by Richard Ford
“Are you sure you feel up to going to dinner?” he said.
“I feel absolutely wonderful.” She was pulling a matching peach-colored sweater over her thick hair. Helen liked matching colors—down to her shoes, the tint of her stockings, sometimes her lipstick and eye shadow. It made her feel good to match. He began climbing out of bed, stiff from his dream but happier to worry about Helen's health than about whether she'd read his novel. Helen's health was important, and that was what he intended to concentrate on.
“Do you think I look nice enough for Paris?” Helen said. She was standing in the middle of the crummy room, up on her peachy high heels, her glasses catching a glimmer from the gauzy light.
“You look terrific,” Matthews said, holding his blanket up to cover himself. He smiled at her too animatedly. “I'd happily take you anywhere in the world.” Except Clancy's, he thought.
“Would you really?” He heard a rare, faint trace of West Virginia accent in Helen's voice. Her eyes were wide, as if his declaration surprised her.
“Absolutely,” he said. He thought about putting his arms around her, but she was all dressed and ready, and he was, in essence, naked.
“I wish I had some champagne right now,” she said.
“We'll get you champagne.” He began moving toward his suitcase. “We'll have champagne at Clancy's.”
“I just meant right then. It's already gone. I just had a moment when to be holding a glass of champagne would've been very nice.”
“I bet you'll have a glass before you know it,” Matthews said.
“Oh. I bet I will too.” Helen smiled at him, then turned to gaze out the dark window, while Matthews got himself ready to go.
CLANCY'S was a big, noisy, brassily lit room off the rue St.-Antoine, near the Bastille, in what, Rex gloated, was “the Frenchiest part of Paris.” He and Beatrice had already downed one bottle of champagne by the time Matthews and Helen arrived, and were awaiting the arrival of another one.
“They mix up the best martinis in the world here,” Rex said loudly, standing up and giving Matthews’ hand a big engulfing pump. “But I hate to drink gin on an empty stomach. Don't you, Bill?”
“We didn't think you kids would mind if we got a head start,” Beatrice said, grinning and clearly drunk.
“That's exactly how I feel,” Helen said, getting seated and into the spirit of things. “The race goes to the drunkest. Sit down, Bill,” she said. “This is where we're going. In case you didn't know it.”
Rex began explaining that two American Pan Am pilots, “a couple of guys named Joe from Kansas City,” got tired of not finding steaks in Paris up to their high standards and decided to retire early and open a place for people like themselves, who were stranded here with similar needs and tastes. They found this place, put in the good lighting, got the ambience established with a lot of vintage black-and-white photographs—Babe Ruth hitting a homer, Rocky Marciano KO’ing some black guy. And the rest was history. Both the pilots had unfortunately died of AIDS, Rex said soberly, but the business had been kept going by loyal family members, including one pilot's former wife. It was the best-kept secret in town, and generally considered the unofficial headquarters for the overseas community, a place where you could relax, be yourself and get shit-faced in peace, just like back home. Regrettably, it was beginning to get crowded, and even some French people were showing up, though they were always given the worst tables.
Matthews had realized, on the cab ride over, that he'd set a scene in The Predicament exactly where rue St.-Antoine entered the Place de la Bastille, directly across from a big opera house they passed, and that the crowded, brightly lit roundabout they'd driven through looked precisely the way he'd imagined it, though he'd made it possible to walk down to the Seine in less than five minutes, which was clearly impossible.
Rex Mountjoy, it turned out, was in the machine parts business, specializing in farm implements. American manufacturers had a hammerlock on the big farm-machinery market, Rex said, but their Achilles’ heel was that their parts-and-service was way too expensive and they were essentially shooting themselves in the foot. Rex's big, heavy-jowled, heavy-lidded face grew even more solemn in the discussion of his own affairs. From thousands of miles across the ocean, in the corporate parts department of a big-market-share company headquarters, Rex had spied an opening where a smart gunslinger type could pick up refurbished parts in the States, sell them direct into the infant retail implement market here in France, and come away with a bundle. He hadn't thought his business would stay profitable for longer than two, maybe three years, until the competition in the EU got wise to him and some bureaucrat up in Brussels tailor-made a regulation to embargo exactly what he was doing. “But we're still here,” Rex said, putting his giant farm-implement mitts around a big martini glass and sniffing the simple pleasures of his success. “The French all hate to work. It's that simple,” Rex said prodigiously. “They're fighting a rearguard action against the success ethic. If you had a good idea, you'd definitely want to bring it over here and sell it on the street.”
