Guided Tours of Hell (12 page)

Nina would visit the Louvre. That was a destination. She imagined telling Leo she’d been to a show of one of his favorite painters, Tintoretto or Carpaccio, the largest canvases, the biggest collection assembled anywhere ever. But wait! The second most idiotic thing would be to fill her time in Paris like an empty sack with glittery things to catch Leo’s interest. What about
her
favorite artists? She’d always liked the French Orientalists: Géricault and Gérôme. But now it seemed depressing to go to the Orsay and stare at pictures of naked Moorish girls being bathed and perfumed for some pasha.

She stopped in front of a window in which exquisite shoes were arranged at angles that made them appear to be taking off or landing. Her eyes tracked to a pair of red suede high heels so elegant and graceful they could afford to flirt with an edge of the cartoonish and the Minnie Mouse.

She and Leo often window-shopped but never really went shopping in Paris. What would be the point? Shopping was about the future: a sweater to wear tomorrow, a bowl in which to put apples at home. But they’d had no reason to want anything beyond the present moment. And of course the future was banned as a subject for thought or discussion.

Did
this
count as shopping: That last trip, they’d gone to a Monoprix for the graph-paper notebooks Leo bought by the dozen. They’d passed racks of dresses and skirts, intriguing French cosmetics, packs of hosiery spouting puffs of beige net and black Lycra. They were walking through the underwear department when Leo stopped and gave Nina a questioning look. And she’d shrugged, embarrassed, but not saying no. Leo wandered off and meditatively browsed the cheap pretty bras and panties.

She watched him from a distance. It was such a tired cliché, guys and their underwear fetish. But Leo’s rapt concentration drew her in, and she realized with surprise that his intensity was fixed on her, on her body and what they would do, until gradually her clear view was heated and blurred by desire, and she looked around uneasily to see if strangers were watching.

That was the trouble with sexual drift: Such thoughts could function like radar, sending out loud, deceptive, misreadable signals to the rest of the population. Now, for example, her erotic reverie about Leo seemed to have attracted a man to the shoe store window, a nice-looking guy in a leather jacket who took in the whole window and then—she could see this from the corner of her eye—focused on the red suede shoes she’d been gazing at all this time.

He looked at the shoes, he looked at Nina. At the shoes, at Nina. Was he about to offer to buy her the shoes in return for some sexual service so degrading and baroque that even this handsome Frenchman couldn’t get a woman to do it for free?

“Quels beaux souliers rouges,”
he said.

Nina smiled and nodded as he spoke to her in French. The man who’d brought her breakfast had spoken English, as had Madame Cordier, so this was almost the first French she’d heard, not counting announcements at the airport, the taxi driver who drove her into town, and the TV narrators with their monotonous play-by-plays of happy peasants slaughtering pigs. Nina understood nearly everything people said, but was shy about speaking. Leo’s French was fluent, so she always let him talk.

Eventually she realized that the man was saying something about “The Red Shoes,” the Hans Christian Andersen story, and then
The Red Shoes
, the Michael Powell film about a ballet based on the Hans Christian Andersen story.

What an amazing coincidence!
The Red Shoes
was Nina’s favorite film, that is, the favorite film of her childhood. Nina gasped with surprise, an intake of breath that must have sounded like horror.

She turned and hurried away from him, her heart pounding with shame and regret. Why am I running? Nina thought. Let’s be objective here. The guy was better looking than Leo. He liked her favorite childhood movie. (What was it that she had liked so much? The romance? The ballet? Another story, like
Anna Karenina
, about a woman so jacked around by men that the only sensible solution was to fling herself in front of a train?) She and this Frenchman could fall in love. Her whole life could change. He probably had a spacious attractive apartment into which she could move. She could shop in the markets, buy flowers, breads, cheeses…and then what? In her luxurious Paris flat, in the gathering dusk, she could pine away for Leo.

Oh, none of this would be happening if she were here with Leo! Passion gave lovers license not to engage with the world as they coasted through it in their little cocoon-made-for-two. But the world lay in wait for them. And as soon as they were alone—on their own—it got them back with a vengeance. It was so risky, being shut off in some little love capsule, losing contact with the truth, losing your faculties, your judgment. It was dangerous, like joining a cult or a fascist army of two.

