A Multitude of Sins (3 page)

“It’s always disappointing to me.”

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

“What shall we speak about?” Wales said.

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

“I’ll make an exception.”

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

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

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

“Would she recognize you?”

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

“Does she?”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Wales said. “Not at all.”

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

“Is that all?” Wales said.

“Yes.” She looked at him and blinked.

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

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

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

“They’re my parents,” she said.

“Do they like you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you ever killed anyone?” she said.

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

“Would you?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you do in Europe?” she said.

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

“Are you famous?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it?” Wales said.

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

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

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

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

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

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