Robert Butler: A Small Hotel

She does not elaborate, and Michael looks at her and suppresses a bristling at her trying to read his mood. She has cocked her head at him. He waits for more.

“You were here with her,” she says.

He leaves the upright where it sits and collapses the rolling handle of Laurie’s suitcase. He lifts the bag. He finds the heft of the thing a comfort at the moment: the physical focus helps him stop the memories. He steps around the bags on the floor and puts the suitcase on the luggage stand by the dresser.

“Did you come for the festival?” Laurie says.

He turns back to the other bags and she twirls on the bedpost again, once, and heads for him. He stops, straightens, waits.

“Did she dress up?” she says.

“No,” he says.

She is before him now. Smiling very slightly at one corner of her mouth. Smelling of something with patchouli that Kelly used to wear. “So I’ll be your first Scarlett,” Laurie says.

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” Michael says, sounding harsher than he wants, in spite of this being, prima facie, a joke.

Laurie misses the allusion for the briefest of moments. His tone is flat. This is Michael, after all, whose silences and hard edges she is still trying to figure out, thinking he’s worth it, thinking this is a real man, not another overgrown boy. But the ongoing mystery of him means that in spite of her having introduced the frame of reference, she needs a moment to realize he’s just quoted an actual line from her favorite movie in the whole world of all time. She laughs. “My heard-hearted Rhett,” she says.

He thinks to try but he can’t make himself unloosen his tone, not with his struggle to remain in this moment, with just Laurie. “Let me unpack the bags,” he says. “Not the baggage.”

She studies his face. He’s the trial lawyer who has just sprung a little rhetorical trap and is playing it deadpan. She lifts her hand and extends her forefinger and puts the tip of it on the tip of his nose. She pushes, gently. He lets her do it.

“I’m for that,” she says. She turns away.

With her back to him now, Michael finds himself very conscious of the tip of his nose. He needed to make the point: for Laurie’s sake as well as his own, he can’t let Kelly into this room. But the tip of his nose makes him smile a faint, tender, involuntary smile at Laurie. A smile that she cannot see. And in this moment of Michael’s letting go to a gentle thing, Kelly spins to him in the center of an Oak Alley cottage bedroom, perhaps this very one, spins to him and leaps into his arms, leaps and hooks her legs around him. This was early on, in their first six months or so. Before they’d married. Before they’d even spoken of marrying. She was younger than Laurie is now, younger by five years.

Kelly leapt into his arms and they kissed, and the kiss ended, and still she clung to him, and he carried her toward the bed, and she said, “Not yet,” and she began to hum. Michael has lost the tune over the years but he clearly remembers her humming, and he moved back to the center of the floor with her holding fast to him and the song she hummed was a waltz. Yes. That much still clings to this memory. A waltz, and he began to do the steps. He waltzed her around this room, around and around this room to the music she hummed softly in his ear, and he was glad that her head was pressed hard against the side of his because the last thing in the world he wanted was to let this woman he loved see tears in his eyes. It makes no difference that they were happy tears. Tears are tears. And he held her tight even after the music stopped. He pressed her close even when he felt her begin to try to straighten up to look him in the face. He held her closer, and she seemed happy to just settle back in, and he held her like that until his tears dried on their own and she would never know.

∼

Kelly closes her bag. Zips it. Pulls it off the bed and steps toward the corner of the room to put the bag out of the way. On the night table sit the bottle of Scotch and the bottle of pills. She has moved the lamp to the far side of the tabletop, next to the clock radio, and she has placed the two bottles carefully side by side in the center of the empty space, their labels facing the bed. She has turned the clock face away, though she has carefully made the radio’s edges parallel with the tabletop. And she moves past all this now without a glance and she stops in the center of the floor at the foot of the bed and she stands very still and she is seeing nothing at all around her and she is feeling that silence again, but this time it has not rushed into her, she just realizes it’s there, filling her up. Her arms hang at her sides and she cannot imagine lifting them.

But she does see the door now. And Kelly does let Kelly into the room. Kelly at twenty-four. The door opens and she steps in. She is wearing black stiletto boots and black leggings and a black mock-turtle tee and black cat ears. Her black mask is gone so she can cry, and her painted cat whiskers are streaked down her cheeks from tears that have only recently stopped. An arm’s length behind her is Michael. Thirty years old in this memory. He is wearing a Tulane Law sweatshirt. Both of them have strands of gold and purple and green beads around their necks. The French windows are closed but the muffled din of Mardi Gras fills the room like the smell of cigarette smoke in the bedding.

Kelly takes only one more step and stops. It’s his room. She is trembling. She feels him come near her, though there is no touching. She senses him as you might sense a live oak in the pitch dark. She waits for him to put his arms around her. She wants that. But he does not touch her. And she wants that too, wants this to be how he is. He rescued her in the midst of Mardi Gras, but having done it, he does not touch her. Not yet. These are, however, not things she is thinking about. These things are simply playing in her body, alongside the trembling.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“That was scary for you,” Michael says.

She turns to him. His eyes are the color of that oak in the dark. The trembling is bad and it’s time to be held. She knows this and he must too, because all at once she is in his arms and clinging to him, though she is aware how he holds his body back a little, holds her only with his arms and his chest and she likes him even more for this and she clings harder.

Her head is upon his chest and from there she says, “I don’t even know your name to thank you.”

“Michael Hays.”

“I’m …” she begins.

But he cuts her off. “Catwoman. I know. I’ve admired your work.”

She pulls away a little to look at him, though they keep their arms around each other. “You mean you don’t favor that little shit in the bat costume?” she says.

“Please,” he says. “I’m a lawyer.”

She wants to laugh but things are still roiling in her. “Sorry. I just can’t stop shaking.”

“I know.”

“It’s not that you’re a lawyer.”

“Good,” Michael says.

She puts her head back on his chest. “Kelly Dil-lard,” she says.

He does not reply.

“You didn’t know my name either,” she says.

“Kelly Dillard,” he says. “You’re safe now.”

And Kelly twenty-five years later breaks off the memory. The pulse of strength it takes to do this lets her lift an arm, draw her wrist across her forehead, which is moist from the warm, muggy late October that has pushed itself into her room. She thinks to close the French windows, thinks this to stop thinking anything else. Not now, she decides. She’ll keep them open. The courtyard below is silent. But is that someone laughing? Perhaps. Far off this time. Out in the Quarter somewhere. Perhaps. But it’s done now. She is managing her mind now.