The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (45 page)

W
ithout the slightest regard for her feelings or the importance of this day, he had said, “Bring back a sandwich or some bread and pâté, will you, anything you see—oh, and the English papers.” He spoke as if she were going out on a common errand or an ordinary walk—to look at the Eiffel Tower, for instance. A telephone dangled on the wall just above his head; all he had to do was reach. It was true that her hotel gave no meals except breakfast, but he might have made a show of trying. He lay on the bed and watched her preparing for the interview. Her face in the bathroom mirror seemed frightened and small. She gave herself eyes and a mouth, and with them an air of decision. Knowing he was looking on made her jumpy; she kicked the bathroom door shut, but then, as though fearing a reprimand, opened it gently.

He took no notice, no more than her aunt had ever taken of her tantrums, and when she came, repentant, tearful almost, to kiss him good-bye, he simply held out the three postcards he had been writing—identical views of the Seine for his children in England. How could he? There was only one reason—he was evil and jealous and trying to call thunderbolts down on her head. An old notion of economy prevented her from throwing the cards out the window—they were stamped, and stamps seemed for some reason more precious than coins. “I don’t
want
them,” she said. Her hand struck nervously on the bottle of wine beside the bed.

“No, that’s dangerous,” he said quickly, thinking he saw what she was up to. She was something of a thrower, not at him, but away from him, and always with the same intention—to make him see he had, in some way, slighted her. As he might have done with a frantic puppy, he diverted her with a pack of cigarettes and the corkscrew.

“I don’t want them, leave me alone!” she cried, and flung them out the open window into the court. “This is your fault,” she said, “and now you’ve got nothing to smoke.” But he had a whole carton of cigarettes, bought on the plane, the day before.

He had to console her. “I know,” he said, “I know. But do bring another corkscrew, will you? I really can’t use my teeth.”

Oh, she would pay him out! For this, and for the past, and for failing to see her as she was.

Hours later he was exactly as she had left him—reading, under a torn red lampshade, on the ashy bed. The room smelled of smoke and hot iron radiators. You would not have known that a woman had ever lived in it. The first thing she did was open the window, but the air was cold and the rain too noisy, and she had to close it again. He did not say, “Oh, it’s you,” or “There you are,” or anything that might infuriate her and set her off again. He said, as if he remembered what her day had been about, “How did it go?”

She had no desire except to win his praise. “Leget wants me,” she said. “I don’t mean for this film, but another next summer. He’s getting me a teacher for French and a teacher only for French diction. What do you think of
that?
He said it was a pity I had spoken English all my life, because it’s so bad for the teeth. Funny that Aunt Freda never thought of it—she was so careful about most things.”

“You could hardly have expected her to bring you up in a foreign language,” he said. “She was English. Millions of people speak English.”

“Yes, and look at them!” She had never heard about the effects of English until today, but it was as if she had known it forever. She could see millions and millions of English-speaking people—black, Asian, and white—each with a misshapen upper jaw. Like her Aunt Freda, he had never been concerned. She gave him a look of slight pity. “Well, it’s happened,” she went on. “I shall be working in Paris, really working, and with
him.”
She untied her damp head scarf and unbuttoned her coat. “When I am R and F that coat will be lined with mink,” she said. “Coat sixteen guineas, lining six thousand.” R and F meant “rich and famous.” His response was usually “When I am old and ill and poor …” She remembered that he was ill, and she had not brought him his sandwich. She dropped on her knees beside the bed. “Are you all right? Feeling better?” The poor man lay there with an attack of lumbago—at least she supposed that was what it was. He had never
been unwell before, not for a second. Perhaps he had put something out of joint carrying his things at the airport, but that seemed unlikely. He had come with just one small case and a typewriter, as if he were meeting her for the weekend instead of for life.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Tell me about Leget.”

She stammered, “He thinks I’ve got … something. A presence. He said that the minute he saw me, when I walked in.… He said he had been hoping to talk to me, alone—to talk about me.”

