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

That winter’s day when Sylvie talked to Louise for the first time, Louise was guiding her bicycle down the stairs. It would be presumptuous for me to say what she was thinking, but I can guess: she was more than likely converting the price of oranges, face powder, and Marie-biscuits from French francs to Australian shillings and pence. She was, and she is, exceptionally prudent. Questions of upbringing must be plain to the eye and ear — if not, better left unexplained. Let me say only that it was a long training in modesty that made her accept this wretched hotel, where, with frugal pleasure, she drank tea and ate Marie-biscuits, heating the water on an electric stove she had been farsighted enough to bring from home. Her room had dusty claret hangings. Silverfish slid from under the carpet to the cracked linoleum around the washstand. She could have lived in comfort, but I doubt if it occurred to her to try. With every mouthful of biscuit and every swallow of tea, she celebrated our mother’s death and her own release. Louise had nursed Mother eleven years. She nursed her eleven years, buried her, and came to Paris with a bicycle and an income.

Now, Sylvie, who knew nothing about duty and less about remorse, would have traded her soul, without a second’s bargaining, for Louise’s room; for Sylvie lived in an ancient linen cupboard. The shelves had been taken out and a bed, a washstand, a small table, a straight chair pushed inside. In order to get to the window, one had to pull the table away and climb over the chair. This room, or cupboard, gave straight onto the stairs between two floors. The door was flush with the staircase wall; only a ravaged keyhole suggested that the panel might be any kind of door. As she usually forgot to shut it behind her, anyone who wanted could see her furrowed bed and the basin, in which underclothes floated among islands of scum. She would plunge down the stairs, leaving a blurred impression of mangled hair and shining eyes. Her eyes were a true black, with the pupil scarcely distinct from the iris. Later I knew that she came from the southwest of France; I think that some of her people were Basques. The same origins gave her a stocky peasant’s build and thick, practical hands. Her hand, grasping the stair rail, and the firm tread of her feet specified a quality of strength that had nothing in common with the forced liveliness of Parisian girls, whose energy seemed to me as thin and strung up as their voices. Her scarf, her gloves flew from her like birds. Her shoes could never keep up with her feet. One of my memories of Sylvie — long before I knew anything about her, before I knew even her name — is of her halting, cursing loudly with a shamed smile, scrambling up or down a few steps, and shoving a foot back into a lost ballerina shoe. She wore those thin slippers out on the streets, under the winter rain. And she wore a checked skirt, a blue sweater, and a scuffed plastic jacket that might have belonged to a boy. Passing her, as she hung over the banister calling to someone below, you saw the tensed muscle of an arm or leg, the young neck, the impertinent head. Someone ought to have drawn her — but somebody has: Sylvie was the coarse and grubby Degas dancer, the girl with the shoulder thrown back and the insolent chin. For two pins, or fewer, that girl staring out of flat canvas would stick out her tongue or spit in your face. Sylvie had the voice you imagine belonging to the picture, a voice that was common, low-pitched, but terribly penetrating. When she talked on the telephone, you could hear her from any point in the hotel. She owned the telephone, and she read Cinémonde , a magazine about film stars, by the hour, in the lavatory or (about once every six weeks) while soaking in the tub. There was one telephone and one tub for the entire hotel, and one lavatory for every floor. Sylvie was always where you wanted to be; she had always got there first. Having got there, she remained, turning pages, her voice cheerfully lifted in the newest and most melancholy of popular songs.

“Have you noticed that noisy girl?” Louise said once, describing her to me and to the young actor who had the room next to mine.

We were all three in Louise’s room, which now had the look of a travel bureau and a suburban kitchen combined; she had covered the walls with travel posters and bought a transparent plastic tablecloth. Pottery dishes in yellow and blue stood upon the shelves. Louise poured tea and gave us little cakes. I remember that the young man and I, both well into the age of reason, sat up very straight and passed spoons and paper napkins back and forth with constant astonished cries of “Thank you” and “Please.” It was something about Louise; she was so kind, so hospitable, she made one want to run away.

“I never notice young girls,” said the young man, which seemed to me a fatuous compliment, but Louise turned pink. She appeared to be waiting for something more from him, and so he went on, “I know the girl you mean.” It was not quite a lie. I had seen Sylvie and this boy together many times. I had heard them in his room, and I had passed them on the stairs. Well, it was none of my affair.

Until Louise’s arrival, I had avoided meeting anyone in the hotel. Friendship in bohemia meant money borrowed, recriminations, complaints, tears, theft, and deceit. I kept to myself, and I dressed like Louise, which was as much a disguise as my bohemian way of dressing in Melbourne had been. This is to explain why I had never introduced Louise to anyone in the hotel. As for the rest of Paris, I didn’t need to bother; Louise arrived with a suitcase of introductions and a list of names as long as the list for a wedding. She was not shy, she wanted to “get to know the people,” and she called at least once on every single person she had an introduction to. That was how it happened that she and the actor met outside the hotel, in a different quarter of Paris. They had seen each other across the room, and each of them thought “I wonder who that is?” before discovering they lived in the same place. This sort of thing is supposed never to happen in cities, and it does happen.

She met him on the twenty-first of December in the drawing room of a house near the Parc Monceau. She had been invited there by the widow of a man in the consular service who had been to Australia and had stayed with an uncle of ours. It was one of the names on Louise’s list. Before she had been many weeks in Paris, she knew far more than I did about the hard chairs, cheerless lights, and gray-pink antique furniture of French rooms. The hobby of the late consul had been collecting costumes. The drawing room was lined with glass cases in which stood headless dummies wearing the beads and embroidery of Turkey, Macedonia, and Greece. It was a room intended not for people but for things — this was a feeling Louise said she often had about rooms in France. Thirty or forty guests drifted about, daunted by the museum display. They were given whiskey to drink and sticky cakes. Louise wore the gray wool dress that was her “best” and the turquoise bracelets our Melbourne grandfather brought back from a voyage to China. They were the only ornaments I have ever seen her wearing. She talked to a poet who carried in his pocket an essay about him that had been printed years before — yellow, brittle bits of paper, like beech leaves. She consoled a wild-haired woman who complained that her daughter had begun to carry on. “How old is your daughter?” said Louise. The woman replied, “Thirty-five. And you know how men are now. They have no respect for girlhood anymore.” “It is very difficult,” Louise agreed. She was getting to know the people, and was pleased with her afternoon. The consul’s widow looked toward the doors and muttered that Cocteau was coming, but he never came. All at once Louise heard her say, in answer to a low-toned question, “She’s Australian,” and then she heard, “She’s like a coin, isn’t she? Gold and cold. She’s interested in music, and lives over on the Left Bank, just as you do — except that you don’t give your address, little monkey, not even to your mother’s friends. I had such a lot of trouble getting a message to you. Perhaps she’s your sort, although she’s much too old for you. She doesn’t know how to talk to men.” The consul’s widow hadn’t troubled to lower her voice — the well-bred Parisian voice that slices stone.