A Multitude of Sins

Quality Time

Where he stopped for the red light on busy Sheridan Road, Wales watched a woman fall down in the snow. A sudden loss of footing on the slick, walked-over hummock the plows had left at the crosswalk. Must be old, Wales thought, though it was dark and he couldn’t see her face, only her fall— backwards. She wore a long gray man’s coat and boots and a knitted cap pulled down. Or else, of course, she was drinking, he supposed, watching her through his salted windshield as he waited. She could be younger, too. Younger and drinking.

Wales was driving to The Drake to spend the night with a woman named Jena, a married woman whose husband had done colossally well in real estate. Jena had taken a suite in The Drake for a week — to paint. She was forty. She had her husband’s permission. They — she and Wales — had done this five nights in a row now. He wanted it to go on.

Wales had worked abroad for fourteen years, writing for various outlets — in Barcelona, Stockholm, Berlin. Always in English. He’d lately realized he’d been away too long, had lost touch with things American. But a friend from years ago, a reporter he’d known in London, had called and said, come back, come home, come to Chicago, teach a seminar on exactly what it’s like to be James Wales. Just two days a week, for a couple of months, then back to Berlin. “The Literature of the Actual,” his friend who’d become a professor had said, and laughed. It was funny. Like Hegel was funny. None of the students took it too seriously.

The woman who’d fallen — old, young, drunk, sober, he wasn’t sure — had gotten to her feet now, and for some reason had put one hand on top of her head, as if the wind was blowing. Traffic rushed in front of her up Sheridan Road, accumulating speed behind headlights. Tall sixties apartment blocks — a long file of them, all with nice views — separated the street from the lake. It was early March. Wintry.

The stoplight stayed red for Wales’s lane, though the oncoming cars began turning in front of him in quick procession onto Ardmore Avenue. But the woman who’d fallen and had her hand on her head took this moment to step out into the thoroughfare. And for some lucky reason the driver in the nearest lane, the lane by the curb, slowed and came to a stop for her. Though the woman never saw this, never sensed she had, by taking two, perhaps three unwise steps, put herself in danger. Who knows what’s buzzing in that head, Wales thought, watching. A moment ago she was lying in the snow. A moment before that everything had been fine.

The cars opposite continued turning hurriedly onto Ardmore Avenue. And it was the cars in this lane — the middle turning lane — whose drivers did not see the woman as she stepped uncertainly, farther into the street. Though it seemed she did see them, because she extended the same hand that had been touching her head and held it palm outward, as if she expected the turning cars to stop as she stepped into their lane. And it was one of these cars, a dark van, resembling a small spaceship (and, Wales thought, moving too fast, much faster than reasonable under the conditions), one of these speeding cars that hit the woman flush-on, bore directly into her side like a boat ramming her, never thinking of brakes, and in so doing knocked her not up into the air or under the wheels or onto its non-existent hood, but sloughed her to the side and onto the road — changed her in an instant from an old, young, possibly drunk, possibly sober woman in a gray man’s coat, into a collection of assorted remnants on a frozen pavement.

Dead, Wales thought — not five feet from where he and his lane now began to pass smartly by, the light having gone green and horns having commenced behind. In his side mirror he saw the woman’s motionless body in the road (he was already a half block beyond the scene). The street was congested both ways, more car horns were blaring. He saw that the van, its taillights brilliant red, had stopped, a figure was rushing back into the road, arms waving crazily. People were hurrying from the bus stop, from the apartment buildings. Traffic was coming to a halt on that side.

He’d thought to stop, but stopping wouldn’t have helped, Wales thought, looking again into the mirror from a half block farther on. A collection of shadowy people stood out on the pavement, peering down. He couldn’t see the woman. Though no one was kneeling to assist her — which was a sure sign. His heart began rocketing. Cold sweat rose on his neck in the warm car. He was suddenly jittery. It’s always bad to die when you don’t want to. That had been the motto of a man named Peter Swayzee he’d known in Spain — a photographer, a silly man who was dead now, shot to pieces covering a skirmish in East Africa, someplace where the journalists expected to be protected. He himself had never done that— covered a war or a skirmish or a border flare-up or a firefight. He had no wish for that. It was reckless. He preferred the parts that weren’t war. Culture. And he was now in Chicago.

Turning south onto the Outer Drive along the lake, Wales began to go over what seemed remarkable about the death he’d just witnessed. Some way he felt now seemed to need resolving, unburdening. It was always important to tabulate one’s responses.

The first thing: that she was dead; how certain he had been about that; how nothing less seemed thinkable. It wasn’t a moral issue. Other people were helping in the event she wasn’t dead. In any case, he’d helped people before — once, in the UBahn, when the Kurds had set off plastique at rush hour. No one in the station could see for the smoke, and he’d guided people out, led them by the hand up into the sunny street.

