A Summons to New Orleans (6 page)

She paused to take a sip of Pimms, but her momentum was going now, and she did not back off her story.

“I walked to the hotel, to the Collier House, in fact. And I told the clerk what had happened, and he called the police, and so on and so forth. Just like a bad TV movie. All the uncomfortable questions and the humiliating exam at the hospital. I had to take the AIDS cocktail as a prophylactic measure. That’s part of the treatment for rape these days.”

“Oh, God,” Nora said suddenly. It was all too much to hear.

“I’m okay,” Simone said. “I’ve been tested, and so has he. But that’s another story. You’ll hear it all at the trial.”

“Trial? They caught him?” Poppy asked.

“Yes. And the trial is Wednesday.” Simone paused. “And that’s why you’re here.” She exhaled a long breath and smiled. “There. That wasn’t so bad.”

Nora shook her head. Her eyes were clouded with tears and she was finding it hard to breathe. “I can’t believe it,” she said.

“Neither could I,” Simone said. “Even when I tell it, it sounds like something that happened to another person.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Poppy asked, and there was a degree of indignation in her voice.

“I couldn’t. I don’t know. I was ashamed.”

“You did nothing wrong!
He
should be ashamed.”

“Yes, but the human psyche’s a weird little number, isn’t it?”

Poppy stood and put her arms around her friend. Simone started to cry in earnest then, and Nora cried, too, watching them. She cried for her friend’s pain and anguish, and she cried for her own helplessness, the fact that she could not even make a move toward reassurance. She had nothing at all to say.

6

I
n the afternoon, the heat became unbearable. Blistering. There was nothing to do but lie down in the cool hotel room and wait for it to pass. Nora tried to hypnotize herself by staring at the ceiling fan slicing through the air. She did not want to feel anything. She held off her emotions like two hands trying to hold off a hurricane. They were coming, but she would make them wait. She learned this trick when Cliff left her. Everything was battering at her, but she became skilled at emptying herself of all emotion, creating a void inside. She would retreat there; for hours at a time she could lie there and think of nothing at all, feel nothing. It was a useful skill, and she didn’t even know how she did it. If she could explain it, she could make a million.

She exhausted herself into a fitful sleep, dreamed stupid
dreams filled with talking animals and people from her childhood; when she woke up, she was crying. How could any of this be? How could she, who had stepped so carefully around life, be smack-dab in the middle of it? How could so much pain have tracked her down? She realized this was not her own pain, but there was such a slight difference. She realized, too, that she had arrived at a point in life when things happened from which she would never recover. There would be more things like this. Cancer, soon, as they all entered their forties. More divorces. Troubled children. Unfaithful men. Menopause. Dead parents. Epiphanies.

She wanted none of it, yet she did not want to be dead. She felt stranded and alone, here in the middle of her life. She did not know what to do.

She was ashamed to admit that she did not want to go to the trial. Her selfish thought was,
I have had enough.
My own pain is still too fresh. I can’t bear it. But she knew that this was such a bad thought, if she gave any weight to it her soul would be irreparably damaged.

Boo would say, “I told you she was trash.”

“She was raped, Mother,” she would spit back.

“Some people go looking for trouble.”

She shut down the conversation. There were enough troubling discussions with Boo that were real. She didn’t need to start making them up. But she couldn’t really help it. Sometimes she felt she carried her mother’s personality inside her—the ugly reprimands, the skeptical eye, the constant criticism.

What Nora could not believe was that this happened to Simone of all people, who had never put a foot wrong, had never had anything bad happen to her, could negotiate her way out of the tightest spot. Being raped was more like something that would happen to her, Nora. She wasn’t sure why
she felt that way. Perhaps because she was nearly raped once, in college. She had been so grateful to be in the company of a football player, she actually believed he wanted to leave the party so he could see her apartment. (He said he was looking for a place in that complex.) So she took him there, and the next thing she knew, her hands were being held down, and she was on the bed, and he was on top of her and shushing her. She could not move at all. He could have killed her if he had wanted to, snapped her neck at will. Somehow she thought to bite him, on the cheek. He screamed and jumped up, concerned, no doubt, about his perfect countenance. She ran out and he left. That was all. She never told anyone. Why would she? It had been humiliating, and it had been mostly her fault.

A distant sense of anger stirred in her, and for the first time she realized that, no, of course it had not been her fault. She took a man to her room, that was all. The rest of it was his crime. And certainly Simone was not to blame for what happened to her. It was horrible, that was all.

With a jolt, she thought about her encounter with the two men the night before. What if they weren’t going to mug her at all? What if they had had something else in mind? Now she was scared, and she pictured Leo Girardi’s round, reassuring face, and she felt immensely grateful and affectionate toward him. She wanted to track him down and give him a bigger tip.

A knock on the door made her sit up, her heart hammering. But it was only Poppy, of course, coming to see how she was doing.

