Guided Tours of Hell (18 page)

At last, he said, “How about here?”

“It looks terrific,” lied Nina. In fact its windowless faux-brick facade looked notably less terrific than fifty places they’d just passed.

Inside, scores of radiant people chatted and laughed and chewed under heavy aphrodisiac clouds of cigarette smoke, wine, and garlic. Everyone seemed to love it here. How delighted they were with their food!

“This is fine!” said Nina.

Would there be an empty table? Nina braced for trouble. Encouragingly, the stout owner wiped her hands on her apron and showed them to the table for two near the back of the room.

Nina and Leo settled into their seats. Nina glanced around. On every side were couples, tempestuously in love, staring into each others’ eyes, letting go of each other’s hands only long enough to tuck into plates of chicken in glossy brown sauce and creamy mashed potatoes. Imagine if Nina had come here alone! Everything that so cheered her now would have driven her mad with self-pity!

This place had been created for them: a full-sized mechanical bistro, paused in suspended animation, waiting for Leo and Nina to walk in and switch it on. And they had just wandered in—on instinct, on bistro sixth sense. Such were the joys of discovery, of striking out for new terrain. This magical place existed in the lives and dinner plans of these lovers, but not in any tourist guide: terra incognita. But Nina couldn’t say that lest Leo think she was criticizing him for so rarely allowing chance to influence their choices. Besides, Nina should really stop playing the airy free spirit, the spontaneous brave explorer. She hadn’t been so adventurous before, all alone without Leo.

“This place is from central casting,” Leo said.

“Abracadabra,” Nina said. “Nineteen-fifties Paris.”

“That’s what the city does for us,” said Leo. “Remember our last time here?”

“Yes, I do,” said Nina, forgetting to breathe for a moment.

Leo’s presence was putting the city in a state of mild arousal, and as attraction sometimes—rarely—does, bringing out its best behavior. Leo was forcing it back to being the Paris of pretty hotels and hearty bistros, not the city of Camille Claudel, the city of broken dreams, of brothels and anti-Semitic madames watching pigs get whacked on TV.

“Nina!” said Leo. “What’s the matter? You look terrible!”

“Oh, do I?” Nina said. “Sorry.”

This was not the time to tell Leo about Madame Cordier’s parting words. Their mood seemed volatile enough, though Nina couldn’t say why. A certain stale tension lingered between them. No doubt it was Nina’s fault. Perhaps she couldn’t shake the many negative unhelpful emotions left over from when she’d believed that Leo had ditched her. Wouldn’t it be ironic if they broke up now because she had misunderstood Leo and thought they already had?

The
patronne
brought their wine and a gravy-stained menu. It would be torture, they agreed, to pick only one dish for each course. The candlelight flattered Leo. Nina was ravenously hungry. He had restored her appetite. The patient was recovering.

The menus kept them occupied the whole time the
patronne
was gone. Nina ran through a series of possibilities and decided just as the owner appeared. She ordered the grilled sweetbread and mesclun salad, the duck confit, Leo the terrine of skate and andouille sausage and fried potatoes. Then they sat back and drank their wine and basked in the promise of wonderful food.

“I have a confession,” said Leo.

Nina felt her chest tighten.

“I’d heard about this place,” said Leo. “Our coming here wasn’t entirely an accident.”

That
was Leo’s confession? Nina’s midsection unclenched.

“Who cares?” she said. “I love this place. Who told you about it?”

“Adele Cordier,” said Leo. “Back at the hotel. First I asked her if she knew a great bistro—and then I informed her that we were checking out two nights before we were scheduled to go. Surprise! She said she felt especially ripped off that I did those two things in that order. Like asking a girlfriend to lend you money and then telling her you’re breaking up. But I wasn’t ending a love affair, I was checking out of a hotel. She was extremely unprofessional, and besides, I couldn’t see what difference it made, asking for restaurant advice and then telling her we were leaving.”

“No wonder she was pissed,” Nina said uncertainly. What about Leo’s refusal to pay the full bill? And hadn’t Madame Cordier spotted his valise when he’d first come downstairs? Right away, that should have suggested that Leo and Nina might be departing. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to see the suitcase. Nina knew how such things could happen.

