Women with Men

Occidentals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Apparently,” Matthews said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That's too bad,” Helen said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Take a train where?” Helen said.

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

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

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

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

“Probably not,” Matthews said.

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

MATTHEWS HAD KNOWN Helen Carmichael nearly two years. She had been a student in the adult course he taught in the African-American Novel — his specialty at Wilmot College (though he was not of African descent). He and Helen had liked each other at once, met regularly for coffee after class, then started sleeping together when the course ended, a time roughly coinciding with the dark grainy period after Penny had taken their daughter, Lelia, and left for California, the period when Matthews figured out he hated teaching and everything about it, determined he should seek a less governed life and began writing a novel as a way of occupying himself until the school year was over and he could resign.

Helen was eight years older than he was, a tall, indelicately bony ash-blond woman with a big-breasted, chorus-girl figure, a wide, sensuous mouth and big benevolent blue eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. Matthews liked looking into her eyes and found solace there. All men, he noticed, stared at Helen. There was a bigger-than-life quality to her, though not necessarily bigger and better. Helen enjoyed believing men had “a hard time handling” her and that most men were afraid of her because she was “hard to keep up with,” which meant she thought she was savvy and ironic. Helen came from a small West Virginia coal-mining town and had already been married three times, but was unmarried now and had no wish to try again. She worked for an advertising company across the Ohio River in Parkersburg, not far from where she grew up, and had told Matthews she believed this was as far as life had taken her and where it would probably leave her — and that at forty-five she had made her pact with destiny and was able to be a realist about it. He liked her for her independence.

She and Matthews had begun enjoying a casual and altogether satisfactory sexual intimacy, spending afternoons in bed in his house, taking weekend trips up to nearby Pittsburgh and occasionally as far away as D.C., but mostly just enjoying a twilight drive and dinner in one of the cozy inns or restored cider mills that dotted the Ohio River banks, often ending up in some rickety old four-poster in a hot little third-floor garret room, attempting but usually failing to make as little noise as possible while still getting the most from the evening and each other.

As a general matter, they shared a view of themselves as random voyagers who'd faced life's stern blows (Helen had had cancer of the something a year before and was still officially in recovery and on medication; Matthews had, of course, been abandoned). Only they'd emerged stronger, more resolute and no less hopeful of providence and life's abundance. Matthews realized it wasn't typical to fall for an older woman after your wife leaves you. Except he hadn't really fallen for Helen; he simply liked her and liked her way of treating him seriously yet also ironically; whereas Penny had treated him with nothing but the greatest sincerity, sweetness and seemingly loving patience until the day she walked out. He wasn't at all sure what he offered Helen — he couldn't see much — though she seemed happy. The only promise she seemed to want and want to give in return was never to expect anything from the other unless the other was physically present to fulfill it. Marriage, Helen felt, should append this proviso to its solemn vows. Matthews felt the same.

Matthews’ defeated marriage, however, was his great source of disappointment and woe. He had begun The Predicament intending it as a plain yet accurate portrayal of his marriage to Penny, a marriage in which meaningful language had been exhausted by routine, in which life's formalities, grievances and even shouts of pain had become so similar-sounding as to mean little but still seem beyond remedy, and in which the narrator (himself, of course) and his wife were depicted as people who'd logged faults, neglect and misprisions aplenty over twelve years but who still retained sufficient affection to allow them to recognize what they could and couldn't do, and to live in the warmth of that shared understanding. In that way, he felt, it was a typical academic marriage. Other people forged these same accommodations without ever knowing it. His parents, for instance. It was possible they hated each other, yet hating each other was worth more than trying to love somebody else, somebody you'd never know in a hundred years and probably wouldn't like if you did. Better, they'd found, to focus on whatever good was left, set aside all issues they would never agree on, and call it marriage, even love. How to do this was, of course, the predicament. (At one point, he'd come close to calling his book a memoir and not a novel at all.) But having the book published, Matthews had hoped, would be a dramatic and direct public profession of new faith to Penny, who had left town with an undergraduate (not a priest) and taken Lelia to live in the Bay Area. The student had eventually come back to school.

None of this, however, had worked. Penny hadn't read The Predicament, had declined delivery of an early proof Matthews had couriered to her with an inscription, and had almost completely stopped communicating with him. So that at the last minute he revised the Greta part in such a way that instead of coming home to Maine, eager to reconcile, Greta died in a traffic accident.

In the year and a half since Matthews had left teaching, he had finished his novel, seen unwanted divorce proceedings begun against him, sold the white-clapboard, blue-shuttered faculty colonial he'd occupied with Penny, set aside some money and moved miles from campus, into a smaller, brick-and-clay-tile, rough-hewn bungalow in a country setting, where he'd begun getting used to what had departed (conceivably his younger and callower self), what had arrived (not very much), and what the consequences for the future were. The idea of himself as a novelist seemed to be one appealing arrival: a silent artist living obscurely alone in small-town Ohio. Once, he'd been a teacher, but retired early. His wife had left him because he was too eccentric. There had been a child. Occasionally he made a brief appearance in New York, but was mostly content to go on writing small, underappreciated masterpieces that were more popular in Europe than in his own country.

Matthews’ parents still owned a large and successful retail furniture company up in Cleveland — a company that had been in the Matthews name since before the Depression — and there was room for him, if he wanted, to fit right into the management scheme and before long be running things. His father had expressed this hope even after Matthews got tenure, as if teaching literature was widely accepted as an ideal preparation for the furniture business. Matthews’ mother and sister were involved in a profitable interior-design venture connected to the furniture company, and they had made noises about his coming home and taking over the accounts end while they concentrated on the creative decision-making.

But Matthews had told them that he couldn't entertain either of these offers at the moment, that he had more important things on his mind: his divorce, his daughter, his life as a thirty-seven-year-old former professor who knew a great deal about African-American literature and furniture, a man who'd made big mistakes and wanted to make fewer if possible.

His parents had willingly conceded it was a good idea, given the difficult transitions in his life, that he take some time off to “sort things out.” They even acknowledged that writing a novel was sound as a form of therapy before getting down to real life. They seemed to understand about Matthews’ divorce and why it was regrettably necessary, and had made their own private overtures to Penny and Lelia. They had not been especially happy about Helen's unexpected and seemingly impermanent presence in his life, or about her age. But they'd refrained from passing judgment on human adaptations they didn't comprehend but which their only son considered necessary and good. (He frequently brought Helen along on his visits, where she good-naturedly tried to fit herself in, take part and act at ease, though the two of them always stayed downtown in a hotel.)

Nine months after Matthews finished his novel, it had been published by a small, aggressive imprint of a large, prestigious New York house, and once published had gone immediately and completely out of sight. There were a few respectful if insignificant reviews, a few copies were sold. But he quickly lost touch with his editor, and there was never any mention of another contract or of a book he might want to write at a future date. Privately (though he told Helen) he wasn't surprised. He was a novice — a college professor who'd jumped out into the wider world — plus he hadn't believed his novel was really good enough in the way it depicted ordinary, middle-class people caught in the grip of small, internal dilemmas of their own messy concoction. That was not usually a popular subject, he understood, unless the people were lesbians with sexually abusive fathers, or else homicide detectives or someone suffering from a fatal disease — none of which was the case in The Predicament, which was too much about his own life. Still, he was satisfied to have written it, happy to have done it on his own and to have used it to break with teaching. He might, he felt, start thinking of something else to write — something more far-reaching.

Though one gray afternoon in November, just at dusk, he'd received a call from a woman at the publishers in New York (he was on the back porch, reglazing loose panes in his storms before crawling up onto the stepladder). The woman told him that to everyone's pleasure, a French publisher — a Monsieur Blumberg — had called to make an offer on Matthews’ book and wanted to publish it in France if Matthews would agree to a small price.

“I can't think why anybody'd read my book in France,” Matthews said to the publishing woman, Miss Pitkin or Miss Pittman. “Nobody wanted to read it over here.” He was, though, happy that one of his imaginings was coming true.

“You can never tell with the French,” the woman said. “They get things we don't. Maybe it'll turn out better in French.” She laughed a small laugh.

Matthews thought of what it meant for his book to “turn out” better in a language other than the one it was written in. It didn't seem very good. Though possibly it meant he was a genius.

“It's hard to think Dante could be better than in French, isn't it?” Miss Pitkin/Pittman said.

“I don't believe Dante was written in French,” Matthews said. He wondered what she looked like. He was staring out toward the line of thin woods behind which was another house and the big autumnal sun descending prettily.

“Well. Go to France and live it up.” She chuckled. She was typing something on a computer. “Honi soit qui mal y pense.”

“I don't know what that means,” Matthews said. He knew very little French.

“It's something about Prince Charles. Something he said, supposedly. It probably means ‘Live it up.’”

“Maybe so,” Matthews said. “Maybe I'll live it up.” And then they said goodbye.

THAT NIGHT, because of the cold and rain, and because Helen felt she might be coming down with something, they ate dinner in a dreary, nearly empty Japanese restaurant only a few doors down rue Boulard from the hotel. Matthews didn't like Japanese food, but Helen said she needed the important iron contained in raw fish to combat jet lag and to strengthen her in case she was catching a bug.

Over maguro and awabi, and Matthews’ sea bass tempura, Helen told him how interesting she thought it'd be to meet your translator, someone — so it seemed to her — who would have to know your book better than you did and who would give up so much time just for your (Matthews’) words. In advertising — her line of work — the trick was to get people to read things without knowing they were reading and to slip messages into their heads like spies behind enemy lines.

“It's their profession,” Matthews said, giving up in frustration on his chopsticks and opting for a fork. “People dedicate their lives to translating. It's not a sacrifice to them.”

“It's like a marriage,” Helen said. “At least it's like one of my marriages. Spend years trying to read the tea leaves about what somebody else might've meant. And I never did find out.” Helen was eating a big chunk of red tuna and dredging parts of it in soy sauce, using her chopsticks. Some kind of Japanese violin music was playing in the background.

“I don't think it's like that,” Matthews said.

“What do you think?” Helen said, chewing.

“I think it's inventing,” Matthews said. “I think it's using one book to invent another one. It's not just putting my book into a different language, like moving your clothes from one suitcase to another one. It's creative. And there's a lot of satisfaction accompanying it, is what I think.”

“Oh,” Helen said. “But you're pretty excited, aren't you?” She had lost interest. He had bored her. He was aware he bored her all the time. Helen had a good, practical, earthy, goodhearted take on the world, and he frequently bored it into silence.

“I'm excited. I am.” He smiled at her.

Helen, however, wanted to plot out an itinerary for the next day's events. She had her Fodor's book and studied it on her side of the table while Matthews got through his broccoli and fish and sherbet. All the Japanese waiters and busboys seemed to be French, which felt peculiar. It was France, though. Everyone was French.

Helen wanted to visit Napoleon's tomb tomorrow, then she wanted to go up the Eiffel Tower and, afterwards, walk down the Champs Élysées. She wanted them to see the Louvre, though not necessarily go in (it was crowded with Japanese, she whispered, especially at Christmas). Then she wanted to take a ride in a glass-sided boat and finish the day at the Place de la Concorde, where people had had their heads cut off, including the king and the queen and Robespierre. She didn't know who Robespierre was, she admitted. At night they'd have their first incomparable meal someplace; “then,” she said, “we'll take your tour the next day.” Helen looked pleased. Though she also looked pale, Matthews thought. Travel took a greater toll on women. They registered everything. She had forgotten about the ballet.

“I don't have a tour,” Matthews said dolefully.

“What about all the places where Negro musicians played and famous Negro writers lived in terrible poverty and slept with white women? The stuff you used to teach.”

Matthews had talked about these matters as side issues in the course he'd taught, and Helen still remembered. But he had really known nothing about any of it. He'd only read about it in other books. He knew nothing about the Negro Experience, period. Just before he'd finished his PhD, his adviser at Purdue had called him in one day to say that a colleague at Wilmot College had telephoned the previous night to say a black woman professor had suddenly quit to take another job, leaving her classes without a teacher, and did he have anyone who could step into the breach? Matthews’ professor said if Matthews could get down to Wilmot in two days and be ready to give a lecture on sexual imagery in Langston Hughes’ late poems, some provision might be made for him to stay on longer. He simply had to be flexible. Matthews knew nothing about Langston Hughes. His own work had been in the English Romantics, who'd begun to bore him to death. But he arrived in Wilmot the next morning, spent the following two days reading, then gave a lecture to a group of surprised black students, who seemed not to mind as long as somebody arrived at nine o'clock and talked about something while they mostly slept or smirked at each other. Eventually the chairman decided he could stay on and even work for tenure if he promised to go on teaching African-American studies, so that the college could keep from hiring another black woman, who everybody felt would inevitably turn out to be a lot of trouble. Matthews thought it was a good idea and didn't particularly care what he taught. Anybody could teach anything, was his view. Helen thought the whole story was a riot, though she said she'd never known many black people personally. There weren't that many in West Virginia.

“I don't really know where any of those places are,” Matthews said. “I just read about them. They aren't real to me. They never were.”

“So much for the African-American Experience,” Helen said, refolding her map.

“I've said goodbye to teaching, okay?” Matthews said irritably. “I'm not a teacher anymore. I'm interested in a new life.”

“You're hoping to translate yourself now, I guess,” she said. Helen was nearsighted and would sometimes blink her big blue eyes behind her glasses and open them very wide, as if she could get more sight in that way. It made her seem to be looking at something over your head and being surprised by what she saw there. It was unnerving instead of consoling.

“Maybe,” Matthews said. “Maybe that's exactly right. I'm hoping to be translated into something better than I was.”

“What about your daughter?” Helen said, very pointedly. Helen knew nothing about Lelia, had never laid eyes on her, but periodically liked to mount an aggressive, parental-style sensitivity when she wanted to make points with him or get under his skin. It always caught him unawares, and he in fact disliked her for it. Helen had no children after her three unsuccessful marriages, and Matthews felt this was her way of expressing disappointment about that misfortune and sharing it around with others.

“We don't have to talk about Lelia,” Matthews said, and felt disheartened, looking around now for the Japanese/French waiter to bring their check.

“I guess not. She isn't in on the big changes,” Helen said.

“She lives in California. With Penny,” he said. “She's fine. She's a normal six-year-old, if you can be normal in California. She has parents who love her.”

“Would that include you?” Helen wrinkled her mouth as if she was disgusted by him.

“It would. It really would,” Matthews said. Finally spotting the waiter where he lurked in the shadows near the kitchen, he flagged a hand in the air.

“Just checking.” Helen wiped her mouth with her napkin and began looking all around herself. The restaurant contained only two more diners, seated by the dark other wall. Outside the front window, narrow rue Boulard was empty except for parked cars. It was still raining, and streetlights shone on the dappled pavement.

“I'm just feeling jet-lagged tonight,” Helen said. “I'm sorry, baby doll.” She smiled across the plates and small soiled dishes, then sniffed once, as though she might be crying. “You've brought me to Paris. I don't want to pick on you.”

“Then don't,” Matthews said. “I'm doing the best I know how.” He felt that was exactly what he was doing, but was getting precious little credit for it. Lelia was his daughter and his problem, and he was taking care of it.

“I know you are, sweetheart,” Helen said. “A lot goes on in that head of yours.”

“I wouldn't say that,” Matthews said. He wished they'd left town ten minutes after Blumberg called. They could be happier someplace else.

“I'm guilty of that too,” Helen said to no one in particular. He didn't know what she was talking about. Possibly she hadn't heard him correctly. She was looking out the window, staring wistfully at the Parisian rainfall. “I am,” she said. “We're all guilty of that sin.”

BACK IN THE cold room, Helen quickly undressed in the dark, which was not usual. She had always been proud of her taut chorus-girl figure and preferred the light. But when she got under the covers in the small, chilly bed, she demanded that Matthews get in bed immediately and fuck the very breath out of her, which he did to the best of his abilities, two hands buckled onto the flimsy headboard, one bare foot wedged into a nubbly corner of the wall, the other actually on the tile floor and getting fouled up with his shoes and socks as he whaled away in the still, heatless air, and Helen grew strangely delirious and almost seemed to chant, “Patiently, patiently, patiently,” until they were both complete and lay huddled for warmth, as the rain swept against the windows and the wind hissed through the streets and out through the cemetery's bare treetops.

