Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“It’s a promise,” I said.

“You just say, ‘I understand there’s a war in Africa,’ or ‘Have you seen a good movie from Africa?’ and zip—”

She zippered her red lips firmly shut.

Then she opened them again to say, “Nadia and Johel are supposed to come.”

Terry came back with a flute of champagne reddened with Kir, and for himself a tumbler of rum.

“How pretty!” she said. “It’s too pretty to drink!”

“With the prices here, you’d better drink it,” Terry said. For a man who had spent all afternoon making love to his wife, he was pretty glum.

“Terry hates places like this,” Kay said. “I had to drag him here.”

“Kay—,” he said, his voice whiny.

“Well, it’s true ,” she said. “Terry feels guilty spending all this money when the kids outside are hungry.”

“He’s got a point,” I said.

“Not you too! It’s my birthday!”

“And even in Africa, the lions are celebrating. To your birthday!”

Kay and I saw each other whenever she was in Jérémie: a trip to the beach, a walk in the mountains, an evening game of Scrabble. She was the kind of woman with ideas: there was a crumbling house twenty minutes out of town — the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas’s grandfather. So she piled on the back of my motorcycle and we bumped up and down the back roads until we found the ruined foundation, nothing but some squared-off stones in an empty field where once a mansion had stood. “It’s so sad,” Kay said. Then there was the time she had heard of a family of Amish missionaries out near Mont Beaumont who sold medicinal honey — wouldn’t it be a kick to go find them? Would I want to go and find the pharmacie vodouisante with her? She wanted to buy good-luck powder. So we went down to Basse-Ville and hunted for the Pharmacie Zentrailes together.

Or else we just walked. Eight in the morning she’d present herself in leggings, a T-shirt, and pink tennis shoes, her blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. “Let’s go, early bird,” she’d say. Then we’d walk from my house to Carrefour Prince, about an hour and a half each way on a road that surveyed the ocean. Little house after little house, tin roof, thatch roof, children carrying buckets of water on their heads. Donkeys clip-clopping toward the market. Children everywhere, sitting naked in the dirt, dusty faces streaked with tears. Orphanage, distillery, a pair of churches, Protestant and Catholic. Everywhere we went, people waved at us, and shouted “Blan!” Mango, papaya, grapefruit, mandarin trees shading the road. Ladies washing themselves bare-breasted. Through the break in the trees, glimpses of the sea, tranquil and teal.

* * *

Once upon a time when the times were good, the White family finances had balanced on three pillars, like a stool: the properties, her income in real estate, Terry’s salary. The summer before Terry came down to Haiti, all three collapsed.

Kay’s job had been the first pillar of the family to crumble. Who in South Florida hadn’t sold real estate in those years? With every Tommaso, Ricardo, and Miguel buying a second house or a third, with credit as fluid as tap water, and with housing prices seemingly as buoyant as cork, all Kay needed to make good money in those days was a big smile and a Rolodex. A big smile and a Rolodex were precisely the assets Kay possessed in superabundance. People liked Kay and she liked people. Do you want to see a house? Why not! Let me show you some things. Come on, honey, I’ll take you out tomorrow — lemme check my book. No, tomorrow’s no good, but first thing Thursday, I’ve got just the place to show you. We’ll catch up while we drive around. I’m so happy.

She hadn’t come to real estate as a passion — as a little girl, she had dreamed of training show jumpers — but she liked having her days filled with people, and she liked the money too. Besides, she’d tried so many other things, and nothing had quite clicked. Before there was real estate, Kay had spent a year in grad school at the University of Florida studying Seminoles — if you can believe that; tried her hand as a potter’s apprentice; opened up a dog grooming business called Doggone Chic with her niece; even worked for a spell in human resources at Disney. Nothing had been quite right. Then she’d hooked up with Todd Malgarini and his crew. She’d always had a flair for decorating and design, so Todd had asked her to help him fix up houses for show. Before clients came over, she’d boil a sprig of rosemary with a little lemon and vanilla. Kay’s houses smelled like baking and Sunday morning. In the trunk of her car she kept wine bottles filled with M&M’s and candy corn. She’d arrange them on the kitchen counters, and people felt, not knowing why, that kids could live there. Then there was the trick she used for the bathrooms, rolling up the towels instead of folding them, so the place felt like a spa.

But when Kay saw Todd’s BMW, she thought, I can do that too . So she got herself the real estate license, and there never was a better time for someone selling houses in the greater Watsonville area. Once she got going, she very literally did not have enough hours in her day to show houses to all the people who wanted to see houses: people would have been looking at houses at three in the morning if the owners hadn’t minded.

And what Kay was seeing every day out in the real estate trenches were people no smarter than she doing very well by themselves. Every day she saw people all around her getting second, even third mortgages, riding the market upward, then letting the properties back out onto the market. She saw those people building themselves solid foundations; she saw people turning their sweat and dreams into income, and she wanted to put herself and Terry on a solid foundation too. What was a solid foundation? A solid foundation meant having the same kind of life for herself that her parents had; it meant riding lessons and trips to the Keys and the better kind of lingerie that was flattering but not trampy; and above all, it meant not having to think so much about money. Kay hated thinking about money, but she liked life — that was a basic fact about Kay — and money was just what you needed if you wanted to enjoy it: money meant the wine tasted better and the cotton was softer and the furniture was prettier.

So Kay took equity from her own house — thank you, Wachovia Bank! — for a down payment and spread it across a pair of condos. She knew the market, and she chose good ones, refurbished ones in an old brick building in the city center, not far from the university, but not so close either that they’d be student condos: they were investment grade. Kay was being responsible. That was the irony of the whole situation.

And for a while it worked. She knew what properties like hers were worth — she was selling them every darned day. She looked at what she and Terry had, and she knew the two of them were on a solid foundation. The bank offered her a reverse mortgage: that’s how they turned those apartments into the trip to Vail, the BMW, Terry’s first run for state senate. Kay liked to throw parties, so there was this time, once, they had a fund-raiser for Terry: two hundred people in the backyard and an ice sculpture. She paid almost four hundred dollars for a swan that, when it started to melt, looked like a penguin. They could afford a couple of cases of good wine to keep in the basement for special occasions. They could afford all the stuff that made life extra fun.

Then the market went sour.

* * *

When people talked about “the market,” Kay always had in mind some big, slow, friendly, lumbering dinosaur, like Barney. You could tell where Barney was going from a mile off. Barney wasn’t going to start sprinting downhill. She figured that if the market turned — and she knew it could turn — it would turn slow. Maybe she wouldn’t get out at the peak. But she still had two investment-grade properties under title in downtown Watsonville, not to mention a house and a career.