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 they 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.