A Summons to New Orleans (18 page)

“That’s a fairy tale,” Simone argued.

“Yes, but what isn’t?” Poppy challenged.

Nora felt connected to the alligator, obligated to it, and her heart did not slow down until he lowered his head and swam away, obviously disgusted by them, and annoyed at having been disturbed.

It was the mouth, Nora thought, that was so familiar. The way Boo’s mouth would stretch to outlandish proportions when she yelled or expressed discontent or mimicked someone. How Nora hated it when she did that, particularly the mimicking. She would change her voice to a strange, visceral snarl, and repeat whatever silly or offending comment she had heard, usually coming from her husband. Nora remembered hating her in those moments, staring at her as if she were possessed by a demon.

Oh, God,
Nora thought.
I hate my mother.

Suddenly, she felt as if she had entered some level of hell. There was nothing around her but the ingredients of nightmares. Snakes, spiders, alligators, bugs. Annette used to have dreams like this, and Nora spent a lot of time convincing her that no such place existed. But here she was, in the grip of her daughter’s dreams.

Was this why she had left her children with her mother and taken time off work and flown across the country? To walk down a path that made her skin crawl? To stare into the eyes of an ancient reptile? This wasn’t her idea of a vacation. Yet as she looked around the bayou, she had to acknowledge that there was a strange, harsh beauty to the place. Perhaps she was confronting her own mortality here, and perhaps there was something liberating about that.

“Can we go back now?” Nora said.

“Yes,” Adam agreed. “I feel like we’ve seen enough.”

“You haven’t even seen the horror show,” Poppy assured them. “That comes next. This is civilization compared to where I come from.”

On the walk back, Adam said, staring at his feet, “Now Poppy is going to show you where her own private hell began and ended.”

“What do you know about her upbringing?” Nora asked.

“I know what Poppy wants me to know.”

“And what is that?”

He shrugged and said, “It changes from week to week. I’ve told you, Poppy is not well.”

Nora looked at him, and for the first time she realized he was talking about something else altogether. He was trying to tell her that Poppy was crazy. Well, of course she had become moderately crazy, with all this God talk. But Adam’s need to prove and avenge her insanity seemed equally desperate.

It was so hard to tell anymore who was telling the truth and who was lying. Who was sane and who was crazy. Simone was raped, or maybe she wasn’t. And Poppy was their friend, or maybe she never was. Nora walked along, her arms folded against her stomach, and she prayed a hypocritical prayer to a God she didn’t believe in:
Just get me out of here and I will believe it all. And I will serve goodness. Just don’t let me die here and I will prove myself worthy of surviving.

Her shoes made a plodding sound on the dirt path. Bugs scurried and buzzed.

The four of them walked in a line, without speaking, like soldiers coming home from the war. Traumatized, reverent, hopeful. Afraid of what they might, or might not, find when they got home.

They didn’t make it to Poppy’s house. During the drive back to
town, Simone began to cry. She did it silently, sucking in breaths, which could have been sighs or an attempt to suppress hiccups. It took Nora a long time to realize that she was actually choking back sobs. It was Adam who acknowledged it first.

“Are you okay?” he asked, leaning up from the backseat, putting his hand on her shoulder.

She flinched when he touched her, and he jerked his hand away, as if he had been burned.

Poppy was driving, both hands tight on the wheel, staring dead ahead. She didn’t even glance in Simone’s direction.

“No, I’m not,” Simone said. “I feel like shit.”

“Breathe through your nose,” Adam said.

Simone actually laughed through her tears and said, “What?”

“It’s Adam’s cure for any ailment. That and ‘Have a beer.’ This is what all those years of medical school taught him,” Poppy said.

“It keeps you from hyperventilating,” Adam said wearily, as if he and his wife had had this argument many times before.

“I’m not hyperventilating. I’m just hyperupset.” She paused for a second to give in to a sob. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Nothing is happening the way I wanted it to.”

“What did you want to happen?” Poppy asked, but in a knowing tone, as if she already possessed the answer.

“I had this weird idea that we would all have fun, and I’d be able to forget everything. I mean, while we weren’t at the trial. It would be like the old days.”

