Richard Ford - Women with Men

Most of the other viewers on level one were Germans, the ones Blumberg had said could hold the city in joint custody with the Americans until the French came back from where it was warm. Matthews understood no German, but admired them for looking so well-off and for feeling happy to come back to the city they'd once invaded. He wondered how Helen's father would absorb that.

He seemed to remember a book he'd read or even taught in which two men took a taxi to the red-light district near Montmartre, and an orchestra was playing in a club and a lot of GIs were dancing with French girls. Teaching was finally good for this and only this, he thought — intruding on and devaluing life as lived into an indecipherable muddle of lost days and squandered experiences. He wondered how much life he'd already lost to it and for a moment tried to calculate how many days he'd lived on earth, and how many more he might hold on, and how many he'd thrown in the garbage. He got to how many days he'd lived—13,605—then felt too irritated to go on.

“Richard Wright,” he said.

“Hmmm?” Helen said. She had been silent for what seemed like a long time, taking it all in through the observation window. More Germans were circulating around them, shouldering in, pointing to places on the map and then to the same places in the real city spread in all directions in front of them. Matthews heard the words die Bedienung. He imagined it meant something admiring: the recognition of a paradise lost for the fatherland. Whatever it was, it made the Germans laugh. “Die Bedienung,” he mouthed to himself, and made the little gasping sound Blumberg had made.

“What did you say?” Helen said.

“I just remembered I once read a book where an important scene takes place in Montmartre,” Matthews said. “Richard Wright wrote it, I think.”

Helen looked at him as if she had no idea what that might mean to him. She blinked behind her glasses and looked troubled.

“Die Bedienung, ” Matthews said, but did not gasp.

“Who?”

“It's all right,” he said. “It doesn't matter.”

“The professor,” Helen said, and looked back intently at the gray-brown matte of Paris, as if it were hers to command.

WHEN HELEN CAME BACK from her trip to the Eiffel Tower ladies’ room, she was not alone. She was with a man and a woman, and all three of them were having a loud joke.

“Look who's got nothing else to do but climb the Eiffel Tower,” Helen said, even more loudly. She mimicked being thrown off balance by the sway of the tower in the wind. “Whoa,” she said, and laughed again. Helen seemed no longer sick but happy. Matthews was sorry to see these people. You could ruin your whole experience, he thought, by running into someone you knew. You could lose the feeling of being set adrift in a strange sea, which he was beginning to enjoy.

“This is Rex and Cuddles,” Helen said.

“Cuddles, my butt,” Cuddles said, rolling her eyes and winking at Matthews.

“Cuddles too much,” Helen said.

The Germans were staring at them. Matthews felt sorry to find these people.

“This is Charley,” Helen went on. “Charley's my amour impropre. My amour temporaire, anyway.”

He shook hands with Rex, who volunteered that he and this woman were friends of Helen's from “the old days in Pittsburgh.”

“We're American,” Cuddles said, brimming.

“Can't you guess.” Helen gave Cuddles, whose actual name turned out to be Beatrice, a fishy look. “Bea -at- rice the actress,” Helen said. “They're taking us to our incomparable meal tonight.”

“It's been decided coming out of the Mesdames, ” Beatrice said. She was a much too slender woman, with tanned skin that was too tanned, and tight black pedal pushers that she wore with white ankle socks and ballet slippers. She had on a large black motorcycle jacket and looked like somebody out of the fifties, Matthews thought. Somebody who'd lived in coffeehouses for years, smoked a lot of marijuana, read too much awful poetry and probably written plenty herself. These people were always bores and had strong, idiotic opinions about everything. He looked around him. Germans and Japanese — Axis-power tourists — were eddying noisily this way and that on the viewing platform. His gaze fell out onto the city, the City of Light, a place where no one knew him, a provocative place until this moment. He felt slightly dizzy.

“Bea and Rex come to the Eiffel Tower once a year,” Helen said. “Isn't that romantic?”

“It is,” Matthews said.

“Otherwise you could forget you're in Paris,” Rex said solemnly.

“You might think you're in Tokyo up here, though,” Helen said, eyeing the clusters of Japanese pressing toward the observation windows, jabbering and adjusting their cameras for good snaps.

Rex was watching the Japanese without smiling. He was a big, mealy-skinned, full-bellied man who wore cowboy boots and what Matthews remembered his father calling a car coat. He'd had one when he was ten, and his had matched his father's. Rex had endured a hair transplant that'd left a neat row of stalky-thin hair follicles straight across his dome. It was recent, or possibly it hadn't worked out perfectly. But Rex seemed happy to meet Helen up here, where he was happy to be, anyway. Rex, he thought, was undoubtedly Helen's age and was what men Helen's age looked like if everything hadn't gone right. Rex must've weighed two fifty. Bea, on the other hand, might've made a hundred.

“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.