Primitive People (25 page)

He put on his socks and high-top black sneakers. He got his jacket and car keys: Simone’s signal to leave.

He said, “Christmas dinner at Rosemary’s could be a fairly insane proposition.”

E
VERYONE SEEMED TO UNDERSTAND
that this was a dangerous season. In one magazine a panel of ministers and psychologists sagely advised their readers on how to prevent holiday dynamite from detonating in their lives. A psychiatrist described past grievances and hurts as destructive presents family members bring to family occasions. The secret, he said, was learning to leave those explosive packages home.

Every culture, thought Simone, had its unhealthy times. Haitians feared certain saints’ eves and nights of the full moon and, more recently, election eves and days after demonstrations. The Mayas, she’d read, had periods when no one left the house. How safe it would be to live like that, everyone knowing the risks. If you forgot and started out the door, someone was sure to stop you.

Despite the magazines that Simone left scattered around to warn her, Rosemary blithely insisted that, for Maisie and George, Christmas Eve at their father’s and Christmas Day at home would simply double their portion of holiday joy. But perhaps she, too, secretly realized that Christmas was mined for disaster. Why else did she keep complaining about how the Holy Nativity provided no preparation or guidance for this era of child support and split-custody arrangements? She said, “Maybe the myth would still apply if the Church acknowledged its complications—as a parenting situation, Mary and Joseph and God were genuinely avant-garde. But instead of admitting this, they keep trying to convince us that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were the parthenogenetic
Father Knows Best.”

As she ransacked the attic for the Christmas decorations that she was becoming increasingly, hysterically certain Geoffrey must have taken, Rosemary seemed more than ever like a newly hatched creature, a feathery duckling emerging from the sticky fur of her mouton coat. It was painful to watch her ripping open boxes, searching for lights and baubles that had been in the family for ages. Each year, she said, Geoffrey had supervised the children in the hanging of the ornaments with an anal-compulsive methodicalness that precluded creativity or fun and so reminded Rosemary of Geoffrey’s mother that there were several Christmas Eves when she’d run screaming from the house.

Near the eyeless colonial paintings was a large portrait of a matronly woman in long gloves and an evening gown. Could she have been Geoffrey’s mother? It was hard to tell—the portrait had been turned upside down and its eyes had been cut out. Simone could hardly believe that only one short season had passed since that hot afternoon she first came up here with Rosemary. Those few months seemed longer than her whole life up until now.

Puffs of mildew wafted up as Rosemary tore through a steamer trunk. She said, “I paid my dues in this attic. When the children were little and they’d nap, I’d come up here and look through the stuff. That is how I got to know how sick these people were. The unspeakable things they stashed for someone to find after they were gone—human-hair wreaths, slices of wedding cake under glass, the handkerchief that Uncle Ebenezer spit up into on his deathbed. Of course they never imagined they’d ever die—otherwise, how could they have kept it?

“I was fascinated, I’d spend hours here, very voyeuristic. I see now that it was the closest I came to a creative state. Then one day I woke up and realized that seven years had gone by.

“My first idea was to make junk sculpture from the things in the house. But I knew that getting Geoffrey to part with one tiny scrap would be like convincing him to donate a testicle to science. I can’t imagine who I was before I did my art, when my entire existence was this house and the children, and I hunkered here like a monkey, pawing through someone else’s stuff.”

As always, it surprised Simone that Rosemary had a past here, that she and the children were not parachuted in to coincide with Simone’s arrival. It was so hard to even imagine the life they led before she came. And yet now she heard, in Rosemary’s voice, nostalgia, even grief, a longing for those seven years she claimed to have spent in this attic. She was mourning the person she used to be when George and Maisie were little; she wanted back her life and the layer of skin we shed in every house we spend time in.

Only now did Simone understand that Rosemary’s taking her here that first day had not been some casual
pro forma
house tour. Rosemary was showing her where she lived, territory staked out by those years. But the mood in which she had shown her around was nothing, nothing like now. Then she had been rattled, dithery, falsely efficient, and brittle. Now she seemed at once mushy, irresolute, and driven, and when she gave up searching for the Christmas ornaments, she hid her face and wept.

