“It feels so like we’ve done this right,” she says.
She pauses again. She sees Michael as a man of words. Words are his business. She is a bit awed by all the lawyers and how they live by words. She needs to work this out in words now. And having thus far found Michael’s reticence with her to be charmingly masculine, sexy even, she has no clue what’s going on in him.
“Even us waiting to make love,” she says. “How right was that?” She would like a nod — if not a word — of agreement from him at this point, at least about how they were right to go slow. But he’s not giving it. And she suddenly thinks she understands what’s making him hesitate. It’s her image as a lightweight — and she’s at fault, she knows, for nurturing that. That silliness at their second meeting, for instance. She loves him even more for having gotten past that, but she’s afraid that he’s afraid she’s being superficial about her feelings. She says, “I don’t use the word ‘love’ lightly, my darling. Don’t worry.”
He’s looking at her but he’s not speaking. The light is dim in the room. She needs to read his eyes closely and she can’t. “I’ve almost never said it to a boyfriend,” she says. “But you know me. I have to speak my heart when I feel something.”
Michael, in fact, does not know this about her. He does not know what to say. He does not know what to do. He feels himself staring dumbly, and he thinks he does not know the first thing about women. Not a single thing.
Laurie, aware that she needs to make sure her voice does not falter, but utterly unaware of her own gesture, lays her arm laterally across her chest, covering one nipple with her forearm and one with her hand. She says, “Am I at risk here?”
“I don’t know what risk you’re talking about,” Michael says, not argumentative but truly baffled.
“You don’t?” Laurie says. “Really?”
He has no answer.
“Any verb tense will be okay,” she says.
Nothing.
“The risk,” Laurie says, very softly, loving this man and trusting him, running out of breath and needing to start again, her arm falling to her side. “The risk is you’re not falling in love with me.”
“I’m here. Isn’t that enough?” Michael says, though taking care to match the softness of her voice. “We did this,” he says.
“Please tell me what that means,” Laurie says.
He tries to distance himself with the notion that he has no idea what she wants. But he knows that’s not true. But knowing what she wants doesn’t make it possible for him to give it to her.
“I need some help here, Michael. Tell me what you feel.”
“Is it the word you need?” he says.
“I guess I do,” she says.
And he says, “Love means never having to say I love you.” Part of him truly believes this. But another part suddenly hears himself sounding like a bad country music song.
Laurie rises abruptly to her knees. “Are you fucking kidding me? Do you know how many people in this world have been fucked up from the start by somebody having that idea?”
He backs away from this. “I’m going to get some air,” he says.
He rises from the bed, crosses the room, bends to his pants, pulls them on, his belt swinging heavily free, with his cell phone attached. As he reloops the belt, Laurie finally finds the voice to deal with his withdrawal.
“Michael,” she says. He finishes cinching his belt, and then he turns to her.
She is still on her knees on the bed. “I need this,” Laurie says. “People need this.”
She is speaking softly again. Her need. People’s needs. He is bare-chested. Her nakedness, her quietness, her need: he feels these like a pressure on his chest, like her body falling forward and pressing into him after they both finished, her body still there when they should be separating for a time, her body suddenly too warm, too wet, too much.
He bends, he picks up his shirt, he turns his back on her, puts the shirt on, buttoning hastily as he finds his shoes, slips them on. He has to get some air. He said that already.
He is moving through the dim rooms, and in contradiction to his sounder, wiser, lawyerly judgment, he thinks: I’m fucking this up with this sweet and beautiful young woman. He is pushing through the screen door of the cottage. To ward off an even worse culpability over Kelly, he denies this one now. She’s a child. He’s old enough to be her father. What did he expect.
He walks briskly a dozen paces away from the cottage and he stops. The moon is high. The smell of sugar cane smoke, of something sweet burnt down, is strong in the air. He shouldn’t be blaming Laurie. If it’s wrong with her, it’s wrong. But what made it go wrong so abruptly? He stands very still beneath the moon, and just as abruptly, he is uneasy with himself in many ways. Many. But he would have trouble clearly articulating any of them. And he and Kelly enter the room they have made their own over the years, Room 303 at the Olivier House in the Quarter. They’ve had dinner at Galatoire’s and she’s been very quiet and of course he has appreciated that, of course he has assumed that things are very good between them because she is happy to be quiet with him, and he hangs up his suit coat and he crosses the room loosening his tie and she has drifted toward the bed. He opens the French windows.
“It’s hot in here,” he says. “Or maybe that’s just the oysters backing up on me.”
He looks out at the moon, perched brightly on the farthest rooftop.
He turns.
Kelly is sitting on the side of the bed. She looks up at him. “Michael,” she says, and she stops.
He takes a step toward her, and he waits for a moment. Then he says, “What is it?”
She looks away. Her shoulders hunch a little. “It’s just the oysters,” she says.
He accepts this. He has cufflinks. He thinks to take them off.
“Was I pretty tonight?” she says.
“Of course,” Michael says.
She falls silent again. He’s not sure if he can move away to deal with his cufflinks now. There may be more.
And then she says, “There are things I need. Things I’ve always needed.”
And Michael turns around beneath the moon at Oak Alley Plantation, even as he hears himself say to Kelly “What things do you need?” He faces the cottage where Laurie waits. And he stands before Kelly.
“Was I pretty tonight?” she says.
“Of course,” he says.
“There are things I need,” she says.
“What things do you need?” he says.
“I’ve been sleeping with a man,” she says.
And he stops this now. His hand goes to his phone. He’ll try once more to get through. He flips open the cell and he has a message. The number is hers. It couldn’t have been long ago. He starts the message and puts the phone to his ear.
And Kelly’s voice says, “It’s me. With things unsaid between us — forever unsaid — I didn’t want this all to end without my saying I’m sorry. I am. For this. For everything. You did the best you could. So did I … I hoped to hear a train tonight and just fade away with it down the river. But I know it’s almost time now, and there’s only silence … I love this room. Can you love a room? Or is that just a word? No. I love this room. I always have. Maybe I’ll haunt it … And my darling, I love you too. I always have.”
Michael redials her number and he knows what will happen but he has to try, he has to hold himself in suspension till at least he tries. Her phone rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and it rings and it clicks and her voice message begins and Michael snaps his phone shut. He sprints to the cottage and he slams through the screen door and the front door and he rushes toward the bedroom. Laurie has heard the violence of his entry and when Michael bursts into the room she has scrambled against the headboard. He sees her eyes wide and her hands flat hard against the mattress, pressing her backwards. “God no,” he says. “It’s not about you. I had a phone message. I think Kelly’s trying to kill herself.”