A Multitude of Sins

Dominion

Madeleine Granville stood at the high window of the Hotel Queen Elizabeth II, trying to decide which tiny car far below on Wellington Street was her yellow Saab. Henry Rothman was tying his tie in front of the mirror. Henry was catching a plane in two hours. Madeleine was staying behind in Montreal, where she lived.

Henry and Madeleine had been having a much more than ordinary friendship for two years — the kind of friendship no one but the two of them was expected to know about (if others knew, they’d decided, it didn’t matter because no one really knew). They were business associates. She was a chartered accountant, he was an American lobbyist for the firm she worked for, the West-Consolidated Group, specializing in enhanced agricultural food additives and doing big business abroad. Henry was forty-nine, Madeleine was thirty-three. As business associates, they’d traveled together a great deal, often to Europe, staying together in many beds in many hotel rooms until late on many mornings, eating scores of very good restaurant meals, setting out upon innumerable days in bright noon sunshine, later saying their goodbyes in other hotel rooms or in airports, in car-parks, hotel lobbies, taxi stands, bus stops. While apart, which had been most of the time, they had missed each other, talked on the phone often, never written. But when they’d come each time again into the other’s presence, they’d felt surprise, exhilaration, fulfillment, grateful happy relief. Henry Rothman lived in D.C., where he maintained a comfortable, divorced lawyer’s life. Madeleine had settled in a tree-lined suburb with her child and her architect husband. Everyone who worked with them, of course, knew everything and talked about it constantly behind their backs. Yet the general feeling was that it wouldn’t last very long; and beyond that it was best to stay out of other people’s business. Conflicted gossip about people doing what you yourself would like to be doing was very Canadian, Madeleine said.

But now, they’d decided, was the time for it to be over. They loved each other — they both acknowledged that. Though they possibly were not in love (these were Madeleine’s distinctions). Yet, they had been in something, she understood, possibly something even better than love, something with its own intense and timeless web, densely tumultuous interiors and transporting heights. What it exactly was was hazy. But it had not been nothing.

As always, other people were involved — no one in Rothman’s life, it was true, but two in Madeleine’s. And to these two, life had been promised a steady continuance. So either what was not just an affair ended now — they’d both agreed— or it went much much further, out onto a terrain that bore no boundaries or markers, a terrain full of terrific hazards. And neither of them wanted that.

It could as easily have stopped six months ago, in London — Henry had thought, on the plane flying in the day before yesterday. Seated together at a sidewalk café on Sloane Square one spring morning, with taxis pouring past, he and Madeleine had suddenly found they had nothing much to say at the precise moment when they’d always had something to say — an enjoyable prefiguring of their luncheon plans, rehearsing their assessments of a troublesome client, discussing reviews of a movie they might attend, or an encoded mention of lovemaking the night before — all of the engaging, short-range complications of arrangements such as theirs. Love, Henry remembered thinking then, was a lengthy series of insignificant questions whose answers you couldn’t live without. And it was these questions they’d run out of interesting answers for. But to have ended it then, so far from home and familiar surroundings, would’ve been inconsiderate. Ending it then would’ve meant something about themselves neither of them would’ve believed: that it hadn’t mattered very much; that they were people who did things that didn’t matter very much; and that they either importantly did or didn’t know that about themselves. None of these seemed true.

Therefore, they’d kept on. Though over the intervening months their telephone conversations grew fewer and briefer. Henry went alone to Paris twice. He began a relationship with a woman in Washington, then ended it without Madeleine seeming to notice. Her thirty-third birthday passed unacknowledged. And then, just as he was planning a trip to San Francisco, Henry suggested a stopover in Montreal. A visit. It was clear enough to both of them.

The evening of his arrival, they’d eaten dinner near the Biodome, in a new Basque place Madeleine had read about. She dressed up in a boxy, unflattering black wool dress and black tights. They drank too much Nonino, talked little, walked to the St. Lawrence, held hands in the chill October night, while quietly observing the fact that without a patched-together future to involve and distract them, life became quite repetitious in very little time. But still, they had gone back to his room at the QE II, stayed in bed until one a.m., made love with genuine passion, talked an hour in the dark, and then Madeleine had driven home to her husband and son.

Later, lying alone in bed in the warm, clocking darkness, Henry thought that sharing the future with someone would certainly mean that repetitions had to be managed more skillfully. Or else it meant that sharing the future with someone wasn’t a very good idea, and he should perhaps begin to realize it.

. .

Madeleine had been crying by the window (because she felt like it), while Henry had continued getting dressed, not exactly ignoring her, but not exactly attending to her either. She had rearrived at ten to drive him to the airport. It was their old way when he came to town for business. She wore fitted blue corduroys under a frumpy red jumper with a little round white collar. She was gotten up, Henry noticed, strangely like an American flag.

In the room now neither of them ventured near the bed. They had coffee standing up, while they passed over small office matters, mentioned the fall weather — hazy in the morning, brilliant in the afternoon — typical for Montreal, Madeleine observed. She looked at the National Post while Henry finished in the bathroom.

It was when he emerged to tie his tie that he noticed Madeleine had stopped crying and was studying down twelve stories to the street.

“I was just thinking,” she said, “about all the interesting things you don’t know about Canada.” She had put on a pair of clear-rimmed glasses, perhaps to hide that she’d been crying, and that were otherwise intended to make her look studious. Madeleine’s hair was thick and dark-straw-colored, and tended to dry unruliness, so that she often bushed it back with a big silver clip, as she’d done this morning. Her face was pale, as if she’d slept too little, and her features, which were pleasing and soft with full expressive lips and dark, thick eyebrows, seemed almost lost in her hair.

