Women with Men

by Richard Ford

  “I would want that,” Helen said. “If I died in this room, for instance, I'd want to be buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery. With Baudelaire. Or at least near where he is. I was reading about it.”

  “I'd personally see to it.”

  “Not that I've ever read Baudelaire.”

  “Fleurs du Mal, ” he said from bed.

  “Fine,” Helen said. She looked speculatively out the window at what Matthews knew to be the wide expansive winterscape of the cemetery, beautiful and bleak. They would've covered over the Jewish grave by now. Helen didn't need to see an open grave, in her present state of mind.

  “What do you long for, Charley?” Helen said. “Not that I long for death.” Helen smudged out her cigarette on the metal lip of the window casement and stared at the smoldering white butt.

  “I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

  “Just answer, okay?” Helen said. “For God's sake, the little professor. Just answer one question. Last night you said you wanted to remake yourself into something better. Okay. What's that? I'm in the dark here. We're having a serious conversation.”

  “I'd like for things not to center so much on me, I guess,” Matthews said, feeling cold, as if she had the window open.

  Helen turned and frowned at him again, her eyelids hooding her large, pale-blue irises. She bit a tiny corner of her lower lip. “So, is that your answer?”

  “Yes,” he said. But it was true. He simply hadn't known it was true until now. He longed to be less the center of things. He realized this was what a foreign country—any foreign country—could offer you and what you could never get at home. The idea of home, in fact, was the antithesis of that feeling. At home everything was about you and what you owned and what you liked and what everybody thought of you. He'd had enough of that. He couldn't, of course, expect Helen to appreciate this idea, given the mood she was in. But he didn't know what else to say. So he just nodded in what he knew to be an unconvincing gesture of seriousness, performed ridiculously from the bed.

  “That's how cancer makes you feel too,” Helen said quietly, raising her chin and resting it on her fist, almost touching the glass. Matthews could see only the white sky outside, suddenly cluttered with soaring swifts. Days were as short as they got now. “You feel like everything's about you all the time.”

  “I can imagine,” Matthews said, and felt he could imagine it. He could imagine it pretty easily.

  “That's probably why I like you, Charley.”

  “Why's that?” Matthews said.

  “When I'm with you I don't think about myself very much. Really almost never.”

  “What do you think about?” Matthews said.

  “Well,” Helen said, “nothing much. Not the same things at least. I just think about what we do, where we go for our drives. Nothing important. It's perfect for me, really. I'm thinking just about Paris now. When you think about Paris, you don't have to think about yourself and what might be wrong with you.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “Well, good,” Helen said. “Then we're probably suited for each other, aren't we?” She smiled at him and pulled her pink bedspread more closely around her chin.

  “I guess we are,” Matthews said.

  “Brrr, I'm cold now,” Helen said. “It's time to go see Paris.” She extended one bare leg out of her coverlet and touched her toes to the cold floor. “We don't have all the time in the world now. We have to make our happy moments last.”

  “Yes, we do. We certainly do,” Matthews said, and he believed that was absolutely true.

  OUT IN THE STREETS it was much too blustery and cold to walk far. Helen had wanted to walk all the way to where Napoleon's tomb was housed in the Invalides, then to the Eiffel Tower (which she said was close by), and from there use the metro to the Champs Élysées, then walk to the Place de la Concorde. A day of walking and seeing Paris up close.

  But on the first block of the Avenue du Maine, Matthews realized their cloth coats weren't thick enough to hold off the batting wind and street grit, and Helen announced that she now felt “too stiff” to walk a long way. So they stood shivering in a cab queue outside the Montparnasse station and took a taxi straight to the Invalides.

