“I can tell the truth,” I said, and I wanted to be able to. I didn't want to be a person who couldn't tell the truth, though I didn't want to tell Doris I was shocked by what she'd said.
“It doesn't matter,” she said, and smiled at me in a way she had earlier that day, as though she liked me and I could trust her. She put her glasses back on very carefully. “Did you buy a nice present for your mom? I bet you have good taste.”
“I bought her a watch,” I said.
“You did?” Doris leaned forward. “Let me see it.” She seemed pleased.
I reached in the pocket of my coat, which was beside me on the seat and also had the lawyer's card in it, and took out the little clear-plastic box wrapped in white tissue, and unfolded it so Doris could look. She took the box and opened it and picked up the watch with its tiny moving hand ticking seconds by — I could almost hear it — and she looked at it very closely, then put it up to her ear. “Okay,” she said, and smiled at me. “It works.” She put it back in my hand. “Jan'll love that,” she said as I folded it away. “It's the perfect gift. I wish somebody would give me a watch. You're such a sweet boy.” She took my cheeks between her warm hands and squeezed me, and I thought she was going to kiss me, but she didn't. “Too bad there aren't sweet boys like you everywhere,” she said. She sat back on her seat and put her hands in her lap and closed her eyes, and I believe she might've gone to sleep for a minute. Though after a while she said, with her eyes still closed and the snowy night flashing by outside, “I wish there were Thanksgiving carols so we could sing a song now.” And then she did go to sleep, because her breath slowed and evened, and her head sank over her chest, and her hands were still and limp.
And for a long time after that I sat very still and felt as though I was entirely out of the world, cast off without a starting or a stopping point, just shooting through space like a boy in a rocket. Though after a while I must have begun to hold my breath, because my heart began to beat harder, and I had that feeling, the scary feeling you have that you're suffocating and your life is running out — fast, fast, second by second — and you have to do something to save yourself, but you can't. Only then you remember it's you who's causing it, and you who has to stop it. And then it did stop, and I could breathe again. I looked out the window at the night, where the clouds had risen and dispersed and the snow was finished, and the sky above the vast white ground was soft as softest velvet. And I felt calm. Maybe for the first time in my life, I felt calm. So that for a while I, too, closed my eyes and slept.
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 logicaclass="underline" 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.