Women with Men (3 page)

“April fool!” the clerk said and broke out in a squeaking little laughter. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. It is only a joke,
monsieur,
” the man said, so pleased with himself, even more than when he'd told Austin the lie. “The airport is perfectly fine. It is open. You can leave. There is no trouble. It's fine. It was only a joke.
Bon voyage,
Mr. Austin.
Bon voyage.
”

For the two days after she had left him standing in the street at midnight, after he had kissed her the first time and felt that he had done something exactly right, Austin saw a great deal of Joséphine Belliard. He'd had plans to take the TGV to Brussels and then go on to Amsterdam, and from there fly to Chicago and home. But the next morning he sent messages to his customers and to the office, complaining of “medical problems” which had inexplicably “recurred,” although he felt it was “probably nothing serious.” He would conclude his business by fax when he was home the next week. He told Barbara he'd decided to stay in Paris a few extra days—to relax, to do things he'd never taken the time to do. Visit Balzac's house, maybe. Walk the streets like a tourist. Rent a car. Drive to Fontainebleau.

As to Joséphine Belliard, he decided he would spend every minute he could with her. He did not for an instant think that he loved her, or that keeping each other's company would lead him or her to anything important. He was married; he had nothing to give her. To get deluded about such a thing was to bring on nothing but trouble—the kind of trouble that when
you're younger you glance away from, but when you're older you ignore at risk. Hesitancy in the face of trouble, he felt, was probably a virtue.

But short of that he did all he could. Together they went to a movie. They went to a museum. They visited Notre Dame and the Palais Royal. They walked together in the narrow streets of the Faubourg St.-Germain. They looked in store windows. They acted like lovers. Touched. She allowed him to hold her hand. They exchanged knowing looks. He discovered what made her laugh, listened carefully for her small points of pride. She stayed as she had been—seemingly uninterested, but willing—as if it was all his idea and her duty, only a duty she surprisingly liked. Austin felt this very reluctance in her was compelling, attractive. And it caused him to woo her in a way that made him admire his own intensity. He took her to dinner in two expensive places, went with her to her apartment, met her son, met the country woman she paid to care for him during the week, saw where she lived, slept, ate, then stood gazing out her apartment windows to the Jardin du Luxembourg and down the peaceful streets of her neighborhood. He saw her life, which he found he was curious about, and once he'd satisfied that curiosity he felt as though he'd accomplished something, something that was not easy or ordinary.

She told him not much more about herself and, again, asked nothing about him, as if his life didn't matter to her. She told him she had once visited America, had met a musician in California and decided to live with him in his small wooden house by the beach in Santa Cruz. This was in the early seventies. She had been a teenager. Only one morning—it was after four months—she woke up on a mattress on the floor, underneath a rug made out of a tanned cowhide, got up, packed her bag and left.

“This was too much,” Joséphine said, sitting in the window of her apartment, looking out at the twilight and the street where children were kicking a soccer ball. The musician had been disturbed and angry, she said, but she had come back to France and her parents’ house. “You cannot live a long time where you don't belong. It's true?” She looked at him and elevated her shoulders. He was sitting in a chair, drinking a glass of red wine, contemplating the rooftops, enjoying how the tawny light burnished the delicate scrollwork cornices of the apartment buildings visible from the one he was in. Jazz was playing softly on the stereo, a sinuous saxophone solo. “It's true, no?” she said. “You can't.”

“Exactly right,” Austin said. He had grown up in Peoria. He lived on the northwest side of Chicago. He'd attended a state U. He felt she was exactly right, although he saw nothing wrong in being here at this moment, enjoying the sunlight as it gradually faded then disappeared from the rooftops he could see from this woman's rooms. That seemed permissible.

She told him about her husband. His picture was on the wall in Léo's room—a bulbous-faced, dark-skinned Jew, with a thick black mustache that made him look like an Armenian. Slightly disappointing, Austin had thought. He'd imagined Bernard as being handsome, a smooth-skinned Louis Jourdan type with the fatal flaw of being boring. The real man looked like what he was—a fat man who once wrote French radio jingles.

