Guided Tours of Hell (10 page)

The Provençal couple was eating now, steaming platters of
boudin noir
, meat with sauce—delicious, even in black-and-white. Nina could hardly remember the pig. Anyone would have killed it.

The camera zoomed in on the Provençal farm wife, laughing, enjoying her food. You could see she was missing some teeth. Then she spotted the camera. Her face set, and she stopped laughing. In the quick half-second before she scowled and shut her shining lips, her eyes had that look of remembering, ingested, along with the pig.

C
HILDREN WERE BURIED, STANDING
up in a row, their heads budding out of the ground, and the Provençal farmer raced back and forth, playing them like a marimba. As he hit their skulls with a mallet, the children began to sing, percussive chimes that turned into the sound of someone banging on Nina’s door.

Nina flew out of bed and opened the door before she’d had time to wonder why anyone would be knocking. In another hotel she might have assumed it was the maid, come to clean.

Reassuringly, the man at her door was carrying a tray.

“Bonjour, Madame,”
he said. The man wore a houndstooth jacket, a slicked-back shelf of dyed red hair, and the smile of a friendly iguana. Had he been downstairs when she checked in? Nina would have remembered—if she could remember checking in.

But now she did remember, though mostly what she recalled was how different it had been this time, checking in without Leo. Together they used to generate a faint sexual commotion, showing off and leaning close together over the swift exchanges of credit cards and keys. Alone, Nine thought it best to keep the lowest possible profile, to occupy no space at all and at last become invisible as the nun’s cell of an elevator came to spirit her off to her room. Nina was fairly relaxed in hotels, but you’d have to have no animal instinct whatsoever not to be alert: sleeping in a new place, alone, completely surrounded by strangers. And now one such stranger—a peculiar one—was at the door of her room.

“Bonjour, Monsieur,”
Nina said.

The redheaded man brushed past Nina and set his tray on the dresser. On the tray was a bottle, a coffeepot, a glass. The rest was draped in plastic wrap. You rarely saw that in France. She watched the man take in the musty room, the slightly grimy white bra she’d slipped off from under her sweater when she’d crawled into bed in her clothes. That was a whole day and night ago. It was morning again. That is, Nina hoped it was light outside beyond the heavy shutters.

One problem was that Leo had very clear ideas about what to do, and in what order, on arriving in a new city. Nina used to have her own ideas before she and Leo were together. She’d gone to London and Berlin, to interview artists for
Squeeze
. But as soon as she’d started traveling with Leo, she’d surrendered her passport to him and become dependent on
his
jet lag cure, which involved going straight to bed in the pretty hotel rooms, making love for an hour or two until the change in time was just another detail peripheral to Nina and Leo. Then they would nap for a while, go out and walk around, have coffee, then dinner, then bed again, and by that time feel totally normal.

“Madame is over her jet lag?” asked the redheaded man, in English.

Nina’s mind was racing. Was there a bill to sign? A tip to give? Leo always took care of that.

“Oui! J’espère!”
Nina was almost shouting.

She hadn’t slept at all on the flight. A disturbing thing had happened.

There were many Hasidic passengers who were going on to Antwerp and who kept rushing to pray in back of the plane as if on an urgent mission. One of the men bumped into Nina. But she wasn’t annoyed at all. She was grateful to him and his friends for the prayers that were keeping the plane in the air.

Evidently, this feeling was not shared by the three couples across the aisle from Nina; Belgian, Italian, Austrian—they had just met and were playing cards. Each time the Hasidim rushed by, a nasty pause fell over the game and the cardplayers shuddered and sneered, and then everyone burst out laughing.

Nina wanted to yell at them or say something brilliant and cutting. But what would she have said? Also there was a good chance that whatever Nina started might get ugly or scary, and continue or escalate for the rest of the flight. She was guiltily relieved that Leo wasn’t with her.

Leo blamed what flaws he found in himself—sinusitis, anxieties, a lack of athletic ability—on his being Jewish. But he also seemed to blame Nina for
not
being Jewish. And so whenever the subject came up, a wedge of distance and rancor would insert itself between them, and many kisses and caresses would be needed to work it loose.