Sometime later — he'd thought he heard a clock chime somewhere close by, four bells — Matthews awoke and went to the window, the bedspread wrapped around him, his wool socks on. To his surprise, the wind and rain had stopped, and much of the afternoon mist had been sucked away, leaving the cemetery sharply illuminated by moonlight, the ranks of six-story apartment buildings beyond it vivid under the unexpected stars. Though even more surprisingly, the specter of the great Montparnasse Tower blocked the sky in what Matthews now felt must be the west. Farther on, if the night were clearer, he would see the Eiffel Tower itself (this he knew from maps he'd studied when writing his novel).

In the first moments when he'd lain awake beside Helen in the warm bed, listening for the wind, he knew unquestionably that he should never have come here, or should've left after Blumberg's call, and that the whole event was already somehow spoiled, splattered onto everything. The feeling that he “would've” loved Paris overcame him, “would've” but for something he'd already done wrong — some novice's error — but didn't know about. Not that you ever knew about most of the mistakes you were making, or ever much caught yourself. Events, reliances, just began not to work out right for seemingly no reason, then life began to descend into disastrous straits. Helen seemed that way, seemed to be diminishing in a way he couldn't describe but only feel. He liked Helen. He admired her. But he shouldn't have come to Paris with her. That was his mistake. Bringing her was his hopeless attempt to take an experience with him, and afterwards bring it home again, converted to something better. Only if he'd brought Penny with him could that have worked — worked in the sense that the two of them had once been so close as to be two parts of one person. That was years ago. Whatever he'd liked then, she'd liked. Though that was over now.

But at the cold window, with Helen snoring in bed and the thin pink counterpane around his shoulders, Matthews began to feel different, as if the new moonlight and crinkled stars had configured the world newly, and Paris, even in the frosted glowing night, seemed to lie forth more the way he would've wanted had he ever let himself want it. A metropolis of bounteous issue; a surface to penetrate; a depth in which to immerse oneself, even reside in. Coming to Paris now, at his age, with a serious, mature intent, might mean exactly what he'd thought, a wish to stay. Only he wasn't here to convert anything to a commodity he could take back but to suit himself to the unexpected, to what was already here. Helen had been exactly right about that.

Still, he wondered about the translator. Madame de Grenelle. What had “fascinated” her about his not very good book? Some terrible flaw in it? A small, cruel and embarrassing ignorance? Some vast and subtle opportunity missed or misconstrued, which all the French would immediately see but that she meant to correct for him? This, though, was how a novelist thought: things were infinitely mutable and improvable, revisable, renewable — each surface only one side of a great volume to be revealed.

Matthews thought fitfully of Lelia. What time was it in California? He would mount a proper accounting of himself if the moment finally arrived — some California court where he would achieve joint custody. A sensible visiting arrangement. Summers. School vacations. Christmas. Still, he didn't feel like the father of a six-year-old daughter, unseen for nearly two years owing to her mother's intransigence. Occasionally he confused Greta in his book with Penny and imagined Penny dead. He'd made her up and in time would stow her away.

But was it that odd not to see your daughter, given conditions of relative hostility? A settled, more predictable life seemed better, even in California, though Penny seemed increasingly if mysteriously disapproving the longer they were apart. As if he was missing some opportunity he didn't even know about. Eventually it would resolve itself.

Across rue Froidevaux, at the far corner of rue Boulard, in an apartment building that must've been the exact nineteenth-century vintage as the Nouvelle Métropole, only one window was left lighted. But in it was a Christmas tree, its red and green and orange bulbs blinking in the windless night. No person was visible. The tree simply stood alone, high up and unnoticeable from the street: a beacon of a sort for no one. Possibly, Matthews thought, Americans lived there and couldn't do without a tree far from home. The French, of course, would never be bothered. “Joyeux Noël” was enough for them. For a long moment, his feet beginning to ache, the cold slicing in between the folds of his coverlet, he tried to stare across at the tree's shimmery lights and focus on them, to receive the tree's tiny fancy festiveness as his own. Matthews stared and stared, and in a time which wasn't so long he felt he'd succeeded in at least that small wish.

IN THE MORNING they slept late, almost until noon. Though in his sleep bells had been ringing and ringing, and twice he thought he felt Helen get out of bed, heard her throwing up behind the closed bathroom door, followed by her climbing back in bed, cold and apparently dampened. It was colder in the room now. That he was certain of.

When he opened his eyes, Helen was sitting in the green, plastic-covered armchair, wrapped in the pink percale bedspread he'd covered himself with hours before. That was why he felt cold.

“How do you feel?” he said from beneath his thin blanket.

“I'm fine,” Helen said noncommittally. She had on his red wool socks and was smoking a cigarette. He'd never seen her smoke before, though he knew that years ago she had. The room smelled smoky and also sweaty. It was this smell that had waked him, that and being cold. “I guess I caught a bug when I went out in the rain. Who knows? I could've eaten something too.”

“Did you throw up?” Matthews said.

“Mmmm,” Helen said, big white smoke jets exiting her nostrils. Helen had her glasses on, and her blond hair was bedraggled, as if she'd been sweating or feverish. She looked pale and tired and thin. Helen always seemed big and healthy. “A big, pushy blond” was what she called herself. Now she looked worn out.

A nice light was coming in the window, a gray steely light with some yellow-stippled sun in it. No more rain, though the wind was up again, blowing on the Boulevard Raspail, past the big lion. He pictured wind riffling the glassy puddles in the street. He did not particularly want to be there.

“I was just thinking about having a translator,” Helen said. “What an experience that is. I don't know why I was thinking about it. It's just an experience I'll never have.” She blew smoke at the windowpanes and watched it cling to the glass, grow thin and disappear.

“I'm not going to be translated,” Matthews said from under the covers. “My book is. Or maybe not.”

“That's right,” Helen said, and cleared her throat.

“Do you feel like the Paris tour today?”

“Of course.” Helen pulled her head back and gave him a stern schoolmarm's frown. “I'm not about to sit here with it right outside my window. No way, René.”

“I thought you might not feel good enough.” With the return of Helen's bedspread, he felt he could just as easily forgo Paris, in spite of what he'd decided in the middle of the night. He was in Paris. Whatever he did was the right thing. Staying in bed, for instance, and later finding dinner. That would be as much Paris as Napoleon's tomb.

“What would you do if I died over here?” Helen said.

“Jesus!” Matthews said. “Why would you bring that up?” The thought shocked him. This was jet lag. He'd read it was a kind of small-scale clinical depression. All chemical. No doubt Helen's medication made it worse. “Let's think about something more pleasant.”

“Would you have me buried?” she said. “Do you have to live someplace to be buried there? Here, I mean.”

“I have no idea,” Matthews said. He thought about inviting Helen back into the bed to warm him up. But he knew what would happen. Even feeling like shit, Helen would be up to that.

“I'm serious,” she said, still smoking avidly but giving him a disapproving eye for not being serious.

“I'd have you buried on the spot,” Matthews said. “Right where you fell, if that's what you wanted.”

“I would want that,” Helen said. “If I died in this room, for instance, I'd want to be buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery. With Baudelaire. Or at least near where he is. I was reading about it.”

“I'd personally see to it.”

“Not that I've ever read Baudelaire.”

“Fleurs du Mal, ” he said from bed.

“Fine,” Helen said. She looked speculatively out the window at what Matthews knew to be the wide expansive winterscape of the cemetery, beautiful and bleak. They would've covered over the Jewish grave by now. Helen didn't need to see an open grave, in her present state of mind.

“What do you long for, Charley?” Helen said. “Not that I long for death.” Helen smudged out her cigarette on the metal lip of the window casement and stared at the smoldering white butt.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

“Just answer, okay?” Helen said. “For God's sake, the little professor. Just answer one question. Last night you said you wanted to remake yourself into something better. Okay. What's that? I'm in the dark here. We're having a serious conversation.”

“I'd like for things not to center so much on me, I guess,” Matthews said, feeling cold, as if she had the window open.

Helen turned and frowned at him again, her eyelids hooding her large, pale-blue irises. She bit a tiny corner of her lower lip. “So, is that your answer?”

“Yes,” he said. But it was true. He simply hadn't known it was true until now. He longed to be less the center of things. He realized this was what a foreign country — any foreign country — could offer you and what you could never get at home. The idea of home, in fact, was the antithesis of that feeling. At home everything was about you and what you owned and what you liked and what everybody thought of you. He'd had enough of that. He couldn't, of course, expect Helen to appreciate this idea, given the mood she was in. But he didn't know what else to say. So he just nodded in what he knew to be an unconvincing gesture of seriousness, performed ridiculously from the bed.

“That's how cancer makes you feel too,” Helen said quietly, raising her chin and resting it on her fist, almost touching the glass. Matthews could see only the white sky outside, suddenly cluttered with soaring swifts. Days were as short as they got now. “You feel like everything's about you all the time.”

“I can imagine,” Matthews said, and felt he could imagine it. He could imagine it pretty easily.

“That's probably why I like you, Charley.”

“Why's that?” Matthews said.

“When I'm with you I don't think about myself very much. Really almost never.”

“What do you think about?” Matthews said.

“Well,” Helen said, “nothing much. Not the same things at least. I just think about what we do, where we go for our drives. Nothing important. It's perfect for me, really. I'm thinking just about Paris now. When you think about Paris, you don't have to think about yourself and what might be wrong with you.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“Well, good,” Helen said. “Then we're probably suited for each other, aren't we?” She smiled at him and pulled her pink bedspread more closely around her chin.

“I guess we are,” Matthews said.

“Brrr, I'm cold now,” Helen said. “It's time to go see Paris.” She extended one bare leg out of her coverlet and touched her toes to the cold floor. “We don't have all the time in the world now. We have to make our happy moments last.”

“Yes, we do. We certainly do,” Matthews said, and he believed that was absolutely true.

OUT IN THE STREETS it was much too blustery and cold to walk far. Helen had wanted to walk all the way to where Napoleon's tomb was housed in the Invalides, then to the Eiffel Tower (which she said was close by), and from there use the metro to the Champs Élysées, then walk to the Place de la Concorde. A day of walking and seeing Paris up close.

But on the first block of the Avenue du Maine, Matthews realized their cloth coats weren't thick enough to hold off the batting wind and street grit, and Helen announced that she now felt “too stiff” to walk a long way. So they stood shivering in a cab queue outside the Montparnasse station and took a taxi straight to the Invalides.

Helen, upon arrival, seemed to know a lot about absolutely everything having to do with Napoleon, Louis XIV, the Domed Church and all the buildings. Napoleon had been her father's lifelong fascination back in West Virginia, she said. There had been books and battle plans and postcards and portraits and busts and memorabilia all over their family home. It had been her father's greatest wish, Helen said as they inched about quietly and reverently beneath the echoing dome, to someday stand at the railing above the actual tomb itself, just as they were doing, and exactly as the terrible Hitler had done back in 1940, and offer a better honor than the Führer's to the great man of France. Helen pointed out the portraits of the four evangelists and of St. Louis offering Christ the sword with which he would defeat the infidels. She knew exactly who was buried with Napoleon (his brothers and his son, the Eaglet) and that the emperor's remains were divided into six coffins like a pharaoh's, each one made of a different precious material. And she could identify the twelve statues encircling the big red porphyry tombstone as being Winged Victory, who represented the French people reunited finally by their great leader's death.

Outside again, in the afternoon chill, Helen stared up at the great gold dome. She had her glasses off, her hand sheltering her eyes, as if from a sun, though one wasn't visible. Avenue de Breteuil lay behind her, cars and buses honking and letting off new crowds of tourists. “My single regret is my father isn't here with me. Or instead of me,” she said, gazing up. “He'd appreciate this so much.”

Matthews at that moment was thinking about his novel, his hands thrust in his trench-coat pockets. He was wondering whether he shouldn't just have called it a memoir and been done with it. He should, he felt. He didn't hear what Helen said, but sensed it was about being in the army in France and visiting this very spot not long after Hitler had been here.

“I know it meant a lot to him,” he said, looking all around. Again he had no idea what part of Paris he was in. Which arrondissement.

“You know what people want when they come to Paris?” Helen said, still staring up at the glowing dome, with the white sky in the background.

“I don't,” Matthews said. “I have no idea.”

“To be French.” Helen sniffed. “The French are more serious than we are. They care more. They have a perspective on importance and unimportance. You can't become them. You just have to be happy being yourself.”

Looking away, Matthews suddenly noticed the great colossus of the Eiffel Tower almost springing into the sky, more huge and grave but also so much prettier than he'd imagined it could be. None of the miniatures ever showed you how pretty and graceful it was. It was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen. Better than Niagara Falls. Only the Pyramids, he felt, were probably more wonderful. He was shocked by how happy he was to see it.

“That's right,” Matthews said, and he took Helen's cold, stiff hand, the one that held her glasses. He thought she'd been crying, and he wanted her to stop and be happy. “There's the Eiffel Tower,” he said brightly. “It was hidden, but now there it is.”

“Well, oh my,” Helen said, seeing it. “It sure is. There it is. I'm so happy to see it. I wondered if I would.”

“Me, too,” Matthews said. “I wasn't sure we would.”

“Aren't we lucky,” Helen said. “It's the miracle of the Occident.”

“I guess it is,” Matthews said. “I guess we are.”

And then they walked on.

THEIR WALK to the Eiffel Tower turned out to be longer than Helen had thought. This, she said — referring to the Fodor's — was because of a broad turn in the river Seine. “It's like New Orleans that way.” New Orleans, she said, was her favorite American city.

She announced that she was feeling better, due to the crisp air, and thought the day could go on the way she'd hoped — her “first day in Paris”: the stroll down the Champs Élysées, the visit to the famous execution site, the Louvre, the romantic boat ride, then the search for an incomparable meal.

Helen spoke much better French than Matthews expected and, because she felt better, went in several shops along the Avenue de la Bourdonnais and talked animatedly to the clerks, and to flower vendors and newsagents on the side streets leading toward the Champ-de-Mars. In all of this Matthews felt Helen became a kind of spectacle — the tall, pale, buxom blond American woman with thick glasses spouting out French to small aproned Frenchmen who looked up at her in annoyance, often before simply turning around and ignoring her. It was rude, but he didn't think he could blame them. They'd all seen Helens before, and nothing in life had changed.

Avenue de la Bourdonnais was a rich area, Matthews could see, with tall, elegant apartment buildings, big Jaguars and BMW wagons lining the wide, tree-lined boulevard, and many people talking on cell phones, standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Possibly this was the diplomatic sector, he thought. Possibly the American embassy itself was nearby, since there were a lot of Americans on the street, trying to act as if they spoke the language — his grad school French was too poor to even try. Though the French, he thought, seemed like they were acting too. They were like amateur actors playing French people but trying too hard. There was nothing natural to the whole enterprise.

Yet he found there was another, good side to it: since, when he would listen in on some conversation Helen was having with a clerk or a flower vendor and would try to figure out from this word or that what either one of them was saying, he got almost everything wrong. Listening this way, he made up whole parts and sometimes the entirety of conversations based on an erroneous interpretation of a hand gesture or a facial expression or some act of seemingly familiar body language coupled with a word he thought he knew but was usually also wrong about. It could get to be addictive, he believed, not understanding what people were saying. Time spent in another country would probably always be spent misunderstanding a great deal, which might in the end turn out to be a blessing and the only way you could ever feel normal.

In a tiny, unheated religious curio shop on rue Marinoni, Helen went rooting through bins of plastic crucifixes in several sizes and materials, then through framed color depictions of Christ in various aspects of dolor and beseechment, and finally through a stack of colored tea towels with religious mottoes stamped on them in several languages, like sweatshirts. Eventually she held one up, a pink one, that had the glory of god is to keep things hidden printed on it in white block letters.

“What's that mean?” Matthews said. “Is it a joke?”

“I'll give it to somebody back home for Christmas, somebody who lies to her husband.” She was staring down at her palm, trying to identify the right money to pay with. She seemed exhausted again. The young female Chinese clerk frowned at her. “It's a proverb,” Helen said, fingering through her coins. “It'll mean something different to anybody you give it to.” She smiled at him. “Do you love Paris now?” she said. “Do you feel like you're not the center of everything? Because you're certainly not.”

