Primitive People

by Francine Prose

  Kenny winked at Simone over his coffee cup. “Speaking of Shelly … We’ll take a Godfather oath of silence about this afternoon. Cosa nostra, right? We don’t even have to repeat how much sugar we put in our coffee. I’ll go nuts if I hear Shelly call sugar ‘white death’ one more time.”

  On the way home Kenny drove past his house, a white vinyl-sided bungalow next to a satellite dish so large the house looked like its maintenance shack. It was neither the city apartment nor the gritty cave in which Simone had pictured Kenny dwelling.

  Kenny said, “When I was in high school I had a crush on my Spanish teacher. She lived in an apartment on a corner by a dry cleaner’s. I worked weekends at the A & P so I could afford to get my jeans dry-cleaned. I could get a hard-on just hanging out in front of her house. Once, I actually ran into her in the street outside her door. I said hello in this strangled voice—total humiliation. But now when I drive past my own house I get that same weird hard-on. It’s almost as if I’m thinking I’ll come out of the house and see me. And I know it’s crazy—I mean, this time I know no one’s home.”

  GEORGE AND MAISIE WERE deeply alarmed that Rosemary might forget Christmas. Of all the worries plaguing them, this was one they would admit, perhaps because it seemed relatively safe or especially urgent. They must have heard the lack of conviction in Simone’s reassurances, because one evening Maisie was driven to ask, “Are we having a tree?”

  “A tree?” Rosemary glanced up from her plate of hot dogs and Cheez Doodles. Her eager, uncomprehending smile confirmed the children’s worst fears.

  “A Christmas tree,” said Maisie.

  “Christmas?” Rosemary repeated. “When exactly is it?”

  George burst into tears.

  “Oh, George, loosen up,” Rosemary had said. “Of course we’re having Christmas.” But as yet she had given no sign of holiday awareness.

  By contrast, the neighborhood around Geoffrey’s office was giftwrapped with bows and holly berries and clumps of bulbous Styrofoam bells. When the children saw this, the weekend after Thanksgiving weekend, they flung themselves on their father as if he had decorated the storefronts himself.

  “Cool Christmas stuff,” George said.

  “Thank you,” Geoffrey said. “Now you guys go into the office. I have top-secret matters to discuss with Simone.”

  Maisie asked, “Is this about our presents?”

  George said, “Shut up, stupid.”

  Geoffrey said, “Your sister is not stupid and don’t tell her to shut up.”

  The children were happy to leave Simone conferring with their father, for this was the only season when adult conspiracy was encouraged, even required. When they were out of earshot, Geoffrey said, “Simone, I need your help.”

  She knew that Maisie was probably right: he meant consumer advice. But his asking for her help was confusing and seductive. If only he didn’t look at her as if he were interested in who she was, as if there were a chance that what she said might amuse or delight him.

  “Christmas is less than three weeks away and I have no idea what to get them.” Geoffrey’s wry smile was at once superior and sheepish, the grimace of a young boy compromised into good behavior. “I can’t believe how every year I fall in the same trap. Everyone knows the holiday’s lost whatever meaning it had. It’s a manifestation of our acquisitive materialist values. I know this must sound disingenuous coming from the guy who just blew three grand on a Wurlitzer so his kids could see it bubble. But buying things is enjoyable, at least in this culture, and it’s the culture we live in, I can’t fight it alone. And if I held my ground and said no, who would suffer? George and Maisie—that’s who!

  “Meanwhile, I go through Purgatory like clockwork each December. I feel I’m being tested on how well I know my kids. Have I noticed how they’ve changed since last Christmas? Have I registered their desires, their passions and hungers and fears? And no matter what, I fail the test; I buy too much or too little—some stupid toy that’s too old or too young, too complex or too simple.”

  Yet just weeks before, Simone recalled, Geoffrey had bought George the computer game and Maisie the book—gifts they both enjoyed. He had gotten the jukebox, too, and the children had loved it. Buying things for George and Maisie was what Geoffrey did best. Had he forgotten or lost the skill? Had something happened in between? Or was it the fact of Christmas that made him lose confidence in what he knew?

