“Swamp Witch Number I,” Rosemary said. “The first of my new series. Supposedly there is a tribe of swamp dwellers outside Damascus, I think, who believe in a race of female djinns who can roll themselves into balls and skim like phosphorescent missiles on the surface of the marshes. The phosphorescence is a problem. I’ve been considering neon.”
“Thank you,” Simone said.
“This is the first time I’ve given away work. I thought it would be therapeutic for me to learn to let things go.” Rosemary sounded like a child shamed into sharing a favorite toy, but instead of feeling irritated, Simone thought once more of Shelly and of how much Rosemary might soon be required to let go. Unexpected, affectionate tears welled up in Simone’s eyes.
Mistaking them, apparently, for tears of gratitude, Rosemary modestly averted her gaze and attended to Simone’s present. She gave a little cry of pleasure and wound the scarf around her neck. But now the floral pinks and oranges that were so pretty in Glenda’s store seemed instead cruel and mocking; they made Rosemary look like a woman who had been vomiting since dawn.
Rosemary cried, “I’ll never take it off.” Simone imagined she saw a shudder disturb the fur of Rosemary’s coat, as if it knew how literally Rosemary might mean this.
“I feel so Isadora Duncan,” Rosemary said. “A model for us all. Raising those children on her own and living her life in art. I just learned the most amazing fact. Did you know that the woman who gave Isadora Duncan the fatal scarf was Preston Sturges’s mother? Isadora Duncan? Preston Sturges? I can never tell for certain, Simone, how much of this cultural stuff you are getting. I assume you catch everything. Stop me if I’m wrong. But speaking of art—Simone, you haven’t opened your other present.”
Simone unwrapped the heavy book. She looked at it for a while, and before she could blink them back, more tears came to her eyes. “My, my,” she heard Rosemary say. “What an emotional morning we’re having.”
The naked young woman stared out at Simone, as did her black maid and black cat, almost as if they recognized her, remembered watching her from Joseph’s wall. Simone struggled to recall how much she had told Rosemary. Was it possible that in a drunken, unguarded moment she could have mentioned this painting and what Joseph had done to it? She’d had a few drunken moments here but none, she believed, that unguarded.
“This book had your name on it,” Rosemary said, “though I know it says Manet. For years I’ve been intending to buy it for myself. But in the store, when I looked through it, I knew it was meant for you. I assume you realize I don’t mean the Olympia. That would be just too insulting and humiliating to consider.”
Rosemary took the book from Simone and leafed through the pages until she found a large color reproduction of a portrait of a woman. The woman had on an ermine hat and cloak, a white gown trimmed with black lace. She wore one glove and held the other and seemed on the verge of weeping. It sent shivers up and down Simone’s spine—the woman could have been her twin.
“Isn’t she gorgeous?” Rosemary said. “Manet’s portrait of Madame Brunet. The story is, she hated it and went storming out of his studio. She didn’t think it made her look pretty, compared, I guess, to those simpy cherubs everyone was painting. But I always thought that maybe no one until then had realized that she was—wouldn’t you say?—part black or Latino. And when she saw the painting she suddenly thought: Now everyone will know. Isn’t she the most beautiful woman practically anyone ever painted? This feeling I’d had since I met you that I’d seen you before—I was thinking of this painting. Isn’t that amazing!”
Shouldn’t it have pleased Simone that a great and famous artist had thought it worth his while to paint a woman who looked like her? In fact, it made her feel diminished, robbed of herself, reduced to one of many: it was how she’d felt when Kenny tried to comfort her by mentioning all the other women he’d hurt.
Rosemary said, “Isn’t it fascinating to know that people just like us existed before?”
Simone shut the book and turned its cover to face Rosemary. She said, “My fiancé had a copy of this painting on his studio wall.” It was the one true detail she had revealed about her past since she had come to this country. She caught herself and with a sharp intake of breath sank down on the couch.
