A Small Hotel (13 page)

“Sam’s asleep?” he says.

“She was full of chat,” Kelly says, beside him now.

“The rigors of first grade,” he says.

“More pleasures than rigors tonight.”

“Good.” He turns and, without a word, steps away from her, crosses the deck to a Grundig boombox and starts the cassette he put in late last night. Stephane Grappelli’s sweet, slow, improvised jazz violin version of “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

He turns back to Kelly, who has followed him part way and is now settling into a deck chair. “I’m tired,” she says. “I almost finished the last of the boxes today.”

He moves to the deck chair beside her, but before he can sit, Kelly says, “You should play the Ella version.”

“No lyrics tonight,” he says.

She hums an assent, turning the hum into a following of the tune for a few bars.

“The harpsichord is the genius touch,” Michael says.

“Dance with me,” Kelly says.

“I thought you were tired.”

“Not too tired to dance,” she says.

Michael offers his hand. She takes it and rises and they hold each other close and they move a little, slow dancing for a time with small, improvised steps. The harpsichord begins to riff with the bridge and Kelly puts her lips to Michael’s ear and says, “Thank you for all this.”

He stops their dancing. He pulls away just a little, enough to look her in the eyes and then to kiss her.
She returns the kiss and presses it into him, opening their mouths to it for a moment, and then they begin to dance again.

And a wee, clear voice picks up the lyric on the precisely correct beat and begins to sing, drawing out the words to fit Grappelli’s ornamentations as he glides into the final repeat of the chorus. “Follow my lead, oh how I need …”

Michael and Kelly turn to Samantha, standing in the doorway in her Little Mermaid pajamas, as she finishes the phrase “… someone to watch over me.”

Kelly lets go of Michael and pulls away and puts on a large, public voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the famous jazz singer Samantha Hays!” She crosses to her daughter and swoops her up in her arms, saying “That was wonderful, my darling.”

Michael does not move, happy to watch the two girls in his life from this place apart. He does not examine his comfort with this distance, but it is strong in him. This is his proper place. From here he can provide, protect. Nearer to them, in the sweet smell of them, in the fragile, needy physicality of them, he would only become clumsy, would only feel the demand for words and gestures he could never adequately give.

He is impressed with his daughter, proud of her. He says, “Hey, Sam. You should be sleeping.”

Kelly, her back to her husband, holding her daughter close, compensating for him as always, says, “We are both so proud of our baby.”

Samantha presses her face against the side of her mother’s but focuses on her father. Michael nods at her, nods from this vast, sweet feeling inside him. Kelly cannot see the gesture, and Sam simply understands it to mean it’s time for her to sleep.

And Michael stops beneath the trees at Oak Alley and his hand goes to his phone once more and he and Sam are at the aft gunwale of his boat, his 33-foot Bertram Sport Fisherman, pristinely new and his at last and just in time, for she is eleven, his daughter, eleven is the perfect age, and this he can do for her, this much he can do, to set her in the fighting chair and crouch beside her and show her how to use the light tackle.

“Will they be heavy?” she says, and he can hear the faint quaver still in her voice.

“You’re after bait fish,” he says. “You can do it.”

“Then you’ll catch the bigger ones?”

He palms her hand on the reel. She’s going to be okay. “That’s right,” he says. “With the ones you catch. We’re a team.”

“I’m catching the babies?” The quaver has come back.

“No,” Michael says firmly. “They’ll be adults, but smaller species.”

Samantha nods her head once, sharply, and he squeezes her hand in appreciation at her determination, though he does not understand that it is simply to please him.

She carefully readjusts her hands on the tackle.

“You okay now?” Michael says.

“Sure,” Sam says.

He rises. And Samantha casts her line as he’s taught her.

He will step away now. She needs to do this on her own. But as he turns, he hears her begin to hum. She quickly finds the tune and then sings, very softly, “Anticipation, anticipation is makin’ me late, is keepin’ me waitin.’”

He crouches beside his daughter again. This, too, he can do for her. “Don’t spoil it,” he says, firmly. “Be quiet and look around you. You’re alone in the middle of a great sea.”

