Johel is not a small man, but it’s easy to miss that under the jovial layers of blubber. Because he smiles easily and often and chuckles frequently, it’s easy to miss or not understand that he had some unyielding kernel of courage and rectitude — or maybe he didn’t even know he possessed it himself until that moment.
He says to Ti Pierre, “Don’t touch her again, brother.”
Here is how calmly he says it: Will you please pass me the salt? Or: And how are you this morning, Fred? But he frightens Ti Pierre. Ti Pierre is a man of the world, a man of experience, and he knows that in this country it is men like Johel who have the power: men who know how to speak the language, who know the law, who don’t speak with an accent. He looks at Johel’s eyes and knows that this is a man who will not forget, will not forgive. Ti Pierre knows that in this country, when the police come, it is Johel who will talk and it is Ti Pierre who will end up in a cell. Life has taught Ti Pierre to be afraid of men like Johel.
Johel says, “It was a wonderful night. I’ll pay everything I owe.”
That’s the prudent lawyer speaking, the one who knows the value of settling early, even at a cost to one’s pride, of resolving problems quickly and efficaciously.
Everything Haitian is always cash business. People who overstay their visas by a decade don’t open bank accounts. Johel has cash on hand for Ti Maurice, cash for the food, cash for the bartenders, cash for the drinks. Thousands and thousands of dollars in cash. He puts Ti Pierre’s full fee on the table, which Ti Pierre counts and pockets. Then he puts half again more on the table, and he says, “That’s for her.”
Ti Pierre says to Nadia, “Let’s go.”
Nadia starts to get up, and when she gets to her feet, she is small and fragile. She has lost a shoe: it has skittered across the nightclub floor. Johel stares at the shoe, its sole scuffed and tarnished. Then he looks at Nadia’s tiny stockinged foot.
In Creole, Johel says, “Do you want to go with him?”
“I don’t know,” Nadia says.
“Let’s go,” Ti Pierre says. “We got Boston tomorrow.”
“I don’t know,” Nadia says again, looking at Johel, the green eyes pleading with him, looking at him in every way a man wants to be looked at, just once, by a beautiful woman.
So Johel says, “This money is for you. You can take it and go with him if you want. Or you can take it and leave. If you have no place to go tonight, you can come with me.”
Eventually the wedding is canceled, and Johel’s mother collects a hundred dollars from his uncle.
6
She left almost no trace when she was gone.
Johel went to work, and when he came home, the apartment was empty. Only a hint of her sweat lingered in his good sheets. A little rum was gone from the bottle. A few dark hairs on the pillow. Either out of politeness or indifference, she left the ivory nightgown he gave her hanging from a hook on the bathroom door. She left no other sign or signal — but how would she? She had no idea how to read or write, nothing more than her own name. It wasn’t a secret where she had gone: a week later he looked up Erzulie L’Amour on the Internet, found they had played a Miami nightclub, called up, and discovered that she had sung there the night before.
What did Nadia do that first week in Johel’s apartment? She slept, mostly. She must have been exhausted, and she was very young. At first she slept on Johel’s leather couch, where he installed her with a duvet and his pillows; then on Johel’s bed, picking herself up from the couch and putting herself between the sheets. She had so few things of her own: the dress on her back, a small suitcase, and her purse, small and nearly empty. Johel thought it strange that anyone could move across the earth having so little. The only thing that seemed truly hers was a small ceramic figurine, no taller than Johel’s outstretched hand, that she had bought for herself when Erzulie L’Amour played Boston. The doll was painted in the thick furs of Russian winter, lips and cheeks bright red against the cold, staring out at the world with twinkling eyes of boundless sadness. Nadia placed the doll on Johel’s nightstand, the first thing that she would see when she woke up.
When she woke up, she asked for spaghetti. So he fried her up some the way his mother made it, thick and greasy in tomato paste, with garlic and onions. Then she went back to sleep. From time to time she got up to pee. He had never known a woman could sleep so much. She slept almost without interruption for two full days. Only once did he leave her alone, slipping out to buy some food and then, on impulse, from a little lingerie store on the corner, a satin nightgown, which reached down to her ankles and was worked around the bosom in fine lace — just something soft to sleep in. When she saw the nightgown, she said, “Merci,” as if he had brought her a glass of water when she was very thirsty in the night. She slipped into the nightgown, inserted herself between his fine Egyptian cotton sheets, settled her angular head on his pillows, and went back to sleep.
Johel watched her sleep, as surprised by her presence as he would have been by the arrival of a fox in his midtown apartment. The few occasions when she left his bed, she watched TV — midday soap operas whose plots she seemed to intuit immediately and whose dramas she absorbed as her own. Then she told Johel the stories of those television dramas as if she had lived them, her story mingling with those stories in a breathless, boring stream of narrative that held him as enchanted as an audience with the president.
It took almost a week before Johel slipped into his own bed beside her. When she found him there, she rolled over and placed her soft face on his chest. Then Johel did not move more than he possibly could, not even when his arm began to ache or when he started to sweat. He listened to the sound of traffic far below and her soft breathing.
She had been in Johel’s house ten days when she came to bed naked. She crossed her small leg over his large one and he could feel her hair on his thigh, her small breasts on his chest. Johel had decided in his mind that he was going to save her from whatever she needed saving from. He wanted to be the kind of man who gave her everything and expected nothing; but when he felt the softness of her skin and her gentle breathing on his neck, he kissed her and rolled his big body over hers.
Only a month. How then to explain Johel’s panic when she was gone, his sorrow, his night terrors, his unreasoning sadness? His thoughts slipping around in circles over and over again until they bumped up against themselves coming the other way round. The nausea? Whatever he thought before was love — that wasn’t love. Only a woman’s sorcery could do this. She must have slipped love powder into his coffee, rubbed it on his body while he was sleeping, kneading love into his muscles and groin and fat. Why would she do such a thing, enchant him and then abandon him? He knew the answer: it was a woman’s nature. Tonton Jean, who knew women like a bird knows flight, had once told him that women carry a sachet of love powder in their purses or hide it in their brassieres, and they sprinkle a dash here and there as needed. That is how women survive in this hard world.
* * *
The only love powder she had used had been her story. She told it to him lying naked beside him in bed, her delicate, slow voice sweet in his ears. Later he would lie in bed alone and tell it to himself, the only thing of her that he had left.