Guided Tours of Hell (11 page)

And perhaps she would discover: The same thing had happened to Madame! Then they would be more than intimates. They would be sisters, fellow victims. Why not fling herself at Madame’s feet? Leo had made her realize that she was a passionate person.

But wait. Wouldn’t it be far worse to see Nina’s private tragedy reduced to one of Leo’s bad habits? And whom was she going to tell all this to? Leo’s former mistress? Nina wasn’t one of those people who confessed their darkest secrets to the first person who made eye contact with them for more than half a second. She hadn’t needed Leo to enroll her in the Billie Holiday school of manners, to tell her that mystery and passion lasted longer if one refrained from discussing one’s
relationship
, from analyzing one’s
feelings
. What amazed her most was that—in light of everything that was occurring—it still cheered her immensely to recall that she and Leo had this…reserve…in common.

“Oh, Leo? He’s fine,” said Nina.

“I am sure Leo’s fine,” said Madame. “The streets will be littered with corpses and Leo will still be fine.”

“Pardon me?” said Nina.

The waitress had brought their breakfast. Nina poured her coffee with what she hoped was panache but the pot was soon leaking a fecal ring onto the snowy white tablecloth. Her first bite of croissant scattered buttery flakes all over her chest. Madame tore off the end of her croissant and nibbled at the crusty fang, all the while gazing at Nina. The subject was not to be changed.

No other conversation would be permitted until Nina said, “How do you know Leo?”

“I know Leo many years,” Madame said. “I met him in Tours. I was married, with three little children. My husband was a professor; we lived in a house with many students. This was the sixties. Sixty-eight. Leo came to visit. There was a big demonstration at school, but one of my children was sick. I stayed home and Leo stayed with me. Everyone in the house was arrested at the demonstration. And by the time they got out of jail, I’d taken my kids and gone to Paris with Leo.”

“Wow,” said Nina. The envy she felt was so instinctive, so pure and unalloyed, it was like hearing that someone you hate had just been given a prize or a fortune. But what was she jealous of, really? That Madame Cordier had once had a chance to wreck her life for Leo?

“Yes. Wow.” Madame Cordier curled her lip, a reflexive tic of nostalgia. “Leo had a tiny apartment. My children slept in the kitchen. My kids were very good kids, but Leo couldn’t bear it. One morning he said he was leaving. Leaving me. Leaving Paris. Going to Provence, to Aries, to try and finish his novel.”

“Leo was writing a novel?” Nina loved this new view of Leo as some corny bozo who’d left New York and gone to France to try and write a novel. She was, however, depressed by the unseemly fervor with which she’d latched onto this sudden chance to sneer and look down on Leo.

“All the American guys were writing novels,” said Madame. “Novels about American guys who come to France to write novels.”

Madame Cordier and Nina laughed, mirthlessly. “I stayed on with my children. I was very sad. Very blue. I was drinking lots of red wine. Bad wine. Then I got hit by a taxi.”

Nina winced, but Madame held up her hand. “It knocked some sense in my head. When I got out of hospital, I was in a cast, on crutches. So I got my children from my mother’s and moved in with a man, the only man I knew with a street-floor apartment. No stairs. He was a friend of Leo’s. He was nice to me and the children. Then one day Leo came to the door. My new boyfriend wasn’t home. Leo and I went to a hotel, a hotel like this one….” Madame looked around and shrugged. “It took me no time to realize that my new lover was a mistake.”

So there it was, what Madame and Nina shared, not just a distant mutual friend. Surprise! What they had in common was that sex with Leo had made everything else seem like a mistake. Not that Nina knew what exactly “sex with Leo” meant—what exactly she and Leo had done that he might have done with this other person. It was so hard to remember sex; you remembered your surroundings, the distractions, the interruptions—strangely, the very things that you forgot about first, at the time. At home, Nina still had notes on the rooms, as if what had happened between them had anything to do with Colette’s bed, with Oscar Wilde’s bathtub.

“I would never have gone back to Leo,” Madame said. “Except that I found out there had been an unfortunate misunderstanding. I thought that Leo had left me—left me! But when he came back into my life, he swore that he had told me: He would be gone only three months, and then he would return. He swore he told me to wait for him, to wait for him in Paris. But don’t you think I would remember that? Wouldn’t a woman pay attention when her man is telling her when he will be coming back?”

