Women with Men

by Richard Ford

  “You're a writer?” Rex said in a jokey voice.

  “Not exactly,” Matthews said. A man in the milling crowd, plainly an American, looked right in his face after hearing Rex say he was a writer. The man was clearly wondering if Matthews was somebody famous, and if so, who.

  “Bea writes poetry,” Rex said.

  “That's wonderful,” Matthews said. Helen and Bea were sharing a private word. Bea was shaking her head as though expressing surprise, then her eyes flickered at Matthews and away again. Some accusation, he assumed, Helen had lodged that would never have been made if they hadn't bumped into Cuddles and Rex. All at once a choir of voices, from somewhere on the platform, began singing a Christmas carol in German. “O, Tannenbaum…” It turned the whole place, 187 feet aloft, calamitous and chaotic.

  “It must be a burden to have a compulsion to write,” Rex practically shouted.

  “It's not, no,” Matthews said, trying to be heard.

  “I never had it,” Rex said. “I wasn't compelled.”

  Suddenly the caroling stopped, as if somebody in authority had decided it was much too loud.

  “That's all right,” Matthews said more normally. “I'm not compelled either.”

  “Hell, yes, it's all right,” Rex said, sternly for some reason. “What any person chooses to do is all right.”

  Rex's big sad brown eyes were set wide apart and separated by a wide barge of a nose that had probably been broken many times. Rex seemed as stupid as a bullock, and Matthews did not want to have dinner with him. More than likely, Helen would not be up to it anyway.

  “I guess so,” Matthews said, and smiled, but Rex was looking around for the carolers.

  Helen and Bea rejoined them, with a plan worked out.

  “Clancy's. We're dining at Clancy's,” Helen said eagerly.

  “I know, it doesn't sound French,” Bea said. “But how much French food can you eat? You'll like it.”

  “Matthews just wants it to be incomparable,” Helen said. “But he eats what I tell him to.”

  “That's good,” Bea said, and patted Matthews on the arm.

  Matthews didn't like being called Matthews. Sometimes Helen did it when she was in her cups, then would often keep doing it for hours. It was also Helen's choice of words that they have an “incomparable” meal. It was her Paris fantasy. It was a word he wouldn't use.

  “So, look, we're off, you kids,” Bea said, grabbing Rex's big arm and pulling herself close to him. Matthews realized he was gazing at Rex's hair re-seeding, though he was sure Rex was used to people staring at it. “See you at eight. Don't be en retard,” Bea said, and then away they went into the crowds.

  “Bea's a firecracker,” Helen said.

  “I see,” Matthews said. Bea and Rex stood waiting for the elevator. Bea waved back through the wandering tourists. He wanted to stay until they disappeared, after which he would conceivably never see them again.

  “Are you taking mental notes for your next novel?” Helen said. “I hope so.”

  “Who said I was writing another novel?”

  “I don't know,” Helen said. “What else are you going to do? Sell sofas? Seems to me it's all you know how to do anymore. That and not like things.”

  “What don't I like?” Matthews said uncomfortably. “I like you.”

  “Yeah, right. And pigs have ears.”

  “Pigs do have ears,” he said. “Two of them. Apiece.”

  “Wings. Okay, pigs have wings. You get the point.”

  He didn't get the point at all. But Helen had started for the elevator. Bea and Rex were no longer in sight. There was no chance to talk about what he did and didn't like. Not now. He simply came after and followed her to the elevator and out.

  ON THE CROWDED Quai Branly, at the foot of the tower, Helen stopped in the gusty wind and gazed again straight up at the swirling misty sky, in which the spire had become obscured.

  “We couldn't have seen anything way up on top, anyway,” she said. “Do you think? We got the best view there was.”

  “I'm sure,” Matthews said.

  Across the busy boulevard was the Pont d'Iéna, and the river, which they could barely see. They'd passed over it in the cab from the airport, but now that he was closer to the water, brown and churning and slightly rancid-smelling in winter flood, Matthews felt it gave the whole city a menacing aspect, which he suspected wasn't accurate but only seemed so at this moment. Yet that Paris could seem menacing was a new sensation: a city with such a river shares in all its aspects. He thought about telling this to Helen but presumed she wouldn't be interested.

