Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

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Distantly an old rotary phone rings. From her bedroom Kelly hears it, waking in the middle of the night. She keeps her eyes hard shut, though she is awake, though she knows the phone is ringing. She hears her mother rustle past the bedroom door, heading for the phone. Her father is sad again somewhere. Kelly forces her eyes wide open. The sunlight on the bedspread is too bright. She closes her eyes and opens them. The phone rings. Her mind clarifies. The brick wall. The wrought iron grapes. The night table. It’s her cell phone, which rings again. She chose this sound. But it’s distant now, muffled, and she looks to her purse lying at the foot of the bed. Her cheeks are tight with dried tears. The phone rings. She has no intention of answering it, even without thinking who it probably is. She’s out of town. She’s gone away. She looks out the French windows, not seeing anything, really. Did she fall asleep for a few moments? Perhaps so. The phone rings. What an oddly wrongheaded decision, she thinks, to make her cell phone sound like the phones of her childhood. And there it is ringing again. And she waits. A bird spanks past, heading for the courtyard. And she waits and she waits and the phone has stopped. The phone is silent.

Something in her has shifted. She’s not sure how much. She is sad. She is somewhere being sad. She rises from the chair and moves to the night table, passing through the sunlight into shadow. It’s dim here. She turns on the lamp. She picks up the bottle of Scotch. She slices the gold foil seal with her fingernail and peels it away. She pulls the black-capped cork and it resists and resists and then moves and it pops loudly. She does not have to lift the bottle to smell the dark honey smell of the Scotch. She waits. She waits, not knowing for what. Then she squeezes the cork back in, but not fully, not tightly, and she puts the bottle down in the exact spot where it was sitting.

She picks up the pills. The plastic prescription bottle is the color of caramel. She loved caramel as a child. She pushes down on the cap and twists it and opens the bottle and she shakes two of them into the palm of her hand. Pale blue, perfectly round. One is etched with the name, curving along the edge in a two-hundred-degree arc: PERCOCET. And within the arc is a large numeral 5. The milligrams. The second pill, flipped to the other side, is blank but for a deep, gaping, knife-groove through the middle.

Kelly looks at the two pills for a long while. She is aware of no thoughts, no decision going on, but finally she takes one pill out of her palm with her forefinger and thumb and she lays it carefully in the empty space where the bottle sat, PERCOCET-side up. She lays the second directly beneath, touching the one above, making the beginning of a perfectly straight vertical line. She moves the bottle of Scotch farther to the side, closer to the bed, clearing this space. She pours more pills into her palm, and she puts one carefully below the other two, and then another and another until there are … how many? She counts. Seven. Lucky seven. The bottle once held ninety Percocet. More than half of them are left. She takes another pill and lays it to the right of the first, and she lays in another pill below that, and another and another until she has two tight columns. Then she starts again at the top. And she refills her palm two more times. Her hands are steady, her hands are calm and steady. She builds a third column and another and she keeps building until she has seven columns and seven rows. A small, complex, scallop-edged square made up of circles. A perfect little square in the center of the night table. Forty-nine pills. She puts the half dozen still in her palm back into the bottle. She has more than enough.

She realizes she’s hunched over. Her back aches. She straightens. She breathes deeply in, lets it out. She looks down at the pills. They are perfect.

She turns and crosses the room and enters the bathroom. It’s dark in here and she keeps it that way. She can see what she wants. A drinking glass beside the faucets. She puts her hand on the glass and picks it up and she is about to turn and go but she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She pauses, though she keeps her eyes slightly averted, as if the person in the mirror is naked in a public place, is making a terrible spectacle of herself and you want to look but you don’t, quite, you do what you can to maintain a bit of her dignity even if she won’t. What can you say to her? What can you say? Kelly steps out of the bathroom.

She crosses the room, sits on the side of the bed, puts the glass on the corner of the night table. She looks at the pills. They were only recently made perfect there. Leave them alone for now. She picks up the bottle of Macallan and pulls the cork and it comes out easily, making a little echo of a pop. Kelly begins to pour and whatever is being thought-out inside her makes her lift the bottle quickly. She’ll have two fingers, neat, thank you. That’s enough for now. Just a little warmth for now is sufficient.

She is ready to lie down on the bed. Prop herself up and drink for a while. She returns the glass to the edge of the night table — she will not risk spilling any of her Scotch — and she begins to lift her feet. But she sets them back on the floor. She looks down. Her shoes are still on. How long has she been in this room? For a while now, and her shoes are still on. She considers this. In any room that she feels is her private space, she is always instantly barefoot. Perhaps in the six weeks of cold in Pensacola in the heart of their brief winter she will wear socks around the house. That’s all. But her shoes are still on. With her little black Chanel she wore her black Louboutin platform pumps and they need to come off.

She puts the toe of one at the tip of the heel of the other and nudges the shoe loose and lets it fall off her foot. It lands on its side and exposes its arterial-red sole to her. She looks sharply away. She finds the other heel with her bare toes and pries off the shoe and drops it to the floor. Kelly lifts her legs and scoots back on the bed, plumps a pillow behind her so she can stay upright from the shoulders up, and she reaches over and lifts her Macallan. She leans back and brings the glass to her lips.

Now the first taste of the Scotch is upon her, like warm dark honey, and she lets the sip go down quickly — this isn’t a glass of wine; this isn’t about taste — and she waits for the settling in: one second, two, a few more. And then, inside, she descends into a warm sea: first in the very center of her, in the place where she draws this breath and the next, she feels the undulant warmth and then it swells outward, across her chest and up all the way to her throat and downward, as well, even into the place where she takes a man inside her.

∼

Michael kept walking after Kelly failed to answer her cell phone, ending the call at the first sound of her outgoing message. He could not speak to her answering machine. At this moment he could not even begin to think what he might say to her answering machine. He reaches the end of the allée, but he does not turn back to the plantation house. He crosses the highway and he goes up the angled road that climbs the levee and he arrives at the graveled road on the berm. Before him is the river, nearly half a mile wide here, the far shore a dense line of trees. Upriver a ways, on the far shore, two push boats have laid by, side by side, each with a dozen barges at the prow. Michael shoves his hands in his pockets and he regrets that he no longer smokes. This would have been the moment to light a cigarette, to keep one hand pushed into a pocket and to smoke a cigarette with the other and hunch his shoulders a little and shut the door in his head so it’s just him and the cigarette and the smoke filling him like a sweet midnight fog where nobody can see him and he can see nobody. But it’s been more than a decade and there’s nobody to bum a cigarette from out here and he’ll be okay. He’s been pretty good at shutting the door on his own. He doesn’t have to think about anything he doesn’t want to think about. That’s why he has found this high ground and has put himself in front of the Mississippi.