Tales of Two Americas Read online

  “So she’s alive?” she asked.

  “Oh, he told you she was dead?” Dede said, putting down the glass he was holding.

  “She’s not dead?” she asked again, just to be sure.

  “They took turns, I suppose,” he said. “She called to tell me he was kidnapped, then she told me he was dead, until I heard different.”

  She grasped for a few more words but could find none. How could she have let herself be fooled, robbed, so easily? How could she have been so naïve, so stupid? Maybe it had something to do with Gaspard being so sick that week, with the possibility of his dying and his daughter being there to see it happen. She had been distracted.

  Blaise and Olivia must have trained or practiced for weeks, to take more and more away from her, to strip her of both her money and her dignity. They also must have been convincing to the point that no one could even doubt them. They had fooled Dede too.

  “I guess we’re both Boukis,” she finally said. “Imbeciles.”

  “Suckers, idiots,” he added, wiping the insides of the glasses harder. “I’d understand if they were starving and couldn’t make money any other way, but they decided to become criminals so they can go back to Haiti and live the good life.”

  “It’s not right,” she said, though nothing felt right anymore.

  They were interrupted by some drink orders from another waitress. Dede worked silently filling the orders, then, when he was done, he said, “I promise you. They’re not going to enjoy all the money they stole from me.”

  “You’re going to have them killed?” she asked.

  “Maybe not killed.” He seemed surprised at how casually she uttered the words.

  “Would you hurt them?” She heard the pleading tone in her voice, as though she were begging for their execution.

  “You should want them dead,” he reassured her. “At least he didn’t marry me.”

  “She might have married you,” Elsie said.

  “Clearly I wasn’t her type. Wasn’t enough for her. Your husband was.”

  She was asking herself now why he had married her. There were other women with a lot more money than she had, women who could have gotten him his papers faster. Maybe he was hoping she would commit a crime, steal one of her richer patients’ life savings for him. She was glad Gaspard’s daughter was there that week, otherwise Blaise might have possibly talked her into stealing from him, or even killing him. Who knows?

  “What would you do if you went to Haiti and found them?” she asked, while considering the possibility herself.

  “I’d give them a chance to pay me back first.” He grabbed a bottle of rum from the mirrored table behind him and pushed one of the glasses he’d been cleaning toward her. She demurred at first, waving it away, but then she realized that she wanted to keep talking to him. She also wanted to keep talking about Olivia and Blaise, and he was the only person she could talk to about them now.

  “What would you do to her first?” he asked her.

  “I’d shave her head,” she said, without even giving it much thought. “I’d shave off that head of hair she gelled so much.”

  “That’s all?” he asked, laughing.

  After taking a gulp of the rum, she said, “That’s not all. After shaving her head and cutting off all his fingers, I’d pound both their heads with a very big rock until their brains were liquid, like this drink now in my hand.”

  “Wouy! That’s too much,” he said, pouring himself a glass. “I never want you mad at me.”

  “What would you do?” she asked him.

  “The stuff they do to the terrorists. The stuff with water I saw in a movie the other night. I’d wrap their heads with a sugar sack and pour water in their noses and make them think they’re drowning. And I wouldn’t do that to just them. I’d get all the other thieves who steal from people like us—”

  “The Boukis. The naïve people.”

  “Again, I’d understand if he was broke or she was starving,” he said.

  “The more money they have, the greedier they are,” she said, feeling herself drifting away from Blaise and Olivia and slipping into some larger discussion about thieving and justice that she didn’t have the energy to pursue.

  “Your revenge would be better than mine,” she said, circling back to Olivia and Blaise. “Those two would suffer a lot more with you.”

  It was also not the first time he had been burned. Once, a seemingly-pregnant woman walked into the bar in the middle of the afternoon. She pretended to suddenly go into labor, and while he was looking for his cell phone to call an ambulance, she pulled out a gun and forced him to empty the cash register. He was bringing up that robbery now, saying he preferred that, being confronted face-to-face, to being robbed behind his back.

  “This situation is not ending the same way,” he said, his voice growing louder and the pace at which he was speaking becoming faster. “I’m not turning this one over to the police to just drop. And what police? The Haitian police?”

  She was thinking about going to a police station near her house and filing a report, in case Blaise and Olivia ever decided to move back to Miami. But how embarrassing would that be? She imagined the police calling her stupid or even lovestruck. They might even laugh behind her back. She had willingly given that money to Blaise anyway. She didn’t think it would do her much good either.

  “That’s why I’m having them caught myself,” Dede was saying. “For you, for me, and for everyone else they did this to. Even if it’s the last thing I do before I die. Believe me, you’re going to start dreaming about killing them more and more from now on.”

  She hoped not. She would rather think ahead, though she wasn’t sure anymore what lay ahead. She was glad Gaspard was still alive, that he had not died in her care. She wanted to keep moving, keep working. Alive or dead, neither Blaise nor Olivia was going to be part of her life anymore.

