Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

“Yes I do,” Kelly says.

“He’s now asking you to marry him,” Michael says.

Kelly wants to banter now, wants to play Michael’s game, but her impulse to throw her arms around him balances that exactly, so she sits there saying nothing for a very small moment in which the judge intones, “Will the witness please answer the question?”

“Yes or no,” Michael says.

“Yes,” Kelly says.

The gavel bangs and the judge cries, “Case dismissed. Everyone back to lunch.” And the spectators and the tweedy man and the prosecutor all laugh and cheer.

Kelly is ready for the big embrace now, but Michael has turned away, is reaching up over the bench to shake the judge’s hand. Kelly waits. Michael is saying a few words of thanks to the judge, and Kelly rises, and she waits, and then Michael is passing before her and coming up into the witness box, and he takes her into his arms. They kiss.

And Kelly is forty-eight years old and she is sitting in her Mercedes, sitting at the curb across the street from that same courthouse, which still threatens to drop the modular blocks of its top floor, and she roils hotly in her head, in her limbs, and she holds her cell phone in her hand, but the welter in her won’t let her work her fingers to make this call that she has come here to make. She watches the distant figures moving before the building, seemingly unaware it’s about to fall on them.

And Kelly at forty-nine sits in the flower-print chair and wrenches her mind out of her car and back into this room, this familiar room, this empty room that threatens to collapse on her at any moment.

∼

Michael stands beneath a gilt federal bull’s-eye mirror in the front parlor of the Oak Alley plantation house, sipping a period mint julep made with brandy and sugarcane rum. He is, at the moment, alone, and he is glad for that. He’s glad he can see Laurie, who is across the room, near the mahogany piano, but for now yes, he’s also glad he’s not with her and with the others she inevitably draws to her. She’s laughing with two young women. Michael can pick Laurie’s laugh out of the crowd. He enjoys her laughter along with his sense of solitude, but the solitude does not last long. Laurie turns her face to him and cocks her head, and she speaks a few more words to the two women and then begins to glide across the parlor toward him.

As she approaches, he has a brief flash of two years earlier. A cocktail party in a senior partner’s Gulf-frontage house and the place is full of lawyers and judges and spouses and clerks and paralegals, and Michael finally stands alone in this crowd too: he has just finished a trivial conversation with a junior associate, who has gone away to refresh his drink, and Kelly, who was standing beside him, looking beautiful and distracted, has moved off as well. Michael is alone in a small cleared space with only people’s backs to him, but now a corridor of sightline opens up, and across the room he sees Laurie. She is wearing a cocktail dress in black satin that makes her naked shoulders and arms seem radiantly white, and she sees him seeing her, and she smiles and lifts her wine glass to him, and she nods, and he nods at her, and she is looking vaguely and recently familiar now. She apparently has taken the nods as an invitation to come to him. She moves through the crowd and he has nothing in his mind about her except noting — with actual objectivity — that she is very good looking, and he concedes to himself that if his solitary respite at this boring party is to be broken, it’s okay if it’s by this young woman.

She arrives. She says, “Mr. Hays.”

She knows him. Yes, he’s seen her somewhere. He says, “Michael.”

“Michael,” she says. “I’m Laurie Pruitt. I work for Arthur Weisberg.”

They shake hands. Her grip is surprisingly firm. He recognizes her now from a single passing glance at the office of his own lawyer, Max Bloom. Art is Max’s longtime partner.

“I’m his paralegal,” Laurie says.

“New paralegal,” Michael says.

“Fresh,” Laurie says, and she enhances the sibilance of the word just a little, flashes its double meaning.

Michael lets her know he gets this. “His fresh paralegal,” he says, reproducing her enhancement of the word.

“Fresh,” she repeats, lifting her wine glass to him.

And Laurie reaches Michael in the present, in the parlor at Oak Alley, and she puts on her thickest Southern drawl. “Well, Mr. Hays,” she says. “You are looking downright lonely over here. Is it your political views that have alienated your fellow plantation owners? Or the cheapness of your cigars?”

“I smoke only the finest cigars,” Michael says.

“And the largest ,” she says, and she once again massages a word to open its ambiguity.

He says, “If only Sigmund Freud had been born by now, Miss Pruitt, I would have a shocking response to that comment.”

“Why, whatever do you mean, Mr. Hays?”

And a cell phone rings. Michael’s, hidden beneath his swallowtail coat. The faces in the room turn toward the sound, upper lips squaring and nostrils flaring in disdain.

Michael ignores the censure and quickdraws his phone to see who’s calling, even as Laurie hisses, “Michael.”

It’s Bloom, Weisberg, Hatfield & Moore. Finally, word. Michael says to Laurie, “You know what today is.”

She softens instantly, “Of course,” she says, touching his arm.

Michael turns and flips open the phone before the second ring and he moves out the parlor door. “Claire,” he says to his lawyer’s secretary, “I’ll call Max right back. I’ve got to step outside the nineteenth century first.”

And Michael moves through the front door and across the veranda and the terrace and into the allée. He keeps walking, even after he’s alone and can call Max and can hear that it’s all over. He’s delaying this, and he realizes he is, and since he’s alone he feels free to visibly, sharply shake his head, make an overt gesture of disgust at himself, at his own weakness. And having done this, he flips open his phone and calls Max’s office.

“Claire, it’s Michael. I’m ready for Max.”

And moments later Max is on the line. “Michael,” he says. “She didn’t show.”

“What?”

“Kelly didn’t show up to finalize.”

“I don’t understand,”

“Even her lawyer was taken by surprise,” Max says. “He’s been trying to locate her. Nothing. No answer.”

“This was when?”

“The appointed hour. Eleven. Judge Fox waited till noon. As long as he could.”

“Jesus.”

“I hoped to have some news by now. I’m sorry to put this on you.”

Michael says nothing for a long moment. It’s as if he’s standing there thinking, but he isn’t. He thinks about thinking something about this turn of events, but there’s not much actually going on in his head.

“Michael?” Max says.

“Yes.”

“You okay?”

“I just want it over.”

“Of course,” Max says. “What was her mood the last time you talked?”

“It’s been a couple of weeks. I don’t know.”

“We’ll keep trying,” Max says.

“Thanks. Yes. I have to go.” And Michael hangs up.

He tries again to think this out, but his mind is still benumbed and he is mostly aware now of the drift of voices from the house and the drape of shadows from the canopied oaks above him and the sooty sweet smell of sugarcane stubble burning somewhere. He finds himself facing the house but he turns away, walks down the allée now toward the levee, and as he does, he dials the house in Pensacola.

The phone there rings and rings, and then Kelly’s voice says, “I’m sorry. No one is home. Please leave a message …” and Michael hangs up. He dials Kelly’s cell phone.