“It is like the old days,” Poppy said. “With the exception of Adam. We’re all treating each other the way we used to.”

“What do you mean?” Simone asked.

Poppy said, “You all think I’m crazy, and I think you’re all just running from what scares you. Wait, I didn’t mean it like that. I love you guys, and you are just the kind of friends I want. You help me get away from myself because you both have this way of getting the focus of attention.”

“How did I do that?” Simone demanded. “By getting raped?”

“Well, yes, in a way.”

“Are you saying I wanted to get raped?”

Poppy took a long time to answer. Finally she said, “I believe
we are all where we are because of a series of choices we have made. Choices that either lead us to or away from God.”

“I chose to get raped?”

“You chose the circumstances that led to that.”

“Poppy, for God’s sake,” Adam said.

“What happened to you was horrible, should not have happened. But you did talk to the guy, and you did let yourself trust him . . .”

“Poppy, that’s insane,” Nora blurted out before she knew what hit her.

“See what I mean?”

“No, I want to hear this,” Simone insisted.

“I don’t think you do,” Adam intervened.

“She knows what she wants, Adam,” Poppy said. She signaled and carefully moved into another lane to pass a car. Her concentration was still perfectly intact, even as an argument as big as a hurricane was brewing inside the car. “Well, all I mean is this. If you chose to make yourself vulnerable, if you put yourself in harm’s way, it was an important and necessary instinct. It was a lesson you had to teach yourself. You knew that you could not learn this lesson without submitting to an act of violence.”

“Submitting?”

“And if you would only open your ears, you would hear God trying to tell you something.”

“Oh, this is priceless. What is He, in all His wisdom, trying to say?”

“I don’t know, Simone. This is your journey, not mine. But you are only hurting yourself by making yourself unavailable to hear it.”

“I suppose God has an extra-special message for me, too,” Nora said. “Making my husband leave me for a waitress. Was that some kind of divine telegram?”

“Everything is a divine telegram,” Poppy said. “And God doesn’t make anything happen. We make things happen. And He tries to explain to us what these lessons are for. That’s all. Everything we need to know in life we already know. Everything we want, we have the means to achieve it. And the reason most of us don’t is because we won’t listen to Him. You have to be still to hear Him talking. He talks through us. In fact, it manifests itself in the sound of our voices. But we are constantly shutting ourselves down.”

“How so?” Simone asked. She had stopped crying, and seemed more interested than angry.

Poppy said, “This is how it is. When you are confronted with a problem, and you solve it, you give yourself credit for creating the solution. But the solution already exists. It is an existing entity. To the degree that we can’t or won’t solve our problems, it’s always because we can’t be quiet or still long enough to see it or hear it. The solution has a life of its own. We don’t create it. We simply find it.”

“I see,” Simone said. “So it’s up to me to find the solution to my current problem. That is, if the jury does not convict Quentin Johnson, it’s because I have not made it happen.”

“There are two possibilities,” Poppy said. “One is that you have not helped them see the solution. Because, for whatever reason, you don’t want the solution badly enough. Maybe because you have not entirely represented the truth, so the experience is tainted and impure. The other possibility is that convicting this man is not the solution. The solution is somewhere else.”

“Where might that be? Could you draw me a map, give a grid reference?”

“You already know where it is. You just have to listen.”

“My God,” Simone said, shaking her head. “You don’t believe me.”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Poppy said.

“Of course it matters. How can I face tomorrow if my friends don’t even believe my story? It matters more than anything.”

“Why did you want an audience for this? Who are you trying to convince?”

“I was hoping for some support.”

“But why? The truth, like the solution, has a life of its own.

Having your friends here or not doesn’t change that. For example, a child never throws a tantrum when he or she is alone. A tantrum needs an audience.”

“How did you suddenly become an expert on children?” Adam asked.

“Because I was one.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t even show up tomorrow,” Simone said.

Poppy sighed and said, “You haven’t heard anything I’ve said.”

“I want to go back to the hotel,” Simone said.

“Of course you do,” Poppy replied. “I knew you had no intention of going to my house.”

