“I have an eight-year-old son,” the intense, bespectacled young man said, and seemed to set his shoulders inside his bomber jacket. He blinked at Henry and leaned forward on the balls of his feet, making himself appear even more reduced. His eyes behind his yellow lenses were the blandest uninflected brown, and his mouth was small and thin. His skin was soft and olive-tinted, with a faint flush of emotion in his cheeks. He was like a pretty little actor, Henry thought, clean-shaven and actorishly fit-looking. Madeleine had married a pretty boy. Why indeed ever have a Henry Rothman in your life if this boy appealed to you? It made him feel his most human qualities had been appropriated for purposes he didn’t approve. It wasn’t a good feeling.
“I know you do,” Henry said about the business of the child.
“So, I don’t want to fuck with you,” the young man said, reddening. “I’m not about to let you fuck up my marriage and keep my son from having two parents at home. Do you understand that? I want you to.” His soft boy’s mouth became unexpectedly hard, almost snarly. He had small, tightly-bunched square teeth that detracted from his beauty and his anger and made him seem vaguely corrupted. “If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t give a goddamn what you and Madeleine did together,” he went on. “Fuck in hotel rooms all over the planet and I couldn’t give a shit.”
“I guess you’ve made your point, then,” Henry said.
“Oh, am I making a point?” Madeleine’s husband said, widening his eyes behind his idiotic lenses. “I didn’t realize that. I thought I was just explaining to you the facts of life, since you’re way out of touch with them. I wasn’t trying to persuade you. Do you understand?” The boy didn’t remove his eyes from Henry’s. An aroma of inexpensive leather had begun wafting off the black jacket, as if he’d bought it just that day. Henry began to consider that he’d never owned a black leather jacket. In Roanoke, well-off doctors’ sons didn’t go in for those. Their style had been madras sports coats and white bucks. Jewish country club style.
“I understand what you mean,” Henry said in what he assumed would seem a fatigued voice.
Madeleine’s husband glared at him, but Henry realized that he himself wasn’t the least bit more serious about this. Merely less engaged. And he would be willing to bet money Madeleine’s husband wasn’t serious either, though he perhaps didn’t know it and somehow believed he felt great passion about all this baloney. Only neither of them was truly up against anything here. Everything they were doing, they were choosing to do — he was choosing to be here, and this Jeff was choosing to put this unconvincingly ferocious look on his face. They should talk about something else now. Ice hockey.
“I admit I may like Madeleine more than I ought to,” Henry said and felt satisfied with that. “I may have acted in some ways that aren’t entirely in your interest.”
At this, the young man blinked his lightless brown eyes more rapidly. “Is that so?” he said. “Is this your great admission?”
“I’m afraid it is,” Henry said, and smiled for the first time. He wondered where Madeleine actually was at the very moment he’d admitted to her boy husband, in his own fashion at least, that he’d been fucking her. He’d only done it so that something that passed between himself and this young man could have a grain of substance to it. “What kind of architecture do you do?” he asked companionably. Some people were speaking French close by. He looked around to see who. It would be so nice just to start speaking French now, or Russian. Anything. Madeleine’s husband said something he wasn’t sure he understood. “Excuse me.” He smiled again tolerantly.
“I said fuck you,” the young man said and stepped closer. “If you persist with this, I’ll arrange for something really bad to happen to you. Something you don’t want to happen. And don’t think I won’t do that. Because I will.”
“Well. I certainly believe you,” Henry said. “You have to believe that when someone says it. It’s the rule. So, I believe you.” He looked down at his own white shirt front and noticed a tiny black decoration of Madeleine’s mascara from when she had pressed close to him by the window after crying. It made him feel fatigued all over again.
The young man stepped back now. His face had lost its blush and looked pale and mottled. He had never removed his hands from his pockets. He could have a gun there. Though this was Canada. No one got murderous over infidelity.
“You American assholes,” Madeleine’s husband said. “You’ve got divided inner selves. It’s in your history. You have choices about everything. It’s pathetic. You don’t really inhabit anything. You’re cynical. The whole fucking country of you.” He shook his head and seemed disgusted.
“Take all the time you want. This is your moment,” Henry said.
“No, that’s enough,” the young man said and looked tired himself. “You know what you need to know.”
“I do,” Henry said. “You made that clear.”
Madeleine’s husband turned and without speaking strode off across the festive gilt-and-red lobby and out the revolving doors where the tae kwon do children had gone, disappearing as they had amongst the passersby. Henry looked at his wristwatch. This had all occupied fewer than five minutes.
. .
Back in his room he changed his shirt and arranged his clothes and toiletries into his suitcase. The room was cold now, as though someone had shut off the heat or opened a window down a hallway. Two message slips lay on the carpet, half under the door. These would be from Madeleine, or else they were new, second-thought threats from the husband. He decided to leave them be. Though some insistent quality about the message slips triggered a sudden strong urge to make up the bed, straighten the room, set out the breakfast tray, urges which meant, he understood, that his life was becoming messy. It probably wouldn’t be better until he was on the plane.
But standing exactly where Madeleine had stood earlier, he watched the big T-shaped crane slowly lift a great concrete-filled bucket toward the top of an unfinished building’s high silhouette. He wondered again where, in this strange disjointed city, Madeleine was. Having a coffee with a girlfriend she could regale the day to; or waiting for her son to get out of school, or for the husband to arrive and some brittle, unhappy bickering to commence. Nothing he envied. On the window glass, he saw where she’d been writing with her finger; it showed up now that the air in the room was colder. It seemed to say Denny. What or who was Denny? Maybe the message was someone else’s, some previous hotel guest.
And then, for no apparent reason he felt exhausted to the point of being dazed. Sometime, too, in the last hour, he had cracked off a sizeable piece of a molar. The jagged little spike caught at the already-tender tip of his tongue (the broken part he’d swallowed without knowing it). The day had worked its little pressures. He took off his glasses and lay down across the newspapers. He could hear a muffled TV in another room, a studio audience laughing. There was time to sleep for a minute or five.
About Madeleine, though: there had been a time when he’d loved her, when he’d said he loved her, felt so rather completely. None of the foolishness about love or being in love. One definite time he could remember had been on a pebbly beach in Ireland, near a little village called Round Stone, in Connemara, on a trip they’d made by car from Dublin, where they’d seen investors and negotiated significant advantages for the client. They’d laid a picnic on the rocky shingle and, staring off into the growing evening, declared the lights they could see to be the lights of Cape Breton, where her father had been born, and where life would be better — though in true geography, they’d been facing north and were only viewing the opposite side of the bay. Behind them in the village, there’d been a little fun fair with a lighted merry-go-round and a tiny bright row of arcades that glowed upward as the night fell. There, that time, he’d loved Madeleine Granville then. And there were other times, several times when he knew. Why even question it?