Rosemary reached into her own bag and pulled out two boxes of crayons, two jars of rubber cement, and two packs of colored construction paper. “I got the children art supplies,” she said, “We really must do something to supplement their art education. It has just struck me that my children are six and ten and I personally have never once seen either of them pick up a pencil to draw. Does this mean that yet another natural impulse has been stomped out of them already? First generosity, then their joie de vivre, and now the urge to create?
“And speaking of generosity …” Rosemary rewrapped the presents and stuffed them in the wrong bags. “Simone, I have to tell you: I forbid you to get me a gift. But I also want to confess that I’ve got something for you. Straightforwardness is the only way to prevent an etiquette disaster. What we do or don’t do matters less than being clear about it. Eyes front and center as we march toward the nightmare of Christmas morning!”
The next afternoon Simone went out to buy a Christmas present for Rosemary. Incapable of facing the mall again, she thought of Glenda’s store.
Good Witch of the East smelled of bayberry, a fire roared in the wood stove; the marble tombstone cherub wore a rakishly tilted Santa hat. Glenda greeted Simone with a thimble-sized glass of eggnog. She said, “Non-alcoholic holiday cheer. Everyone’s got to drive. Shopping for the kiddies?”
“No.” Simone was embarrassed that she’d bought their presents elsewhere. Perhaps it was discomfort that made her say, “For Mrs. Porter,” though she hadn’t called Rosemary that since her first days in the house.
“Rosemary,” Glenda corrected her. “What a wonderful person. Of all the people to work for … you are truly lucky. She’s a deeply good human, and the sad thing is: so is Geoffrey.”
Simone made a stiff, unsuccessful attempt to smile concurringly. Glenda said, “Kenny says the meanest things about Rosemary, but I always defend her.” On the face of it, Glenda was taking credit for her loyalty to Rosemary, but actually she was boasting about being someone with whom Kenny gossiped meanly. Knowing Kenny, Simone imagined that many could claim this same intimate connection.
Glenda said, “Let’s work on this. Let’s give it some thought. Rosemary deserves something beautiful at this point in her life.”
Glenda sashayed through her store, pausing and picking up objects, as if seeing each one with a fresh shock of discovery and pleasure. “Rosemary is so dramatic. Almost theatrical. Also, she’s an artist. That requires something special.”
Disappointed that Simone didn’t know Rosemary’s astrological sign, Glenda finally settled on a long, colorful chiffon scarf and flung it around her neck with a brittle, stagy gesture so reminiscent of Rosemary that Simone had to buy it.
“Ikat,” said Glenda. “From Bali. The most romantic place on the planet.”
Counting out the money, Simone discovered that she had only one more dollar than the scarf cost, with tax. What would she have done if it was more and she couldn’t afford it? At least then she would still have had money left—instead of only a dollar. Simone felt light-headed, as one might after a haircut, except that this sudden weightlessness spread all the way to her feet.
While she gift-boxed the scarf, Glenda asked Simone how they celebrated Christmas in Haiti. Simone couldn’t remember telling Glenda that she was from Haiti. Kenny must have told her. She wondered what else he’d said. Could it be that Kenny said mean things about her, too?
“I was wondering,” Glenda said, “if you had any friends back in Haiti who could maybe send us some paintings or those incredible sequined voodoo flags. We could work something out. I used to carry these darling decal-covered metal briefcases, but when things got rough down there, the supply completely dried up.”
Simone said, “People in Haiti are poor. They don’t give so many presents. No one has time there now to make beautiful things.”
Glenda said, “People continue to make beautiful things in unbelievable circumstances. You would not believe the stuff I’m seeing from Afghan refugees. Though I guess Afghanistan and Haiti are totally different cultures.”
Glenda took a deep breath. “Simone, Kenny is a totally changed person since he’s known you. He is always talking about what a good influence you are. What a lot of people don’t realize about Kenny is how lonely the man is. He doesn’t let anyone see it, but he’s told me in private that he would really like to settle down with a wife and kids, the whole enchilada. Instead of which he’s got Shelly.”