“That's good advice,” Matthews said. He had ordered a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé, which Beatrice had immediately begun calling “foolish pussy.” Both Beatrice and Helen, who were again locked in an intensely private conversation, occasionally looked up to refer to Matthews’ “foolish pussy”—Helen with a blazing smile that seemed to him feverish and hot.
“Have some more foolish pussy, Bill,” Helen practically shouted, then laughed noisily, her mouth open so Matthews could see her tongue, wide and flat and café-au-lait-colored—a color he knew doctors associated with illness. The tongue, his mother had always said, the tongue tells the story of your health. Helen's tongue wasn't telling a good story.
Rex, it became clear, had ordered everything for everybody—which included more martinis, big iceberg salads with beefsteak tomatoes and onion slabs drenched in white vinegar, continent-sized sirloins with two accompanying Idahos on platters all by themselves. A boat full of butter, sour cream, chives, bacon crumbles, steak sauces, horseradish, mustard and ketchup was set in the middle of the table on a lazy Susan with three previously aired bottles of Côtes du Rhône. Rex announced that if anyone wanted anything else, they only had to ask for it, “just as long as it isn't poulet and haricots verts.”
“Really. If I don't eat two of these a week, I get goddamn anemic,” Beatrice said, sawing straight into her red meat, holding her fork like a shoehorn. Beatrice was dressed in the same black bohemian outfit she'd had on in the Eiffel Tower; and because she was drunk now and seemed irritable, she looked, Matthews thought, like the picture of an anemic person.
Rex, on the other hand, seemed to have grown jollier and much more companionable as the day and now the night wore on. He was dressed like somebody headed for a college football game, a big red crewneck sweater over a green plaid sport shirt and a pair of brown corduroys—clothes Matthews hadn't noticed earlier because of the car coat. He'd refashioned his hair transplant so it didn't make him look as absurd—though his big-browed forehead still appeared tender and slightly angry in spots.
“It must be a real burden to have the compulsion to write,” Rex said confidentially, his mouth full.
“No, it really isn't,” Matthews said, trying to eat his own steak and keep eye contact with Rex. The noise in Clancy's rose and fell like a tide. New people constantly came through the door, people the other diners knew, and a clamor would crescendo and then fall off. Everybody seemed to be shouting in English, though he and Rex were able to talk under the roar by getting closer. Rex, he noticed, had on some loud minty aftershave that seemed familiar—also something his father wore.
“I guess all your family are writers too,” Rex said.
“No, they're in the furniture business in Cleveland,” Matthews said. “I've only written one book, and I don't think it's very good. So you couldn't really call me a writer. Not yet, anyway.”
“I see,” Rex said. “I guess it's all just
personal expression.”
“Rex traces his family directly back to Adam and Eve,” Beatrice said. She'd been talking to Helen but listening to them. Parentage was obviously an issue she liked to bring up at Rex's expense.
“She's jealous because my parents had last names,” Rex said, and pushed his big lips out and made a juicy, insolent kiss at Beatrice.
“Right. Like Zigolowsky and Prdozilewcza—the ones you don't need many vowels for. Mountjoy's his stage name. I hardly need say that, though, I guess.”
The din in Clancy's rose and fell again, and somewhere, apparently in the room with them, a dog started barking. Several people seated near Clancy's big, white-flocked Christmas tree started laughing. “Gordon,” someone said. “Here, Gordon.” There was another brisk bark, then a squeal of sudden intense pain.
“French people,” Rex said, straining his big neck around to find the offenders. “Yep, yep, there they are,” he said. “I see 'em. Four of 'em with their fuckin’ pooch.”
