A Summons to New Orleans (20 page)

Simone had talked to him, Nora thought. Why? Why had she bothered? Was it really possible that she had given in to an impulse, then felt embarrassed by it?

Then again, if Simone had been embarrassed by her impulsive act, why would she have chosen to draw as much attention to herself as possible by contacting police officers, doctors and, eventually, the D.A.’s office? It seemed like a lot of work to justify an impulsive act.

Nora wasn’t sure why she was running all this through the logic mill. It wasn’t as if she doubted Simone. But the conversation with Quentin’s mother had left her a little unsettled. She was a real person, afflicted with genuine concern and confusion. Nora wondered what it would feel like to have her own son accused of rape. Wouldn’t she defend him in the same blind, supportive manner? Michael was capable of turning on her. In fact, he had done so. Yet she would never turn on him, she thought. Never desert him, never hesitate to support him. In this respect, parenthood seemed like an illogical imbalance.

The next thing she knew, the trial was over, and after being given some convoluted instructions, the twelve men and women of the jury filed out and the judge disappeared. She and Simone and Poppy sat still in their seats until Margaret approached them.

“Well, it’s out of our hands now,” Margaret said.

“What’s going to happen?” Simone asked.

“Who knows? Like I said earlier, rape trials are impossible to predict. I think we made a good case, but you never know how these people are going to vote.”

“Will we get a verdict tonight?” Simone asked.

“We might, or they might decide to break. Hard to tell. You guys hang around for a while.”

“Can we go outside?” Simone asked. “I’m dying to smoke a cigarette.”

“Yes, but don’t go far.”

The three of them walked down the empty hallway without speaking. They finally made their way out onto the front steps. They sat on the top step, and Simone took out a cigarette and smoked it slowly, staring at the street.

“I think you had a good trial,” Poppy offered.

Simone looked at her. “What’s a good trial?”

“Well, your lawyers presented the case well.”

“They aren’t my lawyers. They are D.A.’s. They represent the state. It’s the state’s case.”

“Even so,” Poppy said, “they did a good job.”

Simone exhaled the smoke in Nora’s direction and asked, “What do you think?”

Before she had time to think about it, Nora said, “Why did you talk to him at the club?”

Simone stared at her for a long time. She felt Poppy staring at her, too. Nora felt in danger, like the child who pointed out that the emperor was naked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you did talk to him.”

“I talked to him because he talked first and I didn’t want to be rude.”

“I remember you in college,” Nora said. “You never cared about being rude. At parties, you’d get rid of guys in an instant.”

“This isn’t college.”

“But still.”

“Hell, Nora, I don’t know why I talked to him. Maybe I was drunk.”

“You said you weren’t.”

“Either way, did I deserve to get raped?”

“No, of course not.”

“You danced with him,” Poppy said.

“Yes, we danced. Dancing and talking is not equal to consensual sex. What is wrong with you two?”

“But why would you do it?” Nora persisted.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Nora! Why would Cliff tell you he wasn’t seeing anybody when he was fucking a path across the college campus—” She stopped herself, then said, “I mean, across Virginia.”

“What do you mean by that?” Nora asked.

“Nothing,” Simone said. She lit another cigarette and stared at the empty street.

Cliff was cheating even then,
Nora thought.
How could I not know it? How could I have married a man who never really cared about my feelings? I deluded myself, that’s how.
And that was how Simone did it. She trusted someone who wasn’t worth trusting. Hadn’t they all done that, to some degree or another?

They sat for a long time without speaking. Simone seemed to smoke several more cigarettes. Nora kept waiting for a good time to speak, but it never came.

Finally Margaret came out, looking tired and dejected.

“The jury wants to break,” she said. “They will reach the verdict on Monday. Can you stay?”

Nora didn’t say anything. She was still concentrating on Simone’s words. Was Cliff cheating on her even then? If so, how was it that Simone knew and she never did? Why didn’t her friends tell her that? If they had known, they let her walk right into an unhappy marriage. They had come to her wedding and danced and eaten rubber chicken and congratulated her, and no one had had the guts to tell her.