“I don't feel much like it's Christmas.”

“That's because you're not religious. Plus you're spoiled,” Helen said. “For spoiled people the real thing's never enough. Don't you know that?”

“I don't think I'm spoiled,” Matthews said.

“And spoiled people never do. But you are, though.” She said this sweetly, not to accuse him, just to acknowledge the truth everyone knew and needn't talk about. “Not to want to be the center of things, that's what spoiled people think they want,” she said. “I'm the same way. I'm just not as bad as you are. But it's all right. You can't help it. It's gotten you this far.” She smiled at him again and looked around the little shop, where a thousand colored likenesses of Christ gazed down on them in attitudes of compassion and acquiescence.

ON THE FIRST LEVEL of the Eiffel Tower, at 187 feet, Helen's stomach went immediately queasy and her knees unsteady, and she told Matthews she could feel the whole construction swaying and weaving in the “winds aloft” and that she'd never make it to level two, the 377-foot platform, much less to the top, where it was 899 and the view extended forty-two miles and Paris could be seen as it really was.

She ventured, however, over to the big banked window that looked north and, according to the colored map provided below the glass panorama, toward the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Élysées and, farther on, though invisible beneath the low sky, toward the Sacré-Coeur church and Montmartre.

“Montmartre's where all the painters painted, including Picasso,” said Helen, focusing out over the great dun-colored grid of the city in winter. “I, of course, thought I'd never get to see it. And I don't feel like I can actually take it all in now. I can't, I guess.”

Most of the other viewers on level one were Germans, the ones Blumberg had said could hold the city in joint custody with the Americans until the French came back from where it was warm. Matthews understood no German, but admired them for looking so well-off and for feeling happy to come back to the city they'd once invaded. He wondered how Helen's father would absorb that.

He seemed to remember a book he'd read or even taught in which two men took a taxi to the red-light district near Montmartre, and an orchestra was playing in a club and a lot of GIs were dancing with French girls. Teaching was finally good for this and only this, he thought — intruding on and devaluing life as lived into an indecipherable muddle of lost days and squandered experiences. He wondered how much life he'd already lost to it and for a moment tried to calculate how many days he'd lived on earth, and how many more he might hold on, and how many he'd thrown in the garbage. He got to how many days he'd lived—13,605—then felt too irritated to go on.

“Richard Wright,” he said.

“Hmmm?” Helen said. She had been silent for what seemed like a long time, taking it all in through the observation window. More Germans were circulating around them, shouldering in, pointing to places on the map and then to the same places in the real city spread in all directions in front of them. Matthews heard the words die Bedienung. He imagined it meant something admiring: the recognition of a paradise lost for the fatherland. Whatever it was, it made the Germans laugh. “Die Bedienung,” he mouthed to himself, and made the little gasping sound Blumberg had made.

“What did you say?” Helen said.

“I just remembered I once read a book where an important scene takes place in Montmartre,” Matthews said. “Richard Wright wrote it, I think.”

Helen looked at him as if she had no idea what that might mean to him. She blinked behind her glasses and looked troubled.

“Die Bedienung,” Matthews said, but did not gasp.

“Who?”

“It's all right,” he said. “It doesn't matter.”

“The professor,” Helen said, and looked back intently at the gray-brown matte of Paris, as if it were hers to command.

WHEN HELEN CAME BACK from her trip to the Eiffel Tower ladies’ room, she was not alone. She was with a man and a woman, and all three of them were having a loud joke.

“Look who's got nothing else to do but climb the Eiffel Tower,” Helen said, even more loudly. She mimicked being thrown off balance by the sway of the tower in the wind. “Whoa,” she said, and laughed again. Helen seemed no longer sick but happy. Matthews was sorry to see these people. You could ruin your whole experience, he thought, by running into someone you knew. You could lose the feeling of being set adrift in a strange sea, which he was beginning to enjoy.

“This is Rex and Cuddles,” Helen said.

“Cuddles, my butt,” Cuddles said, rolling her eyes and winking at Matthews.

“Cuddles too much,” Helen said.

The Germans were staring at them. Matthews felt sorry to find these people.

“This is Charley,” Helen went on. “Charley's my amour impropre. My amour temporaire, anyway.”

He shook hands with Rex, who volunteered that he and this woman were friends of Helen's from “the old days in Pittsburgh.”

“We're American,” Cuddles said, brimming.

“Can't you guess.” Helen gave Cuddles, whose actual name turned out to be Beatrice, a fishy look. “Bea-at- rice the actress,” Helen said. “They're taking us to our incomparable meal tonight.”

“It's been decided coming out of the Mesdames,” Beatrice said. She was a much too slender woman, with tanned skin that was too tanned, and tight black pedal pushers that she wore with white ankle socks and ballet slippers. She had on a large black motorcycle jacket and looked like somebody out of the fifties, Matthews thought. Somebody who'd lived in coffeehouses for years, smoked a lot of marijuana, read too much awful poetry and probably written plenty herself. These people were always bores and had strong, idiotic opinions about everything. He looked around him. Germans and Japanese — Axis-power tourists — were eddying noisily this way and that on the viewing platform. His gaze fell out onto the city, the City of Light, a place where no one knew him, a provocative place until this moment. He felt slightly dizzy.

“Bea and Rex come to the Eiffel Tower once a year,” Helen said. “Isn't that romantic?”

“It is,” Matthews said.

“Otherwise you could forget you're in Paris,” Rex said solemnly.

“You might think you're in Tokyo up here, though,” Helen said, eyeing the clusters of Japanese pressing toward the observation windows, jabbering and adjusting their cameras for good snaps.

Rex was watching the Japanese without smiling. He was a big, mealy-skinned, full-bellied man who wore cowboy boots and what Matthews remembered his father calling a car coat. He'd had one when he was ten, and his had matched his father's. Rex had endured a hair transplant that'd left a neat row of stalky-thin hair follicles straight across his dome. It was recent, or possibly it hadn't worked out perfectly. But Rex seemed happy to meet Helen up here, where he was happy to be, anyway. Rex, he thought, was undoubtedly Helen's age and was what men Helen's age looked like if everything hadn't gone right. Rex must've weighed two fifty. Bea, on the other hand, might've made a hundred.

“You're a writer?” Rex said in a jokey voice.

“Not exactly,” Matthews said. A man in the milling crowd, plainly an American, looked right in his face after hearing Rex say he was a writer. The man was clearly wondering if Matthews was somebody famous, and if so, who.

“Bea writes poetry,” Rex said.

“That's wonderful,” Matthews said. Helen and Bea were sharing a private word. Bea was shaking her head as though expressing surprise, then her eyes flickered at Matthews and away again. Some accusation, he assumed, Helen had lodged that would never have been made if they hadn't bumped into Cuddles and Rex. All at once a choir of voices, from somewhere on the platform, began singing a Christmas carol in German. “O, Tannenbaum…” It turned the whole place, 187 feet aloft, calamitous and chaotic.

“It must be a burden to have a compulsion to write,” Rex practically shouted.

“It's not, no,” Matthews said, trying to be heard.

“I never had it,” Rex said. “I wasn't compelled.”

Suddenly the caroling stopped, as if somebody in authority had decided it was much too loud.

“That's all right,” Matthews said more normally. “I'm not compelled either.”

“Hell, yes, it's all right,” Rex said, sternly for some reason. “What any person chooses to do is all right.”

Rex's big sad brown eyes were set wide apart and separated by a wide barge of a nose that had probably been broken many times. Rex seemed as stupid as a bullock, and Matthews did not want to have dinner with him. More than likely, Helen would not be up to it anyway.

“I guess so,” Matthews said, and smiled, but Rex was looking around for the carolers.

Helen and Bea rejoined them, with a plan worked out.

“Clancy's. We're dining at Clancy's,” Helen said eagerly.

“I know, it doesn't sound French,” Bea said. “But how much French food can you eat? You'll like it.”

“Matthews just wants it to be incomparable,” Helen said. “But he eats what I tell him to.”

“That's good,” Bea said, and patted Matthews on the arm.

Matthews didn't like being called Matthews. Sometimes Helen did it when she was in her cups, then would often keep doing it for hours. It was also Helen's choice of words that they have an “incomparable” meal. It was her Paris fantasy. It was a word he wouldn't use.

“So, look, we're off, you kids,” Bea said, grabbing Rex's big arm and pulling herself close to him. Matthews realized he was gazing at Rex's hair re-seeding, though he was sure Rex was used to people staring at it. “See you at eight. Don't be en retard,” Bea said, and then away they went into the crowds.

“Bea's a firecracker,” Helen said.

“I see,” Matthews said. Bea and Rex stood waiting for the elevator. Bea waved back through the wandering tourists. He wanted to stay until they disappeared, after which he would conceivably never see them again.

“Are you taking mental notes for your next novel?” Helen said. “I hope so.”

“Who said I was writing another novel?”

“I don't know,” Helen said. “What else are you going to do? Sell sofas? Seems to me it's all you know how to do anymore. That and not like things.”

“What don't I like?” Matthews said uncomfortably. “I like you.”

“Yeah, right. And pigs have ears.”

“Pigs do have ears,” he said. “Two of them. Apiece.”

“Wings. Okay, pigs have wings. You get the point.”

He didn't get the point at all. But Helen had started for the elevator. Bea and Rex were no longer in sight. There was no chance to talk about what he did and didn't like. Not now. He simply came after and followed her to the elevator and out.

ON THE CROWDED Quai Branly, at the foot of the tower, Helen stopped in the gusty wind and gazed again straight up at the swirling misty sky, in which the spire had become obscured.

“We couldn't have seen anything way up on top, anyway,” she said. “Do you think? We got the best view there was.”

“I'm sure,” Matthews said.

Across the busy boulevard was the Pont d'Iéna, and the river, which they could barely see. They'd passed over it in the cab from the airport, but now that he was closer to the water, brown and churning and slightly rancid-smelling in winter flood, Matthews felt it gave the whole city a menacing aspect, which he suspected wasn't accurate but only seemed so at this moment. Yet that Paris could seem menacing was a new sensation: a city with such a river shares in all its aspects. He thought about telling this to Helen but presumed she wouldn't be interested.

When they had walked ten minutes along the quai, as far as the Pont de l'alma, where the Fodor's required them to cross the river in order to seek the Champs Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe and to satisfy Helen's desire for an epic stroll, she sat down on an iron bench, put her head back and took an enormous breath, then exhaled it.

This, he believed, was Helen's way of “taking it all in.”

He stood and looked across the charged river at the Trocadéro and the Palais de Chaillot — names he'd seen in the Fodor's and could now place, though without a clue to what went on there or made them important. They looked like something put up for a world's fair, which the city had then had to find uses for — like Shea Stadium in New York. Basically a mistake. All around Paris's skyline you could see profiles of construction derricks. In the cab, he'd counted seventeen in one small bombed-out piece of ground.

He felt, however, like he was with Helen now, that she was the person in charge; whereas before, even yesterday, it had been his trip and she'd only been along for it. Now, though — at least this afternoon — she'd appropriated events to her wishes, so that what he felt was surprisingly, uncomfortably young, much younger than the eight years that separated them. Yet she was more vitally involved than he was. How, he wondered, could that be?

“I'm done for,” Helen said. “I can't go another step. I've had too much fun.” She had her glasses off and was sticking a pill in her mouth.

“We can take a taxi to the Place de la Concorde,” Matthews said. “It'd still be nice to see where people had their heads chopped off.”

“I can skip it,” Helen said. “I'm stiff and I feel dizzy. I got dizzy in the Eiffel Tower. I'm still glad I went, though.” She swallowed her pill down hard. “I think I have to go home now.”

“Home all the way to West Virginia?”

“Just to the hotel right now,” she said. “I have to lie down for a while. I'm weak.” Cars and motorcycles and buses were surging by in front of them along the quai. “I'm sorry I got pissy,” she said, her head back again, staring up at the white sky.

“You weren't very pissy,” Matthews said. “You just said I didn't much like you. But I do. I like you quite a lot. It's not very easy being here now.”

“I know. It's just supposed to be,” Helen said. With her fingertip she lightly touched the tiny dent her glasses had pressed on her nose. “It's supposed to be the time of your life. You're supposed to die and go to heaven, all in the same day.”

“We ought to be used to what's supposed to happen,” Matthews said.

“Spoken like a man who's unhappily separated from his first wife,” Helen said, and grinned, still staring up. “That's just hind-spite. You should take the brighter side of things.”

“Which one is that?”

“Oh, let me see,” Helen said almost dreamily. “What does my little motto say, my little proverb?”

“‘The glory of God is to keep things hidden.’”

“There you go,” Helen said. “Doesn't that just mean: Take two pills and call me in the morning, sayeth the Lord?”

“I guess it could,” Matthews said. “It could mean why don't you shut up, too.”

“There you go. So why don't you shut up?” Helen smiled sweetly at him where he stood alone on the cold sidewalk, hands in his coat pockets, head bare to the wind. “No offense.”

“No, none taken,” Matthews said, and he began to wave for a taxi out on the crowded avenue along the river.

IN THE HOTEL, they both fell into bed and into dense sleeps, from which he did not awaken until after dark, so that when his eyes found only darkness, he had no idea where he was or what day it was or, for an instant, who Helen Carmichael might be, breathing beside him. The air all around was steamy, and he was sweating and could feel warm sweat on Helen's bare back. He lay, then, for a long time as though a great burden of sleep and fatigue was resting on his chest, and finally he let the weight sink him back into darkness as if the darkness of sleep was better than the darkness of the unknown.

In his second sleep he dreamed vividly. There, he was both sitting at what seemed to be a typical Parisian sidewalk café (something he had never done) but also watching himself do the very same thing. Wearing a heavy black overcoat and a red scarf and a disreputable-looking black beret, he was talking to someone at an extremely high rate of speed. He couldn't, in the dream, see who he was talking to, but the thought that it was Penny seemed foregone. He was still wearing a wed-ding ring.

And he was speaking French! French words (all unfathomable) were flooding out of his mouth just the way they flooded out of every Frenchman's mouth, a mile a minute. No one — whoever he was talking to — offered anything in reply. So that it was only he, Charley Matthews, rattling on and on and on in perfect French he could miraculously speak, yet, as his own observer, in no way understand.

This dream, in its own dream time, seemed to go on until, when he suddenly awoke with the feeling he'd rescued himself from some endless, winnerless race, he was exhausted and his heart was pounding, his legs aching, and even his shoulders were stiff, as though his sleep was truly a burden he'd been forced to carry for days.

The stingy fluorescent ceiling light had been turned on in the room, and for a long time Matthews lay naked and stared at the pale tube as if it was a source of assurance, though still without completely comprehending where he was or why.

“Don't sleep forever,” he heard Helen say.

“Why not?”

“It'll ruin your sleep. You have to wake up now so you can sleep later.”

Matthews raised only his head and looked down the length of his body. Helen was standing in the bathroom door, a towel wrapped around her breasts and waist. With another towel she was drying her hair in the stronger light of the bathroom. She looked large and important in the doorway. “Junoesque” was the word she liked. It was this particular attitude and incarnation that allowed Helen to think most people couldn't handle her and that she was too much for most men. Matthews stared at her in the lighted doorway, thinking that the soapy flower smell from the shower had now overpowered the sweaty smell from earlier. “We haven't eaten all day,” Helen said. “Did you realize that? Not that I'm hungry.”

The thought of Beatrice and Rex floated unhappily back into his mind. “Did we cancel dinner with your friends, or did I dream that?”

“You dreamed it.” Helen tilted her head sideways so her long, pale hair fell to the side and she could dry the parts that were underneath.

“We should have,” Matthews said. “I'd rather die here now than eat dinner at — where was it?”

“Clancy's,” Helen said, then took a deep breath and sighed. “Clon-cee. You don't have to go with me.”

“I have to if you do,” Matthews said. “How do you feel?”

“I feel absolutely wonderful,” she said. “I've decided I'm going to read your book next.”

“My book?” Matthews said.

