Women with Men

1

Martin Austin turned up the tiny street — rue Sarrazin — at the head of which he hoped he would come to a larger one he knew, rue de Vaugirard, possibly, a street he could take all the way to Joséphine Belliard's apartment by the Jardin du Luxembourg. He was on his way to sit with Joséphine's son, Léo, while Joséphine visited her lawyers to sign papers divorcing her husband. Later in the evening, he was taking her for a romantic dinner. Joséphine's husband, Bernard, was a cheap novelist who'd published a scandalous book in which Joséphine figured prominently; her name used, her parts indelicately described, her infidelity put on display in salacious detail. The book had recently reached the stores. Everybody she knew was reading it.

“Okay. Maybe it is not so bad to write such a book,” Joséphine had said the first night Austin had met her, only the week before, when he had also taken her to dinner. “It is his choice to write it. I cause him unhappiness. But to publish this? In Paris? No.” She had shaken her head absolutely. “I'm sorry. This is too much. My husband — he is a shit. What can I do? I say goodbye to him.”

Austin was from Chicago. He was married, with no children, and worked as a sales representative for an old family-owned company that sold expensive specially treated paper to foreign textbook publishers. He was forty-four and had worked for the same company, the Lilienthal Company of Winnetka, for fifteen years. He'd met Joséphine Belliard at a cocktail party given by a publisher he regularly called on, for one of its important authors. He'd been invited only as a courtesy, since his company's paper had not been used for the author's book, a sociological text that calculated the suburban loneliness of immigrant Arabs by the use of sophisticated differential equations. Austin's French was lacking — he'd always been able to speak much more than he could understand — and as a consequence he'd stood by himself at the edge of the party, drinking champagne, smiling pleasantly and hoping he'd hear English spoken and find someone he could talk to instead of someone who would hear him speak a few words of French and then start a conversation he could never make sense of.

Joséphine Belliard was a sub-editor at the publishing house. She was a small, slender dark-haired Frenchwoman in her thirties and of an odd beauty — a mouth slightly too wide and too thin; her chin soft, almost receding; but with a smooth caramel skin and dark eyes and dark eyebrows that Austin found appealing. He had caught a glimpse of her earlier in the day when he'd visited the publisher's offices in the rue de Lille. She was sitting at her desk in a small, shadowy office, rapidly and animatedly speaking English into the telephone. He'd peered in as he passed but had forgotten about her until she came up to him at the party and smiled and asked in English how he liked Paris. Later that night they had gone to dinner, and at the end of the evening he'd taken her home in a taxi, then returned to his hotel alone and gone to sleep.

The next day, though, he'd called her. He had nothing special in mind, just an aimless, angling call. Maybe he could sleep with her — not that he even thought that. It was just a possibility, an inevitable thought. When he asked if she would like to see him again, she said she would if he wanted to. She didn't say she'd had a good time the night before. She didn't mention that at all — almost, Austin felt, as if that time had never happened. But it was an attitude he found attractive. She was smart. She judged things. It wasn't an American attitude. In America a woman would have to seem to care — more, probably, than she did or could after one harmless encounter.

That evening they had gone to a small, noisy Italian restaurant near the Gare de l'est, a place with bright lights and mirrors on the walls and where the food was not very good. They'd ordered light Ligurian wine, gotten a little drunk and engaged in a long and in some ways intimate conversation. Joséphine told him she had been born in the suburb of Aubervilliers, north of Paris, and couldn't wait to leave home. She had gone to a university and studied sociology while living with her parents, but now had no relationship with her mother, or with her father, who had moved to America in the late seventies and not been heard from. She said she had been married eight years to a man she once liked and had had one child with but did not especially love, and that two years ago she had begun an affair with another man, a younger man, which lasted only a short time, then ended, as she had expected it might. Afterwards she had believed she could simply resume married life more or less as she'd left it, a lifelong bourgeois muddle of continuance. But her husband had been shocked and incensed by his wife's infidelity and had moved out of their apartment, quit his job at an advertising firm, found a woman to live with and gone to work writing a novel which had as its only subject his wife's supposed indiscretions — some of which, she told Austin, he'd obviously made up, though others, amusingly enough, were surprisingly accurate.

“It's not so much I blame him, you know?” Joséphine had said and laughed. “These things come along. They happen. Other people do what they please.” She looked out the restaurant window at the row of small parked cars along the street. “So?”

“But what's happening now?” Austin said, trying to find a part of the story that would allow him into it. A phrase, a niche that could be said to invite his closer interest — though there didn't seem to be such a phrase.

“Now? Now I am living with my child. Alone. That is all of my life.” She unexpectedly looked up at Austin, her eyes opened wide, as though to say, What else is there? “What more else?” she in fact did say.

“I don't know,” Austin said. “Do you think you'll go back with your husband?” This was a question he was quite happy to ask.

“Yes. I don't know. No. Maybe,” Joséphine said, extending her lower lip slightly and raising one shoulder in a gesture of carelessness Austin believed was typical of French women. He didn't mind it in Joséphine, but he usually disliked people for affecting this gesture. It was patently false and always came at the service of important matters a person wished to pretend were not important.

Joséphine, though, did not seem like a woman to have an affair and then talk about it matter-of-factly to someone she barely knew; she seemed more like an unmarried woman looking for someone to be interested in. Obviously she was more complicated, maybe even smarter, than he'd thought, and quite realistic about life, though slightly disillusioned. Probably, if he wanted to press the matter of intimacy, he could take her back to his room — a thing he'd done before on business trips, and even if not so many times, enough times that to do so now wouldn't be extraordinary or meaningful, at least not to him. To share an unexpected intimacy might intensify both their holds on life.

Yet there was a measure of uncertainty surrounding that very thought — a thought he was so used to having he couldn't keep from it. Maybe it was true that even though he liked her, liked the frankness and direct nature of her conduct toward him, intimacy was not what he wanted. She appealed to him in a surprising way, but he was not physically attracted to her. And maybe, he thought, looking at her across the table, an intimacy with him was the last thing on earth she was interested in. She was French. He didn't know anything about them. An illusion of potential intimacy was probably what all French women broadcast, and everyone knew it. Probably she had no interest in him at all and was just passing the time. It made him feel pleased even to entertain such a multilayered view.

They finished dinner in thoughtful, weighted silence. Austin felt ready to begin a discourse on his own life — his marriage, its length and intensity, his feelings about it and himself. He was willing to talk about the uneasy, unanchored sensation he'd had lately of not knowing exactly how to make the next twenty-five years of life as eventful and important as the previous twenty-five, a sensation buttressed by the hope that he wouldn't fail of courage if courage was required, and by the certainty that everybody had his life entirely in his hands and was required to live with his own terrors and mistakes, etc. Not that he was unhappy with Barbara or lacked anything. He was not the conventionally desperate man on the way out of a marriage that had grown tiresome. Barbara, in fact, was the most interesting and beautiful woman he'd ever known, the person he admired most. He wasn't looking for a better life. He wasn't looking for anything. He loved his wife, and he hoped to present to Joséphine Belliard a different human perspective from the ones she might be used to.

“No one thinks your thoughts for you when you lay your head on the pillow at night” was a sobering expression Austin often used in addressing himself, as well as when he'd addressed the few women he'd known since being married — including Barbara. He was willing to commence a frank discussion of this sort when Joséphine asked him about himself.

But the subject did not come up. She didn't ask about his thoughts, or about himself. And not that she talked about her self. She talked about her job, about her son, Léo, about her husband and about friends of theirs. He had told her he was married. He had told her his age, that he had gone to college at the University of Illinois and grown up in the small city of Peoria. But to know no more seemed fine to her. She was perfectly nice and seemed to like him, but she was not very responsive, which he felt was unusual. She seemed to have more serious things on her mind and to take life seriously — a quality Austin liked. In fact, it made her appealing in a way she had not seemed at first, when he was only thinking about how she looked and whether he wanted to sleep with her.

But when they were walking to her car, down the sidewalk at the end of which were the bright lights of the Gare de l'est and the Boulevard Strasbourg, swarming with taxis at eleven o'clock, Joséphine put her arm through his arm and pulled close to him, put her cheek against his shoulder and said, “It's all confusion to me.”

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.

2

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.

“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.”

3

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.

AT ONE A.M., when it was six p.m. in Chicago, he had called Barbara, and they had come close to having a serious argument. It had made Austin angry, because when he had dialed the number, his own familiar number, and heard its reassuring ring, he'd felt happy — happy to be only hours away from leaving Paris, happy to be coming home and to have not just a wife to come home to but this wife — Barbara, whom he both loved and revered. And happy, also, to have effected his “contact” with Joséphine Belliard (that was the word he was using; at first it had been “rapprochement,” but that had given way). Happy that there were no bad consequences to rue — no false promises inspiring false hopes, no tearful partings, no sense of entrapping obligations or feelings of being in over your boot tops. No damage to control.

Which was not to say nothing had taken place, because plenty had — things he and Joséphine Belliard both knew about and that had been expressed when she held his wrist in the car and admitted she wasn't strong enough, or that something was too strong for her.

What does one want in the world? Austin thought, propped against the headboard of the bed that night, having a glass of warm champagne from the minibar. He was in his blue pajama bottoms, on top of the covers, barefoot, staring across the room at his own image in the smoky mirror that occupied one entire wall — a man in a bed with a lighted bed lamp beside him, a glass on his belly. What does one want most of all, when one has experienced much, suffered some, persevered, tried to do good when good was within reach? What does this experience teach us that we can profit from? That the memory of pain, Austin thought, mounts up and lays a significant weight upon the present — a sobering weight — and the truth one has to discover is: exactly what's possible but also valuable and desirable between human beings, on a low level of event.

No easy trick, he thought. Certainly not everyone could do it. But he and Joséphine Belliard had in an admittedly small way brought it off, found the point of contact whose consequences were only positive for each of them. No hysteria. No confusion. Yet not insignificant, either. He realized, of course, that if he'd had his own way, Joséphine would be in bed beside him right now; though in God knows what agitated state of mind, the late hours ticking by, sex their sole hope of consolation. It was a distasteful thought. There was trouble, and nothing would've been gained — only something lost. But the two of them had figured out a better path to take, which had eventuated in his being alone in his room and feeling quite good about everything. Even virtuous. He almost raised his glass to himself in the mirror, only it seemed ridiculous.

He waited a while before phoning Barbara, because he thought Joséphine might call — a drowsy late-night voice from bed, an opportunity for her to say something more to him, something interesting, maybe serious, something she hadn't wanted to say when they were together in the car and could reach each other.

But she didn't call, and Austin found himself staring at the foreign-looking telephone, willing it to ring. He'd had a lengthy conversation between himself and Joséphine playing in his mind for several minutes: he wished she was here now — that's what he wanted to say to her, even though he'd already decided that was distasteful. Still, he thought of her lying in bed asleep, alone, and it gave him a hollow, almost nauseated feeling. Then, for some reason, he thought of her meeting the younger man she'd had the calamitous affair with, the one that had ended her marriage. He picked up the receiver to see if the telephone was working. Then he put it down. Then he picked it up again and called Barbara.

“What did you do tonight, sweetheart? Did you have some fun?” Barbara was in jolly spirits. She was in the kitchen, fixing dinner for herself. He heard pots and pans rattling. He pictured her in his mind, tall and beautiful, confident about life.

“I took a woman to dinner,” he said bluntly. There was no delay on the line — it was as if he were calling from the office. Something, though, was making him feel irritated. The sound of the pans, he thought; the fact that Barbara considered fixing her dinner to be important enough to keep doing it as she was talking to him. His feeling of virtue was fading.

“Well, that's wonderful,” Barbara said. “Anybody special, or just somebody you met on a street corner who looked hungry?” She wasn't serious.

“A woman who works at Éditions Périgord,” Austin said sternly. “An editor.”

“That's nice,” Barbara said, and what seemed like a small edge rose in her voice. He wondered if there was a signal in his voice, something that alerted her no matter how hard he tried to seem natural, something she'd heard before over the years and that couldn't be hidden.

“It was nice,” Austin said. “We had a good time. But I'm coming home tomorrow.”

“Well, we're waiting for you,” Barbara said brightly.

“Who's we?” Austin said.

“Me. And the house. And the plants and the windows. The cars. Your life. We're all waiting with big smiles on our faces.”

“That's great,” Austin said.

“It is great,” Barbara said. Then there was silence on the line — expensive, transoceanic silence. Austin felt the need to reorganize his good mood. He had nothing to be mad about. Or uncomfortable. All was well. Barbara hadn't done anything, but neither had he. “What time is it there?” she said casually. He heard another pot clatter, then water turn on in the sink. His champagne glass had gotten warmer, the champagne flat and sweet.

