Primitive People (6 page)

One night he said, “My dad bought a new Land Rover? For the days when we’ll be with him?”

“How nice of him,” Simone said, attempting a neutral tone.

Later, when Simone went downstairs, Shelly and Rosemary were, coincidentally, discussing Geoffrey’s sleazy attempts to buy the children’s love and devotion.

Rosemary said, “Simone, I promise, you will understand tomorrow. The instant you meet the man everything will become clear. The man thinks everything is for sale and available for a price, including those most precious commodities, his own amusement and pleasure. Luckily he has the wealth to satisfy every infantile male whim, including the million bucks of electronic toys his imaginary advertising business requires. It’s an indication, isn’t it, of the passionate interest he takes in his children—Simone has been here for what seems like our whole lives and Geoffrey has never met her.”

Rosemary poured wine into glasses and brought one to Shelly. “Thank you,” said Shelly, and went back to staring out the window. “What are those piles of branches? Burning a friend at the stake? That has always been my secret fear. Joan of Arc made a lasting impression.”

Rosemary said, “Simone found a dead sheep in the woods. The Count is up to his old tricks.”

“Count Dracula,” said Shelly. “It must be hell on property values. But Simone should be used to it—coming from Haiti and all.”

“Ridiculous,” said Rosemary. “What do they do in
Haiti,
kill chickens? That’s qualitatively different from rites involving dead sheep and underage boys.”

“Come off it, Rosemary,” Shelly said. “They’re killing more than chickens in Haiti, aren’t they, Simone? I read that the
tonton macoute
employed a stable of insane dwarfs hired exclusively to bite off the testicles of Duvalier’s torture victims.”

Simone was startled to hear Shelly repeat this old story, which embassy people regularly dusted off to entertain guests and new arrivals. Maybe rumors about the travel bureau had gotten this far as well.

“Shelly!” Rosemary wrung her hands. “Look at poor Simone! Haiti is Simone’s country!”

“So what?” Shelly shrugged lightly. “All the more reason to bring it out into the light of day. There are certain truths one has to face, especially about one’s own country. I for one wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn those dwarfs were on the CIA payroll.”

After a silence Rosemary said, “I wish you were staying for dinner.”

“I wish I were, too,” said Shelly. “But that dreary photographer in Clintonville is giving a ghastly party.”

“Oh, parties.” Rosemary sighed dreamily. “I can’t do parties anymore. Going to parties with Geoffrey was like party aversion therapy. Always looking around to see who he was flirting with. And when I saw, I’d get a shock—party behavior modification.”

“Parties are like everything else,” Shelly said. “You have to stay in practice.”

“Maybe now,” Rosemary said. “If I ever got invited anywhere again …”

“What you’ve got to remember,” Shelly said, “is how much Geoffrey stage-managed. It was in his interest to prevent you from trying to have a good time. As with everyone, of course, the roots are all in his childhood. Simone, imagine: the man’s anal-sadistic British mother used to give tea parties for his friends, twelve-year-old boys invited in for scones and marmite sandwiches. No wonder he grew up using social occasions to make his loved ones squirm.”

“Mothers!” Rosemary threw up her hands. “It’s a miracle we survive them. My problem is, I have no memory. I get lonely and forget how it was—and think Geoffrey was better than nothing. I need my friends to remind me that in fact it was worse. I only wish you’d been around, Simone, though we couldn’t have been friends. But after tomorrow you’ll see what I mean. You’ll understand what I’ve suffered.”

“Be careful, Simone.” Shelly opened her mouth in a studied, ironic yawn. “Very charming surface. But put Geoffrey in blackface and innate him—we’re looking at Baby Doc.”

On Saturday morning Simone rose early to wash her hair and dress with ritual concentration, not—certainly not!—as she’d dressed for Joseph, but as if for an event. As a girl she’d worn white to church like the girls in Joseph’s paintings, and later she’d had one good dress for important embassy functions. Now she chose a white T-shirt and blue jeans from the armloads of old clothes that, a few days before, Rosemary had thoughtfully dumped in a pile on the floor of Simone’s room. Simone found a pair of denims that fit—they were way too long to have been Rosemary’s. It was odd to think she might be wearing the clothes of the man she was going to meet. Simone put on lipstick and wiped it off—Rosemary would have noticed.

