And he stops his mind now, as Laurie’s hair dryer roars on the other side of the bathroom door. He stops and he is about to rise and dress in a suit of clothes even more alien to him than that tuxedo. And along the way in this memory he’s just had—in his lingering for just a moment over the contentment he felt in the two of them wordlessly understanding each other—an even earlier event coursed beneath the surface. Michael does not go there now. He couldn’t even consciously summon this deeper memory if he was moved to try. But his sense of ease with Kelly on the night of the Clinton fundraiser was rooted in that past event, for it had given him an initial impression of what his life would be with Kelly, and that impression settled into him, and it would not change for a quarter of a century. The impression would remain and affect everything, even though the memory of the event itself would eventually vanish.
It was this: Later on that same Ash Wednesday morning of their first days together, they have been walking the quiet Quarter and there have been some lovely moments between them and some awkward moments between them and Michael doesn’t know what to do about this woman and they find their way to the Café du Monde. They sit at street’s edge in the café’s open-air pavilion and order beignets and chicory coffee and the waiter moves off, and Michael and Kelly sit across from each other at the tiny bistro table, and he is afraid there will be talk, earnest talk. But instead, they look each other in the eyes and she doesn’t ask him to speak, she doesn’t seem to wish to talk at all. They look each other in the eyes and they don’t look away and this goes on for a few moments and a few moments more and her face is not compressed into questions, not restless, her face is not seeking something, her face is placid, an unrippled pond bright from daylight but without even a reflection there, and Michael untenses, unlocks, he feels his own face go calm, and he and Kelly don’t look away from each other. And this goes on. They look at each other steadily for a long while and then somewhere about her eyes she shows the tiniest moon-ascension increment of a threshold smile, but it too holds and persists without pushing on and he does not have to deal with it, does not have to smile as well or be forced not to smile in return, it is a simple thing with no demands on him, and his chest and arms and shoulders go quiet, his mind goes quiet, he knows he can be good with this woman and she can be good with him. And as they look each other silently in the eyes just like this for a long while more, this impression of Kelly burrows deeply into Michael, and the memory of this moment will vanish from his conscious memory and only the impression itself will remain. And so, as Michael sits on the side of the bed now, asserting his characteristic control over his mind, backing away from the past, thinking to put on an antebellum tuxedo and missing the irony of that, he does not overtly remember those few minutes when there was only silence and hope and the sudden inevitability of the future between him and the woman who, he assumes, ceased being his wife this morning.
∼
Michael stands inside the front door of the cottage, dressed for Laurie, his hands clasped behind his back, thinking to step outside to wait but hesitating as he deals with a niggling unease at showing himself in public in costume. He finished dressing while Laurie was still knocking around in the bathroom and he has a faint moue of a thought about how his wife—his ex-wife now, surely, given that declining sun before him—how his ex-wife and this woman from an entirely different generation share in some sort of ancient female gene which makes them compulsively and needlessly worry that their men won’t get dressed in time. And now, this glancing off of Kelly, even vaguely, even over some little quotidian quirk—how she always fussed at him to hurry up, hurry up and get ready—this murmur of Kelly in him makes his hands unclasp and drop to his sides for a moment and then bury themselves in his pants pockets. And he shuts down his mind on this whole subject. He can’t let himself think about Kelly.
“So.” This is Laurie’s voice, behind him. She speaks just the one word. A verbalized clearing of the throat. Michael takes his hands from his pockets, and he turns to face her. Laurie is framed in the doorway from the dining room. She is wearing her white silk hoop-skirted gown and her shoulders are bare and she has her hands demurely clasped before her at the waist. She smiles a small-scale, self-satisfied smile, and her hands separate and float out beside her, and as they do, her smile expands, calibrates itself for a multitude. She steps into the room and does a slow, elegant twirl. And Michael is standing in the central reception hall in his house, and behind him he hears the rustle of his daughter’s expected descent from the second floor. She makes a sound to let him know she is there. Perhaps even a single, simple word: So. He turns. Samantha is seventeen and she is going to the prom. She poses near the bottom of the staircase, her hands clasped before her at the waist. Her shoulders are bare. They shouldn’t be bare, he thinks, though when she swims, they are bare—at the pool far more of his teenage daughter is also bare—and he has come to accept that, but he can’t help thinking her shoulders shouldn’t be bare in a dress like this, worn for a seventeen-year-old boy as dumbshittedly hormonal as the boy who is soon to arrive, and Michael knows that he has to let all this go, that inside his head—even in there, where he should know how to be reasonable and controlled—he is being a foolish cliché of a father. What does not occur to him is that he should be saying something to Sam now about how beautiful she looks. He stands looking at her and the standing part becomes a bit unsteady, for her beauty actually staggers him. But he does not know how to put that into words—does not have the emotional mechanism to put that into words—so he shoves his hands into his pockets. Sam waits and then she steps forward and she twirls for him, slowly. Kelly arrives from the back of the house. “Sam!” she cries. “You’re so beautiful!” And though Kelly is also in the room, Sam ends her twirl facing Michael. “You’ll be the Queen of the Prom!” Kelly cries. Sam waits for her father. He pulls his hands out of his pockets and he tilts his head slightly to the side and he is certain he is smiling his approval, he feels certain that he is smiling and that smiling is enough. Sam steps closer to him and he opens his arms and she presses against him and he hugs her. And this is more than enough. He is proud of himself for not saying anything about her shoulders. And Sam lets go of him and moves off to her mother and wordful hugs, and he does not realize he has disappointed her—he has no idea whatsoever—and she does not know how to ask for what she needs from him and so she does not understand that her beauty has truly registered on him, registered so powerfully, indeed, that six years later, in the presence of this other young beautiful woman, he is spontaneously filled with a vision of his daughter’s beauty even though that is the last thing he wants in his head right now, a reminder that the woman he will have sex with in a few hours is—as he expects will be murmured about in a room full of strangers tonight—young enough to be his daughter.
