Guided Tours of Hell (14 page)

Absent. Visiting Cathedrals. Whose heart wouldn’t be won forever? Still, Nina wondered sourly if he had one Absent, Visiting Cathedrals sign that he recycled for different women, or if he bothered making a new sign for each new model he made love to, or if by that point Rodin and his model were in such a fever of desire that she preferred him to use an old sign rather than take time to scribble a new one.

“Venez,”
the old woman said, and graced Nina with a puckish grin. She groped along a dark wall.

“Et voilà!”
she exclaimed. She pushed a button, and a hidden door in the wall swung open. Then she ushered Nina into a long narrow room, surgically clean and bare but for a row of sliding compartments on each side and perpendicular to each wall.

Madame Martin slid out a heavy vertical flat. Nina started to help her, but Madame waved her away. Nina stepped up to look at the sketch on the flat, a drawing in soft pencil of a masturbating woman, shown only from the tops of her breasts to the middle of her thighs, her long torso arched diagonally across the heavy paper.

“Oh, my goodness!” said Nina.

“C’est beau, non?”
said Madame Martin.

“C’est beau. Oui,”
Nina said.

Why had the old woman brought her here? Why was she showing this to Nina? Or really, to whomever she thought Nina was? That probably explained it. She had mistaken Nina for some curator who warranted the cellar-to-attic tour: the sculptures, the photos, the atelier, and now the dirty pictures.

Nina had known these drawings were here. In fact she’d been thinking about them—expecting to see them—when Madame Martin opened the door in the wall. Leo had spoken of Rodin’s erotic drawings locked away in the museum. Maybe he’d even mentioned it when he’d pointed out the museum from a distance. And now Nina was getting to see them. Wait till she told Leo!

The old woman stood on her toes and strained as she pulled out the flats, each of which contained one drawing: women on their backs with their legs spread, their hands behind their heads, two naked women, face-to-face, one on the other’s lap.

It could hardly have been weirder, being here in total silence except for the creaking of the flats, with this genteel, proper Frenchwoman and these intensely erotic drawings. The only way to deal with it was to have the out-of-body experience that was learned behavior for looking at art in museums. Asexual, clinically detached, like going to the doctor’s. As if the naked people on canvas weren’t naked people, as if what Rodin put on paper had had nothing to do with sex. Nina and Leo used to talk about this. What was wrong with those poor critics and art historians who had such a stake in denying that certain artists loved the body? Some problem with
their
own bodies, perhaps? No problem with Leo’s and Nina’s!

The drawings were spectacular, and again there was no mistaking that the man who had drawn them was madly in love with every curve and fold, every inch of the flesh that he so tenderly translated from three dimensions into two. Probably there were critics who saw the story of Camille Claudel as the case history of a misogynist: clinical evidence that Rodin secretly hated women. Let them take a good look at these drawings and see if they still believed that! But no doubt they’d already seen them and remained unpersuaded.

Given the drawings’ subject matter, it was not at all surprising when Madame Martin reverted to her dearest subject: how much Rodin loved the body. He wanted to be God, she said, making Adam and Eve out of clay.

Gradually, Nina understood what Madame Martin was doing: She was showing Nina what she had, how much she’d been given to live with. Like a house-proud wife or widow taking guests on tour of her magnificent home: Look at what my man bought for me, look at what he left me. As if Rodin had meant these drawings for Madame Martin to hoard in this museum. Not for Camille Claudel, not for his wife—and certainly not for Nina. He’d done all this for Madame Martin to cherish and use as she pleased.

Finally they rolled back the last flat. They both felt a little drained. Madame Martin walked Nina out through the atelier and back onto the wide path lined with plane trees. She invited her to stroll through the gardens, spend as long as she liked, go through the museum again if she needed more for her essay.

Her essay! Nina nodded. She could agree to that—with genuine conviction and an easy conscience. She would write an essay for
Allo!
But not the essay Madame meant. She could hardly tell
Allo!
readers about the erotic drawings, fill their heads with envious dreams of what they would never see. She thanked Madame Martin, who smiled briskly and gave her head a sparrowlike shake and mimed that she was shivering and hurried back indoors.

Nina had gotten away with it. She’d been taken around the museum without being found out as someone other than the person whom she was supposed to be.

