Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“Tell me about it.”

“Sheets. Just for example.”

“Not diamonds?”

“Have you ever slept on a really good sheet? A girl’s best friend is definitely her sheets. I got those cotton sheets with superhigh thread counts, you know? Just because I liked the way they felt against my skin? And I replaced them when they weren’t soft anymore or if the colors faded? So I get here and a lady asks me for money to send her kids to school for a year, and I do the math and I used to spend that — I didn’t spend that on a sheet. Maybe on a pillowcase.”

“You spent all that on a pillowcase?”

“It’s easy ,” she said. “If you want a good one.”

“Had you ever been to a poor country before you came here?”

She said, “You know those commercials on TV? Send money so this kid in Africa can eat? And he’s got flies in his eyes? And he’s all snotty? That’s it. There was this little kid in Kenya? His name was Wilson, that was my little guy. Then Terry came to Haiti, he called me up and said, ‘Kay, you can’t believe this place, how people are living.’ When he got here, I saw the pictures and how beautiful it was and all the kids looked like Wilson and I said, ‘Terry, I’m coming to visit, like it or not.’”

I asked her what brought her husband to Haiti in the first place.

“Didn’t Terry tell you?”

“He mentioned something—”

“Oh, we went broke!” she said with defiant cheerfulness. “We were broke before everyone else went broke. You could not believe how broke we went. Terry lost his job and I was in real estate, but with the economy — well, you know. We had some properties, investments that didn’t — you know with the crash and everything — work out. We went broke, broker, and brokest. When Terry got the job here, it was Haiti or lose the house and move back in with my mom and dad.”

Talking about money had made her anxious: she had begun to stare at the cookies.

“Would you like another cookie?” I asked.

“Just one,” she said, and took the smallest cookie on the plate.

Conversation faltered for a moment. We sat in silence until, employing that feminine expertise in small and unimportant talk so essential to her métier, she asked how I met my wife — India, temple, lynch mob, isn’t that romantic! ; how I found “inspiration” for my books — I wish I knew; and whether we ate the mangoes that fell from our mango trees — no, they were small and wormy. The sunlight had crawled high enough that it was now in Kay’s eyes. She moved her chair closer to mine. Then I asked her how she met her husband.

It was the summer after college, she told me, when a green Cadillac Escalade raced through a red light and hit her yellow Volkswagen Golf, which had been her father’s graduation present just three weeks before. She thought she was going to die, and when she looked up, there was Terry, in uniform.

“It was like the baby ducks, you know? Are you my daddy? I guess he just imprinted on my brain. I was like, ‘Don’t leave,’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry.’ The second I saw him, I felt safe.”

“I could see that,” I said. “He’s got that kind of quality.”

“You know who hit me? It was a priest — he was drunk. In his clerical collar and everything. They had like this Sunday luncheon after Mass, and there you go. Too much wine or something. After that, Terry came to visit me in the hospital.”

“Talk about the hand of fate.”

“Terry was so sweet when I was in the hospital. He brought me balloons and flowers. I was there for a long time, and he came just about every day. So I married him.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” she said. “And you know who married us? The priest who put me in the hospital.”

“What an idea!”

“Terry thought of it.”

“Did it work out the way you hoped?”

“He got drunk.”

“Terry?”

“The priest. We took away his keys at the end of the reception.”

“I was asking about the marriage.”

She smiled, her lips pursed neatly together. She waved her slender ring finger. “Still together,” she said, an inscrutable expression, evocative and compelling, settling again on her pretty lips and eyes. “You have hummingbirds!”

“And woodpeckers. They drive my wife—”

“So we had dinner with Johel last night. You know Johel, don’t you? He grilled the most amazing tuna steaks. And Nadia — she’s just a beauty.”

So that was why Kay was on my porch. She wanted to know things; she was probing. And I had heard a story. I didn’t know if Kay had heard it also. At the Hotel Patience one could rent a little room for the afternoon. It was here, they said, that Kay’s husband and the judge’s wife passed an occasional petit moment . They said the judge knew; they said the judge didn’t know. I knew because everyone knew; and everyone knew because everyone else knew. But I didn’t know if it was true. It could have just been a story that people told.

Kay said, “I’ve never seen an African American lady with blue eyes before.”

“I haven’t met her,” I said.

“It’s so striking.”

I said, “Some Frenchman raped her mother’s great-great-grandmother and some other Frenchman raped her father’s great-great-grandmother. Then those genes just floated down through the generations, waiting to meet each other again. You see it here from time to time.”

“She was so quiet. She didn’t talk all night.”

I tried to change the subject. “Did you know he was a national spelling champion?”

“Johel? Where did you hear that?”

“I looked him up,” I said.

“I’m a crummy speller,” Kay said. “I’m lucky I have a short name.”

“He grew up in New York. When he was thirteen, he was the national spelling champion. His word was ‘elegiacally.’”

“I admire him, I really do,” she said. “He’s got so much talent, he could be anywhere doing anything, and still he’s here.”

“Is he still going ahead with the election thing?”

“What I heard,” she said — and what she heard was this, from Terry: “Brother needs to grow himself a fucking pair and not let his woman tell him what to do.”

“So he’s not going to do it?” I said.

“Terry told me that Nadia is too frightened. She won’t let him.”

“What is she frightened of?”

Kay lifted her hand and formed it into the shape of a pistol, which she fired at my head.

“Bang, bang,” she said.

“It sounds like the woman has a head on her shoulders.”

Kay looked disapproving. “I don’t like a man who won’t make a decision for himself.”

“Would Terry listen to you about a thing like that?”

“You mean, would Terry do something I didn’t approve of?”

I nodded.

“Hello!” she said. “We’re in Haiti!”

Kay looked around as if hidden in the bougainvillea or hibiscus, there might be someone listening.

“Just after Terry got the offer to come here, he got another offer,” she said. “Head of security at a shopping mall in Tennessee. And I thought, Great, now he doesn’t have to go to Haiti . We went up there to visit. I liked the way we could go out at night, the shopping, the music. It was good salary, good hours for Terry, good for me, everything good. But Terry said he wasn’t going. We had a big fight. He said, ‘I don’t want to spend my life protecting the Gap and Zara,’ and I said, ‘Honey, those places are essential to my way of life.’ But in the end Terry got what he wanted.”

“And you didn’t approve?”

Kay’s fine-boned face was immobile, her eyes like slivers of old ice. There was a long conversational silence, filled with callings of innumerable birds and the cry of the ice vendor on the cobblestone street: “Vann glace! Vann glace!” Laughter of children from the neighbor’s garden. The scratching of lizards on the pebbles. A smell of burning charcoal.