Women with Men

by Richard Ford

  “I feel great,” Austin said. He smiled at Léo, who had not stopped staring at him, holding up his drumstick like a little cigar-store Indian. The child had on short trousers and a white T-shirt that had the words BIG-TIME AMERICAN LUXURY printed across the front above a huge red Cadillac convertible which seemed to be driving out from his chest.

  Léo uttered something very fast in French, then looked at his mother and back at Austin, who hadn't gotten far into the room since being hugged and kissed.

  “Non, non, Léo,” Joséphine said, and laughed with an odd delight. “He asks me if you are my new husband. He thinks I need a husband now. He is very mixed up.” She went on darkening her eyes. Joséphine looked pretty in the window light, and Austin wanted to go over right then and give her a much more significant kiss. But the child kept staring at him, holding the drumstick up and making Austin feel awkward and reluctant, which wasn't how he thought he'd feel. He thought he'd feel free and completely at ease and on top of the world about everything.

  He reached in his pocket, palmed the wooden egg and knelt in front of the little boy, showing two closed fists.

  “J'ai un cadeau pour toi,” he said. He'd practiced these words and wondered how close he'd come. “I have a nice present for you,” he said in English to satisfy himself. “Choissez le main.” Austin tried to smile. He jiggled the correct hand, his right one, trying to capture the child's attention. “Choissez le main, Léo,” he said again and smiled, this time, a little grimly. Austin looked at Joséphine for encouragement, but she was still appraising herself in her mirror. She said something very briskly to Léo, who beetled his dark little brow at the two presented fists. Reluctantly he pointed his drumstick at Austin's right fist, the one he'd been jiggling. And very slowly—as though he were opening a chest filled with gold—Austin opened his fingers to reveal the bright little green egg with gold paisleys and red snowflakes. Some flecks of the green paint had already come off on his palm, which surprised him. “Voilà,” Austin said dramatically. “C'est une jolie oeuf!”

  Léo stared intently at the clammy egg in Austin's palm. He looked at Austin with an expression of practiced inquisitiveness, his thin lips growing pursed as though something worried him. Very timidly he extended his wooden drumstick and touched the egg, then nudged it, with the shaped tip, the end intended to strike a drum. Austin noticed that Léo had three big gravelly warts on his tiny fingers, and instantly a cold wretchedness from his own childhood opened in him, making Léo for an instant seem frail and sympathetic. But then with startling swiftness Léo raised the drumstick and delivered the egg—still in Austin's proffered palm—a fierce downward blow, hoping apparently to smash it and splatter its contents and possibly give Austin's fingers a painful lashing for good measure.

  But the egg, though the blow chipped its glossy green enamel and Austin felt the impact like a shock, did not break. And little Léo's pallid face assumed a look of controlled fury. He quickly took two more vengeful back-and-forth swipes at it, the second of which struck Austin's thumb a stinging then numbing blow, then Léo turned and fled out of the room, down the hall and through a door which he slammed behind him.

  Austin looked up at Joséphine, who was just finishing at the window.

  “He is very mixed up. I tell you before,” she said, and shook her head.

  “That didn't work out too well,” Austin said, squeezing his throbbing thumb so as not to have to mention it.

  “It's not important,” she said, going to the couch and putting her compact in her purse. “He is angry all the time. Sometimes he hits me. Don't feel bad. You're sweet to bring something to him.”

  But what Austin felt, at that moment, was that he wanted to kiss Joséphine, and not to talk about Léo. Now that they were alone, he wanted to kiss her in a way that said he was here and it wasn't just a coincidence, that he'd had her on his mind this whole time, and wanted her to have him on her mind, and that this whole thing that had started last week in discretion and good-willed restraint was rising to a new level, a level to be taken more seriously. She could love him now. He could conceivably even love her. Much was possible that only days ago was not even dreamed of.

