A Small Hotel (16 page)

This is not good, Kelly thinks. This thinking is not good. I don’t know a way to draw a breath around my own husband without wondering how and why. So she rises and goes into the house and pours two more fingers of Scotch and she comes back out onto the deck and she sits down, and it is not clear whether Michael even knew she was gone.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

There is one beat, and then another, just long enough for her to think that she was right, that he does not even know whether she is there or not there, but on the third beat, Michael turns to her. “What about?” he says.

Kelly feels a twist of something she has to admit is disappointment. It would be easier if he could clearly be one thing or another about her. “I got up and didn’t ask if you needed something.”

“That’s okay.”

“What do you need?” Kelly says.

He doesn’t reply.

“I’m asking it now.”

He looks away. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Good.”

They are both silent for a time.

And then she says, “Work?”

“What?”

“Are you thinking about work?”

“No.” And he says no more.

She stares into the darkness hovering beyond their backyard.

And after what feels to Kelly like a very long while, Michael says, “Sorry.”

“Yes?” she says.

“Work. Yes. Some of that,” he says.

Her mind is processing very slowly now, and it must show.

“Your question,” he says. “Yes of course I was thinking about work. Aren’t I always?”

“I suppose.”

“But just not at that moment. The moment you asked.”

She nods, though it is a gesture that she feels as remote from as if she were watching across the room,
at a party for lawyers, as one stranger nods to another stranger.

“At that particular moment,” Michael says, “I was trying to figure out if I need to bite the bullet and have the boat engine rebuilt.”

She turns away from him. She sips her Scotch. She knows she is looking for a sign. She is waiting for her husband to say something that will make it impossible for her to do this thing she feels she is on the verge of doing. It doesn’t have to be much. She has always hoarded away little scraps of seemingly tender things from him. Just a little something is all she needs. Soon.

But she’s afraid he will fall silent now, and that will be that. She’s driven to keep the sounds going, and so she hears herself say, “Engines need rebuilding.” This sounds ridiculous to her. It
is
ridiculous. She has reached the tipping point with her Scotch way too soon.

But she sips a bit more. Burn, baby, burn. She almost says that aloud, almost addresses the Scotch going down her throat. She clenches her lips shut. She finds a point of light across the bayou and focuses on that. The light on someone’s back porch. What are they doing inside? Arguing? Having sex? Sitting in a room together not saying a word?

“I get it,” Michael says.

She turns to him. She doesn’t understand what he gets.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll make an appointment. But I’m fine. I’m in the pink.”

“In the pink?”

“You and your impromptu metaphors.”

“Have you gone mad, Michael?”

“I was just deciding you hadn’t.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“But I have gone mad,” she says.

“That thing about rebuilding engines,” he says. “Sometimes I struggle when you get metaphorical.”

“Ah, that. I’m also a little drunk.”

“Then let’s just forget it.”

“What did you …”

“Nothing,” he says. “I thought you were talking about the EKG. Dr. Neff suggested it. You lobbied for it. A few weeks ago.”

“Drunk.” Kelly lifts her glass at him. “Just drunk. Get the test or not. I’m sure ‘in the pink’ means something sexual, by the way. Sex for men. Speaking of metaphors.”

“He said it was just routine. I’m of a certain age.”

“Me too.”

“We both are.”

“I need to rebuild my engine,” Kelly says.

And Michael shrugs and turns away.

Can something that will drastically change a life be decided like this? As stupidly as this? She puts her glass down on the deck beside her, several sips of Scotch left in it. She is, in fact, not drunk. Not at all. She and Michael have always talked like this. It’s how they talk. Whatever she does, it’s because of all of it.

And she lays her head back on the deck chair, and she closes her eyes, and she knows Michael will stay quiet now till one or the other of them rises and says it’s time to sleep. And in this silence, and with the thing she must decide, she slides back only a few days, she lets the curtain fall on the first act of
Jesus Christ Superstar
and Judas has just sung that he won’t be damned for all time and Michael has gone straight to his cell phone for something he’s been thinking about for the whole first act, and Kelly rises and creeps up the aisle with the crowd and out into the Saenger’s new crimson and gold lobby. This is the night of the Saenger’s reopening and she stops beneath the skylight, and she looks up, and it seems small, it seems too small to have bothered.