“Clever man,” he said. “I don’t blame him. I know what he means—I saw it when you were seventeen. It’s more than a face, more than drive. I thought then that I’d never been close to it before.”

The child in her, told it was singular, felt a rush of love. She said with new urgency, “Are you better? Oh, I forgot to say … he asked who had brought me up. I told him I had no parents. He asked who was, well,
responsible
for me.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Of course. I said, my aunt.”

“Your aunt! Did you happen to mention she was dead?”

“I told him she’d died reaching for a drink, and how she was born pickled, and how her mind had never been original or sharp, but I loved her and owed her so much. She taught me how to sit and walk and move. Leget said, ‘Yes, but your general culture’—don’t make a face, darling, it’s not the same in French. I told him it was just old detective stories and that the time before I was born seemed a lovely summer day full of detectives rushing to save pretty girls. I never thought about love. I used to just think, When I meet the nice detective …”

He had heard this many times. “Let me know when you do meet him,” he said.

“Perhaps you won’t like me when I’m R and F,” she said. “So it won’t matter what I tell you. Perhaps you’d rather I just stayed what you called me once, Aunt Freda’s captive niece. You’re sick of hearing about her. You’re already sick of Leget, and I’m absolutely certain you’re sick of me.”

He got up by rolling on his side and gripping the edge of the mattress. He was dressed except for his trousers, and in the abjection of pain did not mind looking foolish. He took his jacket off and as he did so heard the lining tear. He stood looking at the bookshelf nailed beside the bed, giving his attention to the tattered Penguins, and
Sélections du Reader’s Digest
, out of which Gitta proposed to improve her French. He looked at the Beaujolais
he could not open, and the empty bottle of Haig. He said, and meant it now, “I am old and ill and poor.” He was thirty-nine. What seems to the traveler ten or twenty years, he remembered, may in real time be ten thousand. In the nineteen years Gitta will have to travel before she overtakes me—but she never will, not unless the lumbago turns out to be fatal. He was old and ill, and he would be poor because he would give everything from now on to his wife and children. He would never buy drink again except in duty-free airport shops. “I’ll have to do a hell of a lot of traveling,” he remarked.

“What? Oh, you’re being silly. Please sit down. Or lie down. Or take something.”

“It’s the same if I stand.” He began to explain that the aspirin he had swallowed earlier would not dissolve because he had nothing to wash it down with; and that pain was lodged like fishhooks beneath the skin. “But I’ll take one more aspirin,” he said, to appease Gitta rather than the pain.

She was barely listening, looking intently now at the dark rain, or at her face on the window. She must have been recalling her triumph—her conquest. Turning to him slowly she said, “Why do you have your shirt tucked in that way? It looks funny.” She added, “I’ve never seen anyone else do that.”

“You’ve been knocking around with a lot of damn foreigners in Paris,” he said. “Don’t even know how to keep their clothes on.”

She came to him, awkwardly for a girl who had been taught how to move, and touched his head for fever. “It’s nothing. You aren’t sick at all.” Pain stuck to fragrance like glue; the scent of her hand became a source of uneasiness. Had he really expected to keep her to himself? He knew of one anguish, and that was the separation from his children; but Gitta had been a child, and more—they had been lovers since she was seventeen. He found the aspirin in an open suitcase and hobbled to the bathroom. Clutching the basin, he stood on one foot and flexed his knee.

“Is it that bad?” she said, without sympathy because his forehead was cool. “You’re making a horrible face.” He looked, as if he had only one minute left, at the walls, which seemed newly papered, and the white ceiling.

“I’m trying out the nerve,” he said, as though that meant anything. He reached up to the light over the mirror and he thought the nerve had frayed and split. He imagined a ragged sort of string tied round his spine. “It’s more like needles and pins now,” he presently said.

“I thought men never had pains,” she said. “Only neurotic women.” He
could not guess the direction of her thoughts, for their knowledge of each other was intimate, not general. “Who gave you the electric toothbrush?” she asked.

