But this thing did not end this morning as it was supposed to, and a vision of her rises in his head like river fog. He is standing alone in the grass between St. John’s Episcopal and its parish house and he is smoking a cigarette and nodding as civilly as he can to people from both sides of the aisle telling him how lucky he is. Very civilly, actually, given how badly he wants to separate himself from all this and smoke a cigarette in this hour before he marries Kelly. He feels kindly about all these well-meaning people but he just wants to be left alone for now, Kelly herself being the only person in the world he’d be willing to put out this cigarette for and talk to. Yes: he wants to talk to her even more than smoke. And he drops the cigarette and stubs it out and he heads for the parish house. He has no clear plan in mind. He’s not supposed to see the bride. He knows that she and her girls are in the parish house, but restrooms are over there too and so he has to take a piss and he will just go over with that intention and if something happens, it happens.
Michael steps into the reception hall. To his left, through a half-opened door, are the sounds of women’s voices. Ahead, across the hall, is a turning and the corridor to the restrooms. He hesitates. And then he moves to the doorway, very carefully approaching from a bit to the side, staying out of sightlines. He arrives, and, incrementally, he looks in.
A fluttering of bridesmaids in powder blue with others at makeup tables beyond. This is risky. But sitting at the center make-up table, her side to him, is Kelly in white. Her chestnut hair has been poodle-permed into a mass of tight curls and long twisting spirals. He has never seen her like this and she is at once movie-star glamorous, which he likes, and suddenly unfamiliar to him, which he does not. But he can see the clean sharp lines of her profile, which is very familiar indeed, which he loves to look at when she is unaware, the vision of which rests gentle in his mind even standing on the berm of the levee before the Oak Alley Plantation.
But in the parish hall on his wedding day, as Michael reassures himself by focusing on her profile, Kelly suddenly rises from her chair and gathers her gown to move in his direction. He takes a quick backward step and another and he turns and takes another step, toward the bathroom corridor. But then he stops. He came to see her. He turns again, to face the doorway.
He waits for a long moment, and he begins to doubt that she’s coming out, but then she emerges and she sees him and she straightens in surprise.
“Michael,” she says, the word said with a balance of abruptness and eager lilt that make it a rebuke but with a sweet taint of pleasure at the sight of him. A rebuke nonetheless, and he knows he’s supposed to explain his presence without her needing to say anything more. However, he is simply taking in the sight of her in ivory silk and old lace and puffed sleeves and he goes faintly knee-wobbly at her beauty.
“You’re not supposed to see me,” Kelly says.
“Sorry,” Michael says, very low.
“Did you come to pee?” she says.
“Yes,” he says.
Kelly smiles a knowingly purse-lipped smile. “Then it’s officially okay. You can see the bride and not ruin our luck if you have to pee.”
“That’s a sensible tradition,” Michael says.
They stand looking at each other for a long moment. Just quietly looking, with both their faces placid.
Then Kelly says, “So. I was just heading to pee, as well. Are you about to or are you done?”
“Done.”
“This has been a lovely shared bodily-function moment,” she says. “Just like an old married couple.”
Another silence follows. Michael feels calm, feels connected to Kelly in this silence. And on the berm of the levee he remembers these next few moments that way. He does not remember—nor did he notice at the time—that something dark crept into Kelly’s face in this silence. She was expecting something that, because it did not happen, troubled her in a way she could not hide. But there was no need to hide it; Michael could not see a thing. For he was content now. He was very glad he was marrying Kelly Hays. He wanted to put them back onto the path everyone was expecting.
So he says, “We should save the kiss?”
Neither does he notice the lift of her now as she breathes in deep and puts everything in her head away but the ceremony. “For the altar,” she says. “Yes.”
Michael angles his head slightly toward his shoulder, indicating the bathroom corridor behind him. “I put the lid down,” he says.
“Then I’m glad it’s you I’m marrying,” Kelly says.
Michael nods and turns and moves toward the door. As he walks away, all that he’s been feeling about her finally registers—faintly but visibly—in his face. But his back is to Kelly, and she does not see.
And he comes down from the levee and he walks toward the Big House and ahead is a figure in voluminous white hurrying in his direction, and as Laurie approaches, she can read nothing of the news in Michael’s face, though she tries hard. But he looks as if he has come from a smoke or a piss and nothing more.
“So what’s happening?” she says as she draws near.
“She didn’t show up,” Michael says.
“To finalize?”
“Nobody can find her,” Michael says, and he and Laurie are standing before each other now.
“The bitch,” Laurie says. She has never expressed this sentiment to Michael, though she has felt it several major times in the last few months. But she has always hesitated to say it and now it has leaped from her unchecked and she has an abrupt stopping inside her, an intake of breath and a stopping, to see if she has made some terrible mistake with this man she is still trying to learn how to read. He does not seem to react at all except to gently take her elbow and turn her and set them off toward the house.
