Primitive People

by Francine Prose

  “It was fascist,” Kenny said. “Any party that makes you stop what you’re doing and do what everyone else is doing is fascist. Even singing ‘Happy Birthday.’”

  Rosemary said, “Was Geoffrey with someone? Tell me, Kenny. I can take it.”

  “I can’t take it,” Shelly said. “In fact, it makes me feel a sudden overwhelming need for lobster and Japanese soba noodles.” She stood and cleared the asparagus plates and reappeared with a large glass bowl through which one could glimpse a tangle of mossy-colored pasta.

  “These lobsters did not want to die,” Shelly said, waving a chunk of pinkish meat on her fork, triumphant proof that in the end the lobsters’ wishes had counted for nothing. “I had a hard time accepting my role in the deaths of two recently living creatures.”

  Kenny said, “You’re better off sticking to supermarket chicken. Then you get underpaid black women down South doing the killing for you—hacking up poultry and their own hands under disgusting conditions.”

  “Yankees compulsively pick on the South,” Shelly told Simone.

  “Yankees?” said Kenny. “Fuck that.”

  A decorous silence fell over their struggles with their pasta. Finally Shelly stood and said, “Kenny, help me with the choucroute.” She and Kenny shared a private laugh. Simone looked away.

  After they left Rosemary said, “Southern women. They simply cannot get beyond these primitive dominance games. Like female penguins fighting over the biggest rock. They keep having to make it obnoxiously clear whom the male belongs to. Or if the male happens to belong to you—well then, who can steal him if she wants to. They’re still back one evolutionary stage: monkeys competing for mates. They wouldn’t want to delude you into trusting your female friends, and they feel compelled to remind you of this. It’s their way of being honest.”

  Who knew how long Rosemary might have continued this analysis of her friend if Kenny hadn’t entered with a platter of sausage, potatoes, and sauerkraut? Shelly followed close behind with spoons and a two-tined fork.

  “Peasant food,” Shelly announced.

  “Cold-weather food,” Rosemary said. “Oh marvelous, marvelous, thank you!”

  The food was so delicious Simone had to work at not bolting it down. She was used to eating with Maisie and George in private, puppylike frenzies of hunger. She tried not to think of the children dining with their father, surely not on fried plantains, raw vegetables, and frozen shrimp. Most likely they were at the Tepee Diner, eating the normal American diet of normal American children. For a moment Simone couldn’t think what such a diet might consist of. At the embassy on the Fourth of July they’d served hot dogs, corn, and fried chicken, but Simone had never seen anyone here eat anything like that.

  “Knowing Geoffrey,” Rosemary said, “right at this minute he’s got the children smothered in animal fat, stuffing their faces with ten-pound sirloin steaks in one of those Mafioso beef-and-lasagna joints he always secretly liked.”

  “Villa Carnivora,” said Kenny.

  Shelly pushed her plate away, then reluctantly retrieved it, carved one last piece of sausage and popped it into her mouth. “I honestly don’t know how men do it.” She waved her knife at the remaining sausage. “Detach themselves that way. I mean, actually slice and chew these things and not let themselves make the obvious natural phallic association. Well, I suppose detachment and denial are testosterone breakdown products—”

  “Shelly,” cried Rosemary. “Please! Some of us are still eating!”

  Kenny took his time chewing, deliberately swallowed, and said, “It doesn’t bother me. The way I can get past eating this is I pretend it’s a piece of dogshit.”

  “Come on, now,” Rosemary said. “Please.”

  “Savage!” said Shelly. “I’m mortally wounded by that dagger aimed at the heart of my culinary pretensions. Perhaps it’s time for some music to soothe the savage whatever.”

  Shelly set down the phonograph needle and loud applause rasped from the speakers, long enough for Shelly to pull Kenny to his feet. Simone heard a choked-up vibrato guitar, then two men crooning a love song. Simone felt that each of the men had in mind some real woman and believed this was his only chance to say what was in his heart: Tonight we’ll meet, at the dark end of the street …

  At first Kenny was playacting, whirling and tilting Shelly. Only a practiced dancer could have overplayed it like that, and Simone knew from how Shelly moved in his arms that they were used to dancing together. Shelly was performing, too, tossing her head and shrieking when Kenny dipped her too close to the ground.

