A Summons to New Orleans (21 page)

“She’s not crazy. She’s just lonely. I didn’t come through for her. I have to bear the weight of that. But there’s no dead baby. No one killed a baby. And there is nothing under the basement floor. You have to believe me.”

“I believe you, Leo. But if there is nothing under the basement floor, there’s no real harm in Poppy pulling it up, is there? Just to prove things once and for all.”

“I just think it is a very destructive act,” Leo said.

“Maybe so. But destructive acts are important, aren’t they? Deconstruction has become an important movement in the world. In literature and politics and psychoanalysis. Why not deconstruct? Why not prove what isn’t there? You can build on that foundation.”

Leo stared at her for a long moment, then said, “What are you wearing?”

Nora felt cold. She shivered and pulled her robe around her. “What do you mean?”

“You’re all dressed up under there. Are you going out?”

“I . . . I thought I might.”

“You haven’t learned your lesson, have you?”

“I’m not going to do anything dangerous.”

Leo smirked and said, “No one sets out to do anything dangerous. We all operate under the illusion of control. You can’t control this city. You can’t control yourself in it. Why are you doing this?”

Nora took off the robe, dropping the pretense with a sense of power and autonomy.

“You know what, Leo? You don’t get to come in here and tell me how to behave. No one gets to tell me how to behave. My husband tried. He projected his own lack of self-control onto me, until he dumped me for a waitress. All my life my mother has tried to tell me how to act. She shed her disappointment onto me, and she needed me to be just as unhappy. Even my children try. They want to manipulate me out of my own free will. But here’s the horrible truth. We’re all free to do what we want.”

Leo shrugged. “Okay, so do it.”

“Thanks for your permission. Now excuse me.”

She attempted to brush past him. He grabbed her arm.

“She is going to take you out there tomorrow. But remember, there is no dead baby.”

“So you’ve told me, over and over.”

He stared at her and said, “Do you want me to walk with you?”

“No, I really don’t. I want to be alone.”

“Just remember, I tried to warn you.”

“Leo, you are drunk. You should get in a cab and go home. And tomorrow you should spend a long time thinking about why you wanted to come here in the first place. I didn’t encourage it.”

“Wait a minute, you called me. Remember?”

“It was an impulsive move.”

“The truth lies in impulse.”

“Save it for your classes.”

“My students don’t believe me.”

“Maybe,” Nora said, “because you don’t believe yourself.”

She walked out of the hotel room, into the dark, humid night, in search of a life-altering experience. Or, at the very least, hoping to find a reason to stay awake.

14

N
ora walked down Chartres Street to St. Ann, then up to Royal, then past Royal to Bourbon. As she neared Bourbon Street, she heard the din of celebration. There was always a party in New Orleans, it seemed. She wondered how Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest and other events managed to distinguish themselves. Partying seemed the natural state of things in the French Quarter.

It was getting close to eleven, and the streets were so crowded it was hard to walk. People moved in clusters, middle-aged men and women carrying plastic cups of lethal drinks (hurricanes, probably), laughing louder than they probably ever did at home, feeling liberated by the lack of rules, the permission to act up in public. These were probably accountants and lawyers and insurance salesmen, and they
probably depended on their wild night in New Orleans to distinguish them, to reassure themselves that they did not have one foot in the grave. How sad it would be for all of them to return to normal life, Nora thought. How sad it would be for her. She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to think about the stack of unfinished invitations in her briefcase. She didn’t know what she was going to do about the fact that she had neglected her work. She hoped New Orleans would help her forget that fact. And once she purchased a beer and had several sips, still standing on the street, she ceased to care.

But she knew, of course, that it was all a sad illusion. As she glanced at the merrymakers around her, she realized they all had real lives to get back to, and it was a depressing fact that none of their lives back home were as good or as lively or as invigorating as these frantic moments of abandon on Bourbon Street.
What kind of life is this,
she wondered,
that we have to steal happiness from undisciplined moments in a strange city?

Shouldn’t it be the other way around, she wondered? Shouldn’t our real lives be full of excitement and stimulation, and our vacation lives provide peace and quiet and dead calm? Things had gotten turned around, and she wasn’t sure how. Hadn’t she always meant to live an exciting life? How had she neglected that, as if it were no more important than a pedicure or hair streaks?

She thought about Leo and his strange and frantic story about the dead baby. She wished she had some such legacy, but she didn’t. She had simply endured a painful existence with her cold and angry parents, and she had finally escaped, into a cold and distant marriage, and now she was stranded with her children, trying to figure out another way to be. She constantly felt it was her responsibility to come up with a meaning of life to pass on to her children. But they were
nearly grown—at least Michael was, and Annette was trying hard to get there—and she had no valuable information to offer. Just get grown, try to stay alive and out of trouble, don’t make waves, don’t get noticed, don’t feel miserable. What kind of advice was that?

