She wanted so badly for it to have been good, for the words to be true and the touching to be true, even if for a few moments. Her body longed for that, and her body longs for that now, she feels a terrible scrabbling warmth come over her and she pulls at her little black dress, pulls at it from just below her hips, she pulls it up and off her and she unclasps her bra and sloughs it off and she slides her panties down her legs and steps from them and she is naked. She is as naked as she feels inside. She sat on the side of this bed only a few months ago and she told Michael what she had done. She could not bear to continue to sleep next to him and wake next to him and she could not bear to admire the churn and crackle of his mind and she could not bear his silences with that interstate motel room a secret. Because it happened, because it existed, because the fact of it went to bed with her and woke with her and it listened with her and it longed with her, and she had to put it outside of herself no matter what. So she sat on this bed, and he was standing between her and the French windows, and the two of them had just arrived from dinner at Galatoire’s, and she told him there was something she had to say and he squares around to face her and she says there is this terrible stupid thing she has done, and she tells him, and he keeps his eyes steady on her as she speaks, even as she tells it all, tells him the whole secret, and his face does not change, just as it does not change whenever she needs to know if he loves her, and she understands what is happening, she understands, and it spreads in her as a slow undulation of intense heat, and he says, “So it’s done?” and his voice is flat, even as it clarifies—“Our marriage?”—and his eyes show nothing and the nothing of them suddenly quickens the heat in her, backdrafts words into her head and an impulse into her hands, she could fly at him and claw at him and cry out at him now, but she won’t, she was the one in the motel room, that was her, she did this, but she is wildly angry at him even so and she can’t say No it’s not done and she can’t say Yes it is. She says, “Is it?” and it’s the right thing to say because if he says Please darling no it can’t be, it’s over with you and this man isn’t it? I can forgive you if you only say you want to stay with me: if he says that, then it will be the same as saying I love you and she can hold on to those words forever and everything will be all right, everything will be better than it’s ever been. But he says nothing. He turns his back abruptly on her and he moves to the French windows and he stands there, and from beyond him, from across the rooftops of the Quarter, from beside the river, comes the cry of a train. And after a long moment, and very low, so low she can only barely hear him, he says, “It always surprises me to hear a train whistle in the Quarter.” And she says nothing. And he says nothing more. The flames have flared and died and she waits for whatever is next, and he is not moving, and she lowers her face, unable even to look at the back of him now, and she waits. Until, at last, she senses him turn. And she looks into his face. And it is blank. It is utterly blank. And she knows it’s done.
And unaware of anything but the end of her marriage playing once more in her head, Kelly has moved now to the French windows, has pressed herself against the balustrade, and she looks out onto the moonlit rooftops, but she does not see them, all she sees is Michael’s face, impassive, and even that is fading from her mind, and it is leaving nothing behind, and she is utterly unaware of what is below her: in the pool, the young couple in their improvised swimsuits standing up to their chests in water, facing each other, his hands around her waist, her hands on his shoulders, and they have stopped joking about what they are doing and they are quiet and looking at each other and smelling the chlorine of the pool and the young woman is thinking that the smell of chlorine will never be the same again and she lifts her face to the moon overhead, and though it is not yet full, it is very bright, and her eyes drift from the moon and she sees a woman standing in her open French windows three floors above them, and the woman is naked—she is slim and beautiful and she is utterly naked—and the young woman lowers her face to her lover and she motions upward with her chin and they both look at the naked woman in the French windows and they smile, and the young man is thus moved to bring his hands up his lover’s back to the hooks on her bra and he undoes them and she lets him do this, she draws her arms forward and she takes the bra and she drops it away from her onto the surface of the pool, and she and the young man press their bodies together and they kiss, even as Kelly turns and vanishes into her room.
