Guided Tours of Hell (9 page)

Allo!
was Leo’s newsletter for American Francophile tourists. Leo said he’d started it as a scam to keep going to France and, after he hired Nina, a scam to keep taking her with him. France was a passion for Leo—as was Nina, she’d hoped. He made his money from other newsletters, on investments and health.

They’d met at a crowded party; actually, a wedding. The bride was Nina’s former boss, the publisher of
Squeeze
, a downtown arts magazine that she had just folded in order to travel the globe with her elderly rich new husband. What a coincidence that Leo needed a writer-editor and Nina needed a job! They exchanged cards (Leo’s) and scribbled phone numbers (Nina’s) with much checking to make sure that they’d really completed this apparently simple transaction. The wedding was held on a tour boat that lazily circled Manhattan while Nina and Leo paced tighter, watchful circles around each other.

Nina started work that Monday. On Friday Leo took her to dinner at his favorite bistro, Chez Josephine—dark and narrow as a railway car, with low tin ceilings and ribbons of peeling paint like party decorations, in fact the only decorations except for some faded group photos of French soldiers—or were they Boy Scouts?—lined up behind panes of smudged glass. For one fleeting instant Leo struck Nina as a little sad: this fast-talking, aging New York guy pretending to be in Paris. Then halfway through the curried mussels he reached over and took her hand and tasted the briny curried cream sauce from the tip of each finger. The desire that flooded through Nina bypassed any notion that this was corny—and also perhaps a bit sudden for the first hour of their first date. And any thoughts she might have had about Leo being sad were alchemized into passion for the sad beauty that was Leo.

That first night, at Leo’s loft, he picked two CDs from a rack and played one selection from each. The first—surprise!—was Edith Piaf. But if Nina had expected that, her smugness was soon blown away by the sheer raw ache of Piaf’s eerie warble. The second was Billie Holiday singing “Don’t Explain.” Her lullaby voice crooned Hush now, Don’t explain, Just say you’ll remain, Fire don’t explain, forces of nature don’t explain and neither does her man, forget the lipstick, the cheating, he’s her man, she’s so glad he’s back, and she loves him….

After one verse, Leo said, “I can’t stand this. It makes me too unhappy,” and rushed out of the room.

Nina assumed that what he couldn’t stand was the depth of his own emotion, his sympathy for the singer’s, the
woman’s
broken heart, for the abject pure nobility of her languorous self-debasement. She assumed that his reason for playing those songs was to convey a message he couldn’t say: that what was about to happen between them was not only about sex, but about romance, love beyond reason, love beyond death, love beyond the reaches of time, the love that still haunted the voices of these women, dead for so many years. He was telling Nina that she was capable of such passion. And that same night, in Leo’s bed, this turned out to be true. That anything could feel like that had focused Nina’s attention and convinced her that her whole life, prior to that moment, was a ripped magazine she was leafing through until her appointment with Leo.

But later, she listened harder—of course she went out and bought the CDs and played them over and over—and began to think that Leo’s playing the Billie Holiday song was less about his ideal of love than about his idea of how a woman in love should behave. After a blissful few weeks when they were constantly together, she’d come to believe that the lyrics were meant to be prescriptive: an etiquette lesson on what Nina should—and shouldn’t—do and say. Hush now, don’t explain if Leo disappears for a whole weekend. Hush now, don’t explain if he doesn’t answer his phone. Nor will Nina be asked to explain. Well, she
won’t have
anything to explain! She’ll spend the weekend by the phone, waiting for Leo to call.

With subtle expression changes, brief sharp withdrawals of interest, Leo had taught Nina that some things were not to be discussed. And Nina was such a good student they never
had
to discuss them, so there was never any unpleasantness, which Leo wouldn’t have liked. At her most uncertain moments, Nina had to wonder:
Was
she a passionate person…or an evasive proud one, only too ready to play by the rules that Leo had set down?

But what should she have done that first night? Turned and run for her life while Leo was off in another room, hiding from Billie Holiday’s pain or discreetly hanging back while Billie gave his new girlfriend instruction by example?

