Women with Men

by Richard Ford

  “You can never tell with the French,” the woman said. “They get things we don't. Maybe it'll turn out better in French.” She laughed a small laugh.

  Matthews thought of what it meant for his book to “turn out” better in a language other than the one it was written in. It didn't seem very good. Though possibly it meant he was a genius.

  “It's hard to think Dante could be better than in French, isn't it?” Miss Pitkin/Pittman said.

  “I don't believe Dante was written in French,” Matthews said. He wondered what she looked like. He was staring out toward the line of thin woods behind which was another house and the big autumnal sun descending prettily.

  “Well. Go to France and live it up.” She chuckled. She was typing something on a computer. “Honi soit qui mal y pense.”

  “I don't know what that means,” Matthews said. He knew very little French.

  “It's something about Prince Charles. Something he said, supposedly. It probably means ‘Live it up.’”

  “Maybe so,” Matthews said. “Maybe I'll live it up.” And then they said goodbye.

  THAT NIGHT, because of the cold and rain, and because Helen felt she might be coming down with something, they ate dinner in a dreary, nearly empty Japanese restaurant only a few doors down rue Boulard from the hotel. Matthews didn't like Japanese food, but Helen said she needed the important iron contained in raw fish to combat jet lag and to strengthen her in case she was catching a bug.

  Over maguro and awabi, and Matthews’ sea bass tempura, Helen told him how interesting she thought it'd be to meet your translator, someone—so it seemed to her—who would have to know your book better than you did and who would give up so much time just for your (Matthews’) words. In advertising—her line of work—the trick was to get people to read things without knowing they were reading and to slip messages into their heads like spies behind enemy lines.

  “It's their profession,” Matthews said, giving up in frustration on his chopsticks and opting for a fork. “People dedicate their lives to translating. It's not a sacrifice to them.”

  “It's like a marriage,” Helen said. “At least it's like one of my marriages. Spend years trying to read the tea leaves about what somebody else might've meant. And I never did find out.” Helen was eating a big chunk of red tuna and dredging parts of it in soy sauce, using her chopsticks. Some kind of Japanese violin music was playing in the background.

  “I don't think it's like that,” Matthews said.

  “What do you think?” Helen said, chewing.

  “I think it's inventing,” Matthews said. “I think it's using one book to invent another one. It's not just putting my book into a different language, like moving your clothes from one suitcase to another one. It's creative. And there's a lot of satisfaction accompanying it, is what I think.”

  “Oh,” Helen said. “But you're pretty excited, aren't you?” She had lost interest. He had bored her. He was aware he bored her all the time. Helen had a good, practical, earthy, goodhearted take on the world, and he frequently bored it into silence.

  “I'm excited. I am.” He smiled at her.

  Helen, however, wanted to plot out an itinerary for the next day's events. She had her Fodor's book and studied it on her side of the table while Matthews got through his broccoli and fish and sherbet. All the Japanese waiters and busboys seemed to be French, which felt peculiar. It was France, though. Everyone was French.

  Helen wanted to visit Napoleon's tomb tomorrow, then she wanted to go up the Eiffel Tower and, afterwards, walk down the Champs Élysées. She wanted them to see the Louvre, though not necessarily go in (it was crowded with Japanese, she whispered, especially at Christmas). Then she wanted to take a ride in a glass-sided boat and finish the day at the Place de la Concorde, where people had had their heads cut off, including the king and the queen and Robespierre. She didn't know who Robespierre was, she admitted. At night they'd have their first incomparable meal someplace; “then,” she said, “we'll take your tour the next day.” Helen looked pleased. Though she also looked pale, Matthews thought. Travel took a greater toll on women. They registered everything. She had forgotten about the ballet.

  “I don't have a tour,” Matthews said dolefully.

  “What about all the places where Negro musicians played and famous Negro writers lived in terrible poverty and slept with white women? The stuff you used to teach.”

