Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Odile looked at Carol, as if she knew what she was thinking. “Poor Felix doesn’t belong in this world,” she said. “He should have been killed at the end of the war. Instead of that, every year he gets older. In a month, he will be twenty-two.”

But Odile was over thirty. Carol found the gap between their ages distasteful, and thought it indelicate of Odile to stress it. Felix, who had been ineffectively rinsing the plastic bowls in cold water, now poured the coffee out. He pushed one of the bowls toward Odile; then he suddenly took her hand and, turning it over, kissed the palm. “ Why should I have been killed?” he said.

Carol, breathless with embarrassment, looked at the brick wall of the court. She twisted her fingers together until they hurt. How can they act like this in front of me, she thought, and in such a dirty room? The thought that they might be in love entered her head for the first time, and it made her ill. Felix, smiling, gave her a bowl of coffee, and she took it without meeting his eyes. He sat down on the bed beside Odile and said happily, “I’m glad you came. You both look beautiful.”

Carol glanced at Odile, thinking, Not beautiful, not by any stretch of good manners. “French girls are all attractive,” she said politely.

“Most of them are frights,” said Felix. No one disputed it, and no one but Carol appeared distressed by the abrupt termination of the conversation. She cast about for something to say, but Odile put her bowl on the floor, said again that she was tired, lay back, and seemed all at once to fall asleep.

Felix looked at her. “She really can shut out the world whenever she wants to,” he said, suggesting to Carol’s startled ears that he was quite accustomed to seeing her fall asleep. Of course, she might have guessed, but why should Felix make it so obvious? She felt ashamed of the way she had worried about Felix, and the way she had run after Odile, wanting to know her family. This was all it had come to, this dirty room. Howard was right, she thought. It doesn’t pay.

At the same time, she was perplexed at the intimacy in which she and Felix now found themselves. She would have been more at ease alone in a room with him than with Odile beside him asleep on his bed.

“I must go,” she said nervously.

“Oh, yes,” said Felix, not stopping her.

“But I can’t find my way back alone.” She felt as if she might cry.

“There are taxis,” he said vaguely. “But I can take you to the Métro, if you like.” He buttoned his shirt and looked around for a jacket, making no move to waken Odile.

“Should we leave her here?” said Carol. “Shouldn’t I say good-bye?”

He looked surprised. “I wouldn’t think of disturbing her,” he said. “If she’s asleep, then she must be tired.” And to this Carol could think of nothing to say.

He followed her down the staircase and into the street, dark now, with stripes of neon to mark the cafés. They said little, and because she was afraid of the dark and the Arabs, Carol walked close beside him. On the Boulevard de Grenelle, Felix stopped at the entrance to the Métro.

“Here,” he said. “Up those steps. It takes you right over to Passy.”

She looked at him, feeling this parting was not enough. She had criticized him to Howard and taught herself to ignore him, but here, in a neighborhood where she could not so much as find her way, she felt more than ever imprisoned in the walls of her shyness, unable to say, “Thank you,” or “Thanks for the coffee,” or anything perfunctory and reasonable. She had an inexplicable and uneasy feeling that something had ended for her, and that she would never see Felix, or even Odile, again.

Felix caught her look, or seemed to. He looked around, distressed, at the Bar des Sportifs, and the sportifs inside it, and said, “If you would lend me a little money, I could buy you a drink before you go.”

His unabashed cadging restored her at once. “I haven’t time for a drink,” she said, all briskness now, as if he had with a little click dropped into the right slot. “But if you’ll promise to take Odile to dinner, I’ll lend you two thousand francs.”

“Fine,” said Felix. He watched her take the money from her purse, accepted it without embarrassment, and put it in the pocket of his jacket.

“Take her for a nice dinner somewhere,” Carol repeated.

“Of course.”

“Oh!” He exasperated her. “Why don’t you act like other people?” she cried. “You can’t live like this all the time. You could go to America. Mr. Mitchell would help you. I know he would. He’d vouch for you, for a visa, if I asked him to.”

“And Odile? Would Mr. Mitchell vouch for Odile too?”

She glanced at him, startled. When Felix was twenty-five, Odile would be nearly forty. Surely he had thought of this? “She could go, too,” she said, and added, “I suppose.”

“And what would we do in America?” He rocked back and forth on his heels, smiling.

“You could work,” she said sharply. She could not help adding, like a scold, “For once in your life.”

“As cook and butler,” said Felix thoughtfully, and began to laugh. “No, don’t be angry,” he said, putting out his hand. “One has to wait so long for American papers. I know, I used to do it. To sit there all day and wait, or stand in the queue — how could Odile do it? She has her job to attend to. She has to help her family.”

“In America,” said Carol, “she would make more money, she could help them even more.” But she could not see clearly the picture of Felix and Odile combining their salaries in a neat little apartment and faithfully remitting a portion to France. She could not imagine what on earth Felix would do for a living. Perhaps he and Odile would get married; something told her they would not. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s really your own business. I shouldn’t have said anything at all.” She moved away, but Felix took her hand and held it.

“You mean so well,” he said. “Odile is right, you know. I ought to have been killed, or at least disappeared. No one knows what to do with me or where I fit. As for Odile, her whole family is overdue. But we’re not — how does it go in American papers, under the photographs? — ’Happy Europeans find new life away from old cares.’ We’re not that, either.”

“I suppose not. I don’t know.” She realized all at once how absurd they must look, standing under the Métro tracks, holding hands. Passersby looked at them, sympathetic.

“You shouldn’t go this way, looking so hurt and serious,” he said. “You’re so nice. You mean so well. Odile loves you.”

Her heart leaped as if he, Felix, had said he loved her. But no, she corrected herself. Not Felix but some other man, some wonderful person who did not exist.

Odile loved her. Her hand in his, she remembered how he had kissed Odile’s palm, and she felt on her own palm the pressure of a kiss; but not from Felix. Perhaps, she thought, what she felt was the weight of his love for Odile, from which she was excluded, and to which Felix now politely and kindly wished to draw her, as if his and Odile’s ability to love was their only hospitality, their only way of paying debts. For a moment, standing under the noisy trains on the dark, dusty boulevard, she felt that she had at last opened the right door, turned down the right street, glimpsed the vision toward which she had struggled on winter evenings when, standing on the staircase, she had wanted to be enchanted with Paris and to be in love with Howard.

But that such a vision could come from Felix and Odile was impossible. For a moment she had been close to tears, like the Christmas evening when she found the mistletoe. But she remembered in time what Felix was — a hopeless parasite. And Odile was silly and immoral and old enough to know better. And they were not married and never would be, and they spent heaven only knew how many hours in that terrible room in a slummy quarter of Paris.