Was Simone just seeking a reason to go visit Kenny? She had to be very clear about this—then maybe Kenny would be, too. It was impossible to tell with a man how something might be taken. She would hate her visit to be misunderstood as a sexual invitation or as an acceptance of the invitation implicit in every move Kenny made. Men made it so hard to remember who you ordinarily were. Just by asking her to meet him at a cafe Joseph had transformed her into a smiling, agreeable person who answered every question yes; and it was this changed, acquiescent Simone who woke up the next day in Joseph’s bed.
One afternoon a light bulb in the kitchen went out with an alarming pop. When Simone replaced it, Maisie asked if she could have the burnt-out bulb.
Simone said, “No, it’s dangerous.” Maisie fixed her with a look. She needed it for something—for some game or ritual, Simone sensed, that was not to be interfered with. For the first time it struck Simone that these were the children who had cut the eyes out of the family portraits upstairs. She had never thought of that as a story about George and Maisie but only as a story about what their mother had let them do.
That evening as Simone was walking past the sun porch, she found George watching Maisie bury the light bulb in a flower pot full of pebbles and dirt. Maisie said to Simone, “It was our pet. I don’t know if you can watch this.”
Simone said, “Fine, I am busy,” and hurried past the door.
The next day Simone got in the car and drove to Kenny’s salon. When Simone walked in, it took Kenny a second to cover his surprise beneath a foxlike, carnivorous interest in this tasty turn of events.
No customers were in the shop. Kenny grabbed his jacket, flipped the CLOSED sign over, and locked the door. “Let’s head for the border,” he said.
Soon Simone was scrunched in the passenger seat of Kenny’s tiny red car, practically scraping the blacktop as they rocketed over the roads. The engine whined like a bratty child, prohibiting grownup conversation. Kenny called out impressive facts about torsion and pickup speed while oversteering wildly and, it seemed, independently of what the car was doing.
“Look how she holds the pavement,” Kenny yelled, skidding toward the shoulder. Gravel sprayed the undercarriage. Simone shut her eyes.
“We are now approaching Connecticut,” Kenny said. “Run away with the rich and famous!”
How pretty it was, this winding lane through stubbled fields and towns smelling of woodsmoke rather than, as in Haiti, of smoldering rubber tires. You didn’t expect, as you might there, some terrifying event, roadblocks and men with machetes screaming into your car. There, memos circulated through the embassy discouraging travel to the provinces, but here you could take any route, any turn, stop at any antique store. The white siding on the old houses bordered the optimistic blue sky with a clean, geometric edge that filled you with pride in human achievement. How honestly this world winked back at you in the bright autumn sun. Simone almost felt safe to surrender herself to the landscape whipping by.
Even Kenny, intent on the road, registered Simone’s enjoyment. “Riding around in fast cars,” he said, “is every American’s birthright.”
Simone was relieved that crossing the New York border did not involve uniformed guards scrutinizing her papers. There was no way to make Kenny understand the luxury of a road without roadblocks, to explain without lecturing him and spoiling his good time. Simone felt a pang of missing Miss McCaffrey, with her insatiable appetite for trivial details of Haitian life. Here it was almost impossible for Simone to mention Haiti without feeling that she was rambling on, being boring and self-involved. Emile had said this would be the case; he’d said it would make it easier not to reveal too much. It upset her to think about Emile now, it made her feel awkward and clumsy, as if Emile had meant more to her, hurt her more than he did, or as if he were really her husband and might disapprove of her being with Kenny.
Immediately, as if she’d summoned it with improper thinking, a yellow New York City cab nearly ran them off the road. Kenny said, “Fucking weekenders,” though it was a Wednesday. “I see more and more city fucking cabs up here in the country. Rich scumbags miss their train at Grand Central and can’t wait two hours for the next train and go hail a fucking cab. Well, okay, here we are. Welcome to Connecticut! Free at last, free at last! Great God A’mighty, free at last! Though God only knows where I get the idea Shelly’s radar stops at the border. Besides, what am I worried about—what have we got to hide?”
“Nothing,” said Simone.
