And the truth was he felt even more relieved, and didn’t feel at all sorry for Marjorie, sitting there stoically, making a little tent of her hand to cover her nose and staring ahead as if nothing had happened. He thought she would cry, certainly. She was a girl who cried — when she was unhappy, when he said something insensitive, when she was approaching her period. Crying was natural. Clearly, though, it was a new experience for her to be hit. And so it called upon something new, and if not new then some strength, resilience, self-mastery normally reserved for other experiences.
“I can’t go to the Nicholsons’ now,” Marjorie said almost patiently. She removed her hand and viewed her palm as if her palm had her nose in it. Of course it was blood she was thinking about. He heard her breathe in through what sounded like a congested nose, then the breath was completed out through her mouth. She was not crying yet. And for that moment he felt not even sure he had smacked her— if it hadn’t just been a thought he’d entertained, a gesture somehow uncommissioned.
What he wanted to do, however, was skip to the most important things now, not get mired down in wrong, extraneous details. Because he didn’t give a shit about George Nicholson or the particulars of what they’d done in some shitty motel. Marjorie would never leave him for George Nicholson or anyone like George Nicholson, and George Nicholson and men like him — high rollers with Hinckleys— didn’t throw it all away for unimportant little women like Marjorie. He thought of her nose, red, swollen, smeared with sticky blood dripping onto her green dress. He didn’t suppose it could be broken. Noses held up. And, of course, there was a phone in the car. He could simply make a call to the party. He pictured the Nicholsons’ great rambling white-shingled house brightly lit beyond the curving drive, the original elms exorbitantly preserved, the footlights, the lowlit clay court where they’d all played, the heated pool, the Henry Moore out on the darkened lawn where you just stumbled onto it. He imagined saying to someone — not George Nicholson — that Marjorie was ill, had thrown up on the side of the road.
The right details, though. The right details to ascertain from her were: Are you sorry? (he’d forgotten Marjorie had already said she was sorry) and What does this mean for the future? These were the details that mattered.
Surprisingly, the raccoon that had been cartwheeled by the pickup and then lain motionless, a blob in the near-darkness, had come back to life and was now trying to drag itself and its useless hinder parts off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the grassy verge and into the underbrush that bordered the reservoir.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Marjorie said, and put her hand over her damaged nose again. She could see the raccoon’s struggle and turned her head away.
“Aren’t you even sorry?” Steven said.
“Yes,” Marjorie said, her nose still covered as if she wasn’t thinking about the fact that she was covering it. Probably, he thought, the pain had gone away some. It hadn’t been so bad. “I mean no,” she said.
He wanted to hit her again then — this time in the ear— but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why not. No one would ever know. “Well, which is it?” he said, and felt for the first time completely furious. The thing that made him furious — all his life, the very maddest — was to be put into a situation in which everything he did was wrong, when right was no longer an option. Now felt like one of those situations. “Which is it?” he said again angrily. “Really.” He should just take her to the Nicholsons’, he thought, swollen nose, bloody lips, all stoppered up, and let her deal with it. Or let her sit out in the car, or else start walking the 11.6 miles home. Maybe George could come out and drive her in his Rover. These were only thoughts, of course. “Which is it?” he said for the third time. He was stuck on these words, on this bit of barren curiosity.
“I was sorry when I told you,” Marjorie said, very composed. She lowered her hand from her nose to her lap. One of the little green bows that had been in her hair was now resting on her bare shoulder. “Though not very sorry,” she said. “Only sorry because I had to tell you. And now that I’ve told you and you’ve hit me in my face and probably broken my nose, I’m not sorry about anything — except that. Though I’m sorry about being married to you, which I’ll remedy as soon as I can.” She was still not crying. “So now, will you as a gesture of whatever good there is in you, get out and go over and do something to help that poor injured creature that those motherfucking rednecks maimed with their motherfucking pickup truck and then because they’re pieces of shit and low forms of degraded humanity, laughed about? Can you do that, Steven? Is that in your range?” She sniffed back hard through her nose, then expelled a short, deep and defeated moan. Her voice seemed more nasal, more midwestern even, now that her nose was congested.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” Steven Reeves said, and opened the car door onto the silent road.
“I know,” Marjorie said in an emotionless voice. “And you’ll be sorrier.”
When he had walked down the empty macadam road in his tan suit to where the raccoon had been struck then bounced over onto the road’s edge, there was nothing now there. Only a small circle of dark blood he could just make out on the nubbly road surface and that might’ve been an oil smudge. No raccoon. The raccoon with its last reserves of savage, unthinking will had found the strength to pull itself off into the bushes to die. Steven peered down into the dark, stalky confinement of scrubs and bramble that separated the road from the reservoir. It was very still there. He thought he heard a rustling in the low brush where a creature might be, getting itself settled into the soft grass and damp earth to go to sleep forever. Someplace out on the lake he heard a young girl’s voice, very distinctly laughing. Then a car door closed farther away. Then another sort of door, a screen door, slapped shut. And then a man’s voice saying “Oh no, oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, no.” A small white light came on farther back in the trees beyond the reservoir, where he hadn’t imagined there was a house. He wondered about how long it would be before his angry feelings stopped mattering to him. He considered briefly why Marjorie would admit this to him now. It seemed so odd.
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.