Guided Tours of Hell (15 page)

They could never mention this. Hush now, don’t explain. She could understand his embarrassment. Men were supposed to face down wild animals, bandits, vicious bullies, and killers. They were not allowed to fall apart in small enclosed windowless spaces. But Nina’s endlessly flexible love had more than enough tensile strength to effortlessly embrace the fact that Leo was claustrophobic. When you loved someone, you loved him at every age he ever was or would be, and the Leo who so feared elevators was Leo as a small boy. Who else could he find to love him so much—to love every weakness and failing?

Nina unlocked the door with difficulty that stopped this side of panic. She switched on the light and saw with dismay that someone had cleaned her room, dismay because of how the bed was made, the blankets tucked haphazardly under the lumpy pillows, the bedspread hanging down on one side and rucked up at the bottom, with none of the practiced rigor of a hotel chambermaid: the hasty way a bed might be made by a resentful family member.

The breakfast tray had been removed, but the half-empty water bottle remained to give Nina one last chance to drink the backwash some stranger had thoughtfully left her. No point even looking for a chocolate on the pillow. The shutters were still open, which made Nina suddenly anxious, as if someone might be spying on her through the dusty, thin white curtain. Someone would have to hover there—and what was there to spy on? A nervous American tourist pacing until she collapsed, fully dressed, on the bed and fell asleep watching TV.

She looked out the window and down at the deserted roof. The cats must have settled their disagreement over the plastic-wrap mouse.

Madame Cordier had said that a prostitute died, leaping from this window. But the roof wasn’t very far down. She must have broken her neck. Had Madame said it was this room? Or had she just
not
said it wasn’t? Had she told Nina that the girl was dead or just that she’d jumped out the window?

A gust of chill air blew in from outside, and suddenly Nina was sure: The girl was dead, and her ghost was faking the record-breaking orgasms. It wasn’t healthy to think this way. It was time to be a real person. “Be a real person, Nina,” Leo used to say. She was never certain what he thought a real person was, but she understood that he meant she was being paranoid and irrational.

Nina leaned out to tug at the shutters, which finally banged shut with the chilling finality of jail-cell doors in films about innocent men on death row. Suppose they never opened again? Fine. What did Nina care?

She decided to take a hot bath, a long blissful soak. Blissful? She must have been imagining a bath in some other bathroom, perhaps a tub in one of those heavens where she’d stayed with Leo—surely not this swampy noxious cave, stinking of mildew and piss. She found the stopper, rinsed it off with what passed for hot water, and wedged it in the drain.

The faucet choked and spat out several splats of brownish liquid that sank thin flakes of sediment to the bottom of the tub. Nina ran the water until it was semiclear, then looked around for some soap. And now her mind
was
mercifully taking her back to another bathroom, another hotel, a hotel she’d stayed in with Leo. She recalled every shining detail of the shampoos and gels and lotions, each a different pastel color in a clear glass bottle. Everything—the conditioner, the soap dish, the cotton puffs, the snowy bathrobes—whispered of comfort and luxury and the promise of sex.

Not to be outdone, the Danton offered two identical thin rectangles of hard, tightly wrapped airplane soap. Every detail seemed designed to communicate cheapness, dirt, and deprivation.

How could this be a whorehouse? A whorehouse was supposed to have at least some theoretical relation to pleasure. Though Nina had seen photos of brothels in Bombay, the cramped cells, the filthy mattresses, the dangling lightbulbs that served as focal points for the prostitutes to stare at while they lay on their backs and worked. No wonder the poor woman who labored nights at the Danton felt she had to compensate for the hotel’s flaws with her high volume, nonstop pornographic sound track.

Nina slipped off all her clothes at once, like a carapace, noting with interest the baggy pouches, the stains and streaks that had gravitated to her outfit. Anyone would think she’d been using her good black skirt for an ashtray.

She lowered her hips down into the tub and scooted under the water and watched her body flatten into a white blurry fish.

Leo had a strange habit. Often, when Nina took a long bath, he’d knock on the bathroom door and ask if she was all right.