“After one,” he said. “I'm sleepy now. I've got a long day tomorrow.”

“So go to sleep,” Barbara said.

“Thanks,” Austin said.

There was more silence. “Who is this woman?” Barbara said somewhat brittlely.

“Just a woman I met,” Austin said. “She's married. She has a baby. It's just la vie moderne.”

“La vie moderne,” Barbara said. She was tasting something now. Whatever she was cooking she was tasting.

“Right,” Austin said. “Modern life.”

“I understand,” Barbara said. “La vie moderne. Modern life.” She tapped a spoon hard on the rim of a pan.

“Are you glad I'm coming home?”

“Of course,” Barbara said, and paused again while Austin tried to particularize for himself the look that was on her face now. All the features in her quite beautiful face seemed to get thinner when she got angry. He wondered if they were thin now. “Do you think,” Barbara said, trying to sound merely curious, “that you might just possibly have taken me for granted tonight?” Silence. She was going on cooking. She was alone in their house, cooking for herself, and he was in a nice hotel in Paris — a former monastery — drinking champagne in his pajamas. There was some discrepancy. He had to admit that. Though it finally wasn't very important, since each of them was well fixed. But he felt sorry for her, sorry that she thought he took her for granted, when he didn't think he did; when in fact he loved her and was eager to see her. He was sorry she didn't know how he felt right now, how much regard he had for her. If she did, he thought, it would make her happy.

“No,” Austin said, finally answering her question. “I don't think I do. I really don't think so. Do you think I ever do?”

“No? It's fine, then,” Barbara said. He heard a cabinet door close. “I wouldn't want you to think that you took me for granted, that's all.”

“Why do we have to talk about this now?” Austin said plaintively. “I'm coming home tomorrow. I'm eager to see you. I'm not mad about anything. Why are you?”

“I'm not,” Barbara said. “Never mind. It doesn't matter. I just think things and then they go away.” More spoon banging.

“I love you,” Austin said. The rim of his ear had begun to ache from the receiver being pressed into it with his shoulder.

“Good,” Barbara said. “Go to sleep loving me.”

“I don't want to argue.”

“Then don't argue,” Barbara said. “Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. I'm sorry.”

“Why are you mad?” Austin said.

“Sometimes,” Barbara said. Then she stopped. “I don't know. Sometimes you just piss me off.”

“Well, shit,” Austin said.

“Shit is right. Shit,” Barbara said. “It's nothing. Go to sleep.”

“Fine. I will,” Austin said.

“I'll see you tomorrow, sweetheart.”

“Sure,” Austin said, wanting to sound casual. He started to say something else. To tell her he loved her, again in the casual voice. But Barbara had hung up the phone.

Austin sat in bed in his pajamas, staring at himself in the smoky mirror. It was a different picture from before. He looked grainy, displeased, the light beside his bed harsh, intrusive, his champagne glass empty, the night he'd just spent unsuccessful, unpromising, vaguely humiliating. He looked like he was on drugs. That was the true picture, he thought. Later, he knew, he would think differently, would see events in a kinder, more flattering light. His spirits would rise as they always did and he would feel very, very encouraged by something, anything. But now was the time to take a true reading, he thought, when the tide was out and everything exposed — including himself — as it really, truly was. There was the real life, and he wasn't deluded about it. It was this picture you had to act on.

He sat in bed and felt gloomy, drank the rest of his champagne and thought about Barbara in the house alone, probably doing something to prepare for his arrival the next afternoon — arranging some fresh flowers or preparing to cook something he especially liked. Maybe that's what she was doing when they were talking, in which case he was certainly wrong to have been annoyed. After thinking along these lines for a while, he reached over and began to dial Joséphine's number. It was two a.m. He would wake her up, but that was all right. She'd be glad he had. He would tell her the truth — that he couldn't keep from calling her, that she was on his mind, that he wished she was here with him, that he already missed her, that there was more to this than seemed. But when he'd dialed her number the line was busy. And it was busy in five minutes. And in fifteen. And in thirty. So that after a while he dispiritedly turned off the light beside the bed, put his head on the crisp pillow and passed quickly into sleep.

4

In the small suburban community of Oak Grove, Illinois, Austin meant to take straight aim on his regular existence — driving to and from the Lilienthal office in nearby Winnetka; helping coach a Little League team sponsored by a friend's Oak Grove linoleum company; spending evenings at home with Barbara, who was a broker for a big firm that sold commercial real estate and who was herself having an excellent selling season.

Austin, however, could sense that something was wrong, which bewildered him. Although Barbara had decided to continue everyday life as if that were not true, or as if whatever was bothering him was simply outside her control and because she loved him, eventually his problem would either be solved privately or be carried away by the flow of ordinary happy life. Barbara's was a systematically optimistic view: that with the right attitude, everything works out for the best. She possessed this view, she said, because her family had all been Scottish Presbyterians. And it was a view Austin admired, though it was not always the way he saw things. He thought ordinary life had the potential to grind you into dust — his parents’ life in Peoria, for instance, a life he couldn't have stood — and sometimes unusual measures were called for. Barbara said this point of view was typically shanty Irish.

On the day Austin returned — into a hot, springy airport sunshine, jet-lagged and forcibly good-spirited — Barbara had cooked venison haunch in a rich secret fig sauce, something she'd had to sleuth the ingredients for in a Hungarian neighborhood on West Diversey, plus Brabant potatoes and roasted garlics (Austin's favorite), plus a very good Merlot that Austin had drunk too much of while earnestly, painstakingly lying about all he'd done in Paris. Barbara had bought a new spring dress, had her hair restreaked and generally gone to a lot of trouble to orchestrate a happy homecoming and to forget about their unpleasant late-night phone conversation. Though Austin felt it should be his responsibility to erase that uncomfortable moment from memory and see to it his married life of long standing was once again the source of seamless, good-willed happiness.

Late that night, a Tuesday, he and Barbara made brief, boozy love in the dark of their thickly curtained bedroom, to the sound of a neighbor's springer spaniel barking unceasingly one street over. Theirs was practiced, undramatic lovemaking, a set of protocols and assumptions lovingly followed like a liturgy which points to but really has little connection with the mysteries and chaos that had once made it a breathless necessity. Austin noticed by the digital clock on the chest of drawers that it all took nine minutes, start to finish. He wondered bleakly if this was of normal or less than normal duration for Americans his and Barbara's age. Less, he supposed, though no doubt the fault was his.

Lying in the silent dark afterwards, side by side, facing the white plaster ceiling (the neighbor's dog had shut up as if on cue from an unseen observer of their act), he and Barbara sought to find something to say. Each knew the other's mind was seeking it; an upbeat, forward-sounding subject that conjured away the past couple or maybe it was three years, which hadn't been so wonderful between the two of them — a time of wandering for Austin and patience from Barbara. They wished for something unprovoking that would allow them to go to sleep thinking of themselves the way they assumed they were.

“Are you tired? You must be pretty exhausted,” Barbara said matter-of-factly into the darkness. “You poor old thing.” She reached and patted him on his chest. “Go to sleep. You'll feel better tomorrow.”

“I feel fine now. I'm not tired,” Austin said alertly. “Do I seem tired?”

“No. I guess not.”

They were silent again, and Austin felt himself relaxing to the sound of her words. He was, in fact, corrosively tired. Yet he wanted to put a good end to the night, which he felt had been a nice one, and to the homecoming itself, and to the time he'd been gone and ridiculously infatuated with Joséphine Belliard. That encounter — there was no encounter, of course — but in any case those pronouncements and preoccupations could be put to rest. They could be disciplined away. They were not real life — at least not the bedrock, realest life, the one everything depended on — no matter how he'd briefly felt and protested. He wasn't a fool. He wasn't stupid enough to lose his sense of proportion. He was a survivor, he thought, and survivors always knew which direction the ground was.

“I just want to see what's possible now,” Austin said unexpectedly. He was half asleep and had been having two conversations at once — one with Barbara, his wife, and one with himself about Joséphine Belliard — and the two were getting mixed up. Barbara hadn't asked him anything to which what he'd just mumbled was even a remotely logical answer. She hadn't, that he remembered, asked him anything at all. He was just babbling, talking in his near sleep. But a cold, stiffening fear gripped him, a fear that he'd said something, half asleep and half drunk, that he'd be sorry for, something that would incriminate him with the truth about Joséphine. Though in his current state of mind, he wasn't at all sure what that truth might be.

“That shouldn't be hard, should it?” Barbara said out of the dark.

“No,” Austin said, wondering if he was awake. “I guess not.”

“We're together. And we love each other. Whatever we want to make possible we ought to be able to do.” She touched his leg through his pajamas.

“Yes,” Austin said. “That's right.” He wished Barbara would go to sleep now. He didn't want to say anything else. Talking was a minefield, since he wasn't sure what he would say.

Barbara was silent, while his insides contracted briefly, then slowly began to relax again. He resolved to say nothing else. After a couple of minutes Barbara turned and faced the curtains. The streetlight showed palely between the fabric closings, and Austin wondered if he had somehow made her cry without realizing it.

“Oh well,” Barbara said. “You'll feel better tomorrow, I hope. Good night.”

“Good night,” Austin said. And he settled himself helplessly into sleep, feeling that he had not pleased Barbara very much, and that not only was he a man who probably pleased no one very much now, but that in his own life — among the things that should and always had made him happy — very little pleased him at all.

IN THE NEXT DAYS Austin went to work as he usually did. He made make-up calls to his accounts in Brussels and Amsterdam. He told a man he'd known for ten years and deeply respected that doctors had discovered a rather “mysterious inflammation” high in the upper quadrant of his stomach but that there was reasonable hope surgery could be averted with the aid of drugs. He tried to think of the name of the drug he was “taking” but couldn't. Afterwards he felt gloomy about having told such a pointless falsehood and worried that the man might mention something to his boss.

He wondered, staring at the elegantly framed azimuth map Barbara had given him when he'd been awarded the prestigious European accounts, and which he'd hung behind his desk with tiny red pennants attached, denoting where he'd increased the company's market share — Brussels, Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Paris — wondered if his life, his normal carrying-on, was slipping out of control, yet so gradually as not to be noticed. But he decided it wasn't, and as proof he offered the fact that he was entertaining this idea in his office, on an ordinary business day, with everything in his life arrayed in place and going forward, rather than entertaining it in some Parisian street café in the blear aftermath of calamity: a man with soiled lapels, in need of a shave and short of cash, scribbling his miserable thoughts into a tiny spiral notebook like all the other morons he'd seen who'd thrown their lives away. This feeling now, this sensation of heaviness, of life's coming unmoored, was actually, he believed, a feeling of vigilance, the weight of responsibility accepted, the proof that carrying life to a successful end was never an easy matter.

On Thursday, the moment he arrived in the office he put in a call to Joséphine at work. She'd been on his mind almost every minute: her little oddly matched but inflaming features, her boyish way of walking with her toes pointed out like a country bumpkin. But also her soft, shadowy complexion and soft arms, her whispered voice in his memory: “Non, non, non, non, non.”

“Hi, it's me,” Austin said. This time a bulky delay clogged his connection, and he could hear his voice echo on the line. He didn't sound like he wanted to sound. His voice was higher pitched, like a kid's voice.

“Okay. Hi,” was all Joséphine said. She was rustling papers, a sound that annoyed him.

“I was just thinking about you,” he said. A long pause opened after this announcement, and he endured it uncomfortably.

“Yes,” she said. Another pause. “Me, too. How are you?”

“I'm fine,” Austin said, though he didn't want to stress that. He wanted to stress that he missed her. “I miss you,” he said, and felt feeble hearing his voice inside the echo.

“Yeah,” she said finally though flatly. “Me, too.”

He wasn't sure if she'd actually heard what he'd said. Possibly she was talking to someone else, someone in her office. He felt disoriented and considered hanging up. Though he knew how he'd feel if that happened. Wretched beyond imagining. In fact, he needed to persevere now or he'd end up feeling wretched anyway.

“I'd like to see you very much,” Austin said, his ear pressed to the receiver.

“Yeah,” Joséphine said. “Come and take me to dinner tonight.” She laughed a harsh, ironic laugh. He wondered if she was saying this for someone else's benefit, someone in her office who knew all about him and thought he was stupid. He heard more papers rustle. He felt things spinning.

“I mean it,” he said. “I would.”

“When are you coming back to Paris?”

“I don't know. But very soon, I hope.” He didn't know why he'd said that, since it wasn't true, or at least wasn't in any plans he currently had. Only in that instant it seemed possible. Anything was possible. And indeed this seemed imminently possible. He simply had no idea how. You couldn't decide to go for the weekend. France wasn't Wisconsin.

