Mary said nothing.
“Do you see what is happening here? There is a weakening,” Soulavier said. “Opposition is coming to the fore. There have been money problems, banks closing. Loans defaulted. Dominicans especially they are angry. Do you think we have troops out to repel foreign invaders?” His expression was sharp, one eyebrow raised in dramatic inquiry.
“I don’t know anything about your politics,” Mary said.
“Then you are the fool, Mademoiselle. You have been played as a gamepiece but you are ignorant of your role.”
She looked at Soulavier with new respect. The rebuke echoed some of her own self accusing thoughts. She was not so unlearned; still it might be best to let him believe she was ignorant.
“You put me in danger to talk to you,” he continued. “But if you are truly an innocent then you should know the shape of the trap. That is all I can give you.”
“All right,” Mary said.
“If you go with me to Leoganes you will be away from Port-au-Prince and whatever might happen here. Leoganes is smaller, more peaceful. You go there on pretense that we are protecting you. Dominicans in the domestic army…They are opposed to Colonel Sir. He has appeased them for years now but we are in bad shape. Mineral prices are down around the world. Your nanotechnology, which the industrialized world guards so closely…You extract minerals from garbage and seawater much more cheaply than drilling and mining.”
Mary lost her bearings, felt almost disembodied now, this conversation on economic theory was so out of place.
“You do not use our armies, you no longer buy our weapons, you stop using our minerals, our timber…Now our tourism is being strangled. What are we to do? We do not want to see our children starve like insects. That is what Colonel Sir must worry about. He has no time for you and me.” He shook his hands vigorously at her as if flinging away drops of water. Then he settled back into the seat, folded his arms and lifted his jaw. “He is a beleaguered man. All around him people who were once friends now they are enemies. The balance, you know. The balance. So the courts and judges of your nation, the judicial branch, tells him he is a criminal. Mixed signals when once the President, the executive branch, treated him like a beloved partner. This fans the flames, Mademoiselle. I am taking risks even speaking of these things now. But for you I still give advice. Just for you.”
Mary watched him for a moment. Sincere or not he was putting a few things in perspective for her. If Colonel Sir was losing control she might be in more trouble than she imagined. “Thank you,” she said.
Soulavier shrugged. “Will you travel with me away from Port-au-Prince and from these damned…domestic army machines?”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll need a few minutes back at the bungalow alone, to calm myself.”
He shrugged again magnanimously. “After that we will go to Leoganes.”
46
Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies. How’s that for a powerful argument?
She hung on to him like a limpet. She had said something earlier about his condition making her the stable one in this duality—something to that effect—her words a dull murmur in Richard’s memory. She was addressing him and he felt some minor compulsion to listen to her rather than to sink completely into his private thoughts.
“Tell me about yourself,” she suggested. “We’ve been lovers off and on for two years, but I don’t know anything about you.”
+ In my apartment. Just myself. Her. She asked something.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Tell me about when you were married.”
He sat forward on the couch, stiff muscles complaining. He had been sitting there since breakfast, forty-five minutes without moving. “Let’s switch on the LitVid,” he said.
“Please tell me. I’d like to help.”
“Nadine,” he said flatly, “nothing’s wrong. Why not just leave me alone.”
She puffed out her lips and shook her head, feigning hurt but refusing to give up. “You’re in trouble. All this has upset you and I know what that’s like. It’s not good to be alone when you’re in trouble.”
+ Anything to avoid.
He reached out for her and tried to caress her breast but she sideslipped deftly and sat in the brokendown chair across from the couch, out of reach. “It’ll be good to talk. I know you’re not a bad man. You’re just very upset. When I get upset, sometimes my friends help me talk it through…”
“I’m unemployed, I’m untherapied, I’m unpublished, I’m getting old, and I have you,” he said. “So?”
She ignored his bitterness. “You were married once. Madame de Roche told me that.”
He watched her closely. If he jumped forward now he could get her. And then what would he do. He felt himself fading in and out like a bad signal. Patches of Goldsmith’s poetry spoke themselves in Goldsmith’s voice. That voice was a lot more magnetic than his own.
+ I am a simple man. Simple men vanish now.
“What was her name? Did you get divorced?”
“Yes,” he said. “Divorced.”
“Tell me about that.”
He squinted. Goldsmith’s voice fading. Of all things he did not want to think about Gina and Dione. He had put aside that misery years ago.
“Talk to me. It’s what you need, Richard.” Note of triumph. She was into it. Her cheeks flushed beneath a painfully sincere tilt of eyebrows.
“Nadine, please. It’s a very unpleasant subject.”
She set her jaw and her eyes brightened. “I’d like to know. To listen.”
Richard looked up at the ceiling and swallowed hard. The poetry was fading; that much was good. Maybe she had something. The talking cure.
“You’re trying to therapy me,” he said, shaking his head and chuckling. With the chuckle the poetry returned; he had rejected this ploy and again Nadine was a buzzing nonentity and he could grab her if he wanted to. Make his statement as Goldsmith had. Break free.
Nadine grimaced. “Richard, we’re just talking. We have our problems, all of us, and talking is okay. It’s not intrusive.”
“This kind of talking is.”
“What happened? Was she that bad for you?”
“For Christ’s sake.”
Nadine bit her lower lip. He looked at her with what he hoped was a forbidding expression.
+ I’m a simple man. Don’t you see I’m simply waiting for the right moment.
The poetry faded again, returned again. Moses. Blood sacrifice to keep away the wrath of God. Richard had looked that up once; Goldsmith’s interpretation of the story was not orthodox. Circumcision. What did they call circumcision in women: infibulation. Clitoridectomy. + The things one gathers leading a literary life.
He put aside a polite suggestion from somewhere below that he start crying. His expression remained fixed and mild. “We were divorced,” he said.
+ Not true.
“We were going to be divorced, I mean,” he corrected himself. Neither he nor whoever spoke with Goldsmith’s poetry was confessing now. An earlier fellow was poking forth. The one who had been married. + I thought I killed him.
“Yes?”
Again the suggestion: This is best spoken of while you are crying, you know.
No tears.
“Dione was her name. I was a lobe sod for Workers Inc.”
“Yes.”
“We had a daughter.” Again he swallowed. “Gina. She was sweet.”
“You loved them both very much,” Nadine suggested. He scowled then chuckled. Even in her helpfulness she intruded, did not know where to stop. He saw himself inadequately modeled within her and that was the story of Nadine’s life, knowing thyself or anyone else being impossible for her. Broken modeler.