Women with Men

by Richard Ford

  “Are you sleeping?” She closed her eyes.

  “Yes,” Matthews said. “I am.”

  “You should,” she said, and slipped to sleep again in just that fragile moment.

  Matthews sat back and waited a moment, listening for more noises out in the street. A siren or a horn blowing, something to add a rhythm to the other noise, the boom. He heard a car move down the snowy street, skid briefly, its brakes applied, and drive on. And then he came to bed, thinking as he crawled in from the bottom, along the cold plaster wall, that he would never sleep now, since his heart was pounding, and because in truth the day to come would likely be, as Helen said, a strange day.

  WHEN HE AWOKE it was ten-thirty. Light through the window was brighter than he'd expected. A stalk of yellow angled across the tiles to his shirt, where it lay from the night before.

  He put his trousers on and went to the window. There would be an entirely new view of Paris, he thought. The room wasn't as chilled. He had slept well and long.

  And he was correct. The snow from the night had all but gone. A few irregular patches remained in the cemetery and on a parked car or two in the street. But it seemed spring suddenly, the sycamore trunks damp and darkened, the ground soaked, a light fog rising off the gravestones as the sun found them, making the cemetery a park. Of course, there was no sign of the man who'd slept in the tomb. He couldn't distinguish which one it had been, and thought it might've been a dream. He'd drunk too much. Even Rex and Beatrice seemed figmentary—bad dreams one ought just as well relinquish.

  Helen lay perfectly still, her head under her pillow, no sign of breathing in the covers. For the second time—or was it the third—he leaned to listen. Her breathing was strong and deep. She could sleep until afternoon. She was weak, he thought. Rest would be her ally.

  But what was he to do until then? Read one of her police mysteries. Sitting by Helen's bed reading while the city warmed and turned (perhaps only briefly) more agreeable would be the wrong thing. Too much like a hospital: wanting to be there when the patient woke up from the surgery. There wasn't any surgery; there wasn't anything. It was possible Helen was only jet-lagged. Or that because she was experiencing the change of life she exaggerated her symptoms. Something involuntary. That had happened to his mother and driven his father crazy. Then one day it had stopped. He didn't know if Helen had cancer or was experiencing pain. You only knew such things with proof, had seen the results. There were the bruises, but they could have simple explanations—not that she was lying.

  But to let her sleep in hopes she'd feel better after, that's what he'd want if he were Helen. Until then, he could walk out into the Paris streets alone, for the first time, and experience the city the way you should. Close up. Unmediated.

  In thirty minutes he was showered and dressed, had found the Fodor's, drawn the curtains closed across the bright morning and left a note for Helen, which he stuck to the bathroom mirror with toothpaste. H. I'll be back by 1:00. Don't wear yourself out. We'll have a boat ride. Love, C.

  ON RUE FROIDEVAUX the morning was like spring, the light watery and dense, a new warm seam in the breeze that felt foreign and impermanent but saved the day. He had it in mind to walk in any direction until he found some kind of toy store, a fancy French version where there were precious objects unimaginable to American children, and there buy a Christmas present for Lelia. He'd loaded off boxes full of obvious American toys weeks ago. All from Ohio, from a mall. But something special from France could turn out to be perfect. The gift that made all the difference. He didn't know if Lelia knew he was in France, if he'd told her he was going when they'd talked the last time, after Thanksgiving.

  Consulting the Fodor's map, he made a plan to walk to the Boulevard Raspail, go left and stay on beyond the Boulevard du Montparnasse—famous streets from his map research for The Predicament— then angle down rue Vavin to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Someplace along these storied streets, he was confident he'd find the store he wanted, after which he would try another plan, which would bring him back to the Nouvelle Métropole by one to look in on Helen. This might dictate a doctor visit, although he hoped not.

  He wondered if she had a copy of his book stowed away. He'd meant to make a brief search of her suitcase when he was straightening the room and she was in the bathroom. But it had slipped his mind. Though truthfully, he didn't care now. Even if portraits made people look better than they ever could be, they still didn't like the idea. Biographies were full of these feuds. Helen, however, was capable of understanding that a character was just a character, a contrivance of words—practically total invention—not some transformation of a real person to the page. Real people would always have the tendency to be themselves and not as moldable as characters should be for important discoveries to occur. (This was certainly one of the problems with The Predicament.) Real people were always harder.