“So. Call me, I guess,” Joséphine said. “I would see you.”

“I will,” Austin said, his heart beginning to thump. “When I come I'll call you.”

He wanted to ask her something. He didn't know what, though. He didn't know anything to ask. “How's Leo?” he said, using the English pronunciation.

Joséphine laughed, but not ironically. “How is Leo?” she said, using the same pronunciation. “Léo is okay. He is at home. Soon I'm going there. That's all.”

“Good,” Austin said. “That's great.” He swiveled quickly and stared at Paris on the map. As usual, he was surprised at how much nearer the top of France it was instead of perfectly in the middle, the way he always thought of it. He wanted to ask her why she hadn't called him the last night he'd seen her, to let her know he'd hoped she would. But then he remembered her line had been busy, and he wanted to know who she'd been talking to. Although he couldn't ask that. It wasn't his business.

“Fine,” he said. And he knew that in five seconds the call would be over and Paris would instantly be as far from Chicago as it ever was. He almost said “I love you” into the receiver. But that would be a mistake, and he didn't say it, though part of him furiously wanted to. Then he nearly said it in French, thinking possibly it might mean less than it meant in English. But again he refrained. “I want to see you very much,” he said as a last, weak, compromise.

“So. See me. I kiss you,” Joséphine Belliard said, but in a strange voice, a voice he'd never heard before, almost an emotional voice. Then she quietly hung up.

Austin sat at his desk, staring at the map, wondering what that voice had been, what it meant, how he was supposed to interpret it. Was it the voice of love, or some strange trick of the phone line? Or was it a trick of his ear to confect something he wanted to hear and so allow him not to feel as wretched as he figured he'd feel but in fact didn't feel. Because how he felt was wonderful. Ebullient. The best he'd felt since the last time he'd seen her. Alive. And there was nothing wrong with that, was there? If something makes you feel good for a moment and no one is crushed by it, what's the use of denying yourself? Other people denied. And for what? The guys he'd gone to college with, who'd never left the track once they were on it, never had a moment of ebullience, and maybe even never knew the difference. But he did know the difference, and it was worth it, no matter the difficulties you endured living with the consequences. You had one life, Austin thought. Use it up. He'd heard what he'd heard.

THAT EVENING HE picked Barbara up at the realty offices and drove them to a restaurant. It was a thing they often did. Barbara frequently worked late, and they both liked a semi-swanky Polynesian place in Skokie called Hai-Nun, a dark, teak-and-bamboo hideaway where the drinks were all doubles and eventually, when you were too drunk to negotiate your way to a table, you could order a platter of fried specialties and sober up eating dinner at the bar.

For a while an acquaintance of Austin's, a commodities trader named Ned Coles, had stood beside them at the bar and made chitchat about how the salad days on the Board of Trade were a thing of the past, and then about the big opportunities in Europe after 1992 and how the U.S. was probably going to miss the boat, and then about how the Fighting Illini were sizing up at the skilled positions during spring drills, and finally about his ex-wife, Suzie, who was moving to Phoenix the next week so she could participate more in athletics. She was interested, Ned Coles said, in taking part in iron-woman competitions.

“Can't she be an iron woman in Chicago?” Barbara said. She barely knew Ned Coles and was bored by him. Ned's wife was also “kidnapping” their two kids to Arizona, which had Ned down in the dumps but not wanting to make a fuss.

“Of course she can,” Ned said. Ned was a heavy, beet-faced man who looked older than forty-six. He had gone to Harvard, then come home to work for his old man's company and quickly become a drunk and a nuisance. Austin had met him in MBA night school fifteen years ago. They didn't see each other socially. “But that's not the big problem,” Ned went on.

“What's the big problem?” Austin said, muddling an ice cube in his gin.

“Moi-même,” Ned said, and looked grim about it. “She contends I'm a force field of negativism that radiates into all the north suburbs. So I have to move to Indiana for her to stay. And that's way too big a sacrifice.” Ned laughed humorlessly. He knew a lot of Indiana jokes that Austin had already heard. Indiana, to Ned Coles, was the place where you caught sight of the flagship of the Polish navy and visited the Argentine war heroes memorial. He was old Chicago, and also, Austin thought, an idiot. He wished Ned's wife a good journey to Arizona.

When Ned wandered off into the restaurant, leaving them alone at the lacquered teak bar, Barbara grew quiet. Both of them were drinking gin, and in silence they let the bartender pour them another two on the rocks. Austin knew he was a little drunk now and that Barbara was probably more drunk than he was. He sensed a problem could be lurking — about what he wasn't sure. But he longed for the feeling he'd had when he put the phone down with Joséphine Belliard that morning. Ebullience. To be fiercely alive. It had been a temporary feeling, he understood perfectly well. But he longed for it now all the more achingly on account of its illusory quality, its innocent smallness. Even realists, he thought, needed a break now and then.

“Do you remember the other night?” Barbara began as if she were choosing her words with extreme precision. “You were in Paris, and I was back here at home. And I asked you if you thought you might be taking me for granted?” She focused on the rim of her glass, but unexpectedly her eyes cast up and found his. There was one other couple in the bar, and the bartender had seated himself on a stool at the end and was reading a newspaper. This was the dinner hour, and many people were in the restaurant section. Someone had ordered a dish that required fire to be brought from the kitchen to their table, and Austin could see the yellow flame lick up at the ceiling, hear the loud sssss and the delighted diners say, “Oooo.”

“I didn't think that was true,” Austin said resolutely in answer to her question.

“I know you didn't,” Barbara said and nodded her head slowly. “And maybe that's exactly right. Maybe I was wrong.” She stared at her glass of gin again. “What is true, though, Martin, and what's worse — about you, anyway — is that you take yourself for granted.” Barbara kept nodding her head without looking at him, as if she'd discovered an interesting but worrisome paradox in philosophy. When Barbara got mad at him, particularly if she was a little drunk, she nodded her head and spoke in this overly meticulous way, as if she'd done considerable thinking on the subject at hand and wished to illuminate her conclusions as a contribution to common sense. Austin called this habit “reading the ingredients on the Molotov cocktail,” and he hated it and wished Barbara wouldn't do it, though there was never a good moment to bring the subject up.

“I'm sorry, but I don't think I know what you mean by that,” he said in the most normal voice he could manufacture.

Barbara looked at him curiously, her perfect Lambda Chi beauty-queen features grown as precise and angular as her words. “What I mean is that you think — about yourself — that you can't be changed, as if you're fixed. On your insides, I mean. You think of yourself as a given, that what you go off to some foreign country and do won't have any effect on you, won't leave you different. But that isn't true, Martin. Because you are different. In fact, you're unreachable, and you've been becoming that way for a long time. For two or three years, at least. I've just tried to get along with you and make you happy, because making you happy has always made me happy. But now it doesn't, because you've changed and I don't feel like I can reach you or that you're even aware of what you've become, and frankly I don't even much care. All this just occurred to me while I was ordering a title search this afternoon. I'm sorry it's such a shock.”

Barbara sniffed and looked at him and seemed to smile. She wasn't about to cry. She was cold-eyed and factual, as if she were reporting the death of a distant relative neither of them remembered very well.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Austin said, wanting to remain as calm as she was, though not as cold. He didn't exactly know what this meant or what could've brought it about, since he didn't think he'd been doing anything wrong. Nothing had happened two or three years ago that he could remember. Joséphine Belliard had had a small effect on him, but it would pass the way anything passed. Life seemed to be going on. He thought, in fact, that he'd been acting about as normal as he could hope to act.

But did this mean that she had taken all she intended to and was through with him? That would be a shock, he thought, something he definitely didn't want. Or did she only mean to say he needed to shape up and become more reachable, go back to some nice way he'd been that she approved of — some way he would've said he still was. Or maybe she was saying she intended to make her own changes now, be less forgiving, less interested in him, less loving, take more interest in herself; that their marriage was going to start down a new, more equitable road — something else he didn't like the sound of.

He sat thoughtfully in the silence she was affording him for just this purpose. He certainly needed to offer a response. He needed intelligently and forthrightly to answer her charges and demonstrate sympathy for her embattled position. But also he needed to stand up for himself, while offering a practical way out of this apparent impasse. Much, in other words, was being asked of him. He was, it seemed, expected to solve everything: to take both positions — hers and his — and somehow join them so that everything was either put back to a way it had been or else made better so that both of them were happier and could feel that if life was a series of dangerous escarpments you scaled with difficulty, at least you eventually succeeded, whereupon the plenteous rewards of happiness made all the nightmares worthwhile.

It was an admirable view of life, Austin thought. It was a sound, traditional view, absolutely in the American grain, and one that sent everybody to the altar starry-eyed and certain. It was a view Barbara had always maintained and he'd always envied. Barbara was in the American grain. It was one of the big reasons he'd been knocked out by her years ago and why he knew she would be the best person he or anyone else could ever love. Only he didn't see at that moment what he could do to make her wishes come true, if he in fact knew anything about what her wishes were. So that what he said, after admitting he was sorry to hear what she'd already said, was: “But I don't think there's anything I can do about it. I wish there was. I'm really sorry.”

“Then you're just an asshole,” Barbara said and nodded again very confidently, very conclusively. “And you're also a womanizer and you're a creep. And I don't want to be married to any of those things anymore. So.” She took a big emptying swig out of her glass of gin and set the thick tumbler down hard on its damp little napkin coaster. “So,” she said again, as if appreciating her own self-assured voice, “fuck you. And goodbye.” With that, she got up and walked very steadily and straight out of the Hai-Nun (so straight that Austin didn't wonder about whether she was in any condition to drive) and disappeared around the bamboo corner just as another fat lick of yellow flame swarmed into the dark dining-room air and another hot, loud sizzling sound went up, and another “Oooo” was exhaled from the dazzled diners, a couple of whom even clapped.

This was certainly an over-response on Barbara's part, Austin felt. In the first place, she knew nothing about Joséphine Belliard, because there was nothing to know. No incriminating facts. She was only guessing, and unfairly. In all probability she was just feeling bad about herself and hoping to make him responsible for it. In the second place, it wasn't easy to tell the truth about how you felt when it wasn't what someone you loved wanted to be the truth. He'd done his best by saying he wasn't sure what he could do to make her happy. That had been a place to start. He'd sensed her opening certitude had just been a positioning strategy and that while a big fight might've been brewing, it would've been one they could settle over the course of the evening, ending with apologies, after which they could both feel better, even liberated. It had gone like that in the past when he'd gotten temporarily distracted by some woman he met far from home. Ordinary goings-on, he thought.

Though women were sometimes a kind of problem. He enjoyed their company, enjoyed hearing their voices, knowing about their semi-intimate lives and daily dramas. But his attempts at knowing them often created a peculiar feeling, as if on the one hand he'd come into the possession of secrets he didn't want to keep, while on the other, some other vital portion of life — his life with Barbara, for instance — was left not fully appreciated, gone somewhat to waste.

But Barbara had stepped out of all bounds with this leaving. Now they were both alone in separate little cocoons of bitterness and self-explanation, and that was when matters did not get better but worse. Everyone knew that. She had brought this situation into existence, not him, and she would have to live with the outcome, no matter how small or how large. Drinking had something to do with it, he thought. His and hers. There was a lot of tension in the air at the moment, and drinking was a natural response. He didn't think either of them had a drinking problem per se — particularly himself. But he resolved, sitting at the teak bar in front of a glass of Beefeater's, that he would quit drinking as soon as he could.

When he walked outside into the dark parking lot, Barbara was nowhere in sight. A half hour had gone by. He thought he might find her in the car, mad or sleeping. It was eight-thirty. The air was cool, and Old Orchard Road was astream with automobiles.

When he drove home, all the lights were off and Barbara's car, which she'd left at her office when he picked her up, was not in the garage. Austin walked in through the house, turning on lights until he got to their bedroom. He opened the door gingerly, so as not to wake Barbara if she was there, flung across the top covers, asleep. But she wasn't there. The room was dark except for the digital clock. He was alone in the house, and he didn't know where his wife was, only that she was conceivably leaving him. Certainly she'd been angry. The last thing she had said was “fuck you.” Then she'd walked out — something she hadn't done before. Someone, he understood, might conclude she was leaving him.

Austin poured himself a glass of milk in the brightly lit kitchen and considered testifying to these very moments and facts, as well as to the unpleasant episode in the Hai-Nun and to the final words of his wife, in a court of law. A divorce court. He featured himself sitting at a table with his lawyer, and Barbara at a table with her lawyer, both of them, eyes straight ahead, facing a judge's bench. In her present state of mind Barbara wouldn't be persuaded by his side of the story. She wouldn't have a change of heart or decide just to forget the whole thing in the middle of a courtroom once he'd looked her square in the eye and told only the truth. Still, divorce was certainly not a good solution, he thought.

