by Barbara Hall
“Well, come on in and get dry.”
The room had a sitting area not far from the bed, a stiff-backed antique couch in front of an antique reproduction coffee table. He sat down and smiled at her, crossing his legs.
“You look nice like that,” he said.
“I was in bed.”
“You look good without makeup.”
“Oh, well. You know what they say. Makeup has a way of making you look older.”
“You look very young. And very pretty.”
“Are you drunk?” she asked.
He laughed. “No. I only had a Diet Coke at Harry’s. I was waiting to start drinking with you.”
“Oh. Well, I was at the trial all day.”
“How did it go?”
“It went pretty well. It was harrowing, but it was okay. Do you want something to drink?”
“Do you have anything?”
“Well, there’s an honor bar right outside my door. How about some wine?”
“Sure.”
She stepped out into the night. The rain was coming down harder now, and it pelted down on her hair and her night-gown, and she stepped in a couple of puddles. But the air was so hot it felt like a warm shower. She poured the drinks and when she came back, Leo was still smiling.
She handed him his glass of wine and he raised it, saying, “To New Orleans.”
“Oh, I don’t think I can drink to that.”
He shrugged. “To us, then.”
“Okay.”
They clinked and sipped their wine. She sat in a chair across from him.
He said, “I guess you think I’m the moodiest person on earth.”
“No, I don’t think that. There are a lot of moody people.”
“It’s just that when I’m with my kid, sometimes I’m pretty focused on that. When I’m away from her, I can let other things in. I came close to losing her, and I try very hard to make sure that I’m a good father.”
“How did you almost lose her?”
“By not being a good father, in the beginning. It’s a long story.” He sipped his wine and smiled. “Now I’m on the verge of getting full custody. Her mother, who was so adamant about taking her away from me . . . well, now she’s met another man, so she wants her free time. I just want Nicole to grow up feeling wanted and valued. It’s tough.”
“Yes, being a parent is hard,” Nora said.
“Even harder when the parents hate each other.”
“Oh, I don’t know. My ex-husband and I dislike each other a lot. But we somehow keep it from the kids.”
“How do you do that?”
“Well, he does it by being absent from their lives. And I make sure I never talk negatively about him, no matter how angry I am.”
“You’re a strong woman.”
“No, I’m not. I’m very vindictive, but I’ve got time. I know that the kids will figure it out. It will have a stronger impact if they get there on their own.”
He nodded, sipping his wine. “That’s why you’re the stronger sex.”
She laughed. “Because we’re mean?”
“No. Because you’re patient.”
Nora thought about that, wondering if she were really patient or just passive, relying on nature to take its course, relying on her children to develop insights, growing into a natural wisdom. But there was no guarantee that would happen. There was no real reason to think they would ever side with her. If she continued to protect Cliff, and he continued to feed the lie, there was every chance they would grow up siding with him, just because he could invent a more pleasant story. Or an easier one to swallow. It occurred to her that she should start telling them her side of things soon.
Thinking of it made her feel like Simone on the witness stand, trying to get an indifferent jury to believe that her story was more believable, even though it was far less pleasant. In the end, how did the truth get decided? If the jury turned against Simone, would that make her case any less valid? And if her kids didn’t believe that their father had misbehaved, would that be some failure on her part? Maybe so, in both cases. Because, she supposed, the burden was on the teller to make the audience trust that the bad deed had mattered, had done enough damage to warrant the rage and the hurt it left in its wake. The goal was not to get them to believe. The goal was to get them to care.
Leo said, “So how is Poppy these days? Is she happy?”
Nora was caught off guard, and she stopped herself from answering the way she wanted to. Why should they be talking about Poppy? If he wanted to know how she was, he should go across the courtyard to her room and ask her.
But she censored this thought, and she said, “Well, she’s as happy as anyone can be who is separated from her husband and attending her best friend’s rape trial.”
Leo laughed. “Poppy has a best friend?”
“What do you mean? She and Simone and I were very close.”
“But Poppy never got close to anyone. I was the best candidate for that, and for a while we were almost joined at the hip. Her old man was determined to put a stop to it, though, and the thing I could never get over was that he damn near succeeded.”
“But you didn’t take the money.”
“No. No, that wasn’t what broke us up. It was far more complicated than that.”
“Did you ever have any interest in seeing her again?”
He shrugged. “Out of curiosity, I guess. But I’ve known for a while that she was back in town, and I made no effort to see her. So I guess I’m not all that curious. Is she still pretty?”
“Yes, of course.”
“She cared a lot about that, you know. She acted like she didn’t, but whenever we were near a mirror, I was conscious of her stealing looks.”
“That doesn’t make her unique, as the gentle r goes.”
“But she had this weird thing where she also despised her looks. Or despised the fact that she was judged on them. You know, she was this debutante, this queen-of-the-ball-type person. Her father forced her to go through with that kind of thing. That’s why she . . .”
He stopped abruptly and stared at the floor.