Henry went on tying his tie. Out in the cityscape beyond the window was a big, T-shaped construction crane, the long crossing arm of which appeared to exit both sides of Madeleine’s head like an arrow. He could see the little green operator’s house, where a tiny human was visible inside, backed by the light of a tiny window.

“All the famous Canadians you’d never guess were Canadians, for instance.” She didn’t look at him, just stared down.

“Par exemple?” This was as much French as he knew. They spoke English here. They could speak English to him. “Name one.”

Madeleine glanced at him condescendingly. “Denny Doherty, of the Mamas and the Papas. He’s from Halifax. Donald Sutherland’s from the Maritimes someplace. P.E.I., I guess.”

Madeleine appeared different from how she actually was — a quality he always found strangely titillating, because it made her unreadable. Generally people looked how they were, he thought. Prim people looked prim, etc. Madeleine looked like her name implied, slightly old-fashioned, formal, settled, given to measuring her responses, to being at ease with herself and her character assessments.

But in fact she was nothing of the kind. She was a strong farm girl from north of Halifax herself, had been a teenage curling champion, liked to stay up late having sex, laughing and drinking schnapps, and could sometimes be quite insecure. He thought this incongruity was a matter of their ages (he was sixteen when she was born), and that other people who knew her didn’t find it incongruous at all. In general, he thought, younger people were more accepting now, Canadians especially. He would miss that.

Madeleine mused back out the window at the cars lined along the side of the Cathedral Marie-Reine-du-Monde. “It’s hazy to be flying,” she said. “I’d rather just stay here.”

It was eleven. The breakfast tray sat on the disheveled bed, on top of the scattered newspapers. Henry liked the Canadian papers, all the stories about things going wrong that he didn’t have to care about.

Henry Rothman was a large bespectacled man, who when he was young had looked — and he’d agreed — like the actor Elliott Gould in his role in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, though he’d always felt he was more light-hearted than the character Elliott Gould had played — Ted. Rothman was a lawyer as well as a lobbyist, and represented several big firms that did business all over the world. He was a Jew, just like Elliott Gould, but had grown up in Roanoke, gone to Virginia then Virginia Law School. His parents had been small-town doctors who now lived in Boca Grande where they were by turns ecstatic and bored in a condominium doing nothing. Henry practiced in a firm that included his two brothers, David and Michael, who were litigators. He had been divorced ten years, had a daughter living in Needham, Mass., teaching school.

Madeleine Granville knew all about the cost of things: fertilizer, train transport, container ships full of soybeans, corn; she understood futures, labor costs, currency, the price of money. She’d studied economics at McGill, spoke five languages, had lived in Greece and had dreamed of being a painter until she met a handsome young architect on a train from Athens to Sofia, and quickly married him. They’d settled in Montreal where the architect had his practice and where they liked it fine. To Rothman it seemed young, heady, exciting, but also savvy, solid, smart. He liked it very much. It seemed very Canadian. Canada, in so many ways, seemed superior to America anyway. Canada was saner, more tolerant, friendlier, safer, less litigious. He had thought of retiring here, possibly to Cape Breton, where he’d never been. He and Madeleine had discussed living together by the ocean. It had become one of those completely transporting subjects you give your complete attention to for a week — buying maps, making real estate inquiries, researching the average winter temperature — then later can’t understand why you’d ever considered it.

In truth Rothman loved Washington; liked his life, his big house behind Capitol Hill, his law-school chums and his brothers, the city’s slightly antic, slightly tattered southernness, his poker partners, his membership at the Cosmos Club. His access. He occasionally even had dinner with his ex-wife, Laura, who, like him, was a lawyer and had remained unmarried. Who you really were, and what you believed, Rothman realized, were represented by what you maintained or were helpless to change. Very few people really got that; most people in his stratum thought everything was possible at all times, and so continued to try to become something else. But after a while these personal truths simply revealed themselves like maxims, no matter what you said or did to resist them. And that was that. That was you. Henry Rothman understood he was a man fitted primarily to live alone, no matter what kind of enticing sense anything else made. And that was fine.

Madeleine was writing something with her fingertip on the window glass, while she waited for him to finish getting dressed. Crying was over now. No one was mad at anyone. She was just amusing herself. Pale daylight shone through her bunched yellow hair.

“Men think women won’t ever change; women think men will always change,” she said, concentrating, as if she were writing these words on the glass. “And lo and behold, they’re both wrong.” She tapped the glass with her fingertip, then stuck out her lower lip in a confirming way and widened her eyes and looked around at him. What a complicated girl she was, Henry thought; her life just now beginning to seem confining. In a year she would probably be far away from here. This love affair with him was just a symptom. Although a painless one.

He came to the window in his starched shirtsleeves and put his arms around her from behind in a way that felt unexpectedly fatherly. She let herself be drawn in, then turned and put her face nose-first against his shirt, her arms loose about his soft waist. She took off her glasses to be kissed. She smelled warm and soapy, her skin where he touched her neck under her ear, as smooth as glass.

“What’s changed, what hasn’t changed?” he said softly.

“Oh,” she said into his shirt folds and shook her head. “Mmmmm. I was just trying to decide …”

He pressed with his big fingers into the taut construction of her body, held her close. “Say,” he said softly. She could speak, then he could provide a good answer. The window made the back of his hands feel cool.

“Oh well.” She let out a breath. “I was trying to determine how to think about all this.” She idly rubbed her shoe sole over the polished toe of his black wingtip, scuffing it. “Some things are always real-er than others. I was wondering if this would seem very real at a future date. You know?”

“It will,” Henry said. Their thinking was not so far apart now. If they were far apart, someone might feel unfairly treated.

“You respect the real things more, I think.” Madeleine swallowed, then exhaled again. “The phony things disappear.” She drummed her fingers lightly on his back. “I’d hate it if this just disappeared from memory.”

