Women with Men (24 page)

Walking back into the dark sleeping room, he felt, in fact, elated and didn't want to go to bed again, though he was cold. An unusual spicy, meaty cooking smell came from somewhere. He thought he heard a voice laughing and the snap of shuffled cards. The room had moonlight in it, and the air was light and luminous. He sat in the chair and stared up at the Arab art, then stood and looked more closely—at the camels, the oasis, the men sitting talking. It all fit. The drawings were subtler than he'd realized. He had thought of this room as a pit, a hole, a cheap and dingy last-ditch. But he felt better about it. He could stay here. If Helen went on, or went home, he could take the room for a month. Things could change. The hotel would take on another character under other circumstances.
He could provide a table and write here, though he had nothing in mind to write (Madame de Grenelle might prove important for this). Though there was no way to know until you tried. He'd seen photos of the rooms of famous artists—almost always in Paris—and they were all worse than the Nouvelle Métropole. Worse by a multiple of four. Yet in retrospect they seemed perfect, each a place you'd want to be, the only room that this novel or that poem could ever have been conceived in. You trusted your instincts. That was all. He tried to think of the line that ran through his head from time to time. Where was it from? He couldn't remember the line now, or who had written it.

He looked at Helen, sleeping. He came close, leaned over her, put an ear near her face to learn if she was there still, heard her breath, brief and shallow. She took pills. They could take you away. He would need to find a doctor tomorrow. There would be some numbers to look up in a book.

She was wrong, he thought, to keep him from disclosing his love. That had been what he felt and should've been allowed to say. Love was never inappropriate; it hurt nothing. It was not, of course, the spiritual thing she'd asked for, nothing like that. If he'd said “love” then, she'd have burst out laughing.

Somewhere down in the street a loud sound erupted, a pop, but a pop that was also a boom, like nothing he'd exactly heard before. He sat again, very still, waiting for other noises, following noise, his thoughts interrupted.

Helen lay as she had, on her side, though her eyes were open. She was staring at him, just seeing him.

“Why are you awake?” he said softly. He got down on his knees by her and touched her face, touched her cheek, which was cool.

“What are you doing?” she said without moving, almost inaudibly, then sighed.

“Just sitting,” he said.

“Tomorrow seems like an odd day, doesn't it?”

“It'll be fine. Don't worry about tomorrow,” he said.

“Are you sleeping?” She closed her eyes.

“Yes,” Matthews said. “I am.”

“You should,” she said, and slipped to sleep again in just that fragile moment.

Matthews sat back and waited a moment, listening for more noises out in the street. A siren or a horn blowing, something to add a rhythm to the other noise, the boom. He heard a car move down the snowy street, skid briefly, its brakes applied, and drive on. And then he came to bed, thinking as he crawled in from the bottom, along the cold plaster wall, that he would never sleep now, since his heart was pounding, and because in truth the day to come would likely be, as Helen said, a strange day.

WHEN HE AWOKE
it was ten-thirty. Light through the window was brighter than he'd expected. A stalk of yellow angled across the tiles to his shirt, where it lay from the night before.

He put his trousers on and went to the window. There would be an entirely new view of Paris, he thought. The room wasn't as chilled. He had slept well and long.

And he was correct. The snow from the night had all but gone. A few irregular patches remained in the cemetery and on a parked car or two in the street. But it seemed spring suddenly, the sycamore trunks damp and darkened, the ground soaked, a light fog rising off the gravestones as the sun found them, making the cemetery a park. Of course, there was no sign of the man who'd slept in the tomb. He couldn't distinguish which one it had been, and thought it might've been a dream. He'd drunk too much. Even Rex and Beatrice seemed
figmentary—bad dreams one ought just as well relinquish.

Helen lay perfectly still, her head under her pillow, no sign of breathing in the covers. For the second time—or was it the third—he leaned to listen. Her breathing was strong and deep. She could sleep until afternoon. She was weak, he thought. Rest would be her ally.

But what was he to do until then? Read one of her police mysteries. Sitting by Helen's bed reading while the city warmed and turned (perhaps only briefly) more agreeable would be the wrong thing. Too much like a hospital: wanting to be there when the patient woke up from the surgery. There wasn't any surgery; there wasn't anything. It was possible Helen
was
only jet-lagged. Or that because she was experiencing the change of life she exaggerated her symptoms. Something involuntary. That had happened to his mother and driven his father crazy. Then one day it had stopped. He didn't
know
if Helen had cancer or was experiencing pain. You only knew such things with proof, had seen the results. There were the bruises, but they could have simple explanations—not that she was lying.

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.