Primitive People (14 page)

“Are you saying I look like a bag lady?” asked Rosemary.

Just then Kenny came up. “Did someone say schizophrenia? I thought I heard my middle name. Shelly, the wild mushroom and puff pastry triangles are
primo.
Find the waiter, go on.”

“Men!” Shelly said. “First they stuff you with little butter pastries, and then they make comments about your thighs.”

“Your thighs are great,” murmured Kenny distantly, gazing around the group. “Simone, you look beautiful! Unbelievably hot! Like an incredibly classy high-priced Caribbean hooker. Don’t get offended, okay? You know me well enough by now to know I mean it as a compliment.”

“She won’t get offended,” Rosemary assured Kenny. “That’s exactly what I told her.”

But in fact it had sounded quite different coming this time from Kenny. Simone was annoyed at herself for feeling pleased and flattered because a man thought she could pass for a credible whore and not get laughed off the streets.

A waiter in a tuxedo appeared on the porch and clapped his hands until silence spread from group to group. “We’re starting the ceremony,” he said. “I’m Barry, your Pied Piper.”

“It was my impression,” Rosemary said, “that the Pied Piper appealed exclusively to rats and little children.”

“You’re being too literal,” Shelly said. “It’s a problem you have.”

The guests formed a tractable mass that spread around the side of the house and down a gravel path. “Are they going into the stable?” asked Rosemary. “Simone, can you see up ahead?”

Shelly said, “Not exactly a stable. An architecturally significant landmark Dutch-colonial barn.”

Rosemary asked, “Is this where the
wedding
is?”

“Jesus was born in one,” Kenny said.

“That was a Jewish-carpenter social occasion,” said Shelly. “The same rules hardly apply.”

“Though perhaps for a Sufi homeopath …” said Rosemary.

“I love mixed marriages,” said Shelly. “They’re so much sexier.” She and Rosemary wobbled ahead. Kenny held Simone back.

“The first nice day this week,” he said, “you and I are going for a drive to Connecticut. I’ll take you across state boundaries. It’s probably a federal crime. Meet me at the salon—I’ll cancel the afternoon. I’ll tell the answering service I’m having a triple bypass.”

Simone and Kenny had to hurry to catch up with Shelly and Rosemary, who were squeezing through the stable door, just behind George and Maisie. The barn smelled of rotted hay and manure with a
soupçon
of gardenias. Craning their necks, the guests pressed deeper inside.

Rosemary said, “These heels were not designed for straw-and-cowshit wear.”

A man standing behind Simone and Kenny told his companion, “They wanted a kind of cathedral effect, like the stalls were little chapels. Combined with a Bethlehem manger thing, a really holy place. Not some Episcopal church that the robber barons built on land they stole from the Native Americans. And the truly beautiful thing, the part that really makes it, is that all the food that’s left over from the wedding is being trucked down to the city and distributed to the homeless.”

“Friends of the groom,” Kenny whispered to Simone.

If the horse barn was a cathedral, the horses must have been priests, patiently waiting in their wooden boxes for sinners to come for confession, occasionally snorting and lifting their heads, which caused the crowd to ripple and make room, except for a few women who made a point of standing near the horses, aggressively stroking their noses and cooing in their ears.

The minister, a round-faced young woman with a helmet of yellow hair, grabbed the bridal couple and opened the gate to an empty paddock. She pushed the couple inside the stall and shoved them around to face her. Purple lipstick and kohl around her eyes gave the hefty blond bride a bruised, Oriental look that went nicely with her ankle-length black skirt and long-sleeved shiny black blouse.

“My God,” breathed Rosemary. “Batsy’s dressed to marry the Ayatollah.”

“Actually the guy looks like Wyatt Earp,” said Shelly. “She’ll be fine if he spends half the time on her that he must lavish on that mustache.”

“Hey, I know that guy,” said Kenny. “He is a total scum.” Simone checked nervously for eavesdroppers, but everyone stared straight ahead.

“Is Geoffrey missing this?” Rosemary said. “Do you think there could be somewhere else he had to be on Thanksgiving?”

The minister’s syrupy, moneyed voice flowed out over the stable. “I’m Charlotte Hunt,” she said. “I’m the ninety-fifth woman to be ordained by the Congregational Church of New York.” There was a smattering of applause. “I’m honored to have been asked here today to help marry Betsy and Ethan, not only because it’s always great to see a couple really in love, but also because of the spirit of compromise that my being here symbolizes—and the wonderfully positive feelings that this gives me about the marriage.

