A Small Hotel (7 page)

And for the very first time, she says, “Michael, I love you.”

He does not look at her. He does not answer. Not for one beat. Not for another. The trembling in Kelly ceases abruptly. But before some new feeling can assert itself in her, born of the very fears that kept her from this declaration for weeks now, Michael speaks.

“He did go out there once to fish,” he says, keeping his eyes on the Gulf. “A friend of his took us out in a boat. I didn’t know how to interpret what I sensed about my dad. We went far enough so that the shore had vanished. There was only deep water all around, and my dad was actually afraid. It took me years to realize this. He’d be rip-shit furious if he thought I knew.”

Kelly isn’t sure he’s heard her. Perhaps his absorption with the memory of his father blocked out her words. The place in her where the trembling abruptly
ceased expands now, warmly, he has suddenly exposed himself to her, has let her see his vulnerability, this complex thing between him and his dad—she knows complex things between a child and a father all too well—and she has to do something for Michael, something, she wants to take him in her arms, but not yet, not in this moment. In this moment it seems to her the most natural thing would be to say it once more, to reassure him that way, to let him know it and share it and give it back and then they can hold each other and it will be all right for both of them. “I love you, Michael,” she says.

And he says nothing. He does not look at her and he does not say a word.

Another sort of quaking has begun in the center of her, but she still clings to the simplest possibility. “Did you hear me?” she says.

He turns to her. Turns his whole body to her, putting a hand first on one of her shoulders, guiding her to face him, then bracketing her with both his hands at her shoulders. This could be a whoa-wait-just-a-minute gesture. His hands are gentle on her but he is still holding her away. It could be an oh-my-we-have-a-major-misunderstanding-here gesture. She is trembling again. She searches his face: his eyes are gentle, she thinks, as gentle as his hands. Maybe it’s okay. Maybe
he will speak now. She realizes she needs words from him now. She needs actual words from this man. Three of them. A classic three words. But there are no words. He looks at her and his eyes are steady and he looks and looks and she can’t stand here much longer like this. She doesn’t know what she will do but she can’t just stay here at arm’s length in this silence. Perhaps she will simply turn and run away.

But now his hands leave her shoulders and they come around behind her and he moves into her, he pulls her to him, and she makes herself believe this will do for now. This will do. She wants this to do, since it’s all he’s going to give, and it will do. She puts her arms around him. She turns her head and lays it on his chest and she closes her eyes and she tells herself this is good, this is very good, his taking her in his arms. And she and Michael stand there for a long while holding each other and the only sound is the sound of the water and the wind and the birds. And Kelly blinks. A bird has flashed past her. Her face is turned to the French windows. The bird is gone—out of sight into the courtyard below—and she blinks again.

And she approaches the Blanchard Judicial Building, the courthouse where Michael often appears. This is their second summer, some months after she spoke the word
love
on a Pensacola Beach. The word has not
been mentioned again. She still teaches third grade in Mobile, but she and Michael are living together this second summer. Each morning he goes out in his dark suit and white shirt and she often sleeps late. He kisses her awake only barely, only enough to say goodbye, and he goes out and she sleeps and then she fries an egg for herself in Michael’s kitchen and she reads and she swims in the apartment complex pool and she watches the soaps and she waits for him. But this morning he left a note on the kitchen table. He gave her a courtroom number and a precise time, a quarter past noon, and he said he wanted her there. She has never seen him work a trial and she is happy to dress smartly and do her makeup very carefully and go out to watch her man in court.

The building is ugly modern, made up of modular blocks stacked like a child would stack them, the top floor in three massive, staggered parts hanging out, threatening to topple. She passes into their shadow and through the front doors and into an elevator. She emerges on the fourth floor. Before her is Courtroom 402 and in both directions are turnings and the clock on the wall says 12:14. She lingered too long preparing for this. But in a chair beside the courtroom door in front of her sits a burly, gone-to-paunch guard. She steps quickly to him.

“Courtroom 406?” she asks.

