Guided Tours of Hell

by Francine Prose

  “And then?” said Nina.

  “And nothing,” said Madame. “I am a passionate woman. Those were romantic times. Every girl in Paris wanted to be Jeanne Moreau. Or Jean Seberg. Or Anne Magnani, Maria Callas. Anyway, a martyr.”

  Madame turned down the sides of her mouth, her Jeanne Moreau imitation. And indeed she did have that preoccupied look of fatigued, combustible brooding. She said, “There was a Billie Holiday song that Leo used to play….”

  Oh, great, thought Nina. “Don’t Explain.” Leo had probably played it for a whole harem, a whole lifetime of passionate women. It had never occurred to Nina that this was what Leo was really doing. He wasn’t playing a song that moved him so deeply he couldn’t listen, a song that expressed the romantic potential of Nina’s passionate soul. He wasn’t even instructing her in how he wanted her to behave. He was just employing a time-tested seduction technique that he had been using on women—successfully!—for over twenty years.

  “Was this when Leo was married?” said Nina.

  “Married?” Madame Cordier frowned prettily. “Maybe Leo was married. Yes. A skinny American girl, maybe she had money. When Leo spent his last traveler’s check, they always fell madly in love again.”

  Madame smiled, flashing pointy teeth like the white tips of Halloween candy. There had been a bowl of candy corn on Leo’s desk that day, a lovely Japanese bowl in a high-glazed mossy green. Leo loved ironic gestures like that: pop, cross-cultural, stylish. After his Nina, I’m over here, she’d turned back from the window and counted the triangular striped candies until she’d regained control of her face and could calmly get up and leave. See you soon, he’d told her….

  Nina gazed coolly at Madame Cordier. Nina didn’t even have a savings account, so that couldn’t be why Leo liked her.

  “I am glad I am French,” Madame said. “We are practical. Hard-headed. I buy and remodel hotels. I never thought till this moment that maybe this is why I go into the business. That maybe it had something to do with that hotel I went to with Leo. But I don’t think so. No. Do you? Really, it’s too ridiculous!

  “Years later a close friend died and left me my first hotel. One thing led to another…. Pretty soon I have six hotels. All in different arrondissements. My newest hotel, not counting this, is a very historic hotel, many great people stayed there. Sarah Bernhardt, Colette.”

  “We stayed at that hotel!” Nina said. “Last time, with Leo. We loved it!”

  She’d meant it as a compliment, a gesture of recognition. A hotel owner would want to know if you’d admired her latest acquisition. But the mention of Leo made everything double-edged and suspect. Was Nina complimenting Madame’s hotel—or boasting about Leo? If that was what Nina was doing, claiming Leo, pulling rank, why not take it all the way, pull out all the stops?

  “It was very romantic,” Nina said.

  She kept her eyes on Madame’s as they entered the next round in their game of dueling hotel rooms with Leo. In fact her apparent compliment was a statement of possession. And why not? After Madame’s allusions to those life-changing afternoons with Leo, those afternoons that pried her away from a husband and a lover, it was Nina’s turn to stake out her postage stamp of sexual territory.

  But what could Nina claim to possess? Certainly not Leo. That she had been with him most recently ultimately counted for nothing. In fact it counted against her. That Madame’s grief was long in the past, that she’d had years to recover from Leo made the whole conversation so much less painful for her.

  “Frankly,” Madame said, “I am very surprised that Leo would send you here now when I made it perfectly clear to him that I am just commencing renovations. After next week this hotel will be closed for six months. I cannot imagine what is in Leo’s mind.”

  At least Madame wasn’t blaming Nina. She was suggesting they both blame Leo.

  Nina said, “It’s sometimes hard to know, with Leo.”

  This was Nina’s chance—perhaps her last chance—to describe what Leo had done to her, especially now that Madame Cordier had confided her Leo story.

  The moment lingered in the air. Madame gave Nina a searching look. Nina waited for some conspiratorial glint. But nothing like that was forthcoming.

  “This hotel was a whorehouse,” Madame said.

  “I thought so!” said Nina. Madame stared at her.

