A Multitude of Sins (22 page)

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.