Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

Before them now is the quarter-mile alley of live oaks leading from the highway to the Big House, and Michael slows even more. He and Laurie both turn their heads, as they slide past, to look down the canopied corridor of trees. With the massive frame of the oaks, the Creole pavilion house shows only its wide, double-galleried face, fronted by two-story Tuscan columns, and then it is gone. And momentarily Michael slows almost to a stop and turns into the plantation grounds, passing a sign that announces: Antebellum Fashion Festival .

Before he accelerates again, Laurie says, “I wish we’d begun a year earlier.”

He has had these what-can-you-possibly-be-thinking moments several times already with her. The wreckage he is leaving behind was inconveniently timed? He will not let her remark make him consider the wreckage now. And it is deeply in his nature not to make his inner life visible. So he shows nothing. If she looked at him, Laurie would not be able to tell if he even heard what she said. Not that this occurs to her. After only a moment’s pause, she says, “There are twenty-eight oaks and twenty-eight columns around the house. It would be cool if I were twenty-eight this first time.” He speeds up now on the perimeter road and she has said what she has to say, more for herself than for Michael, and that he makes no indication whatsoever he has heard is of no consequence to her. The Big House emerges fully as they run parallel to the alley of oaks, its dark, hipped roof rising to a widow’s walk.

∼

And Kelly is standing in the center of Room 303, at the foot of the four-poster double bed, with the posts and the canopy frame and two birds plucking at an overflowing basket of grapes on the headboard all done in black wrought iron. This and so many other things are as they always have been. The bed wall is exposed brick. The lamp on the night table is a sandalwood palm tree. The lamp on the desk on the opposite wall is a teak monkey in a fez, climbing another palm. He is draped with Mardi Gras beads. The beads may have changed over the years, but there have always been beads. The French windows are open to a trompe l’oeil balcony, a filigreed iron balustrade from one side of the jamb to the other. Nowhere to step outside. Just lean there and look down to the courtyard and out to the hipped and gabled roofs of the Quarter and to the sun, falling toward late afternoon in the western sky before her.

Laughter wafts into the room like a fresh scent from the street. Kelly leaves her bag behind and moves to the balcony. She looks down. In an open doorway to one of the pool-level suites, a young couple laughs and the woman nudges the man’s shoulder with her forehead and he says something else and she lifts her face and laughs harder, though the sound strikes Kelly’s ear only faintly, as faint as distant memory; the laughter has sounded in her enough to have drawn her to look but not enough to dissipate the murk in her head, her chest. She turns away, faces back into the room.

She looks at her bag sitting upright on the floor, its handle extended. She moves to the bag, grasps the handle. The laughter dies. She lifts her eyes to the door of the room. Outside, she herself waits to enter. Kelly at twenty-four. Perhaps the age of the woman in the courtyard. But Kelly in this present moment, holding tight at the handle of her rolling bag, squeezes back the memory, keeps the door shut. She angles the bag toward her, turns, pulls it to the side of the bed. She lowers the handle and bends and lifts the bag and places it gently on the mattress. She is breathing heavily, though the bag was light. She waits. She slows herself down. There is time yet. Perhaps even options of a sort. This whole process is to do one thing and then wait and then do another thing.

For now, open the bag: the zipper tab between her thumb and forefinger, the ripping sound, her hand tracing the bag, down and across and up. And she lifts the lid. Inside is a folded, bulky, white terry-cloth robe. But it is here only for padding. She unfolds the robe, and within are simply a bottle of Macallan cask-strength, single-malt Scotch and a bottle of Percocet.

∼

Michael steps from his car into the driveway next to a pitched-roof cottage with a screened front porch and a wooden back deck. Surrounding the plantation grounds is the ongoing enterprise of the last hundred and seventy years at Oak Alley, sugarcane. The air still smells faintly of smoke and cane, the fall harvest having been completed only a short time ago, the crop cut and gone for processing and the stubble burned to the ground, leaving six hundred acres of dark rutted earth waiting for the new shoots. Michael takes in the smell, a pleasure he had not expected this weekend.

“It’s wonderful,” Laurie says. “More than I’d imagined.”

Michael does not look at her but heads toward the trunk, lifting her Rollaboard from the back seat as he passes. He takes one step beyond the end of the car and puts her rolling bag on the driveway for her to pull. She’s in the small front yard, her back to him, arms rising as if embracing the scene before her: another cottage on the service road and a maintenance shop farther out and then five hundred yards of naked cane fields to a distant line of trees marking an unseen railroad track. Her arms move on, though, and she clasps her hands at the back of her head. Her shoulders lift and pause and fall in a sweet sigh of contentment.

Michael doesn’t see it. One by one he pulls Laurie’s suitcase and a mate to Kelly’s upright bag and his garment carrier out of the trunk, setting the larger bags beside each other and draping the garment bag over Laurie’s suitcase.

He turns to close the trunk and she is beside him now. “Thanks for letting me choose this place,” she says.

He lowers the trunk and gently clicks it shut. He turns to her and she is kissing him hard on the mouth and he is fine with bodies, fine with using the language of the body, and he presses her close and the kiss goes on and then ends and they break. Laurie looks Michael in the eyes.

She says, “Now that’s way too somber a look after a kiss like that.” She cocks her head slightly. “Don’t you think?”

And he clenches inside. What more does she want from him? He is a man of words in the courtroom, this Michael Hays. But the expectation of words in a circumstance like this always makes him take the Fifth — silently — no matter what those words might be if he were inclined to figure them out. So instead, suddenly clumsy even with his body, he kisses her again, trying for the forehead — given his putoffedness — but his incipient move prompts her to raise her face to him, as she assumes he’s after her lips. Consequently, he ends up kissing her high on the bridge of her nose. Which gives even the usually chilled-out Laurie her own what-can-you-possibly-be-thinking moment.

But now they are pulling their luggage along, and she has taken his garment bag over her arm without his even asking, and they are through the porch door and the cottage door and moving through their living room full of cherrywood Chippendale reproductions, and Laurie leads the way into the dining room and then, to the right, into a hallway that leads back toward the front of the cottage and into the master bedroom. The bed is large, mahogany, the four high, fluted posts with carved rice plants. She stops, leaves the luggage on the floor, moves around the corner of the foot of the bed with one hand on the post like a stripper doing a slow turn on her pole.

He has stopped, blocked by the bags on the floor.

“I love it,” she says. “I love it all.”

She puts her hand now on the floral chintz quilt. But she pauses and straightens and looks at Michael. “Of course,” she says. “Now I get your mood. Duh.”