Away from Home (3 page)

In the corner of the room on a table was a small Christmas tree, with gold balls and tinsel, and packages underneath it for the Burns’s children. Somehow Mil Burns had managed to get real American gift-wrapping paper. Helen recognized it immediately. She had probably sent to the States for the presents, too. There were no other Christmas decorations in the room. Trainer Wilkes had been taken elsewhere by one of the guests, and Helen found herself standing alone. She was relieved. She looked at the other guests idly, noticing their clothes, listening to the Christmas carols with an ache in her throat. She wondered what her friends were doing right now in Westport. It was two hours earlier in the States. They were probably having dinner, or perhaps they were through with dinner and were wrapping last-minute presents furtively, trying to hide them from the excited children. I won’t be home again for six Christmases, she thought. Julie will be a teen-ager. She’ll be going to Christmas dances with boys and hanging mistletoe from the top door sill. And I’ll be so much older, so much darker skinned, so much blonder, so much a stranger, that all my friends will have to learn to know me all over again, and I them.

She caught sight of Margie standing in a corner talking with two of the American women whom she herself did not know. Margie in her brown and white checked mousseline shirtwaist dress, the skirt propped out by a huge crinoline, looked like a Brazilian wife next to them—chic, pampered, wearing the latest Dior style. The other two women were wearing sunback cotton dresses, the kind Margie wore when she went to the grocery store. They were tanned and contented looking, and they wore a great deal of real gold jewelry set with Brazilian stones. Helen wandered over to them.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” one was saying in a midwestern accent. “I’m buying a lot of jewelry here. Diamonds especially. Real jewelry is so cheap in Brazil, and it’s an investment. Believe me, people treat you better when you have real jewelry. You attract a nicer class of people back home when you have nice jewelry.” She held out her hand and looked at her two glittering rings.

Helen tried not to laugh. “That’s a lovely aquamarine,” she said.

“Isn’t it!”

“I’d like you to meet Helen Sinclair,” Margie said. “This is—”

“First names,” said the woman with the rings. “Ernestine. And this is Linda.”

“How do you do,” said Linda. She was in her late forties, a small woman, very thin, and she looked shy. Her hair was cut short and curled against her head in tight little snails, as if it had been over-permanented, over-set, and dried too much by the tropical sun. She wore rimless glasses and she had a huge red rubylite hanging around her neck on a gold chain.

“That’s a lovely rubylite,” Helen said.

“How did you know?” Linda said, smiling happily. “I love it, too; it’s my birthstone. My husband gave it to me for my birthday.”

“Helen’s husband is a gemologist,” Margie said. “She knows so much about stones it’s terrifying.”

“I told her not to stop there,” Ernestine said sternly. She gestured at Linda’s rubylite pendant. “That’s all right, but she should buy
real
stones. Expensive ones. Diamonds.”

“I like this one,” Linda said.

“You listen to me,” said Ernestine. “When you go back to the States you’ll be sorry if you haven’t bought a few really
good
pieces.” She was a big woman, mostly bosom, and she had naturally blond hair which she wore in a pony tail. She looked about thirty-five.

“I’m sure Linda would rather have something her husband gave her for her birthday,” Helen said. “I know I would. And this rubylite is a beauty.” She smiled at the older woman, feeling sorry for her, and wondering which one of these men was married to Ernestine.

“My birthstone is really garnet,” Linda said, in a breathy, rather apologetic voice. “But this is red, so we thought it would count for the same thing.”

“Why not?” Margie said.

“Where are you from?” Ernestine asked Helen.

“We lived in Westport, Connecticut, before we came here.”

“We’ve lived all over,” Ernestine said. “We lived in California for a while, and in Kansas, and we even lived in Seattle, Washington. Have you ever been there?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I like Brazil,” Ernestine said. She tossed her head, and the heavy blond pony tail flicked back and forth, rather like the tail of a percheron. When she spoke she showed large, white, even teeth, and she looked like the kind of person who would bite into something to see if it were real. “My husband’s going to go into business here. He’s thinking of buying land in the jungle and then selling it back in a couple of years when values go up. There’s going to be a land boom in the Interior when they finish the new capital. It’s going to be like the American West, only bigger. Bigger! When they finish the Belem-Brazilia Road, land values out there in the jungle are going to double and redouble.”