“It won’t,” he said. “I can promise you.” Now was the moment to get them out of the room. Too many difficult valedictory issues were suddenly careering around. “How about getting some lunch?”

Madeleine sighed. “Oh,” she said. “Yes, lunch would be superior. I’d like some lunch.”

The phone on the bed table began ringing then, shrill rings that startled them both and for some reason made Henry look suddenly out the window, as if the noise came from out there. Not so far away, on a pretty, wooded, urban hillside he could see the last of the foliage — deep oranges and profound greens and dampened browns. In Washington, summer was barely over.

He was startled when the phone rang a fourth time. It had not rung since he’d been in the room. No one knew he was here. Henry stared at the white telephone beside the bed. “Don’t you want to answer it,” she said. They were both staring at the white telephone.

The phone rang a fifth time, very loudly, then stopped.

“It’s a wrong number. Or it’s the hotel wanting to know if I’m out yet.” He touched his glasses’ frame. Madeleine looked at him and blinked. She didn’t think it was a wrong number, he realized. She believed it was someone inconvenient. Another woman. Whoever was next in line after her. Though that wasn’t true. There was no one in line.

When the phone rang again, he hurried the white receiver to his ear and said, “Rothman.”

“Is this Henry Rothman?” A smirky, unfamiliar man’s voice spoke.

“Yes.” He looked at Madeleine, who was watching him in a way that wished to seem interested but was in fact accusatory.

“Well, is this the Henry Rothman who’s the high-dollar lawyer from the States?”

“Who is this?” He stared at the hotel’s name on the telephone. Queen Elizabeth II.

“What’s the matter, asshole, are you nervous now?” The man chuckled a mirthless chuckle.

“I’m not nervous. No,” Henry said. “Why don’t you tell me who this is.” He looked at Madeleine again. She was staring at him disapprovingly, as if he were staging the entire conversation and the line was actually dead.

“You’re a fucking nutless wonder, that’s who you are,” the voice on the phone said. “Who’ve you got hiding in your hole there with you. Who’s sucking your dick, you cockroach.”

“Why don’t you just tell me who this is and leave the cockroach stuff out of it,” Rothman said in a patient voice, wanting to slam the phone down. But the man abruptly hung up before he could.

The big black crane with the little green house attached was still emerging from both sides of Madeleine’s head. The words SAINT HYACINTHE were written along one armature.

“You look shocked,” she said. Then suddenly she said, “Oh no, oh shit, shit.” She turned toward the window and put her hands to her cheeks. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “It was Jeff, wasn’t it? Shit, shit, shit.”

“I didn’t admit anything,” Henry said, and felt immensely irritated. Loud pounding would commence immediately from out in the hall, he supposed, then shouting and kicking, and a terrible fistfight that would wreck the room. All this, just moments before he could make it to the airport. He considered again that he hadn’t admitted anything. “I didn’t admit anything,” he said again and felt foolish.

“I have to think,” Madeleine said. She looked pale and was patting her cheeks softly, as if this was a way of establishing order inside her head. It was theatrical, he thought. “I just have to be quiet a moment,” she said again.

Henry surveyed the cramped, odorless little room: the cluttered bed with the silver breakfast utensils, the crystal bud vase with a red rose, the dresser and the slightly dusty mirror, the armchair with a blue hydrangea print; two reproductions of Monet’s Water Lilies facing each other on featureless white walls. Nothing here foretold that things would work out perfectly and he would make his flight on time, or that none of that would happen. Here was merely a venue, a voiceless place with nothing consoling about it. He could remember when rooms felt better than this. Coming to Montreal had been peculiarly pointless — a vanity, and he was trapped in it. He thought what he often thought at moments when things went very bad — and this seemed bad: that he overreached. He always had. When you were young it was a good quality, it meant you were ambitious, headed upward. But when you were forty-nine, it wasn’t very good.

“I have to think where he might be.” Madeleine had turned and was staring at the phone as if her husband were inside it and threatening to burst out. It was one of those moments when Madeleine was not how she appeared: not the formal, reserved girl in Gibson Girl hair, but a kid in a bind, trying to dream up what to do. This was less intriguing.

“Maybe the lobby,” Henry said, while thinking the words: Jeff. A man lurking in the hall outside my door, waiting to come in and make mayhem. It was an extremely unpleasant thought, one that made him feel tired.

The telephone rang again, and Henry answered it.

“Let me speak to my wife, cockroach,” the same sneering voice said. “Can you pull out of her that long?”

“Who do you want?” Henry said.

“Let me speak to Madeleine, prick,” the man said.

The name Madeleine produced a tiny upheaval in his brain. “Madeleine’s not here,” Henry Rothman lied.

“Right. You mean she’s busy at the moment. I get it. Maybe I should call back.”

“Maybe you’ve made a mistake here,” Henry said. “I said Madeleine’s not here.”

“Is she sucking your dick,” the man said. “Imagine that. I’ll just wait.”

“I haven’t seen her,” Henry went on lying. “We had dinner last night. Then she went home.”

“Yep, yep, yep,” the man said and laughed sarcastically. “That was after she sucked your dick.”

Madeleine was still facing out the window, listening to one half of the conversation.

“Where are you?” Henry said, feeling disturbed.

“Why do you want to know that? You think I’m outside your door calling you on a cell phone?” He heard some metal-sounding clicks and scrapes on the line, and Jeff’s voice became distant and unintelligible. “Well, open the door and find out,” the man said, back in touch. “You might be right. Then I’ll kick your ass.”

“I’ll be happy to come talk to you,” Henry said, then stopped himself. Why say such a stupid thing? There was no need. He caught himself in the mirror just then, a large man in shirtsleeves and a tie, with a little bit of belly. It was embarrassing to be this man. He looked away.

