Guided Tours of Hell (21 page)

They would never mention Leo’s episode on the stairs. Hush now, don’t explain. It was better that way. The incident would be forgotten, Leo’s dignity left intact. Maybe noncommunication was a synonym for good manners. Maybe Leo was right. Analysis—in fact, any mention of what transpired between them—was not merely the death of passion but a shameful waste of time. Instead of investigating the causes and symptoms of Leo’s claustrophobia, instead of going on about whether Leo had meant to ditch her in Paris, she’d had a series of revelations about Orpheus and Eurydice, though already she could hardly recall what had seemed so revelatory. A fat drop of cold liquid hit her forehead. Tears of insult sprang to her eyes.

“What’s this shit dripping down on us?” she said.

“Don’t ask,” Leo warned her.

Leo stopped in front of one of the wall plaques that appeared at intervals, brass squares engraved with quotations on the subject of death. Unnecessarily, Leo translated the French for Nina, “‘Remember every morning that you may be dead by evening. Remember every evening that you may be dead by morning.’

“Terrific,” said Leo. “Just what I needed to hear.” He gripped Nina’s upper arm.

“I’m getting through this,” Leo said. “But I’m not enjoying it, Nina.”

T
HE STAIRS THAT RESTORED
them to the living (not that the living paid them any more notice than the dead) were also long and steep but, despite what Nina anticipated, less arduous and exhausting. Perhaps the promise of daylight made the climb seem easier, combined with the added assurance that this nightmare would soon end. On the way up, they paused prudently to rest and catch their breath. And in a short time, they popped out onto the noisy street and were blithely dodging the taxis that screeched and careened around the circle.

Had Leo and Nina been changed by their underground ordeal? Certainly the world had. How fragrant the smell of diesel seemed now, how lively and skilled the drivers, how graceful the veiled Muslim girls who brushed past them, shouting and giggling. This time, Orpheus had succeeded and left the underworld so far behind that he and Eurydice could already laugh at their recent perils.

Apparently, Nina and Leo had had a
great
time down in the Catacombs!

“Pretty amazing,” said Leo.

“Amazing,” Nina agreed. How instantly the thrill of escape transforms the memory of imprisonment.

Leo said, “Wait till I encourage droves of
Allo!
readers to have massive coronaries humping up and down those stairs. Of course, I’ll say it’s only for travelers in tip-top physical shape. But show me one flabby American who doesn’t think he’s in tip-top condition.”

Often, when Leo wrote for
Allo!
, he amused himself with a private game: At least once per article, he’d recommend some crummy dive or smoke-clogged brasserie, some roach-infested truck stop with abysmal food, some seedy Montmartre strip joint, places
Allo!
readers would automatically hate unless they chose to imagine they were slumming, seeing the insider’s Paris. Maybe no one actually followed Leo’s and Nina’s tips; surprisingly, no one ever wrote to complain or cancel a subscription. Demographic studies showed that the typical
Allo!
subscriber was married and retired with a median pension income of seventy thousand a year.

Nina said, “Are you sure you want to do that? What if someone died—and sued you? Us.”

Leo let that
us
go by. “I’ll find out the exact number of steps,” he said. “And put that in the article. That way, I will have covered my ass. They can’t say they weren’t warned.”

Leo often claimed that he was doing his readers a favor by keeping them on their toes, sending them to some bistro where penniless students ate wedges of packaged cheese and sandy salads with charred croutons and chunks of cold salt pork. He was doing his public a service by making them decide, at least once per trip, what they really liked or hated. Had he been doing Nina a similar favor by making her think she was traveling alone and staying in a lovely
hôtel de charme
? Was it kindness or cruelty? Love made it so hard to tell. Had it all been a test, and had Nina passed or failed? What was in it for Leo? Another successful experiment in female-mind control?

They were passing through the neighborhood not far from the Hotel Danton. Perhaps that was why Nina found herself stuck in this grating repetitive groove; perhaps these minor chords of paranoia and self-pity still lingered in the air.

“Where to?” Nina piped up.

“Père Lachaise,” said Leo. “Let’s walk awhile, have an early lunch and go the rest of the way by metro. Maybe stop at the Cluny to try and find some especially gorgeous and grisly depiction of the Grim Reaper, hard at work in the fields.”

