Guided Tours of Hell (24 page)

Leo steered Nina through a courtyard and into a vaulted granite hall. He went to buy tickets while Nina leafed through a cheap glossy photo book of Paris tourist spots under a postcard-blue heaven. Already she felt like a prisoner staring at pictures of sky, only dimly believing that blue sky still existed.

She studied a poster advertising a ticket book with coupons for admission to more monuments and museums than anyone could want to see. Why couldn’t Leo do
that
for
Allo!
? Buy a coupon book and dutifully go every place that it let you visit. Why couldn’t he write something educational, helpful, and pragmatic, untouched by personal terror of extinction and death?

Leo appeared to be arguing with the woman at the booth. Their voices echoed through the antechamber as they politely took turns exploding in bursts of furious French. Nina went to investigate, but Leo had already given up, paid, grabbed the tickets, and intercepted her halfway.

“Fascist bitch,” said Leo.

“What’s the problem?” Nina asked.

“We have to take a guided tour. We can’t go around on our own.”

“Why?” said Nina. “I hate guided tours.”

“Bomb threats,” Leo said. “They can’t have all those sleazy Arab terrorists wandering wherever they please, stashing little packets of Semtex in French national historical monuments.”

They passed through a narrow opening in a barrier of metal grillwork crowned with spikes. First Leo and then Nina tripped down the invisible step that led into a gigantic room surrounded by dripping stone walls the color of auto exhaust. The emptiness and vastness of the underground cavern made Nina feel like a nervous spelunker, or like an astronaut cut loose by mistake and floating weightless in outer space.

The room was too dark to see very far. And why would anyone want to? Hundreds of briefcases tied with rope could be ticking away in the shadows.

“The Hall of the Men-at-Arms,” said Leo. “This is where they kept the prisoners during the Terror when they overflowed every abbey and holding pen and subhuman jail in Paris. That bitch at the ticket booth claimed this place is always being targeted by terrorists, but I’ll bet it’s a lie so they can herd us like sheep and save a couple of sous.”

But how could it save money to pay someone to take them around? Nina threaded her arm through Leo’s. How dark and glacial it was!

Near the gate, facing each other, were two backless wooden pews so punitive and unyielding they might have been the originals on which prisoners awaited their rides to the guillotine. A woman and a girl of about ten sat on one of the benches. Nina and Leo nodded at them and walked on without stopping.

They drifted around the huge hall. Each thick stone arch, each stone pillar was exactly like the others. There was no reason to be anywhere instead of anywhere else. There was nothing to say, and besides, it would have felt strained and artificial to stand in the midst of that echoing void and fake a conversation. They circled around and sat down on the bench across from the woman and the girl.

Under a wide mane of tight dark curls, the woman’s handsome features asserted themselves despite a patina of makeup that took on a slightly orange cast in the dim available light. With her olive skin and glossy black hair, the girl was obviously her daughter, and at the same time looked slightly Eurasian. Their very different sorts of beauty transmitted a sexy message: The woman hadn’t just cloned herself but had slept with a man to conceive the child.

“How much time do we have to wait?” Nina said.

“Twenty minutes,” Leo answered.

Leo stared at the woman and the girl. Nina had nothing against the child, but wished the woman would have the grace to disappear or die. This was what it meant to be with a man, with any man, with Leo: to see this otherwise winsome picture vandalized by jealousy and envy, turned into a personal reproach on the themes of fertility and beauty. Nina wasn’t as pretty, she had no daughter, Leo would register that. Poor Leo, who hardly did anything to make Nina jealous! Leo didn’t use other women to control her and make her suffer—at least he hadn’t yet. And Nina might have envied the woman even if Leo weren’t with her.

Suddenly Nina experienced an unsettling premonition: If she valued her present life, she should just grab Leo and run. She felt quite certain that this woman disguised as an innocent tourist would eventually reveal herself as a screeching Fury who would swoop down, clawing at Nina’s poor heart, fouling it with bird-shit, enfolding Leo in her wings, like the hag in the Camille Claudel sculpture.

“The prisoner,” said the mother.

“La prisonnière,”
said the girl.

“Bon
,
”
said the mother. “The guillotine.”

A merry grin illuminated the girl’s face as she chopped her upturned palm with the blade of her other hand.

“Great,” whispered Leo. “The Addams family.”

Nina laughed, a bit hysterically.