He’d learned it from his mother, he said. When his mother was a girl, a neighbor’s kid drowned in the tub. So his mother had called into him whenever he took a bath, which was extremely annoying, because he was usually masturbating. It had never occurred to him that he would grow up to be just as crazy. But he’d been programmed; he couldn’t help it. He was afraid
not
to check periodically when someone he cared about was in the tub. Suppose someone he loved fell asleep and drowned and Leo let her die just because he was afraid of turning into his mother.

Someone
might be irritated at being interrupted just as she slipped into the warm, enveloping fog one wanted from a bath. But if Nina minded, it was only for a second, a burr of irritation quickly washed away in the flood of erotic surrender and overwhelming awareness of her love for Leo, annoying tics and all. Leo cared about her! That was what Nina heard, even though—it occurred to her now—what Leo actually said was that his bathtub-drowning neurosis was about being Jewish; and Nina, not being Jewish, would never understand. He had never specifically said that he was worried about
Nina
drowning. The fear was that “someone he cared about” might slide under the water. Only now did Nina allow herself the depressing thought of Leo interrupting a long succession of women, each at the point of losing herself in the pleasures of the tub.

She could stay in the bath forever now! She could fall over and drown and no one would bother her, knocking timidly at the door. But suddenly, bathing began to seem like a strange thing to do, soaking in your own dirt, as shower-takers said.

Nina got out and dried herself with a thin towel that reeked of candy-sweet disinfectant. She gathered her clothes and put them back on, which was not a good sign. At least she put on clean underwear except for the same black tights, whose baggy feet gave off puffs of grayish dust. Then she switched on the television and lay down on top of the bedspread, clutching the remote control.

The only interesting program was about Soviet breakaway republics, street fighting and guerilla warfare between two warring Asiatic nations whose names Nina couldn’t catch.
This
was what Nina should be thinking about: genocide, savage local wars, world peace. That all she could think of was Leo further lowered her self-esteem. She told herself that her failure to focus on the important issues, to concentrate on the news was not a moral but a linguistic lapse; she was missing too much of the French. Her language skills must be degenerating, because she’d always found it easier to understand French on TV than in life. Even though they spoke quickly on television, you weren’t expected to answer and could try to comprehend without the pressure to compose a grammatical reply.

Soldiers lay on their stomachs in bombed-out rooms, plugging away at mortars; the charred bare windows of government buildings emitted clouds of smoke. Stretchers raced by too quickly for Nina to see who was on them. Toothless grannies beat their chests and fell on the graves of husbands and sons.

The remote control worked if you shook it and kept hitting the plus button. Nina switched to a channel on which there was some sort of talk show. These people sat on high stools, as if at a kitchen counter, smiling dementedly and breaking off their rapid-fire chat to sing snatches of songs that inspired the audience to fits of raucous applause. Who were these people? What were they saying? Nina had been wrong to assume she understood their language at all.

So it didn’t matter—in fact it was a relief—that the next show was in Italian. Strip
Jeopardy
, as it turned out. If the all-girl contestants missed a question, they had to remove an item of clothing.

A tall blond (on Nina’s TV set, white-haired) woman lost everything but her underwear and was looking troubled until the kindly quiz-show host tossed her a thigh-length satin robe. She embraced the avuncular host and covered his face with kisses. He wore a slightly longer robe in a shiny dark silk.

Most of the pretty hotels in which the famous dead had slept provided robes for when the living emerged all wet and warm from the tub. During that last trip, it had often been hard to tell when Leo and Nina’s lovemaking started or stopped, hard to remember specific events apart from a general feeling. But there was one evening Nina remembered, or a part of that evening: Nina had stepped out of the tub and thrown a robe over her steaming skin. Leo was lying on the bed and, as she crossed the room, he watched her very intently, then shut his eyes and tipped back his head, and she knelt and kissed his throat.

N
INA MUST HAVE FALLEN
asleep. A trail of drool slicked her pillow. Had someone changed channels while she’d slept? Could she still be dreaming?

It seemed to her that on TV a pig was about to die.

As a child she’d had a recurring dream that began with her mother or father calling her name in their gentle familiar voices. When she heard that, she knew what was coming next: A ghostly figure, a translucent chalky silhouette would drift closer and closer to her bed, and just before it reached her, she would wake up, rigid with terror.

That’s how it was about the pig. She knew what was going to happen although there was no pig around.

