“Home, I assume. I don’t know.”
The burden of talk slides back to Michael, but he goes silent. He has learned what he can — nothing — about what he is focused on at the moment.
“Look,” Sam says, “she just called basically to say she loved me. She’s sad. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
Michael remains silent. He would like to, but he does not know how to change the conversation now.
“Are you there?” Sam says.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry about all this,” she says. “For both of you.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s hard not hearing from you,” Sam says.
“I’m sorry,” Michael says.
“I have to go now. I have to sing.” And sitting in the manager’s office of a dinner club on the North Side of Chicago, waiting to sing, Samantha feels her stubbornness stir in her, and though she has not said it in a few years, having struggled to accept this thing in her father that she tries without success not to accept in the men she falls for, she says, “I love you, Daddy.”
“Sing your heart out, Sam,” he says.
“I will,” she says. Easier to accept is her father’s awkwardness at the end of phone conversations, so without a formal exchange of “good-byes”, she hangs up, and at the exact same moment, so does he.
Michael slowly puts his phone away, trying to be the attorney about this, the engaged but detached attorney with a skitterish client. Kelly will turn up. It’s in her best interest to turn up. And there is a rustling near him and a hand slipping into his arm. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t listening,” Laurie says. “I was lurking from afar.”
Michael is surprised at the quick swelling of gratitude he feels at Laurie appearing beside him: he likes her hand on his arm, firm there, he likes the headshop-dusky smell of her, likes the aggressive smartness of her, her knowing the first thing that would occur to him, that would threaten to piss him off though he wouldn’t show it, likes that she knows and she goes straight to it and refutes it, he likes her turning him away from the house now, heading them down the allée into the dark.
They walk slowly for a time without saying anything, and Michael is grateful to Laurie for that too, especially since he knows she is prone to talk and will start to talk soon, but she also sometimes knows to keep quiet, and Michael puts his hand on hers in the crook of his arm. He realizes the gesture will probably loosen her tongue, but he finds himself ready for that, even finds, a little to his surprise, given the circumstances, that he will be glad to hear her voice.
She says, “No word, I take it.”
“No word,” he says.
“I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“Good.”
Laurie knows her man’s predilections and believes that knowing them and teasing about them somehow mollifies them: she nudges him with her elbow and says, “Only about that.”
And though he meant simply that it was good she wasn’t going to talk about Kelly and though it’s true that he would actually like to hear her voice at the moment, he plays his role. “Too bad,” he says.
She elbows him again, knowing rightly this time that he’s simply posing.
They have emerged from beneath the canopy of oaks and they approach the iron gate at the highway. The house floats brightly behind them and the salon orchestra has begun again and it is all distant, like watching a cruise ship from the shore, heading out in the dark into the Gulf.
Michael and Laurie stop at the gate, turn to face each other.
She says, “I’d love to lunge into your arms right now and, you know, cling to you. But this fricking dress won’t allow it.”
“Now that really is too bad,” he says.
Laurie cocks her head toward the levee and wrinkles her brow in faux philosophical thought. “But if I wasn’t wearing this dress, we wouldn’t be here tonight in the first place for me to wish I could throw myself into your arms.”
“We’d be somewhere.”
“O. M. G,” she says, full-stopping with each initial. “My man’s gone sentimental on me.”
“That’s computerese, right?”
“‘Sentimental’? Nah. Outside of Photobucket baby-animal shots, it’s pretty much all petty snark out there.”
Michael was willing to hear her voice, but she has a sweet tooth for bantering and he’s presently not up to that. He looks away.
She says, “Oh my god. It means ‘Oh my god.’”
He looks back to her.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve got the ditz gene. You know that by now, yes?”
He doesn’t answer.
“This is the wrong time,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No fricking dress, and we’re holding each other and I’m not saying a thing.”
“You don’t have the ditz gene,” he says. “You’ve got the mimic gene. The tasty butterfly making herself look like the poisonous one. It’s safer.”
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.”