A Small Hotel (17 page)

But then they finish their lunch and he pays and she insists on splitting the bill and he lets her do that and they do it in a very public way, lofting their two credit cards as if they are toasting with wine, and they
go out the door, and without a word they begin to walk south on Palafox. Begin to stroll. Half an arm’s length between them. Chaste. Obviously innocent. And they end up at the end of Palafox on a bench looking out at Pensacola Bay and there is still space between them.

“If you’ve changed your mind,” Kelly says.

And he knows instantly what she means. “Not at all. I’m grateful for the chance to talk to you. It was the restaurant.”

“Of course,” she says. “But on the walk too.”

“It was simply nice walking with you.”

“It was.”

“I didn’t want to spoil it,” he says.

“What kind of man are you?” she says, laughing again, but very softly.

He shrugs. “Inadequate,” he says.

At this, Kelly wants to put her arms around him. She consciously holds very still, waits for more, but knowing already that the time will come when she will take him in her arms and help him make right whatever this is, knowing he will tell her. And she tries to hold still in this familiar room she’s come to, and all the doors lead nowhere: the bathroom, the closet, an empty corridor, off a faux balcony. What should she have understood in those first moments with Drew Singleton? What should she have heard in what he said
that would have told her to stand up and shake his hand and wish him well, that would have let her walk away and preserve what she had—at least that much—let her at least keep whatever she had.

After a very slight pause as he looks far out at the bay, no doubt contemplating his inadequacies, Drew suddenly does a little head snap and says, “Jeez. Listen to me. What a way to start this. I didn’t ask you to lunch so I can wallow in self-pity or fish for compliments.”

How could she have possibly walked away when he instantly co-opted any actionable fear she might be smart enough to have?

“You can say anything you want in any way you feel it,” Kelly says to Drew. “I’ll understand.”

His eyes restlessly search her face as she speaks these words.

“Be yourself,” she says.

Drew grasps her hand and squeezes it and she squeezes back and then he drops it at once. More reassurance for her to go on.

And he talks to Kelly of his wife. Of how he loves his wife. Of how she loves him. Of how, until she met him, she’d always been with men who were abusive in some way or other. Of how grateful she was to be with a man like him at last. But how she always seems to need more and how that’s getting worse. She draws
other men to her and needs to please them and Drew is certain—almost certain—almost certain but reluctant to consider anything else—he feels he is certain that she does not act in any private way on this need for attention, this need for constant reassurance.

At this point Kelly says, “I’m sure you tell her …”

“I tell her all the time,” he says. “I wear my heart on my sleeve.”

And Kelly initiates a touch. She takes his hand, and they are still holding hands as he says, “I let her know every day that I love her.” Kelly squeezes his hand tightly, and she feels a welling-up in her chest, her throat, and she tries not to let it press tears from her eyes.

“But what I give her is not enough,” he says. “And I think the very fact that I tell her—that I am the kind of man who will tell her—is the very thing that makes me inadequate.”

And Kelly knows now, having moved back into the middle of Room 303, knows only after it is far too late, that if she were to be seduced, if she were to be persuaded to destroy her own life, this was the way for a man to do it.

And Drew squares around to face Kelly on the bench by the bay, as they work themselves up to an affair, and he takes her other hand in his and he lifts them both and he says, “Why are so many women
drawn to emotionally unavailable men, even as they ask for openness and vulnerability?”

Kelly has no answer. As this man lifts her hands, she can only think that her own life may be a testament to that very problem. She has no answer. But she wants that to change.

Drew says, “I saved her. She’s always said that. But I can’t save myself.”

Kelly finds herself standing before the night table. The lovely pale-blue square, the mosaic of
PERCOCET
. How did she not understand what was happening with this man? What should she should have figured out right away? His avowed inadequacy? His declaration of it made her first want to hold him. But he didn’t really feel inadequate. He quickly made that simply be about his declarations of love for his wife. He never felt inadequate at all. He felt righteous. How did Kelly miss that? And there was something important left out of his perplexity over who’s attracted to whom. Why was he himself drawn to the woman he married, knowing that she always fell for bad guys? Was it really love he felt? Did he really think he could save her? The thing about being on a white horse—and staying quixotically on it—is that you yourself are unavailable up there. But she can’t think it through now. It’s too late. She and this man drove fast on I-10 toward
the Alabama State line and as soon as they were out of Pensacola they checked into the first motel they came to, and the room smelled of concrete and carpet cleaner, and they had sex and a dozen times he said he loved her—it was foreplay talk, it was the pounding talk, it was orgasm talk—and they came back to this motel twice more, as if it were romantic, as if a cheap interstate motel was something romantically their own and the smell of carpet cleaner would never be the same again, and then on the third time, after the sex, he said that we all go through life loving and loving, finding many people we love, and he loved her but he loved his wife as well—which he’d been clear about from the start—and he and Kelly had to face the bittersweet reality that they couldn’t really go on but she was always going to be a perfect, self-contained thing in his life and he hoped he would be that for her. And that was that. And if she had not been an absolute fool, if somehow the bullshit line he fed her had actually been true in their case—in some universe, between two specific people, it might well be true, she supposed—then maybe she could indeed have put a few beautiful memories away and kept them to herself, but for her and for this particular man, it was a lie, it was all a terrible lie, and it was done, and it was anything but beautiful, and worse, she had changed inside
and she could not face Michael by simply saying to herself
Oh well, fuck and learn
. She had not understood the fragile balancing act that was her life, and once she fell, she could not imagine a way to fly back up to that thin, hard wire above her. She could not imagine. She puts her forefinger on the night table and she draws it down through the square of pills, tumbling them apart.

