A Small Hotel (3 page)

Theresa says, “Definitely time for a pit stop.”

And now more frat boys. Maybe frat boys. Three of them, young certainly, not painted but drunk. They float by and they make meowing sounds at Kelly and veer too near her and she turns her back to them and they go on. Theresa says to her, “I should have done like you. I need a costume.” Both Theresa and Katie are dressed in jeans and sweatshirts.

“I need a drink,” Katie says.

“Me too,” Theresa says.

Katie does a now-presenting hand-sweep toward the door nearby. “Bar,” she says.

“Bar,” Theresa says.

The sound of the crowd swells down the block. This is all still new to Kelly and she is not drunk and she has no need to get drunk at the moment. She feels surprisingly invisible here and she wonders if that’s one of the allures of Mardi Gras, to feel this way: unseen, unseeable, unknowable in the midst of the tumult of so many others. And the more intense the crowd, the more
comfortably bound inside herself she feels. The crowd down Bourbon is chanting something and cheering and Kelly says, “You two go on in. I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes.”

“You going to flash for some real beads?” Theresa says.

“Catwoman’s above all that,” Kelly says, and she moves off toward the hubbub.

People are packed too densely for her to push through in the street itself so she moves to the edge of the sidewalk, just beneath the overhanging balconies, finding the seam between the street crowd and the crowd that has oozed from the doors of bars and clubs. Underfoot is the squinch and slide of the gutter muck and the smells are strong of waste and spillage and spew, smells that will become for Kelly, in the years ahead, just a faint presence in the nose and in the finish of the scent of New Orleans, a not unpleasant thing in that form, like the smell of a skunk from a great distance out on a farm road can be not unpleasant, but near to her, in her first Mardi Gras, the smell is overwhelming and she struggles to keep her footing in her stilettos. But she makes progress toward the voluble center of the block.

Voluble now with a cry in unison: “Show your tits! Show your tits!” Over and over the cry is sent upwards
and Kelly is facing this compressed center of the crowd and she is beneath a wide Creole townhouse balcony with the objects of the crowd’s attention clearly located above. All eyes are turned upward, a hundred hands are raised, jiggling strands of beads. And right in front of her is a small cleared arc of space made by the crowd having moved away a bit from two young women. These two are the objects of a quieter entreaty from above. They are each of them a little too corpulent, not quite pretty in the face, one with a weak chin and a crooked nose, the other with close set eyes and thin lips, not homely but not quite pretty, women who never get looked at twice in the Florida town or the South Carolina town or the Illinois town where they live, but here they wear tank tops and they are the objects of intense and clamorous interest, and these bodies of theirs, which they stand before mirrors and criticize and rue for all the other days of the year, are suddenly desirable, are commodities of great value commanding a currency that everyone around them covets ardently, the beads, the good beads, the thick red and gold and purple and green beads with attachments, with miniature masks or babies or mermaids or devils or rubber duckies or bottles of Jim Beam, cheap shit novelty stuff at any other time of the year but on these few days they are the world’s wealth, they are physical objects of desire,
they are the primo Mardi Gras throws, and the two young women can have these things because of their bodies and they can have wild adulation from faces and cameras and whoopings and cheers all around them, but first there is negotiation, there is naked capitalism, supply and demand, hard bargaining. And Kelly takes all this in and her sense of being alone here in the middle of this tumult, alone and untouchable in her own solitude, is very strong now.

And the crowd cheers and the air is full of beads flying up, up and out of sight toward the balcony and caught above: tits have been shown up there just now and the two young women in the street are laughing and they look at each other and Kelly takes a step into the empty space, away from the two women but near them, she stands with those who are gawking and pleading, and she glances up, and all along the balcony is a row of mostly male faces turned downwards. But side by side in the center of the row are two young women and they are putting on their new beads, their nipples blinkered again somewhere beneath the dozens of heavy strands of accumulated wealth.