  Helen, upon arrival, seemed to know a lot about absolutely everything having to do with Napoleon, Louis XIV, the Domed Church and all the buildings. Napoleon had been her father's lifelong fascination back in West Virginia, she said. There had been books and battle plans and postcards and portraits and busts and memorabilia all over their family home. It had been her father's greatest wish, Helen said as they inched about quietly and reverently beneath the echoing dome, to someday stand at the railing above the actual tomb itself, just as they were doing, and exactly as the terrible Hitler had done back in 1940, and offer a better honor than the Führer's to the great man of France. Helen pointed out the portraits of the four evangelists and of St. Louis offering Christ the sword with which he would defeat the infidels. She knew exactly who was buried with Napoleon (his brothers and his son, the Eaglet) and that the emperor's remains were divided into six coffins like a pharaoh's, each one made of a different precious material. And she could identify the twelve statues encircling the big red porphyry tombstone as being Winged Victory, who represented the French people reunited finally by their great leader's death.

  Outside again, in the afternoon chill, Helen stared up at the great gold dome. She had her glasses off, her hand sheltering her eyes, as if from a sun, though one wasn't visible. Avenue de Breteuil lay behind her, cars and buses honking and letting off new crowds of tourists. “My single regret is my father isn't here with me. Or instead of me,” she said, gazing up. “He'd appreciate this so much.”

  Matthews at that moment was thinking about his novel, his hands thrust in his trench-coat pockets. He was wondering whether he shouldn't just have called it a memoir and been done with it. He should, he felt. He didn't hear what Helen said, but sensed it was about being in the army in France and visiting this very spot not long after Hitler had been here.

  “I know it meant a lot to him,” he said, looking all around. Again he had no idea what part of Paris he was in. Which arrondissement.

  “You know what people want when they come to Paris?” Helen said, still staring up at the glowing dome, with the white sky in the background.

  “I don't,” Matthews said. “I have no idea.”

  “To be French.” Helen sniffed. “The French are more serious than we are. They care more. They have a perspective on importance and unimportance. You can't become them. You just have to be happy being yourself.”

  Looking away, Matthews suddenly noticed the great colossus of the Eiffel Tower almost springing into the sky, more huge and grave but also so much prettier than he'd imagined it could be. None of the miniatures ever showed you how pretty and graceful it was. It was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen. Better than Niagara Falls. Only the Pyramids, he felt, were probably more wonderful. He was shocked by how happy he was to see it.

  “That's right,” Matthews said, and he took Helen's cold, stiff hand, the one that held her glasses. He thought she'd been crying, and he wanted her to stop and be happy. “There's the Eiffel Tower,” he said brightly. “It was hidden, but now there it is.”

  “Well, oh my,” Helen said, seeing it. “It sure is. There it is. I'm so happy to see it. I wondered if I would.”

  “Me, too,” Matthews said. “I wasn't sure we would.”

  “Aren't we lucky,” Helen said. “It's the miracle of the Occident.”

  “I guess it is,” Matthews said. “I guess we are.”

  And then they walked on.

  THEIR WALK to the Eiffel Tower turned out to be longer than Helen had thought. This, she said—referring to the Fodor's—was because of a broad turn in the river Seine. “It's like New Orleans that way.” New Orleans, she said, was her favorite American city.

  She announced that she was feeling better, due to the crisp air, a
nd thought the day could go on the way she'd hoped—her “first day in Paris”: the stroll down the Champs Élysées, the visit to the famous execution site, the Louvre, the romantic boat ride, then the search for an incomparable meal.

  Helen spoke much better French than Matthews expected and, because she felt better, went in several shops along the Avenue de la Bourdonnais and talked animatedly to the clerks, and to flower vendors and newsagents on the side streets leading toward the Champ-de-Mars. In all of this Matthews felt Helen became a kind of spectacle—the tall, pale, buxom blond American woman with thick glasses spouting out French to small aproned Frenchmen who looked up at her in annoyance, often before simply turning around and ignoring her. It was rude, but he didn't think he could blame them. They'd all seen Helens before, and nothing in life had changed.

  Avenue de la Bourdonnais was a rich area, Matthews could see, with tall, elegant apartment buildings, big Jaguars and BMW wagons lining the wide, tree-lined boulevard, and many people talking on cell phones, standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Possibly this was the diplomatic sector, he thought. Possibly the American embassy itself was nearby, since there were a lot of Americans on the street, trying to act as if they spoke the language—his grad school French was too poor to even try. Though the French, he thought, seemed like they were acting too. They were like amateur actors playing French people but trying too hard. There was nothing natural to the whole enterprise.

