Women with Men

by Richard Ford

  A third, even longer silence occurred between him and Margie McDermott. He closed his eyes, and in that instant there were three thousand miles separating them. He was in Pittsburgh. He had called her on a lark. He'd only wanted to hear her voice and imagine the possibility of something exceptional taking place. When he opened his eyes he wished he'd see Pittsburgh.

  “Charley, is something the matter?” Margie said. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure, I'm fine,” Matthews said. “We just have a bad connection. There's an echo.”

  “You sound fine on this end,” she said.

  “I'm happy to hear your voice, Margie.” The little unit counter was somehow down to forty.

  “I am too, Charley. We didn't do anything too bad, did we?”

  “No. No way. We did great.”

  “And we were smart to get out when we did, weren't we?”

  Matthews didn't know if Margie meant out of their marriages, their affair or just Ohio.

  “We were,” he said.

  “I'd like to see you,” Margie said unexpectedly.

  “Me, too,” Matthews lied.

  “Anything's possible, I guess. You know? If you come to Paris you should call me. Okay? Parnell travels a lot now. He's in sales. The kids go to school. We could probably find a little time.”

  “I'd like that,” Matthews said.

  “Me, too,” Margie said.

  He assumed she was lying and that she knew she was and that he was, and it didn't matter. “I guess I'd better take off,” he said. “I've got to drive back down to Wilmot tonight. I mean this morning.”

  “Keep my number, okay?” Margie said.

  “Oh, for sure, I will,” he said.

  “A big hug for you, Charley. Till next time.”

  “A big hug for you,” Matthews said. “A big hug.” Then he hung up.

  SOMEHOW IT HAD gotten to be one o'clock. Soupe de poisson was on his mind. The Parisians were all heading to lunch now, jamming the restaurants around St.-Germain. Probably he should've had lunch with Margie, since he was hungry and hadn't eaten since Clancy's. Though how could he eat lunch with Margie if he couldn't quite stand the sound of her voice? Plus he was in Pittsburgh, not just down the street, cold and getting colder. He thought again about eating alone, buying a Herald Tribune. But since the restaurants were all full, the waiters would be in a hurry and testy. His French wouldn't hold up, and lunch would degenerate into bad-willed bickering and misunderstanding—the horror stories people talked about.

  He'd been gone much longer than his note to Helen promised. She would be awake and wondering and possibly sicker. On the other hand, she might feel much better and be ready for some excitement. They could eat lunch together. It seemed strange now to have imagined not walking back, just leaving Helen in the hotel.

  He thought he should start back.

  The metro would be the quickest route to rue Froidevaux. The metro went everywhere. But pausing in front of the tabac, which was itself filling up, he couldn't find Froidevaux on Fodor's metro plan. The Montparnasse cemetery would be a good landmark, but it wasn't on the map, and he couldn't think of the name Helen had told him was the right stop. Possibly it was Denfert-Rochereau, though it might've been Mouton Duvernet, each of which he could see, each of which sounded right. But if he was wrong, or got on an express or on a train going the wrong direction, he could end up at the airport. It was risky.

  Best, he thought, to walk back up rue de Rennes, away from the river, and look for a taxi at Montparnasse station, or else hoof it all the way to Boulevard Raspail and refind the lion statue, after which he'd recognize things. One way or another, it was thirty minutes. He knew Paris that well.

  This trip, he thought, hiking up the cold avenue, was supposed to have been about one thing but had become about something else: a version of sick bay. Nobody's idea of fun. Helen was probably going to become a problem he didn't know how to solve. Terminate the trip, certainly, if serious medical issues arose. Maybe he could phone Rex and Beatrice, if Helen had their number. Or just show up at the hospital, the way people did at home now. English would be spoken in hospitals.

  Oxford was out now. He hadn't thought about Oxford in two days. He'd looked forward to realizing—certifying was the better word—the idyll he'd esteemed all these years. The “sweet City with her dreaming spires.” It was Matthew Arnold. He'd been offered encouragement fifteen years ago, written his essay on “Mont Blanc,” stressing similarities with Thoreau but casting doubt on Shelley's view of the physical world as animate. It had won a minor college prize. But that had been that. He hadn't made it to Oxford the first time. This would be the second.