  He moved toward where she was, repocketing the egg, his injured thumb pulsating. She was leaned over the couch in her idiotic animal pants, and he rather roughly grasped her hips—covering the faces of a yellow giraffe and a gray rhino with his hands—and pulled, trying to turn her toward him so he could give her the kiss he wanted to give her, the authoritative one that signaled his important arrival on the scene. But she jumped, as though he'd startled her, and she shouted, “Stop! What is it!” just as he was negotiating her face around in front of his. She had a lipstick tube in her hand, and she seemed irritated to be so close to him. She smelled sweet, surprisingly sweet. Like a flower, he thought.

  “There's something important between us, I think,” Austin said directly into Joséphine's irritated face. “Important enough to bring me back across an ocean and to leave my wife and to face the chance that I'll be alone here.”

  “What?” she said. She contorted her mouth and, without exactly pushing, exerted a force to gain a few inches from him. He still had her by her hips, cluttered with animal faces. A dark crust of eye shadow clung where she had inexpertly doctored her eyelids.

  “You shouldn't feel under any pressure,” he said and looked at her gravely. “I just want to see you. That's all. Maybe have some time alone with you. Who knows where it'll go?”

  “You are very fatigued, I think.” She struggled to move backward. “Maybe you can have a sleep while I'm going.”

  “I'm not tired,” Austin said. “I feel great. Nothing's bothering me. I've got a clean slate.”

  “That's good,” she said, and smiled but pushed firmly away from him just as he was moving in to give her the important kiss. Joséphine quickly kissed him first, though, the same hard, unpassionate kiss she'd greeted him with five minutes before and that had left him dissatisfied.

  “I want to kiss you the right way, not that way,” Austin said. He pulled her firmly to him again, taking hold of her soft waist and pushing his mouth toward hers. He kissed her as tenderly as he could with her back stiff and resistant, and her mouth not shaped to receive a kiss but ready to speak when the kiss ended. Austin held the kiss for a long moment, his eyes closed, his breath traveling out his nose, trying to feel his own wish for tenderness igniting an answering tenderness in her. But if there was tenderness, it was of an unexpected type—more like forbearance. And when he had pressed her lips for as many as six or eight seconds, until he had breathed her breath and she had relaxed her resistance, he stood back and looked at her—a woman he felt he might love—and took her chin between his thumb and index finger and said, “That's really all I wanted. That wasn't all that bad, was it?”

  She shook her head in a perfunctory way and very softly, almost compliantly, said, “No.” Her eyes were cast down, though not in a way he felt confident of, more as if she were waiting for something. He felt he should let her go; that was the thing to do. He'd forced her to kiss him. She'd relented. Now she could be free to do anything she wanted.

  Joséphine hurriedly turned back toward her purse on the couch, and Austin walked to the window and surveyed the vast chestnut trees of the Jardin du Luxembourg. The air was cool and soft, and the light seemed creamy and rich in the late afternoon. He heard music, guitar music from somewhere, and the faint sound of singing. He saw a jogger running through the park gate and out into the street below, and he wondered what anyone would think who saw him standing in this window—someone glancing up a moment out of the magnificent garden and seeing a man in an apartment. Would it be clear he was an American? Or would he possibly seem French? Would he seem rich? Would his look of satisfaction be visible? He thought almost certainly that would be visible.

  “I have to go to the lawyer now,” Joséphine said behind him.

  “Fine. Go,” Austin said. “Hurry back. I'll look after little Gene K
rupa. Then we'll have a nice dinner.”

  Joséphine had a thick sheaf of documents she was forcing into a plastic briefcase. “Maybe,” she said in a distracted voice.

  Austin, for some reason, began picturing himself talking to Hank Bullard about the air-conditioning business. They were in a café on a sunny side street. Hank's news was good, full of promise about a partnership.

  Joséphine hurried into the hall, her flat shoes scraping the boards. She opened the door to Léo's room and said something quick and very soft to him, something that did not have Austin's name in it. Then she closed the door and entered the WC and used the toilet without bothering to shut herself in. Austin couldn't see down the hall from where he stood by the window, but could hear her pissing, the small trickle of water hitting more water. Barbara always closed the door, and he did too—it was a sound he didn't like and usually tried to avoid hearing, a sound so inert, so factual, that hearing it threatened to take away a layer of his good feeling. He was sorry to hear it now, sorry Joséphine didn't bother to close the door.

