Michael too has shifted a step away, but not in retreat. He squares up to confront all three at once, not just the dark one who blocked their retreat. “Gentlemen,” he says, “there are plenty of easy tits around the corner. You don’t want to do it the hard way in this town. You’ll spill your beer.”
And now everything comes to a stop. Michael and the three men stare at each other in silence, not moving. The drunks are weighing as best they can the risks and the gains. The only movement is the smaller blond looking briefly down at the cup in his hand, apparently to ponder the spilling of his beer. Michael is wide in the shoulders. Michael has thick upper arms. Michael is utterly motionless and Kelly cannot see his face, but ten years later she will watch him from behind in a courtroom at a murder trial and she will not see his face but he will be staring down a cop he suspects faked some evidence and she will think that his face is the same as it was on the first day they met.
The silence between the four men persists. In reality it is probably not more than a few seconds, but it’s a long time, a very long time, for Kelly. As an observer she is free to begin to flush hot and grow limb-restless with fear for herself and for this man trying to help her. And she knows the situation needs some new element, something Michael did not presume to add himself, either from macho simplicity or from deference to her. But she can do this.
“Darling,” she says. “Will you promise never to leave me alone again at Mardi Gras? I don’t care how bad you have to piss.”
The three drunken men glance to her: if the asshole who’s messing with their game isn’t just a stranger trying to be a hero, if in fact he’s really with the bitch, then the situation changes somewhat. Not necessarily a lot — this is a guy thing now, with its own life — but enough that Michael recognizes a brief opportunity. He turns his back on the men and takes a step toward Kelly.
“Just stay where I put you next time,” he says.
She takes a step toward him and there is a rush in her from its being time to try to walk away. And from the man’s face. She is seeing Michael’s face straight on for the first time. His eyes are dark and heavy-lidded and steady on her and the rush in her may be mostly about his face, even the walking away part is about his eyes now. His arm is around her again and they take a step together up Toulouse and another, and now that he’s holding her she finds she’s starting to let go to what’s been happening and the trembling is beginning, she might well tremble already at his touch, but this is mostly about what’s been happening with these other men and she is wobbly in the legs once more.
Michael says, low, “Let’s move a little briskly.”
And they do. They push on faster. No cries or curses follow them. Surely macho-crazed drunks in pursuit would make a loud show of it. And even with the din of Mardi Gras coming from Bourbon Street, she does hear their own feet brisking on the pavement, carrying them away.
Michael brings his face close to hers. “That was smart, what you said.”
Kelly wants to reply, but the farther they get from the danger, the more she realizes this incident is over, the more she trembles, and she can’t quite shape any words. And this man — Michael, the man she will marry a little over a year later — this man seems to her to understand everything.
“Look,” he says. “I’m staying in a hotel up ahead. Would you like to go there and collect yourself? If you prefer, I can just put you in the room and disappear.”
And Kelly finds her voice. “Thanks,” she says. “Yes. But don’t disappear.”
∼
On one side of the four-poster rice bed lies Laurie’s hoop-skirted gown in white watered silk and trimmed in crimson pleated satin. On the other side of the bed, propped up against the backboard, is Michael, still dressed in the black jeans and polo shirt he wore for the drive. He has just put his cell phone into its holster and laid it on the night table: no message from his lawyer that the morning hearing, the finalizing of the divorce, is done with. Not that he needs an instant report. Max knows Michael wants to just get away from all that. Max can handle it. Michael plays that little litany a bit more: It’s what a lawyer is for, especially a lawyer’s lawyer. Let this thing go.
And Laurie emerges from the bathroom, damp and wrapped in a towel knotted at the center of her chest. She stands at the foot of the bed and Michael looks at her and she looks back at him. This goes on for a few seconds, and Laurie wonders if Michael needs to be a movie star to be fully understood: where his face is ten feet high, maybe the nothing that is so often there would actually become a nuanced something.
She smiles the faintest of smiles at him. “So if I put my hand here,” she says, putting her hand on the knot of the towel, “would you sit up straight and widen your eyes and start breathing heavy?”
“Of course,” Michael says.
She waits. Her hand is still there. He is not moving. His face is not changing.
“Well?” she says.
Michael makes a minute movement of his head, a slight tilt and release and return to his previous uprightness. A movie-actor-sized shrug. “That’s just the hypothetical demonstration,” he says.
“You are a funny bunny,” Laurie says. “John Wayne by way of Clarence Darrow by way of Mount Rushmore.”
“Drop your towel, my dear. I won’t disappoint you. But you were anxious to turn into Scarlett, and the night is long.”
“You’re right, darling. This should wait. We’ll make it a real occasion.” She turns her back to him and takes a step toward the bathroom, saying, “You’re not ready.” She tosses this over her shoulder but with an admonitory firmness.
“I’m fast,” he says.
“I hope you’re talking about getting dressed,” she says, and without looking back at him, she whips off her towel. She hasn’t yet fully figured out her handsomely ripening Michael Hays, Esquire, but be that as it may, the sight of her perfect ass seems a relevant point to make at the moment.
And with the sudden showing of the long, sweet nakedness of the back of her body, Michael’s breath catches, and then, as the bathroom door clicks shut, an afterimage blooms and clarifies into flesh and his breath catches again at the sight of Kelly, in his room at the Olivier House the morning after their first Mardi Gras: she has risen and she is moving away from the bed and she ripples through him, the long, sweet nakedness of her, down the indent of her spine to the sweet fullness of her backside cleavage, and she vanishes around the corner of the wall on her way to the bathroom. Michael is left propped on pillows against the wrought iron headboard, and he turns his face to the open French windows and to the striking silence there, the silence of Ash Wednesday, the silence after the clamorous rush of Fat Tuesday, like the silence after sex.
He rests for a time in both those silences, and then he hears the soft whisk of Kelly’s approach, and she is beside him again and her arm slides over his chest and the long length of her leg falls gently upon his and her head comes to rest against his shoulder. He slips his arm around her back and lays his hand on the point of her hip and presses her close. But he keeps his eyes on the dove-gray sky out the windows.
And they lie like this for a while, until Kelly says, “You’re a quiet man.”
“Am I?” Michael thinks about it. He has already spoken to her of his work in the firm. And of Pensacola and Florida politics and even, a bit, of the fishing in the Gulf. “I think I talk a lot,” he says.
“When you make love you’re quiet,” she says. “I hope I didn’t embarrass you.”