Austin walked up to the sliding glass door that gave on to the back yard and to the dark and fenceless yards of his neighbors, their soft house lights and the reflection of his own kitchen cabinets and himself holding his glass of milk and of the breakfast table and chairs, all combined in a perfect half-lit diorama.

On the other hand, he thought (the first being a messy divorce attempt followed by sullen reconciliation once they realized they lacked the nerve for divorce), he was out.

He hadn't left. She had. He hadn't made any threats or complaints or bitter, half-drunk, name-calling declarations or soap-operaish exits into the night. She had. He hadn't wanted to be alone. She had wanted to be alone. And as a result he was free. Free to do anything he wanted, no questions asked or answered, no suspicions or recriminations. No explanatory half-truths. It was a revelation.

In the past, when he and Barbara had had a row and he had felt like just getting in the car and driving to Montana or Alaska to work for the forest service — never writing, never calling, though not actually going to the trouble of concealing his identity or whereabouts — he'd found he could never face the moment of actual leaving. His feet simply wouldn't move. And about himself he'd said, feeling quietly proud of the fact, that he was no good at departures. There was in leaving, he believed, the feel of betrayal — of betraying Barbara. Of betraying himself. You didn't marry somebody so you could leave, he'd actually said to her on occasion. He could never in fact even seriously think about leaving. And about the forest service he could only plot as far as the end of the first day — when he was tired and bruised from hard work, his mind emptied of worries. But after that he was confused about what would be happening next — another toilsome day like the one before. This had meant, he understood, that he didn't want to leave; that his life, his love for Barbara, were simply too strong. Leaving was what weak people did. Again his college classmates were called upon to be the bad examples, the cowardly leavers. Most of them had been divorced, strewn kids of all ages all over the map, routinely and grimly posted big checks off to Dallas and Seattle and Atlanta, fed on regret. They had left and now they were plenty sorry. But his love for Barbara was simply worth more. Some life force was in him too strongly, too fully, to leave — which meant something, something lasting and important. This force, he felt, was what all the great novels ever written were about.

Of course, it had occurred to him that what he might be was just a cringing, lying coward who didn't have the nerve to face a life alone; couldn't fend for himself in a complex world full of his own acts’ consequences. Though that was merely a conventional way of understanding life, another soap-opera view — about which he knew better. He was a stayer. He was a man who didn't have to do the obvious thing. He would be there to preside over the messy consequences of life's turmoils. This was, he thought, his one innate strength of character.

Only now, oddly, he was in limbo. The “there” where he'd promised to stay seemed to have suddenly separated into pieces and receded. And it was invigorating. He felt, in fact, that although Barbara had seemed to bring it about, he may have caused all this himself, even though it was probably inevitable — destined to happen to the two of them no matter what the cause or outcome.

He went to the bar cart in the den, poured some scotch into his milk, and came back and sat in a kitchen chair in front of the sliding glass door. Two dogs trotted across the grass in the rectangle of light that fell from the window. Shortly after, another two dogs came through — one the springer spaniel he regularly heard yapping at night. And then a small scruffy lone dog, sniffing the ground behind the other four. This dog stopped and peered at Austin, blinked, then trotted out of the light.

Austin had been imagining Barbara checked into an expensive hotel downtown, drinking champagne, ordering a Cobb salad from room service and thinking the same things he'd been thinking. But what he was actually beginning to feel now, and grimly, was that when push came to shove, the aftermath of almost anything he'd done in a very long time really hadn't given him any pleasure. Despite good intentions, and despite loving Barbara as he felt few people ever loved anybody and feeling that he could be to blame for everything that had gone on tonight, he considered it unmistakable that he could do his wife no good now. He was bad for her. And if his own puny inability to satisfy her candidly expressed and at least partly legitimate grievances was not adequate proof of his failure, then her own judgment certainly was: “You're an asshole,” she'd said. And he concluded that she was right. He was an asshole. And he was the other things too, and hated to think so. Life didn't veer — you discovered it had veered, later. Now. And he was as sorry about it as anything he could imagine ever being sorry about. But he simply couldn't help it. He didn't like what he didn't like and couldn't do what he couldn't do.

What he could do, though, was leave. Go back to Paris. Immediately. Tonight if possible, before Barbara came home, and before he and she became swamped all over again and he had to wade back into the problems of his being an asshole, and their life. He felt as if a fine, high-tension wire strung between his toes and the back of his neck had been forcefully plucked by an invisible finger, causing him to feel a chilled vibration, a bright tingling that radiated into his stomach and out to the ends of his fingers.

He sat up straight in his chair. He was leaving. Later he would feel awful and bereft and be broke, maybe homeless, on welfare and sick to death from a disease born of dejection. But now he felt incandescent, primed, jittery with excitement. And it wouldn't last forever, he thought, probably not even very long. The mere sound of a taxi door closing in the street would detonate the whole fragile business and sacrifice his chance to act.

He stood and quickly walked to the kitchen and telephoned for a taxi, then left the receiver dangling off the hook. He walked back through the house, checking all the doors and windows to be certain they were locked. He walked into his and Barbara's bedroom, turned on the light, hauled his two-suiter from under the bed, opened it and began putting exactly that in one side, two suits, and in the other side underwear, shirts, another pair of shoes, a belt, three striped ties, plus his still-full dopp kit. In response to an unseen questioner, he said out loud, standing in the bedroom: “I really didn't bring much. I just put some things in a suitcase.”

He closed his bag and brought it to the living room. His passport was in the secretary. He put that in his pants pocket, got a coat out of the closet by the front door — a long rubbery rain jacket bought from a catalog — and put it on. He picked up his wallet and keys, then turned and looked into the house.

He was leaving. In moments he'd be gone. Likely as not he would never stand in this doorway again, surveying these rooms, feeling this way. Some of it might happen again, okay, but not all. And it was so easy: one minute you're completely in a life, and the next you're completely out. Just a few items to round up.

A note. He felt he should leave a note and walked quickly back to the kitchen, dug a green Day-Glo grocery-list pad out of a drawer, and on the back scribbled, “Dear B,” only then wasn't sure what to continue with. Something meaningful would take sheets and sheets of paper but would be both absurd and irrelevant. Something brief would be ironic or sentimental, and demonstrate in a completely new way what an asshole he was — a conclusion he wanted this note to make the incontrovertible case against. He turned the sheet over. A sample grocery list was printed there, with blank spaces provided for pencil checks.

Pain ……………………

Lait ……………………

Cereal ………………….

Oeufs …………………

Veggies …………………

Hamburger ……………….

Lard ……………………

Fromage …………………

Les Autres ………………

He could check “Les Autres,” he thought, and write “Paris” beside it. Paris was certainly autres. Though only an asshole would do that. He turned it over again to the “Dear B” side. Nothing he could think of was right. Everything wanted to stand for their life, but couldn't. Their life was their life and couldn't be represented by anything but their life, and not by something scratched on the back of a grocery list.

His taxi honked outside. For some reason he reached up and put the receiver back on the hook, and almost instantly the phone started ringing — loud, brassy, shrill, unnerving rings that filled the yellow kitchen as if the walls were made of metal. He could hear the other phones ringing in other rooms. It was suddenly intolerably chaotic inside the house. Below “Dear B” he furiously scribbled, “I'll call you. Love M,” and stuck the note under the jangling phone. Then he hurried to the front door, grabbed his suitcase, and exited his empty home into the soft spring suburban night.

5

During his first few dispiriting days back in Paris, Austin did not call Joséphine Belliard. There were more pressing matters: to arrange, over terrible phone connections, to be granted a leave of absence from his job. “Personal problems,” he said squeamishly to his boss, and felt certain his boss was concluding he'd had a nervous breakdown. “How's Barbara?” Fred Carruthers said cheerfully, which annoyed him.

“Barbara's great,” he said. “She's just fine. Call her up yourself. She'd like to hear from you.” Then he hung up, thinking he'd never see Fred Carruthers again and didn't give a shit if he didn't, except that his own voice had sounded desperate, the one way he didn't want it to sound.

He arranged for his Chicago bank to wire him money — enough, he thought, for six months. Ten thousand dollars. He called up one of the two people he knew in Paris, a former Lambda Chi brother who was a homosexual and a would-be novelist, living someplace in Neuilly. Dave, his old frat bro, asked him if he was a homosexual himself now, then laughed like hell. Finally, though, Dave remembered he had a friend who had a friend — and eventually, after two unsettled nights in his old Hôtel de la Monastère, during which he'd worried about money, Austin had been given the keys to a luxurious, metal-and-velvet faggot's lair with enormous mirrors on the bedroom ceiling, just down rue Bonaparte from the Deux Magots, where Sartre was supposed to have liked to sit in the sun and think.

Much of these first days — bright, soft mid-April days — Austin was immensely jet-lagged and exhausted and looked sick and haunted in the bathroom mirror. He didn't want to see Joséphine in this condition. He had been back home only three days, then in the space of one frenzied evening had had a big fight with his wife, raced to the airport, waited all night for a flight and taken a middle-row standby to Orly seated between two French children. It was crazy. A large part of this was definitely crazy. Probably he was having a nervous breakdown and was too out of his head even to have a hint about it, and eventually Barbara and a psychiatrist would have to bring him home heavily sedated and in a straitjacket. But that would be later.

“Where are you?” Barbara said coldly, when he'd finally reached her at home.

“In Europe,” he said. “I'm staying a while.”

“How nice for you,” she said. He could tell she didn't know what to think about any of this. It pleased him to baffle her, though he also knew it was childish.

“Carruthers might call you,” he said.

“I already talked to him,” Barbara said.

“I'm sure he thinks I'm nuts.”

“No. He doesn't think that,” she said, without offering what he did think.

Outside the apartment the traffic on rue Bonaparte was noisy, so that he moved away from the window. The walls in the apartment were dark red-and-green suede, with glistening tubular-steel abstract wall hangings, thick black carpet and black velvet furniture. He had no idea who the owner was, though he realized just at that moment that in all probability the owner was dead.

“Are you planning to file for divorce?” Austin said. It was the first time the word had ever been used, but it was inescapable, and he was remotely satisfied to be the first to put it into play.

“Actually I don't know what I'm going to do,” Barbara said. “I don't have a husband now, apparently.”

He almost blurted out that it was she who'd walked out, not him, she who'd actually caused this. But that wasn't entirely true, and in any case saying anything about it would start a conversation he didn't want to have and that no one could have at such long distance. It would just be bickering and complaining and anger. He realized all at once that he had nothing else to say, and felt jittery. He'd only wished to announce that he was alive and not dead, but was now ready to hang up.

“You're in France, aren't you?” Barbara said.

“Yes,” Austin said. “That's right. Why?”

“I supposed so.” She said this as though the thought of it disgusted her. “Why not, I guess. Right?”

“Right,” he said.

“So. Come home when you're tired of whatever it is, whatever her name is.” She said this very mildly.

“Maybe I will,” Austin said.

“Maybe I'll be waiting, too,” Barbara said. “Miracles still happen. I've had my eyes opened now, though.”

“Great,” he said, and he started to say something else, but he thought he heard her hang up. “Hello?” he said. “Hello? Barbara, are you there?”

“Oh, go to hell,” Barbara said, and then she did hang up.

FOR TWO DAYS Austin took long, exhausting walks in completely arbitrary directions, surprising himself each time by where he turned up, then taking a cab back to his apartment. His instincts still seemed all wrong, which frustrated him. He thought the Place de la Concorde was farther away from this apartment than it was, and in the wrong direction. He couldn't always remember which way the river ran. And unhappily he kept passing the same streets and movie theater playing Cinema Paradiso and the same news kiosk, over and over, as if he continually walked in a circle.

He called his other friend, a man named Hank Bullard, who'd once worked for Lilienthal but had decided to start an air-conditioning business of his own in Vitry. He was married to a Frenchwoman and lived in a suburb. They made plans for a lunch, then Hank canceled for business reasons — an emergency trip out of town. Hank said they should arrange another date but didn't specifically suggest one. Austin ended up having lunch alone in an expensive brasserie on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, seated behind a glass window, trying to read Le Monde but growing discouraged as the words he didn't understand piled up. He would read the Herald Tribune, he thought, to keep up with the world, and let his French build gradually.

