The Two Hotel Francforts

by David Leavitt

  Now, let me return to Edward. I have mentioned the episode of the borrowed revolver. I have not mentioned the person from whom it was borrowed: an elderly Englishman, jovial and tipsy, who happened to be present when Edward pointed that revolver at his head, and who proved instrumental in convincing him to put it down. In fact, that Englishman might have been the most sensible person ever to stumble into their lives, for once the crisis was averted, he took Iris aside and said, “Your husband is a troubled chap. If I were you, I’d get him to a doctor.” And at this advice she bristled—not just because she feared what a doctor, were one to be summoned, might say; not just because she considered the Englishman impertinent; but because, in suggesting that Edward was “ill,” the old man had failed to appreciate her husband’s genius—which, she was certain, explained, even excused, his putting a revolver to his head. Of course, in the long run it would have been better if she had heeded the Englishman’s advice. At the very least it would have saved her some time. Instead she went up to her room and started packing. Three hours later, they left—the first of many precipitous departures, all before dawn, and all at Iris’s instigation, as if by fleeing to another hotel, another beach, another town, they could leave Edward’s difficulty behind. But it always followed them.

  After that, things got worse. At the new hotel, Edward refused to get out of bed. This impeded the maids in their efforts to make up the room. The maids “talked.” The talk led to speculation among the other guests as to whether the odd American in 314 might have anything to do with certain rumors that had recently come in, as if by carrier pigeon, from up the coast.

  Alas, Iris took this gossip more seriously than she did her husband’s condition. Now it was Edward who was asking for a doctor. Every day, he said, he could feel himself sinking deeper into the “slough of despond”—a phrase she could not place, but which, in its very allusiveness, affirmed, to her ear, the vigor of his intelligence and the breadth of his learning and gave her the excuse she needed to deprecate his ailment. For her notion of psychiatric illness, even by the standards of the times, was crude—another benefit of her Catholic upbringing. What Edward needed wasn’t a doctor, she insisted; it was fresh air, wholesome food, sunlight—a point she underscored by flinging open the curtains—at which he groaned. Now, as much as she could, she stayed in his room with him—until, one afternoon, the necessity to purchase certain items too intimate to entrust to a servant impelled her to make a brief foray into town. A mistake, as it turned out. For no sooner had she left than Edward, on his own, telephoned the hotel manager and asked for a doctor. It was, he said, an emergency. And so when Iris returned, it was to find the NE PAS DÉRANGER sign hanging from his door handle, and two old women loitering near the elevators. Not recognizing her as the wife, they informed her that the American in 314 had had “some kind of breakdown.”

  “Nonsense,” Iris replied. “My husband has a cold. That is why he has been in bed these last few days.” She then pushed past the two women and went into her own room, which adjoined his. Here she found Daisy whimpering by the connecting door. She gathered the dog to her breast and waited, braced for the worst, already planning their departure and anticipating their next port of call.

  Twenty minutes later, the door opened. The doctor came in. “Are you Mrs. Freleng?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Well, I’ve examined your husband,” he said, “and there’s nothing wrong with him except that he’s a garden-variety neurasthenic. You find them by the thousand in these places.”

  She was about to reply that her husband was not a garden-variety anything when Edward himself appeared. To her amazement, he had gotten dressed. He seemed immensely pleased—both by the doctor’s diagnosis and by the proposed treatment: a month’s stay at one of those maisons de repos in which the Swiss specialize, along with just about every other means of profiting from human misery and human greed. And this, to Iris, was the most confounding thing of all. For she had always taken it for granted that Edward was unique and special, and that therefore any malady from which he suffered would be a unique and special malady. And so the fact that Edward himself should welcome the news that he was just another idle, hotel-dwelling neurotic left her at a loss for words. She was, as the English say, gobsmacked.

  The next day, they left for Switzerland, for the maison de repos, where Edward proved to be a model patient, submitting meekly to every order his nurses issued, no matter how arbitrary. And this was the man who, not so many years before, had renounced his Cambridge fellowship rather than knuckle under to afternoon tea!

