* * *
The evening had been made possible by Facebook: it was Kay’s birthday, and she had invited all her multitudinous Facebook friends to join her for drinks and dinner.
I arrived at the restaurant early and nursed a glass of rum until Kay’s pretty cheek brushed up against my own and Terry’s hard hand palpated my shoulder, and their perfumes, like lemons, roses, and musk, settled in a pleasant cloud around me.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Kay said. “I was afraid nobody was going to come.”
“Don’t you have many friends?” I asked.
“I’m very popular,” she said. “I’m the most popular girl in school.”
“Leave Kay alone on a desert island and she’d make friends with a coconut,” Terry said.
“I love coconuts,” she giggled. “I even married one.”
She rapped her hand against his head and ruffled his graying hair.
Terry said, “I need a drink.”
“I want something girly,” Kay said. “Please.”
Terry drifted obediently in the direction of the bar. “And what have you done with yourself all day?” I asked.
She leaned in close and said, “My husband rented a beautiful room for me in a beautiful hotel with a beautiful view, and we turned on the air conditioner and drank champagne and my husband made love to me all afternoon. And now I intend to celebrate.”
“It’s nice to see you happy,” I said.
“It’s very nice to be so happy,” she said.
She must have sensed in me something understanding, because she added, “Promise me you won’t let me say anything embarrassing tonight.”
“You’re very charming,” I said. “You don’t need to worry.”
“You’re so diplomatic.”
“I’m sincere.”
She leaned up close and whispered in my ear. “If I start to say something embarrassing, you just say something about Africa and I’ll be quiet like a mouse. That’s our signal.”
“It’s a promise,” I said.
“You just say, ‘I understand there’s a war in Africa,’ or ‘Have you seen a good movie from Africa?’ and zip—”
She zippered her red lips firmly shut.
Then she opened them again to say, “Nadia and Johel are supposed to come.”
Terry came back with a flute of champagne reddened with Kir, and for himself a tumbler of rum.
“How pretty!” she said. “It’s too pretty to drink!”
“With the prices here, you’d better drink it,” Terry said. For a man who had spent all afternoon making love to his wife, he was pretty glum.
“Terry hates places like this,” Kay said. “I had to drag him here.”
“Kay—,” he said, his voice whiny.
“Well, it’s true,” she said. “Terry feels guilty spending all this money when the kids outside are hungry.”
“He’s got a point,” I said.
“Not you too! It’s my birthday!”
“And even in Africa, the lions are celebrating. To your birthday!”
2
Kay and I saw each other whenever she was in Jérémie: a trip to the beach, a walk in the mountains, an evening game of Scrabble. She was the kind of woman with ideas: there was a crumbling house twenty minutes out of town—the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas’s grandfather. So she piled on the back of my motorcycle and we bumped up and down the back roads until we found the ruined foundation, nothing but some squared-off stones in an empty field where once a mansion had stood. “It’s so sad,” Kay said. Then there was the time she had heard of a family of Amish missionaries out near Mont Beaumont who sold medicinal honey—wouldn’t it be a kick to go find them? Would I want to go and find the pharmacie vodouisante with her? She wanted to buy good-luck powder. So we went down to Basse-Ville and hunted for the Pharmacie Zentrailes together.
Or else we just walked. Eight in the morning she’d present herself in leggings, a T-shirt, and pink tennis shoes, her blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. “Let’s go, early bird,” she’d say. Then we’d walk from my house to Carrefour Prince, about an hour and a half each way on a road that surveyed the ocean. Little house after little house, tin roof, thatch roof, children carrying buckets of water on their heads. Donkeys clip-clopping toward the market. Children everywhere, sitting naked in the dirt, dusty faces streaked with tears. Orphanage, distillery, a pair of churches, Protestant and Catholic. Everywhere we went, people waved at us, and shouted “Blan!” Mango, papaya, grapefruit, mandarin trees shading the road. Ladies washing themselves bare-breasted. Through the break in the trees, glimpses of the sea, tranquil and teal.
