Primitive People

by Francine Prose

  As always, it surprised Simone that Rosemary had a past here, that she and the children were not parachuted in to coincide with Simone’s arrival. It was so hard to even imagine the life they led before she came. And yet now she heard, in Rosemary’s voice, nostalgia, even grief, a longing for those seven years she claimed to have spent in this attic. She was mourning the person she used to be when George and Maisie were little; she wanted back her life and the layer of skin we shed in every house we spend time in.

  Only now did Simone understand that Rosemary’s taking her here that first day had not been some casual pro forma house tour. Rosemary was showing her where she lived, territory staked out by those years. But the mood in which she had shown her around was nothing, nothing like now. Then she had been rattled, dithery, falsely efficient, and brittle. Now she seemed at once mushy, irresolute, and driven, and when she gave up searching for the Christmas ornaments, she hid her face and wept.

  Simone looked on helplessly, wanting to tell Rosemary how sad and beautiful everything seemed on her last day in Port-au-Prince, the vigilance it took not to fall in love with everything she was leaving: goodbye bougainvillea, goodbye desk, goodbye bed, goodbye street, goodbye café where Joseph took Simone and later took Inez. Then somehow she might gently hint that Rosemary might be leaving here, too. Simone could still hear Shelly asking, “Have you seen that attic?”

  For days Simone had been fighting the urge to warn Rosemary about Shelly, to shock her out of the ignorance that struck her as willed and a little maddening. At moments it seemed possible that if Rosemary knew what was coming, together she and Simone and the children might somehow forestall it. But as Simone watched Rosemary weep helplessly over the misplaced Christmas ornaments she understood that telling her would only hasten the inevitable.

  “Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas,” Geoffrey said in a rolling baritone. He looked very different in the cottony white stick-on eyebrows and beard, but Simone peered through the Santa disguise to the familiar unreadable Geoffrey. This was the first time they had been face to face since that day in the jeep with Shelly, and it went without saying, it was understood: they would never discuss it.

  Maisie giggled appreciatively. George said, “Oh, outstanding,” then reconsidered and smirked and blushed, embarrassed for his father.

  “How was the traffic?” asked Geoffrey. “Mobs of Christmas Eve partygoers hitting the road after their seventeenth eggnog?”

  “It was all right,” said Simone.

  Geoffrey said, “In a couple of hours those roads will be demo derby.”

  Simone didn’t reply. She was remembering how Kenny had described Geoffrey’s face as working in two halves, the half that felt entitled to tell you what was real and what wasn’t, and the other half always checking to see whether you believed him. But Simone hadn’t met Geoffrey yet, so Kenny’s description made no sense; the face she had pictured when he’d said that was, she realized now, Joseph’s.

  Now at least she could stop resisting what everyone said about Geoffrey. He was not, after all, a nice man at a difficult point in his life. He was a man who could sleep with his wife’s best friend and make his children keep it secret. It was always a mistake to ignore such a wide range of warnings, when everything you saw or heard advised you to watch out. Hadn’t there been signs everywhere that she should never have trusted Joseph?

  “Hang on,” Geoffrey told Simone. From his desk he took a small rectangular package wrapped in olive-green paper.

  “Merry Christmas.” Geoffrey kissed Simone clumsily on the cheek.

  Inside the box was a necklace of delicate silver ovals, each containing a miniature sunset—an iridescent pink-and-blue sky behind black silhouetted palm trees. Light winked off the pearly clouds so they appeared to be shifting. Simone felt sad and inadequate, as she often did at sunset: the compulsion to keep looking, the sense of not taking in enough, the pressure of knowing how quickly it would all disappear.

  “Like it?” said Geoffrey. “It’s 1940s, I think. I hope it isn’t tourist crap you used to see all over Haiti.”

  Simone was amazingly pleased that Geoffrey had got her a present. What moved her was that he’d gone to a shop, to a case of jewelry, and that—who cared how obvious it was?—the tropical scene made him think of her. That she had been on Geoffrey’s mind was evidence she existed. It made her catch her breath to imagine him picking up the necklace and picturing it against the skin at the base of her throat. Even now, despite everything, she was gratified and deeply happy that his thoughts had, however briefly, lingered on her.

