The Two Hotel Francforts

by David Leavitt

  Spain might have been the worst part of the trip. Julia refused to eat anything. Such was her fussiness about the sanitary facilities that she developed an acute case of constipation. For hours at a time she played solitaire—she had rigged up a sort of board that she could hold on her lap—or gazed at the photographs of our apartment in Vogue, from which she sometimes read aloud: “It was the wish of the lady of the house, an American long resident in Europe, to maintain the flat’s Parisian charm while reducing its Parisian crowdedness. Less of everything—Colette instead of Proust! Matisse instead of Ingres!—but still distinctly à la française.” She had only one copy, and it was getting dog-eared.

  Now, in the Buick, I looked at Edward. I wanted to reassure myself that it was actually he, not Julia, who was in the passenger seat. Like a dog, he had his face out the window. “Look, we’re in Estoril!” he said. “There’s the Atlantic!” He pointed at a hotel, from the roof of which the name ATLNTICO pulsed out in neon. “And that’s the Palace!” Again, the name, PALÁCIO, was written on the roof—which led me to wonder if he’d even actually been to Estoril. It was an impression he liked to give, that anywhere he went was a place he’d been before.

  We parked the car. From the steps of the casino, an English-style park rolled toward the ocean. We walked up an avenue lined with palm trees to the entrance. “Feel that breeze,” Edward said. “So much cooler than Lisbon. Doesn’t it remind you of the Riviera? You know, that slightly convalescent air, and all these hotels that look vaguely like hospitals. And then the train tracks dividing the beach from the town. Only it’s not the Mediterranean on the other side, it’s the Atlantic. That’s a big difference. I could never abide Mediterranean resorts, the water like a tepid bath. Whereas an ocean is wilder than a sea. Listen, even from here you can hear the waves.”

  I listened—and heard the engines of limousines, the wail of dance music, the chattering of café-goers. Certain words are the same in every European language. Visa. Passport. Hotel.

  We arrived at the casino. As at Macy’s, commissionaires with epaulets on their shoulders held open the doors. Past the gaming tables and the poker parlors and the cinema and the Wonder Bar Edward led me to a vast rotunda where Europeans in evening dress were dancing. He pulled a table out from the wall, indicated that I should sit, then, when I had, pushed the table back in so that it pinned me.

  “I feel like a child being tucked into bed,” I said.

  “Just call me Nanny,” he said. Overhead, an immense chandelier shivered. The orchestra was playing Noël Coward’s “World Weary,” the singer pronouncing the lyrics phonetically:

  When I’m feeling weary and blue, I’m only too glad to be left alone,

  dreaming of a place in the sun when day is done far from a telephone …

  “Hardly ever see the sky,” Edward sang along, “buildings seem to grow so high.”

  Give me somewhere peaceful and grand

  Where all the land slumbers in monotone …

  A waiter appeared. “Absinthe,” Edward ordered. “It’s legal here,” he added after the waiter had left.

  “I know. I’ve never tried it.”

  “Really? The kiss of the green fairy is bitter.” Under the table I could feel the pressure of his leg against mine. “I actually learned quite a bit about absinthe when we were writing the second of the Legrand novels. Iris’s idea was that the victim should be an absinthe hound. Since he can’t get the stuff in Paris, he has it smuggled in from Spain. Well, his wife hates him, so she decides to do away with him by putting cyanide in his absinthe. Her gambit is that the coroner will declare the cause of death to be absinthe poisoning—which he does.”

  I’m world weary, world weary,

  Living in a great big town …

  “And is there actually such a thing as absinthe poisoning?”

  “Only to the extent that there’s such a thing as alcohol poisoning. The thujone itself is relatively harmless.”

  The waiter returned, bearing on his tray the elaborate implementa of absinthe. These included a carafe of water and two tiny glasses, each of which he filled a quarter of the way with the viscous green liqueur. Then he balanced a leaf-shaped perforated spoon atop each glass. Then he put a sugar cube atop each spoon. It was Edward who poured the water from the carafe through the sugar cubes—at which the absinthe clouded. “To sweeten, a little, the green fairy’s kiss.”

  We toasted wordlessly. In flavor the absinthe reminded me of some strong licorice my mother used to keep by her bedside—to mask, I suppose, the bourbon on her breath.

  I’m world weary, world weary,

  Tired of all these jumping jacks …

  Suddenly a woman stumbled out of the crowd. “Eddie, is that you?”

  “Oh, God,” Edward said. “Hello, George.”

  The woman leaned over for a kiss, so that her breasts hung like bladders. A diamond-studded cross dangled between them. She was in her sixties, with freckled skin and untidy gray-black hair.

  “George, this is Pete.”