  When they had walked ten minutes along the quai, as far as the Pont de l'alma, where the Fodor's required them to cross the river in order to seek the Champs Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe and to satisfy Helen's desire for an epic stroll, she sat down on an iron bench, put her head back and took an enormous breath, then exhaled it.

  This, he believed, was Helen's way of “taking it all in.”

  He stood and looked across the charged river at the Trocadéro and the Palais de Chaillot—names he'd seen in the Fodor's and could now place, though without a clue to what went on there or made them important. They looked like something put up for a world's fair, which the city had then had to find uses for—like Shea Stadium in New York. Basically a mistake. All around Paris's skyline you could see profiles of construction derricks. In the cab, he'd counted seventeen in one small bombed-out piece of ground.

  He felt, however, like he was with Helen now, that she was the person in charge; whereas before, even yesterday, it had been his trip and she'd only been along for it. Now, though—at least this afternoon—she'd appropriated events to her wishes, so that what he felt was surprisingly, uncomfortably young, much younger than the eight years that separated them. Yet she was more vitally involved than he was. How, he wondered, could that be?

  “I'm done for,” Helen said. “I can't go another step. I've had too much fun.” She had her glasses off and was sticking a pill in her mouth.

  “We can take a taxi to the Place de la Concorde,” Matthews said. “It'd still be nice to see where people had their heads chopped off.”

  “I can skip it,” Helen said. “I'm stiff and I feel dizzy. I got dizzy in the Eiffel Tower. I'm still glad I went, though.” She swallowed her pill down hard. “I think I have to go home now.”

  “Home all the way to West Virginia?”

  “Just to the hotel right now,” she said. “I have to lie down for a while. I'm weak.” Cars and motorcycles and buses were surging by in front of them along the quai. “I'm sorry I got pissy,” she said, her head back again, staring up at the white sky.

  “You weren't very pissy,” Matthews said. “You just said I didn't much like you. But I do. I like you quite a lot. It's not very easy being here now.”

  “I know. It's just supposed to be,” Helen said. With her fingertip she lightly touched the tiny dent her glasses had pressed on her nose. “It's supposed to be the time of your life. You're supposed to die and go to heaven, all in the same day.”

  “We ought to be used to what's supposed to happen,” Matthews said.

  “Spoken like a man who's unhappily separated from his first wife,” Helen said, and grinned, still staring up. “That's just hind-spite. You should take the brighter side of things.”

  “Which one is that?”

  “Oh, let me see,” Helen said almost dreamily. “What does my little motto say, my little proverb?”

  “‘The glory of God is to keep things hidden.’”

  “There you go,” Helen said. “Doesn't that just mean: Take two pills and call me in the morning, sayeth the Lord?”

  “I guess it could,” Matthews said. “It could mean why don't you shut up, too.”

  “There you go. So why don't you shut up?” Helen smiled sweetly at him where he stood alone on the cold sidewalk, hands in his coat pockets, head bare to the wind. “No offense.”

  “No, none taken,” Matthews said, and h
e began to wave for a taxi out on the crowded avenue along the river.

  IN THE HOTEL, they both fell into bed and into dense sleeps, from which he did not awaken until after dark, so that when his eyes found only darkness, he had no idea where he was or what day it was or, for an instant, who Helen Carmichael might be, breathing beside him. The air all around was steamy, and he was sweating and could feel warm sweat on Helen's bare back. He lay, then, for a long time as though a great burden of sleep and fatigue was resting on his chest, and finally he let the weight sink him back into darkness as if the darkness of sleep was better than the darkness of the unknown.

  In his second sleep he dreamed vividly. There, he was both sitting at what seemed to be a typical Parisian sidewalk café (something he had never done) but also watching himself do the very same thing. Wearing a heavy black overcoat and a red scarf and a disreputable-looking black beret, he was talking to someone at an extremely high rate of speed. He couldn't, in the dream, see who he was talking to, but the thought that it was Penny seemed foregone. He was still wearing a wed-ding ring.

