Guided Tours of Hell

by Francine Prose

  “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.

  “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.

  “WHAT 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 th
ey 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 Mada
me 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.

  AS 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.