Primitive People (20 page)

Geoffrey spun the wheels several times to prove he hadn’t forgotten. Shelly, ever the hostess, raked up the embers of conversation. “Lord, Simone, I don’t think I’ve seen you since that unspeakable wedding. Have you ever been subjected to more grotesque excesses? I have never seen such pretension, such false camaraderie. A woman I’d never met in my life said, ‘We’ve got to have lunch and catch up.’ The part I liked best was watching the Count during the service in the stable. Didn’t you think he was eyeing the stallion and imagining the bride and groom and himself and the horse in a double-ring ceremony?”

George said, “In school our science teacher brought in a horse’s heart, and we all took turns holding it in our hands and passing it around the room. It was rubbery and gross.”

Shelly said, “I see Georgie has inherited his conversational style from his mother.” She raised one petite leather-gloved hand for attention and said, “While we’re on the subject of biological hearts—if that’s what subject we’re on—let me tell you children something that happened when I was your age.

“My dad was a doctor, and when I was—I don’t know, ten or so—he brought a dead person’s heart home from the autopsy room. He carried it in a fried-chicken bucket and dumped it out in the bathroom sink. I remember my sister and I crowding into the bathroom while he held up the heart and showed us how it functioned. I mean, how it
used
to function. It wasn’t working so well right then.”

They waited for the rest of the story, but it seemed to be over. Shelly had just wanted to mention the heart in her bathroom sink. Geoffrey was smiling and, Simone observed, regarding Shelly with admiration. Shelly’s story had made her sound gutsy and un-squeamish, the way Inez sounded when she told intimate anecdotes about her lovers: the dangerous places they made love and what items of clothing she wasn’t wearing. One old man had had a fatal heart attack lying on top of Inez, who repeated some very frank details about how she realized he was dead.

This was something else that women—certain women—knew how to do: to talk daringly about unpleasant things and make men think right away of sex. And yet when she, Simone, had told Emile about the body on the sidewalk, her story had been only about death and not at all about sex. She could not make that corpse work for her like flashy jewelry. It lay on the street with its organs out and refused to perform, refused to make her seem like a bad girl who would do bad things with men.

Geoffrey said, “From what I hear, Haiti offered daily opportunities to see the freshly dead human heart beating right in your own front yard.”

Simone had to stop and tell herself: There was no way Geoffrey could know this. Emile was the only person Simone had told about the corpse since she’d left Port-au-Prince. Geoffrey must mean some body or bodies he’d seen in a news report. He meant it happened to everyone. It was a Haitian daily event.

“Poor Simone!” Shelly said. “She looks totally blown away. We can’t expect her to sit here and discuss the tragedy of her homeland as if it were cocktail party chitchat.”

Simone felt taken care of, grateful, almost safe. But seconds later she thought: Wasn’t it Shelly who told Rosemary about Duvalier’s testicle-eating dwarf? Shelly wasn’t protecting her but establishing dominance, showing that she had the power to dole out loyalty and kindness, to guard Simone’s tender feelings, to prove that she was sensitive and could watch out for someone else. Or perhaps it was Geoffrey whom Shelly was trying to shield—to safeguard from whatever engaging thing Simone might have been about to say.

Shelly turned and gave Simone a look of compassion and utter triumph, a look that reveled and gloried in female competition the way the facial expressions of certain athletes celebrate effort and strain.

Shelly said, “Isn’t it wonderful how globally conscious Geoffrey is?” Her face told Simone: This is perpetual war. I am not to be trusted.

Simone recalled how Rosemary had warned her about Southern women, but now, now that she thought of it, she remembered that look on Inez. She had chosen not to see it, or had confused it with friendship. When Simone first starting going with Joseph, she told everything to Inez. Inez, they both acknowledged, was the expert on love, and inevitably she felt challenged to test her expertise on Simone’s lover.

Shelly said, “You know, Simone, I’ve always felt that you and I were alike.” Simone could only stare at her. Whatever did she mean? And what was Simone doing making small talk in a stranded car with Rosemary’s husband, Rosemary’s children, Rosemary’s alleged best friend? If Rosemary died today, these were the people who would bury her.

A wave of sympathy and fellow feeling for Rosemary nearly bowled Simone over. When, at what point in these last months, had Rosemary become her friend?

