Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

And unaware of anything but the end of her marriage playing once more in her head, Kelly has moved now to the French windows, has pressed herself against the balustrade, and she looks out onto the moonlit rooftops, but she does not see them, all she sees is Michael’s face, impassive, and even that is fading from her mind, and it is leaving nothing behind, and she is utterly unaware of what is below her: in the pool, the young couple in their improvised swimsuits standing up to their chests in water, facing each other, his hands around her waist, her hands on his shoulders, and they have stopped joking about what they are doing and they are quiet and looking at each other and smelling the chlorine of the pool and the young woman is thinking that the smell of chlorine will never be the same again and she lifts her face to the moon overhead, and though it is not yet full, it is very bright, and her eyes drift from the moon and she sees a woman standing in her open French windows three floors above them, and the woman is naked — she is slim and beautiful and she is utterly naked — and the young woman lowers her face to her lover and she motions upward with her chin and they both look at the naked woman in the French windows and they smile, and the young man is thus moved to bring his hands up his lover’s back to the hooks on her bra and he undoes them and she lets him do this, she draws her arms forward and she takes the bra and she drops it away from her onto the surface of the pool, and she and the young man press their bodies together and they kiss, even as Kelly turns and vanishes into her room.

∼

And Michael and Laurie move through the moonlight between the plantation house and their cottage, and her hand is on his arm, and she is setting the pace. A slow pace. She is relishing this walk to their bed, and Michael is keenly aware that the phone on his hip won’t ring now, that this issue will remain unresolved until tomorrow at the very least. He puts his hand on Laurie’s in the crook of his arm and he tries hard to remain in this moment, with this new woman. But instead, he stands before Kelly in the hotel room they know so well and she says, “Michael,” and she rarely uses his name to address him, and she says, “Can we talk?” and with that opening to what she wants to say, he figures he has once again fallen short somehow, probably from his preoccupied mind — and admittedly, even as they have checked into what they think of as their room, in their hotel, in their city, for a long weekend, he has been thinking mostly about a retired Navy captain DUI he’s trying to keep out of jail and get into rehab, and he has no doubt that he has, in effect, ignored Kelly since about the Louisiana border — so he squares around before her and clears his mind and he waits for her typically vague indictment. She is sitting on the bed, and even after he has demonstrably given her his full attention, she hesitates to speak, and he feels uncomfortable standing over her when there is apparently some sort of issue to deal with, and if she’s not going to rise to him, then he should probably sit down beside her on the bed. But before he can, she starts to talk.

And in the moonlit dark full of the smell of sugar cane smoke, heading to his bed with this young woman beside him, Michael struggles to stop this memory. He does not want these words in his head. But they happen. As he remembers them. Stripped down. And when they were spoken, he felt very little as he heard them, as he tried to comprehend them. And when he found things to say in return, he heard his own voice as if it was someone else speaking.

“I’ve been sleeping with a man,” Kelly says.

At first he has no words at all, not even in this other voice.

“It’s over,” she says.

“How long?” he says.

“For a month.”

“Over for a month?”

“It lasted for a month. It’s over now. For a few weeks.”

“Why did it end?” And he realizes how odd this question is, preceding the more obvious why did it start .

“He stopped loving me,” she says.

He takes this in. “And if his feelings hadn’t changed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why are you telling me?”

Then no words for a time. And then her voice again. “I find it’s not so simple just to resume.”

Then no words.

And then he says, “So it’s done?” And he hears the ambiguity. Though she has already implied that the affair is done. But he could still be asking about that. He isn’t. She has slept with another man and she has stopped because he has stopped loving her. She is not answering. He clarifies. “Our marriage?” he says.

She does not speak, and he feels himself catching up to all this. Those last two words came directly from his own mouth.

She says, “Is it?”

And he better turn his back now and move away because he knows already what is next, and that would be as difficult for him to face as the thing he has just faced: his eyes are growing thick with incipient tears. He is a wretched fool of a worthless child lost in the woods and about to cry. He turns his back to her and he walks to the open French windows and he clenches his eyes shut to stop the tears without touching them, without giving her the slightest clue as to what he’s doing. Sightless, he hears a train whistle — one of the working trains rolling heavily along the edge of the city, out by the river. He says, “It always surprises me to hear a train whistle in the middle of New Orleans,” and he has lost touch with his own voice again and he is losing touch with his own feelings again, as well, for he finds he can straighten and take a breath and set himself, and he will do what he needs to do. He allows himself a quick, heavy palming of his eyes so there will be no trace of any tear, and he turns to his wife, who, he is relieved to see, is staring not at him but at the floor. She seems to sense him watching. She lifts her eyes, and she looks at him, and her face is utterly blank. This always sweetly animated face has no trace of a feeling on it — in this extraordinary circumstance, there is no affect at all — and he knows the answer to the question. But he is all right, he is staying strong now: he imagines she needs him to be strong now, so that she can do what she needs to do.

And she says, “Yes. It’s done.”

“What is it?” This is Laurie’s voice. Michael looks at her. They have stopped moving.

Her upturned face is blanched white in this light, and she seems young, so very young. But made alabaster by the moon, made into an ancient statue of a very young woman, she seems timeless, as well, grown already old in some distant past. And to this sense of her, Michael finds he can speak the thing in his mind.

“What did I miss?” he says.

She knows at once he’s speaking of Kelly. “That she was cheating on you,” Laurie says.

But that’s not what he’s trying to understand, and he can think of nothing more to ask.

“Did you ever cheat on her?” she says.

“No,” he says.

“Were you ever tempted?”

“Abstractly. A time or two. But only in the abstract.”

Laurie laughs, though it is a low, soft-edged laugh. “See,” she says. “This is also Men . Or it once was. Here’s a little secret, my darling. Some of us miss you old-fashioned guys. I’m a lucky girl.”

Now she has stopped being a statue. Her dark eyes are intensely alive in the midst of her moon-cold face. And she no longer seems young in any way. He takes her in his arms and kisses her and the kiss goes on and then it turns into a gradually diminishing flutter of pecks and lip-pluckings and finally it ends.

They pull back slightly and they look each other in the eyes. And Laurie says, “I hope you realize that I’m falling madly in love with you.”