Guided Tours of Hell (17 page)

“Christ, Nina, what is this? Be a real person, okay? Are you going to make me spend the rest of my life paying for the sins of the frequent-flier program?”

That wasn’t what Nina was doing. This wasn’t about separate flights. But what if it
was
all a big mistake? What a relief
that
would be! And Leo said ‘the rest of my life.’ Did he mean to spend it with Nina? Who else would make him keep paying…?

Leo said, “Come here.” He held out his arms.

Nina stood and crossed the room. Leo pulled up her skirt and rolled down her tights and set her, facing him, on his knees.

“W
HAT WAS
THAT
?” SAID
Leo, after their hearts had stopped hammering, and their breathing had slowed to normal.

Why was he asking Nina, just because she’d been there? She could summon up some pornographic snapshots that could make desire kick in again, but they were only details. A cyclone had picked them up—like that!—and set them down somewhere else. Nina was a different person from the weepy lovesick wimp, the pathetic alien spirit who, until a half hour ago, had been in possession of Nina’s now relaxed and pleasurably tingling body.

All that was prehistory. Her time alone in Paris already seemed like a rough patch in someone else’s life, some dippy fool who had squandered her grief on a silly misunderstanding. Anyway, that was over. Now they were communicating on such a deep cellular level that a mistake about travel plans hardly counted at all.

Leo gathered her to his chest. “One good thing happened when you were gone.
The Red Shoes
was on cable. I remembered your saying that it was your favorite film.”

So Leo had remembered something Nina had said—remembered it for months! Did this mean that he had been thinking about her when she wasn’t there? Once Nina had read that until babies reached a certain developmental stage, they assumed that when people left the room they disappeared forever. And it had struck her that most men lived and died without progressing beyond this plateau. Of all the inequities of gender, the one that seemed most unfair was that women could be obsessed with a man for months, years, a lifetime, while men busied themselves with useful activity and rarely wasted a precious hour of sustained attention on the women they claimed to love. Nina’s pleasure in the possibility that Leo had thought about her, however briefly, delayed the startling realization—

“Leo!” she said. “The strangest thing! Yesterday some guy started talking to me in front of a store. And he was talking about
The Red Shoes
.”

Leo said, “Great. Is this what you’ve been doing here, picking up French guys in front of shoe stores?”

She hadn’t said it was a shoe store. Had she? How did Leo know? Was Leo staging brief scenarios in which he hired strangers to appear out of nowhere and chat about subjects that Leo would then bring up, as if by chance? Did anyone do that except in Hollywood thrillers about wicked gigolos who marry lonely rich women and drive them mad to collect their fortunes? Why would Nina let herself slip back into that stew of paranoia she’d been soaking in before Leo knocked on her hotel room door? Another possibility was that this coincidence proved that she and Leo had never been out of touch, even with an ocean between them.

“It wasn’t like that, Leo. Don’t you think it’s weird? I was in Paris talking about a film you were watching in New York.”

“Yes and no,” said Leo. “I’m sure there’s some incredibly obvious boring explanation. The guy saw the film on TV in New York. Or it went up on a satellite and showed in both countries at once.”

It was troubling to imagine Vickie, the tormented ballerina, dancing
The Red Shoes
for all eternity in stratospheric orbit. But now, in Leo’s reassuring presence, Nina could once again see the film as art, as compelling drama and not just a depressing tale about a woman so torn between two men—
and
their ideas of what she should be—that the harsh whistle of an oncoming train sounded like a Siren’s song, an invitation she couldn’t refuse. Leo was right, there was probably some simple explanation. Nina’s mention of
The Red Shoes
had made Leo think: shoe store.

Leo switched on the night-light, then rolled on his side and looked at Nina and turned off the light again. They made love and fell asleep and awoke at the same moment.

This time, when Leo turned on the light, they finally saw the room. And now at last they could afford to apprehend its full unexpurgated horror, a vision too grisly to have faced alone, though together they could risk it. A room from a Weegee photograph or from a horrific nightmare. A room where a murder had taken place or was just about to happen.

“It’s the ugliest room I’ve ever seen,” Leo said. “Do you think it’s really a whorehouse?”