Simone looked on helplessly, wanting to tell Rosemary how sad and beautiful everything seemed on her last day in Port-au-Prince, the vigilance it took not to fall in love with everything she was leaving: goodbye bougainvillea, goodbye desk, goodbye bed, goodbye street, goodbye café where Joseph took Simone and later took Inez. Then somehow she might gently hint that Rosemary might be leaving here, too. Simone could still hear Shelly asking, “Have you seen that attic?”

For days Simone had been fighting the urge to warn Rosemary about Shelly, to shock her out of the ignorance that struck her as willed and a little maddening. At moments it seemed possible that if Rosemary knew what was coming, together she and Simone and the children might somehow forestall it. But as Simone watched Rosemary weep helplessly over the misplaced Christmas ornaments she understood that telling her would only hasten the inevitable.

“Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas,” Geoffrey said in a rolling baritone. He looked very different in the cottony white stick-on eyebrows and beard, but Simone peered through the Santa disguise to the familiar unreadable Geoffrey. This was the first time they had been face to face since that day in the jeep with Shelly, and it went without saying, it was understood: they would never discuss it.

Maisie giggled appreciatively. George said, “Oh, outstanding,” then reconsidered and smirked and blushed, embarrassed for his father.

“How was the traffic?” asked Geoffrey. “Mobs of Christmas Eve partygoers hitting the road after their seventeenth eggnog?”

“It was all right,” said Simone.

Geoffrey said, “In a couple of hours those roads will be demo derby.”

Simone didn’t reply. She was remembering how Kenny had described Geoffrey’s face as working in two halves, the half that felt entitled to tell you what was real and what wasn’t, and the other half always checking to see whether you believed him. But Simone hadn’t met Geoffrey yet, so Kenny’s description made no sense; the face she had pictured when he’d said that was, she realized now, Joseph’s.

Now at least she could stop resisting what everyone said about Geoffrey. He was not, after all, a nice man at a difficult point in his life. He was a man who could sleep with his wife’s best friend and make his children keep it secret. It was always a mistake to ignore such a wide range of warnings, when everything you saw or heard advised you to watch out. Hadn’t there been signs everywhere that she should never have trusted Joseph?

“Hang on,” Geoffrey told Simone. From his desk he took a small rectangular package wrapped in olive-green paper.

“Merry Christmas.” Geoffrey kissed Simone clumsily on the cheek.

Inside the box was a necklace of delicate silver ovals, each containing a miniature sunset—an iridescent pink-and-blue sky behind black silhouetted palm trees. Light winked off the pearly clouds so they appeared to be shifting. Simone felt sad and inadequate, as she often did at sunset: the compulsion to keep looking, the sense of not taking in enough, the pressure of knowing how quickly it would all disappear.

“Like it?” said Geoffrey. “It’s 1940s, I think. I hope it isn’t tourist crap you used to see all over Haiti.”

Simone was amazingly pleased that Geoffrey had got her a present. What moved her was that he’d gone to a shop, to a case of jewelry, and that—who cared how obvious it was?—the tropical scene made him think of her. That she had been on Geoffrey’s mind was evidence she existed. It made her catch her breath to imagine him picking up the necklace and picturing it against the skin at the base of her throat. Even now, despite everything, she was gratified and deeply happy that his thoughts had, however briefly, lingered on her.

“Thank you,” Simone said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get you—”

Geoffrey said, “No problem.”

A certain wariness in his voice made Simone pause and wonder if what he’d been thinking about was not the necklace against her throat but the appropriate gift for someone who knew he was sleeping with Shelly. Was it affection and concern—or bribery, buying her silence? One depressing possibility was that Shelly had bought the necklace, which, Simone suddenly noted, repeated the tropical motif of the asparagus plates at Shelly’s dinner. Her face prickled astringently with shame at how flattered she’d been. She knew she would feel even worse if she allowed herself to remember how she used to imagine asking Geoffrey to help solve her problems with Immigration. Anything she asked Geoffrey now would necessarily involve Shelly; she might as well have stayed in Haiti and put her fate in the tiny hands of Bill Webb.

