What happened next—that, I suppose, is the story Georgina would tell me to tell: how on the spur of the moment, I asked a steward to gather together my luggage; how without looking over my shoulder, I descended the gangplank of the Manhattan; how I returned to the Hotel Francfort, and knocked on the door to room 111, and offered Dr. Gray not just my car but my services as a driver … And then how, for the next two years, with the Grays as my partners and Marseille as my base, I ferried refugees over the Pyrenees, in my faithful Buick, in the middle of the night … until the Germans occupied the unoccupied zone and we had to flee, once again, to Lisbon. But I’m not going to tell that story, because it’s already been told many times, and anyway I didn’t do anything that someone else couldn’t have done. Besides, I despise books in which all the interest lies in the fame of the people the narrator runs into, or serves, or saves. Leave that crap to Georgina. I don’t have the patience for it anymore.
What I do want to write about is this: what the Grays’ room looked like that afternoon, with the curtains filtering the late-afternoon sunlight so that it softened the harsh geometry of the floor. On the dressing table, bottles of gin and vermouth, not jars of unguents and creams, were ranged. Where solitaire cards should have been spread, newspapers rested in neat piles. Quietly Cornelia—she now insisted that I call her Cornelia—did a crossword. “Why don’t you take off your shoes and lie down?” she said, and I said that, yes, that sounded like a good idea; and I did lie down, atop that bed that she shared with her husband, and fell more deeply asleep than I had in weeks, waking only around six in the evening to realize that the Manhattan was now at sea. Then I looked up at Cornelia, and she was still sitting in the chair in front of the dressing table, doing her crossword, and for an instant it was as if the future were casting its shadow over the present, or a train had arrived at its destination, though it hadn’t yet left; and in that moment, I swear, I could see everything that was going to happen next: that in my future there would be more infidelity, another marriage broken up, though not my own; and I regretted that Julia, with the intuition of the betrayed, should have seen what was coming even before I did. And I wished that her last weeks on earth could have been happier ones.
“How are you feeling?” Cornelia said.
“Better, thanks.” I sat up, touched my feet to the floor. “Oh, I forgot to tell you—when I took the taxi here, something funny happened. I said ‘Hotel Francfort,’ and the driver took me to the Francfort Hotel.”
“What? I thought this was the Francfort Hotel.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Know what?” My wife has always been a woman who dislikes not knowing things. And so I told her what Edward had told me the morning I met him, the story of how the hotels had come to have the same name—but I told it as if I had come upon it all firsthand, as if he had played no part in any of it, not even the witticism that he attributed to the refugees themselves, though in fact I had never heard it out of any mouth but his: “Just think, here we are fleeing the Germans, and we end up at a hotel called Francfort!”