The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (16 page)

“I slept with them, yes. Just as I would have slept with you. So that afterward he could come and smell you on my body, on the bedsheets. So that I could answer his very
detailed
questions. So that he could take the nightgown I’d been wearing into the bathroom and … Don’t look shocked. You’ve no right. Not after what you’ve done. That evening you went with him to Estoril, I’d prepared myself—I mean by that exactly what you think I mean. Only then the thing I’ve anticipated from the beginning, the thing I knew would happen eventually—it finally happened. The only surprise was that it was you. I’d always expected it would be some youth who slayed him, some stunningly handsome youth … Well, who can account for taste?”

“Thank you.”

“I’m not deprecating you. In one sense I’m glad. You’re less likely to drive him over the edge than a younger man would be. As for me, the whole business comes as something of a relief. Because at least now it’s all out in the open. For you and Julia, on the other hand—honestly, I think it would be far better if you stayed here. Stayed away from us. We’re poison. But I suppose it’s too late for that now.”

“If what you’re asking is whether I still plan to take my wife back to New York, the answer is yes. Even kicking and screaming, I’ll take her.”

“Then there’s only one other thing I have to say. Don’t get it into your head that Edward will leave me. He won’t. You can ask him yourself.” She gathered up her things. “Well, I suppose I’d better be going. He’s waiting across the street. He’ll be in shortly.”

“And what if Julia finds out—but not from me? From someone else?”

“The consequences will be yours to live with, won’t they?”

I looked away, toward the baffling clock. She stood. “You probably think I’ve enjoyed this. Or at least that I’ve got some primitive satisfaction from it. Well, I haven’t. For me this entire conversation has been extremely distasteful.”

“Then why have it?”

“Because there are occasions when none of the choices are good. You simply have to calculate which is the least bad.”

“Like going home.”

“More or less.”

I tried to laugh. She did not let down her guard. And how glorious she looked right then! Edward had been right to compare her to the
Madonna with the Long Neck
. There was something authentically Mannerist about Iris, a quality at once magisterial and freakish, as if her body had been laid out on a torture rack and stretched beyond
endurance, and now the elongated splendor of her limbs, the erotic torque of her neck, testified to the indivisibility of suffering and grace.

A few minutes after she left, Edward came in, with Daisy.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“
I’m
all right,” I said. “What about you?”

He sat down. “What can I say, Pete? This is what happens when you get caught up with people like me. People who don’t take precautions. If you never want to see me again, I’ll understand.”

“And what do you want?”

“I’m in no position to want anything.”

“Fine. Let’s go then.”

“Where?”

“You know where.”

He didn’t even order a beer. Outside, the sun was at its most brutally bright, that brightness that precedes its setting. Daisy at our side, we walked toward Rua do Alecrim, toward the iron staircase and the unmarked door.

One afternoon—I think it was more or less in the middle of our stay in Lisbon—Edward and I took a ride on the Bica Elevator. This elevator, in case you do not know it, is actually a funicular. Its one car has three staggered compartments, rather like the treads of a stepladder. Well, that week we were always looking for places where we could be alone, Edward and I, even for a few minutes. And since the Bica Elevator was cheap, and it was relatively easy to get a compartment to ourselves, it became one of our haunts. I don’t recall that we ever touched each other during those brief trips. For that was not the point. The point was to breathe, just for a moment, some air that no one else was breathing.

I have never much cared for funiculars. Chalk this up to the car salesman’s native distrust of all vehicles that, in the fixity of their routes, deny the open road we cherish. And what is the funicular but a freak even among trains and trams and the like, humpbacked and fused to its precipitous track, from which it can never be parted and without which it cannot live? Edward used to say that the Bica
Elevator reminded him of Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill. To me it was more like an invalid attached to an iron lung … Now it occurs to me that marriage itself is a kind of funicular, the regular operation of which it is the duty of certain spouses not just to oversee but to power. And the uphill portion, for all the effort it requires, is nothing compared with the downhill, during which there is the perpetual risk of free fall. Ask any bicyclist and he will tell you that descending is far more dangerous than ascending.

