A Summons to New Orleans Page 2

  She had not told Simone why she and Cliff broke up. Simone might know anyway—she seemed to know everything—but she was nice enough to let it go as a simple divorce. She was even nice enough to say that Cliff had never been good enough for her, that now she could find herself a real man. Simone had never been married. Lately, Nora wondered if she might be gay, but she knew that was stupid because Simone had dated nearly every man who mattered at UVA. Tall, skinny, with Cher-like black hair (the Sonny era), and full of that great aloof quality—indifference mixed with a sheltered intelligence—Simone never had any trouble attracting either men or women. She had a great sense of humility, either real or convincingly affected, which made her impossible to dislike. She was a listener, a quizzer. She liked to know about other people’s problems and rarely volunteered her own. She was the person Nora always turned to when life seemed bleak and unimaginative. Simone could make her laugh. Simone could make her own life seem exciting, just by commenting on it. Like when she told her about her breakup.

  “Oh, my God!” she. exclaimed. “Nora Kay, imagine you, out there for two seconds, a single woman. You’ll have men breaking in your windows. With your brains, and that figure, and those adorable babies, who wouldn’t want you? This is going to be the most exciting time of your life. What an opportunity, to get back out there, knowing what you know. Now you can really start to live.”

  It was a nice enough thing to say, but so far from the truth that Nora didn’t even feel obligated to point out that fact. It was true that she still looked pretty good. Her face was appleshaped, and all that acne in high school really had paid off (oily skin, no wrinkles, as her mother had promised). Now from a distance she looked like someone in her twenties. And her children were beautiful, and she did have some life experience stored up, but no man would break her windows or anything else. They wouldn’t because she wouldn’t let them. She was, and always had been, mildly afraid of men. Not afraid that they would hurt her, but afraid that she would hurt them, with her quick tongue and impatient nature. She had a history of being mean to men, and she had no real idea why. Except for the fact that her mother had hated her father with a special intensity usually found only in skinheads or sociopaths. They had stayed married, though, letting their hatred breed unrestrained, multiplying until it finally had killed her father. The angrier of the species survives, Nora thought.

  Cliff was the first man who had ever left her. He left her for a woman with no scars, visible or otherwise.

  Hell, I’m going out, Nora decided. I’m in New Orleans, and I never get to go anywhere, and it’s generally safe. Tomorrow I’ll figure out what I’m going to do.

  2

  People were coming out onto the streets of the city like bugs after dark. They were tourists mostly, in khaki shorts and T-shirts, with cameras and fanny packs and shopping bags. Knots of young people moved along clutching plastic cups of alcohol, moving without much purpose. The horse-and-buggies moved through the streets, and the drivers intoned to their passengers about this or that being the oldest city in the Mississippi Valley. As Nora looked about her, everyone seemed anonymous, yet she could feel people looking at her as if she didn’t belong. She walked with her purse swinging and bumping against her hip, her arms crossed over her stomach. Simone had once told her in college that she walked as if she were always leaving an argument. But in a strange city, this did not seem like a bad way to walk.

  As she approached Jackson Square, it occurred to her that she had friends who lived in New Orleans, people she had known at UVA whom she now barely remembered. Some big guy, desperately overweight even then, probably more so now, who was always having Sazerac parties in his dorm room. They called him “Gentle Ben,” but she couldn’t remember his last name. Then there was Frankie, the gay black cheerleader who would tap-dance on command and do an Amos ‘n’ Andy impersonation, and generally insist on humiliating himself with the Southern stereotype. His last name was Harris, wasn’t it? But she couldn’t call him. He wouldn’t remember her.

