Richard Ford - Women with Men

“Don't sleep forever,” he heard Helen say.

“Why not?”

“It'll ruin your sleep. You have to wake up now so you can sleep later.”

Matthews raised only his head and looked down the length of his body. Helen was standing in the bathroom door, a towel wrapped around her breasts and waist. With another towel she was drying her hair in the stronger light of the bathroom. She looked large and important in the doorway. “Junoesque” was the word she liked. It was this particular attitude and incarnation that allowed Helen to think most people couldn't handle her and that she was too much for most men. Matthews stared at her in the lighted doorway, thinking that the soapy flower smell from the shower had now overpowered the sweaty smell from earlier. “We haven't eaten all day,” Helen said. “Did you realize that? Not that I'm hungry.”

The thought of Beatrice and Rex floated unhappily back into his mind. “Did we cancel dinner with your friends, or did I dream that?”

“You dreamed it.” Helen tilted her head sideways so her long, pale hair fell to the side and she could dry the parts that were underneath.

“We should have,” Matthews said. “I'd rather die here now than eat dinner at — where was it?”

“Clancy's,” Helen said, then took a deep breath and sighed. “Clon-cee. You don't have to go with me.”

“I have to if you do,” Matthews said. “How do you feel?”

“I feel absolutely wonderful,” she said. “I've decided I'm going to read your book next.”

“My book?” Matthews said.

“Yes,” Helen said. “Ton livre.”

“You won't like it,” Matthews said. “Nobody but the French like it.”

As a first perfectly clear thought, this was not welcome news. Helen had always acted as though his book and the fact that he'd written it were merely amusing if not actually embarrassing and ridiculous anomalies, in no way worth taking time to investigate. A kind of engrossing but valueless hobby. Her standard line — offered even to Matthews’ parents and sister in Cleveland — had been that she didn't intend to read The Predicament because she was afraid she'd either like it so much Matthews would then hopelessly intimidate her, or else hate it so much she'd never be able to take him seriously again and their relationship would be over. (Privately, she'd told him only explanation two was the real one.)

This had suited Matthews fine, inasmuch as in the last months of writing The Predicament, and not long after he'd begun his affair with Helen, he'd inserted a character who was — even he knew — somewhat modeled on her: a tall, ash-blond, Buick-bumper, Rockette type he'd exaggerated into a garish woman who wore mules, slit-up-the-sides dresses, and talked in a loud voice about coarse subjects, but whom the protagonist clings to after his wife abandons him, even though they have little in common but sex. In Matthews’ mind, this was not Helen Carmichael; only one or two superficial details were appropriated. And it was in no way meant to size Helen up or be her portrait.

Except try to tell Helen that. Helen maintained strong certainties about her own substance and integrity, but also spent considerable time scanning the no-man's-land around her like a razor-beam searchlight, on the lookout for possible adversaries and nonbelievers. Plus she wasn't stupid — though her personal reading tastes were always for best-sellers and ghoulish police mysteries. She would certainly see the character of Carlette as a not especially flattering image of herself and would be mad as hell about it. It was not a prospect Matthews felt eager to confront in the midst of an expensive and already half-wrecked trip to Europe.

And not that he'd blame her — assuming she got to the Carlette part. Probably people never had kind thoughts about seeing themselves in someone else's made-up book. It was a matter, he understood, of power and authority: one person's being usurped or stolen outright by another, for at very best indifferent purposes. And that was definitely how Helen would view it. So, if he could, he would like to keep her from feeling any of these bad ways by discouraging her from reading The Predicament anytime soon.

“I'm sure I won't like it,” Helen said, having disappeared back into the tiny bathroom, where Matthews could hear her unscrewing the top of some kind of jar, then popping the cap on a container of pills. “I just thought it might tell me something interesting about you.”

“I'm not very interesting.” Matthews stared unhappily up at the fluorescent tube, which produced its thin, mint-colored and quaverous light. He pulled the blanket over his lower half, though the room still felt steamy.

“I'm sure you're not,” Helen said. She opened the medicine cabinet and closed it. “I just want to uncover the real Charley Matthews. The man behind the whatever. Whatever the French think is so thrilling. Maybe you're deep and I don't know it.” Helen stuck her head around the doorjamb and smiled at him meanly. “You know? Deeeeep,” Helen said. “You're deeeeep.”

“I'm not deep at all,” Matthews said, feeling trapped.

“No, I know that,” she said, disappearing once more.

Though in a moment she emerged wearing a slip, her hair almost dry. She stepped across the tiny cluttered room to where her blue plastic suitcase was open on the floor and squatted beside it to unpack clean clothes.

Turning sideways, prepared to say something about the utter inanity of his own novel, Matthews noticed surprisingly that Helen had an enormous purple and black and even brown bruise halfway up her left thigh. And another one, he saw now, was on her other thigh, close to her underpants, just where her buttocks began to bloom outward in the way he liked.

“Jesus, what in the hell are those big bruises!” he said, and leaned up on one elbow as if to get closer. “They look like you fell off a damn truck.”

“Thanks,” Helen said, still going through her packed clothes.

“What caused them?”

“I don't know.” Helen stopped her hands for a moment in their busy delving and looked up at the window, a perfect blank curtain of night that seemed to block any light from escaping. She took a breath and let it out. “Maybe it's my medicine,” she said, and shook her head. Then she knelt on one knee and went back to her clothes. “You should get dressed if you're coming with me.”

“Did they just show up?” Matthews said. He was transfixed by these bruises, which looked like big gloomy expressionist paintings or else thunderclouds.

“Did what show up?”

“Those bruises.”

“Yep. They did.” She seemed to want to look at her hip where her slip's hem was above the bruise, but didn't look.

“Have you had them before?” he said, still in his bed. “I've never seen them.”

“Look. What difference does it make?” Helen said, supremely annoyed. “I have a goddamn bruise. Okay? I can't help it.”

“Do they hurt?”

“No. They don't hurt. If you hadn't pointed them out like I was a goddamn sideshow, I wouldn't have thought about them. So leave it alone.”

“Do you want to see a doctor?” He understood mysterious bruises of that sort were serious. You didn't get bruises like these — and maybe there were others too — from bumping into bedposts and armchairs. These were possibly related to Helen's cancer. She could be sick again, and how she felt this morning — stiff and weak — and then dizzy this afternoon could be interpreted as symptoms of cancer coming back. She probably knew it herself but didn't want it to interfere with the trip.

“I'll go to my doctor when I get home,” she said. She was pulling one of her signature short skirts, this one peach-colored, over her hips, so that her two bruises went out of sight.