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

“One stepdaughter,” said Jérôme. “She had a husband, but he took cyanide. The two towers are on the far side of the town,” he said. He raised a hand, wiping out of the present parking meters and cars. He began to walk, Lucie following. He seemed to have forgotten that she was with him. They turned into a street shaded by plane trees; the street presently became too narrow for trees, or even for people walking together. Lucie fell behind, pushed and jostled and sometimes separated from Jérôme by a Sunday provincial crowd. “I remember all of this,” Jérôme said, but not really to her. He looked at his face on a plate glass window. “I remember,” he said, walking again.

The antique china shop with plates against blue silk, said Jérôme. The tobacconist’s with the yellow mailbox outside. The mailbox used to be another color — I think it was blue. (Lucie saw that he was once more beginning to count something on his fingers.) The fishmonger with the trays of cracked ice. The pastry shop. The café. The second café. The chapel.

“Jérôme, there is a sign saying Concert on the door,” said Lucie, close behind him. She was bothered by the Sunday crowd, whose indifference to strangers seemed to her hostile. She wanted Jérôme to stop and rest and even a church would do, even though he said he had finished with religion. All the wrong omens for the day were in place, Jérôme’s constellations of disaster: Jérôme not listening, looking at his face in a shopwindow as if he had forgotten what he was; Jérôme tearing paper, fiddling with breadcrumbs, saying he wanted to buy a house in France when they could barely even afford this trip.

Now he had come to a halt before another window and he stared in some puzzlement at stacks of men’s shirts in magenta and blue. “Well, what do you think?” he asked, though not quite of Lucie. “I could easily live in this place. Look,” he said, moving on. “Look at that.” It was a glass bottle twisted in shape, as if it had been wrung out to dry. “In the old days they lowered iron shutters on Sunday. There must be less stealing now. Or else they never close.”

“What was it for?” said Lucie. “That useless bottle?”

“To give to friends.”

Well, at least it was an answer. But is that what people give each other here? she wondered. Is that what you are expected to bring when you are invited for a weekend? “We can’t go on walking up and down the street,” she said. “We could sit in that little church. Just for a minute.”

It was small, a pink and white room with an almond pastry ceiling. “A private chapel,” said Jérôme. “A patrician family with a resident priest. Corsicans. Transplanted Italians. The Stations of the Cross are even uglier than in Quebec.” He perceived something Lucie had not noticed — the bare altar, the absence of a crucifix and of a sanctuary light.

He thinks I am praying, said Lucie. He won’t interrupt me, because he never does the worst thing, but he is standing behind me despising me. She tried to clear her memory of shop windows; all her closed eyes could see were twisted bottles, magenta shirts. That is what you do on a holy day when there is no God, she said. You walk up and down and let strange people push you and you talk about what you might want to buy. I should have married a doctor after all, she said against her clasped hands. I would have been perfect for a doctor. I would have learned Spanish. Doctors like going to Mexico for their holidays. I could have answered the phone.

Jérôme knew that something had taken place in the chapel. The street had emptied and they could walk side by side now, but they had more trouble walking together than ever before. When they came to a corner, they collided, each attempting to cross in a different direction.

“Do you see that policeman?” said Jérôme, speaking to Lucie, only to her, now that she had stopped trying to listen. “I’m sure he was here twenty years ago. Look at his face. Red and stupid. Look at him with his red nose. Why won’t you look? I remember this café,” he went on. “We came here after a film.” It was a café where they served nothing except pancakes. The waitresses wore Breton costumes, here, miles from the sea. It reminded him of the baroque ceiling in the chapel. The street was all a mistake, as if it had been knocked together by a child.

At home everything looks the same, said Lucie. We don’t want these landslides, this strangeness. Who is “we”? What film? Was it Madame Arrieu? He doesn’t want to see her again. He’s afraid of seeing her. That is why he spent the night walking around the room instead of sleeping.

Nadine had left the car unlocked and the key stuck in the ignition; it showed how anxious she had been to get away from the Girards. Jérôme and Lucie sat in the back of the car holding hands. He told her about a girl he had brought to this town, a long time ago. Corinne was the girl’s name. As soon as he had seen the Breton café the memory returned. Corinne worked in a bookshop in Montparnasse. She wanted Jérôme to think about nothing but her, and when she saw that he was interested in differences of opinion — oh, and in himself, and in girls in general, because they were unlike himself, they belonged to a different culture — Corinne could not understand it. Lucie was not like Corinne, he said. She had a natural goodness that welled up like a spring. Even if she wanted to be selfish and to put herself first, she would not know how to begin. He meant every word of this; she was not to forget what he was telling her now. “Even when you’re asleep, you’re better than other women,” he said.

This was felicity. No one but Lucie knew what Jérôme could be like. He told her things he had never told anyone; even the doctors had said so. She gave him the simplest, most loving response she could think of, which was, “You didn’t sleep well last night. You must be tired. Did you take anything this morning? Not even an Equanil?”

“For God’s sake, stop asking me how I am,” he shouted, and he flung out of the car and left her just as Nadine and her grandmother came walking across the square.

Through shock and horror that suddenly seemed like rain on a window, Lucie saw this new person — saw her sunglasses, her straw summer handbag, her linen suit; watched her greeting Jérôme, who now strolled back to the car as though he had left it for no purpose but this meeting. With the quick tally came a feeling of injustice, of unfairness, as though Lucie had been harshly treated. She could not attach the conviction to any one word or event. Jérôme was often impatient when she turned the conversation to his health, a turning she found too natural to avoid. Was it Lucie’s fault if she had not looked her best yesterday? And what ought to be her best now, at the age of twenty-eight? Her sturdy blond beauty had suffocated under hospital training, and then this marriage. Was it Lucie’s fault? Jérôme’s?

“My grandmother,” said Nadine.

“Did you have a good dinner last night?” said Madame Arrieu, shaking hands. “Are you pleased with your room? Did this child take good care of you?” Settled in, her profile to Lucie, she said, “Nadine, have you written your parents?”

“Oh, she has parents!” cried Lucie, from the back. “I am so glad.”

Madame Arrieu quickly looked round. A miniature, eager Lucie was held on the surface of her glasses. Nadine frowned, half turned, elbow on the back of her seat, as she moved the car away from the curb. “Nadine! Answer Madame Girard.”

“My parents are cruising around Greece,” said Nadine.

“Nadine! Not Greece. The coast of Jugoslavia — please. Your parents would never spend a holiday in a fascist country.”

“The postcards all look the same,” said Nadine.