Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose

his friends for the prayers that were keeping the plane in the air.
    Evidently, this feeling was not shared by the three couples across the aisle from Nina; Belgian, Italian, Austrian—they had just met and were playing cards. Each time the Hasidim rushed by, a nasty pause fell over the game and the cardplayers shuddered and sneered, and then everyone burst out laughing.
    Nina wanted to yell at them or say something brilliant and cutting. But what would she have said? Also there was a good chance that whatever Nina started might get ugly or scary, and continue or escalate for the rest of the flight. She was guiltily relieved that Leo wasn’t with her.
    Leo blamed what flaws he found in himself—sinusitis, anxieties, a lack of athletic ability—on his being Jewish. But he also seemed to blame Nina for not being Jewish. And so whenever the subject came up, a wedge of distance and rancor would insert itself between them, and many kisses and caresses would be needed to work it loose.
    Nina had grown up in New York. Everyone she knew was Jewish! She’d never given it any thought until Leo made her so self-conscious that now, whenever she tried to describe to herself the sort of person Leo was (smart, articulate, sensitive, sensual, chronically anxious) she wondered if she were actually seeing him, if she were capable of seeing him—or was she just falling back on a series of vile anti-Semitic clichés.
    It was Leo who’d made her worry that she might be anti-Semitic. Nina wasn’t anti-Semitic! The few times she had dozed on the plane, she’d been jolted awake by a shock of adrenaline and hate for the card-playing couples. That must be why she’d slept so much ever since her arrival to Paris.
    Nina considered telling the red-haired man the story about the airplane, and even about Leo. Or she considered it up to the point at which her ability to speak was snuffed out by his fixed patient smile. Did the breakfast he’d brought, if that’s what is was, come free with the room? Or was there a bill she was meant to pay? Did someone imagine she’d ordered this? And why was the man just standing there? Was he being solicitous—or sinister? Their attention drifted to the flickering TV. Nina must have turned off the sound and fallen asleep with the picture on. She and the man watched some French parents embracing children with a fervor suggesting that the children had just been released after a perilous hostage crisis. Following this came a montage of attractive, ravaged-looking Bosnians carrying wounded comrades and family members away from street fights and battles.
    “Terrible.” The man sighed breathily.
    “Really bad,” said Nina.
    The redheaded man held Nina’s eyes in his neutral gaze. “Would Madame like the shutters open?”
    “That would be nice,” she said.
    Did he not know what was out there? What was in his mind as he wrestled open the shutters so that he and Nina could look down on a layered geometry of flat sandy roofs pocked with oily puddles and black pipes belching smoke and gas? On the largest roof three cats scrabbled around in circles, clawing at a sheet of plastic wrap the wind lifted and spun between them.
    The plastic wrap guided Nina back to the dresser and the food tray. On the tray an individual box of breakfast cereal sat in a bowl at a jaunty angle, beside a metal thimble of cream and two baggy tangerines. The Perrier bottle was open and—was Nina still dreaming?—half-empty. She looked quizzically at the redheaded man who looked quizzically back. Not everyone might complain about the cereal and fruit, but the open bottle was inarguably over the top.
    I’m being tested, thought Nina.
    “Uh…did I order this?” she said.
    The man straightened his jacket collar. “Compliments of the hotel.”
    So Leo had alerted them. He did that, more often than not, dropped some reference to Allo! while making reservations that translated into fruit plates, champagne, and love notes from the