A Small Hotel (11 page)

Luke has waited a few moments for a response, but she is saying nothing. He shrugs a very small shrug and says, low, afraid she’s heard him as argumentative, “The Quarter just don’t seem like a place you
happen to end up in going from point A to point B.” He pauses again.

Kelly looks at him. It’s from some other movie. Short hair. No whiskers. A film by an Altman protégé, Alan Rudolph:
Choose Me
. Choose me. I’m easy. She feels Michael next to her in a theater somewhere. Mobile. They saw that movie together, early on. Carradine didn’t look all that great to her by then. Too lean. Hungry. Simply hungry. She was glad. She put her head on Michael’s shoulder. Choose me. She feels tears coming to her eyes.

Luke is saying something. “You’re feeling scuffed up tonight,” he says, very softly. “I’m sorry.”

Kelly hears his words, appreciates the sudden shift in him, but she can find no words of her own.

Luke says, “I’m going back over to the bar now. If you need to just talk, you give me a sign.” He rises, picks up his drink.

“Thanks,” Kelly says. Thanks for going away. He turns. He goes. And she is sitting in her Mercedes, sitting at the curb across the street from the Blanchard Judicial Building and she roils hotly in her head, in her limbs, and she holds her cell phone in her hand, but the welter in her won’t let her work her fingers to make this call that she has come here to make. She watches the distant figures moving before the building, and she lowers her
eyes and she finally makes her forefinger move—her finger is trembling, however, her whole hand, as well, is trembling—she can barely draw a breath—and she begins to dial.

And she drags herself back into this bar on some corner of probably Bourbon Street—she’s probably made her way to Bourbon Street—and she still can hardly draw a breath. It’s the bar now. It’s the bar that won’t let her breathe. She pulls her purse to her, feels around for her wallet. She takes out twenty. Enough for the drink. She puts it on the table and she rises and she moves past the bar without seeing anyone there and she goes out of this place and she crosses what is probably Bourbon Street because Bourbon Street won’t let her breathe either and she heads down whatever cross street this is, heads in the direction of the river.

Soon, though, she is diverted uptown by a lit window in a closed antique shop on Royal and she casts her eyes over the things there without seeing them, but without seeing anything inwardly either, and she drifts on and a tune plays in her head—weary blues have made me cry—just those few bars over and over—and she wonders if she will wear a blister on her heel from walking and walking in her Louboutins and she wonders why she wore them and she wonders if she packed any Band-Aids to put on the blister that she will
probably rub onto her heel but of course she didn’t and she wonders why she should wonder such a thing does she think she’s a tourist come to the Quarter with all the things packed that she needs instead of come here simply to move from point A to point B and she hums and thinks about her feet and about the faint dryness in her mouth and then the shops vanish and beside her is an iron fence and she stops and looks and it’s Jesus standing in a floodlight at the back of the cathedral and his arms are raised above his head and his hand is broken, his hand is broken by Katrina and still unhealed, and she thinks that FEMA should take care of Jesus, that FEMA should heal his hand, and she finds herself backing away from him because Jesus does not approve of her and she is sorry for whatever she has done and whatever she might do and for whatever she is doing even now and his arms are raised as if in a blessing but his eyes are cast up Orleans Street toward Bourbon and he does not even notice her and that is just as well. She backs off. She turns and enters the darkness of Père Antoine’s Alley and emerges upon Jackson Square and she could look only a little to her right to see the bench where she and Michael sat but she did not mean to come here and she angles off to her left to get away, moving quickly, and her mind has clarified enough in this escape to hear the voice of a heavy woman sitting
in the darkness with a tarot deck and the faint flicker of candles before her on a small table.

“I will read your future,” the woman says.