  Geoffrey said, “Tell me honestly, which do you think is worse: not having the money to buy your kids Christmas presents or being so out of touch that you don’t know what to get them?”

  Simone could have told him. It would have been so satisfying to ventilate Geoffrey’s cocoon with a few selected razory scenes from the lives of Haitian children. She could describe babies living in cardboard boxes, children scrapping over garbage behind the Holiday Inn. How tempting to watch Geoffrey’s handsome face go slack with dismay as he comprehended that this was not the dizzy non sequitur Rosemary had accustomed him to expect. Haitian children knew that not having food was worse than too many choices. The reproof of their situation would resurface throughout Geoffrey’s evening, a mild headache of conscience that would fade and disappear by morning.

  Geoffrey said, “Have you noticed that the children seem a little down in the dumps? Of course, under normal circumstances they’re hardly the happiest kids in the world. But it seems to me they took a major dive sometime around Thanksgiving. And the fact is, I love those kids, bizarre little warts and all.”

  It was strangely exhilarating to hear Geoffrey remark on this change in the children, which Simone had observed but thought she might have imagined; it was reassuring just to know she could still tell what was real, and moving to hear someone, anyone, claim to love George and Maisie. Of course Rosemary loved them, but with a passion that tracked erratically between hysteria and neglect, a love that could send them out in a car with someone who couldn’t drive and then turn around and forbid them to ever ride in a car again. Geoffrey was always the person who paid the closest and most consistent attention. Why hadn’t Simone consulted him first, instead of trying Kenny? Because it would have seemed disloyal to Rosemary to ask Geoffrey’s help. But it was very different when Geoffrey brought it up. She could hardly refuse to talk to the man about his own son and daughter.

  But before she had even begun to decide how to approach his question, Geoffrey asked, very quietly, “Have the children mentioned anything?”

  A chill tickled the back of Simone’s neck and rippled along her spine. Geoffrey didn’t sound like an anxious parent casting about for answers that might explain why his children seemed anxious and depressed. He sounded as if he knew exactly what the children might have mentioned and was trying to find out if they’d mentioned it to Simone.

  “For example?” Simone asked.

  “I have no idea,” Geoffrey said.

  Then, though she’d been trying not to, Simone thought of her magazines and their chilling statistics on how many American fathers sexually interfered with their children. In one article a panel of doctors agreed that these days when a child was sad you had to consider that first. Hadn’t Kenny said you could never tell about people’s secret lives? Nothing about the Count made you think right away of sheep. Simone remembered Joseph saying something similar—you could never be sure what anyone did in bed in the dark. Was this something all men knew and felt compelled to tell you? Perhaps Joseph had been warning her not to trust him with Inez. Simone had liked what she and Joseph did in bed in the dark. But after he left she worried that she’d done it all wrong.

  From inside Geoffrey’s office came the raised voices of the children arguing volubly over the computer controls. George and Maisie sounded more normal, more vital than they had all week. Their giddy, shrill, contentious voices persuaded Simone that whatever their problems might be, incest wasn’t among them. They would not sound so lighthearted to be remanded into their father’s care. But what went on in Geoffrey’s house that he didn
’t want Simone seeing?

  “What engages them?” Geoffrey implored. “Who are George and Maisie?”

  The landing trapped the building heat in a suffocating pocket, and sickeningly, the staircase seemed to accordion in and out. Simone filled her lungs with radiator air. Then she heard herself say, “George likes Eskimos. And Maisie collects old light bulbs and buries them in pots.”

  “Whatever for?” said Geoffrey.

  “I don’t know,” Simone answered. “Like a funeral, I suppose.”

  Why had she told Geoffrey this? Suppose the children found out? She wanted to make Geoffrey promise to keep it secret, though how could she impress on him how crucial secrecy was? How dangerously easy it was to betray even those you loved when the impulse to tell the truth got mixed up with the desire to please. The children had trusted her not to tell. They had meant for her to tell no one.

  Outside, a light snow had begun to fall. The wind flicked ice against the glass, demanding Simone’s attention. She was very uneasy about driving home in bad weather. When had it gotten so dark out? How far from an oncoming car did you dim your lights?

