A Multitude of Sins (21 page)

“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
un
serious 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.