  Reaching the conflux with Montparnasse, he saw across to the taxi queue by the station, where he and Helen had waited to go to the Invalides the day before. French trains must arrive in clusters, he thought, since thirty people were lined up with their suitcases. Only one taxi was angling off the avenue for a pickup. He would be there all day, when at the most he had a twenty-minute walk. He could call the room, but that would take more time, and Helen might still be asleep.

  Without quite meaning to, he'd jettisoned the Club 21 and St.-Germain. When he came back to Paris, it would all be different; when his book was published—the book Helen could've been lying in bed reading while he tramped the streets. The next time, he'd be alone. His orientation to the city would change. For one thing, the squalid Nouvelle Métropole wouldn't be the epicenter. Probably he wouldn't be able to find it, whereas now it was “home.” Next time he would stay nearer St.-Sulpice and the Luxembourg—the heart of Paris.

  Thinking of Helen at that moment reading The Predicament in their cramped, smelly little room made him feel, oddly, not like the writer of that book, not even like a writer at all—far from how he'd imagined feeling when he thought about occupying the same room for a month, expecting to create something there. Though it might be a positive sign not to think of yourself as a writer, or not to think of yourself much at all. Only phonies went around thinking of themselves as being this or that. Self-regard was the enemy.

  In any case, he could never write about Paris—the real Paris. He would never know enough. It could simply season him, call up an effect, color his views. He would never, for instance, think of Christmas again in the crude, gaudy American way. Paris had been added. It was possible even to increase your brainpower with the additions of unusual experience. Most people, he'd read, operated on one-sixteenth of their brain's ability. But what happened if they began operating on an eighth? The world would change overnight. Great writers, the same article had said, operated on a fourth.

  The granite lion was dead ahead now, in the roundabout on Boulevard Raspail. Denfert-Rochereau was entering from the left. That would've been the metro stop. In the median strip on rue Froidevaux, children were playing Ping-Pong on green concrete tables, two on a side. Occasional flurries of ragged wind deflected the balls off the table, but the children retrieved them and began playing again immediately—their serves bouncing high over the low concrete barriers that served as nets. They were laughing and jabbering: “Allez! Allez! Sup-er, sup-er!”

  He wondered what had happened to the man last night, the man who'd slept in the burial vault in his bedroll. Along the cemetery wall he could see reddish, leafless treetops. Was the same man there every night, or had that been his first time to scale the wall and seek that shelter? You wouldn't come back from that decline, Matthews thought.

  In the sparsely furnished lobby of the Nouvelle Métropole, an Indian or possibly a Pakistani man approached him the moment he entered through the glass doors. It was as though the man had been waiting for him. He wasn't sure he'd seen this man before. Possibly when they'd checked in. A manager. The man wore a dark-blue suit, a white shirt and a dark-green tie; his black hair was neatly parted and combed. He smiled hesitantly, and his mouth showed a good amount of dark gums. He seemed, Matthews thought, concerned about something—how long they were staying, or some problems with a credit card
; matters Matthews had already worked out with the other hotel personnel but that obviously hadn't been transmitted to this man. Everything was settled. He would see Madame de Grenelle in two days, and then, if Helen was well enough, they would leave.

  “There is a problem,” the Indian manager said in English, coming straight up to him and standing close, as if he expected to whisper. Though he spoke too loud. “A serious problem,” he said. Matthews had already prepared an answer in French, about credit cards.

  “What sort of serious problem?” he said. A younger Indian man stood alone behind the reception, his hands on the counter. He was staring at Matthews and also seemed concerned.

  “The woman in forty-one,” the manager said, and cut his eyes toward the reception. “I'm sorry. You are in forty-one? Is this true?” The corners of his smooth brown mouth twitched slightly. He might've been suppressing a smile. What had Helen done that was funny?

