Mavis Gallant - The Cost of Living - Early and Uncollected Stories

Thinking this as he walked, turning it over and over, he had noticed a small crowd outside the Museum of Modern Art and, advancing, he saw that they were looking at his wife who stood, posed, against the glass doors. She was wearing a thin black dress and a small hat. She must be frozen, Charles thought, for it was a cold day and many of the women in the crowd held their collars close to their faces. But there was not a shiver, not a movement, as she stood, looking through her black-gloved fingers in the curious way the photographer had caused her to remain. The photographer said something, and she dropped one arm. She paid no attention to the crowd, and although she stared, one would have said, straight into her husband’s face, she appeared not to see him. She looked, he thought, gaunt and tired. The shadow under her cheekbone, which photographed as a clean curve, seemed, under the hard winter sun, the concavity of illness. The eye framed by her fingers looked vampish and absurd, the over-darkened eye of silent films.

He thought all this without criticism, for he greatly admired his wife, and he was proud of her impersonal beauty when he saw it on the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar . She was the most physically disciplined human being he had ever known. She rose each morning at half-past six and went off to work, her thin body supplied with nothing more than coffee. At noon she ate cottage cheese and a raw tomato. For dinner she allowed herself a steak and ate it scrupulously to the last bite, without any visible enjoyment. Her consumption of this slice of meat had something about it that was ritualistic and cannibalistic, and it had, for a while, interfered with Charles’s enjoyment of his own food.

Her moral discipline was just as pronounced. There was not an appetite of mind or spirit she could not control as she controlled the limbs of her body before a camera. Once, when she had been interviewed for a magazine that described the home lives of fashion models, she had said, in Charles’s hearing: “I’m always too cold in winter and too hot in summer. I always have a slight headache. I’m always just a little bit hungry.” He had been surprised to hear her say this. She had never volunteered anything to him that would suggest she found her métier disagreeable. Her edginess, usually, was caused by other agents: the telephone, servants, people who drank too much, parties that went on too long, and noise of any kind. She groomed herself with the absorbed concentration of a cat; and she often sat before a mirror, chin on hand, contemplating, quite objectively, her own image. She was self-contained, and she had few friends and almost no enemies. She never gossiped, and it was doubtful if she had, even in fancy, been unfaithful to her husband. Charles, indeed, had long ceased even to wonder about this.

So, thought Charles, summing up this picture as he walked back to his office, it was not from her mother that Joyce had inherited this unexpected streak of waywardness. Of course, one could not compare the two: Joyce was still a child, in a sense. She was gauche and untidy. She talked, it seemed to Charles, about nothing; and she ate far too many sweets, although Marian was surprisingly indulgent about this.

“It’s up to you. You’re old enough to know what you want to look like,” she would say, not unkindly, picking up from the floor the empty wrapper of a bar of chocolate. Joyce ate candy in her room at night, after the light was put out. She had done this from the time she was old enough to have her own allowance. It was difficult for Charles to picture her before her adolescence. When he thought of her as a small child, it was in terms of photographs. There was a photograph of her at four, in a sun suit, blinking into the sun from a sandbox. It was an enlarged snapshot which Marian had had framed and kept on her dressing table. There were baby pictures, of course, the face shadowed by the hood of a pram, or looking up blankly from a tasseled cushion. There was the far-fetched photograph from the mother-and-daughter series that had appeared in a fashion magazine, and which Charles kept on his desk, although the child in the picture was not remotely like his daughter.

He tried to remember Joyce as a baby, Marian pushing a pram. But either this had never happened, or his mind had refused to retain so unlikely an image. In Charles’s memory, Joyce appeared quite suddenly at twelve, the age at which she had been permitted to dine with her parents. Her untidy table manners had greatly annoyed him, and he had often complained to Marian about the expensive Swiss governess who, all these years, should have been grooming a model little girl, clean and silent as a watch, ready to take her place at her parents’ table.

Well, Marian would have to be told. It was, in any case, a problem for a woman, he thought, although he could not blame Joyce’s delinquency on his wife. She had always been conscientious about spending time with Joyce. She seemed always to be meeting her at trains, or putting her on them. He recalled his wife’s voice, from her bedroom, in conversation with Joyce’s governess, saying eagerly, pleadingly almost: “But she has something, don’t you think? Something pretty? Something about the eyes?” The governess, Miss Roefrich, had murmured something that was somehow flattering to Miss and Mrs. Kimber, which Charles considered a master stroke of tact. He, himself, could not have placed his wife and his daughter in the same breath.

He would not be seeing Marian until late that evening. Charles was dining with a Miss Lawrence, who lived near Columbia University, and at whose small apartment he spent two evenings a week. Miss Lawrence usually assembled the meal, since Charles felt they should not be seen too often in restaurants. Miss Lawrence, whose name was Bernice, but who called herself Bambi, was the secretary of a radio producer, but she had no opinions about radio, present or future, nor, for that matter, about anything else, and Charles found her conversation restful. In four years, she had complained only once or twice about their secluded relationship. The most difficult argument had taken place after she bought and read Vogue’s Book of Etiquette . She had shown Charles the section on Dining with Married Men. “It says it’s all right, if you don’t do it too often with the same married man,” she had explained.

“How many married men do you know, for God’s sake?” Charles had demanded, and the evening had ended in tears and terms of reproach.

This evening, dinner began with a mushroom soup and ended with chocolate éclairs. Charles told Bernice about a case, and she related a tale of outrageous gossip about a program director and film star.

“I’m going on a diet, starting Monday,” said Bernice, as she rose from the table. “Don’t laugh. This time I mean it.”

He watched her, thoughtfully, as she cleared the table. “What were you like at sixteen?” he said. “I mean, what were you doing?”

“It’s not that long ago,” said Bernice, looking at him. “I was in high school; what do you think?”

“Were you interested in men?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at, exactly. I went to a good high school, all girls. Lauren Bacall was in my class. They were all nice girls. We never talked about men. We were interested in clothes, and world events. We had a very superior World Events teacher.” She turned on the radio, moving away from him.

“What I mean is,” said Charles, “would it have occurred to you…no, I’ll put it this way: what would your family have done if you’d gone away for the weekend with some man, say a young boy from…from another good high school?”

“Killed me,” said Bernice, simply. “My mother would have cried, but my father would have killed me.” She looked at him. “Why?” she said.