  “Eskimos?” Geoffrey was saying. “Light-bulb funerals? My children have these great interests and I’m the last to know it!”

  The snow kept up through the night and all Saturday morning. Among the things it muffled was any sense of time, so that it hardly seemed unusual when on Saturday, around noon, Rosemary called Simone to the kitchen to help her finish a bottle of bourbon.

  “I’m done for the day,” Rosemary said. “Venus Number V has to dry overnight. Besides, I’ve come to think it’s healthy for me to take weekends off, observe the normal five-day grind like a regular working stiff. And with this white garbage falling from the sky, it’s difficult to scare up the minimal inspiration needed to convince oneself that art is worth doing, that it’s not all the product of vanity, boredom, and duty.”

  Rosemary filled two glasses with whiskey and handed one to Simone. “I would appreciate not being informed that it’s too early to start drinking.”

  Drinking at noon had not been, until now, one of Rosemary’s vices, but Simone could see where Rosemary might be in need of extra cheer. She seemed unusually perturbed, even by normal standards. She poured a cup of black coffee and drank it to chase the bourbon. Even in the mouton coat she looked shivery and cold.

  “Ugh,” she said. “I hate bourbon. It always reminds me of Shelly. How ironic that the demographic group most worried about racial pollution should gravitate to the liquor with the most toxic impurities and potential teratogens.” She paused to scowl out the window. “God, I despise the snow.”

  The snow had tossed its white sheet over the world and turned it into furniture in a house where a death has occurred and now stands empty, awaiting the movers. Simone had never felt so isolated. She was a lifetime from civilization, an eternity from the children. The ten miles or so to Geoffrey’s house had become an un-crossable wasteland. She would never get out, never again. She was stuck here forever and ever.

  Rosemary said, “You know how I found out about Geoffrey’s last femme fatale? I was returning a videotape he borrowed for the kids, some simpering cotton-candy piece of animated fluff. And there wasn’t a receipt for it, or the girls at the video store couldn’t find it. When I said my husband had rented the tape and I repeated Geoffrey’s name, everyone got silent and shot guilty glances at this one girl—the usual blond subliterate trollop, very PG-13.

  “And you know what I wondered? This is the priceless part. I wondered was this better or worse than when the pizza girl used to give Geoffrey free pizzas? For that’s what my husband was doing, trading his sexual services up and down the Hudson Valley for a bag of chips from Marylou at the 7-Eleven, a case of Dos Equis from Stacey at Beverage World. Et cetera.

  “It’s not that he even asked for it, it was very touching. These poor girls working for minimum wage were so moved by my millionaire husband they were ready to give him everything—every last thing they had.”

  Rosemary toasted this insight, then drained her glass. “I suppose this is a cue for the freshening of our drinks. I refuse to tell this sad tale to sober ears. Salud! L’chaim! Drink up!”

  Simone thought about Geoffrey and about what had made these girls do this. It was how he let his eyes rest on you, how he looked at you when you spoke—with respect and real concern that could not be entirely faked, no more than he could deny the fact that he truly liked women. She could imagine the effect this had on young local girls who had never before and would never again see that look on a male face. Geoffrey knew that what women wanted was the simple attention a man might pay another man who was talking about his car.

  “I would ask myself,” Rosemary said, “what I minded most. Did I resent his being intimate with someone else? By then, intimate was way beyond our range, though we still had occasional sex, if you could call it that. I think what I really objected to was that it worked out so well for Geoffrey, like one of those perfect ecosystems where no energy gets wasted. I’d fall asleep in the middle of the videotape—and Geoffrey was home free. He didn’t have to fuck me, and his slut of the week would give him another movie.”

  Simone watched a sip of bourbon work halfway down Rosemary’s throat. Rosemary choked lightly for a few seconds until she gulped and swallowed.

  “Whoa, big fella.” She put down her glass and leaned toward Simone. “I don’t want you to think for one minute that this is American love. I swear that at one time Geoffrey and I felt the WASP equivalent of passion.

