Richard Ford - Women with Men

“So, look, we're off, you kids,” Bea said, grabbing Rex's big arm and pulling herself close to him. Matthews realized he was gazing at Rex's hair re-seeding, though he was sure Rex was used to people staring at it. “See you at eight. Don't be en retard, ” Bea said, and then away they went into the crowds.

“Bea's a firecracker,” Helen said.

“I see,” Matthews said. Bea and Rex stood waiting for the elevator. Bea waved back through the wandering tourists. He wanted to stay until they disappeared, after which he would conceivably never see them again.

“Are you taking mental notes for your next novel?” Helen said. “I hope so.”

“Who said I was writing another novel?”

“I don't know,” Helen said. “What else are you going to do? Sell sofas? Seems to me it's all you know how to do anymore. That and not like things.”

“What don't I like?” Matthews said uncomfortably. “I like you.”

“Yeah, right. And pigs have ears.”

“Pigs do have ears,” he said. “Two of them. Apiece.”

“Wings. Okay, pigs have wings. You get the point.”

He didn't get the point at all. But Helen had started for the elevator. Bea and Rex were no longer in sight. There was no chance to talk about what he did and didn't like. Not now. He simply came after and followed her to the elevator and out.

ON THE CROWDED Quai Branly, at the foot of the tower, Helen stopped in the gusty wind and gazed again straight up at the swirling misty sky, in which the spire had become obscured.

“We couldn't have seen anything way up on top, anyway,” she said. “Do you think? We got the best view there was.”

“I'm sure,” Matthews said.

Across the busy boulevard was the Pont d'Iéna, and the river, which they could barely see. They'd passed over it in the cab from the airport, but now that he was closer to the water, brown and churning and slightly rancid-smelling in winter flood, Matthews felt it gave the whole city a menacing aspect, which he suspected wasn't accurate but only seemed so at this moment. Yet that Paris could seem menacing was a new sensation: a city with such a river shares in all its aspects. He thought about telling this to Helen but presumed she wouldn't be interested.

When they had walked ten minutes along the quai, as far as the Pont de l'alma, where the Fodor's required them to cross the river in order to seek the Champs Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe and to satisfy Helen's desire for an epic stroll, she sat down on an iron bench, put her head back and took an enormous breath, then exhaled it.

This, he believed, was Helen's way of “taking it all in.”

He stood and looked across the charged river at the Trocadéro and the Palais de Chaillot — names he'd seen in the Fodor's and could now place, though without a clue to what went on there or made them important. They looked like something put up for a world's fair, which the city had then had to find uses for — like Shea Stadium in New York. Basically a mistake. All around Paris's skyline you could see profiles of construction derricks. In the cab, he'd counted seventeen in one small bombed-out piece of ground.

He felt, however, like he was with Helen now, that she was the person in charge; whereas before, even yesterday, it had been his trip and she'd only been along for it. Now, though — at least this afternoon — she'd appropriated events to her wishes, so that what he felt was surprisingly, uncomfortably young, much younger than the eight years that separated them. Yet she was more vitally involved than he was. How, he wondered, could that be?

“I'm done for,” Helen said. “I can't go another step. I've had too much fun.” She had her glasses off and was sticking a pill in her mouth.

“We can take a taxi to the Place de la Concorde,” Matthews said. “It'd still be nice to see where people had their heads chopped off.”

“I can skip it,” Helen said. “I'm stiff and I feel dizzy. I got dizzy in the Eiffel Tower. I'm still glad I went, though.” She swallowed her pill down hard. “I think I have to go home now.”

“Home all the way to West Virginia?”

“Just to the hotel right now,” she said. “I have to lie down for a while. I'm weak.” Cars and motorcycles and buses were surging by in front of them along the quai. “I'm sorry I got pissy,” she said, her head back again, staring up at the white sky.

“You weren't very pissy,” Matthews said. “You just said I didn't much like you. But I do. I like you quite a lot. It's not very easy being here now.”

“I know. It's just supposed to be,” Helen said. With her fingertip she lightly touched the tiny dent her glasses had pressed on her nose. “It's supposed to be the time of your life. You're supposed to die and go to heaven, all in the same day.”

“We ought to be used to what's supposed to happen,” Matthews said.

“Spoken like a man who's unhappily separated from his first wife,” Helen said, and grinned, still staring up. “That's just hind-spite. You should take the brighter side of things.”

“Which one is that?”

“Oh, let me see,” Helen said almost dreamily. “What does my little motto say, my little proverb?”

“‘The glory of God is to keep things hidden.’”

“There you go,” Helen said. “Doesn't that just mean: Take two pills and call me in the morning, sayeth the Lord?”

“I guess it could,” Matthews said. “It could mean why don't you shut up, too.”

“There you go. So why don't you shut up?” Helen smiled sweetly at him where he stood alone on the cold sidewalk, hands in his coat pockets, head bare to the wind. “No offense.”

“No, none taken,” Matthews said, and he began to wave for a taxi out on the crowded avenue along the river.

IN THE HOTEL, they both fell into bed and into dense sleeps, from which he did not awaken until after dark, so that when his eyes found only darkness, he had no idea where he was or what day it was or, for an instant, who Helen Carmichael might be, breathing beside him. The air all around was steamy, and he was sweating and could feel warm sweat on Helen's bare back. He lay, then, for a long time as though a great burden of sleep and fatigue was resting on his chest, and finally he let the weight sink him back into darkness as if the darkness of sleep was better than the darkness of the unknown.

In his second sleep he dreamed vividly. There, he was both sitting at what seemed to be a typical Parisian sidewalk café (something he had never done) but also watching himself do the very same thing. Wearing a heavy black overcoat and a red scarf and a disreputable-looking black beret, he was talking to someone at an extremely high rate of speed. He couldn't, in the dream, see who he was talking to, but the thought that it was Penny seemed foregone. He was still wearing a wed-ding ring.

And he was speaking French! French words (all unfathomable) were flooding out of his mouth just the way they flooded out of every Frenchman's mouth, a mile a minute. No one — whoever he was talking to — offered anything in reply. So that it was only he, Charley Matthews, rattling on and on and on in perfect French he could miraculously speak, yet, as his own observer, in no way understand.

This dream, in its own dream time, seemed to go on until, when he suddenly awoke with the feeling he'd rescued himself from some endless, winnerless race, he was exhausted and his heart was pounding, his legs aching, and even his shoulders were stiff, as though his sleep was truly a burden he'd been forced to carry for days.

The stingy fluorescent ceiling light had been turned on in the room, and for a long time Matthews lay naked and stared at the pale tube as if it was a source of assurance, though still without completely comprehending where he was or why.