The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (11 page)

“Me?”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“But why? I’m so ordinary. And you’ve done so much in your life, gone to Harvard and Cambridge, known so many interesting people—”

He covered my mouth with his hand. “Quiet. You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know—anything.”

He was now standing so close that I wondered if he was going to kiss me. Instead he took off his jacket. With one swift motion he yanked his shirt and tie over his head.

“Let’s swim,” he said.

“Swim?”

“Come on!” Already he had his trousers and shorts off. White buttocks blazing, he ran into the water, where he got on his knees as if in prayer. A wave crested over him. It withdrew and he was gone.

“Edward!” I called.

A few seconds later, another wave hurled him back onto the sand. “That was glorious!” he said, pushing his hair back. “Come on!”

I didn’t hesitate. I pulled off my clothes as he had, without ceremony. I took off my glasses. The patch of darkness toward which I swam might have been a rock or a sea monster. All I had to navigate by was Edward’s voice. “Warmer,” he said. “Colder … Warmer …”

Suddenly we collided. The hair on his chest was slick as seaweed. I could feel the contours of his pectoral muscles. I could feel his erection.

Behind us a wave was building. I tried to draw away, but Edward wouldn’t let me go. “The thing to do is to go under it,” he said. “Hold on to me.”

Then he pulled me down until we were sitting on the sandy bottom. The wave broke over us. I felt it as the faintest trembling.

We rose again. I was laughing. He took my head in his hands, and now he did kiss me. Another wave broke, pulling us apart from each other, sending us tumbling.

“Edward!” I called, but he didn’t answer. I turned and saw a bigger wave approaching and, remembering what he had said, I dove down, cleaving myself to the ocean floor.

This time I felt the wave as a rumbling—what I imagined an earthquake would feel like.

“Pete!” I heard him calling as I broke the surface.

“I’m here!” I answered.

Separately we stumbled out of the water. The tide had carried us thirty feet or so up the shoreline. To reach our clothes we had to backtrack. “A pity we didn’t bring towels,” he said, drying his face with his shirt.

I put on my glasses. The salt water had marked them. As in a cartoon of drunkenness, I saw spots.

“Where are you going?” I asked Edward, who had picked up his pile of clothes and was moving in the direction of the dunes.

Again he didn’t answer. Maybe he hadn’t heard me. I picked up my own clothes and followed him, until we reached the perimeter of the pine trees. Tufts of beach grass burst sporadically from the sand. Edward put his clothes down and stepped toward me.

Very delicately, he took the glasses from my face, folded them, and rested them atop his pile of clothes.

“Why did you do that?” I said.

And he said, “So that you can truthfully say you never saw what was coming.”

It was five in the morning when I got back to Lisbon. Though the sky was still dark, the stars were gone. You could feel the imminence of sunrise. The entrance to the Francfort was locked. I had to ring the bell three times before the porter, vexed to have been wakened, let me in. The lobby had a hushed, churchlike air. An OUT OF SERVICE sign now hung on the elevator, so I took the stairs to the second floor, where I knocked timorously on the door to our room. No reply. I knocked a little louder. Still no reply. It was while I was pondering the dilemma of how to knock loudly enough to wake Julia, yet softly enough not to wake our neighbors, that I heard a groan and a stumble. Wraithlike in her pajamas, Julia let me in. The room was impossibly shadowy, as rooms where others have been sleeping so often seem to those who have been out all night.

“I had a terrible headache, so I took a Seconal,” Julia said. “What time is it?”

“Never mind. Go back to sleep.”

She staggered to the bed and was at once snoring. I went into
the bathroom and got undressed. In my jacket pocket I found the copy of
The Noble Way Out
that I had bought at Bertrand, still in its brown-paper wrapping. I put it on top of the toilet, then took off my shoes. They were full of sand. My socks, too, were full of sand. When I pulled down my pants, sand spilled onto the floor. With a brush, I tried to sweep it all up—to no avail, since every time I bent over, more sand fell from me. The grains were clustered in the hair on my chest and legs. They seemed to be moving, like lice. I got into the bath, where I rinsed and rinsed with tepid water, and yet it seemed that there was always some further crevice or cleft in which the sand hid. Soon the drain was blocked. The tub wouldn’t empty. I dried off and dressed. Clearly Julia was down for the count, so I headed downstairs, where I told the porter to let her know that I would be at the Suiça. In the interval, the sun had risen. Save for the occasional businessman reading his newspaper as he walked, the occasional market woman carrying a basket of fish on her head, the streets were empty. At the Suiça, yawning busboys were just taking the chairs off the tables. The coffee that the waiter brought me was the first of the day, with grounds at the bottom of the cup. On the sidewalk, pigeons strutted, their feathers the color of pencil-eraser smudges.

