A Small Hotel

by Robert Olen Butler

  “But I have gone mad,” she says.

  “That thing about rebuilding engines,” he says. “Sometimes I struggle when you get metaphorical.”

  “Ah, that. I’m also a little drunk.”

  “Then let’s just forget it.”

  “What did you …”

  “Nothing,” he says. “I thought you were talking about the EKG. Dr. Neff suggested it. You lobbied for it. A few weeks ago.”

  “Drunk.” Kelly lifts her glass at him. “Just drunk. Get the test or not. I’m sure ‘in the pink’ means something sexual, by the way. Sex for men. Speaking of metaphors.”

  “He said it was just routine. I’m of a certain age.”

  “Me too.”

  “We both are.”

  “I need to rebuild my engine,” Kelly says.

  And Michael shrugs and turns away.

  Can something that will drastically change a life be decided like this? As stupidly as this? She puts her glass down on the deck beside her, several sips of Scotch left in it. She is, in fact, not drunk. Not at all. She and Michael have always talked like this. It’s how they talk. Whatever she does, it’s because of all of it.

  And she lays her head back on the deck chair, and she closes her eyes, and she knows Michael will stay quiet now till one or the other of them rises and says it’s time to sleep. And in this silence, and with the thing she must decide, she slides back only a few days, she lets the curtain fall on the first act of Jesus Christ Superstar and Judas has just sung that he won’t be damned for all time and Michael has gone straight to his cell phone for something he’s been thinking about for the whole first act, and Kelly rises and creeps up the aisle with the crowd and out into the Saenger’s new crimson and gold lobby. This is the night of the Saenger’s reopening and she stops beneath the skylight, and she looks up, and it seems small, it seems too small to have bothered.

  “Only the janitors will see the stars through that,” Drew says.

  This third time she recognizes his voice at once, and she does not look at him, she keeps her face lifted to the skylight, which, it’s true, shows nothing of the sky beyond because of the glare of lobby lights. She completes his thought. “After they’re done and it’s dark inside.”

  Kelly and Drew stare at the skylight for a few moments more, and then they lower their faces, aware of the synchronicity, and they turn to each other.

  She holds back her smile. “Will you say it or should I?”

  “I’ll do it,” he says.

  But he doesn’t.

  “Well?” she says.

  “We have to stop meeting like this.”

  Now she smiles, and so does he. He knew. “We do move in the same tight little world,” she says.

  “Yes.” Drew lifts his face back to the skylight as he says, “Do you know why I hesitated?”

  “No.”

  He continues to gaze upwards, as if he can’t look her in the eyes for this. “I don’t want to stop meeting like this.”

  What he says strikes her as something that she just felt as well, but would not have found words for.

  He’s looking at her now.

  She has the impulse to do what she so often does with Michael when they talk, and what she has done with Drew in every conversation they’ve ever had: lightly twist and weave the small-talk. Banter über alles. And even though these words he has just spoken have followed that same pattern, his voice has gone soft and serious and he has averted his eyes as he’s said them. He means what he says, and she feels the same way. And his eyes are steady on hers and her eyes are steady on his, and she leans ever so slightly toward him, and she lowers her voice as much as she can and still be heard over the babble of the intermission crowd—enough that he can hear the same earnestness that she has just heard—and she says, “If we stop, we’ll just have to find another way.”

  He nods once at this. And then his eyes soften and narrow and unnarrow, and she senses from them that something has passed through him, and she knows to say, “Are you okay?”

  “Why would you say that?” His literal words voice surprise but nothing about his body changes to express such a feeling.

  “I don’t know,” Kelly says, and for the moment she doesn’t.

  He smiles a small, quick smile that vanishes at once. “Did you like the first act?”

  Is he just changing the subject, intending no ambiguity, telling her indirectly to mind her own business, or is he still playing with the words, actually talking about the two of them, their own first act, and how they’ve been running into each other and how she now can even tell when he’s troubled? “I have a feeling it’s going to end badly,” she says.

  He takes this in. Makes a decision. “We’re talking about the play?” he says.

  “I don’t know. Are we?”

  “I’m not doing all that great,” he says. “Since you asked.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “I didn’t know it showed so clearly.”

  “I’m not sure it does.”

  “Only to you,” he says, and his voice has gone soft enough that Kelly can barely hear him as a loud-talking couple passes by, speaking of chocolates.

  “I didn’t mean to intrude,” she says.

  “Not at all.”

  “This isn’t a great place to talk.”

  “No.”

  “And our spouses are waiting,” she says. And from the faint pull at the corners of his mouth Kelly knows that the trouble is with his wife.

  Drew says, “The principal in my firm is a benefactor of the theater.”

  She hears this as a preamble of an excuse for telling her that his wife isn’t with him. But he pauses ever so slightly before the hard part and Kelly finds herself intervening. “Look,” she says. “If the not-great thing can benefit from a woman’s advice, give me a call. We can have coffee.”

  Drew’s hand comes to her, touches her on the forearm. “Do you mean that?”

  “Of course.”

  “This is going to sound odd.” But he says no more for a moment.

