God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) by Dimitry Elias Leger

awesome, and its capacity to make me feel drunk, selfish, and even self-mutilating is so intense that I dare not say the name of the emotion even to myself, for surely love could bloom from the gratitude I feel towards him. Yes, love could. It could spring from such a well, slowly but worthily, unlike coups de foudre and the black rages they alternate and die with. Yes, love could. Unless hate came first.
    Natasha? her husband said, snapping his fingers and nudging the girl out of her agita. The ghost of her great love blinked out of existence.
    The President held his hand out to her. Natasha’s new husband had the unwelcome habit of asking her to hold his hand whenever he wanted to reassure himself of something or whenever he felt her attention slipping away from him, like a father to a child. Like a child, she hated this request. She hated it when boyfriends her age did it. Today a lover forty years her senior was doing it. Sure, he had put a ring on it, but come on. His fingers were big, brown, andhairy, like a bear’s, but with white hairs. Natasha couldn’t help but throw up a little in her mouth.
    Come, he said, poorly feigning patience.
    With that simple word, the young girl lashed out at her husband, though she stood still on the tarmac with her mouth closed. Only her unblinking, unsmiling eyes, big, brown, and catlike conveyed her indignation. Was that an order? Who does he think he is? She felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. I can’t believe he did that, right here, right now.
    The couple was walking toward a gleaming private jet for a one-way flight to Florence, Tuscany, Italy, in other words, heaven on earth; that is, if, like Natasha, you are a painter with fantasies of becoming an all-time great Catholic artist, like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Dante, even though Dante was a writer and not a painter. Natasha had loved Dante and all things Florentine since she’d stolen and read front to back and back to front a beat-up copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Monsignor Dorélien’s library when she was kid. Heaven and Florence, Dante’s hometown, were Dante’s obsessions. They slowly became Natasha’s too, in no particular order. The irony that the Divine Comedy was a long poem about acute homesickness by a man who hated life in exile, and here she was, hoping for happiness in exile, was lost on her. The whole point of her marriage was to give her the freedom to fly off the island to live a life of adventure of her own choosing and not of fate’s.
    A memory of a recent night with her husband wafted before her eyes. So bold and proud in public, he was meek and anxious sexually, more often doomed than not. She looked at her husband with a flash of charitable eyes. Yes, he still had that damn hand thrust at her without even bothering to get off his stupid cell phone. Maybe he sensed her communion with the ghost of the young man he’d stolen her from. His professionally honed ability to read people frightened her. It sometimes seemed as though he could read minds. Still, he was about to give her Tuscany. That should buy him some consideration. He was old, so he should be allowed to be old-school. His manners, like the suede loafers he favored, were dainty and chivalrous. Where the young girl had seen imperiousness, a dash of guilt from her emotional betrayal of him made her see charm even though the white shirt, light blue suit, and purple pocket square he wore were jet-setish and goofy. Oh, the international headlines the next morning were going to be cruel.
    Mr. President? she said. Did I do something wrong?
    Come now, sweetheart, he said. That’s no way to talk to your husband. How many times have I told you to call me Jean? You have that right now, you know. You are my wife. You are no longer the girl working in that awful orphanage. I’m no longer the president of Haiti. As of this morning I gave up the job, remember? I threw it all away for you, my