  In Helen's current state, of course, it was difficult to know how she'd take it; it was possible that instead of getting furious, she might just laugh it off or even be flattered. The truth was that no one should get involved with a writer if she (or he) didn't want to show up in a book. Try a carpenter or a locksmith or an implement salesmen, and rest easy.

  In the meantime he felt better about everything. And walking up the wide, congested Boulevard Raspail—a legendary street he knew almost nothing specific about, bound for some unknown destination, with little language available, no idea about currency, distances or cardinal points—made him feel a small but enlivened part of a wider, not a narrower, experience. Helen dominated life, shoved other interests aside, visualized her own interests clearly and assumed his were the same. And not that he even blamed her. He respected her for it. If his life had been narrow, the blame was his, especially given how charged he now felt as he crossed Montparnasse by Le Dôme, where Lenin and Trotsky had eaten lunch and where, he now remembered from teaching, the great Harry Crowder sang a song by Samuel Beckett in 1930. If he found his way here later and could figure out how to order soupe de poisson in French, he decided, he'd lunch at Le Dôme himself.

  The best thing to say about Helen was that he wasn't adequate to her needs and demands, due to needs and demands of his own, and that he should let things go on as they now would, then quietly part company with her once they were home. He'd felt the very same—that he'd barely escaped with his life—when he left behind being a professor. He'd have taken the blame for that, too, if he'd gotten trapped there. Helen was nothing like as serious a threat. At day's end, Helen was a nice woman.

  Something, without doubt, was changing in his life now, and changing for the better. The fact that he didn't mind being “lost” and alone in Paris was just one small scrap of the evidence. Blumberg's comment that nobody knew him here, which had seemed at the time (two days ago) like a great dark shadow on its way to blotting out the sun, seemed perfectly fine today. You recognized changes in yourself, he believed, not by how others felt about you, but by how you felt about yourself. And instead of worrying about how he couldn't convert experience in Paris to be applicable to Ohio, it might now be possible to convert himself to whatever went on in Paris—something he'd never have dreamed possible when he was teaching the African-American Novel at Wilmot College.

  All of which made his planned visit with Madame de Grenelle even more crucial, since the translation of The Predicament seemed like the first move toward converting himself into someone available to take on more of life. That was undoubtedly why black artists had flocked to Paris: because in the process of removing themselves from the center of terrible events at home, they'd found ways to let more of life in and, in so doing, disappeared but became visible to themselves at the same time. “Paris welcomed the Negro writers.” That was the phrase he'd read in textbooks, was certainly a phrase he'd repeated over the years, accepted without giving it a thought or without believing he had anything in common with Negro writers. Perhaps, though, Paris could open its arms to Charley Matthews. He wasn't spoiled to want that now. Ma
ny stranger things had happened.

  Bending off Raspail and down onto narrow rue Bréa, he without once looking walked straight to the toy store he'd sought, a narrow shop window on a block of expensive-looking jewelry stores and second-rate galleries featuring Tibetan art. si j’étais plus jeune, the sign said.

  Inside the shop, which specialized in toys made in Switzerland, he discovered a bewildering variety of wonderful possibilities, everything ridiculously costly and probably nothing able to be sent as far as California with any hope of arriving unbroken before New Year's. Possibly it would be better to buy something small, cart it home and save it for later—for Lelia's birthday in March.

  Though that wouldn't do. Something had to arrive from Paris, whether she knew he was here or not, and he had to get it there in time for Christmas—a week away. Expense shouldn't enter into the equation.