Nothing changed from state to state, but Kenny behaved as if they had crossed into a new country whose exotic customs needed explaining. He plucked his radar detector off the dashboard and, leaning across Simone, stuffed it into the glove compartment.
“Connecticut and Virginia,” he said. “The most fascist states in the nation. What I hate is how suddenly the side of the road gets so coiffed.”
Kenny made a screeching turn into the parking lot of a rambling, mustard-colored frame barn.
“THE WALDORF HOTEL.” Kenny read the sign. “That’s what I love about this place. Woodchuck delusions of grandeur. Relax—it’s not really a hotel, just a redneck bar. Though I guess they do have some rooms upstairs for guys too sluiced to drive home. I’ve always wanted to register at one of those cornpone inns, sign in under a phony name, and disappear forever. Especially if I had company—what do you say, Simone? Shelly wouldn’t eat here if an atom bomb hit and it was the last greasy spoon on the face of the planet.”
Inside the vast low-ceilinged bar the air was cool and dark and beery. The wood paneling was covered with license plates and animal heads. Simone studied a giant moose, its glassy eyes fixed on some distant point between melancholy and rage.
“I see you’re digging the taxidermy,” said Kenny. “This place is closer to a voodoo temple than the regulars would like to admit.”
Simone followed Kenny to a table, off by itself. On the table was a shiny checked cloth and a ruby glass oil lamp, which, when Kenny picked it up, began to flicker and sputter. “This place could blow sky-high,” he said. “Incinerated in a second. Kenny, cool out, man. You can relax. You are not with Shelly.”
Simone nodded confirmingly and found herself envying Shelly. Kenny talked about her so much—it hardly mattered what he said. There had never been a man who mentioned Simone so often.
“The down side of Connecticut is what saves it,” said Kenny. “We’re right in the middle of that manicured shit and actual humans still live here.”
The nearest other customers—a woman with a puff of downy white hair and a pastel-blue pantsuit, a grizzled old cowboy in a grommeted shirt and a bola tie—leaned over their table, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes.
“An all-purpose cheaters’ bar,” Kenny said. “Nighttime it’s guys from Torrington cruising for rural nookie. Afternoons, your geriatric lovers cheating on social security. I know that’s what I’m looking at as I approach my golden years. I’ll be lucky to get that much when I’m that old fart’s age.”
Simone’s smile, meant to suggest that Kenny was being too modest, accidentally signaled the waitress, who drifted over to their table and hovered there without speaking, projecting the same disconsolate rage as the moose on the wall. Kenny ordered a New England fried seafood plate and a Miller draft.
“Five minutes over the border,” he told Simone, “and they hit you with freaking New England. But deep fry is the only thing these places can halfway do.”
Simone said, “I’ll have the same.”
Kenny turned to watch the waitress walk back to the kitchen. “Bermuda shorts in November.” He shook his head. “This place is authentic.”
Kenny flipped through the panels in their private jukebox, then plugged in a quarter and sang along, “Today I passed you on the street. And my heart fell at your feet. Hank Williams! The guy makes me want to howl like a dog. Want to know something strange? When I’m with Shelly, there’s all this music I can’t admit I like. And when she plays cert
ain stuff—like that song she had me grinding to when we were all at her house that night—I feel compelled to give her shit for saying she likes that. Christ, I sound like some boring chick analyzing her relationship. How about it, Simone? Want to dance?”
Simone shook her head. “No one’s dancing.”
“Of course not,” Kenny agreed. “It would be totally out of line to dance here.” But they gazed at the empty dance floor as if someone were. Kenny said, “I’ll bet they’ve got places like this in Haiti.”
Simone thought: Yes on the beery smell, no on everything else. This did not feel dangerous, like the Carrefour bar to which Inez took her and Joseph, and where Joseph had asked first Simone and then Inez to dance.
A few nights later they went back to the bar. It was as if they expected something to be continued or concluded, and every small act felt significant and as heavy as moving through water. Just riding around in Inez’s car required enormous effort. A bottle of rum went around and the three of them kept drinking and finished it as they got to the bar and went in and ordered more.
