The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (5 page)

Like Harry, Julia was the youngest child. I myself am an eldest child. By nature I am gluttonous, impetuous, indifferent to worldly success—the polar opposite of Harry, who is methodical, abstemious, and enterprising, as well as stoically, humorlessly self-sacrificing. To hear him tell it, everything he has ever done in his life has not just been for someone else’s sake but has required him to deprive himself of a pleasure small or great (though, to be honest, the only thing in which he really takes pleasure, so far as I can see, is self-deprivation). This is often how it is with the last-born child. He knows himself to be the product of middle age and its disillusionment, and that this is why there are so few photographs of him as a baby, and why as a child he was left so much to his own devices or, worse, at the mercy of his siblings, who tortured him. The last-born child must learn to fend for himself. He has no choice. And Julia’s case was worse, because to the burden of being the youngest was added that of being a daughter in a world that favored sons. Hence the single-mindedness, the bleakness of prospect, the tenacity that were the signal features of her character.

Of course, when I first met her I saw none of this. Rather, what I saw was a creature at once fleet and nervous, like those tiny deer you sometimes startle in the woods in the Florida Keys. The very night we met, she asked me to take her back to my room—and it was a revelation. All my life, I saw, I had been looking, in the absence of any pressing desire or goal, for a purposefulness outside myself on which I might, as it were, ride piggyback. It could have
been a religion, it could have been a political party, it could have been a collection of musical instruments made from shoeshine boxes. Instead it was Julia. I adored her, I wanted her, and if I didn’t yet know her—well, what of it? Do you really need to know something to know that it enchants you? (Probably you do. Good luck, though, in convincing a young person of this.) Of course, there were signs I should have heeded. She lied to me about her age. She said she was twenty-four when really she was twenty-nine—three years older than I was. Also she had no friends, or at least none to whom she ever introduced me. As for her family, she said that she despised them and was living with her mother only until she could afford to flee. They were crass—whereas she valued art; had taken lessons in painting and pottery and singing; had tried her hand at writing a novel. But none of the paintings satisfied her, her pots kept falling off the wheel, and she gave up the singing when her teacher told her she had to quit smoking. As for the novel, she could not stop rewriting the first chapter. At the end of a year she had generated nine hundred pages, all of them first chapters.

Now she had an idée fixe, and it was to live in Paris. Only in Paris, she believed, could the artistic impulse that New York had frustrated take root and bloom. I asked her how many times she had been to Paris, and she said that she had never been there once. A trip with two of her sisters had been planned for the summer of 1914, but the war had interrupted. (She never forgave the war for it.) Luckily, she happened to have a French governess at the time, a prematurely elderly young woman who in the evenings would read aloud to her from the Comtesse de Ségur’s
Les Malheurs de Sophie
, that work by which, for mysterious reasons, so many little girls of the period were entranced. It was from Sophie, Julia said, that she gleaned her earliest notions of a French self, as well as her earliest conviction that she was destined to reside in Paris—a conviction that only
grew as she grew, and moved from the misadventures of Sophie to those of Colette’s Claudine, of which her governess disapproved strenuously and which were, for that reason, all the more enticing. Now I have before me Julia’s copy of
Claudine in Paris
. The pages are brittle and puffy, for she had a habit of reading in the bath. Many passages are underlined, including this one:

“We were sitting at a little table, against a pillar. To my right, under a panel daubed tempestuously with naked Bacchantes, a mirror assured me that I had no ink on my cheek, that my hat was on straight and that my eyes were dancing above a mouth red with thirst, perhaps a little fever. Renaud, sitting opposite me, had shaky hands and moist temples.

“A little moan of covetousness escaped me, aroused by the trail of scent left by a passing dish of shrimps.”

Today I wonder which was stronger in Julia—the longing for Renaud or for the shrimps. The shrimps, I suspect. For if she’d wanted a Frenchman, I really believe she could have found one. She might have had to wait a bit, but she could have found one. The trouble was, a Frenchman would have asked more of her and given less in return. He might have cheated on her. He might have interfered with the rapture of the shrimps. I do not want to suggest that Julia was venal; only that, like most youngest children, she was highly pragmatic. What she needed was a husband who was sufficiently in her thrall that he would do all he could to make her happy, but sufficiently lazy that he could be counted on for loyalty. And that bill I fitted perfectly.