“You’d think so,” Nina said weakly. How was she supposed to know what had been said or not said, understood or misunderstood, what had fallen into the gaps between Leo’s French and Madame’s English? But she was right: You
would
pay attention, you’d want to get those facts straight.

That afternoon in Leo’s office, when he told her she was going to Paris, Nina had been attentive. But obviously she’d found it hard to follow what Leo was saying. Maybe Leo was someone who had trouble making himself clear. But the Leo she knew valued clarity. People made investments, medical and travel decisions based on what they read in his newsletters. Maybe it was all a simple, regrettable misunderstanding. She should have asked if it meant anything, his sending her to Paris without him. Any sane person would have asked. But not, apparently, Nina, who was too proud and too well schooled by Leo to ask this seemingly basic question.

“And then?” said Nina.

“And nothing,” said Madame. “I am a passionate woman. Those were romantic times. Every girl in Paris wanted to be Jeanne Moreau. Or Jean Seberg. Or Anne Magnani, Maria Callas. Anyway, a martyr.”

Madame turned down the sides of her mouth, her Jeanne Moreau imitation. And indeed she did have that preoccupied look of fatigued, combustible brooding. She said, “There was a Billie Holiday song that Leo used to play….”

Oh, great, thought Nina. “Don’t Explain.” Leo had probably played it for a whole harem, a whole lifetime of passionate women. It had never occurred to Nina that this was what Leo was
really
doing. He wasn’t playing a song that moved him so deeply he couldn’t listen, a song that expressed the romantic potential of Nina’s passionate soul. He wasn’t even instructing her in how he wanted her to behave. He was just employing a time-tested seduction technique that he had been using on women—successfully!—for over twenty years.

“Was this when Leo was married?” said Nina.

“Married?” Madame Cordier frowned prettily. “Maybe Leo was married. Yes. A skinny American girl, maybe she had money. When Leo spent his last traveler’s check, they always fell madly in love again.”

Madame smiled, flashing pointy teeth like the white tips of Halloween candy. There had been a bowl of candy corn on Leo’s desk that day, a lovely Japanese bowl in a high-glazed mossy green. Leo loved ironic gestures like that: pop, cross-cultural, stylish. After his
Nina, I’m over here,
she’d turned back from the window and counted the triangular striped candies until she’d regained control of her face and could calmly get up and leave.
See you soon
, he’d told her….

Nina gazed coolly at Madame Cordier. Nina didn’t even have a savings account, so that couldn’t be why Leo liked her.

“I am glad I am French,” Madame said. “We are practical. Hard-headed. I buy and remodel hotels. I never thought till this moment that maybe this is why I go into the business. That maybe it had something to do with that hotel I went to with Leo. But I don’t think so. No. Do you? Really, it’s too ridiculous!

“Years later a close friend died and left me my first hotel. One thing led to another…. Pretty soon I have six hotels. All in different arrondissements. My newest hotel, not counting this, is a very historic hotel, many great people stayed there. Sarah Bernhardt, Colette.”

“
We
stayed at that hotel!” Nina said. “Last time, with Leo. We loved it!”

She’d meant it as a compliment, a gesture of recognition. A hotel owner would want to know if you’d admired her latest acquisition. But the mention of Leo made everything double-edged and suspect. Was Nina complimenting Madame’s hotel—or boasting about Leo? If that was what Nina was doing, claiming Leo, pulling rank, why not take it all the way, pull out all the stops?

“It was very romantic,” Nina said.

She kept her eyes on Madame’s as they entered the next round in their game of dueling hotel rooms with Leo. In fact her apparent compliment was a statement of possession. And why not? After Madame’s allusions to those life-changing afternoons with Leo, those afternoons that pried her away from a husband and a lover, it was Nina’s turn to stake out her postage stamp of sexual territory.

But what could Nina claim to possess? Certainly not Leo. That she had been with him most recently ultimately counted for nothing. In fact it counted against her. That Madame’s grief was long in the past, that she’d had years to recover from Leo made the whole conversation so much less painful for her.

“Frankly,” Madame said, “I am very surprised that Leo would send you here now when I made it perfectly clear to him that I am just commencing renovations. After next week this hotel will be closed for six months. I cannot imagine what is in Leo’s mind.”

At least Madame wasn’t blaming Nina. She was suggesting they both blame Leo.

