A Summons to New Orleans Read Online Free Page A

him.
    “Just tell me. Are you having an affair?” she had insisted. And while she was thinking of some other approach, some stinging kind of question that might leave him breathless, he just sighed and said, “Yeah, okay, what do you want to do?”
    She had not known how to answer him. She didn’t know what to do. She fully expected to spend a few more months accusing him and collecting his denials like weapons to use against him. But there it was, out in the open, and she stood holding his honesty in her hands like a grenade.
    Though it seemed like a lifetime away, that was only four months ago. She had felt so smug in her isolation for a while, expecting to be rewarded for being left. At first she expected Cliff to come back, but then he fled the state, and all the nastiness surrounding his illegal activities surfaced, and she knew she couldn’t want him anymore, so she began to hope for his demise. It didn’t come. Even though he broke the law every day, simply by getting out of bed and breathing, he was living a fairly contented life in Miami with June Ann, the waitress from the Red Lobster.
    Nora remembered, with a shudder, the time she and Cliff had gone to the Red Lobster on their anniversary, and June Ann had waited on them. She hadn’t a clue at the time, but she now realized the two of them were deep into their affair by then, and for some reason she could recall all the metaphors they engaged in while placing their order.
    “I’ll have the spicy clams,” Cliff had said. “My wife will have the cold seafood plate.”
    “The clams are very spicy now,” June Ann had said. “They could burn your mouth. They are hard to digest, some people say.”
    “I’ll take my chances,” Cliff had said. “But my wife likes hers cold. Very cold.”
    “I’ll make sure it’s chilled,” June Ann had said.
    Confused, Nora had said, “It doesn’t have to be chilled. I just want the cold shrimp platter.”
    “With lemon?” June Ann had asked.
    “Yes,” Cliff had said. “She likes it sour, too.”
    June Ann had smiled down at her order pad, unable to look at Nora.
    How could she have been so stupid, so naïve?
    Of course, she wasn’t naïve. She had always known but had not wanted to know, would have done anything to avoid facing what was heading toward her at the pace and height of a tidal wave.
    But a waitress? A waitress? Okay, a graduate student at UVA, but that didn’t make it any better. When she had learned the truth, the cliché of it had bothered her more than anything.
    “You’re more creative than that, aren’t you?” she had asked Cliff. “Fucking a student? Jesus, aren’t you even embarrassed? Don’t you have a shred of dignity left?”
    Apparently not.
    I must not let this whole thing bring me down to his level, Nora thought as she continued to meander along Bourbon Street. She should see this outing as an awakening, a new part of her journey. Trouble was, she hated her journey. She had always hated journeys and until four months ago had figuredshe was through with hers. She disliked emotional growth. She didn’t want to do this anymore, didn’t want to discover anything else about herself. Her new therapist said she should see this change as an opportunity.
    “You don’t understand,” Nora had told her. “I saw my later years as a freedom from opportunity. I thought I was through with all that. I was looking forward to the resolution. I hated my youth. I hated all that soul-searching. I wanted to find the good parking space in life. I wanted to be settled.”
    “Life isn’t like that,” her therapist had assured her. “You are constantly evolving, or should be.”
    “Then, when the hell do you rest?”
    “When you’re dead, I suppose,” her terminally cheerful therapist had replied.
    “But you can’t enjoy it then.”
    “Well, Nora, you’ve never really seemed to enjoy your life. Isn’t that true?”
    It was true. Nora didn’t think life was something to be enjoyed. It