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

A rotary sprinkler now pivots on its stem. Roy is protected from Bea by rainbows. Bea, waiting for Roy to surrender, heaves her slight weight onto one foot. Her dress follows the line of her spine. “Honestly, Roy, you’re just a coward, you know,” she says. Accustomed to making animals trust her, she advances now almost without seeming to move. “Afraid of some old bugs! When I was your age I wasn’t scared of anything.” Bea has passed the lime tree. Her dress is in full sun. She will drop the stool and the book and shoot through rainbows. She will suddenly shove Roy off his tricycle and slap him twice, coming and going. She will drag the tricycle away and leave him there to mull over his defeat. No, none of it happens: Roy suddenly comes to life, pushes forward to meet her. When she turns back with him, she sees Malcolm. His whole family comes toward him now, and Bea is smiling.

A grievance overtakes her welcoming look. Something has come up. What now? On the way indoors she tells him: Leonard and Verna Baum, their closest friends, the only Canadians they know here, are not going to Belgium. Leonard is going to Germany, with the Army. Her interest in having Canadian friends, like her interest in history, is new. She does not always recognize a Canadian when she hears one.

“What’s your father?” she said to a stray little boy who, like a puppy, followed Roy home one day. Just like that: not even “What’s your name?”

“He’s an Ayer Force Mayn,” said the innocent, in syllables that should have rung like gongs to Bea.

“Well, Roy happens to be Canadian,” said Bea haughtily, demonstrating how you put down any American aged about five.

By mistake, Bea has packed and shipped to Belgium pots and pans that belong to their landlord. She forgot to send their trunk of winter clothes. Ruth is back to baby food, and Roy (when he will eat) lives on marmalade sandwiches. Malcolm and Bea will have their dinner at the local bric-a-brac snack bar called Drug Diane. He knows, because she seems so comfortable in this ramshackle way of living, that she must have had something like it when she was a child. As if he had never seen her house, never known her father, she sometimes describes a house and a garden and a set of parents. “I liked it when we first came over to France and lived right in Versailles,” she will say. “It was more like home.”

The desire to be rid of Bea overtakes Malcolm at hopeless times, when he can do nothing about it. If she left him now, this second, it would settle every problem he ever has had in his life — even the problem of the winter clothes left behind. Bea, questioned about it, says she has never wanted to leave him. Sometimes she says, “All right, you take Roy, I’ll keep Ruth.” She forgets Roy isn’t his. She thinks her difficulties would be resolved if she just knew something more about men. All she knows is Malcolm. The father of Roy hardly counted. She slept with him “only the once,” as she puts it, and hated it. She warned Malcolm the other day: she would have an affair. If she waits too long, no one will want her. When Malcolm said, “With Leonard?” she burst out laughing. A few seconds later, evidently thinking of herself in bed with Leonard, she laughed again. “ Him ,” she said. “It’s too easy. Anybody can have him. They say any girl that ever worked in his office…” But her interest dies quickly. Malcolm has seldom heard her gossiping. Gossip implies at least a theory about behavior, and Bea has none. “Anyway, Leonard’s losing his hair and all,” she said, seriously.

So, she has an idea about a lover, Malcolm can see that, but it is still someone unreal.

Bea hasn’t asked what Malcolm and Leonard were doing in Paris today, Saturday. She knows that Leonard rang just after lunch and said, “Can you come in and get me? I can’t drive my car.” He gave the address of a hospital.

“I think Leonard’s had a heart attack,” he said to Bea. “Don’t say anything to Verna yet.”

But when Malcolm found Leonard he discovered that Leonard’s Danish girl, Karin, had cut her wrists with a fruit knife — one of those shallow cuts, with the knife held the wrong way. She isn’t dead, but her stomach has been pumped out for good measure, and she is tied to her hospital bed. The police have Leonard’s name.