So we got engaged, and she sprang on me the idea of moving to Paris, and I was not at all averse to it. On the contrary, her passionate desire provoked an equally passionate desire in me—the desire to satisfy her desire. For I had never in my life encountered a will so tenacious or a longing so intense as Julia’s. Perhaps gurus inspire
in their disciples a feeling similar to this, the feeling that a woman of determination can incite in a man whose capacity for ardor, though great, has no specific ambition or goal on which to spend itself. Accordingly, I wrote to Harry to ask if he might find me a job in the Paris office of General Motors, or in a Paris auto showroom. Quite reasonably, he responded with suspicion. Was a woman involved? he wanted to know. I replied that one was, at which he took the first train from Detroit to New York to investigate. The dinner the three of us had together was not, as you can imagine, a great success. Julia and Harry must have recognized the youngest child in each other, for they regarded each other with immediate suspicion. He asked her a lot of questions that I would never have been bold or rude enough to ask her myself, and, in the course of asking them, compelled her to divulge two facts that she had so far managed to keep from me. First, she was Jewish. Second, she was divorced. That she was Jewish came as no surprise. I had guessed as much. That she was divorced, I will admit, was a bit of a blow. After we sent Harry off in a taxi, we had a teary scene. She told me that she had not wanted to tell me that she was Jewish in case I should have religious qualms and that she had not wanted to tell me about her first husband in case I should think less of her for being a divorcée. It had all been long ago, when she was very young. His name was Valentine Breslau. They had not loved each other. The union had been imposed on them by their parents, who wished to solidify a business alliance between the families. Valentine had promised to take her to Paris for their honeymoon. Instead he took her to the Poconos. He made “loathsome” demands of her, and when she refused to satisfy them, he turned to prostitutes. For six months she put up with his brutishness, until finally she could take no more and left him, returning to her parents. He pleaded with her to come back. She refused. Her parents pleaded with her to go back.
She turned a deaf ear. Her father was a “beast” about the matter, she said, worried more about the business partnership that the divorce threatened to capsize than his own daughter’s welfare. Shortly thereafter, he had a heart attack and died. Telling me this, Julia burst into a fit of weeping. I took her in my arms and promised that I would make everything all right, even with her mother. Her mother, Julia was convinced, had psychic powers. She could read Julia’s mind. By way of example, Julia told this story. One afternoon, shortly after the divorce, she and Mrs. Loewi had a fierce argument, at the end of which Julia left the parental apartment, vowing never to return. For a few hours she rode around town in a taxi. Then she decided to check in to a hotel. Now, the hotel in question, she assured me, was not a famous one, and God knows, there are thousands of hotels in New York. Yet somehow the manager was expecting her, knew her name, and told her that he had no rooms. Horrified, she fled to another hotel—and here too the manager was expecting her, knew her name, and told her that he had no rooms.

This episode Julia interpreted as follows: her mother, having foreseen which hotels she was going to try—having foreseen this even before Julia had tried them—had telephoned to warn the managers that her daughter was on the way, and that she was not about to pay her bill.

I laughed. I suggested this was silly.

Julia was not amused.

“Perhaps she employs spies,” I said.

“She doesn’t need to,” Julia said.

I decided that I would go to see her mother myself. I would tell Mrs. Loewi that I intended to marry her daughter no matter what. Even without the family’s blessing, I would marry her. Even if they disowned her, I would marry her. I did not tell Julia about this plan. I knew she would try to stop me. At the Loewi apartment, an elderly
manservant showed me into the dining room. Though the room overlooked Central Park, the curtains were drawn, as if to prove that a view was something the family could afford to ignore. The table was long, with ornate and uncomfortable chairs. Mrs. Loewi was waiting for me. She struck me as an exceedingly old-fashioned lady, with manners that dated, like her clothes, from the last century. She sat at the head of the table. I sat directly to her right. We drank tea. All through my speech, she kept her plump hands folded in front of her. Her face was impassive. At last I stopped speaking. A few seconds passed, and then she said this one clear sentence: “I beg you to reconsider.” That was all. Her voice was higher than I had expected, less forceful, more girlish. I waited for something more. Nothing came. I was taken aback. I had expected demurrals, threats, at the very least the offer of a bribe that I could gallantly refuse—instead of which, here was this one brief advisory, uttered dispassionately, as if from a sense of duty. Eventually I stood. She stood. Upright, she was even shorter than Julia, though stouter. She might have come up to my elbow. She led me to the door, where she shook my hand. For the first and only time, I looked into her eyes. And what did I see there? Compassion. Relief. A smidgen of cunning.