“I can’t,” Simone said. “I have to get back to work.”

“I’ll be here,” Poppy said. “I live here.”

“I wish you could stay, Simone,” Margaret said. “I hate for you to leave, not knowing.”

Simone lit another cigarette and said, “Oh, well, I feel like I know. I got a look at their faces during the closing arguments. Even if they think it happened, they believe I was asking for it.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that . . .” Margaret argued, half-heartedly.

“Or they think maybe it happened, but it didn’t hurt me
that much. I mean, here I sit with all my well-dressed friends, no visible scars.”

Margaret said, “Have a little more faith in the judicial system than that.”

“Why?” Simone asked.

“Yes, why?” Poppy agreed. “My father was a judge, you know. I have a very good idea of how it works down here.”

Margaret met Poppy’s eyes, and there was something accusatory in them.

“Everybody remembers Judge Marchand,” Margaret said, though she wasn’t nearly old enough to have ever worked with him. “He was a legend.”

“Yes,” said Poppy. “He was.”

Margaret sighed and stood, wiping off the back of her skirt like a tomboy. “Well, I guess we’ll have to call you in Los Angeles,” Margaret said.

Simone said, “Margaret, tell me what you really think.”

Margaret looked at her, as if the question were completely inappropriate.

“About what?”

“The verdict.” Margaret said, “Simone, crazy as it sounds, rape convictions are next to impossible. It doesn’t have much to do with you. He’s local, you’re not. He’s black, you’re white. You talked to him in a club. None of this is your fault. But jurors have their own set of beliefs.”

“Just tell me,” Simone insisted.

Margaret lit a cigarette, letting a pregnant moment pass.

She blew out the smoke and said, without much emotion, “Not guilty.”

Simone nodded, her eyes on the ground.

“But you never know,” Margaret said, as a parting gift before she walked away.

Nora put a hand on Simone’s arm.

“She’s just guessing, Simone.”

“Not guilty,” Simone repeated.

As if it were the final word.

They parted in front of the hotel. There was no mention of taking
the evening a step further. No one even suggested having a drink on the patio. Nora suspected that once they all said good night, they would pursue their own interests. Poppy might get in her car and drive somewhere. Simone might take a drug or have a drink in her room and call someone on the phone. And Nora thought that, indeed, she might go out. Something about the French Quarter was tempting her. It was almost the end of her trip, and despite all the dramatic twists and turns, the visit to New Orleans had not fulfilled her expectations. She wanted to have an adventure. She wanted to feel different about herself. She longed to learn something.

Inside her room, she sat and stared at the walls, thinking of the noisy, exhilarating atmosphere of Bourbon Street. It felt dangerous, and unlike her. She wanted to be there. She realized, her heart thumping wildly, that she wanted to know what Simone had felt like that night. She wanted to walk those streets, go into the club, maybe even converse with a stranger. Up until the moment Simone was raped, the evening had sounded great, crazy with excitement and possibility. Couldn’t she take that kind of chance? Nora wondered. Couldn’t she get close to the edge like that, then pull back, just short of disaster?

This is insane,
she thought, even as she prepared for the adventure. She put on a tight, black, sleeveless dress and a heavy pewter necklace, and then clipped on earrings that were bigger than those she normally wore. In fact, she seldom wore jewelry at all, as it made her feel like a fraud. For the same reason,
she also rarely wore open-toe shoes. Her mother said that it was whorish. But tonight she wanted to feel a little whorish, so she slipped on some high-heeled sandals. Her toenails were painted a shameless red. She liked the way they looked.

Her heart was racing as she stared in the mirror, and she reminded herself that she did not have to go. This did not have to happen. The reflection before her looked unnatural. She felt like a transvestite. She was afraid of seeing someone she knew, afraid of letting her awful secret out. But what was her secret? Wasn’t it just that she was really someone who never dressed like she intended to have a good time? That was her secret: She was frightened of the world, and she dressed in a frightened, apologetic way. As extreme as these clothes felt on her, she was certain that she wouldn’t be looked at twice on Bourbon Street.

