Women with Men (16 page)

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

And she said, “No, no. Oh, no, no.” That was all she said. And then she didn't talk to me anymore.

ON THE TRAIN
, I sat facing Doris as the empty, dark world went by outside our compartment in a snowy stream. She had washed her face and cleaned her glasses and put on perfume, and her face had color in it. She looked nice, though the front of her red dress had stains from where we'd had to lie down on the bar floor in the wet. We sat and looked out the window for a while, not talking, and I saw that she had taken off her stockings and her earrings, and that her hands
were
pretty. Her fingers were long and thin, and there was no polish on her fingernails. They looked natural.

In the depot I had called my father. I thought I should tell him about Barney and what had happened and say that I was all right, though I knew I could explain it wrong and he could decide to come and get me, and I wouldn't get to Seattle, or ever get to see my mother.

The phone rang a long time, and when my father answered it he seemed out of breath, as if he'd been running or had come in from outside. “It's snowing in Montana, bud,” he said, catching his wind. I heard him stamp his feet on the floor. “It feels like you've been gone a long time already.”

“We're still in Shelby,” I said. “It's snowing here too.” Doris was at the ticket desk, talking to the woman I had talked to—Betty.
I knew they were talking about Barney. There were other people in the waiting room now, with suitcases and paper packages, and it was noisy. “We saw a man get shot up in a bar tonight,” I said to my father, just like that.

“What is it?” my father said, as though he hadn't heard me right. “What's it you said?”

“The police did it.”

“Where's Doris?” my father said. “Put her on.” And I knew that what I'd said had shocked him. “Where are you?” he said, and his voice sounded scared.

“In Shelby,” I said. “In the depot. I was on the floor with Doris. Nothing happened to us.”

“Where's she now, son?” my father said and suddenly seemed very calm. “Let me speak to her now.”

“She's talking to somebody,” I said. “She can't come to the phone.”

“Are the police there?” my father said, and I knew he was thinking right then about coming up and getting me and taking me back. But it was snowing too hard, and the train would get there before he could.

“We were in the Oil City bar,” I said, and I said it calmly. “It wasn't somebody we knew. It was an Indian.”

“What in the world's going on now?” my father said, and he said this loudly, so that I wondered if he'd had a drink. “Was she with somebody?”

“No,” I said, “she wasn't. It's all right now. It's finished.”

And then there was a long time on the line during which my father didn't say anything but I could hear his feet moving on the floor and hear him breathing hard, and I knew he was trying to think of what he should do at that moment.

“I can't save you from very much, can I?” he said softly, as if he didn't care if I heard it or maybe didn't even want me to. So I didn't answer, and waited for him to say something he
wanted me to hear. I tried thinking of something to ask, but I didn't want to know anything. Telling him what had happened had made anything else not important.

And then he said, and he said it more loudly, as if he had a new idea, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He waited for a moment. “Your mother called up here tonight.”

“What did she say?”

“She wanted to know if you'd gotten away all right and how you felt. She asked me if I wished I was coming with you, and I told her she'd need to ask me earlier if she wanted that to happen. I said I had other plans.”

“Is Jensen there?” And I called her by her last name. I don't know why.

My father laughed. “Yoyce? No, Miss Yensen's got different visitors tonight. It's just us hounds in the house. I let them both in. They're searching around for you right now.”

“You don't have to worry about me,” I said.

“All right, then, I'll quit.” And he paused again. “Your mother said she might try to keep you out there. So don't be surprised.”

“What did you say to her about it?”

“I said it was up to you. Not me.”

“What did she say then?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Not about that.” And I decided then that he hadn't had a drink. “Before you called I was just sitting thinking about when I was your age. My parents had several big dustups—yelling and everything. Fighting. My dad once got my mother up against a wall in the house and threatened to hit her because he'd invited over some friends of his from Moorhead, and she didn't like them and told them to get out. I had a good seat for that. Nobody moved away, though. That
was better than all this foolishness. I don't know what
you're
supposed to do about it, of course.”

Doris looked at me across the waiting room and smiled and waved. She pointed her finger at herself, but I didn't want her to talk to my father. “Do you remember when you said Doris was sympathetic?” I said, watching her. “You were talking about her one day. I wondered what you meant by that.”

