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

“She gets it from me,” said Bonnie, shortly, as if she had never noticed her own hair was brown.

The man with Florence was stocky and dark. He wore sneakers, tartan swimming trunks of ample cut, a gold waterproof watch, a gold medal on a chain, and a Swedish-university cap some sizes too small. He carried a net bag full of diving equipment. His chest was bare.

“Well, I don’t know,” Bonnie said. “I just don’t know.”

By a common silent decision, the two rejected the beach and turned and came toward Bonnie. They made an impression as harsh and unpoetical as the day. The sun had burned all expression from their faces — smooth brown masks, in which their eyes, his brown and hers green, shone like colored glass. Even though Wishart had never dared allow himself close relations, he was aware of their existence to a high degree. He could detect an intimate situation from a glance, or a quality of silence. It was one more of his gifts, but he would have been happier without it. Pushed by forces he had not summoned or invented, he had at these moments a victim’s face — puzzled, wounded, bloodless, coarse. The gap between the two couples closed. Bonnie had taken on a dreamy, vacant air; she was not planning to help.

“This is Bob Harris,” Florence said. “He’s from New York.”

“I guessed that,” Bonnie said.

It was plain to Wishart that the new man, now sincerely shaking hands all around, had no idea that Mrs. McCarthy might want to demolish him.

Every day after that, the four met on Bonnie’s beach and lunched in a restaurant Bonnie liked. If Wishart had disapproved of the beach, it was nothing compared to the restaurant, which was full of Bonnie’s new friends. Wine — Algerian pink — came out of a barrel, there were paper flags stuck in the butter, the waiters were insolent and barefoot, the menu was written on a slate and full of obscene puns. Everyone knew everyone, and Wishart could have murdered Bonnie. He was appalled at her thinking he could possibly like the place, but remembered that her attitude was the result of years of neuter camaraderie. It didn’t matter. On the tenth of July he was expected in Venice. It was not a pattern of life.

It seemed to Wishart that Bonnie was becoming silly with age. She had developed a piercing laugh, and the affected drawl was becoming real. Her baiting of Bob Harris was too direct to be funny, and her antagonism was forming a bond between them — the last thing on earth she wanted. Bob had the habit of many Americans of constantly repeating the name of the person he was talking to. Bonnie retaliated by calling him Bob Harris, in full, every time she spoke to him, and this, combined with her slightly artificial voice, made him ask, “Is that a Southern accent you’ve got, Mrs. McCarthy?”

“Well, it just might be, Bob Harris!” Bonnie cried, putting one on. But it was a movie accent; she did it badly, and it got on Wishart’s nerves. “Well, that’s a nice breeze that’s just come up,” she would say, trailing the vowels. “We’re certainly a nice little party, aren’t we? It’s nice being four.” Nice being four? Nice for Wishart — the adored, the sought-after, Europe’s troubadour? He closed his eyes and thought of Mrs. Sebastian, Venice, shuttered rooms, green canals.

Then Florence burst out with something. Wishart guessed that these cheeky outbursts, fit for a child of twelve, were innocent attempts to converse. Because of the way her mother had dragged her around, because she had never been part of a fixed society, she didn’t know how people talked; she had none of the coins of light exchange. She said in an excited voice, “The Fox, the Ape, the Bumblebee were all at odds, being three, and then the Goose came out the door, and stayed the odds by making four. We’re like that. Mama’s a lovely bumblebee and I’m fox-colored.” This left Wishart the vexing choice between being a goose and an ape, and he was the more distressed to hear Bob say placidly that it wasn’t the first time he had been called a big ape. All at once it seemed to him preferable to be an ape than a goose.

“Have you got many friends in Paris, Bob Harris?” said Bonnie, who had seen Wishart’s face pucker and shrink.

“Last year I had to send out one hundred and sixty-nine Christmas cards,” said Bob simply. “I don’t mean cards for the firm.”

“The Bambino of the Eiffel Tower? Something real Parisian?”

Bob looked down, with a smile. He seemed to feel sorry for Mrs. McCarthy, who didn’t know about the cards people sent now — nondenominational, either funny or artistic, depending on your friends.

He stayed in one of the spun-sugar palaces on the Croisette, and Wishart’s anguished guess had been correct: Flor went to his room afternoons, while Bonnie was having her rest. The room was too noisy, too bright, and it was Flor who seemed most at ease, adjusting the blind so that slats of shade covered the walls, placing her clothes neatly on a chair. She seemed to Bob exclusive, a prize, even though the evidence was that they were both summer rats. He had met her in a café one afternoon. He saw his own shadow on her table, and himself, furtive, ratlike, looking for trouble.

Wishart had decided that Bob was no problem where he was concerned. His shrewdness was not the variety likely to threaten Wishart, and he took up Flor’s time, leaving Bonnie free to listen to Wishart’s chat. He did not desire Bonnie to himself as a lover might, but he did want to get on with his anecdotes without continual interruptions.

Alone with him, Bonnie was the person Wishart liked. When they laughed together on the beach, it was like the old days, when she had seemed so superior, enchanting, and bright. They lived out the fantasy essential to Wishart; he might have been back in London saying and thinking “Cannes.” They had worked out their code of intimate jokes for the season; they called Bonnie’s young friends “ les fleurs et couronnes ,” and they made fun of French jargon, with its nervous emphasis on “ moderne ” and “ dynamique .” When Bonnie called Wishart “ un homme du vingtième siècle, moderne et dynamique ,” they were convulsed. Flor and Bob, a little apart, regarded them soberly, as if they were a pair of chattering squirrels.

“Wishart is one of Mama’s best friends,” said Flor, apologizing for this elderly foolishness. “I’ve never liked him. I think he thinks they’re like Oberon and Titania, you know — all malice and showing off. Wishart would love to have wings and power and have people do as he says. He’s always seemed wormy to me. Have you noticed that my mother pays for everything?”

In point of fact, Bob paid for everything now. He expected to; it was as essential to his nature as it was to Wishart’s to giggle and sneer. “Wishart doesn’t like the way I look. The hell with him,” he said placidly.

Lying on her back on the sand, Flor shaded her eyes to see him properly. He was turned away. He seemed casual, indifferent, but she knew that he stayed on in Cannes because of her. His holiday was over, and his father, business- and family-minded, was waiting for him in Paris. The discovery of Flor had disturbed Bob. Until now he had liked much younger girls, with straight hair and mild, anxious eyes; girls who were photographed in the living room wearing printed silk and their mother’s pearls. His ideal was the image of some minor Germanic princess, whose nickname might be Mousie, and who, at sixteen, at twenty-nine, at fifty-three, seems to wear the same costume, the same hair, and the same air of patient supplication until a husband can be found. This picture, into which he had tried to fit so many women, now proved accommodating; the hair became red, the features hardened, the hands were thin and brown. She stared at him with less hopeless distress. At last the bland young woman became Flor, and he did not remember having held in his mind’s eye any face but hers, just as he would never expect to look in the mirror one morning and see any face except his own.