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

She wanted to say something about the scene to the two men in the room behind her. Surely it meant something — the Algerian boys and the ignorant girl? She held still. One of the men in the room was Tunisian and very touchy. He watched for signs of prejudice. When he thought he saw them, he was pleased and cold. He could be rude when he wanted to be; he had been educated in Paris and was schooled in the cold attack.

Jim Bertrand, whose flat this was, and Ahmed had not stopped talking about politics since lunch. Their talk was a wall. It shut out young girls and girlish questions. For instance, Veronica could have asked if there was a curfew, and if it applied to Ahmed as well as the nameless and faceless North Africans you saw selling flowers or digging up the streets; but Ahmed might consider it a racial question. She never knew just where he drew his own personal line.

“I am not interested in theories,” she had taught herself to say, for fear of being invaded by something other than a dream. But she was not certain what she meant, and not sure that it was true.

Jim turned on a light. The brief afternoon became, abruptly, a winter night. The window was a black mirror. She saw how the room must appear to anyone watching from across the street. But no one peeped at them. Up and down the street, persiennes were latched, curtains tightly drawn. The shops were a line of iron shutters broken only by the Arab café, from which spilled a brownish and hideous light. The curb was lined with cars; Paris was like a garage. Shivering at the cold, and the dead cold of the lined-up automobiles, she turned to the room. She imagined a garden filled with gardenias and a striped umbrella. Veronica was a London girl. At first her dreams had been of Paris, but now they were about a south she had not yet seen.

She moved across the room, scuffling her old sandals, dressed in Jim’s dressing gown. She dropped her cigarette on the marble hearth, stepped on it, and kicked it under the gas heater in the fireplace. Then she knelt and lifted the arm of the record-player on the floor, starting again the Bach concerto she had been playing most of the day. Now she read the name of it for the first time: “Concerto Italien en Fa Majeur bwv 971.” She had played it until it was nothing more than a mosquito to the ear, and now that she was nearly through with it, about to discard it for something newer, she wanted to know what it had been called. Still kneeling, leaning on her fingertips, she reread the front page of a Sunday paper. Is Princess Paola sorry she has married a Belgian and has to live so far north? Deeply interested, Veronica examined the Princess’s face, trying to read contentment or regret. Princess Paola, Farah of Iran, Grace of Monaco, and Princess Margaret were the objects of Veronica’s solemn attention. Their beauty, their position, their attentive husbands should have been enough. According to France Dimanche , anonymous letters might still come in with the morning post. Their confidences went astray. None of them could say “Pass the salt” without wondering how far it would go.

When Jim and Ahmed talked on Sunday afternoon, Veronica was a shadow. If Princess Paola herself had lifted the coffeepot from the table between them, they would have taken no more notice than they now did of her. She picked up the empty pot and carried it to the kitchen. She saw herself in the looking glass over the sink: curlers, bathrobe — what a sight! Behind her was the music, the gas heater roaring away, and the drone of the men’s talk.

Everything Jim had to say was eager and sounded as if it must be truthful. “Yes, I know,” he would begin, “but look.” He was too eager; he stammered. His Tunisian friend took over the idea, stated it, and demolished it. Ahmed was Paris-trained; he could be explicit about anything. He made sense.

“Sense out of hot air,” said Veronica in the kitchen. “Perfect sense out of perfect hot air.”

She took the coffeepot apart and knocked the wet grounds into the rest of the rubbish in the sink. She ran cold water over the pot and rinsed and filled it again; then she sat down on the low stepladder that was the only seat in the kitchen and ground new coffee, holding the grinder between her knees. At lunch the men had dragged chairs into the kitchen and stopped talking politics. But the instant the meal was finished they wanted her away; she sensed it. If only she could be dismissed, turned out to prowl like a kitten, even in the rain! But she lived here, with Jim; he had brought her here in November, four months ago, and she had no other home.

“I’m too young to remember,” she heard Ahmed say, “and you weren’t in Europe.”

The coffeepot was Italian and composed of four aluminum parts that looked as if they never would fit one inside the other. Jim had written instructions for her, and tacked the instructions above the stove, but she was as frightened by the four strange shapes as she had been at the start. Somehow she got them together and set the pot on the gas flame. She put it on upside down, which was the right way. When the water began to boil, you turned the pot right way up, and the boiling water dripped through the coffee. You knew when the water was boiling because a thread of steam emerged from the upside-down spout. That was the most important moment.

Afraid of missing the moment, the girl leaned on the edge of the table, which was crowded with luncheon dishes; pushed together, behind her, were the remains of the rice-and-tomato, the bones and fat of the mutton chops. The Camembert dried in the kitchen air; the bread was already stale. She did not take her eyes from the spout of the coffeepot. She might have been dreaming of love.

“You still haven’t answered me,” said Jim in the next room. “Will Algeria go Communist? Yes or no.”

“Tunisia didn’t.”

“You had different leaders.”

“The Algerians are religious — the opposite of materialists.”

“They could use a little materialism in Algeria,” said Jim. “I’ve never been there, but you’ve only got to read. I’ve got a book here…”

Those two could talk poverty the whole day and never weary. They thought they knew what it was. Jim had never taken her to a decent restaurant — not even at the beginning, when he was courting her. He looked at the menu posted outside the door and if the prices seemed more than he thought simple working-class couples could pay he turned away. He wanted everyone in the world to have enough to eat, but he did not want them to enjoy what they were eating — that was how it seemed to Veronica. Ahmed lived in a cold room on the sixth floor of an old building, but he needn’t have. His father was a fashionable doctor in Tunis. Ahmed said there was no difference between one North African and another, between Ahmed talking of sacrifice and the nameless flower seller whose existence was a sacrifice — that is to say, whose life appears to have no meaning; whose faith makes it possible; of whom one thinks he might as well be dead. All Veronica knew was that Ahmed’s father was better off than her father had ever been. “I’m going to be an important personality,” she had said to herself at the age of seventeen or so. Soon after, she ran away and came to Paris; someone got a job for her in a photographer’s studio — a tidying-up sort of job, and not modeling, as she had hoped. In the office next to the studio, a drawer was open. She saw 100 Nouveaux Francs, a clean bill, on which the face of young Napoleon dared her, said, “Take it.” She bought a pair of summer shoes for seventy francs and spent the rest on silly presents for friends. Walking in the shoes, she was new. She would never be the same unimportant Veronica again. The shoes were beige linen, and when she wore them in the rain they had to be thrown away. The friend who had got her the job made up the loss when it was discovered, but the story went round, and no photographer would have her again.