Tales of Two Americas Read online

  “À la vie.” She chose to toast him in French. “To life,” she then added. Though there might not be much life left.

  ■ ■

  That afternoon, Blaise called back to tell Elsie that Olivia’s mother had heard from her kidnappers. The mother had asked to speak to Olivia but her captors refused to put her on the phone.

  “They want fifty thousand.” Blaise spoke in such a rapid nasal voice that Elsie had to ask him to repeat the figure.

  “American dollars?” she asked, just to be sure.

  She imagined him nodding by slowly moving his egg-shaped head up and down as he answered, “Wi.”

  “Of course her mother doesn’t have it,” Blaise said. “These are not rich people. Everyone says we should negotiate. Can maybe get it down to ten. I could try to borrow that.”

  For just a second, Elsie imagined him meaning ten dollars, which would have made things easier. Ten dollars and her old friend and rival would be free. Her ex-husband would stop calling and interrupting her at work. He, of course, meant ten thousand American dollars.

  “Jesus, Marie, Joseph,” Elsie mumbled a brief prayer under her breath. “I’m sorry,” she told Blaise.

  “This is hell.” He sounded almost too calm now. She wasn’t surprised because he was always subdued by worry. Weeks after he was kicked out of the popular konpa band he’d founded and had been the lead singer of, he did nothing but stay home and stare into space whenever she tried to talk to him. Then too he had been exceedingly calm.

  ■ ■

  Elsie’s former friend Olivia was seductive. Everyone who ever met her acknowledged it. Chestnut colored, with a massive head of hair that she always wore in a gelled bun, Olivia was beautiful. But what Elsie had first noticed about her when they’d first met was her ambition. Olivia was Elsie’s age, but was a lot more outgoing and charming. She liked to touch people on either the arm, back, or shoulder while talking to them, whether they were patients, doctors, nurses, or other nurses’ aides. No one seemed to mind, though, her touch becoming something not just anticipated or welcomed but yearned for. Olivia was one of the most popular certified nurses’ aides at the agency that assigned them work. Because of her good looks and near-perfect mastery of textbook English, she often got assigned the easiest patients in the most upscale neighborhoods.

  Elsie and Olivia had met at a two-week refresher course for home attendants and upon completion of the course had gravitated toward each other. Whenever possible, they’d asked their agency to assign them the same group homes, where they mostly cared for bedridden elderly patients. At night when their wards were well medicated and asleep, they’d stay up and gossip in hushed tones, judging and condemning their patients’ children and grandchildren, whose images were framed near bottles of medicine on bedside tables, but whose voices they rarely heard on the phone and whose faces they hardly ever saw in person.

  ■ ■

  The next morning Elsie brought Gaspard his toothbrush and toothpaste and helped him change out of his pajamas into the now too-small slacks and shirt he insisted on wearing in bed during the day. Just as he had every morning for the last week or so, he reached over and ran his coarse fingertips across Elsie’s high cheekbones and whispered, “Elsie, my flower, I think I’m at the end.”

  Compared to some mornings, when Gaspard would stop to rest even while gargling, he seemed rather stable. His entire body was swelling up, though, blending his features in a way that made him look less and less singular all the time. Soon, Elsie feared, his face might become like an ever darkening balloon that someone had just drawn a few translucent dots on. Much to Elsie’s and his daughter’s dismay, Gaspard was still refusing dialysis, which was the only thing that might help.

  “Where’s Nana?” he asked, using his nickname for his daughter.

  The daughter was still sleeping in her old bedroom, whose walls were draped from floor to ceiling with sheer white fabric that the daughter purposely opened the windows to let flow in the early morning April breeze. Elsie knew little about the daughter except that she was living in New York, where she worked for a famous beauty company, designing labels for soaps, skin creams, and lotions that filled every shelf of every cabinet of every bathroom in the house. She was unmarried and had no children and had been a beauty queen at some point, judging from the pictures around the house in which she was wearing sequined gowns and bikinis with sashes across her body. In one of those pictures, she was Miss Haiti-America, whatever that was.

