Robert Butler - A Small Hotel

He rescued her. He took her to his room at the Olivier House. He did not hold her till she said he could and then it was to stop her trembling. To make her feel safe. She stopped trembling. She felt safe. And then they sat in the two chairs on either side of the French windows, and the last of the daylight was fading outside. They talked small and they laughed some and they kept the windows closed so they could hear each other, as the Mardi Gras din pressed into the room. And the small talk finally accumulated enough that they could feel they’d met properly, that they’d done enough to suggest doing a little bit more. In a mutual pause, Michael looks out the window and he says, “Do you think we should try again out there?”

“Yes,” Kelly says.

“You sure it’s okay? You’ve been through it.”

Kelly smiles at this sweetly solicitous man. She says, “The operative word is we .”

“Of course.”

And so they go out. They move along Toulouse and turn onto Bourbon, and for the rest of the evening neither of them even gets a drink. They simply drift together in the crowd, at the edge a little faster but also content to nudge and wedge and stand and float in the density of bodies in the middle of the street, watching, apart together even in the midst of all this, holding hands, and as midnight nears, they squeeze out of the mass, onto the sidewalk, and a blues band is playing somewhere nearby and the two of them find a small square of sidewalk, barely enough to flare their elbows but a space of their own nonetheless, and the music is something Kelly can no longer remember but it is a fast song, an old New Orleans blues song that suffers the blues with a fast tempo, and Michael puts his hand in the small of her back and he is turning her to face him and that hand on her back comes up higher and her first thought is that he is about to kiss her, and she is ready for that, she raises her face to him, but his other hand has taken her hand now and he lifts it and she realizes he wants to dance, and he presses her to him and they move in tiny steps on their small circle of pavement and they dance a slow dance, as if this is the Stylistics playing, as if this is a dance at the American Legion Hall and they are slow-dancing to “Betcha By Golly Wow.” Michael has taken her in his arms and is dancing with her and he is defying the crowd and the noise and the drunkenness and the band’s insistence on being fast and loud. He has his own ideas about the two of them. And Kelly is happy in that moment. Kelly is very happy. And how could she have known? How could she have ever known? She will never again in her life feel as loved as she does before she even knows for sure she is in love, before she has even kissed her future husband for the first time.

And now this.

But for taking her in his arms and dancing slow with her in the middle of Mardi Gras, she will say good-bye to him, she will apologize for what she has done and for what she will do. And with that intention comes a resolution: if she hears his actual voice, if he answers the phone, she will simply say I’m sorry and she will hang up. Because she needs nothing from him. And she knows now what she must do.

She sets her empty glass on the night stand, careful to avoid the pills.

Her phone. Her purse. She rises from the bed, stands unsteadily. She cannot remember having her purse. She’s afraid she left it somewhere out there in the dark. Perhaps by the river. She moves along the bed and she sees the purse on the floor near the foot of the bed.

She goes to it. She bends to it. She pushes her hand through the clutter of unidentifiable objects inside, looking for the phone, and her fingertips touch the fluted metal tube of her lipstick and for the briefest of moments she pauses with the thought that she will never look at herself in the mirror again, never put color on her lips, never run a brush through her hair, and in that moment she is sad for herself, as if she were some other woman, some other woman who has reached the end of what she can bear in this life and Kelly is sad for her, and her hand moves on and it finds the phone and she draws it out and she rises and she turns and she faces the open windows. Beyond, New Orleans is silent. Utterly silent. She opens the phone and dials Michael’s cell.

∼

And it does not make a sound. It is holstered and muted, attached to Michael’s belt and lying in the heap of his trousers across the room from the bed where Michael and Laurie are making love, Laurie happy to have at last guided herself on top and Michael uncomfortable still about being on the bottom but getting over it, though his eyes are not on the woman he is connected to, unlike all the times he made love to Kelly through the years, all the times he watched her face while she was unaware, closing her own eyes as she always did, squeezing them shut and furrowing her brow as if listening to some distant voice she could barely hear but that was trying to tell her something important. Michael’s own eyes with Laurie are shifted slightly away, looking at the blank expanse of the ceiling but without seeing what’s before him, without quite being in his body or in this moment, and he does want that, he does want to be here, be here vividly with Laurie, but he finds — a little bit to his surprise — that his body is so imprinted with Kelly’s that the difference of shape and texture and smell and sound of this new woman distances him from all this. Though not in any way that Laurie would notice. I will adjust, he thinks. And he closes his eyes. And Kelly is in him and they are in a dark room and she is making a sound beneath him like something hurts her bad or like something gives her great joy and she herself cannot tell them apart and so she has to cry out in a way such that no one listening could ever understand what she feels. She is a terrible, everlasting mystery, and though Michael cares what she is feeling, he knows he can never know, and he adjusts, he adjusts. And as he listens to Kelly beneath him while Laurie cries out above him, the phone stops silently flashing, and it is never seen, buried as it is in Michael’s clothes scattered before sex.

∼

And very soon thereafter, Michael and Laurie have finished and both their bodies quake softly from all that, and she is lying beside him, and she curls against him and his arm goes around her, and she says, “Michael, Michael, you were …” and she pauses. She pauses to tease him but pauses also to find just the right words.

Michael waits, and he realizes, a little to his surprise, that he is indifferent to what might follow. He always wondered what Kelly thought of him in bed. More than wondered. He wanted very much for her to find him good at this. But he could never ask. If he asked and he got the answer he desired, he would never be able to take it as anything but a pretty lie. She had to say it on her own or it could never be said. But with Laurie, ready now to tell him of her own free will, he feels no welling of interest, no fear either. It is what it is.

“Stoically great,” Laurie says.

He looks at her. He has no idea what that means.

Laurie lifts her free hand and puts the tip of her finger on the tip of his nose and gently pushes. “That’s a compliment,” she says.

He looks back to the ceiling. He pulls her close.

“Thank you,” she says.

“For my stoicism?”

“For taking me seriously.”

“Of course,” he says.

“That’s Michael. ‘Of course’, he says. That’s my Michael.”

He doesn’t want to talk about who or what he is. But he knows Laurie is trying to be good to him. He gives her a little squeeze. A little thanks-but-let’s-move-on squeeze.

She says, “You were so sad that day at the office when I realized I had to get closer to you. So sad. That was about your third trip to Mr. Bloom over the divorce.”