The Two Hotel Francforts

by David Leavitt

  “You never scratch my back anymore. You used to. All the time.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been tired.”

  “It’s since we met the Frelengs.”

  “Oh, but Julia, it’s not because of Iris—”

  “I didn’t say it was.”

  “No, I mean, it’s not because of you. It’s just that the days here are so long, and by the time they’re over—”

  “It’s all that tromping around you do with Edward. It would wear anyone out.”

  “Yes.”

  “Iris says we should count ourselves lucky, since as long as you two are off together, at least you’re not succumbing to the wiles of foreign seductresses. I find I weary of Iris … Oh yes, there. Lower. To the left. Up a bit. Is that a mosquito bite?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  My wrist was going numb. Julia’s breathing deepened, and as it did, I slowed the motion of my fingers to match it. What relief I had experienced earlier was quickly dissipating, giving way to worry and grief. For something must have gotten through to Julia, some cognizance of love felt or voiced where it should not have been, or else she would never have thought I was in love with anyone. I never had been, after all. Not with anyone but her.

  I had a terrible headache. The moonlight, though dull, held intimations of sharpness, as if shards of the noonday sun were embedded in it. All I had to do was get up and close the shutters—yet if I was to get up and close the shutters, I would have to let her go—and this I dared not do.

  “When they get back to the States, they’re going on a lecture tour,” she said a moment later, a little drowsily. “Forty cities.”

  I kept scratching. I tried not to scratch too hard.

  “Funny—Edward never mentioned it.”

  “Really? Iris won’t shut up about it. Apparently she got a clause put in the contract that they mustn’t travel and perform on the same day. Someone told her that’s how it is for opera singers, and so she said, ‘What goes for opera singers should go for authors.’”

  “Clever of her.”

  “Pete … Do you ever wish we hadn’t met them? The Frelengs?”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know … Sometimes it just seems that things were simpler before. When it was just us. I mean … I have no idea what I mean.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s been a long day. For both of us.” And I moved my hand lower, to the cleft above her lean buttocks—at which she let out a little high-pitched sigh, almost a whinny.

  Another minute passed and she turned to me. “Forgive me for how I’ve been behaving,” she said. “I’m falling all to pieces these days.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “I’m the one who should be apologizing.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Oh, Pete … My Pete …”

  Then she took my hand and pressed it between her legs, held it in the grip of her strong thighs.

  “I love you,” I said, not sure if I was lying—for I hadn’t spoken her name.

  Chapter 21

  Later that night I woke suddenly. For a few seconds I had no idea where I was or whom I was with. I was naked, as was this person sleeping next to me. Julia never slept naked, so how could this be Julia? I never slept naked, so how could this be me? I sat up—and that was when I saw her pajamas and mine tangled together on the floor. Wan moonlight filled the room. It made the furniture look as if it were phosphorescing.

  I had no idea what time it was. I thought it must be very late, but when I checked my watch I found that it was only two in the morning. Ordinarily at two in the morning we would have just been getting back to the hotel, brushing our teeth. Then I remembered how early we had gone to bed the night before, and with that memory came a sensation of sinking, of being dragged down into a disturbed wakefulness deeper than sleep, stranger than dreams. As quietly as I could, I got out of bed. I dressed in the dark and went out. The light in the corridor hurt my eyes. All the doors were shut, even the one belonging to the woman Julia had dubbed Messalina, the woman who stood all day in her doorway, smoking, waiting for someone who never arrived … The lift was broken, so I took the stairs. I had to tip the night porter to be sure that he would let me back in. There was no one in the street. All I could hear was the distant rumble of taxis, the sleep-cooing of pigeons. I walked to the Rossio, where for a while I stood in front of the Francfort Hotel, looking up at the moon. A few lit windows studded the dark facade. None of these, I knew, belonged to Edward, for his and Iris’s room, he had told me, faced in the other direction, onto the market. And in that room—what was happening now? Were they naked? Was Daisy in the bed with them? There was so much more about them that I didn’t know than that I did.