  Yet he found there was another, good side to it: since, when he would listen in on some conversation Helen was having with a clerk or a flower vendor and would try to figure out from this word or that what either one of them was saying, he got almost everything wrong. Listening this way, he made up whole parts and sometimes the entirety of conversations based on an erroneous interpretation of a hand gesture or a facial expression or some act of seemingly familiar body language coupled with a word he thought he knew but was usually also wrong about. It could get to be addictive, he believed, not understanding what people were saying. Time spent in another country would probably always be spent misunderstanding a great deal, which might in the end turn out to be a blessing and the only way you could ever feel normal.

  In a tiny, unheated religious curio shop on rue Marinoni, Helen went rooting through bins of plastic crucifixes in several sizes and materials, then through framed color depictions of Christ in various aspects of dolor and beseechment, and finally through a stack of colored tea towels with religious mottoes stamped on them in several languages, like sweatshirts. Eventually she held one up, a pink one, that had the glory of god is to keep things hidden printed on it in white block letters.

  “What's that mean?” Matthews said. “Is it a joke?”

  “I'll give it to somebody back home for Christmas, somebody who lies to her husband.” She was staring down at her palm, trying to identify the right money to pay with. She seemed exhausted again. The young female Chinese clerk frowned at her. “It's a proverb,” Helen said, fingering through her coins. “It'll mean something different to anybody you give it to.” She smiled at him. “Do you love Paris now?” she said. “Do you feel like you're not the center of everything? Because you're certainly not.”

  “I don't feel much like it's Christmas.”

  “That's because you're not religious. Plus you're spoiled,” Helen said. “For spoiled people the real thing's never enough. Don't you know that?”

  “I don't think I'm spoiled,” Matthews said.

  “And spoiled people never do. But you are, though.” She said this sweetly, not to accuse him, just to acknowledge the truth everyone knew and needn't talk about. “Not to want to be the center of things, that's what spoiled people think they want,” she said. “I'm the same way. I'm just not as bad as you are. But it's all right. You can't help it. It's gotten you this far.” She smiled at him again and looked around the little shop, where a thousand colored likenesses of Christ gazed down on them in attitudes of compassion and acquiescence.

  ON THE FIRST LEVEL of the Eiffel Tower, at 187 feet, Helen's stomach went immediately queasy and her knees unsteady, and she told Matthews she could feel the whole construction swaying and weaving in the “winds aloft” and that she'd never make it to level two, the 377-foot platform, much less to the top, where it was 899 and the view extended forty-two miles and Paris could be seen as it really was.

  She ventured, however, over to the big banked window that looked north and, according to the colored map provided below the glass panorama, toward the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Élysées and, farther on, though invisible beneath the low sky, toward the Sacré-Coeur church and Montmartre.

  “Montmartre's where all the painters painted, including Picasso,” said Helen, focusing out over the great dun-colored grid of the city in winter. “I, of course, thought I'd never get to see it. And I don't feel like I can actually take it all in now. I can't, I guess.”

  Most of the other viewers on level one were Germans, the ones Blumberg had said could hold the city in joint custody with the Americans until the French came back from where it was warm. Matthews understood no German, but admired them for looking so well-off and for feeling happy to come back to the city they'd once invaded. He wondered how Helen's father would absorb that.

  He seemed to remember a book he'd read or even taught in which two men took a taxi to the red-light district near Montmartre, and an orchestra was playing in a club and a lot of GIs were dancing with French girls. Teaching was finally good for this and only this, he thought—intruding on and devaluing life as lived into an indecipherable muddle of lost days and squandered experiences. He wondered how much life he'd already lost to it and for a moment tried to calculate how many days he'd lived on earth, and how many more he might hold on, and how many he'd thrown in the garbage. He got to how many days he'd lived—13,605—then felt too irritated to go on.

