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, standin
g 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.
“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 Call
ing 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.