“Is it cold where you are? Pittsburgh's cold now, isn't it?”
“It's windy. It's probably about the same as Paris.” Matthews fixed his eyes on the blunt tower of St.-Sulpice, two blocks away. There was a flower stall in the church plaza. People were lined up there for Christmas flowers.
A third, even longer silence occurred between him and Margie McDermott. He closed his eyes, and in that instant there were three thousand miles separating them. He was in Pittsburgh. He had called her on a lark. He'd only wanted to hear her voice and imagine the possibility of something exceptional taking place. When he opened his eyes he wished he'd see Pittsburgh.
“Charley, is something the matter?” Margie said. “Are you okay?”
“Sure, I'm fine,” Matthews said. “We just have a bad connection. There's an echo.”
“You sound fine on this end,” she said.
“I'm happy to hear your voice, Margie.” The little unit counter was somehow down to forty.
“I am too, Charley. We didn't do anything too bad, did we?”
“No. No way. We did great.”
“And we were smart to get out when we did, weren't we?”
Matthews didn't know if Margie meant out of their marriages, their affair or just Ohio.
“We were,” he said.
“I'd like to see you,” Margie said unexpectedly.
“Me, too,” Matthews lied.
“Anything's possible, I guess. You know? If you come to Paris you should call me. Okay? Parnell travels a lot now. He's in sales. The kids go to school. We could probably find a little time.”
“I'd like that,” Matthews said.
“Me, too,” Margie said.
He assumed she was lying and that she knew she was and that he was, and it didn't matter. “I guess I'd better take off,” he said. “I've got to drive back down to Wilmot tonight. I mean this morning.”
“Keep my number, okay?” Margie said.
“Oh, for sure, I will,” he said.
“A big hug for you, Charley. Till next time.”
“A big hug for you,” Matthews said. “A big hug.” Then he hung up.
SOMEHOW IT HAD gotten to be one o'clock. Soupe de poisson was on his mind. The Parisians were all heading to lunch now, jamming the restaurants around St.-Germain. Probably he should've had lunch with Margie, since he was hungry and hadn't eaten since Clancy's. Though how could he eat lunch with Margie if he couldn't quite stand the sound of her voice? Plus he was in Pittsburgh, not just down the street, cold and getting colder. He thought again about eating alone, buying a Herald Tribune. But since the restaurants were all full, the waiters would be in a hurry and testy. His French wouldn't hold up, and lunch would degenerate into bad-willed bickering and misunderstanding — the horror stories people talked about.
He'd been gone much longer than his note to Helen promised. She would be awake and wondering and possibly sicker. On the other hand, she might feel much better and be ready for some excitement. They could eat lunch together. It seemed strange now to have imagined not walking back, just leaving Helen in the hotel.
He thought he should start back.
The metro would be the quickest route to rue Froidevaux. The metro went everywhere. But pausing in front of the tabac, which was itself filling up, he couldn't find Froidevaux on Fodor's metro plan. The Montparnasse cemetery would be a good landmark, but it wasn't on the map, and he couldn't think of the name Helen had told him was the right stop. Possibly it was Denfert-Rochereau, though it might've been Mouton Duvernet, each of which he could see, each of which sounded right. But if he was wrong, or got on an express or on a train going the wrong direction, he could end up at the airport. It was risky.
Best, he thought, to walk back up rue de Rennes, away from the river, and look for a taxi at Montparnasse station, or else hoof it all the way to Boulevard Raspail and refind the lion statue, after which he'd recognize things. One way or another, it was thirty minutes. He knew Paris that well.
This trip, he thought, hiking up the cold avenue, was supposed to have been about one thing but had become about something else: a version of sick bay. Nobody's idea of fun. Helen was probably going to become a problem he didn't know how to solve. Terminate the trip, certainly, if serious medical issues arose. Maybe he could phone Rex and Beatrice, if Helen had their number. Or just show up at the hospital, the way people did at home now. English would be spoken in hospitals.
Oxford was out now. He hadn't thought about Oxford in two days. He'd looked forward to realizing — certifying was the better word — the idyll he'd esteemed all these years. The “sweet City with her dreaming spires.” It was Matthew Arnold. He'd been offered encouragement fifteen years ago, written his essay on “Mont Blanc,” stressing similarities with Thoreau but casting doubt on Shelley's view of the physical world as animate. It had won a minor college prize. But that had been that. He hadn't made it to Oxford the first time. This would be the second.
Reaching the conflux with Montparnasse, he saw across to the taxi queue by the station, where he and Helen had waited to go to the Invalides the day before. French trains must arrive in clusters, he thought, since thirty people were lined up with their suitcases. Only one taxi was angling off the avenue for a pickup. He would be there all day, when at the most he had a twenty-minute walk. He could call the room, but that would take more time, and Helen might still be asleep.
Without quite meaning to, he'd jettisoned the Club 21 and St.-Germain. When he came back to Paris, it would all be different; when his book was published — the book Helen could've been lying in bed reading while he tramped the streets. The next time, he'd be alone. His orientation to the city would change. For one thing, the squalid Nouvelle Métropole wouldn't be the epicenter. Probably he wouldn't be able to find it, whereas now it was “home.” Next time he would stay nearer St.-Sulpice and the Luxembourg — the heart of Paris.
Thinking of Helen at that moment reading The Predicament in their cramped, smelly little room made him feel, oddly, not like the writer of that book, not even like a writer at all — far from how he'd imagined feeling when he thought about occupying the same room for a month, expecting to create something there. Though it might be a positive sign not to think of yourself as a writer, or not to think of yourself much at all. Only phonies went around thinking of themselves as being this or that. Self-regard was the enemy.
In any case, he could never write about Paris — the real Paris. He would never know enough. It could simply season him, call up an effect, color his views. He would never, for instance, think of Christmas again in the crude, gaudy American way. Paris had been added. It was possible even to increase your brainpower with the additions of unusual experience. Most people, he'd read, operated on one-sixteenth of their brain's ability. But what happened if they began operating on an eighth? The world would change overnight. Great writers, the same article had said, operated on a fourth.
The granite lion was dead ahead now, in the roundabout on Boulevard Raspail. Denfert-Rochereau was entering from the left. That would've been the metro stop. In the median strip on rue Froidevaux, children were playing Ping-Pong on green concrete tables, two on a side. Occasional flurries of ragged wind deflected the balls off the table, but the children retrieved them and began playing again immediately — their serves bouncing high over the low concrete barriers that served as nets. They were laughing and jabbering: “Allez! Allez! Sup-er, sup-er!”
He wondered what had happened to the man last night, the man who'd slept in the burial vault in his bedroll. Along the cemetery wall he could see reddish, leafless treetops. Was the same man there every night, or had that been his first time to scale the wall and seek that shelter? You wouldn't come back from that decline, Matthews thought.