EXCERPT

RAYMOND COMES TO THE DOOR dressed in black, wearing the face of the man she loves. His skin is the texture of stone, his eyes narrow and changeable; it is the face of someone for whom making a living means causing hurt to others.

It is not the face of someone in pain. That is the one Fiona wears when she walks towards his hotel room, and sees herself in the mirror at the end of the hallway, her body emerging inside the antique frame knotted with vines and roses. Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders, and her eyes are the colour of amber from the Baltic Sea. Her hands are an artist’s hands, the fingers long and pale; her mouth is soft, red, always ready to apologize. Men regard it as her best feature.

She stands before his door, knocking. If he were on the other side, holding his breath, gazing through the peephole, he would see her face distorted as if in grief or sexual desire. She leans her forehead against the cool white wood, thinking she hears movement inside the room, his whispering voice, a rustle of fabric, a telephone cord dragged against a mahogany desk. She knows he is talking to his wife. She knocks for a while longer - stealthily, like a lover, and then sharply and impatiently, like a maid making her morning rounds.

It is then that he comes to the door, opens it, steps back and looks at her with the direct, disinterested gaze of a stranger. It is a look someone passing her on the street might give, indifference edged with a sharp dislike.

“We have to talk,” Raymond says.

She sees it is about to happen again.

Two of the walls in his room on the thirtieth floor are made of glass and look out upon the city. At this height his windows are parallel with the windows of the financial institutions across the street, their offices and boardrooms empty until the morning. Raymond sits on one end of the sofa by the window across from the bed, waiting for her to join him. Below his elbow, on the end table, a rose droops in a bud vase. If she were to hold it in the palm of her hand it would feel silky as a sparrow’s breast; it would feel like his warm scrotum when he guides her hand between his legs and says, hoarsely, Hold me there.

“You know what I’m about to say, don’t you,” he says now, acknowledging that she remembers the other times, the other scenes.

She sits beside him and he turns away from the window to face her. Quickly, he reaches out and touches her wrist, below a corner of her sleeve. It is as wounding as if he had sliced her there with a blade; the shock of it vibrates along her arm. There is nothing tender about the touch, the flick of his fingers. He looks at her like a man in a hurry might look at a traffic light, waiting for it to change; he looks at her like a shopper looks at the person ahead of him at the cash line, the one who pulls out a cheque-book to pay for one or two small items.

“Fiona,” he says, “you know how important my marriage is to me. You know I love my wife.”