There were even more tourists than a week earlier when he'd been here. The tourist season was beginning, and the whole place, he thought, would probably change and become unbearable. The French and the Americans, he decided, looked basically like each other; only their language and some soft, almost effeminate quality he couldn't define distinguished them. Sitting at his tiny, round boulevard table, removed from the swarming passersby, Austin thought this street was full of people walking along dreaming of doing what he was actually doing, of picking up and leaving everything behind, coming here, sitting in cafés, walking the streets, possibly deciding to write a novel or paint watercolors, or just to start an air-conditioning business, like Hank Bullard. But there was a price to pay for that. And the price was that doing it didn't feel the least romantic. It felt purposeless, as if he himself had no purpose, plus there was no sense of a future now, at least as he had always experienced the future — as a palpable thing you looked forward to confidently even if what it held might be sad or tragic or unwantable. The future was still there, of course; he simply didn't know how to imagine it. He didn't know, for instance, exactly what he was in Paris for, though he could perfectly recount everything that had gotten him here, to this table, to his plate of moules meunières, to this feeling of great fatigue, observing tourists, all of whom might dream whatever he dreamed but in fact knew precisely where they were going and precisely why they were here. Possibly they were the wise ones, Austin thought, with their warmly lighted, tightly constructed lives on faraway landscapes. Maybe he had reached a point, or even gone far beyond a point now, when he no longer cared what happened to himself — the crucial linkages of a good life, he knew, being small and subtle and in many ways just lucky things you hardly even noticed. Only you could fuck them up and never know quite how you'd done it. Everything just started to go wrong and unravel. Your life could be on a track to ruin, to your being on the street and disappearing from view entirely, and you, in spite of your best efforts, your best hope that it all go differently, you could only stand by and watch it happen.

For the next two days he did not call Joséphine Belliard, although he thought about calling her all the time. He thought he might possibly bump into her as she walked to work. His garish little roué's apartment was only four blocks from the publishing house on rue de Lille, where, in a vastly different life, he had made a perfectly respectable business call a little more than a week before.

He walked down the nearby streets as often as he could — to buy a newspaper or to buy food in the little market stalls on the rue de Seine, or just to pass the shop windows and begin finding his way along narrow brick alleys. He disliked thinking that he was only in Paris because of Joséphine Belliard, because of a woman, and one he really barely knew but whom he nevertheless thought about constantly and made persistent efforts to see “accidentally.” He felt he was here for another reason, too, a subtle and insistent, albeit less specific one he couldn't exactly express to himself but which he felt was expressed simply by his being here and feeling the way he felt.

Not once, though, did he see Joséphine Belliard on the rue de Lille, or walking along the Boulevard St.-Germain on her way to work, or walking past the Café de Flore or the Brasserie Lipp, where he'd had lunch with her only the week before and where the sole had been full of grit but he hadn't mentioned it.

Much of the time, on his walks along strange streets, he thought about Barbara; and not with a feeling of guilt or even of loss, but normally, habitually, involuntarily. He found himself shopping for her, noticing a blouse or a scarf or an antique pendant or a pair of emerald earrings he could buy and bring home. He found himself storing away things to tell her — for instance, that the Sorbonne was actually named after somebody named Sorbon, or that France was seventy percent nuclear, a headline he deciphered off the front page of L'express and that coursed around his mind like an electron with no polarity other than Barbara, who, as it happened, was a supporter of nuclear power. She occupied, he recognized, the place of final consequence — the destination for practically everything he cared about or noticed or imagined. But now, or at least for the present time, that situation was undergoing a change, since being in Paris and waiting his chance to see Joséphine lacked any customary destination, but simply started and stopped in himself. Though that was how he wanted it. And that was the explanation he had not exactly articulated in the last few days: he wanted things, whatever things there were, to be for him and only him.

On the third day, at four in the afternoon, he called Joséphine Belliard. He called her at home instead of her office, thinking she wouldn't be at home and that he could leave a brief, possibly inscrutable recorded message, and then not call her for a few more days, as though he was too busy to try again any sooner. But when her phone rang twice she answered.

“Hi,” Austin said, stunned at the suddenness of Joséphine being on the line and only a short distance from where he was standing, and sounding unquestionably like herself. It made him feel vaguely faint. “It's Martin Austin,” he managed to say feebly.

He heard a child scream in the background before Joséphine could say more than hello. “Nooooon!” the child, certainly Léo, screamed again.

“Where are you?” she said in a hectic voice. He heard something go crash in the room where she was. “Are you in Chicago now?”

“No, I'm in Paris,” Austin said, grappling with his composure and speaking very softly.

“Paris? What are you doing here?” Joséphine said, obviously surprised. “Are you on business again now?”

This, somehow, was an unsettling question. “No,” he said, still very faintly. “I'm not on business. I'm just here. I have an apartment.”

“Tu as un appartement!” Joséphine said in even greater surprise. “What for?” she said. “Why? Is your wife with you?”

“No,” Austin said. “I'm here alone. I'm planning on staying for a while.”

“Oooo-laaa,” Joséphine said. “Do you have a big fight at home? Is that the matter?”

“No,” Austin lied. “We didn't have a big fight at home. I decided to take some time away. That's not so unusual, is it?”

Léo screamed again savagely. “Ma-man!” Joséphine spoke to him patiently. “Doucement, doucement,” she said. “J'arrive. Une minute. Une minute.” One minute didn't seem like very much time, but Austin didn't want to stay on the phone long. Joséphine seemed much more French than he remembered. In his mind she had been almost an American, only with a French accent. “Okay. So,” she said, a little out of breath. “You are here now? In Paris?”

“I want to see you,” Austin said. It was the moment he'd been waiting for — more so even than the moment when he would finally see her. It was the moment when he would declare himself to be present. Unencumbered. Available. Willing. That mattered a great deal. He actually slipped his wedding ring off his finger and laid it on the table beside the phone.

“Yes?” Joséphine said. “What…” She paused, then resumed. “What do you like to do with me? When do you like? What?” She was impatient.

“Anything. Anytime,” Austin said, and suddenly felt the best he'd felt in days. “Tonight,” he said. “Or today. In twenty minutes.”

“In twenty minutes! Come on. No!” she said and laughed, but in an interested way, a pleased way — he could tell. “No, no, no,” she said. “I have to go to my lawyer in one hour. I have to find my neighbor now to stay with Léo. It is impossible now. I'm divorcing. You know this already. It's very upsetting. Anyway.”

“I'll stay with Léo,” Austin said rashly.

Joséphine laughed. “You'll stay with him! You don't have children, do you? You said this.” She laughed again.

“I'm not offering to adopt him,” Austin said. “But I'll stay with him for an hour. Then you can have your neighbor come, and I'll take you to dinner. How's that?”

“He doesn't like you,” Joséphine said. “He likes only his father best. He doesn't even like me.”

“I'll teach him some English,” Austin said. “I'll teach him to say ‘Chicago Cubs.’” He could feel enthusiasm already leaching off. “We'll be great friends.”

“What is Chicago Cubs?” Joséphine said.

“It's a baseball team.” And he felt, just for an instant, bleak. Not because he wished he was home, or wished Barbara was here, or wished really anything was different. Everything was how he'd hoped it would be. He simply wished he hadn't mentioned the Cubs. This was over-confident, he thought. It was the wrong thing to say. A mistake.

“So. Well,” Joséphine said, sounding businesslike. “You come here, then? I go to my lawyers to sign my papers. Then maybe we have a dinner together, yes?”

“Absolutely,” Austin said, bleakness vanished. “I'll come right away. I'll start in five minutes.” On the dark suede wall, under a little metal track light positioned to illuminate it, was a big oil painting of two men, naked and locked in a strenuous kiss and embrace. Neither man's face was visible, and their bodies were weight lifters’ muscular bodies, their genitals hidden by their embroiled pose. They were seated on a rock, which was very crudely painted in. It was like Laocoön, Austin thought, only corrupted. He'd wondered if one of the men was the one who owned the apartment, or possibly the owner was the painter or the painter's lover. He wondered if either one of them was alive this afternoon. He actually hated the painting and had already decided to take it down before he brought Joséphine here. Which was what he meant to do — bring her here, tonight if possible, and keep her with him until morning, when they could walk up and sit in the cool sun at the Deux Magots and drink coffee. Like Sartre.

“Martin?” Joséphine said. He was about to put down the phone and go move the smarmy Laocoön painting. He'd almost forgotten he was talking to her.

“What? I'm here,” Austin said. Though it might be fun to leave it up, he thought. It could be an ice-breaker, something to laugh about, like the mirrors on the ceiling, before things got more serious.

“Martin, what are you doing here?” Joséphine said oddly. “Are you okay?”

“I'm here to see you, darling,” Austin said. “Why do you think? I said I'd see you soon, and I meant it. I guess I'm just a man of my word.”

“You are a very silly man, though,” Joséphine said and laughed, not quite so pleased as before. “But,” she said, “what I can do?”

“You can't do anything,” Austin said. “Just see me tonight. After that you never have to see me again.”

“Yes. Okay,” Joséphine said. “That's a good deal. Now. You come to here. Ciao.”

“Ciao,” Austin said oddly, not really being entirely sure what ciao meant.

6

Near the Odéon, striding briskly up the narrow street that ended at the Palais du Luxembourg, Austin realized he was arriving at Joséphine's apartment with nothing in his hands — a clear mistake. Possibly some bright flowers would be a good idea, or a toy, a present of some minor kind which would encourage Léo to like him. Léo was four, and ill-tempered and spoiled. He was pale and had limp, wispy-thin dark hair and dark, penetrating eyes, and when he cried — which was often — he cried loudly and had the habit of opening his mouth and leaving it open for as much of the sound to come out as possible, a habit which accentuated the simian quality of his face, a quality he on occasion seemed to share with Joséphine. Austin had seen documentaries on TV that showed apes doing virtually the same thing while sitting in trees — always it seemed just as daylight was vanishing and another long, imponderable night was at hand. Possibly that was what Léo's life was like. “It is because of my divorce from his father,” Joséphine had said matter-of-factly the one time Austin had been in her apartment, the time they had listened to jazz and he had sat and admired the golden sunlight on the building cornices. “It is too hard on him. He is a child. But.” She'd shrugged her shoulders and begun to think about something else.

Austin had seen no store selling flowers, so he crossed rue Regnard to a chic little shop that had wooden toys in its window: bright wood trucks of ingenious meticulous design, bright wood animals — ducks and rabbits and pigs in preposterous detail, even a French farmer wearing a red neckerchief and a black beret. An entire wooden farmhouse was painstakingly constructed with roof tiles, little dormer windows and Dutch doors, and cost a fortune — far more than he intended to pay. Kids were fine, but he'd never wanted any for himself, and neither had Barbara. It had been their first significant point of agreement when they were in college in the sixties — the first reason they'd found to think they might be made for each other. Years ago now, Austin thought — twenty-two. All of it past, out of reach.

The little shop, however, seemed to have plenty of nice things inside that Austin could afford — a wooden clock whose hands you moved yourself, wooden replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. There was a little wood pickaninny holding a tiny red-and-green wood watermelon and smiling with bright painted-white teeth. The little pickaninny reminded Austin of Léo — minus the smile — and he thought about buying it as a piece of Americana and taking it home to Barbara.

Inside, the saleslady seemed to think he would naturally want that and started to take it out of the case. But there was also a small wicker basket full of painted eggs on the countertop, each egg going for twenty francs, and Austin picked up one of those, a bright-green enamel and gold paisley one made of perfectly turned balsa that felt hollow. They were left over from Easter, Austin thought, and had probably been more expensive. There was no reason Léo should like a green wooden egg, of course. Except he liked it, and Joséphine would like it too. And once the child pushed it aside in favor of whatever he liked better, Joséphine could claim it and set it on her night table or on her desk at work, and think about who'd bought it.

Austin paid the clerk for the nubbly-sided little egg and started for the door — he was going to be late on account of being lost. But just as he reached the glass door Joséphine's husband came in, accompanied by a tall, beautiful, vivacious blond woman with a deep tan and thin, shining legs. The woman was wearing a short silver-colored dress that encased her hips in some kind of elastic fabric, and she looked, Austin thought, standing by in complete surprise, rich. Joséphine's husband — short and bulgy, with his thick, dark Armenian-looking mustache and soft, swart skin — was at least a head shorter than the woman, and was dressed in an expensively shapeless black suit. They were talking in a language which sounded like German, and Bernard — the husband who had written the salacious novel about Joséphine and who provided her little money and his son precious little attention, and whom Joséphine was that very afternoon going off to secure a divorce from — Bernard was seemingly intent on buying a present in the store.

