The Two Hotel Francforts

by David Leavitt

  She summoned the waiter. He arrived on the spot. You had the feeling he wouldn’t have dared to make Dr. Gray wait. For there was something about her that commanded respect, even though she was the very opposite of what you would call glamorous, with her neat brown hair, her pared nails, her authoritative, unfussy voice.

  Fresh tea arrived in record time. “Awful little episode that was, over by the Elevator,” Dr. Gray said as she poured. “It makes you remember you’re in a dictatorship. Of course, we don’t feel it so much—certainly not the way one did in Prague. I mean, when the newsstands carry every newspaper from home, why check if the local ones are censored? Which, by the way, they are. It drives me mad, this hands-off attitude toward Salazar, when really he’s no better than Musso. The difference is he’s only interested in maintaining his dominion, not taking over the whole world. We foreigners, we’re a distraction to him, a circus come through town. As soon as we’re gone, he’ll return to the business at hand, which is bludgeoning the Portuguese citizenry into submission.”

  “I see that now. I didn’t before today.”

  “And why would you have? I only know it myself because—well, I’m in the business, I suppose you might say. And it’s not like it’s obvious, the way it was in Prague. Or Berlin, God forbid. I mean, here the worst we can really complain of is boredom, of having to spend too much time in the cafés on the Rossio. Yet we shouldn’t forget, the Rossio used to be the site of the most monstrous public executions. Thousands cheering. That was what passed for entertainment during the Inquisition. And it could come to that again. Have you seen those boys parading around in their ridiculous uniforms? You know why Salazar chose green, don’t you? Because black and brown were already taken.”

  “I take it you’re planning to stay then?”

  “Not for long, I hope. Once Don’s cut through the red tape, the plan is to drive to Marseille, set up the main office there, and then just maintain a satellite operation here in Lisbon. Of course, in this business there are always unexpected obstacles. For instance, who would have guessed it would be such an ordeal to get an international driver’s license?”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “Not yet. Why, do you know of one?”

  “I do, actually. A Buick. Nearly new.”

  “Then you should speak to Don. He’ll be back this evening. Oh, I never even asked your name.”

  “Winters. Pete Winters.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Pete Winters.”

  We shook hands. And did that handshake last just a few seconds longer than it might have? I wasn’t sure. For suddenly it was as if my hand were no longer mine, as if the voice speaking through my mouth were a ventriloquist’s. I was there, in the lobby, and at the same time I was far away, in the back row of a cinema, watching the film.

  “Well, I’d better be off,” I said, pulling my wallet from my pocket. “How much do I owe you?”

  “For what?”

  “The house call.”

  “Don’t make me laugh. You’ve given me something to do. Since we got here, I’ve been bored stiff. I loathe bureaucracy. I can’t wait to get out of this godforsaken city and start doing something again.”

  “In that case, I can but thank you.” I got up. “Oh—but I ate your biscuits. At least let me pay for the biscuits.”

  “I can always get more if I want them. Well, goodbye. And if you need anything, don’t hesitate to call on me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Just knock on my door. Room 111. Easy to remember.”

  “Yes.”

  “Any hour of the night or day.”

  For the second time we shook hands. I went upstairs. While I’d been with Dr. Gray, Julia had gotten dressed.

  “What was that all about?” she asked. “Whatever made you think I’d taken too many pills?”

  “There were only eight in the bottle.”

  “Yes, and when you left there were nine.”

  “But there can’t have been that few. I’d have noticed.”

  “Clearly not.”

  “But why didn’t you wake up? I shook you and still you didn’t wake up.”

  She began brushing her hair. “I didn’t want to wake up. What’s there to wake up for? This grim little room, that woman downstairs.”

  “You mean Dr. Gray?”

  “No, not Dr. Gray. You know who I mean.”

  “Aunt Rosalie.”

  “So you admit it’s her.”

