A Small Hotel (6 page)

He focuses before him and a couple is approaching. Young. Laurie’s age or so. The woman is pretty and her shoulders are bony; the man is carefully coiffed, expensively so, almost certainly, and Michael has a hunch about him. The two couples stop before each other.

“You look wonderful,” Laurie says to the woman.

“So do you,” the woman says.

“I’m Laurie Pruitt. This is Michael Hays.”

They all start shaking hands and the others are saying their names—Jason Murray and Madison Murray—and Jason’s handshake has a certain glad, inquisitive aggressiveness to it, which supports Michael’s initial hunch.

“This is my first of these,” Laurie says. “How about you?”

“Our fourth,” Jason answers, though Laurie was looking at Madison when she asked the question.

“We were married here,” Madison says. “At this event.”

“Oh that’s so cool,” Laurie says.

Now Jason and Madison turn their faces in unison to Michael, awaiting his declaration. Laurie looks at Michael and he’s not answering instantly and she is prepared to answer for him. But even as she is beginning to shape the first word in her mouth, Michael lifts his shoulders in a slightly exaggerated shrug. “I’m a codger lawyer with a young girlfriend who looks great in ruffles and is ardent to wear them.”

The three young faces before Michael freeze, very briefly, as certain witnesses sometimes freeze for him in rare and wonderful moments in a courtroom. But then these three brighten abruptly and laugh.

“I’m a lawyer, too,” Jason says. “Baton Rouge.”

Michael has already guessed the lawyer part.

“We’re from Pensacola,” Laurie says.

“Personal injury?” Michael says.

Jason is caught off guard yet again, though he instantly masks it. “Yes,” he says. “Does it show?”

“The handshake,” Michael says.

“Really.” Jason inflects this as a statement, not a question.

Michael means all this in a collegial, insider sort of way, but he can hear a professional prickle beginning in Jason.

“You do look great in ruffles,” Madison says to Laurie.

“So do you,” Laurie says.

“You must be a D. A. ,” Jason says, tainting this with a scorn clear enough to be audible to another lawyer but light enough that he could believably deny it to a non-lawyer if challenged.

Michael has eaten youngsters like this alive in courtrooms. He does one of his small, fine-tuned, faux self-deprecating shrugs. “Nah,” he says. “I’m just a Swiss Army knife of a lawyer. Whatever you need.”

“Personal injury?” Jason cocks his head.

“I leave that to the experts,” Michael says. And after a tiny pause, he adds, “So if I ever botch a divorce and get plugged by an unhappy husband and don’t die, I’ll give you a call.”

“Or by an unhappy wife,” Jason says, and he does not look at Laurie. His restraint, even as he counter-punches, makes Michael smile a small, approving smile at the young man.

“Sir,” Michael says, drawing the word out, “would gentlemen in suits like ours actually sue a woman?”

Jason smiles a small smile in return.

“We’ll see you both at the ball?” Laurie says.

“Oh yes,” Madison says.

The two men nod at each other.

“Sir,” Jason says.

“Sir,” Michael says, crooking his arm for Laurie but keeping his eyes on his fellow lawyer.

Laurie slips her hand into its place on Michael’s flexed bicep, and they move away. They walk for a few moments in the direction of the distant levee and Laurie says, low, “Whenever your sort meets, do you always start pissing on the same tree?”

“It’s our upbringing,” Michael says. “We are who we are.”

∼

And Kelly sits in the flower-print wingback chair in the corner, in the shadows, and she has once more returned to the beginning of things, to the time when she met Michael, when she first loved him. After they make love on Ash Wednesday morning, after her mistake of asking for a declaration from him, they fall into silence; she lets this quiet man set the mood. He does slide his arm around her, though he turns his face away, toward the open French windows. But he draws her close and they remain silent for a long while, and then they face the fact they will have to check out of the hotel in a couple of hours and it’s hard even to say who makes the first movement but one or the other of them does
and they rise together without any further words and they dress and they go out.