The other thing, of course — and perhaps this was a moral issue: he was moved by the woman as he’d first seen her, falling into the snow, almost gently, then standing and righting herself, getting her hand set properly onto the top of her head. Putting things right again. She’d been completely in her life then, in the fullest grip and perplex of it. And then— as he’d watched — three steps, possibly four, and that was all over. In his mind he broke it down: first, as though nothing that happened had been inevitable. And then as if it all was inevitable, a steady unfolding. In his line of work, no one had a use for this kind of inquiry. In his line of work, the actual was all.

The lake was on the left, dark as petroleum and invisible beyond the blazing lanes of northbound, homeward traffic. Friday night. Out ahead, the city center lit the low clouds shrouding the great buildings, the tallest tops of which had disappeared, igniting the sky from within. The actual jitters, he found, hadn’t lasted so long. Though what was left was simply a disordered feeling — familiar enough — as if something had needed to be established by declaring someone he didn’t even know to be dead, but it hadn’t been. Of course, it could just be anticipation.

The Drake was jammed with people at six p.m. — even in the lower arcade, where there were expensive shops and an imitation Cape Cod restaurant he and Jena had dined in their first night, when they’d been so pleased with themselves to be together. Wales entered this way each night — the back entrance — and exited this way each morning. If Jena’s husband employed a detective to watch for him, then a detective, he decided, would watch the front. He was not very good at deception, he knew. Deception was very American.

Men in suits and their wives in flowered dresses were everywhere in the lower lobby, hurrying one way and another, wearing name tags that said BIG TEN. He wanted past all this. But a man seemed to know him as he wove his way through the crowded arcade toward the elevator banks.

“Hey!” the man said, “Wales.” The man bore through the crowd, a large, thick-necked, smiling man in a shiny blue suit. An ex-athlete, of course. His white plastic name tag said JIM, and below it, PRESIDENT. “Are you coming to our cocktail party?”

“I don’t know. No.” Wales smiled. People were all around, making too much noise. Couples were filtering into a large banquet room, where there were bright lights and loud piano music and laughter.

He had met this man, Jim. But that was all he remembered without really remembering that. At a college dinner, possibly. Now, though, here he was again, in the way. Chicago was large but not large enough. It was large in a small way.

“Well, you’re invited in,” the man Jim said jovially, moving in closer.

“Thanks,” Wales said. “Good. Yes.” They hadn’t shaken hands. Neither wanted to hold the other too long.

“I mean, what better offer have you got, Wales?” the man, Jim, said. His skin was too white, too thick along its big jaw line.

“Well,” Wales said, “I don’t know.” He’d almost said, “That depends,” but didn’t. He felt extremely conspicuous here.

“Did you get the tickets I sent you?” Jim said loudly.

“Of course.” He didn’t know what this Jim could be talking about. But he said, “I did. Thanks.”

“I’m as good as my word, then, aren’t I?” The man was shouting through the crowd noise, which was increasing.

Wales glanced toward the elevator banks farther on. Polished brass doors slowly opening, slowly closing. Pale green triangles — up. Pale red triangles — down. Faint, seductive chiming. “Thanks for the tickets.” He wanted to shake the man’s hand to make him go.

“Tell Franklin I say hello,” the man said, as if he meant it sarcastically. By smiling he made his great unusual jaw look like Mussolini’s jaw. Franklin, Wales wondered. Who was Franklin? He remembered no one at the college named Franklin. He felt drunk, although he hadn’t been drinking. An hour before he’d been teaching. Trapped in a paneled room with students.

Bing … bing … bing. Elevators were departing.

“Oh yes,” Wales said, “I will,” and for a third time smiled.

“So,” Jim said, “you be good now.” All his front teeth were false teeth.

Jim wandered into the crowd that had begun moving more quickly toward the banquet room. Just at that moment Wales could smell a cigar, rich and dense and pungent. It made him think about the Paris Bar in Berlin. Something about smoke and this brassy amber arcade light was almost the same as there. He’d gone in one night with a woman friend for a drink and to buy condoms. When he’d stepped into the gents, he’d found the dispenser was beside the urinals, which were in constant use. And somehow — nervousness possibly, anticipation again — somehow he’d let drop his Deutschemark coin. And because he had been drinking then, and because he wanted to buy the condoms, badly wanted them, he’d squatted beside a man who was pissing and fetched the fugitive coin off the tiles from between the stranger’s straddled legs. The man smiled down at him, unbothered, as if this kind of thing always happened. “I must have dropsy tonight,” Wales said, fingering the hard little silver D-mark, which was not at all dampened. And then he’d started to laugh, peals of loud laughing. No one in the gents could possibly have known what “dropsy” meant. It was very, very funny. A typical problem with the language.

“Viel Glück, mein Freund,” the man said, zipping himself and looking around, pleased about everything.

“Yes well. Der beste Glück. Natürlich,” Wales said, depositing the coin into the machine.

“Now everyone will know,” his woman friend said as they exited the bar into the warm summer’s night along Kantstrasse. She laughed about it. She knew everyone there.

“Surely no one cares,” Wales said.

“No, of course not. No one cares a thing. It’s all completely stupid.”