  Well, perhaps you see what I am getting at. At heart Edward was, I think, quite a modest person. The urges by which he was entranced and tortured were modest urges. He appreciated the doctor’s diagnosis for the same reason that Iris disdained it: because it established his membership in the fraternity of ordinary men, even as it confirmed what he had suspected all along: He was no genius. He was no Great Force. His mind was sharp enough to perceive its own limits, not to transcend them. And this may have been why he was drawn to Alec Tyndall, and to me, and why he felt such fondness toward his daughter—because we did not require him to be remarkable.

  And so Edward spent three months at the maison de repos. Loyal spouse that she was, Iris put up the whole time at a hotel down the road. Every day she brought Daisy to visit him. He would take her into the garden, where she would sniff at the edelweiss or whatever it is that grows in Swiss gardens. True to its name, the maison de repos put much stock in resting. Its inmates were required to rest something like twelve hours a day—and this suited Edward perfectly. So did the meals, which were ample and rich in the manner of nurseries: everything buttered and creamed and breaded, no bony fish to dismantle, no innards or brutish singed steaks. This is not to say that he received no treatment. There was a psychiatrist at the maison, with whom Edward talked every day. Mostly he talked about Cambridge—about how, in the wake of his resignation, a tranquillity unlike any he had ever known had suffused him. For at last he was free from the vagaries of human endeavor. And yet beyond the horizon of that great relief was great uncertainty. For what was he to do with the rest of his life?

  Inimical as I may be to all things Swiss, I must allow that the maison de repos did Edward and Iris a world of good. Among other things, it gave them Xavier Legrand. Like their daughter, the author was conceived en route between two places—Montreux and Geneva, I believe, as they were returning to France following Edward’s treatment. At first Monsieur Legrand was merely a way of passing the time—and so they made the passing of time his raison d’être. Bored in his retirement, he had taken to novel writing as other pensioners take to watercolors. Of course, the fact that Tyndall had put the idea into Edward’s head lent the whole enterprise, for Iris, a slightly sordid air. And still she went along with it, both because Edward’s psychiatrist thought writing would be good for him and because, to her own surprise, she discovered that she rather enjoyed contriving plots. In Lisbon, Edward insisted that he had never cared much about the novels, that they were “Iris’s baby,” that in their production he was at most a glorified amanuensis. I am not at all sure, though, that this is true—for his fingerprints are all over them. And of course, the first of them gave him the excuse he needed to stay in touch with its inseminator and dedicatee, Alec Tyndall.

  So Xavier Legrand’s accidental career was forged—in the oddest crucible imaginable. In due course, the first novel came out. With the copy he sent Tyndall, Edward included a note asking if Tyndall wouldn’t be a good chap and keep the secret of Monsieur Legrand’s identity to himself. Tyndall replied that he was more than happy to do so. Indeed, he asked only that the next time Edward and Iris found themselves back in England, they should give him and Muriel the pleasure of opening a bottle of champagne in their honor. But of course they never did find themselves back in England. Officially the reason was Daisy.

  And that, for years, was their life. They wrote, and Daisy ran up and down the cor
ridors of first-class hotels, and once or twice a year Edward had an episode that required him to return to the maison de repos. Increasingly these episodes involved men—Alec Tyndall giving way to a Greek, who gave way to an Austrian, who gave way to an Argentine—each, for Iris, unique, and uniquely harrowing, since in the erotic realm there is no predicting how a man will behave. One fellow hit Edward in the jaw, another fell madly in love with Iris, a third, having gotten in bed with her, suffered a fit of contrition and rushed back to his wife. Twice she thought she was pregnant. Long ago she had accepted the cessation of sexual intimacy between herself and Edward, in that spirit of penitential fervor that makes the sacrifice of pleasure in itself a kind of pleasure. Yet in comparison with what Edward demanded of her, even a life without sex of any kind would have been welcome …