  “Thank you,” Simone said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t get you—”

  Geoffrey said, “No problem.”

  A certain wariness in his voice made Simone pause and wonder if what he’d been thinking about was not the necklace against her throat but the appropriate gift for someone who knew he was sleeping with Shelly. Was it affection and concern—or bribery, buying her silence? One depressing possibility was that Shelly had bought the necklace, which, Simone suddenly noted, repeated the tropical motif of the asparagus plates at Shelly’s dinner. Her face prickled astringently with shame at how flattered she’d been. She knew she would feel even worse if she allowed herself to remember how she used to imagine asking Geoffrey to help solve her problems with Immigration. Anything she asked Geoffrey now would necessarily involve Shelly; she might as well have stayed in Haiti and put her fate in the tiny hands of Bill Webb.

  Geoffrey said,” Shelly’s in Memphis this week.”

  “I know,” said Simone. “Rosemary invited her for Christmas dinner.” Once more Simone had the sense of having blurted out too much, that the smallest detail of Rosemary’s life was classified information. Simone had been glad to hear that Shelly would be away, even though it meant Kenny would be Rosemary’s only guest.

  Geoffrey was reassuring her that Shelly was out of town—the children wouldn’t be spending Christmas Eve in the adulterous snake pit he shared with their mother’s best friend. But given their unspoken agreement that nothing untoward had happened, it was just peculiar for him to bring up Shelly’s holiday plans.

  Geoffrey said, “Jesus Christ, why am I telling you this? You’re not a judge, Simone. You’re not my mother.”

  He hesitated momentarily, which was in itself endearing, that a man would stop and consider what he was about to say to her next. He said, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to be a male. Every little temptation is an invitation to redesign our whole lives and a huge chance to disappoint ourselves by not having the guts to do it. Every choice feels like a crossroads with cops and barbed wire and barricades, a cop with a grinning skull for a face, the face of your own death, and it’s always a question of whether to stop or crash on through …”

  Simone let Geoffrey ramble on. This was not the time to point out that he had told her this before. It was more or less what he’d said that first day at the Tepee Diner. She had to admit that now, as then, it was touching and seductive. But this time it saddened her—and it wasn’t just hearing it twice. Though Geoffrey seemed to be stating a fact, in fact he was making a request, asking her to save him from something that no one could be saved from. He was asking her a question without any answer, but still he expected her to know and would blame her for not knowing. Geoffrey was so much like George, bringing Simone his nightmares and wanting her to promise that they would never come true.

  Geoffrey sighed. “Speaking of cops and crossroads, be careful on the drive home. You do not want to know what’s out on those roads tonight. Will you listen to me, for God’s sake? I’ve been drinking since lunch, or whatever that meal was, and I’m scaring you about drunk drivers. Don’t women get sick of men telling them to watch out for men just like them?”

  In fact, the roads on the drive back home were curiously deserted. Simone felt like a surfer riding a quiet swell between crashing waves of partygoers separating from their friends. She could tell from the clumps of parked cars that there were only a couple of parties
. Even so, many houses were brightly lit, and Simone slowed down and looked through the windows at the silver Christmas trees and electric candelabra that told her so much, but only so much, about the lives lived inside.

  But what could a stranger tell from looking in Rosemary’s windows this evening and seeing Simone and Rosemary drinking eggnog and watching TV? Rosemary had promised that they would consume tons of eggnog and trim the Christmas tree and watch Alastair Sim in A Christmas Carol on a videotape they would rent from the store where Geoffrey was so well known.

  Rosemary had said, “A Christmas Carol’s the trade-off for not having George and Maisie. You can never get children to watch anything good or old or uncolorized black-and-white. I’m sure there’ll be no problem with it being rented. The big demand is for Slasher Santa and Rambo Saves Christmas, Part Three.”