He glanced at Austin disapprovingly. His small, almost black eyes flickered with some vague recognition. Only there couldn't be any recognition. Bernard knew nothing about him, and there was, in fact, nothing to know. Bernard had certainly never laid eyes on him. It was just the way he had of looking at a person, as though he had your number and didn't much like you. Why, Austin wondered, would that be an attractive quality in a man? Suspicion. Disdain. A bullying nature. Why marry an asshole like that?

Austin had paused inside the shop door, and now found himself staring down into the display window from behind, studying the miniature Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe. They were, he saw, parts of a whole little Paris made of wood, a kit a child could play with and arrange any way he saw fit. A wooden Notre Dame, a wooden Louvre, an Obélisque, a Centre Pompidou, even a little wooden Odéon, like the one a few steps down the street. The whole set of buildings was expensive as hell — nearly three thousand francs — but you could also buy the pieces separately. Austin thought about buying something to accompany the egg — give the egg to Joséphine and miniature building to Léo. He stood staring down at the little city in wood, beyond which out the window the real city of metal and stone went on unmindful.

Bernard and his blond friend were laughing at the little pickaninny holding his red-and-green watermelon. The clerk had it out of the case, and Bernard was holding it up and laughing at it derisively. Once or twice Bernard said, “a leetle neeger,” then said, “voilà, voilà,” then the woman said something in German and both of them burst out laughing. Even the shopkeeper laughed.

Austin fingered the green egg, a lump against his leg. He considered just going up and buying the whole goddamned wooden Paris and saying to Bernard in English, “I'm buying this for your son, you son of a bitch,” then threatening him with his fist. But that was a bad idea, and he didn't have the stomach for a row. It was remotely possible, of course, that the man might not be Bernard at all, that he only looked like the picture in Léo's room, and he would be a complete idiot to threaten him.

He slipped his hand in his pocket, felt the enamel paint of the egg and wondered if this was an adequate present, or would it be ludicrous? The German woman turned and looked at him, the smile of derisive laughter still half on her lips. She looked at Austin's face, then at his pocket where his hand was gripping the little egg. She leaned and said something to Bernard, something in French, and Bernard turned and looked at Austin across the shop, narrowed his eyes in a kind of disdainful warning. He raised his chin slightly and turned back. They both said something else, after which they both chuckled. The proprietress looked at Austin and smiled in a friendly way. Then Austin changed his mind about buying the wooden city and opened the glass door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, where the air was cool and he could see up the short hill to the park.

7

Joséphine's apartment block was an unexceptional one on a street of similar older buildings with white modernistic fronts overlooking the Jardin du Luxembourg. In the tiny, shadowy lobby, there was an elegant old Beaux Arts grillework elevator. But since Joséphine lived on the third level, Austin walked up, taking the steps two at a time, the little green paisley egg bumping against his leg with each stride.

When he knocked, Joséphine immediately threw open the door and flung her arms around his neck. She hugged him, then held her hands on his cheeks and kissed him hard on the mouth. Little Léo, who'd just been running from one room to another, waving a wooden drumstick, stopped stock-still in the middle of the floor and stared, shocked by his mother's kissing a man he didn't remember seeing before.

“Okay. Now I must go,” Joséphine said, releasing his face and hurrying to the open window which overlooked the street and the park. She was putting on her eye shadow, using a tiny compact mirror and the light from outside.

Joséphine was dressed in a simple white blouse and a pair of odd, loose-fitting pants that had pictures of circus animals all over them, helter-skelter in loud colors. They were strange, unbecoming pants, Austin thought, and they fit in such a way that her small stomach made a noticeable round bulge below the waistband. Joséphine looked slightly fat and a little sloppy. She turned and smiled at him as she fixed her face. “How do you feel?” she said.

“I feel great,” Austin said. He smiled at Léo, who had not stopped staring at him, holding up his drumstick like a little cigar-store Indian. The child had on short trousers and a white T-shirt that had the words BIG-TIME AMERICAN LUXURY printed across the front above a huge red Cadillac convertible which seemed to be driving out from his chest.

Léo uttered something very fast in French, then looked at his mother and back at Austin, who hadn't gotten far into the room since being hugged and kissed.

“Non, non, Léo,” Joséphine said, and laughed with an odd delight. “He asks me if you are my new husband. He thinks I need a husband now. He is very mixed up.” She went on darkening her eyes. Joséphine looked pretty in the window light, and Austin wanted to go over right then and give her a much more significant kiss. But the child kept staring at him, holding the drumstick up and making Austin feel awkward and reluctant, which wasn't how he thought he'd feel. He thought he'd feel free and completely at ease and on top of the world about everything.

He reached in his pocket, palmed the wooden egg and knelt in front of the little boy, showing two closed fists.

“J'ai un cadeau pour toi,” he said. He'd practiced these words and wondered how close he'd come. “I have a nice present for you,” he said in English to satisfy himself. “Choissez le main.” Austin tried to smile. He jiggled the correct hand, his right one, trying to capture the child's attention. “Choissez le main, Léo,” he said again and smiled, this time, a little grimly. Austin looked at Joséphine for encouragement, but she was still appraising herself in her mirror. She said something very briskly to Léo, who beetled his dark little brow at the two presented fists. Reluctantly he pointed his drumstick at Austin's right fist, the one he'd been jiggling. And very slowly — as though he were opening a chest filled with gold — Austin opened his fingers to reveal the bright little green egg with gold paisleys and red snowflakes. Some flecks of the green paint had already come off on his palm, which surprised him. “Voilà,” Austin said dramatically. “C'est une jolie oeuf!”

Léo stared intently at the clammy egg in Austin's palm. He looked at Austin with an expression of practiced inquisitiveness, his thin lips growing pursed as though something worried him. Very timidly he extended his wooden drumstick and touched the egg, then nudged it, with the shaped tip, the end intended to strike a drum. Austin noticed that Léo had three big gravelly warts on his tiny fingers, and instantly a cold wretchedness from his own childhood opened in him, making Léo for an instant seem frail and sympathetic. But then with startling swiftness Léo raised the drumstick and delivered the egg — still in Austin's proffered palm — a fierce downward blow, hoping apparently to smash it and splatter its contents and possibly give Austin's fingers a painful lashing for good measure.

But the egg, though the blow chipped its glossy green enamel and Austin felt the impact like a shock, did not break. And little Léo's pallid face assumed a look of controlled fury. He quickly took two more vengeful back-and-forth swipes at it, the second of which struck Austin's thumb a stinging then numbing blow, then Léo turned and fled out of the room, down the hall and through a door which he slammed behind him.

Austin looked up at Joséphine, who was just finishing at the window.

“He is very mixed up. I tell you before,” she said, and shook her head.

“That didn't work out too well,” Austin said, squeezing his throbbing thumb so as not to have to mention it.

“It's not important,” she said, going to the couch and putting her compact in her purse. “He is angry all the time. Sometimes he hits me. Don't feel bad. You're sweet to bring something to him.”

But what Austin felt, at that moment, was that he wanted to kiss Joséphine, and not to talk about Léo. Now that they were alone, he wanted to kiss her in a way that said he was here and it wasn't just a coincidence, that he'd had her on his mind this whole time, and wanted her to have him on her mind, and that this whole thing that had started last week in discretion and good-willed restraint was rising to a new level, a level to be taken more seriously. She could love him now. He could conceivably even love her. Much was possible that only days ago was not even dreamed of.

He moved toward where she was, repocketing the egg, his injured thumb pulsating. She was leaned over the couch in her idiotic animal pants, and he rather roughly grasped her hips — covering the faces of a yellow giraffe and a gray rhino with his hands — and pulled, trying to turn her toward him so he could give her the kiss he wanted to give her, the authoritative one that signaled his important arrival on the scene. But she jumped, as though he'd startled her, and she shouted, “Stop! What is it!” just as he was negotiating her face around in front of his. She had a lipstick tube in her hand, and she seemed irritated to be so close to him. She smelled sweet, surprisingly sweet. Like a flower, he thought.

“There's something important between us, I think,” Austin said directly into Joséphine's irritated face. “Important enough to bring me back across an ocean and to leave my wife and to face the chance that I'll be alone here.”

“What?” she said. She contorted her mouth and, without exactly pushing, exerted a force to gain a few inches from him. He still had her by her hips, cluttered with animal faces. A dark crust of eye shadow clung where she had inexpertly doctored her eyelids.

“You shouldn't feel under any pressure,” he said and looked at her gravely. “I just want to see you. That's all. Maybe have some time alone with you. Who knows where it'll go?”

“You are very fatigued, I think.” She struggled to move backward. “Maybe you can have a sleep while I'm going.”

“I'm not tired,” Austin said. “I feel great. Nothing's bothering me. I've got a clean slate.”

“That's good,” she said, and smiled but pushed firmly away from him just as he was moving in to give her the important kiss. Joséphine quickly kissed him first, though, the same hard, unpassionate kiss she'd greeted him with five minutes before and that had left him dissatisfied.

“I want to kiss you the right way, not that way,” Austin said. He pulled her firmly to him again, taking hold of her soft waist and pushing his mouth toward hers. He kissed her as tenderly as he could with her back stiff and resistant, and her mouth not shaped to receive a kiss but ready to speak when the kiss ended. Austin held the kiss for a long moment, his eyes closed, his breath traveling out his nose, trying to feel his own wish for tenderness igniting an answering tenderness in her. But if there was tenderness, it was of an unexpected type — more like forbearance. And when he had pressed her lips for as many as six or eight seconds, until he had breathed her breath and she had relaxed her resistance, he stood back and looked at her — a woman he felt he might love — and took her chin between his thumb and index finger and said, “That's really all I wanted. That wasn't all that bad, was it?”

She shook her head in a perfunctory way and very softly, almost compliantly, said, “No.” Her eyes were cast down, though not in a way he felt confident of, more as if she were waiting for something. He felt he should let her go; that was the thing to do. He'd forced her to kiss him. She'd relented. Now she could be free to do anything she wanted.

Joséphine hurriedly turned back toward her purse on the couch, and Austin walked to the window and surveyed the vast chestnut trees of the Jardin du Luxembourg. The air was cool and soft, and the light seemed creamy and rich in the late afternoon. He heard music, guitar music from somewhere, and the faint sound of singing. He saw a jogger running through the park gate and out into the street below, and he wondered what anyone would think who saw him standing in this window — someone glancing up a moment out of the magnificent garden and seeing a man in an apartment. Would it be clear he was an American? Or would he possibly seem French? Would he seem rich? Would his look of satisfaction be visible? He thought almost certainly that would be visible.

“I have to go to the lawyer now,” Joséphine said behind him.

“Fine. Go,” Austin said. “Hurry back. I'll look after little Gene Krupa. Then we'll have a nice dinner.”

Joséphine had a thick sheaf of documents she was forcing into a plastic briefcase. “Maybe,” she said in a distracted voice.

Austin, for some reason, began picturing himself talking to Hank Bullard about the air-conditioning business. They were in a café on a sunny side street. Hank's news was good, full of promise about a partnership.

Joséphine hurried into the hall, her flat shoes scraping the boards. She opened the door to Léo's room and said something quick and very soft to him, something that did not have Austin's name in it. Then she closed the door and entered the WC and used the toilet without bothering to shut herself in. Austin couldn't see down the hall from where he stood by the window, but could hear her pissing, the small trickle of water hitting more water. Barbara always closed the door, and he did too — it was a sound he didn't like and usually tried to avoid hearing, a sound so inert, so factual, that hearing it threatened to take away a layer of his good feeling. He was sorry to hear it now, sorry Joséphine didn't bother to close the door.

In an instant, however, she was out and down the hallway, picking up her briefcase while water sighed through the pipes. She gave Austin a peculiar, fugitive look across the room, as if she was surprised he was there and wasn't sure why he should be. It was, he felt, the look you gave an unimportant employee who's just said something inexplicable.

“So. I am going now,” she said.

“I'll be right here,” Austin said, looking at her and feeling suddenly helpless. “Hurry back, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Okay,” she said. “I hurry. I see you.”

“Great,” Austin said. She went out the door and quickly down the echoing steps toward the street.

FOR A WHILE Austin walked around the apartment, looking at things — things Joséphine Belliard liked or cherished or had kept when her husband cleared out. There was an entire wall of books across one side of the little sleeping alcove she'd constructed for her privacy, using fake Chinese rice-paper dividers. The books were the sleek French soft-covers, mostly on sociological subjects, though other books seemed to be in German. Her modest bed was covered with a clean, billowy white duvet and big fluffy white pillows — no headboard, just the frame, but very neat. A copy of her soon-to-be-ex-husband's scummy novel lay on the bed table, with several pages roughly bent down. Folding a page up, he read a sentence in which a character named Solange was performing an uninspired act of fellatio on someone named Albert. He recognized the charged words: Fellation. Lugubre. Albert was talking about having his car repaired the whole time it was happening to him. Un Amour Secret was the book's insipid title. Bernard's scowling, condescending visage was nowhere in evidence.