Ostensibly to Nina but slightly louder than necessary, Leo said, “Marie Antoinette was brought here after her failed escape. The royal family disguised themselves and took a carriage to the Austrian border. But they were so stupid, they couldn’t travel except in the style to which they were accustomed, with a giant entourage, a whole court, coaches, and horses. Of course, everyone who was supposed to help them screwed up—royally, so to speak. Her hairdresser—that’s right, her hairdresser!—sent the loyal soldiers away. They were stopped and recognized before they could cross the border. The driver of the coach was Marie Antoinette’s lover, which made things even more complicated—”

The woman placed a restraining hand on her daughter’s forearm and flashed Leo and Nina a broad smile that created an opening wide enough for her to say, “Well, maybe. And maybe not.”

“Excuse me?” Leo said.

“Count Axel Fersen.” The woman leaned forward. “Maybe he and the Queen were lovers. More than likely they weren’t. Probably the story was part of a whisper campaign about Marie Antoinette’s sexuality. The rumors of adultery, lesbianism, promiscuity, nymphomania. The usual sexual rap sheet hung on powerful women. Nymphomania! What a concept! She and her sister-in-law were accused of teaching the Crown Prince to masturbate! It was said to be a plot to drive the Prince insane and ruin his health forever.”

Hold on! Where was this woman
from
? Nina’s first guess was that she was an academic. A marginally with-it, American feminist French historian. But what kind of feminist was she, playing so obviously to Leo with the casual mention of masturbation and that derisive superior sneer at the whole concept of nymphomania? There was nothing she couldn’t talk about freely and probably nothing she wouldn’t do. Nina knew she was being unfair—the woman wasn’t playing to Leo. She was addressing them both, carefully rotating her head and fixing her animated dark eyes on one and then the other. It wasn’t her fault that Leo suddenly sat up very straight.

“You seem to know a lot about it,” he said, and for a moment Nina hoped futilely that he was being sarcastic instead of admiring. Were he and this woman bonding over Marie Antoinette trivia?

“I’m a director,” the woman said. “A theater director. We’re doing
Danton’s Death
this spring. I’m using that as an excuse for Isadora and myself to do some research in Paris.”

Her tone communicated self-assurance and career success. It was Leo and Nina’s social duty to ask what theater she worked with, what plays she’d brought to the stage. Nina wasn’t going to ask, though out of solidarity she should have. Men—even Leo—so rarely inquired about a woman’s work. The woman gave them time to do so, then sighed and went on. “For months I’ve been doing nothing but reading about the French Revolution.”

Nina said, “What a coincidence! I mean, isn’t it strange? I stayed at the Hotel Danton my first few nights in Paris.”

“Well, I’m sure there must be quite a few of them,” said the woman, trying kindly—if a bit patronizingly—to make Nina’s non sequitur sound marginally less brainless. “Though possibly, there aren’t. One can’t help noticing how little in this country is named after Robespierre and poor Charlotte Corday.”

“Danton’s Death,”
murmured Leo. “What a brilliant play!”

“A work of genius,” said the woman. “I’m surprised you know it. Are you by any chance in the theater?”

“I’m a travel writer,” said Leo.

“I’m Nina,” Nina said.

At first Leo seemed unsure about this, but after a moment confirmed it. “This is Nina. She writes also. We work together on a little private-subscription newsletter called
Allo!
”

Work together! thought Nina. Was that all they were? Coworkers?

“How American we are,” the woman said. “Telling each other what we do for a living. By the way, I’m Susanna Rose.”

“Oh! I’m Leo! Sorry!”

“Where are you from?” said Susanna Rose.

Leo said, “New York. And you?”

Susanna Rose said, “Manhattan. Where else?”

Leo and Susanna Rose exchanged knowing smiles. Nina gave a chuckle, louder than she’d intended.

“What’s masturbation?” said the little girl, Isadora.

A seismic ripple disturbed Susanna Rose’s dark curls as she shook her head and laughed, not
at
her daughter, but as if she and the child were old friends sharing a favorite joke. “Sweetie, you already know the answer to that. You just want me to say it in front of these new people.”

Found out, the child gave the same fresh smile she’d given the word
guillotine
, the smile of the tolerant mini-adult amused by her silly child self. Did all little girls have this knack of flipping from child to grown-up? And did every mother have as much skill and precision at making them do it?