And Laurie finds another feeling coming out of her unexpectedly. Her fear. “If she wants you back …”
Michael cuts her off. “She doesn’t want me back,” he says.
“And you don’t want her,” Laurie says, feeling oddly separated from her mind and her body, saying one thing after another without the mediation of any editor in her brain. She knows the danger of this, but she can’t stop.
Michael is making no comment about what she has just said. Though it wasn’t a question. She said it as a firm statement, and she takes his silence as a good thing. He does not contradict her.
But relieved a bit, she is free to feel a twist of anger, and it too tumbles out. “I felt foolish in there alone.”
“I’m sorry,” Michael says.
“The bitch,” Laurie says, and she presses her lips tightly together, both in anger at Kelly and in fear of whatever other unedited thing might come out of her mouth.
They walk on toward the house in silence.
∼
Lying propped up on the bed, Kelly has just finished the last bit of her drink. She cradles the glass against her chest and looks to the French windows. The sun is disappearing behind the rooftops. The Scotch went down sweetly and did what it knows to do and it quieted her mind for a time, but it did not alter her—she did not seek that—and now that there are no more sips, she cannot simply let herself lie here and begin to think.
She sits up. She looks at the Scotch and at her pills and at her Scotch, and she stays focused on the Scotch for a long moment, and then, once more, she turns her eyes to the pills, to all the pills, to her lattice of pills. But she cannot find a readiness in her, at least for now.
She puts the empty glass on the night table and she rises and she wishes to touch things and she moves and she does, running the tip of her forefinger along the edge of the night table, disturbing nothing, and she clutches and releases the drape beside the French windows and she is at the desk opposite the foot of the bed and she pauses and she cradles a string of the Mardi Gras beads draped on the lamp, she lifts them but she hardly looks at them and she lets them fall, and she moves on and she runs her palm lightly along the top of the mini-refrigerator, which, for a moment, she hears humming, and she brushes h
er fingertips across the doorknob as she passes, and in the wall before her is the closed closet door and she stops.
She moves to the closet, draws very near, but she does not open it. She turns her back to it, and the door to the room opens and she is forty. It is her fortieth birthday. She comes through this door and Michael follows her, and Kelly can see her own face passing by and it startles her, the tension across her brow, the narrowed sadness of her eyes. Michael follows, opaque as always, carrying his own briefcase—he has brought work with him—and Beau follows with the bags.
Beau has been talking without cease. “You all look very familiar to me. You’ve been here before. A few times, yes?”
“Yes,” Kelly says.
Michael motions Beau to the closet.
But Beau stops just inside the door, apparently unaware of Michael’s gesture. “And it’s always this room, isn’t it,” he says. “Very romantic.”
Kelly feels a twist of irony at the word.
“The closet,” Michael says, gently though, being patient, and Beau heads where he’s directed.
Kelly stops at the foot of the bed. She looks at this place where she and Michael began.
“I never forget a face,” Beau says. “Names always, but never a face. I can read them, you know. Read everything in them.”
And Beau chatters on about his palmist aunt on Esplanade from whom come his powers and Kelly tries to read the bed. The life that has evolved between her and Michael has surely left its traces here. And she has come back now. She wanted to come back now. They first made love in this bed, and she felt very close to him then, close even to his silence.
“You or me?” This is Michael’s voice and Kelly turns to him and Beau is gone and Michael has opened the closet door and has unfolded the luggage stand against the wall and he is waiting. Kelly doesn’t answer, and Michael clarifies, as gently as with the chattering bellman, “Do you want to unpack first?”
“No,” Kelly says. “You go ahead.”
He turns to the job.
Kelly looks back to the bed, but there have been a thousand couples in that bed since their Ash Wednesday sixteen years ago, and she turns away, moves to the French windows, opens them, presses against the iron railing and leans out just a little, just enough to feel as if she’s left the room. And it is her wedding day. Kelly at forty remembers her wedding day, and Kelly at forty-nine goes with her. She is crossing the preparation room in St. John’s parish hall and she arrives at the makeup tables and she sits at one, beside Katie, her matron of honor, who is unsheathing her lipstick with a focused intensity that Kelly recognizes as her sister coping with nerves.
Kelly looks at her own face in the mirror. She turns instantly away, as you might look away from a friend who is in trouble but you don’t know what to say to her. Though her lips are just fine, Katie is painting another layer of color onto them. Kelly waits. The waiting is all right. Kelly doesn’t know if she really wants to speak this thing inside her. Katie finishes and starts again. Kelly sets up a little test: if Katie ends now with this layer, I’ll speak; if she goes on, I won’t say a word.
And after a few more strokes and a compressing of the lips, Katie sits back in her chair. She twists her lipstick into the tube and caps it. And now she is aware of Kelly watching her. She turns to her sister.
“What?” Katie says.
Kelly has no choice. But she backs away a bit. “I ran into Michael.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Did he see you?”
“Yes.”
Katie shrugs. “The bad luck’s just superstition. Don’t worry about it.”
