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

When she had hung up, Allie, who had been listening, looked at her accusingly. “I heard Madeline say she didn’t like him,” she said.

“People often say things,” Mrs. Tracy said. “You must never pay attention to what people say if you know the opposite to be true.”

“Like what?” said Allie.

“Well, for instance,” Mrs. Tracy said seriously, “I could believe I was the only person who had enjoyed being here this summer. But I know it isn’t reasonable.”

She had, in fact, put the idea out of her head while pulling grass from the garden.

“Now,” she said, “will you please, for the last time, call Paul and Madeline, so that we can get breakfast over with and get this day under way?”

1951

BY HALF past ten, a vaporish heat had gathered on the road above the Mediterranean, and the two picnickers, Barbara Ainslie and Mike Cahill, walked as slowly as they could. Scuffing their shoes, they held themselves deliberately apart. It was the first time they had been alone. Barbara’s aunt, with whom she was staying in Menton, had begun speaking to Mike on the beach — she thought him a nice young boy — and it was she who had planned the picnic, packing them off for what she termed a good romp, quite unaware that her words had paralyzed at once the tremulous movement of friendship between them.

So far, they had scarcely spoken at all, passing in silence — in the autobus — between the shining arc of the beach and the vacant hotels that faced it. The hotels, white and pillared like Grecian ruins, were named for Albert and Victoria and the Empire. Shelled from the sea during the war, they exposed, to the rain and the road, cube-shaped rooms and depressing papered walls that had held the sleep of a thousand English spinsters when the pound was still a thing of moment. At sixteen, Barbara was neutral to decay but far too shy in the presence of Mike to stare at anything that so much as suggested a bedroom. She had looked instead at the lunch basket on her lap, at her bitten nails, at the shadow of her canvas hat, as if they held the seed of conversation. When they were delivered from the bus at last and had watched it reeling, in its own white dust, on to Monte Carlo, they turned together and climbed the scrambling path to Cap Martin.

“What will we talk about?” Barbara had asked her aunt, earlier that morning. “What will I say?”

Barbara’s aunt could see no problem here, and she was as startled as if a puppy tumbling in a cushioned box had posed the same question.

“Why, what do young people have to say anywhere?” she had asked. “Tell him about your school, if you like, or your winter in Paris.” Having provided that winter, she did not see why its value should be diminished in May, or, indeed, why it should not remain a conversational jewel for the rest of Barbara’s life.

“I suppose so,” Barbara had said, determined not to mention it at all. She was in France not as a coming-out present or because she had not smoked until she was eighteen but ignominiously, because she had failed her end-of-term examinations for the second year running. She had been enrolled in one of the best day schools in New York, a fact that she was frequently reminded of and that somehow doubled her imperfection. Her mother had consulted a number of people — an analyst she met at a party, two intimate women friends, the doctor who had delivered Barbara but had noticed nothing unusual about her at the time — and finally, when the subject was beginning to bore her, she had dispatched Barbara to Paris, to the distressed but dutiful sister of Barbara’s late father. Barbara was conscious, every moment of the day, that she was to get something from her year in France, and return to America brilliant, poised, and educated. Accordingly, she visited all the museums and copied on slips of paper the legends of monuments. Her diary held glimpses of flint tools, angular modern tapestries, cave drawings, the Gioconda (“quite small”), and the Venus de Milo (“quite big”); of a monument “that came by ship from Africa and was erected to the cheers of a throng”; and of a hotel where Napoleon had stayed as a young man, “but which we did not really see because it had been pulled down.” These mementos of Paris she buttressed with snapshots in which ghostly buildings floated on the surface of the Seine, and the steps of the Sacré-Coeur, transparent, encumbered the grass at Versailles. The snapshots she mounted and shielded with tissue in an album called “Souvenirs de France.”

She was proud of the year, and of the fact that she had shivered in unheated picture galleries and not spent her time drinking milk shakes in the American Embassy restaurant; still, she felt her year no match for Mike’s. When her aunt, testing, asked him where he lived in Paris, he had replied, “Oh, St. Germain,” and Barbara had been ill with envy, unaware that he stayed at a recommended pension , the owner of which sent fortnightly reports to his mother.

Glancing now at Mike shyly, as they walked along the upper road, Barbara caught from the corner of her eye the movement of her own earrings, Moroccan hoops she had bought, in the merciful absence of her aunt, from an Arab on the beach. With his sweaty fez and his impertinent speech, the Arab had seemed to Barbara the breathing incarnation of oil, greed, and problems. She had read a great deal in the winter, and she could have told anyone that Africa seethed, Asia teemed, and that something must be done at once about the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Spanish or Heaven only knew what would happen. She had also been cautioned that these difficulties were the heritage of youth, and this she acknowledged, picturing the youth as athletic, open-shirted, vaguely foreign in appearance, and marching in columns of eight.

“Straight over there is the Middle East,” she said to Mike, placing him without question in those purposeful ranks. She pointed in the direction of Corsica, and went on, “All the Arabs! What are we going to do about the Arabs?”

Mike shrugged.

“And the Indians,” Barbara said. “There are too many of them for the food in the world. And the Russians. What are we going to do about the Russians?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Actually, I never think about it.”

“I suppose you don’t,” she said. “You have your work to do.”

He glanced at her sharply, but there was no need to look twice. He had already observed her to be without guile, a fact that confused and upset him. Her good manners, as well, made him self-conscious. Once, when she mentioned her school, he had not mentioned his own New York high school and then, annoyed with himself, had introduced it with belligerence. He might have saved himself the trouble; she had never heard of it and did not know that it was a public school. He blamed his uneasiness, unfairly, on the fact that she had money and he had not. It had not occurred to him, inexperienced as he was, placing her with the thinnest of clues, that she might not be rich.

Mike was older than Barbara, although not by a great deal. He had come to France because the words “art” and “Paris” were unbreakably joined in his family’s imagination, the legend of Trilby’s Bohemia persisting long after the truth of it had died. When his high school art teacher, a young woman whose mobiles had been praised, pronounced that his was a talent not to be buried under the study of medicine or law, his family had decided that a year in Paris would show whether or not his natural bent was toward painting. It was rather like exposing someone to a case of measles and watching for spots to break out.

In Paris, Mike had spent the first three weeks standing in the wrong queue at the Beaux-Arts, and when no one seemed able to direct him to the right one, he had given up the Beaux-Arts entirely and joined a class instructed by an English painter called Chitterley, whose poster advertisement he had seen in a café. It was Mr. Chitterley’s custom to turn his young charges loose on the city and then, once a week or so, comment on their work in a borrowed studio on the quai d’Anjou. Mike painted with sober patience the bridges of the Seine, the rain-soaked lawns of the Tuileries, and a head-on view of Notre Dame. His paintings were large (Mr. Chitterley was nearsighted), askew (as he had been taught in the public schools of New York), and empty of people (he had never been taught to draw, and it was not his nature to take chances).