Richard Ford - A Multitude of Sins

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.”

“Why don’t you just tell me who this is and leave the cockroach stuff out of it,” Rothman said in a patient voice, wanting to slam the phone down. But the man abruptly hung up before he could.

The big black crane with the little green house attached was still emerging from both sides of Madeleine’s head. The words SAINT HYACINTHE were written along one armature.

“You look shocked,” she said. Then suddenly she said, “Oh no, oh shit, shit.” She turned toward the window and put her hands to her cheeks. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “It was Jeff, wasn’t it? Shit, shit, shit.”

“I didn’t admit anything,” Henry said, and felt immensely irritated. Loud pounding would commence immediately from out in the hall, he supposed, then shouting and kicking, and a terrible fistfight that would wreck the room. All this, just moments before he could make it to the airport. He considered again that he hadn’t admitted anything. “I didn’t admit anything,” he said again and felt foolish.

“I have to think,” Madeleine said. She looked pale and was patting her cheeks softly, as if this was a way of establishing order inside her head. It was theatrical, he thought. “I just have to be quiet a moment,” she said again.

Henry surveyed the cramped, odorless little room: the cluttered bed with the silver breakfast utensils, the crystal bud vase with a red rose, the dresser and the slightly dusty mirror, the armchair with a blue hydrangea print; two reproductions of Monet’s Water Lilies facing each other on featureless white walls. Nothing here foretold that things would work out perfectly and he would make his flight on time, or that none of that would happen. Here was merely a venue, a voiceless place with nothing consoling about it. He could remember when rooms felt better than this. Coming to Montreal had been peculiarly pointless — a vanity, and he was trapped in it. He thought what he often thought at moments when things went very bad — and this seemed bad: that he overreached. He always had. When you were young it was a good quality, it meant you were ambitious, headed upward. But when you were forty-nine, it wasn’t very good.

“I have to think where he might be.” Madeleine had turned and was staring at the phone as if her husband were inside it and threatening to burst out. It was one of those moments when Madeleine was not how she appeared: not the formal, reserved girl in Gibson Girl hair, but a kid in a bind, trying to dream up what to do. This was less intriguing.

“Maybe the lobby,” Henry said, while thinking the words: Jeff. A man lurking in the hall outside my door, waiting to come in and make mayhem . It was an extremely unpleasant thought, one that made him feel tired.

The telephone rang again, and Henry answered it.

“Let me speak to my wife, cockroach,” the same sneering voice said. “Can you pull out of her that long?”

“Who do you want?” Henry said.

“Let me speak to Madeleine, prick,” the man said.

The name Madeleine produced a tiny upheaval in his brain. “Madeleine’s not here,” Henry Rothman lied.

“Right. You mean she’s busy at the moment. I get it. Maybe I should call back.”