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

She closed the shutters and came toward him quietly, so that he would not wake and misinterpret her drawing near. Lacking an emotional country, it might be possible to consider another person one’s home. She pressed her face against his unmoving arm, accepting everything imperfect, as one accepts a faulty but beloved country, or the language in which one’s thoughts are formed. It was the most dangerous of ideas, this “Only you can save me,” but her need to think it was so overwhelming that she wondered if this was what men, in the past, had been trying to say when they had talked to her about love.

The rainstorm that afternoon was not enough. Everyone agreed more rain was needed. Rain was wanted to wash the sand, clean the sea, cool their tempers, rinse the hot roofs of the bathing cabins along the beach. When Wishart thought “Cannes” now, it was not light, dark, and blueness but sand, and cigarette butts, and smears of oil. At night the heat and the noise of traffic kept him awake. He lay patient and motionless, with opened owl eyes. He and Bonnie compared headaches at breakfast; Bonnie’s was like something swelling inside the brain, a cluster of balloons, while Wishart’s was external, a leather band.

He could not understand what Bonnie was doing in this place; she had been so fastidious, rejecting a resort when it became too popular, seeming to him to have secret mysterious friends and places to go to. He still believed she would not be here, fighting through mobs of sweating strangers every time she wanted a slopped cup of coffee or a few inches of sand, if there had not been a reason — if she had not been expecting something real.

After a time, he realized that Bonnie was not waiting for anything to happen, and that her air of expectancy the day he arrived had been false. If she had expected anything then, she must have believed it would come through him. She talked now of the futility of travel. She said that Flor was cold and shallow and had broken her heart. There was no explanation for this, except that Flor was not fulfilling Bonnie’s hopes and plans. Self-pity followed; she said that she, Bonnie, would spend the rest of her life like a bit of old paper on the beach, cast up, beaten by waves, and so forth. She didn’t care what rubbish she said to him, and she no longer tried to be gay. Once she said, “It’s no good, Wishart; she’s never been a woman. How can she feel what I feel? She’s never even had her periods. We’ve done everything — hormones, God knows what all. I took her to Zurich. She was so passive, she didn’t seem to know it was important. Sometimes I think she’s dumb. She has these men — I don’t know how far she goes. I think she’s innocent. Yes, I really do. I don’t want to think too much. It’s nauseating when you start to think of your own daughter that way. But she’s cold. I know she’s cold. That’s why we have no contact now. That’s why we have no contact anymore. I’ve never stopped being a woman. Thank God for it. If I haven’t married again, it hasn’t been because I haven’t men after me. Wishart! It’s tragic for me to see that girl. I’m fifty and I’m still a woman, and she’s twenty-four and a piece of ice.”

He was lying beside her on the sand. He pulled his straw hat over his face, perfectly appalled. It was a pure reaction, unplanned. If he let his thoughts move without restraint into the world of women, he discovered an area dimly lighted and faintly disgusting, like a kitchen in a slum. It was a world of migraines, miscarriages, disorder, and tears.

Another day, complaining of how miserable her life had been in Europe, she said, “I stopped noticing when the seasons changed. Someone would say that the trees were in bud. I hadn’t even noticed that the leaves were gone. I stopped noticing everything around me, I was so concentrated on Flor.”

She talked to him about money, which was new. When he discovered she was poor, she dwindled, for then she had nothing to make her different or better than anyone else. She had always been careful over pennies, but he had believed it was the passionate stinginess of the rich. But she was no better than Wishart; she was dependent on bounty, too. “I get no income at all, except from my brothers. And Stanley isn’t required to support me, although he should, as I’ve had the burden of the child. And Flor’s money is tied up in some crazy way until she’s thirty. My father tied it up that way because of my divorce; he never trusted me again. Believe me, he paid for it. I never sent him as much as a postcard from that day until the day he died. Family, Wishart! God! Lovely people, but when it comes to m-o-n-e-y,” she said, spelling it out. “Flor’s allowance from Stanley was only until her majority, and now he hardly sends her anything at all. He forgets. He isn’t made to do anything. She’ll have to wait now until he dies. They say the way he’s living now there won’t be anything left. Wishart, my brain clangs like a cash register when I think about it. I never used to worry at all, but now I can’t stop.”

“You thought she would be married by the time her allowance from Stanley stopped,” Wishart said. No tone could make this less odious. He thought he had gone too far, and was blaming her for having started it, when she relieved him by being simply angry.

“Do you think it’s easy? Marriage proposals don’t grow on trees. I can’t understand it. I had so many.”

Their conversation showed how worn their friendship had become. It was used down to the threads; they had no tolerance for each other anymore, and nothing new to give. They were more intimate than they needed to be. He blamed her. He had tried to keep it bright. Once, Bob had asked Bonnie why she lived in Europe, and Wishart had replied, “Bonnie had Flor and then, worn out with childbearing, retired to a permanently sunny beach.” This was a flattering version of Bonnie’s divorce and flight from home. “Don’t you listen,” Bonnie had said, immensely pleased. (She was pleased on another count: they were sitting on the outer edge of a café, and Bob was repeatedly jostled by the passing crowd. He had once said he liked people and didn’t mind noise, and Bonnie saw to it that he had a basinful of both when it could be managed.) Wishart wanted their holiday to go on being as it had sounded when he said, in London, “I am going to Cannes to stay with a delightful American friend.” The American friend now questioned Wishart about his plans. He perceived with horror that she was waiting for a suggestion from him. He might have been flattered by Bonnie’s clinging to him, but in friendship he was like a lover who can only adore in pursuit. In a few days, he would be in Venice with Mrs. Sebastian — blessed Mrs. Sebastian, authentically rich. Snubbing Bonnie, he talked Venice to the fleurs et couronnes . Rejected by Wishart, abandoned by Flor, Bonnie took on a new expression; even more than Wishart, she looked like the failed comedian afflicted with dreams. He knew it, and was pleased, as if in handing over a disease he had reduced its malignant powers. Then, in time to bump him off his high horse, Wishart received a letter from Mrs. Sebastian putting him off until August. There were no apologies and no explanations; she simply told him not to come. He remembered then that she was cold and vulgar, and that she drank too much, and that, although she was a hefty piece, her nickname was Peewee and she insisted on being called by it. She was avaricious and had made Wishart pay her for a bottle of ddt and a spray one summer when the mosquitoes were killing him. He remembered that in American terms Bonnie was someone and Mrs. Sebastian nothing at all. Bonnie became generous, decent, elegant, and essential to Wishart’s life. He turned to her as if he had been away; but as far as she was concerned he had been away, and he had lost ground. The dark glasses that seemed to condense the long curve of the beach into a miniature image were turned elsewhere. Even a diminished, penitent Wishart could not see his own reflection.