Richard Ford - Women with Men

“While it lasted,” Helen said, her eyes glistening behind her glasses.

“While we lasted,” Rex said.

“And they always do this,” Beatrice said. “They get drunk, and then they get overcome with everything. I usually just leave.”

“Don't leave now,” Helen said, and smiled sweetly.

“Turkwoz,” Matthews heard someone say at a nearby table. “It was Egyptian turkwoz — that's the very best. Better than that American garbage.”

Rex turned to look at who'd said this. He had phased out of the conversation for a moment, thinking about dancing with Helen in faraway Pittsburgh.

“That was a different era,” Beatrice said solemnly. “It was long before I came on the scene.”

“I don't believe in eras,” Helen said. “I believe it's all continuous. Now and then. Women and men.”

“Well, good for you,” Beatrice said, and she stood up to attend whatever was going on in the ladies’ room, leaving the three of them alone.

“Matthews isn't divorced yet,” Helen said. “He also has a daughter he almost never sees. I don't think he wants to be divorced, if the truth were known, which it always is eventually. But I think he needs to be divorced. You need to be divorced, Charley.”

“Helen always has plenty of opinions,” Rex said. Waiters were clearing away plates.

“I'm aware of that,” Matthews said.

“Don't you have to be pretty obsessive to be a writer?” Rex asked again.

“No. I don't think so,” Matthews said. “I don't think I am.”

“You're not?” Rex said. “That's funny. I'd have thought you needed to be. Shows you what I know anymore. About anything.”

ON THE TAXI RIDE back up the Boulevards St. Marcel and Arago it was snowing, the large heavy flakes seeming not to fall but to stay suspended in the yellow streetlight halos, backed by red taillights and darkness.

They had said good night to Rex and Beatrice on the snowy side street outside the restaurant. Dessert had ultimately been decided against. Helen said she wasn't holding up well, that it was only their second day, that her stomach was involved. Rich food. Drinking too much. Matthews’ translator was invoked. A need to sleep.

Beatrice and Rex both seemed to regard Helen with amazement that she could be whatever she still was, while they had “gone on” to be whatever they so clearly were: a nothing businessman and a bad-tempered counterculture failure, in Matthews’ view. Helen, he thought, was much better at being Helen than they were at being Rex and Cuddles.

Helen had stood in the snowy street in her pumps and peach outfit, and waved at them as their taxi disappeared toward the lights of the Bastille and wherever they lived in the suburbs behind Montreuil. Inside Clancy's the party wore on.

“I used to love Rex,” she said, putting a pill in her mouth, one she'd dug with some difficulty out of her handbag. “God, memory's a terrible thing. Whoever invented it — I'd like to get my hands on him.”

As their taxi passed the lion statue in the middle of Place Denfert-Rochereau, Helen gazed out at the rich old apartment buildings down Boulevard Raspail. Suddenly she said, “Do you have a belief in any spirituality of any kind, Charley?”

“Like what?” Matthews said. “Like church? We were Protestants. We gave at the office.”

“Not like church,” Helen said languidly. “I went to church. That's not the same as spiritual. I mean a conviction about something good that you can't see. That kind of thing.”

Matthews thought about Lelia. She came to mind, surprisingly. He hadn't seen her in more than a year and a half, and wasn't sure exactly when he would again. Her future, he felt, was something he believed in, although he wasn't currently acting on it. But he didn't want to say that to Helen. She'd turn it on him, as she already had.

“I do. Yes,” he said.

“And what would that be?” Helen said. She inscribed a little rainbow with her finger on the sweated window, fastened her gaze outside on the sky full of snowflakes.

“What would that be?” Matthews said. “Well. I have a conviction about the idea of change. I believe things change for the better. If they can. Sometimes we think they can't, so that's where the faith part comes in.” He didn't know why he'd said that and in that particular way — as though he were explaining it to a student. Only it didn't sound lame, and now that he'd said it he was satisfied it was true. He wished Penny could've heard it. It would've fixed her good.

“Yes, well,” Helen said as the blue neon sign of the Nouvelle Métropole materialized out of the night. “That wasn't what I wanted, but it's what you said. So I accept it. It's vague. But you're a little vague.”

“Maybe I am,” Matthews said. “I could be.”

“And what of it, right?” She looked at him and smiled a not very friendly smile.

“Right,” he said in the dark taxi seat. “What of it, is right.”

IN THEIR ROOM, the air was dank-smelling and cold again. It was past the hour when heat came in the pipes. Bed was the only place to find warmth. Possibly Paris was not always this cold now, Matthews thought.

Helen went in the bathroom and closed the door and locked it. He heard her running bathwater, heard the toilet flush several times, heard what might've been vomiting but could've been only coughing. Helen hadn't eaten, but she was ingesting medicine of some kind, and that could make you nauseated. She was in pain, he felt sure. She acted as if pain was her companion. Cancer meant pain, and those bruises on her legs were from the cancer she'd had but didn't, reasonably enough, care to discuss.

He did not, in truth, know what to do with himself in the tiny, cold room. Some fearful tension had been alerted in him, and Helen's importance (what else could he call it?) in the overall scheme of things had overshadowed his own. He sat down on the bed and tried to envision his upcoming visit to his translator, but none of that was interesting enough to be distracting. He tried to think about Penny and Lelia, in the middle of their happy day. Christmastime — what was it like in the Bay Area? That didn't hold, either. Helen was possibly in some dire way, and that seemed what everything was about. Best to give into it, yet quietly hope he was wrong.

He got up and tried to move his suitcase in such a way that Helen could walk out of the bathroom and straight to the bed without stepping over part of it. To do that he had to close it; but even closed it had to lie on top of hers, which made the room neater but rendered the suitcases inaccessible. They needed to be opened and on the floor to be available, only then the TV or the bathroom couldn't be reached. He decided to leave them stacked, for convenience’ sake.

He did not, however, want to get into bed. Helen would not be up for sexual shenanigans, but to be in bed when she appeared could indicate that he was, which could cause problems of an unpredictable character. Helen had recently made some nasty cracks about how full-throatedly eager he was for the kind of sex she specialized in—“grown-up sex,” she called it; or, other times, “sex without hand-holding.” Possibly he had been less than full-throated about that. For some reason, women all seemed sexually insatiable now. A woman at the college, a professor of economics he'd had an encounter with in the first bewildering week after Penny's departure, had needed to be fucked all the time, which he hadn't much liked. It had made him hesitant. There was no meeting, nor was one even wished for. To deny her anything had been deemed a vicious insult. Women had always been able to say “No,” or “Let's go slow at first,” or “I'm not ready”—whatever they wanted. And men had been required to think it was fine. Now men couldn't say those same things without pissing everybody off. So, if he got in bed, Helen would in all likelihood taunt him for wanting sex when it was obvious she wasn't interested, even if he wasn't interested either. Of course, it was also possible she might be interested — bruises, pain, jet lag, nausea, cancer — who cares. She might think of it as analgesic. It was another reason to stay out of bed, though he was tired and ready for sleep.