Joséphine said that her affair had proved to her that she did not love her husband, although perhaps she once had, and that while for some people to live with a person you did not love was possible, it was not possible for her. She looked at Austin as if to underscore the point. This was not, of course, how she had first explained her feelings for her husband, when she said she'd felt she could resume their life after her affair
but that her husband had left her flat. This was how she felt now, Austin thought, and the truth certainly lay somewhere in the middle. In any case, it didn't matter to him. She said her husband gave her very little money now, saw his son infrequently, had been seen with a new girlfriend who was German, and of course had written the terrible book, which everyone she knew was reading, causing her immense pain and embarrassment.

“But,” she said, and shook her head as if shaking the very thoughts out of her mind. “What I can do, yes? I live my life now, here, with my son. I have twenty-five more years to work, then I'm finished.”

“Maybe something better'll come along,” Austin said. He didn't know what that might be, but he disliked her being so pessimistic. It felt like she was somehow blaming him, which he thought was very French. A more hopeful, American point of view, he thought, would help.

“What is it? What will be better?” Joséphine said, and she looked at him not quite bitterly, but helplessly. “What is going to happen? Tell me. I want to know.”

Austin set his wineglass carefully on the polished floor, climbed out of his chair and walked to the open window where she sat, and below which the street was slowly being cast into grainy darkness. There was the bump of the soccer ball still being kicked aimlessly against a wall over and over, and behind that the sound of a car engine being revved down the block. Austin put his arms around her arms and put his mouth against her cool cheek and held her to him tightly.

“Maybe someone will come along who loves you,” he said. He was offering encouragement, and he knew she knew that and would take it in a good spirit. “You wouldn't be hard to love. Not at all.” He held her more tightly to him. “In fact,” he said, “you'd be very easy to love.”

Joséphine let herself be pulled, be gathered in. She let her head fall against his shoulder. It was perilous to be where she was, Austin thought, in the window, with a man holding her. He could feel the cool outside air on the backs of his hands and against his face, half in, half out. It was thrilling, even though Joséphine did not put her arms around him, did not reciprocate his touch in any way, only let him hold her as if pleasing him was easy but did not matter to her a great deal.

THAT NIGHT
he took her to dinner at the Closerie des Lilas, a famous bistro where writers and artists had been frequenters in the twenties—a bright, glassy and noisy place where the two of them drank champagne, held hands, but did not talk much. They seemed to be running out of things to say. The next most natural things would be subjects that connected them, subjects with some future built in. But Austin was leaving in the morning, and those subjects didn't seem to interest either of them, though Austin could feel their pull, could imagine below the surface of unyielding facts that there could be a future for them. Certainly under different, better circumstances they would be lovers, would immediately begin to spend more time together, discover what there was to discover between them. Austin had a strong urge to say these very things to her as they sat silently over their champagne, just to go ahead and put that much on the table from his side and see what it called forth from hers. But the restaurant was too noisy. Once he tried to begin, the words sounded too loud. And these were not that kind of words. These were important words and needed to be said respectfully, even solemnly, with their inevitable sense of loss built in.

The words, though, had stayed in his mind as Joséphine again drove the short distance back to rue de Mézières and to
the corner where she'd left him the first night. The words seemed to have missed their moment. They needed another context, a more substantial setting. To say them in the dark, in a crummy Opel with the motor running, at the moment of parting, would give them a sentimental weightiness they didn't mean to have, since they were, for all their built-in sorrow, an expression of optimism.

When Joséphine stopped the car, the gate into the hotel only a few steps away, she kept her hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead, as she had two nights before. She did not offer him anything, a word, a gesture, even a look. To her, this night, their last one, the night before Austin left for Chicago and home and his wife, possibly never to come back again, never to try to pick up from where they were at that moment—this night was just like their first, one Joséphine would forget as soon as the door slammed shut and her headlights swung onto the empty street toward home.