Nina was silent a moment, then said, “Leo, where is Simone de Beauvoir buried?”

“Oh, isn’t that wild?” said Leo. “We talked about that, didn’t we? Nutty women from all over the planet leaving flowers and letters on her grave, those poor crazy girls deceiving themselves with that mother-of-us-all bullshit. None of them seem to have heard what everyone’s known for years: All the time de Beauvoir was writing about how women should call the shots, she was being Sartre’s handmaid and pimp, editing his manuscripts, sending him her cutest girl students—not even getting laid! To say nothing of the charge that de Beauvoir collaborated during the Occupation. I’m pretty sure she and Sartre are buried in Montparnasse. Which we’re actually passing near. But we’d better not stop. How many graveyards can I put in this piece? I’d hate to be late for lunch.”

“Can’t we go there?” Nina asked. “As long as it’s on the way? I’ve been thinking about de Beauvoir’s grave. Ever since you told me, Leo. Before you got here, I was thinking about it, Leo. I’d really like to see it, Leo. It would only take a minute, and then we could be on our way.” Saying Leo’s name so much had not been a good idea. It had made Nina seem like an imploring whiny child. In response, Leo sounded like a tolerant parent at the limits of his patience.

“Don’t tell me,” said Leo. “You want to leave a note on the grave. ‘Please Simone, don’t let Leo notice that my historic hotels article for
Allo!
is already two weeks late.’”

“The piece is in!” cried Nina, wounded. Didn’t he know? Actually, Leo never said if he liked her writing or not, but he printed it unedited, so she’d always assumed…. “I handed it in the week before I left.”

The way Leo changed the subject was truly sleight of hand. You could easily miss the moment at which the conversation veered past you, and it took great stamina to try and change it back.

“Who else is buried in Montparnasse?” persisted Nina.

Leo said, “I don’t get it, Nina. Since when are you such a de Beauvoir fan? I thought you were a sensible person.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I mean I am.” Years ago she’d read
The Second Sex
and found it passionate but boring. She knew the less attractive facts of de Beauvoir’s life but was still moved by the idea of her—a serious intellectual who wrote books
and
had love affairs with writers, a woman who made mistakes and cheated and was cheated on, but still kept loving, kept working, kept going…. Yesterday she’d felt guilty for reducing this brilliant writer to yet another bleeding female heart. But yesterday she’d had the chance to visit her grave—and it had simply slipped her mind. So why was Nina digging in her heels and insisting on doing what hadn’t seemed urgent enough to do on her own?

Maybe the reason she wanted to go was that she
had
thought of it yesterday. The impulse was like a sudden desire to revisit a childhood home, to forge or discover a link between the present and the long-lost self, or in any case her recently discarded pre-Leo-in-Paris self. But what did she want from that paralyzed drip, unable to get out of bed, seeing Paris and Rodin’s sculpture as a clutch of demeaning private communiqués about her failed romance with Leo?

Perhaps what Nina wanted from that earlier self was its two-week head start, getting over Leo. But why was Nina still thinking like a woman whose boyfriend had left her or was about to leave her when new evidence suggested that Leo wasn’t planning to leave her—at least not in the near future.

“Maybe we could go to Montparnasse and skip Père Lachaise,” Nina said. “How many graveyards
do
you need to put in ‘Paris Death Trip’?”

Surely, Leo must have realized by now that this article would never be written unless he had some subconscious desire to permanently alienate his faithful
Allo!
readers. To kiss
Allo!
good-bye, so to speak.

“What’s so funny?” said Leo. “What are you smiling at, Nina?”

“Nothing,” Nina said.

Leo would never agree to this seemingly minor, spontaneous change of plans and actual major disruption in his whole way of being. Nina caught up with him and grabbed his arm with such force that they teetered and clumsily rocked to a stop.

“Whoa,” said Leo. “Easy, big fella.”

“It’s important to me,” she said. “I want to. I mean it, Leo. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. We can just run in and check it out. It would be unfair to me not to. I never ask for anything. And this is nothing. You know that.” Nina was as shocked as Leo by the intensity in her voice.

“Fine,” said Leo. “Fine. Okay. You win. We’ll go to the Montparnasse Cemetery. It’s going to throw the whole day off, but fine, if it makes you happy.”