“I think we should get going,” Simone managed to say. The others turned and looked at her—accusingly, she thought, because the last to arrive had been the first to suggest they leave. She had not been stuck here, as they had, but already she was cracking. The children were desperate to get out—Simone felt it in their bodies. But they couldn’t or wouldn’t say so; besides, it was warm in the car. They had miles to go in Rosemary’s Volvo, and there was always the danger that they might get stuck again, stranded in a smaller vehicle on a lonelier stretch of road.

Finally Shelly yawned and said, “I completely agree with Simone. If we’ve exhausted the subject of corpse hearts, we should take this zoo on the road.”

That day the Volvo was Simone’s car. She had claimed it by driving it ten miles through the snowstorm. But Geoffrey got in on the driver’s side and Shelly sat beside him, and Simone and the children climbed into the back.

Simone had left the keys in the car, so Geoffrey didn’t have to ask for them and risk making them self-conscious about what had been automatic—Geoffrey assuming command control with Shelly as his co-pilot. Simone felt she had joined the children in their private back-seat world, from which they eavesdropped on the adults making plans as if they weren’t present.

Shelly repeatedly pointed out that Geoffrey’s house was much closer than hers, and at last Geoffrey took a gulping breath and said into the mirror, “I think the smartest thing, kids, would be to go over to my place so I can make some calls. You guys can wait out the worst of the storm. After that, I can either run you home, or Simone can drive you.”

How easily he suggested this after all those months of overexplaining why it made no sense for Simone to ever go to his house. Now, of course, Simone realized what he’d been worried about, and it struck her that once again she’d gotten everything backward. She had envisioned the corpses of the pirates’ wives stacked against the wall, when probably what Geoffrey was hiding was Shelly’s toothbrush and shampoo.

As they pulled away from the Land Rover, Maisie waved goodbye at it out the window. “Stay warm, Land Rover,” she said.

“How was your day?” asked Simone, and George answered, “Good,” a word he had managed, with practice, to rid of any affect or meaning.

“We went to the mall,” said Maisie. “We saw this stupid Christmas show. All the kids from this stupid tap-dancing school were dressed up as reindeer.”

“I was stunned,” said Geoffrey. “George liked it better than Maisie.”

Shelly said, “Maybe Maisie might like to study tap.”

Simone cringed at Shelly’s crude attempt at seducing Maisie, and her heart sank when Maisie smiled and said, “Great!”

“That might be just what Maisie needs,” Geoffrey told Simone.

“Yes,” Simone agreed bleakly.

It was vital that Geoffrey stop talking so he could watch the road. Several times they skidded, and Shelly made a sound like bacon frying in a pan.

Geoffrey said, “Shelly, please don’t hiss. I’ve told you it doesn’t help.” After that, Simone and the children were careful about how they breathed.

“Almost there!” Geoffrey said heartily, several times before they almost were.

Finally Geoffrey pulled the Volvo into a driveway and stopped and said, “Let’s hike.”

“I don’t have the shoes for this,” Shelly complained, but no one paid attention. Geoffrey got out and began to slog through the snow; Simone and the children followed. Shelly’s short black boots had high heels on which she wobbled dangerously, and she soon lagged way behind the others.

“I haven’t had this much fun since the Gulag!” Shelly’s high-pitched, brittle cry sliced through the hush of the snow.

Geoffrey looked back at Shelly. You could see him torn between the desire to run and help her and some strange hesitance about seeming solicitous in front of his children and Simone. Or was he perversely enjoying seeing Shelly helpless? In the end, the forces of chivalry lost and Geoffrey plunged ahead.

“Take your time!” he called back to Shelly. “I’m bushwhacking us a path!”

Simone paused and watched Shelly struggle to catch up, her blond head plunging and rising. Simone couldn’t even pretend to herself that Shelly’s misery didn’t please her. She had never wanted to feel this way about another human being. But if she and Shelly were in some sort of war, it was Shelly who had begun it.

Finally they reached a clearing surrounding a little shack. Surely Geoffrey didn’t inhabit this run-down cabin covered with shredding tar paper and chipped asbestos shingle.