And next to the women who flashed are two men with forearms draped in large-beaded plastic necklaces. Gold ones with the beads alternating three to one with black Darth Vader heads and purple ones with jester
faces and another with king cake babies and another with a Big Bird pendant, and the men dangle these now at the two women before Kelly. She looks at them. The women are motioning to the beads they want. The business of this goes forward. They are demanding two strands. Not two for the two of them. Two for each of them. The man above is not giving in. The women gesture: one strand for each tit. He appreciates the argument, but he will not yield. One for each set. And the crowd is now joining in the negotiation. The faces have all turned to the two women from Panama City or from Aiken or from Joliet and they are secretaries in a real estate office or they are elementary school teachers or they are librarians and the crowd is crying out to them “Show your tits! Show your tits!” and the most wonderful beads are quivering above them and they look at each other and they laugh and they know that they are, in this moment, something they always dreamed they might be, and they raise their faces and grasp the bottoms of their tank tops and they lift the tops and their breasts are naked in New Orleans, their nipples wake wide-eyed to the pop of flashbulbs and the loud cheers of hundreds.

And Kelly, fascinated thus far, now recoils inside, once she sees the deal being closed. She never quite indentified with the two young women. She is herself
pretty, pretty enough and confident enough in her prettiness not to have that particular self-doubt, and the self-doubt she cannot name but that fills her up could never be assuaged by strangers, and she knows the value of the objects in the world and she desires many of them but not if Big Bird or Darth Vader are attached, not even in this sealed, self-defining world of Mardi Gras, because she has felt for a little while here that she is herself sealed and self-defining, but now it’s time to move away, go back to the bar and have a drink with her sister and her friend.

But the crowd is shifting its focus, and Kelly finds that the two young women are sliding away and she has a sudden empty space around her and the way back to the sidewalk has new faces, new bodies, men who are focused on Kelly now and are shoulder-to-shoulder and she doesn’t want to have to push by them and she has a quick sharp-clawed scrabbling in her chest and she can hear a call of “Catwoman” from above and she looks up and one of the young men is dangling a long strand of purple beads with a Batman pendant and he makes a lifting motion for her to show her tits and the man next to him is making the same gesture and the two balcony women are laughing and dipping their heads at Kelly in encouragement and they pantomime the raising
of their own tops and Kelly shakes her head no, not me, I won’t, and she turns, looking for a way out, she makes a complete circle, looking for a way out but seeing only the tightly compacted crowd, and all the faces are on her and the cameras are raised and the circle she makes does not look to anyone like panic and the urge to flee, it looks like a show, like an appeal for encouragement, and the crowd takes that up with the cry of “Show your tits! Show your tits!”

Kelly might as well be totally naked, right now, right where she stands, her skin prickles with vulnerability and her limbs are crazy restless and the men blocking the sidewalk are scarier to her, more personal, than the street crowd, and she turns around once more, decided already that she has no choice but to lunge toward these very voices demanding her nakedness, and she raises her hands before her and lowers her face and she throws herself forward and she will pummel and weep and press her way out of this space no matter what.

And the crowd parts at once, swallowing Kelly into its midst, and more women slide into the marketplace behind her and the crowd instantly shifts its attention and forgets why they absorbed this woman in black so readily and she is trapped again, tightly bound in by bodies on all sides in the middle of Bourbon
Street, bodies oblivious to her and to the reason she is now among them.

She presses on, tacking through the dense currents, following any little opening in the general direction of the bar for as far as possible and then shifting into the next opening, and in this way she is making progress, and the chanting and cheering is fading into the distance behind her. And for all the intense and indiscriminate jostling of a Mardi Gras middle-of-the-street crowd, it’s rare that anyone there will consciously put a hand on a stranger, so she’s doing better now, she’s even able to convince herself she’s had an adventure at Mardi Gras, she’s got a good story to tell.

And she finds herself seated on the side of the bed in the Olivier House and it’s twenty-five years later and she thinks: I’m telling the story to myself now. And she wonders why. She should have a drink. But instead, here’s this story playing itself out. Michael is about to appear for the first time. That’s the prompt. Meeting him, of course, has ultimately led to this present moment. But her mind has backed her up farther than necessary to introduce her future husband, and it occurs to her the reason is this: the bag is Gucci, the dress is Chanel; I’ve shown my tits. But that feels wrong, somehow. Too simple. The two librarians wanted to be desired. But at the moment they lifted their tops
to show their naked breasts, weren’t their yearnings running deeper than that? And she stops this thinking. Stops it.