On television a peasant couple sat side by side at a picnic table in the courtyard of a palatial stone barn. A stooped man in a cardigan and beret, his wrinkled wife in an apron, they lived in the Auvergne,
la France profonde
, in a stone house in a magnificent valley.

The couple held hands as they told the interviewer how many generations of their families had farmed that fertile soil,
mon grand-père, ma mère
. Each time they mentioned a generation or referred to the land, the camera rose into the air and swooped over the lush fields and treetops to make sure the viewers saw what they were describing.

They loved each other, they loved their farm, and despite everything that was about to happen, they loved their pig. How did Nina know what was about to happen? There was still no pig to be seen, and just because of the other pigs, the ones in Provence and Alsace, that didn’t mean that another poor pig was slated to be slaughtered.

But now, at long last, there was a pig. The camera had rooted it out, tracked it to its hiding place, a boggy spot near the barn door. The pig was half buried in the dirt, wallowing in mud, looking alternately like a hog or a miniature hippo.

Nina knew it was a pig. She knew what was going to happen. And so did the couple who loved their pig, and so did the camera crew, and so did everyone except for the pig, which slowly hauled itself from the mud and trotted over to the woman as she sweetly sang out its name.

“Mizu mizu mizu,” she sang. The pig lowered its snout and nuzzled her hand. The camera zoomed in on the old woman’s hand, cradling an apple. The pig lowered its head and bit the apple. The old woman stroked the pig’s forehead and warbled into its ear. A look of sheer bliss came over its face. The woman seemed happy, too. Only now did the camera pull back to reveal the farmer holding a rifle. He hesitated a moment, then raised the gun to the pig’s head and shot.

This pig had the best death, the most conscious, humane, and loving demise. Nina felt she was meant to admire this scene, the happy death of this barnyard creature, this couple who had lived in this place for so many generations and found through long trial and error the best way to slaughter a pig. An apple on its tongue, a hand on its chin, a bullet in its temple.

The audience was supposed to admire these peasants and their pig. But if so, why did the filmmakers indulge in ironic arty gestures, for example, playing Puccini’s “Un bel di” on the sound track as the animal died, grinning. They kept stopping the film and running it back and repeatedly showing the pig death footage. With each replay the death appeared less serene and idyllic, and by the third time looked more brutal than the violent mindless deaths of the Alsatian and Provençal pigs.

Someone knocked on Nina’s door.

“Nina?” a man said. “Nina?”

“Excuse me?” she said. “Who is it?”

“Nina,” a man said. “It’s me.”

Nina opened the door.

It was Leo.

Well, maybe it was Leo. That is, he looked exactly and nothing like the Leo she remembered, the Leo she had been thinking about every minute of every day while making such an effort not to think about Leo. She knew that it was Leo, but at the same time couldn’t help feeling that this imitation Leo didn’t resemble anyone she knew. At first she felt unnaturally calm and then so weak in the knees that when Leo opened his arms she slumped and fell into his chest.

Nina burrowed into his neck. She wasn’t ready to look at him yet. First she had to touch his wide back and slightly rounded shoulders. Second, she had to smell him.

It was definitely Leo.

Only lovers had that pride in knowing each other’s smell, which was so much more basic, more true, she and Leo agreed, than how most humans identified one another, with shallow questions about where they were from and what they did for a living. Lovers got past that, way past that, back to the essential, down to the primordial sniffing of cats and dogs in heat. That too was something you didn’t share with every stranger you met.

“I missed you,” Leo said huskily.

“I missed you, too,” said Nina.

Leo knelt and picked up his valise and walked past Nina into the room. He put down his suitcase.

He said, “What is this place? A whorehouse?”

Laughter diffused the tension long enough for them to face each other. The strain and fatigue of travel enhanced Leo’s haggard good looks. And as Leo studied Nina, he seemed to like whatever he saw and not to notice or care that she was wearing the same outfit she’d been sleeping in for days. Nina’s clothing meant nothing to Leo, though he was vain about his own. Their romance still had nothing to do with clothes. Only at a later stage did lovers begin giving each other fashion advice, after the beloved’s once attractive eccentricities began to seem like embarrassing reflections on one’s self.