“Thank you.” Simone took her present and left, leaving it unclear if she meant for the information, the compliment, or Glenda’s help in the shop.
“Merry Christmas,” Glenda called as Simone closed the door.
Simone’s legs felt a little rubbery as she walked along the mini-mall toward Kenny’s salon. She thought of Kenny’s story about lingering near his Spanish teacher’s apartment. Would he spot that nervousness in Simone if she ran into him here? Would he be sympathetic? What did he mean about feeling that way when he drove past his own house now?
Standing to one side so she couldn’t be seen, Simone looked in Kenny’s window. Kenny was cutting a little girl’s hair. Tears streamed down the child’s face. Simone watched Kenny talking to her, trying to charm her into not crying. Finally his charm must have worked; the little girl grudgingly smiled. Up above, on the ceiling, a hundred monkeys looked away, each contemplating the luminous Christmas light clutched in its sticky paw.
On the ride home Simone pulled up behind a yellow New York City taxi. When she appeared in its mirror, the cab sped up and took off. A black man was driving the taxi and naturally Simone thought of Emile, especially when he took curves on two wheels—the driving style of Haiti. Simone gripped the wheel and took a deep breath and hit the gas and followed.
It was intoxicating to do something so unlike herself, thrilling to take this winding road at this suicidal speed. Who would have predicted that, in only three months, Simone would have learned to drive like a maniac? An image filtered into her mind: that steamy morning in Port-au-Prince when she’d gone to the travel agency with Inez’s money. For the first time she could admit to herself how excited she had been. Hadn’t Geoffrey said that sometimes you had to smash through the roadblock?
Several times she got close enough to see the back of the cabdriver’s head, and at one point she thought, teasing herself: What if it is Emile? She knew it probably wasn’t Emile, and anyway, if it was, Emile’s presence in Hudson Landing would not be a happy sign. Emile had his life in Brooklyn, perhaps an illegal-alien harem; he had no reason to pay Simone a friendly social call, seventy miles into the country in the dead of winter. Emile coming to find her here could only mean serious trouble.
She counted slowly backward from ten and told herself: It isn’t Emile. But that was fleeting comfort; in fact, no comfort at all, like waking from a troubling dream to the real troubles of the morning. Her life here was like a stack of chairs in an acrobat’s routine, and with or without a push from Emile, the pyramid was bound to topple. Shelly would take Rosemary’s house; Rosemary would let it happen. Though Shelly might want Simone to stay, Simone knew she couldn’t, no more than she could have stayed in Haiti and watched Joseph romancing Inez and gone from working for Miss McCaffrey to working for Bill Webb. Losing her job would send her reefing out into America, or at least as far as Brooklyn, the only place she knew to go. Would Emile’s cousin remember her and be willing to help again?
A jittery rumba the car did while pulling out of a turn chased all this from her mind—emptied it of everything but fear and pride that she could go this fast without crashing. She had never driven or wanted to drive anywhere near this speed before. Simone was so admiring her competence that it almost seemed she willed it when every turn the cab took was the correct turn toward Rosemary’s house. It felt nervy and dangerous, trailing a strange man alone on the road, but the cabdriver wanted the road to himself, he clearly wanted to shake her, so that keeping up with him seemed like harmless entertainment. She
was sorry when she reached the driveway and the cab continued on.
Within moments she heard the screech of brakes, and the yellow cab came up in her mirror. Adrenaline surged through her in discreet little bursts. A cab following in her driveway was a whole different matter from the game she’d thought she was playing on the country road, and Simone was scared and annoyed at herself for having let this happen.
Simone checked her mirror again. And now she saw that it was Emile. And because she’d envisioned this, it was somehow more of a shock. She found herself unable to stop, fleeing him down the lane, driving on out of inertia and fright and some instinct for postponement.