She could never give Leo up. Their love was worth it, all worth it. How many people felt a sexual buzz just going to work in the morning?
Nina
did, she was joyous—because she knew that Leo would be there. That was almost the only time she
did
know, except when they traveled on the research trips that were merely excuses to devour each other in a series of French hotels. She’d never been happier than she was on these trips! But she couldn’t even say
that
.

They’d been to Paris three times in the last seven months. But now he’d sent her here by herself, to check out the Hotel Danton and write a piece on the small new hotels and secret bistros of Montparnasse.

Two weeks ago, just before Halloween, he’d called her into his office. All that morning, at her desk, Nina had entertained herself by recalling moments from the night before with Leo. What made it all the more erotic was that they’d arrived at the office and gone directly to their separate rooms. There was a game they played: who could hold out longest, until Nina went in to see Leo, or the light flashed on her phone.

Nina had run down the hall, then stopped to catch her breath outside Leo’s door. When she walked in, she was embarrassed, as if he knew what she’d been thinking all morning. That he alone in the world
could
have known made it all the more thrilling.

Leo sat, smiling, behind his desk. How oddly handsome he was! For a man who worked in an office and hated sports and had never, as far as Nina knew, been in a physical fight, Leo looked like a veteran of bar brawls in every seedy port on the planet, or like one of those French move stars—Eddie Constantine, Yves Montand, all those craggy, ravaged guys with tire tracks on their faces. His nose seemed to have been broken and left to mend on its own; his face was deeply lined; small fleshy pads sat like callouses on his occipital ridge.

A greasy cold October mist had nuzzled Leo’s many windows, but his office was warm and brightly lit.

“Five days in Paris?” Leo had said.

“I’d love to,” Nina said simply, and then sank back into a chair, overwhelmed by gratitude in advance for the pleasures before her, starting with certain pleasures that no one else might enjoy: the happiness of being packed in with him for eight hours on the plane—precious hours during which she would know exactly where Leo was.

The first indication that something was wrong came when he gave her the tickets. Normally, Leo kept them in his inside jacket pocket, along with both their passports and all their traveler’s checks. But this time he handed Nina the envelope—in which there was only one ticket. And he seemed to be telling her that she was going to Paris without him.

“You could write about…Montparnasse,” Leo murmured dubiously, as if to himself. “A neighborhood with an arty past, a little frayed at the edges, maybe, but comparatively cheap and convenient….” Nina listened in misery as it grew progressively clearer that this wasn’t an invitation but rather, an assignment. “I’ll be eager to hear what you think of these….” He scribbled a list of bistros on a memo pad and then with an absentmindedness that was startling, even for Leo, crumpled up the paper and threw it in the trash.

A hot little fist of disappointment knotted itself inside Nina’s chest, yet she managed to keep smiling. Nothing was to be shown. She kept the same pleased expression as when she’d thought they were going together. Now the trip seemed like torture, a desolate hell of boredom. But this was their understanding, the etiquette between them: It was impolite to act as if what the other did mattered.

Well, it didn’t matter! Anyone would be glad to have a job with so many free trips to Paris. She would go without him and have a wonderful time! It was just so surprising and painful that he would choose to be without her. That he was capable of it made tears pop into her eyes. She turned and looked out at the blurry lights of a million office windows.

“Nina,” said Leo. “I’m over here.”

As she’d hurried from his office, he’d called after her, “See you soon.” So even though they’d been lovers for months, he apparently wasn’t someone she knew well enough to ask what he was doing. Was he getting rid of her, or what? Why wasn’t Leo going?

Nina spent the next two weeks rehearsing imaginary interrogations of an imaginary Leo, but whenever she came face-to-face with the actual Leo—in bed with him, for example—something stopped her and she couldn’t ask, couldn’t get out the words. It was a matter of pride for them both that their romance was based on passion and not on tedious analyses of every gesture and word. If he’d wanted that, said Leo, he could have gotten married. There were always so many mysteries about what exactly Leo intended. For example, why had he raved on so about the Hotel Danton?

On TV the Provençal farmer was slicing open the pig’s belly. His wife reached in and pulled out the entrails and tossed them in a bucket. The Alastian pig had been noisier but afterwards less gory. The Provençal couple were up to their elbows in blood. At least Nina
thought
it was blood. The TV was black-and-white.

