think that’s great, Ghislaine! It’s a wonderful idea! It’s perfect for you!”
He caught himself. He was talking with such off-the-leash enthusiasm, he was coming too close to giving the game away. He was dying to ask her a key question. He forced himself to keep quiet enough to calm down… then continued in a matter-of-fact voice, “Is this something Nicole suggested?”
“Nicole and Serena, both! Did you ever meet Serena? Serena Jones?”
“Ummmm…” He compressed his lips and rolled his eyes up and off to one side in the I’m-trying-to-remember mode. It didn’t really matter. “Oh, yes… I think I did.”
Actually, he knew he hadn’t. But he remembered the name Serena Jones from somewhere… could it have been a column in the Herald? Swell Anglo families with common names like Jones or Smith or Johnson had a way of giving their children, especially their daughters, romantic or exotic or striking first names like Serena or Cornelia or Bettina, or else Old Family Lineage first names like Bradley or Ainsley or Loxley or Taylor or Templeton. He had a student once named Templeton, Templeton Smith. She was never just mousy little Ms. Smith. She was Templeton Smith. His mind was focused on one thing: swell families and families that have a shot at becoming swell. South Beach Outreach was an organization that came up on the social pages of the Herald and in Ocean Drive magazine’s “Parties” section all the time, solely thanks to the social wattage of its members’ families. Just take a look at the pictures—Anglos, Anglos, Anglos with a certain social cachet. Ghislaine’s friend Nicole, whom she had met at the University, was not a WASP, strictly speaking, or not as Lantier understood what the acronym stood for, namely, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. But in her case, strictly speaking didn’t matter. Her last name was Buitenhuys, which is Dutch, and the Buitenhuyses were old money in New York, anointed money in New York. Whether any of them knew that Ghislaine was Haitian, he had no idea. The important thing was, they were accepting her as one of their social milieu. The stated purpose of South Beach Outreach was to go into the slums, such as Overtown and Liberty City—and Little Haiti!—and do good work amongst the poor. So they saw her as a girl as essentially white as they were! As white as he, her father, saw her! The crowning moment would be his Ghislaine going amidst the people of Little Haiti. The vast majority were black, really black, with no qualifiers. Back in Haiti, no family like his, the Lantiers, even looked at really black Haitians. Didn’t so much as waste a glance on them… couldn’t even see them unless they were physically in the way. Well-educated people like himself, with his PhD in French literature, were like another species of Homo sapiens. Here in Miami they were self-consciously part of the dyaspora… the very word denoted high status. How many?—a half?—two-thirds?—of Haitians living in the Miami area were illegal immigrants who didn’t begin to rate the term. A vast majority had never even heard of any dyaspora… and if they had, they had no idea what it meant… and if they knew what it meant, they didn’t know how to pronounce it.
Ghislaine—he looked at her again. He loved her. She was beautiful, gorgeous! She would soon graduate from the University of Miami in Art History with a 3.8 grade point average. She could easily… pass… He kept that word, pass, hidden in his head, beneath a lateral geniculate… He would never utter pass out loud in front of Ghislaine… or anybody else, for that matter. But he had told her, many times, in fact, that there was nothing to hold her back. He hoped she had gotten the message about… that, too. In some ways, she was sophisticated—when she talked about art, for example. It could be the age of Giotto, the age of Watteau, the age of Picasso, or the age of Bouguereau, for that matter—she knew so much! In another way she wasn’t sophisticated at all. She was never ironic or sarcastic or cynical or nihilistic or contemptuous or any of those things, which are all the signs of the tarantula in smart people, the resentful small deadly creature that never fights… that only waits to bite fiercely and maybe kill you that way. ::::::I’ve got too much of that in myself.:::::: They sat down. Ghislaine was in the Jean Calvin chair. He sat at his desk.