“So, you want to come talk to me?” the man said, then laughed again. “You don’t have the nuts.”

“Sure I do,” Henry said miserably. “Tell me where you are. I’ve got the nerve.”

“Then I will kick your ass,” the man said in a haughty voice.

“Well, we’ll see.”

“Where’s Madeleine?” The man sounded deranged.

“I have no earthly idea.” It occurred to Henry that every single thing he was saying was a lie. That he had somehow brought into existence a situation in which there was not a shred of truth. How could that happen?

“Are you telling the truth?”

“Yes. I am,” he lied. “Now, where are you?”

“In my fucking car. I’m a block from your hotel, asshole.”

“I probably can’t find you there,” Henry said, looking at Madeleine staring at him. He had things back under control, or nearly. Just like that. He could tell in her expression — a pale face, with bleak admiration in it.

“I’ll be at your hotel in five minutes, Mr. big man,” Madeleine’s husband said.

“I’ll wait for you in the lobby,” Henry said. “I’m tall, and I’ll be wearing—”

“I know, I know,” the man said. “You’ll look like an asshole no matter what you’re wearing.”

“Okay,” Henry said.

The husband clicked off.

Madeleine had taken a seat on the arm of the blue-hydrangea chair, her hands clasped tightly. He felt a great deal older and also superior to her, largely, he understood, because she looked sad. He had taken care of things, as he always had.

“He thinks you’re not here,” Henry said. “So you’d better leave. I’m going to meet him downstairs. You have to find a back door out.” He started looking around for his suit coat.

Madeleine smiled at him almost wondrously.

“I appreciate your not telling him I’m here.”

“You are here,” Henry said. He forgot his coat and began looking for his billfold and his change, his handkerchief, his pocketknife, the collection of essential objects he carried. He would check out later. All of this was idiotic now.

“You’re not a bad man, are you?” she said sweetly. “Sometimes I’ll be alone, or I’ll be waiting for you, and I’ll just get mad and decide you’re a shit. But you really aren’t. You’re kind of brave. You sort of have principles.”

These words — principles, brave, shit, waiting — for some reason made him feel unexpectedly, heart-poundingly nervous, precisely when he didn’t want to feel nervous. He was not supposed to be nervous. He felt very large and cumbersome and almost frantic in the room with her. Not superior. He could just as easily start shouting at her. The fact that she was calm and pretty was intolerable.

“I think it’s time for you to leave,” he said, thinking again and suddenly about his suit coat, trying to calm himself.

“Yeah, sure,” Madeleine said, and reached to the side of the blue chair for her purse. She felt inside for keys without looking and produced a yellow plastic-springy car key loop, which seemed to make her stand up. “When will I see you?” she said and touched the bushed-up back of her hair. So changeable, he thought. “This is a little abrupt. I’d pictured something a little more poignant.”

“It’ll all be fine,” Henry said and manufactured a smile that calmed him.

“Setting aside the matter of when I’ll see you again.”

“Setting it aside,” he said, keeping the smile.

She flipped the yellow, springy key loop back and forth once across her fingers and started for the door, going past where Rothman was waiting for her to leave. No kiss. No hug. “Jeff’s not violent,” she said. “Maybe you two’ll like each other. You have me in common, after all.” She smiled as she opened the door.

“That may not be enough for a friendship.”

“I’m sorry this is ending this way,” Madeleine said quietly.

“Me, too,” Henry Rothman said.

She smiled at him strangely and let herself out, permitting the door to shut with a soft click. He thought she hadn’t heard him.

Waiting in the elevator vestibule, where a cigar aroma hung in the air, he began now to contemplate that he was on his way to meet the irate husband of a woman he didn’t love but had nevertheless been screwing. It was like a movie. How was he supposed to think about all this? This would be a man he didn’t know but who had every right to hate him and possibly want to kill him. This would be a man whose life he had entered uninvited, played fast and loose with, possibly spoiled, then ignored, but now wanted out of, thank you. Anyone could agree that whatever bad befell him was exactly what he deserved, and that possibly nothing was quite bad enough. In America, people sought damages in this sort of disagreement, but probably not in Canada. He thought about what his father would say. His father was a large man, gone bald, with a great stiffened stomach and an acerbic manner from years of treating Virginia-cracker anti-Semites with lung cancer. “At the bottom of the mine is where they keep the least amount of light,” his father liked to say. Which was how he felt — in the dark without a reasonable idea for how to go about this. But not frantic now. More like engaged. He’d never been able to stay frantic.

But just blundering in as though he understood everything and letting events take place willy-nilly would certainly be the wrong course. He didn’t need to know much about Jeff — it had never been necessary. But knowing nothing was unlawyerly. On the other hand, there was something so profoundly unserious about this whole debacle, that a sudden urge he recognized as similar to derangement made him want to break out laughing just as the mirrored elevator slid open. Still, as long as Madeleine was out of the hotel, and as long as Jeff hadn’t kicked in the door and caught them in the middle of something private — which hadn’t happened — then who cared who knew who? The lawyer Henry Rothman said this was all about something a man he didn’t know might dream up, versus what he himself would never admit to. Nothing added to nothing. He would simply tell as many lies as necessary — which was lawyerly: a show of spurious good will being better than no show of any will. Actual good will would be represented by the trouble of inventing a lie to cancel out the bad will of having an affair with Madeleine in the first place. And since his relationship with Madeleine was now over with, Jeff could claim the satisfaction of believing he’d caused it to be over. Everybody gets to think he wins, though no one does. That was extremely lawyerly.

