The best thing to say about Helen was that he wasn't adequate to her needs and demands, due to needs and demands of his own, and that he should let things go on as they now would, then quietly part company with her once they were home. He'd felt the very same — that he'd barely escaped with his life — when he left behind being a professor. He'd have taken the blame for that, too, if he'd gotten trapped there. Helen was nothing like as serious a threat. At day's end, Helen was a nice woman.
Something, without doubt, was changing in his life now, and changing for the better. The fact that he didn't mind being “lost” and alone in Paris was just one small scrap of the evidence. Blumberg's comment that nobody knew him here, which had seemed at the time (two days ago) like a great dark shadow on its way to blotting out the sun, seemed perfectly fine today. You recognized changes in yourself, he believed, not by how others felt about you, but by how you felt about yourself. And instead of worrying about how he couldn't convert experience in Paris to be applicable to Ohio, it might now be possible to convert himself to whatever went on in Paris — something he'd never have dreamed possible when he was teaching the African-American Novel at Wilmot College.
All of which made his planned visit with Madame de Grenelle even more crucial, since the translation of The Predicament seemed like the first move toward converting himself into someone available to take on more of life. That was undoubtedly why black artists had flocked to Paris: because in the process of removing themselves from the center of terrible events at home, they'd found ways to let more of life in and, in so doing, disappeared but became visible to themselves at the same time. “Paris welcomed the Negro writers.” That was the phrase he'd read in textbooks, was certainly a phrase he'd repeated over the years, accepted without giving it a thought or without believing he had anything in common with Negro writers. Perhaps, though, Paris could open its arms to Charley Matthews. He wasn't spoiled to want that now. Many stranger things had happened.
Bending off Raspail and down onto narrow rue Bréa, he without once looking walked straight to the toy store he'd sought, a narrow shop window on a block of expensive-looking jewelry stores and second-rate galleries featuring Tibetan art. si j’étais plus jeune, the sign said.
Inside the shop, which specialized in toys made in Switzerland, he discovered a bewildering variety of wonderful possibilities, everything ridiculously costly and probably nothing able to be sent as far as California with any hope of arriving unbroken before New Year's. Possibly it would be better to buy something small, cart it home and save it for later — for Lelia's birthday in March.
Though that wouldn't do. Something had to arrive from Paris, whether she knew he was here or not, and he had to get it there in time for Christmas — a week away. Expense shouldn't enter into the equation.
He continued cruising the shop, examining exquisitely carved mahogany sailboats and handmade train sets in several different sizes and shiny enamel color schemes; lavish bear, lion and llama replicas made — at least it looked like — from cashmere and real jewels; and meticulously detailed puppet-show stages with silk puppets that actually spoke in French, German or Italian, using some tiny computer. He wanted to ask the young shopgirl (who was obviously a bored fashion model) what the store might contain that was small and portable and unique and that a six-year-old girl living in the South Bay would like and for which price was no concern. The clerk, he realized, would know English, as well as French, German and Italian, and probably Swedish and Dutch and Croat, but he felt he should speak to her in French, as Helen would've. Except he didn't know how even to begin such a conversation. What he wanted was hopelessly tangled up in unknown tenses and indecipherable idiomatic expressions and implicit French comprehensions, and worst of all with French numbers — large numbers, which the French purposefully complicated and for which he didn't know any of the names above twenty. Vingt.
The sales clerk stayed perched, legs crossed, on a high-tech-looking metal stool, reading Elle and wearing a preposterously short red leather skirt. And when he'd gone uncomfortably past her station by the cash register for the third time, he simply stopped and looked at her, smiled pitiably, shook his head and for some reason made a circular motion with his upraised index finger, by which he meant to indicate there were more things to admire and buy here than he could choose from, so that he was going to depart and possibly come back later. The young woman, however, looked up, smiled at him, closed her magazine and said in a shockingly American midwestern voice, “If there's anything I can help you with, just ask. I'm not very busy, as you can see.”
At the end of ten minutes, Matthews had made his wishes, qualms and time restrictions known to the young woman, who was Canadian and who knew all about shipping, wrapping, customs declarations and valuation limits on packages sent to America. She even found, by looking in a book, the exact category of gift recommended for six-year-old French girls, from which Matthews chose a bright-yellow wall tablet made of plastic that allowed for the leaving of written messages, and from which messages could both be erased and electronically retrieved by pushing a red button on the side. He wasn't positive Lelia would like this, since she was reportedly better at math than at writing; but she could do math on it if she wanted to, and it wasn't American and had French phrases—Hallo? On y va? Ça va bien? N'est-ce pas? — worked into the yellow plastic border, along with molded images of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Bastille, the Panthéon, a bridge of some kind: everything but Napoleon's tomb.
This, the clerk promised, would be carefully wrapped, insured against breakage and delivered by courier to Penny's house in Palomar Park on or before Christmas Eve. The entire cost was less than a thousand francs, which Matthews put on his credit card. He also inserted inside the box a handwritten note. Dear Sweetheart, You and I will spend next Christmas together in Paris, n'est-ce pas? On y va. Voilà. Dad.
As a result of his successful transaction, when he walked back out into rue Bréa, where the slant, late-morning sunlight on cobblestone pavement felt even warmer than earlier, as if December might just as easily give way straight to spring, he sensed the whole day had been saved, and he was even more free than ever to do exactly as he pleased. Paris wasn't menacing; he'd been right yesterday. And he could operate in it more or less on his own, just as he thought he'd be able to, even though it annoyed him not to know enough words to ask directions, or to understand if any were offered. He would need to stick to the simple, familiar touristic objectives (buying a newspaper, ordering coffee, reading a taxi meter), though this impasse would improve soon enough. But language or no language, he could go wherever he chose — even if he could only order coffee when he got there. The best idea was to treat Paris like a place he knew and felt comfortable, no matter how resistant and exotic it might turn out to be. He decided he'd buy flowers for Helen and let that be his first completely French transaction. A flower stall would come along the same way the toy shop had.
At the bottom of rue Bréa, he turned left toward what the Fodor's indicated would be the Luxembourg Gardens, hoping to take a walk on the sunny lawns, watch children maneuver their small boats in the lagoon (Helen had talked about this) and eventually cross to the Panthéon and angle down to the Sorbonne, while gradually making his way, if he could find it, to the St.-Sulpice church and rue du Vieux-Colombier, where the famous Club 21 had once been located, and where Sidney Bechet and Hot Lips Page played in the fifties. Why not go there, he decided, after all the hours logged yakking about places and people he never knew? He had no idea why the place stayed in his mind or what he hoped to see. Probably it would just be a boarded-up hole-in-the-wall — something else that existed only in a book. Though not his book. He'd made no references to any black clubs in The Predicament. They had nothing to do with his female character's — Greta's — ill-fated stay. Plus he knew nothing about jazz and didn't much care.