Primitive People (15 page)

“I met a Jewish fellow once,” the Count said, “who claimed he could tell from a Jewish man’s name his age within five years.”

“I’m sure,” said Shelly. “Ten years ago they were all Scott and Heather. Five years ago every Jewish child was Joshua or Rachel.”

“And five years from now?” Rosemary asked.

“Mary and Jesus,” said Kenny.

Rosemary said, “The hardest thing about sculpture is naming a piece when it’s done. Sometimes I’ll just let a piece sit and rot until it surrenders and
tells
me its name.”

This failed to generate any of the questions Rosemary might have liked about her work. Happily a waiter appeared with a tray of clattery dishes. This young man was clearly not an actor but a high-school student at a painful stage; every shameful sexual thought had broken out on his face.

“How many want squid salad?” he asked.

When he left, Shelly said, “How clever to match the food with the help. Like different wines for different courses. After the squid, hardbodies take our orders for roast beef.”

“Shelly!” said Rosemary. “That is genuinely cruel.” Then, more quietly, Rosemary said, “Wait a minute. I can feel it. All my danger sensors are blinking at once. Geoffrey must be here.”

“What ESP,” said Shelly. “I saw him about ten minutes ago but kept quiet for your sake. I thought if I didn’t say anything he might just disappear.”

Rosemary said, “I wish I’d worn my mouton coat. I feel very exposed in this poncho.”

“Fasten your seat belts,” said Shelly. “We’re in for a bumpy ride.”

“Am I just paranoid,” Rosemary asked, “or is he headed this way?” Simone noticed that Kenny’s hand had clenched around the knife with which he’d been alternately chasing and cutting a rubbery circle of squid.

“What’s this?” inquired the Count, literally sniffing the air, on which he’d caught a piquant whiff of emotional turmoil.

“I cannot handle it,” Rosemary said. “Coming here was a big mistake. I cannot deal with seeing Geoffrey in this public venue.”

“No problem,” said Shelly, leaping up. “I’ll head him off at the pass.”

The whole table watched Shelly run over and interpose her tense little body between them and Geoffrey. Too far away to overhear, they watched Shelly and Geoffrey talking. They seemed to Simone to sway like snakes, or like a snake and a mongoose, but more taut and alert, more like tunneling rodents fighting over a burrow. Geoffrey kept leaning backward and moving closer and backing off in a way that made Simone think: He’s frightened of Shelly, too.

Returning to the table, Shelly stuck her thumb in the air. “Very graceful,” she said. “Very clean. I explained that having to talk to him now would blow all Rosemary’s circuits. Rosemary, don’t ever say I never went to the mat for you.”

“Great,” muttered Rosemary. “Thus confirming his view of me as a borderline schizo.”

“I was doing you a favor,” said Shelly. “What gratitude!” She turned to the others. “The moral is, don’t interfere in a marriage. It’s like getting trampled by a herd of elephants.”

Rosemary chewed on a piece of squid. Her circuits looked blown, regardless. She said, “Simone, finish your salad. In between courses let’s go check on the children.”

At first it seemed like a good idea—being anywhere else but this table, but as Simone followed Rosemary out of the tent and toward the children’s tent, they saw Geoffrey walking in front of them, generating a kind of force field they dropped farther back to avoid.

Though Geoffrey seemed unaware of their presence, perhaps he knew they were there. Because by the time they reached the children’s tent he had moved far away from the entrance, where the three of them might have been obliged to stand side by side as they watched the magic show in progress. In the few seconds it took to locate George and Maisie, Simone felt unreasonably anxious, as if they might somehow have disappeared.

“I don’t know if I can get through this,” Rosemary whispered to Simone.

The magician, a suave sadistic Viking in a top hat and tails, was making a boy from the audience pick playing cards from a deck. Each time he guessed the boy’s card, he said, “Can’t you do better than that?” The boy was on the edge of tears. Twenty children and a half dozen adults watched, stunned and utterly silent. At last the magician thanked the boy and sent him back to his seat and the whole group applauded with insane relief.

The magician took off his top hat and ran his hand through his plastered-down hair and asked for volunteers to come inspect his hat. No one in the audience spoke. A toddler started crying.