Stepping out into the wide, bright lobby, Henry refocused his eyes to the light and the new, congested atmosphere, a throng of hotel guests pulling suitcases on wheels toward the revolving doors and out to the street. Many were smiling, slow-moving elderlies with plastic cards strung around their necks and little fanny packs full of their valuables; most were speaking indecipherable French. He felt, he realized, absolutely calm.

The lobby otherwise offered a pleasant, inauthentic holiday-festive feel, with big gold-and-glass chandeliers and humming activity. It was like a stage lighted for a musical before the principals came on. He strolled out toward the middle, beyond which showcase windows of the expensive clothing stores and gift shops lined the street side, and the people gazing in the windows looked pleased and well cared for, as though they were expecting something happy to occur soon. It felt like the Mayflower in Washington, where he used to meet clients. And at the same time it felt foreign in the comfortable, half-mysterious way Canada always felt; as if the floors had been tilted three degrees off from what you were used to, and the doors opened from a different side. Nothing you couldn’t negotiate. America, run by the Swiss, Madeleine said.

From the crowded middle-lobby, he observed no one who might be a Jeff. A group of small American-sounding children trooped past in a ragged line, all wearing quilted white tae kwon do uniforms and holding hands. They too were headed toward the revolving doors, followed by some large, middle-aged black ladies, eight of them, all dressed in big quilted fall frocks with matching expensive-looking feathered hats. Southerners, he realized — the ladies all talking far too loud about their bus trip down to Maine this afternoon, and about something that had happened in the night that had been scandalous and was making them laugh.

Then he noticed a man watching him, a man standing beside the entrance to the English sweater shop. He couldn’t be Madeleine’s husband, Henry thought. He was too young — no more than mid-twenties. The man wore black jeans, white sneakers and a black leather jacket; he had rough crew-cut blond hair and was wearing yellow aviator glasses. He looked like a college student, not an architect. If the man weren’t staring at him so intently, he would never have noticed him.

When Henry again caught his eye, the man abruptly began walking straight toward him, hands thrust inside his black jacket side pockets, as if he might be hiding something there, and Henry realized this man was in fact Madeleine’s husband, could only be him, despite looking ten years younger than Madeleine, and twenty-five years younger than himself. This would be different from the rendezvous he’d anticipated. It would be easier. The husband wasn’t even very big.

When he was ten feet away, just at the edge of the crimson carpet, the man stopped, his hands still in his pockets, and simply stared, as if something uncertain about Rothman— something unassociated in his identity — needed to be certified.

“I’m probably who you’re looking for,” Henry said across the space between them. He noticed again the tae kwon do kids still filing out toward the street, still holding hands.

Madeleine’s husband, or the man he thought was Madeleine’s husband, didn’t say anything but began walking toward him again, only slowly now, as if he was trying to give the impression that he’d become intrigued by something. It was all too ridiculous. More theatricality. They should have lunch, he could tell the man a lot of lies and then pay the check. That would be good enough.

“I saw your picture,” the young man said, actually seeming to sneer. He didn’t remove his hands from his pockets. He was much smaller than expected, but very intense. Possibly he was nervous. His aviator glasses emblemized nervous intensity, as did the black jacket zipped up to his neck so you couldn’t tell what he had on underneath it. Madeleine’s husband was handsome but in a reduced, delicate, vaguely spiritless way, as if he’d once failed at something significant and hadn’t altogether gotten over it. It was odd, he thought, that Madeleine could find them both — himself the big cumbersome Jew and this small, insignificant French-seeming man — attractive.

“I’m Henry Rothman.” He extended his large hand, but the husband ignored it. What picture had he seen? One she’d taken, he supposed, and rashly kept. A mistake.

“Where the fuck’s Madeleine?” the young man said.

These were like the words he’d said on the phone, yet he didn’t seem like a young man who would say such a thing, or whatever he’d said. Cockroach. Sucking your dick. He didn’t seem that vulgar. It was absurd. He felt completely in control of things now. “I don’t know where Madeleine is,” he said. And it was true, which made him relax even more. He was prepared to offer a quick trip up to the room. But Madeleine had a habit of leaving earrings, toiletry essentials, articles of underclothing wherever she’d been. Too risky.

“I have an eight-year-old son,” the intense, bespectacled young man said, and seemed to set his shoulders inside his bomber jacket. He blinked at Henry and leaned forward on the balls of his feet, making himself appear even more reduced. His eyes behind his yellow lenses were the blandest uninflected brown, and his mouth was small and thin. His skin was soft and olive-tinted, with a faint flush of emotion in his cheeks. He was like a pretty little actor, Henry thought, clean-shaven and actorishly fit-looking. Madeleine had married a pretty boy. Why indeed ever have a Henry Rothman in your life if this boy appealed to you? It made him feel his most human qualities had been appropriated for purposes he didn’t approve. It wasn’t a good feeling.

“I know you do,” Henry said about the business of the child.

“So, I don’t want to fuck with you,” the young man said, reddening. “I’m not about to let you fuck up my marriage and keep my son from having two parents at home. Do you understand that? I want you to.” His soft boy’s mouth became unexpectedly hard, almost snarly. He had small, tightly-bunched square teeth that detracted from his beauty and his anger and made him seem vaguely corrupted. “If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t give a goddamn what you and Madeleine did together,” he went on. “Fuck in hotel rooms all over the planet and I couldn’t give a shit.”

“I guess you’ve made your point, then,” Henry said.

“Oh, am I making a point?” Madeleine’s husband said, widening his eyes behind his idiotic lenses. “I didn’t realize that. I thought I was just explaining to you the facts of life, since you’re way out of touch with them. I wasn’t trying to persuade you. Do you understand?” The boy didn’t remove his eyes from Henry’s. An aroma of inexpensive leather had begun wafting off the black jacket, as if he’d bought it just that day. Henry began to consider that he’d never owned a black leather jacket. In Roanoke, well-off doctors’ sons didn’t go in for those. Their style had been madras sports coats and white bucks. Jewish country club style.

