Vintage Ford by Richard Ford Page B

be.
    In so many words, the Markhams are faced with a potentially calamitous careen down a slippery socio-emotio-economic slope, something they could never have imagined six months ago. Plus, I know they have begun to brood about all the other big missteps they’ve taken in the past, the high cost of these, and how they don’t want to make any more like that. As regret goes, theirs, of course, is not unusual in kind. Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.

THE WOMANIZER
    1
    Martin Austin turned up the tiny street—rue Sarrazin—at the head of which he hoped he would come to a larger one he knew, rue de Vaugirard, possibly, a street he could take all the way to Joséphine Belliard’s apartment by the Jardin du Luxembourg. He was on his way to sit with Joséphine’s son, Léo, while Joséphine visited her lawyers to sign papers divorcing her husband. Later in the evening, he was taking her for a romantic dinner. Joséphine’s husband, Bernard, was a cheap novelist who’d published a scandalous book in which Joséphine figured prominently; her name used, her parts indelicately described, her infidelity put on display in salacious detail. The book had recently reached the stores. Everybody she knew was reading it.
    â€œOkay. Maybe it is not so bad to
write
such a book,” Joséphine had said the first night Austin had met her, only the week before, when he had also taken her to dinner. “It is his choice to write it. I cause him unhappiness. But to publish this? In Paris? No.” She had shaken her head absolutely. “I’m sorry. This is too much. My husband—he is a shit. What can I do? I say good-bye to him.”
    Austin was from Chicago. He was married, with no children, and worked as a sales representative for an old family-owned company that sold expensive specially treated paper to foreign textbook publishers. He was forty-four and had worked for the same company, the Lilienthal Company of Winnetka, for fifteen years. He’d met Joséphine Belliard at a cocktail party given by a publisher he regularly called on, for one of its important authors. He’d been invited only as a courtesy, since his company’s paper had not been used for the author’s book, a sociological text that calculated the suburban loneliness of immigrant Arabs by the use of sophisticated differential equations. Austin’s French was lacking—he’d always been able to speak much more than he could understand—and as a consequence he’d stood by himself at the edge of the party, drinking champagne, smiling pleasantly and hoping he’d hear English spoken and find someone he could talk to instead of someone who would hear him speak a few words of French and then start a conversation he could never make sense of.
    Joséphine Belliard was a sub-editor at the publishing house. She was a small, slender dark-haired Frenchwoman in her thirties and of an odd beauty—a mouth slightly too wide and too thin; her chin soft, almost receding; but with a smooth caramel skin and dark eyes and dark eyebrows that Austin found appealing. He had caught a glimpse of her earlier in the day when he’d visited the publisher’s offices in the rue de Lille. She was sitting at her desk in a small, shadowy office, rapidly and animatedly speaking English into the telephone. He’d peered in as he passed but had forgotten about her until she came up to him at the party and smiled and asked in English how he liked Paris. Later that night they had gone to dinner, and at the end of the evening he’d taken her home in a taxi, then returned to his hotel alone and gone to sleep.
    The next day, though, he’d called her. He had nothing special in mind, just an aimless, angling call. Maybe