  “Quite a few of my hotels were whorehouses. That’s just the hotel business, what happens. Obviously, it is premature to write about this for Allo!…though maybe this could be an article for some other publication, the grand old whorehouses of Paris. They are history, too. No? Many sad things happened here. For example, what room was it…some poor girl jumped out the window.”

  “Probably room twenty-eight,” said Nina. “My room.”

  “Hmmm,” said Madame. “Maybe.”

  “I can come back when the renovation’s done,” Nina said. “There’s no harm seeing it now. Perhaps a before and after piece….”

  Madame rang the bell and rose and briskly shook Nina’s hand. “I hope you enjoy your stay in Paris.”

  “I’m very glad to have met you,” Nina said, and in fact she was. She was grateful to Madame Cordier, not only for showing her several new and unattractive aspects of Leo, but for getting her out of bed. What was Nina’s problem? What had yesterday been about, spending the whole day sleeping and watching bad French TV? She was getting paid to travel, given a budget—okay, a tight budget, but a budget—from Allo! She was in Paris, free, on her own. Why had she thought she needed Leo?

  “Wear warm clothes,” said Madame Cordier. “The weather is very cold. Very bitter.”

  IT HAD NEVER BEEN cold or bitter when Nina was here with Leo. The rain had fallen in warm oily drops and thoughtful cooling showers. But this time, Leo had warned her a few days before she left: “The weather could be beastly. But even if it’s freezing and wet, better Paris than here!”

  Nina had nodded. Yes, of course. By then she’d spent two weeks on the edge of tears that welled up and spilled over whenever she thought about asking Leo if they were really breaking up. Even if it was freezing and wet, better Paris than here. Nina could hardly disagree with that incontestable statement. Everyone loved Paris, rain or shine. With Leo or without him.

  With Leo or without him. The most idiotic thing would be to let that bogus distinction warp her whole time in Paris. The Luxembourg Gardens with Leo vs. the gardens without, boulevards she’d walked with him vs. the same avenues alone, the Mona Lisa smiling at Leo or, less mysteriously, at Nina. The narrow lanes it was best to avoid for fear of suddenly coming upon a bistro she had eaten in with Leo, or had been too nervous to eat in, too busy looking at him. With Leo or without him. How small that difference was compared with other, more major differences. For example, the weather.

  The air here had always felt sweet on her skin, even when it was gritty and polluted. But now the rain fell in cold needles, and the damp breath of the stones was the secret slow revenge of all that historic beauty. No one liked being outside, and people got it over with quickly, slipping into doorways as if on secret missions.

  Last May Nina kept catching glimpses of the city as it must have looked once—and still looked in Doisneau and Brassaï photos of Paris in the ’40s and ’50s. Girls in pretty dresses, lovers embracing on the street, La Vie de Bohème with a fashion makeover involving nose rings, fishnet, and dreadlocks. But Paris in November seemed much closer to New York: Everyone wore the same winter clothes, the same harried expressions, as if all of them were late for jobs they were already in danger of losing.

  Nina wandered for a while, vaguely toward the river. It was not unpleasant except for the problem of not knowing where she was going or how she would know when she got there and could give up and go back to the hotel. Having no destination made her unsure and self-conscious, as if someone were observing all the confusions and worries that showed plainly on her face.

  The first time they’d walked in Paris, Leo talked about Rimbaud and
the demonic marathon walks that left holes in his shoes and his feet. Nina had known about Rimbaud’s walks, but she smiled and let Leo tell her. For all she knew, Leo was planning a walk just as frenzied and manic for them.

  Leo was a fast walker, no maps, no red lights, no split-second hesitations; there was never any doubt that he would decide the route they would take. But then he would put his arm around her, and they’d begin to walk very close, their hips and upper thighs rubbing beneath Leo’s jeans and Nina’s thin dress. Pedestrians moved over. It must have been very clear that Leo and Nina should get off the streets and go directly back to bed.