  Matthews had talked about these matters as side issues in the course he'd taught, and Helen still remembered. But he had really known nothing about any of it. He'd only read about it in other books. He knew nothing about the Negro Experience, period. Just before he'd finished his PhD, his adviser at Purdue had called him in one day to say that a colleague at Wilmot College had telephoned the previous night to say a black woman professor had suddenly quit to take another job, leaving her classes without a teacher, and did he have anyone who could step into the breach? Matthews’ professor said if Matthews could get down to Wilmot in two days and be ready to give a lecture on sexual imagery in Langston Hughes’ late poems, some provision might be made for him to stay on longer. He simply had to be flexible. Matthews knew nothing about Langston Hughes. His own work had been in the English Romantics, who'd begun to bore him to death. But he arrived in Wilmot the next morning, spent the following two days reading, then gave a lecture to a group of surprised black students, who seemed not to mind as long as somebody arrived at nine o'clock and talked about something while they mostly slept or smirked at each other. Eventually the chairman decided he could stay on and even work for tenure if he promised to go on teaching African-American studies, so that the college could keep from hiring another black woman, who everybody felt would inevitably turn out to be a lot of trouble. Matthews thought it was a good idea and didn't particularly care what he taught. Anybody could teach anything, was his view. Helen thought the whole story was a riot, though she said she'd never known many black people personally. There weren't that many in West Virginia.

  “I don't really know where any of those places are,” Matthews said. “I just read about them. They aren't real to me. They never were.”

  “So much for the African-American Experience,” Helen said, refolding her map.

  “I've said goodbye to teaching, okay?” Matthews said irritably. “I'm not a teacher anymore. I'm interested in a new life.”

  “You're hoping to translate yourself now, I guess,” she said. Helen was nearsighted and would sometimes blink her big blue eyes behind her glasses and open them very wide, as if she could get more sight in that way. It made her seem to be looking at something over your head and being surprised by what she saw there. It was unnerving instead of consoling.

  “Maybe,” Matthews said. “Maybe that's exactly right. I'm hoping to be translated into something better than I was.”

  “What about your daughter?” Helen said, very pointedly. Helen knew nothing about Lelia, had never laid eyes on her, but periodically liked to mount an aggressive, parental-style sensitivity when she wanted to make points with him or get under his skin. It always caught him unawares, and he in fact disliked her for it. Helen had no children after her three unsuccessful marriages, and Matthews felt this was her way of expressing disappointment about that misfortune and sharing it around with others.

  “We don't have to talk about Lelia,” Matthews said, and felt disheartened, looking around now for the Japanese/French waiter to bring their check.

  “I guess not. She isn't in on the big changes,” Helen said.

  “She lives in California. With Penny,” he said. “She's fine. She's a normal six-year-old, if you can be normal in California. She has parents who love her.”

  “Would that include you?” Helen wrinkled her mouth as if she was disgusted by him.

  “It would. It really would,” Matthews said. Finally spotting the waiter where he lurked in the shadows near the kitchen, he flagged a hand in the air.

  “Just checking.” Helen wiped her mouth with her napkin an
d began looking all around herself. The restaurant contained only two more diners, seated by the dark other wall. Outside the front window, narrow rue Boulard was empty except for parked cars. It was still raining, and streetlights shone on the dappled pavement.

  “I'm just feeling jet-lagged tonight,” Helen said. “I'm sorry, baby doll.” She smiled across the plates and small soiled dishes, then sniffed once, as though she might be crying. “You've brought me to Paris. I don't want to pick on you.”

  “Then don't,” Matthews said. “I'm doing the best I know how.” He felt that was exactly what he was doing, but was getting precious little credit for it. Lelia was his daughter and his problem, and he was taking care of it.

  “I know you are, sweetheart,” Helen said. “A lot goes on in that head of yours.”

  “I wouldn't say that,” Matthews said. He wished they'd left town ten minutes after Blumberg called. They could be happier someplace else.

  “I'm guilty of that too,” Helen said to no one in particular. He didn't know what she was talking about. Possibly she hadn't heard him correctly. She was looking out the window, staring wistfully at the Parisian rainfall. “I am,” she said. “We're all guilty of that sin.”

