The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (13 page)

Now, though, I had no idea.

I almost rose—then remembered that, but for my socks, I was naked. On the far side of the door, the voices railed on.

“Je ne peux pas ouvrir la porte,” I said. “Je n’ai pas la clé.”

They didn’t understand.

“I don’t have the key. Je n’ai pas la clé.”

Whispered consultation. Then silence.

The next voice was that of Señora Inés.

“Monsieur, c’est l’heure. Devez sortir.”

“Je n’ai pas la clé. Monsieur—l’autre Monsieur—a pris la clé. Il est sorti.”

“N’avez pas la clé?”

“Je n’ai pas la clé.”

More consultation. Then footsteps. Then a master key must have been found, for in a moment the door opened. Señora Inés stepped through. She walked straight to the window, opened the curtains and the shutters, then turned to look at me, her arms crossed over her breasts. No doubt the spectacle of a naked man pulling bedcovers to his chest was one with which she was not unfamiliar. And still she wore an expression of unease.

One eye stared straight at me; the other looked a little to my left, as if to see what was outside the window.

I said, “Mes vêtements—ils sont dans l’armoire. Je n’ai pas la clé de l’armoire.”

“N’avez pas la clé de l’armoire?”

“L’autre monsieur a pris tous les clés, tous les deux.”

That the key to the armoire was missing apparently posed more of a difficulty than that the key to the door was missing. Señora Inés
summoned the maid, who, upon entering the room, burst out laughing. Señora Inés rebuked her and she shut her mouth. Instructions were issued and the maid left. Señora Inés now crossed her arms again and peered at me with her moving eye. Was she also in on Edward’s scheme? It seemed unlikely. From what I could tell, his flight had left her just as perplexed as it had me.

Eventually the maid returned. She carried half a dozen keys, each of which she tried in the lock on the armoire. The third one did the trick.

Señora Inés ordered the maid out. She took my clothes from the armoire and laid them on the bed, her attitude ruthlessly solicitous, like that of a nurse. Once the clothes were sorted, she left and shut the door. I got up and dressed. The chair on which I sat to lace my shoes was ridiculously low. To my surprise, both my wallet and my passport were in my jacket pocket, where I had left them.

Once I was put back together, I stepped out into the vestibule. I could hardly see. I had to feel my way down the stairs into the salon. In silence the prostitutes watched me, to make sure I felt the potency of their contempt.

Señora Inés stood behind the bar. “Combien?” I asked, reaching for my wallet.

She shook her head. “Monsieur Edward a déjà payé.”

“Merci,” I said.

Now came the most difficult challenge: the stairway. Clutching the railing, I descended like an invalid. No one offered to help me. Then again, no one could have helped me—the stairwell was too narrow for two people to go down it side by side.

As I neared the door, the light became stronger. I wondered how I would explain to Julia the loss of the second pair of glasses. At least I would not have to tell her I had been robbed of my money and my passport. Or would she welcome that news? For she was shrewd,
my Julia. She would quickly calculate that between my having to wire for more money and having to obtain a new passport, we’d miss the sailing of the
Manhattan
. Why, in my avidity to win her forgiveness, I might even reconsider her wish to stay on in Portugal.

I had made it to the landing. I opened the door and stepped outside. Much to my surprise, rain was falling. The sky, so brilliantly blue the whole week, was a heavy gray.

Down the iron staircase I stumbled, onto the sidewalk. Heavy drops fell like birdshot. A blur of human traffic passed. When a space opened, I plunged into it.

I turned left, in the direction of the river. Edward was walking toward me, with Daisy.

He smiled. “Glad to see me?” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Are you glad to see me?”

I swung out and punched him in the face. He reeled and fell. Daisy barked. I pulled him up from the ground by his lapels, which I felt tearing.

“You bastard,” I said, and hit him again. Again he fell, again I pulled him up. He was limp as a rag doll—and smiling.

“What kind of game are you playing?”

“No game.”

I hit him a third time. By now Daisy was in a panic. She was straining at her leash, barking, nipping at my heels. “Give me my glasses,” I said. He handed them over. I put them on and his face came into focus. Blood was streaming from his mouth, onto his shirt.