The butler came by with his tray of highballs and they each took one. “How long have you lived in Brazil?” Helen asked.

“Seven years,” Ernestine said. “Let’s sit down; my feet hurt.” She took hold of Helen’s arm and led her to two unoccupied chairs against the wall. “Ahh … what a relief. You can’t get a decent pair of shoes here, especially if you wear an eight and a half triple A. All the Brazilians have little square feet. Did you ever notice?”

“I’d never noticed,” Helen said.

“Well, they do. Which one is your husband?”

“That tall man over there,” Helen said. “Speaking to the Brazilian.”

“Ah, how attractive he is! I love dark men. You’re very lucky.”

“I think so too,” Helen said.

“That handsome one over there on the couch is
my
little boy.” Ernestine pointed at a small, balding, rotund man in his early fifties. “He’s cute, isn’t he?”

Helen would hardly have thought of the word
cute
to describe Ernestine’s husband, but she nodded and smiled. “Yes, he is.”

Ernestine put her empty highball glass on the floor beside her chair and turned to Helen intimately, her face set in a determined expression of loyalty. She looked like someone about to pledge allegiance to the flag. She twined her fingers around Helen’s arm. “Don’t sell these people short,” Ernestine said. “These are all wonderful people in this room. Of course, there are a few that are corny—two couples here whose names I won’t mention because they won’t be here very long. One or two parties and then they’ll never be asked back.”

“What’s
corny?
”

“Wives who flirt too much with other women’s husbands. Too much drinking. Acting unrefined. You’ll see. Watch any one of the women at this party for half an hour and you’ll see that she never does anything out of line. Oh, five, six years ago it was another story. There was lots of carrying on, lots of divorces. But now everyone who comes to Brazil to live has to be screened first by the State Department and they’ve gotten rid of all that. All these people here always tread the straight and narrow.”

Helen had never actually heard anyone use the expression
straight and narrow
before. She looked at Ernestine, but Ernestine wore a look of staunch, almost sentimental virtue and not a trace of a smile.

“Let’s go over and talk to the men,” Ernestine said. She stood up and went over to Bert and the Brazilian, who had been joined by Trainer Wilkes and a tall, thin man Helen did not know.

The men were involved in an excited discussion, and Helen and Ernestine drifted over to the edge of their group without a word, listening politely as people do who are group-hopping at a cocktail party, not sure whether they want to stay or whether they are going to interrupt something highly emotional for the formality of introductions. Helen wanted to reach out and take Bert’s hand, or put her arm around his waist. It would make too much of an interruption; she would look like a possessive wife, she was afraid. She always tried to leave him alone at cocktail parties so he would feel free to talk with other people and would not feel that she was his Siamese twin just because she was his wife. After all, they were chained together for good, so they might as well pretend they were free. But she was longing to touch him. She looked at his face, at his lips as he spoke, and she remembered the moment they had had together that evening before all the household things had interrupted. “I’m thinking of something I’m going to do to you tonight.” She could hear his voice inside her head now, saying that again, and she repeated it to herself. The conversation of the men rose and receded around her and she hardly heard it. She was watching her husband, pretending to be interested in the discussion, and she was thinking of the smoothness of his skin under that blue shirt. I can’t help it, Helen thought; I want to go home and make love to my husband. I’m bored here and I can’t think about anything else except that I want him to make love to me. She wondered if it were the time of the month when she could get pregnant, and if that was why she felt so alive and full of desire. But she felt that way more and more all the time living in Brazil. Perhaps it was the climate. Or perhaps the leisure, or perhaps because the sun and air on the beach made her healthy. I wish it were late and we could go home.

She loved the look Bert had when he was listening to something that interested him. His face came alight as if he had made a discovery in his relationship with the other person. All his relationships with other people were discoveries for him; she had never seen anyone so interested in talking with other people. And the others always seemed to respond to it, so that a person who was usually quite ordinary became a conversationalist with Bert, became self-revelatory, even if what the person had to show was, after all, something quite dreadful. People, even at their worst, were always amusing to Bert, and usually much more than amusing.

