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

“Bob is just a deep, creative boy looking for a girl with a tragic sense of life,” Wishart said to Bonnie, who laughed herself to tears, for, having tried to trap Bob into saying “Stateside” and “drapes” and having failed, she needed new confirmation of his absurdity. The conversation of the pair, devoid of humor, was repeated by Wishart or Bonnie — whichever was close enough to hear. “Do you know what they’re talking about now ?” was a new opening for discussion, amazement, and, finally, helpless laughter.

“They’re on birds today,” Wishart would say, with a deliberately solemn face.

“Birds?”

“Birds.”

They collapsed, heaving with laughter, as if in a fit. The fleurs et couronnes , out of sympathy, joined in.

“Do you know what bothered me most when I first came over here?” Wishart had heard Flor say. “We were in England then, and I didn’t recognize a single tree or a single bird. They looked different, and the birds had different songs. A robin wasn’t a robin anymore. It was terrible. It frightened me more than anything. And they were so drab. Everything was brown and gray. There aren’t any red-winged blackbirds, you know — nothing with a bright flash.”

“Aren’t there?” The urban boy tried to sound surprised. Wishart sympathized. The only quality he shared with Bob was ignorance of nature.

“Didn’t you know? That’s what’s missing here, in everything. There’s color enough, but you don’t know how I miss it — the bright flash.”

Bob saw the sun flash off a speedboat, and everywhere he looked he saw color and light. The cars moving along the Croisette were color enough.

“Will you always live here now?” said Flor. “Will you never live at home again?”

“It depends on my father. I came over to learn, and I’m practically running the whole Paris end. It’s something.”

“Do you like business?”

“Do you mean do I wish I was an actor or something?” He gave her a resentful look, and the shadow of their first possible difference fell over the exchange.

“My father never did anything much,” she said. Her eyes were closed, and she talked into the sun. The sun bleached her words. Any revelation was just chat. “Now they say he drinks quite a lot. But that’s none of my business. He married a really dull thing, they say. He and Mama are Catholics, so they don’t believe in their own divorce. At least, Mama doesn’t.”

He noticed that Flor kissed her mother anxiously when they met, as if they had been parted for days, or as if he had taken Flor to another country. The affection between the two women pleased him. His own mother, having died, had elevated the notion of motherhood. He liked people who got on with their parents and suspected those who did not.

“I suppose he thinks he shouldn’t be living with his second wife,” Flor said. “If he still believes.”

“How about you?”

“I’d believe anything I thought would do me or Mama any good.”

This seemed to him insufficient. He expected women to be religious. He gave any amount of money to nuns.

These dialogues, which Wishart heard from a distance while seeming to concentrate on his tan, and which he found so dull and discouraging that the pair seemed mentally deficient, were attempts to furnish the past. Flor was perplexed by their separate pasts. She saw Bob rather as Bonnie did, but with a natural loyalty to him that was almost as strong as a family tie. She believed she was objective, detached; then she discovered he had come down to Cannes from Paris with a Swedish girl, the student from whom he had inherited the cap. Knowing that “student” in Europe is a generous term, covering a boundless field of age as well as activity, she experienced the hopeless jealousy a woman feels for someone she believes inferior to herself. It was impossible for Bonnie’s daughter to achieve this inferiority; she saw the man already lost. The girl and Bob had lived together, in his room. Flor’s imagination constructed a spiteful picture of a girl being cute and Swedish and larking about in his pajamas. Secretly flattered, he said no, she was rather sickly and quiet. Her name was Eve. She was off somewhere traveling on a bus. Cards arrived bearing the sticky imprint of her lips — a disgusting practice. Trembling with feigned indifference, Flor grabbed the cap and threw it out the window. It landed on the balcony of the room below.

Bob rescued the cap, and kept it, but he gave up his hotel and moved into Flor’s. The new room was better. It was quiet, dark, and contained no memories. It was in the basement, with a window high in one wall. The walls were white. There was sand everywhere, in the cracked red tiles of the floor, in the chinks of the decaying armchair, caked to the rope soles of their shoes. It seemed to Flor that here the grit of sand and salt came into their lives and their existence as a couple began. When the shutters were opened, late in the afternoon, they let in the peppery scent of geraniums and the view of a raked gravel path. There must have been a four-season mimosa nearby; the wind sent minute yellow pompons against the sill, and often a gust of sweetish perfume came in with the dying afternoon.

Flor had not mentioned the change to Bonnie, but, inevitably, Bonnie met her enemy at the desk, amiable and arrogant, collecting his key. “Has that boy been here all along?” she cried, in despair. She insisted on seeing his room. She didn’t know what she expected to find, but, as she told Wishart, she had a right to know. Bob invited her formally. She came with Flor one afternoon, both dressed in white, with skirts like lampshades, Bonnie on waves of Femme. He saw for the first time that the two were alike, and perhaps inseparable; they had a private casual way of speaking, and laughed at the same things. It was like seeing a college friend in his own background, set against his parents, his sisters, his mother’s taste in books. He offered Bonnie peanuts out of a tin, brandy in a toothbrush glass. He saw everything about her except that she was attractive, and here their difference of age was in the way. Bob and Florence avoided sitting on the lumpy bed, strewn with newspapers and photographs. That was Bonnie’s answer. They knew she knew; Bonnie left in triumph, with an air she soon had cause to change. Now that Bonnie knew, the lovers spent more time together. They no longer slipped away during Bonnie’s rest; they met when they chose and stayed away as long as they liked. If they kept a pretense of secrecy, it was because to Bob a façade of decency was needed. He had not completely lost sight of the beseeching princess into whose outline Flor had disappeared.

When he and Flor were apart, he found reason to doubt. She had told him the birds of Europe were not like the birds at home, but what about human beings? She never mentioned them. The breath of life for him was contained in relations, in his friendships, in which he did not distinguish between the random and the intense. All his relationships were of the same quality. She had told him that this room was like a place she had imagined. The only difference was that her imagined room was spangled, bright, perfectly silent, and full of mirrors. Years after this, he could say to himself “Cannes” and evoke a season of his life, with all the sounds, smells, light and dark that the season had contained; but he never remembered accurately how it had started or what it had been like. Their intimacy came first, then love, and some unclouded moments. Like most lovers, he believed that the beginning was made up of these moments only, and he would remember Flor’s silent, mirrored room and believe it was their room at Cannes, and that he had lived in it, too.

One afternoon at the beginning of July, they fell asleep in this room, the real room, and when Flor woke it was dark. She knew it had begun to rain by the quickening in the air. She got up quietly and opened the shutters. A car came into the hotel drive; a bar of light swept across the ceiling and walls. She thought that what she felt now came because of the passage of light. It was a concrete sensation of happiness, as if happiness could be felt, lifted, carried around. She had not experienced anything of the kind before. She was in a watery world of perceptions, where impulses, doubts, intentions, detached from their roots, rise to the surface and expand. The difference between Bob and herself was that he had no attachments to the past. This was what caused him to seem inferior in her mother’s view of life. He had told them freely that his father was self-educated and that his mother’s parents were illiterate. There were no family records more than a generation old. Florence had been taught to draw her support from continuity and the past. Now she saw that the chain of fathers and daughters and mothers and sons had been powerless as a charm. In trouble, mistrusting her own capacity to think or move or enjoy living, she was alone. She saw that being positive of even a few things — that she was American, and pretty, and Christian, and Bonnie’s girl — had not helped. Bob Harris didn’t know his mother’s maiden name, and his father’s father had come out of a Polish ghetto, but Bob was not specifically less American than Florence, nor less proud. He was, if anything, more assertive and sure.