“I probably already know what it is,” Henry said. His tongue sought the sharp little spike of his broken molar. The flesh was abraded and sore from going there. He could get it fixed in San Francisco.
“I really don’t think you do,” she said. A big white Japanese 747 descended slowly out of the pale sky and across the autoroute in front of them. “Do you want me to tell you?” she said. “I don’t have to. It can wait forever.”
“That guy wasn’t your husband,” Henry said and quietly cleared his throat. The thought had just come to him— why, now, he didn’t know. Lawyer’s intuition. “Did you think I was stupid? I mean …” He didn’t care to finish this sentence. It finished itself. So much that was said didn’t need to be.
Madeleine looked at him once, looked away, then looked again. She seemed impressed. She seemed happy about feeling impressed, as if this was the best of all outcomes. The enormous jet sank from sight into an unremarkable industrial landscape. No big ball of flaming explosion followed. Everyone safe. “You’re guessing,” she said.
“I’m a lawyer. What’s the difference?”
She liked this, too, and smiled. He understood it was impossible for her not to like him. “How’d you know?”
“Among other reasons?” The freeway traffic was standing back now for the airport exit. “He acted more serious than he felt. Something he said … ‘divided inner somethings’? That wasn’t right. And he looks like an actor. Are you sleeping with him, too? I don’t mean ‘too.’ You know.”
“Not currently,” Madeleine said. She touched her silver hair clip with her little finger and cocked her head slightly. She appeared to be realizing something. What that might be, he thought, would be worth knowing. “I knew you’d go down there,” she said. “I knew you couldn’t resist it. You always want to be so forthright and brave. It’s your disguise.”
Henry watched the pleasureless freeway ambience pass slowly along — freight depots, trucking companies, car rentals, gas stations. The same all over. The green sign was visible. AEROGARE/AIRPORT. An exertion saying everything twice.
“He’s an American,” Madeleine said. “His name’s Bradley. He is an actor. We worried you’d know he wasn’t Canadian.”
“Not a worry there,” Henry said. She took the AEROGARE/AIRPORT SORTIE/EXIT and looked across at him. She seemed slightly undone now. Perhaps, he thought, she was thinking about patting her cheeks when they were in the room, or saying, I’d pictured something more poignant. That could seem excessive now.
He reached and took her hand and held it loosely. She was nervous, her hand warm and moist. This whole business had taken something out of her, too. They had been in love, perhaps were still in love.
“Is someone filming all this?” he said and glanced to the side, at a pickup truck following along beside them on the highway. He expected to see the truck bed full of cameras, sound equipment, smiling young cinéastes. Everything trained on him.
“For once, no,” she said.
Up ahead, d’EMBARQUEMENTS/DEPARTURES was jampacked. Cars, limos, taxis, people loading golf bags, collapsible cribs and taped-up coolers from the backs of idling vans. Policemen with white oversleeves were flagging everyone through in a hurry. He had only a suitcase, a briefcase, a raincoat. It had become a wonderful autumn day. Clouds and haze were being cleansed from the sky.
He continued holding her hand, and she grasped his back in a way that felt important. What would it be like finally, he wondered, to grow uninterested in women? Things he did— going here, there, deciding this, that — he’d always had a woman in mind. Their presence animated things. So much would be different without them. No more moments like this, moments of approximate truth vivifying, explaining, offering silent reason to the choices you made. And what happened to those people for whom it wasn’t an issue? Who didn’t think about women. Certainly they achieved things. Were they better, their accomplishments purer? Of course, when it was all out of your reach — and it would be — you wouldn’t even care.
On the curb side, amid skycaps and passengers alighting and baggage carts nosed in at reckless angles, a family — two older adults and three nearly grown blond children — were having a moment of prayer, standing in a tight little circle, arms to shoulders, heads bowed. Clearly Americans, Henry realized. Only Americans would be so immodest about their belief, so sure a fast amen was just the thing to keep them safe — at once so careless and so prideful. Not the qualities to make a country great.
“Do you think if we asked, they’d include us in their little circle?” Madeleine said, breaking their silence as she pulled to the curb, right beside the praying Americans. She meant to annoy them.
“We’re represented already,” Henry said, looking at the pilgrims’ hefty, strenuous backsides. “We’re the forces of evil they think so much about. The terrible adulterers. We worry them.”
“Life’s just a record of our misdeeds, isn’t it?” she said. He couldn’t open his door for the pray-ers.
“I don’t think that.” He held her warm, soft, moist hand casually. She was just letting the other subject go free now — the lying, tricking, having a joke at his expense. Though why, for God’s sake, not let it go free?
He sat a moment longer, facing forward, unable to exit. He said, “Have you decided you don’t love me?” Here was the great mystery. His version of a prayer.
“Oh, no,” Madeleine said. “I wanted us to go on and on. But we just couldn’t. So. This seemed like a way to seal it off. Exaggerate the difference between what is and what isn’t. You know?” She smiled weakly. “Sometimes you can’t believe the things that are taking place are actually taking place, but you need to. I’m sorry. It was too much.” She leaned and kissed him on the cheek, then took both his hands to her lips and kissed them.
He liked her. Liked everything about her. Though now was the wrong moment to say so. It would seem insincere. Reaching for too much. Though how did you ever make a moment be worth as much as it could be, if you didn’t reach?
Outside, the Americans were all hugging one another, smiling big Christian smiles, their prayers having reached a satisfactory end.
“Are you trying to think of something nice to say?” Madeleine said jauntily.
“No,” Henry said. “I was trying not to.”
“Well, that’s just as good,” she said, smiling. “It might not be good enough for everybody, but I understand. It’s hard to know how to end a thing that didn’t completely begin.”
He pushed open the heavy door, lifted his suitcase out of the back, stepped out into the cool fall light, then looked quickly in at her. She smiled at him through the open doorway. There was nothing to say now. Words were used up.
“Wouldn’t you agree with me about that, Henry?” she said. “That’d be a nice thing to say. Just that you agree with me.”
“Yes, okay,” Henry said. “I do. I do agree with you. I agree with you about everything.”
“Then rejoin your fellow Americans.”
He closed the door. She didn’t look his way again. He watched her ease away, then accelerate, then quickly disappear into the traffic heading back to town.
Charity
On the first day of their Maine vacation, they drove up to Harrisburg after work, then flew to Philadelphia, then flew to Portland, where they rented a Ford Explorer at the airport, ate dinner at a Friendly’s, then drove up 95 as far as Freeport — it was long after dark — where they found a B&B directly across from L. L. Bean, which surprisingly was open all night.
Before getting into the rickety canopy bed and passing out from exhaustion, Nancy Marshall stood at the dark window naked and looked across the shadowy street at the big, lighted Bean’s building, shining like a new opera house. At one a.m., customers were streaming in and out toting packages, pulling garden implements, pushing trail bikes and disappearing into the dark in high spirits. Two large Conant tourist buses from Canada sat idling at the curb, their uniformed drivers sharing a quiet smoke on the sidewalk while their Japanese passengers were inside buying up things. The street was busy here, though farther down the block the other expensive franchise outlets were shut.