“Camouflage,” Geoffrey told Simone as they neared the sagging front porch. “Clever, no? For me the fear of a break-in back here is just not a problem. This is exactly the sort of lesson my ancestors should have learned from the Indians, instead of which they went for the ostentation that’s going to explode in their faces. I mean, when the revolution comes and the urban poor rise up and Rosemary’s château gets sacked and burned, I’ll be sitting pretty here in my Tobacco Road hovel. My God, I sound like that creepy groom at that awful wedding.”

“Who’s going to sack and burn Mom’s house?” said George.

“No one,” said Geoffrey. “Or at least not now. Not while you and Maisie are in it.”

But only when Simone walked inside did she understand what camouflage meant in this case: the interior was so imposing, so unexpectedly grandiose, that she reflexively looked up to check the massive support beams. On the floor and folded over the rafters were exquisite Indian rugs; still others hung, like drying laundry, from a wooden rack. Rich woods and leathers were everywhere—some tanned, some still covered with hair.

Simone couldn’t imagine a man creating this for himself. She thought of Joseph’s bare studio—the Coleman stove, the camp bed, the Manet painting on the wall. She knew with the force of a revelation that Geoffrey had had help.

Then Simone understood the real reason he’d never let her come here. It was not about dead bodies, incest, or evil or, really, about sex, or anything so intimate as a woman’s toothbrush and shampoo. It was a modern secret: interior decorating. Shelly had decorated Geoffrey’s place and he must have thought that when Simone saw it she’d jump to the wrong—or right—conclusions.

Oh, the poor children! The implications struck Simone again, more forcibly than in the car. How long had they known their father was involved with their mother’s best friend? Now Simone understood their melancholy preoccupation, their air of carrying some guilty secret, the burden she’d mistaken for the normal weight of family trouble and divorce.

Simone wondered how long Shelly and Geoffrey had been lovers. First, she suspected, he’d hired Shelly to decorate his house. Then their romance started—probably around Thanksgiving. It occurred to her that this was what she had seen from across the tent at the wedding when Shelly was supposedly making sure Geoffrey left Rosemary alone. Once again Simone had misread the situation, mistaken Shelly and Geoffrey for warring creatures when actually they were mating.

Poor Rosemary, Simone thought. Pitying Rosemary was simpler than facing the fact that Simone pitied herself. You would think she was in love with Geoffrey and had expected something to happen between them, when in fact he was only a man she’d liked thinking about from time to time. It was absurd that the loss of that should seem so serious and so painful. Only now, too late, did she wonder if she’d missed some vital cue. That day they’d danced to the jukebox—the memory made Simone want to weep. Was there something she could have said or done that would have made something happen between them? Probably, at some equivalent moment, Shelly had just snapped up Geoffrey, and now Simone had her principles while Shelly had Geoffrey—and Kenny! Once more another woman had proved to be less high-minded. You had to believe that look on their faces that warned you it was war.

From the children’s point of view, of course, none of this made any difference. All that counted was that Geoffrey and Shelly had a long-standing connection. When interior decoration had turned to romance really didn’t matter compared to the fact that the children knew, and knew that their mother did not. It was amazing and not surprising at all that children could keep such a secret. Because when Rosemary discovered it, their whole world would unravel.

At Geoffrey’s door they turned and watched Shelly struggle up behind them, nearly slipping and catching herself and making grotesque faces. It was at once polite and cruel of Simone and the children to stop and wait and witness every misstep of Shelly’s tortuous progress.

The minute her foot touched the doorstep, she was restored to her normal self. “Children! Take off your shoes and leave them outside—I had this floor redone twice! I spent days in some dump of a Santa Fe bed-and-breakfast talking one savvy Navajo squaw down on the price of those rugs. Give me your coats!”

As she took Simone’s jacket, Shelly’s mouth puckered with concern. “Simone, you look frozen! Let me get you some brandy!”

When Simone took the first sip from the snifter, she noticed that she was still slightly tipsy from drinking with Rosemary this afternoon. How could she have made that drive in this impaired condition? How could she have done it any other way?

When Geoffrey stepped out to get logs for the wood stove, Shelly drew Simone’s attention to her decorating triumph.

“Isn’t this place a gas?” she said. “Altogether the perfect spot for a wealthy cowpoke to lay his head. The basic design principle is that all these grown men are still little boys who still want to play Lone Ranger. Hi-yo, Silver. Giddy-up and away.”