A Small Hotel Page 2

  “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” Michael says, sounding harsher than he wants, in spite of this being, prima facie, a joke.

  Laurie misses the allusion for the briefest of moments. His tone is flat. This is Michael, after all, whose silences and hard edges she is still trying to figure out, thinking he’s worth it, thinking this is a real man, not another overgrown boy. But the ongoing mystery of him means that in spite of her having introduced the frame of reference, she needs a moment to realize he’s just quoted an actual line from her favorite movie in the whole world of all time. She laughs. “My heard-hearted Rhett,” she says.

  He thinks to try but he can’t make himself unloosen his tone, not with his struggle to remain in this moment, with just Laurie. “Let me unpack the bags,” he says. “Not the baggage.”

  She studies his face. He’s the trial lawyer who has just sprung a little rhetorical trap and is playing it deadpan. She lifts her hand and extends her forefinger and puts the tip of it on the tip of his nose. She pushes, gently. He lets her do it.

  “I’m for that,” she says. She turns away.

  With her back to him now, Michael finds himself very conscious of the tip of his nose. He needed to make the point: for Laurie’s sake as well as his own, he can’t let Kelly into this room. But the tip of his nose makes him smile a faint, tender, involuntary smile at Laurie. A smile that she cannot see. And in this moment of Michael’s letting go to a gentle thing, Kelly spins to him in the center of an Oak Alley cottage bedroom, perhaps this very one, spins to him and leaps into his arms, leaps and hooks her legs around him. This was early on, in their first six months or so. Before they’d married. Before they’d even spoken of marrying. She was younger than Laurie is now, younger by five years.

  Kelly leapt into his arms and they kissed, and the kiss ended, and still she clung to him, and he carried her toward the bed, and she said, “Not yet,” and she began to hum. Michael has lost the tune over the years but he clearly remembers her humming, and he moved back to the center of the floor with her holding fast to him and the song she hummed was a waltz. Yes. That much still clings to this memory. A waltz, and he began to do the steps. He waltzed her around this room, around and around this room to the music she hummed softly in his ear, and he was glad that her head was pressed hard against the side of his because the last thing in the world he wanted was to let this woman he loved see tears in his eyes. It makes no difference that they were happy tears. Tears are tears. And he held her tight even after the music stopped. He pressed her close even when he felt her begin to try to straighten up to look him in the face. He held her closer, and she seemed happy to just settle back in, and he held her like that until his tears dried on their own and she would never know.

  ∼

  Kelly closes her bag. Zips it. Pulls it off the bed and steps toward the corner of the room to put the bag out of the way. On the night table sit the bottle of Scotch and the bottle of pills. She has moved the lamp to the far side of the tabletop, next to the clock radio, and she has placed the two bottles carefully side by side in the center of the empty space, their labels facing the bed. She has turned the clock face away, though she has carefully made the radio’s edges parallel with the tabletop. And she moves past all this now without a glance and she stops in the center of the floor at the foot of the bed and she stands very still and she is seeing nothing at all around her and she is feeling that silence again, but this time it has not rushed into her, she just realizes it’s there, filling her up. Her arms hang at her sides and she cannot imagine lifting them.

  But she does see the door now. And Kelly does let Kelly into the room. Kelly at twenty-four. The door opens and she steps in. She is wearing black stiletto boots and black leggings and a black mock-turtle tee and black cat ears. Her black mask is gone so she can cry, and her painted cat whiskers are streaked down her cheeks from tears that have only recently stopped. An arm’s length behind her is Michael. Thirty years old in this memory. He is wearing a Tulane Law sweatshirt. Both of them have strands of gold and purple and green beads around their necks. The French windows are closed but the muffled din of Mardi Gras fills the room like the smell of cigarette smoke in the bedding.

  Kelly takes only one more step and stops. It’s his room. She is trembling. She feels him come near her, though there is no touching. She senses him as you might sense a live oak in the pitch dark. She waits for him to put his arms around her. She wants that. But he does not touch her. And she wants that too, wants this to be how he is. He rescued her in the midst of Mardi Gras, but having done it, he does not touch her. Not yet. These are, however, not things she is thinking about. These things are simply playing in her body, alongside the trembling.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “That was scary for you,” Michael says.

