A Small Hotel

by Robert Olen Butler

  “I will read your future,” the woman says.

  “You’ll get it wrong,” Kelly says, and she moves as fast as her Louboutin platform pumps will allow her to go, which isn’t very fast, and when she is far enough away from the tarot reader so there can be no more discussion of her future, Kelly stops and takes off one shoe and then the other and hooks her fingers in them to carry them. And she feels the cool press of stone on her bare feet, feels it for a long moment, a good thing. Then she moves along the galleried Pontalba and abruptly she is before another place where she did not intend to go: the pavilion of the Café du Monde, lit bright in the dark, and a young man and a young woman are before her, not someone from the past but uncomfortably here before her right now and they are sitting near the street and they have pushed their chairs side by side at the tiny bistro table and he sips his coffee and she takes a bite of a beignet and she struggles to manage the powdered sugar and he watches her do this and she catches him watching and they laugh and he leans to her and puts his lips near her ear and he whispers something, her face softening as he does, and she smiles, and Kelly knows exactly what he has said, she knows exactly what he has said that pleases her, and Kelly turns abruptly away and she moves quickly along the river-edge of Jackson Square where the carriage horses are stinking and nickering all along the curb and she cuts in front of one and crosses Decatur Street and now she is in a neutral place, a place with nothing of her and Michael: she crosses the street-performance space before the wide, low, concrete façade of Washington Artillery Park.

  She climbs the stairs before her and another set of stairs up the façade and she is on top of the monument. A Civil War cannon on a pedestal aims at the Mississippi. She goes down the back stairs and finds herself crossing railroad tracks—the train whistles come from here, she thinks—and she presses on, climbing more stairs. She stops. The river is before her, going black in the gathering night and scattered with lights from Algiers across the way.

  She’s having trouble controlling the heave of her chest. She has rushed here, she realizes. Since she crossed the street she has been moving very fast, free to do so with her feet bare and feeling compelled to see the river. And now she pauses. She struggles to slow her breathing. She is standing on the Moonwalk, the herringbone-brick esplanade along the water, and she can’t think why she was in such a rush. There’s only a wide darkness before her and she turns in the direction of Canal Street and she walks on. And like her husband, the past runs strongly in her, carrying her feelings about her husband, about her marriage, about her life, but it courses in her deeply enough that it’s as if it weren’t there, as if she were unaffected, as if she were merely here, in this present life, choosing to take this step and then the next, moving, in this moment, for instance, toward the distant steamboat Natchez lit up bright at its mooring and toward the even more distant hotels and the bridge to the West Bank. But in fact Kelly is beside another river, the Alabama, and she is five years old and Katie is nine and she is a prissy bossy big sister such as to drive Kelly crazy and the two of them and their mother are sitting on a blanket on the grass and Katie has taken over—even from Mama—taken over the laying out of the sandwiches clenched tight in Saran Wrap and the napkins and the bags of Fritos and Mama is sitting at the edge of the blanket and she’s looking away and Katie is in the center and acting like she is in charge and everything is done.

  “We’re not ready to eat,” Kelly says. “We need Daddy.”

  “He’s thinking,” Katie says.

  And it’s true that he has gone off by himself, and Kelly does not look in his direction now—directly behind her, a few dozen yards away, very near the river, very near the water, almost at the edge of the water—she does not look because she is already quite aware of the fact that he is thinking, but that doesn’t mean things are the way they should be when a family goes on a picnic and decides it’s time for food.

  “I’m not eating without Daddy,” Kelly says, loudly, so he can hear. Katie has been speaking in hushed tones.

  And Kelly’s mother speaks now in the same hush. “Your sister’s right. He’ll come when he’s ready.” She has not even turned her face in order to take sides with Katie. She is still looking away, although not quite toward her husband.

  Katie picks up the sandwich in front of her and begins to peel the plastic away. Finally Kelly’s mother arranges herself on the blanket, though without looking directly at either of her daughters, and begins to pull open a bag of chips. All of this is too much for Kelly. She grabs her own sandwich and jumps up and turns away from these silly people and her mother hisses her name at her but she is already moving away, moving quickly across the grass to the massive-shouldered hunch of her father.

  She arrives behind him and pulls up, her desire to be near him suddenly pressed back by the force of his self-absorption. She hesitates now. But she wants this too much. “Daddy,” she says.

  He does not answer, does not move. And the gravitational poles abruptly shift: what pressed her back before—his silence, his inwardness, his obliviousness—now pull her powerfully toward him. She circles him, moving into the narrow space between her father and the water, and he lifts his face to her.

