Richard Ford - Women with Men

But outside the window now, Paris seemed baffling. It might as well have been East Berlin. Even leaving would be difficult. Plus he'd come so far. Paid for both of them. To leave would be a total loss.

In Matthews’ novel —The Predicament— the main character's wife, Greta (a thin, unflattering disguise for Penny), had suddenly walked out of her snug but airless academic marriage in a small college town in “Maine,” collected her lover in the family car (her lover being a blond and athletic Catholic priest, just then abandoning his clerical collar after having been seduced by Greta immediately upon converting her), driven to Boston, then flown to Paris, where they both came to separate but equally bad ends (a much altered version of the truth: Penny was in California).

Matthews, however, having never been to Paris, had simply chosen it on a whim, the way he thought of picking a place now to leave Paris for. Just choose a word. Prague. Cairo. Gdansk. For his novel, he'd researched everything out of library books, tourist guides and subway maps, and made important events take place near famous sites like the Eiffel Tower, the Bastille and the Luxembourg Gardens, or else in places he'd made up, using French words he liked the sounds of. Rue Homard. Place de Rebouteux. Eventually the Paris section had been scaled back to emphasize the narrator's emotional plight of being left alone, and to contain less of “Greta”'s fate of being struck by a car on the rue de Rivoli — the pretty street running beside the long, beautiful arcade he'd happened to notice out the taxi window this morning. It had made him happy to see the rue de Rivoli street signs. Paris, for just that brief moment, had seemed knowable. Unlike now, when he couldn't figure out which way north was.

In the cemetery, just beyond the wall separating it from rue Froidevaux, some people were lined up beside an open grave. They were all wearing yarmulkes and using a tiny spade, which they passed back down the line to drop bits of dirt into the hole. As the mourners turned away, they quickly opened umbrellas and disappeared into the mist and clutter of gravestones. He'd read that Jews had their own sections in French cemeteries, unlike in America, where they had their own cemeteries.

“Joyeux Noël! Parles-toi anglais ici?” Helen said, letting herself into the cold little room. She was carrying a paper sack with lunch, her raincoat and hair dripping. “Did you see the cemetery full of dead Frenchmen across the street? One side of the wall has life, oblivious and ignorant. One side has death, complete and inescapable. They don't communicate. I like that. Maybe it'd be good to be buried here.” She stuck her tongue out and made cross-eyes at him. Helen was in good spirits.

“Blumberg called,” Matthews said gloomily. “He can't see me now. He's going to the Indian Ocean.”

“That's too bad,” Helen said.

“But he wants me to stay and meet my translator.” He realized he was presenting this as though it was Helen's problem to solve.

“Well,” Helen said, setting the damp sack on the bed table. “Is there some reason why you can't stay?”

“She's not in Paris now,” Matthews said. “She won't be back for four days.”

“What else do we have to do?” Helen said brightly, taking off her wet raincoat. “We'll find something to do in Paree. It's not like Cleveland.”

“I wanted to go on to Oxford,” Matthews said.

“You still won't get into Oxford,” she said. “But you did get into Paris. And aren't translators important? I like your outfit, incidentally.” Matthews was standing at the window with no pajama bottoms on. He was in a fourth-floor room, in a foreign country where no one knew him. He hadn't been thinking about that. Helen pooched out her lips provocatively. Helen had become increasingly voracious about sex, more voracious than she needed to be, Matthews thought. She would necessarily see this as an incitement.

“I'll have to figure out how we can keep the room,” he said, stepping away from the window and looking for his pajama bottoms.

“I don't think there'll be much demand for this place.” Helen looked around at the tiny room. Arabs owned the hotel and Indians ran it. A few Arab-looking pictures were on the walls as decoration: an oasis with one scrawny camel standing in the shade; some men wearing burnooses, sitting in a circle beside another camel in the desert.

“It's desolate here,” Matthews said, hating the sound of his own complaining voice. It was jet lag. “I was thinking we ought to call a cab and get out. Take a train somewhere.”

“Take a train where?” Helen said.

“The Riviera maybe. I thought Paris was closer to the Riviera, anyway.”

“I don't want to go to the Riviera,” she said. “I like it here. I've wanted to come here all my life. Just let the unexpected happen. It'll be romantic. It's Christmas in Paris, Charley. Isn't there some song about that?”

Matthews knew no song about Christmas in Paris. “I never heard of one.”

“Well, then we'll have to make it up,” Helen said. “I'll make up the music, and you can make up the words. You're the novelist. It's not like you need Proust to make up a song about Christmas in Paris.”

“Probably not,” Matthews said.

“See, I told you.” Helen was smiling. “You're already happier. I've translated you into being happy. We'll have you singing in no time.”

MATTHEWS HAD KNOWN Helen Carmichael nearly two years. She had been a student in the adult course he taught in the African-American Novel — his specialty at Wilmot College (though he was not of African descent). He and Helen had liked each other at once, met regularly for coffee after class, then started sleeping together when the course ended, a time roughly coinciding with the dark grainy period after Penny had taken their daughter, Lelia, and left for California, the period when Matthews figured out he hated teaching and everything about it, determined he should seek a less governed life and began writing a novel as a way of occupying himself until the school year was over and he could resign.

Helen was eight years older than he was, a tall, indelicately bony ash-blond woman with a big-breasted, chorus-girl figure, a wide, sensuous mouth and big benevolent blue eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. Matthews liked looking into her eyes and found solace there. All men, he noticed, stared at Helen. There was a bigger-than-life quality to her, though not necessarily bigger and better. Helen enjoyed believing men had “a hard time handling” her and that most men were afraid of her because she was “hard to keep up with,” which meant she thought she was savvy and ironic. Helen came from a small West Virginia coal-mining town and had already been married three times, but was unmarried now and had no wish to try again. She worked for an advertising company across the Ohio River in Parkersburg, not far from where she grew up, and had told Matthews she believed this was as far as life had taken her and where it would probably leave her — and that at forty-five she had made her pact with destiny and was able to be a realist about it. He liked her for her independence.

She and Matthews had begun enjoying a casual and altogether satisfactory sexual intimacy, spending afternoons in bed in his house, taking weekend trips up to nearby Pittsburgh and occasionally as far away as D.C., but mostly just enjoying a twilight drive and dinner in one of the cozy inns or restored cider mills that dotted the Ohio River banks, often ending up in some rickety old four-poster in a hot little third-floor garret room, attempting but usually failing to make as little noise as possible while still getting the most from the evening and each other.