“Yes,” Helen said. “Ton livre.”

“You won't like it,” Matthews said. “Nobody but the French like it.”

As a first perfectly clear thought, this was not welcome news. Helen had always acted as though his book and the fact that he'd written it were merely amusing if not actually embarrassing and ridiculous anomalies, in no way worth taking time to investigate. A kind of engrossing but valueless hobby. Her standard line — offered even to Matthews’ parents and sister in Cleveland — had been that she didn't intend to read The Predicament because she was afraid she'd either like it so much Matthews would then hopelessly intimidate her, or else hate it so much she'd never be able to take him seriously again and their relationship would be over. (Privately, she'd told him only explanation two was the real one.)

This had suited Matthews fine, inasmuch as in the last months of writing The Predicament, and not long after he'd begun his affair with Helen, he'd inserted a character who was — even he knew — somewhat modeled on her: a tall, ash-blond, Buick-bumper, Rockette type he'd exaggerated into a garish woman who wore mules, slit-up-the-sides dresses, and talked in a loud voice about coarse subjects, but whom the protagonist clings to after his wife abandons him, even though they have little in common but sex. In Matthews’ mind, this was not Helen Carmichael; only one or two superficial details were appropriated. And it was in no way meant to size Helen up or be her portrait.

Except try to tell Helen that. Helen maintained strong certainties about her own substance and integrity, but also spent considerable time scanning the no-man's-land around her like a razor-beam searchlight, on the lookout for possible adversaries and nonbelievers. Plus she wasn't stupid — though her personal reading tastes were always for best-sellers and ghoulish police mysteries. She would certainly see the character of Carlette as a not especially flattering image of herself and would be mad as hell about it. It was not a prospect Matthews felt eager to confront in the midst of an expensive and already half-wrecked trip to Europe.

And not that he'd blame her — assuming she got to the Carlette part. Probably people never had kind thoughts about seeing themselves in someone else's made-up book. It was a matter, he understood, of power and authority: one person's being usurped or stolen outright by another, for at very best indifferent purposes. And that was definitely how Helen would view it. So, if he could, he would like to keep her from feeling any of these bad ways by discouraging her from reading The Predicament anytime soon.

“I'm sure I won't like it,” Helen said, having disappeared back into the tiny bathroom, where Matthews could hear her unscrewing the top of some kind of jar, then popping the cap on a container of pills. “I just thought it might tell me something interesting about you.”

“I'm not very interesting.” Matthews stared unhappily up at the fluorescent tube, which produced its thin, mint-colored and quaverous light. He pulled the blanket over his lower half, though the room still felt steamy.

“I'm sure you're not,” Helen said. She opened the medicine cabinet and closed it. “I just want to uncover the real Charley Matthews. The man behind the whatever. Whatever the French think is so thrilling. Maybe you're deep and I don't know it.” Helen stuck her head around the doorjamb and smiled at him meanly. “You know? Deeeeep,” Helen said. “You're deeeeep.”

“I'm not deep at all,” Matthews said, feeling trapped.

“No, I know that,” she said, disappearing once more.

Though in a moment she emerged wearing a slip, her hair almost dry. She stepped across the tiny cluttered room to where her blue plastic suitcase was open on the floor and squatted beside it to unpack clean clothes.

Turning sideways, prepared to say something about the utter inanity of his own novel, Matthews noticed surprisingly that Helen had an enormous purple and black and even brown bruise halfway up her left thigh. And another one, he saw now, was on her other thigh, close to her underpants, just where her buttocks began to bloom outward in the way he liked.

“Jesus, what in the hell are those big bruises!” he said, and leaned up on one elbow as if to get closer. “They look like you fell off a damn truck.”

“Thanks,” Helen said, still going through her packed clothes.

“What caused them?”

“I don't know.” Helen stopped her hands for a moment in their busy delving and looked up at the window, a perfect blank curtain of night that seemed to block any light from escaping. She took a breath and let it out. “Maybe it's my medicine,” she said, and shook her head. Then she knelt on one knee and went back to her clothes. “You should get dressed if you're coming with me.”

“Did they just show up?” Matthews said. He was transfixed by these bruises, which looked like big gloomy expressionist paintings or else thunderclouds.

“Did what show up?”

“Those bruises.”

“Yep. They did.” She seemed to want to look at her hip where her slip's hem was above the bruise, but didn't look.

“Have you had them before?” he said, still in his bed. “I've never seen them.”

“Look. What difference does it make?” Helen said, supremely annoyed. “I have a goddamn bruise. Okay? I can't help it.”

“Do they hurt?”

“No. They don't hurt. If you hadn't pointed them out like I was a goddamn sideshow, I wouldn't have thought about them. So leave it alone.”

“Do you want to see a doctor?” He understood mysterious bruises of that sort were serious. You didn't get bruises like these — and maybe there were others too — from bumping into bedposts and armchairs. These were possibly related to Helen's cancer. She could be sick again, and how she felt this morning — stiff and weak — and then dizzy this afternoon could be interpreted as symptoms of cancer coming back. She probably knew it herself but didn't want it to interfere with the trip.

“I'll go to my doctor when I get home,” she said. She was pulling one of her signature short skirts, this one peach-colored, over her hips, so that her two bruises went out of sight.

Helen knew what he'd been thinking, that was clear, and he realized he shouldn't say anything more now, since she'd said she didn't want to find a doctor. Though where would you find a doctor on rue Froidevaux at seven o'clock the week before Christmas? He remembered shiny brass plaques set into the sides of the rich brownstones on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais. “Dr. So-and-so, Chirurgien.” You couldn't get one of these guys at seven p.m. They were all away, were just at that very moment sitting down to a jolly dinner beside a warm ocean beach where dry palms were gently clattering. To see a doctor, you'd need to call an ambulance and get carted out through the lobby on a stretcher. If you were lucky.

“Are you sure you feel up to going to dinner?” he said.

“I feel absolutely wonderful.” She was pulling a matching peach-colored sweater over her thick hair. Helen liked matching colors — down to her shoes, the tint of her stockings, sometimes her lipstick and eye shadow. It made her feel good to match. He began climbing out of bed, stiff from his dream but happier to worry about Helen's health than about whether she'd read his novel. Helen's health was important, and that was what he intended to concentrate on.

“Do you think I look nice enough for Paris?” Helen said. She was standing in the middle of the crummy room, up on her peachy high heels, her glasses catching a glimmer from the gauzy light.

“You look terrific,” Matthews said, holding his blanket up to cover himself. He smiled at her too animatedly. “I'd happily take you anywhere in the world.” Except Clancy's, he thought.

“Would you really?” He heard a rare, faint trace of West Virginia accent in Helen's voice. Her eyes were wide, as if his declaration surprised her.

“Absolutely,” he said. He thought about putting his arms around her, but she was all dressed and ready, and he was, in essence, naked.

“I wish I had some champagne right now,” she said.

“We'll get you champagne.” He began moving toward his suitcase. “We'll have champagne at Clancy's.”

“I just meant right then. It's already gone. I just had a moment when to be holding a glass of champagne would've been very nice.”

“I bet you'll have a glass before you know it,” Matthews said.

“Oh. I bet I will too.” Helen smiled at him, then turned to gaze out the dark window, while Matthews got himself ready to go.

CLANCY'S was a big, noisy, brassily lit room off the rue St.-Antoine, near the Bastille, in what, Rex gloated, was “the Frenchiest part of Paris.” He and Beatrice had already downed one bottle of champagne by the time Matthews and Helen arrived, and were awaiting the arrival of another one.

“They mix up the best martinis in the world here,” Rex said loudly, standing up and giving Matthews’ hand a big engulfing pump. “But I hate to drink gin on an empty stomach. Don't you, Bill?”

“We didn't think you kids would mind if we got a head start,” Beatrice said, grinning and clearly drunk.

“That's exactly how I feel,” Helen said, getting seated and into the spirit of things. “The race goes to the drunkest. Sit down, Bill,” she said. “This is where we're going. In case you didn't know it.”

Rex began explaining that two American Pan Am pilots, “a couple of guys named Joe from Kansas City,” got tired of not finding steaks in Paris up to their high standards and decided to retire early and open a place for people like themselves, who were stranded here with similar needs and tastes. They found this place, put in the good lighting, got the ambience established with a lot of vintage black-and-white photographs — Babe Ruth hitting a homer, Rocky Marciano KO’ing some black guy. And the rest was history. Both the pilots had unfortunately died of AIDS, Rex said soberly, but the business had been kept going by loyal family members, including one pilot's former wife. It was the best-kept secret in town, and generally considered the unofficial headquarters for the overseas community, a place where you could relax, be yourself and get shit-faced in peace, just like back home. Regrettably, it was beginning to get crowded, and even some French people were showing up, though they were always given the worst tables.

Matthews had realized, on the cab ride over, that he'd set a scene in The Predicament exactly where rue St.-Antoine entered the Place de la Bastille, directly across from a big opera house they passed, and that the crowded, brightly lit roundabout they'd driven through looked precisely the way he'd imagined it, though he'd made it possible to walk down to the Seine in less than five minutes, which was clearly impossible.

Rex Mountjoy, it turned out, was in the machine parts business, specializing in farm implements. American manufacturers had a hammerlock on the big farm-machinery market, Rex said, but their Achilles’ heel was that their parts-and-service was way too expensive and they were essentially shooting themselves in the foot. Rex's big, heavy-jowled, heavy-lidded face grew even more solemn in the discussion of his own affairs. From thousands of miles across the ocean, in the corporate parts department of a big-market-share company headquarters, Rex had spied an opening where a smart gunslinger type could pick up refurbished parts in the States, sell them direct into the infant retail implement market here in France, and come away with a bundle. He hadn't thought his business would stay profitable for longer than two, maybe three years, until the competition in the EU got wise to him and some bureaucrat up in Brussels tailor-made a regulation to embargo exactly what he was doing. “But we're still here,” Rex said, putting his giant farm-implement mitts around a big martini glass and sniffing the simple pleasures of his success. “The French all hate to work. It's that simple,” Rex said prodigiously. “They're fighting a rearguard action against the success ethic. If you had a good idea, you'd definitely want to bring it over here and sell it on the street.”

“That's good advice,” Matthews said. He had ordered a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé, which Beatrice had immediately begun calling “foolish pussy.” Both Beatrice and Helen, who were again locked in an intensely private conversation, occasionally looked up to refer to Matthews’ “foolish pussy”—Helen with a blazing smile that seemed to him feverish and hot.

“Have some more foolish pussy, Bill,” Helen practically shouted, then laughed noisily, her mouth open so Matthews could see her tongue, wide and flat and café-au-lait-colored — a color he knew doctors associated with illness. The tongue, his mother had always said, the tongue tells the story of your health. Helen's tongue wasn't telling a good story.

Rex, it became clear, had ordered everything for everybody — which included more martinis, big iceberg salads with beefsteak tomatoes and onion slabs drenched in white vinegar, continent-sized sirloins with two accompanying Idahos on platters all by themselves. A boat full of butter, sour cream, chives, bacon crumbles, steak sauces, horseradish, mustard and ketchup was set in the middle of the table on a lazy Susan with three previously aired bottles of Côtes du Rhône. Rex announced that if anyone wanted anything else, they only had to ask for it, “just as long as it isn't poulet and haricots verts.”

“Really. If I don't eat two of these a week, I get goddamn anemic,” Beatrice said, sawing straight into her red meat, holding her fork like a shoehorn. Beatrice was dressed in the same black bohemian outfit she'd had on in the Eiffel Tower; and because she was drunk now and seemed irritable, she looked, Matthews thought, like the picture of an anemic person.

Rex, on the other hand, seemed to have grown jollier and much more companionable as the day and now the night wore on. He was dressed like somebody headed for a college football game, a big red crewneck sweater over a green plaid sport shirt and a pair of brown corduroys — clothes Matthews hadn't noticed earlier because of the car coat. He'd refashioned his hair transplant so it didn't make him look as absurd — though his big-browed forehead still appeared tender and slightly angry in spots.

“It must be a real burden to have the compulsion to write,” Rex said confidentially, his mouth full.

“No, it really isn't,” Matthews said, trying to eat his own steak and keep eye contact with Rex. The noise in Clancy's rose and fell like a tide. New people constantly came through the door, people the other diners knew, and a clamor would crescendo and then fall off. Everybody seemed to be shouting in English, though he and Rex were able to talk under the roar by getting closer. Rex, he noticed, had on some loud minty aftershave that seemed familiar — also something his father wore.

“I guess all your family are writers too,” Rex said.

“No, they're in the furniture business in Cleveland,” Matthews said. “I've only written one book, and I don't think it's very good. So you couldn't really call me a writer. Not yet, anyway.”

“I see,” Rex said. “I guess it's all just personal expression.”

“Rex traces his family directly back to Adam and Eve,” Beatrice said. She'd been talking to Helen but listening to them. Parentage was obviously an issue she liked to bring up at Rex's expense.

“She's jealous because my parents had last names,” Rex said, and pushed his big lips out and made a juicy, insolent kiss at Beatrice.

“Right. Like Zigolowsky and Prdozilewcza — the ones you don't need many vowels for. Mountjoy's his stage name. I hardly need say that, though, I guess.”

The din in Clancy's rose and fell again, and somewhere, apparently in the room with them, a dog started barking. Several people seated near Clancy's big, white-flocked Christmas tree started laughing. “Gordon,” someone said. “Here, Gordon.” There was another brisk bark, then a squeal of sudden intense pain.

“French people,” Rex said, straining his big neck around to find the offenders. “Yep, yep, there they are,” he said. “I see 'em. Four of 'em with their fuckin’ pooch.”

“Gordon. Great.” Beatrice looked disgusted. In the bright restaurant light, Matthews could see that Beatrice's skin was more leathery and tough-looking than he'd thought. He wondered how old she really was. Once again he felt ridiculously young, though he was thirty-seven and already had an ex-wife, an ex-profession and a daughter he never saw. Rex and Beatrice and even to some extent Helen seemed like his parents’ age and, much like his parents, almost completely unreachable.

“The UN's a loada crap. I know that,” Rex was saying in answer to some remark of Helen's about differing nationalities needing to get along better. Helen was a strong believer in the UN.

“Oh, let's don't get him started on the UN,” Beatrice said, and rolled her eyes. She decided to have another big gulp of her martini. “Or the EU. Another of his big all-time faves.”

“Yeah. Don't get me started on that,” Rex said, inserting lettuce into his big mouth and breathing a heavy breath at the same time.

“Charley knows all about Negroes. The ones who came to Paris, anyway,” Helen said. “He was once a prof. He can tell you who wrote what and where they lived and why, all that kind of thing. He doesn't look black, does he?”

“You can't always tell,” Beatrice said. “They're not like the French — visible for miles in every direction.”

“I thought you said you were a novelist,” Rex said, head down, negotiating a slice of meat onto a square chunk of potato with the intention of eating them as one.

“I didn't say that,” Matthews said, shaking his head.

“Who said it, then?” Rex said, lifting the loaded fork to his mouth.

“And who cares?” Beatrice said.

“Charley's a novel-least,” Helen said, her eyes hot. “I haven't read his ro-man yet. But I'm going to. I want to see if I'm in it. Part of it's set in Paris.”

“You're not in it,” Matthews said, feeling in a hurry to eat, though with no idea what to do when he was finished. Helen had to be in pain, he thought. That was why she was acting agitated — solicitous one second, ready to turn on him the next. She was also drunk and undoubtedly taking painkillers.

“Is Josephine Baker in it?” Beatrice said, going on eating.

“That's who I was thinking of too,” Helen said.

“No,” Matthews said. “It's all made up. No real people are in it.” Everything he said sounded asinine. He wished he could shut up, finish his meal and take Helen home.

“I thought they only let black people teach that stuff,” Beatrice said. “Of course, I've been over here so long I've forgotten what happens at home.”

“It was pretty unusual,” Matthews said.

“No kidding,” Rex said.

“We're putting Charley on the spot here,” Helen said.

“That's all right,” Rex said. “I'll be next.”