Jena had given him the key, a crisp, white card which, when inserted in a slot, ignited a tiny green light, provoking a soft click, after which the door opened. Room 839.

“Oh, I’ve been dying for you to be here,” Jena said, her voice rich, deeper than usual. He couldn’t quite see her. The room was dark but for a candle Jena had set beside her easel, which was in shadows beside the window. It was a long L-shaped suite ending with a little step-up to tall windows that looked down onto the Drive. The desirable north view. The expensive view. The bed was at the other end, where there was no light, only the clock radio, which said it was 6:05. A good, spacious American room, Wales thought. So much nicer than Europe. You could live an entire life in a room like this, and it would be an excellent life.

Jena was seated in one of two armchairs she’d placed by the windows. She’d been watching cars on the Drive. She extended her arm back to take his hand. She was irresistible. More attractive than anyone. “Aren’t you late?” she said. “You feel very late.”

“There was traffic,” Wales said.

She turned her head toward him. He leaned to kiss her cheek, smelled her faint citrus breath.

Jena had the heat up. She was always cold. She was too thin, he thought, thinner than she looked in her clothes — a small, dark-haired woman with thin arms, not precisely pretty in every light, but pretty — her face slightly pointed, her soft, smiling lips slightly too thin. Yet so appealing — the sensation of incaution about her. She was quick-witted, unpredictable, thought of herself almost constantly, laughed at the wrong moments. She was rich and a wife and a mother, and so perhaps, Wales thought, she’d experienced little of the world, not enough to know what not to do, and so was only herself — a quality he also found appealing.

Wales had been invited to give a lecture to satisfy his college stay. And he’d decided to lecture on the death of Princess Diana as an event in the English press. He’d titled it “A Case of Failed Actuality.” These, he’d said, were the easiest to cover: you simply made up the emotions, made up their consequence, invented what was important. It was usual in England. He’d quoted Henry James: “writing made importance.” It was not exactly journalism, he admitted.

Jena had attended the lecture “from the community,” driving down from her suburb up the lake. Afterward, she’d invited him for a drink. In the bar they’d talked until late about America losing its grip on the world; about the global need to feel more; about an enlarged sense of global grief; about the amusing coincidence of his surname — Wales. She was petite, forward, arousing, rarely stayed on any subject, laughed too much — the laugh, he thought, of a woman accustomed to being distrusted. But he’d thought: where did you come from? Where can I find you again? She had acted uncertain of herself at the beginning — though not shy, she wasn’t shy in the least: she was protected, disengaged, careless, which allowed her to seem uncertain, and thus daring. This he also liked. It was exciting. He knew, of course, that when women came to lectures, they came wanting something — conceivably something innocent — but something, always. That had been two weeks ago. As they left the bar, she’d taken his arm and said, “We’ll have to hurry if we’re going to do anything together. You’re leaving soon.” They had not quite talked about doing anything together. But he was leaving soon.

“Then we’ll hurry,” he said. And they had.

. .

“Your hands are freezing.” Jena took his hands. He liked her very much.

He knelt and put both his arms around her and held her so his cheek was against her hair. She was wearing a small black Chanel dress that revealed her neck, and he kissed her there, then kissed into her hair, which felt dry on his mouth. He could smell himself. He was sour. He should take a bath, he thought. A bath would be a relief.

“I saw a man in the lobby who knew me,” he said. “He asked about someone named Franklin. I didn’t know who he was.”

“He probably thought you were somebody else,” Jena said softly, her face beside his.

“May-be.” Perhaps it was so, except the man had called him Wales. Though, my God, he realized, this was the drab news you would tell your wife when you had nothing else to say. Unimportant news. He didn’t have a wife.

Each of the five nights they’d been at The Drake, Jena had wanted to make love the moment he arrived, as if it was this act that confirmed them both, and everything else should get out of its way; their time was serious, urgent, fast-disappearing. He wanted that act now very much, felt aroused but also slightly unstrung. He had, after all, seen a death tonight. Death unstrung everyone.

Only, what Jena didn’t like was weakness. Weakness anywhere. So he didn’t want to seem unstrung. She was a woman who liked to be in control, but also to be kept off-balance, mystified, as though mystery were a form of interesting intelligence. Therefore she needed him to seem in control, even remote, opaque, possibly mysterious — anything but weak. It was her dream world.

And yet, remoteness was such a burden. Who finally worried about revealing yourself? You did it, whether you wanted to or not. He realized he was letting her play the interesting part in this. It was a form of generosity. What was most real to her, after all, were the things she wanted.

“I’d like to talk,” Jena said. “Can we talk for a little first?”

“I was hoping we would,” Wales said. This was opaque enough. Perhaps he would tell her about the woman he’d seen killed on Ardmore.

“Come sit in this chair beside me.” She looked up, smiling. “We can watch the lights and talk. I missed you.”

He didn’t mind whatever he did with her; you could make a good evening in different ways. Making love would come along. Later they would walk out onto the wide, lighted Avenue in the cold and wind, and find dinner someplace. That would be excellent enough.

