“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.