“I’m all right. It’s Simone we should be worried about,” Nora said.

“She’s taking a nap, but I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me either.”

Poppy moved into the room and began pacing. Her usually neat hair was disheveled and it swung around her face, obscuring her expression. She fingered her silver cross and stared at the carpet as she walked.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“We have to do something about this,” Poppy said.

“Well, we’re going to the trial, I guess.”

“Yes, but we have to take care of her. We have to make sure she’s okay.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“Me either,” Poppy said. “I’ve been praying for her, ever since we got back from lunch. But that is so . . . nothing. Prayer is not really a useful exercise. God is going to do what He wants, and all we can do is ask for the strength and wisdom to understand it.”

Nora said, “I don’t really believe in God.”

“I know, but that doesn’t matter to Him.”

“It doesn’t?”

Poppy shook her head. “His grace is there, whether we believe in it or not.”

“I think Simone will be okay,” Nora said, eager to get off this subject. “She seems pretty together. She’s had some counseling.”

“You don’t understand, Nora. You really don’t. When something like this happens, it gets inside you and it festers. You start to nurture it, the bad feeling, because you’re so afraid if you let it go, it will come back and kill you.”

“How do you know? Has anything like this ever happened to you?”

Poppy stopped pacing and looked at her with an expression of mild surprise. Nora rummaged through her brain, trying to recall some dark part of her history Poppy might have once
shared in college. Some awful fact revealed over too many beers at a party or in a bar. God knows what Poppy had once told her that she had forgotten, or had never absorbed in the first place. Nora had been so preoccupied in college, so intent on getting good grades and graduating and marrying Cliff. It was completely possible that all manner of important information about her friends had skimmed the surface of her mind and gotten lost in her own commotion.

“Bad things have happened to me,” Poppy said. “Not exactly like that. But I know what she’s going through.”

“Oh,” Nora said, and she wanted to hear more but felt it was inappropriate to ask.

“What I really want to do is give her the Bible. I want her to be open to God’s help. I want her to turn to Him. It’s her only hope.”

“Well, that’s not necessarily true. There’s therapy and support groups, and drugs, too. Antidepressants . . .”

“I called my husband,” Poppy suddenly announced.

“You did?”

She nodded. “I was so upset, I didn’t know what else to do. Adam has worked a lot with battered women. He used to run this free clinic, where he did cosmetic surgery for women whose faces had been damaged by physical abuse.”

“That’s admirable,” Nora said. She wondered why Poppy had characterized her husband as a superficial man, concerned only with enlarging women’s breasts.

“So I asked him what to do, how to handle this. You know what he said? The only cure for this kind of pain is time. He said, ‘Poppy, you have to let this run its course. Don’t try to fix it. It’s not fixable. There’s no fast cure.’”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“But it’s just bullshit!” Poppy exclaimed, her voice breaking like a child’s. “That’s no consolation to Simone. God, I
could just kill her. All this time we’ve talked on the phone and emailed each other. She let me go on and on about my marital problems, and all the time she was sitting on this terrible secret. I’m so ashamed of myself.”

Poppy started to cry. Nora didn’t know what to do. She felt cold and indifferent, even though she had shed her own tears only moments before. Now she felt her defenses returning, and she actually felt angry about Poppy’s display of emotion. All this faith in God, and here she was, just as weak and clueless as anyone.

Something rumbled in the distance, like the footsteps of God, coming to punish her for her cynicism. But it was only thunder, of course, rolling at a low, ominous pace.

Poppy wiped her face with the back of her hand and said, “It’s going to rain.”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“Didn’t she understand how dangerous this city is? Hasn’t she seen the statistics? You don’t go walking down Pirates Alley by yourself. I tried to tell you all about this city. I tried to explain that it’s hell on earth. No one would listen.”

Nora had nothing to say about that. She had committed her own indiscretions here. As if the thoughts were somehow connected she said, “Tell me again how you know Leo Girardi.”

Poppy looked at her as if she had suddenly started speaking in tongues.

“Leo?”

“Yes, he gave me a cab ride the other night. Remember?”

Poppy nodded, as if she had some vague recollection of that.

“I’d like to find him again,” Nora said, “to thank him.”

“Thank him for giving you a cab ride?”

“Well, he sort of rescued me. It’s a long story.”

Poppy nodded and said, “Leo is good at rescuing people.”

She sat down on the bed and crossed her legs, swinging her foot back and forth in a sort of nervous gesture. She stared at the wall for a moment before speaking.

“Leo was my first real boyfriend in high school. We were very close. We thought we’d get married. Daddy didn’t like him, of course. He was poor. His father was a janitor, of all things. His mother was a maid at a hotel in the Quarter. But they were good, sturdy people. Daddy wanted none of that. They weren’t ‘our kind’ of people.”