He sat between her and her worktable, where there were brushes, beakers of water and turpentine, tubes of pigment, pencils, erasers, swatches of felt cloth, razor blades, a vase containing three hyacinths. He had seen her paintings before — enlarged black-and-white photographs of a man and a woman, photographs from the nineteen-fifties. The people were nicely dressed, standing in the front yard of a small frame house in what seemed to be an open field. These were her parents. Jena had painted onto these photographs, giving the man and woman red or blue or green shadows around their bodies, smudging their faces, distorting them, making them look ugly but not comical. There was to be a series of these. They were depressing, Wales thought — unnecessary. “Bacon did this sort of thing first, of course,” Jena had said confidently. “He didn’t show his. But I’ll show mine.”

She took a long, red cashmere sweater off the back of her chair and put it on over her dress. The air was chilled by the window glass. It was exhilarating to be here, as though they were on the edge, waiting to jump.

Below them eight floors, the Drive was astream with cars — headlights and taillights — the lush apartments up the Gold Coast sumptuous and yellow-lit, though off-putting, inanimate. The pink gleam from the hotel’s sign discolored the deep night air above. The lake itself was like a lightless precipice. Lakes were dull, Wales thought. Drama-less. He’d grown up near the ocean, which was never a disappointment, never compromised.

“There’s something wonderful about the lake, isn’t there?” Jena said, leaning close to the glass. Tiny motes of moisture floated through the tinted air beyond.

“It’s always disappointing to me.”

“Oh, no,” Jena said sweetly and turned to smile at him. “I love the lake. It’s so comforting. It’s contained. I love Chicago, too.” She turned back and put her nose to the windowpane. She was happy.

“What shall we speak about?” Wales said.

“My family,” Jena said. “Is that all right?”

“I’ll make an exception.”

“I mean my parents,” she said, “not my husband or my daughters.” Jena had been married twenty years, though her two children were young. One was ten, he could remember, the other possibly six. She liked her rich husband, who encouraged her to do everything she wanted. Take flying lessons. Spend summers in Ibiza alone. Never consider employment. Know men. She needed only to stay married to him — that was the agreement. He was older — Wales’s age. It was satisfactory. Merely not perfect.

She put ten slender fingertips onto the cold window glass and held them there as though against piano keys, then looked back at him and smiled. “Where are your parents?” she asked. She had asked this twice before and forgotten twice.

“Rhode Island,” Wales said. “My father’s eighty-four. My mother has, well … ” He didn’t care if he said this, but still he hesitated. “My mother has Alzheimer’s.”

“Would she recognize you?”

“Would?” Wales said. “She would if she could, I suppose.”

“Does she?”

“No.”

“And do you have siblings?” This she hadn’t asked before. She often chose unlikeable words. Siblings. Interaction. Network. Bond. Words her friends said.

“One sister, who’s older. In Arizona. We’re not close. I don’t like her very much.”

“Hmm.” Jena pulled her fingers away, just barely, then touched them back to the glass. Her legs were crossed. She was barelegged and barefoot and no doubt cold. She was being polite by asking. “My parents were essentially speechless,” she said and exhaled wearily. “They were raised so poor in southern Ohio — where nobody really had anything to say, anyway — that they didn’t know there were all these things you needed to be able to say to make the world work.” She nodded, agreeing with herself. “My mother for instance. She wouldn’t just walk up to you and just say, ‘Hello, I’m Mary Burns.’ She’d just start talking, just blurt out what she needed to get said. Then she’d stare at you. And if you acted surprised, she’d dislike you for it.”

Jena seemed to fix her gaze on the molten flow of cars below. This was her story, Wales thought; the one she couldn’t get over from her past, the completely insignificant story that she believed cooperated in all her major failures: why she married who she’d married. Why she didn’t go to a better college. Why she wasn’t more successful as an artist. He’d had his own, years ago: 1958, an overcast day on Narragansett Bay with his father, in a dory. A fishing trip. His father had confessed to him about a half-Portuguese woman he loved down in Westerly — someone his mother and sister never heard about. The story stayed fixed in his mind for years, though he’d forgotten it until just now.

Still, these things were unimportant. You imagined the past, you didn’t remember it. You could just imagine it differently. He would tell her that, tell her she was a wonderful woman. That’s all that mattered.

“Is this okay?” Jena said, pulling her sweater sleeves up above her slender elbows. Her dark hair shone with the candle’s flicker. The room was reflected out of kilter in the tall window. “I can’t stand it if I bore you.”

“No,” Wales said. “Not at all.”

“Okay, so my father,” she went right on. “He couldn’t go inside a restaurant and ask for a table. He’d just stand. Then he’d inch forward, expecting his wishes would be understood by whoever was in charge — as if his being there could only mean what he needed it to mean.” Jena shook her head, breathed against the glass and mused at the fog her breath left. “So odd,” she said. “They were like immigrants. Except they weren’t. I guess it’s a form of arrogance.”