  “My mother always said,” Kenny announced to the room, “that everything interesting begins with a slow dance.”

  At first he and Shelly were entertaining themselves and in theory Rosemary and Simone, but soon the showing off stopped and Simone could feel herself drop off the edge of their visual field. She wondered which was worse, the aggressive sexual display or the moment when real desire kicked in and they were aware only of each other. Simone closed her eyes and listened to the two men pouring themselves into the song. She thought of the night she’d come home after seeing Joseph and Inez in the cafe: how she’d lain awake, hating the heat, the dark, the rub of the sheets on her skin.

  The voices paused for a tremulous, overwrought guitar break, and as if the singers had left the room, Shelly and Kenny danced closer. Simone remembered a quiet Sunday afternoon she and Joseph and Inez went for coffee. On the way they’d passed musicians singing on a corner, a melancholy slow rumba they hardly appeared to be playing but that seemed to ooze out of them while their minds were somewhere else. A couple danced in the center of a circle, a gray-haired sinewy old man and a beautiful straight-backed young woman, a haughty, disdainful half-smile on her face, her skirt bunched up in her hand.

  Simone didn’t, wouldn’t dance. Joseph had teased her about it, but kindly, as lovers make fun of one another’s quirks. But Inez danced, that was clear; you could tell from how she rolled her shoulders and shifted her feet to the beat. Only now did Simone see Joseph’s sideways glance. In Joseph’s paintings dancing couples melted and flowed into each other. But Simone had remained convinced—dancing didn’t make you happy. The best thing that could be said for it was that no song lasted forever.

  Laughing, slightly breathless, Kenny and Shelly sank down onto a couch. Kenny twisted around and burrowed his face into Shelly’s neck. He seemed unaware of the others, genuinely aroused. Simone was alarmed and fascinated. How far was he planning to take this?

  Shelly scooted forward. “Time for dessert!” she said.

  Kenny blinked and for a moment looked petulant and injured—like George and Maisie, thought Simone, when she woke them early for school. Then Kenny’s face formed a skin, like an egg on a plate, and he again became Mr. Short Eyes, the young man who swiped so confidently at the children’s hair and dragged you around by the shoulders. All evening that part of Kenny had been curiously submerged, replaced by the quieter, fuzzy-bear Kenny deferentially cursing at Shelly.

  “Anyway,” Kenny said now, “that’s not my kind of music. Black people imitating white people imitating hillbilly trash. I like forties swing, old standards, Cole Porter, old jazz, Chet Baker, Bud Powell, Bird, all those beautiful cats: live-fast, die-young, leave a good-looking corpse. What’s Haitian music like, Simone?”

  Simone had often been asked this by the American arts groups and dancers who visited Port-au-Prince, and each time she answered, her answer had grown shorter. They had not wanted to hear about the African roots of Caribbean rhythm—and neither, Simone knew, did Kenny.

  “Very good to dance to,” replied Simone, smiling stiffly, hearing herself sound like a cheery islander promoting the Caribbean on TV. She had never smiled so often and so falsely as since she’d come to Hudson Landing. Miss McCaffrey had smiled a lot but never required it of Simone.

  Shelly said, “Kenny, we should get married—that is, to other people. Then we could have an adulterous love affair and maybe get som
ething going.”

  “Fuck you,” said Kenny good-humoredly.

  “Say what you will,” said Shelly. “But one mustn’t underestimate the greatness of adultery—the song we’ve just been hearing is a kind of hymn. Let’s face it, life is hotter at the dark end of the street. Courtly love was about that, it’s the basis of modern civilization. Rosemary, you were married and you never cheated once. I can believe you blew your one chance for a grand amour.”

  Rosemary’s fingers worked distractedly, tweezing fur from her coat. She said, “Geoffrey got enough chances for both of us. That was the whole point of our separation.”

  Shelly said, “That is never the ‘whole point.’ Am I right, Simone?”