A moment later Madame Martin reappeared. Nina’s heart skipped a beat, assisted by the black coffee and the fear that the woman she’d been mistaken for had arrived in their absence, or else a phone call had come in, and Nina’s game was up.

But Madame Martin had merely remembered that she still had Nina’s coat. She ran, with the coat stretched across her arms, the way war victims on the TV news ran with wounded children. Nina hurried toward her, to spare her a trip across the garden. It was all very awkward, getting her coat back. Nina thanked her even more warmly. They said good-bye several times more.

Nina felt as if she were being watched by someone who might be offended if she turned and left. She walked beneath a bare pergola down the length of the garden. The lawns and flower beds were undergoing major excavation. Huge areas were dug up and roped off with neon-orange plastic net, and the ripe smell of sewers and wet cement hung thickly in the air. Shouldn’t they have finished before the sculptor’s birthday? They’d be done by spring or summer, when the tourists came back.

After a decent interval, Nina left the grounds and returned to the deserted street. She looked around. Where to? What now? Leo would know where to go.

But what made Leo so special? Who was Leo compared with Rodin? And what was sleeping with Leo beside what she’d just experienced, the orgy she’d taken part in, the lustful entwining of bodies and limbs that Rodin set in motion: ecstatic, blissful, unsatisfied still, all these years after his death?

U
SING THE SAME NAVIGATIONAL
system as before—lost, hopelessly lost, then found again, Nina somehow resurfaced on the boulevard Saint-Germain.

Cars and pedestrians chased each other down the crowded avenue, darting between pale shadows and patches of cold silver light. Was it morning or afternoon light? Nina couldn’t tell. How much time had she spent at the museum? Where was her watch? Had she left it at the hotel? Well, it wouldn’t have helped her now. She knew that she hadn’t reset it.

She stood on a busy corner, watching people go by, trying to guess the approximate hour from the looks on their faces. Were they going to lunch? Returning? Leaving work and heading home early after a miserable day?

Nina wished she’d brought the list of restaurants that Leo was scribbling as he told her how much she would love the Hotel Danton. She would have had to rescue the scrap of paper from the trash. She hadn’t wanted to get that close, to risk brushing elbows or knees, though in the past they’d clung to each other behind that very desk.

Did his absentmindedness betray what they both knew but couldn’t acknowledge, that his packing her off to Paris wasn’t merely business as usual? Why had he sent her here, anyhow, when he could have simply done what normal men did: told her that it wasn’t working out and he needed to see other women. Looking out at the city lights, Nina had imagined that there were other offices in which lovers were making each other unhappy, but none in which men were buying women off with free trips to Paris. Why had he picked the Hotel Danton? Did he want her to meet Madame Cordier? Was there some lesson he meant her to learn? Or possibly, some secret?

Nina would feel competent, tracking down an enticing bistro, studying the menu, ordering, taking notes on the food and wine. They used to alternate taking notes. Leo was less circumspect. In fact he made a production of requesting souvenir menus, asking pointed questions so that anyone would realize that he had some professional interest. Soon, delectable morsels—compliments of the chef—would appear from the kitchen, plates of buttery
amuse-bouche
with caviar and crème fraîche, balls of exotic fruit sorbet, expensive bottles of wine.

Several times Nina asked Leo if that was ethical. Weren’t they supposed to re-create the experience of a typical
Allo!
reader, humble and anonymous and likely to be mistreated? Leo said there was nothing wrong in letting the restaurants do their best, and that the experience they were re-creating was that of a typical
Allo!
reader on an atypically lucky day.

She should head back to Montparnasse and find those secret bistros and write them up for
Allo!
The smell of wine and tobacco, the clink of silverware and glass, voices rising and ebbing—it might be cheering, a comfort. Nina imagined several appealing dishes: slices of duck breast cooked rare, anything with venison or wild mushrooms, or stepping down, roast chicken and
frites
, any place could do that. But they seemed appealing for someone else to eat. Nina wasn’t hungry, which was worrisome and unusual, considering she’d eaten nothing for the last two days except a bite of croissant, half an overripe tangerine, and an ocean of black coffee.

Perhaps that was why she felt so weak. Honestly, she was exhausted. Could one still have jet lag after sleeping for two days?

