by Barbara Hall
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.
But penance need not be paid in suffering, she thought, the idea occurring to her like a peaceful revelation. It can be paid in forward motion. Correcting the mistake is a positive move, a nurturing move. Unlike the fierce, angry religion she had been raised in, this new religion she was discovering was nurturing and hopeful. You get better by being better. Doing better. Forgiving yourself and moving on. Could she do that? Did she have the courage?
My God, she thought, Simone was raped, violated and nearly killed. And she, Nora, had wasted all this time on details, clamoring for the truth, struggling with her disbelief. She doubted because it was safer than believing. She had spent her life in the false safety of the middle ground. Was she brave enough to leave it?
The way her heart was speeding up, the way she suddenly felt giddy and drunk, told her that she was. She wanted to try. It was a lesson Simone had desperately been trying to teach them, but they had been too paralyzed by fear and dread to learn it. Simone had faced death and discovered the secret to life. And the secret to life was so simple and pure. The secret was simply this: You’re alive. Do something.
“Are you okay?” Adam asked.
She looked at him and realized that quite some time might have passed while she was contemplating all this. She realized, too, that she was wearing a detached, mysterious smile, and that that might have frightened him.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m really fine. I just feel like going home.”
“Let me get the check.”
“No, I mean home. Virginia. My children. My life.”
“Oh. Well, you should probably wait until Sunday.”
“I will. I just mean . . . the fact that I want to go home is a new thing. To be in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be home. I didn’t know what it meant. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to ramble.”
“You’re not rambling,” he said. “I know just what you mean.”
He paid the check and they walked to the hotel in silence. Nora had so many thoughts racing through her head, she couldn’t process them all. At the same time, she managed to glance around her and really see things. She saw the old, un-even sidewalks, and the stagnant rain puddles, and the trash collecting in the gutter, and the horse manure in the street, and the lovely old buildings in crumbling pastel shades, and the black night sky, and the wilting trees, and the lights in the distance, across the river, and she was aware of Lake Pontchartrain behind her, and she was aware of the music sifting down the street, bending around the corners, the lost laughter and fractured conversation, and all the business of life, falling like an unexpected snow, a common and uneventful and purely miraculous gift from the sky.
15
The sun raced through the windows early, before seven, and Nora groaned and rolled over, pulling the sheet over her head. She had forgotten to draw the curtains. Now she was paying for it. So excited by her recent revelations, she had simply undressed and crawled into bed, hoping to ruminate further. Instead, she had fallen asleep almost instantly. She was paying the price. But she wanted to pay the price. She was surprised and pleased to discover that her epiphany was still strong and valid. She still understood and believed in all the conclusions she had drawn the night before. She lay awake, running them over in her head, expecting to deflate and devalue them, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to. She remembered her days in college, when she would smoke pot at night, have some great awakening, only to find in the morning that it was silly and specious. But that didn’t happen this morning. She still believed in the plan she had formulated: You’re alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative (if there was one, and she wanted to believe there was), was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.
That was an easy enough course of action. She thought she could do it. She really thought she could survive.
So she sang in the shower and smiled while she brushed her teeth, and she thanked God, or some such Higher Power, for her children, and for her awareness, and for her chance to begin again. But the thing she did not count on while she prepared for her day was that there were people out there who were invested in her not moving on. Not discovering the meaning of life, not paying penance, not doing better. There were people who were invested in her staying exactly as she was.
The first such person was her mother, who called just as she was stepping out onto the patio to have breakfast.
“You need to come home,” her mother said.
“Yes, Mother, I’m coming home on Sunday.”
“No, I mean today. Your children are in trouble.”
“What’s wrong?” She felt dizzy again, and she thought, No, of course you aren’t going to get away with this. There is further punishment to be had.
“Well, your daughter cried herself to sleep because she misses you so much, and your son claims you’re the reason that the marriage broke up, which is why he wants to go live with his father.”
Nora sighed. “These aren’t problems, Mother. They are simply the truth. Annette misses me, which is normal, so she cries, which is also normal. Of course Michael blames me, because I am partly to blame, and I just haven’t had the awareness to realize that, or to explain it to him.”
“You’re to blame? That man is a criminal. Have you forgotten he is wanted by th
e state of Virginia?”
The hallowed state, Nora thought, and smiled.
“Yes, but Mother, I chose him, and I elected to stay with him, knowing all this. Why did I do that?”
“Because you don’t know a fool when you see one, that’s why.”
“But why don’t I recognize a fool? Is that a lesson you forgot to teach me?”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault?”
“It’s everyone’s fault. Human beings are faulty.”
“I told you not to marry him.”
“You wasted your breath. I needed to do it. And yes, I contributed because how could Cliff really respect someone who would indulge his vices? Of course he loved me, because I could not make him stay. I couldn’t because I didn’t care enough. It’s complicated, Mother.”
“You talk like a train hit you,” Boo said.
“I don’t expect you to understand. I’ll be home on Sunday, as planned. I’ll drive down and pick up the kids.”
“You don’t care that your daughter is weeping in misery?”
“Yes, I care, but it’s an experience she needs to have.”
“She needs to suffer?”
“She’s going to suffer whether she needs it or not.”
“I believe you are on drugs,” Boo declared. “Has that Simone put you up to something? Has she gotten you on drugs? I never trusted that girl.”
“I know, Mother. You don’t trust anyone. And neither have I, for a long time. But I have decided to trust myself. I know I’m going to do the right thing.”
“You have lost your damned mind.”
“If my mind was damned, it was worth losing.”
“You’re going crazy,” Boo declared.
“No, Mother, I have been crazy. I think I am going sane. Sometimes it feels like the same thing.”