  Nina would visit the Louvre. That was a destination. She imagined telling Leo she’d been to a show of one of his favorite painters, Tintoretto or Carpaccio, the largest canvases, the biggest collection assembled anywhere ever. But wait! The second most idiotic thing would be to fill her time in Paris like an empty sack with glittery things to catch Leo’s interest. What about her favorite artists? She’d always liked the French Orientalists: Géricault and Gérôme. But now it seemed depressing to go to the Orsay and stare at pictures of naked Moorish girls being bathed and perfumed for some pasha.

  She stopped in front of a window in which exquisite shoes were arranged at angles that made them appear to be taking off or landing. Her eyes tracked to a pair of red suede high heels so elegant and graceful they could afford to flirt with an edge of the cartoonish and the Minnie Mouse.

  She and Leo often window-shopped but never really went shopping in Paris. What would be the point? Shopping was about the future: a sweater to wear tomorrow, a bowl in which to put apples at home. But they’d had no reason to want anything beyond the present moment. And of course the future was banned as a subject for thought or discussion.

  Did this count as shopping: That last trip, they’d gone to a Monoprix for the graph-paper notebooks Leo bought by the dozen. They’d passed racks of dresses and skirts, intriguing French cosmetics, packs of hosiery spouting puffs of beige net and black Lycra. They were walking through the underwear department when Leo stopped and gave Nina a questioning look. And she’d shrugged, embarrassed, but not saying no. Leo wandered off and meditatively browsed the cheap pretty bras and panties.

  She watched him from a distance. It was such a tired cliché, guys and their underwear fetish. But Leo’s rapt concentration drew her in, and she realized with surprise that his intensity was fixed on her, on her body and what they would do, until gradually her clear view was heated and blurred by desire, and she looked around uneasily to see if strangers were watching.

  That was the trouble with sexual drift: Such thoughts could function like radar, sending out loud, deceptive, misreadable signals to the rest of the population. Now, for example, her erotic reverie about Leo seemed to have attracted a man to the shoe store window, a nice-looking guy in a leather jacket who took in the whole window and then—she could see this from the corner of her eye—focused on the red suede shoes she’d been gazing at all this time.

  He looked at the shoes, he looked at Nina. At the shoes, at Nina. Was he about to offer to buy her the shoes in return for some sexual service so degrading and baroque that even this handsome Frenchman couldn’t get a woman to do it for free?

  “Quels beaux souliers rouges,” he said.

  Nina smiled and nodded as he spoke to her in French. The man who’d brought her breakfast had spoken English, as had Madame Cordier, so this was almost the first French she’d heard, not counting announcements at the airport, the taxi driver who drove her into town, and the TV narrators with their monotonous play-by-plays of happy peasants slaughtering pigs. Nina understood nearly everything people said, but was shy about speaking. Leo’s French was fluent, so she always let him talk.

  Eventually she realized that the man was saying something about “The Red Shoes,” the Hans Christian Andersen story, and then The Red Shoes, the Michael Powell film about a ballet based on the Hans Christian Andersen story.

  What an amazing coincidence! The Red Shoes was Nina’s favorite film, that is, the favorite film of her childhood. Nina gasped with surprise, an intake of breath that must have sounded like horror.

  She turned and hurried away from him, her heart pounding with shame and regret. Why am I running? Nina thought. Let’s be objective here. The guy was better looking than Leo. He liked her favorite childhood movie. (What was it that she had liked so much? The romance? The ballet? Another story, like Anna Karenina, about a woman so jacked around by men that the only sensible solution was to fling herself in front of a train?) She and this Frenchman could fall in love. Her whole life could change. He probably had a spacious attractive apartment into which she could move. She could shop in the markets, buy flowers, breads, cheeses…and then what? In her luxurious Paris flat, in the gathering dusk, she could pine away for Leo.

  Oh, none of this would be happening if she were here with Leo! Passion gave lovers license not to engage with the world as they coasted through it in their little cocoon-made-for-two. But the world lay in wait for them. And as soon as they were alone—on their own—it got them back with a vengeance. It was so risky, being shut off in some little love capsule, losing contact with the truth, losing your faculties, your judgment. It was dangerous, like joining a cult or a fascist army of two.

