Women with Men (17 page)

MATTHEWS HAD KNOWN
Helen Carmichael nearly two years. She had been a student in the adult course he taught in the African-American Novel—his specialty at Wilmot College (though he was not of African descent). He and Helen had liked each other at once, met regularly for coffee after class, then started sleeping together when the course ended, a time roughly coinciding with the dark grainy period after Penny had taken their daughter, Lelia, and left for California, the period when Matthews figured out he hated teaching and everything about it, determined he should seek a less governed life and began writing a novel as a way of occupying himself until the school year was over and he could resign.

Helen was eight years older than he was, a tall, indelicately bony ash-blond woman with a big-breasted, chorus-girl figure, a wide, sensuous mouth and big benevolent blue eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. Matthews liked looking into her eyes and found solace there. All men, he noticed, stared at Helen. There was a bigger-than-life quality to her, though not necessarily bigger and better. Helen enjoyed believing men had “a hard time handling” her and that most men were afraid of her because she was “hard to keep up with,” which meant she thought she was savvy and ironic. Helen came from a small West Virginia coal-mining town and had already been married three times, but was unmarried now and had no wish to try again. She worked for an advertising company across the Ohio River in Parkersburg, not far from where she grew up, and had told Matthews she believed this was as far as life had taken her and where it would probably leave her—and that at forty-five she had made her pact with destiny and was able to be a realist about it. He liked her for her independence.

She and Matthews had begun enjoying a casual and altogether satisfactory sexual intimacy, spending afternoons in bed in his house, taking weekend trips up to nearby Pittsburgh
and occasionally as far away as D.C., but mostly just enjoying a twilight drive and dinner in one of the cozy inns or restored cider mills that dotted the Ohio River banks, often ending up in some rickety old four-poster in a hot little third-floor garret room, attempting but usually failing to make as little noise as possible while still getting the most from the evening and each other.

As a general matter, they shared a view of themselves as random voyagers who'd faced life's stern blows (Helen had had cancer of the something a year before and was still officially in recovery and on medication; Matthews had, of course, been abandoned). Only they'd emerged stronger, more resolute and no less hopeful of providence and life's abundance. Matthews realized it wasn't typical to fall for an older woman after your wife leaves you. Except he hadn't really fallen for Helen; he simply liked her and liked her way of treating him seriously yet also ironically; whereas Penny had treated him with nothing but the greatest sincerity, sweetness and seemingly loving patience until the day she walked out. He wasn't at all sure what he offered Helen—he couldn't see much—though she seemed happy. The only promise she seemed to want and want to give in return was never to expect anything from the other unless the other was physically present to fulfill it. Marriage, Helen felt, should append this proviso to its solemn vows. Matthews felt the same.

Matthews’ defeated marriage, however, was his great source of disappointment and woe. He had begun
The Predicament
intending it as a plain yet accurate portrayal of his marriage to Penny, a marriage in which meaningful language had been exhausted by routine, in which life's formalities, grievances and even shouts of pain had become so similar-sounding as to mean little but still seem beyond remedy, and in which the narrator (himself, of course) and his wife were depicted as people
who'd logged faults, neglect and misprisions aplenty over twelve years but who still retained sufficient affection to allow them to recognize what they could and couldn't do, and to live in the warmth of that shared understanding. In that way, he felt, it was a typical academic marriage. Other people forged these same accommodations without ever knowing it. His parents, for instance. It was possible they hated each other, yet hating each other was worth more than trying to love somebody else, somebody you'd never know in a hundred years and probably wouldn't like if you did. Better, they'd found, to focus on whatever good was left, set aside all issues they would never agree on, and call it marriage, even love. How to do this was, of course, the predicament. (At one point, he'd come close to calling his book a memoir and not a novel at all.) But having the book published, Matthews had hoped, would be a dramatic and direct public profession of new faith to Penny, who had left town with an undergraduate (not a priest) and taken Lelia to live in the Bay Area. The student had eventually come back to school.

None of this, however, had worked. Penny hadn't read
The Predicament,
had declined delivery of an early proof Matthews had couriered to her with an inscription, and had almost completely stopped communicating with him. So that at the last minute he revised the Greta part in such a way that instead of coming home to Maine, eager to reconcile, Greta died in a traffic accident.

In the year and a half since Matthews had left teaching, he had finished his novel, seen unwanted divorce proceedings begun against him, sold the white-clapboard, blue-shuttered faculty colonial he'd occupied with Penny, set aside some money and moved miles from campus, into a smaller, brick-and-clay-tile, rough-hewn bungalow in a country setting, where he'd begun getting used to what had departed (conceivably
his younger and callower self), what had arrived (not very much), and what the consequences for the future were. The idea of himself as a novelist seemed to be one appealing arrival: a silent artist living obscurely alone in small-town Ohio. Once, he'd been a teacher, but retired early. His wife had left him because he was too eccentric. There had been a child. Occasionally he made a brief appearance in New York, but was mostly content to go on writing small, underappreciated masterpieces that were more popular in Europe than in his own country.

Matthews’ parents still owned a large and successful retail furniture company up in Cleveland—a company that had been in the Matthews name since before the Depression—and there was room for him, if he wanted, to fit right into the management scheme and before long be running things. His father had expressed this hope even after Matthews got tenure, as if teaching literature was widely accepted as an ideal preparation for the furniture business. Matthews’ mother and sister were involved in a profitable interior-design venture connected to the furniture company, and they had made noises about his coming home and taking over the accounts end while they concentrated on the creative decision-making.

