“I know. It's just supposed to be,” Helen said. With her fingertip she lightly touched the tiny dent her glasses had pressed on her nose. “It's supposed to be the time of your life. You're supposed to die and go to heaven, all in the same day.”
“We ought to be used to what's supposed to happen,” Matthews said.
“Spoken like a man who's unhappily separated from his first wife,” Helen said, and grinned, still staring up. “That's just hind-spite. You should take the brighter side of things.”
“Which one is that?”
“Oh, let me see,” Helen said almost dreamily. “What does my little motto say, my little proverb?”
“‘The glory of God is to keep things hidden.’”
“There you go,” Helen said. “Doesn't that just mean: Take two pills and call me in the morning, sayeth the Lord?”
“I guess it could,” Matthews said. “It could mean why don't you shut up, too.”
“There you go. So why don't you shut up?” Helen smiled sweetly at him where he stood alone on the cold sidewalk, hands in his coat pockets, head bare to the wind. “No offense.”
“No, none taken,” Matthews said, and he began to wave for a taxi out on the crowded avenue along the river.
IN THE HOTEL, they both fell into bed and into dense sleeps, from which he did not awaken until after dark, so that when his eyes found only darkness, he had no idea where he was or what day it was or, for an instant, who Helen Carmichael might be, breathing beside him. The air all around was steamy, and he was sweating and could feel warm sweat on Helen's bare back. He lay, then, for a long time as though a great burden of sleep and fatigue was resting on his chest, and finally he let the weight sink him back into darkness as if the darkness of sleep was better than the darkness of the unknown.
In his second sleep he dreamed vividly. There, he was both sitting at what seemed to be a typical Parisian sidewalk café (something he had never done) but also watching himself do the very same thing. Wearing a heavy black overcoat and a red scarf and a disreputable-looking black beret, he was talking to someone at an extremely high rate of speed. He couldn't, in the dream, see who he was talking to, but the thought that it was Penny seemed foregone. He was still wearing a wed-ding ring.
And he was speaking French! French words (all unfathomable) were flooding out of his mouth just the way they flooded out of every Frenchman's mouth, a mile a minute. No one — whoever he was talking to — offered anything in reply. So that it was only he, Charley Matthews, rattling on and on and on in perfect French he could miraculously speak, yet, as his own observer, in no way understand.
This dream, in its own dream time, seemed to go on until, when he suddenly awoke with the feeling he'd rescued himself from some endless, winnerless race, he was exhausted and his heart was pounding, his legs aching, and even his shoulders were stiff, as though his sleep was truly a burden he'd been forced to carry for days.
The stingy fluorescent ceiling light had been turned on in the room, and for a long time Matthews lay naked and stared at the pale tube as if it was a source of assurance, though still without completely comprehending where he was or why.
“Don't sleep forever,” he heard Helen say.
“Why not?”
“It'll ruin your sleep. You have to wake up now so you can sleep later.”
Matthews raised only his head and looked down the length of his body. Helen was standing in the bathroom door, a towel wrapped around her breasts and waist. With another towel she was drying her hair in the stronger light of the bathroom. She looked large and important in the doorway. “Junoesque” was the word she liked. It was this particular attitude and incarnation that allowed Helen to think most people couldn't handle her and that she was too much for most men. Matthews stared at her in the lighted doorway, thinking that the soapy flower smell from the shower had now overpowered the sweaty smell from earlier. “We haven't eaten all day,” Helen said. “Did you realize that? Not that I'm hungry.”
The thought of Beatrice and Rex floated unhappily back into his mind. “Did we cancel dinner with your friends, or did I dream that?”
“You dreamed it.” Helen tilted her head sideways so her long, pale hair fell to the side and she could dry the parts that were underneath.
“We should have,” Matthews said. “I'd rather die here now than eat dinner at — where was it?”
“Clancy's,” Helen said, then took a deep breath and sighed. “Clon-cee. You don't have to go with me.”
“I have to if you do,” Matthews said. “How do you feel?”
“I feel absolutely wonderful,” she said. “I've decided I'm going to read your book next.”
“My book?” Matthews said.
“Yes,” Helen said. “Ton livre.”
“You won't like it,” Matthews said. “Nobody but the French like it.”
As a first perfectly clear thought, this was not welcome news. Helen had always acted as though his book and the fact that he'd written it were merely amusing if not actually embarrassing and ridiculous anomalies, in no way worth taking time to investigate. A kind of engrossing but valueless hobby. Her standard line — offered even to Matthews’ parents and sister in Cleveland — had been that she didn't intend to read The Predicament because she was afraid she'd either like it so much Matthews would then hopelessly intimidate her, or else hate it so much she'd never be able to take him seriously again and their relationship would be over. (Privately, she'd told him only explanation two was the real one.)
This had suited Matthews fine, inasmuch as in the last months of writing The Predicament, and not long after he'd begun his affair with Helen, he'd inserted a character who was — even he knew — somewhat modeled on her: a tall, ash-blond, Buick-bumper, Rockette type he'd exaggerated into a garish woman who wore mules, slit-up-the-sides dresses, and talked in a loud voice about coarse subjects, but whom the protagonist clings to after his wife abandons him, even though they have little in common but sex. In Matthews’ mind, this was not Helen Carmichael; only one or two superficial details were appropriated. And it was in no way meant to size Helen up or be her portrait.
Except try to tell Helen that. Helen maintained strong certainties about her own substance and integrity, but also spent considerable time scanning the no-man's-land around her like a razor-beam searchlight, on the lookout for possible adversaries and nonbelievers. Plus she wasn't stupid — though her personal reading tastes were always for best-sellers and ghoulish police mysteries. She would certainly see the character of Carlette as a not especially flattering image of herself and would be mad as hell about it. It was not a prospect Matthews felt eager to confront in the midst of an expensive and already half-wrecked trip to Europe.
And not that he'd blame her — assuming she got to the Carlette part. Probably people never had kind thoughts about seeing themselves in someone else's made-up book. It was a matter, he understood, of power and authority: one person's being usurped or stolen outright by another, for at very best indifferent purposes. And that was definitely how Helen would view it. So, if he could, he would like to keep her from feeling any of these bad ways by discouraging her from reading The Predicament anytime soon.
“I'm sure I won't like it,” Helen said, having disappeared back into the tiny bathroom, where Matthews could hear her unscrewing the top of some kind of jar, then popping the cap on a container of pills. “I just thought it might tell me something interesting about you.”
“I'm not very interesting.” Matthews stared unhappily up at the fluorescent tube, which produced its thin, mint-colored and quaverous light. He pulled the blanket over his lower half, though the room still felt steamy.