  Then there was Poppy Marchand. Well, Poppy. Of course, there was always Poppy. She had been one of Nora’s and Simone’s best friends. They had all lived in a house together in their fourth year, along with a few other floaters, people who claimed to live there but who were rarely seen. Nora, Simone and Poppy had been the only constants there in that house near Vinegar Hill. They made the cooking and cleaning charts and stuck to them. They studied together and went to parties together and discussed their futures late at night while drinking or getting stoned. Poppy was from one of the oldest families in New Orleans, and her parents were rich—this they knew without ever being told it. Yet Poppy was reticent about her past, volunteering nothing except how much she hated her hometown, and how she never intended to return there. Poppy had been one of those girls whose father was the head of a krewe, and her mother had been a Mardi Gras princess or queen or whatever, and Poppy had been expected to move back home and carry on the tradition. She never said exactly why this whole business seemed so abhorrent to her, but she insisted that she would head north after graduation, and indeed she had. In fact, the last Nora had heard of Poppy, she was living in England, an artist, and had gotten a few paintings in the Tate Gallery. The truth was, she had lost touch with Poppy even before they graduated. In the last days at UVA, Poppy had withdrawn, seemingly into her studies, but really into herself. She no longer joined them for taco dinners in front of Charlie’s Angels reruns; she didn’t go with them to parties, and she dropped out of the intramural tennis team they all had played on.

  “Poppy has begun her retreat,” Simone used to say whenever Poppy decided to disappear. She did that a lot, but she always came out of it, except at the end.

  Poppy seemed like a delicate creature: small and thin, with shiny brown hair that curled under like in old movies. She wore headbands and knee-length skirts and white blouses with a pearl necklace always nestled at her throat. She spoke several languages and had been all over the world and was a great athlete, despite her small build. She was a cox on the women’s eights rowing crew, and she could have made the tennis team if she had wanted to. But Poppy always seemed to have some distant goal in mind. She was an artist, no doubt about it, and she pursued that above all else. Her paintings took up the whole apartment, and the others stepped around them, giving them a perfect right to be there.

  Nora had been afraid of Poppy. Afraid to engage her in any kind of debate or meaningful conversation, afraid she would be defeated, afraid that Poppy might suddenly tell her something she didn’t want to know about herself. But she had loved Poppy, too. Every now and then they had gone out drinking together, and Poppy would get a loose tongue after a few light beers and start talking about how meaningless it all was, this crazy, careless life they led at college, this notion that they all had achieved something by stumbling along the grounds that Thomas Jefferson had built, as if they had anything to gain from it. Mr. Jefferson had not envisioned keg parties or Easters or fraternities. He believed in liberty through knowledge, education, enlightenment. Poppy was the only person Nora knew who took Thomas Jefferson seriously. Poppy was the only person she knew who had ever turned anyone in under the honor code. She had witnessed someone cheating on a final English exam, and she had told. The student was expelled. Poppy had no regrets.

  Nora wondered if that kind of vigilance was a virtue. Had it served anyone? Everyone cheated in college. Maybe because they knew that everyone cheated in the real world as well. Nora had never had to cheat because she found English to be such an easy major—speculating on Jane Austen or Shakespeare or James Joyce while the rest of the college slaved away at math equations or historic analysis seemed unfair to her. Her major was open to interpretation, certainly, and it relied in large part on the ability to bullshit during an essay.

  Nora knew she would not try to call Poppy Marchand. There was almost no chance she had settled in New Orleans, and even if she had, Nora would not know what to say to her. They had not spoken since graduation
.

  Nora paused to listen to the street musicians in Jackson Square, but they weren’t very impressive. They played rattly old guitars and squeaky trumpets, and one guy rubbed sticks up and down a washboard. Tourists paid attention, however, gathering around them as if they were eating fire. They took pictures. She moved past the spectacle, her arms still crossed, making her way to the more commercial end of the street.

  She turned right just past the square and walked the two blocks up to Bourbon Street. As she walked, it occurred to her that New Orleans was a city that seemed always closed, despite its activity. It had that desolate, hollow feeling of a sleepy town on a Sunday afternoon. Or perhaps the scary feeling of a place on the verge of a revolution, a hushed sort of danger settling in the stale air.