∼
And Michael and Laurie move through the moonlight between the plantation house and their cottage, and her hand is on his arm, and she is setting the pace. A slow pace. She is relishing this walk to their bed, and Michael is keenly aware that the phone on his hip won’t ring now, that this issue will remain unresolved until tomorrow at the very least. He puts his hand on Laurie’s in the crook of his arm and he tries hard to remain in this moment, with this new woman. But instead, he stands before Kelly in the hotel room they know so well and she says, “Michael,” and she rarely uses his name to address him, and she says, “Can we talk?” and with that opening to what she wants to say, he figures he has once again fallen short somehow, probably from his preoccupied mind—and admittedly, even as they have checked into what they think of as their room, in their hotel, in their city, for a long weekend, he has been thinking mostly about a retired Navy captain DUI he’s trying to keep out of jail and get into rehab, and he has no doubt that he has, in effect, ignored Kelly since about the Louisiana border—so he squares around before her and clears his mind and he waits for her typically vague indictment. She is sitting on the bed, and even after he has demonstrably given her his full attention, she hesitates to speak, and he feels uncomfortable standing over her when there is apparently some sort of issue to deal with, and if she’s not going to rise to him, then he should probably sit down beside her on the bed. But before he can, she starts to talk.
And in the moonlit dark full of the smell of sugar cane smoke, heading to his bed with this young woman beside him, Michael struggles to stop this memory. He does not want these words in his head. But they happen. As he remembers them. Stripped down. And when they were spoken, he felt very little as he heard them, as he tried to comprehend them. And when he found things to say in return, he heard his own voice as if it was someone else speaking.
“I’ve been sleeping with a man,” Kelly says.
At first he has no words at all, not even in this other voice.
“It’s over,” she says.
“How long?” he says.
“For a month.”
“Over for a month?”
“It lasted for a month. It’s over now. For a few weeks.”
“Why did it end?” And he realizes how odd this question is, preceding the more obvious why did it start.
“He stopped loving me,” she says.
He takes this in. “And if his feelings hadn’t changed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you telling me?”
Then no words for a time. And then her voice again. “I find it’s not so simple just to resume.”
Then no words.
And then he says, “So it’s done?” And he hears the ambiguity. Though she has already implied that the affair is done. But he could still be asking about that. He isn’t. She has slept with another man and she has stopped because he has stopped loving her. She is not answering. He clarifies. “Our marriage?” he says.
She does not speak, and he feels himself catching up to all this. Those last two words came directly from his own mouth.
She says, “Is it?”
And he better turn his back now and move away because he knows already what is next, and that would be as difficult for him to face as the thing he has just faced: his eyes are growing thick with incipient tears. He is a wretched fool of a worthless child lost in the woods and about to cry. He turns his back to her and he walks to the open French windows and he clenches his eyes shut to stop the tears without touching them, without giving her the slightest clue as to wha
t he’s doing. Sightless, he hears a train whistle—one of the working trains rolling heavily along the edge of the city, out by the river. He says, “It always surprises me to hear a train whistle in the middle of New Orleans,” and he has lost touch with his own voice again and he is losing touch with his own feelings again, as well, for he finds he can straighten and take a breath and set himself, and he will do what he needs to do. He allows himself a quick, heavy palming of his eyes so there will be no trace of any tear, and he turns to his wife, who, he is relieved to see, is staring not at him but at the floor. She seems to sense him watching. She lifts her eyes, and she looks at him, and her face is utterly blank. This always sweetly animated face has no trace of a feeling on it—in this extraordinary circumstance, there is no affect at all—and he knows the answer to the question. But he is all right, he is staying strong now: he imagines she needs him to be strong now, so that she can do what she needs to do.
And she says, “Yes. It’s done.”
“What is it?” This is Laurie’s voice. Michael looks at her. They have stopped moving.
Her upturned face is blanched white in this light, and she seems young, so very young. But made alabaster by the moon, made into an ancient statue of a very young woman, she seems timeless, as well, grown already old in some distant past. And to this sense of her, Michael finds he can speak the thing in his mind.
“What did I miss?” he says.
She knows at once he’s speaking of Kelly. “That she was cheating on you,” Laurie says.
