A Small Hotel Read online

  Kelly doesn’t want to drink alone. She’s had enough close encounters with strangers. The three of them have an arranged meeting place if they get split up anyway, back at their hotel room across Canal Street. She steps out of the bar, and with the tumult on Bourbon and with Toulouse Street to her right that, by comparison, is only thinly and casually populated, she strolls off toward Rampart.

  But almost at once a loud, slurred meowing begins behind her.

  She knows not to stop, not even to look. But she takes only a few more steps and on each side of her a body rushes by and the two converge before her to block her way, and she stops. The two young men look faintly familiar in a fleetingly-witnessed-crime-and-now-pick-them-out-of-a-lineup sort of way. She remembers. They are the drunks who meowed at her earlier. Not frat-boyish really. Spiky hair and bad teeth. Townies somewhere. Grease monkeys and 7-Eleven clerks. They are blondish and could be brothers. They are holding drinks in Styrofoam cups and they are draped in beads. The taller, heavier, older of the two shifts his eyes briefly over Kelly’s shoulder. She remembers there was a third and she knows he’s behind her. And there is a clutching in her throat as palpable as if one of them has grabbed her there with his hand.

  The taller of the two says, “The cat. The cat’s back.”

  The smaller says, “Catwoman. Cat girl.”

  Kelly takes a single tentative, sliding step to the left and the two men shift with her.

  “Whoa,” the older one says. “You’re all dressed up for us.”

  “Looking good,” the other says.

  In a low, calm way the older one says, “Show your tits.”

  His little brother struggles to take a cheap strand of beads from the tangle on his neck. The older brother looks Kelly steadily in the eyes. “Show your tits,” he says again.

  The other one stops struggling with the beads and says, “Tits. Can you show us six? Do cats have six?”

  “Two,” the older one says. “It’s Catwoman.”

  “Two’s better.”

  “Show us.” This comes from behind Kelly. The third man.

  “Show your tits,” they all three say. And they begin to chant it. “Show your tits. Show your tits.”

  The chanting seems less a threat than the older one’s quiet demand and Kelly takes another step to the side and even as she thinks to run, her legs wobble, her knees won’t hold firmly, her ankle turns a little in the stilettos. And the third man appears, a dark-haired one, stocky, and the three shoulder up and the older blondish one, still the leader, says “Tits first” and Kelly makes a little movement to the side again but the three of them together are quick, they shift too, keeping in front of her and she’s having trouble drawing a breath and the three of them don’t chant this time but say in low, intense unison, “Show your tits.”

  Then an arm is around her waist and a man’s voice says “The cat’s with me” and the arm is strong and presses her gently but firmly to move. Instantly the leader of the men takes a step toward them saying “Who’s this asshole …” and the man holding Kelly blocks the other man with a carefully modulated stiff arm, not quite touching him but firmly placed between them, meaning serious business but not quite aggressive enough to start a fight, not yet at least, and he says in an elaborately friendly tone “Chill out, man” and this is all going very fast for Kelly and she is trying to catch up and she has not even looked at this new man, and she does that now. She sees Michael’s profile for the first time, the sweet hard prominence of chin and brow, and at this moment she doesn’t know who he is or, in fact, if his intentions are any better than the others’. But she can sort that out later. She shifts closer into him and he’s saying to the leader of the three, in that friendly tone, “It’s all just a great party here.”

  Michael again gently presses her to move and they do, together, taking a step up Toulouse, but the stocky one lurches in front of them, blocking the way, and the man says, “Hey, this is between us and her.” Michael’s arm slides from around Kelly’s waist and he gently elbows her away from him. She complies. She takes a few steps, goes up onto the sidewalk, but she does not keep going, as Michael perhaps wishes for her to do. She turns and watches.

  Michael too has shifted a step away, but not in retreat. He squares up to confront all three at once, not just the dark one who blocked their retreat. “Gentlemen,” he says, “there are plenty of easy tits around the corner. You don’t want to do it the hard way in this town. You’ll spill your beer.”