  “Richard Wright,” he said.

  “Hmmm?” Helen said. She had been silent for what seemed like a long time, taking it all in through the observation window. More Germans were circulating around them, shouldering in, pointing to places on the map and then to the same places in the real city spread in all directions in front of them. Matthews heard the words die Bedienung. He imagined it meant something admiring: the recognition of a paradise lost for the fatherland. Whatever it was, it made the Germans laugh. “Die Bedienung,” he mouthed to himself, and made the little gasping sound Blumberg had made.

  “What did you say?” Helen said.

  “I just remembered I once read a book where an important scene takes place in Montmartre,” Matthews said. “Richard Wright wrote it, I think.”

  Helen looked at him as if she had no idea what that might mean to him. She blinked behind her glasses and looked troubled.

  “Die Bedienung,” Matthews said, but did not gasp.

  “Who?”

  “It's all right,” he said. “It doesn't matter.”

  “The professor,” Helen said, and looked back intently at the gray-brown matte of Paris, as if it were hers to command.

  WHEN HELEN CAME BACK from her trip to the Eiffel Tower ladies’ room, she was not alone. She was with a man and a woman, and all three of them were having a loud joke.

  “Look who's got nothing else to do but climb the Eiffel Tower,” Helen said, even more loudly. She mimicked being thrown off balance by the sway of the tower in the wind. “Whoa,” she said, and laughed again. Helen seemed no longer sick but happy. Matthews was sorry to see these people. You could ruin your whole experience, he thought, by running into someone you knew. You could lose the feeling of being set adrift in a strange sea, which he was beginning to enjoy.

  “This is Rex and Cuddles,” Helen said.

  “Cuddles, my butt,” Cuddles said, rolling her eyes and winking at Matthews.

  “Cuddles too much,” Helen said.

  The Germans were staring at them. Matthews felt sorry to find these people.

  “This is Charley,” Helen went on. “Charley's my amour impropre.
My amour temporaire, anyway.”

  He shook hands with Rex, who volunteered that he and this woman were friends of Helen's from “the old days in Pittsburgh.”

  “We're American,” Cuddles said, brimming.

  “Can't you guess.” Helen gave Cuddles, whose actual name turned out to be Beatrice, a fishy look. “Bea-at- rice the actress,” Helen said. “They're taking us to our incomparable meal tonight.”

  “It's been decided coming out of the Mesdames,” Beatrice said. She was a much too slender woman, with tanned skin that was too tanned, and tight black pedal pushers that she wore with white ankle socks and ballet slippers. She had on a large black motorcycle jacket and looked like somebody out of the fifties, Matthews thought. Somebody who'd lived in coffeehouses for years, smoked a lot of marijuana, read too much awful poetry and probably written plenty herself. These people were always bores and had strong, idiotic opinions about everything. He looked around him. Germans and Japanese—Axis-power tourists—were eddying noisily this way and that on the viewing platform. His gaze fell out onto the city, the City of Light, a place where no one knew him, a provocative place until this moment. He felt slightly dizzy.

  “Bea and Rex come to the Eiffel Tower once a year,” Helen said. “Isn't that romantic?”

  “It is,” Matthews said.

  “Otherwise you could forget you're in Paris,” Rex said solemnly.

  “You might think you're in Tokyo up here, though,” Helen said, eyeing the clusters of Japanese pressing toward the observation windows, jabbering and adjusting their cameras for good snaps.

  Rex was watching the Japanese without smiling. He was a big, mealy-skinned, full-bellied man who wore cowboy boots and what Matthews remembered his father calling a car coat. He'd had one when he was ten, and his had matched his father's. Rex had endured a hair transplant that'd left a neat row of stalky-thin hair follicles straight across his dome. It was recent, or possibly it hadn't worked out perfectly. But Rex seemed happy to meet Helen up here, where he was happy to be, anyway. Rex, he thought, was undoubtedly Helen's age and was what men Helen's age looked like if everything hadn't gone right. Rex must've weighed two fifty. Bea, on the other hand, might've made a hundred.