Primitive People

by Francine Prose

  Even worse, Rosemary paid by check; she was sure Simone would want to start an account at the bank in Hudson Landing. She said, “This is America. A bank account proves you exist.” It would also have proved that Simone wasn’t living with her husband in Brooklyn and would make it easy to find her if Immigration started looking. Emile had specifically cautioned her never to sign her name or tell anyone—anyone!—one true fact about her past. He said, “You can never tell here what will lead to what.” She could be deported or sent to camps up north. He’d told her there was a giant computer that knew everything about you, and once you were in its memory, you would never be free.

  Simone took the checks Rosemary proffered on occasional Fridays and filed them in her dresser drawer. Rosemary would never notice that the sums hadn’t been drawn. She often described how she’d tried to balance her account two months in a row, then flung her checkbook against the wall and given up forever. Simone supposed she would cash the checks at some time in the future, though right now this future seemed, at best, gelatinous and cloudy. Try as she might, she couldn’t see beyond her present existence at Rosemary’s, which felt at times like house arrest: half prison, half cocoon. But she had come to agree with Emile’s cousin—she was lucky to be here.

  By now Simone felt very gloomy, but she couldn’t show it because she and Kenny had drifted back to the main salon and the children were watching. Kenny said, “The rich are not only richer. They are sleazier than you and me. Again, present company excepted.” He stuck his thumb up at George and Maisie. “Okay, George Raft. Let’s do it.”

  George stared into the mirror and sat so still his eyeballs jiggled. He tried not to wince as Kenny assaulted the front of his hair. Finally Kenny stepped back and admired his work and, as an afterthought, fired up his electric clippers and shaved a tiny Batman symbol on the back of George’s head. When he finished he held up a hand mirror, and though it took George some time to get the hang of two mirrors, Simone could tell the moment he saw, because his whole face lit up.

  “Excellent,” George said.

  Kenny made Maisie’s hair spike up on top and hang down in corkscrew curls—a kind of jellyfish effect. He kissed the children and Simone, and walked them out to the car.

  “Speaking of the joint,” he said, leaning down into the car, “or should I say the nuthouse, come hang out if you get time off for good behavior. I could use the company. Anyhow, I’ll see you around. This is not the largest town when it comes to the young and the hip. It’s stronger on the dead and the undead. The overbred and the restless.”

  Kenny paused and looked around, miming paranoia. In Haiti you learned to be aware of who might be standing nearby—or you learned, as Simone had, to be mindful of what you said. Clearly Emile was right: one must take the same precautions here.

  The mini-mall was deserted; a light rain had begun to fall. “Speaking of the undead,” Kenny said, “have you met Rosemary’s so-called friend and my so-called girlfriend, Shelly?”

  “I don’t think so,” Simone said.

  “You don’t think so?” Kenny rolled his eyes. “If you don’t know, you haven’t met her. Shelly’s a force of nature. She’s the entry under ‘Ballbreaker’ in the Guinness Book of World Records. I just sit back and watch her work. I learn from her, I mean it. I have mothers come in and try to stiff me, bad checks, they left their wallets home, but if I were Shelly they would never suggest it. I would be making a profit instead of barely clearing enough to pay some high-school chick to dust those fucking monkeys on the ceiling. Which, let me add, were Shelly’s brilliant decorating suggestion.”

  Mortifyingly, Simone realized that she, too, had forgotten to pay Kenny. She groped in her purse for Rosemary’s sixty dollars, but Kenny put his hand on hers and curled her fingers over the bills.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I know that scene. Believe me. You’re going to need it. This is exactly what I mean. Look how I’m running my business. But I may be the last guy left in the valley with a nonbionic human heart. Anyway, I wouldn’t want you thinking that all Americans are like that—that we’re all like your sleazebag robber baron boss and his artsy batshit wife.”

  Simone gestured with her head to remind Kenny that the children were listening. First he did a stagy double take, then winked at Maisie and George.

  “They’d be the first to agree,” he said. “Tell her, guys. Am I right?”