“Gordon. Great.” Beatrice looked disgusted. In the bright restaurant light, Matthews could see that Beatrice's skin was more leathery and tough-looking than he'd thought. He wondered how old she really was. Once again he felt ridiculously young, though he was thirty-seven and already had an ex-wife, an ex-profession and a daughter he never saw. Rex and Beatrice and even to some extent Helen seemed like his parents’ age and, much like his parents, almost completely unreachable.
“The UN's a loada crap. I know that,” Rex was saying in answer to some remark of Helen's about differing nationalities needing to get along better. Helen was a strong believer in the UN.
“Oh, let's don't get him started on the UN,” Beatrice said, and rolled her eyes. She decided to have another big gulp of her martini. “Or the EU. Another of his big all-time faves.”
“Yeah. Don't get me started on that,” Rex said, inserting lettuce into his big mouth and breathing a heavy breath at the same time.
“Charley knows all about Negroes. The ones who came to Paris, anyway,” Helen said. “He was once a prof. He can tell you who wrote what and where they lived and why, all that kind of thing. He doesn't look black, does he?”
“You can't always tell,” Beatrice said. “They're not like the French—visible for miles in every direction.”
“I thought you said you were a novelist,” Rex said, head down, negotiating a slice of meat onto a square chunk of potato with the intention of eating them as one.
“I didn't say that,” Matthews said, shaking his head.
“Who said it, then?” Rex said, lifting the loaded fork to his mouth.
“And who cares?” Beatrice said.
“Charley's a novel-least,” Helen said, her eyes hot. “I haven't read his ro-man yet. But I'm going to. I want to see if I'm in it. Part of it's set in Paris.”
“You're not in it,” Matthews said, feeling in a hurry to eat, though with no idea what to do when he was finished. Helen had to be in pain, he thought. That was why she was acting agitated—solicitous one second, ready to turn on him the next. She was also drunk and undoubtedly taking painkillers.
“Is Josephine Baker in it?” Beatrice said, going on eating.
“That's who I was thinking of too,” Helen said.
“No,” Matthews said. “It's all made up. No real people are in it.” Everything he said sounded asinine. He wished he could shut up, finish his meal and take Helen home.
“I thought they only let black people teach that stuff,” Beatrice said. “Of course, I've been over here so long I've forgotten what happens at home.”
“It was pretty unusual,” Matthews said.
“No kidding,” Rex said.
“We're putting Charley on the spot here,” Helen said.
“That's all right,” Rex said. “I'll be next.”
Gordon suddenly gave three sharp reports from near the Christmas tree. Several diners shouted, then laughed. Then everyone heard a fierce, yowling cat hiss. There was then a scramble of scratching claws and growling, and something hurtled past Matthews’ legs under the table, with something else hurtling after it. The French people—all small men and women in pastel sweaters and nice jackets—seemed vaguely dismayed. One of the men got up and made his way through the tables in the direction Gordon seemed to have escaped. He didn't seem the least bit surprised, only annoyed.
Rex glared at him as he sidled past. “Monkeys'll be next,” he said menacingly. “Then talking birds. This place is going to hell.”
“Everyone's going to Prague now, anyway,” Beatrice said. “Paris is finished. I wish I'd learned Czech instead of French.”
“Or Budapest,” Rex said, pronouncing it Budapesht, like Matthews’ colleagues at Wilmot College. “Now, there's a place you can really make some money. You oughta try to publish your books in Hungarian. What's the title?”
“It's the Paris of the east,” Beatrice said.
“What is?” Rex was pushing his empty plate away.
“Prague,” she said.
“Right. I've been there. Once was enough, though.”
“Behold, the alpha male,” Beatrice said, with reference to Rex.
“I'm a man only one woman has to marry, though,” Rex said.
Matthews pretended he hadn't heard Rex ask about the title of his book. He didn't want to hear himself say the words, if only for fear of what Helen might say. In truth, he didn't want to hear himself say anything. Half of his steak was uneaten. Helen had touched none of hers. Beatrice and Rex had cleaned their plates. He wondered if he and Helen could apologize and leave. Plead jet lag.
