A Multitude of Sins

  Then he heard his own car start. The muffled-metal diesel racket of the Mercedes. The headlights came smartly on and disclosed him. Music was instantly loud inside. He turned just in time to see Marjorie’s pretty face illuminated, as his own had been, by the salmon dashboard light. He saw the tips of her fingers atop the arc of the steering wheel, heard the surge of the engine. In the woods he noticed a strange glow coming through the trees, something yellow, something out of the low wet earth, a mist, a vapor, something that might be magical. The air smelled sweet now. The peepers stopped peeping. And then that was all.

  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 t
hey 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.