Afterwards, the victim and his assassin were forever bound — the red spots that cover the stem of a wild hemlock plant are referred to as the “blood of Socrates.” A misnomer, of course, because there would be no blood. Only the chill, spreading through Pierre’s body like syrup across a pancake.
This was the method upon which Christine had decided, but she had initially wanted something far more vulgar. In those first few days afterwards, her only solace had been the lurid scenarios she concocted in her mind. In her favorite, she has him naked, bound and gagged, with a rope tied fast around his neck. By this she leads him out into the street, where all the audiences he has ever performed for are arranged, jostling with each other for the finest views. The street is covered with the glass of a thousand bottles, and she drags him down it, the shards shredding his skin into pale, wraithlike ribbons. She had once cut her hand open dicing onions, and been amazed at the way the flesh lost all its elasticity, instantly becoming pale, almost alien. She wanted every inch of Pierre to look that way, red and white like a candy cane.
But the hemlock had seemed easier, and would allow her to be somewhere far away by the time it did its work. She opened a water bottle — there were two by the door, above the minibar — and rapped the container against its rim. Pierre would drink one before bed — he did this like a ritual, even at home — and then sleep for the last time. The paste broke off in chunks and spiraled down inside the bottle. Christine shook it until her arm hurt. Within an hour, it would dissolve completely.
She repacked her bag, left the hotel room, and returned to the lobby. The loudspeakers were playing Rush’s “YYZ,” and Christine wondered for a moment both how to spend the rest of her day and whether anyone else listening to the song realized it was a tribute to the building in which they stood. She decided to simply return to the terminal and wait.
After wandering for a little while, she eventually found a spot at a coffee shop in the nexus of Terminal 1. From the ceiling, five colored-glass silhouettes were suspended, their arms and legs fully outstretched, like they were dancing in space. A plaque titled the installation, I Dreamed I Could Fly. But to Christine the figures looked more like they were falling — as if they had tumbled downwards through the glass roof above them and, rather than shattering it, absorbed its material as their own.
Sitting down with a coffee, she began to wait. There was a magazine in her purse, but she didn’t reach for it. Merely watching the crowds move back and forth before her was enough to pass the time. A few years prior, she might have hoped to spot a celebrity. But charter flights were too common these days, and airports had surrendered their status as the great equalizer. The rich and famous no longer had to wait alongside the masses as they endured the twin miseries of lost luggage and invasive security checks.
His flight was due to arrive at 4 in the afternoon, from Boston. At quarter to, Christine returned to the baggage claim. From her purse she drew a scarf and sunglasses — more than enough to disguise someone not being looked for. As she sat down for one last wait, her hands quivering in anticipation, she reached inside her jacket and withdrew the thick sheaf of letters. She had found them a week ago while cleaning his study, tucked behind the Elmore Leonard section of his bookshelf. She’d sat down on the floor and read every last one, racing through their words as if someone had dared her. Index cards, napkins, hotel stationery — the history of his adultery. And at its center a boy, just barely old enough to drink.
She’d read, in the skeletal block printing of a child’s hand, how they’d met at a performance in Los Angeles. Pierre had gotten drunk, and they’d consummated things soon after. Apparently, it was neither’s first time. The letters were so worshipful they were almost odes — the boy felt like he and Pierre shared something unnamable, and then he spent four pages trying to name it. He couldn’t remember the last time a man had made him feel sexy the way Pierre did.
They had been meeting for nearly a year since that first tryst — often here, at Pearson, which was halfway between Vancouver and Atlanta, where the boy lived. Thus, when the letters involuntarily reared their head in her imagination, they were dictated in a candy-sweet Southern drawl. His name was Timothy.
He didn’t want to keep it a secret anymore. He wanted them to move away, to Italy, although he’d never been there. He wanted a villa where they could make love in the sunshine, in the yard, where their lips and tongues and fingers could intertwine slowly, free of the haste of secrecy. He misspelled both definitely and necessary.
But Pierre’s letters were far worse. The casual way he referred to the lovers he’d had in the past — some men she knew, men who’d stayed in their home, men whom she had made dinners for, taken holidays with. The explicit way he described his desires, using words she’d never even heard him speak. And, worst of all, through forty-seven letters, she wasn’t mentioned once.
So Christine knew. When he had called on Wednesday and said he needed to stop in Toronto on the way home from Boston, that there was some consulting he’d been asked to do on a children’s production of the The Magic Flute, she knew where he was going. And she’d come to meet him.
The clock read 4:15, and the flight from Boston read, Arrived. On the carousel before her, bags were beginning to slip down, one after another. Cardboard boxes, bright red Samsonites, huge black rolling trunks. She waited for his, a caramel-colored duffel. But it didn’t appear, and neither did he. At 4:30, the crowd around the conveyor began to thin, and she backed away, worried that she might be noticed. But by quarter to 5, she stood alone. Pierre was not coming — their plans must have changed. Perhaps he and Timothy had just met in Boston, his trip to Toronto entirely a ruse. Or he had gone to Atlanta, and even now they were locked in some squalid bachelor apartment, soaping each other in its phone-booth shower.
The luggage for the next flight, from Minnesota, had begun to descend. Christine paced, unsure what to do next. The bags were identical to those that had come before — the same boxes, the same Samsonites, the same trunks. Each was a different life, she realized — each had a separate owner, with its own history, all moving independently of one another. And this made her feel very small, as if she was nothing more than a bag herself — inside an airport, inside a city, inside the civilization that must have cities. Exhaustion swept over her. Stumbling, she made her way back to the hotel.
In the elevator up to the room, Christine slumped against the mirror. She could go anywhere in the world from here — the cash was in her bag at her feet. All futures were only a ticket away. But she felt sapped of direction — the Christine before her in the mirror looked old. Unwanted. Impotent. On the fourteenth floor, the doors opened. Dragging a hand along the wall and her tiny case behind her, her eyes half closed, she stumbled to the room.
A hanger dangled around the knob, something she didn’t remember having put there herself. She picked it up — Ne Pas Deranger, it read. French. She took a step back. Men’s voices came from inside the room. Laughter. Deep inside her, a rage awoke. This was not enough — it was too passive. She wanted him to know. She wanted the boy to die, to leave him stranded and alone. She wanted to fly him to the middle of the desert and then abandon him, with nothing but the knowledge of his own infidelity to wait with him for death. Socrates’s death was far more than he deserved. Fist clenched, she raised her hand, ready to knock. But something stayed her hand, forced it down, to the hanger. She flipped it to its English side. Do Not Disturb. And then she left.