  “We met at a wedding at somebody’s carriage house in Croton. Geoffrey was outside, leaning against a car, talking to my brother. When I came over a miracle happened—they stopped and talked to me. Geoffrey asked if there was a place to eat nearby. I mentioned the Tepee Diner, where now, I understand, he claims to have eaten as a child.

  “What a fool I was to imagine that a grand passion could begin with restaurant conversation! Though this was before restaurant chat caught on—we were very avant-garde. But what stopped me cold was that when I spoke, Geoffrey actually listened. I’d had three or four regrettable affairs in my, I’m appalled to say, debutante career. And none of them had been what you would call an ego-building experience. In fact, I was never exactly a monster of sexual confidence. But then again what woman is … well, secure about her charms?”

  “I don’t know,” Simone answered, but she was thinking: Inez and Shelly. Women like that knew what to do, knew a way of acting, and it was always so disillusioning how well their act worked on men. It made men seem so predictable, so stupid and easily fooled, and it always disheartened Simone, probably more than it should have.

  A silence elapsed, and Simone knew that Rosemary was also thinking of Shelly. It would have been cruel of Simone to bring up Shelly right then, though she recognized an impulse to make Rosemary suffer for her own feeling that she and Rosemary had this shameful thing in common: they were two out-to-pasture nanny goats no man would ever want. Emile hadn’t looked at Simone—or worse, he had looked just once, long enough to judge that she wasn’t worth the risk of complicating his business. In the cab Simone felt she’d ruined things by mentioning the corpse on the street, but really, it was decided by then; Emile had dismissed her, and Simone was getting back at him, saying: Look how we’ll wind up. All this preening and strutting and flirting and, inside, bloody meat. But what precisely had she ruined and what did she want from Emile? A proposal of marriage? An expression of sexual interest that she could then deflect? Would Emile’s indifference have hurt her if Joseph hadn’t run off with Inez? Anything that happened twice seemed like a trend or a confirmation.

  “I don’t know either,” Rosemary said, “but I’d bet on a low percentage. Most women get the message when they are very young that they are not the female perfection every man thinks is his birthright. Most women get kind of turtle-y, thick-shelled, and settle for less. They get used to having their feelings trampled in a particular way. We all lea
rn sooner or later, it’s species survival knowledge. I mean, pigeons stop pecking the lever when the pellet doesn’t drop.

  “But Geoffrey was, as they say, different. He had this way of looking at you, you felt he wanted to be around you. Who wouldn’t want a man like that, to be with all the time? Male attention is like a drug, it creates the need for itself and punishes you when you don’t have it—even though you were perfectly okay before you knew that you needed it. Well … not okay. Maintaining.

  “Geoffrey and I and my brother went to the diner. I don’t remember what we ate. Geoffrey and I were talking. My brother left, the diner emptied. I hardly registered any of this, I was so focused on Geoffrey. The diner was closing, the waitresses took turns glaring at us. You couldn’t expect them to notice or care that Geoffrey and I were falling in love. But I’d lost all touch with the so-called real world. I simply couldn’t have got up, I couldn’t have left that table.”

  Rosemary went to the window and pressed her nose against the glass. When she stepped back, a steamy patch fogged the mullioned pane, on which she scribbled a little fist with its middle finger raised.

  “Geoffrey and I were children, children of twenty-five, though the problem with being twenty-five is that you don’t know you’re still children. But wait! How old are you, Simone? I don’t think I’ve ever asked.”

  “Twenty-five,” Simone replied.

  “Well!” said Rosemary. “Life makes some of us grow up faster than others. How did you meet your husband?”

  Simone, too, had first seen her husband leaning against a car: specifically, the taxi in which Emile met her at Kennedy Airport. But if she told Rosemary this, the whole story would have to come out. Why not confess that she was an illegal immigrant, the on-paper wife of a cabdriver living somewhere in Brooklyn? Rosemary wouldn’t turn her in, Rosemary might even help her. But Rosemary wouldn’t be able to take it seriously for very long. To her, the truth that had the power to get Simone deported would just be juicy gossip with which to entertain Shelly. Besides, Simone had trouble remembering what exactly she’d said so far, which had always seemed to her to be the major problem with lying.