The Two Hotel Francforts

by David Leavitt

  Always in that last hour we fell behind schedule. “Hurry up, please, it’s time,” said the raging sun, brightest before it set. There was never a chance to bathe. By the time we met up with our wives at the Suiça, we would be soiled and stinking and invariably late. Yet if Julia found this strange, she never let on. I think her idea of what men did together was narrow, and rooted in memories of her brothers, who rowed and boxed. Well, perhaps she assumed we were rowing. Or boxing.

  As we crossed the Rossio, and the Suiça came into view, Edward and I would stop talking. Instinctively we would step a little apart. Then Daisy would see Iris and pull at her leash, and Iris, as attuned to the chime of Daisy’s tags as Pavlov’s dog to the click of his metronome, would wave and cry out, “Daisy! Daisy!” Her hair in disarray, her stork’s neck moist with sweat, she’d flail like a diva in a mad scene. Whereas Julia, pale and pallid, would be utterly still.

  Then we’d sit down, Edward and I, and there would be a brief and terrible moment like the one when, your car stopped on a steep incline at a red light, you must simultaneously let the brake go and shift into gear. For a few helpless seconds, the wheels rolled backward, the asphalt seemed about to slip away under us—until the social engine kicked back into life. Someone asked how someone’s day had gone. Iris lifted Daisy onto her lap. Drinking helped. We did a lot of drinking in Lisbon. Everyone did. For the fact was, the wheels were rolling backward, the asphalt was slipping away under us. Yet from the way people carried on, you’d have thought it was a joyride.

  One evening we ran into the Fischbeins. “Ah, the Americans!” Monsieur Fischbein said, raising his glass of beer in a toast. “Do you know what I have learned in these days? The American passport, it is the sésame ouvre-toi. At the sight of mine, all doors shut.”

  He laughed—and this time his wife, knitting what appeared to be a noose, did not bother to be embarrassed for him. He went on to explain that, having been turned down by the Americans for a visa, they had tried the Argentines, the Brazilians, the Mexicans, and the Cubans, before finally turning to the Cambodians, from whom one could in a pinch purchase a visa at a price that varied according to demand, “as in the bourse.” Of course, Monsieur Fischbein added, such a visa had no practical value. They were not so foolish as to imagine they could ever get to Cambodia. “But it is very pretty to look at”—he opened his passport to show us—“and sufficient to allow us to renew our residency permits for one month more.”

  “And in a month?” Edward asked.

  “In a month, who knows? We will have obtained another visa, from another country impossible to reach. Or we will be abroad. Or we will be dead.”

  I think this was three or four days into that last week—three or four days, that is, since Iris and I had had our little chat at the British Bar. A factitious jollity carried us through those evenings, the pretense that we were just two couples out on the town together and not what we really were, which was a little commedia dell’arte troupe of three, performing its pantomime for an unwitting audience of one … Yes, I’m sure if you’d seen us those evenings, you’d have thought us the best of friends, eating lobster and drinking vinho verde and talking about … what? Politics. Books. (Mostly Edward and Iris’s books.) And questions of such grave import as, Did Salazar have a German mistress? Was Wallis Simpson a hermaphrodite? Was the woman at the next table the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg? We thought she might be. We weren’t sure. For when it came to it, none of us had the remotest idea what the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg looked like, and wasn’t that hilarious? Everything was hilarious, hilarity was our means of keeping at bay the coarse instincts rooting around under the table, lust and envy and enmity and the desire to kill … Nor was the performance all that difficult to sustain, for what roles were we required to play but the roles of ourselves—Iris jittery and chattery, Edward glum and acerbic, me anxiously attentive to Julia? And how ironic! Of the four of us, Julia was the only one who failed to conform to type—and she was the only one who was not acting. It had been like that since Sintra. She was—how else to put it?—tight-lipped. Not surly, not short-tempered or petulant. Just tight-lipped. In public she maintained a posture of irreproachable civility. No matter how uncomfortable the chair, she kept her back straight. No matter how peculiar the food put before her, she ate an acceptable portion of it. Even Daisy’s habitual licking of her ankles she tolerated without protest. I found it uncanny. For me, a change of temperament is always more frightening than a change of mind.

  I wondered if Iris had anything to do with it. Beyond the details of their sightseeing, Julia never spoke of the afternoons they spent together. Yet Iris had to be saying something to her in the course of those afternoons. She had to. For she was determined to remind me, at every opportunity, of my wife’s dependency on me, and so how could she resist doing whatever she could to foster that dependency? What bothered me most was that Julia thought that Iris cared about her. But Iris did not care about her. She cared only about herself, and holding on to Edward. And so, as I sat at the dinner table those evenings, I would find myself thinking that here was yet something else I had to protect Julia against: I had to protect her against Iris. Which might have been exactly what Iris intended—that I should feel the cords of conjugal duty tightening around my neck. Yes, we were all double agents …

  Chapter 18

  Back at the Francfort, alone with me in our room, Julia was, if anything, more reticent than she had been at dinner. Briskly she performed her complex toilet, rubbing one kind of cream onto her cheeks, and another onto her hands, and a third under her eyes, before settling down to play the ritual last game of solitaire that she played every night before going to bed, as if to propitiate some god of slumber. Only now she played it in silence.

