“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, standing 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.”