  Elsie had also gathered from pieces of overhead conversations that some years ago, Gaspard’s wife, his daughter’s mother, had divorced him and moved back to Haiti. (“My wife took two good kidneys with her,” she’d once heard Gaspard tell a friend on the phone.) The daughter was willing to donate one of her kidneys to him, but Gaspard refused to even consider it.

  Sometimes Gaspard would also share a few things with Elsie, to explain, she suspected, why his daughter couldn’t leave the city she’d been living in since college and move back to Miami to take care of him. He would often add, when his daughter showed up on Friday nights and left on Sunday afternoons, that his daughter was living the life he and her mother had always dreamed of for their only child, a free life where she earned enough money to never want for anything from anyone.

  “I don’t want you to think she’s deserting me, like a lot of people forget their old people here,” he said.

  “But she’s here often enough, Mesye Gaspard,” Elsie had said. “That’s what counts.”

  Aside from his daughter, he hated having visitors. He minced no words in telling the people who called him, especially the clients and other accountants he’d worked with at his tax-preparation/multiservice business, that he wanted none of them to see him the way he was.

  The daughter walked to Gaspard’s room as soon as she woke up. In order to avoid tiring him, they didn’t speak much, but for the better part of the morning, she read to him from an old Haitian novel with a prescient title, L’Espace d’un cillement (In the Flicker of an Eyelid).

  ■ ■

  Blaise called once more that afternoon as Elsie was preparing a palm hearts and avocado salad that Gaspard had especially requested. It was something his wife used to prepare for him, he said, something he now wanted to share with his daughter, who this time would be spending an entire week with him.

  “I think they hurt her, Elsie,” Blaise said. His speech was garbled and slow, as though he’d just woken up from a deep sleep.

  “Why do you think that?” Elsie asked. Her thumb accidentally slipped across the blade of the knife she was using to slice the palm hearts. She squeezed the edge of the wound with her teeth, the sweet taste of her own blood filling her mouth.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “I can feel it. You know she won’t give in easily. She’ll fight.”

  The night Olivia and Blaise met, Elsie had taken her to see Blaise’s band, Kajou, play at Dede’s Night Club in Little Haiti. The place was owned by Luca Dede, a man in his late forties but who had a teenager’s face, a Haitian of partial Ghanaian origin whose maternal line was, like Elsie’s family, from the southern town of Les Cayes. Luca Dede’s music promoter father had discovered Blaise in Port-au-Prince and had gotten him a visa to tour the United States. Blaise overstayed his visa, kept playing, and never went back to Haiti. Elsie was so used to going to Dede’s, Blaise’s most consistent gig, that she didn’t even bother dressing up that night. She chose instead to wear a buttoned-up white shirt and a pair of casual dark slacks as though she were going to an office. Hungry for a night out, Olivia wore a too-tight, sequined cocktail dress that she’d bought in a thrift shop.

  “It was the most soiree thing they had,” Olivia said when Elsie met her at the entrance. “They didn’t have one, but I wanted a red dress. I wanted fire. I wanted blood.”

  “You need a man,” Elsie said.

  “Correct,” Olivia said,
tilting her body forward on five-inch heels to plant a kiss on Elsie’s cheek. Though they’d known each other for a while, it was the first time Olivia had greeted her with a kiss, rather than one of her usual intimate-feeling touches. They were out to have fun, away from their ordinary cage of sickness and death. Perhaps Olivia was simply celebrating that.

  Being with Olivia that night gained Elsie a few glances from several men, including Luca Dede. Minding the bar as usual, Dede sent winks and drinks their way until it was clear that Olivia had only a passing interest in him. While Elsie didn’t dance that night, Olivia danced with every man who trotted over to their table and held out a hand to her. Several rum punches later, Olivia even got up between sets, and on a dare from Dede, sang, in a surprisingly pitch-perfect voice, the Haitian national anthem. Olivia got a standing ovation. The crowd whistled and hooted and Elsie couldn’t help noticing that, his voice magnified by the microphone Olivia had just returned to him, her husband cheered loudest of all.