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER, Rosemary began cooking veal scaloppine with lemon. “Sauté technique from another life,” she said, shaking the pan over the flame. She told Simone her friend Shelly was coming for dinner and asked her to set three places. The children were with their father; he’d picked them up at school.

  “Shelly’s poisonously bitchy,” said Rosemary. “But I adore her. Very Southern, very Old South—you have to breed for an edge like that. Her grandfather was a famous Memphis gynecologist who bred prize camellias for a hobby. He would name new species after his favorite patients. When you got down off the table, out of the stirrups, he’d hand you a white flower, a prize specimen of, let’s say”—Rosemary held an imaginary flower out to Simone—“Miss Simone.” Rosemary laughed. “Very gothic and icky. Definitely one of a kind.”

  But Shelly wasn’t so different from lots of American women Simone had met: pretty, delicate blondes with dewy skin and slicked-back, straight-from-the-shower hair, though with the sharp little teeth and trembly nerves of tiny overbred dogs. She kissed Rosemary as if this were a gesture whose irony she would appreciate, as if they were little girls dressed up, mimicking their mothers.

  “Rosemary!” said Shelly. “That coat is a classic! You look like an Eskimo shaman!”

  “I live in this coat,” said Rosemary. “I wear it in the studio. Actually, it is a classic. I found it in the closet I put it in, circa 1967. If the sunlight hits it, it’ll shatter like glass. They say the sixties are coming back and I for one am thrilled. I haven’t had anything this comfortable for, oh my God, twenty-five years.”

  “Wear that in Manhattan,” Shelly said, “and you get spray-painted as an eco-criminal.”

  “And they’re right,” Rosemary said. “I just think there should be allowances for animals that were dead before anyone knew there was a problem. This is Simone. She lives with us and helps take care of George and Maisie.”

  As Shelly coolly appraised Simone with an almost consumerlike interest, Rosemary pleaded, “Help me, Shelly. I’ve been going insane. Whom does Simone look like?”

  Shelly said, “I can’t believe the scene you’ve got here. Fabulously Gone with the Wind. Well, it’s always something. Did I tell you about that client of mine who hired a babysitter named Lolita. A babysitter named Lolita!”

  “As far as Geoffrey was concerned,” Rosemary said, “they were all named Lolita.” She paused and after a deep sigh said, “Simone’s from Haiti. Shelly’s an interior decorator.”

  “Haiti,” mused Shelly. “Sequined voodoo flags. And of course those great naïve paintings. But that lasted about a month or so, and then you couldn’t unload Haitian primitive. Everyone just fled back to fabulous fifties or English country chintz.” With evident pain, Shelly regarded a monumental oak hutch. “God, Rosemary, I wish you’d let me do something with this place. A little white paint and some cheap track lighting—just as a public service.”

  “My fiancé is a painter in Haiti,” said Simone. “He sells to foreign collectors from Europe and the U.S.” But Joseph was no longer her fiancé and no longer sold to foreign tourists. Why had she told this lie, unasked, in the midst of a whole other conversation? Why, despite Emile’s warnings and her own better judgment, had she volunteered this information that could provoke further questions which might lead from Joseph to Emile and straight to the INS?

  It was surprising how little Rosemary had tried to find out about Simone before turning her children over to someone who, for all she knew, might be a former tonton macoute come over in a rowboat. What kind of mother sent her children out with a caregiver wh
o couldn’t drive? Well, Emile had said to keep quiet, and it helped, Simone found, that the level of curiosity here was so dependably low—not from politeness or reserve or reluctance to appear nosy so much as from lack of interest in how others lived. How foolish to let Shelly and Rosemary call this out in her now: the urge to boast and impress them with her artist fiancé.

  Perhaps showing off was contagious—people here did it so often. All Simone had to do was walk into the room for someone to start talking, though they rarely spoke directly to her or expected a reply, so that it seemed that any response would be impolite and disruptive. They said to her what they would have said were they all alone in a room, but without the constraint and self-consciousness they might feel, talking to themselves.