“Turn right at the corner,” he says, pointing. “Then left.”

She rushes along the corridors, taking the turns. A guard up ahead sees her coming and vanishes through a door. She arrives where he disappeared, and this is Courtroom 406 and she goes in, the guard standing stiffly beside the door, making sure the late arrival won’t disturb the proceeding. She is indeed late. Things are already underway.

Michael is before the witness box, his back to Kelly and the half dozen spectators scattered about in the viewing rows. But he’s turning around even as a graying man in tweeds is speaking from the box and a profusely white-haired portly judge leans attentively toward them both.

“And so the three men sort of gaped, you know, and they backed away,” the tweedy man is saying.

Michael has completed his turn to face the spectators, and from his position he can certainly see Kelly now, still standing at the doorway, but he makes no sign of it.

The tweedy man continues, “Then the couple …”

Michael raises a hand and interrupts the witness without looking back at him. “So you would describe them as a couple?”

“Well,” the man says, hesitating momentarily as if trying to verify his own perception, “they were together at this point.”

Michael abruptly turns to him once more. “What happened next?”

“The three men backed away, and they seemed intimidated.”

“How so?” Michael says.

“They looked shaken. The man …”

“The man who intervened?”

“Yes. The man clearly had made an impression.”

“A strong impression?”

The witness nods firmly. “Yes,” he says.

“Thank you,” Michael says. “I have no further questions for this witness.”

The judge says, “You may step down,” and the witness does, circling the stand and passing between the prosecution and defense tables, the prosecutor giving him a quick glance as he goes by. A disapproving glance, it seems to Kelly. Michael has cleverly exposed something in his cross-examination. She is getting what she often identifies to Michael as the itchy-crawlies, the term she invokes in a whisper, even if they are alone in their own bedroom, when she wants him to touch her, to make love to her, and his mind is elsewhere. His public persona has done this to her instantly.

She steps forward and sits in the back row, as the witness sits in the front.

Michael turns to the judge. “I have one more witness, your honor.”

The judge nods an oversized nod.

Michael says, “I’d like to call Kelly Dillard.”

Kelly would later be reminded of an armadillo. Not a deer in headlights, an armadillo. The armadillo, when crossing a road at night and being suddenly flabbergasted by an onrush of headlights, will freeze for only an instant and then it will leap straight upwards, a reflex that contributes greatly to its role as the semi-official Florida State Roadkill. Though her astonishment at being unexpectedly called to the witness stand gives Kelly that frozen instant, almost at once she jumps up and comes forward. Inside, however, she remains in that first state of suspension.

Briskly efficient in body but dazed in mind, she passes Michael with only a little sideways glance—he is looking away—and she enters the witness stand and she finds herself with her hand on a Bible and telling a bailiff that she will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. She sits.

Michael is before her now. “I’m sorry to take you by surprise, Miss Dillard,” he says. “But you have a crucial piece of testimony in this case.”

“I do?” she says, still failing to get her thoughts to adhere to all this.

“Yes,” Michael says. “The man involved in this incident, the man perceived by witnesses as being part of the couple in question, will you marry him?”

This will take a few moments to sink in to Kelly. Just parsing the sentence in her head is coming slowly.

Meanwhile, the prosecutor rises. “I object,” he says. “This man doesn’t deserve her.”

From beside Kelly, the judge’s voice says, “Overruled. You may answer the question, Miss Dillard.”

And Kelly gets it, and she is ready to leap up again. But even as her eyes bloom with tears, she stays seated and straightens her spine into the part Michael has given her to play.

He is saying, “Do I need to refresh your memory? The man, Michael Hays, saved you from exposing your tits to three drunken louts in New Orleans. Do you remember him?”

“Yes I do,” Kelly says.

“He’s now asking you to marry him,” Michael says.

Kelly wants to banter now, wants to play Michael’s game, but her impulse to throw her arms around him balances that exactly, so she sits there saying nothing for a very small moment in which the judge intones, “Will the witness please answer the question?”

“Yes or no,” Michael says.