They stroll down Toulouse and turn on Chartres and approach the flagstone mall between the cast-iron-fenced Jackson Square and the St. Louis Cathedral. She has slipped her hand into the crook of his arm. She can feel the rock-hardness of his bicep and it assures her, somehow, the body taking on the metaphor for the man himself. Solid. And from that, dependable. He can keep her safe, happy. His arm moves them forward. The mall is nearly deserted. No drunks. Only a few people passing through with faces lowered. Only a stray Mardi Gras doubloon or a broken length of beads swept tight against the curb.

As Michael and Kelly cross in front of the Cathedral, the bell begins to toll above them, the deep prelude and then the solemnly paced counting, heading, at this moment, up to ten. Kelly slows at the sound, and Michael follows her lead now. She stops them. She looks up the center of the three, slate-cloaked spires. “Can you wait a little for your coffee?” she asks. She knows the morning will soon end, the two of them will part. But the bell tolled a reminder as she passed, so she will sit here beneath it for a while, trying to hold on to time.

“I can wait,” he says.

They sit on an iron bench, behind them the Square and Andy Jackson rearing high on his horse, before them the Cathedral. Kelly puts her head on Michael’s shoulder and she closes her eyes to rest in this present moment without a thought to the next, but as soon as she does, a feeling tremors through her like the vibration of the Cathedral bell. She lifts her head and opens her eyes. She needed something from him in the room. Seeking it did not turn out well. But now she has no choice.

“It all ends so abruptly,” she says, keeping her eyes forward, not looking at Michael.

He is silent.

“And completely,” she says. Now she turns her head to him. He is looking about the mall.

He nods at the cathedral. “That’s why they tolerate it,” he says. “They get you back today, big time. And you need them more than ever.”

Kelly has begun this and she will not retreat. But she resists saying it directly: this time together is ending so abruptly, whatever it is that’s between us also will end. She puts it on him: “You think I was talking about Mardi Gras?”

He looks at her. But his face shows nothing. She has no idea what he’s feeling. And she grows afraid. She’s a fool to push this now. So she takes the burden
off him to speak—even to feel—and she curses her own cowardice as she forces a sweet smile and says, “You’re right. I was.”

He looks at her—as if blankly—for a moment and then he says, “The next logical question … But why don’t I know this yet?” And there is a leaping in her: she knows what he’s referring to. He’s not blank at all. He understands what she’s feeling. In spite of his seeming blankness.

“Where I live,” she says.

“Yes,” Michael says.

Sitting now on the flower-print chair with the two bottles on the night table across the room, Kelly stops the memory for a moment. Her eyes grow tight with unreleased tears. She is struck by this: how abiding and deep an early impression we can draw of another person from a single, unexamined incident. That he did know what she was talking about. That he was himself feeling what she was feeling. The tears express themselves now and she does not touch them. Did she trust this early impression too much or not enough over the years to come? As strongly as she wanted to be in the fullness of present-time on that Ash Wednesday, she cannot be in this moment now, this present, this circumstance. She lets Ash Wednesday play on.

“We skipped some stages, didn’t we,” Kelly says to Michael as they sit on the iron bench before the Cathedral.

“We did,” he says.

“Mobile,” she says.

He smiles. “A ‘Bama girl.”

“Big-city ‘Bama.”

“Oh it shows,” Michael says.

And now his blankness is a comic’s deadpan. It’s all okay, she thinks, as she laughs. “And you?” she says.

“Florida, then and now. We neither of us fell far from the tree.”

“Were you barefoot and chewing grass in a town with two blinking lights?”

“Pretty close,” he says.

“It shows,” she says, keeping her own face straight.

He doesn’t laugh. Kelly—a little to her surprise—does not worry about his being offended. She isn’t picking up any of that. She senses him thinking about his small-town Florida, but simply serious thoughts, perhaps nostalgic ones.

She’s wrong. He says, “You mentioned something about your sister.”

She feels that little leaping again. She realizes instantly that he has come back to a consideration of the end of their time together. “She’s long gone,” Kelly says.

“Do you have a plan?”

“Please,” she says, in two, long, are-you-kidding-me syllables.

Michael smiles at this and then sets his face again. “I can drop you,” he says.

This takes Kelly by surprise. “Really?”

“I’ve got shoes and cycling traffic lights in my present Florida town. Pensacola. You’re right on the way.”

“So it’s not over?” Kelly says. “Not abruptly at least?”

Michael rises, stands over her, offers his hand. “Coffee first,” he says. “With chicory.”