Michael still insists on presenting himself, however. Kelly emerges at last from that Bourbon Street crowd and she goes into the bar on the corner of Toulouse, and there she learns yet another thing about Mardi Gras: you don’t split up and expect to find each other again. Kelly makes a thorough tour of the frat and sorority drunks, and a Yoda drinking with a Ken and Barbie, and the Blues Brothers in a corner table—half a dozen of them—singing the chorus of “Rubber Biscuit,” and the dazed and queasy women in the toilet at the back. But Katie and Theresa are gone.

Kelly doesn’t want to drink alone. She’s had enough close encounters with strangers. The three of them have an arranged meeting place if they get split up anyway, back at their hotel room across Canal Street. She steps out of the bar, and with the tumult on Bourbon and with Toulouse Street to her right that, by comparison, is only thinly and casually populated, she strolls off toward Rampart.

But almost at once a loud, slurred meowing begins behind her.

She knows not to stop, not even to look. But she takes only a few more steps and on each side of
her a body rushes by and the two converge before her to block her way, and she stops. The two young men look faintly familiar in a fleetingly-witnessed-crime-and-now-pick-them-out-of-a-lineup sort of way. She remembers. They are the drunks who meowed at her earlier. Not frat-boyish really. Spiky hair and bad teeth. Townies somewhere. Grease monkeys and 7-Eleven clerks. They are blondish and could be brothers. They are holding drinks in Styrofoam cups and they are draped in beads. The taller, heavier, older of the two shifts his eyes briefly over Kelly’s shoulder. She remembers there was a third and she knows he’s behind her. And there is a clutching in her throat as palpable as if one of them has grabbed her there with his hand.

The taller of the two says, “The cat. The cat’s back.”

The smaller says, “Catwoman. Cat girl.”

Kelly takes a single tentative, sliding step to the left and the two men shift with her.

“Whoa,” the older one says. “You’re all dressed up for us.”

“Looking good,” the other says.

In a low, calm way the older one says, “Show your tits.”

His little brother struggles to take a cheap strand of beads from the tangle on his neck. The older brother
looks Kelly steadily in the eyes. “Show your tits,” he says again.

The other one stops struggling with the beads and says, “Tits. Can you show us six? Do cats have six?”

“Two,” the older one says. “It’s Cat
woman
.”

“Two’s better.”

“Show us.” This comes from behind Kelly. The third man.

“Show your tits,” they all three say. And they begin to chant it. “Show your tits. Show your tits.”

The chanting seems less a threat than the older one’s quiet demand and Kelly takes another step to the side and even as she thinks to run, her legs wobble, her knees won’t hold firmly, her ankle turns a little in the stilettos. And the third man appears, a dark-haired one, stocky, and the three shoulder up and the older blondish one, still the leader, says “Tits first” and Kelly makes a little movement to the side again but the three of them together are quick, they shift too, keeping in front of her and she’s having trouble drawing a breath and the three of them don’t chant this time but say in low, intense unison, “Show your tits.”

Then an arm is around her waist and a man’s voice says “The cat’s with me” and the arm is strong and presses her gently but firmly to move. Instantly the leader of the men takes a step toward them saying
“Who’s this asshole …” and the man holding Kelly blocks the other man with a carefully modulated stiff arm, not quite touching him but firmly placed between them, meaning serious business but not quite aggressive enough to start a fight, not yet at least, and he says in an elaborately friendly tone “Chill out, man” and this is all going very fast for Kelly and she is trying to catch up and she has not even looked at this new man, and she does that now. She sees Michael’s profile for the first time, the sweet hard prominence of chin and brow, and at this moment she doesn’t know who he is or, in fact, if his intentions are any better than the others’. But she can sort that out later. She shifts closer into him and he’s saying to the leader of the three, in that friendly tone, “It’s all just a great party here.”