At any rate—and now this strikes me as apposite—it was aboard the Bica Elevator that Edward first told me that Iris was Roman Catholic. “I suspect that this was what her childhood felt like,” he said as the climb began. “The nuns always giving her these little penances to perform. Yet no sooner had she completed one set than she’d commit another sin. And so on, forever and ever.”

“Does she still practice?”

“Not anymore. She gave it up when she married me. The tenets of the faith, if not the terrors. The terrors—those are harder to get rid of.” Years had passed since Iris had last gone to confession, and still she totted up her transgressions in a sort of spiritual account book, and tried to balance them with acts of contrition. The sin of which she considered herself guiltiest was pride, which is unique among the sins in being regarded by the secular world as a virtue. Pride in one’s work, pride in one’s success … These are good things, aren’t they? And Iris was proud of her work, she was proud of her success, above all she was proud that for so many years she had kept the funicular from crashing to the ground. Indeed, there was only one thing of which she was not proud, and that was her love for her husband. Its very immoderacy shamed her. This was why she hated me so. For until she met me she had never once in her life let down her guard on this score, not even when she was at her most abject, not even on those dark nights of the soul when,
having dismissed the lover Edward had sent to her, she turned to the wall and thought, “If only I had a mother …” For she could not imagine confiding such a thing in anyone but a mother. And now she had confided it in me, her worst enemy.

Mind you, she was not blundering. She was a skilled card player. She knew that when you are dealt a weak hand, the only thing is to play it as if it were strong. And the hand she had been dealt really was incredibly weak. For what cards did it hold? Habit—the habit of a long marriage. Loyalty—at least the hope of it. A daughter in exile. A dog nearing the end of its life. And these were the
strong
cards.

Well, she looked them over and she made a calculation. The best chance she stood of keeping Edward was not by forbidding the affair, but by managing it. To manage it, she had to manage me. To manage me, she had to persuade me that Julia, were she to catch so much as a whiff of Edward’s scent on my clothes, would just crumble into a pile of dust. And here she had a lucky break. Our talk at the British Bar came right on the heels of that terrible episode in Sintra, indeed just minutes after I had left Julia at the Francfort’s revolving door. And so the image that came into my mind as Iris made her case was not of my wife as I had first known her, that youngest child radiant in her willfulness, but my wife as I had last known her—frail and febrile, crossing through glass, crossing a river, crossing the Styx.

So that was that. Iris left the British Bar, and she saw that she had achieved her purpose. Never again would Edward and I be alone together. Wherever we went, she would be with us: Iris, and, through her, the specter of Julia, crumbling into pieces. Yet did Iris also see that, in ensuring my compliance, she had paid a higher price than she had to? For she had meant only to show me the depth of her pride. But instead she had broken down and shown me the depth of her passion. By comparison, sleeping with me would have been nothing.

Now I see her processing (that is the word for Iris) down Rua do Arsenal. Not once turning her head. Along Rua do Ouro she makes her way, past the Elevator and across the Rossio to the Francfort Hotel, where, as she climbs the stairs, the clerk thinks, There is a true English lady … She locks her door behind her—and it is only then, in the darkness of that insalubrious bedroom where you had to choose between suffocating from the heat or from the smell, that she divests herself of the heavy armor with which she hid and protected her heart. For now she was utterly alone. She did not even have Daisy for company. At the last moment, she could not resist imposing a single condition on Edward: that when he went off with me, he take the dog along. Probably she was hoping that Daisy would prove an impediment to us—that because of Daisy we would be turned away at doors or out of rooms—when really all she was doing was depriving herself of the one creature from whose company she might have derived some comfort in those terrible hours.