I tried to clarify in my head the events of the previous night. The trouble was, everything was clouded in an absinthe haze, in which the actual could not easily be distinguished from the hallucinatory. Perhaps instinct itself is a sort of green fairy, the bitter taste of which we temper with excuses: I was drunk. It was late. The world was ending. Of course, such excuses are paper thin. Even as we make them, we don’t believe them. They are part of the ritual, along with the carafe and the sugar cube and the perforated spoon.

Toward dawn, the green mist cleared a little. We were walking back to the car, the cuffs of our pants rolled up, our shoes in our
hands. There was still some moonlight, which gave me a chance to reflect upon how big Edward’s feet were—at least twice as big as Julia’s. On each meaty knuckle, a tuft of stiff, pale hair stood out. For a man who is habituated to sleeping with women, the body of another man is always a bewilderment, not in its strangeness but in its familiarity—the strangeness of its familiarity. Touching Edward on the beach, in the dark, I might have been touching myself—and so I assumed that what I would want done to me he would want done to him. And sometimes he did. But sometimes he did not.

Hard, hairy sternum where there should have been pillowy breasts; stomach going soft but still firm under the surface fat; testicles like prunes, and the organ itself, gay like Daisy’s tail, circumcised, and so requiring more than its own lubrications to function—a bit of a problem, that, since on the beach we had nothing to hand, as it were, except what we could make in our mouths. And we kept getting sand in our mouths … All this came back to me as I sat outside the Suiça, and the sun resumed its posture of perennial bored sovereignty, like a lifeguard on his high chair, and the pigeons gathered, on the lookout for any new customers who, out of gratitude at finding themselves, after so many months, in a city with bread to spare, might give them some crumbs … Either I was in the throes of the strangest dream I’d ever dreamed or everything I’d known until now—my entire life—was the dream, and Edward the warm bed in which I had at last awakened from it.

Then I saw Julia crossing the Rossio on the diagonal. She was wearing high heels, and between these and the black-and-white polka-dot dress she had chosen, I thought how much she looked like a pigeon; whereas Iris was like a great awkward waterbird, a pelican or, as her classmates had observed early on, a stork. Julia had her black hair tied back with a white ribbon. “I meant to wash it
this morning, but I couldn’t,” she said as she sat down. “What the hell happened in the bathroom? It looks as if a sandstorm hit.”

“That’s my fault, I’m afraid. I was on the beach last night.”

“The beach! I thought you were just going out for a drink.”

“We were. But then on the spur of the moment we decided to go to Estoril.”

“At that hour? How did you get there?”

“We took the car.”

“Our car?”

“Why not? What else is it for?”

She pushed a stray hair out of her eyes. “I hope you found someplace to park it when you got back.”

“Actually, I left it at the station in Estoril. Don’t worry, I’ll pick it up this afternoon. We’d had quite a bit to drink, so we came back in a taxi.”

“I see.” A pause like the trembling ash on the end of a cigarette. “Quite a night, was it?”

“Do you disapprove?”

“Not at all. In fact, I’m rather pleased. You’re usually such a stick-in-the-mud, it’s good to know you’re capable of having an adventure. Even if it isn’t with me.”

The formation of habits is something else that travel accelerates. After a week, the waiter at the Suiça knew us well enough that we didn’t have to order. For Julia he brought a cup of black coffee, for me another
garoto
, as well a plate of those flan-filled tartlets I loved so much.

“Anyway, was it fun?” She was stirring nothing into her coffee. “Did you have fun?”

“I suppose.”

“It’s curious, in Paris you never had many male friends.”