“I realize that,” Kelly says. And she does, of course. This isn’t the issue. She lets Katie read her, as her sister knows to do.
“What, then?” Katie says.
“Do you think he loves me?” Kelly says.
“He’s marrying you,” Katie says.
“Yes.”
Katie looks closely into her sister’s eyes. “Are you asking if you love him?”
“No,” Kelly says. “Not that. I do. I love him crazy much. That’s why I worry.”
“Why would you doubt it?” Katie says.
Kelly could pick at the word doubt, but she doesn’t. She says, very softly, “He’s never said it.”
“Never?”
“Never the word,” Kelly says. “He’s never used the word.”
A man slides silently, simultaneously, into both their minds. Not an image—there’s nothing specific to see in this regard, no memory, just a void—but they both have a sense of him now—their father—and then he passes on through, he’s dressed up and waiting in the church and on this day he’ll play his father role as it should be played, and he instantly passes from their minds.
Kelly says, “Your Danny uses the word.”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad for you,” Kelly says.
“Look,” Katie says. “You should talk to Michael about it.”
This is the obvious advice, of course. This is good advice. They both know that. But Kelly says a thing now that, as soon as it’s said, the two sisters understand to be surpassingly true in this matter.
“I can’t,” Kelly says. “If you have to ask, it doesn’t count.”
∼
Far off, the cry of a train whistle. Kelly blinks in a room now no longer bright. Not yet dim but no longer bright. The train whistle cries again, distantly, from the riverfront. The sun, though still out there somewhere, has slipped behind the rooftops of the Quarter. A moment ago she was preparing to be married, she was leaning out above the courtyard on her fortieth birthday and remembering her wedding day and she came back into the room and she lay in bed beside Michael on that day. And this little afterimage plays in her mind now, with one Scotch in her and the rest of the bottle and the pills waiting and the room going dim: there was a train whistle. After she unpacks, she comes to the bed and Michael is propped up on the side nearest the night table and he has papers on his chest and he is wearing his reading glasses and she lies down beside him and he says, without looking up from the papers, “I’m sorry. I have to do this.”
“It’s okay,” Kelly says.
And then the train whistle. And it makes Michael lift his face toward the French windows. But only for a moment. He takes off his reading glasses and turns to Kelly. “Happy fortieth,” he says.
“Thanks,” Kelly says.
“We’ve still got time before the dinner reservations,” he says, as if that would be the qualm she might have with his working at this moment.
She nods—ever so faintly—more to herself, about him—but he clearly assumes that she totally understands, and he puts his reading glasses back on, and she looks away as he returns to his papers, and then the train whistle sounds once more.
Kelly leans back heavily against the closet door. Something needs to change now. Something needs to happen. She straightens. She moves. Across the floor, past the bed. She stops briefly before the open French windows. The sky still holds much of its brightness, though the sun is invisible now and the slate roofs have gone twilight dim and the dimness plunges into the courtyard before her. The French Quarter smell is changing with the sinking sun, a coolness comes on, the long-rotted food smells and the old piss wane, and ascending are the smells of the masonry and the river and a hint of some fresh food cooking, a roux, frying oysters. These are good smells, she knows, but they make her sad.
She turns away and moves to the night table and she looks once more at the pills and the bottle of Scotch. But only for a moment. She slips her shoes on, she picks up her purse, she crosses to the door and she goes out.
∼
The festival evening has moved fully outside now, onto the slate terrace, where a five-piece salon orchestra is playing a medley of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and oyster shooters float around on silver trays in the gathering twilight. Michael slides a shooter into him, happy the Oak Alley people have put in a good Russian vodka instead
of trying to find a period equivalent. He sets his empty glass on a passing tray but palms a no-thank-you to the bearer who stops to offer another. Michael will drink no more tonight, except for a little wine. He needs to talk to Kelly and he wants to be clear-headed for the night with Laurie. The floodlights come on. When the last of the twilight dissipates, he’ll try Kelly’s cell phone again. Soon.
“Look at that,” Laurie says, low.
He looks at her instead. But without even glancing his way she knows he’s going to stay fixed on her instead of following her gaze—she likes that he will do this and he likes the elegance of the next gesture: she simply lowers her face, just a little, to discreetly point toward what she wants him to see.
“It’s so sweet,” Laurie says. He looks. The personal injury lawyer and his wife are sitting at one of the dinner tables, the only couple not milling with the drinks and the music on the terrace. They have pulled out two chairs and are facing each other and he has reached around her neck and is clasping a necklace.
“Remember?” Laurie says. “It’s their anniversary.”
Michael doesn’t remark on the scene, but he can hear the sentimental ooze of Laurie’s tone, and he waits a couple of beats before turning away so she won’t think he’s being critical of her feelings about this.
Laurie pitches her voice even lower, and the ooze morphs into a firmer tone of downright admiration. “I think he’s got tears in his eyes.”
A Small Hotel Page 7