  The details. They’d been so good at the details. Whose idea had it been, for example, to tell her that Olivia had written her name, like a tattoo, at the bottom of her feet? They might have also told her that Olivia had drawn a cross there too, as a symbol that she wanted a Christian burial. That last call, she realized, was to make sure she wasn’t coming to the supposed funeral.

  Dede poured her another glass of rum. Then another. And even as the news of Olivia being alive slowly began to sink in, she was surprised that a kind of grief she hadn’t lingered on was now actually lifting, that a distant ache in her heart was slowly turning to relief. She wanted to fight that relief. She did not want to welcome, embrace, the slight reprieve she’d felt she’d been given in learning that someone she believed to be dead was now alive, as though Olivia had been resurrected after a week under the ground.

  She now felt tears flowing down her face, tears she couldn’t stop. She didn’t want them to be tears of joy, but a few of them were. The country seemed a bit less scary now. Her parents and sister, whom she’d gone back to speaking to more regularly, seemed like they might be in less danger, say, from being kidnapped. Yet the tears kept flowing. Tears of anger too. Of being robbed of money that took years to save, of seeing her dream of owning the white house in North Miami disappear along with the children that, thankfully, they’d never have. She felt even more alone now than before she’d met either Blaise or Olivia, lonelier than when she’d just arrived in this country having only one friend.

  Dede kept his eyes on her, but they were now filled with more concern than lust. Her tears were becoming moans then grunts, then, before she could fight her screams, a new revenge fantasy emerged. She was now wishing that her voice alone could destroy Dede’s place, that it could smash the glass bottles and turn them into shards. Her screech, her bawl, which was coming from so deep inside that she felt as though it were raising her off the ground, would help her float above Dede’s head, above the permanent drunks in the booths, and the college st
udents, and the empty stage that Blaise had so often sung on, all of it shattering so fast and blending into the air so quickly that she could easily inhale it and bury it inside her body.

  “I’ll take you home,” she heard Dede say, and the next thing she knew she was curled up in a ball in the backseat of his car, the same old black Mercedes he’d had for years, and which she thought was no longer working until he was heading down what, between opening and closing her eyes, she recognized as North Miami Avenue. He had somehow managed to obtain her address from her, or maybe, she thought, smiling, he had known it all along.

  “You’re living in North Miami now?” she heard him say.

  She was talking to him in her head, but no words came out of her mouth, which felt like it was full of vomit. Yes, she was living in North Miami, in the house of her dreams, but not in the way she’d intended. Soon after Blaise moved out, she’d driven by the house, and, unlike every other night she’d stopped by, there were lights on. Replacing the For Sale sign was now a rental sign for the one-room efficiency in the back. She saw this as a kind of miracle, a sign that she was truly meant to live there.

  The new owners were young doctors from Jamaica and they told her they were happy to have her. Having her own separate entrance made it easy for her to make herself scarce. They often left her notes inviting her to dinner at the main house, but she was always working and was barely around. She sensed that they were being friendly because they felt sorry for her since she seemed to have no one. She was resisting becoming friends with them. She no longer wanted to make friends.

  When they reached the house, she handed Dede the keys and he somehow managed to open the door and hold her upright at the same time. She felt him cradle her as she stumbled to the bathroom and emptied out her stomach in the toilet. When he carried her to the twin bed across from the door, she felt as though she were flying, not the good kind of flight, but the kind where you’re tumbling through the air and terrified of crashing.

  On the bed, she felt herself slipping in and out, between half consciousness and a deep darkness in which Olivia and Blaise were waiting, like they had been waiting the night they’d all slept together. That night she had performed acts and said things she could no longer remember in detail. Maybe in the throes of passion she had even given them permission to be together. Maybe that’s why they’d both abandoned her.

  She kept opening her eyes to fight this image of the three of them, but particularly of her telling them to go off and be together, to go live out their love, because it was obviously what the two of them wanted. She was now the dosa, the surplus one.

  She felt a damp washcloth land gently on her forehead. Dede had made her a compress and was whispering comforting words in the air above her head. She could not make out most of the words, but after a long pause she heard him say, “You’re home now.”

  She nodded in agreement.

  “Yes, I’m home,” she managed to say.

  “Do you want me to stay?” he asked.

  Having him stay would calm her down, even if he just sat on the floor across the room and watched her sleep. But then she would still wake up in the morning feeling alone with her own losses and pain.

  “You can go,” she said, feeling a bit more confident now in her ability to speak.

  “You sure?” he asked, while stroking her cheeks with his index finger. His finger, wet and slow, felt as though it were carving a warm stream into her skin, a stream that was soaking up her whole body.

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “I wish I’d met you first,” he said, widening the circle he was now drawing with his finger on her face. “I wish I’d seen you first. I wish I’d known you first. I wish I’d loved you first.”

  “You sound like one of his stupid songs.” She stuttered through the words, not sure whether he would find them funny or insulting.

