Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

“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.”