“Well,” the man says, hesitating momentarily as if trying to verify his own perception, “they were together at this point.”
Michael abruptly turns to him once more. “What happened next?”
“The three men backed away, and they seemed intimidated.”
“How so?” Michael says.
“They looked shaken. The man …”
“The man who intervened?”
“Yes. The man clearly had made an impression.”
“A strong impression?”
The witness nods firmly. “Yes,” he says.
“Thank you,” Michael says. “I have no further questions for this witness.”
The judge says, “You may step down,” and the witness does, circling the stand and passing between the prosecution and defense tables, the prosecutor giving him a quick glance as he goes by. A disapproving glance, it seems to Kelly. Michael has cleverly exposed something in his cross-examination. She is getting what she often identifies to Michael as the itchy-crawlies, the term she invokes in a whisper, even if they are alone in their own bedroom, when she wants him to touch her, to make love to her, and his mind is elsewhere. His public persona has done this to her instantly.
She steps forward and sits in the back row, as the witness sits in the front.
Michael turns to the judge. “I have one more witness, your honor.”
The judge nods an oversized nod.
Michael says, “I’d like to call Kelly Dillard.”
Kelly would later be reminded of an armadillo. Not a deer in headlights, an armadillo. The armadillo, when crossing a road at night and being suddenly flabbergasted by an onrush of headlights, will freeze for only an instant and then it will leap straight upwards, a reflex that contributes greatly to its role as the semi-official Florida State Roadkill. Though her astonishment at being unexpectedly called to the witness stand gives Kelly that frozen instant, almost at once she jumps up and comes forward. Inside, however, she remains in that first state of suspension.
Briskly efficient in body but dazed in mind, she passes Michael with only a little sideways glance—he is looking away—and she enters the witness stand and she finds herself with her hand on a Bible and telling a bailiff that she will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. She sits.
Michael is before her now. “I’m sorry to take you by surprise, Miss Dillard,” he says. “But you have a crucial piece of testimony in this case.”
“I do?” she says, still failing to get her thoughts to adhere to all this.
“Yes,” Michael says. “The man involved in this incident, the man perceived by witnesses as being part of the couple in question, will you marry him?”
This will take a few moments to sink in to Kelly. Just parsing the sentence in her head is coming slowly.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor rises. “I object,” he says. “This man doesn’t deserve her.”
From beside Kelly, the judge’s voice says, “Overruled. You may answer the question, Miss Dillard.”
And Kelly gets it, and she is ready to leap up again. But even as her eyes bloom with tears, she stays seated and straightens her spine into the part Michael has given her to play.
He is saying, “Do I need to refresh your memory? The man, Michael Hays, saved you from exposing your tits to three drunken louts in New Orleans. Do you remember him?”
“Yes I do,” Kelly says.
“He’s now asking you to marry him,” Michael says.
Kelly wants to banter now, wants to play Michael’s game, but her impulse to throw her arms around him balances that exactly, so she sits there saying nothing for a very small moment in which the judge intones, “Will the witness please answer the question?”
“Yes or no,” Michael says.
“Yes,” Kelly says.
The gavel bangs and the judge cries, “Case dismissed. Everyone back to lunch.” And the spectators and the tweedy man and the prosecutor all laugh and cheer.
Kelly is ready for the big embrace now, but Michael has turned away, is reaching up over the bench to shake the judge’s hand. Kelly waits. Michael is saying a few words of thanks to the judge, and Kelly rises, and she waits, and then Michael is passing before her and coming up into the witness box, and he takes her into his arms. They kiss.
And Kelly is forty-eight years old and she is sitting in her Mercedes, sitting at the curb across the street from that same courthouse, which still threatens to drop the modular blocks of its top floor, and she roils hotly in her head, in her limbs, and she holds her cell phone in her hand, but the welter in her won’t let her work her fingers to make this call that she has come here to make. She watches the distant figures moving before the building, seemingly unaware it’s about to fall on them.
And Kelly at forty-nine sits in the flower-print chair and wrenches her mind out of her car and back into this room, this familiar room, this empty room that threatens to collapse on her at any moment.