Crossing the intersection, Nina saw that she had somehow landed directly outside La Coupole. It could have been an accident, or some masochistic homing instinct. She stared into the enclosed porch of the bright café, at morose couples cradling tiny cups and gazing out at the street, and at others who’d chosen to be inside, to be warm and look at each other.

Nina thought of Simone de Beauvoir hanging out in this very café, writing or talking or reading amid a smoky blue haze of ideas, black coffee, and Gauloises. She saw de Beauvoir trying her hardest not to think about Jean-Paul Sartre, off somewhere with a beautiful, much younger, female philosophy student.

This was one of the problems with love! It could narrow your field of vision and limit your intelligence to the point at which you were insulting everyone else’s. Imagine, reducing Simone de Beauvoir to a country-and-western torch song, the existentialist Tammy Wynette standing by her Sartre! All right, de Beauvoir’s affair with Sartre was a little…problematic. But what about her writing? Her books? Her international reputation? Nina thought of Billie Holiday.
Hush now, don’t explain
. Those four words, the first line of the existentialist national anthem.

Not long ago, Leo had told Nina that Simone de Beauvoir’s grave had become a shrine for young French feminists who left flowers and handwritten notes on her tomb, asking her for advice and favors. Maybe that’s what Nina should do. Go search for Simone de Beauvoir’s grave. She was in the mood for something like that, some pilgrimage or symbolic act or oracular consultation. But she couldn’t imagine what she would write in a note to leave on Simone de Beauvoir’s grave.
Please send Leo back to me
. Nina would be ashamed! She’d always thought of herself as a feminist. It was something a woman just naturally was, if she had any brains. But what kind of feminist was Nina, unable to think of anything to ask this saint of women’s rights except to intervene and, please, oh please, make her boyfriend love her again? De Beauvoir would have understood. She knew all about patience, about men who disappeared, about waiting for them, believing in them…outlasting the competition.

Nina walked into the café and ordered black coffee to keep up the buzz from the coffee she’d drunk with Madame Cordier. Several times this morning she’d had to pause on her walk while a frolicky hiccough interrupted her heartbeat. She hoped it was a caffeine overdose and didn’t mean that she was dying.

Nina eased off her coat and looked around, but got no farther than a young couple nearby who were causing quite a scene. A pale girl in black with orange hair and dark roots shouldered a video camera trained on her Arab boyfriend. As she talked into the microphone, Nina understood her so easily that for a moment she thought her French had improved until she realized that the girl was American, speaking English.

“Tuesday morning,” she said. “Eleven A.M. Achmed is eating breakfast. Achmed has ordered coffee. He’s about to take his first sip. Let’s go in for a close-up. Monsieur Achmed, please. Look at the camera.”

Achmed raised one weary shoulder and half-hid his regal face, slouching down in his chair till his long legs reached across the aisle and under the next empty table. Nina was openly staring now, but Achmed didn’t return her gaze, though he was aware of her watching. His lidded eyes were like half-lowered shades covering the windows while the house’s owner waited inside for guests to arrive and adore him.

Of all the people in Paris these two had been ordered up and sent here expressly for Nina. This girl on her junior year abroad videotaping her boyfriend reminded Nina of herself, taking notes on Hemingway’s sink and Oscar Wilde’s bathtub. After Achmed was long gone, the poor girl could watch the tape, just as Nina—at especially self-tormenting moments—could reread her piece on historic hotels in a back issue of
Allo!

Simone de Beauvoir, Billie Holiday, and now this girl in the café. Next it would be Jean Seberg, Héloïse, Maria Callas, Piaf, every woman who’d ever gotten famous for suffering over men. But wasn’t it always like that? The world showed you what you were looking for, what you were tuned in to see. Once Nina had had a redheaded boyfriend, and for that time and long after, she was shocked to find the streets of New York crowded—teeming—with redheads. This morning a man with copper-colored hair had brought her coffee. But it was no longer a message, just the color of someone’s hair.

Nina signaled for the check. Wait. She didn’t have French francs. Her legs went weak, even after she recalled that she’d changed fifty dollars at the airport. What did she think they would do to her if she didn’t have cash? Surely the café took credit cards. Probably traveler’s checks, too.