“I’m not surprised,” Rosemary said. “Olympia is the most famous naked girl in the history of art. One can hardly imagine the scandal this innocent creature created—more than you could generate these days with public live sex with a donkey. Then the feminists got hold of it with all that blather about female self-determination, when you only have to look at it to see that poor girl’s scared to death.”
“He mutilated it,” said Simone. “He painted slashes and blood and dirt all over the woman’s body. He made it look as if she’d had her throat cut and her breasts sliced off.”
“My goodness!” exclaimed Rosemary. “Why did he do that?”
“He hates white people,” Simone said. “Especially white women. Especially colonial white girls with black mammies and black cats.” She simply wanted Rosemary to know that there were people who had such feelings. It was a little like wanting to warn Rosemary about Shelly, the urge to protect combined with the urge to shake her and force her to look. Willed innocence did that to you, it made you want to stomp it, or maybe it was real innocence and what you wanted was to corrupt.
Rosemary said, “That’s ridiculous. I mean, I can see his point. But it would have scared the hell out of me. If I’d caught my fiancé defacing a painting of, I don’t know, a black woman, a green woman, I don’t care what color woman, I would have been out of there in two seconds flat. Though I’m not exactly the expert on self-protection or survival, or even on jumping ship before the whole thing goes down in flames. But I would rather have had a husband fucking the entire video store than a fiancé slashing master paintings of reclining female nudes.”
Simone noted how neatly Rosemary had transformed this into a contest over which of them had had to put up with the most terrible man. But if it were a contest, how easily Simone could win, stunning Rosemary into surrender with the truth about Geoffrey and Shelly. Then she and Rosemary could decide who had chosen the worse man. Which was crueler: a man who slept with your best friend and let your children know or a man who defaced a painting … Or a man who defaced a painting and slept with your best friend? There was no reason to tell Rosemary the part about Inez. It would not console Simone that she and Rosemary had this in common, that they had both lost their men to their so-called good friends.
“But listen,” Rosemary was saying. “Listen to the way women talk to each other. Always in competition over who has the best man. Or the worst man. Trying to sound as if we have a good deal and are luckier than our friends, or alternately as if we have a bad deal and are suffering more. It drives me crazy when Shelly does it, but I know I’m just as bad.”
After that there was nothing that either of them felt like saying. Simone lay down and rolled over and must have fallen asleep again. Because the next thing she knew, Rosemary was waking her and asking if she felt capable of meeting the children at the end of the driveway.
Rosemary said, “In the highly unlikely event that their father brings them on schedule, we should be seeing their bright little faces in about fifteen minutes.”
THE CHILDREN WERE WALKING up the driveway by the time Simone reached them. She was struck by a sharp, humbling pang of loss at having missed seeing Geoffrey. The children looked like two little tots in one of Maisie’s fairy-tale books, bravely trudging toward the hut of the witch with the recipe for baked children. George was focused on his boots. Maisie squinted up at the trees. Neither of them saw Simone till they had almost run into her. Then they seemed to make a point of not smiling or wishing her Merry Christmas, of calculatedly pouting and sulking and making sure she noticed. “How was Christmas Eve?” Simone asked.
Maisie said, “Fine.”
“What did you eat?” said Simone.
George and
Maisie glanced at each other as if to confirm some vow of silence or pact that George, predictably, would have more trouble keeping. “Roast beef,” he said.
“At the diner?” Simone asked.
“No,” George said. “At Dad’s. We had sweet potato timbales.”
Simone had only the dimmest idea of what timbales were, except for an absolute certainty that they were code for “Shelly.” Did George know she would know this? Was he trying to tell her? It was not beyond Geoffrey or Shelly to pretend that Shelly was in Memphis. Perhaps this was the reason for the children’s grim reserve. They couldn’t even tell Simone that Shelly had cooked Christmas Eve dinner. But why were they blaming her for what they couldn’t say?
“If you had been home,” Simone said, “we could have had carrot sticks and frozen fried shrimp.” She had reached the point of being able to tease the children about their peculiar food tastes. But now the children were miles away, unreachable through charm. Maisie narrowed her eyes at Simone.
