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.”