“No one. I bought it.”

“What did you want a thing like that for?” He realized that she thought she had caught him out and that his wife had given it to him—probably for Father’s Day, with a ribbon around it. She was still thin-skinned about his family, even now, after he had proved there was nothing but her. His children were altogether taboo; their very names carried misfortune. Giving her the cards to post—his attempt to bring about a casual order—must have seemed such a violation of safety that she was probably amazed at finding them both here, intact.

He started to answer but the habit of clandestine holidays cut him short, for they heard a high-pitched exchange in English outside the door: “… sent in an unsealed envelope to save sixpence.” “I should have torn it up.” “So I did.”

She smiled at him. The day was still safe; the complicity between them had from the beginning been as important as love.

Of course she needed him, she said to herself. Without him, she would never have known about love, only about gratitude, affection, claustrophobia. She sat on the bed and spread the torn coat on her knee. The lining was rent under the arm; with difficulty she joined the ragged seams. The material seemed stiff and old, and it was unpleasant to handle. Intellectual sweat, she said deep within her mind.

“The first time you saw me with Aunt Freda you said, ‘She is using you as
a femme de charme,’
remember? But she had been kind, as always, and she’d bought me a sumptuous velvet skirt and a leather jacket, and I didn’t see why I couldn’t wear them together. I must have been a sight. I thought all
you
could see were my bitten nails.”

“You and your aunt were too tied up,” he said. “Too dependent on each other.” He sounded as if the aunt were to blame for a flaw in Gitta; at least that was the meaning she selected. She could have straightened out the right and wrong of it, but what would their lives become, with so many explanations? She imagined them, a worn-out old couple in a traveler’s climate, not speaking much—explanations having devoured conversation long ago—pretending to be all right when anyone looked at them. “Women are bad for each other,” he said. She thought he was describing her life without him,
but perhaps it was another woman’s—he’d had nothing but daughters. She felt, obscurely, that a searing discussion had taken place.

Settling into an armchair he groaned sincerely. He said, “Well, you liked old Leget. That’s a good thing.”

She looked up and said simply, “I told you. I worship him. I would do anything he asked.”

“Don’t ever tell him that.”

“I mean it. I worshiped his films before I ever knew you knew him. It’s talent I love. I’d do anything.”

“So you said. What
has
he asked you to do?”

“It’s just one scene, to tell you the truth. I … I sort of sleepwalk through American Express. Don’t laugh.
Stop
it! I don’t mean walking in my sleep. You know how sometimes you feel no one can see you, because you are so intent—looking for a friend, let’s say—and suddenly you wake up and notice everybody staring? I can’t explain it the way he does. Actually, I don’t need to say anything. I just am. I exist. I’m me, Gitta.”

“You aren’t you if you don’t open your mouth. Also, if you don’t talk, it means he pays you a good deal less.”

“Don’t be so small. You know very well I am paid and how much. It doesn’t come out of his pocket. I’m not some little tart he picked up in the Café Select.”

“I’m going to be sorry I introduced you to Leget,” he said. “You’re doting.”

“He doesn’t care for women,” she said primly, and, as if one statement completed the other, “He has his wife.”

She wondered if he was trying to tell her she owed him the interview. But she remembered all that she owed him, particularly now, when he had given up everything for her—his children, and the room he was used to working in, and his wife answering the telephone (she could imagine no other use for her), and perhaps his job. He might go into a news agency here, but it was a comedown. That might be the greatest loss of all; it was the only one he mentioned. But she was astute enough at times to guess he might not speak of what bothered him most. How could she match his sacrifice? She had rid herself of everything that might divert a scrap of her love; she had thrown away a small rabbit with nylon fur, a bracelet made of painted wooden links, both highly charged with the powers of fortune. It was not enough; she was frightened without her talismans, and they
were still not on an equal footing. She often said to him now, “Never leave me.”