Women with Men (20 page)

He seemed to remember a book he'd read or even taught in which two men took a taxi to the red-light district near Montmartre, and an orchestra was playing in a club and a lot of GIs were dancing with French girls. Teaching was finally good for this and only this, he thought—intruding on and devaluing life as lived into an indecipherable muddle of lost days and squandered experiences. He wondered how much life he'd already lost to it and for a moment tried to calculate how many days he'd lived on earth, and how many more he might hold on, and how many he'd thrown in the garbage. He got to how many days he'd lived—13,605—then felt too irritated to go on.

“Richard Wright,” he said.

“Hmmm?” Helen said. She had been silent for what seemed like a long time, taking it all in through the observation
window. More Germans were circulating around them, shouldering in, pointing to places on the map and then to the same places in the real city spread in all directions in front of them. Matthews heard the words
die Bedienung.
He imagined it meant something admiring: the recognition of a paradise lost for the fatherland. Whatever it was, it made the Germans laugh.
“Die Bedienung,”
he mouthed to himself, and made the little gasping sound Blumberg had made.

“What did you say?” Helen said.

“I just remembered I once read a book where an important scene takes place in Montmartre,” Matthews said. “Richard Wright wrote it, I think.”

Helen looked at him as if she had no idea what that might mean to him. She blinked behind her glasses and looked troubled.

“Die Bedienung,
” Matthews said, but did not gasp.

“Who?”

“It's all right,” he said. “It doesn't matter.”

“The professor,” Helen said, and looked back intently at the gray-brown matte of Paris, as if it were hers to command.

WHEN HELEN CAME BACK
from her trip to the Eiffel Tower ladies’ room, she was not alone. She was with a man and a woman, and all three of them were having a loud joke.

“Look who's got nothing else to do but climb the Eiffel Tower,” Helen said, even more loudly. She mimicked being thrown off balance by the sway of the tower in the wind. “Whoa,” she said, and laughed again. Helen seemed no longer sick but happy. Matthews was sorry to see these people. You could ruin your whole experience, he thought, by running into someone you knew. You could lose the feeling of
being set adrift in a strange sea, which he was beginning to enjoy.

“This is Rex and Cuddles,” Helen said.

“Cuddles, my butt,” Cuddles said, rolling her eyes and winking at Matthews.

“Cuddles too much,” Helen said.

The Germans were staring at them. Matthews felt sorry to find these people.

“This is Charley,” Helen went on. “Charley's my
amour impropre.
My
amour temporaire,
anyway.”

He shook hands with Rex, who volunteered that he and this woman were friends of Helen's from “the old days in Pittsburgh.”

“We're American,” Cuddles said, brimming.

“Can't you guess.” Helen gave Cuddles, whose actual name turned out to be Beatrice, a fishy look. “Bea
-at-
rice the actress,” Helen said. “They're taking us to our incomparable meal tonight.”

“It's been decided coming out of the
Mesdames,
” Beatrice said. She was a much too slender woman, with tanned skin that was too tanned, and tight black pedal pushers that she wore with white ankle socks and ballet slippers. She had on a large black motorcycle jacket and looked like somebody out of the fifties, Matthews thought. Somebody who'd lived in coffeehouses for years, smoked a lot of marijuana, read too much awful poetry and probably written plenty herself. These people were always bores and had strong, idiotic opinions about everything. He looked around him. Germans and Japanese—Axis-power tourists—were eddying noisily this way and that on the viewing platform. His gaze fell out onto the city, the City of Light, a place where no one knew him, a provocative place until this moment. He felt slightly dizzy.

“Bea and Rex come to the Eiffel Tower once a year,” Helen said. “Isn't that romantic?”

“It is,” Matthews said.

“Otherwise you could forget you're in Paris,” Rex said solemnly.

“You might think you're in Tokyo up here, though,” Helen said, eyeing the clusters of Japanese pressing toward the observation windows, jabbering and adjusting their cameras for good snaps.

