A Small Hotel (14 page)

She reaches out and puts her fingertips on his cheek. “See why I’m crazy about you?” she says.

They stand there like that for a long moment, with Laurie simply touching Michael’s face, not saying any more. He is grateful to her for this silence. Even more so because he knows it’s not her natural state.

Finally she lowers her hand and, without taking her eyes off him, inclines her head slightly off to the
right, toward the levee. “I think I could figure out how to climb up there with the dress. I bet there’s something nice to see in the dark.”

Michael opens the gate. He and Laurie cross the highway and go up the inclined road to the berm of the levee, and her hoop-skirted dress does not prevent him from putting his arm around her waist.

∼

And fifty miles downriver, at the foot of another levee, Kelly rises from where she has been poised on her haunches between water and land, made simply weary, at last, by watching a river whose current she cannot see. She wants her own little room. Her own locked space. Room 303. Her ironic space. And the irony is hers. She’s in on it. She is climbing the steps and crossing the tracks and climbing again and the cannon is hers too, everything she sees tonight is all hers. And she descends the front of the monument and turns away from the Café du Monde and she crosses Decatur, moving in and out of the spill of lamplight, and as she heads up the dim St. Peter Street side of Jackson Square, she finds herself on a warm spring night at a cocktail party in the house of one of Michael’s senior partners, and the place is full of lawyers and judges and
spouses and clerks and paralegals. Her drink is almost empty. She knows that without having to check. And she also knows she’s looking beautiful. She is certainly not unaware of her flaws, her inbred flaws and the flaws of being forty-seven, but for some reason the fractional part of her that knows she can still look beautiful and even more or less young when she wants to, that part of her is in control at the moment, and maybe it’s the wine but there she is, the I’m-okay Kelly, standing in this crowd and not caring overly that Michael is ignoring her.

He’s speaking to an associate about John Edwards. “Look,” Michael is saying, “I’m not endorsing him, but a hundred and fifty dollar haircut turns into a four hundred dollar haircut when the campaign-quality L. A. hair guy has to come to you.”

Kelly drains the last bit of her wine while Michael says, “Surely, that’s justified while running for president.”

Kelly lowers her glass and looks through the crowd, across the room, to the bar.

Michael’s associate says, “I’ve done a hundred and a half for the sake of a jury.”

“Of course,” Michael says. “It’s like the lifts in your shoes.”

There is a beat of silence. Kelly looks toward her husband’s conversation. His back is partly turned to her.

The associate, who is not quite Kelly’s height, is breaking into a smile and then a laugh, which Michael joins. The associate says, “One jury in three will acquit on just those things.”

Kelly moves away, heading for the bar, excusing herself through the bodies without even checking to see if they belong to someone she knows. She needs more wine. But when she arrives before the bartender, a young man with a tattoo of a Chinese character on the side of his throat, she alters her plan. “Scotch and water,” she says.

As he mixes, she turns fully around and leans against the bar. The slow eddying of the crowd opens a sightline back to her husband. The associate has moved away. Michael is alone. He is nodding to someone across the room. And now he lifts a bit at the chest, straightens up in that male way at the sudden attention of a woman, and he watches. The someone must be approaching. Kelly doesn’t really care who it is, but there’s nothing else to look at, and a thin, pretty blonde woman wearing a black satin bare-shouldered cocktail dress arrives in front of Michael. She seems very young. She does an awestruck little shoulder ripple and face bob. This is Michael: his upstraightness has now morphed into a tight-assed formality. He shakes her hand.

Kelly looks away.

“Scotch and water,” the bartender says behind her.

She turns around, and as she puts her hand on her drink, someone arrives next to her, and a male voice says, “Scotch and water.”

She looks. For a moment he is in profile. His darkish hair is cropped very close, as close as the carefully manicured scruff of his beard, and there is a thin angularity to him that she thinks is very nice. He turns his face to her and he smiles. He is, she reckons, the age that she is looking tonight. She nods and lifts her own drink to him.

“Scotch and water?” he says.

“Scotch and water,” she says.

His brow furrows. “Did you oversee the proportions?”

“Bartender’s choice,” Kelly says.

He lowers his voice with a sideways glance. “Do I need to intervene? Did he get it right?”

