“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.”