Helen reached out and took his hand. He returned the pressure, but absently. He doesn’t know what I’m thinking, she thought. He’s not thinking about making love, and he isn’t even dreaming that I’m thinking of it. He’s put me on a shelf somewhere for a few hours and he hardly even knows I’m alive. Oh, I wish it were time to go home! Maybe I’m frivolous and silly not to be listening to all this cocktail-party talk where I could be learning something, too, but I need, I need, I need to be made love to.…

Reluctantly Helen forced herself to listen to the conversation around her. She let go of Bert’s hand and fixed an expression of alertness on her face, and concentrated. The tall, thin man, whose name she did not know, was speaking.

“I haven’t been here long,” he said, “but I’ve been watching the Brazilians and I
know
. The same kind of hate that was shown to Nixon on his Pan-American tour is here too. They hate Americans because we have money and we drive our children to school every day in cars.” He had a pinched face, lean and long and dark, and when he spoke he moved his hands nervously. He was wearing a Balinese printed sport shirt with short sleeves, open at the neck, but instead of making him look relaxed and festive it somehow only made him look more foreign and ill at ease. “You don’t believe they hate us?” he asked. “You want to know something? The other day someone came by and spit on my front lawn, just because my car was parked in front and he knew it had American diplomatic license plates.”

The Brazilian named Nestor held his hand up in a gesture of peace. He was small and neat, with silky dark skin, and he wore a seersucker suit. “But all diplomatic license plates are the same,” he said, in almost unaccented English. “They all have a red background, and none of them indicate what country they’re from.”

“Someone spit on my front lawn,” said the man in the Balinese shirt. “My wife saw him.”

Nestor smiled. “That’s because Rio is full of Portuguese,” he said. “Portuguese love to spit. They spit anywhere. You might say it’s a national habit. They just go along the street and spit. Do you know, they keep chamber pots under their beds, and when the chamber pots are full they just toss the contents out the window. Whoosh—out it goes on the street, on someone’s head. Why, spitting is nothing. Sometimes people spit on
my
lawn too. It must have been a Portuguese. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Trainer Wilkes leaned over and whispered in Helen’s ear. “Never mind.” He gestured at the man in the Balinese printed shirt. “You listen to him. He’s one of the brightest minds here.”

Helen looked at the man whose lawn had been spat upon. He was evidently a diplomat of some kind, a member of the Embassy. She realized how little she knew about politics and like or dislike, or even that frightening word
Hate
. She had been here for almost a year and she had never seen any sign that anyone hated her because she was an American. Am I dense? she thought. There must be all sorts of dangerous undercurrents that I’ve never even dreamed of, and that even now I can’t bring myself to believe exist. Somehow, she didn’t like the man in the gay shirt. He frightened her a little; he was so intense, so sure that other people’s motives had to be bad. It was the exact opposite of the way she had always greeted life, and whenever she met someone who felt the way he did she was torn with a combination of resentment and inferiority feelings. He might be right after all, and she didn’t want him to be. I must be an ostrich, Helen thought; and yet, he’s so—what is the Brazilian word?—so
antipatico
.

“I spent ten years in the States, off and on,” Nestor was saying to Bert. “There’s a restaurant in New York I used to love, El Morocco. And the Stork Club. Do you know the St. Regis Hotel?”

“Of course,” Bert said.

“I always used to stay there when I was in New York. Except one year when I stayed at the Plaza. I love your hansom cabs that go around the park.”

“Oh, yes,” Bert said.

“You know, it’s a funny thing,” Nestor said, smiling ingratiatingly. “The Plaza Hotel is the only one I ever found in New York that had adopted the civilized custom of bidets, and they don’t work!”

“They don’t work?”

“Never. They’ve been turned off, deliberately.” Nestor smiled again, and made a little gesture of depreciation. “I’m sure they had good reasons. Here in Brazil
everyone
has a bidet, but unfortunately we often don’t have enough water for even the simpler pieces of plumbing to function!” He laughed, and Bert laughed too. “It’s true, isn’t it? This is a country of paradoxes.”