Mavis Gallant - The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

“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.”

She cut off the thread and went on, “Leget is young to be married. I mean, so definitely married.”

“There’s no age limit.” He was not yet divorced. He had jumped without a net — at his time of life! When he had talked gently to her in the old days, at the beginning, it had been about herself. Now, as he composed a new message in which he figured, she heard the word “compulsive,” or perhaps it was “impulsive”—she could not take it in. She felt utterly an impostor, sewing for a grown person who ought to look after his own clothes, as if sewing were a translation of devotion. He was unwell, of course, and out of his element. Inactive, he seemed to disappear. We are all selfish, she decided. She had been devoted to her aunt, but selfishness was a green fly, unobserved, the color of the leaf. She murmured, as she had many times in the past two days, “Don’t leave me,” but it was only a new exorcism. She had shed her talismans — oh, mistake! If he made love to her, that might be a way out of their predicament; it seemed, in fact, the only way. But when he crept onto the bed, behind her back, it was only because he’d had enough of sitting in the chair.

“I’m not going out,” she said suddenly. “Ring downstairs and see if they can send someone out to the café for you.”

She turned and saw that he was watching her closely. Just as his hand went to the telephone she said, “Darling, a hideous thing happened today. I didn’t tell you. When I was coming home after seeing Leget, the rain started pelting, so I stopped in a doorway, and some man, a sort of workingman, was there, in the dark. I had the feeling if I said ‘Partez!’ he would go, and I was ashamed to think it — to think he was inferior, I mean. All at once he moved between me and the street, and when I looked back I saw the building was empty — it was being torn down from the inside. The outside walls were all that was left. I got my back against the wall, and as he walked toward me I pushed him away with both hands, with all my might. He opened his mouth — it was full of blood. He sort of fell against me; some of it got on my coat. He staggered back and fell in a heap, and I left him. I walked away very slowly to show I wasn’t frightened, but I was so upset that I went in a café and had a drink and watched their television for about an hour. I was afraid if I came straight back to you I might be hysterical and it might bother you.”

“You probably aren’t hungry then, are you?” he said.

“Of course I’m hungry. I’m as hungry as you are. You know perfectly well I haven’t eaten the whole day.”

He seemed to take it for granted she was making this up — she could tell. He had known her to do it before, when she was anxious to change the meaning of a situation, but in those days she had been living with her aunt, and trying to make her life seem vivid and interesting to him.

“Why didn’t you shout, or call someone?”

“Because I wanted to show him I wasn’t afraid of him.”

“Weren’t you?”

“I wanted to kill him. I was murderous.”

“That’s understandable,” he said. “You’ll realize tomorrow, or when you wake up in the night, that you were frightened. What shall I ask them to fetch you from the café? A ham sandwich? Two sandwiches?”

“I don’t care.” She was bitterly offended, alone, astray, for he was making little of the danger she had been in. All he seemed to have on his mind was food. He spoke into the telephone, explained that he was very ill. Sandwiches, he said, and he knew the French for “corkscrew.”

She said, “What if it isn’t real? What if I made it up?”

“Even if you have, it’s frightened you. You’ve frightened yourself.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I wasn’t in on it.”

“Aren’t you frightened that I wanted to kill someone?”

“I haven’t got round to that,” he said. “If you invented it only to frighten me, I’ll try to respond.”

“All right. I made it up to worry you, let’s say. But there’s blood on the sleeve of my coat. As for you, you only got this lumbago because you don’t want us to be happy. Now that your wife knows, you don’t enjoy making love to me.”

“Be an angel,” he said. “Don’t say too much more now.”

“As long as Aunt Freda had me,” she said, “you had me and all the rest. She kept me for you. And she didn’t mind your being married, because it meant I’d never leave her. There, that’s what I think. Do you want to go back? Aunt Freda said men never leave home unless their wives are hell.”

“My wife wasn’t hell.”

“Then there’s no explanation, is there?”

“There bloody well is, and you know what it is.”

“We’re like children, aren’t we?” she said. “In a way?”

Knowing more than she did about children, he said, sadly, “No, not at all.”

She started to answer, “If anything goes wrong now, I suppose I have no one to blame but myself,” which came out, without her meaning it that way, “no one to love but myself.”

She was frightened, as he had predicted, in the night. She supposed that the man who had come out of the shadows of the courtyard and was now blocking her way to the street intended to kill her. “I don’t need to die,” she said, meaning that she did not want to be transformed; that life was manageable. He stood with his arms spread, hands dangling, as though imitating a clumsy bird. “Oh, look,” she cried. “It isn’t fair!” for the bus she wanted slipped away from the curb. No one could see her in here, and there was nothing left of the queue she had abandoned so as to shelter from the rain. “I’m late as it is,” she said. It seemed her only grievance.

She supposed he knew no English. “If only I’d said ‘Get out’ the instant I saw you,” she raged at him. “You’d have gone. You’d have respected the tone. All you deserve from me is commands. ‘Get out,’ I ought to have said. ‘Get out!’ ”