Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

Kelly turns away from the balcony and takes a few small steps into the room and she has not yet driven to the courthouse and she has not yet phoned Drew and asked for him to come outside, to come outside to her, she has not yet done this, though it is in her mind to do it, and she is sitting at night on her deck with a pretty good Scotch, just two fingers and no more tonight, and Michael is sitting next to her and he is probably thinking about something other than sitting on the deck with her, or maybe thinking about how sitting on the deck with her is this utterly neutral thing, maybe thinking how there could have been a certain widely-longed-for strong feeling in his life and he either can’t figure out what it was supposed to be or he knows, abstractly, what it is and what you call it, but out of his deep sense of personal integrity he will never speak of it overtly if he’s not sure he feels it, while her own sense of integrity will never let her ask about it overtly if she’s not already certain that it is so: she learned that much long ago, from another man, a man who, after all, upon due consideration, upon weighing everything even after waiting to see how his daughters turned out, simply preferred to be dead.

This is not good, Kelly thinks. This thinking is not good. I don’t know a way to draw a breath around my own husband without wondering how and why. So she rises and goes into the house and pours two more fingers of Scotch and she comes back out onto the deck and she sits down, and it is not clear whether Michael even knew she was gone.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

There is one beat, and then another, just long enough for her to think that she was right, that he does not even know whether she is there or not there, but on the third beat, Michael turns to her. “What about?” he says.

Kelly feels a twist of something she has to admit is disappointment. It would be easier if he could clearly be one thing or another about her. “I got up and didn’t ask if you needed something.”

“That’s okay.”

“What do you need?” Kelly says.

He doesn’t reply.

“I’m asking it now.”

He looks away. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Good.”

They are both silent for a time.

And then she says, “Work?”

“What?”

“Are you thinking about work?”

“No.” And he says no more.

She stares into the darkness hovering beyond their backyard.

And after what feels to Kelly like a very long while, Michael says, “Sorry.”

“Yes?” she says.

“Work. Yes. Some of that,” he says.

Her mind is processing very slowly now, and it must show.

“Your question,” he says. “Yes of course I was thinking about work. Aren’t I always?”

“I suppose.”

“But just not at that moment. The moment you asked.”

She nods, though it is a gesture that she feels as remote from as if she were watching across the room, at a party for lawyers, as one stranger nods to another stranger.

“At that particular moment,” Michael says, “I was trying to figure out if I need to bite the bullet and have the boat engine rebuilt.”

She turns away from him. She sips her Scotch. She knows she is looking for a sign. She is waiting for her husband to say something that will make it impossible for her to do this thing she feels she is on the verge of doing. It doesn’t have to be much. She has always hoarded away little scraps of seemingly tender things from him. Just a little something is all she needs. Soon.

But she’s afraid he will fall silent now, and that will be that. She’s driven to keep the sounds going, and so she hears herself say, “Engines need rebuilding.” This sounds ridiculous to her. It is ridiculous. She has reached the tipping point with her Scotch way too soon.

But she sips a bit more. Burn, baby, burn. She almost says that aloud, almost addresses the Scotch going down her throat. She clenches her lips shut. She finds a point of light across the bayou and focuses on that. The light on someone’s back porch. What are they doing inside? Arguing? Having sex? Sitting in a room together not saying a word?

“I get it,” Michael says.

She turns to him. She doesn’t understand what he gets.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll make an appointment. But I’m fine. I’m in the pink.”

“In the pink?”

“You and your impromptu metaphors.”

“Have you gone mad, Michael?”

“I was just deciding you hadn’t.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“But I have gone mad,” she says.

“That thing about rebuilding engines,” he says. “Sometimes I struggle when you get metaphorical.”

“Ah, that. I’m also a little drunk.”

“Then let’s just forget it.”

“What did you …”

“Nothing,” he says. “I thought you were talking about the EKG. Dr. Neff suggested it. You lobbied for it. A few weeks ago.”

“Drunk.” Kelly lifts her glass at him. “Just drunk. Get the test or not. I’m sure ‘in the pink’ means something sexual, by the way. Sex for men. Speaking of metaphors.”

“He said it was just routine. I’m of a certain age.”

“Me too.”

“We both are.”

“I need to rebuild my engine,” Kelly says.

And Michael shrugs and turns away.

Can something that will drastically change a life be decided like this? As stupidly as this? She puts her glass down on the deck beside her, several sips of Scotch left in it. She is, in fact, not drunk. Not at all. She and Michael have always talked like this. It’s how they talk. Whatever she does, it’s because of all of it.

And she lays her head back on the deck chair, and she closes her eyes, and she knows Michael will stay quiet now till one or the other of them rises and says it’s time to sleep. And in this silence, and with the thing she must decide, she slides back only a few days, she lets the curtain fall on the first act of Jesus Christ Superstar and Judas has just sung that he won’t be damned for all time and Michael has gone straight to his cell phone for something he’s been thinking about for the whole first act, and Kelly rises and creeps up the aisle with the crowd and out into the Saenger’s new crimson and gold lobby. This is the night of the Saenger’s reopening and she stops beneath the skylight, and she looks up, and it seems small, it seems too small to have bothered.

“Only the janitors will see the stars through that,” Drew says.

This third time she recognizes his voice at once, and she does not look at him, she keeps her face lifted to the skylight, which, it’s true, shows nothing of the sky beyond because of the glare of lobby lights. She completes his thought. “After they’re done and it’s dark inside.”

Kelly and Drew stare at the skylight for a few moments more, and then they lower their faces, aware of the synchronicity, and they turn to each other.

She holds back her smile. “Will you say it or should I?”

“I’ll do it,” he says.

But he doesn’t.

“Well?” she says.

“We have to stop meeting like this.”

Now she smiles, and so does he. He knew. “We do move in the same tight little world,” she says.

“Yes.” Drew lifts his face back to the skylight as he says, “Do you know why I hesitated?”

“No.”

He continues to gaze upwards, as if he can’t look her in the eyes for this. “I don’t want to stop meeting like this.”

What he says strikes her as something that she just felt as well, but would not have found words for.

He’s looking at her now.

She has the impulse to do what she so often does with Michael when they talk, and what she has done with Drew in every conversation they’ve ever had: lightly twist and weave the small-talk. Banter über alles. And even though these words he has just spoken have followed that same pattern, his voice has gone soft and serious and he has averted his eyes as he’s said them. He means what he says, and she feels the same way. And his eyes are steady on hers and her eyes are steady on his, and she leans ever so slightly toward him, and she lowers her voice as much as she can and still be heard over the babble of the intermission crowd — enough that he can hear the same earnestness that she has just heard — and she says, “If we stop, we’ll just have to find another way.”