Richard Ford - Women with Men

Oxford was out now. He hadn't thought about Oxford in two days. He'd looked forward to realizing — certifying was the better word — the idyll he'd esteemed all these years. The “sweet City with her dreaming spires.” It was Matthew Arnold. He'd been offered encouragement fifteen years ago, written his essay on “Mont Blanc,” stressing similarities with Thoreau but casting doubt on Shelley's view of the physical world as animate. It had won a minor college prize. But that had been that. He hadn't made it to Oxford the first time. This would be the second.

Reaching the conflux with Montparnasse, he saw across to the taxi queue by the station, where he and Helen had waited to go to the Invalides the day before. French trains must arrive in clusters, he thought, since thirty people were lined up with their suitcases. Only one taxi was angling off the avenue for a pickup. He would be there all day, when at the most he had a twenty-minute walk. He could call the room, but that would take more time, and Helen might still be asleep.

Without quite meaning to, he'd jettisoned the Club 21 and St.-Germain. When he came back to Paris, it would all be different; when his book was published — the book Helen could've been lying in bed reading while he tramped the streets. The next time, he'd be alone. His orientation to the city would change. For one thing, the squalid Nouvelle Métropole wouldn't be the epicenter. Probably he wouldn't be able to find it, whereas now it was “home.” Next time he would stay nearer St.-Sulpice and the Luxembourg — the heart of Paris.

Thinking of Helen at that moment reading The Predicament in their cramped, smelly little room made him feel, oddly, not like the writer of that book, not even like a writer at all — far from how he'd imagined feeling when he thought about occupying the same room for a month, expecting to create something there. Though it might be a positive sign not to think of yourself as a writer, or not to think of yourself much at all. Only phonies went around thinking of themselves as being this or that. Self-regard was the enemy.

In any case, he could never write about Paris — the real Paris. He would never know enough. It could simply season him, call up an effect, color his views. He would never, for instance, think of Christmas again in the crude, gaudy American way. Paris had been added. It was possible even to increase your brainpower with the additions of unusual experience. Most people, he'd read, operated on one-sixteenth of their brain's ability. But what happened if they began operating on an eighth? The world would change overnight. Great writers, the same article had said, operated on a fourth.

The granite lion was dead ahead now, in the roundabout on Boulevard Raspail. Denfert-Rochereau was entering from the left. That would've been the metro stop. In the median strip on rue Froidevaux, children were playing Ping-Pong on green concrete tables, two on a side. Occasional flurries of ragged wind deflected the balls off the table, but the children retrieved them and began playing again immediately — their serves bouncing high over the low concrete barriers that served as nets. They were laughing and jabbering: “Allez! Allez! Sup-er, sup-er!”

He wondered what had happened to the man last night, the man who'd slept in the burial vault in his bedroll. Along the cemetery wall he could see reddish, leafless treetops. Was the same man there every night, or had that been his first time to scale the wall and seek that shelter? You wouldn't come back from that decline, Matthews thought.

In the sparsely furnished lobby of the Nouvelle Métropole, an Indian or possibly a Pakistani man approached him the moment he entered through the glass doors. It was as though the man had been waiting for him. He wasn't sure he'd seen this man before. Possibly when they'd checked in. A manager. The man wore a dark-blue suit, a white shirt and a dark-green tie; his black hair was neatly parted and combed. He smiled hesitantly, and his mouth showed a good amount of dark gums. He seemed, Matthews thought, concerned about something — how long they were staying, or some problems with a credit card; matters Matthews had already worked out with the other hotel personnel but that obviously hadn't been transmitted to this man. Everything was settled. He would see Madame de Grenelle in two days, and then, if Helen was well enough, they would leave.

“There is a problem,” the Indian manager said in English, coming straight up to him and standing close, as if he expected to whisper. Though he spoke too loud. “A serious problem,” he said. Matthews had already prepared an answer in French, about credit cards.

“What sort of serious problem?” he said. A younger Indian man stood alone behind the reception, his hands on the counter. He was staring at Matthews and also seemed concerned.

“The woman in forty-one,” the manager said, and cut his eyes toward the reception. “I'm sorry. You are in forty-one? Is this true?” The corners of his smooth brown mouth twitched slightly. He might've been suppressing a smile. What had Helen done that was funny?

“That's my wife,” Matthews said. “She's jet-lagged. If you'd like to clean the room, we'll go out for lunch.”

“I'm sorry,” the Indian manager said, and brought his two hands together at his waist and clasped them and blinked. His mouth twitched again, so that he could only repeat himself. “I'm sorry,” he said again.

“What about?” Matthews said. “What are you sorry about? What's happening?” He looked at the manager, blinked his eyes too, took a breath, let it out, then waited to learn whatever the problem was, whatever would be next, the next inconvenience he'd need to divert from its present course onto a better one. It would be something simple. These things were the same — never easy, but simple. Nothing was ever easy. He was sure of that, if he wasn't sure of anything else.

And then the man began to explain what the problem was about.

THEIR ROOM smelled a way it hadn't smelled before. The curtains and the window had been opened, the air inside was cold, but still it smelled different. Not like death, but a clean, astringent odor, as though the room had been gone over, scrubbed and put right at some point. Outside somewhere, a dog was barking, a slow, determined barking — something the dog saw but didn't recognize. A mystery. Something that didn't fit into its regular world.

Their luggage was still stacked where he'd put it when they'd come back last night. Nothing was very different in the room. The Arab pictures were the same. The fluorescent light had been turned on. An empty bottle of Bombay gin had been added. Several — possibly four in all — clear plastic freezer bags, empty. A glass from the bathroom, also empty. An ashtray with two cigarettes stubbed out. But mostly neat. Had they scrubbed the room? he wondered. Who'd opened the window? He realized he felt slightly faint.

Helen lay on her side, her right hand open under her cheek, her left hand lost beneath the covers. She was wearing at least her pale-pink pajama top with dark piping. Her glasses were on the table beside the plastic freezer bags and his note. She was very, very pale, her features fixed. Her thick hair wasn't disarranged. Her bottom lip seemed to be tucked in under the top, her teeth undoubtedly resting on it. It was an attitude of sleep.

In the hallway outside he heard the elevator door open, then whispers. A woman's whisper and a man's. Suddenly a young Indian woman came into the doorway, one of the maids, in a loose-fitting, beltless seersucker dress. A large girl. She leaned in, looked at the bed, gasped, then disappeared. In a moment, the elevator closed.

On the night table were two white envelopes. One marked: Mgt — Hotel Nouvelle Métropole SEULEMENT! He sat in the green chair and opened this immediately. In it was a folded piece of white notepaper on which was written: My fate is my responsibility. Mr. Matthews is not my husband. It was signed: Helen Carmichael. Her passport was enclosed.