“Yes,” Kelly says.

The gavel bangs and the judge cries, “Case dismissed. Everyone back to lunch.” And the spectators and the tweedy man and the prosecutor all laugh and cheer.

Kelly is ready for the big embrace now, but Michael has turned away, is reaching up over the bench to shake the judge’s hand. Kelly waits. Michael is saying a few words of thanks to the judge, and Kelly rises, and she waits, and then Michael is passing before her and coming up into the witness box, and he takes her into his arms. They kiss.

And Kelly is forty-eight years old and she is sitting in her Mercedes, sitting at the curb across the street from that same courthouse, which still threatens to drop the modular blocks of its top floor, 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, seemingly unaware it’s about to fall on them.

And Kelly at forty-nine sits in the flower-print chair and wrenches her mind out of her car and back into this room, this familiar room, this empty room that threatens to collapse on her at any moment.

∼

Michael stands beneath a gilt federal bull’s-eye mirror in the front parlor of the Oak Alley plantation house, sipping a period mint julep made with brandy and sugarcane rum. He is, at the moment, alone, and he is glad for that. He’s glad he can see Laurie, who is across the room, near the mahogany piano, but for now yes, he’s also glad he’s not with her and with the others she inevitably draws to her. She’s laughing with two young women. Michael can pick Laurie’s laugh out of the crowd. He enjoys her laughter along with his sense of solitude, but the solitude does not last long. Laurie turns her face to him and cocks her head, and she speaks a few more words to the two women and then begins to glide across the parlor toward him.

As she approaches, he has a brief flash of two years earlier. A cocktail party in a senior partner’s Gulf-frontage house and the place is full of lawyers and judges and spouses and clerks and paralegals, and Michael finally stands alone in this crowd too: he has just finished a trivial conversation with a junior associate, who has gone away to refresh his drink, and Kelly, who was standing beside him, looking beautiful and distracted, has moved off as well. Michael
is alone in a small cleared space with only people’s backs to him, but now a corridor of sightline opens up, and across the room he sees Laurie. She is wearing a cocktail dress in black satin that makes her naked shoulders and arms seem radiantly white, and she sees him seeing her, and she smiles and lifts her wine glass to him, and she nods, and he nods at her, and she is looking vaguely and recently familiar now. She apparently has taken the nods as an invitation to come to him. She moves through the crowd and he has nothing in his mind about her except noting—with actual objectivity—that she is very good looking, and he concedes to himself that if his solitary respite at this boring party is to be broken, it’s okay if it’s by this young woman.

She arrives. She says, “Mr. Hays.”

She knows him. Yes, he’s seen her somewhere. He says, “Michael.”

“Michael,” she says. “I’m Laurie Pruitt. I work for Arthur Weisberg.”

They shake hands. Her grip is surprisingly firm. He recognizes her now from a single passing glance at the office of his own lawyer, Max Bloom. Art is Max’s longtime partner.

“I’m his paralegal,” Laurie says.

“New paralegal,” Michael says.

“Fresh,” Laurie says, and she enhances the sibilance of the word just a little, flashes its double meaning.

Michael lets her know he gets this. “His fresh paralegal,” he says, reproducing her enhancement of the word.

“Fresh,” she repeats, lifting her wine glass to him.

And Laurie reaches Michael in the present, in the parlor at Oak Alley, and she puts on her thickest Southern drawl. “Well, Mr. Hays,” she says. “You are looking downright lonely over here. Is it your political views that have alienated your fellow plantation owners? Or the cheapness of your cigars?”

“I smoke only the finest cigars,” Michael says.

“And the
largest
,” she says, and she once again massages a word to open its ambiguity.

He says, “If only Sigmund Freud had been born by now, Miss Pruitt, I would have a shocking response to that comment.”

“Why, whatever do you mean, Mr. Hays?”

And a cell phone rings. Michael’s, hidden beneath his swallowtail coat. The faces in the room turn toward the sound, upper lips squaring and nostrils flaring in disdain.