  He continued cruising the shop, examining exquisitely carved mahogany sailboats and handmade train sets in several different sizes and shiny enamel color schemes; lavish bear, lion and llama replicas made—at least it looked like—from cashmere and real jewels; and meticulously detailed puppet-show stages with silk puppets that actually spoke in French, German or Italian, using some tiny computer. He wanted to ask the young shopgirl (who was obviously a bored fashion model) what the store might contain that was small and portable and unique and that a six-year-old girl living in the South Bay would like and for which price was no concern. The clerk, he realized, would know English, as well as French, German and Italian, and probably Swedish and Dutch and Croat, but he felt he should speak to her in French, as Helen would've. Except he didn't know how even to begin such a conversation. What he wanted was hopelessly tangled up in unknown tenses and indecipherable idiomatic expressions and implicit French comprehensions, and worst of all with French numbers—large numbers, which the French purposefully complicated and for which he didn't know any of the names above twenty. Vingt.

  The sales clerk stayed perched, legs crossed, on a high-tech-looking metal stool, reading Elle and wearing a preposterously short red leather skirt. And when he'd gone uncomfortably past her station by the cash register for the third time, he simply stopped and looked at her, smiled pitiably, shook his head and for some reason made a circular motion with his upraised index finger, by which he meant to indicate there were more things to admire and buy here than he could choose from, so that he was going to depart and possibly come back later. The young woman, however, looked up, smiled at him, closed her magazine and said in a shockingly American midwestern voice, “If there's anything I can help you with, just ask. I'm not very busy, as you can see.”

  At the end of ten minutes, Matthews had made his wishes, qualms and time restrictions known to the young woman, who was Canadian and who knew all about shipping, wrapping, customs declarations and valuation limits on packages sent to America. She even found, by looking in a book, the exact category of gift recommended for six-year-old French girls, from which Matthews chose a bright-yellow wall tablet made of plastic that allowed for the leaving of written messages, and from which messages could both be erased and electronically retrieved by pushing a red button on the side. He wasn't positive Lelia would like this, since she was reportedly better at math than at writing; but she could do math on it if she wanted to, and it wasn't American and had French phrases—Hallo? On y va? Ça va bien? N'est-ce pas?— worked into the yellow plastic border, along with molded images of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Bastille, the Panthéon, a bridge of some kind: everything but Napoleon's tomb.

  This, the clerk promised, would be carefully wrapped, insured against breakage and delivered by courier to Penny's house in Palomar Park on or before Christmas Eve. The entire cost was less than a thousand francs, which Matthews put on his credit card. He also inserted inside the box a handwritten note. Dear Sweetheart, You and I will spend next Christmas together in Paris, n'est-ce pas? On y va. Voilà. Dad.

  As a result of his successful transaction, when he walked back out into rue Bréa, where the slant, late-morning sunlight on cobblestone pavement felt even warmer than earlier, as if December might just as easily give way straight to spring, he sensed the whole day had been saved, and he was even more free than ever to do exactly as he pleased. Paris wasn't menacing; he'd been right yesterday. And he could operate in it more or less on his own, just as he thought he'd be able to, even though it annoyed him not to know enough words to ask directions, or to understand if any were offered. He would need to stick to the simple, familiar touristic objectives (buying a newspaper, ordering coffee, reading a taxi meter), though this impasse would improve soon enough. But language or no language, he could go wherever he chose—even if he could only order coffee when he got there. The best idea was to treat Paris like a place he knew and felt comfortable, no matter how resistant and exotic it might turn out to be. He decided he'd buy flowers for Helen and let that be his first completely French transaction. A flower stall would come along the same way the toy shop had.

  At the bottom of rue Bréa, he turned left toward what the Fodor's indicated would be the Luxembourg Gardens, hoping to take a walk on the sunny lawns, watch children maneuver their small boats in the lagoon (Helen had talked about this) and eventually cross to the Panthéon and angle down to the Sorbonne, while gradually making his way, if he could find it, to the St.-Sulpice church and rue du Vieux-Colombier, where the famous Club 21 had once been located, and where Sidney Bechet and Hot Lips Page played in the fifties. Why not go there, he decided, after all the hours logged yakking about places and people he never knew? He had no idea why the place stayed in his mind or what he hoped to see. Probably it would just be a boarded-up hole-in-the-wall—something else that existed only in a book. Though not his book. He'd made no references to any black clubs in The Predicament. They had nothing to do with his female character's—Greta's—ill-fated stay. Plus he knew nothing about jazz and didn't much care.