“Is the jury still out?” Laurie says.
Michael doesn’t understand. “What?”
“The verdict, counselor. I’m awaiting the verdict.” Laurie’s voice is keeping it light, but she is realizing she has some work to do with this man, and if she hadn’t just dressed herself up and if he weren’t looking so soothingly sturdily handsomely fine in his high collar and white marcella tie, she’d start right now. Some loosening spade work. But his reticent stiffness still has a certain charm for her, and it certainly feels antebellum, so she waits for a long moment with her smile turned indulgent and then says, “Am I stunningly beautiful?”
The question actually surprises Michael. His first thought is: you know damn well you are. But he knows not to say that. “Yes,” he does say, and if he had his way, that would be sufficient. But he can see her wanting more, and he says, “Of that you’re guilty beyond any reasonable doubt.”
Laurie laughs. “Cheers in the courtroom,” she says.
And Michael thinks he has said and done the right thing. With Laurie. With Sam. With Laurie and with Sam. And with Kelly? He won’t touch that. He wants to call Max. He wants just to call Max and have him s
ay two words: It’s done. Come on, Max. He probably went straight to court afterwards for some other case. But what the hell is text messaging for? Michael’s cell phone is secreted beneath his swallowtail coat, but not asking about Kelly is part of the letting go of her. He’ll wait it out for now.
“Let’s promenade,” Laurie says, and she’s beside him, she’s turning him, she’s slipping her hand into the crook of his arm.
∼
Kelly has been standing beside the bed for a long while. She has turned her head and she has been staring at the bottle of Scotch. The Scotch primarily, but for a time, of course, the bottle of pills registered on her as well, out of focus, away from the center of the picture of the night table she composed for herself when she first turned her head. But now just the Scotch. The Scotch still sealed and dim in the shadow on the other side of this great swath of sunlight pouring through the French windows onto the bed. The Scotch keeps her mind quiet. No memories at all, really. Just the bottle. Just the look of it there. Just its being there. But eventually it lets this in: a bottle of Scotch still sealed sitting in the center of the long, mahogany dining room table and her sitting at a right angle to it, turning her head to look at it and then turning away, looking straight before her along the table to the window and the water oaks outside and the bayou. An egret passes before her, beats its wings once in the slow, massive way of the egrets, as slow and vast as she herself could feel if she were to drink this Scotch. And Kelly’s chest clamps shut with a sound. A phone ringing. Muffled, though. Her chest releases. But the puzzlement remains. And her hand moves to the sound and she finds her cell phone in a pocket of the terrycloth robe that she is also surprised about, to find she’s wearing a robe. But yes. She showered. She put this on. She came down the steps. She took her cell phone from her purse. She thought to drink awhile. She got the bottle. She put the bottle on the dining room table. She sat beside it. She made a call. And the phone is still ringing and she takes it from her pocket and the screen says “Sam.”
She opens the phone and puts it to her ear.
“Mama,” Sam’s voice says.
“Hey, Sam.” This is her own voice.
“I’m sorry I didn’t hear my phone ring,” Sam says.
“Where are you, baby?”
“Chicago, Mama. I’ve got a gig tomorrow.”
“I’m very proud of you.”
“What’s going on, Mama?”
“Other than the obvious?” Kelly says this even as she refuses to let her mind turn overtly to that obvious thing. She does not let it in. Either as she speaks to her daughter or as she presently stands beside the bed.
“Your message,” Sam says.
“What did I say, baby?”
“You were wet. You were dry. You wondered why you’d never fully appreciated Scotch before.”
“All true.”
“You don’t remember the message?”