∼
Michael stands beneath a gilt federal bull’s-eye mirror in the front parlor of the Oak Alley plantation house, sipping a period mint julep made with brandy and sugarcane rum. He is, at the moment, alone, and he is glad for that. He’s glad he can see Laurie, who is across the room, near the mahogany piano, but for now yes, he’s also glad he’s not with her and with the others she inevitably draws to her. She’s laughing with two young women. Michael can pick Laurie’s laugh out of the crowd. He enjoys her laughter along with his sense of solitude, but the solitude does not last long. Laurie turns her face to him and cocks her head, and she speaks a few more words to the two women and then begins to glide across the parlor toward him.
As she approaches, he has a brief flash of two years earlier. A cocktail party in a senior partner’s Gulf-frontage house and the place is full of lawyers and judges and spouses and clerks and paralegals, and Michael finally stands alone in this crowd too: he has just finished a trivial conversation with a junior associate, who has gone away to refresh his drink, and Kelly, who was standing beside him, looking beautiful and distracted, has moved off as well. Michael is alone in a small cleared space with only people’s backs to him, but now a corridor of sightline opens up, and across the room he sees Laurie. She is wearing a cocktail dress in black satin that makes her naked shoulders and arms seem radiantly white, and she sees him seeing her, and she smiles and lifts her wine glass to him, and she nods, and he nods at her, and she is looking vaguely and recently familiar now. She apparently has taken the nods as an invitation to come to him. She moves through the crowd and he has nothing in his mind about her except noting—with actual objectivity—that she is very good looking, and he concedes to himself that if his solitary respite at this boring party is to be broken, it’s okay if it’s by this young woman.
She arrives. She says, “Mr. Hays.”
She knows him. Yes, he’s seen her somewhere. He says, “Michael.”
“Michael,” she says. “I’m Laurie Pruitt. I work for Arthur Weisberg.”
They shake hands. Her grip is surprisingly firm. He recognizes her now from a single passing glance at the office of his own lawyer, Max Bloom. Art is Max’s longtime partner.
“I’m his paralegal,” Laurie says.
“New paralegal,” Michael says.
“Fresh,” Laurie says, and she enhances the sibilance of the word just a little, flashes its double meaning.
Michael lets her know he gets this. “His fresh paralegal,” he says, reproducing her enhancement of the word.
“Fresh,” she repeats, lifting her wine glass to him.
And Laurie reaches Michael in the present, in the parlor at Oak Alley, and she puts on her thickest Southern drawl. “Well, Mr. Hays,” she says. “You are looking downright lonely over here. Is it your political views that have alienated your fellow plantation owners? Or the cheapness of your cigars?”
“I smoke only the finest cigars,” Michael says.
“And the largest,” she says, and she once again ma
ssages a word to open its ambiguity.
He says, “If only Sigmund Freud had been born by now, Miss Pruitt, I would have a shocking response to that comment.”
“Why, whatever do you mean, Mr. Hays?”
And a cell phone rings. Michael’s, hidden beneath his swallowtail coat. The faces in the room turn toward the sound, upper lips squaring and nostrils flaring in disdain.
Michael ignores the censure and quickdraws his phone to see who’s calling, even as Laurie hisses, “Michael.”
It’s Bloom, Weisberg, Hatfield & Moore. Finally, word. Michael says to Laurie, “You know what today is.”
She softens instantly, “Of course,” she says, touching his arm.
Michael turns and flips open the phone before the second ring and he moves out the parlor door. “Claire,” he says to his lawyer’s secretary, “I’ll call Max right back. I’ve got to step outside the nineteenth century first.”
And Michael moves through the front door and across the veranda and the terrace and into the allée. He keeps walking, even after he’s alone and can call Max and can hear that it’s all over. He’s delaying this, and he realizes he is, and since he’s alone he feels free to visibly, sharply shake his head, make an overt gesture of disgust at himself, at his own weakness. And having done this, he flips open his phone and calls Max’s office.
“Claire, it’s Michael. I’m ready for Max.”
And moments later Max is on the line. “Michael,” he says. “She didn’t show.”