  I tried to make her talk. I asked her questions. I asked her what she and Iris talked about when they were alone.

  “The usual things.”

  “Such as?”

  “This and that.”

  “And me? Do you talk about me?”

  “Why do men always assume that women talk about them?”

  “Well, don’t they?”

  She shook her head derisively. Her game spent itself. She reshuffled. Time and again we came up against conversational brick walls like this. It drove me mad. The trouble was not that she had never given me the cold shoulder before. She had. Once she had given it to me for a full ten minutes—before breaking down, with no prodding from me, and telling me what was wrong. For the Julia I knew, though she could be impassioned, was never systematic. She could initiate but she could never sustain. And so this regimen of silence that she had been keeping up for days—without wavering, without flinching—baffled me. And yet I dared not say anything, for fear of what I might unleash.

  Now it is clearer to me what was happening. The double life was beginning to tell. It was putting me at cross-purposes with myself. On the one hand, I still saw it as my duty to protect Julia. On the other … But that was the trouble, the other hand. It reached always, and only, for Edward. And Edward, for his part, was becoming, every day, more remote. Exactly how I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was more of an instinctive perception—that he was making a gradual retreat or withdrawal from the fervency that had marked the early stage of our affair. For we had now known each other more than a week, and by the standards of the summer of 1940, a week was a year, five years, an eternity.

  Then I lost my patience.

  It was during one of our afternoon outings. For the second day in a row Señora Inés had no rooms, and it seemed to me that Edward was not sufficiently disappointed. Not only that, when I asked him where he wanted to go instead, he temporized. “You decide,” he said.

  “I suppose we could take a drive,” I said.

  “Yes, why not?” he said. “Why not take a drive?”

  I took the Estoril road. As we passed the docks, he held Daisy up to the open window so that she could sniff the briny air.

  “Why is it that whenever we go
out of the city, we go north?” he asked.

  “Do we?” I said. “I hadn’t realized … Well, I suppose it’s because this was the route we took that first night, when we went to the casino.”

  “But there are so many other ways we could go. For instance, we could go south.”

  “You want to go south? Fine. I’ll turn around.”

  “Oh, don’t turn around on my account. It makes no difference to me.”

  “Then why did you bring it up?”

  “No reason.”

  I held my tongue.

  “In a sense, it might be said that our failure is to form habits.”

  “What? What failure?”

  “Pater. I’m quoting from The Renaissance. ‘Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.’ I think that’s how it goes. Sorry, Daisy, my lap’s falling asleep.” He lifted her up, uncrossed his legs, recrossed them in the other direction. “It’s the bourgeois way to fall into a routine, to eat always at the same restaurants, to always take the same walks. Then you get to a new place and you think you can break free. You feel the freshness of the unknown, you tell yourself that this time you’re really going to explore. Only it never lasts.”

  “But that’s not true in our case. We’ve been all over Lisbon.”

  “At first. Then the ambit narrowed. Rua do Alecrim, the British Bar, the road to Estoril.”

  “All right, then, how about this? We’ll take the next turn. Wherever the next turn leads us, we’ll go.”

  But the next turn, as it happened, led us to the very grove of pine trees where we had stopped a few days before. Now a Cadillac with Polish plates was parked there. While the chauffeur smoked, two couples picnicked on the sand.

  “How dare they?” I said. “Don’t they realize we have the prior claim?”

  “I don’t see what you’re making such a fuss about,” Edward said. “They have as much right to be here as we do.”

  “I was kidding.”

  “Were you?”

  I put the car in reverse. Determined to get us lost, I took the first turn I came to, then the first turn after that, then the first turn after that. But the turns kept turning in on themselves, bringing us inevitably back to the original road, the one I wanted to escape. There were people everywhere. Even when we stopped to relieve ourselves—the three of us pissing in a row, Edward and I on foot and Daisy in a placid squat—a cadre of nuns interrupted us, their parasols as black as their habits. A little further on, three skinny children were trying to make a cat smoke a cigarette. We got back on the road, only to find ourselves stuck behind an ancient truck carrying a vast quantity of cork, the bark in rolls, like giant cinnamon sticks. There was no room to pass. After about twenty minutes we came to a fork. “Whichever way that truck turns, I’m turning the other way,” I said.

  The truck went right. I went left. A parked car came into view. The Cadillac. The Polish picnickers.

  “We’re going in circles,” I said. “All day we’ve just been going in circles.”

  “Like Francesca da Rimini,” Edward said.

  “Yet another allusion I’m too ignorant to grasp,” I said.

  “Oh? I assumed they would have taught Dante at Wabash,” Edward said.

  I pulled to the side of the road. “Get out,” I said. “You can walk back to Lisbon.”