“Chickens!” said the magician. “I’ll show you.” And he tilted the shiny black topper he’d just worn on his head. “Empty, no?” No one said a word.

“Empty!” said the magician. “Like your little noggins. How quiet we are today. Well, maybe now we get a response.” He yanked a white rabbit out of the hat and held it by its ears. The bunny looked pink and defenseless, swimming in the air like a newborn.

“Ooooh,” chorused the children, more from shock than pleasure.

“He’s hurting it!” one girl cried out.

“Not at all,” said the magician. “This is my friend Bobo. Say hello to Bobo, children.”

“Hi, Bobo,” said a few voices.

Rosemary said, “Child abuse and rabbit abuse. Fabulous combination. Believe me, a geek show is not standard fare for our weddings and children’s birthdays. But why am I apologizing to you? In Haiti, plenty of social occasions must feature animal sacrifice. I just cannot fathom who the adult in charge here is—who is protecting these children from this obvious sexual freak.”

Simone looked across the tent and her eyes met Geoffrey’s. She nodded, and Geoffrey gave her a quick military salute.

“Now I need a lady volunteer from my audience.” The magician stared over the children’s heads at Rosemary and Simone. Simone was afraid he’d call on her and she’d be too timid to refuse. Then she’d have to lie in a coffin and let him saw her in half. She thought of Baron Samedi, the voodoo god of death, dressed like the magician in a top hat and tails. In Haiti children were frequently warned to avoid dark spirits, but American parents invited them in to entertain their young.

The magician considered her and then passed her over for Rosemary. Simone wasn’t sure if she should be relieved or insulted. Without taking his eyes off Rosemary, the magician switched on a record player. A wheezy, ghoulish violin waltz crackled through the static.

“May I have the honor of this dance?” the magician asked.

“I don’t think so,” Rosemary said.

“I will be very insulted,” the magician said, and sashayed toward her across the tent. The audience twisted around to see whom he’d chosen. Simone caught the moment when George and Maisie realized it was their mother. She watched them watch the magician reach for Rosemary’s hand.

Rosemary resisted, then crumpled, undermined by politeness and by the fear of being a bad sport. She reluctantly took the magician’s hand and followed him into the center.

George and Maisie looked around. Then they got up and went to their father, cutting across the magician’s path, annoying the magician and alarming Rosemary, who murmured “George and Maisie?” as if calling out in a dream.

Geoffrey put one arm around each of the children and they stood poised for attack or defense. But what was there to fight about? No one was in danger. A magician performing for children had asked for a volunteer.

Neither the magician nor Rosemary appeared to know how to waltz, and he dragged her around with only the most casual relation to the music. The magician’s back was straight, his elbows locked, his face turned stiffly away. His evening clothes and her poncho made for an interesting pairing. It was upsetting to watch how Rosemary detached herself and complied.

Simone thought of how in Haiti
tonton macoute
asked women to dance, and if the women refused, the
tonton macoute
would chase them and beat them with their sticks. You learned to keep away from dancing crowds or stand far from the music. But this blond magician was nothing like the
tonton macoute,
all he could do was embarrass you. He couldn’t take your house or kill you or imprison someone you loved.

Half twirling, half pushing Rosemary till her back was to the audience, the magician shouted, “Children, I would like your help now—counting from one to three …

“One!” His eyes drilled the crowd till it echoed, “One!”

“Two!” said the magician.

“Two!” said the crowd.

“Three!” said the magician.

“Three!”

The magician snapped his wrist and clawed and fumbled at Rosemary’s back as if he meant to produce from it yet another rabbit. At first it looked as if he had come up with something pink and embryonic. Then he snapped it in the air and it unfolded—a very large pink satin brassiere he was pretending to have just extracted by magic from under Rosemary’s poncho. Even the children could tell it was several times Rosemary’s size, but it looked so naked, so exposed and organic, you felt it had come fresh from contact with a woman’s breasts—had recently cradled in the dark something tender and fleshy and warm. It looked like a body part itself, more like skin than cloth. A few older children laughed harshly.

