by Barbara Hall
“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.”
“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
Nora 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, sh
e 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?