  Once she arrived at Bourbon Street, of course, everything changed. The city unfolded around her, full of noise and chaos and drunken activity. Tourists were everywhere, stumbling against each other and laughing much louder than they would have in any other setting. So much music, and it all merged, creating a nerve-jangling racket. There were hustlers outside all the clubs, men dressed in white shirts and black pants, waving people into the” places with halfhearted enthusiasm. She continued to walk with her arms crossed, her purse now actually starting to hurt her as it hit against her thigh. Her breath came fast, and she was glad she was there, amazed she was there, and at the same time she wanted to be back in her hotel room, or, better yet, back at home watching America’s Most Wanted with her children sleeping down the hall. Had her mother put them to bed yet? Why hadn’t she called home? she thought suddenly. She was out of her league, out of control.

  She noticed some men staring at her. A few of them actually attempted to talk to her, but she just kept walking. Whenever men noticed her, Nora felt something akin to rage bubbling up inside her. It had been years since she had been comfortable with that kind of attention, if ever. She had married Cliff right out of college, and had dated him for a year before graduating. So it had been about fifteen years since she had had any tolerance for flirtation. Was it harmless? It was hard to remember. Those men who lurched in her direction or winked or called her “baby”—did they have any kind of decent intention? Was that how it all began, or did serious, respectful attention occur in some other mutated form? She could distantly recall, like something she had daydreamed as a child, a time when turning a man’s head was a goal, a thing to aspire to. But even back then, did she think those men were worthy or pathetic? After all, she had met Cliff at a keg party at UVA, when she was starting her fourth year and he was starting his last year in grad school. But he hadn’t winked or lurched. He had offered her a beer and asked if she was in the business school, and things had just evolved from there. He seemed so serious; it took her a long time to figure out that he was interested in her.

  But that, too, was just a trap. He had led her down a very circuitous path to humiliation. He had respected her, wooed her conventionally, married her in a proper ceremony at the Boar’s Head Inn, moved her into a beautiful home just outside the city, impregnated her twice. Then, when she was beyond being much use to anyone, he abandoned her for a waitress.

  All in all, she told herself, a one-night stand would have been better.

  I have to get over this, she thought, making her way down Bourbon Street, being bumped by all the people who had left their manners back home, who had given themselves permission to be assholes in public. This was New Orleans, for God’s sake, the birthplace of jazz, reportedly home to every vice imaginable, a place where no one was expected to behave. People were just here to have a good time, and Nora was conscious of her own puritanical nature, dressed in black, sneering at everyone, and feeling superior and angry and righteously alone.

  I have to stop hating men, she reminded herself. It was not going to get her anywhere she wanted to be. God knows she did not want to be a man-hating feminist, or even one of those temporary man-haters, claiming to despise them all until one of them stepped up, someone with a six-figure salary and a willingness to fuck her and take her children out to dinner on Sunday evenings. Hadn’t she always frowned on those people, the women she saw at the gym or her poetry-writing extension courses or her book club? Women in stretch pants and oversized denim shirts and espadrilles, defending Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno while hurling invectives at Jennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, as if there were any significant difference between those types? Women always looking for other angry female authority figures to define their own misguided sense of individuality. She thought they were sad back then. Sad, and funny, and completely worthy of her disdain. She was married then. She could afford to sneer.

  “Are you having an affair?” she had asked Cliff, straight out, the night he came home late, reeking of perfume. There already had been other clues. Hang-up calls, and strange numbers on the phone bill, and a lack of interest in sex, and a persistent crankiness, a constant, low-level needling about her housekeeping habits and her appearance. (“Do you have anything besides sweat pants? Do you ever think about buying new lingerie? When was the last time you put on a bathing suit?”) She had ignored all the signs, the way she had ignored certain things about her children, hoping it would all go away. Like how she had allowed her son to sleep in their bed until he was seven, and she was still in denial about her daughter’s compulsive chewing. She knew her son was smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, and she prayed they were only regular cigarettes. (But what could she say to her son about pot, when she had smoked an entire plantation’s worth during her senior year in college?) She kept waiting for her children to grow out of these dangerous desires. And she had waited for her husband to do the same.