“Can we go back inside?” he said. “I need to put some ice on my jaw.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I might have broken a tooth.”

“Jesus. All right, come on.”

The maid, when she opened the door, regarded us as one might a pair of capering monkeys. Somehow I managed to get Edward up the stairs, standing behind him in case he should fall, for he was far from steady on his feet. Later I would discover that he had twisted his ankle rather badly. We reached the top, where Señora Inés awaited us. Edward asked for an ice pack, which was supplied. For a few minutes he and Señora Inés spoke in rapid French, his tone placating, hers stern at first, then affronted, then yielding.

Edward handed her some bills, which she tucked into her bust.

“We can have the room for another hour,” he said. He still had the keys. Both keys. He gave them to me and we went upstairs.

Once we were inside, I locked the door. I unleashed Daisy.

“Come here,” I said and removed the bloody ice pack from his face. “Open your mouth.”

He obliged. I put my finger inside it, ran it along the edges of his teeth.

“Nothing broken,” I said, “but you’re going to have a hell of a bruise.”

“I hope so.”

I pushed him down onto his back and got on top of him. I kissed him roughly, knowing the kiss would hurt.

“Don’t smile,” I said, “or I’ll hit you again.”

“Don’t hit me again,” he said.

Those were the words I needed to hear. I pulled his tie tight around his neck, almost choking him. And then I untied it.

“I shouldn’t have hit you.”

“Yes, you should. I deserved it.”

“You did, actually. Why did you leave like that?”

“Why? I don’t know. I was just looking at you … and I thought, This is perfect. This is what I’ve wanted from the beginning. So I left.”

“It was what you wanted, so you left?”

“Well, what was the alternative?”

“You could have stayed.”

“But then the moment would have been lost. By leaving, I preserved it, so to speak. And not just for me. For you. I knew that when I saw you next, you’d want it more. And you did. Daisy, don’t.”

“I thought you’d planned the whole thing out in advance. That you were a spy or a con man. That you’d taken my money, my passport.”

“Yes, on reflection I can see how you might have thought that.”

“What else was I supposed to think?”

“Oh, any number of things. For instance, that I’d gone to have a beer at the British Bar—do you know the British Bar?—and lost track of time. Which, by the way, is extremely easy to do at the British Bar, since there’s a clock there—it’s quite famous—on which the numbers are written backward. So that if, say, it’s quarter past five, the minute hand is on the nine and the hour hand on the seven. I think I’ve got that right.”

“But how could I have known that? Especially when you’d locked me in, locked my clothes away?”

“I had, hadn’t I? That was thrilling. Finally I had you in my power.”

“Then you
did
have a reason.”

“In retrospect, it looks like it. Iris would certainly say so. It’s her worldview. She thinks everything is plotted. Whereas my world-view is that things happen at random, and people act on impulse, and it’s only afterward, when we look back, that we see a pattern. I suppose it’s a matter of which parts you shine the light on, if you get my drift. My great failing is that I can’t cope with time. I want to combat the degradation that memory suffers at the hands of time. And the effort is futile, isn’t it, because—have you noticed?—it’s always the memories you comb through the most avidly that fade the fastest, that are eclipsed the fastest by—what to call it?—a sort of memory-fiction. Like a dream. Whereas the things we forget totally, the things that sneak up on us in the middle of the night, after thirty years—they’re so uncannily fresh. Daisy, please!”

“What time is it?”

“The question, of all questions, that I loathe the most. Ten to seven.”

“God, what will Julia think?”

“It’ll depend on what you tell her.”

“We should get going. I don’t want to.”

“If you like, I can ask if we can keep the room for another hour.”

“In an hour it’ll be the same. I still won’t want to go.”

“So now we’re just like all the other foreigners in Lisbon. Where we have to stay, we don’t want to be. Where we want to be, we can’t stay.”

“If it were up to me—”

“It is up to you.”

“Not entirely.”

“For another hour it can be up to you.”

“Half an hour?”

