Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

He nods once at this. And then his eyes soften and narrow and unnarrow, and she senses from them that something has passed through him, and she knows to say, “Are you okay?”

“Why would you say that?” His literal words voice surprise but nothing about his body changes to express such a feeling.

“I don’t know,” Kelly says, and for the moment she doesn’t.

He smiles a small, quick smile that vanishes at once. “Did you like the first act?”

Is he just changing the subject, intending no ambiguity, telling her indirectly to mind her own business, or is he still playing with the words, actually talking about the two of them, their own first act, and how they’ve been running into each other and how she now can even tell when he’s troubled? “I have a feeling it’s going to end badly,” she says.

He takes this in. Makes a decision. “We’re talking about the play?” he says.

“I don’t know. Are we?”

“I’m not doing all that great,” he says. “Since you asked.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“I didn’t know it showed so clearly.”

“I’m not sure it does.”

“Only to you,” he says, and his voice has gone soft enough that Kelly can barely hear him as a loud-talking couple passes by, speaking of chocolates.

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” she says.

“Not at all.”

“This isn’t a great place to talk.”

“No.”

“And our spouses are waiting,” she says. And from the faint pull at the corners of his mouth Kelly knows that the trouble is with his wife.

Drew says, “The principal in my firm is a benefactor of the theater.”

She hears this as a preamble of an excuse for telling her that his wife isn’t with him. But he pauses ever so slightly before the hard part and Kelly finds herself intervening. “Look,” she says. “If the not-great thing can benefit from a woman’s advice, give me a call. We can have coffee.”

Drew’s hand comes to her, touches her on the forearm. “Do you mean that?”

“Of course.”

“This is going to sound odd.” But he says no more for a moment.

“The silence?” she says.

He huffs a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “I’m working up my courage.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Okay. I’d already thought … and this is the odd part, for as briefly and accidentally as we’ve know each other … It had already occurred to me that you’d be someone I could actually talk to. Talk seriously.”

Kelly finds herself having to wait for enough breath to answer this, even as her mind rushes to first acts and bad endings, even as she wants to take this hand of his that still lingers on her arm and entwine her fingers in his. But she simply says, “I think it’s time to exchange cell phone numbers.”

∼

And as Kelly stands in the center of Room 303 following memories within memories, Michael and Laurie are arriving at the veranda of the plantation house. They stop at its very edge. They have not spoken since they left the berm of the levee. They have walked arm-inarm under the trees, and Laurie has connected Michael’s deep and — she is learning — characteristic silence with his old-school romanticism. And that’s okay, that’s okay for now and in this context; she is charmed by it. And he is grateful for her silence. He is trying hard to stay in the moment, trying to follow no memory at all but simply be here with this beautiful young woman who seems quite comfortable with him just as he is.

The two of them linger at the edge of the veranda and watch the chatting, drinking, posturing, period-costumed twenty-first century lawyers and bankers and doctors and real estate agents and small-business owners. This is Laurie’s event and Michael waits for her to take the lead. And Laurie is considering this dress-up fantasy thing she has chosen for the two of them on the weekend when they will, with conscious forethought and planning, do the deed for the first time. Has she ever had sex like that before? Duh. No. It’s always been impulsive and impromptu. And she likes it that way. Absolutely. But this way, it’s as if the doing of it will actually establish a very important connection between them: and it is important, she feels. It is. They are not just doin’ it tonight. They are making love. She gets that, she is cool with that, OMFG, this could be something very big for her.

And she can make it her own. She moves her hand from the crook of his arm and she takes his hand and she entwines their fingers and she says, “I just got this great idea.”

She waits, as if for a reaction, though she knows him enough to understand that the patient look he is giving her is all she will get. He is so cute sometimes.

“You’ve been very sweet,” she says. “About the dress-up.”

And in this dramatic pause she reaches up and puts her hand on his sweetly oft-straightened tie and she twists one end up.

Michael reflexively puts his own hand on the tie, thinking that she is straightening it and preferring to do that himself. He realizes what she has done instead.

She says, “But let’s go now. I’m sorry I got this all mixed up. Let’s go to our little cottage and make love right now, my romantic darling.”

He looks steadily into her eyes as he fills with a warmth like the hit of a good Scotch. This is just what he needs to do right now. Just so.

Laurie waits for him, but in spite of the spin she’s been applying to his silences, this one unsettles her. She says, “Romantic you, impulsive me. We can have it both ways, yes?”

Michael offers his arm and she takes it quickly and holds on tightly, and as they move away from the veranda, she says, “One thing, though. Turn off your cell phone.”

And he stops at once and takes out his phone and he turns it off before her very eyes.

∼

And Kelly makes her legs move, though they are very heavy. She tries to break free of the current that’s carrying her. She moves from the center of the room, past the foot of the bed, and she stops in the space bound by three doors: to the bathroom, to the closet, to the corridor outside. And she is sitting at a table at Artissimo, near the red piano in the window, and Drew is across from her and they have been eating salad together and they have been talking small and they are near the theater where they met for the third time and they are very public here, in this tightly bound city where they live with their respective spouses, and they have done this because it is, of course, absolutely okay, anyone can see them because nothing is going on but an older woman meeting a younger male acquaintance to give some big-sisterly advice. But the two of them know, while there are people nearby, to talk small, and all the words they said in the restaurant on that day have vanished from Kelly now — except her saying to him, “You ordered a salad” and him saying to her, “Yes I did,” and her saying, “Without steak or chicken in it,” and him saying, “Certainly not,” and her saying, laughing, “What kind of man are you?” and him saying, with a gravity and a look that are intended to remind them both of why they are here, “I have recently been asked that question”—and that was the thing, of course, the recent events in his life, and Kelly and Drew knew not to speak of it in the restaurant, they knew that they would not say a word even though it was the reason he called her the week after the Saenger and said, “Did you mean it, that I could talk with you?” and she said, “Yes, I meant it,” and he suggested lunch and they came here and of course as soon as they got here it was clear that he couldn’t talk about anything important because others could hear.

But then they finish their lunch and he pays and she insists on splitting the bill and he lets her do that and they do it in a very public way, lofting their two credit cards as if they are toasting with wine, and they go out the door, and without a word they begin to walk south on Palafox. Begin to stroll. Half an arm’s length between them. Chaste. Obviously innocent. And they end up at the end of Palafox on a bench looking out at Pensacola Bay and there is still space between them.