A Small Hotel

by Robert Olen Butler

  As they cross the last hundred yards of tarnished-silver ground to the cottage, Michael tries to stay focused on the present moment with this young woman, and it is true that the soft clinging of her, and the moon-shadow of pressure remaining on his lips from the kiss, and the imminence of their nakedness are beginning to rustle in his body. And her silence now. Her silence is part of this readying of his body and mind for the first night of full togetherness with a new woman. After a long while, after many years, it is made new. He fends off the past. There has already been too much of that. But the things he responds to in women in what feel to him like instinctive ways are running strong in him, things he has, however, learned from a multitude of memories that are too small individually and happened too long ago for him ever to recall.

  His mother moving silently in the dark next to him, just that, along a street thick with the early heat of a Florida spring night and the smell of Confederate jasmine, porch lights lit, passing distantly, and his mother at his side keeping still, and he wakes and leaps from bed as blood flows from the ceiling, a moment ago from a deer hung for dressing but from the ceiling now, from the light fixture and into his bed and she takes him in her arms and his father’s silhouette fills the doorway and Michael does not know that the man has moments ago put his hand roughly on her arm to prevent her going in to a boy who needs to be a man and she defied her husband this time, for once, and he warned her at least not to say anything, not to prattle on like usual, and she agreed to that so he would let go of her arm—though his hand had loosened already, it had not yet let go—and she did go in and Michael never knew any of this occurred outside his door as he pants heavily, as if his heart will stop, still making sounds that he knows shame the shadow in the doorway—that shame his father—and his mother comes to him and she holds him and then she leads him back to bed and she sits beside him and his heart slows and the blood is gone, the blood was never there, and it’s all right, and he takes in her silence, he rests now in her silence, and he too has come to prefer this, from when he was very small, from the sharp sideways looks and abrupt shushings from his father to his mother when Michael was just beginning to gather the momentum of his own words, when he was hearing the rhythms and flow of his mother’s voice in his own head, when he was open to imitating them, and she always fell silent when commanded, teaching Michael how to learn what’s right and good, by yielding to this man, and she moves beside him along a street on a spring night and they are going somewhere together just the two of them and the air is sweet and he loves his mother and these memories are long vanished from Michael in all but the dark and the sweet rustle of a woman and the silence.

  ∼

  “I’m naked,” Kelly says aloud. She crosses her arms over her chest and covers her nipples with her hands. How is it that I’m naked? This she says only in her head. She is standing in the middle of the floor at the foot of the bed. She looks around her. She does not find her clothes. She turns. The French windows are open. But no one can see. There are only moonlit rooftops and, in the distance, a Marriott and a Sheraton floating near each other in red neon with a gold speckling of their room lights below. She lowers her hands. But she wants to be clothed now. She moves along the bed and she sees her dress crumpled before the night table, as if she has already taken her Scotch and her pills and she has simply vanished, a dark rapture that has carried off her body and left her clothes behind.

  She goes to her dress and picks it up and lifts it and lets it fall over her. She is unaware of the lick of its silk going down her body. She is very aware of the bottle and the pills, but she goes up onto the bed on her knees and she turns and sits, her back against the iron headboard. The wrought-iron bars press hard at her and she leans forward and twists around and uprights a pillow there. She straightens and leans back again. She understands the irony. She’s protecting her body from this minor discomfort even as she intends to send that body to the grave. Tonight. Soon. But that will be just a larger-scale plumping of a pillow. Once she’s there, the grave is painless. And living isn’t. Living is full of pain now. More so now. Much more now. Now that she’s destroyed her family. Sam loved having a family. Sam needs a family. She’s let Sam down. Horribly. Forever. She’s put a poisonous thing inside herself that’s a far worse poison than a handful of pain pills because it preserves her consciousness, heightens her consciousness, keeps her awake forever to all that she’s lost.

  These are words in Kelly’s head. She’s talking it out in there abstractly, and she realizes that it’s safer that way. She’s reasoning a thing out that in fact lives beyond words. It lives in her limbs and her chest and her face and her loins. That’s the terrible power of what she’s done. There are no words to fix it. No words to properly describe it. But it was words withheld, it was words not spoken, it was silence that led her to this. “No.” She says this aloud, into the room. Her voice is low but it feels as if she’s just yelled. No need to yell. The point is, she says to herself in her head, it’s never been about words. They’re just signifiers. And the absence of words signifies too. She has never been loved. She has never been worthy of that.

  She needs a drink.

  But she doesn’t take it yet.