She wanted so badly for it to have been good, for the words to be true and the touching to be true, even if for a few moments. Her body longed for that, and her body longs for that now, she feels a terrible scrabbling warmth come over her and she pulls at her little black dress, pulls at it from just below her hips, she pulls it up and off her and she unclasps her bra and sloughs it off and she slides her panties down her legs and steps from them and she is naked. She is as naked as she feels inside. She sat on the side of this bed only a few months ago and she told Michael what she had done. She could not bear to continue to sleep next to him and wake next to him and she could not bear to admire the churn and crackle of his mind and she could not bear his silences with that interstate motel room a secret. Because it happened, because it existed, because the fact of it went to bed with her and woke with her and it listened with her and it longed with her, and she had to put it outside of herself no matter what.
So she sat on this bed, and he was standing between her and the French windows, and the two of them had just arrived from dinner at Galatoire’s, and she told him there was something she had to say and he squares around to face her and she says there is this terrible stupid thing she has done, and she tells him, and he keeps his eyes steady on her as she speaks, even as she tells it all, tells him the whole secret, and his face does not change, just as it does not change whenever she needs to know if he loves her, and she understands what is happening, she understands, and it spreads in her as a slow undulation of intense heat, and he says, “So it’s done?” and his voice is flat, even as it clarifies—“Our marriage?”—and his eyes show nothing and the nothing of them suddenly quickens the heat in her, backdrafts words into her head and an impulse into her hands, she could fly at him and claw at him and cry out at him now, but she won’t, she was the one in the motel room, that was her, she did this, but she is wildly angry at him even so and she can’t say
No it’s not done
and she can’t say
Yes it is
. She says, “Is it?” and it’s the right thing to say because if he says
Please darling no it can’t be, it’s over with you and this man isn’t it? I can forgive you if you only say you want to stay with me
: if he says that, then it will be the same as saying
I love you
and she can hold on to those words forever and everything will be
all right, everything will be better than it’s ever been. But he says nothing. He turns his back abruptly on her and he moves to the French windows and he stands there, and from beyond him, from across the rooftops of the Quarter, from beside the river, comes the cry of a train. And after a long moment, and very low, so low she can only barely hear him, he says, “It always surprises me to hear a train whistle in the Quarter.” And she says nothing. And he says nothing more. The flames have flared and died and she waits for whatever is next, and he is not moving, and she lowers her face, unable even to look at the back of him now, and she waits. Until, at last, she senses him turn. And she looks into his face. And it is blank. It is utterly blank. And she knows it’s done.

And unaware of anything but the end of her marriage playing once more in her head, Kelly has moved now to the French windows, has pressed herself against the balustrade, and she looks out onto the moonlit rooftops, but she does not see them, all she sees is Michael’s face, impassive, and even that is fading from her mind, and it is leaving nothing behind, and she is utterly unaware of what is below her: in the pool, the young couple in their improvised swimsuits standing up to their chests in water, facing each other, his hands around her waist, her hands on
his shoulders, and they have stopped joking about what they are doing and they are quiet and looking at each other and smelling the chlorine of the pool and the young woman is thinking that the smell of chlorine will never be the same again and she lifts her face to the moon overhead, and though it is not yet full, it is very bright, and her eyes drift from the moon and she sees a woman standing in her open French windows three floors above them, and the woman is naked—she is slim and beautiful and she is utterly naked—and the young woman lowers her face to her lover and she motions upward with her chin and they both look at the naked woman in the French windows and they smile, and the young man is thus moved to bring his hands up his lover’s back to the hooks on her bra and he undoes them and she lets him do this, she draws her arms forward and she takes the bra and she drops it away from her onto the surface of the pool, and she and the young man press their bodies together and they kiss, even as Kelly turns and vanishes into her room.

∼

And Michael and Laurie move through the moonlight between the plantation house and their cottage, and
her hand is on his arm, and she is setting the pace. A slow pace. She is relishing this walk to their bed, and Michael is keenly aware that the phone on his hip won’t ring now, that this issue will remain unresolved until tomorrow at the very least. He puts his hand on Laurie’s in the crook of his arm and he tries hard to remain in this moment, with this new woman. But instead, he stands before Kelly in the hotel room they know so well and she says, “Michael,” and she rarely uses his name to address him, and she says, “Can we talk?” and with that opening to what she wants to say, he figures he has once again fallen short somehow, probably from his preoccupied mind—and admittedly, even as they have checked into what they think of as their room, in their hotel, in their city, for a long weekend, he has been thinking mostly about a retired Navy captain DUI he’s trying to keep out of jail and get into rehab, and he has no doubt that he has, in effect, ignored Kelly since about the Louisiana border—so he squares around before her and clears his mind and he waits for her typically vague indictment. She is sitting on the bed, and even after he has demonstrably given her his full attention, she hesitates to speak, and he feels uncomfortable standing over her when there is apparently some sort of issue to deal with, and if she’s not going to rise to him, then he should probably sit
down beside her on the bed. But before he can, she starts to talk.

And in the moonlit dark full of the smell of sugar cane smoke, heading to his bed with this young woman beside him, Michael struggles to stop this memory. He does not want these words in his head. But they happen. As he remembers them. Stripped down. And when they were spoken, he felt very little as he heard them, as he tried to comprehend them. And when he found things to say in return, he heard his own voice as if it was someone else speaking.

“I’ve been sleeping with a man,” Kelly says.

At first he has no words at all, not even in this other voice.

“It’s over,” she says.

“How long?” he says.

“For a month.”

“Over for a month?”

“It lasted for a month. It’s over now. For a few weeks.”

“Why did it end?” And he realizes how odd this question is, preceding the more obvious
why did it start
.

“He stopped loving me,” she says.

He takes this in. “And if his feelings hadn’t changed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why are you telling me?”

Then no words for a time. And then her voice again. “I find it’s not so simple just to resume.”