  BACK IN THE cold room, Helen quickly undressed in the dark, which was not usual. She had always been proud of her taut chorus-girl figure and preferred the light. But when she got under the covers in the small, chilly bed, she demanded that Matthews get in bed immediately and fuck the very breath out of her, which he did to the best of his abilities, two hands buckled onto the flimsy headboard, one bare foot wedged into a nubbly corner of the wall, the other actually on the tile floor and getting fouled up with his shoes and socks as he whaled away in the still, heatless air, and Helen grew strangely delirious and almost seemed to chant, “Patiently, patiently, patiently,” until they were both complete and lay huddled for warmth, as the rain swept against the windows and the wind hissed through the streets and out through the cemetery's bare treetops.

  Sometime later—he'd thought he heard a clock chime somewhere close by, four bells—Matthews awoke and went to the window, the bedspread wrapped around him, his wool socks on. To his surprise, the wind and rain had stopped, and much of the afternoon mist had been sucked away, leaving the cemetery sharply illuminated by moonlight, the ranks of six-story apartment buildings beyond it vivid under the unexpected stars. Though even more surprisingly, the specter of the great Montparnasse Tower blocked the sky in what Matthews now felt must be the west. Farther on, if the night were clearer, he would see the Eiffel Tower itself (this he knew from maps he'd studied when writing his novel).

  In the first moments when he'd lain awake beside Helen in the warm bed, listening for the wind, he knew unquestionably that he should never have come here, or should've left after Blumberg's call, and that the whole event was already somehow spoiled, splattered onto everything. The feeling that he “would've” loved Paris overcame him, “would've” but for something he'd already done wrong—some novice's error—but didn't know about. Not that you ever knew about most of the mistakes you were making, or ever much caught yourself. Events, reliances, just began not to work out right for seemingly no reason, then life began to descend into disastrous straits. Helen seemed that way, seemed to be diminishing in a way he couldn't describe but only feel. He liked Helen. He admired her. But he shouldn't have come to Paris with her. That was his mistake. Bringing her was his hopeless attempt to take an experience with him, and afterwards bring it home again, converted to something better. Only if he'd brought Penny with him could that have worked—worked in the sense that the two of them had once been so close as to be two parts of one person. That was years ago. Whatever he'd liked then, she'd liked. Though that was over now.

  But at the cold window, with Helen snoring in bed and the thin pink counterpane around his shoulders, Matthews began to feel different, as if the new moonlight and crinkled stars had configured the world newly, and Paris, even in the frosted glowing night, seemed to lie forth more the way he would've wanted had he ever let himself want it. A metropolis of bounteous issue; a surface to penetrate; a depth in which to immerse oneself, even reside in. Coming to Paris now, at his age, with a serious, mature intent, might mean exactly what he'd thought, a wish to stay. Only he wasn't here to convert anything to a commodity he could take back but to suit himself to the unexpected, to what was already here. Helen had been exactly right about that.

  Still, he wondered about the translator. Madame de Grenelle. What had “fascinated” her about his not very good book? Some terrible flaw in it? A small, cruel and embarrassing ignorance? Some vast and subtle opportunity missed or misconstrued, which all the French would immediately see but that she meant to correct for him? This, though, was how a novelist thought: things were infinitely mutable and improvable, revisable, renewable—each surface only one side of a great volume to be revealed.

  Matthews thought fitfully of Lelia. What time was it in California? He would mount a proper accounting of himself if the moment finally arrived—some California court where he would achieve joint custody. A sensible visiting arrangement. Summers. School vacations. Christmas. Still, he didn't feel like the father of a six-year-old daughter, unseen for nearly two years owing to her mother's intransigence. Occasionally he confused Greta in his book with Penny and imagined Penny dead. He'd made her up and in time would stow her away.

