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Kelly stops before the door of the Olivier House. Nothing is decided. Not quite. Not yet. If there’s any thought in her that perhaps something has been decided, any thought she can access, then her answer to herself is no, nothing has been decided. Except that she has to go to her room. But she stops before the door of the Olivier House and she looks around the street and she smells the night smells of New Orleans and there is a warm trace of boiling shrimp in the air and that’s a very good thing to her, but even the faint, unnamable fetidness of the Quarter at night is good to her, even that makes the distant lamplight blur in her eyes, and she will start to weep now, weep fully and forever to the end, if she stands here any longer, so she goes up the steps and through the door and down the entrance hall and there is a smell of wood fire and she passes the door to the parlor and the flames are lashing in the fireplace and she approaches the freestanding reception desk and a woman sits there, a woman with a long drape of hair the color of dense November cloud cover and she has a thin, unmadeup face, pretty in a long-ago-flower-child way, and it is a familiar face, and the woman says, “Good evening, Mrs. Hays.”
“Good evening.” And though the context is obvious enough, Kelly tries to get her mind to work to summon up a clear memory of the familiar woman before her. She can’t. “I’m sorry. Have you been here many years?”
“I’ve worked the night desk here for … oh my, quite a few years now. I think for just about as long as you and your husband have been coming here. I’m Ramona.”
“Hello, Ramona,” Kelly says. “I’m here alone this time.”
“I didn’t realize.”
“We’re separated,” Kelly says.
“I’m sorry.”
Kelly presses her hand against the edge of the desk to steady herself. “I say ‘separated.’ Not that we’ll reconcile.”
“I understand.”
“Yes. Well. I’m going up to my room now, and I don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Of course.”
“It was not a good ending, you understand.”
Ramona puts her hand on the desk, not reaching for Kelly’s but showing Kelly that hers is there if she wants to take it. “I’ve been through it myself, cher. I work nights for a reason.”
“I’m not here,” Kelly says.
“I understand,” Ramona says.
Now Ramona lifts her hand and extends it and brings it very near Kelly’s and Kelly takes this woman’s hand and squeezes it, briefly, only briefly: she was wrong about wanting to touch someone’s hand. She doesn’t want to touch anyone.
She nods good night to Ramona and circles the desk and moves to the courtyard doors and she puts her hand on the latch and a phone rings behind her and Kelly pushes quickly through into the dark of the courtyard and the door closes behind her but it’s too late, she is sitting in her Mercedes outside the courthouse and she has dialed her cell phone and it has rung and she has imagined it ringing in his hand just before he answered it and she has said what she has said, invited what she has invited, and she has gotten out of her car, but she leans back against the closed door, stays where she is, and she watches across the way, far across the way at the comings and goings at the courthouse doors, bodies vanishing into the building, bodies emerging, and then she thinks it’s him, coming out that door, and he pauses, and that distant face turns and looks in her direction and he moves toward her and she straightens and steps away from the car, but only one step, and he is clear now, she can see the tight, scruff-darkened contour of his face and she waits, and Drew Singleton crosses the street and he is before her, he is very close to her, and she thinks she can smell him, the Ivory soap and the shirt starch of him.
And he says, “I was afraid I’d mistaken …”
“You hadn’t,” Kelly says.
“It’s all terribly confusing.”
“I know.”
He squares his shoulders before her. “Kelly, I’m very happy to suddenly find myself standing in the middle of this street with you and not be mistaken. But I have to say this first.”
He pauses and his shoulders sag a little now with a difficult thing.
“Go ahead,” Kelly says.
“I still love her,” Drew says. “I love my wife. I’m not sure I can leave her. I don’t think I can.”
Drew pauses again and Kelly holds very still and she waits for what’s next, and contrary to the classic expectation in this circumstance, she’s okay with what he’s just said, more than okay, because it makes what she deeply hopes for in the next few moments possible, because his needing to say this thing to her in the middle of the street before they go on is the very reason he is the kind of man — though in her mind he is not a type, he is intensely particular, he is the only man — who brings these possibilities into her life, who reminds her how deeply these needs run, deeply enough that the risks are worth it, worth it for what she expects now from Drew Singleton.
And he goes on. “But. But. You need to know … Can I say this?”
“Yes.” Barely a whisper this. Kelly can barely make a sound.
“I love you too,” Drew says.
And everything stops inside her. If she could make this be enough, if only she could make this one time, this once, this spontaneous once, this once in the middle of the street, this once in spite of a husband and a wife, if only she could make this once be enough, she would do that, if she could kiss this man now and say good-bye and return to her life and never need anything from Michael again that he can’t readily give, she would do that. She wants to do that. But she knows how impossible that is. She needs this now in the middle of the street and she needs it again and again — and soon — and she needs it while they are naked together and holding each other as close as bodies can on this earth, she needs to hear it, she needs to hear a man say he loves her, she needs that, she needs.
“Is that crazy?” he says.
“It’s not,” Kelly says. “But once said, it bears repeating.”
“I love you too,” Drew says.
“Simpler, please.”
“I love you,” Drew says.
And she is happy. And she is unutterably sad. And she says, “Where shall we go?”
And she is weeping now: she has moved into the deep night shadow of the loggia leading to the inner courtyard beneath her window and she has stopped and she has leaned against the stone wall and she is weeping, and she presses hard at her eyes with the palms of her hands, trying to press the tears away. She does not need to do this now, she just needs to go to her room and lie down, and if there is more to think about, she can do it there and she can decide, she can decide what to do, she can decide what she will do about what she has done, and she straightens and she moves through the loggia and into the courtyard and she is focused so intently on the steps going up to her room that she does not see the pool and she does not see the young couple who were laughing with each other and leaning into each other when she arrived this afternoon, does not see them as they are stepping from their poolside room and the young woman is wearing her black panties and black bra as an impromptu bikini and the young man is wearing his workout-gray boxers as an impromptu bathing suit because it is a warm November night and they have been wishing they’d brought swimsuits for the pool and they see this woman emerge from the loggia and they stop but they know in the dim spill of blue light from the pool that they look perfectly natural, they look like they are wearing swimsuits and they look like they are in love and they see this woman across the pool who does not glance their way and the little trepidation they had about swimming in their underwear vanishes and the young man in the couple thinks the woman is pretty and he has a faint, unacknowledged wish that she had looked his way and had seen what a pretty girl he’s with and what a hunk of a guy he is in his boxer shorts and had stopped and smiled and come to them and asked if she could join them, and the young woman in the couple sees that the woman is hurrying in a focused way and she thinks the woman is going up the steps to meet her lover and is a little bit late but it will be all right because her man is waiting patiently and is full of love like this young man is for the young woman.