At one point Simone awoke from an abstracted moment and saw Inez out on the dance floor dancing with a Dominican whore. Both women had slight, boyish bodies, though the whore was much darker; both were concentrating hard, rubbing their bellies together to the music but otherwise hardly moving. Finally Inez sat down and leaned over and whispered to Joseph. Her mouth kept moving against his ear until Joseph laughed and got up and danced the same way with the same whore—just as close, just as absorbed, just a little bit taller.
That night as Inez drove Simone and Joseph home in her convertible sports car, Simone half hoped for a roadblock—for someone to line the three of them up and shoot them in the head. It seemed so much less painful and tedious than what she sensed coming next. Why was she even surprised when a few days later she saw Inez and Joseph together in the café? Simone thought of Shelly and Kenny dancing at Shelly’s house. She thought: This is how I am spending my life—watching other people dance.
While they waited for their food, Kenny said, “We had a high-school science teacher, a real genetics nut. He was breeding sixtoed bunnies. He started out with one normal and one freak rabbit and allowed the sixtoes to live and eighty-sixed the rest, and by spring every student got to take home a sixtoed Easter bunny. The whole school knew what was going on—no one said a word. Amazing, the outrageous shit you could pull in those days.
“Not that it’s so different now. It’s all a big breeding experiment organized by the rich. All those bitches at the wedding checking out the horses, doing quick little chromosome counts, calculating the market price to console themselves as they watched Betsy court major bloodline pollution. Those people didn’t come over on the Mayflower to marry Sufi homeopaths. It makes you understand how slavery could exist, pricing your fellow humans by the state of their dental health.”
Kenny shook his head. “I can’t believe myself. Jesus. Simone, forgive me. I am heartily sorry for comparing WASP wedding etiquette with the historical tragedy of your race … Hey. You know what these tiny jukeboxes always make me think of?”
Before Kenny could tell her, the waitress brought their meals: platters of mysterious, crusty items garnished with apple rings bleeding onto the lettuce. Simone took a bite of what appeared to be a potato and a thin film of fishy oil evenly coated her mouth.
“Salty,” said Kenny. “I don’t need my blood pressure taken to know this is sending it through the roof.”
Simone ate a shrimp shell by mistake and raggedly cleared her throat. She realized it was her turn to continue the conversation, an obligation she had rarely felt since coming to this country. Finding herself so rusty at simple adult chat made her clutch at anything relevant to blood pressure or salt.
She said, “Salt is very important to the Haitian people. In Haiti many people believe that salt will bring a zombie back to life. That is why sorcerers who are said to have private armies of zombies are extremely careful about what their zombies eat.”
Kenny said, “Simone, you are the most interesting woman I have ever met. Not every chick you take out has the scoop on zombie diet. I’m so used to these boring, predictable women. When I’m with them I don’t have to listen—we could be doing a movie I wrote the script for myself.”
Predictable would not have been Simone’s word for American women, though maybe if this were her country their train of thought might seem more on track. Simone had given up trying to follow Rosemary and Shelly as they switchbacked and careened from one topic to the next. Still, she liked it that Kenny had made a distinction between her and boring women.
“Many people believe in spirits,” she said. “Some Haitian people believe in devils who prey only on children. The loup-garou is our werewolf; it has red eyes and red hair. When a child gets sick, they say a loup-garou is drinking its blood.”
“God,” said Kenny. “Don’t little kids have enough problems without their own designer vampires?”
“George and Maisie do,” Simone said.
Kenny said, “Worry not. George and Maisie will grow up and marry Mom and Dad. Respectively. Or maybe they’ll both grow up and marry Dad. They’ll fight about the estate and the inheritance and reconcile and clone themselves and repeat it the next generation. I’m sure there’s a zillion Haitian kids who would trade lives with George and Maisie, get that good food and the rich guilty dad and the mansion up on the river.”
“I like George and Maisie,” said Simone. She couldn’t have said this to Joseph. All he would see was their money and the color of their skin. But at least he talked about color—it was a permissible topic. No one here ever talked about race unless they were mindlessly rattling on, and if they caught themselves, it was a social mistake and they quickly changed the subject.