  And he was speaking French! French words (all unfathomable) were flooding out of his mouth just the way they flooded out of every Frenchman's mouth, a mile a minute. No one—whoever he was talking to—offered anything in reply. So that it was only he, Charley Matthews, rattling on and on and on in perfect French he could miraculously speak, yet, as his own observer, in no way understand.

  This dream, in its own dream time, seemed to go on until, when he suddenly awoke with the feeling he'd rescued himself from some endless, winnerless race, he was exhausted and his heart was pounding, his legs aching, and even his shoulders were stiff, as though his sleep was truly a burden he'd been forced to carry for days.

  The stingy fluorescent ceiling light had been turned on in the room, and for a long time Matthews lay naked and stared at the pale tube as if it was a source of assurance, though still without completely comprehending where he was or why.

  “Don't sleep forever,” he heard Helen say.

  “Why not?”

  “It'll ruin your sleep. You have to wake up now so you can sleep later.”

  Matthews raised only his head and looked down the length of his body. Helen was standing in the bathroom door, a towel wrapped around her breasts and waist. With another towel she was drying her hair in the stronger light of the bathroom. She looked large and important in the doorway. “Junoesque” was the word she liked. It was this particular attitude and incarnation that allowed Helen to think most people couldn't handle her and that she was too much for most men. Matthews stared at her in the lighted doorway, thinking that the soapy flower smell from the shower had now overpowered the sweaty smell from earlier. “We haven't eaten all day,” Helen said. “Did you realize that? Not that I'm hungry.”

  The thought of Beatrice and Rex floated unhappily back into his mind. “Did we cancel dinner with your friends, or did I dream that?”

  “You dreamed it.” Helen tilted her head sideways so her long, pale hair fell to the side and she could dry the parts that were underneath.

  “We should have,” Matthews said. “I'd rather die here now than eat dinner at—where was it?”

  “Clancy's,” Helen said, then took a deep breath and sighed. “Clon-cee. You don't have to go with me.”

  “I have to if you do,” Matthews said. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel absolutely wonderful,” she said. “I've decided I'm going to read your book next.”

  “My book?” Matthews said.

  “Yes,” Helen said. “Ton livre.”

  “You won't like it,” Matthews said. “Nobody but the French like it.”

  As a first perfectly clear thought, this was not welcome news. Helen had always acted as though his book and the fact that he'd written it were merely amusing if not actually embarrassing and ridiculous anomalies, in no way worth taking time to investigate. A kind of engrossing but valueless hobby. Her standard line—offered even to Matthews’ parents and sister in Cleveland—had been that she didn't intend to read The Predicament because she was afraid she'd either like it so much Matthews would then hopelessly intimidate her, or else hate it so much she'd never be able to take him seriously again and their relationship would be over. (Privately, she'd told him only explanation two was the real one.)

  This had suited Matthews fine, inasmuch as in the last months of writing The Predicament, and not long after he'd begun his affair with Helen, he'd inserted a character who was—even he knew—somewhat modeled on her: a tall, ash-blond, Buick-bumper, Rockette type he'd exaggerated into a garish woman who wore mules, slit-up-the-sides dresses, and talked in a loud voice about coarse subjects, but whom the protagonist clings to after his wife abandons him, even though they have little in common but sex. In Matthews’ mind, this was not Helen Carmichael; only one or two superficial details were appropriated. And it was in no way meant to size Helen up or be her portrait.

  Except try to tell Helen that. Helen maintained strong certainties about her own substance and integrity, but also spent considerable time scanning the no-man's-land around her like a razor-beam searchlight, on the lookout for possible adversaries and nonbelievers. Plus she wasn't stupid—though her personal reading tastes were always for best-sellers and ghoulish police mysteries. She would certainly see the character of Carlette as a not especially flattering image of herself and would be mad as hell about it. It was not a prospect Matthews felt eager to confront in the midst of an expensive and already half-wrecked trip to Europe.

