“Setting aside the matter of when I’ll see you again.”
“Setting it aside,” he said, keeping the smile.
She flipped the yellow, springy key loop back and forth once across her fingers and started for the door, going past where Rothman was waiting for her to leave. No kiss. No hug. “Jeff’s not violent,” she said. “Maybe you two’ll like each other. You have me in common, after all.” She smiled as she opened the door.
“That may not be enough for a friendship.”
“I’m sorry this is ending this way,” Madeleine said quietly.
“Me, too,” Henry Rothman said.
She smiled at him strangely and let herself out, permitting the door to shut with a soft click. He thought she hadn’t heard him.
Waiting in the elevator vestibule, where a cigar aroma hung in the air, he began now to contemplate that he was on his way to meet the irate husband of a woman he didn’t love but had nevertheless been screwing. It was like a movie. How was he supposed to think about all this? This would be a man he didn’t know but who had every right to hate him and possibly want to kill him. This would be a man whose life he had entered uninvited, played fast and loose with, possibly spoiled, then ignored, but now wanted out of, thank you. Anyone could agree that whatever bad befell him was exactly what he deserved, and that possibly nothing was quite bad enough. In America, people sought damages in this sort of disagreement, but probably not in Canada. He thought about what his father would say. His father was a large man, gone bald, with a great stiffened stomach and an acerbic manner from years of treating Virginia-cracker anti-Semites with lung cancer. “At the bottom of the mine is where they keep the least amount of light,” his father liked to say. Which was how he felt — in the dark without a reasonable idea for how to go about this. But not frantic now. More like engaged. He’d never been able to stay frantic.
But just blundering in as though he understood everything and letting events take place willy-nilly would certainly be the wrong course. He didn’t need to know much about Jeff — it had never been necessary. But knowing nothing was unlawyerly. On the other hand, there was something so profoundly unserious about this whole debacle, that a sudden urge he recognized as similar to derangement made him want to break out laughing just as the mirrored elevator slid open. Still, as long as Madeleine was out of the hotel, and as long as Jeff hadn’t kicked in the door and caught them in the middle of something private — which hadn’t happened — then who cared who knew who? The lawyer Henry Rothman said this was all about something a man he didn’t know might dream up, versus what he himself would never admit to. Nothing added to nothing. He would simply tell as many lies as necessary — which was lawyerly: a show of spurious good will being better than no show of any will. Actual good will would be represented by the trouble of inventing a lie to cancel out the bad will of having an affair with Madeleine in the first place. And since his relationship with Madeleine was now over with, Jeff could claim the satisfaction of believing he’d caused it to be over. Everybody gets to think he wins, though no one does. That was extremely lawyerly.
Stepping out into the wide, bright lobby, Henry refocused his eyes to the light and the new, congested atmosphere, a throng of hotel guests pulling suitcases on wheels toward the revolving doors and out to the street. Many were smiling, slow-moving elderlies with plastic cards strung around their necks and little fanny packs full of their valuables; most were speaking indecipherable French. He felt, he realized, absolutely calm.
The lobby otherwise offered a pleasant, inauthentic holiday-festive feel, with big gold-and-glass chandeliers and humming activity. It was like a stage lighted for a musical before the principals came on. He strolled out toward the middle, beyond which showcase windows of the expensive clothing stores and gift shops lined the street side, and the people gazing in the windows looked pleased and well cared for, as though they were expecting something happy to occur soon. It felt like the Mayflower in Washington, where he used to meet clients. And at the same time it felt foreign in the comfortable, half-mysterious way Canada always felt; as if the floors had been tilted three degrees off from what you were used to, and the doors opened from a different side. Nothing you couldn’t negotiate. America, run by the Swiss, Madeleine said.
From the crowded middle-lobby, he observed no one who might be a Jeff. A group of small American-sounding children trooped past in a ragged line, all wearing quilted white tae kwon do uniforms and holding hands. They too were headed toward the revolving doors, followed by some large, middle-aged black ladies, eight of them, all dressed in big quilted fall frocks with matching expensive-looking feathered hats. Southerners, he realized — the ladies all talking far too loud about their bus trip down to Maine this afternoon, and about something that had happened in the night that had been scandalous and was making them laugh.
Then he noticed a man watching him, a man standing beside the entrance to the English sweater shop. He couldn’t be Madeleine’s husband, Henry thought. He was too young — no more than mid-twenties. The man wore black jeans, white sneakers and a black leather jacket; he had rough crew-cut blond hair and was wearing yellow aviator glasses. He looked like a college student, not an architect. If the man weren’t staring at him so intently, he would never have noticed him.
When Henry again caught his eye, the man abruptly began walking straight toward him, hands thrust inside his black jacket side pockets, as if he might be hiding something there, and Henry realized this man was in fact Madeleine’s husband, could only be him, despite looking ten years younger than Madeleine, and twenty-five years younger than himself. This would be different from the rendezvous he’d anticipated. It would be easier. The husband wasn’t even very big.
When he was ten feet away, just at the edge of the crimson carpet, the man stopped, his hands still in his pockets, and simply stared, as if something uncertain about Rothman— something unassociated in his identity — needed to be certified.
“I’m probably who you’re looking for,” Henry said across the space between them. He noticed again the tae kwon do kids still filing out toward the street, still holding hands.
Madeleine’s husband, or the man he thought was Madeleine’s husband, didn’t say anything but began walking toward him again, only slowly now, as if he was trying to give the impression that he’d become intrigued by something. It was all too ridiculous. More theatricality. They should have lunch, he could tell the man a lot of lies and then pay the check. That would be good enough.
“I saw your picture,” the young man said, actually seeming to sneer. He didn’t remove his hands from his pockets. He was much smaller than expected, but very intense. Possibly he was nervous. His aviator glasses emblemized nervous intensity, as did the black jacket zipped up to his neck so you couldn’t tell what he had on underneath it. Madeleine’s husband was handsome but in a reduced, delicate, vaguely spiritless way, as if he’d once failed at something significant and hadn’t altogether gotten over it. It was odd, he thought, that Madeleine could find them both — himself the big cumbersome Jew and this small, insignificant French-seeming man — attractive.
“I’m Henry Rothman.” He extended his large hand, but the husband ignored it. What picture had he seen? One she’d taken, he supposed, and rashly kept. A mistake.
“Where the fuck’s Madeleine?” the young man said.
These were like the words he’d said on the phone, yet he didn’t seem like a young man who would say such a thing, or whatever he’d said. Cockroach. Sucking your dick. He didn’t seem that vulgar. It was absurd. He felt completely in control of things now. “I don’t know where Madeleine is,” he said. And it was true, which made him relax even more. He was prepared to offer a quick trip up to the room. But Madeleine had a habit of leaving earrings, toiletry essentials, articles of underclothing wherever she’d been. Too risky.