  “I’ll put her in the band,” he hollered.

  “Make her president,” Dede echoed from the bar.

  Three years before, Elsie and Blaise had met more quietly, but also at Dede’s. She too had walked into Dede’s with a friend, an old school friend from Haiti, the head of the agency who’d helped her get her visa to the United States, mentored her through her qualifying exams, hired her, and put her up until she was able to live on her own. Her friend had since moved to Atlanta to start another business there, but introducing her to Blaise was one of the many ways she’d tried to make sure Elsie wasn’t alone.

  That night Elsie had heard Blaise sing with Kajou for the first time. She was not impressed. Blaise and his band sounded like every other konpa band out there, repeating the same bubbly beats and endlessly urging everyone to raise their hands up in the air. He would later tell her that it was her look of disinterest, and even disdain, that had drawn him to her.

  “You seemed like the only woman in the room I couldn’t seduce,” he said, while sliding into the empty chair next to her and ordering them rum sours after the show. He could never pass up a challenge.

  ■ ■

  “I got a couple of loans,” Blaise announced when he called yet once again a few hours later. His voice cracked and he stuttered and Elsie wondered if he’d been crying.

  “I have forty-five hundred now,” he added. “Do you think they’ll accept that?”

  “Are you going to send the money just like that?” Elsie asked.

  “I think I’ll bring it,” he said, sounding as though he hadn’t quite made up his mind. “I think I’ll get on the plane once I have all the money and bring it myself.”

  “What if they take you too?” Elsie’s level of concern shocked even her. Selfishly, she wondered who would be called if he were kidnapped. Like her, he didn’t have any family in Miami. The closest thing he had were Dede and the bandmates, who’d parted company with him over money problems he’d refused to discuss with her. Maybe that’s why he’d left her for Olivia. Olivia would have insisted on knowing exactly what had happened with the band and why. Olivia might have tried to fix it, so he could keep playing at all cost. Olivia probably believed, just as he did, that he needed all his time for his music, that working as a parking attendant during the day was spiritually razing him.

  “How do you know this isn’t some kind of plot to trick you out of your money?” Elsie asked.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “She’d never go this long without calling me.”

  “You would know,” Elsie said.

  It was something she’d said to him before, when she’d desperately tried to hide her jealousy with mock suspicion.

  Soon after Olivia met Blaise, Olivia would also reach up to kiss his cheeks the way she had Elsie’s. At first Elsie had ignored this, however every once in a while she would bring it to their attention in a jokey way by saying something like, “Watch out, sister, that’s my man.” From her experience working with the weak and the sick, she’d learned that the disease you ignore is the one that kills you, so she tried her best to have everything out in the open.

  Whenever Blaise asked her to invite Olivia to his gigs, she always obliged because she also enjoyed Olivia’s company outside of work. And when the band broke up and he was no longer singing at Dede’s or anywhere else, the three of them would go out together to shop for groceries or see a movie, and even attend Sunday morning Mass at Notre Dame Catholic Church. They were soon like a trio of siblings, of whom Olivia was the dosa, the last, untwinned, or surplus, child.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called before all this.” Blaise spoke now as though they were simply engaged in the dawdling pillow talk Elsie had once so enjoyed during their six-year marriage. “I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”

  “That’s how it goes with the quick divorce, non?” she said.

  She was waiting for him to say something else about Olivia. He was slow at parceling out news. It had taken him months to inform her that he was leaving her for Olivia. Perhaps it would have been easier to accept had he simply blurted something out that first night he’d seen Olivia at Dede’s. Then she wouldn’t have spent so much time reviewing every moment the three of them had spent together, wondering whether they’d winked behind her back during Mass or smirked as she lay between them in the grass after their Saturday afternoon outings to watch him play soccer in the Little Haiti soccer park.