Austin looked out her window at the hotel's rustic wooden gate, beyond which was a ferny, footlit courtyard, a set of double glass doors, the lobby and the stairs up two flights to his small room. What he wanted was to take her there, lock the door, close the curtains and make sorrowful love until morning, until he had to call a cab to leave for the airport. But that was the wrong thing to do, having gotten this far without complication, without greater confusion or harm being caused to either of them. Harm
could
be caused by getting involved with him, Austin thought. They both knew it, and it didn't require saying. She wouldn't think of sleeping with him in any case.
No
did mean
no
to her. And that was the right way to play this.

Austin sat with his hands in his lap and said nothing. It was the way he'd known this moment of leaving would occur. Somberly on his part. Coldly on hers. He didn't think he
should reach across and take her hands again as he had before. That became playacting the second time you did it, and he had already touched her that way plenty of times—sweetly, innocently, without trying anything more except possibly a brief, soft kiss. He would let this time—the last time—go exactly according to her wishes, not his.

He waited. He thought Joséphine might say something, something ironic or clever or cold or merely commonplace, something that would break her little rule of silence and that he could then reply to and perhaps have the last good word, one that would leave them both puzzled and tantalized and certain that a small but important moment had not entirely been missed. But she did not speak. She was intent on there being nothing that would make her do anything different from what she did naturally. And Austin knew if he had simply climbed out of the car right then, without a goodbye, she would've driven straight away. Maybe this was why her husband had written a book about her, Austin thought. At least he'd known he'd gotten her attention.

Joséphine seemed to be waiting for the seat beside her to become empty. Austin looked across at her in the car darkness, and she for an instant glanced at him but did not speak. This was annoying, Austin thought; annoying and stupid and French to be so closed to the world, to be so unwilling to let a sweet and free moment cause you happiness—when happiness was in such short supply. He realized he was on the verge of being angry, of saying nothing else, of simply getting out of the car and walking away.

“You know,” he said, more irritably than he wanted to sound, “we could be lovers. We're interested in each other. This isn't a sidetrack for me. This is real life. I like you. You like me. All I've wanted to do is take advantage of that in some way that makes you glad, that puts a smile on your face.
Nothing else. I don't need to sleep with you. That would cause me as much trouble as it would cause you. But that's no reason we can't just like each other.” He looked at her intently, her silhouette softened against the lights above the hotel gate across the street. She said nothing. Though he thought he heard a faint laugh, hardly more than an exhaled breath, intended, he presumed, to express what she'd thought of all he'd just said. “Sorry,” Austin said, angry now, swiveling his knees into the doorway to get out. “Really, I am.”

But Joséphine put her hand on his wrist and held him back, not looking at him, but speaking toward the cold windshield. “I am not so strong enough,” she whispered, and squeezed his wrist.

“For what?” Austin said, also whispering, one foot already on the paving stones, but looking back at her in the darkness.

“I am not so strong enough to have something with you,” she said. “Not now.” She looked at him, her eyes soft and large, her one hand holding his wrist, the other in her lap, half curled.

“Do you mean you don't feel strongly enough, or you aren't strong enough in yourself?” Austin said, overassertive but feeling good about it.

“I don't know,” Joséphine said. “It is still very confusing for me now. I'm sorry.”

“Well, that's better than nothing,” Austin said. “At least you gave me that much. That makes me glad.” He reached across and squeezed her wrist where she was holding his tightly. Then he got out of the car into the street. She put her hand on the gearshift and pushed it forward with a loud rasp.

“If you come back,” she said in a husky voice through the doorway, “call me.”

“Sure,” Austin said, “I'll call you. I don't know what else I'd do in Paris.”

He closed the door firmly, and she drove away, spinning her tires on the slick stones. Austin walked across the street to the hotel without looking back at her taillights as they disappeared.