Nina was almost grateful that at the very last moment Madame Cordier had revealed herself as a foul anti-Semite. It was easier to discredit the rest, everything that had fueled Nina’s old doubts—or started new ones—about Leo.

“She’s been pissed off for twenty-five years,” Leo said. “She was probably born that way. Anyhow, she should be ashamed.

Imagine, expecting civilized humans to stay in that dump of a whorehouse. What else did she say about me, Nina?”

Nina swallowed. Miraculously, the
patronne
brought their first courses. Leo couldn’t expect Nina to answer a tricky question like that with her mouth full of sweetbreads and feathery pale greens.

Leo admired his striped terrine. “It looks like a Rothko. Better than a Rothko. Tastes better. Try some.”

Nina leaned forward obediently, permitting Leo to feed her. He gave her time to savor the terrine’s barrage of sequential flavors. Then he said:

“What else did she say about me? I know you know something, Nina. I can see it in your face.”

Only Leo knew her face well enough to read such detailed messages there. This proved that they were still in love. Nina took a deep breath.

“She said you were writing a novel.”

“Excuse me?” Leo said.

“She said when you lived in Paris you were writing a novel.”

“God. You know, I think she’s right. How embarrassing. I’d forgotten.”

“It’s not embarrassing,” Nina said, though she’d certainly thought so when she was looking for reasons to despise and patronize Leo. But now it didn’t seem corny at all. Young Leo in Paris writing his novel seemed very touching and sweet.

“Did she mention what my novel was about?”

“She didn’t know,” lied Nina. “I mean she didn’t say.”

“She did,” said Leo. “You’re protecting me. Go on, spit it out, Nina.”

“She said that all the American guys had come to Paris to write novels about American guys who’d come to Paris to write novels.”

“Bitch,” said Leo. “Absolutely untrue. It’s all coming back to me now. It was science fiction.
Brave New World
.
1984
. I remember, it was about mind control and a race of aliens that take over the television networks and tell everybody what to think. They convince the world about what reality is. They send everyone on the planet nightly subliminal signals with racist and nationalist subtexts—and pretty soon a million small local wars break out, and aliens conquer the planet. I wrote this in the sixties. Everyone was paranoid then. Once again, I was way ahead of my time. Thirty years in advance of the landing.”

A perfect subject for Leo. Leo, the mind control expert. Telling
Allo!
readers what to think, trying to do the same to Nina, informing her that she would adore a cheap whorehouse of a hotel, trying to convince her—
convincing
her—that he’d said he was coming to Paris with her.

That ex-girlfriend of Leo’s who was having perpetual sex with the plants and rocks and trees recently sent him a letter about how, after a lifelong struggle, she was no longer susceptible to certain kinds of mental oppression. She had finally come to realize that she had power over her own brain. Shouldn’t it worry Nina that Leo’s former girlfriend was talking about getting out from under a lifetime of mental bondage? The old girlfriend always turned out to be the one you should have listened to. In which case, what about Madame Cordier…?

“It’s happening now,” said Nina. “The worldwide mind control, I mean. Not the part about the space aliens, of course. But the right-wing nationalist propaganda. All those dead pigs on TV.”

“All those dead pigs? All
what
dead pigs? Earth to Nina. Hello-o.”

“Remember?” said Nina. “The documentary? The peasant couple killing the pig? You said the pig’s name was Dreyfus.”

“Ah, poor Dreyfus,” Leo said. “Was there more than one pig?”

“Before you got here,” said Nina. “There was one dead pig a night.” But already, those nights and those pigs had receded so far into the past that Nina half-wondered if she’d imagined the nightly pig executions.

“How can you know
what
to think?” Nina said. “Everything you think is real could be flipped around by one essential fact you learn only later on. It could all turn out to be totally different from whatever you’d thought.”

“Meaning what?” Leo said. “I’m not sure I see where all of this is going. Meaning that reality is subjective? Did you just discover this, Nina? Congratulations!”

“Meaning that before you got here,” said Nina, “I thought you weren’t coming to Paris, and everything looked hopeless. Miserable. Gloomy. Tragic. Everywhere I looked, I saw women with broken hearts smashing their sculpture, women videotaping hateful guys and getting bit on the face by parrots.”

Nina stopped, out of breath. This was the closest she had ever come to a declaration of how much she needed Leo—or at least how much she mourned for him when he wasn’t around.

