The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (3 page)

“Look at this!” Edward said. “A proper hotel lobby! Our Francfort doesn’t have a lobby, only a mean little reception. Oh, and you’ve got a winter garden, too.”

“Not much use in the summer, a winter garden,” I said, as if it were something to be ashamed of. “Well, thanks for getting me back in one piece. I think I can manage from here.”

“Nonsense, I’m not having you break your neck going down a dark corridor. Wait a second.”

Then he strode off to the front desk, where for about five minutes he chatted with Senhor Costa, the hotel manager, in a French too idiomatic and swift for me to follow. For though I had lived in France for fifteen years, working for an American company as I did, I had never really mastered the language. Neither had Julia. This was for both of us a source of embarrassment.

When he returned, he held the key to our room. “Sorry about that. I was just asking him to take my name in case a room happened to open up … Oh, a lift! What we wouldn’t give for a lift, especially now that we’re on the top floor.”

“Yes, but it’s a very old lift,” I said as we stepped inside. “It breaks down all the time.”

“
Shh
.” Edward touched a finger to his lips. “You mustn’t say
things like that or they’ll hear you.” At which the lift, as if to prove his point, shuddered and heaved, lurched upward, trod air, as it were, for a few long seconds before hauling itself, with a great groan of effort, to the second-floor landing. “See what I mean? It’s the same with cars. You mustn’t praise them or they’ll break down. Of course, being in the car business, you must know that.”

“I don’t make a habit of talking to my cars.”

“Wise of you. Their conversation isn’t much.”

Again he took my arm. Down the corridor he led me—he and Messalina nodded to each other like old acquaintances—to my door, into which he fitted the key as if it were his own. Sunlight spilled through the cleft. “I say, this is nice,” he said, taking in our little room with its narrow bedstead, its intricate tiled floor, its single chair over the back of which Julia had flung one of her slips. Pots and jars, the unguents and emollients on which my wife relied to maintain her youth, lay scattered over the surface of the vanity. “Oh, and don’t tell me you’ve got a bathroom!”

“I’m afraid we have, yes.”

“Don’t be afraid, be glad. May I?” He nudged open the door. Underwear hung drying from a cord that Julia had rigged up over the tub.

“I’m sorry things are in such a state,” I said. But Edward wasn’t listening. First he tried the cold tap, then the hot tap. Then he lifted the plug from the drain. Then he touched his fingers to one of the pairs of Julia’s panties.

“Silk,” he said, caressing the material. “With handmade lace. Very nice.”

I was flabbergasted. Was this a compliment? And if so, who was being complimented?

“Julia has always been very particular about her things,” I said.

“She has a tiny waist,” he said, reaching his hand through one of the leg holes. “Iris’s figure is more zaftig. Rubenesque—if Rubens
had ever painted Scottish lasses. Of course, she’d never wear this kind of thing. She only ever wears plain white cotton knickers. Schoolgirl knickers.” He smiled at me. “Do you like that sort of thing? You know, a grown woman in little girl’s pants?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Oh, come on. You must have thought about it.” He stepped closer. “Schoolgirl knickers on a woman with curves. The effect can be quite eye-catching.”

“Excuse me.” I left the bathroom and walked to the window, which I opened.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. I just needed some air.”

Now he was standing behind me, his hands on my shoulders. “Ah, that’s a good smell. A real Lisbon smell. Linens drying, fish guts, coal smoke … And what’s that? Listen.”

Aside from the wail of a shutter that had come unmoored, the only sound was a pianist—a child, I guessed—practicing a Brahms intermezzo.

“Oh, him,” I said. “He’s been playing that same piece since we got here, only he can’t seem to get past this one chord. Just a sec, here it comes.” And indeed the pianist, having made it through the first few bars, reached the troublesome chord; flubbed it; started again. “Every day it’s the same. It gets rather maddening after a while.”

“At least it’s not traffic. Our room overlooks an outdoor market. If we close the window, we suffocate from the heat. But if we open it, we can’t sleep for the noise. Which is to say nothing of the stench.”

“Odd thing, the two hotels having the same name.”

