A Small Hotel by Robert Olen Butler

Author:Robert Olen Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2011-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

And Michael wants to shout but he doesn’t, he finds the same control of his voice he finds in a courtroom, and he says, “I can’t be blamed if I’m wrong about some of the things …”

“So blame me,” she cries. “I deserve it. If you can’t love me then at least hate me.”

And he doesn’t say a word. He moves past her and he opens the front door and he goes out and he doesn’t think to close the door and she watches for a moment as he goes down the walk, and then she turns her face away from him and her hands were too slow, her hands wish now they’d clawed at his face as he passed, just to get him to do something in return, anything.

∼

And Michael says nothing in response to Laurie’s declaration of love. Not that there’s a recoil in him. He simply does not hear it for what it is. For Michael, it is a woman’s rhetoric. These are simply words. Easy currency for a woman. For him, she’s here and he’s here with her. That’s so because they find things in each other they each seem legitimately to enjoy. They’re going to their cottage and they will be naked together and they will join their bodies and they will unjoin them. They will fall asleep together. They will wake and they will rise in the morning. Good morning, how’d you sleep. Fine. They will eat breakfast in the restaurant that was once the living quarters for the post-war field workers. Are you enjoying yourself? Yes. And you? And now and then he will think about the retired Navy captain and also about Monday afternoon and jury selection for a pro-bono who will be tough to protect from bias. While Michael is with Laurie, he will think of no other woman in the same way that he is thinking of her. He will try to think of no other woman at all, particularly the woman at the center of a considerable pain in him. He will be open to the possibility of many more nights of joining and of sleeping and of waking with this woman he has just kissed. For him, that too is considerable. And his response to her rhetoric is to let his hand fall to the small of her back and to turn her and move them off toward the cottage. And for now, this gesture—particularly his hand in the small of her back—is sufficient for Laurie.

As they cross the last hundred yards of tarnished-silver ground to the cottage, Michael tries to stay focused on the present moment with this young woman, and it is true that the soft clinging of her, and the moon-shadow of pressure remaining on his lips from the kiss, and the imminence of their nakedness are beginning to rustle in his body. And her silence now. Her silence is part of this readying of his body and mind for the first night of full togetherness with a new woman.

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