* * *
Once upon a time when the times were good, the White family finances had balanced on three pillars, like a stool: the properties, her income in real estate, Terry’s salary. The summer before Terry came down to Haiti, all three collapsed.
Kay’s job had been the first pillar of the family to crumble. Who in South Florida hadn’t sold real estate in those years? With every Tommaso, Ricardo, and Miguel buying a second house or a third, with credit as fluid as tap water, and with housing prices seemingly as buoyant as cork, all Kay needed to make good money in those days was a big smile and a Rolodex. A big smile and a Rolodex were precisely the assets Kay possessed in superabundance. People liked Kay and she liked people. Do you want to see a house? Why not! Let me show you some things. Come on, honey, I’ll take you out tomorrow—lemme check my book. No, tomorrow’s no good, but first thing Thursday, I’ve got just the place to show you. We’ll catch up while we drive around. I’m so happy.
She hadn’t come to real estate as a passion—as a little girl, she had dreamed of training show jumpers—but she liked having her days filled with people, and she liked the money too. Besides, she’d tried so many other things, and nothing had quite clicked. Before there was real estate, Kay had spent a year in grad school at the University of Florida studying Seminoles—if you can believe that; tried her hand as a potter’s apprentice; opened up a dog grooming business called Doggone Chic with her niece; even worked for a spell in human resources at Disney. Nothing had been quite right. Then she’d hooked up with Todd Malgarini and his crew. She’d always had a flair for decorating and design, so Todd had asked her to help him fix up houses for show. Before clients came over, she’d boil a sprig of rosemary with a little lemon and vanilla. Kay’s houses smelled like baking and Sunday morning. In the trunk of her car she kept wine bottles filled with M&M’s and candy corn. She’d arrange them on the kitchen counters, and people felt, not knowing why, that kids could live there. Then there was the trick she used for the bathrooms, rolling up the towels instead of folding them, so the place felt like a spa.
But when Kay saw Todd’s BMW, she thought, I can do that too. So she got herself the real estate license, and there never was a better time for someone selling houses in the greater Watsonville area. Once she got going, she very literally did not have enough hours in her day to show houses to all the people who wanted to see houses: people would have been looking at houses at three in the morning if the owners hadn’t minded.
And what Kay was seeing every day out in the real estate trenches were people no smarter than she doing very well by themselves. Every day she saw people all around her getting second, even third mortgages, riding the market upward, then letting the properties back out onto the market. She saw those people building themselves solid foundations; she saw people turning their sweat and dreams into income, and she wanted to put herself and Terry on a solid foundation too. What was a solid foundation? A solid foundation meant having the same kind of life for herself that her parents had; it meant riding lessons and trips to the Keys and the better kind of lingerie that was flattering but not trampy; and above all, it meant not having to think so much about money. Kay hated thinking about money, but she liked life—that was a basic fact about Kay—and money was just what you needed if you wanted to enjoy it: money meant the wine tasted better and the cotton was
softer and the furniture was prettier.
So Kay took equity from her own house—thank you, Wachovia Bank!—for a down payment and spread it across a pair of condos. She knew the market, and she chose good ones, refurbished ones in an old brick building in the city center, not far from the university, but not so close either that they’d be student condos: they were investment grade. Kay was being responsible. That was the irony of the whole situation.
And for a while it worked. She knew what properties like hers were worth—she was selling them every darned day. She looked at what she and Terry had, and she knew the two of them were on a solid foundation. The bank offered her a reverse mortgage: that’s how they turned those apartments into the trip to Vail, the BMW, Terry’s first run for state senate. Kay liked to throw parties, so there was this time, once, they had a fund-raiser for Terry: two hundred people in the backyard and an ice sculpture. She paid almost four hundred dollars for a swan that, when it started to melt, looked like a penguin. They could afford a couple of cases of good wine to keep in the basement for special occasions. They could afford all the stuff that made life extra fun.
Then the market went sour.