Gordon suddenly gave three sharp reports from near the Christmas tree. Several diners shouted, then laughed. Then everyone heard a fierce, yowling cat hiss. There was then a scramble of scratching claws and growling, and something hurtled past Matthews’ legs under the table, with something else hurtling after it. The French people — all small men and women in pastel sweaters and nice jackets — seemed vaguely dismayed. One of the men got up and made his way through the tables in the direction Gordon seemed to have escaped. He didn't seem the least bit surprised, only annoyed.

Rex glared at him as he sidled past. “Monkeys'll be next,” he said menacingly. “Then talking birds. This place is going to hell.”

“Everyone's going to Prague now, anyway,” Beatrice said. “Paris is finished. I wish I'd learned Czech instead of French.”

“Or Budapest,” Rex said, pronouncing it Budapesht, like Matthews’ colleagues at Wilmot College. “Now, there's a place you can really make some money. You oughta try to publish your books in Hungarian. What's the title?”

“It's the Paris of the east,” Beatrice said.

“What is?” Rex was pushing his empty plate away.

“Prague,” she said.

“Right. I've been there. Once was enough, though.”

“Behold, the alpha male,” Beatrice said, with reference to Rex.

“I'm a man only one woman has to marry, though,” Rex said.

Matthews pretended he hadn't heard Rex ask about the title of his book. He didn't want to hear himself say the words, if only for fear of what Helen might say. In truth, he didn't want to hear himself say anything. Half of his steak was uneaten. Helen had touched none of hers. Beatrice and Rex had cleaned their plates. He wondered if he and Helen could apologize and leave. Plead jet lag.

The Frenchman in the pink sweater and the ascot came back through the restaurant, carrying a small tan poodle cradled in his arms. The poodle was panting as though it was exhausted, its little tongue lolled to the side. The Frenchman was smiling as if everyone in Clancy's was happy to finally see the dog. Outside the big clean front window, it was starting to snow.

“Did you know Helen was a wonderful dancer?” Rex said, running his wide hand over his skull, through the new hair seedlings. “She was on her way to Radio City.”

“June Taylor, anyway,” Helen said. “They were on TV when I was a little girl.” She smiled and shook her head as though the idea was funny. “That was in Pittsburgh.”

“Except what happened?” Beatrice said.

“Helen would dance till she dropped,” Rex said, setting his hands on the table in front of him, lacing his fingers and staring down at them. He was paying no attention to Beatrice.

“We all did then,” Helen said, and looked like she might break into tears. “I'm tired. I'm jet-lagged, that's all. I'm sorry.”

“These two were a marquee item once upon a blue moon,” Beatrice said to Matthews by way of explanation. “In case you were wondering.”

“While it lasted,” Helen said, her eyes glistening behind her glasses.

“While we lasted,” Rex said.

“And they always do this,” Beatrice said. “They get drunk, and then they get overcome with everything. I usually just leave.”

“Don't leave now,” Helen said, and smiled sweetly.

“Turkwoz,” Matthews heard someone say at a nearby table. “It was Egyptian turkwoz — that's the very best. Better than that American garbage.”

Rex turned to look at who'd said this. He had phased out of the conversation for a moment, thinking about dancing with Helen in faraway Pittsburgh.

“That was a different era,” Beatrice said solemnly. “It was long before I came on the scene.”

“I don't believe in eras,” Helen said. “I believe it's all continuous. Now and then. Women and men.”

“Well, good for you,” Beatrice said, and she stood up to attend whatever was going on in the ladies’ room, leaving the three of them alone.

“Matthews isn't divorced yet,” Helen said. “He also has a daughter he almost never sees. I don't think he wants to be divorced, if the truth were known, which it always is eventually. But I think he needs to be divorced. You need to be divorced, Charley.”

“Helen always has plenty of opinions,” Rex said. Waiters were clearing away plates.

“I'm aware of that,” Matthews said.

“Don't you have to be pretty obsessive to be a writer?” Rex asked again.

“No. I don't think so,” Matthews said. “I don't think I am.”

“You're not?” Rex said. “That's funny. I'd have thought you needed to be. Shows you what I know anymore. About anything.”

ON THE TAXI RIDE back up the Boulevards St. Marcel and Arago it was snowing, the large heavy flakes seeming not to fall but to stay suspended in the yellow streetlight halos, backed by red taillights and darkness.

They had said good night to Rex and Beatrice on the snowy side street outside the restaurant. Dessert had ultimately been decided against. Helen said she wasn't holding up well, that it was only their second day, that her stomach was involved. Rich food. Drinking too much. Matthews’ translator was invoked. A need to sleep.

Beatrice and Rex both seemed to regard Helen with amazement that she could be whatever she still was, while they had “gone on” to be whatever they so clearly were: a nothing businessman and a bad-tempered counterculture failure, in Matthews’ view. Helen, he thought, was much better at being Helen than they were at being Rex and Cuddles.

Helen had stood in the snowy street in her pumps and peach outfit, and waved at them as their taxi disappeared toward the lights of the Bastille and wherever they lived in the suburbs behind Montreuil. Inside Clancy's the party wore on.

“I used to love Rex,” she said, putting a pill in her mouth, one she'd dug with some difficulty out of her handbag. “God, memory's a terrible thing. Whoever invented it — I'd like to get my hands on him.”

As their taxi passed the lion statue in the middle of Place Denfert-Rochereau, Helen gazed out at the rich old apartment buildings down Boulevard Raspail. Suddenly she said, “Do you have a belief in any spirituality of any kind, Charley?”

“Like what?” Matthews said. “Like church? We were Protestants. We gave at the office.”

“Not like church,” Helen said languidly. “I went to church. That's not the same as spiritual. I mean a conviction about something good that you can't see. That kind of thing.”

Matthews thought about Lelia. She came to mind, surprisingly. He hadn't seen her in more than a year and a half, and wasn't sure exactly when he would again. Her future, he felt, was something he believed in, although he wasn't currently acting on it. But he didn't want to say that to Helen. She'd turn it on him, as she already had.

“I do. Yes,” he said.

“And what would that be?” Helen said. She inscribed a little rainbow with her finger on the sweated window, fastened her gaze outside on the sky full of snowflakes.

“What would that be?” Matthews said. “Well. I have a conviction about the idea of change. I believe things change for the better. If they can. Sometimes we think they can't, so that's where the faith part comes in.” He didn't know why he'd said that and in that particular way — as though he were explaining it to a student. Only it didn't sound lame, and now that he'd said it he was satisfied it was true. He wished Penny could've heard it. It would've fixed her good.

“Yes, well,” Helen said as the blue neon sign of the Nouvelle Métropole materialized out of the night. “That wasn't what I wanted, but it's what you said. So I accept it. It's vague. But you're a little vague.”

“Maybe I am,” Matthews said. “I could be.”

“And what of it, right?” She looked at him and smiled a not very friendly smile.

“Right,” he said in the dark taxi seat. “What of it, is right.”

IN THEIR ROOM, the air was dank-smelling and cold again. It was past the hour when heat came in the pipes. Bed was the only place to find warmth. Possibly Paris was not always this cold now, Matthews thought.

Helen went in the bathroom and closed the door and locked it. He heard her running bathwater, heard the toilet flush several times, heard what might've been vomiting but could've been only coughing. Helen hadn't eaten, but she was ingesting medicine of some kind, and that could make you nauseated. She was in pain, he felt sure. She acted as if pain was her companion. Cancer meant pain, and those bruises on her legs were from the cancer she'd had but didn't, reasonably enough, care to discuss.

He did not, in truth, know what to do with himself in the tiny, cold room. Some fearful tension had been alerted in him, and Helen's importance (what else could he call it?) in the overall scheme of things had overshadowed his own. He sat down on the bed and tried to envision his upcoming visit to his translator, but none of that was interesting enough to be distracting. He tried to think about Penny and Lelia, in the middle of their happy day. Christmastime — what was it like in the Bay Area? That didn't hold, either. Helen was possibly in some dire way, and that seemed what everything was about. Best to give into it, yet quietly hope he was wrong.

He got up and tried to move his suitcase in such a way that Helen could walk out of the bathroom and straight to the bed without stepping over part of it. To do that he had to close it; but even closed it had to lie on top of hers, which made the room neater but rendered the suitcases inaccessible. They needed to be opened and on the floor to be available, only then the TV or the bathroom couldn't be reached. He decided to leave them stacked, for convenience’ sake.

He did not, however, want to get into bed. Helen would not be up for sexual shenanigans, but to be in bed when she appeared could indicate that he was, which could cause problems of an unpredictable character. Helen had recently made some nasty cracks about how full-throatedly eager he was for the kind of sex she specialized in—“grown-up sex,” she called it; or, other times, “sex without hand-holding.” Possibly he had been less than full-throated about that. For some reason, women all seemed sexually insatiable now. A woman at the college, a professor of economics he'd had an encounter with in the first bewildering week after Penny's departure, had needed to be fucked all the time, which he hadn't much liked. It had made him hesitant. There was no meeting, nor was one even wished for. To deny her anything had been deemed a vicious insult. Women had always been able to say “No,” or “Let's go slow at first,” or “I'm not ready”—whatever they wanted. And men had been required to think it was fine. Now men couldn't say those same things without pissing everybody off. So, if he got in bed, Helen would in all likelihood taunt him for wanting sex when it was obvious she wasn't interested, even if he wasn't interested either. Of course, it was also possible she might be interested — bruises, pain, jet lag, nausea, cancer — who cares. She might think of it as analgesic. It was another reason to stay out of bed, though he was tired and ready for sleep.

He walked to the cold window and peered out again. He could feel both the cold from outside and the last vestiges of heat in the boxed radiator below the sill. Outside, however, the air was all snow and blackness. He could see the Montparnasse Tower, most of its office squares lighted. Cleaning was going on there, like anywhere. But the Eiffel Tower was still absent from where he thought it should be. Lost in the snow. Possibly closed — though now would be the time to visit it, when the City of Light was lighted. He would certainly go back there when all this was over.

Only a few cars trafficked along rue Froidevaux. Not that it was so late — midnight — but no one wanted to drive through snow in Paris. A police car motored slowly past, its blue light flashing, bound for no emergency. Someone on a motor scooter parked at the curb and came straight inside the hotel. Someone who'd made all the racket yesterday, he thought. The night shift.

He watched a small man appear from the right on foot, possibly from rue Boulard, a man with what looked like a bedroll or a sleeping bag slung to his shoulders, a man in boots, with a long coat, capless. He crossed rue Froidevaux, through the line of sycamores, and walked down the cemetery wall until he was almost lost from sight halfway between the yellow circles of streetlamp lights. He stopped, lit a cigarette, exhaled smoke, turned and looked up and down the mostly empty street, then deliberately stepped to the wall, adjusted his bedroll higher on his shoulders, gave a last look around, and very efficiently but still deliberately scaled the wall and slipped down out of sight to the other side.

Matthews put his nose close to the frosted glass and stared out into the cemetery garden, so jammed with white stone slabs and prim little burial chapels as to appear full, though yesterday of course a place had been found for one more. That grave — in the clutter of others and in the snow and darkness — he could no longer find.

He waited for the man to reappear, searched all along the quadrant of what he thought was the Jewish section, near the man's entry point. But there was no one. The man had come in secretly and then disappeared. Though no doubt he was staying near the wall's interior shadow. There would be a guard inside, a patrol against this very sort of violation — fines exacted.

But there was a movement then, a flicker of darker shadow among the pale, flat monuments. A zig and a zag. Matthews almost didn't catch it, since it came far to the right of where the intruder had intruded, in a remoter corner of the cemetery, just inside the wall where rue Froidevaux intersected with a smaller, nameless street. It was only a flicker, a slight interruption in the snowlight. But it showed again, and then Matthews could see the man — or perhaps another man with a sleeping bag on his back. And he was darting and crouching, then quickly slipping behind a burial vault, then hurrying out the other side and ducking again, falling once, or so it seemed, then scrabbling on hands and knees to regain his footing and casting himself first this way, then that, as if something, something Matthews couldn't see, was dogging him, trying to drive him out of the place, or worse.

Matthews watched, his nose to the frosted pane, until the man had darted and skittered and cowered along the cemetery wall almost to the point of invisibility in the snow and dark. But then, all at once, the man halted before one of the steep, peaked-roof mausoleums, no different from a hundred others. He turned and, as he had outside the wall, looked one way and then the other, then he carefully opened the heavy grated gate, stepped inside, closed the door and was visible no more.

“What time is it in California?” Helen said. She was in the bathroom still, standing at the little mirror, examining herself. He hadn't heard the door open.

“I don't know,” he said. “Why?”

“I thought you were standing there thinking about your wife and daughter.”

“No,” Matthews said, facing her across the cold, newly neatened room. “I was watching a man break into the cemetery.”

“That's a switch. Most people want to break out.” Helen had on pink, silky pajamas with dark piping, apparel he'd never seen her wear. Usually she slept naked. She brought her face close to the bathroom mirror and opened her mouth to see inside it. “Mmmmm-mm,” she said.

Matthews wanted to be agreeable if that's what she wanted. He felt sorry for her. He thought he should feel sorry for both of them.

“I'd like to make love,” Helen said, still scrutinizing herself up close, “but I'm too tired.”

“That's all right.”

“Take a rain check,” she said. “Or a snow check.”

“Okay,” Matthews said.

“I put on pj's so you wouldn't have to see all my ugly bruises.” She sighed at her image. “There's others.”

“That's okay,” he said. Somewhere in the sky outside, he could hear the rumbling and high whistle of a big jet settling out of the snowy night. Some oddity in the wind must've brought such sounds in. But if he looked, he knew he'd see nothing. He and Helen could be most anywhere.

“I would've liked to go dancing,” she said. “I am a very good dancer. We've never danced. We should've, one time at least.”

“Can't we dance later?”

“Oh. Maybe,” she said. “You know what I said about eras? Whatever it was Bea didn't like. That was right, though, wasn't it? There aren't any eras. There's just one time, all together.”

“I never thought about it,” Matthews said, the jet rumbling on at a distance, lower and lower.

Helen walked out of the bathroom in her bare feet and came to the window where Matthews was and looked out. She smelled warm and fragrant. The bottom strands of her hair were damp. And he felt happy at that moment just to put his arm around her bony shoulders and draw her close to him. “I'm going through the change of life. Plus I have cancer,” Helen said without inflection. “You'd think one of those would give me a break.” She didn't return Matthews’ embrace, didn't seem to notice it, just gazed into the stilly floating drama of snow. She was merely beside him here, no more.

But he felt, for that instant, stunned. And if she hadn't been in his arm's protection, he thought, he would've shouted out. A complaint. An objection. Some recounting of votes. How could anything else be important now? His worries, his hopes, his travails in life? Everything gave way to what Helen had just said. She could even have said something less important to her, and it would still have banished his concerns in a heartbeat. What was that quality? he wondered. A flair for the dramatic? An attitude that brooked no resistance? A certainty above other certainties? Whatever it was, he lacked it, definitely lacked it, at least in the quantities she possessed it.

But the result was to make him feel fond toward her, fonder than he'd felt in the entire year he'd known her, even at first, when she'd been his student and they'd fucked in his old house on Hickory Lane, and it was all excitation and sweating and plunging efforts. He liked her more now than he no doubt ever would. She set things in proper perspective regarding importance and unimportance, created a priority using her own life — a standard. And in all the ways he had wanted not to be at the center of things, he was not now, and what he felt was relief.

“Look, there's one little Christmas tree.” She was gazing at the high apartment window across rue Froidevaux. “Weren't we supposed to make up a song? Christmas in Paris, da-dee-da, da-dee-da-da. You were going to write the words.”

“I'll do it tomorrow,” Matthews said. The dark little triangle of the tree, its orange and red and green lights twinkling through the snow and night, was perfectly outlined in the apartment window four floors up. To look at it provided a moment of purest pleasure.

“I think you're afraid of me. But for another reason now,” Helen said.

“No, you're wrong,” Matthews said with certainty. “I'm not afraid of you at all.” He pulled her closer, felt the silk over her shoulders, took in the warm and slightly pungent aroma of her body. He could've made love to her now. It would've been easy.

“Then what do you feel?” she said. “About me, I mean.”

“I love you,” Matthews said. “That's how I feel.”

