Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

But this thing did not end this morning as it was supposed to, and a vision of her rises in his head like river fog. He is standing alone in the grass between St. John’s Episcopal and its parish house and he is smoking a cigarette and nodding as civilly as he can to people from both sides of the aisle telling him how lucky he is. Very civilly, actually, given how badly he wants to separate himself from all this and smoke a cigarette in this hour before he marries Kelly. He feels kindly about all these well-meaning people but he just wants to be left alone for now, Kelly herself being the only person in the world he’d be willing to put out this cigarette for and talk to. Yes: he wants to talk to her even more than smoke. And he drops the cigarette and stubs it out and he heads for the parish house. He has no clear plan in mind. He’s not supposed to see the bride. He knows that she and her girls are in the parish house, but restrooms are over there too and so he has to take a piss and he will just go over with that intention and if something happens, it happens.

Michael steps into the reception hall. To his left, through a half-opened door, are the sounds of women’s voices. Ahead, across the hall, is a turning and the corridor to the restrooms. He hesitates. And then he moves to the doorway, very carefully approaching from a bit to the side, staying out of sightlines. He arrives, and, incrementally, he looks in.

A fluttering of bridesmaids in powder blue with others at makeup tables beyond. This is risky. But sitting at the center make-up table, her side to him, is Kelly in white. Her chestnut hair has been poodle-permed into a mass of tight curls and long twisting spirals. He has never seen her like this and she is at once movie-star glamorous, which he likes, and suddenly unfamiliar to him, which he does not. But he can see the clean sharp lines of her profile, which is very familiar indeed, which he loves to look at when she is unaware, the vision of which rests gentle in his mind even standing on the berm of the levee before the Oak Alley Plantation.

But in the parish hall on his wedding day, as Michael reassures himself by focusing on her profile, Kelly suddenly rises from her chair and gathers her gown to move in his direction. He takes a quick backward step and another and he turns and takes another step, toward the bathroom corridor. But then he stops. He came to see her. He turns again, to face the doorway.

He waits for a long moment, and he begins to doubt that she’s coming out, but then she emerges and she sees him and she straightens in surprise.

“Michael,” she says, the word said with a balance of abruptness and eager lilt that make it a rebuke but with a sweet taint of pleasure at the sight of him. A rebuke nonetheless, and he knows he’s supposed to explain his presence without her needing to say anything more. However, he is simply taking in the sight of her in ivory silk and old lace and puffed sleeves and he goes faintly knee-wobbly at her beauty.

“You’re not supposed to see me,” Kelly says.

“Sorry,” Michael says, very low.

“Did you come to pee?” she says.

“Yes,” he says.

Kelly smiles a knowingly purse-lipped smile. “Then it’s officially okay. You can see the bride and not ruin our luck if you have to pee.”

“That’s a sensible tradition,” Michael says.

They stand looking at each other for a long moment. Just quietly looking, with both their faces placid.

Then Kelly says, “So. I was just heading to pee, as well. Are you about to or are you done?”

“Done.”

“This has been a lovely shared bodily-function moment,” she says. “Just like an old married couple.”

Another silence follows. Michael feels calm, feels connected to Kelly in this silence. And on the berm of the levee he remembers these next few moments that way. He does not remember — nor did he notice at the time — that something dark crept into Kelly’s face in this silence. She was expecting something that, because it did not happen, troubled her in a way she could not hide. But there was no need to hide it; Michael could not see a thing. For he was content now. He was very glad he was marrying Kelly Hays. He wanted to put them back onto the path everyone was expecting.

So he says, “We should save the kiss?”

Neither does he notice the lift of her now as she breathes in deep and puts everything in her head away but the ceremony. “For the altar,” she says. “Yes.”

Michael angles his head slightly toward his shoulder, indicating the bathroom corridor behind him. “I put the lid down,” he says.

“Then I’m glad it’s you I’m marrying,” Kelly says.

Michael nods and turns and moves toward the door. As he walks away, all that he’s been feeling about her finally registers — faintly but visibly — in his face. But his back is to Kelly, and she does not see.

And he comes down from the levee and he walks toward the Big House and ahead is a figure in voluminous white hurrying in his direction, and as Laurie approaches, she can read nothing of the news in Michael’s face, though she tries hard. But he looks as if he has come from a smoke or a piss and nothing more.

“So what’s happening?” she says as she draws near.

“She didn’t show up,” Michael says.

“To finalize?”

“Nobody can find her,” Michael says, and he and Laurie are standing before each other now.

“The bitch,” Laurie says. She has never expressed this sentiment to Michael, though she has felt it several major times in the last few months. But she has always hesitated to say it and now it has leaped from her unchecked and she has an abrupt stopping inside her, an intake of breath and a stopping, to see if she has made some terrible mistake with this man she is still trying to learn how to read. He does not seem to react at all except to gently take her elbow and turn her and set them off toward the house.

And Laurie finds another feeling coming out of her unexpectedly. Her fear. “If she wants you back …”

Michael cuts her off. “She doesn’t want me back,” he says.

“And you don’t want her,” Laurie says, feeling oddly separated from her mind and her body, saying one thing after another without the mediation of any editor in her brain. She knows the danger of this, but she can’t stop.

Michael is making no comment about what she has just said. Though it wasn’t a question. She said it as a firm statement, and she takes his silence as a good thing. He does not contradict her.

But relieved a bit, she is free to feel a twist of anger, and it too tumbles out. “I felt foolish in there alone.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael says.

“The bitch,” Laurie says, and she presses her lips tightly together, both in anger at Kelly and in fear of whatever other unedited thing might come out of her mouth.

They walk on toward the house in silence.

∼

Lying propped up on the bed, Kelly has just finished the last bit of her drink. She cradles the glass against her chest and looks to the French windows. The sun is disappearing behind the rooftops. The Scotch went down sweetly and did what it knows to do and it quieted her mind for a time, but it did not alter her — she did not seek that — and now that there are no more sips, she cannot simply let herself lie here and begin to think.

She sits up. She looks at the Scotch and at her pills and at her Scotch, and she stays focused on the Scotch for a long moment, and then, once more, she turns her eyes to the pills, to all the pills, to her lattice of pills. But she cannot find a readiness in her, at least for now.

She puts the empty glass on the night table and she rises and she wishes to touch things and she moves and she does, running the tip of her forefinger along the edge of the night table, disturbing nothing, and she clutches and releases the drape beside the French windows and she is at the desk opposite the foot of the bed and she pauses and she cradles a string of the Mardi Gras beads draped on the lamp, she lifts them but she hardly looks at them and she lets them fall, and she moves on and she runs her palm lightly along the top of the mini-refrigerator, which, for a moment, she hears humming, and she brushes her fingertips across the doorknob as she passes, and in the wall before her is the closed closet door and she stops.