  In an instant, however, she was out and down the hallway, picking up her briefcase while water sighed through the pipes. She gave Austin a peculiar, fugitive look across the room, as if she was surprised he was there and wasn't sure why he should be. It was, he felt, the look you gave an unimportant employee who's just said something inexplicable.

  “So. I am going now,” she said.

  “I'll be right here,” Austin said, looking at her and feeling suddenly helpless. “Hurry back, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. Okay,” she said. “I hurry. I see you.”

  “Great,” Austin said. She went out the door and quickly down the echoing steps toward the street.

  FOR A WHILE Austin walked around the apartment, looking at things—things Joséphine Belliard liked or cherished or had kept when her husband cleared out. There was an entire wall of books across one side of the little sleeping alcove she'd constructed for her privacy, using fake Chinese rice-paper dividers. The books were the sleek French soft-covers, mostly on sociological subjects, though other books seemed to be in German. Her modest bed was covered with a clean, billowy white duvet and big fluffy white pillows—no headboard, just the frame, but very neat. A copy of her soon-to-be-ex-husband's scummy novel lay on the bed table, with several pages roughly bent down. Folding a page up, he read a sentence in which a character named Solange was performing an uninspired act of fellatio on someone named Albert. He recognized the charged words: Fellation. Lugubre. Albert was talking about having his car repaired the whole time it was happening to him. Un Amour Secret was the book's insipid title. Bernard's scowling, condescending visage was nowhere in evidence.

  He wondered what Bernard knew that he didn't know. Plenty, of course, if the book was even half true. But the unknown was interesting; you had to face it one way or another, he thought. And the idea of fellatio with Joséphine—nothing, up to this moment, he'd even considered—inflamed him, and he began to realize there was something distinctly sexual about roaming around examining her private belongings and modest bedroom, a space and a bed he could easily imagine occupying in the near future. Before he moved away he laid the green paisley egg on her bed table, beside the copy of her husband's smutty book. It would create a contrast, he thought, a reminder that she had choices in the world.

  He looked out the bedroom window onto the park. It was the same view as the living room—the easeful formal garden with great leafy horse chestnut trees and tonsured green lawns with topiaries and yew shrubs and pale crisscrossing gravel paths, and the old École Supérieure des Mines looming along the far side and the Luxembourg Palace to the left. Some hippies were sitting cross-legged in a tight little circle on one of the grass swards, sharing a joint around. No one else was in view, though the light was cool and smooth and inviting, with birds soaring through it. A clock chimed somewhere nearby. The guitar music had ceased.

  It would be pleasant to walk there with Joséphine, Austin thought, to breathe the sweet air of chestnut trees and to stare off. Life was very different here. This apartment was very different from his house in Oak Grove. He felt different here. Life seemed to have improved remarkably in a short period. All it took, he thought, was the courage to take control of things and to live with the consequences.

  He assumed Léo to be asleep down the hall and that he could simply leave well enough alone there. But when he'd sat leafing through French Vogue for perhaps twenty minutes he heard a door open, and seconds later Léo appeared at the corner of the hall, looking confused and drugged in his BIG-TIME AMERICAN LUXURY shirt with the big red Cadillac barging off the front. He still had his little shoes on.

  Léo rubbed his eyes and looked pitiful. Possibly Joséphine had given him something to knock him out—the sort of thing that wouldn't happen in the States. But in France, he thought, adults treated children differently. More intelligently.

  “Bon soir,” Austin said in a slightly ironic voice and smiled, setting the Vogue down.

  Léo eyed him sullenly, still suspicious about hearing French spoken by this person who wasn't the least bit French. He scanned the room quickly for his mother's presence. Austin considered a plan of reintroducing the slightly discredited paisley egg but decided against it. He glanced at the clock on the bookcase: forty-five minutes would somehow need to be consumed before Joséphine returned. But how? How could the time be passed in a way to make Léo happy and possibly impress his mother? The Cubs idea wouldn't work—Léo was too young. Austin didn't know any games or tricks. He knew nothing about children, and, in fact, was sorry the boy was awake, sorry he was here at all.