“Is that all?” Wales said.

“Yes.” She looked at him and blinked.

“It doesn’t seem very important,” he said.

“It’s just why they were unsuccessful human beings,” Jena said calmly. “That’s all.”

“But does it mean very much to you?” It surprised him that this was what she wanted to talk about. It seemed so intimate and so irrelevant.

“They’re my parents,” she said.

“Do they like you?”

“Of course. I’m rich. They treat me like royalty. It’s why I’m a painter,” Jena said. “They didn’t honor their duty to order the world in a responsible way. So I have to say things with my painting, because they didn’t.”

Perhaps all the time spent with children, he thought, making nothing into something, distorted your view. “But does it bother you,” he asked.

“No,” Jena said. “I’d like to put them in a novel, too. Do you think they would be believable in a novel?” She hoped to write a novel. She liked all media.

“I’m sure they would,” he said. And he thought: how difficult could it be to write a novel? So many did it. He liked novels because they dealt with the incommensurable, with the things that couldn’t be expressed any other way. What he did was so much the opposite. He dealt with things that happened. The wrapping of the Reichstag. The funeral of a phony princess. Failed actualities, with his reactions to make up for the failure.

Someone knocked loudly on the door at the end of the short, dark hallway, and then opened it. He’d forgotten to turn the lock.

“Housekee-ping?” a young woman’s bright voice spoke. A bar of yellow light entered the room from the corridor outside.

“No!” Jena said loudly, her face, so close to his, startled, sharply unpretty. Her mouth could look surprisingly cruel, though she wasn’t especially cruel that he had seen. “No housekeeping.”

“Housekee-ping?” the voice said again, happily. “Would you like to be your bed turned down?”

“No!” Jena shouted. “Not. No bed turned down.”

“Okay. Thank you.” The door clicked closed.

Jena sat for a moment in her chair, in the candlelight, as if she was very displeased. Her hands were clasped, her mouth tightly shut. He could sense her heart beating stern, insistent beats. He’d thought, naturally enough, that it was her husband. She must’ve thought so. And sometime, of course, it would be, long after it mattered. “Would you like to be your bed turned down?” she said ruefully.

He looked around the darkened room. A tall wood-and-brass clock with a motionless brass pendulum stood in the shadows against the wall. There was a pretty decorative fireplace and a mantel. There was a print in a gold frame. Caravaggio. The Calling of St. Michael. He’d seen it in the Louvre. A glass of wine would be nice now, he thought. He looked around for a bottle on a table surface, but saw none. Jena’s clothes were all put away, as though she’d lived here for months, which was how she liked things: ordered surfaces, an aura of permanence, as if everything, including herself, had a long history. It was her form of kindness: to make things appear solid, reliable.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” she said.

“No,” Wales said. She liked to think of him not as a journalist but as a spy. It was her way to make him opaque, to keep herself off-balance. She had asked very little about what he did. At first, when they’d gone for a drink, she’d been interested. But after that she wasn’t.

“Would you?”

“No,” Wales said. “Do you have someone in mind?” He realized he still had on his coat and tie.

“No,” Jena said and smiled and widened her eyes, as if it was a joke.

He thought for the second time in an hour about the woman’s death he’d witnessed on Ardmore Avenue, about the progress of those events to their end. So much possibility, so much chance for a better outcome had been caught in that slow motion. It should make one able to see the ends of events before they happened, to forestall bad outcomes. It could be applied to love affairs.

“That’s surprising,” Jena said. “But it’s because you’re a journalist. If you were a real writer you’d be different.”

She smiled at him again, and he caught the tiny faraway feeling that he could love her, could enter the mystery that way, though the opportunity would pass soon. But her willingness to say the wrong thing, to boast — he liked it. She wasn’t jaded by experience, but freed by a lack of it.

“What do you do in Europe?” she said.

“I go see things and then write about them. That’s all.”

“Are you famous?”

“Journalists don’t get famous,” he said. “We make other people famous.” She didn’t know anything about journalists. He liked that, too.

“Someday you’ll have to tell me what’s the strangest thing you ever saw and then wrote about. I’d like to know about that.”

“Someday I will,” Wales said. “I promise.”

Making love was eventful. At first she was almost dalliant, though selective, vaguely theatrical, practiced. And then after time — though all at once, really — engrossed, specific, unstinting, exactly as if it was all unscripted, all new ground, whatever they did. She could find the new with great naturalness, and he was moved by the sensation that something new could occur with someone: that self-awareness could take you on to immersion and then continue for a long while. He resisted nothing, abjured nothing, never lost touch with her in all of it. It was what he wanted.

And when it was over he was for a long time lost from words. She had turned on the lamp by the bed and slept with her hand covering her eyes. And he’d thought: where had this gone in my life? How would I keep this? And then: you don’t. This doesn’t keep. You take it when it’s given.

