by Barbara Hall
“So you’re telling me that murderers are ethical,” Nora said. “Murderers and rapists.”
“Depends on your murderer,” Leo said. “In a sense, most murderers are ethical in that most murders are crimes of passion, not a way of life. But let’s take your average serial killer. He certainly is ethical. The same guy who would kill a dozen prostitutes wouldn’t think of killing a guy in a bar fight or running down a cop. He has his own code of ethics. Which is not to say that such a person is moral.”
“Well, what makes a person moral?”
“Morality is usually linked with spirituality. Unlike ethics, which are merely linked to a code of principles, often but not always aligned with a social contract.”
“What about evil?” Nora asked, feeling the drink traveling through her from her head to her fingertips. “What about that?”
“Oh, well, that’s complicated.”
“Tell me.”
“Everyone has a different definition. I call it the active denial of self. And the active denial of self results in the active destruction of anyone else’s sense of self. Hence, Hitler. Hence, Stalin. Of course, Kierkegaard thought of the active denial of self as despair. But I think despair and evil are inevitably linked. Bertrand Russell thought that evil was a byproduct of boredom and that both these things were cousins of fatigue. Imagine that. Fatigue!”
“So maybe Hitler only needed a good night’s sleep?”
“Exactly,” Leo said, grinning.
“Where does God figure into all of this?”
Leo rubbed a thumb across his bottom lip and stared at the bar, at the circles of condensation left behind by his glass.
“Here’s what I think about God,” he said. “It just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if anyone believes. Of course He exists, if in no other form than in what Jung describes as the collective unconscious. You know, the common human experience. Those symbols we all recognize. Those experiences we all understand. So maybe that’s God. But it’s like believing in gravity. Whether or not you believe in it, it’s there.”
“So you believe God is there.”
“I never think about it. I know I don’t have to. I know He doesn’t require it. The Buddha said it is pointless to contemplate unanswerable questions.”
“But aren’t most ethical questions unanswerable?”
“No. Only the question of God.”
“Then I guess what I’m wondering is, what makes people behave well? I mean, what stops them from doing bad things?”
Leo laughed. “Obviously, nothing. People do bad things all the time.”
“But horrible things. Unthinkable things.”
“Well, there’s no such thing as an unthinkable thing. But that takes us back to ethics. Most people behave because they are ethical—that is, they enter into a social contract. I won’t kill you if you won’t kill me. If someone deviates from the ethical or social contract, that person is punished.”
“Not always.”
“There are loopholes,” he said. “Things aren’t black and white.”
“No, but . . .”
“And speaking of that, why do we associate black with evil? Black is the presence of all colors. While white, the color of purity, is the absence of color. Why, then, do we value absence over presence? I’ll tell you why. Because presence is too frightening. Which is why we drink.”
Nora wanted another sip of her drink, but his comment forced her to abstain. She sat still, crossing her hands in her lap. She was aware of being dressed in black. What did that mean, ethically or morally speaking, she wondered.
“Okay,” she said, “here’s a question. What would make a man leave his wife of many years for a barely legal waitress?”
Leo smiled and said, “I’m sure you’re just making up an example. But, not knowing the details, I’d have to say boredom, which brings us back to Kierkegaard. Or maybe he’d say lack of consciousness.”
Nora felt brave enough to sip her drink, then said, “Was this Kierkegaard married?”
Leo shook his head. “He broke off his engagement, which was a seminal moment for him. He felt that he sacrificed his love for the sake of purity, much as Abraham attempted to sacrifice his son for the sake of God.”
“God spared Isaac.”
“Yes, but Abraham was prepared to kill him. Think of it. Do you mind if I smoke?”
Nora shrugged, though she did mind, and the fact of Leo’s smoking lowered him in her estimation somehow.
He noticed her expression and smiled.
“You’re thinking, what’s an ethical guy like me doing smoking a cigarette.”
“They’re your lungs,” she said.
“Yes, they are my lungs. And my ethics are my own. I’m on the same page with Jung, who believed that the attempt to keep the shadow side at bay would ultimately be the destruction of us all. He believed that the dark and the light had to coexist, and that any attempt to deny the darkness was futile and ultimately fatal. At the very least, it resulted in shallow and unrealized individuals.”
Jess put full martinis down in front of both of them and winked at Nora, for some reason she could not fathom. Her own martini was still half-full, but she was happy for the second one. It meant the night would last longer.
Nora said, “Do you have any ideas that are your own? I mean, everything I’m hearing comes from some text book, some genius with a foreign name.”
Leo laughed casually, unconcerned, though Nora had meant to put him on the defensive.
“Well, as the man in Ecclesiastes said, there’s nothing new under the sun. Actually, that’s a saying he stole from the Egyptians. The sun sets and the sun also rises. Even Mr. Hemingway borrowed from his predecessors.”
Nora yawned, trying to sort out her thoughts. She was considering the countenance of Kierkegaard, whose thin face and disheveled hair she thought she remembered from college textbooks. He looked not unlike Elvis in a cravat, as she recalled.
