Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose Page A

the farmer who would have fit so neatly inside his bowling pin of a wife. Their pig was a very docile pig, unlike the pig last night, which the elderly Alsatian couple had slaughtered, also on TV.
    When the Provençal farmer bopped his pig on the head with a mallet, the pig nodded, as if remembering, then sank to its knees and died. The Alsatian pig had struggled and squealed and bled all over the snow, and the Alsatian couple had also yelled as they ran around lunging and grabbing.
    But even that was quiet compared with the woman next door to Nina whose all-night screaming orgasm had kept the hotel awake all last night. Nina slept between crescendos and woke in fits of grief or rage, though it had never bothered her, all her other times in Paris. Screaming was something Frenchwomen did, or else there was a sex tape that French hotel owners put on to impress American tourists.
    Nina had said that to Leo, the last time they were in Paris. They’d heard a woman that time, too. They’d both known she was faking. Because they knew what the real thing was. Intense, the opposite of noise, it made the whole world get quiet.
    That time in Paris they’d hardly gone outside except to change hotels, the five—or was it six?—hotels the famous dead had slept in, Oscar Wilde, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Edith Piaf, supposedly in the same rooms Nina was writing about for Allo!
    Allo! was Leo’s newsletter for American Francophile tourists. Leo said he’d started it as a scam to keep going to France and, after he hired Nina, a scam to keep taking her with him. France was a passion for Leo—as was Nina, she’d hoped. He made his money from other newsletters, on investments and health.
    They’d met at a crowded party; actually, a wedding. The bride was Nina’s former boss, the publisher of Squeeze , a downtown arts magazine that she had just folded in order to travel the globe with her elderly rich new husband. What a coincidence that Leo needed a writer-editor and Nina needed a job! They exchanged cards (Leo’s) and scribbled phone numbers (Nina’s) with much checking to make sure that they’d really completed this apparently simple transaction. The wedding was held on a tour boat that lazily circled Manhattan while Nina and Leo paced tighter, watchful circles around each other.
    Nina started work that Monday. On Friday Leo took her to dinner at his favorite bistro, Chez Josephine—dark and narrow as a railway car, with low tin ceilings and ribbons of peeling paint like party decorations, in fact the only decorations except for some faded group photos of French soldiers—or were they Boy Scouts?—lined up behind panes of smudged glass. For one fleeting instant Leo struck Nina as a little sad: this fast-talking, aging New York guy pretending to be in Paris. Then halfway through the curried mussels he reached over and took her hand and tasted the briny curried cream sauce from the tip of each finger. The desire that flooded through Nina bypassed any notion that this was corny—and also perhaps a bit sudden for the first hour of their first date. And any thoughts she might have had about Leo being sad were alchemized into passion for the sad beauty that was Leo.
    That first night, at Leo’s loft, he picked two CDs from a rack and played one selection from each. The first—surprise!—was Edith Piaf. But if Nina had expected that, her smugness was soon blown away by the sheer raw ache of Piaf’s eerie warble. The second was Billie Holiday singing “Don’t Explain.” Her lullaby voice crooned Hush now, Don’t explain, Just say you’ll remain, Fire don’t explain, forces of nature don’t explain and neither does her man, forget the lipstick, the cheating, he’s her man, she’s so glad he’s back, and she loves him….
    After one verse, Leo said, “I can’t stand this. It makes me too unhappy,” and rushed out of the room.
    Nina assumed that what he couldn’t stand was the depth of his own emotion, his sympathy for the