Primitive People

by Francine Prose

  “Be careful, Simone.” Shelly opened her mouth in a studied, ironic yawn. “Very charming surface. But put Geoffrey in blackface and innate him—we’re looking at Baby Doc.”

  On Saturday morning Simone rose early to wash her hair and dress with ritual concentration, not—certainly not!—as she’d dressed for Joseph, but as if for an event. As a girl she’d worn white to church like the girls in Joseph’s paintings, and later she’d had one good dress for important embassy functions. Now she chose a white T-shirt and blue jeans from the armloads of old clothes that, a few days before, Rosemary had thoughtfully dumped in a pile on the floor of Simone’s room. Simone found a pair of denims that fit—they were way too long to have been Rosemary’s. It was odd to think she might be wearing the clothes of the man she was going to meet. Simone put on lipstick and wiped it off—Rosemary would have noticed.

  George appeared in a new sweatshirt and pants he kept scowling at and tugging. Maisie stood like a Victorian doll while Simone tied the sash on her dress. Then Rosemary knelt and squeezed the children as if they were leaving forever.

  “Watch out for each other!” she called after them. “You know what your father is capable of.”

  Then she caught Simone’s sleeve and said, “It’s safer to see Geoffrey as an ever-present threat. Right now he is feeling guilty and, by Porter standards, generous. The unstated implication is that we can go on living like this indefinitely—me and the kids starving to death in a falling-down mansion while he spends the cash flow on luxury toys for his weekend discretional children. And that’s the best we can hope for. At any minute he could decide he wants the house and full-time children. He has the money and lawyers to do anything he wants.”

  A few minutes out of the driveway, the children erupted in conversation. They seemed to have been holding their breaths while making their getaway. George said, “That kid who got kicked off the bus for the whole year for tying up that first-grader with the bus driver’s belt?”

  “It wasn’t the bus driver’s belt.” Maisie was nearly gagging with contempt. “It belonged to a kid in Special Ed sixth grade.”

  George said, “There is no Special Ed sixth grade.”

  Maisie said, “Yes, there is. Stupid.”

  The banality, the shrillness, the underlayer of menace—these were voices Simone recognized, the voices of embassy children in normal American-child conversation. It was surely, she hoped, another sign of George and Maisie’s improvement. But why did it have to be on the road, where their happy chatter distracted her and made her driving uncertain? Nor was she sure she liked them being so buoyant en route to their father’s, who might be, as Rosemary warned, a rival and a threat.

  The world was noisier in the rain, quick-tempered and aggressive, a sudden hail of drops on the roof, the liquid whisper of passing cars. A cruising police car so frightened Simone—suppose they asked to see her papers?—that it seemed a miracle when the police drove on by. When the road presented a new problem, a left turn across merciless traffic, Simone froze until George said, “Now. Go ahead. Turn!”

  They drove past the sagging frame homes of greater Hudson Landing, with their asbestos-shingled porches flat up against the sidewalk. Simone saw an old woman pushing a child in a grocery cart, the first black faces she had seen since she’d left Manhattan. Would she be insulted if Simone waved or said hello? She remembered Emile’s warnings against being friendly to strangers who might be INS informants.

  In the center of the city was the restored business section, old façades of newly sandblasted brick and repainted plaster and siding, like the pristine, just-unwrapped town in George’s unused train set.

  “There it is!” George and Maisie sang out when they spotted their father’s office. Simone pulled into a parking space—well, two parking spaces. George and Maisie ran down the street and vanished into a doorway.

  Simone dawdled at a window in which fancy soaps luxuriated in nestlike satiny cushions. Then she followed the children inside. They’d stopped on the landing halfway up the stairs. Their father had met them halfway down and was hugging George and Maisie with a great deal of fuss and commotion. Simone stood at the base of the steps, feeling shy and excluded and stupidly possessive about the children’s affection. It was wrong and selfish of her to want them to love her more than their father. Maisie plastered herself against her father’s side. George tenderly thumped his back.