“Oh, don't bring that into this,” Helen said. He could feel her go limp, as if he'd insulted her. “Dream up something else. Think of some better words. Those weren't supposed to be in our deal.”

“Then I don't know what else to say,” Matthews said, and he didn't know.

“Well, then don't say anything,” Helen said. “Share the happy moments in silence. Leave words out of it.”

“I'm supposed to be good at words.”

“I know,” Helen said, smiling at him thinly. “You can't be good every time, I guess.” She kissed him on the cheek, had a quick look back at the snowy night, then took herself to bed.

IN THE NIGHT, Matthews slept deeply again, a sleep that knew nothing, a sleep like death. Though after a time he knew he was asleep and wanted only to stay. He was aware of Helen leaving the bed, dropping something on the bathroom floor, saying something, possibly a laugh, then finding the bed again.

He slept until he needed to use the toilet and got up. But when he'd finished he put his face to the little bathroom window, which gave onto the air shaft. The snow, he saw, had stopped, and moonlight again was bright. Everything joined at the backs of the buildings, and some draft of air was making a flap of tin or steel rattle softly below. Across the open space he could see a lighted apartment, where four people — young French people, of course, two women, two men — were sitting on couches, talking and smoking cigarettes and drinking beers out of glasses. The light inside was yellow, and the room next to the sitting room was lighted also. There was a bed there with coats laid on top, and on the side opposite was a bright kitchen, with a window box of what might've been red geraniums. What time was it? he wondered. These people were talking so late. Or possibly he hadn't slept long, only deeply. He was sure, though, that soon he would see one pair depart and the other two begin straightening the house and preparing for bed. It would be satisfying to watch them, and not to see them undress or make love or argue or bicker or embrace, but just to watch them do the ordinary things, go about life as always. It would be so telling to see that. Over the years, he felt certain, others had done what he was doing: watched — perhaps watched these very people — and stolen about these strange rooms at late, undetermined hours, feeling desolate. Elated. Angry. Bewildered. Then taken some satisfaction to bed again. He shared this experience. Probably even with Langston Hughes — he didn't know why he'd thought of him — but with many others. They had all done this, in Paris, in this very bathroom. You only had to be here to share it.

Walking back into the dark sleeping room, he felt, in fact, elated and didn't want to go to bed again, though he was cold. An unusual spicy, meaty cooking smell came from somewhere. He thought he heard a voice laughing and the snap of shuffled cards. The room had moonlight in it, and the air was light and luminous. He sat in the chair and stared up at the Arab art, then stood and looked more closely — at the camels, the oasis, the men sitting talking. It all fit. The drawings were subtler than he'd realized. He had thought of this room as a pit, a hole, a cheap and dingy last-ditch. But he felt better about it. He could stay here. If Helen went on, or went home, he could take the room for a month. Things could change. The hotel would take on another character under other circumstances. He could provide a table and write here, though he had nothing in mind to write (Madame de Grenelle might prove important for this). Though there was no way to know until you tried. He'd seen photos of the rooms of famous artists — almost always in Paris — and they were all worse than the Nouvelle Métropole. Worse by a multiple of four. Yet in retrospect they seemed perfect, each a place you'd want to be, the only room that this novel or that poem could ever have been conceived in. You trusted your instincts. That was all. He tried to think of the line that ran through his head from time to time. Where was it from? He couldn't remember the line now, or who had written it.

He looked at Helen, sleeping. He came close, leaned over her, put an ear near her face to learn if she was there still, heard her breath, brief and shallow. She took pills. They could take you away. He would need to find a doctor tomorrow. There would be some numbers to look up in a book.

She was wrong, he thought, to keep him from disclosing his love. That had been what he felt and should've been allowed to say. Love was never inappropriate; it hurt nothing. It was not, of course, the spiritual thing she'd asked for, nothing like that. If he'd said “love” then, she'd have burst out laughing.

Somewhere down in the street a loud sound erupted, a pop, but a pop that was also a boom, like nothing he'd exactly heard before. He sat again, very still, waiting for other noises, following noise, his thoughts interrupted.

Helen lay as she had, on her side, though her eyes were open. She was staring at him, just seeing him.

“Why are you awake?” he said softly. He got down on his knees by her and touched her face, touched her cheek, which was cool.

“What are you doing?” she said without moving, almost inaudibly, then sighed.

“Just sitting,” he said.

“Tomorrow seems like an odd day, doesn't it?”

“It'll be fine. Don't worry about tomorrow,” he said.

“Are you sleeping?” She closed her eyes.

“Yes,” Matthews said. “I am.”

“You should,” she said, and slipped to sleep again in just that fragile moment.

Matthews sat back and waited a moment, listening for more noises out in the street. A siren or a horn blowing, something to add a rhythm to the other noise, the boom. He heard a car move down the snowy street, skid briefly, its brakes applied, and drive on. And then he came to bed, thinking as he crawled in from the bottom, along the cold plaster wall, that he would never sleep now, since his heart was pounding, and because in truth the day to come would likely be, as Helen said, a strange day.

WHEN HE AWOKE it was ten-thirty. Light through the window was brighter than he'd expected. A stalk of yellow angled across the tiles to his shirt, where it lay from the night before.

He put his trousers on and went to the window. There would be an entirely new view of Paris, he thought. The room wasn't as chilled. He had slept well and long.

And he was correct. The snow from the night had all but gone. A few irregular patches remained in the cemetery and on a parked car or two in the street. But it seemed spring suddenly, the sycamore trunks damp and darkened, the ground soaked, a light fog rising off the gravestones as the sun found them, making the cemetery a park. Of course, there was no sign of the man who'd slept in the tomb. He couldn't distinguish which one it had been, and thought it might've been a dream. He'd drunk too much. Even Rex and Beatrice seemed figmentary — bad dreams one ought just as well relinquish.

Helen lay perfectly still, her head under her pillow, no sign of breathing in the covers. For the second time — or was it the third — he leaned to listen. Her breathing was strong and deep. She could sleep until afternoon. She was weak, he thought. Rest would be her ally.

But what was he to do until then? Read one of her police mysteries. Sitting by Helen's bed reading while the city warmed and turned (perhaps only briefly) more agreeable would be the wrong thing. Too much like a hospital: wanting to be there when the patient woke up from the surgery. There wasn't any surgery; there wasn't anything. It was possible Helen was only jet-lagged. Or that because she was experiencing the change of life she exaggerated her symptoms. Something involuntary. That had happened to his mother and driven his father crazy. Then one day it had stopped. He didn't know if Helen had cancer or was experiencing pain. You only knew such things with proof, had seen the results. There were the bruises, but they could have simple explanations — not that she was lying.

But to let her sleep in hopes she'd feel better after, that's what he'd want if he were Helen. Until then, he could walk out into the Paris streets alone, for the first time, and experience the city the way you should. Close up. Unmediated.

In thirty minutes he was showered and dressed, had found the Fodor's, drawn the curtains closed across the bright morning and left a note for Helen, which he stuck to the bathroom mirror with toothpaste. H. I'll be back by 1:00. Don't wear yourself out. We'll have a boat ride. Love, C.

ON RUE FROIDEVAUX the morning was like spring, the light watery and dense, a new warm seam in the breeze that felt foreign and impermanent but saved the day. He had it in mind to walk in any direction until he found some kind of toy store, a fancy French version where there were precious objects unimaginable to American children, and there buy a Christmas present for Lelia. He'd loaded off boxes full of obvious American toys weeks ago. All from Ohio, from a mall. But something special from France could turn out to be perfect. The gift that made all the difference. He didn't know if Lelia knew he was in France, if he'd told her he was going when they'd talked the last time, after Thanksgiving.

Consulting the Fodor's map, he made a plan to walk to the Boulevard Raspail, go left and stay on beyond the Boulevard du Montparnasse — famous streets from his map research for The Predicament— then angle down rue Vavin to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Someplace along these storied streets, he was confident he'd find the store he wanted, after which he would try another plan, which would bring him back to the Nouvelle Métropole by one to look in on Helen. This might dictate a doctor visit, although he hoped not.

He wondered if she had a copy of his book stowed away. He'd meant to make a brief search of her suitcase when he was straightening the room and she was in the bathroom. But it had slipped his mind. Though truthfully, he didn't care now. Even if portraits made people look better than they ever could be, they still didn't like the idea. Biographies were full of these feuds. Helen, however, was capable of understanding that a character was just a character, a contrivance of words — practically total invention — not some transformation of a real person to the page. Real people would always have the tendency to be themselves and not as moldable as characters should be for important discoveries to occur. (This was certainly one of the problems with The Predicament.) Real people were always harder.

In Helen's current state, of course, it was difficult to know how she'd take it; it was possible that instead of getting furious, she might just laugh it off or even be flattered. The truth was that no one should get involved with a writer if she (or he) didn't want to show up in a book. Try a carpenter or a locksmith or an implement salesmen, and rest easy.

In the meantime he felt better about everything. And walking up the wide, congested Boulevard Raspail — a legendary street he knew almost nothing specific about, bound for some unknown destination, with little language available, no idea about currency, distances or cardinal points — made him feel a small but enlivened part of a wider, not a narrower, experience. Helen dominated life, shoved other interests aside, visualized her own interests clearly and assumed his were the same. And not that he even blamed her. He respected her for it. If his life had been narrow, the blame was his, especially given how charged he now felt as he crossed Montparnasse by Le Dôme, where Lenin and Trotsky had eaten lunch and where, he now remembered from teaching, the great Harry Crowder sang a song by Samuel Beckett in 1930. If he found his way here later and could figure out how to order soupe de poisson in French, he decided, he'd lunch at Le Dôme himself.

The best thing to say about Helen was that he wasn't adequate to her needs and demands, due to needs and demands of his own, and that he should let things go on as they now would, then quietly part company with her once they were home. He'd felt the very same — that he'd barely escaped with his life — when he left behind being a professor. He'd have taken the blame for that, too, if he'd gotten trapped there. Helen was nothing like as serious a threat. At day's end, Helen was a nice woman.

Something, without doubt, was changing in his life now, and changing for the better. The fact that he didn't mind being “lost” and alone in Paris was just one small scrap of the evidence. Blumberg's comment that nobody knew him here, which had seemed at the time (two days ago) like a great dark shadow on its way to blotting out the sun, seemed perfectly fine today. You recognized changes in yourself, he believed, not by how others felt about you, but by how you felt about yourself. And instead of worrying about how he couldn't convert experience in Paris to be applicable to Ohio, it might now be possible to convert himself to whatever went on in Paris — something he'd never have dreamed possible when he was teaching the African-American Novel at Wilmot College.

All of which made his planned visit with Madame de Grenelle even more crucial, since the translation of The Predicament seemed like the first move toward converting himself into someone available to take on more of life. That was undoubtedly why black artists had flocked to Paris: because in the process of removing themselves from the center of terrible events at home, they'd found ways to let more of life in and, in so doing, disappeared but became visible to themselves at the same time. “Paris welcomed the Negro writers.” That was the phrase he'd read in textbooks, was certainly a phrase he'd repeated over the years, accepted without giving it a thought or without believing he had anything in common with Negro writers. Perhaps, though, Paris could open its arms to Charley Matthews. He wasn't spoiled to want that now. Many stranger things had happened.

Bending off Raspail and down onto narrow rue Bréa, he without once looking walked straight to the toy store he'd sought, a narrow shop window on a block of expensive-looking jewelry stores and second-rate galleries featuring Tibetan art. si j’étais plus jeune, the sign said.

Inside the shop, which specialized in toys made in Switzerland, he discovered a bewildering variety of wonderful possibilities, everything ridiculously costly and probably nothing able to be sent as far as California with any hope of arriving unbroken before New Year's. Possibly it would be better to buy something small, cart it home and save it for later — for Lelia's birthday in March.

Though that wouldn't do. Something had to arrive from Paris, whether she knew he was here or not, and he had to get it there in time for Christmas — a week away. Expense shouldn't enter into the equation.

He continued cruising the shop, examining exquisitely carved mahogany sailboats and handmade train sets in several different sizes and shiny enamel color schemes; lavish bear, lion and llama replicas made — at least it looked like — from cashmere and real jewels; and meticulously detailed puppet-show stages with silk puppets that actually spoke in French, German or Italian, using some tiny computer. He wanted to ask the young shopgirl (who was obviously a bored fashion model) what the store might contain that was small and portable and unique and that a six-year-old girl living in the South Bay would like and for which price was no concern. The clerk, he realized, would know English, as well as French, German and Italian, and probably Swedish and Dutch and Croat, but he felt he should speak to her in French, as Helen would've. Except he didn't know how even to begin such a conversation. What he wanted was hopelessly tangled up in unknown tenses and indecipherable idiomatic expressions and implicit French comprehensions, and worst of all with French numbers — large numbers, which the French purposefully complicated and for which he didn't know any of the names above twenty. Vingt.

The sales clerk stayed perched, legs crossed, on a high-tech-looking metal stool, reading Elle and wearing a preposterously short red leather skirt. And when he'd gone uncomfortably past her station by the cash register for the third time, he simply stopped and looked at her, smiled pitiably, shook his head and for some reason made a circular motion with his upraised index finger, by which he meant to indicate there were more things to admire and buy here than he could choose from, so that he was going to depart and possibly come back later. The young woman, however, looked up, smiled at him, closed her magazine and said in a shockingly American midwestern voice, “If there's anything I can help you with, just ask. I'm not very busy, as you can see.”

At the end of ten minutes, Matthews had made his wishes, qualms and time restrictions known to the young woman, who was Canadian and who knew all about shipping, wrapping, customs declarations and valuation limits on packages sent to America. She even found, by looking in a book, the exact category of gift recommended for six-year-old French girls, from which Matthews chose a bright-yellow wall tablet made of plastic that allowed for the leaving of written messages, and from which messages could both be erased and electronically retrieved by pushing a red button on the side. He wasn't positive Lelia would like this, since she was reportedly better at math than at writing; but she could do math on it if she wanted to, and it wasn't American and had French phrases—Hallo? On y va? Ça va bien? N'est-ce pas? — worked into the yellow plastic border, along with molded images of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Bastille, the Panthéon, a bridge of some kind: everything but Napoleon's tomb.

This, the clerk promised, would be carefully wrapped, insured against breakage and delivered by courier to Penny's house in Palomar Park on or before Christmas Eve. The entire cost was less than a thousand francs, which Matthews put on his credit card. He also inserted inside the box a handwritten note. Dear Sweetheart, You and I will spend next Christmas together in Paris, n'est-ce pas? On y va. Voilà. Dad.

As a result of his successful transaction, when he walked back out into rue Bréa, where the slant, late-morning sunlight on cobblestone pavement felt even warmer than earlier, as if December might just as easily give way straight to spring, he sensed the whole day had been saved, and he was even more free than ever to do exactly as he pleased. Paris wasn't menacing; he'd been right yesterday. And he could operate in it more or less on his own, just as he thought he'd be able to, even though it annoyed him not to know enough words to ask directions, or to understand if any were offered. He would need to stick to the simple, familiar touristic objectives (buying a newspaper, ordering coffee, reading a taxi meter), though this impasse would improve soon enough. But language or no language, he could go wherever he chose — even if he could only order coffee when he got there. The best idea was to treat Paris like a place he knew and felt comfortable, no matter how resistant and exotic it might turn out to be. He decided he'd buy flowers for Helen and let that be his first completely French transaction. A flower stall would come along the same way the toy shop had.

At the bottom of rue Bréa, he turned left toward what the Fodor's indicated would be the Luxembourg Gardens, hoping to take a walk on the sunny lawns, watch children maneuver their small boats in the lagoon (Helen had talked about this) and eventually cross to the Panthéon and angle down to the Sorbonne, while gradually making his way, if he could find it, to the St.-Sulpice church and rue du Vieux-Colombier, where the famous Club 21 had once been located, and where Sidney Bechet and Hot Lips Page played in the fifties. Why not go there, he decided, after all the hours logged yakking about places and people he never knew? He had no idea why the place stayed in his mind or what he hoped to see. Probably it would just be a boarded-up hole-in-the-wall — something else that existed only in a book. Though not his book. He'd made no references to any black clubs in The Predicament. They had nothing to do with his female character's — Greta's — ill-fated stay. Plus he knew nothing about jazz and didn't much care.

