Women with Men by Richard Ford

this fact even bothered him, since giventhe right circumstances he felt he could persuade anybody of anything—no matter what. He had no clear idea what this persuasive quality was, though Barbara had occasionally remarked on it, often with the unflattering implication that he didn't believe in very much, or at least not in enough. It always made him uneasy that this might be true, or at least be thought of as true.
    He
had
believed that he and Joséphine could have a different kind of relationship. Sexual, but not sexual at its heart. But rather, a new thing, founded on realities—the facts of his character, and hers. With Barbara, he'd felt he was just playing out the end of an old thing. Less real, somehow. Less mature. He could never really
love
Joséphine; that he had to concede, since in his deepest heart he loved only Barbara, for whatever that was worth. Yet he'd for a moment felt compelled by Joséphine, found her appealing, considered even the possibility of living with her for months or years. Anything was possible.
    But seeing her in her apartment today, looking just as he knew she would, being exactly the woman he expected her to be, had made him feel unexpectedly bleak. And he was savvy enough to know that if he felt bleak now, at the very beginning, he would feel only bleaker later, and that in all likelihood life would either slowly or quickly become a version of hell for which he would bear all responsibility.
    His thumb still vaguely ached. The women were laughing again on the tennis courts beyond the flowering rhododendrons. Austin could actually see a pair of woman's calves and tennis shoes, jumping from side to side as though their owner was striking a ball first forehand, then backhand, the little white feet dancing over the red surface. “
Arrête!
Stop!” a woman yelled, and sighed a loud sigh.
    Frenchwomen, Austin thought, all talked like children: in high-pitched, rapid-paced, displeasingly insistent voices,which most of the time said,
“Non, non, non, non, non,”
to something someone wanted, some likely as not innocent wish. He could hear Joséphine saying it, standing in the living room of her little apartment the only other time he'd visited there—a week ago—speaking on the phone to someone, spooling the white phone cord around her finger as she said into the receiver,
“Non, non, non, non, non, non. C'est incroyable. C'est in-croy-a-ble!”
It was terrifically annoying, though it amused him now to think of it—at a distance.
    Barbara had absolutely no use for Frenchwomen and made no bones about it. “Typical Froggies,” she'd remark after evenings with his French clients and their wives, and then act disgusted. That was probably what bothered him about Joséphine: that she seemed such a typical bourgeois little Frenchwoman, the kind Barbara would've disliked in a minute—intractable, preoccupied, entirely stuck in her French life, with no sense of the wider world, and possibly even ungenerous if you knew her very long (as her husband found out). Joséphine's problem, Austin thought, looking around for little Léo, was that she took everything inside her life too seriously. Her motherhood. Her husband's ludicrous book. Her boyfriend. Her bad luck. She looked at everything under a microscope, as if she were always waiting to find a mistake she could magnify big enough that she'd have no choice but to go on taking life too seriously. As if that's all adulthood was—seriousness, discipline. No fun. Life, Austin thought, had to be more lighthearted. Which was why he'd come here, why he'd cut himself loose—to enjoy life more. He admired himself for it. And because of that he didn't think he could become the savior in Joséphine's life. That would be a lifelong struggle, and a lifelong struggle wasn't what he wanted most in the world.
    When he looked around again, Léo was not where he'd been, standing dreamily to the side of the older boys, watchingtheir miniature cutters and galleons