  How long ago had it been that I had taken the train to Estoril, and hoped that when I got there I would find Edward waiting for me, and then, when I had gotten there, he had been waiting for me? A week at most. So why did it now seem too much to wish for that if I stared hard enough at the door to the Francfort Hotel, it would open and he would step through it? And still I gave it a try. I focused all my attention on that door, willed it to open, willed him to step through it … But he didn’t. Considering the hour, the Rossio was tranquil. A beggar cried for alms, an old man sang a fado, from the Chave d’Ouro a couple emerged—the man in black tie, the woman in an evening gown—and made their way to the fountain near the statue of Dom Pedro, where they took off their shoes and stepped gingerly up over the rim and into the water. But then a policeman appeared, and they got out and skittered away. I saw that I had two choices—I could stay here all night or I could go back to my room—so I decided to go back. Despite the tip, the porter answered the door grumpily, and when I asked him if he could make me a sandwich, either he did not understand me or he pretended not to understand me. Back in the room, I tiptoed so as not to wake Julia. I took off my clothes and was about to put on my pajamas when I remembered that I had not had them on before I went out. Naked again, I climbed over Julia into the bed. She flopped around onto her back. It was only when I had the sheets pulled over my chest that I realized I had once again forgotten to close the shutters.

  Chapter 22

  For the rest of the night I didn’t sleep. Is there really such a thing as a sleepless night? Much later, a psychiatrist would tell me that people who complain of sleepless nights actually do sleep—but dream they are awake. To me this is one of those fine distinctions that mean nothing.

  In any case, my memory of that night is less of anxious inertia than of ceaseless and exhaustive labor. I was in our Paris apartment—not the apartment as I had lived in it, but as it had been photographed for Vogue: bleached of color, bereft of human presence, expensive, cold, magnificent, and austere. All night I walked the corridors and paced the rooms, trying to commit them to memory, a surveyor without tools. I have a poor sense of direction—though there might be an alarm clock in my head, there is no compass—and so I have never quite accepted that the apartment faced south on one side and north on the other, because to me it felt as if it faced east on one side and west on the other. That was something else I did during that night: try to situate the apartment in space, correct my perspective, align myself.

  Obviously I felt guilty—for how I had talked about the apartment, for my cavalier treatment of Julia. “Beautiful things are their own reward,” she had said—words at which I had scoffed. Yet who was I to doubt their authenticity, I whose aesthetic sense was no more sophisticated than Daisy’s? Most people are exactly what they appear to be, I have found. To imagine otherwise—to think that in our absence our loved ones lead secret lives, sleep with the concierge’s son, shoplift diamonds—is just self-amusement. I wish Julia hadn’t spent so much time playing solitaire, but she did, and so it made sense that she should have wanted an expensive, cold, magnificent, austere apartment to play it in. Nor was the woman who stayed home and played cards all that remote from the girl who had defied her family and run off with me to Paris. For the signal quality of
Julia’s character was immobility of purpose—and is it such a long journey from immobility of purpose to immobility? Too often, what looks like change is really just a hardening of the spirit.

  In any case, she slept that night. Her breathing slowed, her skin cooled. The engine idled. The resumption of sexual relations, I am told, often has a soporific effect on women. For me it was unsettling. I was now so habituated to Edward’s body, its hardness and hairiness and seeming indestructibility, that I found myself treating Julia with an excess of caution, as if I were Gulliver and she some Lilliputian bride … Not that my wife was delicate. Far from it. Though small, she was sturdy—as sturdy as Edward. My fear of crushing her physically, I knew, was really a fear of crushing her morally … I wondered if this was how my father had felt, returning from his mistress to find my mother passed out at the kitchen table: regretful, guilty, sorry—and wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of there. And, at the same time, glad to be home. For there is always something comforting about returning home, especially when you have been tramping about in the wilderness, rowing and boxing. It is like meeting someone with whom you share a native language after weeks of stumbling about in a foreign one. The fluency comes as a relief, even if the things you need to say most you cannot say.

