Guided Tours of Hell (16 page)

“This place is wild,” said Leo.

“You noticed,” Nina said.

“Adele Cordier’s a real piece of work,” Leo said. “She called and specifically promised that this place was charming—and remodeled top to bottom.”

It lightened Nina’s spirits that Leo talked about Madame Cordier like any hotel owner, someone to do business with—or not. But maybe it should have worried Nina to hear Leo speak that way about a former lover. How would Leo talk about Nina in their separate futures—futures that seemed less imminent and less separate now than they had just a few hours before? Normally, Nina and Leo never mentioned past loves, except for that poor woman having all-day sex with plants. Leo’s passion for history did not extend to personal history. Once Leo told Nina about a man he knew whose new wife asked him to make a list of all his previous girlfriends; he said he’d go to his office and do it—and he never came home again. The warning in Leo’s story was clear: He and Nina had no romantic pasts before they’d met. He was right, it was wiser not to consider the time they’d wasted, the years they could have spent together. The only subject more taboo than the past was the subject of the future….

Leo said, “Adele’s an old friend from when I lived here. She buys and redecorates hotels now. I thought: Why not do her a favor, check out her new hotel. We could go to Paris and write the whole thing off.”

We
? When had Leo ever said
we
? Also, hadn’t he said that a friend in London has recommended this hotel? And what about the other hotel Madame Cordier owned, the one in which Sarah Bernhardt had stayed and, more recently, Leo and Nina? Did she recommend that one, too?

Madame Cordier had insisted that she’d told Leo that the Danton wasn’t fixed up yet. One of them was lying or had a twisted idea of the truth. But it was surprisingly easy to let one’s ideas get twisted. Yesterday, had anyone asked, Nina would have insisted that Leo had told her that she was going to Paris without him.

“I met her. Madame Cordier,” Nina blurted out.

“How predictable,” said Leo. “All these hotel owners—these innkeepers—believe in the personal touch. Poor slobs. Their job depends on sending up fruit baskets and champagne, and conning writers into saying something complimentary, or at least listing the joint in
Allo!
Remember that guy who kept calling our room and we kept blowing him off and finally he came and knocked on the door when we were fooling around in the tub? Where was that? Was that Oscar Wilde’s room? I only remember the tub.”

Lucky Leo could still recall events like that without the searing pain that such memories had begun to cause Nina. But why should it be painful for him? He hadn’t just lived through days—no, weeks—since they’d broken up. He hadn’t known they’d broken up. He thought they’d been together all along.

“What are you doing here?” Nina said.

“What do you mean?” asked Leo.

“I thought you weren’t coming to Paris.”

“You did? Why? I can’t believe it,” said Leo. “I thought we agreed I couldn’t leave New York until yesterday evening. But our frequent-flier miles expired the day you left, and if we didn’t use them by then we’d have to pay for your ticket.”

Frequent-flier miles? Separate flights? Surely Nina would have registered these fairly complex arrangements. But she didn’t remember Leo mentioning frequent-flier miles. Often such questions did come up, requiring him to work out some thorny air-travel snag. So maybe he
had
explained all this, and it had scooted right past Nina.

If only she could reconstruct the details of that afternoon in his office, what he’d said and didn’t say that made her think she was going alone. She started off assuming the opposite: that they were going together. Something must have made it plain enough for her to change her mind. She saw herself looking out his window, heard his “Nina, I’m over here.” Could you feel so strongly and suffer so deeply because of a misunderstanding? What a ridiculous question! Wars broke out for less….

Always, in the past, she and Leo had barely tipped the bellboy and locked the door before they were glued together, stumbling toward the bed. They joked about Leo’s jet lag cure, which often began on the flight, under the airplane blankets, with quasi-accidental touches that escalated into furtive groping. If some prudish fellow passenger disapproved—well, so much the better! And so when they reached the hotel rooms already falling into each other, it wasn’t the beginning but rather a stage in what had begun with a kiss before takeoff, clasped hands during landing, and evolved into long starved looks in the taxi from the airport.

But now they were starting off cold, so to speak. They had to find out where they were.

Leo kissed her, then kissed her again, seriously enough so that Nina toppled slightly and held up her hands, as if to regain her balance.