Kelly glances very quickly at the bartender, who is uncapping the Scotch but looking discreetly away with the merest trace of a smile, a good bartender giving permission for two strangers to make him the subject of playful talk. She returns to the stylishly scruffy face before her and lifts her forefinger and takes a sip of her drink. She ponders a moment. “For me, it’s just fine,”
she says. “For you …” She finishes the sentence with a who-knows shrug.

“No,” the man says. “Really no. I sense we’re the same in this.”

Kelly smiles and slows herself down. Is this just bored cocktail party banter or is it flirting? For her it’s banter. Perhaps for a man, the two are the same. Perhaps for this nice-faced man, it’s flirting. It makes no difference. She would glance now in the direction of Michael and the blonde except the man is blocking that view, and Michael is not a flirter anyway, and she says, “I sense that too. Which means if the Scotch were good enough, you wouldn’t use any water at all.”

“You see? My intuition is unerring.”

“Then you’re a dangerous man.”

The bartender sets a Scotch and water before the intuitive man. He picks it up.

“Isn’t this odd,” he says.

“What?”

“I can sense your Scotch and water preferences, but I’m not sure if you’re one of us.”

“Being?”

“An attorney.”

“I’m married to one of you,” Kelly says.

“Ah,” the man says. “That.”

“And you?”

He shrugs. “I’m one of us.”

“Here with one of us?”

“Somewhere in the room.”

Good. That’s settled. Kelly offers her hand. “I’m Kelly Hays.”

He takes her hand and shakes it with an earnest not-quite-firmness that she suspects he developed for greeting new female clients. “I’m Drew Singleton,” he says.

“Mr. Singleton.”

“Drew,” he says, keeping the handshake going.

“Kelly,” she says.

“Would that happen to be Michael Hays?”

“Yes.”

“Impressive.”

“He must be your boss.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You broke off the extended handshake as soon as you realized he was my husband.”

Drew laughs, but even as the laugh animates him, his eyes focus more intensely on her face.

“You’re good,” he says. “Wrong, in this case, but good.”

“Like one of you.”

She pauses just enough to let him try to figure this out without actually having time to do it.

“Right or wrong isn’t the point,” she says. “It’s being good that counts.”

He laughs again. He lifts his Scotch and water to her and they touch glasses.

“A whole other firm,” Drew says.

And now he waits for her to puzzle for a moment.

“Not only is he not my boss,” Drew says. “I don’t even work in his firm.”

And Kelly stops in a stretch of dark somewhere alongside Jackson Square. She tries to shake all this off. But she is at another party at another house in the summer of that same year, a large Gulf-frontage house with a major deck and pool, and many of the others are in swimsuits but she is wearing a summer dress, because however beautiful and more or less young she can sometimes feel she looks, her confidence does not extend to any swimsuit with any style at all. She is already drinking Scotch and water, though slowly, having skipped the wine but not intending to get tipsy, and she is standing on the deck just to the side of the wide sliding doors into the house. She is watching a blonde. Not the blonde who approached Michael at the earlier party, though that blonde will soon emerge from the doors beside Kelly. This blonde is across the pool and is not as young by a decade as she looks, which is about twenty-five, and Kelly is trying to
figure out the signs that tell her this is so. The woman is standing with a drink and she is gesturing grandly with her free hand and the three men around her are listening intently.

And a male voice says, “We’re both in a rut.”

Kelly turns to find Drew Singleton beside her. He lifts his own Scotch and water. “But this is a pretty good one,” he says.

They touch glasses, and they both drink.

“You remember me?” Drew says.

“Of course.”

The blonde across the way laughs. It is a sharp, projected laugh, as if by a skilled stage actress in a large theater. She slaps backhanded at the arm of one of the men.

“Didn’t I see you come in with her?” Kelly says.

“Quite brazenly,” Drew says.

She looks at him. “She’s one of us? Me, us?”

“A lawyer’s wife? Yes.”

“Your wife?”

Drew laughs. “Of course. I didn’t really mean …”

“I know,” Kelly says, rather firmly, feeling suddenly twitchy. “She’s very beautiful.”

“She is.”

“You looked very good together in your brazenness.” She realizes this has come out sounding oddly sad.

“Did we?” Drew says. “I love her.”

And his declaration comes out flat, explanatory in some suddenly serious way.

