A Summons to New Orleans Read Online Free
Author: Barbara Hall
she think those men were worthy or pathetic? After all, she had met Cliff at a keg party at UVA, when she was starting her fourth year and he was starting his last year in grad school. But he hadn’t winked or lurched. He had offered her a beer and asked if she was in the business school, and things had just evolved from there. He seemed so serious; it took her a long time to figure out that he was interested in her.
But that, too, was just a trap. He had led her down a very circuitous path to humiliation. He had respected her, wooed her conventionally, married her in a proper ceremony at the Boar’s Head Inn, moved her into a beautiful home just outside the city, impregnated her twice. Then, when she was beyond being much use to anyone, he abandoned her for a waitress.
All in all, she told herself, a one-night stand would have been better.
I have to get over this, she thought, making her way down Bourbon Street, being bumped by all the people who had left their manners back home, who had given themselves permission to be assholes in public. This was New Orleans, for God’s sake, the birthplace of jazz, reportedly home to every vice imaginable, a place where no one was expected to behave. People were just here to have a good time, and Nora was conscious of her own puritanical nature, dressed in black, sneering at everyone, and feeling superior and angry and righteously alone.
I have to stop hating men, she reminded herself. It was not going to get her anywhere she wanted to be. God knows she did not want to be a man-hating feminist, or even one of those temporary man-haters, claiming to despise them all until one of them stepped up, someone with a six-figure salary and a willingness to fuck her and take her children out to dinneron Sunday evenings. Hadn’t she always frowned on those people, the women she saw at the gym or her poetry-writing extension courses or her book club? Women in stretch pants and oversized denim shirts and espadrilles, defending Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno while hurling invectives at Jennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, as if there were any significant difference between those types? Women always looking for other angry female authority figures to define their own misguided sense of individuality. She thought they were sad back then. Sad, and funny, and completely worthy of her disdain. She was married then. She could afford to sneer.
“Are you having an affair?” she had asked Cliff, straight out, the night he came home late, reeking of perfume. There already had been other clues. Hang-up calls, and strange numbers on the phone bill, and a lack of interest in sex, and a persistent crankiness, a constant, low-level needling about her housekeeping habits and her appearance. (“Do you have anything besides sweat pants? Do you ever think about buying new lingerie? When was the last time you put on a bathing suit?”) She had ignored all the signs, the way she had ignored certain things about her children, hoping it would all go away. Like how she had allowed her son to sleep in their bed until he was seven, and she was still in denial about her daughter’s compulsive chewing. She knew her son was smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, and she prayed they were only regular cigarettes. (But what could she say to her son about pot, when she had smoked an entire plantation’s worth during her senior year in college?) She kept waiting for her children to grow out of these dangerous desires. And she had waited for her husband to do the same.
“I can’t believe you just said that” was Cliff’s response to her accusation.
“Why? Why can’t you believe it? I smelled your shirt. You’re home late every night. People have told me things.”
“You believe everything you hear? You listen to your mother, for God’s sake?”
Her mother, in fact, had come up with no concrete evidence over the years, though she had suspected Cliff of everything from mail fraud to murder since the day she met
But that, too, was just a trap. He had led her down a very circuitous path to humiliation. He had respected her, wooed her conventionally, married her in a proper ceremony at the Boar’s Head Inn, moved her into a beautiful home just outside the city, impregnated her twice. Then, when she was beyond being much use to anyone, he abandoned her for a waitress.
All in all, she told herself, a one-night stand would have been better.
I have to get over this, she thought, making her way down Bourbon Street, being bumped by all the people who had left their manners back home, who had given themselves permission to be assholes in public. This was New Orleans, for God’s sake, the birthplace of jazz, reportedly home to every vice imaginable, a place where no one was expected to behave. People were just here to have a good time, and Nora was conscious of her own puritanical nature, dressed in black, sneering at everyone, and feeling superior and angry and righteously alone.
I have to stop hating men, she reminded herself. It was not going to get her anywhere she wanted to be. God knows she did not want to be a man-hating feminist, or even one of those temporary man-haters, claiming to despise them all until one of them stepped up, someone with a six-figure salary and a willingness to fuck her and take her children out to dinneron Sunday evenings. Hadn’t she always frowned on those people, the women she saw at the gym or her poetry-writing extension courses or her book club? Women in stretch pants and oversized denim shirts and espadrilles, defending Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno while hurling invectives at Jennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, as if there were any significant difference between those types? Women always looking for other angry female authority figures to define their own misguided sense of individuality. She thought they were sad back then. Sad, and funny, and completely worthy of her disdain. She was married then. She could afford to sneer.
“Are you having an affair?” she had asked Cliff, straight out, the night he came home late, reeking of perfume. There already had been other clues. Hang-up calls, and strange numbers on the phone bill, and a lack of interest in sex, and a persistent crankiness, a constant, low-level needling about her housekeeping habits and her appearance. (“Do you have anything besides sweat pants? Do you ever think about buying new lingerie? When was the last time you put on a bathing suit?”) She had ignored all the signs, the way she had ignored certain things about her children, hoping it would all go away. Like how she had allowed her son to sleep in their bed until he was seven, and she was still in denial about her daughter’s compulsive chewing. She knew her son was smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, and she prayed they were only regular cigarettes. (But what could she say to her son about pot, when she had smoked an entire plantation’s worth during her senior year in college?) She kept waiting for her children to grow out of these dangerous desires. And she had waited for her husband to do the same.
“I can’t believe you just said that” was Cliff’s response to her accusation.
“Why? Why can’t you believe it? I smelled your shirt. You’re home late every night. People have told me things.”
“You believe everything you hear? You listen to your mother, for God’s sake?”
Her mother, in fact, had come up with no concrete evidence over the years, though she had suspected Cliff of everything from mail fraud to murder since the day she met