The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (68 page)

One dawn she knew by Roy’s breathing that he was awake. Every muscle was taut as he pulled away, as if to touch her was defilement. No use saying what they had been like not long before, because he could not remember. She was a disgusting object because of a cracked ankle, because she had drunk too much and been sick behind a chapel, and because she had led an expedition to look at Jesus. She lay thinking it over until the dawn birds stopped and then she sat up on the edge of the bed, feeling absolutely out of place because she was undressed. She pulled clothes on as fast as she could and packed whatever seemed important. After she had pushed her
suitcase out the door, she remembered the wooden bowls and the poster. These she took along the path and threw in the Reeves’ foul incinerator, as if to get rid of all traces of witchery, goodness, and love. She realized she was leaving, a decision as final and as stunning as her having crossed the promenade in Nice with Roy’s hand on her arm.

She said through the white netting over the door, “I’m sorry, Roy.” It was not enough; she added, “I’m sorry I don’t understand you more.” The stillness worried her. She limped near and bent over him. He was holding his breath, like a child in temper. She said softly, “I could stay a bit longer.” No answer. She said, “Of course, my foot will get better, but then you might find something else the matter with me.” Still no answer, except that he began breathing. Nothing was wrong except that he was cruel, lunatic, Fascist—No, not even that. Nothing was wrong except that he did not love her. That was all.

She lugged her suitcase as far as the road and sat down beside it. Overnight a pocket of liquid the size of a lemon had formed near the anklebone. Her father would say it was all her own fault again. Why? Was it Sarah’s fault that she had all this loving capital to invest? What was she supposed to do with it? Even if she always ended up sitting outside a gate somewhere, was she any the worse for it? The only thing wrong now was the pain she felt, not of her ankle but in her stomach. Her stomach felt as if it was filled up with old oyster shells. Yes, a load of old, ugly, used-up shells was what she had for stuffing. She had to take care not to breathe too deeply, because the shells scratched. In her research for Professor Downcast she had learned that one could be alcoholic, crippled, afraid of dying and of being poor, and she knew these things waited for everyone, even Sarah; but nothing had warned her that one day she would not be loved. That was the meaning of “less privileged.” There was no other.

Now that she had vanished, Roy would probably get up, and shave, and stroll across to the Reeves, and share a good old fry-up. Then, his assurance regained, he would start prowling the bars and beaches, wearing worn immaculate whites, looking for a new, unblemished story. He would repeat the first soft words, “Don’t be frightened,” the charm, the gestures, the rituals, and the warning “It won’t always be lovely.” She saw him out in the open, in her remembered primrose light, before he was trapped in the tunnel again and had to play at death. “Roy’s new pickup,” the Reeves would bawl at each other. “I said, Roy’s new one … he hardly knows how to get rid of her.”

At that, Sarah opened her mouth and gave a great sobbing cry; only one, but it must have carried, for next thing she heard was the Reeves’ door, and, turning, she saw Tim in a dressing gown, followed by Meg in her parachute of a robe. Sarah stood up to face them. The sun was on her back. She clutched the iron bars of the gate because she had to stand like a stork again. From their side of it, Tim looked down at her suitcase. He said, “Do you want—are you waiting to be driven somewhere?”

“To the airport, if you feel like taking me. Otherwise I’ll hitch.”

“Oh, please don’t do that!” He seemed afraid of another outburst from her—something low-pitched and insulting this time.

“Come in this minute,” said Meg. “I don’t know what you are up to, but we do have neighbors, you know.”

“Why should I care?” said Sarah. “They aren’t my neighbors.”

“You
are
a little coward,” said Meg. “Running away only because …” There were so many reasons that of course she hesitated.

Without unkind intention Sarah said the worst thing: “It’s just that I’m too young for all of you.”

Meg’s hand crept between the bars and around her wrist. “Somebody had to be born before you, Sarah,” she said, and unlocked her hand and turned back to the house. “Yes, boys, dear boys, here I am,” she called.

Tim said, “Would you like—let me see—would you like something to eat or drink?” It seemed natural for him to talk through bars.

“I can’t stay in the same bed with someone who doesn’t care,” said Sarah, beginning to cry. “It isn’t right.”

