A Multitude of Sins (2 page)

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.