  Honestly, I don’t know why she put up with it as long as she did—which is to say nothing of why he made her put up with it, when he could just as easily have done the sensible thing and gone looking for men to sleep with on his own. He had no excuse not to. He had done time at Cambridge, was sufficiently conversant with Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis to see his own appetites for the commonplace things they were. Now I am convinced that Iris was as wrong to assume that Edward sought only to satisfy his own urges through her as Edward was dishonest to claim that he sent the men to her bed as a sort of recompense. He sent them to her bed for his own gratification—and to test how much she would tolerate. He did it to punish her and reward her, to draw her closer and drive her away. And really, is it that uncommon to act out of mixed, even contradictory, motives? If it had not been for Iris, Edward told me later, he would likely have done himself in the day he tendered his resignation at Cambridge. Indeed, all that had kept him alive since was her refusal to let go. He pushed her to the limits of human endurance, and still she would not let go. Instead she force-fed him. She crammed the will to live down his throat just as sustenance was crammed down the throats of the suffragettes. And so he was grateful to her—as the patient is grateful to the surgeon who saves his life—and yet he despised her—as the prisoner despises his warden.

  And that was how it went with them—for eighteen years. Privately, Iris worried lest a time should come when Edward would want more than just words and smells; when he would want to watch the other man in bed with her or (God forbid) try to get into bed with them himself. But this never happened. They got older, and the episodes came less frequently. These aside, you must understand, their life was a relatively sedate one. They had the writing of the novels to absorb them, and a wire fox terrier to amuse them, and that companionability, that ease of understanding, that is the great boon of marriage. In becalmed periods, Iris would consider the other couples she knew. All of them had secrets: drinking, gambling, money troubles. She would listen to their stories and she would think, Our problems are no worse than anyone else’s. And then Edward would send a man to her bed and she would think, I am lying to myself. They are worse.

  And in due course, they took the cottage in the Gironde, so that Daisy could run about doggishly while she still had the wherewithal. It was Edward who suggested the move. At first Iris was nonplussed. Was this a trap laid by yet another devil, an infinitely more cunning devil than the ones with which she had previously done business? Apparently not—for Edward thrived in the Gironde. He did mannish things. He planted a vegetable garden and converted one of the outbuildings into a studio. In the mornings they would write. Then they would return to the house to eat whatever delicacies their cook, Celeste, had prepared for them. Then Edward would take Daisy for a gambol on the beach, and Iris would nap. And what a miracle that was, to be able to lie down on the sofa in the afternoon without worrying in case he should disappear, or threaten to jump off a balcony! For in the Gironde, it seemed impossible that he should disappear, and there was no balcony. True, he suffered one more episode, which necessitated one more visit to the maison de repos. Yet by and large these were for both of them years of ease, of pleasures that were all the keener for their plainness, and difficulties that were in their plainness close to pleasures.

  One morning they stopped work early and took a walk on the beach. It was winter, and the wind was blowing the sand up into little eddies. Edward let Daisy off the leash, and she ran along the shore joyfully, darting in and out of waves that moistened her delicate paws, sniffing and marking and chasing the ball that he threw for her. She would catch it, carry it to him, and refuse to relinquish it, which pleased him to no end. For what, he asked, was a retriever if not a sort of sentient boomerang, a creature spellbound by its instinct to fetch and carry back, fetch and carry back? Whereas a terrier had grit. A terrier would be caught on the horns of a dilemma: whether to fight to hold on to the ball or let it go. A terrier understood the terrible predicament of being alive, the impossible choices it necessitated, the endless ceding and seizing and bargaining.

  As Edward spoke, Iris pulled her shawl tighter around her neck. The wind was blowing behind them, billowing them forward. And then Edward did something he had not done in years: he took her hand.

  She knew better than to speak. They kept on walking until Daisy returned with her ball. Only then did Edward let her hand go—and in that moment it was as if a great forgiveness, greater than anything she had dared hope for, descended upon them.

  Six months later the Germans came—and then, in Lisbon, I came.

  Chapter 16

  “I wish we were in Bucharest,” I said.

  “Why Bucharest?” Edward said.

  “Because from what I’ve read, if you’re a foreigner—a civilian—and you’re in Bucharest, you’re stuck there for the duration. God knows you can’t get a train, and to catch a boat you’d have to go to Greece.”