Nina said, “It’s sometimes hard to know, with Leo.”

This was Nina’s chance—perhaps her last chance—to describe what Leo had done to her, especially now that Madame Cordier had confided
her
Leo story.

The moment lingered in the air. Madame gave Nina a searching look. Nina waited for some conspiratorial glint. But nothing like that was forthcoming.

“This hotel was a whorehouse,” Madame said.

“I thought so!” said Nina. Madame stared at her.

“Quite a few of my hotels were whorehouses. That’s just the hotel business, what happens. Obviously, it is premature to write about this for
Allo!
…though maybe this could be an article for some other publication, the grand old whorehouses of Paris. They are history, too. No? Many sad things happened here. For example, what room was it…some poor girl jumped out the window.”

“Probably room twenty-eight,” said Nina. “My room.”

“Hmmm,” said Madame. “Maybe.”

“I can come back when the renovation’s done,” Nina said. “There’s no harm seeing it now. Perhaps a before and after piece….”

Madame rang the bell and rose and briskly shook Nina’s hand. “I hope you enjoy your stay in Paris.”

“I’m very glad to have met you,” Nina said, and in fact she was. She was grateful to Madame Cordier, not only for showing her several new and unattractive aspects of Leo, but for getting her out of bed. What was Nina’s problem? What had yesterday been about, spending the whole day sleeping and watching bad French TV? She was getting paid to travel, given a budget—okay, a tight budget, but a budget—from
Allo!
She was in Paris, free, on her own. Why had she thought she needed Leo?

“Wear warm clothes,” said Madame Cordier. “The weather is very cold. Very bitter.”

I
T HAD NEVER BEEN
cold or bitter when Nina was here with Leo. The rain had fallen in warm oily drops and thoughtful cooling showers. But this time, Leo had warned her a few days before she left: “The weather could be beastly. But even if it’s freezing and wet, better Paris than here!”

Nina had nodded. Yes, of course. By then she’d spent two weeks on the edge of tears that welled up and spilled over whenever she thought about asking Leo if they were really breaking up. Even if it was freezing and wet, better Paris than here. Nina could hardly disagree with that incontestable statement. Everyone loved Paris, rain or shine. With Leo or without him.

With Leo or without him. The most idiotic thing would be to let that bogus distinction warp her whole time in Paris. The Luxembourg Gardens with Leo vs. the gardens without, boulevards she’d walked with him vs. the same avenues alone, the Mona Lisa smiling at Leo or, less mysteriously, at Nina. The narrow lanes it was best to avoid for fear of suddenly coming upon a bistro she had eaten in with Leo, or had been too nervous to eat in, too busy looking at him. With Leo or without him. How small that difference was compared with other, more major differences. For example, the weather.

The air here had always felt sweet on her skin, even when it was gritty and polluted. But now the rain fell in cold needles, and the damp breath of the stones was the secret slow revenge of all that historic beauty. No one liked being outside, and people got it over with quickly, slipping into doorways as if on secret missions.

Last May Nina kept catching glimpses of the city as it must have looked once—and still looked in Doisneau and Brassaï photos of Paris in the ’40s and ’50s. Girls in pretty dresses, lovers embracing on the street,
La Vie de Bohème
with a fashion makeover involving nose rings, fishnet, and dreadlocks. But Paris in November seemed much closer to New York: Everyone wore the same winter clothes, the same harried expressions, as if all of them were late for jobs they were already in danger of losing.

Nina wandered for a while, vaguely toward the river. It was not unpleasant except for the problem of not knowing where she was going or how she would know when she got there and could give up and go back to the hotel. Having no destination made her unsure and self-conscious, as if someone were observing all the confusions and worries that showed plainly on her face.

The first time they’d walked in Paris, Leo talked about Rimbaud and the demonic marathon walks that left holes in his shoes and his feet. Nina had known about Rimbaud’s walks, but she smiled and let Leo tell her. For all she knew, Leo was planning a walk just as frenzied and manic for them.

Leo was a fast walker, no maps, no red lights, no split-second hesitations; there was never any doubt that he would decide the route they would take. But then he would put his arm around her, and they’d begin to walk very close, their hips and upper thighs rubbing beneath Leo’s jeans and Nina’s thin dress. Pedestrians moved over. It must have been very clear that Leo and Nina should get off the streets and go directly back to bed.