“I understand what you mean,” Henry said in what he assumed would seem a fatigued voice.

Madeleine’s husband glared at him, but Henry realized that he himself wasn’t the least bit more serious about this. Merely less engaged. And he would be willing to bet money Madeleine’s husband wasn’t serious either, though he perhaps didn’t know it and somehow believed he felt great passion about all this baloney. Only neither of them was truly up against anything here. Everything they were doing, they were choosing to do — he was choosing to be here, and this Jeff was choosing to put this unconvincingly ferocious look on his face. They should talk about something else now. Ice hockey.

“I admit I may like Madeleine more than I ought to,” Henry said and felt satisfied with that. “I may have acted in some ways that aren’t entirely in your interest.”

At this, the young man blinked his lightless brown eyes more rapidly. “Is that so?” he said. “Is this your great admission?”

“I’m afraid it is,” Henry said, and smiled for the first time. He wondered where Madeleine actually was at the very moment he’d admitted to her boy husband, in his own fashion at least, that he’d been fucking her. He’d only done it so that something that passed between himself and this young man could have a grain of substance to it. “What kind of architecture do you do?” he asked companionably. Some people were speaking French close by. He looked around to see who. It would be so nice just to start speaking French now, or Russian. Anything. Madeleine’s husband said something he wasn’t sure he understood. “Excuse me.” He smiled again tolerantly.

“I said fuck you,” the young man said and stepped closer. “If you persist with this, I’ll arrange for something really bad to happen to you. Something you don’t want to happen. And don’t think I won’t do that. Because I will.”

“Well. I certainly believe you,” Henry said. “You have to believe that when someone says it. It’s the rule. So, I believe you.” He looked down at his own white shirt front and noticed a tiny black decoration of Madeleine’s mascara from when she had pressed close to him by the window after crying. It made him feel fatigued all over again.

The young man stepped back now. His face had lost its blush and looked pale and mottled. He had never removed his hands from his pockets. He could have a gun there. Though this was Canada. No one got murderous over infidelity.

“You American assholes,” Madeleine’s husband said. “You’ve got divided inner selves. It’s in your history. You have choices about everything. It’s pathetic. You don’t really inhabit anything. You’re cynical. The whole fucking country of you.” He shook his head and seemed disgusted.

“Take all the time you want. This is your moment,” Henry said.

“No, that’s enough,” the young man said and looked tired himself. “You know what you need to know.”

“I do,” Henry said. “You made that clear.”

Madeleine’s husband turned and without speaking strode off across the festive gilt-and-red lobby and out the revolving doors where the tae kwon do children had gone, disappearing as they had amongst the passersby. Henry looked at his wristwatch. This had all occupied fewer than five minutes.

. .

Back in his room he changed his shirt and arranged his clothes and toiletries into his suitcase. The room was cold now, as though someone had shut off the heat or opened a window down a hallway. Two message slips lay on the carpet, half under the door. These would be from Madeleine, or else they were new, second-thought threats from the husband. He decided to leave them be. Though some insistent quality about the message slips triggered a sudden strong urge to make up the bed, straighten the room, set out the breakfast tray, urges which meant, he understood, that his life was becoming messy. It probably wouldn’t be better until he was on the plane.

But standing exactly where Madeleine had stood earlier, he watched the big T-shaped crane slowly lift a great concrete-filled bucket toward the top of an unfinished building’s high silhouette. He wondered again where, in this strange disjointed city, Madeleine was. Having a coffee with a girlfriend she could regale the day to; or waiting for her son to get out of school, or for the husband to arrive and some brittle, unhappy bickering to commence. Nothing he envied. On the window glass, he saw where she’d been writing with her finger; it showed up now that the air in the room was colder. It seemed to say Denny. What or who was Denny? Maybe the message was someone else’s, some previous hotel guest.

And then, for no apparent reason he felt exhausted to the point of being dazed. Sometime, too, in the last hour, he had cracked off a sizeable piece of a molar. The jagged little spike caught at the already-tender tip of his tongue (the broken part he’d swallowed without knowing it). The day had worked its little pressures. He took off his glasses and lay down across the newspapers. He could hear a muffled TV in another room, a studio audience laughing. There was time to sleep for a minute or five.

About Madeleine, though: there had been a time when he’d loved her, when he’d said he loved her, felt so rather completely. None of the foolishness about love or being in love. One definite time he could remember had been on a pebbly beach in Ireland, near a little village called Round Stone, in Connemara, on a trip they’d made by car from Dublin, where they’d seen investors and negotiated significant advantages for the client. They’d laid a picnic on the rocky shingle and, staring off into the growing evening, declared the lights they could see to be the lights of Cape Breton, where her father had been born, and where life would be better — though in true geography, they’d been facing north and were only viewing the opposite side of the bay. Behind them in the village, there’d been a little fun fair with a lighted merry-go-round and a tiny bright row of arcades that glowed upward as the night fell. There, that time, he’d loved Madeleine Granville then. And there were other times, several times when he knew. Why even question it?

Even then, however, there was always the “Is this it?” issue. Thinking of it made him think of his father again. His father had been a born New Yorker, and had retained New Yorker ways. “So, Henry. Is this it for you?” he’d say derisively. His father always felt there should be more, more for Henry, more for his brothers, more than they had, more than they’d settled for. To settle, to not overreach was to accept too little. And so, in his father’s view, even if all was exquisite and unequaled, which it might’ve seemed, would it still get no better than this in life? Life always had gotten better. There’d always been more to come. Although, he was forty-nine now, and there were changes you didn’t notice — physical, mental, spiritual changes. Parts of life had been lived and never would be again. Maybe the balance’s tip had already occurred, and something about today, when he’d later think back from some point further on, today would seem to suggest that then was when “things” began going wrong, or were already wrong, or was even when “things” were at their greatest pinnacle. And then, of course, at that later moment, you would be up against something. You’d be up against your destination point, when no more interesting choices were available, only less and less and less interesting ones.