“Only the janitors will see the stars through that,” Drew says.

This third time she recognizes his voice at once, and she does not look at him, she keeps her face lifted
to the skylight, which, it’s true, shows nothing of the sky beyond because of the glare of lobby lights. She completes his thought. “After they’re done and it’s dark inside.”

Kelly and Drew stare at the skylight for a few moments more, and then they lower their faces, aware of the synchronicity, and they turn to each other.

She holds back her smile. “Will you say it or should I?”

“I’ll do it,” he says.

But he doesn’t.

“Well?” she says.

“We have to stop meeting like this.”

Now she smiles, and so does he. He knew. “We do move in the same tight little world,” she says.

“Yes.” Drew lifts his face back to the skylight as he says, “Do you know why I hesitated?”

“No.”

He continues to gaze upwards, as if he can’t look her in the eyes for this. “I don’t want to stop meeting like this.”

What he says strikes her as something that she just felt as well, but would not have found words for.

He’s looking at her now.

She has the impulse to do what she so often does with Michael when they talk, and what she has done
with Drew in every conversation they’ve ever had: lightly twist and weave the small-talk. Banter über alles. And even though these words he has just spoken have followed that same pattern, his voice has gone soft and serious and he has averted his eyes as he’s said them. He means what he says, and she feels the same way. And his eyes are steady on hers and her eyes are steady on his, and she leans ever so slightly toward him, and she lowers her voice as much as she can and still be heard over the babble of the intermission crowd—enough that he can hear the same earnestness that she has just heard—and she says, “If we stop, we’ll just have to find another way.”

He nods once at this. And then his eyes soften and narrow and unnarrow, and she senses from them that something has passed through him, and she knows to say, “Are you okay?”

“Why would you say that?” His literal words voice surprise but nothing about his body changes to express such a feeling.

“I don’t know,” Kelly says, and for the moment she doesn’t.

He smiles a small, quick smile that vanishes at once. “Did you like the first act?”

Is he just changing the subject, intending no ambiguity, telling her indirectly to mind her own business, or is he still playing with the words, actually talking
about the two of them, their own first act, and how they’ve been running into each other and how she now can even tell when he’s troubled? “I have a feeling it’s going to end badly,” she says.

He takes this in. Makes a decision. “We’re talking about the play?” he says.

“I don’t know. Are we?”

“I’m not doing all that great,” he says. “Since you asked.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“I didn’t know it showed so clearly.”

“I’m not sure it does.”

“Only to you,” he says, and his voice has gone soft enough that Kelly can barely hear him as a loud-talking couple passes by, speaking of chocolates.

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” she says.

“Not at all.”

“This isn’t a great place to talk.”

“No.”

“And our spouses are waiting,” she says. And from the faint pull at the corners of his mouth Kelly knows that the trouble is with his wife.

Drew says, “The principal in my firm is a benefactor of the theater.”

She hears this as a preamble of an excuse for telling her that his wife isn’t with him. But he pauses ever
so slightly before the hard part and Kelly finds herself intervening. “Look,” she says. “If the not-great thing can benefit from a woman’s advice, give me a call. We can have coffee.”

Drew’s hand comes to her, touches her on the forearm. “Do you mean that?”

“Of course.”

“This is going to sound odd.” But he says no more for a moment.

“The silence?” she says.

He huffs a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “I’m working up my courage.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Okay. I’d already thought … and this is the odd part, for as briefly and accidentally as we’ve know each other … It had already occurred to me that you’d be someone I could actually talk to. Talk seriously.”

Kelly finds herself having to wait for enough breath to answer this, even as her mind rushes to first acts and bad endings, even as she wants to take this hand of his that still lingers on her arm and entwine her fingers in his. But she simply says, “I think it’s time to exchange cell phone numbers.”