Leo sat down on the edge of the bed. Nina almost sat on his lap. But her guardian angel must have yanked her back seconds before Leo twisted around and reached for the remote.

Leo stared at the TV. Nina sat in a nearby chair.

No need to change the channel. The Auvergne pig was dying again. That was what got Leo’s attention. The old woman was still singing its name. Mizu mizu mizu. Had they been repeating this scene, replaying it over and over during the time it had taken Nina and Leo to get from the doorway to the bed?

The end, hoped Nina. One final loop. The apple. The opera. Blam.

“Would you look at this?” said Leo. “Right-wing propaganda.
La France profonde
. Our peasant
grand-mère
and
grand-père
. Doing things the old way, the French way, not the Turkish or Senegalese or Algerian way. Voting the right-wing agenda is a vote for the peasants, for delicious French sausage made from French pigs hand-fed and hand-raised on French apples. Voting the straight right-wing ticket doesn’t mean a vote, as one might ignorantly suppose, for deporting foreign workers, firebombing guest worker hostels, protectionism, high tariffs. Not at all!…It’s a vote for sausage! You know what the pig’s name should be?”

“Mizu?” said Nina.

“Dreyfus!” Leo laughed. “This lovely film about the lovely French farmers is all about the coming election. And that’s why it took me two goddamn hours to get in from the airport. There was a demonstration on the Orly road, gangs of rednecks from the provinces dumping oranges on the highway. Crates of Moroccan oranges. How many oranges can
France
grow?

“But of course you can’t blame them, the poor bastard farmers are broke, right along with the rest of the world, except for a few corporate slimeballs. The time is ripe for some fascist shithead to get the trains running on time and everyone eating pure French pork like our pure peasant grandparents. French sausage! You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud—”

“I heard about that demonstration,” Nina said. “The oranges on the road.”

“Sure,” said Leo. “Everyone heard about it. And I got to be the lucky guy sitting in traffic with the meter running.”

“Was the flight all right?” said Nina.

“Hellish,” Leo said. “The airline must have held a contest: free tickets for the most colicky infants and hyperactive toddlers. All the winners got to travel together on one flight to Paris—
my
flight, needless to say—with their passive parents, heavy into the drinks cart. The kids were all shrieking and punching each other and racing up and down the aisles. I insisted on being bumped up to business class. I flashed some back issues of
Allo!
until I found a steward who knew what
Allo!
was.

“There were some empty seats in business. They put me next to a teensy old lady. I figured she’d be no problem. She’d tell me about her grandchildren and then pass out over the pretakeoff champagne. It turned out she was a German who’d lived most of her life in Estonia. She’d done time in a Russian detention camp. Obviously a Nazi. What was she doing in business class? I knew I should have stayed in coach; at least the kids were harmless.

“One glass of champagne and she’s telling me that every evil act the Russians committed was all because of a Jewish plot, and the Jews will never get enough of making Germany pay. I told her I was Jewish. She said she was sure I’d want to know the truth. This was before they’d even turned off the no-smoking sign.”

“How terrible,” said Nina. What a spooky coincidence! She too had come over on a plane of unrepentant Nazis. Was the international Jewish conspiracy the popular topic right now on transatlantic flights? Nina couldn’t say this to Leo. He would be too quick to inform her that what had happened to her wasn’t the same thing at all. Because Nina wasn’t Jewish. Better not to mention her flight. Not for now, anyway.

“She drove me insane,” said Leo. “I wound up getting crazy. As soon as we reached cruising altitude, I went into the toilet and wrote a line of numbers in blue ballpoint on my arm.”

“Oh, dear,” Nina said.

“Like a concentration camp tattoo.”

“I realize, Leo,” said Nina.

“And when I went back to my seat I casually pulled up my cuff and reached across her for a magazine. I made sure she saw.”

“What did she do?” asked Nina.

“Nothing,” Leo said. “If she was going to apologize, she would have done it when I announced I was Jewish. But at least we didn’t have to talk for the rest of the flight.”

“That was a blessing,” said Nina.

“A lifesaver,” Leo said. “Later I went and washed the numbers off, and I made sure she noticed that, too.”

