Primitive People

by Francine Prose

  Geoffrey said, “From what I hear, Haiti offered daily opportunities to see the freshly dead human heart beating right in your own front yard.”

  Simone had to stop and tell herself: There was no way Geoffrey could know this. Emile was the only person Simone had told about the corpse since she’d left Port-au-Prince. Geoffrey must mean some body or bodies he’d seen in a news report. He meant it happened to everyone. It was a Haitian daily event.

  “Poor Simone!” Shelly said. “She looks totally blown away. We can’t expect her to sit here and discuss the tragedy of her homeland as if it were cocktail party chitchat.”

  Simone felt taken care of, grateful, almost safe. But seconds later she thought: Wasn’t it Shelly who told Rosemary about Duvalier’s testicle-eating dwarf? Shelly wasn’t protecting her but establishing dominance, showing that she had the power to dole out loyalty and kindness, to guard Simone’s tender feelings, to prove that she was sensitive and could watch out for someone else. Or perhaps it was Geoffrey whom Shelly was trying to shield—to safeguard from whatever engaging thing Simone might have been about to say.

  Shelly turned and gave Simone a look of compassion and utter triumph, a look that reveled and gloried in female competition the way the facial expressions of certain athletes celebrate effort and strain.

  Shelly said, “Isn’t it wonderful how globally conscious Geoffrey is?” Her face told Simone: This is perpetual war. I am not to be trusted.

  Simone recalled how Rosemary had warned her about Southern women, but now, now that she thought of it, she remembered that look on Inez. She had chosen not to see it, or had confused it with friendship. When Simone first starting going with Joseph, she told everything to Inez. Inez, they both acknowledged, was the expert on love, and inevitably she felt challenged to test her expertise on Simone’s lover.

  Shelly said, “You know, Simone, I’ve always felt that you and I were alike.” Simone could only stare at her. Whatever did she mean? And what was Simone doing making small talk in a stranded car with Rosemary’s husband, Rosemary’s children, Rosemary’s alleged best friend? If Rosemary died today, these were the people who would bury her.

  A wave of sympathy and fellow feeling for Rosemary nearly bowled Simone over. When, at what point in these last months, had Rosemary become her friend?

  “I think we should get going,” Simone managed to say. The others turned and looked at her—accusingly, she thought, because the last to arrive had been the first to suggest they leave. She had not been stuck here, as they had, but already she was cracking. The children were desperate to get out—Simone felt it in their bodies. But they couldn’t or wouldn’t say so; besides, it was warm in the car. They had miles to go in Rosemary’s Volvo, and there was always the danger that they might get stuck again, stranded in a smaller vehicle on a lonelier stretch of road.

  Finally Shelly yawned and said, “I completely agree with Simone. If we’ve exhausted the subject of corpse hearts, we should take this zoo on the road.”

  That day the Volvo was Simone’s car. She had claimed it by driving it ten miles through the snowstorm. But Geoffrey got in on the driver’s side and Shelly sat beside him, and Simone and the children climbed into the back.

  Simone had left the keys in the car, so Geoffrey didn’t have to ask for them and risk making them self-conscious about what had been automatic—Geoffrey assuming command control with Shelly as his co-pilot. Simone felt she had joined the children in their private back-seat world, from which they eavesdropped on the adults making plans as if they weren’t present.

  Shelly repeatedly pointed out that Geoffrey’s house was much closer than hers, and at last Geoffrey took a gulping breath and said into the mirror, “I think the smartest thing, kids, would be to go over to my place so I can make some calls. You guys can wait out the worst of the storm. After that, I can either run you home, or Simone can drive you.”

  How easily he suggested this after all those months of overexplaining why it made no sense for Simone to ever go to his house. Now, of course, Simone realized what he’d been worried about, and it struck her that once again she’d gotten everything backward. She had envisioned the corpses of the pirates’ wives stacked against the wall, when probably what Geoffrey was hiding was Shelly’s toothbrush and shampoo.

  As they pulled away from the Land Rover, Maisie waved goodbye at it out the window. “Stay warm, Land Rover,” she said.