  “That's my wife,” Matthews said. “She's jet-lagged. If you'd like to clean the room, we'll go out for lunch.”

  “I'm sorry,” the Indian manager said, and brought his two hands together at his waist and clasped them and blinked. His mouth twitched again, so that he could only repeat himself. “I'm sorry,” he said again.

  “What about?” Matthews said. “What are you sorry about? What's happening?” He looked at the manager, blinked his eyes too, took a breath, let it out, then waited to learn whatever the problem was, whatever would be next, the next inconvenience he'd need to divert from its present course onto a better one. It would be something simple. These things were the same—never easy, but simple. Nothing was ever easy. He was sure of that, if he wasn't sure of anything else.

  And then the man began to explain what the problem was about.

  THEIR ROOM smelled a way it hadn't smelled before. The curtains and the window had been opened, the air inside was cold, but still it smelled different. Not like death, but a clean, astringent odor, as though the room had been gone over, scrubbed and put right at some point. Outside somewhere, a dog was barking, a slow, determined barking—something the dog saw but didn't recognize. A mystery. Something that didn't fit into its regular world.

  Their luggage was still stacked where he'd put it when they'd come back last night. Nothing was very different in the room. The Arab pictures were the same. The fluorescent light had been turned on. An empty bottle of Bombay gin had been added. Several—possibly four in all—clear plastic freezer bags, empty. A glass from the bathroom, also empty. An ashtray with two cigarettes stubbed out. But mostly neat. Had they scrubbed the room? he wondered. Who'd opened the window? He realized he felt slightly faint.

  Helen lay on her side, her right hand open under her cheek, her left hand lost beneath the covers. She was wearing at least her pale-pink pajama top with dark piping. Her glasses were on the table beside the plastic freezer bags and his note. She was very, very pale, her features fixed. Her thick hair wasn't disarranged. Her bottom lip seemed to be tucked in under the top, her teeth undoubtedly resting on it. It was an attitude of sleep.

  In the hallway outside he heard the elevator door open, then whispers. A woman's whisper and a man's. Suddenly a young Indian woman came into the doorway, one of the maids, in a loose-fitting, beltless seersucker dress. A large girl. She leaned in, looked at the bed, gasped, then disappeared. In a moment, the elevator closed.

  On the night table were two white envelopes. One marked: Mgt—Hotel Nouvelle Métropole SEULEMENT! He sat in the green chair and opened this immediately. In it was a folded piece of white notepaper on which was written: My fate is my responsibility. Mr. Matthews is not my husband. It was signed: Helen Carmichael. Her passport was enclosed.

  The other envelope was marked: Mr. Matthews. In it was a similar piece of folded notepaper, on which he read these things:

  My last thoughts…

  I'm hurrying. I don't want you to come back and find me. Alive! Death is my little secret. I would like to stay in France. Please try for that. I really just don't fit anymore. Among the living, I mean. It's really no more complicated than that. (This stuff already seems to be working!)

  I think a good life is supposed to be to die knowing nothing. Or maybe it's to die knowing nobody. Anyway, I've almost succeeded at both of them.

  “Only in paradise is death banned from claiming the weak.” This is a saying I've been saving. I forget where I heard it. Maybe TV. This stuff is working.

  We were never in love. Don't misunderstand that. It will make all this trouble much easier. A cancer cell is just one organism proliferated. I thought of it being like a novel representing all of life and we had that in common. But it's not. It's not a metaphor.

  Don't open the other envelope. Please! Goodbye. Good luck.

  Affectionately,

  Helen

  HE COULD SEE both towers now: the Montparnasse and the Eiffel, though they were cut off by lowering clouds. Only their bottom halves were visible. He had thought, of course, that they would both make it home. And yet this had taken so little, so little time, only a small amount of planning. He didn't see how he could've been gone long enough. He'd said he loved her the night before and meant it, and she had said no to that. But if they weren't in love, he thought, what were they? And what was the spiritual component she'd wanted, the thing that to his discredit he couldn't think of? He had let her down.