The clock beneath the lamp said 9:19. Wales could smell the solvent and the hyacinths on her painter’s table, sharp, murky aromas afloat in the warm room. Outside, voices spoke in the hall. Twice the phone rang. He showered, then walked to the window while she slept, and looked at the painted photograph, the two people, their smiling midwestern features distorted. She must hate them. Then he remembered the Bacons in the Tate. The apes in agony.

What he wanted to think about then was the funeral day in London. It was a relief to think about it. The balmy Saturday with summer lasting on. He’d taken the train from some friends’ outside of Oxford. The station — Paddington— had been empty, its long, echoing platforms hushed in the watery light, the streets outside the same. Though the tabloids had their tombstone headlines up. WE MOURN! WE GRIEVE! THEY WEEP! GOODBYE.

At the Russell Hotel, he’d stayed in and watched it all on TV. It was an event for TV anyway — his reactions were the story. Passing on the screen were the cortège, the acre of memorials, the soldiers, the bier, the Queen, the Prince. The awful brother. The boys with their perfect large teeth and the whites of their eyes too white. Through the open window, in with a breeze, he’d heard someone say — a woman, possibly in the next room, watching it all just as he was—“This’ll never happen again, will it?” she’d said. “Ya can’t say that about much, can ya? Completely unique, ya know? Well, not her, of course. She wasn’t unique. She was a whoor. Well, sure, maybe not a whoor. But you know.”

In America it was five a.m. He wondered if anyone would be up watching.

And to all of it his reactions were: How strange to have a royal family. She was never a beauty. What did it all cost? Death by automobile is always slightly trivial. People applauded the hearse. What does one write in a condolence book? It’s really themselves they’re pitying. How will they feel in a month? In a year? We magnify everything to learn if we’re right. Someone—and this is what he wrote finally, the crux of it, the literature of the failed actuality—someone has to tell us what’s important, because we no longer know.

The next day he’d learned that his friend’s wife had died in Oxford. An aneurysm. Very sudden. Very brief and painless. Only, no one could send flowers. All the flowers were spoken for, which seemed to point everything up badly. “The English. We’ve learned something about ourselves, haven’t we, James?” his friend said bitterly as they sat in his car outside the Oxford station, waiting for other friends to arrive. For the other funeral. The real-er one.

“What is it?” Wales said.

“That we’re as stupid as the next bunch. As stupid as you are. That’s all new to us, you see. We’ve never exactly known that until now.”

Why that all came back to him he couldn’t say. Stories he wrote usually didn’t. Though later, it had been easy to write a lecture whose theme was “Failed Actuality: How We Discover the Meaning of the Things We See.” In it he’d retold the story of his friend’s wife’s death as a point of contrast. Which was when Jena had come into the picture, and they’d begun to hurry.

From the window, he watched onto the little wedge of public park between the hotel’s back entrance and the Drive, still solid with cars this late. Taxis cruised past, their yellow roof-lights signaling at liberty. A jogger in bright orange bounced alone along the concrete beach that curved up to Lincoln Park. A man with two Weimaraners had stopped to sprinkle breadcrumbs on the park benches. All expelled soundless breaths into the night.

Outside on the cold Avenue they walked to the restaurant she preferred. Not far — Walton Street. She liked going to one place over and over until she tired of it and then would never go back. The wind was gusting. Lights up Michigan glittered. Traffic hummed but was thinner. The canyon of buildings seemed festive, a white background of night light and the startling half moon nearly lost in hazy distance. A skiff of snow had blown against the curbs. Heavy coats a must. Wales felt good, at ease with things. Unburdened. Not at all unstrung.

In the hotel lobby there’d been a wedding party with a bride, but no sign of Jim with the tickets. No sign of a detective when they passed out the main doors.

On the brisk walk, Jena’s mind was loosened after making love, as if she couldn’t match things right. She mentioned her husband and their therapy — all his idea, she said, her face hidden in a sable parka her husband had certainly paid for. She’d been fine with things, she said. But he’d wanted something more, something he couldn’t quite describe but could feel vividly the lack of. A sense of locatedness was absent— his words — something she should somehow contribute to. “I thought a therapist would at least tell me something important, right?” Jena said. “‘Forget marriage.’ Or, ‘Here’s a better way to do it.’ Why else go? Except that’s not in the package. And the package gets expensive.”

Wales thought about Jena’s husband, about conversations he and the husband could have. How they might like each other. The husband would no doubt think Jena was out of her head just for being the way she was — so different, she would seem, from real estate. It made him happy that Jena had someone to feel certain about; someone willing to be complicit in his own deception; that there were these children. Her circle of affection. What else was marriage if not a circle of affection?

“It really seems so hopeless, doesn’t it?” She laughed, too loud.

“Maybe no one could … ” He started to say something extremely banal but stopped. He shook his head “no.” It made her smile. Her face was softened, so appealing even in the blasted air, her lips slightly bruised. She took his hand, which he found to be trembling. Again, the vigor of lovemaking, he thought. He had an urge, a strong one just then, to tell her he loved her — here on the street. But by stopping midsentence he once again curtailed revealing himself. She preferred that. A pledge of love was inappropriate, even if he’d felt it.