It must have felt to her as if she was being returned to her childhood. Once again she was making the sea journey from Malaysia; once again she was being delivered into the cold, clean hands of the nuns; once again she was peering down the path to the house of her imposing relations. I suspect that it was in those years that she acquired her taste for penance, for even in the grimmest circumstances, you have to find some means of amusing yourself. Well, if nothing else, it was good training for what was to come.

She met him in Cambridge, at one of those spring balls or whatever they’re called that they have there. He had then been in England for eight months, studying philosophy under G. E. Moore. From what I gather, Moore was considered a Great Force—and so his endorsement of Edward carried great weight. Supposedly it was all based on some papers Edward had written in Heidelberg.

Well, Edward asked Iris to dance—and at first she was suspicious.
She had never considered herself pretty in any way. More to the point, her relations had done their best to nip what self-confidence she had in the bud. For she stood to inherit a lot of money when she turned twenty-one, and if she married, these relations knew, their chance to manage that fortune would be spoiled. And so they made sure to remind her at every opportunity that she was not pretty, and that therefore any man who paid her the least attention should be regarded with distrust—a strategy that might have worked, had Edward not seemed so utterly guileless, which he was, and had he not compared her to the
Madonna with the Long Neck
, which he did. For until then her height had been her greatest embarrassment—and now he was telling her it was her greatest glory. Of course, far worse embarrassments were in store for her.

From what I am told, the first year of their marriage was a relatively happy one. In Cambridge they lived in some little hovel, some squalid nest, from which they would emerge once or twice a day to take a brisk walk around the green. A stranger observing them would have thought them, if not an attractive couple, then an interesting one—both so tall, and able to take such great strides. And they could talk to each other. In marriage this is no small thing. Julia and I could not talk to each other—and in retrospect I see what an impoverishment that was. Whereas Iris, despite her lack of education, had the sort of mind that Edward appreciated. Few people outside the rarefied circles of Cambridge could make sense of his papers—but she could. Nor did she begrudge him the effort they cost him. For when he was working, he was prone to a certain fanaticism, particularly regarding early drafts and pages with which he was dissatisfied. First he would tear the pages into shreds. Then he would burn the shreddings in the fireplace. Then he would bury the ashes in the back garden. All this Iris observed with a kind of erotic ravishment. What she could not bear were his disappearances.
These were sometimes figurative (he would hardly speak to her for a whole day) and sometimes literal (he would go for a walk—and not return until the next afternoon). They were sometimes accompanied by explanations (a sudden urge to see the Elgin Marbles) and sometimes not. And how Iris suffered during those long hours of his absence! It was, she said, as if the earth were trembling up under her feet, as if she might at any minute be sucked down into the abyss … Until he returned and the world regained its solidity. All this would have been tolerable had he given her some warning. But he never did. For Edward, his broad shoulders notwithstanding, was mercurial. You could reach for him, and sometimes you would grab hold of him. But sometimes all you would grab hold of was a reflection of a reflection in a revolving door.

Well, perhaps now you will understand why he lasted in Cambridge such a short time. For even in that haven of erratic temperaments, there were rules you had to follow. Granted, from an American perspective, they were strange rules, mostly having to do with dinners and teas at which it was obligatory to make an appearance. Especially if you were a junior fellow, your absence at these occasions was regarded with disfavor—not because the other fellows cared especially for your company, but because in not showing up you were flouting tradition. If you were a foreigner, it was worse. The infraction was then regarded as implying a national slight.

Anyway, Edward missed several of these teas and dinners—and in due course the master of his college sent him a note of chastisement. It was in the nature of a slap on the wrist. But Edward took it in deadly earnest and resigned.

The trouble, in my opinion, was that he had never had a real job—and so he had never been fired from a real job. Being fired is a signal experience for any man, one that he should have sooner
rather than later if he is to get on in the world. For until he does, he will suffer under the delusion that employers are as forgiving as mothers. Well, all his life Edward had been told he was a genius, and cosseted accordingly; and so he failed to see that where the ego of a Great Institution is concerned, the whims of one little scholar are nugatory. And sometimes examples must be made.