But that’s not what he’s trying to understand, and he can think of nothing more to ask.
“Did you ever cheat on her?” she says.
“No,” he says.
“Were you ever tempted?”
“Abstractly. A time or two. But only in the abstract.”
Laurie laughs, though it is a low, soft-edged laugh. “See,” she says. “This is also Men. Or it once was. Here’s a little secret, my darling. Some of us miss you old-fashioned guys. I’m a lucky girl.”
Now she has stopped being a statue. Her dark eyes are intensely alive in the midst of her moon-cold face. And she no longer seems young in any way. He takes her in his arms and kisses her and the kiss goes on and then it turns into a gradually diminishing flutter of pecks and lip-pluckings and finally it ends.
They pull back slightly and they look each other in the eyes. And Laurie says, “I hope you realize that I’m falling madly in love with you.”
∼
On this night, as Michael hears an overt declaration of love from a new woman and as Kelly stands naked in the middle of her hotel room near her Scotch and her pills, as they both continue to churn with the past that brought them to this present moment, neither will turn to those strangely muted weeks following Kelly’s confession. Michael moved into the Crowne Plaza, covering the desk with his papers and neatly lining up his empty two-a-night mini whiskey bottles on the TV cabinet, and Kelly often stood in the center of rooms for long stretches of time, listening to the ticking of her house or the humming of her refrigerator or the bratting of a motor boat passing on the bayou. When the two of them spoke, it was to deal with the details of the divorce, and they were sad and calm and quiet and business-like and mutually, wearily agreeable over assets.
One Sunday afternoon in the midst of the process, as Michael returned to the house to clean out his office downstairs, Kelly retreated to her office next to the master bedroom upstairs. Her office. She looks around. She has always worked. But Michael made it possible for her to work hard and not worry about making money. On the wall are photos of her with charity bigwigs and politicians. And framed thank-you letters. Make-A-Wish and the homeless. Habitat for Humanity and the symphony. The four causes she worked for over the years. Too many causes, perhaps. She was too restless. She should have stayed with one. But they all said thank you. And there were times—especially away from the offices, away from the fundraisers—at the hospitals and the shelters, at the building sites and the dressing rooms—there were times when they even said we love you. She thinks: how pathetic I have been.
She rises up and goes out of her office and into the bedroom and she closes the door and she locks it and she lies down on the bed and she begins to do the silent little number-mantra she’s used over the years to clear her head and sleep. Oh three oh six eight four. Oh three oh six eight four. Keep those imageless numbers sounding loudly in her head, and the image-laden, free-associating thoughts—the sleep killers—don’t have a chance to enter into her. But she sits up abruptly now. The numbers became simple sounds over the years, but the source of them lurches back into her now: March 6, 1984. Mardi Gras. The day she met Michael. She lies back down. She whispers softly to herself, “Oh shit.” She will keep the house but she will lose her sleep aid.
But she soon sleeps anyway. And she wakes. And she has no idea how long it has been. It feels like a long time. She assumes it’s been a long time. Her head feels pumped full of something hot and gaseous. She has a bitter taste in her mouth. She goes out of the bedroom and along the hall and down the stairs, and as she takes the last step into the foyer, Michael emerges from the hallway to his office. They both stop abruptly. It feels to her like the dark, alternate-universe equivalent to her stepping from the preparation room before her wedding, heading off to pee, and there he was. Out of place. Wanted and not wanted.
“You’re still here,” she says.
“I’m empty handed,” he says. “But it’s all sorted. I’ll have someone come and move the things.”
“I lost track of time is all. I slept.”
“Good,” he says. Softly.
They stand where they are. They don’t move.
“I was just leaving.” he says.
“All right.”