Bea hasn’t even said, “What was wrong with Leonard?” or “What did he want?”—which means she knows. If she knows, then Verna knows. Leonard is at this moment telling a carefully invented story to Verna, who may pretend to be taken in.

Bea sits very calmly on the balcony of the apartment, with Ruth in a pen at her feet, and waits for Malcolm to bring her a drink.

“Leonard’s done a lot of lying to Verna,” she says, out of the blue. “But I’m the sort of person no man would ever lie to.”

She sits in a deck chair, serene, hair pulled into a dark ponytail so tense her black eyes look Asian. She means raw lying, such as a man’s saying he is going out to buy cigarettes when he really wants to send a telegram. She would never think of a more subtle form, and might not consider it lying. She truly thinks that her face, her way of being invite the truth.

Malcolm is convinced he will never have an idea about Bea until he understands her idea of herself. Of course Bea has an idea; what woman hasn’t? In her mind’s eye she is always advancing, she is walking between lanes of trees on a June day. She is small and slight in her dreams, as she is in life. She advances toward herself, as if half of her were a mirror. In the vision she carries Ruth, her prettiest baby, newly born, or a glass goblet, or a bunch of roses. Whatever she holds must be untouched, fresh, scarcely breathed on.

What is her destination in this dream? Is it Malcolm?

She looks taken aback. It is herself. She is final. She can’t go farther than herself, and Malcolm can’t go any farther than Bea.

Malcolm, pouring straight gin, thinks “infantile” and then “conceited.” Having her entire attention, he sits on the balcony railing and tries to tell her that no one is a destination, and no marriage simply endures: it is difficult to begin, and difficult to end. (Her dark eyes are full of love. She takes this for a declaration.) The only question, the correct question, about any marriage — the Baums’, for instance — would be “What is it about?” Every marriage is about something. It must have a plot. Sometimes it has a puzzling or incoherent plot. If you saw it acted out, it would bore you. “Turn it off,” you would say. “No one I know lives that way.” It has a mood, a setting, a vocabulary, bone structure, a climate.

All Bea says to that is “Well, no man would ever lie to me.”

It is not true that Bea put pressure on me to marry her, Malcolm decides. In her cloudiest rages she says, “You were maneuvered! I lied to you from the beginning! If that’s what you think, why don’t you come out with it?” But I have never thought it. There was no beginning. There were springs, and sources, but miles apart, uncharted. It would be like crossing a continent on foot to find them all. I would find some of them long before I knew she existed. The beginning, to her, would need a date to it — the day we met. I had been in Canada four months then, and was still without friends or money, waiting for a job I had been promised in London. Friends and money — I thought I was coming to a place where it would be easy to find both. One afternoon — a Saturday? — I was picked up in a movie by two giggling girls. Outside, I saw they were dumpy, narrow-eyed. They were twins, they told me, named Pattie and Claire. In that Western city every face bore a racial stamp, and because this was new to me I kept asking people what they were. The girls shrugged. They were called Griffith, whatever that was worth. Their father had come out here from Cape Breton Island after their mother died. I understood they might be blueberry blondes — Indians. I was still so ignorant then that I thought you could say this. The poisonous hate in their eyes lasted two or three seconds. My accent saved me. My English accent, so loathed, so resented out here, seemed hilarious to Pattie and Claire. I was hardly a generation away from signs reading, “Men Wanted. No British Need Apply,” but the girls didn’t know that. They must have been fifteen, sixteen. They wanted me to take them somewhere, but on a Saturday afternoon there was nowhere to go, nowhere I could take them, except my one-room flat (“suite,” the girls called it). They drank rye and tap water, and told dirty stories, and laughed, and opened all the drawers and cupboards. They weren’t tarts. They didn’t want money. It was their idea of a normal afternoon. They wanted me to ring up some bachelor friend, but I didn’t know anyone well enough. The upshot of the day was that they took me home with them. It was about eight o’clock; the sun was still high and hot.