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

with me to the Suiça that evening. I was thinking I might ask Edward to sign it. As soon as I saw him, however, I had second thoughts and buttoned the jacket pocket in which the book was stowed. The Frelengs had already staked out a table on the sidewalk. As we approached, Edward stood and waved. Since our last meeting, he had shaved—there were two small nicks onhis cheek—while Iris had taken off her snood and pinned her hair loosely atop her head. I had for some reason assumed that her hair was brown. In fact it was a lustrous red. She had on a peasant skirt and a crocheted blouse that gave her a sort of Edwardian poetess air. So far as I could tell, she wore no makeup, which I worried might make Julia self-conscious. Despite her initial reluctance, Julia had finally given in to impulse and bought herself a new black dress. She was wearing her pearls. She was wearing the one pair of shoes she had held aside during the long trip from Paris in case some occasion should arise that required pristine shoes. Her skin gleamed with lotion, as if polished.
    No sooner had we sat down than Daisy, who was lying at Edward’s feet, hauled herself up with a grunt, stumbled over to Julia, and began licking her ankle.
    “Daisy, please,” Edward said.
    “You’ll have to forgive her,” Iris said. “She licks everything these days. Shoes, blankets, dirty socks.”
    “It’s true,” Edward said. “Even when she goes up the stairs, she licks each one before she steps on it, I suppose to make sure it’s real.”
    “Daisy, that’s enough, now, leave Julia alone,” Iris said.
    “It’s quite all right,” Julia said, reaching down to pat Daisy’s head—and to push her away.
    “We’ve never been to Pyla,” I said. “What’s it like?”
    “Just a typical little fishing village,” Edward said. “With a few hotels that, toward the end, were full of Belgians.”
    “For them it was the place to flee
to
,” Iris said.
    “And your house?” Julia asked.
    “Rustic. Always a fire going in the winter.”
    “It was for Daisy’s sake that we moved there in the first place,” Edward said. “You see, she spent her youth living in hotels, with noplace to run except up and down corridors, being chased by maids. And so we felt that in her old age she deserved to do the things she was bred to do—root hedgehogs out of their holes, roll around on the carcasses of dead fish.”
    “Daisy has a particular fondness for dead fish,” Iris said. “Every afternoon Eddie would take her for a walk on the beach, and if there was a dead fish in sight, you could bet she’d head straight for it.”
    “Really.”
    “Also we had a marvelous cook, Celeste, who’d make all sorts of special dishes for her, only to come to me afterward with her nose out of joint and say, ‘Madame, j’ai préparé pour le chien un ragout de boeuf, eh bien, il va dans le jardin manger les crottes de chat. Comme si c’était des bonbons!’”
    “Might I hold her on my lap?” I asked.
    “What a good idea,” Julia said.
    I lifted the dog off the ground—which gave Julia a chance to pull her legs back under her chair. Now Daisy’s face was just a few inches from mine. Her eyes were clouded, her teeth a brownish yellow. With little in the way of fuss, she turned around twice, curled into a ball, and went to sleep.
    As surreptitiously as she could, Julia dipped her napkin in her water glass and touched it to the ankle Daisy had been licking.
    “And you,” Iris said. “Where in Paris did you live?”
    Julia winced at the past tense. “In the sixteenth,” she said. “On Rue de la Pompe.”
    “Oh, I know that area. So … bourgeois. What was your apartment like?”
    “Well, you know, typically Parisian.
Parquet, moulures, cheminée
, as they say.”
    “We just had it redone,” I said.
    “The original decor was Empire,” Julia said. “Elegant but heavy.But then I met this marvelous decorator, a genius really, and now we hardly recognize the