Richard Ford - Women with Men

Helen knew what he'd been thinking, that was clear, and he realized he shouldn't say anything more now, since she'd said she didn't want to find a doctor. Though where would you find a doctor on rue Froidevaux at seven o'clock the week before Christmas? He remembered shiny brass plaques set into the sides of the rich brownstones on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais. “Dr. So-and-so, Chirurgien.” You couldn't get one of these guys at seven p.m. They were all away, were just at that very moment sitting down to a jolly dinner beside a warm ocean beach where dry palms were gently clattering. To see a doctor, you'd need to call an ambulance and get carted out through the lobby on a stretcher. If you were lucky.

“Are you sure you feel up to going to dinner?” he said.

“I feel absolutely wonderful.” She was pulling a matching peach-colored sweater over her thick hair. Helen liked matching colors — down to her shoes, the tint of her stockings, sometimes her lipstick and eye shadow. It made her feel good to match. He began climbing out of bed, stiff from his dream but happier to worry about Helen's health than about whether she'd read his novel. Helen's health was important, and that was what he intended to concentrate on.

“Do you think I look nice enough for Paris?” Helen said. She was standing in the middle of the crummy room, up on her peachy high heels, her glasses catching a glimmer from the gauzy light.

“You look terrific,” Matthews said, holding his blanket up to cover himself. He smiled at her too animatedly. “I'd happily take you anywhere in the world.” Except Clancy's, he thought.

“Would you really?” He heard a rare, faint trace of West Virginia accent in Helen's voice. Her eyes were wide, as if his declaration surprised her.

“Absolutely,” he said. He thought about putting his arms around her, but she was all dressed and ready, and he was, in essence, naked.

“I wish I had some champagne right now,” she said.

“We'll get you champagne.” He began moving toward his suitcase. “We'll have champagne at Clancy's.”

“I just meant right then. It's already gone. I just had a moment when to be holding a glass of champagne would've been very nice.”

“I bet you'll have a glass before you know it,” Matthews said.

“Oh. I bet I will too.” Helen smiled at him, then turned to gaze out the dark window, while Matthews got himself ready to go.

CLANCY'S was a big, noisy, brassily lit room off the rue St.-Antoine, near the Bastille, in what, Rex gloated, was “the Frenchiest part of Paris.” He and Beatrice had already downed one bottle of champagne by the time Matthews and Helen arrived, and were awaiting the arrival of another one.

“They mix up the best martinis in the world here,” Rex said loudly, standing up and giving Matthews’ hand a big engulfing pump. “But I hate to drink gin on an empty stomach. Don't you, Bill?”

“We didn't think you kids would mind if we got a head start,” Beatrice said, grinning and clearly drunk.

“That's exactly how I feel,” Helen said, getting seated and into the spirit of things. “The race goes to the drunkest. Sit down, Bill,” she said. “This is where we're going. In case you didn't know it.”

Rex began explaining that two American Pan Am pilots, “a couple of guys named Joe from Kansas City,” got tired of not finding steaks in Paris up to their high standards and decided to retire early and open a place for people like themselves, who were stranded here with similar needs and tastes. They found this place, put in the good lighting, got the ambience established with a lot of vintage black-and-white photographs — Babe Ruth hitting a homer, Rocky Marciano KO’ing some black guy. And the rest was history. Both the pilots had unfortunately died of AIDS, Rex said soberly, but the business had been kept going by loyal family members, including one pilot's former wife. It was the best-kept secret in town, and generally considered the unofficial headquarters for the overseas community, a place where you could relax, be yourself and get shit-faced in peace, just like back home. Regrettably, it was beginning to get crowded, and even some French people were showing up, though they were always given the worst tables.

Matthews had realized, on the cab ride over, that he'd set a scene in The Predicament exactly where rue St.-Antoine entered the Place de la Bastille, directly across from a big opera house they passed, and that the crowded, brightly lit roundabout they'd driven through looked precisely the way he'd imagined it, though he'd made it possible to walk down to the Seine in less than five minutes, which was clearly impossible.

Rex Mountjoy, it turned out, was in the machine parts business, specializing in farm implements. American manufacturers had a hammerlock on the big farm-machinery market, Rex said, but their Achilles’ heel was that their parts-and-service was way too expensive and they were essentially shooting themselves in the foot. Rex's big, heavy-jowled, heavy-lidded face grew even more solemn in the discussion of his own affairs. From thousands of miles across the ocean, in the corporate parts department of a big-market-share company headquarters, Rex had spied an opening where a smart gunslinger type could pick up refurbished parts in the States, sell them direct into the infant retail implement market here in France, and come away with a bundle. He hadn't thought his business would stay profitable for longer than two, maybe three years, until the competition in the EU got wise to him and some bureaucrat up in Brussels tailor-made a regulation to embargo exactly what he was doing. “But we're still here,” Rex said, putting his giant farm-implement mitts around a big martini glass and sniffing the simple pleasures of his success. “The French all hate to work. It's that simple,” Rex said prodigiously. “They're fighting a rearguard action against the success ethic. If you had a good idea, you'd definitely want to bring it over here and sell it on the street.”

“That's good advice,” Matthews said. He had ordered a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé, which Beatrice had immediately begun calling “foolish pussy.” Both Beatrice and Helen, who were again locked in an intensely private conversation, occasionally looked up to refer to Matthews’ “foolish pussy”—Helen with a blazing smile that seemed to him feverish and hot.

“Have some more foolish pussy, Bill,” Helen practically shouted, then laughed noisily, her mouth open so Matthews could see her tongue, wide and flat and café-au-lait-colored — a color he knew doctors associated with illness. The tongue, his mother had always said, the tongue tells the story of your health. Helen's tongue wasn't telling a good story.

Rex, it became clear, had ordered everything for everybody — which included more martinis, big iceberg salads with beefsteak tomatoes and onion slabs drenched in white vinegar, continent-sized sirloins with two accompanying Idahos on platters all by themselves. A boat full of butter, sour cream, chives, bacon crumbles, steak sauces, horseradish, mustard and ketchup was set in the middle of the table on a lazy Susan with three previously aired bottles of Côtes du Rhône. Rex announced that if anyone wanted anything else, they only had to ask for it, “just as long as it isn't poulet and haricots verts. ”

“Really. If I don't eat two of these a week, I get goddamn anemic,” Beatrice said, sawing straight into her red meat, holding her fork like a shoehorn. Beatrice was dressed in the same black bohemian outfit she'd had on in the Eiffel Tower; and because she was drunk now and seemed irritable, she looked, Matthews thought, like the picture of an anemic person.

Rex, on the other hand, seemed to have grown jollier and much more companionable as the day and now the night wore on. He was dressed like somebody headed for a college football game, a big red crewneck sweater over a green plaid sport shirt and a pair of brown corduroys — clothes Matthews hadn't noticed earlier because of the car coat. He'd refashioned his hair transplant so it didn't make him look as absurd — though his big-browed forehead still appeared tender and slightly angry in spots.