“What?”
“Kelly didn’t show up to finalize.”
“I don’t understand,”
“Even her lawyer was taken by surprise,” Max says. “He’s been trying to locate her. Nothing. No answer.”
“This was when?”
“The appointed hour. Eleven. Judge Fox waited till noon. As long as he could.”
“Jesus.”
“I hoped to have some news by now. I’m sorry to put this on you.”
Michael says nothing for a long moment. It’s as if he’s standing there thinking, but he isn’t. He thinks about thinking something about this turn of events, but there’s not much actually going on in his head.
“Michael?” Max says.
“Yes.”
“You okay?”
“I just want it over.”
“Of course,” Max says. “What was her mood the last time you talked?”
“It’s been a couple of weeks. I don’t know.”
“We’ll keep trying,” Max says.
“Thanks. Yes. I have to go.” And Michael hangs up.
He tries again to think this out, but his mind is still benumbed and he is mostly aware now of the drift of voices from the house and the drape of shadows from the canopied oaks above him and the sooty sweet smell of sugarcane stubble burning somewhere. He finds himself facing the house but he turns away, walks down the allée now toward the levee, and as he does, he dials the house in Pensacola.
The phone there rings and rings, and then Kelly’s voice says, “I’m sorry. No one is home. Please leave a message …” and Michael hangs up. He dials Kelly’s cell phone.
∼
Distantly an old rotary phone rings. From her bedroom Kelly hears it, waking in the middle of the night. She keeps her eyes hard shut, though she is awake, though she knows the phone is ringing. She hears her mother rustle past the bedroom door, heading for the phone. Her father is sad again somewhere. Kelly forces her eyes wide open. The sunlight on the bedspread is too bright. She closes her eyes and opens them. The phone rings. Her mind clarifies. The brick wall. The wrought iron grapes. The night table. It’s her cell phone, which rings again. She chose this sound. But it’s distant now, muffled, and she looks to her purse lying at the foot of the bed. Her cheeks are tight with dried tears. The phone rings. She has no intention of answering it, even without thinking who it probably is. She’s out of town. She’s gone away. She looks out the French windows, not seeing anything, really. Did she fall asleep for a few moments? Perhaps so. The phone rings. What an oddly wrongheaded decision, she thinks, to make her cell phone sound like the phones of her childhood. And there it is ringing again. And she waits. A bird spanks past, heading for the courtyard. And she waits and she waits and the phone has stopped. The phone is silent.
Something in her has shifted. She’s not sure how much. She is sad. She is somewhere being sad. She rises from the chair and moves to the night table, passing through the sunlight into shadow. It’s dim here. She turns on the lamp. She picks up the bottle of Scotch. She slices the gold foil seal with her fingernail and peels it away. She pulls the black-capped cork and it resists and resists and then moves and it pops loudly. She does not have to lift the bottle to smell the dark honey smell of the Scotch. She waits. She waits, not knowing for what. Then she squeezes the cork back in, but not fully, not tightly, and she puts the bottle down in the exact spot where it was sitting.
She picks up the pills. The plastic prescription bottle is the color of caramel. She loved caramel as a child. She pushes down on the cap and twists it and opens the bottle and she shakes two of them into the palm of her hand. Pale blue, perfectly round. One is etched with the name, curving along the edge in a two-hundred-degree arc: PERCOCET. And within the arc is a large numeral 5. The milligrams. The second pill, flipped to the other side, is blank but for a deep, gaping, knife-groove through the middle.
Kelly looks at the two pills for a long while. She is aware of no thoughts, no decision going on, but finally she takes one pill out of her palm with her forefinger and thumb and she lays it carefully in the empty space where the bottle sat, PERCOCET-side up. She lays the second directly beneath, touching the one above, making the beginning of a perfectly straight vertical line. She moves the bottle of Scotch farther to the side, closer to the bed, clearing this space. She pours more pills into her palm, and she puts one carefully below the other two, and then another and another until there are … how many? She counts. Seven. Lucky seven. The bottle once held ninety Percocet. More than half of them are left. She takes another pill and lays it to the right of the first, and she lays in another pill below that, and another and another until she has two tight columns. Then she starts again at the top. And she refills her palm two more times. Her hands are steady, her hands are calm and steady. She builds a third column and another and she keeps building until she has seven columns and seven rows. A small, complex, scallop-edged square made up of circles. A perfect little square in the center of the night table. Forty-nine pills. She puts the half dozen still in her palm back into the bottle. She has more than enough.
