A Small Hotel (10 page)

Michael shrugs.

Laurie says, “Haven’t you ever shed a tear for the love of a woman?”

“I should try that call again,” Michael says.

“Not for her you haven’t,” Laurie says. “Of course not.”

Michael starts to move away but Laurie puts her hand on his arm to stop him. “I don’t like being left here alone,” she says.

“Do you like my staying married?”

Laurie nods once, firmly. “Okay. I get it.”

Michael shifts his arm to disengage from her hand, but she holds tighter.

“Not so fast,” she says. “Give me a kiss first. A good one.”

He takes her into his arms. “This isn’t exactly an antebellum public act,” he says.

“I don’t care,” she says. “Kiss me right and I’ll even let you flash your cell phone all you want.”

And he does kiss her right, and for longer than she expected under the circumstances, which she understands to mean that she is crucially important to him, that she has nothing to fear from this wife who did not know how to love this man that Laurie adores. She lets his lips go and he turns and she watches him move away, and she just knows for sure—without it ever having needed to be mentioned—that it was a bona fide act of love for him to put on that swallowtail coat for her.

Michael passes Madison and Jason and he does not look at them directly, but in his periphery he can see them leaning into each other. Laurie was right that he doesn’t approve, and he holds on for a moment to a little surge of fellow-male disgust. This is part of a deep reflex in him. And briefly maintaining a low-grade distaste for Jason Murray allows him to pass on down the allée without a flare up of any conscious image at all of a day and a night long ago in an open canopy forest along the Blackwater River near the Alabama border. However, Michael’s passage now into the gathering night shadows of the trees of Oak Alley does make a deep sandbottom current of the river run in him. And in that current is a Remington .243 Youth Rifle and he holds onto it tight for a long panicky while and then he’s not even aware he’s carrying it and he drives forward through the wire grass and gallberry and all about him
are the pine and the oak and the sycamore, and the trees huddle up and they crowd into him and he no longer has any idea what direction he’s going in. He’s eleven years old and he is lost and he hears a thrash and he stops and he wants to see his dad coming out of the forest to him but instead it’s the back-flash of a whitetail deer and Michael doesn’t even think of the rifle in his hand, he only wishes he knew where to run, like this animal, and he pushes on and on and then he emerges into a tight little clearing. He must have been calling out for his father but he’s not sure—he can’t remember his voice—but he does call now. “Dad!” he cries. And again, “Dad!”

And his father’s voice comes to him in return, from somewhere behind him in the forest. “Michael! Stay put!”

Michael does not move. He stands very still, as if he and his father have read the deer rubs and the tracks and they are ready to hold still and wait. Michael will wait as still as his dad has taught him to wait. And Henry Hays comes out of the woods and Michael is not even aware that with his first step toward his father he has dropped his rifle and he takes that step and another and he is running and he opens his arms—he yearns to throw himself upon his father and hold close to him—and now his father looms above him blocking out the
forest but something comes upon Michael’s shoulders and blocks him to a stop and thrusts him back and he is thrashing from his father’s hands.

“Pull yourself together,” his father says. “What’s got into you boy?”

“I was up ahead of you …”

“I mean now,” his father says. “Are those tears? Are you actually crying? And you drop your rifle? I can’t believe this is my own son. Pull yourself together.”

And Michael seizes up, stiffens and goes dead cold, perhaps as a whitetail would feel raising its head and seeing a muzzle flash. There are indeed tears in Michael’s eyes and his rifle is not in his hands and in this first deer hunting trip with his father he has failed utterly and he cannot make anything about his body work, he cannot speak or move or breathe, and his father’s deep-forest-dark eyes are wide with something that Michael cannot bear to look at. But he cannot look away.

Henry Hays releases his son. “Stand straight now,” he says sharply.

Michael struggles to do this.

“Listen to me,” Michael’s father says. “We come into the woods and we take the lives of animals, like men have done since the beginning of time. You have to honor who you are and your responsibility in the
world. You can’t do that with these tremblings and hugs and these disgusting tears. God put you on the earth to be a man. So be one.”