  Even from below, Geoffrey looked slighter and more boyish than the lumbering monster Simone had been led to expect. He smiled down over the children’s heads. “You must be Simone.”

  When Simone reached the landing he rather formally put out his hand. As they shook hands, he blushed deeply, and despite herself, Simone was flattered. He had shiny brown hair and blue surprised eyes that lit and dimmed like headlights. He seemed drawn to Simone by some interest or force he was actively trying to stifle. She thought of a dieting fat man passing a bakery, so near to what he had loved and renounced and now pretended to ignore. You could step back and watch it in Geoffrey, attraction warring with will, a state of affairs any sentient pastry might take as a personal challenge. All this so appealed to Simone that she slowly backed up until what she read in Geoffrey’s eyes was that she was in danger of falling down the stairs.

  Geoffrey said, “I got you guys some presents. They’re in the office. Go look.” Maisie jumped up and kissed his cheek. George consented to pass close enough so his father could ruffle his hair.

  Watching the children run past him, Geoffrey seemed at once tense and ardent. Simone saw in him the uneasy boy that Shelly had described, waiting for his friends to discover the lukewarm tea his mum had set out with soggy, crustless sandwiches.

  “And I must be Geoffrey,” he said. “But I guess you know that. I guess you know my life story and all my personality disorders. You probably know every detail of my classically repressed Anglo-WASP childhood: how my poor homesick mother made icky British snacks and invited my pals for tea.”

  “Excuse me?” said Simone.

  Geoffrey raised his hands, palms outward. “Ah, I can see you do. Rosemary makes quite a thing of it, quite the amateur Freudian. To her, my finding Mum with the marmite jar was the primal scene. But please, come in! Unlike my wife, I know that family therapy is not in your job description.”

  “Mr. Porter—” said Simone.

  “Please. Geoffrey.” Geoffrey smiled and Simone forgot whatever she’d planned to say as she tried to reconcile this appealing, slightly gawky person with the devil she’d heard described.

  The office consisted of two large white rooms with gray industrial carpet, both smelling strongly of flower perfumes wafting up from the soap store downstairs. One room contained several computers and imposing copy machines. “Star Ship Enterprise,” Geoffrey said.

  “Fire this up,” he told George, handing his son a small metal square that—amazingly—George knew how to slip into the right computer slot. The screen lit up and a slew of belching frogs swarmed over the monitor.

  “Swamp Thing!” cried George, punching the keyboard until a cartoon zombie lumbered onto the screen, snapping at the frogs.

  “Educational and entertaining,” Geoffrey told Simone. “Swamp Thing can’t get his froggie dinner till George spells a word.”

  Simone felt, without turning, Maisie’s eyes drill their backs.

  “Look at this,” said her father, and steered Maisie into the other room—bare but for a drafting table, metal shelves, and art supplies. When Simone took up with Joseph, his girlfriend had just kicked him out of the house and he was living in his studio with only a mattress, his easel, and paints. Simone had confused lack of furniture with the lack of a past to compete with.

  Simone thought again of the Olympia on the wall of Joseph’s studio. How frightened and naked the white girl looked behind all that blood and those wounds! The only item on Geoffrey’s wall was a large print of a Madonna surrounded by separate 8 x 10 blowups of her facial features—a lip, a nose, a hooded eye,
one beatific eyebrow.

  Geoffrey paused in the doorway till Simone caught up and could witness the warming spectacle of him giving his daughter a gift, a picture book wrapped in red tissue and tied with a curly blue bow.

  “Read the cover,” Geoffrey ordered.

  Maisie read, “You are real.”

  “Bravo,” said Geoffrey.

  On the next page Maisie read, “Trees are real.” She turned another page and a cardboard pine tree popped up from the book. “A house is real,” read Maisie, and a Victorian gingerbread house jumped out of the binding.

  “You are real,” said Geoffrey. “A crucial concept—and one I’m not certain Maisie gets quite enough of with Rosemary for a mother. Of course, the intriguing thing is to say that a house is real and then show the children a cardboard house that isn’t real at all.”

