And she lays her head back on the deck chair, and she closes her eyes, and she knows Michael will stay quiet now till one or the other of them rises and says it’s time to sleep. And in this silence, and with the thing she must decide, she slides back only a few days, she lets the curtain fall on the first act of Jesus Christ Superstar and Judas has just sung that he won’t be damned for all time and Michael has gone straight to his cell phone for something he’s been thinking about for the whole first act, and Kelly rises and creeps up the aisle with the crowd and out into the Saenger’s new crimson and gold lobby. This is the night of the Saenger’s reopening and she stops beneath the skylight, and she looks up, and it seems small, it seems too small to have bothered.
“Only the janitors will see the stars through that,” Drew says.
This third time she recognizes his voice at once, and she does not look at him, she keeps her face lifted to the skylight, which, it’s true, shows nothing of the sky beyond because of the glare of lobby lights. She completes his thought. “After they’re done and it’s dark inside.”
Kelly and Drew stare at the skylight for a few moments more, and then they lower their faces, aware of the synchronicity, and they turn to each other.
She holds back her smile. “Will you say it or should I?”
“I’ll do it,” he says.
But he doesn’t.
“Well?” she says.
“We have to stop meeting like this.”
Now she smiles, and so does he. He knew. “We do move in the same tight little world,” she says.
“Yes.” Drew lifts his face back to the skylight as he says, “Do you know why I hesitated?”
“No.”
He continues to gaze upwards, as if he can’t look her in the eyes for this. “I don’t want to stop meeting like this.”
What he says strikes her as something that she just felt as well, but would not have found words for.
He’s looking at her now.
She has the impulse to do what she so often does with Michael when they talk, and what she has done with Drew in every conversation they’ve ever had: lightly twist and weave the small-talk. Banter über alles. And even though these words he has just spoken have followed that same pattern, his voice has gone soft and serious and he has averted his eyes as he’s said them. He means what he says, and she feels the same way. And his eyes are steady on hers and her eyes are steady on his, and she leans ever so slightly toward him, and she lowers her voice as much as she can and still be heard over the babble of the intermission crowd — enough that he can hear the same earnestness that she has just heard — and she says, “If we stop, we’ll just have to find another way.”
He nods once at this. And then his eyes soften and narrow and unnarrow, and she senses from them that something has passed through him, and she knows to say, “Are you okay?”
“Why would you say that?” His literal words voice surprise but nothing about his body changes to express such a feeling.
“I don’t know,” Kelly says, and for the moment she doesn’t.
He smiles a small, quick smile that vanishes at once. “Did you like the first act?”
Is he just changing the subject, intending no ambiguity, telling her indirectly to mind her own business, or is he still playing with the words, actually talking about the two of them, their own first act, and how they’ve been running into each other and how she now can even tell when he’s troubled? “I have a feeling it’s going to end badly,” she says.
He takes this in. Makes a decision. “We’re talking about the play?” he says.
“I don’t know. Are we?”
“I’m not doing all that great,” he says. “Since you asked.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“I didn’t know it showed so clearly.”
“I’m not sure it does.”
“Only to you,” he says, and his voice has gone soft enough that Kelly can barely hear him as a loud-talking couple passes by, speaking of chocolates.
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” she says.
“Not at all.”
“This isn’t a great place to talk.”
“No.”
“And our spouses are waiting,” she says. And from the faint pull at the corners of his mouth Kelly knows that the trouble is with his wife.
Drew says, “The principal in my firm is a benefactor of the theater.”
She hears this as a preamble of an excuse for telling her that his wife isn’t with him. But he pauses ever so slightly before the hard part and Kelly finds herself intervening. “Look,” she says. “If the not-great thing can benefit from a woman’s advice, give me a call. We can have coffee.”
Drew’s hand comes to her, touches her on the forearm. “Do you mean that?”
“Of course.”
“This is going to sound odd.” But he says no more for a moment.
“The silence?” she says.
He huffs a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “I’m working up my courage.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Okay. I’d already thought … and this is the odd part, for as briefly and accidentally as we’ve know each other … It had already occurred to me that you’d be someone I could actually talk to. Talk seriously.”
Kelly finds herself having to wait for enough breath to answer this, even as her mind rushes to first acts and bad endings, even as she wants to take this hand of his that still lingers on her arm and entwine her fingers in his. But she simply says, “I think it’s time to exchange cell phone numbers.”
∼
And as Kelly stands in the center of Room 303 following memories within memories, Michael and Laurie are arriving at the veranda of the plantation house. They stop at its very edge. They have not spoken since they left the berm of the levee. They have walked arm-inarm under the trees, and Laurie has connected Michael’s deep and — she is learning — characteristic silence with his old-school romanticism. And that’s okay, that’s okay for now and in this context; she is charmed by it. And he is grateful for her silence. He is trying hard to stay in the moment, trying to follow no memory at all but simply be here with this beautiful young woman who seems quite comfortable with him just as he is.
The two of them linger at the edge of the veranda and watch the chatting, drinking, posturing, period-costumed twenty-first century lawyers and bankers and doctors and real estate agents and small-business owners. This is Laurie’s event and Michael waits for her to take the lead. And Laurie is considering this dress-up fantasy thing she has chosen for the two of them on the weekend when they will, with conscious forethought and planning, do the deed for the first time. Has she ever had sex like that before? Duh. No. It’s always been impulsive and impromptu. And she likes it that way. Absolutely. But this way, it’s as if the doing of it will actually establish a very important connection between them: and it is important, she feels. It is. They are not just doin’ it tonight. They are making love. She gets that, she is cool with that, OMFG, this could be something very big for her.
And she can make it her own. She moves her hand from the crook of his arm and she takes his hand and she entwines their fingers and she says, “I just got this great idea.”
She waits, as if for a reaction, though she knows him enough to understand that the patient look he is giving her is all she will get. He is so cute sometimes.
“You’ve been very sweet,” she says. “About the dress-up.”
And in this dramatic pause she reaches up and puts her hand on his sweetly oft-straightened tie and she twists one end up.
Michael reflexively puts his own hand on the tie, thinking that she is straightening it and preferring to do that himself. He realizes what she has done instead.
She says, “But let’s go now. I’m sorry I got this all mixed up. Let’s go to our little cottage and make love right now, my romantic darling.”