“Isn’t it? I asked around about that. The story is, they used to have the same owner. And when he died, he left one hotel to one son and the other to the other, but the brothers got rivalrous and tried to outdo each other in renovations, until finally they both went
bankrupt and had to sell. And though it’s been years since the hotels have had any affiliation, the quarrel lives on, as if of its own volition. The problem is, no one outside of Lisbon realizes that there are actually
two
Hotel Francforts—or should that be Hotels Francfort?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Let’s say Hotel Francforts. And since no one outside of Lisbon realizes there are two, half the time letters addressed to guests at the one arrive at the other, where, as often as not, they’re thrown into the trash.”

“Really?”

“I’ve seen it happen. It’s a disaster for the refugees, who are always waiting for something vital to come in the mail. May I?” He pulled the chair out from under the vanity and sat. I turned toward him. His legs were spread just wide enough that his trousers bunched at the crotch.

“Sit down,” he said.

There was nowhere to sit but on the bed, so I sat on the bed. He put his hands behind his head, in the process sliding down in his chair a little. Now his legs, crossed at the ankles, stretched to the point where our shoes—the tips of our shoes—touched.

“Pete,” he said. “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Did I offend you earlier, talking about your wife’s underwear like that?”

“Offend me? No.”

“Still, I shocked you.” He drew in his knees and leaned forward. “You really must forgive me. Years of hotel life have made me uncouth.”

“I thought you had a house.”

“We do—now. Before, though, during the years of pilgrimage, as I call them, we lived in hotels. Dozens of them. And every night, after dinner, the ladies would repair to the lounge. And every night, after dinner, the gentlemen would repair to the smoking room, for cigars and dirty stories. Continental resorts are old-fashioned in that way. Of course, you’re innocent of all that.” He nudged my shoe with his.

“No, I’m not.”

“It’s okay. I find it refreshing.”

“But I’m not innocent. How could I be? All my life I’ve worked in auto showrooms. Car salesmen aren’t exactly shrinking violets. You hear a lot of racy stories.”

“Really? Tell me one.”

“I can’t think of any just now.”

“All right, then. Sell me a car. I’d love to buy a car from you.”

“I can sell you
my
car. She’s a beaut—a 1939 Buick Limited six-passenger Touring Sedan, hardly ever driven, with just the miles between Paris and Lisbon on the odometer.”

“You drove to Lisbon? What was that like?”

“On the road to Bordeaux, the traffic went at a crawl. There were farmers with donkey carts, and peasants pushing their mothers in strollers, and horses loaded up with every imaginable sort of junk—chamber pots, milking stools, crates of chickens. And in the midst of it all, the Packards and the Hispano-Suizas, honking their horns to speed things up. And then every few hours a military convoy would show up, trying to go the opposite direction, toward Paris, but since the road had no shoulder, everything would just end up in a hopeless tangle … And I thought, France is doomed.”

“My God.”

“And Julia refused to go out into the fields. All the other women
did, even the ones in limousines—they had no qualms about hitching up their furs and squatting. But not Julia.”

“We came by train,” Edward said. “On the Sud Express, we were stuck nine hours outside of Salamanca, with the lights out and the rain bucketing down. It rained all the way to the Portuguese frontier. The sun only came out when we crossed. I mean it came out literally as we were stepping across the frontier. How’s that for cheap symbolism?” Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “Now I remember where I’ve heard of Wabash. ‘The Wabash Cannonball.’ How does it go? Past the lakes of something-something, where the something-somethings fall …”

“No changes to be taken on the Wabash Cannonball.”

“A train, wasn’t it?”

“There are all sorts of stories about it. For instance, that it had seven hundred cars. And the engine was so fast that you arrived before you left.”

“Funny you should say that,” he said, “because when I was a boy, whenever I’d go to visit my mother in California, I’d perform this funny sort of ritual. I’d walk the length of the train, front to back, going backward as the train went forward, to the caboose. And then in the other direction, to the engine. I had to do it. It was like not stepping on a crack … Well, I’d forgotten all about that until just a few days ago, on the Sud Express, I found myself doing the same thing. Only the train was moving so slowly that I could match my pace to its pace. I could walk backward at exactly the speed that it was going forward. So that in every one of the windows, the scene was the same. A muddy field, a goat … Now, if
that
train had had seven hundred cars …” He uncrossed his legs, then recrossed them in the other direction, in the process stretching them out a little. Now our feet scissored each other.