George appeared in a new sweatshirt and pants he kept scowling at and tugging. Maisie stood like a Victorian doll while Simone tied the sash on her dress. Then Rosemary knelt and squeezed the children as if they were leaving forever.

“Watch out for each other!” she called after them. “You know what your father is capable of.”

Then she caught Simone’s sleeve and said, “It’s safer to see Geoffrey as an ever-present threat. Right now he is feeling guilty and, by Porter standards, generous. The unstated implication is that we can go on living like this indefinitely—me and the kids starving to death in a falling-down mansion while he spends the cash flow on luxury toys for his weekend discretional children. And that’s the best we can hope for. At any minute he could decide he wants the house and full-time children. He has the money and lawyers to do anything he wants.”

A few minutes out of the driveway, the children erupted in conversation. They seemed to have been holding their breaths while making their getaway. George said, “That kid who got kicked off the bus for the whole year for tying up that first-grader with the bus driver’s belt?”

“It wasn’t the bus driver’s belt.” Maisie was nearly gagging with contempt. “It belonged to a kid in Special Ed sixth grade.”

George said, “There is no Special Ed sixth grade.”

Maisie said, “Yes, there is. Stupid.”

The banality, the shrillness, the underlayer of menace—these were voices Simone recognized, the voices of embassy children in normal American-child conversation. It was surely, she hoped, another sign of George and Maisie’s improvement. But why did it have to be on the road, where their happy chatter distracted her and made her driving uncertain? Nor was she sure she liked them being so buoyant en route to their father’s, who might be, as Rosemary warned, a rival and a threat.

The world was noisier in the rain, quick-tempered and aggressive, a sudden hail of drops on the roof, the liquid whisper of passing cars. A cruising police car so frightened Simone—suppose they asked to see her papers?—that it seemed a miracle when the police drove on by. When the road presented a new problem, a left turn across merciless traffic, Simone froze until George said, “Now. Go ahead. Turn!”

They drove past the sagging frame homes of greater Hudson Landing, with their asbestos-shingled porches flat up against the sidewalk. Simone saw an old woman pushing a child in a grocery cart, the first black faces she had seen since she’d left Manhattan. Would she be insulted if Simone waved or said hello? She remembered Emile’s warnings against being friendly to strangers who might be INS informants.

In the center of the city was the restored business section, old façades of newly sandblasted brick and repainted plaster and siding, like the pristine, just-unwrapped town in George’s unused train set.

“There it is!” George and Maisie sang out when they spotted their father’s office. Simone pulled into a parking space—well, two parking spaces. George and Maisie ran down the street and vanished into a doorway.

Simone dawdled at a window in which fancy soaps luxuriated in nestlike satiny cushions. Then she followed the children inside. They’d stopped on the landing halfway up the stairs. Their father had met them halfway down and was hugging George and Maisie with a great deal of fuss and commotion. Simone stood at the base of the steps, feeling shy and excluded and stupidly possessive about the children’s affection. It was wrong and selfish of her to want them to love her more than their father. Maisie plastered herself against her father’s side. George tenderly thumped his back.

Even from below, Geoffrey looked slighter and more boyish than the lumbering monster Simone had been led to expect. He smiled down over the children’s heads. “You must be Simone.”

When Simone reached the landing he rather formally put out his hand. As they shook hands, he blushed deeply, and despite herself, Simone was flattered. He had shiny brown hair and blue surprised eyes that lit and dimmed like headlights. He seemed drawn to Simone by some interest or force he was actively trying to stifle. She thought of a dieting fat man passing a bakery, so near to what he had loved and renounced and now pretended to ignore. You could step back and watch it in Geoffrey, attraction warring with will, a state of affairs any sentient pastry might take as a personal challenge. All this so appealed to Simone that she slowly backed up until what she read in Geoffrey’s eyes was that she was in danger of falling down the stairs.

Geoffrey said, “I got you guys some presents. They’re in the office. Go look.” Maisie jumped up and kissed his cheek. George consented to pass close enough so his father could ruffle his hair.

Watching the children run past him, Geoffrey seemed at once tense and ardent. Simone saw in him the uneasy boy that Shelly had described, waiting for his friends to discover the lukewarm tea his mum had set out with soggy, crustless sandwiches.