“Oh,” my father said, and I heard one of the dogs bark, and he shouted out, “Hey now! Dogs!” Then he said, “I must've meant she was generous with her affections. With me she was. That's all. Why'd you think about that? Is she nice to you?”

“Yes,” I said, “she is.” Then I said, “Do you think it'd be better if I stay out with Mother?”

“Well, only if you want to,” my father said. “I wouldn't blame you. Seattle's a nice place. But I'm happy to have you come back here. We should talk about that when you've been there. You'll know more about it.”

“Okay,” I said.

I heard a dog's collar jingling, and I thought he was probably petting one of them. “Are you sure you're all right?” my father said.

“I'm fine,” I said. “I am.”

“I love you, Larry. I forgot to tell you that before you left. That's important.”

“I love you,” I said.

“That's good news,” he said. “Thank you.”

And then we hung up.

AFTER AN HOUR
of watching the night go by—the town of Cut Bank, Montana, some bright headlights behind a flashing, snowy barricade and a road sign toward Santa Rita and the Canada border, then a long, dark time while the train ran
beside the highway and there were no cars, only a farm light or two in the distance and a missile site off in the dark and a few trucks racing to get home by Thanksgiving—after an hour of that, Doris began talking to me, just saying whatever was in her mind, as if she thought I might be interested. Her voice sounded different in the compartment. It had lost a thickness it'd had, and was just a plain voice that only meant one thing.

She remarked again that the town of Shelby had felt very foreign to her, and that it reminded her of Las Vegas, Nevada, where she and Benny had gotten married. She said both were remote from anyplace important and both were unpredictable—unlike Great Falls, which she said was too predictable. She said she knew the sheriff had not intended to shoot Barney, that they would've done anything to avoid it but that they didn't know enough. Then she said again that she was the wrong person for my father, and that there were important things she'd always wanted to say to my mother, things she thought about her—some good, some not—but that she could never express them, because my mother had locked on her as a rival years before. Then she talked about how it would feel to be divorced, that the worst part of that would be your thinking, not being able to control what went through your mind, and that the next day, Thanksgiving Day, she was going to tell my mother to come home right then, or else run the risk of being on her own forever. “Your life'll eat you.” Those were the words she used. And then she leaned back in her seat and looked at me.

“I was involved with another woman for a while. Quite a while, in fact. It was very fulfilling,” she said. “Though I'm not now. Not anymore. Does that shock you? I'm sure it does.”

“No,” I said, although it did. It shocked me very much.

“It shocked me,” Doris said. “But
you
couldn't admit that. It's not how you're made. You don't really know how to trust
people with the truth. You're like your father.” She took her glasses off and smoothed under her eyes with the tips of her fingers.

“I can tell the truth,” I said, and I wanted to be able to. I didn't want to be a person who couldn't tell the truth, though I didn't want to tell Doris I was shocked by what she'd said.

“It doesn't matter,” she said, and smiled at me in a way she had earlier that day, as though she liked me and I could trust her. She put her glasses back on very carefully. “Did you buy a nice present for your mom? I bet you have good taste.”

“I bought her a watch,” I said.

“You did?” Doris leaned forward. “Let me see it.” She seemed pleased.

I reached in the pocket of my coat, which was beside me on the seat and also had the lawyer's card in it, and took out the little clear-plastic box wrapped in white tissue, and unfolded it so Doris could look. She took the box and opened it and picked up the watch with its tiny moving hand ticking seconds by—I could almost hear it—and she looked at it very closely, then put it up to her ear. “Okay,” she said, and smiled at me. “It works.” She put it back in my hand. “Jan'll love that,” she said as I folded it away. “It's the perfect gift. I wish somebody would give me a watch. You're such a sweet boy.” She took my cheeks between her warm hands and squeezed me, and I thought she was going to kiss me, but she didn't. “Too bad there aren't sweet boys like you everywhere,” she said. She sat back on her seat and put her hands in her lap and closed her eyes, and I believe she might've gone to sleep for a minute. Though after a while she said, with her eyes still closed and the snowy night flashing by outside, “I wish there were Thanksgiving carols so we could sing a song now.” And then she did go to sleep, because her breath slowed and evened, and her head sank over her chest, and her hands were still and limp.