And in spite of how he has strayed and panicked and cried and even abandoned his nascent manhood in this forest today, Michael suddenly grows quiet inside. He can still do this. For all but one of the several times in his coming adult life when Michael will remember pieces of this day, this will be his primary impression: his father made perfect sense; his father was surpassingly reasonable.

Though once, late at night in his law office, soon after Sam had been born, after a good day in court when he knew what questions to ask and when to push them and when to turn and walk away and dismiss the lying son of a bitch in the witness box, Michael finds his father in his mind and he has the impulse to turn his lawyerly skills on his old man, to see if his reasonableness will hold up under cross-examination: so he and Michael are standing in that clearing, and his father has just finished his little speech about manhood, and Michael says, “How did I get lost?”

“You are a child still,” his father says. “No man. You wandered off like a child.”

“I was walking ahead of you as you told me to do.”

“You need to learn to stalk a deer.”

“I was moving slowly,” Michael says, “watching for rubs and scrapes and tracks.”

“Like I taught you.”

“If I was moving slowly ahead of you, where you’d put me, following only the spoor of our prey, how was I responsible for wandering off?”

His father falters, like a lying witness in the box. “You are a child.”

Michael waves off this answer. “Where were you?” he says.

But he doesn’t let his father answer. He has no more questions. In his mind he turns and walks away, walks away from this: that his father fell back deliberately to test him, that it was all his father’s contriving. But what does that matter? Michael still failed the test. He had to learn the lesson, yes? His father had to do this to teach him.

And on the night that followed the day of Michael’s humiliation, he and his father have pitched a tent near the river and Michael has brought some homework to do in the tent by the kerosene lamp, and he imagines he is Henry Clay teaching himself the law as a young man, and he is glad for this tent and the dim light and his father outside, glad his father brought him here in spite of what happened.

Michael rises and steps out of the tent. The dark tannin water of the river has a bright black sheen in the moonlight. His father is sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette, his back to him. From all of this—even from the reprimand—Michael fills with a thing that he is ready to give a name to, and he comes forward, he opens his arms, he will throw his arms around his father from behind and he will say he loves him. But his father, of course, hears his approach, slightly turning his head, showing just a bit of the side of his face.

Michael stops. His father’s alertness to him makes him lower his arms. But Michael still wants to say this thing, wants to name the feeling, wants to say
I love you
. “Daddy,” he begins, and he pauses ever so slightly to work up to the words. And he loves his daddy so much he takes pleasure even in the hesitation, in starting the sentence once more by naming him. “Daddy, I …”

But his father abruptly raises his hand. “Don’t say a thing.” His voice is firm, his voice is the voice from the clearing, and the words vanish from Michael. He feels the same stopping in him that he felt at his father’s first rebuke today.

And then his father surprises him. The man pitches his voice low and mellows its tone. Almost gently he says, “Come sit here beside me.”

Michael swells with the feeling he felt he needed to say, but because of that very feeling, he obeys, simply obeys, he comes around the log and sits beside his father as close as he dares, almost touching, almost but not quite touching, and he waits.

And his father says, “Words spoil it. They spoil it completely. You understand?”

Michael shakes his head yes.

A silence falls briefly between them. And then, still gentle, his father says, “Just listen to the forest.”

Michael tries, though there is a racing in him now. He’s trying to understand. It’s mid-autumn. The forest is quiet. But the quiet has a density to it that begins to register in Michael as a sound. He closes his eyes. Deep in the woods he can hear the fluted whinnying of an owl.

“And watch the stars,” his father says.

Michael opens his eyes. He lifts his face. The sky is vast above him, and it is dense with stars, and it is utterly silent.

∼

Kelly has walked away from Bourbon Street, stepping from the hotel and going to her left, into the dim lakeside half of the Quarter, but she turned away from Rampart, headed first toward Esplanade and then at
some point back toward the river. Not that she is thinking any of this out or is even aware at all of what street she’s on. There are things to decide. This much she knows. Things that don’t involve thinking, not at all, and so she has come outside into the early evening scent of the Quarter and she is drawn forward by the quiet, hazily lamppost-lit streets, moving past the shuttered casement windows of the shotgun houses and Creole cottages. But up ahead, on a corner, is the neon of a bar and a soprano sax riffing up out of a bass and a drum and Kelly has walked enough and she thinks to turn in there, she’ll go in and sit and she’ll drink a little bit more and see what the music will say.