  At long last, the sun rose. Julia got out of bed. I kept my eyes shut until I heard the bathroom door click shut. Then I jumped up and got dressed.

  “Oh,” she said when she came out. “I thought you were asleep.” She too was dressed. She had dressed on the sly, where I couldn’t watch her.

  “No, I’m up.” I felt my pocket for the keys. “Well, are you ready?”

  “I’m ready,” she said. “But, Pete … couldn’t we have breakfast here this morning? At the hotel?”

  “Why? What’s wrong with the Suiça?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it. I’ve just been thinking, why waste the money when breakfast here is included in the price? And since we’ve been in Lisbon, we’ve been spending money right and left.”

  “A cup of coffee’s not going to make any difference.”

  “Restaurants, drinks, gasoline for all those excursions you make with Edward. Things add up. Do we even have enough cash to pay the hotel bill? Have you checked?”

  “We will when I sell the car.”

  “But you haven’t sold the car.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll sell it.”

  “I can’t see why you haven’t sold it already, given how eager you claim to be to get away.”

  It was this last remark that took the wind out of my sails. We went downstairs. The dining room was crowded with our fellow guests, none of whom I had bothered to get to know and few of whom I recognized. There was only one free table. It abutted, on one side, the door to the kitchen, and on the other a woman so fat that I could barely squeeze past her to get into my chair.

  “God forbid she should get up to make room,” I said.

  “Not so loud,” Julia said. “She’s speaking English.”

  The woman was indeed speaking English—that schoolroom English that is the lingua franca of exile. “Me, I have a visa, I have money,” she was telling a companion whose back was turned toward us, “and now they say me I cannot sail on the Manhattan—the Manhattan is only for Americans.”

  “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “They’re only letting Americans on the Manhattan.”

  “I know. Iris told me. What of it?”

  “But there can’t possibly be more than six or seven hundred Americans in Portugal. The ship will sail half-empty.”

  “What a pity. It means I can’t give her my ticket.”

  “The Liberty statue, she turns her back on me and spits,” the woman said.

  A waiter in a stained uniform approached our table, poured us coffee from a dented silver pot, and was gone again. I took one sip of the coffee and spit it out.

  “This coffee is terrible. It’s even worse than at French hotels.”

  “Really? I don’t see what’s wrong with it.”

  “Then why are you putting in sugar? You never put in sugar.”

  “I’m allowed to put sugar in if I want. Anyway, you’re putting it in.”

  “Yes, but I always put it in. And why hasn’t he brought us anything to eat? Garçon!”

  “Just relax. You’re not going to starve.”

  “At the Suiça we’d have been served by now.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, if you’re so keen to go to the Suiça, just go.”

  “I’m only pointing out that if the purpose of this exercise is to get our money’s worth, the least we can expect is something to eat. Or is this really about the Frelengs?”

  “What about them?”

  “That we’re more likely to run into them at the Suiça.”

  “I’m not afraid of running into them.”

  Unceremoniously, the waiter dropped a basket of croissants onto our table. I bit into one. “These are stale,” I said. “They’re not even proper croissants. Only the French know how to make proper croissants. Italian ones are bad enough, and these are—Julia?”

  But she was gone. Vanished. It was as if a portrait had run out of its frame.

  I found her in the room, furiously rubbing lotion into her hands.

  “What happened? Why did you leave?”

  “It was her. Aunt Rosalie.”

  “Where?”

  “In the dining room. I don’t think she saw me. I think I got out in time. Go down and see if she’s still there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because otherwise I’ll have to stay in the room all day.”

  “All right. But Julia—how will I know her?”

  “She was sitting two tables away from us. Alone. Wearing a cap—a sort of sailor cap.”

  I returned downstairs. Sure enough, two tables from ours sat a woman in a sailor cap. She was not Aunt Rosalie. She was Georgina Kendall.