  And now everything comes to a stop. Michael and the three men stare at each other in silence, not moving. The drunks are weighing as best they can the risks and the gains. The only movement is the smaller blond looking briefly down at the cup in his hand, apparently to ponder the spilling of his beer. Michael is wide in the shoulders. Michael has thick upper arms. Michael is utterly motionless and Kelly cannot see his face, but ten years later she will watch him from behind in a courtroom at a murder trial and she will not see his face but he will be staring down a cop he suspects faked some evidence and she will think that his face is the same as it was on the first day they met.

  The silence between the four men persists. In reality it is probably not more than a few seconds, but it’s a long time, a very long time, for Kelly. As an observer she is free to begin to flush hot and grow limb-restless with fear for herself and for this man trying to help her. And she knows the situation needs some new element, something Michael did not presume to add himself, either from macho simplicity or from deference to her. But she can do this.

  “Darling,” she says. “Will you promise never to leave me alone again at Mardi Gras? I don’t care how bad you have to piss.”

  The three drunken men glance to her: if the asshole who’s messing with their game isn’t just a stranger trying to be a hero, if in fact he’s really with the bitch, then the situation changes somewhat. Not necessarily a lot—this is a guy thing now, with its own life—but enough that Michael recognizes a brief opportunity. He turns his back on the men and takes a step toward Kelly.

  “Just stay where I put you next time,” he says.

  She takes a step toward him and there is a rush in her from its being time to try to walk away. And from the man’s face. She is seeing Michael’s face straight on for the first time. His eyes are dark and heavy-lidded and steady on her and the rush in her may be mostly about his face, even the walking away part is about his eyes now. His arm is around her again and they take a step together up Toulouse and another, and now that he’s holding her she finds she’s starting to let go to what’s been happening and the trembling is beginning, she might well tremble already at his touch, but this is mostly about what’s been happening with these other men and she is wobbly in the legs once more.

  Michael says, low, “Let’s move a little briskly.”

  And they do. They push on faster. No cries or curses follow them. Surely macho-crazed drunks in pursuit would make a loud show of it. And even with the din of Mardi Gras coming from Bourbon Street, she does hear their own feet brisking on the pavement, carrying them away.

  Michael brings his face close to hers. “That was smart, what you said.”

  Kelly wants to reply, but the farther they get from the danger, the more she realizes this incident is over, the more she trembles, and she can’t quite shape any words. And this man—Michael, the man she will marry a little over a year later—this man seems to her to understand everything.

  “Look,” he says. “I’m staying in a hotel up ahead. Would you like to go there and collect yourself? If you prefer, I can just put you in the room and disappear.”

  And Kelly finds her voice. “Thanks,” she says. “Yes. But don’t disappear.”

  ∼

  On one side of the four-poster rice bed lies Laurie’s hoop-skirted gown in white watered silk and trimmed in crimson pleated satin. On the other side of the bed, propped up against the backboard, is Michael, still dressed in the black jeans and polo shirt he wore for the drive. He has just put
his cell phone into its holster and laid it on the night table: no message from his lawyer that the morning hearing, the finalizing of the divorce, is done with. Not that he needs an instant report. Max knows Michael wants to just get away from all that. Max can handle it. Michael plays that little litany a bit more: It’s what a lawyer is for, especially a lawyer’s lawyer. Let this thing go.

  And Laurie emerges from the bathroom, damp and wrapped in a towel knotted at the center of her chest. She stands at the foot of the bed and Michael looks at her and she looks back at him. This goes on for a few seconds, and Laurie wonders if Michael needs to be a movie star to be fully understood: where his face is ten feet high, maybe the nothing that is so often there would actually become a nuanced something.

  She smiles the faintest of smiles at him. “So if I put my hand here,” she says, putting her hand on the knot of the towel, “would you sit up straight and widen your eyes and start breathing heavy?”

  “Of course,” Michael says.

  She waits. Her hand is still there. He is not moving. His face is not changing.

  “Well?” she says.

  Michael makes a minute movement of his head, a slight tilt and release and return to his previous uprightness. A movie-actor-sized shrug. “That’s just the hypothetical demonstration,” he says.

  “You are a funny bunny,” Laurie says. “John Wayne by way of Clarence Darrow by way of Mount Rushmore.”

  “Drop your towel, my dear. I won’t disappoint you. But you were anxious to turn into Scarlett, and the night is long.”