“Of course. What, in all of time, is half an hour?”

“But they add up.”

“No, they don’t. They really don’t.”

“You were supposed to be for Iris, you know.”

“Iris?”

Edward nodded. We were sitting at a back table in the British Bar, on Rua Bernardino Costa. On the famous clock, the hour hand was touching the four, the minute hand between the six and the seven. We had come here in order to put off, just a little longer, our inevitable reunion with our wives.

“It might have worked out that way, too, if it hadn’t been for your glasses. Something about your glasses … They made me want you for myself.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, though in retrospect I see that I did understand—that perhaps I had understood all along.

He told me the story. About a year after he and Iris married, she became pregnant. “And the pregnancy was terrible. She nearly died. So did the baby. Maybe it would have been better if she had.”

“Iris?”

“No. The baby. Our daughter, you see, is what in olden times
people called feebleminded. An imbecile. I do so prefer these antiquated terms, don’t you? They’re so much more … bracing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well. She lives in California now, with my mother. But that’s another story. The point is, after she was born, Iris developed this absolute terror of getting pregnant again. Because she was convinced—absolutely convinced—that our daughter’s condition, as they say, owed to the circumstances of the birth. And so we just … stopped. Sex, I mean. There was no treaty. It was more a matter of … unspoken mutual consent. And then the other decision—to put the child in the institution—it was Iris’s to make. As the mother, she had the right to make it. Not that she was ever easy about it. To be honest, she felt rather guilty. She still does.

“We were living in New York then. The girl was three. She couldn’t speak, could barely walk. So we took her on the train to California—she loved that trip. I really think those were the happiest days of her life—and come to think of it, I walked the length of the train that time, too. With her. And then we left her with my mother, and went back to New York and sailed to France, where we began leading—the good life, I believe it’s called.”

“And your daughter? Didn’t you think about her?”

“Well, of course I
thought
about her. The trouble is, that’s all I really could do, think about her … But I’m straying from the point, which is to explain how you were supposed to be for Iris. You look so surprised. As if the idea never occurred to you. Well, why do you think I was talking about her underwear?”

“Are you saying that it was planned? That you planned it between you?”

“In a manner of speaking. It’s a sort of … arrangement we have. It goes back years. Le Touquet, that was the first time. As a matter of fact, it was with Alec Tyndall, the fellow who bet me he could write a
murder novel faster than I could. Which just goes to show that there really is more to every story than meets the eye. Iris is right again.”

“Wait—what happened with this Tyndall?”

“Well, we were in the bar at the hotel, and we were both very drunk. We’d been drinking for hours. And Iris had gone to bed, and Tyndall’s wife was, as they say, indisposed, and we got to talking—trading dirty stories. He was really a very dirty-minded fellow, Tyndall. The British are, as a rule. He wanted to hear dirty stories, and of course I obliged him. I told him all sorts of things about Iris. Some of them were even true. And then, when I could see he was getting, oh, most excited, I slipped the key across the table to him. The key to our room. And I suggested he just … go up and let himself in.”

“Did Iris know?”

“Oh, no. She didn’t have a clue. I was acting entirely on impulse, taking—oh, yes—a tremendous risk … Only somehow I knew it wasn’t really a risk. And I was right.

“He stayed with her all night. Did I mention that Daisy was with me in the bar? Daisy, my bosom companion of so many
madrugadas
. We walked up and down the promenade until dawn, didn’t we, Daisy? Until we saw the lights go on in the room. Iris pulling open the curtains.”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. She just … looked at me. The expression on her face … it was almost a smirk.

“Well, that was how it started. Mind you, it’s never been a regular thing with us. Just a few times a year. Nor has it always worked out as smoothly as it did with Tyndall.”

“And this was what was supposed to happen with me?”

“Well, why did you think she took Julia off to the vet like that?
Why do you think she told Julia to let us go off alone together to have a drink?”

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”

“No, it’s not in the least believable, is it? Not, for instance, as believable as my being a con man.”

“Is that why you’re telling me this? Because you’re upset that I thought you were a con man?”