She realized she could offer her children no more valuable information than she herself had achieved. If her life ended up sad and misguided and without definition, how could she promise them that their lives would be different?
They learn from you,
a voice in her head said.
They cannot conceive of anything more than you have experienced. One day they might move beyond you, but they will always blame you for not showing them the way.
She wanted to know the way, so that she could tell them. Would it help that she had attended this rape trial, that she had met such strange characters as Leo and Adam and Margaret and Quentin Johnson’s mother? Would it ever matter that her best friends were Poppy and Simone? Would her children just consider her foolish because she put her faith in these friends? It was hard to say on this night, or on any other, but the beauty of being on vacation was that none of it could really matter. It was an escape from reality.

She walked down toward the end of Bourbon Street, until she finally got to the club called Oz, where Simone had encountered Quentin Johnson. The scene outside was noisy and boisterous. She tried to imagine what Simone had felt like, making her way inside. Did she hope to encounter Quentin? Or was she content to be alone? Did she feel relieved when she saw a welcoming face?

Nora made her way past the bouncer. He was a large black man who made a big deal out of checking her ID. Nora laughed, and when he noticed her age on the driver’s license he pretended to be amazed. It was a cheap trick, but Nora appreciated it. She felt an adolescent need to say, “Look, I’m
old and I have two children,” but she somehow knew he was aware of her trek around the business of life and was making a game out of it all. Or maybe he was making fun of her. She felt old and out of place in her black sundress and big jewelry.

The noise inside the club was deafening. There was the relentless beat of disco music, and the lights on the dance floor changed at a dizzying pace—from blue to green to yellow, then back to blue. Even if she had not seen the sign on the door
(THIS IS A GAY CLUB, BE NICE OR LEAVE)
she would have known where she was. True, there were several mixed couples dancing, but the club was really made up of gay couples. For a second, she wondered what her father might have thought. He had wanted her to be a teacher and stay close to home. Here she was, drinking a beer in a gay club in New Orleans. Life was a funny business.

She tried, as she had vowed to do, to think of how Simone must have felt here. How she must have felt when she turned to see a friendly face. It was easy to understand why she would have trusted him, would have followed him anywhere. It was not a scary place; all the patrons seemed to know each other. Nora felt safe, sipping her beer at the bar, but if some-one had asked her to dance, she wasn’t sure how she would have responded.

Suddenly someone touched her shoulder and she turned, ready to explain that she was a heterosexual woman who wanted to be left alone.

The man who touched her shoulder was Adam.

“What?” she said. She wasn’t sure what else to say.

Adam smiled at her. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to go out.”

“It’s not safe,” he told her.

“I’m not doing anything dangerous. I just wanted to go out on the town.”

“Are you drunk?” he asked.

“No, of course not. This is my first beer.”

“You look beautiful. You don’t even look like yourself.”

She smiled and looked away from him. She was reminded of mixers in college, where promising UVA men tried to talk her into going with them somewhere, relying on her knowledge that they were all invested in their futures and would never do anything to jeopardize that.

UVA was good in that way. No matter how much a man wanted her, he wanted his career, his future, more. He wasn’t about to risk that. Nora wasn’t sure what to think of men now that she had entered the later years and they had all distinguished themselves. She realized she was moving into a second phase of life, where men were willing to admit their initial mistakes, but were they willing to change their approach? It was hard to say.

Her daughter, Annette, had started to read Edgar Allan Poe recently, and Nora had attempted to fuel her interest by saying, “You know, he went to the same school that I did, until he got kicked out for gambling.” And lately Annette had started to amend her interest by saying to others, “This guy would have gone to school with my mother if he weren’t a gambler.”

Adam said, “I couldn’t sleep, and I wasn’t sure what to do. I saw you leaving so I followed you. Is that a bad thing?”

“Not yet, I guess.”

“Let’s dance,” Adam said.

“I don’t feel like dancing.”

“There’s nothing else to do here,” he argued.

“Okay, so let’s do something else.”

Adam thought about it and said, “Do you want to get something to eat?”

“I’m not really hungry.”

“So just walk with me.”

She walked with him to the Clover Grill, and he ate a ham-burger while she smiled and watched him. She said, “Look, I’ve talked to Leo and some other people who know Poppy, and there is reason to think she is crazy.”

Adam nodded and said, “There are people who tell me she is an ambulatory schizophrenic. There are others who say she is just bipolar. But the bottom line is that she is crazy. So I support that assessment.”

“Do you love her?”

“Of course,” Adam said, biting into his hamburger. He smiled as he wiped the residual grease from his lips. “I love her very much. I want to protect her. The world doesn’t know how to protect crazy people.”