  Consolingly, this drew Simone closer to the children, whom, she observed, were usually spoken to in exactly the same way. Also, it was helping her absorb the culture more quickly; Miss McCaffrey used to say that to adapt to another country you had to be all eyes and ears, and that the mistake most diplomats made was to be all mouth and larynx. Certainly this was true of Bill Webb, talking constantly to hide his fear of being asked a question he couldn’t answer. It had given Simone a chilling sense of what working for him would be like. Miss McCaffrey enjoyed learning new things, but Bill Webb wouldn’t like it, and every time it happened, he would take it out on Simone.

  Neither Rosemary nor Shelly seemed to have heard Simone mention her fiancé.

  “A public service for whom?” Rosemary asked. “For Geoffrey? How long my children and I remain under this roof depends on how puerile and vindictive he chooses to get. This place has been in his family since they stole it from the Indians. The children and I are tenants here or, the way Geoffrey feels, guests—”

  “The way Geoffrey thinks,” corrected Shelly. “It is not an unimportant distinction.”

  “I forgot,” said Rosemary. “Geoffrey doesn’t have feelings.” She motioned for Shelly and Simone to sit and set out a platter of veal arranged with lemon wedges and parsley. “Ladies, please. Help yourselves. There’s salad and risotto.”

  “Kenny has feelings,” Shelly said. “Unfortunately, ninety-nine percent of them are about himself and about how, because he is such a nice guy, he is barely earning enough to pay some high-school chick to dust the Velcro monkeys. One half percent is about how I don’t love him enough or at all, and the final half percent is about rich and famous movie stars who are, as he eloquently puts it, scumbags, which is why they are rich and famous. I could find this more touching coming from a poor or unsuccessful person than from a man charging thirty dollars a pop to cut rich ugly children’s hair.” Shelly clapped a hand over her mouth. “Not all ugly, of course. George and Maisie are gorgeous.”

  “Thank you,” Rosemary said.

  Shelly lifted her fork up in a salute to the food. “This veal is marvelously underdone. No one underdoes veal anymore. Lord, listen to me! First calling the children ugly and then being bitchy about the food. It’s so hard for me to switch gears, dealing with other women. With men it’s totally different. They insist you be nasty and rotten. It makes them think they can do things with you that they can’t do with their wives.”

  Rosemary said, “Kenny shaved a Batman logo on the back of George’s head. George of all people. The funny thing was, George loved it. Maybe there’s hope for him yet. And by the way—I don’t want to jinx it—George seems to have quit those awful crying jags since Simone has been here. Not that the school would notice any sort of improvement. But he’s stopped bringing home those depressing notes about his weeping in class. I suppose George could be throwing them out or just not delivering them, but even that, with Georgie, would be an encouraging sign.”

  In an effort to conceal how happy Rosemary’s saying this made her, Simone pretended to reconsider some rejected veal on her plate. She, too, had noticed that the children seemed less withdrawn than when she had arrived. You still wouldn’t call them chatty, but they made efforts at conversation. Maisie told anecdotes from school, mostly about other children’s misbehavior. George asked fake-casual questions about upsetting current events. “Is the ozone layer gone yet? That kid in Poughkeepsie who got tortured and killed—did he know the guy who did it?” One evening George had asked Simone to tuck him into bed, but later, when Simone knocked on his door, he’d called out, “No thanks. That’s all right.”

  Shelly said, “George has a problem to overcome. It’s called his DNA code.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Rosemary said. “His father’s half of the DNA code. The other half is mine.”

  “Half is a lot,” replied Shelly. “It only takes one chromosome.”

  Rosemary said, “The bluebloods will have a run for their money when the mutants take over. New races that don’t require oxygen or ozone.”

  “You’re losin’ me, darlin’,” Shelly murmured, drifting toward Simone. “What are Haitian men like? Perfect gentlemen, I’m sure.”

  “My husband is a cabdriver,” said Simone. “He gets tired at night. One night he got very angry and threw a beer bottle through a window.”

