And now this.
But for taking her in his arms and dancing slow with her in the middle of Mardi Gras, she will say good-bye to him, she will apologize for what she has done and for what she will do. And with that intention comes a resolution: if she hears his actual voice, if he answers the phone, she will simply say I’m sorry and she will hang up. Because she needs nothing from him. And she knows now what she must do.
She sets her empty glass on the night stand, careful to avoid the pills.
Her phone. Her purse. She rises from the bed, stands unsteadily. She cannot remember having her purse. She’s afraid she left it somewhere out there in the dark. Perhaps by the river. She moves along the bed and she sees the purse on the floor near the foot of the bed.
She goes to it. She bends to it. She pushes her hand through the clutter of unidentifiable objects inside, looking for the phone, and her fingertips touch the fluted metal tube of her lipstick and for the briefest of moments she pauses with the thought that she will never look at herself in the mirror again, never put color on her lips, never run a brush through her hair, and in that moment she is sad for herself, as if she were some other woman, some other woman who has reached the end of what she can bear in this life and Kelly is sad for her, and her hand moves on and it finds the phone and she draws it out and she rises and she turns and she faces the open windows. Beyond, New Orleans is silent. Utterly silent. She opens the phone and dials Michael’s cell.
∼
And it does not make a sound. It is holstered and muted, attached to Michael’s belt and lying in the heap of his trousers across the room from the bed where Michael and Laurie are making love, Laurie happy to have at last guided herself on top and Michael uncomfortable still about being on the bottom but getting over it, though his eyes are not on the woman he is connected to, unlike all the times he made love to Kelly through the years, all the times he watched her face while she was unaware, closing her own eyes as she always did, squeezing them shut and furrowing her brow as if listening to some distant voice she could barely hear but that was trying to tell her something important. Michael’s own eyes with Laurie are shifted slightly away, looking at the blank expanse of the ceiling but without seeing what’s before him, without quite being in his body or in this moment, and he does want that, he does want to be here, be here vividly with Laurie, but he finds — a little bit to his surprise — that his body is so imprinted with Kelly’s that the difference of shape and texture and smell and sound of this new woman distances him from all this. Though not in any way that Laurie would notice. I will adjust, he thinks. And he closes his eyes. And Kelly is in him and they are in a dark room and she is making a sound beneath him like something hurts her bad or like something gives her great joy and she herself cannot tell them apart and so she has to cry out in a way such that no one listening could ever understand what she feels. She is a terrible, everlasting mystery, and though Michael cares what she is feeling, he knows he can never know, and he adjusts, he adjusts. And as he listens to Kelly beneath him while Laurie cries out above him, the phone stops silently flashing, and it is never seen, buried as it is in Michael’s clothes scattered before sex.
∼
And very soon thereafter, Michael and Laurie have finished and both their bodies quake softly from all that, and she is lying beside him, and she curls against him and his arm goes around her, and she says, “Michael, Michael, you were …” and she pauses. She pauses to tease him but pauses also to find just the right words.
Michael waits, and he realizes, a little to his surprise, that he is indifferent to what might follow. He always wondered what Kelly thought of him in bed. More than wondered. He wanted very much for her to find him good at this. But he could never ask. If he asked and he got the answer he desired, he would never be able to take it as anything but a pretty lie. She had to say it on her own or it could never be said. But with Laurie, ready now to tell him of her own free will, he feels no welling of interest, no fear either. It is what it is.
“Stoically great,” Laurie says.
He looks at her. He has no idea what that means.
Laurie lifts her free hand and puts the tip of her finger on the tip of his nose and gently pushes. “That’s a compliment,” she says.
He looks back to the ceiling. He pulls her close.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For my stoicism?”
“For taking me seriously.”
“Of course,” he says.
“That’s Michael. ‘Of course’, he says. That’s my Michael.”
He doesn’t want to talk about who or what he is. But he knows Laurie is trying to be good to him. He gives her a little squeeze. A little thanks-but-let’s-move-on squeeze.
She says, “You were so sad that day at the office when I realized I had to get closer to you. So sad. That was about your third trip to Mr. Bloom over the divorce.”
“Can we stay in this moment? Just the two of us?” Michael says.
Laurie lifts her head. “Oh darling, of course. I’m sorry.”
She nuzzles her head back into the hollow between his shoulder and chest.
He wants to be quiet now. He wants to be quiet for a long while. He wants to be by himself, to be honest. He wants to kiss her sweetly good night and then go somewhere else. He realizes this with a little inner flinch. But he knows he will stay with her. His rational mind is glad he has a woman now. But everything else about him feels spent. He feels he needs to be away from her for a little while in order to want her again. He wishes he felt otherwise. So he will stay. But he is glad there is a moment of silence, and another. He is glad Laurie is capable of being quiet.
“I’m sleepy,” she says.
“Good,” he says. “I am too.”
“I have to say this first, though.”
He does not reply but turns his head slightly in her direction. Let’s get it over with.
She lifts her head from him, rises up on an elbow. “I said something outside. I need to adjust that.”
He knows what she’s referring to. For a moment he thinks things will be all right. He has prior evidence of her knack for knowing what he needs. He is relying on that now. He needs for her to pull back from what she said.
She straightens up fully now, squares around to face him. “I said I am falling madly in love with you.”
She pauses. He waits.
“I got the verb tense wrong,” she says. “Have fallen, my darling. I have fallen madly in love with you.”
She waits for Michael to respond. He says nothing rather than what’s in his head: I don’t need this now.