“It is what most people do,” said Tim. “Meg has the dogs, and her television. She has everything. We haven’t often lived together. We gradually stopped. When did we last live together? When we went home once for the motor show.” She finally grasped what he meant by “live together.” Tim said kindly, “Look, I don’t mean to pry, but you didn’t take old Roy too much to heart, did you? He wasn’t what you might call the love of your life?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Dear, dear,” said Tim, as if someone had been spreading bad news. He seemed so much more feminine than his wife; his hands were powdery—they seemed dipped in talcum. His eyes were embedded in a little volcano of wrinkles that gave him in full sunlight the look of a lizard. A white lizard, Sarah decided. “This has affected Meg,” he said. “The violence of it. We
shall talk it over for a long time. Well. You have so much more time. You will bury all of us.” His last words were loud and sudden, almost a squawk, because Meg, light of tread and silent on her feet, had come up behind him. She wore her straw hat and carried her morning glass of gin and orange juice.

“Sarah? She’ll bury you,” said Meg. “Fetch the car, Tim, and take Sarah somewhere. Come along. Get to Friday. Tim.” He turned. “Dress first,” she said.

The sun which had turned Tim into a white lizard now revealed a glassy stain on Meg’s cheek, half under her hair. Sarah’s attention jumped like a child’s. She said, “Something’s bitten you. Look. Something poisonous.”

Meg moved her head and the poisoned bite vanished under the shade of her hat. “Observant. Tim has never noticed. Neither has Roy. It is only a small malignant thing,” she said indifferently. “I’ve been going to the hospital in Nice twice a week for treatment. They burned it—that’s the reason for the scar.”

“Oh, Meg,” said Sarah, drawn round the gate. “Nobody knew. That was why you went to Nice. I saw you on the bus.”

“I saw you,” said Meg, “but why talk when you needn’t? I get plenty of talk at home. May I ask where you are going?”

“I’m going to the airport, and I’ll sit there till they get me on a plane.”

“Well, Sarah, you may be sitting for some time, but I know you know what you are doing,” said Meg. “I am minding the summer heat this year. I feel that soon I won’t be able to stand it anymore. When Tim’s gone I won’t ever marry again. I’ll look for some woman to share expenses. If you ever want to come back for a holiday, Sarah, you have only to let me know.”

And so Tim, the battery of his car leaking its lifeblood all over French roads, drove Sarah down to Nice and along to the airport. Loyal to the Reeve standards, he did not once glance at the sea. As for Sarah, she sat beside him crying quietly, first over Meg, then over herself, because she thought she had spent all her capital on Roy and would never love anyone again. She looked for the restaurant with the blue tablecloths, and for the beach where they had sat talking for a night, but she could not find them; there were dozens of tables and awnings and beaches, all more or less alike.

“You’ll be all right?” said Tim. He wanted her to say yes, of course.

She said, “Tim, Roy needs help.”

He did not know her euphemisms any more than she understood his. He said, “Help to do what?”

“Roy is unhappy and he doesn’t know what he wants. If you’re over forty and you don’t know what you want, well, I guess someone should tell you.”

“My dear Sarah,” said the old man, “that is an unkind thing to say about a friend we have confidence in.”

She said quickly, “Don’t you see, before he had a life that suited him, inspecting people in jails. They didn’t seem like people
or
jails. It kept him happy, it balanced …” Suddenly she gave a great shiver in the heat of the morning and heard Lisbet laugh and say, “Someone’s walking on your grave.” She went on, “For example, he won’t eat.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” cried Tim, understanding something at last. “Meg will see that he eats.” Right to the end, everyone was at cross-purposes. “Think of it this way,” said Tim. “You had to go home sometime.”

“Not till September.”

“Well, look on the happy side. Old Roy … matrimony. You might not enjoy it, you know, unless you met someone like Meg.” He obviously had no idea what he was saying anymore, and so she gave up talking until he set her down at the departures gate. Then he said, “Good luck to you, child,” and drove away looking indescribably happy.

Sarah kept for a long time the picture of Judas with his guts spilling and with his soul (a shrimp of a man, a lesser Judas) reaching out for the Devil. It should have signified Roy, or even Lisbet, but oddly enough it was she, the victim, who felt guilty and maimed. Still, she was out of the tunnel. Unlike Judas she was alive, and that was something. She was so much younger than all those other people: As Tim had said, she would bury them all. She tacked the Judas card over a map of the world on a wall of her room. Plucked from its origins it began to flower from Sarah’s; here was an image that might have followed her from the nursery. It was someone’s photo, a family likeness, that could bear no taint of pain or disaster. One day she took the card down, turned it over, and addressed it to a man she was after. He was too poor to invite her anywhere and seemed too shy to make a move. He was also in terrible trouble—back taxes, ex-wife seizing his salary. He had been hounded from California to Canada for his political beliefs. She was in love with his mystery, his hardships, and the death of Trotsky. She wrote, “This person must have eaten my cooking. Others have risked it so
please come to dinner on Friday, Sarah.” She looked at the words for seconds before hearing another voice. Then she remembered where the card was from, and she understood what the entire message was about. She could have changed it, but it was too late to change anything much. She was more of an
amoureuse
than a psycho-anything, she would never use up her capital, and some summer or other would always be walking on her grave.