  The final afternoon when she and a man she hardly knew had sex in a cheap motel and she failed to measure up, when she failed to keep this man beside her no matter how often he said the words she always thought would fix her, that final afternoon they’d come to the motel separately. He’d suggested that. She didn’t realize it, but she had already failed to measure up. He said he loved her a number of times that afternoon but it was already not true. It had never been true. He had suggested they come separately because he didn’t want to have an awkward trip together afterwards. So she gets into her car and she drives out of the motel parking lot and onto I-10 and she heads east, back to Pensacola. Back to her house. And to what else? Back to what life? There are no words for that, either. She is rushing at 70 miles an hour along a highway toward nothing. And quite slowly, quite gently, she closes her eyes. She holds her eyes shut and looks at this darkness. She looks and she waits and she looks. She waits for what feels like a very long time, and then there is a vibration in her hands and a rough, deep pulsing sound fills the car, and she simply opens her eyes. She has drifted off the road—she expected that, surely—that’s what she was seeking, of course—but the turnpike wake-up grooves have opened her eyes by reflex, and by reflex, by weary inertia, she keeps them open, and she guides the car back onto the highway. And she knows how stupid she is, how self-absorbed, to have endangered others.

  She needs a drink.

  Kelly turns to the night table, and she pours herself some Scotch. A couple of fingers, more or less. She doesn’t want to lose her focus now from simple drunkenness and wake to another day when she has to start all this over again. It’s better at night. It’s better now. But she will begin with a little more Scotch. She lifts the glass from the table and sits back against the pillow—she is quite comfortable, actually—like those moments driving fast and smooth and blind, simply looking into the darkness within her own eyes.

  She sips her Scotch. She closes her eyes. She touches her hair. She should have done her hair. Not long ago, when she was already as sad as this, she did her hair for herself, for her birthday. She sat like this with a Scotch, on the deck of their house. Of her house. He let the house go to her. He never said. He never said but she knew. She had defiled this place he’d built for them. He could have forced a sale to equally divide the asset, but he didn’t. He wanted her to have it but he never said why. She knew it was a rebuke. And she let other assets go to him in compensation. He made the money. That was his mistress. She endured the long whiling of silence spent in her house as he made the money. She didn’t want to move out of the house. She couldn’t face that. She puts her hair up in a French twist for her birthday, and she puts on her makeup. She sits down at twilight and lets the dark come upon her. She thinks she hears the beating of wings, the slow
beating of the wings of an egret flying past in the darkness. Do egrets fly in the dark? She can’t imagine. And she thinks of the first hours she spent with her future husband. On the deck of her house and on the bed in Room 303, she thinks of the first hours of Kelly and Michael.

  He rescued her. He took her to his room at the Olivier House. He did not hold her till she said he could and then it was to stop her trembling. To make her feel safe. She stopped trembling. She felt safe. And then they sat in the two chairs on either side of the French windows, and the last of the daylight was fading outside. They talked small and they laughed some and they kept the windows closed so they could hear each other, as the Mardi Gras din pressed into the room. And the small talk finally accumulated enough that they could feel they’d met properly, that they’d done enough to suggest doing a little bit more. In a mutual pause, Michael looks out the window and he says, “Do you think we should try again out there?”

  “Yes,” Kelly says.

  “You sure it’s okay? You’ve been through it.”

  Kelly smiles at this sweetly solicitous man. She says, “The operative word is we.”

  “Of course.”

  And so they go out. They move along Toulouse and turn onto Bourbon, and for the rest of the evening neither of them even gets a drink. They simply drift together in the crowd, at the edge a little faster but also content to nudge and wedge and stand and float in the density of bodies in the middle of the street, watching, apart together even in the midst of all this, holding hands, and as midnight nears, they squeeze out of the mass, onto the sidewalk, and a blues band is playing somewhere nearby and the two of them find a small square of sidewalk, barely enough to flare their elbows but a space of their own nonetheless, and the music is something Kelly can no longer remember but it is a fast song, an old New Orleans blues song that suffers the blues with a fast tempo, and Michael puts his hand in the small of her back and he is turning her to face him and that hand on her back comes up higher and her first thought is that he is about to kiss her, and she is ready for that, she raises her face to him, but his other hand has taken her hand now and he lifts it and she realizes he wants to dance, and he presses her to him and they move in tiny steps on their small circle of pavement and they dance a slow dance, as if this is the Stylistics playing, as if this is a dance at the American Legion Hall and they are slow-dancing to “Betcha By Golly Wow.” Michael has taken her in his arms and is dancing with her and he is defying the crowd and the noise and the drunkenness and the band’s insistence on being fast and loud. He has his own ideas about the two of them. And Kelly is happy in that moment. Kelly is very happy. And how could she have known? How could she have ever known? She will never again in her life feel as loved as she does before she even knows for sure she is in love, before she has even kissed her future husband for the first time.

  And now this.

  But for taking her in his arms and dancing slow with her in the middle of Mardi Gras, she will say good-bye to him, she will apologize for what she has done and for what she will do. And with that intention comes a resolution: if she hears his actual voice, if he answers the phone, she will simply say I’m sorry and she will hang up. Because she needs nothing from him. And she knows now what she must do.

  She sets her empty glass on the night stand, careful to avoid the pills.