  “Those songs were stupid.” He chuckled, raising his hands over his mouth as if to suppress a deeper laugh. “The man was ruining a treasured kind of music and he didn’t even realize it. Or he didn’t care.”

  “Why did you tolerate him?” she asked.

  “Why did you?” he countered.

  “He had his charms,” she said, and he did. One of them was how he became very conversational before sex. Talking was his foreplay. He would ask her to recount her day to him. He would want to hear all about her patients, her thoughts, her dreams, as if to help him expand, or reinvent, the person he was about to make love to.

  “I tolerated him because he was my friend,” he said. “Because he was like a brother to me.”

  “You’re sounding like one of his songs again,” she said.

  “Maybe not all his songs were stupid,” he said. “Only people you care about can hurt you like he did.”

  “Only people you love,” she said.

  She didn’t realize that she had this many words left in her, and for Dede of all people. He was the one dragging these words out of her. He was making her speak. He was making her want to speak.

  “That will never happen to me again,” she said.

  “Maybe it won’t be him, but as long as you’re breathing you can be hurt.”

  “Now you’re just saying anything to say something,” she said.

  “Isn’t that what we’ve both been doing?”

  “Go,” she said.

  He raised the washcloth and kissed her wet forehead then put the washcloth back in place.

  “I need to close up the bar anyway,” he said. “But I have to tell you this one more thing and I hope you don’t take it badly.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I didn’t know you were such a weakling with the rum.”

  He laughed, this time loud and deep, and his laughter was not just keeping her from crashing but exuberantly filling the inside of her hollow-feeling head. She tried to laugh too, but wasn’t sure she was doing it. Instead, she started unbuttoning her blouse.

  “I’m not usually this weak,” she said.

  “Just tonight?” he asked.

  “Just tonight.”

  She surrendered.

  AMERICAN WORK

  Richard Russo

  BY THE TIME Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first novel, was published, he was already well known, thanks to the hugely popular Sketches by Boz. Still, the phenomenal success of Pickwick took both its author and its publisher by surprise. It’s a brilliant piece of work, and it remained G. K. Chesterton’s favorite among all of Dickens’s novels. But novels don’t exist in a vacuum, any more than success does, and Pickwick’s success is best understood in context, as the perfect book published at the perfect moment, a book about the emerging British working class that was being read and embraced by the same class, a novel that really took off—in terms of both art and commerce—with the introduction of Sam Weller, a working stiff who becomes both Mr. Pickwick’s valet and his moral compass. Mr. Pickwick is a gentleman, both educated and prosperous, but also detached from the reality of the new world order that resulted from the industrial revolution. In other words, an elite. He and the other elites of his circle are not bad people, but they are buffoons who contribute little of real value to society. This turned out to be not just a winning satiric formula but a brilliant intuition about how, precisely, the world had changed. Many of Dickens’s readers hadn’t been readers before, and guess what? They liked seeing their lives reflected, and they particularly liked seeing the work they did acknowledged, even if, like Sam Weller, they shined boots. As they saw it, the work they did needn’t be glamorous, just honest and necessary.

  For many Americans the takeaway from the election that gave us President Donald Trump is that it was all about jobs. Sure, he promised to build a wall and restrict immigration, but the stated purpose of those initiatives was to create, return, and protect good American jobs. What were all those angry white men angry ab
out? The loss of jobs, to Mexico and the rest of the world. But to see things in these terms may be to miss the larger point, because it wasn’t just jobs these men believed they’d lost. They’d also lost their work, and the two are far from synonymous. When you lose your job, the impact is primarily financial. Overnight you have less money, which makes you anxious about your future. How will you pay your mortgage? Send your kids to college? Survive a major illness or injury? Nor are these small losses, small fears. But losing your work may be even more profound and soul destroying. If the loss is not only your job but a whole sector of jobs, then you’re probably well on your way to losing both your dignity and your identity, your sense of your place in the overall scheme of things. If you don’t know who you are or how you fit in, maybe you’re nobody. Maybe you don’t matter. Maybe your friends and your kids don’t matter either. Losing your job makes you scared; losing your work makes you angry.

  I, myself, don’t have a job. My last full-time employment was more than a decade ago at Colby College in Maine, where I taught literature and creative writing. Since then I’ve been hired by film and TV producers to write scripts, gigs that typically last a couple of months. That’s not a lot of employment, and there have been times when not having a job, or steady, reliable income, or consistent health care, has made me fearful about the future. But I never felt that my dignity or identity was imperiled, or that I didn’t know where I fit in the overall scheme of things. That’s because, even when I didn’t have a job, I always had plenty of work, usually more than I could handle. I’m a novelist, and while not everybody understands what I do or why, the work itself is held in high esteem. Even more important, I hold that work in high esteem. Even if I’m not as good at it, I get to do what Dickens did, and I’m grateful for that opportunity. In other words, even when I’m unemployed, I don’t feel what many Trump supporters report feeling: ignored, undervalued, denigrated.