  “Fine.” He stepped out limberly, put Daisy on her lead. I slammed the door and floored the accelerator. I wanted the tires to squeal.

  Two hundred feet down the road, I stopped. In a fury I backed up, to stir up dust. The cloud settled, revealing Edward and a panting Daisy. They had not moved.

  I pushed open the passenger door. The expression Edward wore as he got in was not one I had seen before. There was no humor in it, only grit and ennui.

  “Look at her,” he said, holding Daisy up. “She’s got dust in her coat, dust in her eyes. She hates it when she gets dust in her eyes.”

  By now my anger had dissipated, leaving in its wake a nauseated remorse. “Edward, I’m sorry,” I said. “But you drove me to it.”

  “I drove you to it? You’re the one who’s doing the driving.”

  “Look, at least I didn’t leave you there. I could have. The way you left me in that room.”

  “If you had, at least it would have been interesting.”

  “Oh, so in addition to being ignorant, I’m not interesting? It’s second nature to you, isn’t it? Showing people up, reminding them at every opportunity how disappointing you find them, how much more you know than they’ll ever begin to—”

  “Stay still, Daisy!” He was wiping at her snout with his shirttail, which he had wet with spit. “Look, I really don’t see what you’re getting so worked up about. If you don’t understand something I say, you need only ask me to explain.”

  “I get tired of asking you to explain.”

  “But how could anyone get tired of asking someone to explain? I ask you to explain things all the time. Such as what’s that thing-amajig called.”

  “The choke.”

  “Yes, the choke.” He made as if to strangle himself.

  “But it’s not the same. It’s the professor asking the maid what she uses to clean the toilet, as opposed to the maid asking the professor—I don’t know—who Aristotle was.”

  “If I was the professor, I’d be delighted if the maid asked me who Aristotle was.”

  “And if I was the maid … Look, let’s just drop it, all right? Let’s just agree that you’re smarter than I am and leave it at that.”

  “God, this really is like Francesca da Rimini. Exactly like Francesca da Rimini.”

  “You’re determined to tell me who she is, aren’t you? All right, go ahead.”

  He cleared his throat. “Francesca fell in love with her husband’s brother,” he said. “Her husband was a dwarf or a hunchback or something, and the brother was noble and handsome and played the lute. And they would sit together in a bower, Francesca and the brother, and he would play his lute and read aloud to her the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere—until the dwarf-husband got wind of what was happening and had them killed. For that they were consigned to the Second Circle of Hell, to spin forever in a furious whirlwind—the fate, if Dante is to be believed, of all illicit lovers.”

  “And is that where we are? In the Second Circle of Hell?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it’s the Tenth Bolgia of the Eighth Circle, the zone reserved for alchemists, counterfeiters, impostors, and perjurers. I’d say that’s a fair description of Lisbon, wouldn’t you? Georgina Kendall is a counterfeiter. You’re an alchemist. I’m an impostor. We’re all perjurers—except Daisy. No lie has ever passed her sweet black lips.”

  As if in response, Daisy issued a noise partway between a groan and a howl. I glanced over to make sure she was all right. Edward had his eyes closed. With his right hand he was stroking her ears.

  “You know, you’re wrong to think I’m so smart,” he said. “The truth is, I’m just a junk heap. All these allusions and references, these little associations I draw—they’re junk. And all I do all day is sift through them, line them up, move them around.”

  “I don’t mind your allusions. I mean, that’s not really why I threw you out of the car. At first I thought it was. But it wasn’t.”

  “Then why was it?”

  “I just wish I understood what you want. From me. From this.”

  “This?”

  “This.”

  “What I want,” Edward said ruminatively. “Everyone always asks me that, when the truth is, I’m not sure I ever really want anything. No, that’s not true. I want not to make others unhappy. And somehow I always do.”

  Quietly, without our noticing, Lisbon had overtaken us. I looked at the clock on the dashboard. Quarter past eight.

  “We’ll be late again,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Edward said. Nonetheless, when we got out of the car he picked Da
isy up and carried her, presumably to hasten the walk. His shirt, I saw, really was filthy. And how on earth would he explain that to Iris when the time came, when they were alone in their room at the Francfort Hotel, and all the other guests were sleeping, and the dawn light was leaking into the sky? Yet another scene to which poor Daisy would bear mute witness. Yet Edward was right: no lie would ever pass her lips, nor, were she granted the gift of speech, would she ever say a word against her masters. Not even to me.

  Daisy, you were a good girl. May you caper forever in that paradise where good dogs are sent. May there be a plenitude of fish carcasses for you to roll in. And if it is not too much to ask, may you forgive me for getting dust in your eyes.

  Chapter 19

  It was almost eight thirty when we got to the Rossio. As soon as she saw Daisy, Iris stood and waved, as always, while Julia, as always, remained in her chair, smoking and gazing into the distance. In her quietude she resembled one of those sleepy settecento Madonnas whose smiles belie the horror and the apotheosis to come.