There was a knock on the door and she froze, feeling stranded in her game. She felt caught. Punished, as if the hand of God had intervened. Boo always promised that God would react this way. “Get too high on your pedestal, and He’ll knock you down.” She always believed that when she was young, but now she had another idea. She remembered how a friend in AA had once told her, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” And now Nora had time to reflect on her secret. Her secret was that she didn’t have one. And she desperately wanted to.

She threw her robe on over her clothes, kicked off her shoes and went to the door. Leo was there. He was clearly drunk. His eyes were glossy, his hair disheveled, and he held on to the doorway for support. Nora stared at him and wondered why she had ever, even for a second, entertained the notion of sleeping with him.

He said, “I didn’t kill the baby. There’s no baby.”

“Excuse me?”

“I just talked to Poppy. She’s decided not to sell the house after all. She wants to get a demolition crew in there and tear up the basement floor. She swears there is a baby buried there. But I had nothing to do with that. You have to believe me.”

“Leo, you are talking nonsense,” Nora said, though she was reminded of Adam’s strange reference to a dead baby. Clearly something was going on, and she wanted to know what, but she felt like knowing it tomorrow. This kind of interruption was not welcomed.

Her mind disconnected from the present and she looked ahead, wondering just what it was she thought she would find out there in the French Quarter. Even if she connected with a stranger, did she think he would be the man of her dreams, the answer to all her problems? Could one man actually make her feel that her lost years with Cliff were not a waste of time? How much could one evening on the town really heal or protect her from her past?

Leo pushed his way into the room, looking like the wild-eyed Ancient Mariner, intent on telling her his story. Nora watched him as he paced, feeling a little bit superior to him because she wasn’t drunk, even though her fancy clothes under her robe reminded her that she was just as irrational.

“It wasn’t even our baby. It was his,” Leo said.

“Whose?”

“Judge Marchand. Her father. See, some woman brought this baby to the house and left it, saying it was his. He was responsible for it. He told Poppy to take care of it. And she did for a while. We were together then, and she convinced me that it could be our baby. We could get married and raise it. I kept trying to say, ‘Look, this is your father’s responsibility.

It’s wrong of him to pass it off onto you.’ He was a powerful man. He wasn’t about to admit to this illegitimate child. But he didn’t know what to do.”

“Are you sure you know what you’re talking about? You seem a little disoriented, Leo. Maybe you should go home and sleep it off.”

He barely acknowledged her words. He just kept talking, sweeping his hand through his thin, stringy hair.

“That’s what the money was about. Judge Marchand tried to pay me to get rid of it. Not to kill it. Just take it somewhere and put it up for adoption. But I was all young and stubborn and full of myself. I said he had no right to put this off on Poppy and me. I refused his money. I had kind of bought into what Poppy said. I would have married her in a minute and raised that kid. I would have done anything she said. But he got to her. He told her she had a future. She couldn’t throw it away on me. He convinced her. But in the meantime, the baby was there, and she didn’t know what to do with it.”

“So what are you telling me? He killed the baby?”

“No,” Leo said, shaking his head. “Of course not. He just took it somewhere. Gave it away. It would have been easier if I had handled it for him, but I refused. So he took the baby away himself. But after the baby was gone, Poppy kind of went nuts. She missed it. She thought it belonged to us.”

“And then what?”

Leo stood still, thinking, chewing on a nail. It was as if the story had suddenly broken down. He couldn’t remember. Finally he looked at her.

“Poppy loved the baby. She was all alone in the world. She had always felt distanced from her old man. And why shouldn’t she be? He was just a bastard. A corrupt man, in business with all the crooks in town. Poppy’s mother had
been dead for years. Suicide, you know. Her old man drove her to it.”

“Or murder,” Nora reminded him. “That seems to be a possibility.”

“Either way,” Leo said, “she was alone. And the baby gave her hope, somehow. Poppy expected me to defend her. All her life, she wanted someone to intervene and stand up for her. I thought I was doing that by refusing his bribe. But what happened was, the baby went away, and Poppy blamed me.”

“Think carefully about what you are saying,” Nora suggested. “You make Poppy seem crazy.”