“It’s not about happiness,” said Nina. “It’s about obligation.” What was Nina saying? Obligation to what? What did she care about Simone de Beauvoir’s grave? Nothing, less than nothing! This was some superstitious tic, some fear that she would be consumed with regret if she passed so near and didn’t go see the grave.

Nina said, “Leo, you of all people hate to know you’ve been near something great and not stopped to see it. This would be like going to Chartres and not looking at the cathedral, like visiting Agra and skipping the Taj Mahal…. Well, okay. Not exactly like that.”

“Okay.” Leo sighed. “This makes no sense at all. But fine. I already said you win. All right? Satisfied? Let’s cross here.”

He yanked her hand and she followed, stepping off the traffic island and into the empty street just as the light turned green and the taxi drivers hit the gas and headed straight for them, forcing them to hurry, then run, as they threaded through traffic, like pinballs slamming through a maze of harsh bells and flashing lights.

T
HE DEAD WERE POLITE
in Montparnasse, not only silent but considerate, lying modestly under their neutral-colored stones, shrinking back from the pavement, from the tidy edges of the narrow paths and the broad tree-lined alleys so that you didn’t have to step over them or even think about them as you passed right by their dwellings. You could pretend that the place was something else, some other sort of city, with neighborhoods and families, grandparents, bachelors, children, pets, all making room, getting along, overcrowded but civic-minded, law-abiding and peaceful.

Nothing and no one would bother you here, not even the cats that sat on the tombs and watched without seeming to see you, then snarled and took off running when you made the slightest move. Every motion was a blur across the edge of your peripheral vision. Was that a feral cat or the beating wings of a stone angel or a puttering three-wheeled truck bristling with brooms and rakes? No one would harm you, nor would anyone help—if, for example, you’d got here and realized that you had no idea where, in this city of graves, Simone de Beauvoir was buried.

People sat on benches along the wide cobbled avenues: a desiccated old lady in a black coat and lavender gloves, two middle-aged sisters with matching small dogs. Clasped together, a pair of young lovers in blue jeans and sweaters flung themselves across their bench, their limbs at the floppy angles of the dead or gravely wounded. Everyone seemed insubstantial, flat, like pencil drawings or ghosts, and gave no sign of noticing Leo and Nina. Especially not the young couple, whom Nina and Leo hurried past with an uneasy and, it seemed to Nina, jealous haste. Why should they be jealous? They’d made love almost all last night.

On another bench a natty old gentleman in a dark tweed jacket rotated his head and shoulders in small obliging increments so a photographer could shoot his distinguished face from every flattering angle.

“Who is he?” asked Nina. “Do you recognize him?”

“I don’t know,” said Leo. “A poet, maybe. He looks like Buster Keaton.”

He looked to Nina like someone they could ask for directions. What would it cost Leo to ask? He needn’t mention Simone de Beauvoir. He could say that they were looking for Sartre. This old man would know and gladly explain where to find Sartre’s grave. But it wasn’t in Leo’s nature to ask, certainly not in this case. And since his French was so much better than hers, Nina couldn’t ask, and was reduced to glaring at Leo as they passed the old man and walked on.

“Where is the goddamn grave?” Leo said. “If you know it’s in this cemetery, why don’t you know where it is?”

But it was Leo who had said that de Beauvoir’s grave was here. Leo was never wrong about such things. It was Nina who made mistakes.

“Let’s forget it,” Nina said. “If it’s too hard…maybe it’s not here…this is taking too much time.”

“We’re here,” said Leo. “Let’s find the goddamn grave if it’s so goddamn important. It’s not like I haven’t told you the truth about de Beauvoir, just like I have to tell you every goddamn—”

“Tell me
what
, Leo?” said Nina.

“Nothing,” said Leo. “Sorry. Let’s keep on looking for the grave. We’ve wasted the goddamn time already.”

Oh, this was awful! Awful! They were practically never like this, like a married couple with decades of practice in detesting and boring each other! The reflexive squabbles of intimacy were what they most wanted to avoid.

Nina scanned the names on the tombs. Who would have thought that Death had undone so many? It was like trying to find an old friend whose address you had misplaced by checking the names on every door in a large foreign city. In a regular city, a living city, Leo’s directional sense was useful. But it wasn’t working in the dead’s hometown, and Leo wasn’t pleased.