O
ne of Irina’s grandsons, nicknamed Riri, was sent to her at Christmas. His mother was going into hospital, but nobody told him that. The real cause of his visit was that since Irina had become a widow her children worried about her being alone. The children, as Irina would call them forever, were married and in their thirties and forties. They did not think they were like other people, because their father had been a powerful old man. He was a Swiss writer, Richard Notte. They carried his reputation and the memory of his puritan equity like an immense jar filled with water of which they had been told not to spill a drop. They loved their mother, but they had never needed to think about her until now. They had never fretted about which way her shadow might fall, and whether to stay in the shade or get out by being eccentric and bold. There were two sons and three daughters, with fourteen children among them. Only Riri was an only child. The girls had married an industrial designer, a Lutheran minister (perhaps an insolent move, after all, for the daughter of a militant atheist), and an art historian in Paris. One boy had become a banker and the other a lecturer on Germanic musical tradition. These were the crushed sons and loyal daughters to whom Irina had been faithful, whose pictures had traveled with her and lived beside her bed.

Few of Notte’s obituaries had even mentioned a family. Some of his literary acquaintances were surprised to learn there had been any children at all, though everyone paid homage to the soft, quiet wife to whom he had dedicated his books, the subject of his first rapturous poems. These poems, conventional verse for the most part, seldom translated out of German except by unpoetical research scholars, were thought to be the work of his
youth. Actually, Notte was forty when he finally married, and Irina barely nineteen. The obituaries called Notte the last of a breed, the end of a Tolstoyan line of moral lightning rods—an extinction which was probably hard on those writers who came after him, and still harder on his children. However, even to his family the old man had appeared to be the very archetype of a respected European novelist—prophet, dissuader, despairingly opposed to evil, crack-voiced after having made so many pronouncements. Otherwise, he was not all that typical as a Swiss or as a Western, liberal, Protestant European, for he neither saved, nor invested, nor hid, nor disguised his material returns.

“What good is money, except to give away?” he often said. He had a wife, five children, and an old secretary who had turned into a dependent. It was true that he claimed next to nothing for himself. He rented shabby, ramshackle houses impossible to heat or even to clean. Owning was against his convictions, and he did not want to be tied to a gate called home. His room was furnished with a cot, a lamp, a desk, two chairs, a map of the world, a small bookshelf—no more, not even carpets or curtains. Like his family, he wore thick sweaters indoors as out, and crouched over inadequate electric fires. He seldom ate meat—though he did not deprive his children—and drank water with his meals. He had married once—once and for all. He could on occasion enjoy wine and praise and restaurants and good-looking women, but these festive outbreaks were on the rim of his real life, as remote from his children—as strange and as distorted to them
—
as some other country’s colonial wars. He grew old early, as if he expected old age to suit him. By sixty, his eyes were sunk in pockets of lizard skin. His hair became bleached and lustrous, like the scrap of wedding dress Irina kept in a jeweler’s box. He was photographed wearing a dark suit and a woman’s plaid shawl—he was always cold by then, even in summer—and with a rakish felt hat shading half his face. His wife still let a few photographers in, at the end—but not many. Her murmured “He is working” had for decades been a double lock. He was as strong as Rasputin, his enemies said; he went on writing and talking and traveling until he positively could not focus his eyes or be helped aboard a train. Nearly to the last, he and Irina swung off on their seasonal cycle of journeys to Venice, to Rome, to cities where their married children lived, to Liège and Oxford for awards and honors. His place in a hotel dining room was recognizable from the door because of the pills, drops, and powders lined up to the width of a dinner plate. Notte’s hypochondria had been known and gently caricatured for years. His sons,
between them, had now bought up most of the original drawings: Notte, in infant’s clothing, downing his medicine like a man (he had missed the Nobel); Notte quarreling with Aragon and throwing up Surrealism; a grim female figure called “Existentialism” taking his pulse; Notte catching Asian flu on a cultural trip to Peking. During the final months of his life his children noticed that their mother had begun acquiring medicines of her own, as if hoping by means of mirror-magic to draw his ailments into herself.