  “Charming,” said Shelly. “But what do you mean, husband? A minute ago he was your fiancé.”

  Simone said, “My husband is in Brooklyn. My fiancé is in Port-au-Prince.” Why was she revealing so much—and what was she saying? It was Joseph who had thrown the beer bottle through the window. Earlier that evening he had gone with Simone to an embassy party and been very charming to the USIA couple who were thinking of buying his paintings.

  “Simone!” Rosemary cried. “You lucky duck. No wonder you always seem so calm. Maybe I would have been better off if I’d hedged my bets—maybe I could have stuck it out with a husband and a fiancé.”

  “Not if one of them was Geoffrey,” said Shelly. “How quickly we forget. Geoffrey wasn’t neutral—he was a highly charged negative force.”

  Rosemary turned from Shelly to Simone with a slow turtlelike swivel that added decades to her age, an impression heightened by the bald spots on her mouton coat. A wizened condor smiled mournfully at Shelly and Simone, and it took a few seconds for Rosemary to come back into its face.

  She said, “You two are my reality checks,” and toasted them with her wineglass.

  That fall it snowed in October and all the leaves dropped at once. For a few hours it was beautiful, white frosting the scarlet maples, but by afternoon the world had turned snail-slime brown and jagged tree limbs littered the ground. Rosemary paced from window to window, monitoring the wreckage.

  She said, “Simone, your first snowfall! What a historic event! It never snows in October, you do realize that. Freak storms are just the beginning. It’s the death rattle of the planet. My personal calculation is that we’re about six months from Armageddon.”

  Simone turned her back and crossed herself. From where she stood Rosemary would see just the appropriate shudder.

  Rosemary said, “Those branches will have to be carted away. And those teenage hunks who mow the lawn are surely back in seventh grade. You see I am deteriorating about the housekeeping situation. It’s gotten to where I don’t give a hoot if a dish ever gets washed. Believe me, I wasn’t always this way, but this is my present incarnation. The decision you have to make is how much disorder you can stand.”

  Rosemary often mentioned the house’s messy state. Was she hinting that she wished the place was cleaner? But why then did she always insist that it was Simone’s decision? Simone did her own and the children’s laundry and what simple cooking there was. George and Maisie helped with the dishes and with keeping the kitchen and bathroom on the acceptable side of disgusting. How sad—children so heartened by being asked to sponge out the tub! The halls and public rooms of the house seemed dauntingly fragile, like a rusty book that might crumble to powder if you turned its pages.

  Simone’s own room was bright and spacious, in a sunny wing near the children’s. But while the children’s rooms were cozy nests layered with dirty clothes and toys, he
r room had only a single bed, a small dresser, and a battered pine bookcase. The only signs of her presence were a growing stack of women’s magazines and, on the wall across from her bed, the painting Joseph had given her.

  It was smaller than the canvas that Simone had seen him take down from the gallery wall as a gift for the girlfriend he had before her. Simone used to tell herself that her painting was more precious for being small, and this turned out to be true: she’d been able to bring it with her. The picture he’d given his previous lover was of sexy dancing couples; Simone’s was of children lined up outside a country school. Even so, Simone loved her painting and now often found herself staring at it until she felt herself drawn into the scene, becoming one of the children, specifically a tall, thin girl at the end of the line. She could almost hear the bell toll and smell chalk through the classroom windows. But where in Joseph’s picture were the white nuns in their brown habits? The teacher he’d painted was pretty and black and wore a short red dress. Staring at Joseph’s painting put Simone in a gloomy mood, and in general it seemed wiser to stay out of her room, to be out in the fresh air or elsewhere in the house.

  For some reason the debris from the storm was proving hard for Simone to live with; perhaps because the fallen branches represented new, not pre-existing, damage. For a few days Simone studied them through the windows or wandered vaguely around the yard, contemplating the larger branches until, overwhelmed by the size of the job, she’d give up and go back in. Then one foggy morning she went out and dragged all but the heaviest limbs into a series of brushy piles, far from the house at the edge of the lawn where it rolled up against the forest.