Emile flashed his lights and gestured out his window as if bouncing a ball on the road, but Simone pretended not to notice, even as she had to swerve to keep from falling off the slippery driveway; she was mortified that Emile was behind her, watching her oversteer. She parked in her usual spot, a short distance from the house, then realized how unwise she’d been; she should have stopped up the drive, where at least they might have been able to talk without Rosemary seeing.
Immediately Emile jumped out and ran across the frozen rutted driveway. He was wearing jeans and a puffy denim jacket appliqued with patches of fawn-colored vinyl. He opened Simone’s door and took Simone’s elbow and hustled her across the snowy fields. He pushed her lightly ahead of him, at once bullying and uncertain; she could tell he was unaccustomed to walking through deep snow. She led him in the footprints she and Rosemary had made when they’d gone for branches. Emile wore canvas sneakers. Simone thought, His socks must be soaked. And this made her think, as she often did: she was spending too much time with the children. It was not her job to worry about the dryness of everyone’s feet.
At the edge of the woods Emile stopped. Speaking rapidly, breathlessly, he said in Creole, “The travel agent who arranged your trip has been arrested in Port-au-Prince. Their files have been confiscated. There is an INS investigation.”
Emile waited for this to sink in, then said, “Probably they stopped paying protection to the CIA. Now the U.S. government has enough evidence to deport or imprison many Haitian people. Hearings have been scheduled. Official letters have been sent. I expect any minute a letter for you—of course, at my address. There will be a hearing. You will not mention me or any of the people who helped you get to this country. You will not remember anyone’s names and the white man will believe you: he understands that Haitian names are easy to forget.”
A weird mix of exhaustion and relief ebbed and flooded through Simone. She had the strangest desire to get in Emile’s cab and put her head on his shoulder and sleep. She felt as you do in a dream when a car is hurtling toward you and you just sit there in the road and wait for it to hit.
Emile said, “The mail and telephone are not safe. Just as it was in Haiti. So I have driven here to warn you. And all the way from New York I am afraid that someone is following, and I drive very cagey and excellently to shake pursuers off my trail. Many Haitians like myself will suffer for helping innocent Haitian people.”
Simone couldn’t believe how quickly exhaustion flamed into rage. How incredible that, in the midst of this, Emile was boasting about his driving! And if his purpose was to help innocent Haitian people, why did he charge so much? He had made her feel like a package he’d been hired to pick up at the airport. She so wanted to say all this, she was so irritated at Emile—she and Emile could have been veterans of a very long, bad marriage. She had a mean desire to point out that it was she who’d followed him here from Hudson Landing and he had not driven so excellently in shaking her off his trail.
Or maybe this was just what one felt for the messenger bringing bad news. Simone gazed past Emile into the woods, where she’d seen the dead sheep. And all at once the anger and worry drained out of her, just disappeared, and left her on the verge of tears from wanting so badly to talk to Emile.
Once more she imagined getting in his cab, this time not to sleep but to tell him, in a rush of Creole, French, and English, everything she’d experienced since coming to this country, all about George and Maisie, how she’d come to love them and what it was like, watching these people to whom she was invisible except as a mirror they preened before in the hope she’d reflect an acceptable view of their lives. The Emile she imagined listening was not the real Emile, but Emile transformed, her countryman, her long-lost Haitian brother. Why should the pleasure of seeing Emile suddenly seem so sweet—was Simone just homesick for someone from her own country? Her desire to talk to him now felt almost like love: not love for Emile, precisely, but the stinging love you might feel for a bright warm room you passed, walking alone on a dark night.
She would have given anything to tell Emile about the morning she’d seen the sheep. It seemed to her that this incident contained in it everything else, all the terror and strangeness of being in a new place. No matter how many magazines you read, how quickly you caught on, there would always be terrible things you would never understand. And Simone had so wanted to think that she was smarter than the tourists who fooled themselves into believing the voodoo dances were real, that the dancers were being possessed on cue by the appropriate loas.
In Haiti you tripped on dead animals in unexpected places—chickens hanging from branches in the city park, a cow skull in a crowded street—and you knew they were there for a reason; everything had been arranged. But here how were you supposed to know what something like that meant? And the most disturbing thing was that no one around you knew, either. No one knew what to sacrifice, they made it up on the spot, and the sheep in the woods had an air of the totally private, the shameful, and the furtive.