“Do you think people are better off believing in God?” she asked. “I mean, are they happier?”
Leo stared into the ember of his cigarette and said, “I don’t think people are happy, or that they’re meant to be. And I think that’s just fine. I think ‘happy’ is a concept invented by advertisers. It’s a recent phenomenon, the pursuit of happiness. Even when Thomas Jefferson was peddling it, he was really talking about something else. The absence of dread.”
“What constitutes the absence of dread?” Nora asked.
“Well, Kierkegaard thought . . .”
“Fuck Kierkegaard,” Nora said suddenly. “What do you think?”
“I think, as he did, that dread comes from the horrible specter of freedom. It’s no coincidence that the freest country in the world is the most violent. And that’s really what I think.”
“Are you free?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, “I am. And that’s why I drink so much.”
Nora noticed that the room was swirling around her. And’ she knew she was in a foreign city with a virtual stranger, knew perfectly well that she wouldn’t see him again, so she felt at liberty to ask an inappropriate question.
“Is that why you took the money? Because you were free?”
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “What money?”
“From Poppy’s father.”
His face grew stall, and he stared once again at the burning tip of his cigarette.
“I didn’t take any money,” he said.
“Poppy says you did.”
“Is that what she thinks?”
“I don’t know. It’s what she told me.”
A thought germinated in Nora’s brain. Maybe this had all been a matter of miscommunication. Leo had not taken any money. They had parted for all the wrong reasons. And in her inebriated state, she thought herself to be powerful enough to bring them back together. She would do that, and this act would make up for all the selfish acts she had committed in the last few days and months, maybe in her life. She had originally sought out Le
o with the notion of a careless affair. But now she was confronted with the possibility of doing a remarkably good deed. Which meant that she must be ethical. Underneath it all, she had good intentions. Like the heroine of a Jane Austen novel.
“I can’t believe Poppy told you about that,” he said, his face turning solemn.
“She didn’t tell me any details. Just that her father gave you money to leave her alone. She’d had some drinks when she told me.”
“He offered,” Leo said. “I didn’t take it. She knows I didn’t take it. I told her about that. I told her her father was a bastard. I begged her to go away with me, but her connection to him was too strong. And I know why, too. Goddamn her. Now she’s found Jesus and she’s defending her father? That’s enough to make you stop believing in God or ethics or anything. We were both screwed up at the time. But I came out of it and she didn’t. Goddamn her.”
“How were you screwed up?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. “But she didn’t tell you about the baby?”
Nora looked at him, at a loss for words. Finally, she shook her head.
Leo shook his head and sipped his drink again. His cigarette had burned down to the filter.
“There was a baby?” Nora asked.
“No, no baby. That’s part of her fantasy.”
Nora squirmed in her seat, moving the slightest distance away from him. He was bent over toward his drink, and now the fluorescent lights behind the bar settled on his face, making him look surreal.
“Did you love her?” Nora asked.
He turned his face toward her. It was bathed in bright pinks and greens. His eyes were stern and solid, and only the muscles around his mouth moved.
He said, “Of course I loved her. What else could explain it? You asked if I believed in evil. Indeed, I do. I think love is evil. This kind of love, between a man and a woman, devoid of spirituality, anchored in nothing but a kind of recognition of ourselves in another person. It makes you a stranger to yourself. It makes you lie and cheat and steal, and keeps you awake thinking of more ways to lie and cheat and steal. It makes you examine the limits of your behavior, and if you are far gone enough, then you act on them. God, why did you get me started on this?”
He drained half of his new martini and lit another cigarette. Nora felt frightened. She wanted to go home.
She cleared her throat and said, “So murder is ethical but love isn’t? That’s what you believe?”
He turned his face away from her and said, “I’ve told you. I don’t believe.”
Leo didn’t talk for a long time, and Nora respected his silence. She sipped her martini and listened to the music on the jukebox—Smokey Robinson singing “You Really Got a Hold on Me”—and when Jess came around with the check, she picked it up. By the time she had finished paying, Leo was willing to look at her again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m in a bad mood.”
“Well, okay,” she said with false cheer. “Moods are allowed.”
“I’m drunk,” he said.
“So am I. I’ll go home now.”
“I’m going to walk you.”
“No, I’m fine.”
He shook his head. “It’s dangerous here. I’m going with you.”
As Nora headed out of the bar with him, she wondered where the danger was—with or without her companion.
The streets were empty, the tourists finally having retreated. Leo walked her the four blocks to her hotel. She thought of his defense of serial killers and wondered if he had ever considered such a calling for himself. That was probably ridiculous, she decided, as she moved through the soft, damp night, the song of the crickets guiding her home. As she approached the wrought-iron gate of her hotel, Leo stopped, keeping a respectable distance. He hadn’t said a word during the journey.
She couldn’t help thinking about Simone, being thrust against a wall by her rapist, her airway cut off by a single, strong hand, and all the moments of her life leaking away from her, heading toward some kind of cosmic drain, where all life choices go to swirl around and die, none of it amounting to much in that moment between knowing and not knowing, between the stirrup and the ground.