  “No. I mean the woman you think is Aunt Rosalie. Whose name, by the way, is Georgina. Georgina Kendall. What time is it? I’ve got to run. I’ll be late.”

  “For what? Where are you going?”

  “To meet Edward.”

  “Oh, Pete—must you go out this afternoon? Couldn’t you skip it?”

  “Not on such short notice.”

  “But I’m afraid to be alone.”

  “You won’t be alone. Iris will be along any minute.”

  “Oh, God, Iris! I can’t face Iris today. She makes me so uncomfortable. And I’m not well, Pete. That doctor said so. She says I’m dehydrated. Anemic. And don’t they say you should never go on a sea journey when you’re ill?”

  “But you’re not ill. You just need to drink more water. Anyway, there’ll be a doctor on the ship.”

  “Yes, just like there was a doctor on the ship when Uncle Edgar died.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  She was now pulling hairs out of the brush. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t know you anymore,” she said. “The man I married—he’d never leave me like this.” Suddenly she turned to face me. “Where are you really going when you quote-unquote meet Edward?”

  “‘Quote-unquote?’ I do meet Edward.”

  “And it’s this important to you to meet up with him? Important enough that you’d abandon your wife when she needs you? Or is he just your cover? Who are you really meeting, Pete?”

  “I told you. Edward.”

  “You’re having an affair, aren’t you? It’s why you haven’t touched me. Not until yesterday.”

  “Julia, this is absurd. This whole conversation. Why you should think I’m having an affair—”

  “Which you haven’t denied. It’s that doctor, isn’t it? I could see it in her eyes, the way she looked at me …”

  I took a deep breath. “All right, I’m only going to say this once. I have not been lying to you. The only person I ever see in the afternoons is Edward. It’s Edward I saw yesterday, and Edward I saw the day before that, and Edward I’m seeing today. Or who I’m supposed to see today, if I ever get there … I don’t know where you get these wild ideas. Is it from Iris?”

  “You don’t give me much credit, do you? You think I’m stupid or blind. But I’m not. I have eyes.”

  “I don’t know what to say to you anymore. You don’t believe that woman downstairs is Georgina Kendall, you don’t believe I’m meeting Edward. And you say I’ve changed?”

  She sat down at the dressing table and rested her head in her hands. “Look, just forget it. Just go.”

  “No. I’m staying.”

  “But I don’t want you to stay. I need to be alone.”

  “You didn’t five minutes ago.”

  “That was five minutes ago.”

  I took off my jacket. “I don’t care. I’m staying.” “Oh, for the love of Christ, Pete, just leave! Look, I promise I’ll be a good girl, all right? I’ll play a nice game of solitaire, and then I’ll go sightseeing with Iris, and then tonight we’ll all meet up at the Suiça and it’ll be just like old times. We’ll paint the town red.”

  “But it isn’t like old times—”

  “Shh. Don’t say another word. This is your out, don’t you see? So wherever you’re going, whoever you’re seeing, just … go. Put on your jacket and go.”

  For a few seconds I didn’t move. And how I wish I had a photograph of Julia then! She looked, well, radiant. Her cheeks were flushed. The glow in her eyes was of an intensity the likes of which I hadn�
�t seen since New York, when I’d promised to rescue her from her family and bring her to France. And now the thing I had given her I was taking away from her—and that thing was nothing less than her freedom. Yet in defeat—this was the surprise—she was even more splendid than she had been in victory, that victory of which I had assured her fifteen years ago as we sailed out of New York Harbor, presumably never to return.

  I put on my jacket. I left. I shut the door behind me. From her perch, Messalina smiled at me with what I could only call compassion. I never learned who she was, this woman we called Messalina. I never learned where she came from, or what she was waiting for. And yet at that instant it seemed to me that she knew me better than anyone in the world, and that with her smile she was giving me some kind of permission …

  In the lobby, Dr. Gray had left her armchair. A book lay open on the table she had been using. Though the title was printed in letters too small to make out, there was no mistaking the author’s name: Xavier Legrand.