“That’s a problem,” said Kenny. “George and Maisie are screwed. The mom’s a cross between Tinker Bell and the Bride of Frankenstein, the dad’s the son Peter Pan would have if he’d had a baby with Jack the Ripper. Wait. What’s your damage, Simone? You do know who Jack the Ripper is? Or do you not know how I can say such nasty things about handsome young Geoffrey Porter? I mean, is that bewildered look cultural or specific?”
Simone realized it was useless to ask Kenny more about the children. They were obviously not a subject he could keep his mind on for very long.
“Don’t explain,” Kenny said. “I understand the confusion. You haven’t seen Geoffrey’s sadistic side, just the boyish charm. This is a common temporary blindness affecting only females.”
In fact, it did confuse Simone, the discrepancy between her vision of Geoffrey and the monster others painted. Ever since they had danced in his office, she had thought about him often. She liked to think about him before she fell asleep. She looked forward to seeing him; he was nice to her and flirtatious enough to make her feel briefly more cheerful. Sometimes she imagined scenes in which she confessed to being an illegal alien; instinct told her that Geoffrey was the one to ask for help. Here, just as in Haiti, money and family counted. Clearly she had stopped seeing Geoffrey as the threat Rosemary described, the evil destroyer who could on a whim dismantle their entire lives. Even now, the thought of him seemed like a secret charm that made Simone feel less nervous about saying the right thing to Kenny.
Still, there remained the mystery of why Geoffrey didn’t want Simone at his house. He always picked up the children at his office and returned them there on Sunday. Simone had offered to come to his house, but he said finding it was tricky, it would take forever just to give her directions. Once, he’d told her that Rosemary was capable of having his house watched; it was better if women, even Simone, weren’t observed dropping by. Simone knew this was unlikely—how could Rosemary afford a detective? Maybe the place was a mess, or maybe women stayed overnight and left embarrassing evidence.
“Look at them,” Kenny was saying; he meant the elderly couple. “You can never tell about people’s secret sexual lives. Behind closed doors Mr. Joe Average
may be into all manner of weirdness. Take the Count. On the surface he’s your basic Eurotrash queen. But give the guy a mask, a whip, a couple of pretty boys, sheep—well, it’s a heady combination, anything could go down.”
Simone was eager to pursue this, to learn more about the Count. But just then the waitress brought their coffee and lingered at their table until the moment passed for asking about sex with ritually slaughtered animals.
Kenny watched Simone stir sugar into her coffee. He said, “I’ve never seen anyone use so much sweet stuff in my life. It confirms what I’ve come to think about you, Simone—you’re a liberated person. No one here is free enough to use that much white sugar. You know, Simone, if some time you and I were to make it, it would be the first time I ever slept with a woman my own height.”
How was Simone supposed to respond to this? Was Kenny serious or joking? She stared down at the table, not even knowing, herself, exactly what Kenny might read on her face—encouragement or dismissal.
Kenny put three spoons of sugar in his coffee and stirred it meditatively. He said, “I have the little house and the little car. Now I need the little wife and the little kids to go with it. I’d really be there for my kids, not like my own dad, that type-B lump of protoplasm we saw only at dinner and Sunday lunch, not like that scumbag Geoffrey wrecking every good thing he had. I still have the instincts for being with kids that most guys today have lost—it’s a de-evolutionary thing, it went out with the mating instinct. Tell me that George doesn’t walk out of my shop feeling better than when he walked in! I’d be the Dad of the Century. Am I right or what?
“The problem is, I keep getting involved with killer Amazons from hell like Shelly. Not what any sane person would exactly call mother material. You’d have to be a lunatic to do that to a kid. The world is full of nice women, genuinely good-hearted humans, but the ones I’m attracted to are bigger slimeballs than me. And it isn’t only white chicks. I used to see this black girl in Brooklyn. You remember that movie where Pam Grier played the psycho whore who gave guys blowjobs with a razor blade in her mouth? This chick had razor blades in her soul, it was just slower-acting …”
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