“You’ll get it wrong,” Kelly says, and she moves as fast as her Louboutin platform pumps will allow her to go, which isn’t very fast, and when she is far enough away from the tarot reader so there can be no more discussion of her future, Kelly stops and takes off one shoe and then the other and hooks her fingers in them to carry them. And she feels the cool press of stone on her bare feet, feels it for a long moment, a good thing. Then she moves along the galleried Pontalba and abruptly she is before another place where she did not intend to go: the pavilion of the Café du Monde, lit bright in the dark, and a young man and a young woman are before her, not someone from the past but uncomfortably here before her right now and they are sitting near the street and they have pushed their chairs side by side at the tiny bistro table and he sips his coffee and she takes a bite of a beignet and she struggles to manage the powdered sugar and he watches her do this and she catches him watching and they laugh and he leans to her and puts his lips near her ear and he whispers something, her face softening as he does, and she smiles, and Kelly knows exactly what he has said, she knows exactly what he has said that pleases her, and
Kelly turns abruptly away and she moves quickly along the river-edge of Jackson Square where the carriage horses are stinking and nickering all along the curb and she cuts in front of one and crosses Decatur Street and now she is in a neutral place, a place with nothing of her and Michael: she crosses the street-performance space before the wide, low, concrete façade of Washington Artillery Park.

She climbs the stairs before her and another set of stairs up the façade and she is on top of the monument. A Civil War cannon on a pedestal aims at the Mississippi. She goes down the back stairs and finds herself crossing railroad tracks—the train whistles come from here, she thinks—and she presses on, climbing more stairs. She stops. The river is before her, going black in the gathering night and scattered with lights from Algiers across the way.

She’s having trouble controlling the heave of her chest. She has rushed here, she realizes. Since she crossed the street she has been moving very fast, free to do so with her feet bare and feeling compelled to see the river. And now she pauses. She struggles to slow her breathing. She is standing on the Moonwalk, the herringbone-brick esplanade along the water, and she can’t think why she was in such a rush. There’s only a wide darkness before her and she turns in the direction
of Canal Street and she walks on. And like her husband, the past runs strongly in her, carrying her feelings about her husband, about her marriage, about her life, but it courses in her deeply enough that it’s as if it weren’t there, as if she were unaffected, as if she were merely here, in this present life, choosing to take this step and then the next, moving, in this moment, for instance, toward the distant steamboat Natchez lit up bright at its mooring and toward the even more distant hotels and the bridge to the West Bank. But in fact Kelly is beside another river, the Alabama, and she is five years old and Katie is nine and she is a prissy bossy big sister such as to drive Kelly crazy and the two of them and their mother are sitting on a blanket on the grass and Katie has taken over—even from Mama—taken over the laying out of the sandwiches clenched tight in Saran Wrap and the napkins and the bags of Fritos and Mama is sitting at the edge of the blanket and she’s looking away and Katie is in the center and acting like she is in charge and everything is done.

“We’re not ready to eat,” Kelly says. “We need Daddy.”

“He’s thinking,” Katie says.

And it’s true that he has gone off by himself, and Kelly does not look in his direction now—directly behind her, a few dozen yards away, very near the river,
very near the water, almost at the edge of the water—she does not look because she is already quite aware of the fact that he is thinking, but that doesn’t mean things are the way they should be when a family goes on a picnic and decides it’s time for food.

“I’m not eating without Daddy,” Kelly says, loudly, so he can hear. Katie has been speaking in hushed tones.

And Kelly’s mother speaks now in the same hush. “Your sister’s right. He’ll come when he’s ready.” She has not even turned her face in order to take sides with Katie. She is still looking away, although not quite toward her husband.

Katie picks up the sandwich in front of her and begins to peel the plastic away. Finally Kelly’s mother arranges herself on the blanket, though without looking directly at either of her daughters, and begins to pull open a bag of chips. All of this is too much for Kelly. She grabs her own sandwich and jumps up and turns away from these silly people and her mother hisses her name at her but she is already moving away, moving quickly across the grass to the massive-shouldered hunch of her father.

She arrives behind him and pulls up, her desire to be near him suddenly pressed back by the force of his self-absorption. She hesitates now. But she wants this too much. “Daddy,” she says.

He does not answer, does not move. And the gravitational poles abruptly shift: what pressed her back before—his silence, his inwardness, his obliviousness—now pull her powerfully toward him. She circles him, moving into the narrow space between her father and the water, and he lifts his face to her.