Nina had grown up in New York. Everyone she
knew
was Jewish! She’d never given it any thought until Leo made her so self-conscious that now, whenever she tried to describe to herself the sort of person Leo was (smart, articulate, sensitive, sensual, chronically anxious) she wondered if she were actually seeing him, if she were
capable
of seeing him—or was she just falling back on a series of vile anti-Semitic clichés.

It was Leo who’d made her worry that she might be anti-Semitic. Nina wasn’t anti-Semitic! The few times she had dozed on the plane, she’d been jolted awake by a shock of adrenaline and hate for the card-playing couples. That must be why she’d slept so much ever since her arrival to Paris.

Nina considered telling the red-haired man the story about the airplane, and even about Leo. Or she considered it up to the point at which her ability to speak was snuffed out by his fixed patient smile. Did the breakfast he’d brought, if that’s what is was, come free with the room? Or was there a bill she was meant to pay? Did someone imagine she’d ordered this? And why was the man just standing there? Was he being solicitous—or sinister? Their attention drifted to the flickering TV. Nina must have turned off the sound and fallen asleep with the picture on. She and the man watched some French parents embracing children with a fervor suggesting that the children had just been released after a perilous hostage crisis. Following this came a montage of attractive, ravaged-looking Bosnians carrying wounded comrades and family members away from street fights and battles.

“Terrible.” The man sighed breathily.

“Really bad,” said Nina.

The redheaded man held Nina’s eyes in his neutral gaze. “Would Madame like the shutters open?”

“That would be nice,” she said.

Did he not know what was out there? What was in his mind as he wrestled open the shutters so that he and Nina could look down on a layered geometry of flat sandy roofs pocked with oily puddles and black pipes belching smoke and gas? On the largest roof three cats scrabbled around in circles, clawing at a sheet of plastic wrap the wind lifted and spun between them.

The plastic wrap guided Nina back to the dresser and the food tray. On the tray an individual box of breakfast cereal sat in a bowl at a jaunty angle, beside a metal thimble of cream and two baggy tangerines. The Perrier bottle was open and—was Nina still dreaming?—half-empty. She looked quizzically at the redheaded man who looked quizzically back. Not everyone might complain about the cereal and fruit, but the open bottle was inarguably over the top.

I’m being tested, thought Nina.

“Uh…did I order this?” she said.

The man straightened his jacket collar. “Compliments of the hotel.”

So Leo had alerted them. He did that, more often than not, dropped some reference to
Allo!
while making reservations that translated into fruit plates, champagne, and love notes from the management. He’d said it was essential if you had to be sure of sleeping in the actual room where Sarah Bernhardt slept in her coffin. Besides, whom did it hurt? Travel was not a science experiment requiring that one be strictly objective. They had integrity, they would tell the truth even if the hotel was bad.

The redheaded man said, “Madame Cordier would like to invite you for coffee. She will meet you at ten-thirty sharp, an hour from now, in the bar.”

This was the downside of the fruit and champagne: the annoying phone calls from hotel managers asking what they could do, and was there anything special Leo and Nina wanted—when all they desired was each other, and they could hardly say that. The obligatory handshake, the stiff chat in the lobby…

“Thank you,” said Nina. “I mean, please thank Madame. But I have a million things to do.”

What things? Nina hadn’t left her hotel room since she’d got to Paris.

The man said, “Madame is especially eager because you have a friend in common….”

And now Nina experienced one of those moments of blankness, like the brief lag it took her to process the fact that the TV wasn’t in color, the split second before the Provençal farm wife noticed the camera watching. This slight lapse threw Nina off, so that when at last she understood, she recoiled as if the red-haired man wouldn’t stop yelling Leo’s name, though in fact he had said it only once, and without raising his voice in the slightest.

E
VERY PART OF MADAME
Cordier, seemed to be tapping at once: her fingernails on the table, her foot against the floor, her high heels on the linoleum as she stood and straightened her skirt and tapped over to shake Nina’s hand.

She was small, in her early forties, doll-like, crisp and perfect. Her cap of blond hair, her dove-colored suit with its nipped waist and tiny skirt made Nina acutely conscious of having slept in her clothes. Everything about Madame was outlined in sharp pencil, while Nina, all in smudged charcoal, exuded an oily ring onto the page. She shuddered with furious regret. Why hadn’t she bathed and changed?

