Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [30]
“Okay. So how do you feel about this?”
“Well, I think it’s starting to make me crazy.”
Rhee nodded as if this was the sanest response imaginable. “How’s Dirk been treating you since he got back?”
Melissa gazed across the restaurant, suddenly miserable. “It’s never been better,” she said, clearing a sob from her throat.
“But you’re resisting.”
“I guess I am.”
“Why are you resisting?”
There was a precision to Rhee’s voice, a tone of vigorous self-respect, that obliged Melissa to focus her thoughts. To decide what was real in her life, perhaps. “Well, there was a guy. While Dirk was gone.” She told her cousin about James.
“So do you care for this man?”
“Not anymore. Not ever, really.”
“But you were attracted to him. Sexually.”
“Well, yeah. I guess I was.”
“Do you think that’s strange?”
“I think it’s wrong.”
“Did you think you were going to go your whole married life without wanting to sleep with someone else?”
“I don’t know. I guess I never really thought about it.”
Rhee studied her. “Have you told Dirk?”
“No, no, God no, never.” Melissa paused. “Do you think I should?”
Rhee shrugged. “Dirk’s not having an earthly affair, you know that. Not in the sense he’s stepping out with another woman.”
“No.”
“And it doesn’t sound like he’s trying to hide anything.”
“God no. He wants me to know everything. It’s just…” She concentrated. “It scares me,” she went on, wondering if fear was what it took to make something real. “I don’t know what I’m dealing with, what he’s brought into the house—whether he’s messing around with something evil, satanic. Does that make any sense?”
Rhee’s face took on a neutral thoughtfulness, every feature except her smile, which revealed nothing. “Well, based on what you’ve told me, this Erzulie sounds like a lot of different things. Kind of a slut, a sexpot who’s also a saint, sort of a gorgeous Virgin mother—Lord, no wonder he’s got a thing for her. But is she evil?” Rhee seemed to double back on herself. “I might need a couple of days to think about this. In the meantime”—she’d caught Melissa’s panicked look—“I want you to take it slow. Be nice to Dirk, let him be nice to you. I bet he’s dealing with a lot, coming home from a place like that. Try to see it his way as much as you can.”
“All right. But what about James?”
“What about him?”
“What if he keeps coming at me?”
“Oh Melissa, that’s easy. Just call the cops.”
Was there a homegrown voodoo right under her nose, a french-fried North Carolina version she’d been missing all this time? It seemed possible as she made her daily commute, staring out from her car past the orderly fields toward the brooding wall of trees in the distance, that deckle-edged veil of luminous green standing in for the less penetrable jungles of the mind. There was voodoo in Haiti, why not here? With a little prodding Dirk described the ceremonies for her, which sounded chaotic but happy, like swimming in a heavy surf. Melissa tried to picture her very Caucasian spouse dancing in the midst of a couple of hundred Haitians.
“Didn’t you feel funny, the only white guy in the middle of all that?”
“It felt good,” he said. “I felt like I was home.” So where was the evil in all this? Evil was the mini–killing field he and his buddies discovered behind the Haitian army barracks, the twenty corpses they dug up with their trenching tools. Evil was La Normandie, the Macoute social club in Port-au-Prince with its snapshots of murder victims taped to the wall. Evil was the hovering presence of death everywhere, the cemeteries