  Maisie was engrossed in her pop-up book, George was pounding the computer keyboard. The gifts were precisely on target. Geoffrey knew what his children wanted.

  “Look at them!” said Geoffrey. “With Rosemary this wouldn’t be fun but simply another example of my uncontrolled sexist aggression, giving the hot technology to George-the-boy, the book to Maisie-the-girl, when in fact George likes the computer and Maisie likes the book.”

  “I like the computer,” said Maisie.

  Geoffrey said, “I know you do, honey. But no one gets to do what they like all the time. Do you think Daddy likes designing ad campaigns featuring the body parts of a Piero Madonna to put behind the latest model Japanese family hatchbacks? It cannot be coincidental that this office smells like a bordello. The wonder is that your dad can do it up here and make real New York City money. Everyone does stuff for a living they don’t necessarily like, as your friend Simone here will be the first to tell you.”

  Did Geoffrey mean Simone to say she didn’t like caring for George and Maisie? The truth was that she liked her job so much she stayed awake nights fearing she’d lose it. She had come to feel, like Rosemary, that this was the best they could hope for right now, and she longed for it to continue—this interlude of restorative calm after wrenching upheaval and change. Besides, she was so fond of George and Maisie, she would miss them for even a weekend, and she recalled with an unpleasant shock that one such weekend was starting now.

  Geoffrey said, “What I’d like is serious breakfast.”

  George and Maisie said, “Yay!”

  Simone stepped back, but Geoffrey said, “Please. Come with us, Simone.” He tossed George the car keys, and after a few blank moments, George grinned at his father and rushed out, clumping down the stairs. Maisie clung to Geoffrey’s hand and chafed her arm against his.

  “The Tepee Diner,” Geoffrey told Simone. “George and Maisie’s favorite. The oldest downscale dining institution in the Hudson Valley. It was my favorite diner when I was George and Maisie’s age. Dad and I would sneak off there when Mummy was otherwise engaged.”

  George and Maisie scrambled into the back seat of the shiny red Land Rover and, unasked, fastened their seat belts. They all sat for a moment in almost prayerful silence, inhaling the spicy, optimistic, new-car polymer smell.

  The silvery diner caught the sun and flashed it back like the ocean. Inside, a counter ran the length of one mirrored wall and across the aisle were two rows of booths upholstered in tangerine vinyl. In the booths sat young couples in expensive hunt clothes and peevish states of annoyance, suggesting they’d lost the scent of the fox and settled grudgingly for this diner. Every party of two or less was reading The New York Times.

  The waitress wore black leggings and a tight flowered miniskirt. Protruding from the pocket of her oversize man’s shirt was an antique pack of cigarettes.

  “Thirty-year-old Luckeys?” Geoffrey said. “That’s pushing the envelope, healthwise.”

  “Purely decorative,” said the waitress. “Your lungs would vaporize if you smoked one.”

  Geoffrey consulting with the children about what they wanted to eat was such a touching sight that even the tough little waitress registered and approved.

  “French toast all around,” Geoffrey said. “Fresh-squeezed orange juice. Coffee.” To Simone he said, “I know it’s not called French toast in French. Do they have French toast in Haiti?”

  “In Haiti,” said George, “they eat rice and beans and the children are lucky to get it.”

  The waitress turned and walked away. “That’s my boy!” said Geoffrey.

  The French toast was made from crusty baguettes, diagonally sliced, encircled by banana and strawberry slices suggesting flower sexual parts. Simone lowered her head and ate, grateful for the taste of the food and for its power to distract and free her from the steamy curtain of intensity that seemed to encircle their table. She wondered where it had come from, this pressure and isolation, as if the four of them were taking a shower instead of just eating breakfast.

  Only slowly did the fog clear enough for Simone to notice an obese couple, two beach balls with heads and legs, in a nearby booth. The man was involved in complicated negotiation with the waitress, who finally removed their plates—untouched stacks of pancakes. Soon she returned with new plates, new pancakes, new negotiations, these apparently about syrups and pour-jars of fruit toppings. The couple moped in silence, then took a few resentful bites.