Samantha turns her face to him. “You’re here. And mom.”

Michael says, “Inside your head. You’re alone in there. Take it all in just for yourself. No words now.”

Samantha shrugs and looks out at the Gulf.

He knows she can’t truly see what’s before her. She doesn’t get it. He does not think of himself sitting next to his father beside the Blackwater River, looking into the vastness of the sky, but that night animates this present disappointment in his daughter.

He rises, he turns away from her, he steps to the center of the deck of his new boat, and he takes it all in: the vast, calm Gulf; the vault of the bright sky; Kelly lying on a plank of sunlight beside the cabin door, reading a book, very near but unaware of him; and his daughter, her back to him, quiet at last, her narrow shoulders hunched toward the Gulf in concentration.

He steps to the port gunwale and leans outward, and all there is now in the world is the water and the sky and him, as if he is alone in the world. This is a good thing. This is why he has bought this boat. He does understand the dark undertow of this kind of solitude. But he is freed from that simply by knowing they are nearby, his wife and his daughter. Nearby but unseen. He will come out here alone, and they will, in their distant existence, make it all be good. And he will at times come out with men, and the unsentimental familiarity of them, their detached maleness, will serve the same function, will let him swim free of the dark depths beneath him, will let him float here in solitude, as he is doing now, and any longing for someone else to be next to him can vanish.

And Kelly appears beside him at the gunwale, smelling of coconut, her oiled arm touching his. He keeps his face out to the Gulf.

“Which way’s Florida?” she says.

“Starboard,” he says.

She falls silent a few moments and then she says, “Are you thinking of him?”

Michael made the terrible mistake a few years ago, before he and Kelly were married, of speaking of his father to her, of revealing that his father had an odd fear of the open water. She has referred to this a couple of times since, and Michael has always simply ignored it.

He should do that now, or he should confront his mistake openly, but he does a silly other thing, trying to act as if he never made the mistake to begin with. “Who?” he says.

“Your dad.”

“No,” Michael says.

He waits for it to pass. But he wants it to pass once and for all. So he says, making his voice go soft, trying not to cause trouble, “You go too far. I should never say a thing.”

It came out badly. He feels the flinch in her, but she does not reply. She simply moves away.

He’s glad there won’t be an argument. But he’s not seeing what’s before him now. His wife is stewing,
and it’s his fault. His father has slipped onto the boat and is trying to still the trembling in his hand on the reel. And Samantha has begun to sing to herself again.

Perhaps she is singing tonight, Michael thinks, as he stands beneath the oaks of Oak Alley. Somewhere. He shallows his mind now. He needs to know one thing and he cannot deal with the rest. Sam has understood not to press the subject, and he is grateful to her for that. And it’s why he can turn to her now. He dials his daughter’s cell phone. She answers after the first ring.

“Daddy? Daddy, I’m about to go on.”

“Sorry,” Michael says. “It can wait.”

“No,” she says. “It’s okay. I’ve got a minute.”

And Michael finds himself without words. He would never understand the irony of this, but his abrupt word-blankness unsettles him. When he has a purpose and the will for speaking, he trusts himself always to know what to say. It’s his job.

“It’s been a while,” Sam says.

“Where are you singing?” It’s the best he can do for the moment. He has lost his will to speak of his wife to his daughter.

“Chicago,” Sam says. “A little club in Chicago.”

“That’s good,” Michael says. “Chicago’s good.”

Michael can find no more small talk, and Samantha is still trying to grasp her father suddenly calling.

They stay silent for what feels to both of them like a long time. Samantha realizes she has to take charge.

“How are you?” she says.

“I’m okay,” Michael says.

“Good.”

And now he finds his focused, courtroom voice. “Have you heard from your mother lately?”

“Yesterday,” Sam says.

“Was she okay?”

“This is all hard on her.”

Michael feels a tight twist of something at this, but he does not let it deflect him from his line of questioning. “Did she say anything about a change of plans?”

“Plans?”

