Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

As they cross the last hundred yards of tarnished-silver ground to the cottage, Michael tries to stay focused on the present moment with this young woman, and it is true that the soft clinging of her, and the moon-shadow of pressure remaining on his lips from the kiss, and the imminence of their nakedness are beginning to rustle in his body. And her silence now. Her silence is part of this readying of his body and mind for the first night of full togetherness with a new woman. After a long while, after many years, it is made new. He fends off the past. There has already been too much of that. But the things he responds to in women in what feel to him like instinctive ways are running strong in him, things he has, however, learned from a multitude of memories that are too small individually and happened too long ago for him ever to recall.

His mother moving silently in the dark next to him, just that, along a street thick with the early heat of a Florida spring night and the smell of Confederate jasmine, porch lights lit, passing distantly, and his mother at his side keeping still, and he wakes and leaps from bed as blood flows from the ceiling, a moment ago from a deer hung for dressing but from the ceiling now, from the light fixture and into his bed and she takes him in her arms and his father’s silhouette fills the doorway and Michael does not know that the man has moments ago put his hand roughly on her arm to prevent her going in to a boy who needs to be a man and she defied her husband this time, for once, and he warned her at least not to say anything, not to prattle on like usual, and she agreed to that so he would let go of her arm — though his hand had loosened already, it had not yet let go — and she did go in and Michael never knew any of this occurred outside his door as he pants heavily, as if his heart will stop, still making sounds that he knows shame the shadow in the doorway — that shame his father — and his mother comes to him and she holds him and then she leads him back to bed and she sits beside him and his heart slows and the blood is gone, the blood was never there, and it’s all right, and he takes in her silence, he rests now in her silence, and he too has come to prefer this, from when he was very small, from the sharp sideways looks and abrupt shushings from his father to his mother when Michael was just beginning to gather the momentum of his own words, when he was hearing the rhythms and flow of his mother’s voice in his own head, when he was open to imitating them, and she always fell silent when commanded, teaching Michael how to learn what’s right and good, by yielding to this man, and she moves beside him along a street on a spring night and they are going somewhere together just the two of them and the air is sweet and he loves his mother and these memories are long vanished from Michael in all but the dark and the sweet rustle of a woman and the silence.

∼

“I’m naked,” Kelly says aloud. She crosses her arms over her chest and covers her nipples with her hands. How is it that I’m naked? This she says only in her head. She is standing in the middle of the floor at the foot of the bed. She looks around her. She does not find her clothes. She turns. The French windows are open. But no one can see. There are only moonlit rooftops and, in the distance, a Marriott and a Sheraton floating near each other in red neon with a gold speckling of their room lights below. She lowers her hands. But she wants to be clothed now. She moves along the bed and she sees her dress crumpled before the night table, as if she has already taken her Scotch and her pills and she has simply vanished, a dark rapture that has carried off her body and left her clothes behind.

She goes to her dress and picks it up and lifts it and lets it fall over her. She is unaware of the lick of its silk going down her body. She is very aware of the bottle and the pills, but she goes up onto the bed on her knees and she turns and sits, her back against the iron headboard. The wrought-iron bars press hard at her and she leans forward and twists around and uprights a pillow there. She straightens and leans back again. She understands the irony. She’s protecting her body from this minor discomfort even as she intends to send that body to the grave. Tonight. Soon. But that will be just a larger-scale plumping of a pillow. Once she’s there, the grave is painless. And living isn’t. Living is full of pain now. More so now. Much more now. Now that she’s destroyed her family. Sam loved having a family. Sam needs a family. She’s let Sam down. Horribly. Forever. She’s put a poisonous thing inside herself that’s a far worse poison than a handful of pain pills because it preserves her consciousness, heightens her consciousness, keeps her awake forever to all that she’s lost.

These are words in Kelly’s head. She’s talking it out in there abstractly, and she realizes that it’s safer that way. She’s reasoning a thing out that in fact lives beyond words. It lives in her limbs and her chest and her face and her loins. That’s the terrible power of what she’s done. There are no words to fix it. No words to properly describe it. But it was words withheld, it was words not spoken, it was silence that led her to this. “No.” She says this aloud, into the room. Her voice is low but it feels as if she’s just yelled. No need to yell. The point is, she says to herself in her head, it’s never been about words. They’re just signifiers. And the absence of words signifies too. She has never been loved. She has never been worthy of that.

She needs a drink.

But she doesn’t take it yet.

The final afternoon when she and a man she hardly knew had sex in a cheap motel and she failed to measure up, when she failed to keep this man beside her no matter how often he said the words she always thought would fix her, that final afternoon they’d come to the motel separately. He’d suggested that. She didn’t realize it, but she had already failed to measure up. He said he loved her a number of times that afternoon but it was already not true. It had never been true. He had suggested they come separately because he didn’t want to have an awkward trip together afterwards. So she gets into her car and she drives out of the motel parking lot and onto I-10 and she heads east, back to Pensacola. Back to her house. And to what else? Back to what life? There are no words for that, either. She is rushing at 70 miles an hour along a highway toward nothing. And quite slowly, quite gently, she closes her eyes. She holds her eyes shut and looks at this darkness. She looks and she waits and she looks. She waits for what feels like a very long time, and then there is a vibration in her hands and a rough, deep pulsing sound fills the car, and she simply opens her eyes. She has drifted off the road — she expected that, surely — that’s what she was seeking, of course — but the turnpike wake-up grooves have opened her eyes by reflex, and by reflex, by weary inertia, she keeps them open, and she guides the car back onto the highway. And she knows how stupid she is, how self-absorbed, to have endangered others.

She needs a drink.

Kelly turns to the night table, and she pours herself some Scotch. A couple of fingers, more or less. She doesn’t want to lose her focus now from simple drunkenness and wake to another day when she has to start all this over again. It’s better at night. It’s better now. But she will begin with a little more Scotch. She lifts the glass from the table and sits back against the pillow — she is quite comfortable, actually — like those moments driving fast and smooth and blind, simply looking into the darkness within her own eyes.

She sips her Scotch. She closes her eyes. She touches her hair. She should have done her hair. Not long ago, when she was already as sad as this, she did her hair for herself, for her birthday. She sat like this with a Scotch, on the deck of their house. Of her house. He let the house go to her. He never said. He never said but she knew. She had defiled this place he’d built for them. He could have forced a sale to equally divide the asset, but he didn’t. He wanted her to have it but he never said why. She knew it was a rebuke. And she let other assets go to him in compensation. He made the money. That was his mistress. She endured the long whiling of silence spent in her house as he made the money. She didn’t want to move out of the house. She couldn’t face that. She puts her hair up in a French twist for her birthday, and she puts on her makeup. She sits down at twilight and lets the dark come upon her. She thinks she hears the beating of wings, the slow beating of the wings of an egret flying past in the darkness. Do egrets fly in the dark? She can’t imagine. And she thinks of the first hours she spent with her future husband. On the deck of her house and on the bed in Room 303, she thinks of the first hours of Kelly and Michael.