Rex was watching the Japanese without smiling. He was a big, mealy-skinned, full-bellied man who wore cowboy boots and what Matthews remembered his father calling a car coat. He'd had one when he was ten, and his had matched his father's. Rex had endured a hair transplant that'd left a neat row of stalky-thin hair follicles straight across his dome. It was recent, or possibly it hadn't worked out perfectly. But Rex seemed happy to meet Helen up here, where he was happy to be, anyway. Rex, he thought, was undoubtedly Helen's age and was what men Helen's age looked like if everything hadn't gone right. Rex must've weighed two fifty. Bea, on the other hand, might've made a hundred.

“You're a writer?” Rex said in a jokey voice.

“Not exactly,” Matthews said. A man in the milling crowd, plainly an American, looked right in his face after hearing Rex say he was a writer. The man was clearly wondering if Matthews was somebody famous, and if so, who.

“Bea writes poetry,” Rex said.

“That's wonderful,” Matthews said. Helen and Bea were sharing a private word. Bea was shaking her head as though expressing surprise, then her eyes flickered at Matthews and away again. Some accusation, he assumed, Helen had lodged that would never have been made if they hadn't bumped into
Cuddles and Rex. All at once a choir of voices, from somewhere on the platform, began singing a Christmas carol in German.
“O, Tannenbaum…”
It turned the whole place, 187 feet aloft, calamitous and chaotic.

“It must be a burden to have a compulsion to write,” Rex practically shouted.

“It's not, no,” Matthews said, trying to be heard.

“I never had it,” Rex said. “I wasn't compelled.”

Suddenly the caroling stopped, as if somebody in authority had decided it was much too loud.

“That's all right,” Matthews said more normally. “I'm not compelled either.”

“Hell, yes, it's all right,” Rex said, sternly for some reason. “What any person chooses to do is all right.”

Rex's big sad brown eyes were set wide apart and separated by a wide barge of a nose that had probably been broken many times. Rex seemed as stupid as a bullock, and Matthews did not want to have dinner with him. More than likely, Helen would not be up to it anyway.

“I guess so,” Matthews said, and smiled, but Rex was looking around for the carolers.

Helen and Bea rejoined them, with a plan worked out.

“Clancy's. We're dining at Clancy's,” Helen said eagerly.

“I know, it doesn't sound French,” Bea said. “But how much French food can you eat? You'll like it.”

“Matthews just wants it to be incomparable,” Helen said. “But he eats what I tell him to.”

“That's good,” Bea said, and patted Matthews on the arm.

Matthews didn't like being called Matthews. Sometimes Helen did it when she was in her cups, then would often keep doing it for hours. It was also Helen's choice of words that they have an “incomparable” meal. It was her Paris fantasy. It was a word he wouldn't use.

“So, look, we're off, you kids,” Bea said, grabbing Rex's big arm and pulling herself close to him. Matthews realized he was gazing at Rex's hair re-seeding, though he was sure Rex was used to people staring at it. “See you at eight. Don't be
en retard,
” Bea said, and then away they went into the crowds.

“Bea's a firecracker,” Helen said.

“I see,” Matthews said. Bea and Rex stood waiting for the elevator. Bea waved back through the wandering tourists. He wanted to stay until they disappeared, after which he would conceivably never see them again.

“Are you taking mental notes for your next novel?” Helen said. “I hope so.”

“Who said I was writing another novel?”

“I don't know,” Helen said. “What else are you going to do? Sell sofas? Seems to me it's all you know how to do anymore. That and not like things.”

“What don't I like?” Matthews said uncomfortably. “I like you.”

“Yeah, right. And pigs have ears.”

“Pigs do have ears,” he said. “Two of them. Apiece.”

“Wings. Okay, pigs have wings. You get the point.”

He didn't get the point at all. But Helen had started for the elevator. Bea and Rex were no longer in sight. There was no chance to talk about what he did and didn't like. Not now. He simply came after and followed her to the elevator and out.

ON THE CROWDED
Quai Branly, at the foot of the tower, Helen stopped in the gusty wind and gazed again straight up at the swirling misty sky, in which the spire had become obscured.

“We couldn't have seen anything way up on top, anyway,” she said. “Do you think? We got the best view there was.”

“I'm sure,” Matthews said.