  “You’re right, darling. This should wait. We’ll make it a real occasion.” She turns her back to him and takes a step toward the bathroom, saying, “You’re not ready.” She tosses this over her shoulder but with an admonitory firmness.

  “I’m fast,” he says.

  “I hope you’re talking about getting dressed,” she says, and without looking back at him, she whips off her towel. She hasn’t yet fully figured out her handsomely ripening Michael Hays, Esquire, but be that as it may, the sight of her perfect ass seems a relevant point to make at the moment.

  And with the sudden showing of the long, sweet nakedness of the back of her body, Michael’s breath catches, and then, as the bathroom door clicks shut, an afterimage blooms and clarifies into flesh and his breath catches again at the sight of Kelly, in his room at the Olivier House the morning after their first Mardi Gras: she has risen and she is moving away from the bed and she ripples through him, the long, sweet nakedness of her, down the indent of her spine to the sweet fullness of her backside cleavage, and she vanishes around the corner of the wall on her way to the bathroom. Michael is left propped on pillows against the wrought iron headboard, and he turns his face to the open French windows and to the striking silence there, the silence of Ash Wednesday, the silence after the clamorous rush of Fat Tuesday, like the silence after sex.

  He rests for a time in both those silences, and then he hears the soft whisk of Kelly’s approach, and she is beside him again and her arm slides over his chest and the long length of her leg falls gently upon his and her head comes to rest against his shoulder. He slips his arm around her back and lays his hand on the point of her hip and presses her close. But he keeps his eyes on the dove-gray sky out the windows.

  And they lie like this for a while, until Kelly says, “You’re a quiet man.”

  “Am I?” Michael thinks about it. He has already spoken to her of his work in the firm. And of Pensacola and Florida politics and even, a bit, of the fishing in the Gulf. “I think I talk a lot,” he says.

  “When you make love you’re quiet,” she says. “I hope I didn’t embarrass you.”

  “You scream charmingly,” he says.

  “I should give it up for Lent.”

  “Can you?”

  “Just the screaming,” Kelly says.

  He smiles out the windows at this. Then he initiates a shifting of their bodies to lie facing each other, the official small-talk going-on-with-things after having made love for the first time.

  He ripples again, from her eyes: they are large and they are as dark as the Gulf in the night and they are wide with the newness of their intimacy. On her forehead is a thumbed cross of ashes.

  He lifts his hand and gently draws a fingertip across the ashes. “You went out early.”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Are you Catholic?”

  “No,” she says. “It’s just a remembrance. That we all die.”

  “Today only in the Elizabethan sense,” he says.

  “That’s why I’ll never give up sex for Lent,” she says. “It’s already the little death.”

  “And that’s why I’m quiet when we do it,” Michael says.

  Kelly smiles and she puts a hand in the center of his chest and she pushes him flat and she glides over him and rises above him and she bends to kiss him.

  Michael sits up abruptly in his cottage at Oak Alley and he swings his legs off the bed. He does this to stop the memory. He sits there, a little hunched, and he tries to think about putting on a damned-fool of an antebellum swallow-tail dress coat, but he is still kissing Kelly on Ash Wednesday morning, 1984.

  ∼

  And Kelly has, in the flow of her own memory, moved to the same Ash Wednesday morning, and she is screaming as something trembles into focus, into startled clarity inside her, trembles in the place where their bodies are joined and trembles outward into her limbs, her fingertips, her toes. And the silence of this man, which she has noticed at the back of her mind, deepens now even as she forgets about his silence and everything else, and her eyes are squeezed shut. So her memory does not contain—nor does her understanding of this man account for—the fact that his eyes are open and holding steady on her as his body clarifies itself in its own rushing heartbeat of a way. And she will never realize—in all the times of love-making in the quarter of a century before them—that he always keeps his eyes only on her face when his moment begins.

  As for Kelly sitting on the side of the bed twenty-five years later, her memory has dissolved into the quiet time after they first made love. They are entwined on the bed and Michael turns his face to her and his fingertip is tracking across her forehead.

  “You got up early,” he says.

