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

“How is he ?” said Gilles suddenly, with a slight jerk of the tweed cap. “I mean how is he really?”

“Who said anything was the matter with him?” said Lucie.

“Lucky thing you never had children,” said Gilles. “He never had a job. I don’t mean never held one, I mean never had one. Am I right?” He did not require an answer. “Did he ever write anything, finally?”

“I never heard him say he wanted to,” said Lucie. “So I’m not sure what you mean by finally.”

“Then why did he take degrees in literature?” said Gilles. “He could have taught. They were screaming for teachers then. Too late now. Degrees like his are a dime a dozen. Well, you aren’t tied with children. That’s one good thing.”

“It isn’t too late for children,” said Lucie. “I’m twenty-eight.”

“At least you’ll never have problems like what to do about super-intelligent daughters,” said Gilles. “Are you still a Catholic, Lucie? Practicing, I mean.”

“Not now.” That was something she could answer.

“Our upbringing was a disease,” said Gilles.

“That’s what Jérôme says. I don’t know. God never hurt my feelings.”

“It was easy for your generation,” said Gilles. “You had a choice.”

“No one mentioned it at the time,” said Lucie. “Excuse me, Gilles, but your dog is slobbering on our raincoats.”

“Saliva is only a saline solution,” said Gilles. “It washes out.”

“…for cello and orchestra, by the composer Eye-hend,” said the same announcer who had mentioned “End.”

Gilles snapped the radio shut. “The French are twenty years behind the times,” he said. “Still playing the wrong Haydn. Only Michael Haydn matters.”

It occurred to Lucie that she had no clear early memory of what her cousin had been like before Mussolini and Julius Caesar; before Neuilly, New Haven, the goggles, the Labrador retriever, and the right Haydn.

With the stilling of music and of voices a freshness like the freshness of water filled the car. They had left the autoroute and crossed a river; no, the end of this journey would never be Montreal. Now Gilles drove them to the edge of a walled town whose ramparts rose above the road. Lucie observed Jérôme as he gave this wall his deepest attention. She looked too, and saw stone the color of leaves drying and a pair of towers like two of Jérôme’s chessmen.

Between the towers there had once been houses, but they had been pulled apart, trodden to sand, probably when the Renaissance demanded horizons. Jérôme had explained that once. He had stood on the ramparts, looking down to the road where he and Gilles and Lucie and the slobbering dog were now stalled in Saturday traffic, and a girl standing beside him had asked, “Do they rent those towers? Couldn’t we try to live in one?” The girl was one of the two or three he had been in love with before Lucie. Lucie had been a child then, not ready to be known. She had been so devout and solemn her sisters feared she might become a nun. But then she said no, that she would be a nurse and thereby marry a doctor. She turned herself into a nurse and had no home of her own, but slept in any of her married sisters’ houses. The sisters were always making up spare beds for Lucie. Two of her brothers-in-law each tried to become Lucie’s first lover because she looked like their wives but was a virgin still; but she was too devout, too tired, too afraid. At twenty-five she told her favorite sister, “I have waited too long now to marry just anybody. He will have to be special, rare. Intelligent, generous, faithful,” making the choice so hard that she might never need to be chosen. She neglected to say, “Unbreakable, whole.” Just when she was about to become indispensable as a babysitter, she married one of her patients, Jérôme.

Jérôme seemed to be counting something. As Lucie read his face, he might have been counting, “In Solitude, in Anguish, in Despair,” wondering what could be added.

“A great thing about France is you can get Cuban cigars,” said Gilles, throwing away the end of one. “By way of Geneva.” He pulled in at an Elf service station and remarked, “Laure likes us to use Elf stations because they aren’t backed by international capital. No other woman would think of that. I’ve got no change,” he said. “Nothing small enough. They won’t take a check here.”

Now Lucie recalled her cousin. Yes, she remembered him before Mussolini, before Julius Caesar. There was a family joke, a joke still living, about rich cousin Gilles who never had the change for anything — not for a candy bar, not for a stamp.

“If you could let me have something like a hundred dollars — in francs, of course,” said Gilles. “I won’t be able to cash a check until Monday.” He addressed himself to Lucie.

“Ask Jérôme,” she said. She was remembering something she had been told: “Don’t let Jérôme think he isn’t competent. Don’t take over his role. About money — he must learn to spend rationally.” She saw Jérôme coming to life and giving Gilles three times one hundred francs — about sixty dollars, that would be. Was that rational? Was it too little? Was it miserly? Or else too much, the unnecessary gesture again? Gilles made no comment, but the matter of choosing bills and handing them over had started Jérôme off speaking, which was a good sign.

“I came to that town once with another student, one of three girls,” he said. “I was trying to remember her name.”

Gilles looked at Lucie. She knew the expression — a man confronted with another man’s strangeness. Gilles had not seen the walls, high up over the road and to the right. He thought that Jérôme was raving. She said, “You know that Jérôme was a student here, in the nineteen-fifties.” She weighted her voice with all that Gilles was supposed to keep in mind: Jérôme’s precocious brilliance, Jérôme’s degrees.

“The girls in the nineteen-fifties were the prettiest that ever lived,” said Gilles, loudly and heartily. “Good old Jérôme! Of course he remembers them! Two or three of them, anyway.” Lucie was used to that way of speaking too: a man’s way of humoring a madman.

“Does anyone want chocolate?” she said. Gilles took a third of the bar; Jérôme closed his eyes, getting rid of Gilles, the Labrador, Lucie, chocolate, money, and Gilles’ goggles and cap.

“Jérôme could have had a great career,” said Lucie. “But he refused to work within the system. Of course he was right.”

Like everyone else in Lucie’s family, Gilles believed that Jérôme’s relations had engineered the marriage because Jérôme had had a breakdown and Lucie was a nurse. As for Jérôme, said Gilles silently, he may have seemed like an intellectual pioneer all those years ago, but now there were crowds of younger men with degrees every bit as good as his, and all of them waiting for the handful of prestigious titles Free Quebec would throw out: Minister of Culture, Minister for the Restoration of Historical Monuments, Ambassador to the United Nations, to Unesco, to France, to London, to Rome, to the Vatican. Minister of Protocol. Minister of the Armed Forces. Minister in Charge of other Ministries. Minister in Discreet Control of the Self-Perpetuating Revolution. That was what Jérôme had been waiting for. It wasn’t a breakdown he’d had. It was a sulking fit.

Well, just wait. Wait until it happens and there are one hundred and thirty candidates for the Ministry of Culture but not even one bright young man asking to be Minister of Potatoes. I never wanted that, Gilles thought, forcing his way back into southbound traffic. I was never sullen. I never had to be humored and led around like a blind man by my wife. I only wanted to be what I am now — one of the top three or four in my field. I support five people and a dog. I have beautiful homes in two countries. My education is a match for Jérôme’s any day. I don’t create social problems. I am on the side of life, not of failure. I am the equal of my wife, not her dependant. I shall never be poor.