“And I must be Geoffrey,” he said. “But I guess you know that. I guess you know my life story and all my personality disorders. You probably know every detail of my classically repressed Anglo-WASP childhood: how my poor homesick mother made icky British snacks and invited my pals for tea.”

“Excuse me?” said Simone.

Geoffrey raised his hands, palms outward. “Ah, I can see you do. Rosemary makes quite a thing of it, quite the amateur Freudian. To her, my finding Mum with the marmite jar was the primal scene. But please, come in! Unlike my wife, I know that family therapy is not in your job description.”

“Mr. Porter—” said Simone.

“Please. Geoffrey.” Geoffrey smiled and Simone forgot whatever she’d planned to say as she tried to reconcile this appealing, slightly gawky person with the devil she’d heard described.

The office consisted of two large white rooms with gray industrial carpet, both smelling strongly of flower perfumes wafting up from the soap store downstairs. One room contained several computers and imposing copy machines. “Star Ship
Enterprise,”
Geoffrey said.

“Fire this up,” he told George, handing his son a small metal square that—amazingly—George knew how to slip into the right computer slot. The screen lit up and a slew of belching frogs swarmed over the monitor.

“Swamp Thing!” cried George, punching the keyboard until a cartoon zombie lumbered onto the screen, snapping at the frogs.

“Educational and entertaining,” Geoffrey told Simone. “Swamp Thing can’t get his froggie dinner till George spells a word.”

Simone felt, without turning, Maisie’s eyes drill their backs.

“Look at this,” said her father, and steered Maisie into the other room—bare but for a drafting table, metal shelves, and art supplies. When Simone took up with Joseph, his girlfriend had just kicked him out of the house and he was living in his studio with only a mattress, his easel, and paints. Simone had confused lack of furniture with the lack of a past to compete with.

Simone thought again of the
Olympia
on the wall of Joseph’s studio. How frightened and naked the white girl looked behind all that blood and those wounds! The only item on Geoffrey’s wall was a large print of a Madonna surrounded by separate 8 x 10 blowups of her facial features—a lip, a nose, a hooded eye, one beatific eyebrow.

Geoffrey paused in the doorway till Simone caught up and could witness the warming spectacle of him giving his daughter a gift, a picture book wrapped in red tissue and tied with a curly blue bow.

“Read the cover,” Geoffrey ordered.

Maisie read, “You are real.”

“Bravo,” said Geoffrey.

On the next page Maisie read, “Trees are real.” She turned another page and a cardboard pine tree popped up from the book. “A house is real,” read Maisie, and a Victorian gingerbread house jumped out of the binding.

“You are real,” said Geoffrey. “A crucial concept—and one I’m not certain Maisie gets quite enough of with Rosemary for a mother. Of course, the intriguing thing is to say that a house is real and then show the children a cardboard house that
isn’t
real at all.”

Maisie was engrossed in her pop-up book, George was pounding the computer keyboard. The gifts were precisely on target. Geoffrey knew what his children wanted.

“Look at them!” said Geoffrey. “With Rosemary this wouldn’t be fun but simply another example of my uncontrolled sexist aggression, giving the hot technology to George-the-boy, the book to Maisie-the-girl, when in fact George likes the computer and Maisie likes the book.”

“I like the computer,” said Maisie.

Geoffrey said, “I know you do, honey. But no one gets to do what they like all the time. Do you think Daddy likes designing ad campaigns featuring the body parts of a Piero Madonna to put behind the latest model Japanese family hatchbacks? It cannot be coincidental that this office smells like a bordello. The wonder is that your dad can do it up here and make real New York City money. Everyone does stuff for a living they don’t necessarily like, as your friend Simone here will be the first to tell you.”

Did Geoffrey mean Simone to say she didn’t like caring for George and Maisie? The truth was that she liked her job so much she stayed awake nights fearing she’d lose it. She had come to feel, like Rosemary, that this was the best they could hope for right now, and she longed for it to continue—this interlude of restorative calm after wrenching upheaval and change. Besides, she was so fond of George and Maisie, she would miss them for even a weekend, and she recalled with an unpleasant shock that one such weekend was starting now.