Primitive People Read Online Free PDF

though with the sharp little teeth and trembly nerves of tiny overbred dogs. She kissed Rosemary as if this were a gesture whose irony she would appreciate, as if they were little girls dressed up, mimicking their mothers.
    “Rosemary!” said Shelly. “That coat is a classic! You look like an Eskimo shaman!”
    “I live in this coat,” said Rosemary. “I wear it in the studio. Actually, it is a classic. I found it in the closet I put it in, circa 1967. If the sunlight hits it, it’ll shatter like glass. They say the sixties are coming back and I for one am thrilled. I haven’t had anything this comfortable for, oh my God, twenty-five years.”
    “Wear that in Manhattan,” Shelly said, “and you get spray-painted as an eco-criminal.”
    “And they’re right,” Rosemary said. “I just think there should be allowances for animals that were dead before anyone knew there was a problem. This is Simone. She lives with us and helps take care of George and Maisie.”
    As Shelly coolly appraised Simone with an almost consumerlike interest, Rosemary pleaded, “Help me, Shelly. I’ve been going insane. Whom does Simone look like?”
    Shelly said, “I can’t believe the scene you’ve got here. Fabulously Gone with the Wind. Well, it’s always something. Did I tell you about that client of mine who hired a babysitter named Lolita. A babysitter named Lolita!”
    “As far as Geoffrey was concerned,” Rosemary said, “they were all named Lolita.” She paused and after a deep sigh said, “Simone’s from Haiti. Shelly’s an interior decorator.”
    “Haiti,” mused Shelly. “Sequined voodoo flags. And of course those great naïve paintings. But that lasted about a month or so, and then you couldn’t unload Haitian primitive. Everyone just fled back to fabulous fifties or English country chintz.” With evident pain, Shelly regarded a monumental oak hutch. “God, Rosemary, I wish you’d let me do something with this place. A little white paint and some cheap track lighting—just as a public service.”
    “My fiancé is a painter in Haiti,” said Simone. “He sells to foreign collectors from Europe and the U.S.” But Joseph was no longer her fiancé and no longer sold to foreign tourists. Why had she told this lie, unasked, in the midst of a whole other conversation? Why, despite Emile’s warnings and her own better judgment, had she volunteered this information that could provoke further questions which might lead from Joseph to Emile and straight to the INS?
    It was surprising how little Rosemary had tried to find out about Simone before turning her children over to someone who, for all she knew, might be a former tonton macoute come over in a rowboat. What kind of mother sent her children out with a caregiver who couldn’t drive? Well, Emile had said to keep quiet, and it helped, Simone found, that the level of curiosity here was so dependably low—not from politeness or reserve or reluctance to appear nosy so much as from lack of interest in how others lived. How foolish to let Shelly and Rosemary call this out in her now: the urge to boast and impress them with her artist fiancé.
    Perhaps showing off was contagious—people here did it so often. All Simone had to do was walk into the room for someone to start talking, though they rarely spoke directly to her or expected a reply, so that it seemed that any response would be impolite and disruptive. They said to her what they would have said were they all alone in a room, but without the constraint and self-consciousness they might feel, talking to themselves.
    Consolingly, this drew Simone closer to the children, whom, she observed, were usually spoken to in exactly the same way. Also, it was helping her absorb the culture more quickly; Miss McCaffrey used to say that to adapt to another country you had to be all eyes and ears, and that the mistake most diplomats made was to be all mouth and larynx. Certainly this was true of Bill Webb, talking