“Why she what!” Nora asked.
He shook his head. Then he said, “It was why things ended badly between us. Finally she had to choose between my world and hers.”
“You’re saying she chose her father?”
“No, not at all. She totally rejected him. But then she seemed to set off on a journey, trying to find him again.” He yawned, an act of exhaustion and frustration rather than boredom. “I don’t really want to talk about her. Let’s talk about you.”
“There’s nothing to say. I’m pretty ordinary.”
“You don’t look so ordinary to me.”
She struggled to hide her smile. “Why did you want to see me again?”
“I enjoyed our talk,” he said. “About ethics. You had some interesting points of view.”
“I don’t think I really got to say much. I’m not a terribly ethical person.”
“Oh, really? How do you feel about the way your husband treated you? He left you for another woman, right?”
“Yes,” she said, blushing.
“And what did you think of that?”
“I thought it was vile.”
He nodded. “Vile is not a word that unethical people use.”
“I am capable of passing judgment. That doesn’t mean I’m ethical. Hitler did that.”
The words were scarcely out of her mouth before she realized what his reply would be.
“But Hitler was an ethical person. At least, he would argue that he was. He had very strict standards, a rigid belief system. So there are those who would say that belief itself is the enemy of peace and well-being. Even the enemy of true morality, or Godliness. E. M. Forster said, ‘I don’t believe in belief.’ I once assigned a midterm paper on that single sentence. Do you agree or disagree? Please discuss. C. G. Jung said, ‘I don’t believe in God. I know God.’ Use the back of the paper if necessary.”
“
But what does that mean?” Nora asked, feeling lost. “You have to believe in things. You can’t just know God. If people could know God, they would. That’s the point of faith. You believe because you don’t know.”
“And if you want to put your trust in the great thinkers, let’s take Einstein, who decided that the speed of light is the only constant, which must mean that the speed of light is the only truth. Ergo, the speed of light is God? Well, before you go hanging your hat on that idea, chew on this. Einstein, though a spiritual man, died in a state of despair because he felt that his life’s work had denied the existence of God. All that time he was trying to prove God, and he disproved him instead. Disproved him in a literal sense, because his work led to the atom bomb. How do you like those apples? Great Man’s Life Destroys World.”
“But it didn’t . . .”
“But it could. I mean, let’s face it. You and I could sit here all night, think as hard as possible, phone all our friends, call in all our favors, and we still couldn’t destroy the world. We couldn’t even hurt it much.”
“We couldn’t save it, either.”
“No,” he said. “There’s always a downside.”
Leo grew quiet, staring at the ceiling as if he expected something to appear there.
“Another drink?” she finally asked.
“Of course.”
Nora went out into the rain to refill their glasses. She was feeling a little drunk, but she didn’t care. In fact, she grabbed the bottle of wine and took her time walking back, letting the rain wash over her.
Leo was still watching the ceiling. He barely moved as she handed him a glass.
“So,” Nora said, “let’s review. If we can’t destroy the world, and we can’t save it, the fact is, nothing that we do matters very much.”
“Correct.”
“And nothing that is done to us matters very much.”
“Not in the Big Picture.”
“So a rape trial is an insignificant thing.”
Leo didn’t answer.
“And the fact that my husband left me for a waitress . . . that’s even less significant.”
Leo said, “In a world where nothing matters, there’s no such thing as degrees. You can’t qualify insignificance.”
“So my husband did nothing wrong. What the hell kind of ethics teacher are you, if you don’t believe in right or wrong?”
At last, Leo sat up and turned to her, not the least bit drunk, and looking a little annoyed.
“I never said that, Nora. This is an ethical debate. It’s the Socratic method, that’s all. You take the opposing view and see where it leads. At the end of the day, you have to make personal choices about right and wrong. Is there a moral imperative? An absolute definition of these terms? Who the hell knows? If I knew, I wouldn’t be driving a cab.”
“I didn’t mean to make you mad,” Nora said, feeling small.
“But you do make me mad,” he said. “You probably make a lot of people mad, with your desire to make things fit.”
Nora’s throat tightened and she thought she might cry. She wanted to please him, the way she once wanted to please her father, and later, Cliff. The way she wanted to please everyone she encountered. She thought back to the day of her arrival in New Orleans, when Poppy said that her tragic flaw was her sense of equation. And she realized that in her crazy way, Poppy was right. That Nora’s obsession with fairness would be her downfall. If she wasn’t careful, it could lead to madness.
“But I want him to be wrong,” she said, hating the child-like tension in her voice.
“Who?”
“My husband,” she said.
“Well, one way or another, we’re always getting what we want. More often than not, that’s the bad news.”
A flash of light and a crash of thunder, one right after the other, made the room shake, and they stopped talking. Nora couldn’t help thinking that the God neither of them claimed to believe in was commenting on their discussion. They listened to the rain, hammering like golf balls on a tin roof.
Nora leaned back in her chair, sipped her wine, then closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Leo was next to her, kneeling.
