The Controlling Interest

Free preview · read by Jessica

The first time I ever laid eyes on August Bellamy, I thought he was one of those Tulane-looking Creole boys who says *my people* when he means his grandmother, and who has never in his life carried anything heavier than a folder. He was standing in the lobby of my own hotel in a suit the color of wet sand, holding a cup of coffee he did not buy from us, looking up at our ceiling like a building inspector. I couldn’t stand his ass on sight.

The feeling was not mutual, and that was the whole problem. That man smiled at me like we had already met.

I lost twelve years over that smile. That is what it cost me, and I am going to tell all of it, and I am the one who signed at the end.

This was the July I turned twenty six. I was working the front desk at the Rampart, which is my family’s hotel, which meant I had a name tag on with my own last name printed on it, which is a humiliation nobody warns you about. Fifty four rooms. A lobby with two ceiling fans, one of which has never worked since the Clinton administration. My daddy was upstairs in the office with the door shut, and he had been up there with the door shut for three weeks.

It was hot. It is always hot in July and that July was something else, the kind of heat that makes the carpet smell. Somebody had dumped a bucket of ice water on their own head on the internet and now every fool in New Orleans was doing it, including my little sister, who did it in the courtyard and flooded the drain by the ice machine, and I had to call Tee Broussard in on a Saturday.

I was twenty six and I had a whole business degree from Loyola I was using to hand out key cards.

“Good morning,” the man in the sand-colored suit said. “Is Cleve in?”

“Mr. Laval is in a meeting.”

“He’s not in a meeting. He’s upstairs.” He set the coffee down on my counter, on my clean counter, without a napkin under it. “Tell him August is here.”

“Tell him yourself.”

He looked at me then. Really looked, the way a man looks when you have surprised him and he does not mind it, and something moved across his face that I did not like one bit and thought about for the next eleven weeks.

“You must be the daughter,” he said.

“I must be the manager.”

“You’re twenty six years old.”

“And you’re a whole grown man standing in my lobby with outside coffee. Is there anything else?”

He laughed at me. He put his head back and laughed at me in my own family’s lobby at nine in the morning, and Miss Guitte, who walked over from the Tallow Room every morning for our coffee because she said hers was for customers, turned around at the machine in the corner to see what was funny, and I stood there with my ears getting hot and my hand on the mouse like I was doing something on that computer.

Then he picked up his coffee, said, “Yes ma’am,” and went up my stairs two at a time like he’d been there before.

He had been there before. That’s the part I found out later. He had been in and out of that building for a month while my father kept the door shut, and nobody had told me one thing about it.

---

My daddy was Cleve Laval and I loved him and he is the reason for every single thing in this book, including the good.

He was fifty eight that summer. Short, heavy through the chest, a gray mustache he trimmed on Sundays, and the only man I have ever known who wore a hat indoors and made it look correct. He came up in that company behind his own father, who bought a barbershop and a busted double on Marais Street in 1961 with money he made doing something he never once explained to anybody, and by the time my daddy took it over we had eleven buildings, a bar, and a hotel with a roof that has leaked over room nine since 1998.

He also had two hundred and some thousand dollars of somebody else’s money in a deal he should never have touched, and I did not know that, and I was standing right there.

That is the thing about being twenty six in your own family’s business. You think the door being shut is about you. You think, they don’t respect me, they don’t tell me anything, I went to school for this. You walk around the lobby wounded like a teenager.

The door was shut because he was drowning and he did not want his daughter to watch.

---

Room nine is where everything in this happens, eventually.

It is the corner room on the second floor at the Dauphine end. It floods. Not the floor, the wall, right where the roof steps down, and it has been doing that since before I could drive. Tee has patched it four times and every time it rains sideways off the Gulf that wall gets a dark shape on it about the size of a man. We never booked it in the summer. We put linens in it.

So in July of that year, room nine was the only room in fifty four with nobody in it and nobody looking for it, and I had the master key, and I was twenty six.

I’m not going to pretend I didn’t know what I was doing.

---

He came back the next morning, the Sunday, when the lobby was all checkouts and I had been on since six. Same suit, no coffee this time, and he stood at my counter and did not ask for my father.

“You’re still mad.”

“I’m working.”

“You’re mad and you’re working.” He put both hands flat on the counter. Big hands. Cable through the forearms, which surprised me on a man in a suit. “Can I ask you something?”

“You’re going to anyway.”

“Why is your name tag your last name?”

Nobody had ever asked me that. Four years of that little plastic rectangle and not one guest, not one vendor, not one cousin had ever asked me why the girl at the desk was wearing the name that’s on the building.

“Because my daddy printed it.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“That is exactly what you asked.”

“No,” August Bellamy said. “I asked why.”

And I stood there behind my counter with my mouth open like a fish, because I did not have an answer, and because nobody had ever waited on me to have one.

He waited. That’s what I want put down about him, before anything else and before all the rest of it. The man waited. Twelve years later I can still tell you exactly how long, which was about nine seconds, which is a very long time to stand in a lobby with a stranger while a ceiling fan that doesn’t work goes around over your head.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“All right,” he said, and he smiled like I’d handed him something, and he went on up the stairs.

---

On the Thursday my daddy sent me up to room nine to see about the wall, because it had rained sideways all Wednesday night, and August Bellamy was standing in there in his shirtsleeves with his jacket over the chair looking at that dark shape like it was a person he was arguing with.