And for a long time after that I sat very still and felt as though I was entirely out of the world, cast off without a starting or a stopping point, just shooting through space like a boy in a rocket. Though after a while I must have begun to hold my breath, because my heart began to beat harder, and I had that feeling, the scary feeling you have that you're suffocating and your life is running out—fast, fast, second by second—and you have to do something to save yourself, but you can't. Only then you remember it's you who's causing it, and you who has to stop it. And then it did stop, and I could breathe again. I looked out the window at the night, where the clouds had risen and dispersed and the snow was finished, and the sky above the vast white ground was soft as softest velvet. And I felt calm. Maybe for the first time in my life, I felt calm. So that for a while I, too, closed my eyes and slept.

CHARLEY MATTHEWS
and Helen Carmichael had come to Paris the week before Christmas. When they'd made eager plans for their trip, back in Ohio, they'd expected to stay only two days—enough time for Charley (who'd published his first novel) to have lunch with his French editor, for the two of them to take in a museum, eat a couple of incomparable meals, possibly attend the ballet, then strike off for England, where Matthews hoped to visit Oxford, the school where he'd almost been admitted fifteen years earlier. (At the last minute, he'd been turned down and instead taken his PhD at Purdue, a school he'd always felt ashamed of.)

Things in Paris, however, had not turned out as they'd hoped.

In the first place, the late-autumn weather, which the newspaper in Ohio had predicted would be crisp and dry, with plenty of mild afternoon sunshine—perfect for long walks through the Bois de Boulogne or boat rides on the Seine—had almost overnight turned cold and miserably wet, with a dense, oily fog and rain that made it impossible to see anything and made walking outside a hardship. Matthews noticed in the Fodor's, during the taxi ride from the airport, that Paris was much farther north than he'd imagined—he'd had it nearer the
middle. But it lay, he saw, on the same parallel as Gander, Newfoundland, which made what the book said seem logical: that it rained more in Paris than in Seattle and that winter usually started in November. “No wonder it's cold,” he said, watching the unknown, rain-darkened streets drift past. “It's only a half day's drive to Copenhagen.”

The second piece of unexpected news was that François Blumberg, Matthews’ French editor, had called up their first afternoon to see how they were but also to say that his own plans had changed. He was, he said, flying that very afternoon with his wife and four children to somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and so wouldn't be able to invite Matthews to lunch or to visit the publishing house—Éditions des Châtaigniers—which he was closing for the Christmas holidays. The suddenness and rudeness of the cancellation seemed to cause Blumberg satisfaction, though it was Blumberg who'd proposed the whole trip (“We will become good friends then”) and Blumberg who'd made promises to act as Matthews’ guide to Paris, “to special parts tourists would never be lucky enough to see”—secret Oriental gardens in Montparnasse, personal holdings of Blumberg's rich, titled friends, private dining rooms in five-star restaurants, special closed galleries in the Louvre, full of Rembrandts and da Vincis.

“Oh well, of course, certainly, when you come
next
to Paris we shall have a long, long visit,” Blumberg said on the phone. “No one knows you in France now. But this will all change. After your book is published, everything will change. You'll see. You'll be famous.” Blumberg made a little gasping sound then, the quick, shallow intake of breath that suggested he'd said something which surprised even him. All French people must make this noise, Matthews believed. The one Frenchwoman who taught at Wilmot College, where he'd once taught, made it all the time. He had no idea what it meant.

“I guess so,” Matthews said. He was in bed, dressed in only his pajama top. Blumberg had awakened him from his arrival nap. Helen had gone out into the weather to find lunch, something their hotel, the Nouvelle Métropole, was too impoverished to provide. Outside, on cold, rainy rue Froidevaux, a cadre of motorbikes was revving up and popping, and angry male voices were shouting in French as if a fight was breaking out. Somewhere, a blaring police horn was coming nearer. Matthews wondered if it was heading for their hotel.

“I would personally consider it a favor, though,” Blumberg continued, “if you could stay and meet your translator. Madame de Grenelle. She is very, very famous and also very difficult to persuade on the subject of American novels. But she has found your book fascinating and wishes to see you. Unfortunately, she is also away and will not be in Paris until four days.”