She realizes she’s hunched over. Her back aches. She straightens. She breathes deeply in, lets it out. She looks down at the pills. They are perfect.
She turns and crosses the room and enters the bathroom. It’s dark in here and she keeps it that way. She can see what she wants. A drinking glass beside the faucets. She puts her hand on the glass and picks it up and she is about to turn and go but she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She pauses, though she keeps her eyes slightly averted, as if the person in the mirror is naked in a public place, is making a terrible spectacle of herself and you want to look but you don’t, quite, you do what you can to maintain a bit of her dignity even if she won’t. What can you say to her? What can you say? Kelly steps out of the bathroom.
She crosses the room, sits on the side of the bed, puts the glass on the corner of the night table. She looks at the pills. They were only recently made perfect there. Leave them alone for now. She picks up the bottle of Macallan and pulls the cork and it comes out easily, making a little echo of a pop. Kelly begins to pour and whatever is being thought-out inside her makes her lift the bottle quickly. She’ll have two fingers, neat, thank you. That’s enough for now. Just a little warmth for now is sufficient.
She is ready to lie down on the bed. Prop herself up and drink for a while. She returns the glass to the edge of the night table—she will not risk spilling any of her Scotch—
and she begins to lift her feet. But she sets them back on the floor. She looks down. Her shoes are still on. How long has she been in this room? For a while now, and her shoes are still on. She considers this. In any room that she feels is her private space, she is always instantly barefoot. Perhaps in the six weeks of cold in Pensacola in the heart of their brief winter she will wear socks around the house. That’s all. But her shoes are still on. With her little black Chanel she wore her black Louboutin platform pumps and they need to come off.
She puts the toe of one at the tip of the heel of the other and nudges the shoe loose and lets it fall off her foot. It lands on its side and exposes its arterial-red sole to her. She looks sharply away. She finds the other heel with her bare toes and pries off the shoe and drops it to the floor. Kelly lifts her legs and scoots back on the bed, plumps a pillow behind her so she can stay upright from the shoulders up, and she reaches over and lifts her Macallan. She leans back and brings the glass to her lips.
Now the first taste of the Scotch is upon her, like warm dark honey, and she lets the sip go down quickly—this isn’t a glass of wine; this isn’t about taste—and she waits for the settling in: one second, two, a few more. And then, inside, she descends into a warm sea: first in the very center of her, in the place where she draws this breath and the next, she feels the undulant warmth and then it swells outward, across her chest and up all the way to her throat and downward, as well, even into the place where she takes a man inside her.
∼
Michael kept walking after Kelly failed to answer her cell phone, ending the call at the first sound of her outgoing message. He could not speak to her answering machine. At this moment he could not even begin to think what he might say to her answering machine. He reaches the end of the allée, but he does not turn back to the plantation house. He crosses the highway and he goes up the angled road that climbs the levee and he arrives at the graveled road on the berm. Before him is the river, nearly half a mile wide here, the far shore a dense line of trees. Upriver a ways, on the far shore, two push boats have laid by, side by side, each with a dozen barges at the prow. Michael shoves his hands in his pockets and he regrets that he no longer smokes. This would have been the moment to light a cigarette, to keep one hand pushed into a pocket and to smoke a cigarette with the other and hunch his shoulders a little and shut the door in his head so it’s just him and the cigarette and the smoke filling him like a sweet midnight fog where nobody can see him and he can see nobody. But it’s been more than a decade and there’s nobody to bum a cigarette from out here and he’ll be okay. He’s been pretty good at shutting the door on his own. He doesn’t have to think about anything he doesn’t want to think about. That’s why he has found this high ground and has put himself in front of the Mississippi.
A Small Hotel Page 6