The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online Page A

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 andardent 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.

Chapter 5
    Before dinner I went to Bertrand, the bookstore on Rua Garrett. I wanted to see if they had any copies of Xavier Legrand’s books, and indeed they did. The one I bought was called
The Noble Way Out
. According to the jacket, it told the story of a French politician who, on the eve of his arrest for the murder of his blackmailer, is found dead in his office, an apparent suicide. The case looks to be open and shut, as they say, until the novel’s hero, Inspector Voss of the Paris
sûreté
, arrives on the scene and raises doubts not just as to whether the politician killed himself but as to whether he killed his blackmailer. So the good inspector now has two murders, not one, on his hands.
    I brought the book