Sending a present off to Lelia had put Penny back in his mind — an unwelcome visitor. He realized that after Penny left, no matter how he felt at the time, or how many novels her leaving might've ignited, or how deep the trenches of despondence that might've cut down through his life, his assumption had always been that at some point he would simply “switch off.” Switch off from Penny and on to something or somebody else. That's what he assumed people did if life was to go on. Airline-crash survivors, emigrants, exiles of war — they all drew for themselves, or had drawn for them, a line of demarcation they crossed once but then never stepped back over again.

Now, though, clearheaded for the first time in days, he realized that this assumption about lines of demarcation might not be entirely realistic; that succeeding as an exile was possibly a slower, more lingering process and could be one that never got completed before you died (children made it much more difficult). And though sometimes he nonchalantly thought it didn't matter if he and Penny got divorced or never did, or if he sometimes felt as if Penny had gone down in a jetliner and would never be heard from, neither of those was true, so that stronger measures needed to be taken to bring about the desired result. Divorce, in other words. He'd been reluctant or casual or inattentive about it up to now. But no more. Divorce would be his first official act upon arriving back in Ohio. If Penny thought she wanted a divorce from him, she couldn't conceive of the divorce he'd set in motion starting day one. He and Penny would be “switched off” by February, and that was a promise.

This had to do, he understood, with wanting not to be the center of things, with wanting to get lost in events, with conceivably even fitting into the normalcy of another country — though normalcy, of course, was foolish to think about. Look around (he said this unexpectedly out loud). He could never fit in in Paris. Except that was no reason you couldn't, with the right set of motivations, be here, even live here, find an apartment, learn the streets and enough of the language to follow directions. If you couldn't totally switch off, or switch on, you could make clear and decisive moves to produce at least some desired results. You could have part of what you wanted.

He reached what he thought on the map should be rue d'assas, with the Luxembourg directly across the street. But instead he found a different street, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and ahead of him was not the great garden with the seventeenth-century palace built by the Medicis, but once again the Boulevard Raspail, a part of it he hadn't been on. Though the Luxembourg Gardens still had to be on his right. He should simply take the first street that way, even though that meant going back out onto Raspail, clogged now with spewing, honking traffic, stalled in both directions. It was smart, he felt, to be on foot.

The first street off the congested boulevard turned out to be rue Huysmans, which began in the right way until it split into two separate streets, with the one Matthews hoped to take to the Luxembourg blocked to pedestrian traffic by some kind of police action. Several white police vehicles with blue flashers, and even more white police motorcycles, with their helmeted riders sporting machine guns and black flak vests, were congregated around a small bareheaded man seated in the middle of the paved street, his hands raised behind his neck. A few French passersby stood watching down the short street, though a young policeman, also wearing a black flak jacket and black helmet, was using his machine gun to motion pedestrians onto the narrow street Matthews hadn't wanted to go on, rue Duguay-Trouin. Staring down at the man seated in the street, he wondered if there could be a connection between this event and the popping sounds — gun noises — he'd heard last night. Probably there was.

Something seemed familiar about rue Duguay-Trouin, which he reluctantly started down, following the policeman's indecipherable order and wave of his machine gun. He of course had never been on this street in his life. It was only one block long and ended bluntly in a busy, wide avenue Matthews assumed was Boulevard Raspail again.

On both cramped and shadowed sides rue Duguay-Trouin was a solid establishment of not terribly old, sand-colored apartment buildings with set-back, modernized glass entries giving onto courtyards where Matthews could see coldly sparse flower gardens and a few parked cars. It was a street that had been revitalized, unlike rue Froidevaux. No cars were parked along the curb, and only a couple of overcoated pedestrians were on the sidewalk, walking dogs, and the street was sunless and therefore colder than when he exited the toy store. A few crusts of last night's snow had survived in the concrete crevices of the building fronts, and the whole aspect of the street was slightly inhospitable. He couldn't imagine why rue Duguay-Trouin would seem familiar — possibly some reference in some novel he once taught, or a house where James Baldwin or James Jones or Henry James had lived and done God only knows what, and which someone had to record and pretend to be fascinated by. He was happy to forget it.

But when he'd walked almost to the end of the street, where it entered the lighter-skied, wider street at a large, crowded intersection, his eyes happened to fall on the number 4 and another small brass plaque, inscribed with Éditions des Châtaigniers. His eyes passed over the plaque once, unalerted, but then returned. Éditions des Châtaigniers. No. 4 rue Duguay-Trouin. 75006 Paris. This was his publisher. It was only a small shock.

From the pavement he gazed up at the building's tan stone facade. Four floors, with a rank of little balustraded windows near the top, and above that a skimpy level of dormered ateliers with chimneys and what looked like geranium boxes. The offices might be one of the ateliers, he thought. Undoubtedly the whole operation was more modest than one might imagine. Yet it was satisfying to realize that Paris was a sufficiently small and knowable place that he should simply happen accidentally by his publishers on his second day.

Here, of course, was where he'd have met François Blumberg for a brief but solidifying conversation before adjourning up to Le Dôme or La Coupole for a long, memorable lunch that might've lasted until dark and where a staunch friendship could've been forged, ending with him strolling the Boulevard du Montparnasse back toward the hotel (a better hotel, in this revised version), smoking a Cuban cigar as the evening traffic thickened and the yellow lights of the brasseries and tiny bookstores and exclusive side-street restaurants began to warm the evening sky. Those had been his private thoughts, and they had been wonderful thoughts. He'd told no one, because no one would've cared except possibly his parents, who wouldn't have understood. Châtaignier— he'd looked it up — meant chestnut tree.

Yet here it was. At least. And he felt, in fact, certified in this small contact, closed though the offices were for the holidays. He was this near now and would someday most assuredly come nearer — when someone knew him in Paris.

He stepped over to the glassed-in arched entrance of No. 4 and peered down the interior passageway to a small bricked courtyard, where one car was parked and a man was sweeping snow, like fallen leaves, toward a drain grate, using a handmade broom with enormous straw bristles. The man paid him no attention and after a moment passed out of sight.

Beside the glass door was a brass panel with numbered buttons 1 to 10 and lettered buttons up to E. No names were listed, as there would've been in the States. You needed a code even to gain entry. France was a much more private place than America, he thought, but also strangely freer. The French knew the difference between privacy and intimacy.

He looked up again at the building's steep facade — smooth buff-colored stone ending in a remarkably blue sky. He checked back up rue Duguay-Trouin. Only a blond woman with a small Brittany spaniel on a leash stood talking to the policeman with the machine gun. They were shaking their heads as if in disagreement. Muffled traffic noise hummed from the other direction, on the avenue.

Just for the touch, he wanted to push the brass buttons. Nothing, of course, would happen; though he could get lucky and ring the publishing office. He quickly pushed C for Châtaigner, then his own birth date, 3-22-59, then waited, staring into the shadowy passageway toward the parked car and where snow crust was heaped on the drain. He didn't expect anyone to turn up. C-3-22-59 meant nothing. Yet he wouldn't have been surprised if someone — a young secretary or a pretty but overworked assistant editor — had suddenly rounded the corner, smiling, a little out of breath, not recognizing him but happy to let him in, bring him up to the offices. In his working out of these fugitive possibilities he would speak French, just like in his dream; the assistant would be charmed by him, eye him provocatively, and he would later buy her dinner and (again) walk in the evening down the Boulevard du Montparnasse.

Only nothing happened.

Matthews stood outside the door, looking in, his hands in his trench-coat pockets, his presence making no reflection in the glass. He had the sudden sensation he was smiling; if he could've seen his face, it would've worn an almost beatific smile, which would certainly be inappropriate if someone should appear. He studied the panel again, shiny and cold. Impenetrable. He firmly pushed F-1-7-8-9, then waited for some sound, a faint, distant buzz of entry. He looked back at the policeman at the top of the street, where he now stood alone, staring Matthews’ way. No buzz sounded. And he simply turned and walked away from his publisher's door, hoping not to seem suspicious.

The Jardin du Luxembourg seemed like a lost opportunity now. The large, congested street at the end of rue Duguay-Trouin turned out to be rue d'assas, but on his Fodor's plan, rue Duguay-Trouin didn't even appear, so that he wasn't sure where the park was but didn't now care if he walked its spacious lawns or under its chestnut trees. It would be there when he came back to Paris. The Sorbonne too. The Panthéon, the same. He'd never seen them. He couldn't be said to have missed them.

He didn't, however, feel absolutely certain what to do now. Helen would've gone for the guillotine site, a boat ride, possibly the Louvre. But on his own he lacked curiosity for these. A boat ride would be cold. The Louvre had the Japanese. (Most Parisians, he guessed, had never set foot inside the Louvre and couldn't tell you where the Sorbonne was. Most Americans, of course, never saw the Grand Canyon or the Empire State Building.) He believed he could probably find his way with the map to St.-Sulpice and the remains of 21 rue Vieux-Colombier, and then, if there was time, take a walk along St.-Germain for the experience. And he could also, along the way, find a public phone to make a call he'd assumed he wouldn't have the chance to make but now did — a flight of fancy, a single indulgence.

In his last three bleak years of Wilmot College (he couldn't actually remember the date, except Bush was the President), he had allowed himself a brief excursion outside his marriage. This was acknowledged to be nothing lasting, just a sudden careening together of two human beings in otherwise unexpressed and unexamined need (several of these careenings occurred in his Mazda hatchback, a time or two on his cold office floor, once in his bed at home, once in hers). She, in this instance, was Margie McDermott, wife of a professor in the history department, and a woman who was quietly going crazy in eastern Ohio, not so different, Matthews understood, from how Penny felt not long afterwards and probably with the same justice.

With Margie McDermott, the liaison had ended just as it had begun — undramatically though suddenly, and without a great deal of comment. One day they met in a sub shop in the next river town down from Wilmot, decided it was all over and that they were both headed straight for big, big trouble if they didn't cease right then. They looked toward each other across a raised Formica table, proclaimed they were both better served by marriage than by adultery and smart as whips for knowing it so soon. At the end of a brief lunch they got in their separate cars and drove away in opposite directions, feeling — Matthews had been certain — immensely relieved to have dodged the bullets they'd dodged.

In six months, of course, Margie had abandoned her husband, Parnell, and in a year Penny had abandoned Matthews. If they'd only recognized that likelihood, Matthews had often thought, they could at least have kept doing what they'd been doing and enjoyed life a little longer before the curtain slammed down on both their acts.

Margie McDermott had gone directly to Paris, leaving her three children stranded in Ohio with her husband. It turned out she had a former boyfriend from Oberlin who survived in Paris as a painter, someone she had not been in touch with for years but who'd told her she could always come to him if times got tough — which they were. Margie moved in with Lyle and his girlfriend, Brigitte, for six months, tried all kinds of jobs, searched for an apartment, studied French, borrowed money from Parnell, plus some from Parnell's parents, and at long last and after several false starts and tragedies found a job working as a receptionist for American Express, making four hundred dollars a week.

All this Margie had written to Matthews — in a letter that came out of the blue to his new address on the woodsy east edge of Wilmot. He had no idea how she'd found him or why she wanted to be in touch or explain her situation at any length. They had never passed another word once their cars had departed the sub shop on the Marietta highway in nineteen ninety-something. Once or twice he'd seen Parnell at the farmers’ market on Saturday morning, looking forlorn and deviled, surrounded by unhappy kids who all, it seemed to Matthews, looked like the absent Margie and not a bit like Parnell.

In Margie's letter, though, had been an invitation that Matthews seek her out should he ever find himself in Paris. She could, her letter said, now cook an excellent coq-au-vin, and she had always felt “totally sorry” she'd never “in the midst of all that crazy time” cooked him “a proper meal” Matthews could “sit down to and eat like a civilized human being.” She'd enclosed an address and a phone number. “Mine is a poor flat in a very chic neighborhood. The 6th Arrondissement.” He had never responded.

He had, however, tried to picture Margie McDermott, who'd been a thin, small-boned, sallow-faced, delicately pretty brunette who wore corduroy skirts and blue stockings and always seemed passive and accepting and slightly defeated by life but who apparently wasn't at all. (You could never predict these things.) He'd pictured her first in Ohio and then in Paris — in settings he could only make up. But it wasn't, he'd decided, an improbable transition to accept: Ohio to Paris. Though he'd imagined that a difficult, somewhat straitened existence as a receptionist at American Express, instead of as the unhappy, adulterous wife of a history professor and mother of three, would probably work out to accentuate Margie's sallow and defeated sides rather than the adventurous, no-holds-barred, narrow-eyed, nobody's-fool aspects she'd set free in the back of his Mazda.

In any event, he had thought while planning the trip that it was worth a phone call, possibly even a brief visit, though he'd imagined he'd never get out of Helen's sight long enough, in which case it wouldn't matter. He had no idea why he might want to see Margie McDermott, since he hadn't wanted to see her since the last time. His only thought was that he wanted to see her simply because he could, and because this was Paris, and visiting a woman in Paris, even a woman he didn't much want to see, had never happened to him in all of life.

The rue d'assas, at its intersection with the rue de Vaugirard, offered an obvious turning and an invitation to wander back toward the Luxembourg and resume a remnant of his original scheme. But he had lost the taste for sightseeing and felt more purposeful to find a phone and call Margie McDermott, who must live somewhere quite close by, though he couldn't find her street — rue de Canivet, or possibly Canivel — in the Fodor's. Perhaps it was too small to show up.

He made straight out for the busy commercial avenue, which was rue de Rennes, which he could see on the map, leading toward St.-Sulpice or close at least to a connecting street, which seemed in fact to be rue du Vieux-Colombier, where the famous club was and where he was sure he'd find a phone.

Now was the beginning of the last weekend before Christmas, and the warmer weather and sudden sunshine had pushed Parisians out onto the damp sidewalks, crowding around the windows of stores where there must've been sales in progress and standing in line for buses to take them somewhere else, where there were even better bargains. He wondered if here was the true center of Paris, the official downtown recognized by all, or if Paris never had a downtown and was actually just a series of villages connected over time by commerce — like London. These were facts he'd eventually know. It could be that downtown was an American idea, something the French would all laugh at if they knew what he was thinking as he plowed along the crowded sidewalk. Ahead of him, down the long, descending avenue (sloping toward the Seine, he was sure), was St.-Germain-des-Prés and, he'd deduced, the Deux Magots, the Brasserie Lipp, the Café de Flore — one of the great confluences of Europe. There was no more famous place. Descartes was buried in the church. It would have to be the center of something.

At the corner of rue de Mézières he found a public phone outside a tabac, where workingmen stood at a long bar having coffees and smoking cigarettes. This phone accepted no coins, but Helen's travel agent had thought ahead and supplied two phone cards for emergencies, and she'd given him one at the Pittsburgh airport.

The card clocked up fifty crisp little units of something on the pale-green coin box window. Rue de Mézières had begun funneling a damp, bristling wind, and looking straight into it, Matthews could see one pale rounded tower of what must've been the St.-Sulpice church. It was colder, he felt, nearer the river — just like everywhere else.

He had no idea what to expect by calling, and it was tempting just to forget the whole idea. There wouldn't be time to see Margie unless she happened to live a half block away from where he was standing — which was of course possible. On the other hand, Margie could be different now. What he'd finally found uninteresting and going-nowhere about her in an Ohio college town (and no doubt she'd found the same about him) might be changed in Paris. Something locked away due to circumstance, that inhibited everyone's view of everything and everybody, might have opened up here. All kinds of things were now possible. At the very least, they could restore contact (she had written him), have coffee at the Deux Magots or step right inside the tabac, maybe set a plan in motion for his eventual return. Or in five minutes she could appear, breathless, expectant, wearing little other than a green cloth coat. After which they could hurry back to her “poor flat,” and he wouldn't return to the Nouvelle Métropole until after dark, and possibly never. This, of course, wasn't feasible, given Helen's condition. But there'd been a moment, leaving the toy store, when he'd thought about not coming back, just having a long lunch alone, buying the cigar he'd imagined and setting off on a very, very long walk.