  And not that he'd blame her—assuming she got to the Carlette part. Probably people never had kind thoughts about seeing themselves in someone else's made-up book. It was a matter, he understood, of power and authority: one person's being usurped or stolen outright by another, for at very best indifferent purposes. And that was definitely how Helen would view it. So, if he could, he would like to keep her from feeling any of these bad ways by discouraging her from reading The Predicament anytime soon.

  “I'm sure I won't like it,” Helen said, having disappeared back into the tiny bathroom, where Matthews could hear her unscrewing the top of some kind of jar, then popping the cap on a container of pills. “I just thought it might tell me something interesting about you.”

  “I'm not very interesting.” Matthews stared unhappily up at the fluorescent tube, which produced its thin, mint-colored and quaverous light. He pulled the blanket over his lower half, though the room still felt steamy.

  “I'm sure you're not,” Helen said. She opened the medicine cabinet and closed it. “I just want to uncover the real Charley Matthews. The man behind the whatever. Whatever the French think is so thrilling. Maybe you're deep and I don't know it.” Helen stuck her head around the doorjamb and smiled at him meanly. “You know? Deeeeep,” Helen said. “You're deeeeep.”

  “I'm not deep at all,” Matthews said, feeling trapped.

  “No, I know that,” she said, disappearing once more.

  Though in a moment she emerged wearing a slip, her hair almost dry. She stepped across the tiny cluttered room to where her blue plastic suitcase was open on the floor and squatted beside it to unpack clean clothes.

  Turning sideways, prepared to say something about the utter inanity of his own novel, Matthews noticed surprisingly that Helen had an enormous purple and black and even brown bruise halfway up her left thigh. And another one, he saw now, was on her other thigh, close to her underpants, just where her buttocks began to bloom outward in the way he liked.

  “Jesus, what in the hell are those big bruises!” he said, and leaned up on one elbow as if to get closer. “They look like you fell off a damn truck.”

  “Thanks,” Helen said, still going through her packed clothes.

  “What caused them?”

  “I don't know.” Helen stopped her hands for a moment in their busy delving and looked up at the window, a perfect blank curtain of night that seemed to block any light from escaping. She took a breath and let it out. “Mayb
e it's my medicine,” she said, and shook her head. Then she knelt on one knee and went back to her clothes. “You should get dressed if you're coming with me.”

  “Did they just show up?” Matthews said. He was transfixed by these bruises, which looked like big gloomy expressionist paintings or else thunderclouds.

  “Did what show up?”

  “Those bruises.”

  “Yep. They did.” She seemed to want to look at her hip where her slip's hem was above the bruise, but didn't look.

  “Have you had them before?” he said, still in his bed. “I've never seen them.”

  “Look. What difference does it make?” Helen said, supremely annoyed. “I have a goddamn bruise. Okay? I can't help it.”

  “Do they hurt?”

  “No. They don't hurt. If you hadn't pointed them out like I was a goddamn sideshow, I wouldn't have thought about them. So leave it alone.”

  “Do you want to see a doctor?” He understood mysterious bruises of that sort were serious. You didn't get bruises like these—and maybe there were others too—from bumping into bedposts and armchairs. These were possibly related to Helen's cancer. She could be sick again, and how she felt this morning—stiff and weak—and then dizzy this afternoon could be interpreted as symptoms of cancer coming back. She probably knew it herself but didn't want it to interfere with the trip.

  “I'll go to my doctor when I get home,” she said. She was pulling one of her signature short skirts, this one peach-colored, over her hips, so that her two bruises went out of sight.

  Helen knew what he'd been thinking, that was clear, and he realized he shouldn't say anything more now, since she'd said she didn't want to find a doctor. Though where would you find a doctor on rue Froidevaux at seven o'clock the week before Christmas? He remembered shiny brass plaques set into the sides of the rich brownstones on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais. “Dr. So-and-so, Chirurgien.” You couldn't get one of these guys at seven p.m. They were all away, were just at that very moment sitting down to a jolly dinner beside a warm ocean beach where dry palms were gently clattering. To see a doctor, you'd need to call an ambulance and get carted out through the lobby on a stretcher. If you were lucky.