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.”