A Summons to New Orleans (8 page)

She sat at the bar, and the bartender swooped down on her immediately.

“What’s your pleasure?” he asked.

She laughed. “Do bartenders really say that?”

“It’s late and I’m bored,” he admitted.

“I thought this city was always at work,” Nora said.

“It’s boring around here,” the bartender said. His hair hung down past his shoulders, and there was a paltry goatee fomenting around his mouth. “Jazz Fest was last week. That was wild. Now everyone is tired.”

“I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”

“No, you won’t. We make ‘em from scratch here and I’m too lazy to do it.”

“Oh. Well, how about a martini?”

“Done,” he said.

He started mixing, pouring liquids into a silver shaker, and a man with a leathery face approached her and said, “You having a good time here, little lady?”

“I don’t know. It’s too early to tell.”

“You an East Coast girl? You look like a New Yorker.”

“No, I’m a Southerner.”

“God bless you. Give this woman a drink on me,” he instructed the bartender.

“She hasn’t had her first one yet,” the bartender said.

“No matter. She needs another.”

The bartender put two martinis in front of her and stood there, as if he wanted to watch her drink. She sipped the first one. It was ice-cold and delicious. She ought to drink more, she decided, feeling the gin turn from cold to hot as it slid down her throat.

“Gonna be hot tomorrow,” the bartender said.

“You should be used to that.”

“You here on vacation?”

“Not really. Although sort of, I guess.”

“What do you think of our city?”

“I almost got mugged yesterday,” she said, biting into an olive.

“No shit. In the Quarter?”

“Yes, over on St. Ann’s, I think.”

“Yeah, you gotta be careful. Pretty girl like yourself, walking around alone.”

She blushed. It had been ages since anyone referred to her as a girl, let alone pretty. She felt embarrassed by how much she needed to hear it. Two more sips of the martini and she felt like she wanted to ask for details.
What’s pretty about me? The blond hair? My eyes? They were blue until I was six, then they turned this strange blue-green color. But they are okay, aren’t they? Am I fat? Would you leave me for a waitress?

Fortunately, she didn’t say any of this.

Instead she said, “My friend got raped.”

The bartender seemed surprised to hear it. A look of concern spread across his face.

“In New Orleans?”

“Yes, a year ago. They caught the guy. The trial is on Wednesday.”

“Goddammit,” he said. “This place is going to hell in a handbasket. Well, I hope they fry the bastard.”

“They don’t have the death penalty for rapists, do they?”

“They oughta,” he said, taking a swig from a bottle of water. “Women get the short end of the stick, don’t they? I mean, guys can’t really get raped. I guess they could, but most of the guys I know wouldn’t mind. Sorry if that sounds tasteless.”

“I’ve heard worse.”

“But damn, to force a woman to have sex? That’s just wrong.”

Nora stared at him. How old was he? Barely twenty-one, she had to think, given how much trouble he was having sustaining facial hair. Was this how the younger generation saw things? Force a woman to have sex, pay with your life. Did she ever think in such absolutes? Even now, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to see happen to Simone’s rapist. Jail, certainly, for a long time. But death? She did not feel that kind of rage yet. Maybe she would when she laid eyes on him.

“Is she doing okay, your friend?”

“Oh, yeah, she’s fine,” Nora said, and then she was a little disturbed at how cavalier that sounded. But Simone
was
fine
.
Until she told them about the rape, Nora would never have guessed anything had happened to her. Except that she was painfully thin. And on the phone, she had sounded drugged. But so what if she was? It was okay to take painkillers when you had your wisdom teeth out. Wouldn’t it be okay to take a sedative to recover from being raped?

Suddenly the bartender looked up as the door opened and said, “Leo, my man! How’s tricks?”

Leo Girardi headed toward the bar in a lumbering gait. He was a little heavier set than Nora remembered, and not quite as handsome. She had fantasized him into some kind of Harrison Ford–esque hero, and now the reality of him was coldly disappointing. She felt a sudden urge to leave.

He sat beside her without looking at her and spoke instead to the bartender. “Hey, Jess, slow night?”

“Pretty damn slow. Leo, this here is my friend, the martini drinker. I don’t know her name.”

“Nora,” she said to Leo, and he finally looked at her and smiled.