  Her phone. Her purse. She rises from the bed, stands unsteadily. She cannot remember having her purse. She’s afraid she left it somewhere out there in the dark. Perhaps by the river. She moves along the bed and she sees the purse on the floor near the foot of the bed.

  She goes to it. She bends to it. She pushes her hand through the clutter of unidentifiable objects inside, looking for the phone, and her fingertips touch the fluted metal tube of her lipstick and for the briefest of moments she pauses with the thought that she will never look at herself in the mirror again, never put color on her lips, never run a brush through her hair, and in that moment she is sad for herself, as if she were some other woman, some other woman who has reached the end of what she can bear in this life and Kelly is sad for her, and her hand moves on and it finds the phone and she draws it out and she rises and she turns and she faces the open windows. Beyond, New Orleans is silent. Utterly silent. She opens the phone and dials Michael’s cell.

  ∼

  And it does not make a sound. It is holstered and muted, attached to Michael’s belt and lying in the heap of his trousers across the room from the bed where Michael and Laurie are making love, Laurie happy to have at last guided herself on top and Michael uncomfortable still about being on the bottom but getting over it, though his eyes are not on the woman he is connected to, unlike all the times he made love to Kelly through the years, all the times he watched her face while she was unaware, closing her own eyes as she always did, squeezing them shut and furrowing her brow as if listening to some distant voice she could barely hear but that was trying to tell her something important. Michael’s own eyes with Laurie are shifted slightly away, looking at the blank expanse of the ceiling but without seeing what’s before him, without quite being in his body or in this moment, and he does want that, he does want to be here, be here vividly with Laurie, but he finds—a little bit to his surprise—that his body is so imprinted with Kelly’s that the difference of shape and texture and smell and sound of this new woman distances him from all this. Though not in any way that Laurie would notice. I will adjust, he thinks. And he closes his eyes. And Kelly is in him and they are in a dark room and she is making a sound beneath him like something hurts her bad or like something gives her great joy and she herself cannot tell them apart and so she has to cry out in a way such that no one listening could ever understand what she feels. She is a terrible, everlasting mystery, and though Michael cares what she is feeling, he knows he can never know, and he adjusts, he adjusts. And as he listens to Kelly beneath him while Laurie cries out above him, the phone stops silently flashing, and it is never seen, buried as it is in Michael’s clothes scattered before sex.

  ∼

  And very soon thereafter, Michael and Laurie have finished and both their bodies quake softly from all that, and she is lying beside him, and she curls against him and his arm goes around her, and she says, “Michael, Michael, you were …” and she pauses. She pauses to tease him but pauses also to find just the right words.

  Michael waits, and he realizes, a little to his surprise, that he is indifferent to what might follow. He always wondered what Kelly thought of him in bed. More than wondered. He wanted very much for her to find him good at this. But he could never ask. If he asked and he got the answer he desired, he would never be able to take it as anything but a pretty lie. She had to say it on her own or it could never be said. But with Laurie, ready now to tell him of her own free will, he feels no welling of interest, no fear either. It is what it is.

  “Stoically great,” Laurie says.

  He looks at her. He has no idea what that means.

  Laurie lifts her free hand and puts the tip of her finger on the tip of his nose and gently pushes. “That’s a compliment,” she says.

  He looks back to the ceiling. He pulls her close.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “For my stoicism?”

  “For taking me seriously.”

  “Of course,” he says.

  “That’s Michael. ‘Of course’, he says. That’s my Michael.”

  He doesn’t want to talk about who or what he is. But he knows Laurie is trying to be good to him. He gives her a little squeeze. A little thanks-but-let’s-move-on squeeze.

  She says, “You were so sad that day at the office when I realized I had to get closer to you. So sad. That was about your third trip to Mr. Bloom over the divorce.”

  “Can we stay in this moment? Just the two of us?” Michael says.

  Laurie lifts her head. “Oh darling, of course. I’m sorry.”

  She nuzzles her head back into the hollow between his shoulder and chest.

  He want
s to be quiet now. He wants to be quiet for a long while. He wants to be by himself, to be honest. He wants to kiss her sweetly good night and then go somewhere else. He realizes this with a little inner flinch. But he knows he will stay with her. His rational mind is glad he has a woman now. But everything else about him feels spent. He feels he needs to be away from her for a little while in order to want her again. He wishes he felt otherwise. So he will stay. But he is glad there is a moment of silence, and another. He is glad Laurie is capable of being quiet.

  “I’m sleepy,” she says.

  “Good,” he says. “I am too.”

  “I have to say this first, though.”

  He does not reply but turns his head slightly in her direction. Let’s get it over with.

  She lifts her head from him, rises up on an elbow. “I said something outside. I need to adjust that.”

  He knows what she’s referring to. For a moment he thinks things will be all right. He has prior evidence of her knack for knowing what he needs. He is relying on that now. He needs for her to pull back from what she said.