“My office …” he begins, but he doesn’t finish the thought. He tries to decide whether to speak the thing that struck him a short time ago, as he was preparing to leave his life in this house, in this marriage. Ever since that terrible early evening in the Quarter, he has said nothing, asked nothing, about what happened to make her go to another man. It happened. She sought it. The other man ended it. The last thing Michael wants to do—it would be impossible for him—is to do anything to persuade her to stay with him. It’s a thing the woman who is his wife either wants for herself or she doesn’t. His life is built on advocacy, but he realized as soon as he forced back those initial tears that for him there can be absolutely no advocacy in this circumstance. She has to want him freely, with no persuasion, or she doesn’t want him at all. Prima facie. And what he would say right now could be misconstrued as a kind of persuasion, and that’s why he is hesitating. But he wants her to know. “My office,” he says, “seems cleaner than it should be.”
“I haven’t touched a thing,” Kelly says
“I’m not suggesting you have.” His hands flare open before him. And of all things to think about right now, it strikes him that the gesture he just made has some deeply instinctive link back to the caves, a show of having no weapon. He’s thinking a little crazy now. He drags his mind back to this thought he had while emptying his office. “I was just realizing,” he says. He stops again. What has he realized? “I just realized that I never spent as much time working at home as I thought I would.” He should never have begun this. He knew not to say anything, he knew just to let her go, but now he’s sounding crazy, as well.
But Kelly knows what he’s trying to say. “That was never an issue,” she says. And if she has some inclination—some—yes, of course she has some—if she is in any way open at last to saying the things she could not say before, now that she isn’t asking for them anymore, now that she has herself burned down this life they’d made together, now that it makes no difference anyway if he actually loves her enough to say so freely and explicitly—if she has any impulse to explain how all of the unspoken things became a deep river-current that eventually swept her away, it vanishes abruptly with this cluelessness of his. She had sex with a man she h
ardly knew and in doing so destroyed the inner life of this marriage, and he thinks it might be about where he did his paperwork?
He’s not answering.
“Do you think it was about that?” she says, and she sounds to herself as if she’s speaking while choking.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“How?” Her throat has suddenly cleared and her voice rings loud around them both.
He keeps his own voice low but firm. “You had an affair and it’s the last thing in the world I expected and you said the marriage is over and we’re not talking about it and I’m fine with that but …”
“I’m sure you’re fine with that.”
“But I can’t be blamed …”
“Of course we’re not talking.” And Kelly is shouting.
And Michael wants to shout but he doesn’t, he finds the same control of his voice he finds in a courtroom, and he says, “I can’t be blamed if I’m wrong about some of the things …”
“So blame me,” she cries. “I deserve it. If you can’t love me then at least hate me.”
And he doesn’t say a word. He moves past her and he opens the front door and he goes out and he doesn’t think to close the door and she watches for a moment as he goes down the walk, and then she turns her face away from him and her hands were too slow, her hands wish now they’d clawed at his face as he passed, just to get him to do something in return, anything.
∼
And Michael says nothing in response to Laurie’s declaration of love. Not that there’s a recoil in him. He simply does not hear it for what it is. For Michael, it is a woman’s rhetoric. These are simply words. Easy currency for a woman. For him, she’s here and he’s here with her. That’s so because they find things in each other they each seem legitimately to enjoy. They’re going to their cottage and they will be naked together and they will join their bodies and they will unjoin them. They will fall asleep together. They will wake and they will rise in the morning. Good morning, how’d you sleep. Fine. They will eat breakfast in the restaurant that was once the living quarters for the post-war field workers. Are you enjoying yourself? Yes. And you? And now and then he will think about the retired Navy captain and also about Monday afternoon and jury selection for a pro-bono who will be tough to protect from bias. While Michael is with Laurie, he will think of no other woman in the same way that he is thinking of her. He will try to think of no other woman at all, particularly the woman at the center of a considerable pain in him. He will be open to the possibility of many more nights of joining and of sleeping and of waking with this woman he has just kissed. For him, that too is considerable. And his response to her rhetoric is to let his hand fall to the small of her back and to turn her and move them off toward the cottage. And for now, this gesture—particularly his hand in the small of her back—is sufficient for Laurie.
A Small Hotel Page 14