  She has heard already many times: you have your father’s eyes. When she was toddling with language, a question formed inside her and she held it close to her for some days until one night at bedtime she stood before her father, ready to go off with her mother, and she was seeking his ritual kiss, which he would give her on the forehead, but before he even began to lean toward her in his deliberate, slow-motioned way, she asked him the question at last: “Daddy, do I have your eyes?” And he did not say a word. Instead, he pulled her hands out before her and turned them over, palms upward, and he reached with his own right hand and plucked at his eye, closing it at once, smooth-lidded, and he doubled the hand into a gentle fist, and he held the fist over her left hand and opened it, and then he closed her hand. And he did this with his other eye, just the same way, and after he closed her other hand and both his eyes had vanished before her, she dared not move: she had his eyes, she had them in the palms of her hands—she could feel their shape, their weight there—and she did not move, and she barely let herself draw a breath, and they stood there before each other for what felt to Kelly like a long time, like a very long time, like a very very long time, and after a while she began to tremble from what she held, from what she was responsible for. So she lifted her right hand and brought it forward very carefully, and she turned it, and she put her fist against the place of his left eye, and she opened her fist, and she felt his eye pop open beneath her palm. She took her hand away. Her father’s left eye was restored. She brought forth her left hand, and she restored his right eye as well. And he looked at her with those eyes. For another long time, he looked at her, and his eyes did not blink, did not move. They held not the slightest trace of anything she could ever possibly read.

  And now again, his large, wide-set, deep-winter-midnight eyes—so much like Kelly’s eyes—as a child certainly but even more clearly so as an adult—his eyes beside the Alabama River, with the five-year-old Kelly standing before him, are empty of any emotion Kelly can perceive. And she holds out her hand with her sandwich, and she says, “Time to eat. Take mine.”

  And he reaches up and he takes the sandwich from Kelly, and she feels a sweet leaping inside her. But he immediately lays the sandwich on the grass beside him, and the leaping stops in her, everything stops. Though his eyes are open upon her, they have vanished and she does not have them, and so she does what she wants most to do, what she has come here, actually, to do. She falls forward onto him, her arms going around his neck and her head pressing against his, and she says, “I love you, Daddy,” and she wants him to speak, wants for him to draw her even closer and to speak, to tell her this thing that she has told him. But instead she feels her wrists clasped tight, feels herself being peeled away, and her father’s hands grasp her under the arms and her body moves backward and
upward and her father is standing up now and she floats before him, his arms extended, holding her away from him.

  He is smiling. A thinly stretched, barely upturned smile. It is, nevertheless, perceptibly a smile, and this is all that Kelly sees for now, and it balances her disappointment in failing to evoke the words she wishes to hear—words she has not yet heard from her father—not ever ever ever—and the smile even balances the fright of this sudden physical state she finds herself in. And in this balance her feelings are free to sort themselves out as she hangs in mid-air in his strong hands: she does feel his strength, she does trust him to protect her out here, she does feel safe where she is—and he lifts her higher, his smile angling up to her as she rises, and so she laughs. Kelly laughs and her father draws her down toward him—the tease, the come-here-my-baby—and then he abruptly lifts her higher, and this is a thing that once delighted her, as a toddler, when she had no words and when she knew only the strength of her father’s hands and the thrill of being almost in a certain place you want to be and then abruptly not being there but knowing you are still safe and can go back again and at the very same moment your body is thrilled, is flying. She feels all that now. Her father does this once more, draws her to him and at the last moment lifts her, and she laughs again but now he does not draw her in. He keeps her far away from him, high above him, and he begins a slow turn, and Kelly looks up from her father and she sees her mother and her sister standing at the blanket, looking this way, and then she sees a distant tree line, and then she sees the river, running blue before her, running fast and wide, and her father has stopped turning, and still she hangs in the air. She looks down at her father and the smile is gone. He is looking at her steadily, carefully, as if thinking what to do with her, as if trying to decide who she is, and she hangs there above him and she says, “Okay, Daddy.”

  He does not move.

  “Daddy, I want down,” she says.

  And he does not move. He does not show a thing in his face.

  “Please, Daddy,” she says.

  Nothing.

  And now her mother’s voice is behind her. “Lenny.” Her father’s name. Invoked by her mother like this only in very bad moments.

  And still he looks at Kelly as if he does not even know who she is. She squeezes her eyes shut. And she is moving. Her father is turning again with her still held high. She opens her eyes. Below her is her mother. Her father has put his back to her. Her mother lifts her face to Kelly and the eyes—which are not Kelly’s eyes—she does not have her mother’s eyes—these eyes below are wide and Kelly knows the feeling in them, she is beginning to feel the same thing scrabbling in the center of her chest like a sharp-clawed little animal trapped there.

  Her mother lowers her face to her husband’s back. She lifts a hand, but it hesitates. She dares not touch her husband at this moment. And Kelly is suddenly sharply aware of the river behind her. The river is very close behind her, the wide, fast-running river.

  “Lenny,” her mother says. “Put Kelly down now.”

  He does not. Kelly looks across the slope to where Katie is still standing at the picnic blanket, watching all this but keeping her place, waiting for things to go on in the only way she has decided they can. Kelly closes her eyes and waits too, trying not to move, trying not to cry out and flail her arms and legs. She must be reconciled to this or she will lose him utterly and that would be worst of all.

  And now she is falling. Slowly. She touches the ground, and she opens her eyes and her father’s face descends as well. He crouches before her, looks her in the eyes. “I’m sorry, Kitten,” he says. “I was a million miles away for a minute there.”

