“Yes, well,” Helen said as the blue neon sign of the Nouvelle Métropole materialized out of the night. “That wasn't what I wanted, but it's what you said. So I accept it. It's vague. But you're a little vague.”
“Maybe I am,” Matthews said. “I could be.”
“And what of it, right?” She looked at him and smiled a not very friendly smile.
“Right,” he said in the dark taxi seat. “What of it, is right.”
IN THEIR ROOM, the air was dank-smelling and cold again. It was past the hour when heat came in the pipes. Bed was the only place to find warmth. Possibly Paris was not always this cold now, Matthews thought.
Helen went in the bathroom and closed the door and locked it. He heard her running bathwater, heard the toilet flush several times, heard what might've been vomiting but could've been only coughing. Helen hadn't eaten, but she was ingesting medicine of some kind, and that could make you nauseated. She was in pain, he felt sure. She acted as if pain was her companion. Cancer meant pain, and those bruises on her legs were from the cancer she'd had but didn't, reasonably enough, care to discuss.
He did not, in truth, know what to do with himself in the tiny, cold room. Some fearful tension had been alerted in him, and Helen's importance (what else could he call it?) in the overall scheme of things had overshadowed his own. He sat down on the bed and tried to envision his upcoming visit to his translator, but none of that was interesting enough to be distracting. He tried to think about Penny and Lelia, in the middle of their happy day. Christmastime — what was it like in the Bay Area? That didn't hold, either. Helen was possibly in some dire way, and that seemed what everything was about. Best to give into it, yet quietly hope he was wrong.
He got up and tried to move his suitcase in such a way that Helen could walk out of the bathroom and straight to the bed without stepping over part of it. To do that he had to close it; but even closed it had to lie on top of hers, which made the room neater but rendered the suitcases inaccessible. They needed to be opened and on the floor to be available, only then the TV or the bathroom couldn't be reached. He decided to leave them stacked, for convenience’ sake.
He did not, however, want to get into bed. Helen would not be up for sexual shenanigans, but to be in bed when she appeared could indicate that he was, which could cause problems of an unpredictable character. Helen had recently made some nasty cracks about how full-throatedly eager he was for the kind of sex she specialized in—“grown-up sex,” she called it; or, other times, “sex without hand-holding.” Possibly he had been less than full-throated about that. For some reason, women all seemed sexually insatiable now. A woman at the college, a professor of economics he'd had an encounter with in the first bewildering week after Penny's departure, had needed to be fucked all the time, which he hadn't much liked. It had made him hesitant. There was no meeting, nor was one even wished for. To deny her anything had been deemed a vicious insult. Women had always been able to say “No,” or “Let's go slow at first,” or “I'm not ready”—whatever they wanted. And men had been required to think it was fine. Now men couldn't say those same things without pissing everybody off. So, if he got in bed, Helen would in all likelihood taunt him for wanting sex when it was obvious she wasn't interested, even if he wasn't interested either. Of course, it was also possible she might be interested — bruises, pain, jet lag, nausea, cancer — who cares. She might think of it as analgesic. It was another reason to stay out of bed, though he was tired and ready for sleep.
He walked to the cold window and peered out again. He could feel both the cold from outside and the last vestiges of heat in the boxed radiator below the sill. Outside, however, the air was all snow and blackness. He could see the Montparnasse Tower, most of its office squares lighted. Cleaning was going on there, like anywhere. But the Eiffel Tower was still absent from where he thought it should be. Lost in the snow. Possibly closed — though now would be the time to visit it, when the City of Light was lighted. He would certainly go back there when all this was over.
Only a few cars trafficked along rue Froidevaux. Not that it was so late — midnight — but no one wanted to drive through snow in Paris. A police car motored slowly past, its blue light flashing, bound for no emergency. Someone on a motor scooter parked at the curb and came straight inside the hotel. Someone who'd made all the racket yesterday, he thought. The night shift.
He watched a small man appear from the right on foot, possibly from rue Boulard, a man with what looked like a bedroll or a sleeping bag slung to his shoulders, a man in boots, with a long coat, capless. He crossed rue Froidevaux, through the line of sycamores, and walked down the cemetery wall until he was almost lost from sight halfway between the yellow circles of streetlamp lights. He stopped, lit a cigarette, exhaled smoke, turned and looked up and down the mostly empty street, then deliberately stepped to the wall, adjusted his bedroll higher on his shoulders, gave a last look around, and very efficiently but still deliberately scaled the wall and slipped down out of sight to the other side.
Matthews put his nose close to the frosted glass and stared out into the cemetery garden, so jammed with white stone slabs and prim little burial chapels as to appear full, though yesterday of course a place had been found for one more. That grave — in the clutter of others and in the snow and darkness — he could no longer find.
He waited for the man to reappear, searched all along the quadrant of what he thought was the Jewish section, near the man's entry point. But there was no one. The man had come in secretly and then disappeared. Though no doubt he was staying near the wall's interior shadow. There would be a guard inside, a patrol against this very sort of violation — fines exacted.
But there was a movement then, a flicker of darker shadow among the pale, flat monuments. A zig and a zag. Matthews almost didn't catch it, since it came far to the right of where the intruder had intruded, in a remoter corner of the cemetery, just inside the wall where rue Froidevaux intersected with a smaller, nameless street. It was only a flicker, a slight interruption in the snowlight. But it showed again, and then Matthews could see the man — or perhaps another man with a sleeping bag on his back. And he was darting and crouching, then quickly slipping behind a burial vault, then hurrying out the other side and ducking again, falling once, or so it seemed, then scrabbling on hands and knees to regain his footing and casting himself first this way, then that, as if something, something Matthews couldn't see, was dogging him, trying to drive him out of the place, or worse.
Matthews watched, his nose to the frosted pane, until the man had darted and skittered and cowered along the cemetery wall almost to the point of invisibility in the snow and dark. But then, all at once, the man halted before one of the steep, peaked-roof mausoleums, no different from a hundred others. He turned and, as he had outside the wall, looked one way and then the other, then he carefully opened the heavy grated gate, stepped inside, closed the door and was visible no more.
“What time is it in California?” Helen said. She was in the bathroom still, standing at the little mirror, examining herself. He hadn't heard the door open.
“I don't know,” he said. “Why?”
“I thought you were standing there thinking about your wife and daughter.”
“No,” Matthews said, facing her across the cold, newly neatened room. “I was watching a man break into the cemetery.”
“That's a switch. Most people want to break out.” Helen had on pink, silky pajamas with dark piping, apparel he'd never seen her wear. Usually she slept naked. She brought her face close to the bathroom mirror and opened her mouth to see inside it. “Mmmmm-mm,” she said.