* * *
When people talked about “the market,” Kay always had in mind some big, slow, friendly, lumbering dinosaur, like Barney. You could tell where Barney was going from a mile off. Barney wasn’t going to start sprinting downhill. She figured that if the market turned—and she knew it could turn—it would turn slow. Maybe she wouldn’t get out at the peak. But she still had two investment-grade properties under title in downtown Watsonville, not to mention a house and a career.
But it turned out that Barney the Market was some Freakosaurus Rex, capable of sprinting downhill so fast that not even the most personable, prettiest, and most charming of realtors could chase him. There was no way to unload those properties. And Barney the Market wasn’t so fucking friendly either. He was loose in their neighborhood, and every house he stopped at and swiped at with his monster claws lost value: I love you! You love me! There’s no longer equity! Those condos were underwater so deep, so far, and so fast that divers with masks couldn’t have found them. Nobody was buying houses now. Kay, after a few months—like the ten zillion other real estate agents in Florida who thought they were geniuses—didn’t even try. Soon she was back doing what she had been doing before, fixing up houses for Todd Malgarini, work that had felt fun and creative once upon a time and now felt like a humiliation. There weren’t a ton of houses to show, and the Whites fell back on what they had, which was Terry’s salary. This is about when Kay stopped sleeping nights, trying to figure out how to stuff those two condos, a house, the health insurance, the car payments, and the subscription to the Wine of the Month Club into one deputy sheriff’s salary.
Nothing in Kay’s experience had prepared her for being broke. She was terrified. She wished that Terry couldn’t sleep either. Why wasn’t he awake, too? The two of them could talk about the shadows on the ceiling. That one looked like a dancing walrus. That one looked like a sad weasel. She looked at Terry lying there, and she thought, What is wrong with him? So she lay in bed doing the numbers; then, first thing in the morning making coffee, she did them all over again. Kay made plans that didn’t pan out and contingency plans that she knew were unrealistic. Kay and Terry had been paying for private school for Terry’s nephews. Now they couldn’t send that check to Green Valley anymore. They canceled vacations—that wasn’t nearly enough. Kay’s father loaned Kay twenty-five thousand dollars—“against your inheritance,” he said. “Daddy, don’t talk like that,” Kay said. Kay took the money and felt awful in every way. That ran out too.
Then came the moment when the two of them, not exactly holding hands, stepped off the financial cliff, when Terry lost his job after the business with Marianne Miller. He was just outplayed, pure and simple, by that woman. It wasn’t fair, but that’s what it was. That was the summer Terry took up competitive glowering. He was pretty good at it, too. If you got him talking, he’d head straight to the one subject he was fit to talk on, which was how much he hated Marianne Miller.
Give it a rest, Terry—that’s what Kay thought but was (almost) smart enough not to say (too often).
* * *
It wasn’t as if Terry was exactly a hero to her in that stage of life. Things hadn’t exactly been super great between Kay and Terry since forever.
The first thing was about the kids—and don’t tell Terry I told you this, okay? But we tried for years, and finally I got him into the clinic, and—and that was a big thing for Kay&Terry, a very big thing, maybe bigger even for Terry than for her. They almost adopted, the process falling through twice at the last minute, the second time when the birth mother backed out, with Ella Marie White’s room all decorated and waiting for her. After that, Terry, looking as thoroughly beaten by the world as a man can look, said, “Kay, if you want someone who can give you a family, I’d understand.” And Kay rolled over and said, “Like swans, Terry. We’re for life.”
It was just about that time that Terry and Kay became obsessed with politics, the two of them taking all their energy and despair and boredom and channeling it straight into ambition. When she’d met Terry and married him—why, the guy just glowed with promise. Everyone thought so. It wasn’t just Kay. Her sisters, her mom, her friends—people saw him in politics or business, or as a lawyer: anywhere someone smart, articulate, clean-cut, and connected could make it big. They didn’t see a cop; they saw Representative White, with a solid background in law enforcement. Maybe even Senator White.