“Are you cold? We can turn up the heat,” said Madame in a high fluting voice. The woman who’d been screaming all night cried out once in Nina’s mind. Surely that wasn’t Madame Cordier, who surely didn’t live here. In fact, what was she doing here, this stylish overbred woman, in this unreconstructed crummy hotel on the far edge of Montparnasse?

The breakfast room had low tables and upholstered armchairs, like in a good hotel. Perhaps they’d been bought or stolen from a good hotel and left among the grimy mirrors, the scabrous checked linoleum, the spotty glare and furious buzz of the fluorescent tubing. Behind the small bar were two shelves of liquor bottles glued shut by dust, their labels stained sugary brown.

“No, thanks, I’m fine,” said Nina. “I think I’m still a bit jet-lagged.”

“In this direction, it’s terrible,” said Madame. “The other way I quite like it. Waking up all ready”—she widened her eyes—“at three o’clock in the morning.”

Ready for what? All at once Nina was certain that Madame had been Leo’s lover at some time during the decade or so that Leo had lived in France. What was Leo up to now? What else, what new bizarre trick did he have planned next for Nina?

It was uncomfortable being with Leo’s ex-mistress in a foreign country, her country, a cheap hotel, her hotel, which for some reason Nina seemed unable to physically leave. But it got Nina’s attention. She gave Leo credit for that. And as Madame sat down with a single gesture that left her back and shoulders straight, her knees perched at a graceful angle and the ideal distance from the awkward low table, Nina had a moment of near happiness: She liked being here in Paris, agreeing ever so smarmily with this chic Parisienne that transatlantic jet lag was an everyday inconvenience.

Madame motioned for Nina to sit, then smacked a bell on the table.

“Deux cafés,”
Madame told an Arab girl. “With milk?” she asked Nina.

“Un café au lait,”
Nina said. The waitress looked at her, uncomprehending.

“Un café au lait,”
said Madame, with more success. “Your flight was smooth, I trust.”

“Sort of,” Nina said. What would she add if Madame followed up on that sort
of
? Would she say that the Belgian couple had pushed in front of her twice, once at the check-in counter, once again while boarding, so she had focused on them, despised them long before they began their anti-Semitic eye-rolling knee-slapping good time?

Did that call into question that purity of Nina’s response to their filthy sneering race hatred? Would Nina find some subtle means of signaling Madame that she wasn’t Jewish? Oh, Leo was right to have left her and to have devised this wicked good-bye, packing her off to his former mistress in a sleazy whorehouse.

“Always it’s sort of,” said Madame. “Unless one takes the Concorde.”

“This was coach,” said Nina.

“Pity,” Madame said. And then, after a pause, “You
are
writing for
Allo!
?”

Nina nodded vehemently. “Low budget. We always fly coach.”

That
we
hung in the breakfast room like a hive of hostile bees shifting and thrumming between them. Madame tossed her head and raked her short blond hair with her fingers.

“How is dear Leo?” she said.

How did normal people navigate these conversational shoals when the current seemed to be spinning you toward the churning rapids of confession? What if Nina surrendered and told Madame the whole story: How, from the night she’d met Leo, she’d felt helpless, out of control, how once she’d run twenty blocks to a bar from which he’d called, wanting to see her. At first she’d been playacting, pretending that nothing else existed, nothing mattered beyond the well of white light in which she lay with Leo, until at some unguarded moment the game changed and became real, and she looked away from Leo and the world had ceased to exist, or at least his absence had bleached out all its color and now turned all Paris a muddy gray and left her a prisoner in her hotel room.

Telling Madame
that
would certainly change the terms of their brief acquaintance, ratchet their level of intimacy up a notch or two. Perhaps she would even mention that conversation in Leo’s office, how her silly pleased smile had stuck on her face like a fly trapped in amber. She wished she could remember when exactly she’d figured out that their romantic long weekend in Paris was a trip she’d be taking alone. She would describe how he’d made her cry, his
Nina, I’m over here
.