And she does go in, not even looking at the few people scattered about—missing a sizing-up from a vaguely handsome, fortyish local bar denizen—and only briefly glancing at the little stage at the far end of the room, with a heavy woman in a black tunic dress at the microphone waiting for the boys behind her to finish their solos.

Kelly sits at a table. A young woman with a bruise-colored garland of a tattoo circling her bicep asks what she wants and Kelly says a Scotch with a little water and the singer sings the final chorus. Weary blues have made me cry, she sings. And she’s going to say goodbye to those weary blues, and though she knows she won’t
forget them, she’ll be bidding them goodbye, a notion that the singer sings again and again until the music ends to a smattering of applause, and Kelly wonders how you can bid your blues goodbye but not forget them. The singer announces it’s time for her to take a break and
drink
her blues away and someone laughs and the bar falls briefly silent, and Kelly’s cell phone rings, muffled, faint, from inside her purse.

This is Michael. He is standing beneath the oaks, shaking off an unease that he attributes to the unresolved divorce and Kelly run off somewhere, and those thoughts are part of it, certainly, but he does not recognize who it is that has been lingering in the shadow of the trees on this autumn night with the river nearby. The phone has rung and it rings again.

And Kelly has it in her hand and she turns the ringer off, once and for all. She pushes her hand into her purse, burying the phone deep inside. She closes the purse and drops it out of sight onto the chair facing her.

A male voice says, “It’s a good thing that didn’t happen a minute earlier.”

Kelly looks up into the face of a man, fortyish, vaguely handsome in a gaunt way, he reminds her of someone that once thrilled her, from a movie, an Altman movie maybe,
Nashville
, Keith Carradine was the man that thrilled her when she was just turning sixteen.

Michael doesn’t look like Carradine, she thinks. But she herself hasn’t thought of Carradine for many years, until this gaunt man stands over her and he has a drink in each hand.

The man says, “Nettie packs a derringer and she’s been known to use it on cell phone owners if they interrupt her song.”

In spite of the man making her think of her hormonal sixteen-year-old self—and maybe because of it—she’s not sure she’s up for this. But she doesn’t have the impulse energy at the moment even to lower her head. She looks at him, saying nothing.

He lifts the two drinks, the right hand first. “This one’s mine.” He lifts his left hand. “This one’s yours.”

Her drink? Kelly does turn her eyes now, toward the bar, looking for the waitress.

“It’s okay,” the man said. “It’s the one you ordered. I’m just paying. If that’s all right.”

Kelly looks back up at the man. She can find no words. But she hears Carradine singing in her head. “I’m easy,” he sings. “I’m easy.”

The man takes Kelly’s silence as consent. He starts to sit down opposite her, finds the chair engaged, puts the drinks down—Kelly’s in front of her, and his before this chair. “Do you mind?” he says, not waiting for an answer, lifting her purse and putting it on the
table, pressing it up against the wall to make room. He sits.

“I’m Luke,” he says.

Kelly pulls the Scotch with a little water to her. She takes a sip. She says nothing.

“You local?” this man Luke says.

Kelly closes her eyes to the hit of Scotch. It’s not very good Scotch and she has watered it down. She’s still not ready to fully let go. But it feels familiar spreading into her chest, nonetheless. Warm.

“A tourist?” Luke says.

She opens her eyes and looks at this man. It’s the man’s long face, long thin face, the precise square of his chin that she’s been struck by. “I’m just passing through,” she says.

“I’m from New Orleans quite a few years now,” he says, “and I talk to a lot of folks. But I don’t think I ever heard that one.”

Kelly tries to concentrate on the man across the table. Something doesn’t fit. Keith Carradine had a little beard in that movie, and long hair, not like this man at all. She sips at her drink again.