Richard Ford - Women with Men

When he opened his eyes, Helen was sitting in the green, plastic-covered armchair, wrapped in the pink percale bedspread he'd covered himself with hours before. That was why he felt cold.

“How do you feel?” he said from beneath his thin blanket.

“I'm fine,” Helen said noncommittally. She had on his red wool socks and was smoking a cigarette. He'd never seen her smoke before, though he knew that years ago she had. The room smelled smoky and also sweaty. It was this smell that had waked him, that and being cold. “I guess I caught a bug when I went out in the rain. Who knows? I could've eaten something too.”

“Did you throw up?” Matthews said.

“Mmmm,” Helen said, big white smoke jets exiting her nostrils. Helen had her glasses on, and her blond hair was bedraggled, as if she'd been sweating or feverish. She looked pale and tired and thin. Helen always seemed big and healthy. “A big, pushy blond” was what she called herself. Now she looked worn out.

A nice light was coming in the window, a gray steely light with some yellow-stippled sun in it. No more rain, though the wind was up again, blowing on the Boulevard Raspail, past the big lion. He pictured wind riffling the glassy puddles in the street. He did not particularly want to be there.

“I was just thinking about having a translator,” Helen said. “What an experience that is. I don't know why I was thinking about it. It's just an experience I'll never have.” She blew smoke at the windowpanes and watched it cling to the glass, grow thin and disappear.

“ I'm not going to be translated,” Matthews said from under the covers. “My book is. Or maybe not.”

“That's right,” Helen said, and cleared her throat.

“Do you feel like the Paris tour today?”

“Of course.” Helen pulled her head back and gave him a stern schoolmarm's frown. “I'm not about to sit here with it right outside my window. No way, René.”

“I thought you might not feel good enough.” With the return of Helen's bedspread, he felt he could just as easily forgo Paris, in spite of what he'd decided in the middle of the night. He was in Paris. Whatever he did was the right thing. Staying in bed, for instance, and later finding dinner. That would be as much Paris as Napoleon's tomb.

“What would you do if I died over here?” Helen said.

“Jesus!” Matthews said. “Why would you bring that up?” The thought shocked him. This was jet lag. He'd read it was a kind of small-scale clinical depression. All chemical. No doubt Helen's medication made it worse. “Let's think about something more pleasant.”

“Would you have me buried?” she said. “Do you have to live someplace to be buried there? Here, I mean.”

“I have no idea,” Matthews said. He thought about inviting Helen back into the bed to warm him up. But he knew what would happen. Even feeling like shit, Helen would be up to that.

“I'm serious,” she said, still smoking avidly but giving him a disapproving eye for not being serious.

“I'd have you buried on the spot,” Matthews said. “Right where you fell, if that's what you wanted.”

“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.