“We weren't planning to stay that long,” Matthews said irritably.

“Well, of course, exactly as you please,” Blumberg said. “Only it would help matters. Translation is not a matter merely of converting your book into French; it is a matter of
inventing
your book into the French mind. So it is necessary to have the translation absolutely perfect, for people to know it correctly. We don't want you or your book to be misunderstood. We want you to be famous. People spend too much time misunderstanding each other.”

“Apparently,” Matthews said.

Blumberg then gave Matthews Madame de Grenelle's phone number and address and said again that she would be hoping he'd call. From their correspondence, Matthews had always pictured François Blumberg as an old man, a kindly keeper of an ancient flame, overseer of a rich and storied culture that only a few were permitted to share: somebody he
would instinctively like. But now he pictured Blumberg as younger—possibly even his own age, thirty-seven—small, pale, balding, pimply, possibly a second-rate academic making ends meet by working in publishing, someone in a shiny black suit and cheap shoes. Matthews thought of Blumberg struggling up a set of rain-swept metal steps toward a smoky, overbooked charter flight, a skinny wife and four kids trailing behind, laden with suitcases and plastic sacks, all shouting at the top of their lungs.

“So,” Blumberg said, as though pressed for time. “Now is, of course, a perfect time to be in Paris. We all go away where it's warm. You have it all to yourselves, you and your friends the Germans. We'll take it back when you're finished.” Blumberg laughed. Then he said, “I hope we can meet each other next time.”

“Right,” Matthews said. “Me, too.” He intended to say something more to Blumberg, to register the upset this change of plans was certain to cause. But Blumberg blurted some indecipherable phrase in French, laughed again, made another quick gasping sound and hung up.

This was, of course, an insult, Matthews understood. No doubt a peculiarly slighting French insult (though he didn't know what a French insult was). But the proper response was to pack their bags, call a taxi, abandon the hotel and take the first conveyance out. He wasn't sure where. Only the rest of the trip would be cast in shadow then, a shadow of disappointment before it ever had a chance to be fun.

Matthews crawled out of bed and went to the window in his bare feet and pajama top. Outside the cold panes, the air was dirty and thick. It didn't feel anything like Christmas. It didn't feel like Paris, for that matter. Directly across rue Froidevaux, a great cemetery spread out into the fog and trees to beyond where he could see, and off to the right in the mist
was a huge stone statue of a lion, in the middle of a busy roundabout. Beyond that were ranks of buildings and cars beating up and down a wide avenue, their yellow lights lit in the afternoon gloom. This was Paris.

A police car had stopped in the street below, its blue light flashing, two uniformed officers in luminous white helmets gesticulating to three men on motorcycles. In the past, when he'd imagined Paris, he imagined jazz, Dom Pérignon corks flying into the bright, crisp night air, wide shining streets, laughter. Fun. Now he couldn't even guess which direction he was looking. East? Which direction was the Eiffel Tower? This was the Fourteenth Arrondissement. The Left Bank. Many famous American writers had lived near here, though for the moment he couldn't remember who or where, only that the French had made them feel at home in a way their own countrymen hadn't. He had never particularly wanted to come to Paris. The problem had always seemed to him how to convert anything that happened here into anything that mattered back home. He thought of all the bores who came back and droned on stupefyingly about Paris, trying to make their experience of it matter. It didn't happen
naturally
. Therefore, to come to Paris with a serious intent meant you'd need to stay. Except you couldn't go to a place you'd never been, expecting to stay. That wasn't travel. That was escape. And he had nothing to escape from. Penny, his estranged wife, had always wanted him to take her “abroad,” but he'd resisted—which had possibly been a mistake.

But outside the window now, Paris seemed baffling. It might as well have been East Berlin. Even leaving would be difficult. Plus he'd come so far. Paid for both of them. To leave would be a total loss.

In Matthews’ novel
—The Predicament—
the main character's wife, Greta (a thin, unflattering disguise for Penny), had
suddenly walked out of her snug but airless academic marriage in a small college town in “Maine,” collected her lover in the family car (her lover being a blond and athletic Catholic priest, just then abandoning his clerical collar after having been seduced by Greta immediately upon converting her), driven to Boston, then flown to Paris, where they both came to separate but equally bad ends (a much altered version of the truth: Penny was in California).