  She turns to him. His eyes are the color of that oak in the dark. The trembling is bad and it’s time to be held. She knows this and he must too, because all at once she is in his arms and clinging to him, though she is aware how he holds his body back a little, holds her only with his arms and his chest and she likes him even more for this and she clings harder.

  Her head is upon his chest and from there she says, “I don’t even know your name to thank you.”

  “Michael Hays.”

  “I’m …” she begins.

  But he cuts her off. “Catwoman. I know. I’ve admired your work.”

  She pulls away a little to look at him, though they keep their arms around each other. “You mean you don’t favor that little shit in the bat costume?” she says.

  “Please,” he says. “I’m a lawyer.”

  She wants to laugh but things are still roiling in her. “Sorry. I just can’t stop shaking.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not that you’re a lawyer.”

  “Good,” Michael says.

  She puts her head back on his chest. “Kelly Dil-lard,” she says.

  He does not reply.

  “You didn’t know my name either,” she says.

  “Kelly Dillard,” he says. “You’re safe now.”

  And Kelly twenty-five years later breaks off the memory. The pulse of strength it takes to do this lets her lift an arm, draw her wrist across her forehead, which is moist from the warm, muggy late October that has pushed itself into her room. She thinks to close the French windows, thinks this to stop thinking anything else. Not now, she decides. She’ll keep them open. The courtyard below is silent. But is that someone laughing? Perhaps. Far off this time. Out in the Quarter somewhere. Perhaps. But it’s done now. She is managing her mind now.

  She moves to the side of the bed and sits. She turns her face to the night table. The Scotch is a deep amber and she looks closely at the Jacobean manor house on the label, a holly tree next to it, nearly as tall as the top of the pitched roof. This house must exist somewhere, she thinks. Two hundred years ago a woman stood at that third-floor window and looked out on her lawn and thought she could use a drink, could really use a nice old Scotch to burn her tongue. I could use a drink, Kelly thinks. But instead, there is laughter again somewhere. And Kelly’s mind resumes managing itself. She needs to go back to the way this all began between her and Michael, from the start, from the time when Michael was nearby but they had no idea each other even existed, when the smallest impulse in her—for a drink, for a pee—would have put her in a slightly different place at a slightly different time and her life would have been profoundly changed forever.

  She is standing outside the bar at the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon and there is laughter and shouting and a great gabbling roar of voices and Bourbon Street is tightly thronged and it is that first Mardi Gras and her black mask is still on and her whiskers are still pristine and she does not yet know Michael Hays exists in the world, and her sister Katie, four years older and the prime instigator of this visit, and Theresa, Katie’s life-long friend—the reassuringly-even-more-messed-up-than-I-am sort of friend—are huddled with her as sh
irtless frat boy revelers painted gold and purple lurch past, and Katie says in a shout above the din, “My head’s about to explode.”

  Theresa says, “Definitely time for a pit stop.”

  And now more frat boys. Maybe frat boys. Three of them, young certainly, not painted but drunk. They float by and they make meowing sounds at Kelly and veer too near her and she turns her back to them and they go on. Theresa says to her, “I should have done like you. I need a costume.” Both Theresa and Katie are dressed in jeans and sweatshirts.

  “I need a drink,” Katie says.

  “Me too,” Theresa says.

  Katie does a now-presenting hand-sweep toward the door nearby. “Bar,” she says.

  “Bar,” Theresa says.

  The sound of the crowd swells down the block. This is all still new to Kelly and she is not drunk and she has no need to get drunk at the moment. She feels surprisingly invisible here and she wonders if that’s one of the allures of Mardi Gras, to feel this way: unseen, unseeable, unknowable in the midst of the tumult of so many others. And the more intense the crowd, the more comfortably bound inside herself she feels. The crowd down Bourbon is chanting something and cheering and Kelly says, “You two go on in. I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes.”