  “How was your day?” asked Simone, and George answered, “Good,” a word he had managed, with practice, to rid of any affect or meaning.

  “We went to the mall,” said Maisie. “We saw this stupid Christmas show. All the kids from this stupid tap-dancing school were dressed up as reindeer.”

  “I was stunned,” said Geoffrey. “George liked it better than Maisie.”

  Shelly said, “Maybe Maisie might like to study tap.”

  Simone cringed at Shelly’s crude attempt at seducing Maisie, and her heart sank when Maisie smiled and said, “Great!”

  “That might be just what Maisie needs,” Geoffrey told Simone.

  “Yes,” Simone agreed bleakly.

  It was vital that Geoffrey stop talking so he could watch the road. Several times they skidded, and Shelly made a sound like bacon frying in a pan.

  Geoffrey said, “Shelly, please don’t hiss. I’ve told you it doesn’t help.” After that, Simone and the children were careful about how they breathed.

  “Almost there!” Geoffrey said heartily, several times before they almost were.

  Finally Geoffrey pulled the Volvo into a driveway and stopped and said, “Let’s hike.”

  “I don’t have the shoes for this,” Shelly complained, but no one paid attention. Geoffrey got out and began to slog through the snow; Simone and the children followed. Shelly’s short black boots had high heels on which she wobbled dangerously, and she soon lagged way behind the others.

  “I haven’t had this much fun since the Gulag!” Shelly’s high-pitched, brittle cry sliced through the hush of the snow.

  Geoffrey looked back at Shelly. You could see him torn between the desire to run and help her and some strange hesitance about seeming solicitous in front of his children and Simone. Or was he perversely enjoying seeing Shelly helpless? In the end, the forces of chivalry lost and Geoffrey plunged ahead.

  “Take your time!” he called back to Shelly. “I’m bushwhacking us a path!”

  Simone paused and watched Shelly struggle to catch up, her blond head plunging and rising. Simone couldn’t even pretend to herself that Shelly’s misery didn’t please her. She had never wanted to feel this way about another human being. But if she and Shelly were in some sort of war, it was Shelly who had begun it.

  Finally they reached a clearing surrounding a little shack. Surely Geoffrey didn’t inhabit this run-down cabin covered with shredding tar paper and chipped asbestos shingle.

  “Camouflage,” Geoffrey told Simone as they neared the sagging front porch. “Clever, no? For me the fear of a break-in back here is just not a problem. This is exactly the sort of lesson my ancestors should have learned from the Indians, instead of which they went for the ostentation that’s going to explode in their faces. I mean, when the revolution comes and the urban poor rise up and Rosemary’s château gets sacked and burned, I’ll be sitting pretty here in my Tobacco Road hovel. My God, I sound like that creepy groom at that awful wedding.”

  “Who’s going to sack and burn Mom’s house?” said George.

  “No one,” said Geoffrey. “Or at least not now. Not while you and Maisie are in it.”

  But only when Simone walked inside did she understand what camouflage meant in this case: the interior was so imposing, so unexpectedly grandiose, that she reflexively looked up to check the massive support beams. On the floor and folded over the rafters were exquisite Indian rugs; still others hung, like drying laundry, from a wooden rack. Rich woods and leathers were everywhere—some tanned, some still covered with hair.

  Simone couldn�
��t imagine a man creating this for himself. She thought of Joseph’s bare studio—the Coleman stove, the camp bed, the Manet painting on the wall. She knew with the force of a revelation that Geoffrey had had help.

  Then Simone understood the real reason he’d never let her come here. It was not about dead bodies, incest, or evil or, really, about sex, or anything so intimate as a woman’s toothbrush and shampoo. It was a modern secret: interior decorating. Shelly had decorated Geoffrey’s place and he must have thought that when Simone saw it she’d jump to the wrong—or right—conclusions.

  Oh, the poor children! The implications struck Simone again, more forcibly than in the car. How long had they known their father was involved with their mother’s best friend? Now Simone understood their melancholy preoccupation, their air of carrying some guilty secret, the burden she’d mistaken for the normal weight of family trouble and divorce.