So when Terry threw his hat in the ring, Kay figured that this was when Rocketship Terry, headed straight for Planet Success, finally took off. Only Terry took two shots at it and lost both times. The two of them worked their backsides off trying to get Terry up the ladder, and both times he took a licking. Kay never understood why. You know that business with the pheromones, how you fall in love with people because they have some smell you didn’t even know you were smelling? Maybe that’s the way it was with Terry. Funny thing was, she loved the way he smelled. Sometimes he’d come home at the end of the day and she’d bury her nose in the fleshy place under his jawbone, just inhaling him—like a half packet of Marlboro Reds and two cups of black coffee, like honest sweat, like a man …
… there was something she wanted to tell me. Do you mind if I tell you these things? It’s just that we don’t know each other, so I can talk to you …
Kay hadn’t been the only one who thought Terry smelled great. There was another lady voter who found him mighty attractive. Like the swans, my ass. With her nephew Brett’s third-grade teacher. Seriously? Terry was coaching Brett’s Little League, and Miss Whitman came to a game, introduced herself. It didn’t help that Brett was head over heels for Miss Whitman too: all Kay heard that year was Miss Whitman this, Miss Whitman that; the woman made kids laugh and grown men act like pigs.
Oh my fucking Lord, did that hurt. She’s staring at the ceiling at night, worrying how they’re going to eat and pay the mortgage, and Terry’s dreaming about her.
That was a couple of years back now, and something about the affair just rankled down to her bones, rankled to this day, rankled in a way that not even her own infidelity expunged. Basically, she knew that Terry, no matter how much he wept and cried and begged her to take him back, would have left her for Miss Whitman—but Miss Whitman wouldn’t take him. Terry wasn’t good enough for Miss Whitman. He was too good for Kay and not good enough for Miss Whitman, so that pretty much left Kay somewhere down at the bottom of the pile, which was not exactly how Kay thought things should be.
Deepest, longest, hardest pain of her life, and nothing really made it better. Not the counseling thing, not Terry’s tears and protestations and affirmations of undying love. Not even the thing with her dentist, and don’t laugh, say what you will about Dr. Stern, he was basically single; he was gentle; he had a good sense of humor; he took every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon off all summer lo
ng; he had a condo with a pool; and he asked Kay a lot of questions about what it was like to be the woman in Kay’s head and body, then listened to her answers with the same air of concentrated attention he offered her in his office when she talked about her incisor, the one that was getting supersensitive to cold. Also—and this wasn’t a joke—he really had the best-tasting mouth of any man she had ever kissed. She asked him about that once, and he said that it really made a difference, regular flossing. Kay wasn’t exactly sad when Dr. Stern broke it off in the fall—it was just something that she missed. She didn’t even change dentists.
Why did she stick with Terry? It’s a good question—the question she asked herself approximately twice a minute for the last three years. And is it totally crazy if I just say I still love him? Just not the way that she thought love should be. She hated herself for loving him when her sisters told her that she should be hating him: it made her think she was weak and sick. But the thing is, deep down, Terry was a good person. Like the way—when guys were in county lockup at Christmas, he’d make sure their kids got presents. He’d take orders from the guys in lockup and then spend his own money to make sure some fuckup’s three-year-old got a shiny toy truck. Or like the way when his sister was dying (ovarian cancer and only thirty-four), he spent every minute at her house, carrying her to the bathroom, just sitting by her side when, drugged out and dopey, she slept. Kay knew that’s the way Terry would be for her.
And then there was something else. It was Dr. Stern who wrote her the first prescription for Vicodin, and before long she was visiting this pain clinic in a strip mall out on the drive. Wait in that waiting room for an hour with the white trash and the pregnant ladies with the stringy hair, not believing that this was how her life was turning out, and then six minutes with that weird old Indian doctor, shaking his head in stupid figure eights. “What is being the problem, Madame?” Being the problem is that my back/nose/spleen/soul won’t stop hurting. Then walking out with the scrip. Not that she had ever imagined herself doing that, but that’s how she got through those days, and she wasn’t making any excuses. It’s what allowed her to get through those days and not explode with stress and rage and not kill her husband, and if you want to judge me, go ahead, but try walking a couple of miles in my espadrilles first.
Peacekeeping Page 6