  But he thought of the park—the Jardin du Luxembourg—available just outside the window. A nice walk in the park could set them on the right course. He wasn't able to talk to the child, but he could watch him while he enjoyed himself.

  “Voulez-vous aller au parc?” Austin smiled a big, sincere smile. “Maintenant? Peut-être? Le parc? Oui?” He pointed at the open window and the cool, still evening air where swallows soared and flittered.

  Léo frowned at him and then at the window, still dazed. He fastened a firm grip on the front of his shorts—a signal Austin recognized—and did not answer.

  “Whatta ya say? Let's go to the park,” Austin said enthusiastically, loudly. He almost jumped up. Léo could understand it well enough. Parc. Park.

  “Parc?” Léo said, and more cravenly squeezed his little weenie. “Maman?” He looked almost demented.

  “Maman est dans le parc,” Austin said, thinking that from inside the park they would certainly see Joséphine on her way back from the lawyer's, and that it wouldn't turn out to be a complete lie—or if it did, Joséphine would eventually come back and take control of things before there was a problem. It was even possible, he thought, that he'd never see this kid after that, that Joséphine might come back and never want to see him again. Though a darker thought entered his mind: of Joséphine never coming back, deciding simply to disappear somewhere en route from the lawyer's. That happened. Babies were abandoned in Chicago all the time and no one knew what happened to their parents. He knew no one she knew. He knew no one to contact. It was a nightmarish thought.

  Inside of five minutes he had Léo into the bathroom and out again. Happily, Léo attended to his own privacy while Austin stood outside the door and stared at the picture of Bernard's stuffed, bulbous face on the wall of the boy's room. He was surprised Joséphine would let it stay up. He'd suppressed an urge to tell her to stick it to Bernard, to get him in the shorts if she could, though later he'd felt queasy for conspiring against a man he didn't know.

  As they were leaving the apartment, Austin realized he had no key, neither to the downstairs nor to the apartment itself, and that once the door closed he and Léo were on their own: a man, an American speaking little French, alone with a four-year-old French child he didn't know, in a country, in a city, in a park, where he was an absolute stranger. No one would think this was a good idea. Joséphi
ne hadn't asked him to take Léo to the park—it was his own doing, and it was a risk. But everything felt like a risk at the moment, and all he needed to do was be careful.

  They walked out onto rue Férou and around the corner, then down a few paces and across a wide street to a corner gate into the Luxembourg. Léo said nothing but insisted on holding Austin's hand and leading the way as if he were taking Austin to the park because he didn't know what else to do with him.

  Once through the gold-topped gate, though, and onto the pale gravel paths that ran in mazes through the shrubberies and trees and planted beds where daffodils were already blooming, Léo went running straight in the direction of a wide concrete pond where ducks and swans were swimming and a group of older boys was sailing miniature sailboats. Austin looked back to see which building was Joséphine's, and from which window he'd stood looking down at this very park. But he couldn't distinguish the window, wasn't even sure if from Joséphine's window he could see this part of the park. For one thing, there hadn't been a pond, and here there were plenty of people walking in the cool, sustained evening light—lovers and married people both, by the looks of them, taking a nice stroll before going home for dinner. Probably it was part of the park's plan, he supposed, that new parts always seemed familiar, and vice versa.

  Austin strolled down to the concrete border of the pond and sat on a bench a few yards away from Léo, who stood raptly watching the older boys tend their boats with long, thin sticks. There was no wind and only the boys’ soft, studious voices to listen to in the air where swallows were still darting. The little boats floated stilly in the shallows with peanut shells and popcorn tufts. A number of ducks and swans glided just out of reach, eyeing the boats, waiting for the boys to leave.

  Austin heard tennis balls being hit nearby, but couldn't see where. A clay court, he felt certain. He wished he could sit and watch people playing tennis instead of boys tending boats. Female voices were laughing and speaking French and laughing again, then a tennis ball was struck once more. A dense wall of what looked like rhododendrons stood beyond a small expanse of well-tended grass, and behind that, he thought, would be the courts.