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

“It’s marvelous, that bit about the bread,” says the director.

The star of the film, the French Resistance heroine, thinks it was overdone. They shoot two versions, one with the bread falling, and one with the professor losing his spectacles. Now Ernst has the hang of it and knocks the spectacles off without saying “I’m sorry.”

The Resistance heroine is Italian. She glances at Willi, but she smokes and swears, and Willi can’t bear that. Her skin is a mess. She looks as if she’d had smallpox. Someone tells Willi she was once a Roman prostitute.

He likes the young girl who has the part of the professor’s daughter. She is a Parisian of sixteen who has spent her life, until now, in a convent school. She runs down the street screaming behind her parents. Willi thinks she does it well. She seems to him pure and good. He has already noticed that she is chaperoned, and that she doesn’t smoke. But if anyone gets to the girl it will be Ernst. Ernst has more luck with girls than Willi. He is in trouble, and girls will listen to that. Willi has nothing to complain about and lacks conversation. He knows that some weakness in his behavior makes him lose the upper hand, but he is not certain where it begins.

Two years ago, on another film, Willi met a girl who looked like this one. She had blond hair, short as a boy’s, and wore a heart on a gold chain around her neck. She was calm and gentle — it is always the same girl, the one they told him once he was going to have to defend. The blond girl invited Willi to her parents’ flat one afternoon when no one was home. She lived in an old house with high ceilings. He remembers looking out the window into trees. She was proud to be entertaining a man, and she brought him ice and whiskey on a tray. When he refused, she sulked and sat as far away from him as she could. She crossed her legs, looked out the window, twisted and untwisted her gold chain.

He asked a stupid question. He said, “Don’t you like me?” He always asks too soon, and the failure begins there.

“What does it matter?” said the young girl. The question annoyed her. He had let her know she could be cruel.

Wondering what to say then, he touched a lapis-lazuli ashtray.

“My brother-in-law in Stuttgart has a bathroom tiled with this,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said the girl. “It’s lapis lazuli.”

“Whatever it is, my brother-in-law has a bathroom tiled with it.”

“He can’t have. Imagine what it would cost! Why, even an ashtray costs — I don’t know what, exactly. You must mean blue tiles, or blue marble, or something like that.”

Willi felt the weight of the ashtray and said, “I’m sure it’s this.”

“Then he must be so rich — a gangster . Besides, it would be vulgar.”

She was impressed, though. He could see that. She stared at the ashtray. She had forgotten Willi’s question. He had the upper hand, but only because of the brother-in-law. He suddenly thought she wasn’t the girl he had expected. He stayed a few minutes longer, just to be polite, and then went away. He didn’t see the girl again.

He has waited so long he must be certain; he has waited too long to afford a mistake.

1963

WALKING diagonally over the sacred grass on his way up from the parking lot, Malcolm Armitage hears first the gardien’s whistle, then children shooting. To oblige the children, he doubles over his bent arm, wounded. Death, in children’s wars, arrives by way of the stomach. Malcolm does not have to turn to know the children are Americans, just as the gardien , though he may not place Malcolm accurately, can tell he is not French. He can tell because Malcolm is walking on the grass between the apartment blocks, and because he is in his shirtsleeves, carrying his jacket. This is the only warm day in a cold spring. NATO is leaving, and by the time school has ended Malcolm and the embattled children will have disappeared. The children, talked of as rough, destructive, loud, laughed at for the boys’ cropped heads and girls’ strange clothes, are identifiable because they play. They play without admonitions and good advice. They tear over the grass shooting and killing. They shoot their mothers dead through picture windows, and each of them has died over and over, a hundred times. The gardien is not a real policeman, just a bad-tempered old man in a dirty collar, with a whistle and a caved-in cap. In the late warm afternoon the thinned army retreats in the direction of the wading pool, which is full of last year’s leaves and fenced in, but this particular army knows how to get over a fence. The new children gradually replacing them do not mix and do not play. White net curtains cover their windows, and at night double curtains are drawn. The new children attend school on Saturdays, and when they come home they go indoors at once. They do their lessons; then the blue light of television flashes in the chink of the curtains. When they walk, it is in a reasonable manner, keeping to the paths. They seem foreign, but of course they are not: they are French, and Résidence Diane, six miles west of Versailles, is part of France.

As he reaches the brick path edged with ornamental willows and one spared lime tree, Malcolm, unseen, comes upon his family. Bea has her back to him. Her bright-yellow dress is splashed with light. She carries the folding stool she takes to the playground and, tucked high under one arm, Montcalm and Wolfe , which she has been reading for weeks and weeks. When Malcolm asks how far along she is, she says, “Up to where it says Canada was the prey of jackals.” Then she looks as if he were the jackal, because he was born in England. She looks as if she had access to historical information Malcolm will never understand. Only once he said, “Who do you hate most, Bea? The English, the French, or the Americans?” He has had to learn not to tease.

Behind her, for the moment abandoned, is the old blue stroller they bought after some other international baby had grown out of it. Ruth, Malcolm’s child, is asleep in it, slumped to one side. Roy, astride his tricycle, faces Bea. Malcolm imagines himself as two miniatures — two perspiring stepfathers — on the child’s eyes. Roy’s eyes are mirrors. He never looks at you: there is no you. “Look at me,” you say, and Roy looks over there.

The family scene set up and waiting for Malcolm consists of a fight for life. Roy, who is afraid of mosquitoes, has refused to ride his tricycle through a swarm of gnats. He is at a dead stop, with a foot on the path. His dark curls stick to his forehead. His resistance to Bea lies in his silence and stubbornness, or in sudden vandalism. Last weekend he snapped the head off every spaced, prized, counted, daffodil in reach of the playground. Malcolm heard Bea say, “I’ll kill you!” He walked up to them — as he is doing now — trying to show the neighbors nothing was wrong. Bea is moved by an audience; Malcolm would like to be invisible. He drew Bea’s arms back and Roy fell like a sack. She was crying. “Ah, he’s not mine,” she said. “He can’t be. They made a mistake in the hospital.” Only then did she notice Roy had been biting. She showed Malcolm her arm, mutely. He looked at the small oval, her stigmata. “He can’t be mine,” she said. “I had a lovely boy but some other mother got him. They gave me Roy by mistake.”

“Listen,” said Malcolm. “Never say that again.”

Bea, suddenly cheerful, said, “But Roy’s said worse than that to me !”

“Say right now, so he can hear you, that he’s yours and there was no mistake.”

Of course Roy was hers! She said so, laughing. He was hers like the crickets she kept in plastic cages and fed on scraps of lettuce the size of Ruth’s fingernails; like the hedgehog she raised and trained to drink milk out of a wineglass; like the birds she buys on the quai de la Corse in Paris and turns out to freeze or starve or be pecked to death. It is always after she has said something harebrained, on the very limit of reason, that she seems most appealing. Her outrageousness is part of the coloration of their marriage, their substitute for a plot. “Poor kid,” Malcolm will suddenly say, not about the wronged child but of Bea. It is easy for Bea to crave this pity of his, to feel unloved, bullied, to turn to him, though she thinks he is a bully too.