“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?”