Across the busy boulevard was the Pont d'Iéna, and the river, which they could barely see. They'd passed over it in the cab from the airport, but now that he was closer to the water, brown and churning and slightly rancid-smelling in winter flood, Matthews felt it gave the whole city a menacing aspect, which he suspected wasn't accurate but only seemed so at this moment. Yet that Paris could seem menacing was a new sensation: a city with such a river shares in all its aspects. He thought about telling this to Helen but presumed she wouldn't be interested.

When they had walked ten minutes along the quai, as far as the Pont de l'alma, where the Fodor's required them to cross the river in order to seek the Champs Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe and to satisfy Helen's desire for an epic stroll, she sat down on an iron bench, put her head back and took an enormous breath, then exhaled it.

This, he believed, was Helen's way of “taking it all in.”

He stood and looked across the charged river at the Trocadéro and the Palais de Chaillot—names he'd seen in the Fodor's and could now place, though without a clue to what went on there or made them important. They looked like something put up for a world's fair, which the city had then had to find uses for—like Shea Stadium in New York. Basically a mistake. All around Paris's skyline you could see profiles of construction derricks. In the cab, he'd counted seventeen in one small bombed-out piece of ground.

He felt, however, like
he
was with
Helen
now, that she was the person in charge; whereas before, even yesterday, it had been his trip and she'd only been along for it. Now, though—at least this afternoon—she'd appropriated events to her wishes, so that what he felt was surprisingly, uncomfortably
young,
much younger than the eight years that separated them.
Yet she was more vitally involved than he was. How, he wondered, could that be?

“I'm done for,” Helen said. “I can't go another step. I've had too much fun.” She had her glasses off and was sticking a pill in her mouth.

“We can take a taxi to the Place de la Concorde,” Matthews said. “It'd still be nice to see where people had their heads chopped off.”

“I can skip it,” Helen said. “I'm stiff and I feel dizzy. I got dizzy in the Eiffel Tower. I'm still glad I went, though.” She swallowed her pill down hard. “I think I have to go home now.”

“Home all the way to West Virginia?”

“Just to the hotel right now,” she said. “I have to lie down for a while. I'm weak.” Cars and motorcycles and buses were surging by in front of them along the quai. “I'm sorry I got pissy,” she said, her head back again, staring up at the white sky.

“You weren't very pissy,” Matthews said. “You just said I didn't much like you. But I do. I like you quite a lot. It's not very easy being here now.”

“I know. It's just supposed to be,” Helen said. With her fingertip she lightly touched the tiny dent her glasses had pressed on her nose. “It's supposed to be the time of your life. You're supposed to die and go to heaven, all in the same day.”

“We ought to be used to what's
supposed
to happen,” Matthews said.

“Spoken like a man who's unhappily separated from his first wife,” Helen said, and grinned, still staring up. “That's just hind-spite. You should take the brighter side of things.”

“Which one is that?”

“Oh, let me see,” Helen said almost dreamily. “What does my little motto say, my little proverb?”

“‘The glory of God is to keep things hidden.’”

“There you go,” Helen said. “Doesn't that just mean: Take two pills and call me in the morning, sayeth the Lord?”

“I guess it could,” Matthews said. “It could mean why don't you shut up, too.”

“There you go. So why don't you shut up?” Helen smiled sweetly at him where he stood alone on the cold sidewalk, hands in his coat pockets, head bare to the wind. “No offense.”

“No, none taken,” Matthews said, and he began to wave for a taxi out on the crowded avenue along the river.

IN THE HOTEL
, they both fell into bed and into dense sleeps, from which he did not awaken until after dark, so that when his eyes found only darkness, he had no idea where he was or what day it was or, for an instant, who Helen Carmichael might be, breathing beside him. The air all around was steamy, and he was sweating and could feel warm sweat on Helen's bare back. He lay, then, for a long time as though a great burden of sleep and fatigue was resting on his chest, and finally he let the weight sink him back into darkness as if the darkness of sleep was better than the darkness of the unknown.

In his second sleep he dreamed vividly. There, he was both sitting at what seemed to be a typical Parisian sidewalk café (something he had never done) but also watching himself do the very same thing. Wearing a heavy black overcoat and a red scarf and a disreputable-looking black beret, he was talking to someone at an extremely high rate of speed. He couldn't, in the dream, see who he was talking to, but the thought that it was Penny seemed foregone. He was still wearing a wed-ding ring.