  “It’s a diet,” Geoffrey whispered. “I’ve seen them do this before. A good fight with the waitress not only delays gratification but cuts down on their calorie intake and gives them an adrenaline rush so they metabolize faster. Listen to me. I sound so cruel. It’s all those years with Rosemary. She wore off on me, I suppose. I keep trying to locate some vein of sympathy for all of us poor souls in hell, fat people included.

  “But finally I can’t do it, it’s basically so disgusting. I can just imagine how that little scene must look to someone from Haiti, someone from the country with the world’s lowest per capita income.” Geoffrey paused for credit for knowing this fact about Haiti, then looked to see if George or Maisie needed help cutting their French toast. Maisie didn’t and George did. Wisely, Geoffrey left them both alone.

  “What I can sympathize with,” he said, “is how every second of a fat man’s life can turn into a test, a major battle between self-control and the power of desire. Every minor temptation is a crossroads with a traffic cop holding up his hand. Every chance to be bad seems like a decision: give up or break on through. And eventually you see the cop’s a skull and bones, he’s wearing your own death—death’s scaring you and at the same time mocking you for being scared. Well, there’s no longer any choice. It’s your duty to get into trouble.”

  Geoffrey’s tone made it clear that what he meant by trouble was not what the fat couple meant. Simone hadn’t known many men very well, but a high percentage, it seemed, talked as if women were a disease from which they had or hadn’t recovered. Geoffrey was the only one who talked about running roadblocks when what he meant, or what she thought he meant, was going to bed with women. Several times, in Inez’s car, they had run into roadblocks. Simone remembered peering into the dark to see how many men were around, and if they looked as if they would torch your car, just because they could. Not even these painful memories could dampen Simone’s pleasure in Geoffrey’s having chosen to confide in her his very private and personal thoughts. Not every man would talk this way to his children’s caregiver.

  Geoffrey said, “That skull and bones always seemed to me to be saying: Last chance. In a blink of an eye you’ll be dead or old, with all the leisure in the world to regret what you didn’t do, getting up twenty times a night just to take a piss, and every time you wake up you see the face of a different woman you didn’t sleep with. The pressure got unbearable. It’s a wonder I didn’t snap. For six months now I’ve been celibate, totally sworn off women. It’s a kind of trial period—a dry-out time, so to speak.”

  This was welcome news to Simone; it would keep things between them simpler. But how exactly did it fit in with his flirting with the waitress? “Th
e point of the experiment,” Geoffrey said, “is to stop thinking with my dick.”

  Simone glanced at the children, sawing obliviously at their toast. Simone took a gummy bite that required some time to chew.

  After another few mouthfuls she asked, “When should I come for the children tomorrow?” though Rosemary had specifically instructed her that George and Maisie were to be home no later than three. What would she do now if Geoffrey said six-thirty?

  Geoffrey said, “I’m sure that Rosemary has an opinion on this.” Gratefully, Simone told him what Rosemary’s opinion was.

  “Three is early,” Geoffrey said, “but I’ll do anything to keep the peace.”

  “Should I pick them up at your house?” Simone held her breath, awaiting his answer. Tomorrow, Sunday afternoon—it was unlikely he’d be at his office. If he wanted her to go to his house, Simone would have to agree, though it made her nervous to find a new place without the children along for guidance.

  A funny spark passed between them—Simone caught it right away. Geoffrey said, “No no no! The office would be fine.”

  He didn’t want her to come to his house. He didn’t want any discussion. A pinpoint chill scratched up Simone’s spine and she hunched her shoulders and shivered.

  On the beach near the village where Simone’s grandmother lived, there was a ruined stone castle in which a pirate was said to have stacked the corpses of nine wives. People said this was why the water temperature dropped in that part of the cove. When Simone was a little girl she’d been afraid to swim near there, and now, as she looked at Geoffrey, she remembered why. the castle watching you from the shore, the icy shock of the water.