  Kelly lunges forward and she throws her arms around him and she knows not to say anything and she knows not to expect him to say anything, but she tries very hard to hold him close. And with that embrace of her father, Kelly stops on the Moonwalk beside this other river. The image of the embrace has flashed into her mind as if out of nowhere, for the afternoon by the Alabama River has for all her adult life been merely a few scattered fragments. But the embrace carries with it another memory of her father that comes upon her now in its fullness. Almost twenty years ago. She and Michael stand just inside the open veranda doors of the best facility she and her mother and Katie could find, a good place, a converted, sprawling Queen Anne on wooded acreage on the edge of Montgomery, where the ones with means can come who survived, who didn’t quite mean it, who everyone thinks have a chance to put this all behind them. They all wear jogging suits in muted colors. They sit in the dim parlor where she and Michael now stand. They walk the grounds. They sit on the veranda. Her father is on the veranda, sitting alone at a table, unaware of his daughter and son-in-law. His jogging suit is the color of rust.

  “Go ahead,” Michael says softly. I’ll wait here till you want me.”

  “He really likes you,” Kelly says.

  “You two need some time alone, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose.” The last thing she needs right now is time alone with her father. “Yes,” she says.

  Kelly steps through the doors and crosses the veranda. Her father’s face is lowered, as if intently examining the white wrought-iron tabletop. She arrives before him. “Hello, Daddy,” she says.

  He looks up. And it is, of course, the same as it ever was, the very same, the eyes upon her and no way in the world to read them.

  She sits in a chair opposite him. “Are you doing okay?” she says.

  “Sure,” he says.

  For a moment she can think of no more to say. His eyes do not move from her. She needs to will this to happen, this conversation, this small talk, this enormous small talk. “Mama misses you,” she says. “We all do.”

  “That’s good,” her father says.

  She will not even try to figure out what exactly he means when he’s sounding ironic. “How’s the food?”

  “Delicious,” he says. “Never better.”

  In the brief moment she takes to get past still more irony, her father does another thing as he has ever done: a sudden softening. And because the softening is rare and always abrupt and because it always comes in the context of his impossible impenetrableness, she is, as ever, inordinately grateful for it, even as the softness, as ever, yields nothing but a minor connection. His eyes come alive and his voice goes gentle and he says, “That’s a joke, Kitten.”

  “That’s good,” she says. “You’re joking.”

  “It was hilarious from the beginning,” he says.

  She’s at a loss again.

  He reads it. “You know what I’m talking about,” he says.

  He means the suicide attempt. She stifles the urge simply to stand up now and say good-bye and go. But she plays the role he is so good at maneuvering her into. She cannot banter with him at moments like these. She must be the tight-ass daughter, which will allow him to be disappointed with her.

  “Not hilarious, Daddy. Not for us.”

  He tilts his head in mock astonishment. “‘The Ride of the Valkyries?’ ‘I love the smell of car exhaust in the morning’?”

  She goes utterly blank. She might as well be the one sitting here drugged up in a jogging suit.

  “I didn’t actually play the Wagner?” he says.

  Somehow this question sounds sincere. “Not that we knew,” Kelly says.

  “Sorry,” he says, low, looking away. “Then it was all in my head, the joke. It’s funny in there most of the time.”

  They both fall silent. It gives Kelly an opportunity to gather herself for what she has come here to say. “Don’t do this again. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he says, instantly, quietly.

  And this is a thing she has vowed not to press, but she’s suckered yet again by his sudden softness. “I love you, Daddy,” she says.

  He says, “Your grandfather didn’t have a sense of humor about it.”

  “Daddy. Did you hear me?”

  “I did,” he says.

  And for a moment she fe
els a little ripple in her from the acknowledgement. It doesn’t last.

  “And I promise,” he says. “Funny’s better.”

  He meant he did have a sense of humor about killing himself.

  “I can just laugh and leave it at that,” he says.

  Kelly can’t do this alone any longer. She looks toward the doors into the parlor. Michael has already taken a step onto the veranda. He stands waiting for her. She loves him very much in this moment, her Michael. She lifts her chin and he instantly starts this way.

  “Look,” she says. “Michael’s here.”

  Her father turns around and stands up at once, offering his hand, and the two men shake, Michael two-handed, her father putting his other hand on Michael’s elbow.

  “Lenny,” Michael says, “what the fuck?”

  “I love the smell of car exhaust in the morning,” Kelly’s father says.

  Michael laughs loud. Leonard Dillard laughs too, just as loud. They hear themselves and glance at the muted others around them on the veranda and they choke off their laughter, which makes them want to laugh even more. They are now locked in the club room of a private male world. Kelly has vanished. She should be grateful to have this burden taken off her. She should be grateful her father is joking. But she feels tears wanting to form and this is the last thing in the world she wants from herself now and so she finds—easily finds, though it surprises her—a quick, hot swelling of anger in her at both of them. She lets that take her, and the tears vanish, and she leans back in her chair and folds her hands together in her lap as the two men sit.