“I don’t want to go home,” he said.
“No, you shouldn’t. You can sleep on the couch here. I have to be in court tomorrow for the closing arguments. But you probably have to drive early, don’t you?”
He touched her face with his fingertips. “That’s not what I mean.”
From out of nowhere, Nora was visited by a sense of ancient wisdom. She heard in herself a parent’s voice, the kind of voice she had often longed for when dealing with her children, one she felt incapable of accessing on a day-to-day basis. When she opened her mouth, the voice came out, and she was impressed.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Leo,” she said. “It would be really unwise for you to stay. I have to get up early, and so do you. Besides, we hardly know each other, and we’re both friends with Poppy.”
“I haven’t spoken to Poppy in years. Twenty years, I think. I don’t think she even counts as an ex-girlfriend anymore.”
“Still, you see how it might be strange.”
Leo smiled and rubbed his thumb across his lip. He studied her as he did this, as if he had her number and, with a little prompting, could tell her everything she ever wanted to know about herself. That frightened her, because she suspected he might have some disturbing insights, and she didn’t want to hear them.
She straightened up in the chair and pulled her nightgown closer around her.
“Why did you want to see me again?” Leo asked.
“I told you. I wanted to thank you.”
“Besides that. Why did you want to see me tonight?”
She thought about fabricating something that might make her seem more sophisticated or generous than she felt. But a strange impulse took over, and she wanted to tell him the truth. She had never really wanted to tell a man the truth before. It was something she had learned from her mother. Always keep your secrets, never let them know what you’re thinking, and, for God’s sake, don’t let them know that you want them. Better yet, don’t let yourself want them.
But hadn’t her mother needed her father? Wasn’t that why she stayed with him all those years, putting up with his tempers and his coldness and his endless, unrealistic demands on the family? They had to be perfect. They had to go to church and sit together. They had to smile, no matter how miserable they felt inside. When he came home from work, they had to be quiet, no matter how fiercely they had been arguing all day. Her mother could talk the buzzard off the back of a meat wagon, and Nora knew it took a monumental effort to stay quiet while he droned on about his dealings at work, and since it was abundantly clear that her parents did not love each other, need was the only thing she could think of that kept her mother in line. Boo had always encouraged Nora to do well in school. No, not well—better than everyone else. So she could go to college and get a degree, so she could make her own way in the world and not rely on a man. She had half accomplished that goal with Cliff. But now here she was, feeling uncomfortably close to needing Leo, for all the wrong reasons.
“I really think you should go, Leo.”
“Well, I will if you want me to, but, like you said, that storm is pretty bad.”
“I just think you should leave.”
Leo nodded and he finally stood, still rubbing his thumb across his lip as he stared down at her.
“I think you’re very confused,” he said.
“Well, aren’t you a master of interpretation? Everyone’s confused, Leo. I don’t get any special prizes for that.”
He touched her wet hair. She felt angry, but before she could object, he pulled his hand away.
“I’ll go now,” Leo said. “Even though I think it would be a thrill to make love to you. I still remember how cute you looked the first night I saw you. Standing there talking to those criminals, being polite to them. I thought to myself, There is one innocent per
son left on earth. I have to get her into my cab.”
Nora didn’t smile. She thought it was cheap, the way he was trying to remind her that he had saved her. It had the potential to work, but the storm was heating up and she felt it was commenting on her circumstances. Like the weather in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, foreshadowing the events. Or Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, the lightning striking the tree next to the place where they nearly committed adultery. Nora thought that it was probably a weakness, a failing of hers, that she tended to view her life through scenes from literature. How egotistical that was, how presumptuous to think that her existence mattered on such a scale.
There was another crack of lightning, a boom of thunder, and then the lights flickered and went out. Nora jumped, then sat perfectly still. She couldn’t see anything, but she could feel Leo’s presence.
“What was that?” Nora said stupidly.
“Probably hit a transformer. Happens a lot.”
“Will you be able to get home?”
“Unless my car is on fire.”
Nora remained seated, though she could feel Leo moving around the room. Any second she expected to feel him on her, his hands around her throat, his body pressing down on hers. She tried to think of what to do. Not hit him in the nuts; all the self-defense articles said not to do that. A man is programmed, instinctively, to protect that area. Go instead for the eyes or the throat. But she couldn’t see anything. How could she fight back?
It didn’t matter because she sensed that Leo was far away from her. She heard a door open and then felt a cool, damp burst of air.
“So, I’ll see you,” Leo said.
“You’re going?”
“Yep.”
“Well, we could talk later.”
“Yes, we could.”
She heard the door close again and she thought he had reconsidered. She waited for him to speak. But then she heard footsteps sloshing outside her window, and she knew he was gone. Even though it was what she wanted, it seemed odd that he had just left that way. Just good-bye, into the dark, rainy night. Sort of like her marriage. Cliff had left that way, in the middle of the night, and the next day, when she woke up alone, she knew she would be alone for a long time.