“This is structural,” he said.

“This is a roof.”

“It’s a roof today.” He didn’t turn around. “In four years it’s a floor joist, and then it’s this room and the one under it, and then it’s a lawsuit from whoever’s in the one under it.”

“You a contractor now?”

“I’m whatever the numbers say I am.”

And I said something smart, because I always say something smart, and he turned around and looked at me, and neither one of us said anything for a second too long.

What I was wearing, because I have thought about it: a black wrap dress from Dillard’s I had no business wearing to work, and my grandfather’s signet on a chain, and my hair down because the courtyard flood had ruined my press two days before and I had given up on it.

What he did was nothing. Not one thing. He picked his jacket off the chair and said, “Tell your father I’ll call him Monday,” and walked past me close enough that I could smell the cedar on him, and he did not touch me, and I stood in that room by myself for about four minutes with my whole chest going.

I went back down to my counter. I checked in a couple from Baton Rouge. I called Tee about the wall.

And then I went home.

I lived over a shotgun on Esplanade in those days with a window unit that rattled and a cat that hated me, and I got in there at seven and did not turn a light on. I stood in my own kitchen and ate a piece of bread standing up and put my bag down and did not take my dress off, and I want to be plain about what kind of condition a woman is in when she does that, because it is not a good one.

I had not been touched by anybody in fourteen months.

Fourteen months is long enough that you stop noticing it the way you stop noticing a sound. Then somebody stands too close to you in a room with a wet wall in it and the sound comes back all at once and it is the only thing in the building.

I got in the shower and ran it as hot as I could stand. I did not even pretend to myself that I was in there to get clean. I got the water on my back and braced my palms on the tile in front of me like a woman getting searched and stood there that way for a while, and then I gave up.

Fourteen months, and here is what it was about. It was not his mouth and it was not that cedar smell. It was nine seconds.

Him standing at my counter with both palms flat on it, not saying anything, waiting on a twenty six year old girl with a name tag to answer a question she did not have. *No. I asked why.* A grown man had waited on me for nine seconds in my own lobby and my pussy had been going about it since Sunday and I had been calling it being mad.

I got my own titties in my hands, both of them, and my thumbs on my nipples, and the water running down between them. My nipples were already so hard they hurt, and I pulled on them, and it was not gentle, and I was not interested in gentle. I put my head back against the tile and I heard the sound I made come back off it.

Then one hand went down and stayed there.

I was slick before I ever got to it, which I already knew and had been refusing to know since the second floor. Two fingers flat on my clit and no working up to it, no building, just there, because I had been building for four days behind a front desk handing out key cards to people from Baton Rouge.

And I talked. Out loud, to nobody, in an empty apartment on Esplanade with the water running.

“You do not even know my name.”

Which was a lie. He knew my name. It was printed on my chest and he was the only person who had ever asked me about it.

“You did not even touch me.”

That one was true and it made it worse, and I got two fingers inside myself and the heel of my hand down on my clit and I was riding my own hand with my back on that tile and my knees going, and I said his name out loud, the whole thing, first and last, like I was calling him down a hallway.

I came so hard against that wall I had to put an arm out.

And then I stood there with the water going cold on me and got embarrassed in front of absolutely nobody, which is its own particular flavor of it, and it is worse than being caught. Being caught, somebody else is there to blame. In that shower there was just me and the tile and a grown woman who had gotten herself off over nine seconds of a man being patient.

I got out. I did not dry my hair. I put on nothing at all because it was July, and I lay down on top of my own sheets in the dark with that unit rattling and the ceiling going orange from the streetlight, and I told myself I was going to sleep.

Forty minutes.

That is how long I lasted, and I know it was forty minutes because I watched the clock do it, which tells you I was not trying to sleep, I was waiting on myself to give in.

The second time I did it on my stomach with my face in the pillow and my hand under me, and it was slower, and it was worse, because the first one had taken the edge off and what was underneath the edge was the actual thing.

And I let myself have it. His forearms. The cable in them under a shirt in July. Hands the size of that on a woman built like me, on my hips, on the back of my neck, in my hair. I thought about what a man like that weighs. I thought about him not asking. I had two fingers on my clit and my face down in that pillow and my knees pulled up under me, and I was rocking against my own hand on a mattress in a rented shotgun, and I said things out loud into that pillow that I would have laid down and died if one living soul had heard, and I am not putting every one of them on this page.

I will put one, because it is the one that mattered.

“Please.”

I have never said that to anybody in my life. I did not say it to him, ever, not once in eleven weeks in room nine. I said it to a pillow on July the seventeenth before that man ever laid a hand on me, and that is the whole of it right there, early.

I came the second time with my face in the pillow and my whole back shaking and one foot off the side of the bed, and then I lay there in the dark and my eyes were wet and I could not have told you which one of those things it was about.

That was July the seventeenth. I know because it was my mother’s birthday and I had missed the dinner.

---

Eleven weeks. That’s what it came to, start to finish, July into the first days of October, almost all of it in room nine with a towel under the door and that stain on the wall watching us like a chaperone.

All of it gets told, and I mean all of it, because the polite version is what I gave the government and the polite version is how I lost twelve years.

But the thing that set every other thing in motion is what my father did on the last night, standing in the doorway of room nine in his undershirt at a quarter past ten at night. For twelve years I had it completely wrong.

He didn’t catch us.

He was waiting for us.

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