He wished, though, that his hands wouldn’t tremble, since now was the best time, the moment after making love, when everything seemed possible, easy, when they could surprise each other with a look, change almost anything with an offhand remark. It had nothing to do with revealing yourself.

“When you leave Chicago, where’re you going?” Jena said. She took his arm as she had the first night, and they stepped out into Michigan Avenue at the light. The air was colder in the wide street. A group of young nuns hurried past, bound for The Drake in their bright blue habits. They were laughing about the cold. Jena smiled at them.

“London,” Wales said, the wind biting in under his collar. He’d been thinking about London again, about his widowed friend in Oxford. He preferred returning to Europe through England. The easy entry.

“Do you still keep your flat in Berlin?” She was just talking still, not paying attention, light-headed after being with him. They were on the street in Chicago, in winter, going for supper late. Saying “keep your flat” must feel good. He’d felt that way. It was like saying, “We live in the Sixth.” Or, “It’s just off the King’s Road.” Or, “We took rooms behind the Prado.” Simple, harmless things.

“Yes. It’s in Uhlandstrasse,” he said.

“Is that in the East?”

“No. It’s in the rich quarter. Near the Zoo and the Paris Bar. Kudamm. Savignyplatz.” She didn’t know what these words meant, which was fine. She could hear them.

They were in sight of her restaurant. People were walking out the door, struggling into overcoats. Off the Avenue, the wind suddenly vanished, making the air feel almost spring-like. They passed the windows of a large, radiantly lit bookstore. People were having coffee and talking at high, round tables. All those books, Wales thought. It would be nice — he could suddenly feel it — to ride the train in from Gatwick, to have a morning to himself, read a book. There was a pure thought.

“If I asked you something important,” Jena said, “would you not be shocked?” She held his arm, but slowed on the sidewalk, still beside the bookstore.

“I’d try not to be,” Wales said, and looked at her with affection. This was not like her, to make a plea. But it was good. New.

“If I asked you to kill my husband, would you do it?” Jena looked up at him and blinked. Her hazel eyes were wide, swimming but dry. Two dark discs in white that seemed to grow larger. Her face was intent on him. “For me? If I’d love you? If I’d go away with you? At least for a while?”

Wales thought for just that instant about how they looked. A handsome, tall man dressed in a heavy camel hair coat. Hatless, with gray in his hair. Highly shined black shoes from Germany. And Jena, in a sable parka and wool trousers, expensive, heavy gloves. Expensive boots. They looked good together, even on the cold street. They made a pair. They could be in love.

“No, I guess I wouldn’t,” Wales said.

Jena turned and looked quickly back at the Avenue, where a driver had slammed on brakes and skidded over the frozen pavement. Two policemen in a white and blue cruiser waited at the curb, watching the car as it stopped sideways in the middle of the intersection. Perhaps she felt someone was following her. “We’re doing exactly what we want to now, aren’t we?” she said, distracted by the commotion.

“I am,” Wales said.

She looked at him and smiled tightly. He never knew what she thought. Possibly she was more like her parents than she realized. “It was just something to say,” she said and cleared her throat. “You shouldn’t take me so seriously.”

“Wonderful,” Wales said, and smiled.

“Believe it, then,” Jena said stiffly. “Everybody comes before somebody. Somebody always comes after.” She paused as if she wanted to say something more about that but then didn’t. “Why don’t we eat,” she said, and began to move along toward the restaurant’s glass doors, which were just at that moment opening again onto the street.

At dinner she talked about everything that came in her head. She said they should go dancing tonight, that she knew a place only a cab ride away. A black neighborhood. She asked if Wales liked dancing at all. He did, he said. She asked if he liked blues, and he said he did, though he didn’t much. She looked pale now in her black turtleneck with a strand of small pearls. She was wearing her wedding ring and a great square emerald ring he’d never seen before. They drank red wine and ate squab and touched hands like lovers across the small window table. Someone would know her here, but she didn’t mind. She was feeling reckless. What did it hurt?

She talked about a novel she was reading, which interested her. It was all about an English girl who’d once been an ingénue. There had been an influential film in France, and for a time the girl was famous. Then one thing and another went wrong. Eventually she came to live in Prague, alone, older, a former addict. Jena felt identification with her, she said, thought her story could be set in America. Somehow her parents could be in it, too.

After that she talked about her little girls, whom she loved, and then more about her husband, whom she’d asked him to kill and who, she said, was at his best a mild but considerate lover. She talked about scratching her cornea in Munich once, about what a bad experience that’d been — finding an ophthalmologist with American training, one who spoke English, one who sterilized things properly, one whose assistants weren’t heroin addicts or hemophiliacs. He realized that nothing he could do or say would have any effect on her now. Yet what kind of person would she be if he could so easily affect her. And being with her was such a pleasure. It made him feel wonderful, insulated. He wanted to see her again. Next week. Arrange something for then.