Each child carried a shopping bag full of toys and scraps of wrapping. “What did you get?” Simone said.
“Stuff,” said George. “We left most of it at my dad’s.”
Simone put her arm around Maisie’s shoulders. Maisie wrenched away.
“What’s wrong?” Simone asked.
“Nothing,” said Maisie.
“Nothing,” echoed George.
They continued in silence, and as the house loomed up before them, Simone felt progressively more gloomy. Once they were inside, she felt, there would be no hope of resolution, of discovering the trouble and even perhaps the cure.
They were still a good distance from the house when Rosemary ran out of the door and knelt in the driveway and gathered George and Maisie in her arms. Simone watched the hem of her mouton coat sopping up the wet snow.
“Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” Rosemary cried, squeezing Maisie around the waist. Maisie went limp and drooped her head and dangled her hands in the air.
In the entrance hall Rosemary again threw herself on the children, chafing their little bodies while trying to help them with their coats. George and Maisie gently fended her off; she was making undressing harder. At one point there was a brief tug-of-war over who would remove George’s boots.
The warm house smelled invitingly of cinnamon and turkey. Rosemary must have been cooking while Simone was asleep.
Rosemary said, “I am afraid to ask what George and Maisie got for Christmas—what expensive and dangerous items their father is seducing them with now. Wait, let me guess. State-of-the-art computers, murderous off-road vehicles last seen on 60 Minutes, matching snowmobiles, and a week in a private suite at the best hotel in Disneyland.”
George took a book from his shopping bag.
“People of the Igloo.” Rosemary read the title and pretended to stagger under the weight of the massive book. “I love it. An overproduced coffee-table extravaganza full of photogenic starving people. No doubt it omits the part about the alcoholism and the gonorrhea that were never a problem until we went up and showed them how. I hate to think what evil agenda is being signaled here. Is Geoffrey planning to kidnap the children and spirit them off to Anchorage? Why can’t I imagine him in a place with twenty-four hours of winter darkness? Perhaps he thinks that lending houseguests your wife is still a popular Eskimo custom.”
All this floated past George and Simone, who were focused on each other; she could tell he held her accountable for the appropriateness of his present. Keeping secret his Eskimo inner life had been his test for Simone, and once more she had failed it. After this, his expression said, there would not be another chance.
What excuse could Simone make that would smooth everything over? She hadn’t told Geoffrey that George compulsively watched a videotape about drinking fresh seal blood and eating raw animal blubber. She had just said that George was interested in Eskimos. Of the secrets being concealed, it seemed so unimportant. But it was the one that, from the start, George had made clear he wanted kept. Who cared if he was angry at her, this spoiled American child? Now she was hearing Joseph’s voice, and she shook her head to dislodge it.
Maisie reached into her shopping bag and eased out a toy—a bright plastic daisy with sunglasses and a saxophone growing out of a plastic pot.
“Oh, I’ve seen those in the mall! They’re fabulous,” Rosemary said. “George, quick, get the radio! Tune it to one of those stations that play disco Christmas songs!”
George fiddled with the radio dial until he found the right station and soon the plastic flower was wailing on its sax and gyrating to the bass.
“Magic!” pronounced Rosemary. “Goddamn Geoffrey. He always had a great eye.”
While Simone and George and Rosemary watched the flower dance, Maisie glared at Simone. George said, “Dad said he heard Maisie was burying light bulbs. He said this could be a flower dancing on a light bulb’s grave or, if you believed in it, a light bulb reincarnated as a flower.”
“Fascinating,” sneered Rosemary. “Fascinating and poetic. Needless to say”—breaking off in mid-sentence, she went into the living room, obliging the others to follow—“your presents from your mother are by comparison pitifully tedious.”
When they saw the tree, the children slumped, their faces slack with grief and defeat.
“I know it’s not many presents,” Rosemary said. “I know it’s a giant letdown after your dad’s materialist extravaganza. But at least I tried to get you stuff to carry with you all your life.”
Maisie opened her presents from Rosemary. “Art supplies,” she murmured.