  “What about Iris and Julia?”

  “Oh, they’d be somewhere else. Somewhere safe. It’d be just you and me—and Daisy.”

  “I don’t know about Bucharest, Pete. From what I’ve heard, it’s pretty grim. Maybe we could live outside the city. Aren’t there enchanted forests in that part of the world?”

  “And what would we do all day in an enchanted forest?”

  “We’d fell some trees to build a cabin. In winter we’d sleep naked under a bear rug, in front of a log fire.”

  “And live off nuts and berries?”

  “Are you kidding? Forget nuts and berries. We’d eat like kings. Ragouts of wild boar and mushrooms, salads of dandelion greens, grilled trout. There’d be a lake, of course. And when we were feeling especially carnivorous, you could slay a unicorn.”

  “There must be a penalty for that.”

  “Don’t believe what you read about unicorns. They’re vicious. Given half a chance, a unicorn will impale you on its horn and toss you about in the air like a toy.”

  “Did you hear that, Daisy? Don’t mess with unicorns.”

  “Daisy will be too busy dealing with all the squirrels and chipmunks. And then in the afternoons I’ll take her to the lake. She’ll roll around on the dead trout. And so the days will pass.”

  “Until the war ends.”

  “How is it that I knew you were going to say that? You’re a human alarm clock. All you think about is time.”

  “It’s not as if ignoring time stops it.”

  “And it’s not as if paying attention to it slows it down.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s my nature.”

  “It doesn’t matter. There is no forest. There is no Bucharest. It’s half past six in Lisbon, and Pete and Edward have an appointment to meet Julia and Iris at eight.”

  “Damn.”

  “Why swear? It’ll be fun. We’ll paint the town red.”

  “I think I’m going to tell Julia myself. Get it out in the open.”

  “That’s never as good an idea as it sounds. You might as well walk up to the unicorn and ask it to gore you.”

  “Did you know that in all the years of our marriage, Julia and I have never spent a single night apart?”

  “How interesti
ng. Needless to say, Iris and I have spent many nights apart.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant. I mean, that wasn’t why I said it.”

  “I know why you said it. It’s the answer to your own question. It’s why you must never tell her—and why you won’t.”

  Chapter 17

  Suddenly we had a routine. Iris was its orchestrator, its architect. Each day, she allowed Edward and me four hours to ourselves, roughly the hours between four and eight, during which she would take Julia on expeditions—to keep her off the scent, I suppose. Then at eight we would reconnoiter at the Suiça—for drinks, and dinner, and more drinks. Aside from Edward taking Daisy along, this was the only condition Iris imposed—that we never fail to show up for this rendezvous. Well, we never did.

  I must say, they made industrious use of their afternoons, our wives. They toured the Exposition and went to watch the Clipper land on the river (“like a water bug landing on a lake,” Julia said) and had martinis at the Aviz, the swankest hotel in Lisbon, where they caught sight of Schiaparelli.

  Edward and I, by comparison, were desultory. If we could, we would take a room at the brothel on Rua do Alecrim. More often than not, though, the brothel would be full, and we would be left to wander the city, aimless and fretful, constantly on the lookout for someplace we could be alone. And how difficult that turned out to be, for Lisbon was full to bursting that summer. Illicit lovers understand better than most the malaise of having to carry on private business in public. It is like trying to fit yourself into the last stripe of cool shade on a hot sidewalk. If we had no alternative, we would take refuge in men’s toilets, our pants around our ankles and Edward holding Daisy under his left arm like a pocketbook. Or we would go for a drive in the Buick, hoping against hope to find some spot in the country where no passing bus or donkey cart would interrupt us. Once we actually found such a place—a grove of pines a few miles beyond Sintra. We got out of the car and, with characteristic economy of motion, Edward stripped us both naked, lay down on the hood, and pulled me atop him. And oh, the silence of that afternoon! There was no noise at all, not even birdsong. All I could hear was the squeaking of the tires. Through the canopy of leaves, strips of sunlight cut, so intense that afterward my back was red. “I’ve put my brand on you,” Edward said later, touching the skin with a piece of ice.