  Sending a present off to Lelia had put Penny back in his mind—an unwelcome visitor. He realized that after Penny left, no matter how he felt at the time, or how many novels her leaving might've ignited, or how deep the trenches of despondence that might've cut down through his life, his assumption had always been that at some point he would simply “switch off.” Switch off from Penny and on to something or somebody else. That's what he assumed people did if life was to go on. Airline-crash survivors, emigrants, exiles of war—they all drew for themselves, or had drawn for them, a line of demarcation they crossed once but then never stepped back over again.

  Now, though, clearheaded for the first time in days, he realized that this assumption about lines of demarcation might not be entirely realistic; that succeeding as an exile was possibly a slower, more lingering process and could be one that never got completed before you died (children made it much more difficult). And though sometimes he nonchalantly thought it didn't matter if he and Penny got divorced or never did, or if he sometimes felt as if Penny had gone down in a jetliner and would never be heard from, neither of those was true, so that stronger measures needed to be taken to bring about the desired result. Divorce, in other words. He'd been reluctant or casual or inattentive about it up to now. But no more. Divorce would be his first official act upon arriving back in Ohio. If Penny thought she wanted a divorce from him, she couldn't conceive of the divorce he'd set in motion starting day one. He and Penny would be “switched off” by February, and that was a promise.

  This had to do, he understood, with wanting not to be the center of things, with wanting to get lost in events, with conceivably even fitting into the normalcy of another country—though normalcy, of course, was foolish to think about. Look around (he said this unexpectedly out loud). He could never fit in in Paris. Except that was no reason you couldn't, with the right set of motivations, be here, even live here, find an apartment, learn the streets and enough of the language to follow directions. If you couldn't totally switch off, or switch on, you could make clear and decisive moves to produce
at least some desired results. You could have part of what you wanted.

  He reached what he thought on the map should be rue d'assas, with the Luxembourg directly across the street. But instead he found a different street, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and ahead of him was not the great garden with the seventeenth-century palace built by the Medicis, but once again the Boulevard Raspail, a part of it he hadn't been on. Though the Luxembourg Gardens still had to be on his right. He should simply take the first street that way, even though that meant going back out onto Raspail, clogged now with spewing, honking traffic, stalled in both directions. It was smart, he felt, to be on foot.

  The first street off the congested boulevard turned out to be rue Huysmans, which began in the right way until it split into two separate streets, with the one Matthews hoped to take to the Luxembourg blocked to pedestrian traffic by some kind of police action. Several white police vehicles with blue flashers, and even more white police motorcycles, with their helmeted riders sporting machine guns and black flak vests, were congregated around a small bareheaded man seated in the middle of the paved street, his hands raised behind his neck. A few French passersby stood watching down the short street, though a young policeman, also wearing a black flak jacket and black helmet, was using his machine gun to motion pedestrians onto the narrow street Matthews hadn't wanted to go on, rue Duguay-Trouin. Staring down at the man seated in the street, he wondered if there could be a connection between this event and the popping sounds—gun noises—he'd heard last night. Probably there was.

  Something seemed familiar about rue Duguay-Trouin, which he reluctantly started down, following the policeman's indecipherable order and wave of his machine gun. He of course had never been on this street in his life. It was only one block long and ended bluntly in a busy, wide avenue Matthews assumed was Boulevard Raspail again.

  On both cramped and shadowed sides rue Duguay-Trouin was a solid establishment of not terribly old, sand-colored apartment buildings with set-back, modernized glass entries giving onto courtyards where Matthews could see coldly sparse flower gardens and a few parked cars. It was a street that had been revitalized, unlike rue Froidevaux. No cars were parked along the curb, and only a couple of overcoated pedestrians were on the sidewalk, walking dogs, and the street was sunless and therefore colder than when he exited the toy store. A few crusts of last night's snow had survived in the concrete crevices of the building fronts, and the whole aspect of the street was slightly inhospitable. He couldn't imagine why rue Duguay-Trouin would seem familiar—possibly some reference in some novel he once taught, or a house where James Baldwin or James Jones or Henry James had lived and done God only knows what, and which someone had to record and pretend to be fascinated by. He was happy to forget it.