Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

There is a beat of silence. Kelly looks toward her husband’s conversation. His back is partly turned to her.

The associate, who is not quite Kelly’s height, is breaking into a smile and then a laugh, which Michael joins. The associate says, “One jury in three will acquit on just those things.”

Kelly moves away, heading for the bar, excusing herself through the bodies without even checking to see if they belong to someone she knows. She needs more wine. But when she arrives before the bartender, a young man with a tattoo of a Chinese character on the side of his throat, she alters her plan. “Scotch and water,” she says.

As he mixes, she turns fully around and leans against the bar. The slow eddying of the crowd opens a sightline back to her husband. The associate has moved away. Michael is alone. He is nodding to someone across the room. And now he lifts a bit at the chest, straightens up in that male way at the sudden attention of a woman, and he watches. The someone must be approaching. Kelly doesn’t really care who it is, but there’s nothing else to look at, and a thin, pretty blonde woman wearing a black satin bare-shouldered cocktail dress arrives in front of Michael. She seems very young. She does an awestruck little shoulder ripple and face bob. This is Michael: his upstraightness has now morphed into a tight-assed formality. He shakes her hand.

Kelly looks away.

“Scotch and water,” the bartender says behind her.

She turns around, and as she puts her hand on her drink, someone arrives next to her, and a male voice says, “Scotch and water.”

She looks. For a moment he is in profile. His darkish hair is cropped very close, as close as the carefully manicured scruff of his beard, and there is a thin angularity to him that she thinks is very nice. He turns his face to her and he smiles. He is, she reckons, the age that she is looking tonight. She nods and lifts her own drink to him.

“Scotch and water?” he says.

“Scotch and water,” she says.

His brow furrows. “Did you oversee the proportions?”

“Bartender’s choice,” Kelly says.

He lowers his voice with a sideways glance. “Do I need to intervene? Did he get it right?”

Kelly glances very quickly at the bartender, who is uncapping the Scotch but looking discreetly away with the merest trace of a smile, a good bartender giving permission for two strangers to make him the subject of playful talk. She returns to the stylishly scruffy face before her and lifts her forefinger and takes a sip of her drink. She ponders a moment. “For me, it’s just fine,” she says. “For you …” She finishes the sentence with a who-knows shrug.

“No,” the man says. “Really no. I sense we’re the same in this.”

Kelly smiles and slows herself down. Is this just bored cocktail party banter or is it flirting? For her it’s banter. Perhaps for a man, the two are the same. Perhaps for this nice-faced man, it’s flirting. It makes no difference. She would glance now in the direction of Michael and the blonde except the man is blocking that view, and Michael is not a flirter anyway, and she says, “I sense that too. Which means if the Scotch were good enough, you wouldn’t use any water at all.”

“You see? My intuition is unerring.”

“Then you’re a dangerous man.”

The bartender sets a Scotch and water before the intuitive man. He picks it up.

“Isn’t this odd,” he says.

“What?”

“I can sense your Scotch and water preferences, but I’m not sure if you’re one of us.”

“Being?”

“An attorney.”

“I’m married to one of you,” Kelly says.

“Ah,” the man says. “That.”

“And you?”

He shrugs. “I’m one of us.”

“Here with one of us?”

“Somewhere in the room.”

Good. That’s settled. Kelly offers her hand. “I’m Kelly Hays.”

He takes her hand and shakes it with an earnest not-quite-firmness that she suspects he developed for greeting new female clients. “I’m Drew Singleton,” he says.

“Mr. Singleton.”

“Drew,” he says, keeping the handshake going.

“Kelly,” she says.

“Would that happen to be Michael Hays?”

“Yes.”

“Impressive.”

“He must be your boss.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You broke off the extended handshake as soon as you realized he was my husband.”

Drew laughs, but even as the laugh animates him, his eyes focus more intensely on her face.

“You’re good,” he says. “Wrong, in this case, but good.”

“Like one of you.”

She pauses just enough to let him try to figure this out without actually having time to do it.

“Right or wrong isn’t the point,” she says. “It’s being good that counts.”

He laughs again. He lifts his Scotch and water to her and they touch glasses.

“A whole other firm,” Drew says.

And now he waits for her to puzzle for a moment.

“Not only is he not my boss,” Drew says. “I don’t even work in his firm.”

And Kelly stops in a stretch of dark somewhere alongside Jackson Square. She tries to shake all this off. But she is at another party at another house in the summer of that same year, a large Gulf-frontage house with a major deck and pool, and many of the others are in swimsuits but she is wearing a summer dress, because however beautiful and more or less young she can sometimes feel she looks, her confidence does not extend to any swimsuit with any style at all. She is already drinking Scotch and water, though slowly, having skipped the wine but not intending to get tipsy, and she is standing on the deck just to the side of the wide sliding doors into the house. She is watching a blonde. Not the blonde who approached Michael at the earlier party, though that blonde will soon emerge from the doors beside Kelly. This blonde is across the pool and is not as young by a decade as she looks, which is about twenty-five, and Kelly is trying to figure out the signs that tell her this is so. The woman is standing with a drink and she is gesturing grandly with her free hand and the three men around her are listening intently.

And a male voice says, “We’re both in a rut.”

Kelly turns to find Drew Singleton beside her. He lifts his own Scotch and water. “But this is a pretty good one,” he says.

They touch glasses, and they both drink.

“You remember me?” Drew says.

“Of course.”

The blonde across the way laughs. It is a sharp, projected laugh, as if by a skilled stage actress in a large theater. She slaps backhanded at the arm of one of the men.

“Didn’t I see you come in with her?” Kelly says.

“Quite brazenly,” Drew says.

She looks at him. “She’s one of us? Me, us?”

“A lawyer’s wife? Yes.”

“Your wife?”

Drew laughs. “Of course. I didn’t really mean …”

“I know,” Kelly says, rather firmly, feeling suddenly twitchy. “She’s very beautiful.”

“She is.”

“You looked very good together in your brazenness.” She realizes this has come out sounding oddly sad.

“Did we?” Drew says. “I love her.”

And his declaration comes out flat, explanatory in some suddenly serious way.

Kelly feels a dark blooming in her, a dark dark thing. She looks at Drew Singleton, who is looking across the pool at his wife.

“I like how easily you say that,” Kelly says, meaning love , meaning the word love .

At this moment, beyond Drew Singleton, a woman emerges from the house, a pretty young blonde woman in a stylishly minimal swimsuit who is, however, merely a bit of background motion for Kelly, though she would recognize the blonde from the previous party if she weren’t studying Drew’s face with a sudden intensity, as if she’d suddenly heard a rumor about him, a secret about him revealed — he is a man who can speak openly and explicitly, even to a near-stranger, about his love for his wife — and Kelly is compelled to look at him closely, to invest this new, insider knowledge of the man into her physical perception of him, the way you stare at the face of a celebrity for an extra few seconds when you see a tabloid revelation: behind these eyes is the capacity for that .