  “Georgina Kendall, pleased to meet you,” the woman said, holding out a hand that seemed to be all swollen knuckles. “I’m here with Lucy. You remember Lucy? From the train?”

  He nodded.

  “Eddie and I met on the Sud Express, when it was stuck outside Salamanca,” Georgina said to me.

  “In war, trains never run on time,” Edward said aphoristically.

  “Tell me about it! Anyway, we got to be great friends, the four of us—Lucy and me and Eddie and Aster. How is Aster, by the way? And that charming little schnauzer.”

  “Both fine. Are you staying here in Estoril?”

  “Yes, we’re at the Palace, and it’s costing me a fortune—Lucy has a weakness for the tables—but I’m hoping the material I’m collecting for my book will earn us back her losses and then some. You see, I’m a writer”—this to me—“and I’m working on a memoir. Not a diary—a memoir. I mean, I’m writing it as if I’m already back home, sitting in my study, recalling all I’ve been through. It’s to be called Flight from France. Now, you may ask why I’m doing it that way, and I’ll tell you. It’s because I know the market. This time next year, I guarantee, the bookshops will be swamped with memoirs of foreigners escaping France, and I’m not about to let anyone pip me at the post.”

  “But isn’t that a bit tricky?” Edward said. “You’ll have to falsify your perspective. Pretend that you’re looking back when really you’re right in the thick of things.”

  “Illusion, as you know perfectly well, Eddie, is the writer’s stock in trade. Anyway, no one likes to read diaries. They’re so boring. ‘June thirtieth. Woke up, had breakfast. June thirty-first. Woke up, had breakfast.’”

  “June thirty-first?”

  “Well, you know what I mean.”

  “But what if something totally unexpected happens? What if Portugal joins the Allies? Or Franco teams up with Hitler? It’ll ruin your ending.”

  “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m challenging you. I’m calling your bluff.”

  “Dear Eddie,” Georgina said as she turned to me, “he seems to think writers ought to behave like newspaper reporters. He doesn’t understand that for us time doesn’t exist. Consider Proust.” She smiled, showing her small, uneven teeth. “Well, I must be off. Give Aster my best. And the dog.”

  As she disappeared into the crowd, I pressed my leg harder against Edward’s. Suddenly I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to make him cry uncle.

  He didn’t even blink. “Now that, my boy,” he said, “is a hack. Hackus literarius. In case you’ve never seen a live specimen.”

  “I’ve never even heard of her.”

  “Better that you haven’t. She’s a charlatan. Just another of these rich American women who’ve been idling around in Nice since the Napoleonic Wars. Nice, or maybe Saint-Tropez.”

  “Strange, this notion of writing about what’s happening as if it’s already happened.”

 
“Fear of the future, that’s what it is. She thinks that if she can make the present the past, the future can’t hurt her.”

  “And you? Aren’t you afraid of the future?”

  “What’s to be afraid of? The future doesn’t exist. It’s the past that frightens me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it can’t be undone, and it can never be known.” Under the table he changed position, so that his legs were squeezing mine. “That’s the trouble, you see, these days we all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what’s left to recall but past anticipation? What’s left to anticipate but future retrospection?”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “It’s like my brother Harry. The last time I saw him and his wife, they spent the whole of breakfast arguing about where to have lunch.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the whole of lunch arguing about where to have dinner.”

  “Yes!”

  “And the whole of dinner going over what they’d had for breakfast and lunch.”

  “That’s it! That’s the thing to avoid.”

  “But how can you avoid it when everywhere you turn, you have to make plans, learn from your mistakes, strategize?”

  “Right, how can you? How the hell can you?” He leaned in closer. “Are you feeling it now?”

  “What? Your leg?”

  “No, I know you’re feeling that. The absinthe.”

  “I’m not sure. What am I supposed to feel?”

  “You’re supposed to hallucinate.”

  “I might be hallucinating. I’ll need to check.”

  I looked out at the crowd.

  “What do you see?”

  “People dancing. Oh, there are the Fischbeins. Do you see them?”

  “I do. I do see them. So either we’re having the same hallucination or they’re really there.”

  If the Fischbeins were there, they didn’t recognize us. Monsieur Fischbein wore a tuxedo a size too big for him, Madame Fischbein a green taffeta evening gown. Against her freckled wattle, her pearls gleamed. Her fur coat was again slung over the back of her chair.

  “They are as bad as the Germans,” Monsieur Fischbein was telling some unseen auditor. “They say to us we need one paper, we bring. Then they say to us we need another paper, we tell them we cannot bring. Then they say to us they are sorry, we should try another country. But where, I ask you? Terre de Feu?”

  It seemed it was always Terre de Feu.