“Bit by parrots?” said Leo.

“In a pet shop,” said Nina. “But now the whole city seems fine again. Everyone is happy and in love and eating wonderful sweetbreads and skate. I guess you could say I was having a world-class epistemological crisis. First I thought one set of things was real, and then I found out it was something else….”

“An ontological crisis, no? Reality’s the issue here. Not epistemology—how we know what we know. I adore you, Nina. But if that’s the problem, then really, you must still be having your crisis. We
all
are. Constantly. Daily. Can you say for sure what’s real right now? What’s real is that none of us can hope to be certain about anything for longer than half a minute. Obviously, I’m delighted that I could so thoroughly brighten your day. But are we still on the tiresome subject of your thinking I wouldn’t join you, that I was shipping you off to Paris to make you languish here without me?”

That was exactly what Nina thought, though she hadn’t said so, exactly.

“And whose face got bitten by parrots? Nina, why are you being so—”

The owner took their empty plates with a gesture that promised that their main courses were only a heartbeat away.

Oh, why had Nina ordered duck? It required so much chewing and concentration when she needed her wits about her just to figure out what Leo was saying.

“What beautiful potatoes,” Leo said.

He was right. The potatoes were ravishing: small wedges fried golden brown and flecked with fragrant mites of parsley, pepper, caramelized onion, and garlic. Leo forked up two chunks and put them in his mouth, chewed….

Tears began streaming down Leo’s face.

“Leo, what is it?” cried Nina. She had never seen Leo cry. Upsetting visions danced before her, fiendish recipes from hell involving handfuls of cayenne pepper or a splash of carbolic acid instead of the balsamic. But Leo didn’t seem to be in pain—just terribly unhappy. Nina thought that if she stared at Leo and didn’t let her attention waver, her focus might somehow generate a protective bubble around them and spare Leo the added pain of strangers watching him weep.

But finally Nina couldn’t help herself and surreptitiously checked around. Two booths over, a handsome woman wearing a black-and-white checked turban, and with spaces between her front teeth that made her mouth look checked as well, sat across from a small wrinkled dog, curled up in its chair. The woman’s lips were moving. Was she talking to the dog? With a shiver of panic, Nina realized that the world around her had ducked back behind the fright mask it had worn before Leo got here. So Leo was right once again: Her crisis was ongoing.

By now Leo had calmed down enough to speak. It seemed that in Nina’s absence he’d seen a television program in which a noted forensic pathologist discussed his most famous cases. Many of these involved the last meals found in victims’ stomachs. Of all foods, said the medical examiner, potatoes took longest to digest. Now Leo was eating potatoes, the apotheosis of delectable fried potatoes, and all that he could think about was the doctor saying how long potatoes lasted in the stomachs of the dead.

Leo said, “Everything’s like that now. Why not just admit it? Everywhere I look, I see nothing but mortality and death. It doesn’t matter if I’m with you, Nina. In Paris or New York. The old Estonian lady on the flight, she was going to die, and the children on the plane, they were dying, we’re dying. I’m dying, minute by minute…. It’s not exactly news, I know. But sometimes it just kicks in.”

“Sex and death,” Nina chirped with artificial brightness meant to hide the fact that she was reeling from the shock of hearing Leo say it didn’t matter if he was with her or not. Relax. All he’d said was that Nina’s presence didn’t diminish his awareness that someday he had to die. Well, all right. Nina could live with that.

“What else is there besides sex and death, Leo?” she said.

“Death and no sex.” Leo sighed. “Death’s been on my mind, is all. Before I was even conscious of it. Why else would I have gotten the idea of staying in famous dead people’s hotel rooms? And poor Nina can’t even take a bath without my thinking she’s drowned. It’s because I’m Jewish. I envy you, Nina. I do.”

“Envy me what?” said Nina.

“Not being Jewish,” said Leo.

Was Leo saying that Protestants didn’t fear death? They’d brought skulls and hell to New England before the Jews even got there. But maybe Leo was right—at least about Nina. Lately, she rarely thought of death. She’d known her plane wasn’t going to crash without the Hasidim’s prayers. Death wouldn’t waste its grim surprise on her when she was already so wretched. And how could she possibly find the time to worry about her mortality when she needed every waking minute to wonder if Leo loved her?