  “The silence?” she says.

  He huffs a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “I’m working up my courage.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Okay. I’d already thought … and this is the odd part, for as briefly and accidentally as we’ve know each other … It had already occurred to me that you’d be someone I could actually talk to. Talk seriously.”

  Kelly finds herself having to wait for enough breath to answer this, even as her mind rushes to first acts and bad endings, even as she wants to take this hand of his that still lingers on her arm and entwine her fingers in his. But she simply says, “I think it’s time to exchange cell phone numbers.”

  ∼

  And as Kelly stands in the center of Room 303 following memories within memories, Michael and Laurie are arriving at the veranda of the plantation house. They stop at its very edge. They have not spoken since they left the berm of the levee. They have walked arm-inarm under the trees, and Laurie has connected Michael’s deep and—she is learning—characteristic silence with his old-school romanticism. And that’s okay, that’s okay for now and in this context; she is charmed by it. And he is grateful for her silence. He is trying hard to stay in the moment, trying to follow no memory at all but simply be here with this beautiful young woman who seems quite comfortable with him just as he is.

  The two of them linger at the edge of the veranda and watch the chatting, drinking, posturing, period-costumed twenty-first century lawyers and bankers and doctors and real estate agents and small-business owners. This is Laurie’s event and Michael waits for her to take the lead. And Laurie is considering this dress-up fantasy thing she has chosen for the two of them on the weekend when they will, with conscious forethought and planning, do the deed for the first time. Has she ever had sex like that before? Duh. No. It’s always been impulsive and impromptu. And she likes it that way. Absolutely. But this way, it’s as if the doing of it will actually estab
lish a very important connection between them: and it is important, she feels. It is. They are not just doin’ it tonight. They are making love. She gets that, she is cool with that, OMFG, this could be something very big for her.

  And she can make it her own. She moves her hand from the crook of his arm and she takes his hand and she entwines their fingers and she says, “I just got this great idea.”

  She waits, as if for a reaction, though she knows him enough to understand that the patient look he is giving her is all she will get. He is so cute sometimes.

  “You’ve been very sweet,” she says. “About the dress-up.”

  And in this dramatic pause she reaches up and puts her hand on his sweetly oft-straightened tie and she twists one end up.

  Michael reflexively puts his own hand on the tie, thinking that she is straightening it and preferring to do that himself. He realizes what she has done instead.

  She says, “But let’s go now. I’m sorry I got this all mixed up. Let’s go to our little cottage and make love right now, my romantic darling.”

  He looks steadily into her eyes as he fills with a warmth like the hit of a good Scotch. This is just what he needs to do right now. Just so.

  Laurie waits for him, but in spite of the spin she’s been applying to his silences, this one unsettles her. She says, “Romantic you, impulsive me. We can have it both ways, yes?”

  Michael offers his arm and she takes it quickly and holds on tightly, and as they move away from the veranda, she says, “One thing, though. Turn off your cell phone.”

  And he stops at once and takes out his phone and he turns it off before her very eyes.

  ∼

  And Kelly makes her legs move, though they are very heavy. She tries to break free of the current that’s carrying her. She moves from the center of the room, past the foot of the bed, and she stops in the space bound by three doors: to the bathroom, to the closet, to the corridor outside. And she is sitting at a table at Artissimo, near the red piano in the window, and Drew is across from her and they have been eating salad together and they have been talking small and they are near the theater where they met for the third time and they are very public here, in this tightly bound city where they live with their respective spouses, and they have done this because it is, of course, absolutely okay, anyone can see them because nothing is going on but an older woman meeting a younger male acquaintance to give some big-sisterly advice. But the two of them know, while there are people nearby, to talk small, and all the words they said in the restaurant on that day have vanished from Kelly now—except her saying to him, “You ordered a salad” and him saying to her, “Yes I did,” and her saying, “Without steak or chicken in it,” and him saying, “Certainly not,” and her saying, laughing, “What kind of man are you?” and him saying, with a gravity and a look that are intended to remind them both of why they are here, “I have recently been asked that question”—and that was the thing, of course, the recent events in his life, and Kelly and Drew knew not to speak of it in the restaurant, they knew that they would not say a word even though it was the reason he called her the week after the Saenger and said, “Did you mean it, that I could talk with you?” and she said, “Yes, I meant it,” and he suggested lunch and they came here and of course as soon as they got here it was clear that he couldn’t talk about anything important because others could hear.

  But then they finish their lunch and he pays and she insists on splitting the bill and he lets her do that and they do it in a very public way, lofting their two credit cards as if they are toasting with wine, and they go out the door, and without a word they begin to walk south on Palafox. Begin to stroll. Half an arm’s length between them. Chaste. Obviously innocent. And they end up at the end of Palafox on a bench looking out at Pensacola Bay and there is still space between them.

  “If you’ve changed your mind,” Kelly says.

  And he knows instantly what she means. “Not at all. I’m grateful for the chance to talk to you. It was the restaurant.”

  “Of course,” she says. “But on the walk too.”