The Frenchman in the pink sweater and the ascot came back through the restaurant, carrying a small tan poodle cradled in his arms. The poodle was panting as though it was exhausted, its little tongue lolled to the side. The Frenchman was smiling as if everyone in Clancy's was happy to finally see the dog. Outside the big clean front window, it was starting to snow.
“Did you know Helen was a wonderful dancer?” Rex said, running his wide hand over his skull, through the new hair seedlings. “She was on her way to Radio City.”
“June Taylor, anyway,” Helen said. “They were on TV when I was a little girl.” She smiled and shook her head as though the idea was funny. “That was in Pittsburgh.”
“Except what happened?” Beatrice said.
“Helen would dance till she dropped,” Rex said, setting his hands on the table in front of him, lacing his fingers and staring down at them. He was paying no attention to Beatrice.
“We all did then,” Helen said, and looked like she might break into tears. “I'm tired. I'm jet-lagged, that's all. I'm sorry.”
“These two were a marquee item once upon a blue moon,” Beatrice said to Matthews by way of explanation. “In case you were wondering.”
“While it lasted,” Helen said, her eyes glistening behind her glasses.
“While we lasted,” Rex said.
“And they always do this,” Beatrice said. “They get drunk, and then they get overcome with everything. I usually just leave.”
“Don't leave now,” Helen said, and smiled sweetly.
“Turkwoz,” Matthews heard someone say at a nearby table. “It was Egyptian turkwoz—that's the very best. Better than that American garbage.”
Rex turned to look at who'd said this. He had phased out of the conversation for a moment, thinking about dancing with Helen in faraway Pittsburgh.
“That was a different era,” Beatrice said solemnly. “It was long before I came on the scene.”
“I don't believe in eras,” Helen said. “I believe it's all continuous. Now and then. Women and men.”
“Well, good for you,” Beatrice said, and she stood up to attend whatever was going on in the ladies’ room, leaving the three of them alone.
“Matthews isn't divorced yet,” Helen said. “He also has a daughter he almost never sees. I don't think he wants to be divorced, if the truth were known, which it always is eventually. But I think he needs to be divorced. Yo
u need to be divorced, Charley.”
“Helen always has plenty of opinions,” Rex said. Waiters were clearing away plates.
“I'm aware of that,” Matthews said.
“Don't you have to be pretty obsessive to be a writer?” Rex asked again.
“No. I don't think so,” Matthews said. “I don't think I am.”
“You're not?” Rex said. “That's funny. I'd have thought you needed to be. Shows you what I know anymore. About anything.”
ON THE TAXI RIDE back up the Boulevards St. Marcel and Arago it was snowing, the large heavy flakes seeming not to fall but to stay suspended in the yellow streetlight halos, backed by red taillights and darkness.
They had said good night to Rex and Beatrice on the snowy side street outside the restaurant. Dessert had ultimately been decided against. Helen said she wasn't holding up well, that it was only their second day, that her stomach was involved. Rich food. Drinking too much. Matthews’ translator was invoked. A need to sleep.
Beatrice and Rex both seemed to regard Helen with amazement that she could be whatever she still was, while they had “gone on” to be whatever they so clearly were: a nothing businessman and a bad-tempered counterculture failure, in Matthews’ view. Helen, he thought, was much better at being Helen than they were at being Rex and Cuddles.
Helen had stood in the snowy street in her pumps and peach outfit, and waved at them as their taxi disappeared toward the lights of the Bastille and wherever they lived in the suburbs behind Montreuil. Inside Clancy's the party wore on.
“I used to love Rex,” she said, putting a pill in her mouth, one she'd dug with some difficulty out of her handbag. “God, memory's a terrible thing. Whoever invented it—I'd like to get my hands on him.”
As their taxi passed the lion statue in the middle of Place Denfert-Rochereau, Helen gazed out at the rich old apartment buildings down Boulevard Raspail. Suddenly she said, “Do you have a belief in any spirituality of any kind, Charley?”