“That’s what I thought,” said Nina. “And your old friend, Madame, said it used to be one. She said that a prostitute killed herself jumping out of that window.”

“I doubt it,” Leo said. “Probably it’s some sales thing, like those hotels capitalizing on the famous dead who slept there. Soon all the new hotels in Paris will be claiming to be recycled whorehouses, and the most expensive hotels will be the tackiest former…. But this place is impossible. I can’t believe you slept here. Poor Nina, my poor little baby. Reach me the phone book, will you? Let’s blow this dump right now.”

Nina rolled over, groped under her night table, and touched something sticky. Gum!

“Oh, disgusting!” she said.

“What is it?” asked Leo.

“Gum on my hand.”

“Get the phone directory, Nina. Then worry about the gum.”

She would have done anything he asked in any order he suggested. She was so thankful that he’d taken over and called her his poor little baby. What if Leo hadn’t come? Nina might have stayed here forever, checked in and not checked out. But that seemed unlikely, and not only because she couldn’t keep running up the bill. She’d had a plane ticket back to New York, a life and a job—at
Allo!

“It’s in four volumes,” Nina said. “Do you need them all?”

“I don’t care,” said Leo. “Hand me any two.” His attention had drifted back to the silent TV. Was this the same or a different film about war in Soviet breakaway republics? Were these different grannies wailing over different loved ones in different coffins, different men on their stomachs, shooting different mortars and guns?

“Who’s next, I wonder?” said Leo. “It could happen anywhere. We want to think that these people aren’t like us. But vicious ethnic warfare could begin tomorrow in the streets of Crown Heights. We could teach the Balkans a thing or two about…ugh. I don’t want to imagine. It starts to seem like a matter of time. So I, for one, am determined to seize every moment of pleasure I can before the shit hits the fan.”

Leo took the phone book and dialed. He was patient with the receptionists and found an acceptable room on the second try.

“Bingo,” said Leo. “Let’s pack.”

“Shouldn’t we shower?” said Nina.

“Not in this shithole,” said Leo. “Besides I want to think of us walking around smelling like sex, like we do now.”

There was nothing to pack. Leo hadn’t touched his suitcase, and Nina had only to get her toothbrush from the bathroom.

“I was sleeping in my clothes,” she said. “The whole time before you got here.”

“Jet lag,” Leo said. “You were in critical condition without Doctor Leo’s jet lag cure.”

They got dressed. Neither wasted a motion. They were ready to leave in no time.

As they left, Leo grabbed Nina’s wrist.

“This is hotel hell,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t turn around or look back as we walk down the hall.”

Were they playing Lot and his wife, or Orpheus and Eurydice? Both of them practically tiptoed along the long dim corridor.

At the elevator, Leo said, “I’ll walk down.”

Nina heard his receding footsteps. How desperately she had missed him. How amazing—how fortunate—that he would be waiting for her downstairs. That is, she
hoped
he’d be waiting. She’d misunderstood once before. Suppose she rode the elevator down and Leo was nowhere in sight?

The elevator took forever. Nina should have walked with Leo. She clung to her suitcase, which seemed to have gotten heavier since she’d checked in, as if the Danton’s resident demons had packed it full of stones. The elevator hit the ground floor and bounced. The doors balked, then slowly opened.

Leo was talking to Madame Cordier, who was standing behind the desk. Leo leaned toward her. His elbows dug into the counter. Madame’s eyes looked red-rimmed and raw. Leo was flushed and winded. They seemed to be breathing in staggered rhythms, as if there wasn’t enough oxygen for them both.

Leo stalked out the front door. Nina still had the room key. Also she felt obliged to thank Madame Cordier, or at least say a few words. She walked across the lobby.

“L’addition?”
she said meekly.

“Monsieur has paid your bill,” said Madame Cordier. “But he has refused to pay for tonight and tomorrow, even though it was made very clear that we have a cancellation policy….”

Was that why they had been arguing? Nina was relieved. Their conversation had seemed more passionate and freighted with history than a quarrel about money and checking out two days early. But how much else could have happened in the few minutes it took Nina to follow Leo down in the elevator? Nina smiled placatingly at Madame Cordier as she handed her the key.