“She didn’t show up today to finalize the divorce.”

“She didn’t say anything about that.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Home, I assume. I don’t know.”

The burden of talk slides back to Michael, but he goes silent. He has learned what he can—nothing—about what he is focused on at the moment.

“Look,” Sam says, “she just called basically to say she loved me. She’s sad. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Michael remains silent. He would like to, but he does not know how to change the conversation now.

“Are you there?” Sam says.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry about all this,” she says. “For both of you.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s hard not hearing from you,” Sam says.

“I’m sorry,” Michael says.

“I have to go now. I have to sing.” And sitting in the manager’s office of a dinner club on the North Side of Chicago, waiting to sing, Samantha feels her stubbornness stir in her, and though she has not said it in a few years, having struggled to accept this thing in her father that she tries without success not to accept in the men she falls for, she says, “I love you, Daddy.”

“Sing your heart out, Sam,” he says.

“I will,” she says. Easier to accept is her father’s awkwardness at the end of phone conversations, so without a formal exchange of “good-byes”, she hangs up, and at the exact same moment, so does he.

Michael slowly puts his phone away, trying to be the attorney about this, the engaged but detached attorney with a skitterish client. Kelly will turn up. It’s in her best interest to turn up. And there is a rustling near him and a hand slipping into his arm. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t listening,” Laurie says. “I was lurking from afar.”

Michael is surprised at the quick swelling of gratitude he feels at Laurie appearing beside him: he likes her hand on his arm, firm there, he likes the headshop-dusky smell of her, likes the aggressive smartness of her, her knowing the first thing that would occur to him, that would threaten to piss him off though he wouldn’t show it, likes that she knows and she goes straight to it and refutes it, he likes her turning him away from the house now, heading them down the allée into the dark.

They walk slowly for a time without saying anything, and Michael is grateful to Laurie for that too, especially since he knows she is prone to talk and will start to talk soon, but she also sometimes knows to keep quiet, and Michael puts his hand on hers in the crook of his arm. He realizes the gesture will probably loosen her tongue, but he finds himself ready for that, even finds, a little to his surprise, given the circumstances, that he will be glad to hear her voice.

She says, “No word, I take it.”

“No word,” he says.

“I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“Good.”

Laurie knows her man’s predilections and believes that knowing them and teasing about them somehow mollifies them: she nudges him with her elbow and says, “Only about that.”

And though he meant simply that it was good she wasn’t going to talk about Kelly and though it’s true that he would actually like to hear her voice at the moment, he plays his role. “Too bad,” he says.

She elbows him again, knowing rightly this time that he’s simply posing.

They have emerged from beneath the canopy of oaks and they approach the iron gate at the highway. The house floats brightly behind them and the salon orchestra has begun again and it is all distant, like watching a cruise ship from the shore, heading out in the dark into the Gulf.

Michael and Laurie stop at the gate, turn to face each other.

She says, “I’d love to lunge into your arms right now and, you know, cling to you. But this fricking dress won’t allow it.”

“Now that really
is
too bad,” he says.

Laurie cocks her head toward the levee and wrinkles her brow in faux philosophical thought. “But if I wasn’t wearing this dress, we wouldn’t be here tonight in the first place for me to wish I could throw myself into your arms.”

“We’d be somewhere.”

“O. M. G,” she says, full-stopping with each initial. “My man’s gone sentimental on me.”

“That’s computerese, right?”

“‘Sentimental’? Nah. Outside of Photobucket baby-animal shots, it’s pretty much all petty snark out there.”

Michael was willing to hear her voice, but she has a sweet tooth for bantering and he’s presently not up to that. He looks away.

She says, “Oh my god. It means ‘Oh my god.’”

He looks back to her.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve got the ditz gene. You know that by now, yes?”

He doesn’t answer.

“This is the wrong time,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“No fricking dress, and we’re holding each other and I’m not saying a thing.”

“You don’t have the ditz gene,” he says. “You’ve got the mimic gene. The tasty butterfly making herself look like the poisonous one. It’s safer.”