Matthews, however, having never been to Paris, had simply chosen it on a whim, the way he thought of picking a place now to leave Paris for. Just choose a word. Prague. Cairo. Gdansk. For his novel, he'd researched everything out of library books, tourist guides and subway maps, and made important events take place near famous sites like the Eiffel Tower, the Bastille and the Luxembourg Gardens, or else in places he'd made up, using French words he liked the sounds of. Rue Homard. Place de Rebouteux. Eventually the Paris section had been scaled back to emphasize the narrator's emotional plight of being left alone, and to contain less of “Greta”'s fate of being struck by a car on the rue de Rivoli—the pretty street running beside the long, beautiful arcade he'd happened to notice out the taxi window this morning. It had made him happy to see the rue de Rivoli street signs. Paris, for just that brief moment, had seemed knowable. Unlike now, when he couldn't figure out which way north was.

In the cemetery, just beyond the wall separating it from rue Froidevaux, some people were lined up beside an open grave. They were all wearing yarmulkes and using a tiny spade, which they passed back down the line to drop bits of dirt into the hole. As the mourners turned away, they quickly opened umbrellas and disappeared into the mist and clutter of gravestones. He'd read that Jews had their own sections in French
cemeteries, unlike in America, where they had their own cemeteries.

“Joyeux Noël! Parles-toi anglais ici?”
Helen said, letting herself into the cold little room. She was carrying a paper sack with lunch, her raincoat and hair dripping. “Did you see the cemetery full of dead Frenchmen across the street? One side of the wall has life, oblivious and ignorant. One side has death, complete and inescapable. They don't communicate. I like that. Maybe it'd be good to be buried here.” She stuck her tongue out and made cross-eyes at him. Helen was in good spirits.

“Blumberg called,” Matthews said gloomily. “He can't see me now. He's going to the Indian Ocean.”

“That's too bad,” Helen said.

“But he wants me to stay and meet my translator.” He realized he was presenting this as though it was Helen's problem to solve.

“Well,” Helen said, setting the damp sack on the bed table. “Is there some reason why you can't stay?”

“She's not in Paris now,” Matthews said. “She won't be back for four days.”

“What else do we have to do?” Helen said brightly, taking off her wet raincoat. “We'll find something to do in Paree. It's not like Cleveland.”

“I wanted to go on to Oxford,” Matthews said.

“You still won't get into Oxford,” she said. “But you
did
get into Paris. And aren't translators important? I like your outfit, incidentally.” Matthews was standing at the window with no pajama bottoms on. He was in a fourth-floor room, in a foreign country where no one knew him. He hadn't been thinking about that. Helen pooched out her lips provocatively. Helen had become increasingly voracious about sex, more
voracious than she needed to be, Matthews thought. She would necessarily see this as an incitement.

“I'll have to figure out how we can keep the room,” he said, stepping away from the window and looking for his pajama bottoms.

“I don't think there'll be much demand for this place.” Helen looked around at the tiny room. Arabs owned the hotel and Indians ran it. A few Arab-looking pictures were on the walls as decoration: an oasis with one scrawny camel standing in the shade; some men wearing burnooses, sitting in a circle beside another camel in the desert.

“It's desolate here,” Matthews said, hating the sound of his own complaining voice. It was jet lag. “I was thinking we ought to call a cab and get out. Take a train somewhere.”

“Take a train where?” Helen said.

“The Riviera maybe. I thought Paris was closer to the Riviera, anyway.”

“I don't want to go to the Riviera,” she said. “I like it here. I've wanted to come here all my life. Just let the unexpected happen. It'll be romantic. It's Christmas in Paris, Charley. Isn't there some song about that?”

Matthews knew no song about Christmas in Paris. “I never heard of one.”

“Well, then we'll have to make it up,” Helen said. “I'll make up the music, and you can make up the words. You're the novelist. It's not like you need Proust to make up a song about Christmas in Paris.”

“Probably not,” Matthews said.

“See, I told you.” Helen was smiling. “You're already happier. I've translated you into being happy. We'll have you singing in no time.”