  “You going to flash for some real beads?” Theresa says.

  “Catwoman’s above all that,” Kelly says, and she moves off toward the hubbub.

  People are packed too densely for her to push through in the street itself so she moves to the edge of the sidewalk, just beneath the overhanging balconies, finding the seam between the street crowd and the crowd that has oozed from the doors of bars and clubs. Underfoot is the squinch and slide of the gutter muck and the smells are strong of waste and spillage and spew, smells that will become for Kelly, in the years ahead, just a faint presence in the nose and in the finish of the scent of New Orleans, a not unpleasant thing in that form, like the smell of a skunk from a great distance out on a farm road can be not unpleasant, but near to her, in her first Mardi Gras, the smell is overwhelming and she struggles to keep her footing in her stilettos. But she makes progress toward the voluble center of the block.

  Voluble now with a cry in unison: “Show your tits! Show your tits!” Over and over the cry is sent upwards and Kelly is facing this compressed center of the crowd and she is beneath a wide Creole townhouse balcony with the objects of the crowd’s attention clearly located above. All eyes are turned upward, a hundred hands are raised, jiggling strands of beads. And right in front of her is a small cleared arc of space made by the crowd having moved away a bit from two young women. These two are the objects of a quieter entreaty from above. They are each of them a little too corpulent, not quite pretty in the face, one with a weak chin and a crooked nose, the other with close set eyes and thin lips, not homely but not quite pretty, women who never get looked at twice in the Florida town or the South Carolina town or the Illinois town where they live, but here they wear tank tops and they are the objects of intense and clamorous interest, and these bodies of theirs, which they stand before mirrors and criticize and rue for all the other days of the year, are suddenly desirable, are commodities of great value commanding a currency that everyone around them covets ardently, the beads, the good beads, the thick red and gold and purple and green beads with attachments, with miniature masks or babies or mermaids or devils or rubber duckies or bottles of Jim Beam, cheap shit novelty stuff at any other time of the year but on these few days they are the world’s wealth, they are physical objects of desire, they are the primo Mardi Gras throws, and the two young women can have these things because of their bodies and they can have wild adulation from faces and cameras and whoopings and cheers all around them, but first there is negotiation, there is naked capitalism, supply and demand, hard bargaining. And Kelly takes all this in and her sense of being alone here in the middle of this tumult, alone and untouchable in her own solitude, is very strong now.

  And the crowd cheers and the air is full of beads flying up, up and out of sight toward the balcony and caught above: tits have been shown up there just now and the two young women in the street are laughing and they look at each other and Kelly takes a step into the empty space, away from the two women but near them, she stands with those who are gawking and pleading, and she glances up, and all along the balcony is a row of mostly male faces turned downwards. But side by side in the center of the row are two young women and they are putting on their new beads, their nipples blinkered again somewhere beneath the dozens of heavy strands of accumulated wealth.

  And next to the women who flashed are two men with forearms draped in large-beaded plastic necklaces. Gold ones with the beads alternating three to one with black Darth Vader heads and purple ones with jester faces and another with king cake babies and another with a Big Bird pendant, and the men dangle these now at the two women before Kelly. She looks at them. The women are motioning to the beads they want. The business of this goes forward. They are demanding two strands. Not two for the two of them. Two for each of them. The man above is not giving in. The women gesture: one strand for each tit. He appreciates the argument, but he will not yield. One for each set. And the crowd is now joining in the negotiation. The faces have all turned to the two women from Panama City or from Aiken or from Joliet and they are secretaries in a real estate office or they are elementary school teachers or they are librarians and the crowd is crying out to them “Show your tits! Show your tits!” and the most wonderful beads are quivering above them and they look at each other and they laugh and they know that they are, in this moment, something they always dreamed they might be, and they raise their faces and grasp the bottoms of their tank tops and they lift the tops and their breasts are naked in New Orleans, their nipples wake wide-eyed to the pop of flashbulbs and the loud cheers of hundreds.