“Look!” a chorus of children warned Rosemary, who had to twist around in the magician’s arms to see the pink brassiere. It took her awhile to process what she was seeing, and then she smiled a terrible grin of complicity and shame, a smile meant to diminish the significance of the occasion but which instead excited tragic pity and terror. The children folded under the pressure of that smile. All their mothers were humiliated, threatened, in sexual danger, faking acceptance and pleasure to save them from being afraid. A howl of laughter and misery went up from the children, which the magician chose to interpret as a positive response, and modestly bowed his head in acknowledgment.

George and Maisie pressed against their father. His arms were around them tightly. Then a woman’s voice cried, “They’re cutting the cake!” And the children streamed from the tent.

On the way to the main tent Simone and Rosemary met a woman walking briskly in the other direction. The woman wore a monk’s robe made from a grimy red blanket. Simone recognized Glenda from the shop in which they’d got Maisie’s Red Ridinghood cape.

“I love this wedding, don’t you?” Glenda wrinkled her face. “Betsy and Ethan are such good people.”

Everyone had gathered for the cutting of the cake, a frosted monster that loomed so hugely over the bride and groom that both their trembling hands were needed to pick up the knife and attack it. The cake reminded Simone of the Aztec pyramids in the human sacrifice book, and she imagined the priests pitching human hearts down from the highest point.

As the couple cut into the bottom layer, the groom noticed for the first time the decoration on top of the cake: a little boy and girl Pilgrim couple under a bridal canopy. Still holding the knife, the groom stopped and glowered at his bride, who smiled apologetically at the crowd and took the knife from his hand. Her smile implied that he was eccentric, maybe, but not dangerous or homicidal.

“Lord,” Shelly whispered. “She
is
marrying the Ayatollah.”

The groom addressed the wedding guests: “The whole purpose of this ceremony was to create a new Thanksgiving. To turn around the holiday by giving it new meaning, a day of real Thanksgiving, a celebration of caring and love not based on exploitation, on stealing land from native people and eating endangered species.”

“Of course not,” Rosemary whispered.

“The whole point,” said the groom, “was a kind of atonement for what Betsy’s family has done here, ripping off the land and the people and ignoring the will of Allah.”

It was very impressive, how smoothly the crowd absorbed this, perhaps because they’d had so much recent practice in transcending their situation, in just going blank and ignoring what was transpiring around them. Simone thought of the Manet
Olympia
on Joseph’s studio wall and of how sometimes tourists and embassy people came to look at his paintings and saw the bloody nude woman and nodded and went on to something else.

“And now,” the groom was saying, “the icing on the cake, so to speak, is these tacky little Pilgrims.” He plucked the decorations off the cake and showed them to the crowd, two black-clothed angels with tiny feet mired in clouds of white sugar. “After everything we tried to do, after all our efforts—we wind up with this gross symbol of all the evil that Betsy’s ancestors helped to bring about. This reminder of who really owned the land and of what happened to the native people who so freely shared the knowledge of how to survive on the planet.”

The bride must have known her people; she knew how much they could handle. She took the knife and closed the groom’s hand over hers and carved a wedge of cake. Flashbulbs popped and the crowd erupted in a modulated ripple of applause—the perfect volume, the perfect length, the perfect pitch of excitement.

A
FTER THE WEDDING THE
children went off with their father for the Thanksgiving weekend, and Simone didn’t see them again until Monday after school. The minute they stepped down from the bus she knew that something was wrong.

George and Maisie stood nearly immobile except for their anxious little faces, looking around till they found Simone and, when they found her, looking away. Simone longed to run and embrace them, but they seemed too fragile: two eggshells with their centers blown out, bundled in winter coats. Surely it was an optical trick of the foggy November light—the children floated in clouds of breath, faraway, dazzling, and insubstantial.

George said, “Hi,” and that was the extent of their conversation. They turned and trudged up the driveway, Maisie ahead of George, who had paused politely to wait for Simone, who for a moment couldn’t move.

All three of them dragged their feet through the slimy pebbles at a far more leisurely pace than the drizzly weather might have suggested. There was nowhere they wanted to go, nowhere they wanted to be. The drafty house held no more appeal than the slushy driveway.

They had almost reached the front door when George announced, “I have a note from school.”