“I know that I was not Ethan’s first choice to perform the marriage ceremony. He would have preferred someone of his own faith, a Sufi, or at least a Muslim. But Ethan compromised, just as Betsy compromised and agreed to hold the service in this humble manger instead of what Ethan calls my European church. Some of us wish it
were
European. Paris or Rome would be nifty.”

A few laughs gave the minister time to catch a quick breath and say, “Like gaggles of you present today, Betsy and I are cousins. I knew her as a baby.”

“I can’t see,” Maisie wailed, and Kenny lifted her up. George, Simone realized, couldn’t see either, but preferred being wedged between two walls of adults to being picked up and risking unwanted attention from a stableful of strangers.

“Betsy and Ethan came to talk to me in my office,” the minister was saying. “And the minute I saw them together I knew this marriage would succeed. It may not be a popular thing to say nowadays. But what made me so certain was that I could sense immediately a powerful current of sexual attraction.”

In front of Simone the sea of bobbing heads froze: icebergs rocking on an Arctic bay that had suddenly turned solid.

“First they spoke with me together,” said the minister, “and then individually, and when Betsy was in my office she said the most marvelous thing. She said that Ethan was a homeopath everywhere but in bed. She said that bed was one place where he definitely does not think that less is more.”

Kenny covered Maisie’s ears. With a squawk of protest, Maisie pried off Kenny’s hands. The mood of the crowd was such that no one turned to investigate Maisie’s squawking.

“So it struck me,” said the minister, “that this stable was the perfect place to join these two together, a place to remind us of that stronger, more urgent river flowing beneath what we, perhaps foolishly, call civilization. Ethan has asked that I read aloud from the poems of Rumi, a Persian poet whose erotic verse shows us even today how sexual, genital love is a mirror for the love of God and our fellow man.”

The minister unfolded a sheet of paper and read, “‘My soul is beyond desire, my ears are drunk, in one hand is a wine goblet, in the other my lover’s hair, my desire, my only desire …’”

Everyone in the stable inhaled and seemed to get stuck there, as if another breath might provoke still more intimate revelations. Simone could feel the collective swell of relief when the minister said, “And now by the powers vested in me by the State of New York …” How grateful they were for the familiarity of the civil ceremony with its safe categoric abstract promises to love, honor, and obey.

“Obey!” hissed Rosemary. “Can you believe that—love, honor, and
obey
! The last couple in the twentieth century to include that in the service! Is female obedience making a comeback?”

“It’s a Muslim thing,” said Shelly. “Limited application.”

“You may now kiss,” said the reverend, and the couple kissed passionately, perhaps feeling some obligation to make good their sexual boasts. While the guests cleared the stable the newlyweds remained in the stall, licking each other’s faces.

Tables had been set up under a huge striped tent, heated by mammoth blowers from which gusted a hot desert wind, disastrously for the wilting ferns strewn about on the tables. Perhaps it was the ferns that added a stale-icebox vegetable aroma to the more pleasant party smells of perfume, liquor, and cigarettes.

The children had their own tent, to which Simone and Rosemary delivered them.

“I’ll go with you,” Rosemary told Simone, “so you won’t look like their caregiver.”

In the smaller tent fifty overdressed children milled uneasily among the tables, eyeing each other hostilely, as if in a game of musical chairs.

“Upper-class children!” said Rosemary. “Where else in the world do the poor little robots wait to do what they’re told?”

Not in Haiti, Simone could have said, but thought better of it. Packs of children roamed Port-au-Prince, seemingly without families. You imagined them sleeping in a lump, huddled together like puppies.

“All right, children,” Rosemary cried. “Everyone take a seat. Soon someone—not me—will come along and bring you little people some food. Goodness, where are your parents? There are tiny babies here! Maisie, you can get carrot sticks from the grownup tent. I don’t know what they plan to feed you. Hamburgers or something equally imaginative. George and Maisie, keep an eye on this zoo. Come get me and Simone if you need us.”

In the other tent, the adult tent, Shelly and Kenny had saved them places at a round table at which five guests—a man and four women—were already seated.

“Count!” said Rosemary. “Good to see you!” A faint smile of greeting twitched the lips of a ruddy-faced man with a ginger mustache and closely cropped reddish hair. Was this the famous pervert who strung dead animals up in the forest? Was this the killer Simone had imagined shooting at them in the woods? The Count she’d pictured was tall and cruel, puckered with dueling scars. But the actual Count was plump and shiny, like a packaged pastry, iced with loads of unhealthy but not necessarily toxic chemicals.