  And Kelly, fascinated thus far, now recoils inside, once she sees the deal being closed. She never quite indentified with the two young women. She is herself pretty, pretty enough and confident enough in her prettiness not to have that particular self-doubt, and the self-doubt she cannot name but that fills her up could never be assuaged by strangers, and she knows the value of the objects in the world and she desires many of them but not if Big Bird or Darth Vader are attached, not even in this sealed, self-defining world of Mardi Gras, because she has felt for a little while here that she is herself sealed and self-defining, but now it’s time to move away, go back to the bar and have a drink with her sister and her friend.

  But the crowd is shifting its focus, and Kelly finds that the two young women are sliding away and she has a sudden empty space around her and the way back to the sidewalk has new faces, new bodies, men who are focused on Kelly now and are shoulder-to-shoulder and she doesn’t want to have to push by them and she has a quick sharp-clawed scrabbling in her chest and she can hear a call of “Catwoman” from above and she looks up and one of the young men is dangling a long strand of purple beads with a Batman pendant and he makes a lifting motion for her to show her tits and the man next to him is making the same gesture and the two balcony women are laughing and dipping their heads at Kelly in encouragement and they pantomime the raising of their own tops and Kelly shakes her head no, not me, I won’t, and she turns, looking for a way out, she makes a complete circle, looking for a way out but seeing only the tightly compacted crowd, and all the faces are on her and the cameras are raised and the circle she makes does not look to anyone like panic and the urge to flee, it looks like a show, like an appeal for encouragement, and the crowd takes that up with the cry of “Show your tits! Show your tits!”

  Kelly might as well be totally naked, right now, right where she stands, her skin prickles with vulnerability and her limbs are crazy restless and the men blocking the sidewalk are scarier to her, more personal, than the street crowd, and she turns around once more, decided already that she has no choice but to lunge toward these very voices demanding her nakedness, and she raises her hands before her and lowers her face
and she throws herself forward and she will pummel and weep and press her way out of this space no matter what.

  And the crowd parts at once, swallowing Kelly into its midst, and more women slide into the marketplace behind her and the crowd instantly shifts its attention and forgets why they absorbed this woman in black so readily and she is trapped again, tightly bound in by bodies on all sides in the middle of Bourbon Street, bodies oblivious to her and to the reason she is now among them.

  She presses on, tacking through the dense currents, following any little opening in the general direction of the bar for as far as possible and then shifting into the next opening, and in this way she is making progress, and the chanting and cheering is fading into the distance behind her. And for all the intense and indiscriminate jostling of a Mardi Gras middle-of-the-street crowd, it’s rare that anyone there will consciously put a hand on a stranger, so she’s doing better now, she’s even able to convince herself she’s had an adventure at Mardi Gras, she’s got a good story to tell.

  And she finds herself seated on the side of the bed in the Olivier House and it’s twenty-five years later and she thinks: I’m telling the story to myself now. And she wonders why. She should have a drink. But instead, here’s this story playing itself out. Michael is about to appear for the first time. That’s the prompt. Meeting him, of course, has ultimately led to this present moment. But her mind has backed her up farther than necessary to introduce her future husband, and it occurs to her the reason is this: the bag is Gucci, the dress is Chanel; I’ve shown my tits. But that feels wrong, somehow. Too simple. The two librarians wanted to be desired. But at the moment they lifted their tops to show their naked breasts, weren’t their yearnings running deeper than that? And she stops this thinking. Stops it.

  Michael still insists on presenting himself, however. Kelly emerges at last from that Bourbon Street crowd and she goes into the bar on the corner of Toulouse, and there she learns yet another thing about Mardi Gras: you don’t split up and expect to find each other again. Kelly makes a thorough tour of the frat and sorority drunks, and a Yoda drinking with a Ken and Barbie, and the Blues Brothers in a corner table—half a dozen of them—singing the chorus of “Rubber Biscuit,” and the dazed and queasy women in the toilet at the back. But Katie and Theresa are gone.