Richard Ford - Women with Men

But to let her sleep in hopes she'd feel better after, that's what he'd want if he were Helen. Until then, he could walk out into the Paris streets alone, for the first time, and experience the city the way you should. Close up. Unmediated.

In thirty minutes he was showered and dressed, had found the Fodor's, drawn the curtains closed across the bright morning and left a note for Helen, which he stuck to the bathroom mirror with toothpaste. H. I'll be back by 1:00. Don't wear yourself out. We'll have a boat ride. Love, C.

ON RUE FROIDEVAUX the morning was like spring, the light watery and dense, a new warm seam in the breeze that felt foreign and impermanent but saved the day. He had it in mind to walk in any direction until he found some kind of toy store, a fancy French version where there were precious objects unimaginable to American children, and there buy a Christmas present for Lelia. He'd loaded off boxes full of obvious American toys weeks ago. All from Ohio, from a mall. But something special from France could turn out to be perfect. The gift that made all the difference. He didn't know if Lelia knew he was in France, if he'd told her he was going when they'd talked the last time, after Thanksgiving.

Consulting the Fodor's map, he made a plan to walk to the Boulevard Raspail, go left and stay on beyond the Boulevard du Montparnasse — famous streets from his map research for The Predicament— then angle down rue Vavin to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Someplace along these storied streets, he was confident he'd find the store he wanted, after which he would try another plan, which would bring him back to the Nouvelle Métropole by one to look in on Helen. This might dictate a doctor visit, although he hoped not.

He wondered if she had a copy of his book stowed away. He'd meant to make a brief search of her suitcase when he was straightening the room and she was in the bathroom. But it had slipped his mind. Though truthfully, he didn't care now. Even if portraits made people look better than they ever could be, they still didn't like the idea. Biographies were full of these feuds. Helen, however, was capable of understanding that a character was just a character, a contrivance of words — practically total invention — not some transformation of a real person to the page. Real people would always have the tendency to be themselves and not as moldable as characters should be for important discoveries to occur. (This was certainly one of the problems with The Predicament. ) Real people were always harder.

In Helen's current state, of course, it was difficult to know how she'd take it; it was possible that instead of getting furious, she might just laugh it off or even be flattered. The truth was that no one should get involved with a writer if she (or he) didn't want to show up in a book. Try a carpenter or a locksmith or an implement salesmen, and rest easy.

In the meantime he felt better about everything. And walking up the wide, congested Boulevard Raspail — a legendary street he knew almost nothing specific about, bound for some unknown destination, with little language available, no idea about currency, distances or cardinal points — made him feel a small but enlivened part of a wider, not a narrower, experience. Helen dominated life, shoved other interests aside, visualized her own interests clearly and assumed his were the same. And not that he even blamed her. He respected her for it. If his life had been narrow, the blame was his, especially given how charged he now felt as he crossed Montparnasse by Le Dôme, where Lenin and Trotsky had eaten lunch and where, he now remembered from teaching, the great Harry Crowder sang a song by Samuel Beckett in 1930. If he found his way here later and could figure out how to order soupe de poisson in French, he decided, he'd lunch at Le Dôme himself.

The best thing to say about Helen was that he wasn't adequate to her needs and demands, due to needs and demands of his own, and that he should let things go on as they now would, then quietly part company with her once they were home. He'd felt the very same — that he'd barely escaped with his life — when he left behind being a professor. He'd have taken the blame for that, too, if he'd gotten trapped there. Helen was nothing like as serious a threat. At day's end, Helen was a nice woman.

Something, without doubt, was changing in his life now, and changing for the better. The fact that he didn't mind being “lost” and alone in Paris was just one small scrap of the evidence. Blumberg's comment that nobody knew him here, which had seemed at the time (two days ago) like a great dark shadow on its way to blotting out the sun, seemed perfectly fine today. You recognized changes in yourself, he believed, not by how others felt about you, but by how you felt about yourself. And instead of worrying about how he couldn't convert experience in Paris to be applicable to Ohio, it might now be possible to convert himself to whatever went on in Paris — something he'd never have dreamed possible when he was teaching the African-American Novel at Wilmot College.

All of which made his planned visit with Madame de Grenelle even more crucial, since the translation of The Predicament seemed like the first move toward converting himself into someone available to take on more of life. That was undoubtedly why black artists had flocked to Paris: because in the process of removing themselves from the center of terrible events at home, they'd found ways to let more of life in and, in so doing, disappeared but became visible to themselves at the same time. “Paris welcomed the Negro writers.” That was the phrase he'd read in textbooks, was certainly a phrase he'd repeated over the years, accepted without giving it a thought or without believing he had anything in common with Negro writers. Perhaps, though, Paris could open its arms to Charley Matthews. He wasn't spoiled to want that now. Many stranger things had happened.

Bending off Raspail and down onto narrow rue Bréa, he without once looking walked straight to the toy store he'd sought, a narrow shop window on a block of expensive-looking jewelry stores and second-rate galleries featuring Tibetan art. si j’étais plus jeune, the sign said.

Inside the shop, which specialized in toys made in Switzerland, he discovered a bewildering variety of wonderful possibilities, everything ridiculously costly and probably nothing able to be sent as far as California with any hope of arriving unbroken before New Year's. Possibly it would be better to buy something small, cart it home and save it for later — for Lelia's birthday in March.

Though that wouldn't do. Something had to arrive from Paris, whether she knew he was here or not, and he had to get it there in time for Christmas — a week away. Expense shouldn't enter into the equation.

He continued cruising the shop, examining exquisitely carved mahogany sailboats and handmade train sets in several different sizes and shiny enamel color schemes; lavish bear, lion and llama replicas made — at least it looked like — from cashmere and real jewels; and meticulously detailed puppet-show stages with silk puppets that actually spoke in French, German or Italian, using some tiny computer. He wanted to ask the young shopgirl (who was obviously a bored fashion model) what the store might contain that was small and portable and unique and that a six-year-old girl living in the South Bay would like and for which price was no concern. The clerk, he realized, would know English, as well as French, German and Italian, and probably Swedish and Dutch and Croat, but he felt he should speak to her in French, as Helen would've. Except he didn't know how even to begin such a conversation. What he wanted was hopelessly tangled up in unknown tenses and indecipherable idiomatic expressions and implicit French comprehensions, and worst of all with French numbers — large numbers, which the French purposefully complicated and for which he didn't know any of the names above twenty. Vingt.