The jittery black-and-white TV had been the final blow. It had taken Nina strangely long to realize it wasn’t in color, and then she watched as if color might yet appear, like in
The Wizard of Oz
. She was seized with desire to grab the TV and hurl it through the window. Fortunately, her windows were covered by immovable wooden shutters. Who wouldn’t want to keep the sun from shining into this chamber of horrors?

Three of the walls were wainscotted halfway up to a dusty ledge that bordered the scuffed peeling wallpaper in a lotus-bamboo pattern. Shelf paper covered the fourth wall in silver tweed, though not the tweed of the carpet. The thin shag bedspread was the hairy off-white of a blanket scrap some toddler had been chewing on for months. The bathroom smelled of mildew with an edge of urine that instantly ruined the illusion of the virgin hotel room, anonymous and newly minted.

The television had been the last straw, or so Nina had thought until she leaned back and then sat up and her hair stuck to the headboard. And it was then that the woman next door had begun to gasp and moan….

Was Leo a sadist whose idea of a joke was to pack her off for a couple of days to an actual whorehouse in Paris? That would contradict everything she thought she knew about Leo. He could be cool, even distant, but he was not the sort of person who would bother dreaming up inventive ways to be mean: A free trip to a Paris brothel—a neat way of saying, We’re through!

But Nina had discovered that men could suddenly reveal unsuspected alarming traits you surely would have noticed, so maybe they weren’t old traits at all but new and drastic mutations. For a time she’d dated a filmmaker from Havana who one night knelt by the bed and asked Fidel and the Virgin to have mercy on them both. What did you know about anyone? Obviously, you knew strangers more intimately than loved ones, and the person you knew least well was the one you were in love with.

Why had Leo informed her. She was going to like this hotel! He said he’d heard about it from a friend in London. Even after it was clear that they weren’t going together, he went on cruelly, endlessly, about how charming it was. Hey! Nina was fully capable of deciding that for herself! At
Squeeze
, she’d made all the decisions about whose art was interesting, whose work was getting better. Cindy, her boss, hadn’t cared about that; she was mainly concerned with finding the latest club where a downtown girl like herself could find an uptown husband like the one now escorting her around the world.

Leo always tried to tell Nina what to think. She could admit that now. Every dinner they ate, the French movies they saw—he said: You’re going to love this. And he was right, she
did
love them. There was no point even trying to solve the Zen-like riddle: Would she have loved that meal or that film if she hadn’t been with Leo?

The Provençal couple lit a fire. Soon cauldrons of water were boiling and hunks of flesh and bone hung from a laundry line. Now their pig was only a memory trotting around the barnyard.

Nina pretended for as long as she could not to hear the woman next door, starting in for a second night with a sort of hysterical gulping. Nina lacked the nerve and the language skills to call downstairs to complain. She would be up another night, sleep through another day. And sooner or later—sooner—she would have to stop pretending that the reason she was still in bed was just an aggravated case of jet lag.

Now, finally, Nina could hear the man who was giving her neighbor such pleasure. He was growling down in his throat, a rhythmic whirring and stopping, like someone trying to start a car on an icy morning. Leo had been very silent but so had everything else, as they fell on each other in those beautiful rooms, the room in which Piaf slept with Marcel Carné, the room in which Colette awaited Mistinguett, possibly the very room in which Ernest cheated on Hadley.

The same rooms! Leo had checked in advance. Every hotel had promised. But for all Leo’s fuss about booking those particular rooms, he never mentioned their previous occupants when he and Nina were there.

Nor had Nina tried to commune with those ghosts, to see what traces of them remained. Nina hardly gave a thought to the souls who had stayed in those places. She was too busy thinking about sex with Leo, or having sex with Leo, that is, not thinking at all, hardly even noticing as the voices quit, one by one, first the voice of the woman next door, then the voice of the clock, then the nattering voices inside Nina’s own mind. You couldn’t make that happen with just anyone, someone you’d picked off the street. And wouldn’t you
have
to feel something for someone with whom you could?