He wondered what Bernard knew that he didn't know. Plenty, of course, if the book was even half true. But the unknown was interesting; you had to face it one way or another, he thought. And the idea of fellatio with Joséphine — nothing, up to this moment, he'd even considered — inflamed him, and he began to realize there was something distinctly sexual about roaming around examining her private belongings and modest bedroom, a space and a bed he could easily imagine occupying in the near future. Before he moved away he laid the green paisley egg on her bed table, beside the copy of her husband's smutty book. It would create a contrast, he thought, a reminder that she had choices in the world.

He looked out the bedroom window onto the park. It was the same view as the living room — the easeful formal garden with great leafy horse chestnut trees and tonsured green lawns with topiaries and yew shrubs and pale crisscrossing gravel paths, and the old École Supérieure des Mines looming along the far side and the Luxembourg Palace to the left. Some hippies were sitting cross-legged in a tight little circle on one of the grass swards, sharing a joint around. No one else was in view, though the light was cool and smooth and inviting, with birds soaring through it. A clock chimed somewhere nearby. The guitar music had ceased.

It would be pleasant to walk there with Joséphine, Austin thought, to breathe the sweet air of chestnut trees and to stare off. Life was very different here. This apartment was very different from his house in Oak Grove. He felt different here. Life seemed to have improved remarkably in a short period. All it took, he thought, was the courage to take control of things and to live with the consequences.

He assumed Léo to be asleep down the hall and that he could simply leave well enough alone there. But when he'd sat leafing through French Vogue for perhaps twenty minutes he heard a door open, and seconds later Léo appeared at the corner of the hall, looking confused and drugged in his BIG-TIME AMERICAN LUXURY shirt with the big red Cadillac barging off the front. He still had his little shoes on.

Léo rubbed his eyes and looked pitiful. Possibly Joséphine had given him something to knock him out — the sort of thing that wouldn't happen in the States. But in France, he thought, adults treated children differently. More intelligently.

“Bon soir,” Austin said in a slightly ironic voice and smiled, setting the Vogue down.

Léo eyed him sullenly, still suspicious about hearing French spoken by this person who wasn't the least bit French. He scanned the room quickly for his mother's presence. Austin considered a plan of reintroducing the slightly discredited paisley egg but decided against it. He glanced at the clock on the bookcase: forty-five minutes would somehow need to be consumed before Joséphine returned. But how? How could the time be passed in a way to make Léo happy and possibly impress his mother? The Cubs idea wouldn't work — Léo was too young. Austin didn't know any games or tricks. He knew nothing about children, and, in fact, was sorry the boy was awake, sorry he was here at all.

But he thought of the park — the Jardin du Luxembourg — available just outside the window. A nice walk in the park could set them on the right course. He wasn't able to talk to the child, but he could watch him while he enjoyed himself.

“Voulez-vous aller au parc?” Austin smiled a big, sincere smile. “Maintenant? Peut-être? Le parc? Oui?” He pointed at the open window and the cool, still evening air where swallows soared and flittered.

Léo frowned at him and then at the window, still dazed. He fastened a firm grip on the front of his shorts — a signal Austin recognized — and did not answer.

“Whatta ya say? Let's go to the park,” Austin said enthusiastically, loudly. He almost jumped up. Léo could understand it well enough. Parc. Park.

“Parc?” Léo said, and more cravenly squeezed his little weenie. “Maman?” He looked almost demented.

“Maman est dans le parc,” Austin said, thinking that from inside the park they would certainly see Joséphine on her way back from the lawyer's, and that it wouldn't turn out to be a complete lie — or if it did, Joséphine would eventually come back and take control of things before there was a problem. It was even possible, he thought, that he'd never see this kid after that, that Joséphine might come back and never want to see him again. Though a darker thought entered his mind: of Joséphine never coming back, deciding simply to disappear somewhere en route from the lawyer's. That happened. Babies were abandoned in Chicago all the time and no one knew what happened to their parents. He knew no one she knew. He knew no one to contact. It was a nightmarish thought.

Inside of five minutes he had Léo into the bathroom and out again. Happily, Léo attended to his own privacy while Austin stood outside the door and stared at the picture of Bernard's stuffed, bulbous face on the wall of the boy's room. He was surprised Joséphine would let it stay up. He'd suppressed an urge to tell her to stick it to Bernard, to get him in the shorts if she could, though later he'd felt queasy for conspiring against a man he didn't know.

As they were leaving the apartment, Austin realized he had no key, neither to the downstairs nor to the apartment itself, and that once the door closed he and Léo were on their own: a man, an American speaking little French, alone with a four-year-old French child he didn't know, in a country, in a city, in a park, where he was an absolute stranger. No one would think this was a good idea. Joséphine hadn't asked him to take Léo to the park — it was his own doing, and it was a risk. But everything felt like a risk at the moment, and all he needed to do was be careful.

They walked out onto rue Férou and around the corner, then down a few paces and across a wide street to a corner gate into the Luxembourg. Léo said nothing but insisted on holding Austin's hand and leading the way as if he were taking Austin to the park because he didn't know what else to do with him.

Once through the gold-topped gate, though, and onto the pale gravel paths that ran in mazes through the shrubberies and trees and planted beds where daffodils were already blooming, Léo went running straight in the direction of a wide concrete pond where ducks and swans were swimming and a group of older boys was sailing miniature sailboats. Austin looked back to see which building was Joséphine's, and from which window he'd stood looking down at this very park. But he couldn't distinguish the window, wasn't even sure if from Joséphine's window he could see this part of the park. For one thing, there hadn't been a pond, and here there were plenty of people walking in the cool, sustained evening light — lovers and married people both, by the looks of them, taking a nice stroll before going home for dinner. Probably it was part of the park's plan, he supposed, that new parts always seemed familiar, and vice versa.

Austin strolled down to the concrete border of the pond and sat on a bench a few yards away from Léo, who stood raptly watching the older boys tend their boats with long, thin sticks. There was no wind and only the boys’ soft, studious voices to listen to in the air where swallows were still darting. The little boats floated stilly in the shallows with peanut shells and popcorn tufts. A number of ducks and swans glided just out of reach, eyeing the boats, waiting for the boys to leave.

Austin heard tennis balls being hit nearby, but couldn't see where. A clay court, he felt certain. He wished he could sit and watch people playing tennis instead of boys tending boats. Female voices were laughing and speaking French and laughing again, then a tennis ball was struck once more. A dense wall of what looked like rhododendrons stood beyond a small expanse of well-tended grass, and behind that, he thought, would be the courts.

Across the pond, seated on the opposite concrete wall, a man in a tan suit was having his photograph taken by another man. An expensive camera was being employed, and the second man kept moving around, finding new positions from which to see through his viewfinder. “Su-perbe,” Austin heard the photographer say. “Très, très, très bon. Don't move now. Don't move.” A celebrity, Austin thought; an actor or a famous writer — somebody on top of the world. The man seemed unaffected, not even to acknowledge that his picture was being taken.

Léo unexpectedly turned and looked at Austin, as if he — Léo — wanted to say something extremely significant and exciting about the little boats. His face was vivid with importance. Though when he saw Austin seated on the bench, the calculation of who Austin was clouded his pale little features and he looked suddenly deviled and chastened and secretive, and turned quickly back, inching closer to the water's edge as if he intended to wade in.

He was just a kid, Austin thought calmly, a kid with divorced parents; not a little ogre or a tyrant. He could be won over with time and patience. Anyone could. He thought of his own father, a tall, patient, goodhearted man who worked in a sporting goods store in Peoria. He and Austin's mother had celebrated their fiftieth anniversary two years before, a big to-do under a tent in the city park, with Austin's brother in from Phoenix, and all the older cousins and friends from faraway states and decades past. A week later his father had had a stroke watching the news on TV and died in his chair.

His father had always had patience with his sons, Austin thought soberly. In his father's life there'd been no divorces or sudden midnight departures, yet his father had always tried to understand the goings-on of the later generation. Therefore, what would he think of all this, Austin wondered. France. A strange woman with a son. An abandoned house back home. Lies. Chaos. He'd certainly have made an attempt to understand, tried to find the good in it. Though ultimately his judgment would've been harsh and he'd have sided with Barbara, whose success in real estate he'd admired. He sought to imagine his father's very words, his verdict, delivered from his big lounger in front of the TV — the very spot where he'd breathed his last frantic breaths. But he couldn't. For some reason he couldn't re-create his father's voice, its cadences, the exact tenor of it. It was peculiar not to remember his father's voice, a voice he'd heard all his life. Possibly it had not had that much effect.

Austin was staring at the man in the tan suit across the lagoon, the man having his photograph taken. The man was up on the concrete ledge now, with his back turned, the shallow pond behind him, his legs wide apart, his hands on his hips, his tan jacket in the crook of his elbow. He looked ridiculous, unconvincing about whatever he was supposed to seem convincing about. Austin wondered if he himself would be visible in the background, a blurry, distant figure staring from across the stale lagoon. Maybe he would see himself someplace, in Le Monde or Figaro, newspapers he couldn't read. It would be a souvenir he could laugh about at some later date, when he was where? With who?

Not, in all probability, Joséphine Belliard. Something about her had bothered him this afternoon. Not her reluctance to kiss him. That was an attitude he could overcome, given time. He was good at overcoming reluctances in others. He was a persuasive man, with the heart of a salesman, and knew it. From time to time, this fact even bothered him, since given the right circumstances he felt he could persuade anybody of anything — no matter what. He had no clear idea what this persuasive quality was, though Barbara had occasionally remarked on it, often with the unflattering implication that he didn't believe in very much, or at least not in enough. It always made him uneasy that this might be true, or at least be thought of as true.

He had believed that he and Joséphine could have a different kind of relationship. Sexual, but not sexual at its heart. But rather, a new thing, founded on realities — the facts of his character, and hers. With Barbara, he'd felt he was just playing out the end of an old thing. Less real, somehow. Less mature. He could never really love Joséphine; that he had to concede, since in his deepest heart he loved only Barbara, for whatever that was worth. Yet he'd for a moment felt compelled by Joséphine, found her appealing, considered even the possibility of living with her for months or years. Anything was possible.

But seeing her in her apartment today, looking just as he knew she would, being exactly the woman he expected her to be, had made him feel unexpectedly bleak. And he was savvy enough to know that if he felt bleak now, at the very beginning, he would feel only bleaker later, and that in all likelihood life would either slowly or quickly become a version of hell for which he would bear all responsibility.

His thumb still vaguely ached. The women were laughing again on the tennis courts beyond the flowering rhododendrons. Austin could actually see a pair of woman's calves and tennis shoes, jumping from side to side as though their owner was striking a ball first forehand, then backhand, the little white feet dancing over the red surface. “Arrête! Stop!” a woman yelled, and sighed a loud sigh.

Frenchwomen, Austin thought, all talked like children: in high-pitched, rapid-paced, displeasingly insistent voices, which most of the time said, “Non, non, non, non, non,” to something someone wanted, some likely as not innocent wish. He could hear Joséphine saying it, standing in the living room of her little apartment the only other time he'd visited there — a week ago — speaking on the phone to someone, spooling the white phone cord around her finger as she said into the receiver, “Non, non, non, non, non, non. C'est incroyable. C'est in-croy-a-ble!” It was terrifically annoying, though it amused him now to think of it — at a distance.

Barbara had absolutely no use for Frenchwomen and made no bones about it. “Typical Froggies,” she'd remark after evenings with his French clients and their wives, and then act disgusted. That was probably what bothered him about Joséphine: that she seemed such a typical bourgeois little Frenchwoman, the kind Barbara would've disliked in a minute — intractable, preoccupied, entirely stuck in her French life, with no sense of the wider world, and possibly even ungenerous if you knew her very long (as her husband found out). Joséphine's problem, Austin thought, looking around for little Léo, was that she took everything inside her life too seriously. Her motherhood. Her husband's ludicrous book. Her boyfriend. Her bad luck. She looked at everything under a microscope, as if she were always waiting to find a mistake she could magnify big enough that she'd have no choice but to go on taking life too seriously. As if that's all adulthood was — seriousness, discipline. No fun. Life, Austin thought, had to be more lighthearted. Which was why he'd come here, why he'd cut himself loose — to enjoy life more. He admired himself for it. And because of that he didn't think he could become the savior in Joséphine's life. That would be a lifelong struggle, and a lifelong struggle wasn't what he wanted most in the world.