  She understands what his fingertip has found. She lifts her own hand, takes his, brings that fingertip to her mouth and kisses it, finishing the kiss, on an impulse, by parting her lips and touching the ash there with her tongue, which yields a faint texture but no taste. Death should have a strong taste, should burn on the tongue. This is too easy.

  “So you’re Catholic?” Michael says.

  “Did I wake you?” she says.

  He shakes his head no.

  “I’m not Catholic,” she says. “I just do the ashes as a remembrance. We all die.”

  “Today only in the Elizabethan sense,” he says.

  “Now that’s a good reason not to give up sex for Lent. The little death.”

  She thinks she sees a tiny pop of his eyebrows at this. He didn’t expect her to get the joke. She sings softly, “There’s always something there to remind me.”

  He doesn’t laugh or even smile. He looks at her steadily. But surely in that steadiness is affection. Even if her little outburst of song didn’t charm him into a smile, this steadiness has to be good. And she makes a mistake. As unthinkingly as touching her tongue to the ashes, she says, “Are you glad we met?”

  She regrets it at once. His face does not change. Not a flicker of difference. This came out of nowhere for him, she realizes. But his face doesn’t even show surprise. That’s a good sign surely. But there is this scrabbling of need that’s come upon her. “Yes?” she asks.

  And as tiny as the pop of his eyebrows a few moments ago, there is a brief, quick lift of the corners of his mouth. A minute smile. “You know the answer to that,” he says.

  This is way short of what she needs at the moment. But they made love. He saved her and was gentle with her
afterwards, not taking advantage of her vulnerability, not pushing for sex, ready to vanish from his own rooms if she wished and then from her life, but she asked him to stay and he held her and they made love—beginning with the same impulse in both of them at the same moment—impossible even to say who started it—and he thinks her screams are charming when she comes—he said this just a few moments ago, when she was feeling embarrassed. So all this is enough. For now. This is enough.

  And in the present, Kelly abruptly rises from the side of the bed. She wants to shout something across the years, some denial to her stupid young self, wants to shout that aloud now. But she doesn’t. She struggles to stay silent, to stand perfectly still, and she succeeds. Of course she does. She’s not crazy.

  ∼

  Michael has not moved from the side of the bed as Laurie hums in the bathroom. He has stopped kissing Kelly on the Ash Wednesday morning when all that would happen between them truly began. He should start dressing for Laurie, but he is putting on a tuxedo now for Kelly. He steps from the master bedroom cedar closet in their Craftsman house on the Bayou Texar. They’ve moved in at last. The muted pitch to its gabled roof, the exposed but rounded and polished rafters, the redwood shingles: all this feels like him and he appreciates that Kelly has let the house be him in these things, without his having to persuade her. She is presently campaigning for an Arkansas governor trying to be president who hasn’t got a rat’s-ass chance of the nomination, and later in the evening Michael will watch as Bill Clinton shakes Kelly’s hand with both his and he will watch how Clinton continues to hold that handshake for the longest time, even as the two of them talk on, and Michael will see her looking up into this man’s eyes and on the night when the man wins she will be curled up on their couch with Michael and she will weep and sing along: Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. But now Michael steps out of the closet and he hates wearing this tuxedo and she knows it but he’s doing it for her—he simply pressed his lips tight together when she asked and he saw her eyes go to his lips and he knew she was seeing his feelings there and he knew she knew how he hates dressing up formally but how he’ll do it for her—and now he steps from the closet and she comes to him and looks up into his eyes and she holds his gaze for a moment, smiling faintly, and she straightens his tie. “Thank you,” she says. And no more needs to be said, and he is content. He thinks this is a moment when it is all good. As good as it can be between a man and a woman. He has quietly done this simple domestic thing on her behalf. She says two words to acknowledge that. They look at each other. His tie is straight, though such a thing isn’t important to him and even makes him oddly uncomfortable and she knows it and her little smile says to him she’s all right with his not caring about his tie but he will let it stay straight tonight for her, he’ll even stop before the mirror before he leaves the restroom at the fundraiser and he’ll straighten it himself, on her behalf. And he is not jealous of her joy at shaking Bill Clinton’s hand or of the man holding on too goddam long. He trusts Kelly. He trusts her instinctively and completely.