Women with Men (2 page)

And Austin wondered:
what
was all confusion? Not him. He was no confusion. He'd decided he was a good-intentioned escort for her, and that was a fine thing to be under the circumstances. There was already plenty of confusion in her life. An absent husband. A child. Surviving alone. That was enough.
Though he took his arm from her grip and reached it around her shoulder and pulled her close to him until they reached her little black Opel and got in, where touching stopped.

When they reached his hotel, a former monastery with a walled-in courtyard garden, two blocks from the great lighted confluence of St.-Germain and the rue de Rennes, she stopped the car and sat looking straight ahead as if she were waiting for Austin to get out. They had made no mention of another meeting, and he was scheduled to leave in two days.

Austin sat in the dark without speaking. A police station occupied the next corner down the shadowy street. A police van had pulled up with blinking lights, and several uniformed officers in shiny white Sam Browne belts were leading a line of handcuffed men inside, the prisoners’ heads all bowed like penitents. It was April, and the street surface glistened in the damp spring air.

This was the point, of course, to ask her to come inside with him if such a thing was ever to be. But it was clearly the furthest thing from possibility, and each of them knew it. And apart from privately acknowledging that much, Austin had no real thought of it. Although he wanted to do
something
good, something unusual that would please her and make them both know an occurrence slightly out of the ordinary had taken place tonight—an occurrence they could both feel good about when they were alone in bed, even if in fact nothing much had taken place.

His mind was working on what that extra-ordinary something might be, the thing you did if you didn't make love to a woman. A gesture. A word. What?

All the prisoners were finally led into the police station, and the officers had gotten back in their van and driven it straight up rue de Mézières, where Austin and Joséphine Belliard were sitting in the silent darkness. Obviously she was waiting for
him to get out, and he was in a quandary about what to do. Though it was a moment he relished, the exquisite moment before anything is acted on and when all is potential, before life turns this way or that—toward regret or pleasure or happiness, toward one kind of permanence or another. It was a wonderful, tantalizing, important moment, one worth preserving, and he knew she knew it as well as he did and wanted it to last as long as he wanted it to.

Austin sat with his hands in his lap, feeling large and cumbersome inside the tiny car, listening to himself breathe, conscious he was on the verge of what he hoped would be the right—rightest—gesture. She hadn't moved. The car was idling, its headlights shining weakly on the empty street, the dashboard instruments turning the interior air faintly green.

Austin abruptly—or so it felt to him—reached across the space between them, took Joséphine's small, warm hand off the steering wheel and held it between his two large equally warm ones like a sandwich, though in a way that would also seem protective. He would be protective of her, guard her from some as yet unnamed harm or from her own concealed urges, though most immediately from himself, since he realized it was her reluctance more than his that kept them apart now, kept them from parking the car and going inside and spending the night in each other's arms.

He squeezed her hand tightly, then eased up.

“I'd like to make you happy somehow,” he said in a sincere voice, and waited while Joséphine said nothing. She did not remove her hand, but neither did she answer. It was as if what he'd said didn't mean anything, or that possibly she wasn't even listening to him. “It's just human,” Austin said, as though she
had
said something back, had said, “Why?” or “Don't try,” or “You couldn't possibly,” or “It's too late.”

“What?” She looked at him for the first time since they'd stopped. “It's what?” She had not understood him.

“It's only human to want to make someone happy,” Austin said, holding her warm, nearly weightless hand. “I like you very much, you know that.” These were the right words, as ordinary as they sounded.

“Yes. Well. For what?” Joséphine said in a cold voice. “You are married. You have a wife. You live far away. In two days, three days, I don't know, you will leave. So. For what do you like me?” Her face seemed impenetrable, as though she were addressing a cab driver who'd just said something inappropriately familiar. She left her hand in his hand but looked straight ahead.