But what good would it do her to say this to Emile? She remembered his response to her telling him about the dead body in Port-au-Prince. He would think her only subject was disemboweled corpses. Was there something about him that brought such thoughts to mind?
If Emile replied at all, she knew what he would say: Dead man, dead sheep. Haiti and the United States. Everywhere was the same. There was no point asking Emile if she and the children had been shot at on purpose. And what did any of this have to do with the crisis before them—the possibility of an investigation that might end in their both being deported or sent to freeze in a hellish camp on the Canadian border?
“What should we do?” Simone said. She could hardly hear her own voice. She sounded as if she’d do anything: move to Brooklyn, be Emile’s wife.
Emile’s response was a rakish smile meant to convey his regret that Simone was hardly the only woman now turning to him for assistance. And though she might suppose that this fact was immigration-connected, actually it was the consequence of his incredible sexual allure.
“Unfortunately …” Emile looked at the ground. “Your name is one of the names I will have to say I don’t remember. Married? That is ridiculous! I have never heard of this woman. And if by some chance they find you, I expect you to say the same.”
Emile shrugged. “Alternatively … I can give you the names of several of my cousins, unmarried U.S. citizens, bona fide citizens, who for a small fee you could marry now. But I cannot guarantee that this will fool the INS. The safest thing would be for you to go back to Haiti. Fortunately, I have a cousin who is a travel agent in Brooklyn.”
Simone glanced back at the house; there was no one at the windows. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she said.
Some insane, hospitable instinct was asserting itself against Simone’s common sense. What would she do if Emile said yes? How would she explain him to Rosemary?
“Better not to,” said Emile. “Good luck to you now. Okay, now. Goodbye. We will not be in touch, I hope.”
Emile stumbled back to his cab; he got in and turned it around and waved as he pulled away. Watching him, Simone felt a sinking sensation down inside in her chest, as if a tiny elevator had plummeted from her neck to her stomach.
Just then Rosemary came hurrying outside. “Simone, who was that? Who was that man in the cab?
”
“That was my husband,” answered Simone.
“Your husband?” Rosemary repeated. “Why didn’t he stay for lunch? Why didn’t you invite him in?” Then she laughed. “Oh well. Who am I to talk? I am hardly a shining example of wifely hospitality. God knows what I would do or say if Geoffrey treated me like I treat him.”
SIMONE LAY AWAKE ALL night, puzzling out a plan. Alternatives rose before her and popped and dissolved in air. Nothing seemed more practical or likely than anything else. She buried her head in the pillow to keep from hearing Maisie’s soft snoring. She would not let herself be fooled into going to watch the children sleep.
Just before daybreak she found herself thinking of her trip to Connecticut and in particular of Kenny’s little speech about wanting the little house and the little wife. And as the dawn performed its daily trick of making the hopeless seem almost possible, Simone wondered if perhaps she couldn’t marry Kenny. Kenny needed a house and a wife, Simone needed citizenship. It would certainly be a toehold from which to fight deportation. What could she lose by trying, and wasn’t it worth the attempt?
Of course Simone knew perfectly well that it wasn’t a viable plan. Even if she carried it off, something would go wrong. She didn’t believe in marrying for anything but love, but that might be one of those principles that had never proved very useful. Nor did she have the faintest idea how to get Kenny to marry her—she didn’t even know if he was attracted to her or not. How many women did he drive to Connecticut, dropping hints along the way that he would like to be with them if he wasn’t with Shelly? It was never a hopeful sign when a man said you were too good for him, but surely she could show him that she could be bad, too. Maybe Kenny was the virtuous one, loyal and faithful to Shelly, camouflaging it jokingly as paranoia and fear. When the truth came out about Shelly deceiving him with Geoffrey, Kenny would be thankful that he had deceived her with Simone.
Primitive People Page 18