“I know Nora.”

“Damn, it’s a small town. What’s your poison?”

“One of those,” Leo said, nodding at her martini.

She slid the extra one to him. “I can’t finish the one I have.”

He sipped it and studied her as he drank. She did the same. His face looked a little more attractive now, not quite so doughy, and his dark eyes were very pretty—feminine, almost—deep-set with long eyelashes. She tried to picture him in high school, when Poppy knew him. Nora could imagine him about twenty pounds lighter, with more hair, long the way boys wore it then, swept over one eye, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and ripped Levi’s. She liked the image.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Oh, fine, I guess.”

“You didn’t bring Poppy with you.”

Nora felt uncomfortable, wondering if he had only come here with the hope of being reunited with Poppy.

“No, I didn’t. She wasn’t at the hotel when I left. We had kind of a stressful day. She’s married now, you know.”

He nodded. “I heard she left her husband.”

“Oh, well, I’m sure they’re trying to work things out.”

“Like you and your husband?”

“No, we’re not trying at all. He’s in love with someone else.”

“Amazing,” he said, looking at her.

“Why?”

“Well, you seem like perfectly fine wife material to me.”

“You don’t know me.”

“No, and you don’t know me.” He took large sips of his drink and wiped his lips with his sleeve. “What did you call me for?”

“I told you, I wanted to thank you.”

“Yeah, but that seems kind of strange to me.”

“Well.” She didn’t know what else to say. She tucked a
strand of hair behind her ear, the way she used to in high school when she had long hair. Now it seemed foolish, as she had almost nothing to tuck. “What do you teach?”

“Excuse me?”

“In school. What do you teach?”

“Ethics,” he said.

She nodded, but thought he was probably kidding. She had never had an ethics class. She didn’t realize there was such a thing.

“What kind of ethics?” she asked.

“Kind? There’s no kind of ethics. You can’t place a value judgment on ethics, odd as that might sound. I present moral dilemmas and ask my students to construct a response. That’s all. Your ethics are what they are. That’s what they learn. Even the absence of virtue is a form of ethics. If you reject altruism, if you reject belief, that is an ethical position. Your ethics in that case are called nihilism. A rejection of all accepted norms and principles is a code of ethics. If that weren’t the case, then philosophy wouldn’t exist. Descartes, for example, decided it was necessary to doubt everything in order to formulate a single belief. Martin Luther, Meister Eckhart, Socrates, Hegel, Kierkegaard, they all thought it was their duty to deconstruct existing beliefs. So people of their time thought of them as unethical.”

Leo took a sip of his drink and continued talking. “But people like the Buddha and Kierkegaard would say that the only unethical stance is the absence of a stance. That is, the lack of consciousness. Kierkegaard called such people aesthetes, a word he borrowed from the Greeks. Meaning, people who only seek pleasure and who reject consciousness. He thought such people were not actually alive.”

“Aesthetes,” Nora said. “You mean, like, artists?”

“A common misconception,” Leo said, though he didn’t clarify.

“So you’re telling me that murderers are ethical,” Nora said. “Murderers and rapists.”

“Depends on your murderer,” Leo said. “In a sense, most murderers are ethical in that most murders are crimes of passion, not a way of life. But let’s take your average serial killer. He certainly is ethical. The same guy who would kill a dozen prostitutes wouldn’t think of killing a guy in a bar fight or running down a cop. He has his own code of ethics. Which is not to say that such a person is moral.”

“Well, what makes a person moral?”

“Morality is usually linked with spirituality. Unlike ethics, which are merely linked to a code of principles, often but not always aligned with a social contract.”

“What about evil?” Nora asked, feeling the drink traveling through her from her head to her fingertips. “What about that?”

“Oh, well, that’s complicated.”

“Tell me.”

“Everyone has a different definition. I call it the active denial of self. And the active denial of self results in the active destruction of anyone else’s sense of self. Hence, Hitler. Hence, Stalin. Of course, Kierkegaard thought of the active denial of self as despair. But I think despair and evil are inevitably linked. Bertrand Russell thought that evil was a byproduct of boredom and that both these things were cousins of fatigue. Imagine that. Fatigue!”

“So maybe Hitler only needed a good night’s sleep?”

