A Summons to New Orleans (16 page)

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 person 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.

She felt her way into bed and lay there, staring into the darkness, fixing her eyes where she thought the ceiling should be. She dozed a little, and then the lights came back on, jarring her awake. She thought about turning them off, but it was pleasant, falling in and out of sleep this way, aware that life was going on somewhere. The storm was not a period at the end of the sentence. It was just a storm, like many she had lived through as a child in Virginia. She had been so afraid of them then. She would walk around the house, crying, and her mother would say, “If you were living right, you wouldn’t be afraid.”

That admonition would cause her to sit down on a step and think,
What does God know, exactly? What particular thing
will I be killed for?
She was five at the time, but there were a lot of things, so many that she didn’t know where to start. And then, she imagined, there were things she didn’t even know she’d done.

But there was her little brother Pete, always Pete, lying in a heap on the floor, slowly dying from his head injury, while next door she slept with her blanket and sucked her thumb. She had heard the noise but she didn’t want to know. So she had slept, and then he was dead. Was it her responsibility? Her parents never said so, but the doctor had asked her, “Didn’t you hear anything?” Or maybe it wasn’t a doctor. Maybe it was a policeman. Why would a policeman have been there? Whoever asked her, she just tucked her head and said no, nothing. It was, to her knowledge, her first outright lie.

Leo had said truth was the only important thing. But what could he know? How truthful was his life? He had taken money to stay away from Poppy. He denied it, but she believed Poppy more. Or she thought she believed Poppy. She thought she believed Simone, too, but there were all those details in the trial that didn’t hang together. It was too much trouble, figuring out this life. It was too hard to live nobly. Was that even her goal? She had no idea what her goals were. She wanted to be good, in every respect, but what had goodness gotten her? She was a good friend to Simone, she hoped, but it left her lying awake, wondering about the details of the trial. She was a good friend to Poppy, even though she had almost slept with her former lover. She was a good wife to Cliff, though not good enough to keep him from leaving her. She was a good mother . . . well, was she really? No, of course not. She was hideous and lost, leaving her children with her crazy, sadistic mother so she could come down here and pretend to be a good friend. Oh, for God’s sake, there was no predictable
way to be good. Every action has an equal but opposite reaction, she recalled from chemistry class. And so, according to the laws of nature, there was no way to be perfectly good. Every instinct set off a chain reaction of consequences—some good, some bad, some neutral. The only way to avoid stirring up the universe was to do nothing.

The phone rang and she pounced on it, thinking it might be Leo. If he were calling to ask her forgiveness, she would forgive him. If he wanted to come back, she might consider letting him. At least she’d make another date with him. She wanted to hear his ideas again. She wanted to know how to live.

But it was Simone. Her voice sounded bright and cheerful.

“Good news!” Simone said. “The trial has been delayed.”

“What? How?”

“Lightning struck a transformer near the courthouse. Whole place is blacked out so all trials have been canceled.”