“Bad spin doctors,” said Leo. “Bad image. That was Marie Antoinette’s problem.”

“There were many problems,” Susanna Rose conceded. “But that was one of them, yes.”

“Nowadays, she could hire someone to watch the polls and give her fashion advice and take care of damage control after she said to let them eat cake,” Leo told his new friend.

Hello there! What about Nina? She longed to make some possessive gesture, like putting her arm around Leo or, if this turned out to be full-scale war, resting a hand on his thigh. (Though that was also risky—Leo could shrug it off.) As a compromise, she reached for Leo’s hand. Leo moved it away.

What a monster jealousy was! In the taxi Nina had liked it when Leo charmed the driver. But now it drove her wild to see him trying to win this woman over. If he had a portable CD player, he’d be playing Billie Holiday. But why was Nina thinking of Leo in this suspicious, ungenerous way? Why? Because he was flirting with this…stranger, not caring that Nina was right there!

“The French press is a bit more complicated,” Susanna Rose said. “It’s just as corrupt as our media but more sophisticated, less simpleminded.”

“Like the French in general,” said Leo. “And also more full of itself—”

“Ask me some more French,” Isadora said.

“Le lit,”
said her mother.

“The bed,” said the girl.

“Magnifique!”
said Leo.

The child regarded him without interest.

“Another word,” demanded Isadora.

“Le cauchemar,”
said Susanna Rose.

“That’s a hard one,” said the girl. “Not fair.”

“Think about it,” said her mother. Then, turning back to Leo, “These latest French elections are scary.”

“Again it’s public relations,” said Leo. “Popular perception. The right wing whipping up those poor dumb bastards into dumping all those oranges on the airport road.”

“Like with the pigs on TV,” said Nina.

Leo and Susanna Rose turned to stare at her.

“I’m missing some connection here,” Susanna Rose said. “Enlighten me. Tina, is it?”

“Nina,” Leo corrected her gently, before Nina could, less gently.

Nina said, “My first few nights in Paris, every time I turned on the TV, I saw a documentary about peasants killing pigs. Leo explained about the elections, about the TV networks showing the peasants and their pigs as a way of drumming up sentiment for pure, old-fashioned peasant French ways—” She stopped. Why was she telling Susanna Rose how brilliant Leo was? There was another song Leo played, a blues song.
Women he wise, keep your mouth shut, don’t advertise your man.
Leo had a whole repertoire of songs about women not talking!

But Nina should have taken the song’s advice—don’t advertise your man. Because now she had only herself to blame as Susanna Rose fixed Leo with a dewy gaze and said, “Of course, you were right. Don’t you just adore it? How fabulous these people are. Deconstructing pigs on French TV. Right-wing semiotics.”

Why was Susanna Rose so admiring? What did she want from Leo? Nina watched a smoggy haze of attraction rise and hover between them, gleaming with tiny particulate flakes of curiosity and desire.

“Nazi pig propaganda,” Susanna Rose said.

“I’m afraid so,” agreed Leo.

“Pigs,” mused Susanna Rose. “Danton was trampled by a herd of pigs. Also gored twice by bulls. His face was a mass of scar tissue. Women loved him despite it. So I’m being a tyrant about not prettying up our Danton. And we’re having a hell of a time finding an actor who’ll play him. Actors are such peacocks….”

Other sightseers were assembling now, waiting to take the tour. Two American tourist couples tried, as Leo and Nina had, to find some reason to stroll around the vast depressing hall. Soon they gave up and gravitated toward Leo and Nina, close enough for Nina to overhear one man tell another, “Before this vacation, I didn’t know nothing about France. Except French fries. French toast…French kissing.”

“He don’t know nothing about French kissing,” said the man’s wife. “I can tell you that.”

Leo smiled at Susanna Rose.
He
knew about French kissing. And Nina already knew he knew. No point smiling at
her
.

A group of American college students drifted in and immediately felt compelled to try out the acoustics by hooting like owls; they lapsed into stunned silence when the stone walls hooted back. Soon afterwards, a slight, round-shouldered woman materialized from the shadows wearing a belted tan raincoat, a flowered kerchief tied in little points under her chin, and shoes that managed to be both geriatrically sturdy and perilously high-heeled. Calling out,
“Mesdames et Messieurs?”
without the least hope that anyone would reply, she raised one hand and shook it as if something were stuck to her fingers.