  Chapter 24

  Edward was waiting for me at the castle gates, with Daisy at his feet.

  “Thanks for meeting me here,” he said, taking my hand. “I’ve been wanting to see these peacocks. And now we’ve only got a few days.”

  “Not just to see the peacocks,” I said.

  He opened his mouth; seemed, for a moment, to make a mental calculation; said nothing. We entered the castle grounds. I am told that they have since been restored. In 1940, tree roots pushed up the paving stones. The ramparts were crumbling. Leggy rose bushes blossomed amid ragged cypresses and jacarandas. Along dusty pathways and across patios the peacocks ambled, at least a dozen of them. But for the occasional blue or green streaks on their breasts, they were brilliantly, almost ostentatiously, white. They wore little plumed white shakos and dragged their white feathers behind them like bridal trains. Other than the birds, the only thing to admire was the view, which would have impressed me more had I not been to the top of the Elevator. The castle itself had a moldy quality, as if centuries of rain had washed it clean of any lingering human presence.

  The peacocks captivated Daisy. Motionless, tail and ears erect, she gazed at them. “Easy, girl,” Edward said, getting down on his knees and stroking her neck. “Strange, this sudden interest she’s taken in birds. Terriers aren’t usually birders.”

  “I guess she’s not the only one who’s changed direction since coming to Lisbon,” I said.

  This time I got a response out of him—a laugh, if a halfhearted one. We sat on a stray bench. “You’ve got the devil in you”: that was what my mother used to say when, as a child, I would get into the sort of mood I was in now, where nothing would satisfy me short of needling her into slapping my face. Nor was I sure why I had the devil in me, given that at last the moment had arrived toward which I’d been counting down since morning—the moment when I could be alone with Edward. Yet I did. I wished it wasn’t so, but it was. I was angry that he had insisted that we meet here, so far from Rua do Alecrim, and that he had left the note for me at the Suiça rather than the Francfort, and that Julia had made me late by not swallowing too many Seconals … One of the peacocks strolled over to us. Head turned sideways, it half-unfurled its fan, then retracted it again. Daisy’s leash tautened. She was all tension, attention—whereas Edward’s posture was laconic, legs stretched out in front of him, left arm resting behind, but not touching, my neck.

  “You’re awfully quiet today. What’s on your mind?”

  I balled my hands into fists. I tried to push the devil down.

  “What’s on my mind?” I said. “Well, let’s see. I still haven’t sold my car. The Nazis are in Paris. I’m cheating on my wife. What else? Oh, of course! I’ve just been told—not by you—that when you get back, you and Iris will be heading off on some lecture tour.”

  Edward closed his eyes, raised his face toward the sun.

  “Forty cities, isn’t it?”

  “So I am informed.”

  “So you are informed?”

  “It’s a cabinet-level decision.”

  “And do you always go along with cabinet-level decisions?”

  “I find it’s simplest.”

  “So if Iris told you never to speak to me again, you’d never speak to me again?”

  “But she hasn’t. She wouldn’t.”

  Again the peacock approached. Again it did its little striptease move, the tantalizing glimpse no sooner offered than withdrawn.

  “What do you say when she asks about me?”

  “Nothing. She never asks about you.”

  “Not even at the beginning? Not even when you were working out the terms of—what shall we call it—this arrangement? That we’d get the afternoons and nothing else?”

  “All that was her idea.”

  “But at some point she must have insisted that you stop seeing me. She must have.”

  “No. Never.”

  “And if she did?”

  “I told you. She wouldn’t.”

  “And if I did?”

  “What?”

  “Asked you to leave her?”

  “Please don’t ask me that, Pete.”

  “Why? Because for once you’d have to answer? You’d have to say no—or yes?”

  Right then the peacock bloomed. I don’t know how else to describe it. The effect was astonishing—as if, from its feathers, a thousandtiny white birds were being set free, a thousand tiny white birds casting off into the sky. Pigeons groaned as if in pain. A breeze rose up, against which the fan held like a sail. Only the peahens remained equable, as women so often are when confronted with the spectacle of male vanity.