“Well, it was nice talking to you,” Leo said, swaying on his feet.
“You’re not going to drive home, are you?”
He shook his head. “I’ve got a friend a few blocks from here.”
“What about your daughter?”
“She’s taken care of.”
Suddenly he smiled, and his face changed entirely.
“I feel good,” he said. “It’s been ages since I had a talk like that. I used to talk that way with Poppy.”
“Well, I guess those days are over.”
“I guess so,” he said.
“I mean, she’s found Jesus now.”
Leo smiled. “She used to think of me that way.”
“Like Jesus?”
“Yeah.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.
“Well, that’s something,” Nora said. She wanted to sleep.
Leo moved toward her and said, “How long since you’ve been kissed?”
“Not that long,” she lied.
“I’d like to kiss you anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because you listened to me talk about Kierkegaard. Not a lot of people will do that.”
“Well, I didn’t enjoy it all that much.”
He leaned forward and kissed her, calmly and politely, on the lips. Something in her stirred. She felt suddenly desperate. She felt afraid of how much it made her feel, how all these sparks attacked her, these repressed memories of being alive in her body, doing what the body wanted to do. She had been ignoring it for a long time.
“Yeah,” he said, when it was over. “That is what I miss.”
“Good night, Leo.”
She took out her key. He said, “Strange, isn’t it? You live all this time. You have sex and you have babies and you get old. And what you miss is the simple stuff. When I was a teenager, kissing was just a pain in the ass, the thing you had to do to get a woman to sleep with you. But now, it’s a mysterious thing.”
“I guess so,” she said.
“Sleep well,” he instructed her, and he squeezed her arm and walked away.
She went into her cool hotel room, and she felt pleasantly drunk and ready to talk. She called her mother’s number. Boo answered in a gravelly voice.
“Mom? It’s me. I know it’s late. How are the kids?”
“Insufferable,” Boo said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing with them, but Annette has a smart answer for everything, and Michael won’t even leave the house.”
“Why do you want him to leave the house?”
“I asked him to mow the lawn. Know what he said to me? He doesn’t know how. The boy is thirteen years old and he’s never mowed a lawn? I had to go out and do it myself. Honestly, Nora, what kind of children are you raising?”
Nora was contemplating an answer when there was an obvious scuffle on the other end. She heard her mother negotiating with someone else. A high-pitched voice broke through, and then Annette was on the line.
“Mommy,” she said. “Mommy, is that you?”
“Yes, honey. It’s me. How are you?”
“Terrible,” Annette said. “She hit me.”
Nora’s blood ran cold. She remembered being hit by her mother. Hit on the legs with the fly swatter, hit on the butt with a spoon, hit in the face with her mother’s bare hand. Her own children had never been hit by an adult. Only by their peers, in nursery school.
“What do you mean, honey?” Nora asked, her hands starting to tremble.
“I didn’t want to go to bed after Rugrats, and she said I had to, and when I asked her why, she hit me in the face. Mommy, she hit me!”
“Let me talk to your grandmother.”
“Violence is wrong,” Annette reminded her.
“Yes, it is. Let me talk to your grandmother.”
Annette said, “But also, we saw some fireflies. It was cool. When are you coming home?”
“Soon, honey. Let me talk to your grandmother.”
“Love you to pieces, Little Meeses,” Annette said. It was part of a rhyme she and Nora said every night.
“Love you back, Cracker Jack.”
“Love you more, Corner Store.”
“Let me talk to your grandmother.”
Annette went away and then Boo came back on.
“Mother,” Nora said, “did you hit my daughter?”
“I swatted at her. They are too spoiled, Nora.”
“You do not hit my children.”
“I tapped her.”
“You don’t tap my children. My children are not tapped.”
“Then, why don’t you come home and raise them yourself?”
“I’m needed here,” Nora said authoritatively, because she was still a little drunk and her real purpose for being there was secreted away, safe to her.
“Well, you do what you have to do, and I’ll do what I have to do,” Boo said.
“Don’t hit my children. That’s not okay.”
“Fine, whatever you say.”
At this point Boo turned the phone over, and to Nora’s surprise it was Michael’s voice that came on.
“Mommy,” he said, “I tried calling Daddy, but he doesn’t want me. He says it will be too complicated to have me. What’s going on?”
“I’m coming home soon,” Nora said, “and I will take you and your sister to play miniature golf.”
“Daddy says things are just too complicated.”
“And maybe they are,” Nora said. “Michael, you and I did not leave on good terms. But I want you to stay with me. I love you, sweetheart.”
“Mom,” Michael said, “let’s try to get this worked out ‘cause I want to be with Dad this summer.”
“You’re not going to be with your father. He can’t support you. I don’t know if he even has a job down there.”
“He does, too! He’s managing three restaurants.” “That’s what he says,” Nora said, wondering if there was any truth to it. Knowing Cliff, there probably was.
“What, you think he’s lying? You never had any faith in him.”
“Watch your mouth,” Nora cautioned. “You don’t know anything about your father and me. I mean, our lives together.”