Still, at this moment, he didn’t know that; because if he did know it he might decide just to stay on here with Madeleine — though, of course, staying wasn’t really an option. Madeleine was married and had never said she wanted to marry him. The husband had been right about choices, merely wrong in his estimation of them. Choices were what made the world interesting, made life a possible place to operate in. Take choices away and what difference did anything make? Everything became Canada. The trick was simply to find yourself up against it as little as possible. Odd, Henry thought, that this boy should know anything.

In the hall outside the room he heard women’s voices speaking French very softly. The housekeepers, waiting for him to leave. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, and so for a time he slept to the music of their strange, wittering language.

When he turned away from the cashier’s, folding his receipt, he found Madeleine Granville waiting for him, standing beside the great red pillar where luggage was stacked. She’d changed clothes, pulled her damp hair severely back in a way that emphasized her full mouth and dark eyes. She looked jaunty in a pair of nicely fitted brown tweed trousers, and a houndstooth jacket and expensive-looking lace-up walking shoes. Everything seemed to emphasize her slenderness and youth. She was carrying a leather knapsack and seemed, to Henry, to be leaving on a trip. She looked extraordinarily pretty, a way he’d seen her look other times. He wondered if she was expecting to leave with him, if matters with the husband had gone that way.

“I left you two messages.” She smiled in a mockingly amused way. “You didn’t think I’d let you take a taxi, did you?”

Some of the same people he’d seen earlier were present in the lobby — a child sitting alone in a big throne chair, wearing his white tae kwon do get-up. A black woman in a brocaded fall suit, having a present wrapped in the sweater shop. It was past noon. He’d missed lunch.

“Are we going fox hunting?” he said, hoisting his suitcase.

“I’m taking Patrick to see the last of the fall foliage after school.” Patrick was her son. She held one arm out, extended a foot stylishly. “Don’t I look autumnal?”

“You’re standing right where I had a truly ridiculous conversation an hour ago,” he said. He looked toward the revolving doors. Traffic was silently moving on the street. He wondered if Jeff was lurking somewhere nearby.

“We’ll have to erect a commemorative plaque.” Madeleine seemed in gay spirits. “‘Here the forces of evil were withstood by’ … what?” She patted her moist hair with her palm.

“I don’t mind getting a taxi,” Henry said.

“Screw you,” she said brightly. “It’s my country you’ve been kicked out of.” She turned to go. “Come on … ‘with-stood by the forces of dull convention.’ Alas.”

From the passenger’s seat of Madeleine’s yellow Saab, Henry watched the big construction cranes at work — many more cranes and superstructures than had been visible from his window. The city was rising, which made it feel even more indifferent. A taxi would’ve been better. A taxi alone to an airport, never looking right nor left, could be a relief.

“You look all beat up, though I guess you’re not,” Madeleine said. Driving too fast always put her in aggressive good spirits. Together they’d always been driving someplace good. He liked speed then — but less so now, since it threatened getting safely to the airport.

There was nothing to say about looking “all beat up.” He knew her, yet also now he didn’t quite know her. It was part of the change they were enacting. When they were in the thick of things, Madeleine couldn’t drive without looking at him, smiling, remarking about his excellent qualities, cracking jokes, appreciating his comments. Now she could be driving anybody — her mother to the beauty parlor, a priest to a funeral.

“Do you realize what the day after tomorrow is?” Madeleine said, maneuvering skillfully through the traffic’s changing weave. She was wearing some sort of scent that filled the car with a dense rosy aroma he was already tired of.

“No.”

“It’s Canadian Thanksgiving. We have it early so we can get a jump on you guys. Canada invented Thanksgiving. Canada invented Thanksgiving, eh?” She quite liked making fun of Canadians and didn’t like it at all if he did. He had never really thought of her as Canadian. She just seemed like another American girl. He wasn’t sure how you considered someone Canadian, what important allowances you needed to make.

“Do you observe it for the same reason we do?” Henry said, watching traffic. He still felt slightly dazed.

“We just have it,” Madeleine said happily. “Why do you have it?”

“To solemnize the accord between the settlers and the Indians who might’ve murdered them. Basically it’s a national gesture of relief.”

“Murder’s your big subject down there, isn’t it?” Madeleine said, and looked pleased. “We just have ours to be nice. That’s enough for Canada. We’re just happily grateful. Murder really doesn’t play a big part.”

The old buildings of the French University were passing below and to the left. The little Frogs-only fantasy world. He considered how he and Madeleine would function together after today. He hadn’t really thought about it. Everybody, of course, had a past. It would be a relief to the people who knew about them to have this be over with. Plus, not having him in her life was going to be easier for her. Clear her mind. Open the world up again for both of them.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” Madeleine said, both hands firmly on the leather steering wheel.

“I probably already know what it is,” Henry said. His tongue sought the sharp little spike of his broken molar. The flesh was abraded and sore from going there. He could get it fixed in San Francisco.

“I really don’t think you do,” she said. A big white Japanese 747 descended slowly out of the pale sky and across the autoroute in front of them. “Do you want me to tell you?” she said. “I don’t have to. It can wait forever.”

“That guy wasn’t your husband,” Henry said and quietly cleared his throat. The thought had just come to him— why, now, he didn’t know. Lawyer’s intuition. “Did you think I was stupid? I mean …” He didn’t care to finish this sentence. It finished itself. So much that was said didn’t need to be.