  Crossing the intersection, Nina saw that she had somehow landed directly outside La Coupole. It could have been an accident, or some masochistic homing instinct. She stared into the enclosed porch of the bright café, at morose couples cradling tiny cups and gazing out at the street, and at others who’d chosen to be inside, to be warm and look at each other.

  Nina thought of Simone de Beauvoir hanging out in this very café, writing or talking or reading amid a smoky blue haze of ideas, black coffee, and Gauloises. She saw de Beauvoir trying her hardest not to think about Jean-Paul Sartre, off somewhere with a beautiful, much younger, female philosophy student.

  This was one of the problems with love! It could narrow your field of vision and limit your intelligence to the point at which you were insulting everyone else’s. Imagine, reducing Simone de Beauvoir to a country-and-western torch song, the existentialist Tammy Wynette standing by her Sartre! All right, de Beauvoir’s affair with Sartre was a little…problematic. But what about her writing? Her books? Her international reputation? Nina thought of Billie Holiday. Hush now, don’t explain. Those four words, the first line of the existentialist national anthem.

  Not long ago, Leo had told Nina that Simone de Beauvoir’s grave had become a shrine for young French feminists who left flowers and handwritten notes on her tomb, asking her for advice and favors. Maybe that’s what Nina should do. Go search for Simone de Beauvoir’s grave. She was in the mood for something like that, some pilgrimage or symbolic act or oracular consultation. But she couldn’t imagine what she would write in a note to leave on Simone de Beauvoir’s grave. Please send Leo back to me. Nina would be ashamed! She’d always thought of herself as a feminist. It was something a woman just naturally was, if she had any brains. But what kind of feminist was Nina, unable to think of anything to ask this saint of women’s rights except to intervene and, please, oh please, make her boyfriend love her again? De Beauvoir would have understood. She knew all about patience, about men who disappeared, about waiting for them, believing in them…outlasting the competition.

  Nina walked into the café and ordered black coffee to keep up the buzz from the coffee she’d drunk with Madame Cordier. Several times this morning she’d had to pause on her walk while a frolicky hiccough interrupted her heartbeat. She hoped it was a caffeine overdose and didn’t mean that she was dying.

  Nina eased off her coat and looked around, but got no farther than a young couple nearby who were causing quite a scene. A pale girl in black with orange hair and dark roots shouldered a video camera trained on her Arab boyfriend. As she talked into the microphone, Nina understood her so easily that for a moment she thought her French had improved until she realized that the girl was American
, speaking English.

  “Tuesday morning,” she said. “Eleven A.M. Achmed is eating breakfast. Achmed has ordered coffee. He’s about to take his first sip. Let’s go in for a close-up. Monsieur Achmed, please. Look at the camera.”

  Achmed raised one weary shoulder and half-hid his regal face, slouching down in his chair till his long legs reached across the aisle and under the next empty table. Nina was openly staring now, but Achmed didn’t return her gaze, though he was aware of her watching. His lidded eyes were like half-lowered shades covering the windows while the house’s owner waited inside for guests to arrive and adore him.

  Of all the people in Paris these two had been ordered up and sent here expressly for Nina. This girl on her junior year abroad videotaping her boyfriend reminded Nina of herself, taking notes on Hemingway’s sink and Oscar Wilde’s bathtub. After Achmed was long gone, the poor girl could watch the tape, just as Nina—at especially self-tormenting moments—could reread her piece on historic hotels in a back issue of Allo!

  Simone de Beauvoir, Billie Holiday, and now this girl in the café. Next it would be Jean Seberg, Héloïse, Maria Callas, Piaf, every woman who’d ever gotten famous for suffering over men. But wasn’t it always like that? The world showed you what you were looking for, what you were tuned in to see. Once Nina had had a redheaded boyfriend, and for that time and long after, she was shocked to find the streets of New York crowded—teeming—with redheads. This morning a man with copper-colored hair had brought her coffee. But it was no longer a message, just the color of someone’s hair.

  Nina signaled for the check. Wait. She didn’t have French francs. Her legs went weak, even after she recalled that she’d changed fifty dollars at the airport. What did she think they would do to her if she didn’t have cash? Surely the café took credit cards. Probably traveler’s checks, too.