“Good,” said George. “Thank you.”
Rosemary said, “I know it’s hard for you to understand, but it’s the greatest gift I can give you. My hope for the both of you is that you do become artists. It gives you a kind of pleasure that nothing else comes near. I also hope it will someday cause you to look back and understand and in retrospect feel more sympathy for your poor old brain-damaged mother.”
Simone felt a mean, competitive pleasure: they’d opened Rosemary’s gifts first. Now hers might seem, by comparison, marginally more exciting. George examined the knife suspiciously. “Is this for me?” he said, and when Simone nodded, a grin lit up his face. Maisie seemed bewildered by the hideous aqueous lamp.
“Plug Simone’s lamp in,” Rosemary said.
Maisie said, “I will. Later.”
Silently they watched George struggle to pry the blade out of his knife, rotating it and picking at it and making impatient, frustrated faces. Humiliated, he gave up and asked Rosemary to open it for him. Rosemary got the blade out and gave a little scream. She said, “God in heaven, be careful! You could cut your hand off with this!” She pushed the blade in and gave it to George, who hastily put it aside.
“Say thank you,” Rosemary prompted.
“Thank you,” the children chorused.
“We have presents for you,” George said.
Maisie said, “No, we don’t.” George shot Maisie an anxious, questioning glance, looking for direction.
Finally Rosemary said, “I can see there’s an issue here I wouldn’t touch on Christmas Day at the end of a ten-foot pole. God knows, the occasion is loaded enough without pursuing the question of whether or not you got me and Simone presents. If you do have gifts for us, and we’re not expecting you to, you can give them to us any time all day, when the spirit moves you, or tomorrow or later in the week, next year, we don’t care. Gift-giving should be like that, spontaneous and unscheduled.
“Speaking of which … I hear a car outside. Oh, goody! Kenny’s here!”
They listened for the car door to slam. In a while they heard stamping on the porch and Kenny walked in, stamping.
“Oh, look everyone!” Rosemary said. “Kenny’s wearing a tie. A black tie and a black shirt. Godfather Santa. I love it.”
This was a moment for which Simone was not exactly unprepared. In the past days she had spent considerable time reassuring herself that it wa
s possible to get through Christmas dinner with Kenny as if nothing had happened between them, as if she had not gone to his house and tried and failed to seduce him. It should also be humanly possible not to let Rosemary and the children know. If she and Kenny hardly looked at each other, even they might not have to face it.
“Merry Christmas, big fella.” Kenny gravely pumped George’s hand. “Ho ho ho,” he said to Maisie, and lifted her in the air.
“Merry Christmas, guys,” Kenny said, and hugged and kissed Rosemary.
Embracing Simone, he whispered, “I could fucking kill someone. I can’t cope with this holiday shit.”
It was instantly, blessedly obvious how easy this would be, a day with old familiar Kenny, to whom nothing special had occurred, an experience no more intense than one she might have had if she’d gone to his salon and asked him to cut her hair. He was always accusing the people around him of having convenient memory lapses, a fault, Simone saw now, that he was sensitive to because he suffered from it himself.
Already Kenny was dealing out presents: an oddly shaped package for George, a middle-sized box for Maisie, a smaller one for Simone, and the smallest for Rosemary.
George and Maisie tore theirs open first. “Yesss!” hissed George, holding up a complicated digital watch.
Kenny said, “What every man wants on his wrist when the submarine goes down. It tells you everything—time, date, phases of the moon, longitude and latitude, Tokyo stock market closings. You can program in chicks’ telephone numbers, your fucking name if you forget it, though I guess a guy your age doesn’t need that feature yet.”
Rosemary said, “With that watch and Simone’s knife, George is equipped to guide us through the end of Western civilization.”
Maisie had already set up a circular mirrored lake on which a tiny magnetized ice skater was maniacally skimming and twirling. Looking down in the mirror Simone saw: Maisie’s mouth was open.
“A little girl’s classic,” Kenny said. “Always in good taste.”
Primitive People Page 21