But Matthews had told them that he couldn't entertain either of these offers at the moment, that he had more important things on his mind: his divorce, his daughter, his life as a thirty-seven-year-old former professor who knew a great deal about African-American literature and furniture, a man who'd made big mistakes and wanted to make fewer if possible.

His parents had willingly conceded it was a good idea, given the difficult transitions in his life, that he take some time off to “sort things out.” They even acknowledged that writing a novel was sound as a form of therapy before getting down to real life. They seemed to understand about Matthews’ divorce
and why it was regrettably necessary, and had made their own private overtures to Penny and Lelia. They had
not
been especially happy about Helen's unexpected and seemingly impermanent presence in his life, or about her age. But they'd refrained from passing judgment on human adaptations they didn't comprehend but which their only son considered necessary and good. (He frequently brought Helen along on his visits, where she good-naturedly tried to fit herself in, take part and act at ease, though the two of them always stayed downtown in a hotel.)

Nine months after Matthews finished his novel, it had been published by a small, aggressive imprint of a large, prestigious New York house, and once published had gone immediately and completely out of sight. There were a few respectful if insignificant reviews, a few copies were sold. But he quickly lost touch with his editor, and there was never any mention of another contract or of a book he might want to write at a future date. Privately (though he told Helen) he wasn't surprised. He was a novice—a college professor who'd jumped out into the wider world—plus he hadn't believed his novel was really good enough in the way it depicted ordinary, middle-class people caught in the grip of small, internal dilemmas of their own messy concoction. That was not usually a popular subject, he understood, unless the people were lesbians with sexually abusive fathers, or else homicide detectives or someone suffering from a fatal disease—none of which was the case in
The Predicament,
which was too much about his own life. Still, he was satisfied to have written it, happy to have done it on his own and to have used it to break with teaching. He might, he felt, start thinking of something else to write—something more far-reaching.

Though one gray afternoon in November, just at dusk, he'd received a call from a woman at the publishers in New York
(he was on the back porch, reglazing loose panes in his storms before crawling up onto the stepladder). The woman told him that to everyone's pleasure, a French publisher—a Monsieur Blumberg—had called to make an offer on Matthews’ book and wanted to publish it in France if Matthews would agree to a small price.

“I can't think why anybody'd read my book in France,” Matthews said to the publishing woman, Miss Pitkin or Miss Pittman. “Nobody wanted to read it over here.” He was, though, happy that one of his imaginings was coming true.

“You can never tell with the French,” the woman said. “They get things we don't. Maybe it'll turn out better in French.” She laughed a small laugh.

Matthews thought of what it meant for his book to “turn out” better in a language other than the one it was written in. It didn't seem very good. Though possibly it meant he was a genius.

“It's hard to think Dante could be better than in French, isn't it?” Miss Pitkin/Pittman said.

“I don't believe Dante was written in French,” Matthews said. He wondered what she looked like. He was staring out toward the line of thin woods behind which was another house and the big autumnal sun descending prettily.

“Well. Go to France and live it up.” She chuckled. She was typing something on a computer.
“Honi soit qui mal y pense.”

“I don't know what that means,” Matthews said. He knew very little French.

“It's something about Prince Charles. Something he said, supposedly. It probably means ‘Live it up.’”

“Maybe so,” Matthews said. “Maybe I'll live it up.” And then they said goodbye.

THAT NIGHT
, because of the cold and rain, and because Helen felt she might be coming down with something, they ate dinner in a dreary, nearly empty Japanese restaurant only a few doors down rue Boulard from the hotel. Matthews didn't like Japanese food, but Helen said she needed the important iron contained in raw fish to combat jet lag and to strengthen her in case she was catching a bug.

Over maguro and awabi, and Matthews’ sea bass tempura, Helen told him how interesting she thought it'd be to meet your translator, someone—so it seemed to her—who would have to know your book better than you did and who would give up so much time just for your (Matthews’) words. In advertising—her line of work—the trick was to get people to read things
without
knowing they were reading and to slip messages into their heads like spies behind enemy lines.

“It's their profession,” Matthews said, giving up in frustration on his chopsticks and opting for a fork. “People dedicate their lives to translating. It's not a sacrifice to them.”

“It's like a marriage,” Helen said. “At least it's like one of my marriages. Spend years trying to read the tea leaves about what somebody else might've meant. And I never did find out.” Helen was eating a big chunk of red tuna and dredging parts of it in soy sauce, using her chopsticks. Some kind of Japanese violin music was playing in the background.

“I don't think it's like that,” Matthews said.

“What
do
you think?” Helen said, chewing.

“I think it's inventing,” Matthews said. “I think it's using one book to invent another one. It's not just putting my book into a different language, like moving your clothes from one suitcase to another one. It's creative. And there's a lot of satisfaction accompanying it, is what I think.”

“Oh,” Helen said. “But you're pretty excited, aren't you?” She had lost interest. He had bored her. He was aware he
bored her all the time. Helen had a good, practical, earthy, goodhearted take on the world, and he frequently bored it into silence.

“I'm excited. I am.” He smiled at her.

Helen, however, wanted to plot out an itinerary for the next day's events. She had her Fodor's book and studied it on her side of the table while Matthews got through his broccoli and fish and sherbet. All the Japanese waiters and busboys seemed to be French, which felt peculiar. It was France, though. Everyone was French.