  “Ahoy!” she called, waving with nautical gusto. “Eddie’s friend, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m so bad with faces, I wasn’t sure. Join me for coffee, won’t you? Was that your wife? She left in rather a hurry.”

  “She wasn’t feeling well.”

  “Too much absinthe, I’ll bet.” She winked. In the glare of the dining room I saw how spotted her skin was, like the endpapers of a book. “Now, I’m sure you’re wondering what I’m doing here, and I’ll tell you. We got thrown out of our hotel in Estoril. It was Lucy’s fault. That girl! She had too much champagne and tipped over a vase. One of those big Chinese vases. Ten to one it was a fake, but try convincing a hotel manager of that. Luckily, our driver took pity on us and brought us here. Not the Aviz, but, as I told Lucy, it’s only for a few days, until the Manhattan sails. She wanted to take the Clipper, but one has to draw the line somewhere. I’m not made of money! And what about you? Will you be sailing on the Manhattan?”

  “Us? Yes.”

  She leaned in confidentially. “You’ve heard, of course, that they’ve decided not to let foreigners on board. Such a lot of griping about that, though if you ask me, it’s the only way. Especially after what happened last month, when the Manhattan went to Genoa. The idea was the same as here, to pick up stranded Americans, only they didn’t bother to control the sales of the tickets, and foreigners bought them all up. Jews. A friend of mine was on board, she wrote to me about it. The ship was packed to the gills with ’em! They were camped out on the floor of the Palm Room, the Grand Salon, even the post office. So many babies, the laundry couldn’t cope with the diapers. Now, I hope you believe me when I tell you that I have all the sympathy in the world for those people—all the sympathy in the world—but when we reach the point where an American citizen can’t get his laundry done on an American ship … Well, the line has to be drawn somewhere, don’t you agree?”

  “And how is your book going?”

  “Oh, like a dream. You know, I really don’t understand what Eddie w
as carrying on about that night. All I can think is that he’s planning a book of his own and he’s mad that I’ve beat him to the punch. And are he and Violet sailing on the Manhattan, too?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Oh, good. We’ll have loads of fun, the five of us. The six of us. And really, you must admit”—here her voice downshifted into seriousness—“it’ll be a far more pleasant journey, far more pleasant, if it’s just our sort.”

  The waiter arrived with coffee—which gave me the chance I had been looking for to make my excuses and return to the room.

  Julia was standing by the window, peering out at the street.

  “What took you so long? Was she there?”

  “No. I mean, yes. But it wasn’t her. That’s why I was so long. I knew her. I’d met her with Edward.”

  “Who?”

  “That woman. The one who isn’t your aunt.”

  “But it was my aunt. You must have been talking to the wrong person.”

  “Julia, how many women in sailor caps do you think there are in that dining room?” I touched her on the shoulder and she flinched. “Really, darling, you shouldn’t be so nervous—”

  “Stop it. It was her. I saw her.”

  “I’m sure you think you saw her. But you were mistaken. It’s probably because you’re so nervous—”

  “Don’t believe anything she tells you. Promise me you won’t. She’s a liar.”

  “Julia—”

  “My mother thinks she killed Uncle Edgar. Very convenient that he was buried at sea. It meant there couldn’t be an autopsy.”

  “But I thought he died of a diabetic coma.”

  “We only have her word for that. Hers and the ship doctor’s—and God knows they can’t be trusted … And to think that she actually had the nerve to come back to New York every winter, and take a suite at the St. Regis—the St. Regis, of all places!—and throw tea parties. Of course, we always refused her invitations. Well, I went once. Just out of curiosity. And God, what a disappointment that was. I’d expected her at least to be glamorous. Instead of which, here was this lumpy little thing in Dior. And she couldn’t even see that she was being snubbed. That was the irony of it. She thought she was having her cake and eating it too, that she could live it up in France and come home and be welcomed with open arms.”