Austin wanted to speak again. He wished to say something—likewise absolutely correct—into this new void she'd opened between them, words no one could plan to say or even know in advance, but something that admitted to what she'd said, conceded his acquiescence to it, yet allowed another moment to occur during which the two of them would enter onto new and uncharted ground.

Though the only thing that Austin could say—and he had no idea why, since it sounded asinine and ruinous—was:
People have paid a dear price for getting involved with me
. Which were definitely the wrong words, since to his knowledge they weren't particularly true, and even if they were, they were so boastful and melodramatic as to cause Joséphine or anyone else to break out laughing.

Still, he could say that and immediately have it all be over between them and forget about it, which might be a relief. Though relief was not what he wanted. He wanted something to go forward between them, something definite and realis-tic and in keeping with the facts of their lives; to advance
into that area where nothing actually seemed possible at the moment.

Austin slowly let go of Joséphine's hand. Then he reached both of his hands to her face and turned it toward him, and leaned across the open space and said, just before he kissed her, “I'm at least going to kiss you. I feel like I'm entitled to do that, and I'm going to.”

Joséphine Belliard did not resist him at all, though she did not in any way concur. Her face was soft and compliant. She had a plain, not in the least full, mouth, and when Austin put his lips against hers she did not move toward him. She let herself be kissed, and Austin was immediately, cruelly aware of it. This is what was taking place: he was forcing himself on this woman, and a feeling came over him as he pressed his lips more completely onto hers that he was delusionary and foolish and pathetic—the kind of man he would make fun of if he heard himself described using only these facts as evidence. It was an awful feeling, like being old, and he felt his insides go hollow and his arms become heavy as cudgels. He wanted to disappear from this car seat and remember none of the idiotic things he had just an instant before been thinking.
This
had now been the first permanent move, when potentiality ended, and it had been the wrong one, the worst one possible. It was ludicrous.

Though before he could move his lips away, he realized Joséphine Belliard was saying something, speaking with her lips against his lips, faintly, and that by not resisting him she was in fact kissing him, her face almost unconsciously giving up to his intention. What she was saying all the while Austin was kissing her thin mouth was—whisperingly, almost dreamily—
“Non,
non,
non,
non,
non.
Please. I can't. I can't.
Non
,
non
.
”

Though she didn't stop.
No
was not what she meant exactly—she let her lips slightly part in a gesture of recognition.
And after a moment, a long suspended moment, Austin inched away, sat back in his seat and took a deep breath. He put his hands back in his lap, and let the kiss fill the space between them, a space he had somehow hoped to fill with words. It was the most unexpected and enticing thing that could've come of his wish to do right.

She did not take an audible breath. She merely sat as she'd sat before he'd kissed her, and did not speak or seem to have anything in her mind to say. Things were mostly as they had been before he'd kissed her, only he
had
kissed her—
they
had kissed—and that made all the difference in the world.

“I'd like to see you tomorrow,” Austin said very resolutely.

“Yes,” Joséphine said almost sorrowfully, as if she couldn't help agreeing. “Okay.”

And he was satisfied then that there was nothing else to say. Things were as they should be. Nothing would go wrong.

“Good night,” Austin said with the same resolution as before. He opened the car door and hauled himself out onto the street.

“Okay,” she said. She didn't look out the door, though he leaned back into the opening and looked at her. She had her hands on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, appearing no different really from when she'd stopped to let him out five minutes before—only slightly more fatigued.

He wanted to say one more good word that would help balance how she felt at that moment—not that he had the slightest idea how she felt. She was opaque to him, completely opaque, and that was not even so interesting. Though all he could think to say was something as inane as the last thing had been ruinous.
Two people don't see the same landscape.
These were the terrible words he thought, though he didn't say them. He just smiled in at her, stood up, pushed the door closed firmly and stepped slowly back so Joséphine could turn and start down rue de Mézières. He watched her drive away and could tell that she did not look at him in the rearview mirror. It was as though in a moment he did not exist.