When he looked around again, Léo was not where he'd been, standing dreamily to the side of the older boys, watching their miniature cutters and galleons glide over the still pond surface. The older boys were there, their long tending sticks in their hands, whispering among themselves and smirking. But not Léo. It had become cooler. Light had faded from the crenellated roof line of the École Supérieure des Mines, and soon it would be dark. The man having his picture taken was walking away with the photographer. Austin had been engrossed in thought and had lost sight of little Léo, who was, he was certain, somewhere nearby.

He looked at his watch. It was six twenty-five, and Joséphine could now be home. He scanned back along the row of apartment blocks, hoping to find her window, thinking he might see her there watching him, waving at him happily, possibly with Léo at her side. But he couldn't tell which building was which. One window he could see was open and dark inside. But he couldn't be sure. In any case, Joséphine wasn't framed in it.

Austin looked all around, hoping to see the white flash of Léo's T-shirt, the careening red Cadillac. But he saw only a few couples walking along the chalky paths, and two of the older boys carrying their sailboats home to their parents’ apartments. He still heard tennis balls being hit—pockety pock. And he felt cold and calm, which he knew to be the feeling of fear commencing, a feeling that could rapidly change to other feelings that could last a long, long time.

Léo was gone, and he wasn't sure where. “Leo,” he called out, first in the American way, then “Lay-oo,” in the way his mother said. “O êtes-vous?” Passersby looked at him sternly, hearing the two languages together. The remaining sailboat boys glanced around and smiled. “Lay-oo!” he called out again, and knew his voice did not sound ordinary, that it might sound frightened. Everyone around him, everyone who could hear him, was French, and he couldn't precisely explain to any of them what was the matter here: that this was not his son; that the boy's mother was not here now but was probably close by; that he had let his attention stray a moment.

“Lay-oo,” he called out again. “O êtes-vous?” He saw nothing of the boy, not a fleck of shirt or a patch of his dark hair disappearing behind a bush. He felt cold all over again, a sudden new wave, and he shuddered because he knew he was alone. Léo — some tiny assurance opened in him to say — Léo, wherever he was, would be fine, was probably fine right now. He would be found and be happy. He would see his mother and immediately forget all about Martin Austin. Nothing bad had befallen him. But he, Martin Austin, was alone. He could not find this child, and for him only bad would come of it.

Across an expanse of grassy lawn he saw a park guardian in a dark-blue uniform emerge from the rhododendrons beyond which were the tennis courts, and Austin began running toward him. It surprised him that he was running, and halfway there quit and only half ran toward the man, who had stopped to permit himself to be approached.

“Do you speak English?” Austin said before he'd arrived. He knew his face had taken on an exaggerated appearance, because the guardian looked at him strangely, turned his head slightly, as though he preferred to see him at an angle, or as if he were hearing an odd tune and wanted to hear it better. At the corners of his mouth he seemed to smile.

“I'm sorry,” Austin said, and took a breath. “You speak English, don't you?”

“A little bit, why not,” the guardian said, and then he did smile. He was middle-aged and pleasant-looking, with a soft suntanned face and a small Hitler mustache. He wore a French policeman's uniform, a blue-and-gold kepi, a white shoulder braid and a white lanyard connected to his pistol. He was a man who liked parks.

“I've lost a little boy here someplace,” Austin said calmly, though he remained out of breath. He put the palm of his right hand to his cheek as if his cheek were wet, and felt his skin to be cold. He turned and looked again at the concrete border of the pond, at the grass crossed by gravel paths, and then at a dense tangle of yew bushes farther on. He expected to see Léo there, precisely in the middle of this miniature landscape. Once he'd been frightened and time had gone by, and he'd sought help and strangers had regarded him with suspicion and wonder — once all these had taken place — Léo could appear and all would be returned to calm.

But there was no one. The open lawn was empty, and it was nearly dark. He could see weak interior lights from the apartment blocks beyond the park fence, see yellow automobile lights on rue Vaugirard. He remembered once hunting with his father in Illinois. He was a boy, and their dog had run away. He had known the advent of dark meant he would never see the dog again. They were far from home. The dog wouldn't find its way back. And that is what had happened.

The park guardian stood in front of Austin, smiling, staring at his face oddly, searchingly, as if he meant to adduce something — if Austin was crazy or on drugs or possibly playing a joke. The man, Austin realized, hadn't understood anything he'd said, and was simply waiting for something he would understand to begin.

But he had ruined everything now. Léo was gone. Kidnapped. Assaulted. Or merely lost in a hopelessly big city. And all his own newly won freedom, his clean slate, was in one moment squandered. He would go to jail, and he should go to jail. He was an awful man. A careless man. He brought mayhem and suffering to the lives of innocent, unsuspecting people who trusted him. No punishment could be too severe.

Austin looked again at the yew bushes, a long, green clump, several yards thick, the interior lost in tangled shadows. That was where Léo was, he thought with complete certainty. And he felt relief, barely controllable relief.

“I'm sorry to bother you,” he said to the guardian. “Je regrette. I made a mistake.” And he turned and ran toward the clump of yew bushes, across the open grass and the gravel promenade and careful beds in bright-yellow bloom, the excellent park. He plunged in under the low scrubby branches, where the ground was bare and raked and damp and attended to. With his head ducked he moved swiftly forward. He called Léo's name but did not see him, though he saw a movement, an indistinct fluttering of blue and gray, heard what might've been footfalls on the soft ground, and then he heard running, like a large creature hurrying in front of him among the tangled branches. He heard laughter beyond the edge of the thicket, where another grassy terrace opened — the sound of a man laughing and talking in French, out of breath and running at once. Laughing, then more talking and laughing again.

Austin moved toward where he'd seen the flutter of blue and gray — someone's clothing glimpsed in flight, he thought. There was a strong old smell of piss and human waste among the thick roots and shrubby trunks of the yew bushes. Paper and trash were strewn around in the foulness. From outside it had seemed cool and inviting here, a place to have a nap or make love.

And Léo was there. Exactly where Austin had seen the glimpse of clothing flicker through the undergrowth. He was naked, sitting on the damp dirt, his clothes strewn around him, turned inside out where they had been jerked off and thrown aside. He looked up at Austin, his eyes small and perceptive and dark, his small legs straight out before him, smudged and scratched, his chest and arms scratched. Dirt was on his cheeks. His hands were between his legs, not covering or protecting him but limp, as if they had no purpose. He was very white and very quiet. His hair was still neatly combed. Though when he saw Austin, and that it was Austin and not someone else coming bent at the waist, furious, breathing stertorously, stumbling, crashing arms-out through the rough branches and trunks and roots of that small place, he gave a shrill, hopeless cry, as though he could see what was next, and who it would be, and it terrified him even more. And his cry was all he could do to let the world know that he feared his fate.

8

In the days that followed there was to be a great deal of controversy. The police conducted a thorough and publicized search for the person or persons who had assaulted little Léo. There were no signs to conclude he had been molested, only that he'd been lured into the bushes by someone and roughed up there and frightened badly. A small story appeared in the back pages of France-Dimanche and said the same things, yet Austin noticed from the beginning that all the police used the word “moleste” when referring to the event, as though it were accurate.

The group of hippies he'd seen from Joséphine's window was generally thought to contain the offender. It was said that they lived in the park and slept in the clumps and groves of yews and ornamental boxwoods, and that some were Americans who had been in France for twenty years. But none of them, when the police brought them in to be identified, seemed to be the man who had scared Léo.

For a few hours following the incident there was suspicion among the police that Austin himself had molested Léo and had approached the guardian only as a diversion after he'd finished with the little boy — trusting that the child would never accuse him. Austin had patiently and intelligently explained that he had not molested Léo and would never do such a thing, but understood that he had to be considered until he could be exonerated — which was not before midnight, when Joséphine entered the police station and stated that Léo had told her Austin was not the man who had scared him and taken his clothes off, that it had been someone else, a man who spoke French, a man in blue and possibly gray clothing with long hair and a beard.

When she had told this story and Austin had been allowed to leave the stale, windowless police room where he'd been made to remain until matters could be determined with certainty, he'd walked beside Joséphine out into the narrow street, lit yellow through the tall wire-mesh windows of the gendarmerie. The street was guarded by a number of young policemen wearing flak jackets and carrying short machine pistols on shoulder slings. They calmly watched Austin and Joséphine as they stopped at the curb to say goodbye.

“I'm completely to blame for this,” Austin said. “I can't tell you how sorry I am. There aren't any words good enough, I guess.”

“You are to blame,” Joséphine said and looked at him in the face, intently. After a moment she said, “It is not a game. You know? Maybe to you it is a game.”

“No, it's really not,” Austin said abjectly, standing in the cool night air in sight of all the policemen. “I guess I had a lot of plans.”

“Plans to what?” Joséphine said. She had on the black crepe skirt she'd worn the day he'd met her, barely more than a week ago. She looked appealing again. “Not for me! You don't have plans for me. I don't want you. I don't want any man anymore.” She shook her head and crossed her arms tightly and looked away, her dark eyes shining in the night. She was very, very angry. Possibly, he thought, she was even angry at herself. “You are a fool,” she said, and she spat accidentally when she said it. “I hate you. You don't know anything. You don't know who you are.” She looked at him bitterly. “Who are you?” she said. “Who do you think you are? You're nothing.”

“I understand,” Austin said. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry about all of this. I'll make sure you don't have to see me again.”

Joséphine smiled at him, a cruel, confident smile. “I don't care,” she said and raised her shoulder in the way Austin didn't like, the way Frenchwomen did when they wanted to certify as true something that might not be. “I don't care what happens to you. You are dead. I don't see you.”

She turned and began walking away down the sidewalk along the side of the gendarmerie and in front of the young policemen, who looked at her indifferently. They looked back at Austin, standing in the light by himself, where he felt he should stay until she had gone out of sight. One of the policemen said something to his colleague beside him, and that man whistled a single long note into the night. Then they turned and faced the other way.

AUSTIN HAD a fear in the days to come, almost a defeating fear that deprived him of sleep in his small, risqué apartment above the rue Bonaparte. It was a fear that Barbara would die soon, followed then by a feeling that she had died, which was succeeded by a despair of something important in his life having been lost, exterminated by his own doing but also by fate. What was that something? he wondered, awake in the middle of the night. It wasn't Barbara herself. Barbara was alive and on the earth, and able to be reunited with if he wanted to try and if she did. And it wasn't his innocence. That had been dispensed with long before. But he had lost something, and whatever it was, Barbara seemed associated. And he felt if he could specify it, possibly he could begin to pull things together, see more clearly, even speak to her again, and, in a sense, repatriate himself.

Not to know what that something was, though, meant that he was out of control, perhaps meant something worse about him. So that he began to think of his life, in those succeeding days, almost entirely in terms of what was wrong with him, of his problem, his failure — in particular his failure as a husband, but also in terms of his unhappiness, his predicament, his ruin, which he wanted to repair. He recognized again and even more plainly that his entire destination, everything he'd ever done or presumed or thought, had been directed toward Barbara, that everything good was there. And it was there he would need eventually to go.

Behind Joséphine, of course, was nothing — no fabric or mystery, no secrets, nothing he had curiosity for now. She had seemed to be a compelling woman; not a great object of sexuality, not a source of wit — but a force he'd been briefly moved by in expectation that he could move her nearer to him. He remembered kissing her in the car, her soft face and the great swelling moment of wondrous feeling, the great thrill. And her voice saying, “Non, non, non, non, non,” softly. That was what Bernard could never get over losing, the force that had driven him to hate her, even humiliate her.

For his part he admired her, and mostly for the way she'd dealt with him. Proportionately. Intelligently. She had felt a greater sense of responsibility than he had; a greater apprehension of life's importance, its weight and permanence. To him, it had all seemed less important, less permanent, and he could never even aspire to her sense of life — a European sense. As Barbara had said, he took himself for granted; though unlike what Joséphine had said, he knew himself quite well. In the end, Joséphine took herself for granted, too. They were, of course, very different and could never have been very happy together.

Though he wondered again in his dreamy moments after the fear of Barbara's dying had risen off and before he drifted to sleep, wondered what was ever possible between human beings. How could you regulate life, do little harm and still be attached to others? And in that context, he wondered if being fixed could be a misunderstanding, and, as Barbara had said when he'd seen her the last time and she had been so angry at him, if he had changed slightly, somehow altered the important linkages that guaranteed his happiness and become detached, unreachable. Could you become that? Was it something you controlled, or a matter of your character, or a change to which you were only a victim? He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure about that at all. It was a subject he knew he would have to sleep on many, many nights.