Women with Men (28 page)

Outside in the afternoon air, swifts skittered among the rooftops and chimneys and out into the space above the cemetery. He was very hungry. He hadn't eaten since last night. Later on, he thought, he would have to find a place, someplace nearby, take his chances with the French, eat his dinner alone.

HIS ONLY OTHER
trip to Europe had been to Spain. To Madrid, he said. He had been fifteen. Nineteen seventy-four. A youth group. They had stayed near the Parque del Buen Retiro and the Prado and walked and walked and walked, was what he remembered. For some of it he was sick, of course. But on the last day he was forced by others to attend the bullfight. Against his will entirely. They had ridden the subway to the stadium and sat in the sun in front of a legion of old Spaniards who were drunk on wine. All men. Sandwiches were passed around. In all, six bulls were killed, though none of them cleanly. Most, he remembered, didn't seem to want to fight at all. Often they just stood, observing what was happening to them. He'd hated it, he told her, had tried to leave. But everyone—his school friends—insisted he stay. He would never see it again. People threw cushions, eventually.

“Yes,” Madame de Grenelle said. She had lived in the south, she said. A city called Perpignan. She had been taken herself.

Outside, children were chasing pigeons with switches in a little park. They were near Parc Montsouris. She shared a house with another woman, a pale stone row house built in the twenties, with creaking, shiny parquet floors and tall windows at both ends of the long downstairs study. At either end there
seemed to be a park. On the walls were photographs, black-and-whites, showing what he thought were African women seated on the ground, weaving baskets in a dirty village, or washing clothes in a thick river, or holding babies to their breasts. All stared languidly at the camera. He had brought flowers, purple anemones.

Madame de Grenelle was of mixed race. That's all he could tell. She was tall and willowy, with dyed black hair, a flat nose, large hands and pale-blue eyes. Possibly, he thought, she was Berber—because of her eyes, and because she wore a long, thick caftan that was maroon with blue and purple octagon designs. It seemed to him Moroccan. Her father had been a professor of English in Toulouse.

“Translators have no lives of our own,” she said in amusement. “We live off others’ lives. Sometimes nicely.” She smiled. They were seated in chairs in the middle of the long room, where the least light reached from outside. She was fifty, he thought. She smoked American cigarettes. Chesterfields. She'd put his flowers in a vase on a table beside them. He didn't know how to answer her. “Your book has the ring of actuality about it,” she went on. “It's fascinating.”

He didn't know if she meant it was true or simply seemed true. He chose the latter and simply said, “Good.”

“It is your story, I think. The predicament.”

“No,” Matthews lied.

“No?” she said, and smiled at him in a penetrating way.

“I wanted it to
seem
true,” he said.

“I see,” she said. His book lay on the table beside his flowers. “‘Predicament’ does not exist in French.” She smoked her cigarette. “Often, of course, you learn what your book is about after you write it. Sometimes after someone translates it and tells you.”

“It could be,” Matthews said. “I can believe that.”

“Your book will be better in French, I think,” she said. “It's humorous. It needs to be humorous. In English it's not so much. Don't you think so?”

“I didn't think it was humorous,” he said, and thought about the street names he'd made up. The Paris parts.

“Well. An artist's mind senses a logic where none exists. Yet often it's left incomplete. It's difficult. Only great geniuses can finish what they invent. In French, we say…” And she said something then that Matthews didn't understand but didn't try. “Do you speak French?” She smiled politely.

“Just enough to misunderstand everything,” he said, and tried to smile back.

“It doesn't matter,” Madame de Grenelle said, and paused. “So. It is not quite finished in English. Because you cannot rely on the speaker. The
I
who was jilted. All the way throughout, one is never certain if he can be taken seriously at all. It is not entirely understandable in that way. Don't you agree? Perhaps you don't. But perhaps he has murdered his wife, or this is all a long dream or a fantasy, a ruse—or there is another explanation. It is meant to be mocking.”

“That could be true,” Matthews said. “I think it could.”

“The problem of reliance,” she said, “is important. This is the part not finished. It would've been very, very difficult. Even for Flaubert…”

“I see,” Matthews said.

“But in French, I can make perfectly clear that we are not to trust the speaker, though we try. That it's a satire, meant to be amusing. The French would expect this. It is how they see Americans.”

“How?” he said. “How is it they see us?”

Madame de Grenelle smiled. “As silly,” she said, “as not understanding very much. But, for that reason, interesting.”

“I see,” Matthews said.

“Yes,” she said. “Though only to a point.”

“I understand,” Matthews said. “I think I understand that perfectly well.”

“Then good,” she said. “So. We can start.”

ON THE STREET
, rue Braque, he felt he could find the metro now, near where the taxi had left him on Boulevard Jourdan. A university was nearby. He could remember Denfert-Rochereau. Somehow, in the last days, he'd lost the Fodor's.

The children in the little park had quit chasing pigeons and were sitting in a row, all on one wooden bench, enjoying a winter picnic. It was warm again. He felt he should buy the cigar he had nearly bought two days before, on the day of Helen's death. He missed her, had thought of her a great deal, wished she hadn't suffered and could've felt more promise. She
had
fit in, he thought. That wasn't right. She should be here, but things needed to go on now. There was not so much left to do, a few details the embassy office had agreed to assist with. Helen would go home, of course. Burial was restricted to the French. A sister had been found. He would merely sign documents. All in all, it was not so complicated.

And then he would go on to Oxford, and afterwards—perhaps after New Year's—home. He had the feeling of having been in a long struggle. Though he sensed much of it was the foreignness, the beginning of a state of loneliness and longing which would be his if he stayed. It came directly behind all the feelings he liked. You could spend ten years in Paris, never do the same thing twice, but eventually longing and disquieting thoughts would take you over.

It had been a good talk, though it had not been easy to keep his book in perspective. Madame de Grenelle had mentioned Flaubert, and he'd tried to remember the first lines of
Madame
Bovary
: someone arriving at a school, a foreigner. Were they famous lines?

But he had learned something. He had commenced a new era in his life. There
were
eras. That much was unquestionable. In two days it would be Christmas. They, he and Helen, had failed to make up a song. And yet, oddly, this would all be over by Christmas. He hadn't even written a letter to his parents. But in the time that remained here, he would. A long letter. And in his letter he would try as best he could, and with the many complications that would need detailing, to explain to them all that had happened to him here and what new ideas he had for the future.

Copyright © 1997 by Richard Ford

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

“The Womanizer” was originally published in
Granta
, and “Jealous” was originally published in
The New Yorker
.

Ford, Richard, [date]

Women with men: three stories / by Richard Ford. — 1st ed.

p.    cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-49884-7

1. Man-woman relationships—Fiction.  I. Title.

PS3556.0713 W6     1997

813′.54—dc21    97-5832

CIP

Random House Web address:
www.randomhouse.com

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