In the vestibule, I called for the elevator. On the way down, the attendant gave me what I considered an impertinent look. In the lobby the doorman, having ushered me into the revolving door, pushed it so hard that I stumbled out the other side. I would have fallen had a passerby not caught me. I was sure it was deliberate. I did not, however, go back in and punch the doorman in the jaw. Instead I hurried away. I headed south, toward my own apartment, where Julia awaited me.

It was then, for the first and only time, that I doubted my soon-to-be wife. I doubted her so much it frightened me—I mean the
doubt
frightened me, not the thought that was its impetus: that she
might be a liar and a fraud. For it’s never the facts, is it? It’s always the doubt … And so we disregard every warning sign, no matter how blatant, rather than let anything interfere with our getting what we want—which makes us all liars and frauds …

Then I got to the apartment—and there she stood, my Julia, vivid in her wrath and dread, braced for the worst. For somehow or other—maybe from the doorman or the manservant—she had found out what I’d been up to. “What lies did she tell you about me?” she asked. By way of reply, I shut her mouth with my lips. I assured her that it didn’t matter, that all would be well. By now Harry had finagled the position in Paris for me—not with much confidence, he made clear. He didn’t trust Julia. He said she rubbed him the wrong way. Nor should I imagine that the job in Paris would be a cakewalk. I was on probation. My boss there would report directly to Harry on my progress. Harry had “cashed in quite a few chips” to get me this job, he warned me, and if I failed, it would be he who suffered the consequences. My baby brother’s fate was in my hands—just as my fate was in his. “And it’s not as if I wouldn’t like to take off and live in Paris,” he added, “but someone has to keep an eye on poor Mama.” A few days later, Julia and I were married at a registry office. The next morning we sailed to France on the
Aquitania
. It was from aboard ship that she sent the famous telegram to her family in which she vowed never again to set foot on American soil.

I wish I could say that Paris lived up to Julia’s expectations. Alas, however, it did not—and perhaps it never does, for those who have expectations of the place. I myself had no expectations of the place, so I was happy there. I liked my job. The cars interested me, as did the peculiarities of running an American office in a European city, a subject about which, I joked, I could write a book, and might. Croissants in the morning, steak au poivre at lunch, a glass of Cointreau after work, before heading home to Julia, my Julia, beautiful and
ardent and rippling with disquiet. In the end she had not fulfilled her artistic destiny. Rather she had grown into a woman of fashion, idle and a little vain, who spent her days strolling through boutiques, and reading
Vogue
, and consulting with interior decorators in a ceaseless effort to bring our apartment in line with the fantasies of her youth. Not once in all the years of our marriage did she so much as look at another man, I can assure you, though plenty looked at her. If anything she was a bit of a prig. An inordinate amount of her time she devoted to playing solitaire. Now I see that her energy was all for the ascent. She could only write first chapters. The middle, the vast middle, defeated her. Nor was her family, even at this great distance, ever all that far from her. She was constantly encountering them in cafés and restaurants and on the streets. We might be sitting at a table at the Café de la Paix on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I would look up from the menu and suddenly she would be gone. Evaporated. When she returned a few minutes later, she would be wearing dark glasses. “That’s Aunt Sophie over there,” she’d whisper. Or “That’s Cousin Hugo.” Or “That’s Aunt Louise, she must be here on holiday”—which would be my cue to ask for the bill, whether we had eaten or not … I have no idea how many of these phantasms were in fact the people Julia thought they were. Nonetheless I always accommodated her. And how could I not? For at the sight of them she went genuinely pale, and afterward, in the taxi, her heart beat so loudly in her chest that I could feel it … I wanted to make her happy—making her happy was my vocation, and more often than not I succeeded. Or so I believed. Of course, I was a fool. Smug in my satedness, manfully satisfied that I was satisfying her every desire, I failed to see what was obvious even to her: those desires were vapor; their fulfillment was vapor—until a morning came when I woke and found that the burden of her care was crushing the life out of me. I had become my brother.