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

“Aren’t you talking about films?” said Louise.

Sylvie screwed her eyes shut, thought, and said, “Well, if it isn’t films it’s Brecht. Anyway, it’s something I’ve heard.” She laughed, with her hands to her face, but she was watching between her fingers. Then she folded her hands and began telling poor Louise how to sit, stand, and walk on the stage — rattling off what she had learned in some second-rate theatrical course. Patrick had told us that every unemployed actor in Paris believed he could teach.

They still had not told each other their names; and if Louise walked into that cupboard room, and bothered to hear Sylvie out, and troubled to reply, it must have been only because she had decided one could move quite easily into another life in France. She worked hard at understanding, but she was often mistaken. I know she believed the French had no conventions.

“I stay in bed because my room is so cold,” said Sylvie, rapidly now, as if Louise might change her mind and turn away. “This room is an icebox — there isn’t even a radiator — so I stay in bed and study and I leave the door open so as to get some of the heat from the stairs.” A tattered book of horoscopes lay facedown on the blanket. Tacked to the wall was a picture someone had taken of Sylvie asleep on a sofa, during or after a party, judging from the scene. The slit of window in the room gave on a court, but it was a bright court, with a brave tree whose roots had cracked the paving.

“My name is Sylvie Laval,” she said, and, wiping her palm on the bedsheet, prepared to shake hands.

“Louise Tate.” Louise set the thermos down on Sylvie’s table, between a full ashtray and a cardboard container of coagulated milk. She saw the Japanese box with the chrysanthemum painted on the lid, and picked it up.

“What a new element you are going to be for me,” said Sylvie, settling back and watching with some amazement. “I shall observe you and become like you. Yes, that’s the money box, and you must take whatever you need for the sandwich.”

“Why do you want to observe me?” said Louise, turning and laughing at her.

“You look like an angel,” Sylvie said. “I’m sure angels look like you.”

“I was once told I looked like an English poet in first youth,” said Louise, trying to pretend that Sylvie’s intention had been ironical.

Sylvie tilted her little chin as if to say she knew what that was all about. “Your friends are poets,” she said. “They must be like you, too — wise and calm. I wish I knew your friends.”

“They are very plain people,” said Louise, still smiling. “They wouldn’t be much fun for a bright little thing like you.”

“Foreigners?”

“Some. French, too.” Louise was proud of her introductions.

Sylvie looked with her bold black eyes and said, “French. I knew it.”

“Knew what?”

“You and the type upstairs. The great actor — the comedian.” She bit her fingers, hesitating. Her features were coarse and sly. “You’re so comic, the two of you, creeping about with your secret. But love is love, and everyone knows.”

I have wondered since about that bit of mischief. I suppose Patrick had given Sylvie a role to play, because it was the only way he could control her. She had found out, or he had told, and he had warned her not to hurt Louise. Louise was someone who must be spared. She must never guess that he and Sylvie had been lovers. They thought Louise could never stand up to the truth; they thought no one could bear to be told the truth about anything after a certain age.

Sylvie, launched in a piece of acting, could not help overloading. “Do you know any other French people?” she said. “Never mind. There’s me.” She flung out her arms suddenly — to the mirror, not to Louise — and cried, “I am your French friend.”

“She’s got a picture of herself sound asleep, curled up with no shoes on,” said Louise, talking in a new, breathless voice. “It must be the first thing she looks at in the morning when she wakes up. And she seems terribly emotional and generous. I don’t know why, but she gives you the feeling of generosity. I’m sure she does herself a lot of harm.”

We were in Patrick’s room. Louise poured the daily soup into pottery bowls. I have often tried to imagine how he must have seemed to Louise. I doubt if she could have told you. From the beginning they stood too close; his face was like a painting in which there are three eyes and a double profile. No matter how far she backed off, later on, she never made sense of him. Let me tell what I remember. I remember that it was easy for him to talk, easy for him to say anything, so that I can hear a voice, having ceased to think of a face. He seldom gestured. Only his voice, which was trained, and could never be disguised, told that he did not think he was an ordinary person; he did not believe he was like anyone else in the world, not for a minute. I asked myself a commonplace question: What does she see in him? I should have wondered if she saw him at all. As for me, I saw him twice. I saw him the first time when Louise described the meeting in the consul’s widow’s drawing room, and I understood that the dazzling boy was only that droning voice through the wall. From the time of our grippe, I can see a spiral of orange peel, a water glass with air bubbles on the side of the glass, but I cannot see him. There was the bluish smoke of his Caporal cigarettes, and the shape of Louise, like something seen against the light…None of it is sharp.

One day I saw Patrick and Sylvie together, and that was plain, and clear, and well remembered. I had gone out in the rain to give a music lesson to a spoiled child, the ward of a doting grandmother. I came up the stairs, and because I heard someone laughing, or because I was feverish and beyond despair, I went into Patrick’s room instead of my own.

Sylvie was there. She knelt on the floor, wearing her nightdress (the time must have been close to noon), struggling with Patrick for a bottle of French vodka, which tastes of marsh water and smells like eau de cologne. “Louise says mustn’t drink,” said Sylvie, in a babyish voice; “and besides it’s mine.” They stopped their puppy play when they saw me; there was a mock scurry, as if it were Puss who had the governess role instead of Louise. Then I noticed Louise. She sat before the window, reading a novel, taking no notice of her brawling pair. Her face was calm and happy and the lines of moral obligation had disappeared. She said, “Well, Puss,” with our mother’s inflection, and she seemed so young — nineteen or so — that I remembered how Collie had been in love with her once, before going to Malaya to be killed. Sylvie must have been born that year, the year Louise was married. I hadn’t thought of that until now.

“When Berlioz was living in Italy,” I said, “he heard that Marie Pleyel was going to be married, and so he disguised himself as a lady’s maid and started off for Paris. He intended to assassinate Marie and her mother and perhaps the fiancé as well. But he changed his mind for some reason, and I think he went to Nice.” This story rushed to my lips without reason. Berlioz and Marie Pleyel seemed to me living people, and the facts contemporary gossip. While I was telling it, I remembered they had all of them died. I forgot every word I had ever known of French, and told it in English, which Sylvie could not understand.

“You ought to be in bed, my pet,” I heard Louise say.

Sylvie went on with something she had been telling before my arrival. She had an admirer who was a political cartoonist. His cartoons were ferocious, and one imagined him out on the boulevards of Paris doing battle with the police; but he was really a timid man, afraid of cats, and unable to cross most streets without trembling. “He spends thousands of francs,” said Sylvie, sighing. She told how many francs she had seen him spending.