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

For her part, Bonnie was finding her withering Marchbanks tedious. His pursy prejudices no longer seemed delicious humor. He made the mistake of telling her a long, name-studded story of school politics and someone trying to get his job. It established him in reality — a master afraid for his grubby post — and reality was not what Bonnie demanded. She had enough reality on her hands: in the autumn that girl would be twenty-five.

Wishart tried to get back on their old plane. “Distract her,” he said lazily. “Move on. Divert her with culture. Inspect the cathedrals and museums. Take her to the Musée de l’Homme.”

“You don’t meet any men in museums,” said Bonnie, as if this were a sore point. “Anyway, what’s the good? She only comes to life for slobs.” After a moment she said quietly, “Don’t you see, that’s not what I want for Flor. I don’t want her to marry just anybody. It may sound funny to you, but I don’t even want an American. They’ve always let me down. My own brothers — But I don’t want to go into it again. I want a European, but not a Latin, and one who has lived in the States and has had the best of both. I want someone much older than Flor, because she needs that, and someone I can trust. That’s what I want for my girl, and that’s what I meant when I said proposals don’t grow on trees. Neither do men.” But what did Wishart know about men? He was a woman-haunter, woman’s best friend. She put on her sunglasses in order to hide her exasperation with him, because he was a man but not the right person.

Her expression was perfectly blank. There was no doubt now, no other way of interpreting it. In spite of his recent indifference to her, she had not changed her mind. Wishart was being offered Flor.

He had never been foolish enough to dream of a useful marriage. He knew that his choice one season might damn him the next. He had thought occasionally of a charming but ignorant peasant child, whom he could train; he had the town boy’s blurry vision of country people. Unfortunately, he had never met anyone of the kind. Certainly his peasant bride, who was expected to combine with her exceptional beauty a willingness to clean his shoes, was not Flor.

This was not the moment for false steps. He saw himself back in America with a lame-brained but perfect wife. Preposterous ideas made him say in imagined conversations, “The mother was a charmer; I married the daughter.”

He forgot the dangers, and what it would be like to have Bonnie as a mother-in-law. A secret hope unfurled and spread. He got up, and in a blind, determined way began to walk across the beach. Not far away the lovers lay on the sand, facing each other, half asleep. Flor’s arm was under her head, straight up. He saw Bob’s back, burned nearly black, and Flor’s face. They were so close that their breath must have mingled. Their intimacy seemed to Wishart established; it contained an implicit allegiance, like a family tie, with all the antagonism that might suggest as well. While he was watching, they came together. Wishart saw that Flor remained outside the kiss. Two laurels with one root. Where had he heard that? Each was a missing part of the other’s character, and the whole, in the kiss, should have been unflawed.

Flor wondered what it was like for a man to kiss her, and remembered words from men she had not loved. It was a narcissism so shameful that she opened her eyes, and saw Wishart. He was the insect enemy met in an underground tunnel, the small, scratching watcher, the boneless witness of an insect universe — a tiny, scuttling universe that contained her mother, the pop-eyed Corsican proprietor of this beach, the fleurs et couronnes , her mother’s procession of very best most intimate friends. (Before Wishart a bestial countess, to whom Flor, as a girl, had been instructed to be nice.) In a spasm of terror, which Bob mistook for abandonment, she clung to him. He was outside this universe and from a better place.

Wishart returned to Bonnie and sank down beside her on the sand, adjusting his bony legs as if they were collapsible umbrellas. If he continued in error, it was Bonnie’s fault, for she went on again about men, the right man, and Flor. The wind dropped. Cannes settled into the stagnant afternoon. The fleurs et couronnes were down from their naps and chattering like budgerigars. Bonnie had been polishing her sunglasses on the edge of a towel. She stopped, holding them, staring. “Last night I dreamed my daughter was a mermaid,” she said. “What does it mean? Wishart, you know all about those things. What does it mean?”

“ Ravissant ,” said one of her court. “I see the blue sea and the grottoes, everything coral and blue. Coral green and coral blue.”

“There is no such thing as coral blue,” said Wishart mechanically.

“And Florence, la belle Florence, floating and drifting, the bright hair spread like—”

“She sang and she floated, she floated and sang,” took up a minor figure who resembled a guppy. At a look from Bonnie he gave a great gasp and shut up.

“It was nothing like that at all,” said Bonnie snappily. “It was an ugly fishtail, like a carp’s. It was just like a carp’s, and the whole thing was a great handicap. The girl simply couldn’t walk. She lay there on the ground and couldn’t do a thing. Everybody stared at us. It was a perfectly hopeless dream, and I woke up in a state of great distress .”

Wishart had been so disturbed by the kiss that moved into blankness. He could not form a coherent thought. What interested him, finally, was the confirmation of his suspicion that Flor was a poseuse . How conceited she had been, lying there exploring her own sensations as idly as a tourist pouring sand from one hand into the other. He recalled the expression in her eyes — shrewd, ratty eyes, he thought, not the eyes of a goddess — and he knew that she feared and loathed him and might catch him out. “It won’t do,” he said to Bonnie. “It wouldn’t do, a marriage with Flor.” He heard the words, “She has a crack across the brain,” but was never certain afterward if he had said them aloud.

Bonnie turned her pink, shadowed face to him in purest amazement. She noticed that Wishart’s eyes were so perturbed and desperate that they were almost beyond emotion — without feeling, like those of a bird. Then she looked up to the sky, where the plane was endlessly and silently writing the name of a drink. She said, “I wish he would write something for us, something useful.”

His mistake in thinking that Bonnie considered him an equal and would want him for her daughter had been greater than the gaffe about Flor. Everything trembled and changed; even the color of the sky seemed extraordinary. Wishart was fixed and paralyzed in this new landscape, wondering if he was doing or saying anything strange, unable to see or stop himself. It was years since he had been the victim of such a fright. He had believed that Bonnie accepted him at his value. He had believed that the exact miniature he saw in her sunglasses was the Wishart she accepted, the gentleman he had glimpsed in the store window that first day. He had thought that the inflection of a voice, the use of some words, established them as a kind. But Bonnie had never believed in the image. She had never considered him anything but jumped-up. He remembered now that she had never let him know her family back home, had never suggested he meet her brothers.

When Bonnie dared look again, Wishart was picking his way into the sea. He was wearing his hat. He did not mind seeming foolish, and believed eccentricity added to his stature. After standing for a time, knee-deep, looking, with the expression of a brooding camel, first at the horizon and then back to shore, he began to pick his way out again. The water was too dirty for swimming, even if the other bathers had left him room. “Large colored balls were being flung over my head, and sometimes against it,” he composed, describing for future audiences the summer at Cannes. “The shrieking children of butchers were being taught to swim.”