Margie's number was written in her cramped little bird scrawl on a scrap of paper in his wallet. The phone rang once, twice, three times, then Margie McDermott suddenly answered. “Oui, c'est Mar-gee,” Margie said, in a nasally girlish voice that sounded like a French chambermaid.

“Hi, Margie, it's Charley Matthews,” he said, unexpectedly light-headed, so that he almost put the phone down and walked away. Cavernous before him was now the unhappy need of explaining to Margie McDermott who he was. The words “Wilmot College,” “Ohio,” “Remember me?”—even his own name — were flat, metallic, about to be bitter. He looked around at the line of men at the smoky bar, drinking coffee and quietly talking. He wished he could speak French. That would be perfect. English was the wrong language for this sort of maneuvering. “Charley Matthews,” he said again, wretchedly. “Remember me from Ohio?” He felt the same smile again involuntarily stretch to the corners of his mouth.

“Sure,” Margie said brightly, French accent blessedly abandoned. “How are you, Charley? Are you in Ohio?”

“No,” Matthews said. “I'm not.” Though suddenly he didn't want to be in Paris. The sound of Margie's voice, small and waxy and drab, caused all the sound reasons they'd brought their interlude to a close — how long ago was it? — to throng up in his ears like a loud machine hum. “I'm actually in Pittsburgh,” he said.

“You are?” Margie said. “What are you doing there?” She laughed an odd little laugh, as if Pittsburgh was the strangest place on the face of the earth to be. It annoyed him.

“It doesn't matter,” Matthews said. “I was just thinking about you. I guess it's pretty odd. You sent me your number, though. Remember?”

“Oh, right. I sure did,” Margie said. And then there was silence, or at least there was no talking on their line. All around was Paris street noise, but street noise was the same — unless a police siren started up on rue de Rennes. They might even hear the same siren if she lived close by. He would need to cover the mouthpiece. “Are you coming over here?” Margie said.

“Oh, I don't know,” Matthews said, looking warily out at rue de Rennes, where cars and buses and scooters were hurtling past. He put his hand by the mouthpiece, ready to cover it. “Maybe someday. You never can tell.”

There was another silence then. It was barely after six in Pittsburgh, he thought.

“Are you still teaching?” Margie said.

“No,” Matthews said. “I'm not. I quit.”

“Did you and Penny get divorced? Seems like Parnell said that.”

“Not yet,” he said. “But soon.” The bristly wind gusted up in his face. “How's the weather in Paris?”

“It's been very cold,” she said. “But it's a little warmer today. It's pretty nice. Parnell moved over here with the children. We're living together again. It's a lot better.”

“Great,” Matthews said, picturing Parnell looking lost, hauling her three look-alike kids around the farmers’ market in Wilmot. It occurred to him he might look like Parnell right now. Cold, unattached, vaguely stupid. What forces brought about such an unwished-for moment? He could probably ask Parnell about it and learn something.

“So, did you just call up to say hi?” Margie said perkily.

“Yeah,” Matthews said. “I'm at a pay phone.”

“Is it cold where you are? Pittsburgh's cold now, isn't it?”

“It's windy. It's probably about the same as Paris.” Matthews fixed his eyes on the blunt tower of St.-Sulpice, two blocks away. There was a flower stall in the church plaza. People were lined up there for Christmas flowers.

A third, even longer silence occurred between him and Margie McDermott. He closed his eyes, and in that instant there were three thousand miles separating them. He was in Pittsburgh. He had called her on a lark. He'd only wanted to hear her voice and imagine the possibility of something exceptional taking place. When he opened his eyes he wished he'd see Pittsburgh.

“Charley, is something the matter?” Margie said. “Are you okay?”

“Sure, I'm fine,” Matthews said. “We just have a bad connection. There's an echo.”

“You sound fine on this end,” she said.

“I'm happy to hear your voice, Margie.” The little unit counter was somehow down to forty.

“I am too, Charley. We didn't do anything too bad, did we?”

“No. No way. We did great.”

“And we were smart to get out when we did, weren't we?”

Matthews didn't know if Margie meant out of their marriages, their affair or just Ohio.

“We were,” he said.

“I'd like to see you,” Margie said unexpectedly.

“Me, too,” Matthews lied.

“Anything's possible, I guess. You know? If you come to Paris you should call me. Okay? Parnell travels a lot now. He's in sales. The kids go to school. We could probably find a little time.”

“I'd like that,” Matthews said.

“Me, too,” Margie said.

He assumed she was lying and that she knew she was and that he was, and it didn't matter. “I guess I'd better take off,” he said. “I've got to drive back down to Wilmot tonight. I mean this morning.”

“Keep my number, okay?” Margie said.

“Oh, for sure, I will,” he said.

“A big hug for you, Charley. Till next time.”

“A big hug for you,” Matthews said. “A big hug.” Then he hung up.

SOMEHOW IT HAD gotten to be one o'clock. Soupe de poisson was on his mind. The Parisians were all heading to lunch now, jamming the restaurants around St.-Germain. Probably he should've had lunch with Margie, since he was hungry and hadn't eaten since Clancy's. Though how could he eat lunch with Margie if he couldn't quite stand the sound of her voice? Plus he was in Pittsburgh, not just down the street, cold and getting colder. He thought again about eating alone, buying a Herald Tribune. But since the restaurants were all full, the waiters would be in a hurry and testy. His French wouldn't hold up, and lunch would degenerate into bad-willed bickering and misunderstanding — the horror stories people talked about.

He'd been gone much longer than his note to Helen promised. She would be awake and wondering and possibly sicker. On the other hand, she might feel much better and be ready for some excitement. They could eat lunch together. It seemed strange now to have imagined not walking back, just leaving Helen in the hotel.

He thought he should start back.

The metro would be the quickest route to rue Froidevaux. The metro went everywhere. But pausing in front of the tabac, which was itself filling up, he couldn't find Froidevaux on Fodor's metro plan. The Montparnasse cemetery would be a good landmark, but it wasn't on the map, and he couldn't think of the name Helen had told him was the right stop. Possibly it was Denfert-Rochereau, though it might've been Mouton Duvernet, each of which he could see, each of which sounded right. But if he was wrong, or got on an express or on a train going the wrong direction, he could end up at the airport. It was risky.

Best, he thought, to walk back up rue de Rennes, away from the river, and look for a taxi at Montparnasse station, or else hoof it all the way to Boulevard Raspail and refind the lion statue, after which he'd recognize things. One way or another, it was thirty minutes. He knew Paris that well.

This trip, he thought, hiking up the cold avenue, was supposed to have been about one thing but had become about something else: a version of sick bay. Nobody's idea of fun. Helen was probably going to become a problem he didn't know how to solve. Terminate the trip, certainly, if serious medical issues arose. Maybe he could phone Rex and Beatrice, if Helen had their number. Or just show up at the hospital, the way people did at home now. English would be spoken in hospitals.

Oxford was out now. He hadn't thought about Oxford in two days. He'd looked forward to realizing — certifying was the better word — the idyll he'd esteemed all these years. The “sweet City with her dreaming spires.” It was Matthew Arnold. He'd been offered encouragement fifteen years ago, written his essay on “Mont Blanc,” stressing similarities with Thoreau but casting doubt on Shelley's view of the physical world as animate. It had won a minor college prize. But that had been that. He hadn't made it to Oxford the first time. This would be the second.

Reaching the conflux with Montparnasse, he saw across to the taxi queue by the station, where he and Helen had waited to go to the Invalides the day before. French trains must arrive in clusters, he thought, since thirty people were lined up with their suitcases. Only one taxi was angling off the avenue for a pickup. He would be there all day, when at the most he had a twenty-minute walk. He could call the room, but that would take more time, and Helen might still be asleep.

Without quite meaning to, he'd jettisoned the Club 21 and St.-Germain. When he came back to Paris, it would all be different; when his book was published — the book Helen could've been lying in bed reading while he tramped the streets. The next time, he'd be alone. His orientation to the city would change. For one thing, the squalid Nouvelle Métropole wouldn't be the epicenter. Probably he wouldn't be able to find it, whereas now it was “home.” Next time he would stay nearer St.-Sulpice and the Luxembourg — the heart of Paris.

Thinking of Helen at that moment reading The Predicament in their cramped, smelly little room made him feel, oddly, not like the writer of that book, not even like a writer at all — far from how he'd imagined feeling when he thought about occupying the same room for a month, expecting to create something there. Though it might be a positive sign not to think of yourself as a writer, or not to think of yourself much at all. Only phonies went around thinking of themselves as being this or that. Self-regard was the enemy.

In any case, he could never write about Paris — the real Paris. He would never know enough. It could simply season him, call up an effect, color his views. He would never, for instance, think of Christmas again in the crude, gaudy American way. Paris had been added. It was possible even to increase your brainpower with the additions of unusual experience. Most people, he'd read, operated on one-sixteenth of their brain's ability. But what happened if they began operating on an eighth? The world would change overnight. Great writers, the same article had said, operated on a fourth.

The granite lion was dead ahead now, in the roundabout on Boulevard Raspail. Denfert-Rochereau was entering from the left. That would've been the metro stop. In the median strip on rue Froidevaux, children were playing Ping-Pong on green concrete tables, two on a side. Occasional flurries of ragged wind deflected the balls off the table, but the children retrieved them and began playing again immediately — their serves bouncing high over the low concrete barriers that served as nets. They were laughing and jabbering: “Allez! Allez! Sup-er, sup-er!”

He wondered what had happened to the man last night, the man who'd slept in the burial vault in his bedroll. Along the cemetery wall he could see reddish, leafless treetops. Was the same man there every night, or had that been his first time to scale the wall and seek that shelter? You wouldn't come back from that decline, Matthews thought.

In the sparsely furnished lobby of the Nouvelle Métropole, an Indian or possibly a Pakistani man approached him the moment he entered through the glass doors. It was as though the man had been waiting for him. He wasn't sure he'd seen this man before. Possibly when they'd checked in. A manager. The man wore a dark-blue suit, a white shirt and a dark-green tie; his black hair was neatly parted and combed. He smiled hesitantly, and his mouth showed a good amount of dark gums. He seemed, Matthews thought, concerned about something — how long they were staying, or some problems with a credit card; matters Matthews had already worked out with the other hotel personnel but that obviously hadn't been transmitted to this man. Everything was settled. He would see Madame de Grenelle in two days, and then, if Helen was well enough, they would leave.

“There is a problem,” the Indian manager said in English, coming straight up to him and standing close, as if he expected to whisper. Though he spoke too loud. “A serious problem,” he said. Matthews had already prepared an answer in French, about credit cards.

“What sort of serious problem?” he said. A younger Indian man stood alone behind the reception, his hands on the counter. He was staring at Matthews and also seemed concerned.

“The woman in forty-one,” the manager said, and cut his eyes toward the reception. “I'm sorry. You are in forty-one? Is this true?” The corners of his smooth brown mouth twitched slightly. He might've been suppressing a smile. What had Helen done that was funny?

“That's my wife,” Matthews said. “She's jet-lagged. If you'd like to clean the room, we'll go out for lunch.”

“I'm sorry,” the Indian manager said, and brought his two hands together at his waist and clasped them and blinked. His mouth twitched again, so that he could only repeat himself. “I'm sorry,” he said again.

“What about?” Matthews said. “What are you sorry about? What's happening?” He looked at the manager, blinked his eyes too, took a breath, let it out, then waited to learn whatever the problem was, whatever would be next, the next inconvenience he'd need to divert from its present course onto a better one. It would be something simple. These things were the same — never easy, but simple. Nothing was ever easy. He was sure of that, if he wasn't sure of anything else.

And then the man began to explain what the problem was about.

THEIR ROOM smelled a way it hadn't smelled before. The curtains and the window had been opened, the air inside was cold, but still it smelled different. Not like death, but a clean, astringent odor, as though the room had been gone over, scrubbed and put right at some point. Outside somewhere, a dog was barking, a slow, determined barking — something the dog saw but didn't recognize. A mystery. Something that didn't fit into its regular world.

Their luggage was still stacked where he'd put it when they'd come back last night. Nothing was very different in the room. The Arab pictures were the same. The fluorescent light had been turned on. An empty bottle of Bombay gin had been added. Several — possibly four in all — clear plastic freezer bags, empty. A glass from the bathroom, also empty. An ashtray with two cigarettes stubbed out. But mostly neat. Had they scrubbed the room? he wondered. Who'd opened the window? He realized he felt slightly faint.

Helen lay on her side, her right hand open under her cheek, her left hand lost beneath the covers. She was wearing at least her pale-pink pajama top with dark piping. Her glasses were on the table beside the plastic freezer bags and his note. She was very, very pale, her features fixed. Her thick hair wasn't disarranged. Her bottom lip seemed to be tucked in under the top, her teeth undoubtedly resting on it. It was an attitude of sleep.

In the hallway outside he heard the elevator door open, then whispers. A woman's whisper and a man's. Suddenly a young Indian woman came into the doorway, one of the maids, in a loose-fitting, beltless seersucker dress. A large girl. She leaned in, looked at the bed, gasped, then disappeared. In a moment, the elevator closed.

On the night table were two white envelopes. One marked: Mgt — Hotel Nouvelle Métropole SEULEMENT! He sat in the green chair and opened this immediately. In it was a folded piece of white notepaper on which was written: My fate is my responsibility. Mr. Matthews is not my husband. It was signed: Helen Carmichael. Her passport was enclosed.

The other envelope was marked: Mr. Matthews. In it was a similar piece of folded notepaper, on which he read these things:

My last thoughts…

I'm hurrying. I don't want you to come back and find me. Alive! Death is my little secret. I would like to stay in France. Please try for that. I really just don't fit anymore. Among the living, I mean. It's really no more complicated than that. (This stuff already seems to be working!)

I think a good life is supposed to be to die knowing nothing. Or maybe it's to die knowing nobody. Anyway, I've almost succeeded at both of them.

“Only in paradise is death banned from claiming the weak.” This is a saying I've been saving. I forget where I heard it. Maybe TV. This stuff is working.

We were never in love. Don't misunderstand that. It will make all this trouble much easier. A cancer cell is just one organism proliferated. I thought of it being like a novel representing all of life and we had that in common. But it's not. It's not a metaphor.

Don't open the other envelope. Please! Goodbye. Good luck.

Affectionately,

Helen

HE COULD SEE both towers now: the Montparnasse and the Eiffel, though they were cut off by lowering clouds. Only their bottom halves were visible. He had thought, of course, that they would both make it home. And yet this had taken so little, so little time, only a small amount of planning. He didn't see how he could've been gone long enough. He'd said he loved her the night before and meant it, and she had said no to that. But if they weren't in love, he thought, what were they? And what was the spiritual component she'd wanted, the thing that to his discredit he couldn't think of? He had let her down.

He wondered if Helen had been reading his book. There was no sign to indicate that, on the bed table or on the floor. On the bed, anywhere. Probably that was all meant as a joke. Someone was jogging around the cemetery wall, clockwise. A woman in a bright-yellow running outfit. He didn't believe she could be French. The French were different: their gait; their pace; the distance they kept and didn't keep. A Frenchwoman would never run around a cemetery in a bright-yellow outfit.

Clouds were causing darkness to arrive early. The dog had stopped barking. A clock was chiming. The Christmas tree in the high window across rue Froidevaux shone coldly in the late day. Again he heard the shuffling card sounds through the wall.

“YOUR WIFE. I'm very sorry,” the manager said. They were waiting. The people who were coming had decided to take their time.

“She wasn't my wife,” Matthews said. “But — but I knew her very well.” He had stammered. It shocked him. This was the first time in years. He had stammered as a child, experienced other difficulties, hadn't learned things very fast, but had overcome it.

“Of course,” the Indian man said, and made the little gasping sound, the quick intake of breath, which signified, in this instance, he guessed, sympathy.

That was what marriage meant, Matthews thought: what you did at the very end. What you thought, how you felt, what you said. Your responsibilities were different then. He realized suddenly that he had forgotten to buy flowers. He had said to himself that he would and then hadn't. It was another error, and the thought of it made his heart suddenly race.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Matthews lied.

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

“I wanted it to seem true,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I see,” Matthews said.

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

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

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

“I see,” Matthews said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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