“Exactly,” Leo said, grinning.

“Where does God figure into all of this?”

Leo rubbed a thumb across his bottom lip and stared
at the bar, at the circles of condensation left behind by his glass.

“Here’s what I think about God,” he said. “It just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if anyone believes. Of course He exists, if in no other form than in what Jung describes as the collective unconscious. You know, the common human experience. Those symbols we all recognize. Those experiences we all understand. So maybe that’s God. But it’s like believing in gravity. Whether or not you believe in it, it’s there.”

“So you believe God is there.”

“I never think about it. I know I don’t have to. I know He doesn’t require it. The Buddha said it is pointless to contemplate unanswerable questions.”

“But aren’t most ethical questions unanswerable?”

“No. Only the question of God.”

“Then I guess what I’m wondering is, what makes people behave well? I mean, what stops them from doing bad things?”

Leo laughed. “Obviously, nothing. People do bad things all the time.”

“But horrible things. Unthinkable things.”

“Well, there’s no such thing as an unthinkable thing. But that takes us back to ethics. Most people behave because they are ethical—that is, they enter into a social contract. I won’t kill you if you won’t kill me. If someone deviates from the ethical or social contract, that person is punished.”

“Not always.”

“There are loopholes,” he said. “Things aren’t black and white.”

“No, but . . .”

“And speaking of that, why do we associate black with evil? Black is the presence of all colors. While white, the color of purity, is the absence of color. Why, then, do we value absence
over presence? I’ll tell you why. Because presence is too frightening. Which is why we drink.”

Nora wanted another sip of her drink, but his comment forced her to abstain. She sat still, crossing her hands in her lap. She was aware of being dressed in black. What did that mean, ethically or morally speaking, she wondered.

“Okay,” she said, “here’s a question. What would make a man leave his wife of many years for a barely legal waitress?”

Leo smiled and said, “I’m sure you’re just making up an example. But, not knowing the details, I’d have to say boredom, which brings us back to Kierkegaard. Or maybe he’d say lack of consciousness.”

Nora felt brave enough to sip her drink, then said, “Was this Kierkegaard married?”

Leo shook his head. “He broke off his engagement, which was a seminal moment for him. He felt that he sacrificed his love for the sake of purity, much as Abraham attempted to sacrifice his son for the sake of God.”

“God spared Isaac.”

“Yes, but Abraham was prepared to kill him. Think of it. Do you mind if I smoke?”

Nora shrugged, though she did mind, and the fact of Leo’s smoking lowered him in her estimation somehow.

He noticed her expression and smiled.

“You’re thinking, what’s an ethical guy like me doing smoking a cigarette.”

“They’re your lungs,” she said.

“Yes, they are my lungs. And my ethics are my own. I’m on the same page with Jung, who believed that the attempt to keep the shadow side at bay would ultimately be the destruction of us all. He believed that the dark and the light had to coexist, and that any attempt to deny the darkness was futile
and ultimately fatal. At the very least, it resulted in shallow and unrealized individuals.”

Jess put full martinis down in front of both of them and winked at Nora, for some reason she could not fathom. Her own martini was still half-full, but she was happy for the second one. It meant the night would last longer.

Nora said, “Do you have any ideas that are your own? I mean, everything I’m hearing comes from some text book, some genius with a foreign name.”

Leo laughed casually, unconcerned, though Nora had meant to put him on the defensive.

“Well, as the man in Ecclesiastes said, there’s nothing new under the sun. Actually, that’s a saying he stole from the Egyptians. The sun sets and the sun also rises. Even Mr. Hemingway borrowed from his predecessors.”

Nora yawned, trying to sort out her thoughts. She was considering the countenance of Kierkegaard, whose thin face and disheveled hair she thought she remembered from college textbooks. He looked not unlike Elvis in a cravat, as she recalled.

“Do you think people are better off believing in God?” she asked. “I mean, are they happier?”

Leo stared into the ember of his cigarette and said, “I don’t think people are happy, or that they’re meant to be. And I think that’s just fine. I think ‘happy’ is a concept invented by advertisers. It’s a recent phenomenon, the pursuit of happiness. Even when Thomas Jefferson was peddling it, he was really talking about something else. The absence of dread.”