∼

And as Kelly stands in the center of Room 303 following memories within memories, Michael and Laurie are arriving at the veranda of the plantation house. They stop at its very edge. They have not spoken since they left the berm of the levee. They have walked arm-inarm under the trees, and Laurie has connected Michael’s deep and—she is learning—characteristic silence with his old-school romanticism. And that’s okay, that’s okay for now and in this context; she is charmed by it. And he is grateful for her silence. He is trying hard to stay in the moment, trying to follow no memory at all but simply be here with this beautiful young woman who seems quite comfortable with him just as he is.

The two of them linger at the edge of the veranda and watch the chatting, drinking, posturing, period-costumed twenty-first century lawyers and bankers and doctors and real estate agents and small-business owners. This is Laurie’s event and Michael waits for her to take the lead. And Laurie is considering this dress-up fantasy thing she has chosen for the two of them on the weekend when they will, with conscious forethought and planning, do the deed for the first time. Has she ever had sex like that before? Duh. No. It’s always been impulsive and impromptu. And she likes it that way. Absolutely. But this way, it’s as if the doing
of it will actually establish a very important connection between them: and it
is
important, she feels. It is. They are not just doin’ it tonight. They are making love. She gets that, she is cool with that, OMFG, this could be something very big for her.

And she can make it her own. She moves her hand from the crook of his arm and she takes his hand and she entwines their fingers and she says, “I just got this great idea.”

She waits, as if for a reaction, though she knows him enough to understand that the patient look he is giving her is all she will get. He is so cute sometimes.

“You’ve been very sweet,” she says. “About the dress-up.”

And in this dramatic pause she reaches up and puts her hand on his sweetly oft-straightened tie and she twists one end up.

Michael reflexively puts his own hand on the tie, thinking that she is straightening it and preferring to do that himself. He realizes what she has done instead.

She says, “But let’s go now. I’m sorry I got this all mixed up. Let’s go to our little cottage and make love right now, my romantic darling.”

He looks steadily into her eyes as he fills with a warmth like the hit of a good Scotch. This is just what he needs to do right now. Just so.

Laurie waits for him, but in spite of the spin she’s been applying to his silences, this one unsettles her. She says, “Romantic you, impulsive me. We can have it both ways, yes?”

Michael offers his arm and she takes it quickly and holds on tightly, and as they move away from the veranda, she says, “One thing, though. Turn off your cell phone.”

And he stops at once and takes out his phone and he turns it off before her very eyes.

∼

And Kelly makes her legs move, though they are very heavy. She tries to break free of the current that’s carrying her. She moves from the center of the room, past the foot of the bed, and she stops in the space bound by three doors: to the bathroom, to the closet, to the corridor outside. And she is sitting at a table at Artissimo, near the red piano in the window, and Drew is across from her and they have been eating salad together and they have been talking small and they are near the theater where they met for the third time and they are very public here, in this tightly bound city where they live with their respective spouses, and they have done this because it is, of course, absolutely okay, anyone
can see them because nothing is going on but an older woman meeting a younger male acquaintance to give some big-sisterly advice. But the two of them know, while there are people nearby, to talk small, and all the words they said in the restaurant on that day have vanished from Kelly now—except her saying to him, “You ordered a salad” and him saying to her, “Yes I did,” and her saying, “Without steak or chicken in it,” and him saying, “Certainly not,” and her saying, laughing, “What kind of man are you?” and him saying, with a gravity and a look that are intended to remind them both of why they are here, “I have recently been asked that question”—and that was the thing, of course, the recent events in his life, and Kelly and Drew knew not to speak of it in the restaurant, they knew that they would not say a word even though it was the reason he called her the week after the Saenger and said, “Did you mean it, that I could talk with you?” and she said, “Yes, I meant it,” and he suggested lunch and they came here and of course as soon as they got here it was clear that he couldn’t talk about anything important because others could hear.