Madeleine looked at him once, looked away, then looked again. She seemed impressed. She seemed happy about feeling impressed, as if this was the best of all outcomes. The enormous jet sank from sight into an unremarkable industrial landscape. No big ball of flaming explosion followed. Everyone safe. “You’re guessing,” she said.

“I’m a lawyer. What’s the difference?”

She liked this, too, and smiled. He understood it was impossible for her not to like him. “How’d you know?”

“Among other reasons?” The freeway traffic was standing back now for the airport exit. “He acted more serious than he felt. Something he said … ‘divided inner somethings’? That wasn’t right. And he looks like an actor. Are you sleeping with him, too? I don’t mean ‘too.’ You know.”

“Not currently,” Madeleine said. She touched her silver hair clip with her little finger and cocked her head slightly. She appeared to be realizing something. What that might be, he thought, would be worth knowing. “I knew you’d go down there,” she said. “I knew you couldn’t resist it. You always want to be so forthright and brave. It’s your disguise.”

Henry watched the pleasureless freeway ambience pass slowly along — freight depots, trucking companies, car rentals, gas stations. The same all over. The green sign was visible. AEROGARE/AIRPORT. An exertion saying everything twice.

“He’s an American,” Madeleine said. “His name’s Bradley. He is an actor. We worried you’d know he wasn’t Canadian.”

“Not a worry there,” Henry said. She took the AEROGARE/AIRPORT SORTIE/EXIT and looked across at him. She seemed slightly undone now. Perhaps, he thought, she was thinking about patting her cheeks when they were in the room, or saying, I’d pictured something more poignant. That could seem excessive now.

He reached and took her hand and held it loosely. She was nervous, her hand warm and moist. This whole business had taken something out of her, too. They had been in love, perhaps were still in love.

“Is someone filming all this?” he said and glanced to the side, at a pickup truck following along beside them on the highway. He expected to see the truck bed full of cameras, sound equipment, smiling young cinéastes. Everything trained on him.

“For once, no,” she said.

Up ahead, d’EMBARQUEMENTS/DEPARTURES was jampacked. Cars, limos, taxis, people loading golf bags, collapsible cribs and taped-up coolers from the backs of idling vans. Policemen with white oversleeves were flagging everyone through in a hurry. He had only a suitcase, a briefcase, a raincoat. It had become a wonderful autumn day. Clouds and haze were being cleansed from the sky.

He continued holding her hand, and she grasped his back in a way that felt important. What would it be like finally, he wondered, to grow uninterested in women? Things he did— going here, there, deciding this, that — he’d always had a woman in mind. Their presence animated things. So much would be different without them. No more moments like this, moments of approximate truth vivifying, explaining, offering silent reason to the choices you made. And what happened to those people for whom it wasn’t an issue? Who didn’t think about women. Certainly they achieved things. Were they better, their accomplishments purer? Of course, when it was all out of your reach — and it would be — you wouldn’t even care.

On the curb side, amid skycaps and passengers alighting and baggage carts nosed in at reckless angles, a family — two older adults and three nearly grown blond children — were having a moment of prayer, standing in a tight little circle, arms to shoulders, heads bowed. Clearly Americans, Henry realized. Only Americans would be so immodest about their belief, so sure a fast amen was just the thing to keep them safe — at once so careless and so prideful. Not the qualities to make a country great.

“Do you think if we asked, they’d include us in their little circle?” Madeleine said, breaking their silence as she pulled to the curb, right beside the praying Americans. She meant to annoy them.

“We’re represented already,” Henry said, looking at the pilgrims’ hefty, strenuous backsides. “We’re the forces of evil they think so much about. The terrible adulterers. We worry them.”

“Life’s just a record of our misdeeds, isn’t it?” she said. He couldn’t open his door for the pray-ers.

“I don’t think that.” He held her warm, soft, moist hand casually. She was just letting the other subject go free now — the lying, tricking, having a joke at his expense. Though why, for God’s sake, not let it go free?

He sat a moment longer, facing forward, unable to exit. He said, “Have you decided you don’t love me?” Here was the great mystery. His version of a prayer.

“Oh, no,” Madeleine said. “I wanted us to go on and on. But we just couldn’t. So. This seemed like a way to seal it off. Exaggerate the difference between what is and what isn’t. You know?” She smiled weakly. “Sometimes you can’t believe the things that are taking place are actually taking place, but you need to. I’m sorry. It was too much.” She leaned and kissed him on the cheek, then took both his hands to her lips and kissed them.

He liked her. Liked everything about her. Though now was the wrong moment to say so. It would seem insincere. Reaching for too much. Though how did you ever make a moment be worth as much as it could be, if you didn’t reach?

Outside, the Americans were all hugging one another, smiling big Christian smiles, their prayers having reached a satisfactory end.

“Are you trying to think of something nice to say?” Madeleine said jauntily.

“No,” Henry said. “I was trying not to.”

“Well, that’s just as good,” she said, smiling. “It might not be good enough for everybody, but I understand. It’s hard to know how to end a thing that didn’t completely begin.”

He pushed open the heavy door, lifted his suitcase out of the back, stepped out into the cool fall light, then looked quickly in at her. She smiled at him through the open doorway. There was nothing to say now. Words were used up.

“Wouldn’t you agree with me about that, Henry?” she said. “That’d be a nice thing to say. Just that you agree with me.”

“Yes, okay,” Henry said. “I do. I do agree with you. I agree with you about everything.”

“Then rejoin your fellow Americans.”

He closed the door. She didn’t look his way again. He watched her ease away, then accelerate, then quickly disappear into the traffic heading back to town.