  But was it that odd not to see your daughter, given conditions of relative hostility? A settled, more predictable life seemed better, even in California, though Penny seemed increasingly if mysteriously disapproving the longer they were apart. As if he was missing some opportunity he didn't even know about. Eventually it would resolve itself.

  Across rue Froidevaux, at the far corner of rue Boulard, in an apartment building that must've been the exact nineteenth-century vintage as the Nouvelle Métropole, only one window was left lighted. But in it was a Christmas tree, its red and green and orange bulbs blinking in the windless night. No person was visible. The tree simply stood alone, high up and unnoticeable from the street: a beacon of a sort for no one. Possibly, Matthews thought, Americans lived there and couldn't do without a tree far from home. The French, of course, would never be bothered. “Joyeux Noël” was enough for them. For a long moment, his feet beginning to ache, the cold slicing in between the folds of his coverlet, he tried to stare across at the tree's shimmery lights and focus on them, to receive the tree's tiny fancy festiveness as his own. Matthews stared and stared, and in a time which wasn't so long he felt he'd succeeded in at least that small wish.

  IN THE MORNING they slept late, almost until noon. Though in his sleep bells had been ringing and ringing, and twice he thought he felt Helen get out of bed, heard her throwing up behind the closed bathroom door, followed by her climbing back in bed, cold and apparently dampened. It was colder in the room now. That he was certain of.

  When he opened his eyes, Helen was sitting in the green, plastic-covered armchair, wrapped in the pink percale bedspread he'd covered himself with hours before. That was why he felt cold.

  “How do you feel?” he said from beneath his thin blanket.

  “I'm fine,” Helen said noncommittally. She had on his red wool socks and was smoking a cigarette. He'd never seen her smoke before, though he knew that years ago she had. The room smelled smoky and also sweaty. It was this smell that had waked him, that and being cold. “I guess I caught a bug when I went out in the rain. Who knows? I could've eaten something too.”

  “Did you throw up?” Matthews said.

  “Mmmm,” Helen said, big white smoke jets exiting her nostrils. Helen had her glasses on, and her blond hair was bedraggled, as if she'd been sweating or feverish. She looked pale and tired and thin. Helen always seemed big and healthy. “A big, pushy blond” was what she called herself. Now she looked worn out.

  A nice light was coming in the window, a gray steely light with some yellow-stippled sun in it. No more rain, though the wind was up again, blowing
on the Boulevard Raspail, past the big lion. He pictured wind riffling the glassy puddles in the street. He did not particularly want to be there.

  “I was just thinking about having a translator,” Helen said. “What an experience that is. I don't know why I was thinking about it. It's just an experience I'll never have.” She blew smoke at the windowpanes and watched it cling to the glass, grow thin and disappear.

  “I'm not going to be translated,” Matthews said from under the covers. “My book is. Or maybe not.”

  “That's right,” Helen said, and cleared her throat.

  “Do you feel like the Paris tour today?”

  “Of course.” Helen pulled her head back and gave him a stern schoolmarm's frown. “I'm not about to sit here with it right outside my window. No way, René.”

  “I thought you might not feel good enough.” With the return of Helen's bedspread, he felt he could just as easily forgo Paris, in spite of what he'd decided in the middle of the night. He was in Paris. Whatever he did was the right thing. Staying in bed, for instance, and later finding dinner. That would be as much Paris as Napoleon's tomb.

  “What would you do if I died over here?” Helen said.

  “Jesus!” Matthews said. “Why would you bring that up?” The thought shocked him. This was jet lag. He'd read it was a kind of small-scale clinical depression. All chemical. No doubt Helen's medication made it worse. “Let's think about something more pleasant.”

  “Would you have me buried?” she said. “Do you have to live someplace to be buried there? Here, I mean.”

  “I have no idea,” Matthews said. He thought about inviting Helen back into the bed to warm him up. But he knew what would happen. Even feeling like shit, Helen would be up to that.

  “I'm serious,” she said, still smoking avidly but giving him a disapproving eye for not being serious.

  “I'd have you buried on the spot,” Matthews said. “Right where you fell, if that's what you wanted.”