She has heard already many times: you have your father’s eyes. When she was toddling with language, a question formed inside her and she held it close to her for some days until one night at bedtime she stood before her father, ready to go off with her mother, and she was seeking his ritual kiss, which he would give her on the forehead, but before he even began to lean toward her in his deliberate, slow-motioned way, she asked him the question at last: “Daddy, do I have your eyes?” And he did not say a word. Instead, he pulled her hands out before her and turned them over, palms upward, and he reached with his own right hand and plucked at his eye, closing it at once, smooth-lidded, and he doubled the hand into a gentle fist, and he held the fist over her left hand and opened it, and then he closed her hand. And he did this with his other eye, just the same way, and after he closed her other hand and both his eyes had vanished before her, she dared not move: she had his eyes, she had them in the palms of her hands—she could feel their shape, their weight
there—and she did not move, and she barely let herself draw a breath, and they stood there before each other for what felt to Kelly like a long time, like a very long time, like a very very long time, and after a while she began to tremble from what she held, from what she was responsible for. So she lifted her right hand and brought it forward very carefully, and she turned it, and she put her fist against the place of his left eye, and she opened her fist, and she felt his eye pop open beneath her palm. She took her hand away. Her father’s left eye was restored. She brought forth her left hand, and she restored his right eye as well. And he looked at her with those eyes. For another long time, he looked at her, and his eyes did not blink, did not move. They held not the slightest trace of anything she could ever possibly read.

And now again, his large, wide-set, deep-winter-midnight eyes—so much like Kelly’s eyes—as a child certainly but even more clearly so as an adult—his eyes beside the Alabama River, with the five-year-old Kelly standing before him, are empty of any emotion Kelly can perceive. And she holds out her hand with her sandwich, and she says, “Time to eat. Take mine.”

And he reaches up and he takes the sandwich from Kelly, and she feels a sweet leaping inside her. But he immediately lays the sandwich on the grass beside him, and the leaping stops in her, everything stops. Though
his eyes are open upon her, they have vanished and she does not have them, and so she does what she wants most to do, what she has come here, actually, to do. She falls forward onto him, her arms going around his neck and her head pressing against his, and she says, “I love you, Daddy,” and she wants him to speak, wants for him to draw her even closer and to speak, to tell her this thing that she has told him. But instead she feels her wrists clasped tight, feels herself being peeled away, and her father’s hands grasp her under the arms and her body moves backward and upward and her father is standing up now and she floats before him, his arms extended, holding her away from him.

He is smiling. A thinly stretched, barely upturned smile. It is, nevertheless, perceptibly a smile, and this is all that Kelly sees for now, and it balances her disappointment in failing to evoke the words she wishes to hear—words she has not yet heard from her father—not ever ever ever—and the smile even balances the fright of this sudden physical state she finds herself in. And in this balance her feelings are free to sort themselves out as she hangs in mid-air in his strong hands: she does feel his strength, she does trust him to protect her out here, she does feel safe where she is—and he lifts her higher, his smile angling up to her as she rises, and so she laughs. Kelly laughs and her father draws her down
toward him—the tease, the come-here-my-baby—and then he abruptly lifts her higher, and this is a thing that once delighted her, as a toddler, when she had no words and when she knew only the strength of her father’s hands and the thrill of being almost in a certain place you want to be and then abruptly not being there but knowing you are still safe and can go back again and at the very same moment your body is thrilled, is flying. She feels all that now. Her father does this once more, draws her to him and at the last moment lifts her, and she laughs again but now he does not draw her in. He keeps her far away from him, high above him, and he begins a slow turn, and Kelly looks up from her father and she sees her mother and her sister standing at the blanket, looking this way, and then she sees a distant tree line, and then she sees the river, running blue before her, running fast and wide, and her father has stopped turning, and still she hangs in the air. She looks down at her father and the smile is gone. He is looking at her steadily, carefully, as if thinking what to do with her, as if trying to decide who she is, and she hangs there above him and she says, “Okay, Daddy.”