The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (18 page)

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 corridors 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.

“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 interesting. 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.”

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.

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.