Kelly feels a dark blooming in her, a dark dark thing. She looks at Drew Singleton, who is looking across the pool at his wife.

“I like how easily you say that,” Kelly says, meaning
love
, meaning the word
love
.

At this moment, beyond Drew Singleton, a woman emerges from the house, a pretty young blonde woman in a stylishly minimal swimsuit who is, however, merely a bit of background motion for Kelly, though she would recognize the blonde from the previous party if she weren’t studying Drew’s face with a sudden intensity, as if she’d suddenly heard a rumor about him, a secret about him revealed—he is a man who can speak openly and explicitly, even to a near-stranger, about his love for his wife—and Kelly is compelled to look at him closely, to invest this new, insider knowledge of the man into her physical perception of him, the way you stare at the face of a celebrity for an extra few seconds when you see a tabloid revelation: behind these eyes is the capacity for
that
.

And Kelly stops again somewhere beyond Jackson Square, somewhere in the dimness between streetlamps, somewhere before some shuttered Creole cottage with
a dog barking in the distance and Kelly is sitting in her Mercedes, sitting at the curb across the street from the Blanchard Judicial Building, the place where her husband becomes the man he most naturally is, the impressive man, and she is dialing her cell phone with trembling hands and she says into the phone, “It’s me. I’m outside. Outside the courthouse. Please come out here. Please come out here and see me.” But no more than this now. Kelly lets no more than her own desperate voice into her head before she moves on, quickly now, back toward the Olivier House and her room.

∼

Michael goes up the hard-packed dirt and pea-gravel road toward the top of the levee and Laurie pushes his offered hand away as she mutters on about how this was a mistake but don’t let’s go back I don’t want to go back I want to do this and thanks but I need two hands to deal with this dress, and what plays in Michael’s head is the little scene that ends with Laurie going out the wide sliding doors and past Kelly and Drew and on toward the pool, and it is a scene as inconsequential and as incrementally crucial as the scene that concurrently plays just out of Michael’s sight between his wife and a lawyer whose own wife laughs with three men at the
far side of the pool. As Michael looks out those glass doors and idly wonders which lies a current client is telling him are conscious lies and which are lies the client is also telling himself, Laurie appears at his side.

“So, if I can ask your advice,” she says, and she waits for him to turn to her, which he does now. He recognizes her at once, though he has not seen her since the brief first conversation at the earlier party. She is wearing a lime green chiffon mini-robe and her hair is rolled up and she has sunglasses wedged at the top of her forehead.

As soon as she has his attention, Laurie says, “If I was needing counsel, should I go with a lawyer who strips down to his Speedo and swims at a swim party or with a lawyer who stays dressed and just watches?”

“Hello,” Michael says.

“Hello,” Laurie says. “It’s me again.”

“It depends what you need him for,” he says.

“I’m not stalking you,” she says. “We just keep showing up together.”

“I believe you.”

“Good,” Laurie says. “So. Yes. You were saying it depends.”

“If you’ve got trouble with a man, go with the Speedo. If you’re in trouble with the law, you’d want him to be the clothed type.”

“Which are you?”

“There’s no Speedo under these chinos,” Michael says.

“Well,” Laurie says, “if you’re a watcher, I’ll be swimming soon. Just to let you know.” And she moves off at once through a clear space between chatting gaggles of other clothed types, and as she moves—even before she reaches the doors—she strips off the mini-robe. Michael’s breath snags at the sudden flesh of her. He is happy to be living in the era of backside cleavage and bared cheeks, but happy only in the way clothed-type lawyers with the lies of clients in the forefront of their minds are capable of being happy over a matter like that, particularly when prompted to it in public places by women young enough to be their daughters.

And now he finds himself standing in an antique tuxedo on the berm of an upriver levee with that very woman and she is muttering on about her nineteenth century gown and how did they live in these things you’d think life was hard enough in the nineteenth century without doing this to yourself, and she and Michael will sleep together tonight and he is thinking about the moments when she was at her worst. Her body was lovely but she was at her worst. Her reckless flirty worst, soliciting his eyes, implicitly daring him
to act. Kelly has vanished before finishing off their marriage, has gone out somewhere, no doubt drinking, and maybe not alone, and Michael is selectively making some kind of case in his head against this beautiful young woman who seems to think he’s worth something. He doesn’t like what his mind is doing. He reboots.