  “Leave Simone alone,” Rosemary said. “How is she supposed to know? Listen to what I was thinking while you two were dancing. When Geoffrey and I first got married—this was centuries ago, when we were supposedly happy—I had a peculiar dream that turned out to be prophetic. I dreamed Geoffrey was ordering me around, barking out all sorts of commands and hurtful little suggestions: ‘Wash the dishes. Exercise more. Spring for a decent haircut. Try to speak, or at least pretend to speak, so someone can understand.’ I woke up very upset, not having yet seen in my waking life what I would later recognize as Geoffrey’s standard m.o. I woke Geoffrey and told him the dream, wanting comfort, I guess. And Geoffrey opened one eye and said, ‘Don’t have dreams like that!’”

  Shelly went over to a chaise lounge and settled herself as languidly as molded plastic permitted.

  “The thing I hate about wine,” she told Kenny, “is it’s so punishingly fairy-godmother. For hours I’ll be skimming along in Cinderella’s magic coach and then suddenly I’m scraping the ground, and it’s back to mice and a pumpkin!”

  Half a block from Geoffrey’s office Simone heard Latin music. Involuntarily, her step quickened and fell in with the beat until she was doing a sneaky merengue down the empty sidewalk. It wasn’t that she was immune to rhythm, but surrendering to it felt private, not something you would choose to do when other people were doing it, too. In Haiti she had a radio and sometimes danced around her room, but to move that way in public seemed exhibitionistic, as Shelly and Kenny had so convincingly demonstrated last night. On the other hand, losing Joseph to Inez had made it debatable where, exactly, and how far Simone’s sort of modest self-restraint got you.

  No one heard Simone knock. She opened the door to find Geoffrey and the children dancing around his office. Maisie was doing a creditable samba, with both elbows pumping and her tiny clawlike fists shaking phantom maracas over her head. George made do with a shuffling transfer from foot to foot, twitching his shoulders and smiling when he felt obliged.

  The children’s faces shone unrecognizably. Simone could watch light come up in their eyes as their father danced between them, dancing with each in turn, falling into each one’s style, not mimicking but giving them his total respectful attention.

  A man’s voice shouted in Spanish, intermittent staccato cries, ragged, shattered, and undeceived by the saxophones’ offers of consolation. Effervescing to the rhythm, sending bubbles through tubes of light was a magnificent jukebox that hadn’t been there yesterday when Simone brought the children.

  Eventually Geoffrey noticed Simone and danced across the room and dragged her into the center of the floor and into a kind of tango. There wasn’t time to explain that she didn’t dance, or maybe she missed the moment, concentrating on not tripping as he spun her around and the sticky carpet fibers grabbed mischievously at her feet.

  Soon Simone was dancing, or at least she wasn’t not dancing. By then it would have seemed clumsy and rude to balk and back away. Anyhow, they weren’t dancing so much as clowning around; Geoffrey’s exaggerated tango and tight, silly grin were the equivalent of Kenny’s playacting last night. Here, it seemed, couples started dancing by making fun of dancing. In Haiti they just locked in tight and started grinding away.

  Even so, Geoffrey’s closeness left Simone quite out of breath. If she’d tried to speak, her voice might have shook and distracted her from her effort not to seem like a mannequin Geoffrey was pushing. Simone recalled an exercise Rosemary did on her treadmill, mentally traveling from cell to cell, persuading each to relax. But in this context the thought of Rosemary put Simone’s cells on full alert.

  Geoffrey was the same height as Simone, which made the dance, however excruciating, smoother and less problematic than dancing with Joseph would have been. Joseph was shorter than Simone, she could admit that now. One night she and Joseph and Inez had gone to a bar where there was dancing. Joseph asked Simone to dance; she smiled and shook her head no. Simone had to admit it had crossed her mind, the fact that Joseph was shorter. How would she look on the dance floor with a man who was shoulder-height? Now this seemed conclusive proof that she hadn’t loved him enough, so that his leaving her was inevitable, she’d brought it on herself. After Simone refused him, Joseph had asked Inez. There was a funny moment before Inez said no. The world shut down like a stopped clock and then started up again.

  Geoffrey steered Simone nearer the music and paused there, admiring the elaborate chrome-and-neon jukebox until Simone caught on and shouted in his ear, “Oh, how beautiful!”