Only, he recognized, she was just now talking herself out of the last parts of being interested in him. Something must’ve seemed weak. Not being willing to kill someone, or at least say he would. She was raising the stakes, making it up as she went along until he failed.

“Tell me something that happened to you, Jimmy,” she said. “You really haven’t talked much tonight. I’ve just chattered on.” She hadn’t used the name “Jimmy” before. She was pale, but her dark eyes were sparkling.

“I was robbed tonight,” Wales said. “On the way out to my car at school. A black man stopped me in the parking lot and asked to borrow a dollar, and when I brought my billfold out he grabbed at it. Knocked it out of my hand. Scattered money all around.”

“My God,” Jena said. “What happened then?”

“We scuffled. He tried to pick up the money, but I hit him, and then he just ran off. He got a few dollars. Not much.” He stared at her across the table full of empty plates.

“You didn’t tell me any of this before, did you?”

“No,” Wales said. “I was happy to be with you and not to think about it.”

“But weren’t you hurt?” She extended one hand across the table’s width and gently touched his.

“No, I wasn’t,” Wales said. “Not at all.”

“Did it scare you?” she said. Interest rekindled in her eyes. She liked it that he was a man who withheld facts, who could make love, eat dinner, consider dancing and still keep all this to himself. She liked it that he would fight another man. Come to blows.

“It did scare me,” Wales said. “But the thing I remember, and I don’t remember very much, is how his hand felt when it hit my hand. There was terrible force in it. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever felt. It was need and desperation at one time. It was attractive. I’m sure I won’t ever forget it.”

Wales took a sip of his wine and stared at her. All of this had happened to him two months ago, when he first came back to America. Not tonight. He hadn’t fought such a man at all, but had been hit as he’d said and felt about it the way he’d just told her. Only, not now. He wished, for an instant, that he could feel that force again. How satisfying that had been. The certainty. She liked this story. Perhaps it would fix something.

“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” Jena said, folding her napkin, her eyes lowered.

“Oh no,” Wales said. “I’m not hurt. I’m perfectly fine.”

“You’re lucky to be alive, is what you are,” she said, and glanced at him as her eyes sought the waiter.

“I know,” Wales said. “I’ll add it to my list of lucky things.”

On the street, in front of The Drake, they stopped near the busy corner at Michigan, where taxis turned and idled past. It was after midnight, and seemed warmer. The wind had settled. In the curb gutters, ice was turning to murky water. The hotel glowed golden in the night above them.

They simply stood. Wales looked up the side street toward the lake as if he planned to hail a taxi.

“I’ll be going home in the morning,” she said and smiled at him, pulled her hair back on one side and held it there.

“Home, home,” Wales said. “I’ll be going too, then.” He wished he could stay longer. He felt her room key card still in his pocket. That was over.

A man almost directly beside them on the street was talking into a pay phone. He had on a tuxedo jacket and a pair of nice patent leather shoes. He’d been to a party in The Drake, but now seemed desperate about something.

Wales had expected to tell her about the woman he had seen killed, about the astonishment of that, to retell it — the slowing of time, the stateliness of events, the sensation that the worst could be avoided, the future improved by a more gradual unfolding. But he had no wish now to reveal the things he could be made to think, how his mind worked, or what he could feel in response to events. Better to be a spy, to be close to her now, satisfied with her, think exclusively about her. He knew he was not yet distinguishing things perfectly, wasn’t confident which feelings were his real ones, or how he would think about events later. It was not, perhaps, so easy to reveal yourself.

“Are you happy with these days?” he heard her say. She was smiling at him out on the cold sidewalk. “These were wonderful days, weren’t they? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a thousand of them?”

“I’m sorry they’re over,” Wales said. The man in the tuxedo jacket slammed the phone down and walked quickly away, toward the hotel’s lighted marquee. “Could I ask you something,” he said. He felt like he was shouting.

“Yes,” she said. “Do ask me.”

“Did this give you anything?” Wales said. “Did I give you anything you cared about? It seemed like you wanted there to be an outcome.”

“What an odd thing to ask,” Jena said, her eyes shining, growing large again. She seemed about to laugh, but then suddenly moved to him, stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the mouth, hard, put her cold cheek to his cheek and said, “Yes. You gave me so much. You gave me all there was. Didn’t you? That’s what I wanted.”

“Yes,” Wales said. “I did. That’s right.” He smiled at her.

“Good,” she said. “Good.” Then she turned away, and hurried toward the revolving doors as the man in the tuxedo had done, and quickly disappeared. Though he waited then for a time, just outside the yellow marquee — a man standing alone in a brown coat; waited until whatever disordered feelings he had about their moment of departure could be fully experienced and then diminish and become less a barrier. They were not bad feelings, not an unfamiliar moment, not the opening onto desolation. They were simply the outcome. And in a short while, possibly at some instant during his drive back up the lake, he would feel a small release, an unburdening, the sensation of events being completed, so that over time he would think less and less about it until it all seemed, upon reflection, to be almost perfect.