Nina should go back to the hotel and take a refreshing nap and wake up in better shape to write her article. She had two more days left. She could still pull herself together in time to fly back home and suffer jet lag in the opposite direction.

But she couldn’t go back to the hotel. She was too tired to walk there—even if she knew where it was. She could ask at the metro ticket booth: What station was nearest the Hotel Danton? Her French was good enough for that, but the idea made her sleepy, and soon she was too lethargic to consider it at all.

She drifted over to a shop window and looked in at racks of couturier dog sweaters on hangers, puppy jackets with epaulets, turtlenecks, tartan blazers. Pet baskets lined with sprigged Provençal cotton were heaped up on the floor.

Behind the counter a woman was kissing a large toucan whose blue and orange feathers spilled down her arm as she brought the bird close to her lips.

Then, as Nina watched, the bird’s neck shot out like a jack-in-the-box, and the bird bit the woman’s cheek. Nina saw the woman scream, though she couldn’t hear it. The woman put her hand to her face, and her fingers tracked a smear of blood from her cheek to her chin. She looked up. Her eyes locked with Nina’s.

Nina started running, although she tried to appear as if she were walking: the frantic waddle of a schoolchild told not to run in the halls. Nemesis must have been out for lunch or looking the other way, for Nina spotted a taxi stand. Incredibly, five taxis waited to take her wherever she wanted to go.

Somehow Nina managed a convincing impersonation of a woman who could step confidently up to the first taxi in line and open the door and slide in and name her destination. White bristles sat like a soft pelt on the cabdriver’s layered chins. He peered at Nina in the mirror. She repeated the Hotel Danton’s address.

It
must
have been a whorehouse. How else to explain the driver’s searching gaze as he twisted around to face her?

Did he want to discuss this? Hey, Nina would discuss it! First they would establish that the Hotel Danton was indeed a house of prostitution. Then she would ask him what he thought of a man who flew his girlfriend to Paris to stay in a swell place like that.

But no such discussion seemed required. The cab pulled away from the curb and went less than a block before the driver hit his horn, then his brakes, and then they sat for ages amid a silky cloud of diesel exhaust and the hum of idling engines.

There was a lot of traffic, the cabdriver said, in French. Farmers from the provinces had dumped truckloads of oranges onto the roads, blocking the highways to the airport. You couldn’t blame the farmers, they were just trying to live. But the traffic, my God. Taxi drivers had to live too, Madame….

Oranges on the airport road? Had Nina heard him correctly? Her French left so much room for misunderstanding.

The driver made a series of sharp furious turns, and at last they took off. They seemed to be flying down the same streets Nina had walked along earlier, so that riding through them was like seeing a film played backward, fast. This couldn’t be the most direct route. Was this thieving son of a bitch running up the meter? Taxi drivers had to live too, Madame….

The cab made a smooth landing at the curb in front of the Hotel Danton. Coming in from the airport, Nina had been too numb and tired—and also smart enough—not to let herself notice how squalid the hotel was. She’d been wise to ignore it then, because by now she didn’t care. The Hotel Danton was home to her now. She was overjoyed to see it.

She paid the driver and went inside. A new person was at the desk. A hatchet-nosed, haughty young man surrendered Nina’s key despite his evident opinion that her asking for it was gauche. Where had Nina seen him before? At the desk in the Rodin Museum? Maybe not the same young man, but close enough for Nina. So this guy was the other half of what Paris was offering her this time: grieving heartbroken women and sleek disdainful young men.

Nina peered around the corner into the breakfast room. Madame Cordier wasn’t there. What sane person would be? The room had stopped playacting with its coffee, butter, and jam and had revealed its true nature as a place where, at three A.M., any insomniac could stumble in, so desperate for a drink that he or she would be glad to unstick the furry bottles of cheap brandy and fruit liqueurs.

When the elevator door closed, Nina pressed her arms into her sides. This country would be hell on a claustrophobe; the whole continent would be. The truth was—and why not admit it now?—Leo was claustrophobic. He rode elevators to high floors, but if they were staying on the lower floor, he always took the stairs. He said he needed the exercise, but Nina had seen him in elevators, where she’d learned not to talk to him. He was much too tense to listen.