A jumble of images on the TV caught the edge of Nina’s attention. The Auvergne pig had stopped dying, and the film had moved on to a group of farmers milling around with the transfixed stares of spectators at gambling casinos, though what they turned out to be watching was some sort of sausage-eating contest: French peasants at a table stuffing ground meat into their faces.

Leo said, “Ahem. Nina, are you with me?”

“What?” said Nina.

Leo said, “No doubt Adele Cordier told you all about our long tortured passionate love affair, and how I ditched her and ruined her life.”

“Something like that,” said Nina. “She said you kidnapped her from her husband in Tours and brought her back to Paris.”

“I rest my case,” said Leo. “The husband was my friend. I went down there for a political rally. We got arrested. The week I got back to Paris, she showed up at my door with a suitcase and a half-dozen kids. What was I supposed to do? I phoned the husband, my friend. I said, ‘Come get your wife.’ That clever son of a bitch, he said, ‘You got her. You keep her. She’s yours. The bitch is driving me nuts.’ That was 1968. Things were still pretty retro. Two guys could still get together and decide some perfectly capable woman’s fate.”

“Didn’t you live with her?” Nina asked.

Leo shrugged. “I let her stay. I probably slept with her once or twice. Soon she was driving
me
crazy. Was I going out? Where was I going? When was I coming back? Why had I said that? Done this? I was paralyzed with terror. You can imagine, Nina.”

All too easily, Nina could. Soon after they’d become lovers, Nina made the mistake of asking Leo where he’d spent a weekend during which he hadn’t called. He’d put a finger to her lips and said, “People say it’s hard for passion to withstand the effects of time. But I don’t think the problem is time, do you? I think it’s…micromanagement.” Was it micromanagement to want to know where the person you loved had spent the last forty-eight hours?

Leo said, “She was always bathing some naked child in my kitchen sink. They were pretty good kids, I guess. Not noisy or destructive.”

“They were probably scared of you,” Nina said.

“Of me?” said Leo. “Why? Hey, I caved in. Surrendered! I gave her the apartment and left. I went to Aries, I got a summer job breaking horses in the Camargue. I fell off twice, and after that I was a regular cowboy. By the time I got back from the South of France she’d found some new guy and was living with him. I think they even got married when her divorce from my friend came through.”

Leo, a cowboy in the Camargue? Madame Cordier didn’t mention that. Didn’t she say he’d gone to the South to work on his novel?

“She told me you wrecked that happy home,” said Nina. “She told me you showed up and swept her off to a hotel for one afternoon, and that was the end of that guy.”

“She said
that
?” Leo bugged his eyes. “She said one afternoon with me was the end of some other guy? I’m flattered.” He laughed. “Unfortunately, it’s not true. Memory plays weird tricks. One consolation for aging is that you can rearrange the past and make it happen whatever way you wanted. Adele’s a very smart woman, very shrewd, very creative. And every male can breathe a giant sigh of relief that she’s put that energy into wheeling and dealing hotels.”

Nina felt less like a woman talking to her lover than like a bewildered juror assigned to a case so contradictory that it bordered on the metaphysical. You couldn’t tell who was on the same side, or which side was which. Maybe Nina and Leo were allied against the delusional Madame Cordier, or maybe Nina and Madame Cordier should unite against Leo and the tricks he’d been using to bend women’s minds all these years. Probably Madame Cordier always exaggerated or lied. Probably Nina had misunderstood what Leo said that day in his office.

Leo said, “I can’t believe we’re talking about this, digging up shit from the past that’s bound to make us both unhappy.”

“Okay,” Nina said. “Let’s stop it.”

A while later, Leo asked, “What else did she say about me?”

“That you played her the Billie Holiday,” said Nina.

“Huh?” said Leo.

“‘Don’t Explain,’” said Nina. “You played it for her.”

“I don’t think so,” said Leo. “Maybe a different Billie Holiday song. Over the years, my favorites have changed. I could have played her ‘I Cover the Waterfront.’ Which I pretty much did in those days.”

“Hilarious,” said Nina.

“Not ‘Don’t Explain,’” said Leo. “Not that song. That one’s way too tough, way too…close to the bone for me to have played for
her
. Did she say
that
song?”

“I don’t know,” said Nina.