Granta - The Magazine of New Writing 72, Winter 2000 [antikvár]

Overreachers Madeleine Granville was standing at the hotel window of the Queen Elizabeth II, trying to decide which tiny car far below on Mansfield Street was her yellow Saab. Henry Rothman was tying his tie in front of the mirror. Henry was taking a plane in two hours. Madeleine was staying behind in Montreal, where she lived. Henry and Madeleine had been having a much more than ordinary friendship for two years—the kind of friendship no one but the two of them was expected to know about (if others knew, Henry and Madeleine had decided, it didn't matter because no one really knew). The two of them were business associates within a large multinational company specializing in enhanced agricultural food additives. Henry was forty-nine, Madeleine was thirty-three. Together, as business associates, they had travelled a great deal, often abroad, staying together in many beds in many hotel rooms until many late mornings, eating scores of very good restaurant meals, setting out upon innumerable days in bright noon sunshine, then later saying their goodbyes in other hotel rooms or in airports or in car parks, hotel lobbies, taxi stands, bus stops. While apart, which had been most of the time, they had missed each other, talked on the phone often, and when they had come again into the other's presence had felt relieved, grateful, happy, fulfilled. Henry Rothman lived in America, in Washington DC, where he had a comfortable, divorced lawyer's life. Madeleine had settled in a tree-lined suburb with her one child and her architect husband. Everyone who worked with them knew everything and talked about it constantly behind Henry and Madeleine's backs. And yet the feeling was that it would never last, and so whose business was it. Conflicted gossip was very Canadian, Madeleine said. But now, they'd decided, was the time for it all to be over. They loved each other—they each acknowledged that. Though they possibly were not in love (these were Madeleine's distinctions). But they had been in something, she understood—possibly even something better than love, something with its own intense and timeless web, densely tumultuous interiors and transporting heights. What that exactly was was hazy. But it had simply not been nothing. Affair was the wrong word. As always, though, other people were involved, no one in