Surrounding the Count were two lovely storklike women with thin arms and pointy elbows that defied the laws of physics, supporting their large drooping heads. Occasionally they lifted their chins, like telephones off a cradle, and leaned over and whispered in the Count’s ear, messages that made the Count go silly with delight or as close to silliness as his pained tic of a smile permitted. It was impossible to picture him participating gravely and without irony in rituals involving sheep.

But didn’t people want that, their hands plunged in animal blood—or at least the thrill of watching someone do the plunging for them? What about those voodoo services included in package tours of Port-au-Prince, busloads of tourists nervously patting their wallets in time to the frenzied drums while sinewy dancers leaped about and a poor chicken lost its life. Simone had gone to several of these with the ballet dancers from Oklahoma, though she told them she was a Catholic, voodoo was not her religion. She explained that voodoo was the faith of the villages and the poor, and the dancers tried to look sympathetic instead of how they really felt: happy, flushed from the heat, admiring the drumming and the writhing, handsome Haitian versions of themselves.

Simone wondered what the Count thought of the wedding service among the animals. And why were these women talking to him like those other women spoke to the horses?

On Simone’s left, two ladies had just discovered that one of them lived in the country while the other came up from the city for weekends.

“I don’t think I could stand it,” the country woman said. “All that dirt and pollution and noise and crime, the sensory and moral compromises just to get through the average day. You have to develop a shell to survive—it’s a city of hard-boiled eggs.”

“Maybe,” reflected the city woman. “But if I lived in the country I’d lose my shell completely. I’d become a mushy cauliflower from lack of stimulation.”

“I suppose in the city one could have great dinner parties,” the country woman admitted. “That is, until war broke out in the streets and made it dicey to get to them. The dinner-party scene in Beirut must be in terrible shape.”

“And where do
you
live?” the city woman asked Simone, as if to enlist her on the side of either country or city, perhaps figuring that, Simone being black, smart money was on the city.

“I am from Haiti,” Simone replied. She straightened her shoulders defensively, as if to ward off further questions.

“Haiti,” said the city woman. “My husband and I spent two weeks there. What a beautiful country, but economically—my God. The people live in poverty, deep deep poverty. They’re also incredibly spiritual people. For weeks after I got home I felt like a better person for having known them. We bought this beautiful sequined flag of Boussou, the god of agriculture.”

“At least here,” the country woman told Simone, “you can wear that cute mink jacket. If this were the city, you’d be taking your life in your hands.”

Meanwhile, across the table, the Count was introducing his female companions. “This is Morgan,” he said. “And on my right is Silver. Why do wealthy American families name their offspring after horses?”

“Or dogs,” said Rosemary. “Half of Geoffrey’s family were named after thoroughbred hounds. Uncle Rex and Cousin Springer to name just two. Half the first names that sound like old-money last names were actually borrowed from old-money dogs.”

Kenny said, “If they did that in my family, I’d have a Cousin Rin Tin Tin.” There was a silence. People looked at Kenny and looked away. Kenny refilled his champagne glass.

“Rex,” the Count said finally, “is a German name, no?”

“It’s fashion,” said Shelly wearily, “just like everything else. All the little girls are named Melissa, all the boys are named Max. Back home the blacks give their kids fabulous names: Farouk and Valvoline. But up here … I have a client who named her son Luigi after some Italian designer’s kid she saw in a photo spread in
Vogue.
Luigi!”

“It’s a great responsibility,” said Rosemary. “It comes back on you if you screw up. How utterly cynical of us to name our baby son after the last dead king of England. I soon realized that ‘George’ was as close to ‘Geoffrey’ as we could get without having a Geoffrey Porter the Fifteenth. That was the extent of Geoffrey’s rebellion against family tradition. I wasn’t going to let that happen again when it was time to name Maisie. We knew there was a Henry James novel about a little girl named Maisie. We both thought we’d read the novel—mistakenly, as it turned out. How were we supposed to know that
that
Maisie was an unfortunate waiflike victim of ugly, selfish adult divorce? Which is precisely what I mean about names coming back to haunt you. Imagine your child’s name exposing not only your marital problems but the fact that you’ve been lying about something you’ve always pretended to have read.”