  “It was simply nice walking with you.”

  “It was.”

  “I didn’t want to spoil it,” he says.

  “What kind of man are you?” she says, laughing again, but very softly.

  He shrugs. “Inadequate,” he says.

  At this, Kelly wants to put her arms around him. She consciously holds very still, waits for more, but knowing already that the time will come when she will take him in her arms and help him make right whatever this is, knowing he will tell her. And she tries to hold still in this familiar room she’s come to, and all the doors lead nowhere: the bathroom, the closet, an empty corridor, off a faux balcony. What should she have understood in those first moments with Drew Singleton? What should she have heard in what he said that would have told her to stand up and shake his hand and wish him well, that would have let her walk away and preserve what she had—at least that much—let her at least keep whatever she had.

  After a very slight pause as he looks far out at the bay, no doubt contemplating his inadequacies, Drew suddenly does a little head snap and says, “Jeez. Listen to me. What a way to start this. I didn’t ask you to lunch so I can wallow in self-pity or fish for compliments.”

  How could she have possibly walked away when he instantly co-opted any actionable fear she might be smart enough to have?

  “You can say anything you want in any way you feel it,” Kelly says to Drew. “I’ll understand.”

  His eyes restlessly search her face as she speaks these words.

  “Be yourself,” she says.

  Drew grasps her hand and squeezes it and she squeezes back and then he drops it at once. More reassurance for her to go on.

  And he talks to Kelly of his wife. Of how he loves his wife. Of how she loves him. Of how, until she met him, she’d always been with men who were abusive in some way or other. Of how grateful she was to be with a man like him at last. But how she always seems to need more and how that’s getting worse. She draws other men to her and needs to please them and Drew is certain—almost certain—almost certain but reluctant to consider anything else—he feels he is certain that she does not act in any private way on this need for attention, this need for constant reassurance.

  At this point Kelly says, “I’m sure you tell her …”

  “I tell her all the time,” he says. “I wear my heart on my sleeve.”

  And Kelly initiates a touch. She takes his hand, and they are still holding hands as he says, “I let her know every day that I love her.” Kelly squeezes his hand tightly, and she feels a welling-up in her chest, her throat, and she tries not to let it press tears from her eyes.

  “But what I give her is not enough,” he says. “And I think the very fact that I tell her—that I am the kind of man who will tell her—is the very thing that makes me inadequate.”

  And Kelly knows now, having moved back into the middle of Room 303, knows only after it is far too late, that if she were to be seduced, if she were to be persuaded to destroy her own life, this was the way for a man to do it.

  And Drew squares around to face Kelly on the bench by the bay, as they work themselves up to an affair, and he takes her other hand in his and he lifts them both and he says, “Why are so many women drawn to emotionally unavailable men, even as they ask for openness and vulnerability?”

  Kelly has no answer. As this man lifts her hands, she can only think that her own life may be a testament to that very problem. She has no answer. But she wants that to change.

  Drew says, “I saved her. She’s always said that. But I can’t save myself.”

  Kelly finds herself standing before the night table. The lovely pale-blue square, the mosaic of PERCOCET. How did she not understand what was happening with this man? What should she should have figured out right away? His avowed inadequacy? His declaration of it made her first want to hold him. But he didn’t really feel inadequate. He quickly made tha
t simply be about his declarations of love for his wife. He never felt inadequate at all. He felt righteous. How did Kelly miss that? And there was something important left out of his perplexity over who’s attracted to whom. Why was he himself drawn to the woman he married, knowing that she always fell for bad guys? Was it really love he felt? Did he really think he could save her? The thing about being on a white horse—and staying quixotically on it—is that you yourself are unavailable up there. But she can’t think it through now. It’s too late. She and this man drove fast on I-10 toward the Alabama State line and as soon as they were out of Pensacola they checked into the first motel they came to, and the room smelled of concrete and carpet cleaner, and they had sex and a dozen times he said he loved her—it was foreplay talk, it was the pounding talk, it was orgasm talk—and they came back to this motel twice more, as if it were romantic, as if a cheap interstate motel was something romantically their own and the smell of carpet cleaner would never be the same again, and then on the third time, after the sex, he said that we all go through life loving and loving, finding many people we love, and he loved her but he loved his wife as well—which he’d been clear about from the start—and he and Kelly had to face the bittersweet reality that they couldn’t really go on but she was always going to be a perfect, self-contained thing in his life and he hoped he would be that for her. And that was that. And if she had not been an absolute fool, if somehow the bullshit line he fed her had actually been true in their case—in some universe, between two specific people, it might well be true, she supposed—then maybe she could indeed have put a few beautiful memories away and kept them to herself, but for her and for this particular man, it was a lie, it was all a terrible lie, and it was done, and it was anything but beautiful, and worse, she had changed inside and she could not face Michael by simply saying to herself Oh well, fuck and learn. She had not understood the fragile balancing act that was her life, and once she fell, she could not imagine a way to fly back up to that thin, hard wire above her. She could not imagine. She puts her forefinger on the night table and she draws it down through the square of pills, tumbling them apart.