  Then the show was over. Daisy let out a series of barks like a klaxon. The feathers infolded, like masterfully shuffled cards.

  I turned to Edward. He had tears in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could tell you what you want to hear. But I can’t. I’m not brave, Pete. The heroic life, the life of adventure—I’m not cut out for it.”

  “And you think I am?”

  “Yes. As you’re only now discovering.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You must. I’m only alive because of Iris.”

  “Then be alive because of me.”

  “No. There are worthier objects.”

  “Isn’t that for me to decide?”

  “All these years, it’s just been Iris dragging me up from Hades, over and over. And she never turns around. And now you won’t turn around, either. I wish, just for once, that one of you would turn around, that one of you would look me in the eye and let me go. I never asked for any of this.”

  “But you did. You did. You came to my room, you took me to Guincho—”

  “What I started, you kept going.”

  “We both kept it going.”

  He wiped his eyes. “You’re right. You’re right. I let you down, Pete. But you see, I never guessed it would go this far. Or that you’d ever think … I mean, I assumed Julia was the safeguard. That, so long as there was Julia, there was a line we couldn’t cross. And so when Iris said that Julia mustn’t find out, that she wouldn’t survive finding out, I went along with it, yes, to placate her … but also because it suited me. Do you see now? I’m a coward. It’s yet another reason you should want to be rid of me.”

  “Isn’t that a backhanded way of saying you want to be rid of me?”

  “No. I wish it were that simple. But no.”

  I was silent. The peacocks dispersed. Somewhere there had to be young. Nests. Chicks. What did you call them? Peachicks?

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “Beats me. We board the ship. We cross the Atlantic. Assuming a U-boat doesn’t sink us, we land in New York—”

  “And Julia and I go off to Detroit, and you and Iris go off on your lecture tour, and maybe, in a few years, if we happen to be in the same town, we all have dinner together? No. It’s not possible.”

  “And this is? Lisbon? This war? Ask the people
around here if any of this is possible, and they’ll tell you no. None of it is. Yet it’s real.”

  “I refuse to accept that. We have more choices than they do. For instance, we could stay. Other people are. Some are even coming. I mean, those Clipper flights that arrive each week—they don’t arrive empty.”

  “Stop, Pete. This isn’t real.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s possible.”

  “Not for me. And certainly not for Julia.”

  “I’m not her first husband, you know. There’s no reason to think I’ll be her last.”

  “Yes, there is. I’m sorry, but there is. If you don’t believe Iris, believe me. We’re so much alike, Julia and I. We’re two peas in a pod.”

  I laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Just that you chose that phrase. Of all the phrases in the world.”

  All through this exchange, Daisy had been watching the peacocks. Now she lunged. “Daisy, no!” Edward commanded and jumped up to reel her in.

  When he sat down again, it was a little further down the bench. Nor, this time, did he rest his arm behind my neck.

  I put my face in my palms. I could feel my heart beating. In Paris, Julia and I would sometimes go to a cinema that the Métro passed under. And sometimes the Métro would rumble in a way that took us out of the film—during a love scene or a song—but sometimes it would rumble just at the moment when, on the screen, a train was surging into a tunnel, or a plane was crashing into the sea, or guns were firing into the air … And now my heartbeat was that rumbling, and on the screen, two men and a dog were sitting on a bench before a ruined castle, and peacocks were strutting in the sun. None of it had anything to do with me. I was neither of the men, nor was I the dog or even one of the peacocks. I was just the rumble that might have been the traffic on the boulevards, or the war raging hundreds of miles away, but was really only my heartbeat. I wasn’t crying. I wished I could. I shut my eyes tight, tried to make myself cry. But I could no more cry than Julia could, earlier that afternoon, after she had disappointed me by not killing herself.