  Now, turning into the driveway, Simone could only hope that Rosemary would not be hitting some new crescendo of disaster. She was thinking about the time she had danced with Geoffrey and come home to find Rosemary gasping for breath, and though she knew the two things weren’t causally related, she was very aware of Geoffrey’s necklace hidden in her purse. It was almost as if she could hear it ticking away like a bomb. If a dance had wrought that much havoc—who knew what a necklace could do? She could never tell Rosemary that she had got a present from Geoffrey. If she ever wore it, she would have to lie.

  Simone had a vision of Christmas Eve in a hospital waiting room, observing firsthand the carnage created by holiday dynamite detonating in American lives. She knew this fear was just disguised guilt for her pleasure in Geoffrey’s gift, but in Haiti, voodoo proved daily the wonders that guilt and fear could accomplish. She had gone back to being happy for having got the present; at this distance the fact of it was more real than any potential connection with Shelly.

  Prepared for all manner of hellish scenes, Simone gingerly entered the house. In one corner of the living room a small, rather lopsided fir tree grew from a foil-covered pot. In the kitchen Rosemary, perfectly in control, was separating eggs for eggnog and holding forth about salmonella.

  “Every egg a health threat! What’s truly sick is this culture.” Rosemary juggled the yolk between shells, letting the slimy gel loop down and catching it at the last moment. “This could be a pleasure, a very Zen thing to do, but I keep thinking that I should be able to look at the eggs and see the teensy spirochetes wriggling around or whatever. You can’t even have Christmas Eve without wondering which doctor’s on call. I’m proceeding on the theory that enough rum will kill anything bad.”

  Rosemary vigorously whipped the cream with an old-fashioned rotary beater that shot shrapnel flecks of red paint into the stiffening peaks. “You’ll like this, Simone. It’s the New England piña colada. Like something I imagine being served in Port-au-Prince. If only we’d gone there instead of trying to tough out Christmas up here. I realize that Haiti is no longer the vacation paradise it was. The other day, in the bookstore, I was skimming a travel guide to the Caribbean, reading about all the idyllic places the children and I aren’t going. I noticed that the Haiti entry was three-quarters of a page. They reprinted the state department advisory and let that speak for itself.”

  Rosemary talked about Haiti just as she had when Simone first came to work here. She had learned nothing, nothing at all about Simone’s country. But Simone couldn’t blame her; she had never tried to teach her. Miss McCaffrey used to quiz Simone about every aspect of Haitian life, and Simone tried to provide thoughtful answers to even the silliest questions. With Rosemary it was different—you gave up on her before you started. Only Geoffrey had tried to tell Rosemary a lot of truth very fast, but he had only hate in his heart, and he had gone way too far.

  As Rosemary mixed the eggs and rum and cream in a huge cut-glass punch bowl, Simone thought uneasily of the necklace in its box. Rosemary said, “It looks like this recipe was for a hard-drinking party of twenty. We’ve got our work cut out for us, Simone. I suppose we’d better get started.”

  She ladled Simone’s glass full of lumpy liquid that separated into a cloudy brownish fluid with pods of yellow cream floating on top. Simone held the cream back with her teeth and strained the rum from underneath it.

  “Drink the eggnog part,” ordered Rosemary. “It’s a Christmas present for your arteries. Though Christmas isn’t the time for dreary subjects like arterial circulation. Come into the living room and see my brilliant idea—the remarkable object I found for decorating the tree.”

  On the living-room floor was a crystal chandelier that appeared to have crashed there. Nervously Simone looked up; the old chandelier was still there.

  “I found it in the attic,” Rosemary said. “It was a stroke of genius. We unhook the crystals and fasten them on the tree, and when this baby catches the light, we get dazzled by the full megaforce of High Victorian Christmas glitter.”

  Lots of jangling and cursing ensued as Rosemary untangled the chandelier and unhooked the teardrop pendants. She wielded the pliers so carelessly that she kept nipping her hand. Eventually she had a pile of crystals and tied them onto the tree. But gravity was against her; the weight of just one crystal dragged down a branch till it hung perpendicular to the ground. Under the pull of a dozen or so, the tree closed up like an umbrella. Rosemary experimented, attaching the wires at different points on the branches, but at last she removed all the crystals and the tree limbs sprang up as if the winter had ended and it had shed its great load of snow.