“Did he interfere?”

Poppy smirked and said, “Daddy always interferes.”

Nora did not bother to remind her that her father was dead.

Poppy said, “There was an incident, when we were seniors in high school. We got very serious and we were going to elope, but Daddy found out about it and put a stop to it. First he offered Leo money to stay away from me. Leo took it. I couldn’t believe it. He said he was only going to use the money to take me away and marry me. But . . . things conspired. It never happened. I don’t know if he gave the money back. I’d like to think he did.”

“Wow,” Nora said. “Imagine that.”

“It’s not so hard to imagine. Leo was dirt-poor, and Daddy was a very powerful man.”

“No, I mean the coincidence of me getting in his cab.”

Poppy smiled. “It’s not all that fortuitous. New Orleans is a small town. That’s what people forget. It feels like a big city, but that’s only because of the tourists. The people who actually live here, they barely make up a respectable population. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. It’s odd, because the city has all the detriments of a small town, and all the detriments of a city. It’s the worst of both worlds.”

“It’s funny, the way you talk about it. I’m surprised you ended up back here.”

“You can’t escape your history,” Poppy said, as if that were an immutable truth.

“I think I escaped mine,” Nora put forth, not at all convinced, but hoping it was true.

“Really? You still live in Virginia.”

“But nowhere near my mother.”

“Still, have you escaped her? Do you not feel your whole upbringing walking around with you? America is this strange, nomadic place, where we jump from city to city as if changing the landscape will somehow eradicate the past and improve our dispositions. In other cultures, you don’t have that choice. Here we are afflicted by the possibility of distance. We think it’s an answer, but it’s really just a diversion.”

Nora thought of Cliff, running away to Miami with June Ann, trying to start over with a new identity, trying to pretend that he didn’t owe money to anyone, trying to forget he had children to take care of. When would it hit him? Did he wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, regretting the fact that he had deserted his obligations? She hoped so, but she didn’t feel she could count on it. She suspected that Cliff slept just fine, convinced he had gotten away, proud of himself for covering his tracks.

“But you don’t know how to get in touch with Leo Girardi now?” Nora asked.

“I’m sure he’s in the phone book. People don’t try to hide in this city. There’s no point.”

Nora nodded, trying to appear detached. Poppy chewed on a fingernail, appearing to be deep in thought. Nora waited, though she wasn’t sure what for. Eventually she realized she wanted Poppy to leave so that she could track down Leo. She had his business card, but for some reason felt
strange calling him at the cab company. As if she didn’t want his dispatcher to know.

“What else did your husband say?” Nora finally asked.

Poppy shrugged. “The usual stuff. He wants me to come home. He still loves me. He wants to come to New Orleans and talk things out.”

“Is he coming?”

Poppy shook her head. “I forbade it.”

“Does that really work? Forbidding men to do things?”

“We’ll find out, I guess,” Poppy said, and it was clear that she wanted her theory to be tested.

Poppy finally left, and the thunderstorm arrived in full force
. Buckets of rain thundered down on the roof, on the slate patio, against the windows. For Nora, it was a soothing sound. She always enjoyed a storm because it limited her options. There was nothing to do when a thunderstorm was happening. No talking on the phone, no taking a bath, no going outside. She could only sit and listen, flinching at each flash of lightning, counting until she heard the thunder. Annette was deathly afraid of storms. Whenever one occurred at night, Nora always awoke to find her daughter creeping into her bed. Back when she was still married to Cliff, these visits made him cranky. He’d say, “Why the hell do we have a three-bedroom house if our children are going to sleep in our room?”

“It’s only when it storms,” Nora would say.

“It storms a lot in Virginia. Why don’t we just move her in for the summer?”

Annette seemed to frustrate and confound Cliff. She had been a fix-it baby. Their marriage was already troubled when they decided they should either break up or have another child. Nora had read all the articles in
Parenting
and
Redbook,
and she knew it was wrong to have a child for this reason, but
she wanted another one and decided to close her eyes to the onslaught. If Annette had been a boy, things might have been different. Throwing a baseball, coaching Little League, being a Boy Scout guide, might have gotten them through a few more years. But Annette had arrived, as feminine as any little girl could be, and she scared the daylights out of Cliff. From the moment she was born, she was aloof. She did not want to be held, did not want to be taught or guided. It was clear she intended to figure things out for herself. She taught herself how to sleep through the night at six weeks, how to walk at eleven months, how to read at age four. She never said so, but it was apparent that Annette thought her father and brother were inferior examples of humanity. So clumsy, so needy, so desperate for her attention. She ignored them to an almost pathological degree. She focused instead on her mother, as if she had an innate understanding of the female psyche, the woman’s struggle. She felt a kinship with her mother. She called her mother to kill spiders or to help her reach something on a high shelf. She did not want to be dependent on men. She didn’t trust them.