  “Anything new?” she asked suddenly, wanting to shorten their talk.

  “They called me directly.” She could hear him swallow hard. Her ears had grown accustomed to that kind of effortful gulp from working with Gaspard and others. “Vòlè yo.” The thieves.

  “What did they sound like?” She wanted to know everything he knew so she could form a lucid image in her own mind, a shadow play identical to his.

  “I think they were boys, men. I wasn’t recording,” he said, sounding annoyed.

  “Did you ask to speak to her?”

  “They wouldn’t let me,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Do you think I’m in their heads and know what they’re thinking?”

  “Did you insist?”

  “Don’t you think I would?”

  “I’m sure you did—”

  “They’re in control, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you do.”

  “I do,” she conceded, “but did you tell them you wouldn’t send money unless you speak to her? Maybe they don’t have her anymore. You said it yourself. She would fight. Maybe she escaped.”

  “Don’t you think I’d ask to speak to my own woman?” he shouted.

  The way he spat this out irritated her. Woman? His own woman? He had never been the kind of man who called any woman his. At least not out loud. Maybe his phantom music career had secretly made him think that all women were his. He’d never yelled at her either. They had rarely fought, both of them keeping their quiet resentments, irritations, and boredom close to the chest. She now hated him for shouting. She hated them both.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, calming down. “They didn’t speak to me for very long. They just told me to start planning her funeral if I don’t send at least ten thousand by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Just then she heard Gaspard’s daughter call out from the other room. “Elsie, can you come here, please?” The daughter’s voice was laden with the permanent weariness of those who love the seriously ill.

  “Please call me later,” she told Blaise and hung up.

  ■ ■

  When Elsie got to Gaspard’s room, the daughter was sitting there with the same book on her lap. She’d once again been reading to her father when Elsie had slipped away with the intention of stacking the dishwasher with the lunch plates, but ended up answering Blaise’s call instead.

  “Elsie,” the daughter s
aid, as her father pushed his head farther back into the pillows. His fists were clenched in stoic agony, his eyes closed. His face was sweaty and he seemed to have been coughing. The daughter raised the oxygen mask over his nose and turned on the compressor, which had just been delivered that morning, and whose sound made it harder for Elsie to hear.

  “Elsie, I’m sorry,” the daughter said to her in Creole. “I’m not here all the time. I don’t know how you function normally, but I’m really concerned about how much time you spend on the phone.”

  Elsie didn’t want to explain why she was talking on the phone but quickly decided she had to. Not only because she thought the daughter was right, that Gaspard deserved more of her attention, but also because she had no one else to turn to for advice. Her friend in Atlanta had tried to stay out of her separation and divorce, and, perhaps seduced by Olivia, had stopped returning her calls. And so she told Gaspard and his daughter why she had been taking these calls and why the calls were so frequent, except she modified a few crucial details. Because she was still embarrassed by the actual facts, she told them Olivia was her sister and Blaise her brother-in-law.

  “I’m very sorry, Elsie.” The daughter immediately softened. Gaspard opened his eyes and held out his hand toward Elsie. Elsie grabbed his fingers the way she did sometimes to help him rise to his feet.

  “Do you want to go home?” Gaspard asked in an increasingly raspy voice. “We can get the agency to send someone else.”

  “I’m not in her head, Papa,” the daughter said, sounding much younger when she spoke in Creole than she did in English, “but I think working is best. Paying off these types of ransoms can ruin a person financially.”

  “It’s better not to wait.” Gaspard said, still trying to catch his breath. “The less time your sister spends with these malfetè, the better off she’ll be.”

  Gaspard turned his face toward his daughter for final approval and the daughter yielded and nodded in agreement.

  “If you want to save your sister,” Gaspard said with an even more winded voice now, “you may have to give in.”