  Simone wondered how long Shelly and Geoffrey had been lovers. First, she suspected, he’d hired Shelly to decorate his house. Then their romance started—probably around Thanksgiving. It occurred to her that this was what she had seen from across the tent at the wedding when Shelly was supposedly making sure Geoffrey left Rosemary alone. Once again Simone had misread the situation, mistaken Shelly and Geoffrey for warring creatures when actually they were mating.

  Poor Rosemary, Simone thought. Pitying Rosemary was simpler than facing the fact that Simone pitied herself. You would think she was in love with Geoffrey and had expected something to happen between them, when in fact he was only a man she’d liked thinking about from time to time. It was absurd that the loss of that should seem so serious and so painful. Only now, too late, did she wonder if she’d missed some vital cue. That day they’d danced to the jukebox—the memory made Simone want to weep. Was there something she could have said or done that would have made something happen between them? Probably, at some equivalent moment, Shelly had just snapped up Geoffrey, and now Simone had her principles while Shelly had Geoffrey—and Kenny! Once more another woman had proved to be less high-minded. You had to believe that look on their faces that warned you it was war.

  From the children’s point of view, of course, none of this made any difference. All that counted was that Geoffrey and Shelly had a long-standing connection. When interior decoration had turned to romance really didn’t matter compared to the fact that the children knew, and knew that their mother did not. It was amazing and not surprising at all that children could keep such a secret. Because when Rosemary discovered it, their whole world would unravel.

  At Geoffrey’s door they turned and watched Shelly struggle up behind them, nearly slipping and catching herself and making grotesque faces. It was at once polite and cruel of Simone and the children to stop and wait and witness every misstep of Shelly’s tortuous progress.

  The minute her foot touched the doorstep, she was restored to her normal self. “Children! Take off your shoes and leave them outside—I had this floor redone twice! I spent days in some dump of a Santa Fe bed-and-breakfast talking one savvy Navajo squaw down on the price of those rugs. Give me your coats!”

  As she took Simone’s jacket, Shelly’s mouth puckered with concern. “Simone, you look frozen! Let me get you some brandy!”

  When Simone took the first sip from the snifter, she noticed that she was still slightly tipsy from drinking with Rosemary this afternoon. How could she have made that drive in this impaired condition? How could she have done it any other way?

  When Geoffrey stepped out to get logs for the wood stove, Shelly drew Simone’s attention to her decorating triumph.

  “Isn’t this place a gas?” she said. “Altogether the perfect spot for a wealthy cowpoke to lay his head. The basic design principle is that all these grown men are still little boys who still want to play Lone Ranger. Hi-yo, Silver. Giddy-up and away.”

  Shelly didn’t feel obliged to make self-justifying excuses for betraying Rosemary and Kenny and in the process subjecting two children to considerable strain—though to be fair, this last was something she probably didn’t suspect. How brave and confident Shelly seemed in comparison to Kenny, making Simone swear secrecy about how much sugar he put in his coffee. Obviously, Shelly believed no explanation was required. What you did with men, what you did to get men, was just not a moral issue.

  Shelly said, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a chance to do something with Rosemary’s place? Don’t you think that the Miss Havisham thing is getting a little old?”

  Simone glanced across the room. Both children were watching and listening. She wanted to rush over and put her hands over their ears and promise to protect their home from Shelly’s redecorating plans.

  “Great Expectations,” Shelly said. “Do they read that in Haiti? Suffice it to say that this batty old woman has been stood up at the altar and has preserved the wedding party, dress, cake, and all. I mean, has Rosemary showed you that attic … ?”

  Just then Geoffrey announced his return by stamping the snow off his boots. Simone fought an absurd desire to fling herself on his mercy and make him swear that he would never let Shelly have Rosemary’s house. She looked at the children again and wondered if they were thinking this, too.

  “Maybe we should call Mom,” said George—a simple suggestion that was, for George, spectacularly brave and assertive. “We should tell her we’re all right.”

  “All right?” said Shelly. “Hah!”

