dived like porpoises, their wet hair streaming about their faces, although Helen was sure they had gone to the beauty parlor that very day to prepare for the party. The four of them lined up at the edge of the pool, kicking to stay afloat, smiling and calling out to their friends to jump in too. Their upturned faces glittered in the electric lights under the water, like masks.

“Helen,” Baby Amaral said, “do you want a bikini? There are several in the dressing room that might fit you.”

“I don’t know …” she said. To tell the truth, she had not yet gotten the courage to wear the two narrow strips of cloth some of the Brazilian women called a bathing suit, although she had two brief maillots at home.

“Come!” Baby insisted. “It’s so hot, don’t you think so? Aren’t you too hot? I don’t want you to be too hot; you won’t be able to enjoy your dinner.”

Helen looked at her watch and smiled at him. It was nearly midnight. She wondered if Bert was suffering from hunger. He disliked waiting until so late to eat. As for herself, she had not realized how late it was. She trotted obediently into the bathhouse and found a bikini lying on a white wooden bench. When she had undressed and put it on she looked at herself in the mirror. Her tan ended at her waist and began again at the top of her thighs, but the bikini revealed a three-inch-wide strip of white skin below the waist that made her look, she thought, like a chorus girl dancing in a night-club line at a southern resort. Oh, well, she thought, what the hell. She ran out and jumped into the shallow end of the pool.