She paid the bill, left the café, and walked on with no idea where she was going and only intermittent clues about where she actually was. She wandered into crooked lanes lined with yellow restaurant signs and placards picturing platters of couscous or glossy Vietnamese stir-fry, a deserted side street of dusty shops with vintage printing presses, a block of bland concrete apartment houses. At last she rounded a corner and found herself in the place de la Contrescarpe.

Getting her bearings encouraged her, as did the lovely square. Hey, this wasn’t so bad—being in Paris by herself without a care in the world! And let’s hear it for magical thinking! Once more, it was as if her thoughts affected her surroundings, as if the improvement in her mood had managed to conjure up this curving street of bookstores, this shop window full of glossy volumes on Flemish painting, these bins of wispy botanical drawings in crackling cellophane slips. The rain had stopped. From time to time there were even coy hints that the sun might break through.

Nina walked on and got lost again and at last had a panicky moment when she came out of a dark narrow street and into an open square and looked up and saw the Eiffel Tower looming above her like Godzilla. All right! She knew where she was now! Not where she wanted to be! In the wrong direction completely and much farther than she’d intended.

But what was she so scared of? At any point she could find the nearest metro station and take the subway back to the hotel. What stop
was
nearest the hotel? That was something Leo would know, one of the many travel facts he would have on file in his mind. Probably he would also know where exactly the hotel was.
This
was scary, Nina saw now, how quickly one could surrender charge of the most basic information.

Once she’d got lost with Leo. Even Leo was lost. They’d come out on a grimy boulevard jammed with buses emitting black smoke. Leo sent her to look at the street sign, and when she came back and told him the name, he gritted his teeth and snapped, “Spell it!”

An elderly gentleman stopped and helped them, a pleasant man who seemed to Nina still to be living in Paris in the ’50s, a city of lovers so wrapped up in each other they often wound up lost and had to be set back on course. He beamed and warmly grasped Leo’s elbow, and soon Leo and Nina forgot their quarrel and were grinning at each other and at the old man, whom they kept turning around to wave at.

Now, reaching a corner, Nina looked down a street of pale dignified houses. It was the neighborhood—the street—on which she’d stayed with Leo. Halfway down that block was the hotel in which Edith Wharton entertained Morton Fullerton while waiting for the plasterers and parquet-polishers and stained-glass installers to finish work on her home. Now the hotel seemed magnetic, drawing Nina to it. And for what? To gaze in at the lobby with a lump in her throat?

Nina remembered Leo pointing down the street and noting that the Rodin Museum was just a few blocks over. He said they had to go there, but they hadn’t gone anywhere. They’d stayed in their room and joked about Nina writing a piece for which she didn’t have to get out of bed. They never went outside—not once—except to move to the next hotel. So the neighborhood was harmless enough if Nina steered clear of that one building.

She would go to the Rodin Museum. And she would try, she would really try not to get suckered into thinking about the tragic life and death of Camille Claudel.

Leo loved the story of Camille Claudel having been Rodin’s student, his mistress, then his colleague, a gifted sculptor, then going mad because he wouldn’t leave his wife. Just before they put her away in the mental ward forever, she destroyed her own work, trashed her entire studio and her most brilliant sculptures.

Nina liked the story considerably less than Leo did, yet now the thought of Camille Claudel made Nina feel reassuringly in control. She was still a long way from going certifiably insane over Leo! Were there Claudels in the Rodin Museum? Nina couldn’t remember. But she wanted to find out. It was similar to, but better than, a pilgrimage to Simone de Beauvoir’s grave. If this was what Paris was giving her, Nina might as well be gracious and take it. De Beauvoir, Claudel, Madame Cordier, Achmed’s girlfriend, Nina—sisters under the skin, in this city of women who love too much, Paris, city of broken hearts!

She walked around the block to avoid the Edith Wharton hotel and was afraid she was lost again when she took a turn—the wrong one, surely—and found herself alongside the smooth cement wall that bordered Rodin’s gardens. This experience of being lost and lost and then suddenly found had happened to her in Venice but never before in Paris.