“Well, other than the guys at work, who was I supposed to pal around with? Your decorator?”

“What, you couldn’t have been friends with Jean just because he’s a fairy?”

“His being a fairy had nothing to do with it. We just didn’t have much in common. And I didn’t have a whole lot of time, Julia. You seem to have forgotten that. I had a job. On the weekends I was tired. The last thing I wanted to do was to, I don’t know, play tennis with your decorator.”

“But here in Lisbon it’s a different story, is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, I’ve got time. For the first time since I can remember. Unlike these poor souls who have to wait all day in lines in front of consulates. And so, yes, I did enjoy myself last night. I did.”

“You act as if I’m trying to take that away from you. I’m not.”

I wiped my glasses—and remembered how Edward had lifted them from my face.

“You don’t like him, do you?” I said.

“Edward?” Julia lit a cigarette reflectively. “Well … I wouldn’t say I
dis
like him. He’s just a bit of a know-it-all. If anything, I find him dull.”

“And Iris?”

“Oh, I like
her
. She’s interesting. I mean, she’s done such interesting things. What puzzles me is how she ended up with
him
. Yet you often find that with women who grew up as orphans, they gravitate toward men who need mothering. It’s the same with the dog. A way of giving back what they didn’t get themselves as children.”

“I wonder why they never had children of their own.”

“Oh, but they did. They do. A daughter. Retarded or something. She’s in an institution—in California, I think.”

I put my glasses back on.

“I’m surprised he didn’t say anything about it,” Julia continued, “given what great pals you two have become.”

I too was surprised. Then again, had the daughter been mine, would I have mentioned her to Edward?

We were quiet. Julia took out her solitaire cards.

“Do you think you and he are really cousins?” I asked after a moment.

“Of course not,” she said. “Just because we have relations in the same city … It’s ridiculous.”

“Still, you
could
be cousins.”

She looked me evenly in the eye. “We are
not
cousins, and I’ll thank you not to bring the matter up again.”

She swept the cards together and dealt.

“He’s from an entirely different social class.
My
grandfather was a banker.”

“What was Edward’s grandfather?”

“I have no idea.”

“Still, his money had to come from somewhere.”

“His money? I assumed it was her money.” Suddenly she was looking over my head. “Oh my God, there they are. Act like you haven’t seen them.”

“Why?”

“Because if we wave or make a fuss, they’ll feel obliged to sit with us, and they mayn’t want to. I don’t want her to think we’re pests.”

Like a child caught spying, Julia cast her eyes downward, at her cards. Not knowing where else to look, I looked straight ahead. Iris was kneeling on the ground, trying, from what I could make out, to dislodge something from Daisy’s paw. I couldn’t tell if she’d spotted us.

After a few minutes, Julia’s game gave out. She put away the cards and stood. “Come on,” she said.

I didn’t need to ask for the bill. I knew exactly how much we owed. We walked past the Frelengs’ table—and Edward smiled up at us. “Hello there,” he said.

“Oh, hello,” Julia said, as if surprised.

Then I said hello. Then Iris said hello.

Then there was a moment when we might have sat down, or they might have asked us to sit down.

It passed.

“Well, lovely to see you,” Julia said. “Come on, darling.”

“Goodbye,” I said.

Edward’s smile was almost mournful. With his index finger he stroked a postcard that lay on the table. It was of the beach at Guincho.

Back at the hotel, Julia went into the bathroom. She left the door ajar. In the early years of our marriage, she would never have left the door ajar. I wouldn’t have, either. Only over time does the impulse toward modesty fall away in a marriage, leaving in its wake a laxness, an ease of intimacy, that is at once comfortable and terrible. Thus, in their old age my parents had no qualms whatsoever about using the toilet in front of each other—this though it had been eons since they had slept in the same bed. Oh, it is a strange business …

A few minutes later she emerged. In her hand was the book I had bought earlier.

“When did you get this?” she asked.

“Yesterday. I was going to ask them to sign it, but I forgot.”

“Thank heavens for that. Pete, promise me something. Promise me you will not ask them to sign it.”

“Why?”

“Because it would be gauche. You’ve got to trust me on this. I know more about these things than you do.”