What Austin hoped would be the rue de Vaugirard, leading around and up to Joséphine's apartment, turned out instead to be the rue St.-Jacques. He had walked much too far and was now near the medical college, where there were only lightless shop windows containing drab medical texts and dusty, passed-over antiques.

He did not know Paris well—only a few hotels he'd stayed in and a few restaurants he didn't want to eat in again. He couldn't keep straight which arrondissement was which, what direction anything was from anything else, how to take the metro, or even how to leave town, except by airplane. All the large streets looked the same and traveled at confusing angles to one another, and all the famous landmarks seemed to be in unexpected locations when they peeked up into view above the building tops. In the two days he'd been back in Paris—after leaving home in a fury and taking the plane to Orly—he'd tried to make a point of remembering in which direction on the Boulevard St.-Germain the numbers got larger. But he couldn't keep it straight, and in fact he couldn't always find the Boulevard St.-Germain when he wanted to.

At rue St.-Jacques he looked down toward where he thought would be the river and the Petit Pont bridge, and
there they were. It was a warm spring day, and the sidewalks along the river banks were jammed with tourists cruising the little picture stalls and gaping at the vast cathedral on the other side.

The prospect down the rue St.-Jacques seemed for an instant familiar—a pharmacy front he recognized, a café with a distinctive name. Horloge. He looked back up the street he'd come down and saw that he was only half a block away from the small hotel he'd once stayed in with his wife, Barbara. The Hôtel de la Tour de Notre Dame, which had advertised a view of the cathedral but from which no such view was possible. The hotel was run by Pakistanis and had rooms so small you couldn't have your suitcase open and also reach the window. He'd brought Barbara with him on business—it was four years ago—and she had shopped and visited museums and eaten lunch along the Quai de la Tournelle while he made his customer calls. They had stayed out of the room as long as possible until fatigue dumped them in bed in front of the indecipherable French TV, which eventually put them to sleep.

Austin remembered very clearly now, standing on the busy sidewalk on his way to Joséphine Belliard's apartment, that he and Barbara had left Paris on the first of April—intending to take a direct flight back to Chicago. Though, once they'd struggled their heavy luggage out of the room, crammed themselves into the tiny, airless elevator and emerged into the lobby, looking like beleaguered refugees but ready to settle their bill and depart, the Pakistani room clerk, who spoke crisp British English, looked across the reception desk in an agitated way and said, “Oh, Mr. Austin, have you not heard the bad news? I'm sorry.”

“What's that?” Austin had said, out of breath. “What bad news?” He looked at Barbara, who was holding a garment bag and a hatbox, not wanting to hear any bad news now.

“There is a quite terrible strike,” the clerk said and looked very grave. “The airport's closed down completely. No one can leave Paris today. And, I'm sorry to say, we have already booked your room for another guest. A Japanese. I'm so, so sorry.”

Austin had stood amid his suitcases, breathing in the air of defeat and frustration and anger he felt certain it would be useless to express. He stared out the lobby window at the street. The sky was cloudy and the wind slightly chilled. He heard Barbara say behind him, as much to herself as to him, “Oh well. We'll do something. We'll find another place. It's too bad. Maybe it'll be an adventure.”

Austin looked at the clerk, a little beige man with neat black hair and a white cotton jacket, standing behind his marble desk. The clerk was smiling. This was all the same to him, Austin realized: that they had no place to go; that they were tired of Paris; that they had brought too much luggage and bought too much to take home; that they had slept badly every night; that the weather was inexplicably changing to colder; that they were out of money and sick of the arrogant French. None of this mattered to this man—in some ways, Austin sensed, it may even have pleased him, pleased him enough to make him smile.

“What's so goddamned funny?” Austin had said to the smug little subcontinental. “Why's my bad luck a source of such goddamned amusement to you?” This man would be the focus of his anger. He couldn't help himself. Anger couldn't make anything worse. “Doesn't it matter that we're guests of this hotel and we're in a bit of a bad situation here?” He heard what he knew was a pleading voice.