“Oh, fuck it, let’s go to your house, then. Is that what it’s all about?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll go there alone. You wanted to take me on your journey. I wanted to take you on mine. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll take you back now. And Nora, where do you want to go? Back to your husband in Florida?”

Nora felt her cheeks turn hot. “Why are you attacking me?”

“It’s just a question.”

“Well, to follow your line of reasoning, it’s an impossible question. You aren’t actually capable of taking me back to my husband, are you?”

“That wasn’t the question. I just asked where you wanted to go.”

“I want to go back to the hotel, too.”

“Okay. Consider it done.”

Adam said, “You didn’t ask me what I wanted.”

“Let’s hear it,” Poppy said.

“I want to go back to New York, with you, and spend the rest of our lives there.”

“Well, okay, then,” Poppy said. “We all got our desires out in the open. Isn’t that better than listening to the radio?”

Nora slumped in the backseat and watched the lack of scenery shoot past. She felt miserable. Her children were stranded with her mother, whom she hated, and she was stuck in a crazy kind of group therapy, with no leader, no answers, only troubling questions that made them all feel loose and twitchy and like they wanted to disappear.

Poppy dropped them off at the hotel. She wasn’t going to stay, she said. She had someplace to be. Simone went straight to her room, and Nora and Adam stood in the courtyard, stranded, wondering what to do.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Nora suggested.

“But it’s so hot,” Adam said.

“It’s good to sweat. In Victorian times, it was seen as a cure.”

They walked around the Quarter, which was quiet and desolate in the midday heat. Adam’s clothes were too heavy. His curly hair frizzed even more in the humidity. He kept taking off his glasses and wiping them on his shirt sleeve.

When they got to Jackson Square, they took a seat on one of the empty benches. The others were occupied by homeless people and street musicians. Nora thought she and Adam must look out of place, a couple of uptight tourists trying to appear relaxed. It was a stupid place to sit. The sun beat
down, hard and heavy, and she felt even more exhausted than when they were walking. But they did nothing to rectify the situation.

“How did Poppy get so crazy?” Nora asked.

“Well, she’s had a hard life,” Adam said. “But, then, who hasn’t? I don’t mean to minimize it. Her father was a bastard, and he totally controlled and manipulated her. He was an alcoholic and he was abusive. I don’t defend him in any way, and I applauded her efforts to just wipe her slate clean, put the past behind her. But about a year ago, she got into all this spiritualism. It kind of happened slowly. First she started working out at the gym, then she changed her diet, then she started doing yoga, and the next thing you know, she was right back in Christ’s lap. I tried to go along with it. I tried to believe that it was okay for us to be different in that regard. I’m Jewish and not religious at all. But soon, she saw that as a flaw in me. She said that the Jews rejected Christ because they wanted a savior who would lead them into battle against the Romans. And when instead He asked them to turn the other cheek and forgive, they rejected Him. So she decided I came from a heritage of bloodletting and violence, and she couldn’t live with that. I tried to reason with her. I said, ‘So what if my ancestors, even my mother and father, believed that? I didn’t. I have devoted my life to helping people.’ She said that I have led people astray from listening to the inner voice, which is God. Or some such nonsense. And particularly because I’m a plastic surgeon. She says people are healed within, spiritually, and I am perpetuating the evil notion that healing their outsides, what they show to the world, will somehow make them whole. I don’t think that at all. People come to me with problems, I fix them. That’s how I see it.”

“Okay, that’s all pretty New Age and wacky, but it doesn’t make her crazy. Why do you think she is crazy?”

Adam shifted uncomfortably in his seat and said, “A few months before she left me, she started to tell me a crazy story. She said her father was in cahoots with the devil. He had sold his soul, made a pact, or whatever. She was involved in that, she said. She didn’t want to be, but he forced her. She said that he murdered someone in their home. A child. And he buried the child in their basement. He made her keep the secret, and she has kept it all these years, and now she wants to come clean, and clear her conscience. I am perfectly aware that her father was a bad man. But he was a judge, for God’s sake. And if some child had been killed and buried in his basement, someone would have found out about it. I don’t know why she fixated on this story. But the more I tried to reason with her, the more insistent she became. It was frightening to me, and then I finally told her that she had to drop this charade or risk losing me. She chose the charade.”