  He wondered if Helen had been reading his book. There was no sign to indicate that, on the bed table or on the floor. On the bed, anywhere. Probably that was all meant as a joke. Someone was jogging around the cemetery wall, clockwise. A woman in a bright-yellow running outfit. He didn't believe she could be French. The French were different: their gait; their pace; the distance they kept and didn't keep. A Frenchwoman would never run around a cemetery in a bright-yellow outfit.

  Clouds were causing darkness to arrive early. The dog had stopped barking. A clock was chiming. The Christmas tree in the high window across rue Froidevaux shone coldly in the late day. Again he heard the shuffling card sounds through the wall.

  “YOUR WIFE. I'm very sorry,” the manager said. They were waiting. The people who were coming had decided to take their time.

  “She wasn't my wife,” Matthews said. “But—but I knew her very well.” He had stammered. It shocked him. This was the first time in years. He had stammered as a child, experienced other difficulties, hadn't learned things very fast, but had overcome it.

  “Of course,” the Indian man said, and made the little gasping sound, the quick intake of breath, which signified, in this instance, he guessed, sympathy.

  That was what marriage meant, Matthews thought: what you did at the very end. What you thought, how you felt, what you said. Your responsibilities were different then. He realized suddenly that he had forgotten to buy flowers. He had said to himself that he would and then hadn't. It was another error, and the thought of it made his heart suddenly race.

  Outside in the afternoon air, swifts skittered among the rooftops and chimneys and out into the space above the cemetery. He was very hungry. He hadn't eaten since last night. Later on, he thought, he would have to find a place, someplace nearby, take his chances with the French, eat his dinner alone.

  HIS ONLY OTHER trip to Europe had been to Spain. To Madrid, he said. He had been fifteen. Nineteen seventy-four. A youth group. They had stayed near the Parque del Buen Retiro and the Prado and walked and walked and walked, was what he remembered. For some of it he was sick, of course. But on the last day he was forced by others to attend the bullfight. Against his will entirely. They had ridden the subway to the stadium and sat in the sun in front of a legion of old Spaniards who were drunk on wine. All men. Sandwiches were passed around. In all, six bulls were killed, though none of them cleanly. Most, he remembered, didn't seem to want to fight at all. Often they just stood, observing what was happening to them. He'd hated it, he told her, had tried to leave. But everyone—his school friends—insisted he stay. He would never see it again. People threw cushions, eve
ntually.

  “Yes,” Madame de Grenelle said. She had lived in the south, she said. A city called Perpignan. She had been taken herself.

  Outside, children were chasing pigeons with switches in a little park. They were near Parc Montsouris. She shared a house with another woman, a pale stone row house built in the twenties, with creaking, shiny parquet floors and tall windows at both ends of the long downstairs study. At either end there seemed to be a park. On the walls were photographs, black-and-whites, showing what he thought were African women seated on the ground, weaving baskets in a dirty village, or washing clothes in a thick river, or holding babies to their breasts. All stared languidly at the camera. He had brought flowers, purple anemones.

  Madame de Grenelle was of mixed race. That's all he could tell. She was tall and willowy, with dyed black hair, a flat nose, large hands and pale-blue eyes. Possibly, he thought, she was Berber—because of her eyes, and because she wore a long, thick caftan that was maroon with blue and purple octagon designs. It seemed to him Moroccan. Her father had been a professor of English in Toulouse.

  “Translators have no lives of our own,” she said in amusement. “We live off others’ lives. Sometimes nicely.” She smiled. They were seated in chairs in the middle of the long room, where the least light reached from outside. She was fifty, he thought. She smoked American cigarettes. Chesterfields. She'd put his flowers in a vase on a table beside them. He didn't know how to answer her. “Your book has the ring of actuality about it,” she went on. “It's fascinating.”

  He didn't know if she meant it was true or simply seemed true. He chose the latter and simply said, “Good.”

  “It is your story, I think. The predicament.”

  “No,” Matthews lied.

  “No?” she said, and smiled at him in a penetrating way.

  “I wanted it to seem true,” he said.