Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

“If you’ve changed your mind,” Kelly says.

And he knows instantly what she means. “Not at all. I’m grateful for the chance to talk to you. It was the restaurant.”

“Of course,” she says. “But on the walk too.”

“It was simply nice walking with you.”

“It was.”

“I didn’t want to spoil it,” he says.

“What kind of man are you?” she says, laughing again, but very softly.

He shrugs. “Inadequate,” he says.

At this, Kelly wants to put her arms around him. She consciously holds very still, waits for more, but knowing already that the time will come when she will take him in her arms and help him make right whatever this is, knowing he will tell her. And she tries to hold still in this familiar room she’s come to, and all the doors lead nowhere: the bathroom, the closet, an empty corridor, off a faux balcony. What should she have understood in those first moments with Drew Singleton? What should she have heard in what he said that would have told her to stand up and shake his hand and wish him well, that would have let her walk away and preserve what she had — at least that much — let her at least keep whatever she had.

After a very slight pause as he looks far out at the bay, no doubt contemplating his inadequacies, Drew suddenly does a little head snap and says, “Jeez. Listen to me. What a way to start this. I didn’t ask you to lunch so I can wallow in self-pity or fish for compliments.”

How could she have possibly walked away when he instantly co-opted any actionable fear she might be smart enough to have?

“You can say anything you want in any way you feel it,” Kelly says to Drew. “I’ll understand.”

His eyes restlessly search her face as she speaks these words.

“Be yourself,” she says.

Drew grasps her hand and squeezes it and she squeezes back and then he drops it at once. More reassurance for her to go on.

And he talks to Kelly of his wife. Of how he loves his wife. Of how she loves him. Of how, until she met him, she’d always been with men who were abusive in some way or other. Of how grateful she was to be with a man like him at last. But how she always seems to need more and how that’s getting worse. She draws other men to her and needs to please them and Drew is certain — almost certain — almost certain but reluctant to consider anything else — he feels he is certain that she does not act in any private way on this need for attention, this need for constant reassurance.

At this point Kelly says, “I’m sure you tell her …”

“I tell her all the time,” he says. “I wear my heart on my sleeve.”

And Kelly initiates a touch. She takes his hand, and they are still holding hands as he says, “I let her know every day that I love her.” Kelly squeezes his hand tightly, and she feels a welling-up in her chest, her throat, and she tries not to let it press tears from her eyes.

“But what I give her is not enough,” he says. “And I think the very fact that I tell her — that I am the kind of man who will tell her — is the very thing that makes me inadequate.”

And Kelly knows now, having moved back into the middle of Room 303, knows only after it is far too late, that if she were to be seduced, if she were to be persuaded to destroy her own life, this was the way for a man to do it.

And Drew squares around to face Kelly on the bench by the bay, as they work themselves up to an affair, and he takes her other hand in his and he lifts them both and he says, “Why are so many women drawn to emotionally unavailable men, even as they ask for openness and vulnerability?”

Kelly has no answer. As this man lifts her hands, she can only think that her own life may be a testament to that very problem. She has no answer. But she wants that to change.

Drew says, “I saved her. She’s always said that. But I can’t save myself.”

Kelly finds herself standing before the night table. The lovely pale-blue square, the mosaic of PERCOCET. How did she not understand what was happening with this man? What should she should have figured out right away? His avowed inadequacy? His declaration of it made her first want to hold him. But he didn’t really feel inadequate. He quickly made that simply be about his declarations of love for his wife. He never felt inadequate at all. He felt righteous. How did Kelly miss that? And there was something important left out of his perplexity over who’s attracted to whom. Why was he himself drawn to the woman he married, knowing that she always fell for bad guys? Was it really love he felt? Did he really think he could save her? The thing about being on a white horse — and staying quixotically on it — is that you yourself are unavailable up there. But she can’t think it through now. It’s too late. She and this man drove fast on I-10 toward the Alabama State line and as soon as they were out of Pensacola they checked into the first motel they came to, and the room smelled of concrete and carpet cleaner, and they had sex and a dozen times he said he loved her — it was foreplay talk, it was the pounding talk, it was orgasm talk — and they came back to this motel twice more, as if it were romantic, as if a cheap interstate motel was something romantically their own and the smell of carpet cleaner would never be the same again, and then on the third time, after the sex, he said that we all go through life loving and loving, finding many people we love, and he loved her but he loved his wife as well — which he’d been clear about from the start — and he and Kelly had to face the bittersweet reality that they couldn’t really go on but she was always going to be a perfect, self-contained thing in his life and he hoped he would be that for her. And that was that. And if she had not been an absolute fool, if somehow the bullshit line he fed her had actually been true in their case — in some universe, between two specific people, it might well be true, she supposed — then maybe she could indeed have put a few beautiful memories away and kept them to herself, but for her and for this particular man, it was a lie, it was all a terrible lie, and it was done, and it was anything but beautiful, and worse, she had changed inside and she could not face Michael by simply saying to herself Oh well, fuck and learn . She had not understood the fragile balancing act that was her life, and once she fell, she could not imagine a way to fly back up to that thin, hard wire above her. She could not imagine. She puts her forefinger on the night table and she draws it down through the square of pills, tumbling them apart.

She wanted so badly for it to have been good, for the words to be true and the touching to be true, even if for a few moments. Her body longed for that, and her body longs for that now, she feels a terrible scrabbling warmth come over her and she pulls at her little black dress, pulls at it from just below her hips, she pulls it up and off her and she unclasps her bra and sloughs it off and she slides her panties down her legs and steps from them and she is naked. She is as naked as she feels inside. She sat on the side of this bed only a few months ago and she told Michael what she had done. She could not bear to continue to sleep next to him and wake next to him and she could not bear to admire the churn and crackle of his mind and she could not bear his silences with that interstate motel room a secret. Because it happened, because it existed, because the fact of it went to bed with her and woke with her and it listened with her and it longed with her, and she had to put it outside of herself no matter what. So she sat on this bed, and he was standing between her and the French windows, and the two of them had just arrived from dinner at Galatoire’s, and she told him there was something she had to say and he squares around to face her and she says there is this terrible stupid thing she has done, and she tells him, and he keeps his eyes steady on her as she speaks, even as she tells it all, tells him the whole secret, and his face does not change, just as it does not change whenever she needs to know if he loves her, and she understands what is happening, she understands, and it spreads in her as a slow undulation of intense heat, and he says, “So it’s done?” and his voice is flat, even as it clarifies—“Our marriage?”—and his eyes show nothing and the nothing of them suddenly quickens the heat in her, backdrafts words into her head and an impulse into her hands, she could fly at him and claw at him and cry out at him now, but she won’t, she was the one in the motel room, that was her, she did this, but she is wildly angry at him even so and she can’t say No it’s not done and she can’t say Yes it is . She says, “Is it?” and it’s the right thing to say because if he says Please darling no it can’t be, it’s over with you and this man isn’t it? I can forgive you if you only say you want to stay with me : if he says that, then it will be the same as saying I love you and she can hold on to those words forever and everything will be all right, everything will be better than it’s ever been. But he says nothing. He turns his back abruptly on her and he moves to the French windows and he stands there, and from beyond him, from across the rooftops of the Quarter, from beside the river, comes the cry of a train. And after a long moment, and very low, so low she can only barely hear him, he says, “It always surprises me to hear a train whistle in the Quarter.” And she says nothing. And he says nothing more. The flames have flared and died and she waits for whatever is next, and he is not moving, and she lowers her face, unable even to look at the back of him now, and she waits. Until, at last, she senses him turn. And she looks into his face. And it is blank. It is utterly blank. And she knows it’s done.