  “That’s a fine idea,” Geoffrey said. “Very big boy, grown-up and considerate. Why don’t you go into the kitchen and call your mother right now?”

  When George ducked around a pillar into the kitchen area, Geoffrey stage-whispered to Simone and Shelly, “Would anyone like to bet on whether the mother duck is even aware that her ducklings are gone?”

  The phone must have rung for a very long time. Then George said, “Hello, Mom?”

  The rest of them fell silent and listened to George’s soft voice. “Simone got there okay. We’re at Dad’s.” George fell silent and listened, nodding from time to time. At last he said, “Okay. Good. Me, too. Okay. See you. Bye.”

  Only after he got off the phone did he notice that everyone was focused on him. He shrugged and forced a smile. “Mom says that Simone—not Dad—should drive us home.”

  “What are you smiling about, George?” Maisie said.

  “I can drive, goddamn it,” said Geoffrey.

  Shelly said, “Simone, if it wasn’t for you, these children would have perished like baby birds in the snow.”

  Perhaps Shelly imagined a life with Geoffrey that would also involve Simone—and was saving herself the trouble of finding a new au pair. Shelly would not be as careful as Rosemary was to always say “caregiver”—that classless, neutral, genderless word, so unaristocratic, suggesting that employer and employee were all working people together. Shelly was seeking Simone’s complicity in her plans for Geoffrey and his children, and meanwhile subtly assuring Simone: her job security was intact. But Simone knew better than to think that her life would improve under Shelly’s regime, and what was meant to reassure made her extremely anxious. Shelly would not tell her to find her own personal bottom line about housework. Shelly would have definite plans involving white paint and track lighting. Sooner or later she would ask about Simone’s immigration status, and Shelly would not be satisfied till she’d found out the truth. Then far too much of Simone’s future would depend on her pleasing Shelly.

  The phone call had exhausted the last of George’s energy. “I’m tired,” he announced, and his eyelids drooped to prove it.

  “That’s babyish,” said Maisie. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

  “I imagine they would be tired,” Shelly said. “Getting stuck on the road is exhausting.”

  “Okay, pardners,” said Geoffrey. “Maybe it’s time for you guys to crawl up to the sleeping loft and catch a couple of z’s.”

  Shelly said, “Geoffrey, I adore how your language changes to match your house.”

 
Recognizing that their father’s suggestion was a non-negotiable demand, Maisie scampered up the corkscrew staircase and George followed, clutching the center pole. Simone found herself in the same paralyzed state she’d slipped into whenever Joseph got angry and flung bottles around his studio, slamming them against the walls but never too near his paintings. It was unthinkable to be left down here alone with Geoffrey and Shelly. George and Maisie had protected them, and now they were leaving, and it was beyond her to make any move at all.

  Then, blessedly, Simone’s duties showed her the right direction. She was the children’s caregiver. She said, “I will go with the children.” Geoffrey and Shelly smiled their agreement that this was a sensible plan, and Simone knew that if she worked for Shelly, she would often feel vaguely insulted.

  At the top of the stairs Simone tried to stand and cracked her skull on the ceiling. Tears blurred her eyes, and she had to wait before she could see where she was.

  One side of the wainscoted sleeping loft was open to the room below and provided a hidden perch from which to spy on the grownup world. But the children weren’t spying. They were already curled up on an elaborate antique bed. The gray headboard was made from branches, twisted and bound into curves; on the bed was a patchwork quilt in cheerless shades of brown and charcoal.

  Simone lay down between the children. They rested their heads on her shoulders. First their heads grew heavy and then Simone heard their light syncopated wheezing.

  Downstairs Shelly and Geoffrey were doing a great deal of walking. Simone heard the thud of Geoffrey’s boots, the tap of Shelly’s high heels.

  In the hills above Simone’s grandmother’s village there had been a little church in which, if you whispered at the rear wall, you could hear it up at the altar. So from the loft Simone could hear the coffeepot bubbling downstairs. She could almost hear Shelly and Geoffrey breathe; she wondered if they knew it. What else had the children eavesdropped on during the nights they’d spent here? Or had they learned to fall asleep fast so as not to have to listen?