  “We will go back to Antwerp,” Madame Fischbein said. “Whatever the Germans do, it cannot be worse than this.”

  With a fatalistic flourish, the old couple took to the dance floor. Around and around they waltzed, to the tune of “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” Madame leaning her forehead against Monsieur’s bony shoulder. “Look at them,” Edward said. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may and all that. It’s the end of Europe, that’s why they’re dancing, and of course Lisbon is the end of Europe, too. The fingertip of Europe. And everything that Europe is and means is pressed into that fingertip. Too much of it. It’s a cistern full to overflowing—and each time a ship sails, the water level goes down a little. But not nearly enough. And in the meantime the floodgates remain open.”

  “Hold on a minute. According to what you just said, Lisbon is a cistern—”

  “Right.”

  “So the refugees are water—”

  “Correct.”

  “But that means that when they get on the ship—the ship is carrying water as its cargo. Carrying as its cargo the very element on which it sails.”

  “What, you’re saying my metaphor doesn’t hold water?”

  We both burst out laughing.

  “Now are you feeling it?”

  “I believe I am.”

  “Shall we have some more?”

  “Let’s.”

  He refilled our glasses. How long had I known him then? Twelve hours? Fourteen? It’s true: in war, trains never run on time. And now this one, like the Wabash Cannonball, was about to arrive at its destination—only it hadn’t yet left. Or had it left the moment he’d stepped on my glasses?

  Half an hour later, he asked for the bill. “Don’t even try,” he said when I took out my wallet.

  I stood, and was surprised that my legs still worked.

  “Where to?”

  “The beach. Not the one here in Estoril—it’s crawling with police. We’ll go down the coast, to Guincho.”

  We got into the car. For a moment I entertained the possibility that I ought not to be driving in such a condition. I entertained it and dismissed it. For I felt none of the symptoms of inebriation, not giddiness nor agitation nor sleepiness. Rather, what I felt—have you ever driven on a wet road in winter? Do you know that moment when suddenly the car seems to lift right off the surface of the earth? That was what I felt.

  I had no idea what time it was. There were timepieces everywhere—on my wrist, on the dashboard—yet I didn’t look at any of them. After Cascais, the road grew narrower and more windy, far too windy to accommodate such a gargantuan vehicle—and still I navigated them effortlessly, as if the laws of nature had ceased to apply, as if the car had suddenly acquired an unsuspected elasticity, allowing it to bend like an accordion. Even when a bicyclist appeared in my headlights, I didn’t flinch. I simply veered around him. In retrospect, I understand that it was all the absinthe, and that this is one of the many reasons why absinthe is dangerous. Now I wonder that we didn’t kill someone, or get killed ourselves.

  Then we got to Guincho, where two or three other cars were parked on the road’s shoulder. Through a grove of umbrella pines, Edward led me out onto dunes that descended to a crescent-shaped beach. Here and there, shadowy hummocks rose where couples slept or made love under blankets. The moon was high. “Now do you see what I mean about the difference between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean?” he said, taking off his shoes. White-tipped breakers slapped the shore. He rolled up his cuffs and waded into the surf. As I followed, I tried to fit my footprints into his, so that there would be only one set.

  The water stung my ankles. “It’s cold,” I said, stepping back, but Edward wasn’t listening.

  “Where the land ends and the sea begins,” he said. “That’s Camões, the great Lusitanian poet. He wrote that about Cabo da Roca, at the westernmost point in all of Europe. It’s just a little ways to the north. Look.” He put his hands on my shoulders, pointing me in the direction of some murky cliffs. “Can you see it?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll tell people that I did.”

  “Yes. Let’s tell people that we did.”

  He did not move his hands.

  “Pete—”

  “What?”

  “May I say something?”

  “Of course.”

  “I have never in my life been so happy as I am at this moment.” His voice was so solemn I nearly laughed.

  “Do you think I’m mad or evil to say that?” he went on. “I mean, here we are in Portugal—Portugal, for God’s sake—and all around us, all you can see is suffering and fear, suffering and panic. And then when you consider that the people here, they’re the lucky ones, just because they managed to get this far … What right do I have to be happy? Yet I am. I’m not ashamed of it, either.”

  “Maybe it’s because you’re safe.”

  “Yes. There’s a sense of relief you can’t help but feel—at knowing you’ve been thrown clear of danger. And yet the panic and fear of others, the panic and suffering of others … It’s still there … And we’re feeding on it, aren’t we? We might as well admit we’re feeding on it. It should really only belong to them, this weird vitality, this sense that you can do things you wouldn’t normally let yourself do … We have no right to it, yet we’re sharing in it … And that’s not the only reason I’m happy. That’s not even the principal reason I’m happy. I
t’s because of you.”

  “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.