“Of course I do,” Kelly says, and she hears herself laugh. But she has remembered the message only after Sam told her. And she wonders: have I already been drinking today? But she knows she hasn’t. She even knows now, standing by the bed, that the bottle of Scotch on the dining table with Sam on the phone and a pale, thin-clouded sunlight out the window is the same bottle of Scotch she has brought to Room 303.
Kelly turns her face from the night table. Why has she waited this long to open that bottle? She’s never had any trouble opening a bottle. It’s never been her first or her obsessive impulse to open a bottle—even since this all began, since the ending of her and Michael—but she can readily do it and she was certainly ready yesterday to open the bottle and she didn’t. And she shudders, deep in the center of her chest, she shudders and then faintly quakes on, because she knows the other bottle near her now, the other bottle on the night stand, is why the seal on the Scotch hasn’t been broken. Yesterday it wasn’t yet about this other bottle. She knows the plan is larger now. No. There is no plan. There are just more possibilities.
She moves away, finds herself before a flower-print wingback chair in the corner beyond the French windows. She sits. The bottle, the bed, the sunlight across the room are distant now. But Samantha is still close. Kelly tries to force herself back in time. She flails for something of Sam that hasn’t to do with the mess. Some good thing. Some good moment. But she cannot will this. She has to wait for whatever is next.
∼
In the quarter-mile brick allée between the highway and the Big House, two dozen couples swan about beneath the canopy of live oaks. Actually a brace of swans and one coot, Michael thinks. But he makes sure his arm is always available for Laurie’s hand. And for her sake, he returns every smile, careful to give no sign that he is uncomfortable in this get-up. He feels Laurie’s animation next to him as he nods with her at a passing couple, her hand squeezing at his bicep. He puts his hand over hers on his arm. He pats her. He’s happy she’s happy. And he keeps his bicep tensed on her account, aware of this little outburst of vanity, trying to show off a muscle. He blinks a slow blink of self-criticism but keeps the muscle flexed.
When the most recent couple is out of earshot, Laurie says, low, “What’s she thinking of, with those leg-of-mutton sleeves?”
“Dinner?” Michael says.
With her free hand Laurie knuckle-frogs him on the arm. “Queen fricking Victoria is the answer,” she says.
“Man. You’re as good at that as Sammy Bunker.”
“Tell me he’s a costume expert.”
“Frogging expert. I had a perpetual shoulder bruise in fifth grade.”
She hits him again. And she really is good at this. After the second stroke, she instantly looks away, studying the other dresses ahead on the allée. The throb of pain from her knuckle and her instant obliviousness to the assault charms Michael.
They are approaching the slate-floored terrace and front veranda of the house, the path passing through clusters of round, white-clothed tables set with candles and china for the dinner tonight. Laurie guides them in a U-turn to head back down the allée. At the far end, across Highway 18, is the berm of the levee, and seeing it now lets Michael pick up a sound from beyond, the grumble of a push boat out on the river moving barges of rice or fertilizer or asphalt up the Mississippi. He’s glad to put his mind out there, out of sight of the house and the playacting, but he feels Laurie squeeze at his arm and straighten and slow down their pace.
He focuses before him and a couple is approaching. Young. Laurie’s age or so. The woman is pretty and her shoulders are bony; the man is carefully coiffed, expensively so, almost certainly, and Michael has a hunch about him. The two couples stop before each other.
“You look wonderful,” Laurie says to the woman.
“So do you,” the woman says.
“I’m Laurie Pruitt. This is Michael Hays.”
They all start shaking hands and the others are saying their names—Jason Murray and Madison Murray—and Jason’s handshake has a certain glad, inquisitive aggressiveness to it, which supports Michael’s initial hunch.
“This is my first of these,” Laurie says. “How about you?”
“Our fourth,” Jason answers, though Laurie was looking at Madison when she asked the question.
“We were married here,” Madison says. “At this event.”
“Oh that’s so cool,” Laurie says.
Now Jason and Madison turn their faces in unison to Michael, awaiting his declaration. Laurie looks at Michael and he’s not answering instantly and she is prepared to answer for him. But even as she is beginning to shape the first word in her mouth, Michael lifts his shoulders in a slightly exaggerated shrug. “I’m a codger lawyer with a young girlfriend who looks great in ruffles and is ardent to wear them.”
The three young faces before Michael freeze, very briefly, as certain witnesses sometimes freeze for him in rare and wonderful moments in a courtroom. But then these three brighten abruptly and laugh.
“I’m a lawyer, too,” Jason says. “Baton Rouge.”
<
br /> Michael has already guessed the lawyer part.
“We’re from Pensacola,” Laurie says.
“Personal injury?” Michael says.
Jason is caught off guard yet again, though he instantly masks it. “Yes,” he says. “Does it show?”
“The handshake,” Michael says.
“Really.” Jason inflects this as a statement, not a question.
Michael means all this in a collegial, insider sort of way, but he can hear a professional prickle beginning in Jason.
A Small Hotel Page 4