Nora thought about that. She thought just the opposite was true. In fact, crazy people were the only ones who were protected. All those years, her mother walked around with one foot in reality, treating her children and her husband with cold, unapologetic cruelty. And everyone let her do it. Everyone kept her secret. She was crazy, so instead of attacking her, they attacked each other. Just as everyone was now doing with Poppy. Nora and Simone had somehow not connected with each other this week, during this whole ordeal, because they were too busy at first combating, and then protecting, Poppy’s insanity. It completely held their attention. It controlled them. It controlled Leo, too, and now Adam. Nora remembered, from some movie she’d seen or book she’d read, that the devil got his power from the fact that no one believed he existed. And now she thought the same was true of insane people. They controlled the universe by denying that they were crazy, and engaging others in the struggle to prove or disprove it.

“You realize Poppy intends to go out to her house and tear up the basement floor tomorrow,” Nora said.

Adam shrugged, sipping his coffee. “She’s been threatening to do that for years.”

“But she’s really going to do it tomorrow.”

“No, she’s not. She’ll drag us all out there and get hysterical, and we’ll talk her out of it and do something else.”

“Why would we talk her out of it?”

“Because it’s insane.”

“So what? How will we ever know how crazy Poppy is unless we allow her to show us?”

Adam wiped his mouth with a tattered napkin and thought. He seemed to like the idea, though it was clearly a completely new approach.

“All right, why not?”

Nora smiled, stealing a French fry from his plate. “Adam, you seem like an intelligent, sane person. Why do you spend your life chasing her around?”

“I don’t know. Why did you want to go to a gay nightclub by yourself in New Orleans? None of us has any idea why we want what we want. Or the lengths we’ll go to to get it. In fact, most of us are so scared of it, we never even ask the question. So we sit at home and watch TV. I think that’s why I like you. At least you’re looking. I’m looking, too, you know. I realize the answer is eventually going to be to leave her alone. But I have to get there myself. No one can tell me.”

He was cute. He was like a lot of guys she remembered from UVA, though she was certain that must be a false memory. He was dark, ethnic-looking, clearly Jewish, with black curly hair, laced with gray, dark eyes, too close together, thick lashes, a permanent five o’clock shadow. He wore small, rectangular glasses that made him appear smart, and more stylish than he really was.

“Where’d you go to school?” she asked him.

“William and Mary,” he said.

“Really?”

He nodded. “I’m from New York. But I was always attracted to the South.”

“What did you think of it?”

“Scared the hell out of me.”

“How about medical school?”

“Duke,” he said.

“Jesus, you just didn’t learn your lesson, did you?”

“I like to be scared.”

“But you didn’t settle down there.”

“I don’t like it
that
much.”

“You obviously belong in New York.”

“Obviously. I thought I could satisfy my desire for danger by marrying a Southerner. And so far I have.”

“Why plastic surgery?”

“Reconstructive surgery, please.”

“Okay.”

“Because I don’t like sick people. No one dies in my practice. Even people with melanoma, they usually live. And if they don’t, it’s some oncologist who has to deal with it. There are enough people around to deal with sickness. What I want to work with is dissatisfaction. Honest to God, people waste their lives worrying about their noses, their chins, their breasts. I can fix that and let them move on to other things.”

“Poppy says you work with battered women.”

At the mention of this, he seemed to clam up. He pushed his plate away and stared at the remains for a while.

“My old man was the sweetest guy. I never saw him lose his temper. Didn’t hit his kids, didn’t even yell at us. My mother was overpowering, nagging him and belittling him a lot for his lack of ambition. She projected all her needs onto me, of course. It’s an old story.”

He sighed, as if gathering strength for the next part.

“One day, when I was about eighteen, I got into a fight with my then girlfriend. Captain of the cheerleading team, beautiful, smart, headed for Ivy League. I like to call those kind of women the on-paper girls. They look good on paper, you know, what you want to bring home to Mother. Anyway, we were fighting, and before I knew what was happening, I hit her in the face and broke her nose.”

Nora stared at him, unable to believe it. She thought he was making it up to impress or attract her, though that made very little sense.

“There she was,” Adam said, “this perfect girl, this perfect face, and I changed it. Forever.”

“What happened to you?” Nora asked.

“Afterwards? Nothing much. Her father said he wouldn’t press charges if I would pay for a nose job. So I took my bar mitzvah money, which I’d invested in the stock market and made a bundle on, and I paid for her nose job. She got her breasts done at the same time. She came out better. Do you understand? She looked better after they got through with her, and she was happier. And I thought, my God, these men, they fixed the problem. They got me off the hook. I didn’t have to live with that pain forever, and I gave them the credit. Right then, I decided it was what I wanted to do.”

Nora liked the story, but it worried her a little, too. Was it good that he had faced down his demon so early in life, and his career was, in effect, a penance for that? Maybe all of a conscious life was spent in penance. And perhaps she had not sought her own. Being abandoned by Cliff had always felt like punishment, a judgment passed on her. Maybe it was. But suddenly, sitting in the Clover Grill in New Orleans, she understood why she felt so lost in his absence. She had refused
to see her part in the breakup. It had to be there. No one was blameless. And she needed to figure out what her part was, and pay her penance.