  “I can’t believe you just said that” was Cliff’s response to her accusation.

  “Why? Why can’t you believe it? I smelled your shirt. You’re home late every night. People have told me things.”

  “You believe everything you hear? You listen to your mother, for God’s sake?”

  Her mother, in fact, had come up with no concrete evidence over the years, though she had suspected Cliff of everything from mail fraud to murder since the day she met him.

  “Just tell me. Are you having an affair?” she had insisted. And while she was thinking of some other approach, some stinging kind of question that might leave him breathless, he just sighed and said, “Yeah, okay, what do you want to do?”

  She had not known how to answer him. She didn’t know what to do. She fully expected to spend a few more months accusing him and collecting his denials like weapons to use against him. But there it was, out in the open, and she stood holding his honesty in her hands like a grenade.

  Though it seemed like a lifetime away, that was only four months ago. She had felt so smug in her isolation for a while, expecting to be rewarded for being left. At first she expected Cliff to come back, but then he fled the state, and all the nastiness surrounding his illegal activities surfaced, and she knew she couldn’t want him anymore, so she began to hope for his demise. It didn’t come. Even though he broke the law every day, simply by getting out of bed and breathing, he was living a fairly contented life in Miami with June Ann, the waitress from the Red Lobster.

  Nora remembered, with a shudder, the time she and Cliff had gone to the Red Lobster on their anniversary, and June Ann had waited on them. She hadn’t a clue at the time, but she now realized the two of them were deep into their affair by then, and for some reason she could recall all the metaphors they engaged in while placing their order.

  “I’ll have the spicy clams,” Cliff had said. “My wife will have the cold seafood plate.”

  “The clams are very spicy now,” June Ann had said. “They could burn your mouth. They are hard to digest, some people say.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Cliff had said. “But my wife likes hers cold. Very cold.”

  “I’ll make sure it’s chilled,” June Ann had said.

  Confused, Nora had said, “It doesn’t have to be chilled. I just want t
he cold shrimp platter.”

  “With lemon?” June Ann had asked.

  “Yes,” Cliff had said. “She likes it sour, too.”

  June Ann had smiled down at her order pad, unable to look at Nora.

  How could she have been so stupid, so naïve?

  Of course, she wasn’t naïve. She had always known but had not wanted to know, would have done anything to avoid facing what was heading toward her at the pace and height of a tidal wave.

  But a waitress? A waitress? Okay, a graduate student at UVA, but that didn’t make it any better. When she had learned the truth, the cliché of it had bothered her more than anything.

  “You’re more creative than that, aren’t you?” she had asked Cliff. “Fucking a student? Jesus, aren’t you even embarrassed? Don’t you have a shred of dignity left?”

  Apparently not.

  I must not let this whole thing bring me down to his level, Nora thought as she continued to meander along Bourbon Street. She should see this outing as an awakening, a new part of her journey. Trouble was, she hated her journey. She had always hated journeys and until four months ago had figured she was through with hers. She disliked emotional growth. She didn’t want to do this anymore, didn’t want to discover anything else about herself. Her new therapist said she should see this change as an opportunity.

  “You don’t understand,” Nora had told her. “I saw my later years as a freedom from opportunity. I thought I was through with all that. I was looking forward to the resolution. I hated my youth. I hated all that soul-searching. I wanted to find the good parking space in life. I wanted to be settled.”

  “Life isn’t like that,” her therapist had assured her. “You are constantly evolving, or should be.”

  “Then, when the hell do you rest?”

  “When you’re dead, I suppose,” her terminally cheerful therapist had replied.