Read Online Women with Men by Richard Ford - Free Book Online

mirrors on the bedroom ceiling, just down rue Bonaparte from the Deux Magots, where Sartre was supposed to have liked to sit in the sun and think.
    Much of these first days—bright, soft mid-April days—Austin was immensely jet-lagged and exhausted and looked sick and haunted in the bathroom mirror. He didn't want to see Joséphine in this condition. He had been back home only three days, then in the space of one frenzied evening had had a big fight with his wife, raced to the airport, waited all night for a flight and taken a middle-row standby to Orly seated between two French children. It was crazy. A large part of this was definitely crazy. Probably he
was
having a nervous breakdown and was too out of his head even to have a hint about it, and eventually Barbara and a psychiatrist would have to bringhim home heavily sedated and in a straitjacket. But that would be later.
    “Where are you?” Barbara said coldly, when he'd finally reached her at home.
    “In Europe,” he said. “I'm staying a while.”
    “How nice for you,” she said. He could tell she didn't know what to think about any of this. It pleased him to baffle her, though he also knew it was childish.
    “Carruthers might call you,” he said.
    “I already talked to him,” Barbara said.
    “I'm sure he thinks I'm nuts.”
    “No. He doesn't think that,” she said, without offering what he did think.
    Outside the apartment the traffic on rue Bonaparte was noisy, so that he moved away from the window. The walls in the apartment were dark red-and-green suede, with glistening tubular-steel abstract wall hangings, thick black carpet and black velvet furniture. He had no idea who the owner was, though he realized just at that moment that in all probability the owner was dead.
    “Are you planning to file for divorce?” Austin said. It was the first time the word had ever been used, but it was inescapable, and he was remotely satisfied to be the first to put it into play.
    “Actually I don't know what I'm going to do,” Barbara said. “I don't have a husband now, apparently.”
    He almost blurted out that it was she who'd walked out, not him, she who'd actually caused this. But that wasn't entirely true, and in any case saying anything about it would start a conversation he didn't want to have and that no one
could
have at such long distance. It would just be bickering and complaining and anger. He realized all at once that he had nothingelse to say, and felt jittery. He'd only wished to announce that he was alive and not dead, but was now ready to hang up.
    “You're in France, aren't you?” Barbara said.
    “Yes,” Austin said. “That's right. Why?”
    “I supposed so.” She said this as though the thought of it disgusted her. “Why not, I guess. Right?”
    “Right,” he said.
    “So. Come home when you're tired of whatever it is, whatever her name is.” She said this very mildly.
    “Maybe I will,” Austin said.
    “Maybe I'll be waiting, too,” Barbara said. “Miracles still happen. I've had my eyes opened now, though.”
    “Great,” he said, and he started to say something else, but he thought he heard her hang up. “Hello?” he said. “Hello? Barbara, are you there?”
    “Oh, go to hell,” Barbara said, and then she did hang up.
    FOR TWO DAYS Austin took long, exhausting walks in completely arbitrary directions, surprising himself each time by where he turned up, then taking a cab back to his apartment. His instincts still seemed all wrong, which frustrated him. He thought the Place de la Concorde was farther away from this apartment than it was, and in the wrong direction. He couldn't always remember which way the river ran. And unhappily he kept passing the same streets and movie theater playing
Cinema
Paradiso
and the same news kiosk, over and over, as if he continually walked in a circle.
    He called his other friend, a man named Hank Bullard, who'd once worked for Lilienthal but had decided to start an air-conditioning business