Geoffrey said,” Shelly’s in Memphis this week.”

“I know,” said Simone. “Rosemary invited her for Christmas dinner.” Once more Simone had the sense of having blurted out too much, that the smallest detail of Rosemary’s life was classified information. Simone had been glad to hear that Shelly would be away, even though it meant Kenny would be Rosemary’s only guest.

Geoffrey was reassuring her that Shelly was out of town—the children wouldn’t be spending Christmas Eve in the adulterous snake pit he shared with their mother’s best friend. But given their unspoken agreement that nothing untoward had happened, it was just peculiar for him to bring up Shelly’s holiday plans.

Geoffrey said, “Jesus Christ, why am I telling you this? You’re not a judge, Simone. You’re not my mother.”

He hesitated momentarily, which was in itself endearing, that a man would stop and consider what he was about to say to her next. He said, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to be a male. Every little temptation is an invitation to redesign our whole lives and a huge chance to disappoint ourselves by not having the guts to do it. Every choice feels like a crossroads with cops and barbed wire and barricades, a cop with a grinning skull for a face, the face of your own death, and it’s always a question of whether to stop or crash on through …”

Simone let Geoffrey ramble on. This was not the time to point out that he had told her this before. It was more or less what he’d said that first day at the Tepee Diner. She had to admit that now, as then, it was touching and seductive. But this time it saddened her—and it wasn’t just hearing it twice. Though Geoffrey seemed to be stating a fact, in fact he was making a request, asking her to save him from something that no one could be saved from. He was asking her a question without any answer, but still he expected her to know and would blame her for not knowing. Geoffrey was so much like George, bringing Simone his nightmares and wanting her to promise that they would never come true.

Geoffrey sighed. “Speaking of cops and crossroads, be careful on the drive home. You do not want to know what’s out on those roads tonight. Will you listen to me, for God’s sake? I’ve been drinking since lunch, or whatever that meal was, and I’m scaring you about drunk drivers. Don’t women get sick of men telling them to watch out for men just like them?”

In fact, the roads on the drive back home were curiously deserted. Simone felt like a surfer riding a quiet swell between crashing waves of partygoers separating from their friends. She could tell from the clumps of parked cars that there were only a couple of parties. Even so, many houses were brightly lit, and Simone slowed down and looked through the windows at the silver Christmas trees and electric candelabra that told her so much, but only so much, about the lives lived inside.

But what could a stranger tell from looking in Rosemary’s windows this evening and seeing Simone and Rosemary drinking eggnog and watching TV? Rosemary had promised that they would consume tons of eggnog and trim the Christmas tree and watch Alastair Sim in
A Christmas Carol
on a videotape they would rent from the store where Geoffrey was so well known.

Rosemary had said,
“A Christmas Carol’s
the trade-off for not having George and Maisie. You can never get children to watch anything good or old or uncolorized black-and-white. I’m sure there’ll be no problem with it being rented. The big demand is for
Slasher Santa
and
Rambo Saves Christmas, Part Three.”

Now, turning into the driveway, Simone could only hope that Rosemary would not be hitting some new crescendo of disaster. She was thinking about the time she had danced with Geoffrey and come home to find Rosemary gasping for breath, and though she knew the two things weren’t causally related, she was very aware of Geoffrey’s necklace hidden in her purse. It was almost as if she could hear it ticking away like a bomb. If a dance had wrought that much havoc—who knew what a necklace could do? She could never tell Rosemary that she had got a present from Geoffrey. If she ever wore it, she would have to lie.

Simone had a vision of Christmas Eve in a hospital waiting room, observing firsthand the carnage created by holiday dynamite detonating in American lives. She knew this fear was just disguised guilt for her pleasure in Geoffrey’s gift, but in Haiti, voodoo proved daily the wonders that guilt and fear could accomplish. She had gone back to being happy for having got the present; at this distance the fact of it was more real than any potential connection with Shelly.

Prepared for all manner of hellish scenes, Simone gingerly entered the house. In one corner of the living room a small, rather lopsided fir tree grew from a foil-covered pot. In the kitchen Rosemary, perfectly in control, was separating eggs for eggnog and holding forth about salmonella.