And they sit nursing the New Orleans chicory-root coffee under the open-air pavilion of the Café du Monde. And Kelly lifts a beignet, extending her ring and little fingers, trying to be ‘Bamagirl-dainty, but though its square, doughnutty texture is manageable, when she brings the beignet to her mouth, the coating of powdered sugar suddenly, profusely pollinates her face from her mistimed downward breath.

Michael sharply leans to her and speaks with urgency. “Don’t breathe back in. It’ll coat your lungs.”

This makes her laugh and the laugh jostles her beignet, which releases another cloud of sugar.

“Don’t laugh,” Michael says. “It can be fatal.”

She puts the beignet down on her plate. “We’ll just look at them,” she says.

And she begins to do just that, laying her hands on the tabletop and lowering her face and staring at the three beignets sitting in a snow drift of sugar on the plate. She does this for several moments, playing out the joke, but she can dimly see in the upper periphery of her downward sight that Michael does not move, he remains fixed on her.

Kelly lifts her face to him. And she and Michael begin wordlessly to look each other in the eyes for a long, long while, though as Kelly sits in the flower-print chair in Room 303 on the day she has failed to finish her divorce, she does not remember that the silence was extended. This was the unexamined incident that gave Michael his deep and abiding early impression of what life would be with Kelly. For Michael, the influential part was the silence, even as the incidence of that silence has now faded from his conscious memory. Of how he ended the silence, he has no memory whatsoever, conscious or unconscious, though it is this final gesture that makes Kelly squeeze hard with both hands at the arms of her chair beside the French windows.

Michael’s eyes shift ever so slightly upward, and Kelly realizes he is looking at the cross of ashes still on her forehead. And now he looks down at the beignets
before him, and he puts the tip of his forefinger into the powdered sugar at the margin of his plate, and he lifts his finger, coated white, and he reaches out, across the table, and he touches Kelly’s forehead, touches the dark cross of ashes, and he traces a white cross of sugar there.

And he says, “In remembrance of life. And to a thing not ended.”

∼

Kelly’s hands on the arms of the chair eventually loosen their grip. They rub there for a while, even as her mind shuts down. She rubs there and rubs there and then her hands finally stop. How long has she been sitting here utterly empty? The sun is still on the bed. Perhaps not so very long. How unbearably sweetly it all began, yes? Very sweetly. The cross of sugar. Sugar Wednesday. No, Kelly thinks. “Remember you are dust and unto dust you will return.” Did she say that aloud just now? Perhaps. She and Michael are walking along the Gulf shore, the barrier island just south of Pensacola. The sand is fine and white and the dunes behind them block off the shore and there is only the wide, jade Gulf before them and the buffeting of wind and the cry of seabirds, and she and Michael have been together for
months now, months, and they are in swim suits and they’ve been at the beach all afternoon and they’ve been drinking wine—quite a lot of wine perhaps—and they are standing side by side, their bare legs touching, just their legs, ever so lightly, and out before them on the water, far out, is a fishing boat, a private thirty-footer, and Michael has been watching it for a while, and he says, “My dad liked to fish the rivers and the lakes, but not the Gulf.”

Kelly looks at him. He has not turned his face to her to speak; he is still watching the boat. And he did not even begin with the declaration of his father being a fisherman; he has spoken as if that has already been established, as if he has been speaking of these issues already, though he has not.

“It’s a different thing,” Michael says. “It made him uneasy.”

He falls silent. She watches him watching the boat. And she says, “After all these months, that’s the first thing I’ve heard you voluntarily say about your dad.”

He looks at her. “I don’t talk about him much. I don’t know why I did now. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Kelly says. “I’m honored.”

Michael looks away.

“Really I am,” she says. And as Michael watches the Gulf, clearly thinking of his father, Kelly finds herself
ready to speak of another thing. She’s been ready for a while, but till now she sensed it was too soon. Too soon for him. Not her. For herself, she no longer even needs to re-examine her feelings, no longer needs to play the little litany inside her of all the signs. She invokes none of them now. She is aware only of a trembling that’s beginning in the place in her chest where she must focus to consciously breathe in and breathe out.
Courage
she whispers in her mind.
Courage now
.