“Merci,”
said Madame Cordier. “I wish you good luck.”

“Thank you,” Nina said. “I’m sorry.”

“It is nothing,” said Madame. “But really, what can one expect?
Léo, il est juif
.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Nina. She threw down the key hard enough so it bounced and fell off the desk. Madame knelt and was groping for it as Nina rushed for the door. She was still shaking and out of breath when she found Leo waiting outside.

“What’s the matter?” said Leo.

“What a bitch!” said Nina.

Leo raised one hand and hailed a cab.

“We’re history,” he said.

A
S THE TAXI SPED
them toward the sixth arrondissement, Nina felt as if she were only now arriving in Paris, and that her time here without Leo had been a grotesque hallucination. Leo and the driver switched between French and English as they discussed the truckloads of oranges dumped on the road to the airport. The driver didn’t think anything should be dumped on the road. People had to go places, Monsieur, especially to the airport. It only made things more confusing for those who agreed with the poor farmers unable to sell their produce because of cheap, low-quality fruit from Morocco, Tunisia, Israel, Spain, Brazil…. The driver listed every country with a warmer climate and darker-skinned population than France’s. In the back of the taxi, Leo took Nina’s hand and suggestively stroked her thumb.

When a red light delayed them in front of a movie theater, the driver said, “All American films.”

“Bad ones,” Leo said.

“People pay,” the driver said, rubbing his fingers together.

“It’s all about money,” said Leo, and the driver beeped his horn in agreement. Nina was proud of Leo for having charmed this grumpy Parisian, who began driving more recklessly as he told Leo this story: Early one morning, recently, he’d arrived at the taxi garage to find that some Turkish drivers had slaughtered a lamb for a holiday and were divvying up the bloody meat.

Was this like the pigs dying on TV? Nina knew what the driver would say. The Turkish lamb killed on the sooty floor of a smelly Paris garage was the polar opposite of the pig who had generously given up its idyllic life somewhere in rural France. A foreign lamb, a shifty conniving lamb, a lamb that would sell itself cheap and make everything harder for the noble, pure, patriotic French pig.

From the outside, the Hotel Monastère gave off gleaming seductive hints of more brightness and comfort within: its name engraved on a polished brass plaque, a newly sandblasted granite facade, a foyer like a Japanese painting, with a vase like a swollen seed pod, sprouting a tall spray of pink gladiolus and lilies, their beauty heightened by the promise that they would be dead by tomorrow morning.

Leo and Nina squeezed into the same wedge of revolving door and wound their arms around each other as they crossed the lobby. This was lost on the desk clerk, who could have been the first cousin of the disdainful young men at the Rodin Museum and the Hotel Danton. But now this species had lost its power to scare and intimidate Nina.

This young man was also sorry, in this case to inform them that their room was not yet ready. Surely Monsieur would understand. Monsieur had only just telephoned, after all.

Leo and Nina exchanged quick looks. Their rooms were
always
ready. Leo called ahead and told the hotels when they would arrive. Leo liked things arranged in advance. One challenge of travel, he said, was making many random events fall more or less into place.

But now they both seemed faintly relieved that their room wasn’t ready, perhaps because it liberated them from the question of whether or not this trip would be like the last one: a dreamlike crawl from hotel to hotel and directly from bed to bed.

“Fine,” said Leo. “Can we leave our things?”

“Let’s get something to eat,” said Nina.

They exploded from the hotel like children let out early from school. Nina hung on to Leo’s arm as he steered them through the streets. No more hesitation, no more getting lost and then found, now that Nina
had
been found, at least for now, by Leo.

“I thought I handled that pretty well,” Leo said. “I mean, not blowing a fuse because our room wasn’t ready. I know I’m not the most spontaneous guy in the world.”

“You were fine,” said Nina, squeezing his arm. How dearly she cherished and loved him!

“Let’s find the closest place that looks good,” Leo said. “Something right nearby.”

“Great,” said Nina. She would let him choose and thus avoid either credit or, more likely, blame.

But soon they’d passed the closest place and the closest after that, as Leo guided Nina through a maze of progressively narrower streets.