The Two Hotel Francforts

by David Leavitt

  “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.

  Nowhere

  Chapter 15

  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 pa
pers 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.

  So that was that. Far from begging him to change his mind, the master accepted his resignation coldly. Like most blows, Edward took this one without flinching. It was Iris who panicked. And who can blame her? In the course of a single day, her notion of her own future—as the charming wife of a charming don—had gone out the window. Of course, she had known that Edward could be capricious. What she had not guessed was that his caprice could carry him to such an extreme. And still she stood by him. She saw no alternative.

  The next step was to decide where to settle. She had come into her inheritance, so money was not a problem. Edward said he wanted to go to New York, to see the great-aunt of whom he was so fond. Under her tutelage, he thought he could finish the book that was supposed to be his dissertation. It was during the crossing that the child was conceived.

  Oh, the child! That really was the fatal blow. In Lisbon, Julia told me, Iris carried pictures of the girl in her pocketbook. She was very pretty—and, according to Iris, her lovely head was so empty it might have been made of porcelain. Iris was afraid to handle her—in case, in her clumsiness, she should drop her and that porcelain head should shatter. Whereas Edward adored his daughter without pity or guilt. He would talk to her for hours, undeterred by her failure to show even a glimmer of response. Or he would play with her, throwing her up into the air and catching her again. The spectacle of their capering disarmed his wife. She felt rebuked, rebuffed. Did he not realize that in being born, the child had nearly killed her? Not only that, since her arrival, he had not written a word of his book. And so when Iris conceived the notion of putting the girl in an institution—not an especially outrageous notion in those days—she was able to tell herself that it was for Edward’s sake. The mistake she made was not giving him a chance to object.

  It was then that they took that legendary trip to California—and as they trundled across the Midwest, poor Iris had no idea, no idea whatsoever, that she had just guaranteed what in the courts they call the alienation of her husband’s affections. This was not entirely her fault. I don’t believe Edward ever communicated to her the degree of his resentment over her decision to put the child away. I don’t even know that he ever communicated it to himself.

  So it was that the girl ended up in a gruesome state mental hospital that had the sole advantage of being a few hours’ drive from Edward’s mother—and from which his mother had the good sense, in a matter of days, to rescue her. And thank God she did. His mother—by all accounts a weird woman, a holder of séances and pursuer of psychical phenomena—was the silver lining on that cloud. For had it not been for her, the girl would have languished in that institution for the rest of her days, instead of which she grew up among the Theosophists, who regarded her as a kind of silent sibyl, through whom they hoped to make contact with their masters. Certainly a better life than the one to which the State of California would have sentenced her, and probably a better life than she would have led with her parents.

  After that, Edward’s book was abandoned, along with his child and the sexual side of his marriage—this last loss a double-edged sword for Iris, whose fear of conceiving another idiot exceeded her fear of losing her husband to another woman, though only by a hair. They sailed to France, where they took up their vagabond life—that life of Daisy running up and down the corridors of first-class hotels—not because either of them especially craved itinerancy, but because neither had the disposition for settlement. For Iris, as Edward had observed, felt at home nowhere, whereas Edward had a habit of becoming besotted with a place until his infatuation soured into boredom, his boredom into depression, and he suffered what Iris called an “episode.” The episode of the six bottles of champagne. The episode of the mixed-up pills. The episode of the train tracks. The episode of the fifth-floor balcony. And then, perhaps four years into their sojourn in the fairyland forlorn that was Jazz Age Europe, the episode of Alec Tyndall.

  Now, Alec Tyndall—to hear Edward tell it
, he was a bit player in the drama: the accidental instigator, first, of Xavier Legrand’s accidental career and, second, of the “arrangement” by which he sent men to Iris in the night. My hunch, though, is that the role he played was far more crucial than that. For before Alec Tyndall, Edward had not realized that he could love another man.

  Well, who can say what it was about Alec Tyndall that turned the tables for him? I certainly can’t, never having met him. Probably to any eye other than Edward’s, he was nothing special; a married businessman in his thirties; as unremarkable as … well, as I am.

  And maybe that was the appeal. At the British Bar, Iris had told me that she assumed it would be some absurdly handsome youth who would “slay” Edward. Yet the truth is, no handsome youth could have slayed Edward. Edward was unslayable by handsome youth. Instead, what was fatal to him was the clumsy touch of a flawed and ordinary man.

  Anyway, Tyndall—that was, for Iris, the beginning of her exile in the desert, her epoch of temptations and trials. When she opened her door to him that night, she could not at first believe her eyes. Then his avid presence began to make a horrible kind of sense. For just that week Edward had had another episode, this one involving a borrowed revolver. Now she thought she understood why.

  And so she allowed Tyndall into her bed—because she loved Edward. And yet what does that mean—that she loved Edward? I mean, if you put a drop of that vital fluid under a microscope, what would you see?

  In Iris’s case, I think what you would see would mostly be fear: fear of the earth opening up under her feet, fear of Edward’s loss—which meant her own. She thought that she loved him as a saint loves God. Yet isn’t the love of saints a kind of monstrosity? Saint Agatha with her breasts on a plate, Saint Lucy with her eyes on a plate … Wherever she turned, little red-tailed devils plagued her. Being devils, they knew exactly where to aim their pokers: at her pride. You might think they urged Iris into Tyndall’s bed. No! They tried to keep her out of it. And what an ordeal it was, resisting their implorations, and submitting instead to the mortification of the flesh—her own flesh—that her love of Edward demanded. And not even Mrs. Tyndall cared. For this was France in, I believe, 1927. Infidelity was de rigueur. In sleeping with Tyndall, Iris was betraying no one but herself.