  Rosemary said, “Well, it was a good idea. Thank heaven, we’ve got the chains.” She went into the kitchen and came back with red-and-white ropes over her forearms: skeins for someone planning to knit a popcorn-and-cranberry sweater. “I strung the cranberries last night,” she said. “From racial memory.”

  Rosemary looped and cast the ropes with a singular lack of direction, and the tree looked unhappy again—an evergreen in bondage with a few glass teardrops still weeping from its limbs. She said, “George and Maisie will go nuts with joy when they see this tree. Next Christmas you’re going to read about this in some decorating magazine. You’ll be in line at the supermarket, paging through some piece of trash, and you’ll see a photo of this tree of ours, the latest tree-trimming sensation.”

  After they had tortured the tree to the limits of its endurance, Rosemary directed Simone’s attention to how much eggnog remained. They brought the level in the punchbowl down a couple of inches. Rosemary put on A Christmas Carol and tossed Simone a blanket and cuddled up on the facing couch.

  The screen was frosted with static from the old videotape. No amount of tracking could clear the fog from those London streets. Rosemary said, “My favorite part is the ghost of Christmas Past. Our Anglo-Protestant zombie droning on with his little lesson in business ethics …”

  Simone must have fallen asleep. She awoke curled up on the couch. Snow drifted past the windows and on the screen of the buzzing TV.

  She took one shallow breath and was on her feet and running for the bathroom. Whatever was inside her, her system wanted it out and ejected it in a series of convulsions so violent that, even in mid-attack, Simone had to admire her body’s power of refusal. It was strange how little she had to do for her stomach to empty—just lean down over the toilet and brace herself against each new assault. In between spasms she observed that she was frothing at the mouth. She thought of rabies, then of epilepsy, then of Rosemary’s warnings about the eggnog. Burning liquid rose up behind her nose and she choked and cried out.

  Simone stayed on the bathroom floor until she thought she could stand, then washed her face and rinsed her mouth and returned to the living room. On the way she was nearly knocked down by Rosemary running past her.

  By the time Rosemary got back from the bathroom Simone was sitting up, wrapped in a blanket. She had tried lying down again, but that had made her feel worse. Rosemary sat on the opposite couch, shivering in her fur coat.

  “It’s probably not salmonella,” Rosemary said. “If
it were salmonella we’d be hospitalized by now. It’s probably something less serious—God knows what sort of microorganisms were living in that old punchbowl.”

  Simone remembered the chips of red paint that had sprinkled from the eggbeater. “Merry Christmas,” said Rosemary. “In fact, it’s a perfect merry Christmas. How very much in the holiday spirit to start the day off barfing.”

  The digital clock on the VCR was flashing 5:45. Rosemary said, “I read somewhere about digital clocks wrecking our sense of time. Digital shows us only the present minute and not the past or future. I must say, though, there are times when I like not seeing a clock face and confronting how far the hands must travel to get through Christmas Day.”

  Eleven, when the children were due home, did seem a long time away. A bubble of nausea rose in Simone’s throat but subsided on its own.

  Rosemary said, “Not to worry. You are now experiencing a real American Christmas, families all over America freaking—how are they going to survive the day? The vomiting is an extra, but it’s essentially the same story. I suppose we could exchange presents. That’s always good for ten minutes of bliss.”

  Simone said, “Don’t you think we should wait for George and Maisie?” She was afraid she sounded guilty, as if she were stalling for time in which to run out and buy Rosemary a last-minute present. Even though Rosemary had forbidden Simone to buy her a gift, Simone had distinctly just heard her say “exchange.”

  Simone went to her room and got Rosemary’s present from the same drawer in which she kept her uncashed checks. When she got back, the living room was empty. Some time later she heard the toilet flush, and Rosemary returned, looking pale.

  Rosemary gave Simone two presents. One seemed to be a heavy book, the other a large stone basketball, which, to judge from the crumpled gift paper, had been a challenge to wrap. Simone unwrapped it and found, as she’d feared, not a basketball at all but one of Rosemary’s sculptures. Two flat breasts and a globular belly were carved into a rough pumice sphere that gently abraded Simone’s fingers as she turned it over.