  “C’est très belle, no?” said Geoffrey. “The kids and I picked it out.” Simone saw him wink over her shoulder—at the children, she guessed.

  The music stopped, but before she could escape, Geoffrey punched a button. A violin played an introduction and another song began.

  “This ma-a-gic moment,” Geoffrey sang along, and gathered Simone in another dance. “The best thing about having your own jukebox is you can program it yourself. This one is stocked exclusively with songs about ecstasy, desperation, and heartbreak.”

  Ecstasy, desperation, and heartbreak? Simone found Geoffrey’s chattiness reassuring, regardless of its content. At embassy parties she’d often seen dancing couples jabbering away, presumably to signal that all this had nothing to do with sex but was just conversation to music. She couldn’t remember ever seeing Haitians talk while they were dancing, and last night Shelly and Kenny had stopped talking soon after the dancing began.

  Geoffrey said, “This song comes as close as anything to describing falling in love.” Simone tensed and it seemed to her that Geoffrey felt it and tightened his hold. Men so rarely said “falling in love.” Just uttering those three words changed the terms between you.

  “The pity,” Geoffrey went on, “is that for twenty years these guys have been playing roadhouses on the strip, being rediscovered and doing nostalgia tours, and then going back to roadhouses. Is this how we treat our poets?”

  At once relieved and let down that Geoffrey had dropped the subject of love, Simone decided that he reminded her endearingly of George chattering to mask his desire for Simone to tuck him in at night. For a moment she could see something of George in Geoffrey, or something of Geoffrey in George: Geoffrey with the edges rubbed off or as yet undeveloped. How rarely she noticed any trace of Rosemary and Geoffrey in their children. Often she forgot and was shocked to recall that they were George and Maisie’s parents.

  Simone’s limbs loosened slightly, but not to a point that anyone might confuse with grace or compliance. Then she saw George and Maisie watching her dance with Geoffrey, their mouths and eyes forming little round o’s of betrayal and confusion. It was plain to her: this wasn’t neutral to them. No matter what Simone thought she was doing, she was dancing with their father.

  The children were living witnesses to the history of their parents’ marriage: what their father did, what their mother said, how their father answered. Who knew what attention George and Maisie had seen their father pay other women? Who knew if, as a survival technique, they’d attuned themselves to the distant early-warning signals of adult lassitude and enchantment? Perhaps as they watched Simone and Geoffrey, they were detecting traces of pleasure, attraction, even desire—emotions too risky and volatile for Simone to consider right
now.

  She remembered the rainy parking lot on Halloween night, George asking if she’d told Rosemary about his Eskimo tape. The children’s confidence could still be lost—that is, if she’d ever had it. Suddenly it struck Simone with the force of a revelation that the secrets the children entrusted her with were only decoy secrets. George’s Eskimo tape, Maisie’s climbing the walls—they were the bait they threw Simone to lure her off the track.

  The important, inviolate secrets were those they kept on the grownups’ behalf. Those secrets were caustic and had the power to burn them and disfigure their lives. Simone might have been annoyed at the children, who, she now believed, had withheld the truth and tricked her into feeling trusted and valued—if it hadn’t seemed so childish to be angry at children for knowing things so dangerous they couldn’t risk telling her.

  Simone’s body took over and extricated her from the dance. Every muscle locked at once. Geoffrey couldn’t budge her. “What’s wrong?” he said, as his gaze followed Simone’s to the children. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Bingo!”

  He bowed and told Simone, “Thank you,” and glided over to the jukebox. He pushed a button and the music gagged to a stop.

  “Oops! I meant to do that!” Geoffrey grinned. He hunkered down by the children and gathered them in his arms.

  “Huddle time,” he whispered. “Urgent bulletin from central command. Do not, I repeat, do not under any circumstances tell your mother that Simone and I were dancing. Obviously you could see for yourselves that it was perfectly innocent and no different in any way from me dancing with you. But you know your mother and her history of insanity and paranoia.”

  “We know Mom, all right,” George agreed, rapidly cheering up.

  “The idea is not to slander your poor tormented mother. Even if the torment originates in demonic fantasies from her own brain. The idea is to save all of us additional trials and tribulations.”