Neither of us moved. The loose shutter slapped its wall. The pianist hit the inevitable wrong chord.

“Oh, your glasses,” Edward said. “You still haven’t got your glasses.” But I had forgotten all about my glasses.

It took me ten minutes to find the glasses. While Edward stood by, bemused, I rifled through our trunk, my suitcase, Julia’s suitcase, the gas-mask holder in which we kept our money and papers, before finally locating them in my Dopp kit: an old pair, tortoiseshell, the lenses a little scratched.

No sooner had I put them on than I was nauseated. “Are you okay?” Edward asked, holding out his hand to steady me.

Now his eyelashes were sharp as needles, his scar as raw as if it were fresh.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just need to get my bearings. The prescription is a little weaker than on the other pair.”

“I’ve never worn glasses. May I try them?”

I handed them to him—and was relieved to see his body melting back into imprecision.

He put them on and reeled theatrically.

“My God, I can’t see a thing.”

“That’s because your vision’s good.”

“Twenty-fifteen. Better than perfect. I often wonder why they don’t make glasses for people who see
too
well. I mean, to see so clearly that it hurts—isn’t that a kind of impairment? A kind of … delusion?” He took the glasses off, wiped them with his shirttail, and returned them to me. “Well, I’ve enjoyed this little comedy of errors. I thank you for it.”

“Shouldn’t I be thanking you?”

“Why? Because I broke your glasses?”

“No … Because you brought me back.”

“Oh, it was the least I could do.” He walked to the door, turned the handle, and pivoted. “By the way, you wouldn’t care to have dinner with us tonight, would you? You and your wife?”

His tone, to my ear, was noncommittal, and, wanting to sound noncommittal in kind, I said that it would depend on Julia. She might be too tired.

“We’ll play it by ear then. Or eye, as the case may be. And now you know where to find me.”

“At the other Francfort.”

“This is the other Francfort. Or maybe they’re both the other Francfort. Well, goodbye.”

We shook hands and he left. I stayed by the door until I could no longer hear his footsteps. Now that I was getting used to wearing glasses again, I was startled by how much the room resembled a seraglio. It wasn’t just the jars and pots on the vanity, it was Julia’s gowns, her negligees, her very smell—of cigarettes and face powder and Jicky by Guerlain. Yet Edward’s smell was there, too, astringent and canine. To put her off the scent, I threw open the window. The loose shutter had been secured, the pianist had given up for the time being. Down on the street an old woman sat on a stool, peeling potatoes.

In the bathroom, I took off my clothes. What I saw in the mirror
did not impress me: standard-issue Anglo-Saxon face, cheeks potatoish in their stolidity. But for the pomegranate-red nipples, the chest was as undifferentiated as a field. My belt had pressed a pinkish trail into the abdomen, as if a tractor had just passed over it … A Midwestern body. A Great Plain. And how varied, by comparison, was the landscape just of Edward’s face! The scar in particular fascinated me. Hadn’t he mentioned Heidelberg? Somewhere I’d read that at German universities the students engaged in sword fights as a rite of passage. Facial wounds were badges of honor, which they washed lovingly with rancid water. Was this, then, the story of Edward’s scar? Whatever it was, I wanted to read it. I wanted to read Edward.

It was getting on for lunchtime. It occurred to me that I was ravenous, so I got dressed and went down to the hotel restaurant. On the way, I left my key at the front desk in case Julia should come back. Only a few tables were taken, for Lisbon is a town in which people eat late. I ordered an omelette. It arrived prepared in the Spanish style, with chunks of potato. I devoured it. Then I had a flan, three apricots, and a banana. Then I drank two
garotos
, those little Portuguese steamed coffees with milk, followed by two glasses of
aguardente
, which is the Portuguese equivalent of an eau-de-vie. Then I went back to the lobby. The key to our room was no longer on the peg. My stomach lurched. I reminded myself that I really had to eat more slowly. My digestion was not what it had once been.

Not wanting to risk the elevator again, I walked the two flights of stairs to our floor. I knocked.

“Who is it?” Julia called from the other side.