Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

She woke up cramped and thirsty on the back seat of the car. They were stopped in front of the café and must have been parked for some time, for they were in an oblique shadow of late afternoon. Roy was telling Lisbet a lie: he said he had been a magistrate and was writing his memoirs. Next he told her of hangings he’d seen. He said in his soft voice, “Don’t you think some people are better out of the way?” Sarah knew by heart the amber eyes and the pupils so small they seemed a mistake sometimes. She was not Sarah now but a prisoner impaled on a foreign language, seeing bright, light, foreign eyes offering something nobody wanted — death. “Flawed people, born rotten,” Roy went on.

“Oh, everyone thinks that now,” said Lisbet.

They were alike, with fortunes established in piracy. He liked executions; she broke people before they had a chance to break themselves. Lisbet stroked the back of her own neck. Sarah had noticed before that when Lisbet was feeling sure of herself she made certain her neck was in place. Neurotic habit , Sarah’s memory asked her to believe; but no, it was only the gesture of someone at ease in a situation she recognized. Tranquil as to her neck, Lisbet now made sure of her hair. She patted the bright steel wool that must have been a comfort to her mother some thirty-five — no, forty — years before.

I am jealous, Sarah said to herself. How unwelcome. Jealousy is only … the jealous person is the one keeping something back and so …

“Oh, keys, always keys,” said Roy, shaking them. He slammed out in a way that was surely rude to Lisbet. She rested her arm over the back of the seat and looked at Sarah. “You drank enough to stun a rhinoceros, little girl,” she said. “We had to take you out behind the chapel and make you be sick before we could let you in the car.” Sarah began to remember. She saw Roy’s face, a gray flash in a cracked old film about a catastrophe. Lisbet said, “Look, Sarah, how old are you? Aren’t you a bit out of your depth with Roy?” She might have said more, but a native spitefulness, or a native prudence, prevented her. She flew to Majorca the next day, as Roy had predicted, leaving everyone out of step.

Now Roy began hating; he hated the sea, the Reeves, the dogs, the blue of plumbago, the mention of Lisbet, and most of all he hated Sarah. The Reeves laughed and called it “old Roy being bloody-minded again,” but Sarah was frightened. She had never known anyone who would simply refuse to speak, who would take no notice of a question. Meg said to her, “He misses that job of his. It came to nothing. He tried to give a lot of natives a sense of right and wrong, and then some Socialist let them vote.”

“Yes, he liked that job,” Sarah said slowly. “One day he’d watch a hanging, and the next he’d measure the exercise yard to see if it was up to standard.” She said suddenly and for no reason she knew, “I’ve disappointed him.”

Their meals were so silent that they could hear the swelling love songs from the Reeves’ television, and the Reeves’ voices bawling away at each other. Sarah’s throat would go tight. In daytime the terrace was like an oven now, and her ankle kept her from sleeping at night. Then Roy gave up eating and lay on the bed looking up at the ceiling. She still went on shopping, but now it took hours. Mornings, before leaving, she would place a bowl of coffee for him, like an offering; it was still there, at the bedside, cold and oily-looking now, when she came back. She covered a tray with leaves from the plane tree — enormous powdery leaves, the size of her two hands — and she put cheese on the leaves, and white cheese covered with pepper, a Camembert, a salty goat cheese he had liked. He did not touch any. Out of a sort of desperate sentiment, she kept the tray for days, picking chalky pieces off as the goat cheese grew harder and harder and became a fossil. He must have eaten sometimes; she thought of him gobbling scraps straight from the refrigerator when her back was turned. She wrote a letter to her father that of course she did not send. It said, “I’ve been having headaches lately. I wind a thread around a finger until the blood can’t get past and that starts a new pain. The headache is all down the back of my neck. I’m not sure what to do next. It will be terrible for you if I turn out to have a brain tumor. It will cost you a lot of money and you may lose your only child.”

One dawn she knew by Roy’s breathing that he was awake. Every muscle was taut as he pulled away, as if to touch her was defilement. No use saying what they had been like not long before, because he could not remember. She was a disgusting object because of a cracked ankle, because she had drunk too much and been sick behind a chapel, and because she had led an expedition to look at Jesus. She lay thinking it over until the dawn birds stopped and then she sat up on the edge of the bed, feeling absolutely out of place because she was undressed. She pulled clothes on as fast as she could and packed whatever seemed important. After she had pushed her suitcase out the door, she remembered the wooden bowls and the poster. These she took along the path and threw in the Reeves’ foul incinerator, as if to get rid of all traces of witchery, goodness, and love. She realized she was leaving, a decision as final and as stunning as her having crossed the promenade in Nice with Roy’s hand on her arm.

She said through the white netting over the door, “I’m sorry, Roy.” It was not enough; she added, “I’m sorry I don’t understand you more.” The stillness worried her. She limped near and bent over him. He was holding his breath, like a child in temper. She said softly, “I could stay a bit longer.” No answer. She said, “Of course, my foot will get better, but then you might find something else the matter with me.” Still no answer, except that he began breathing. Nothing was wrong except that he was cruel, lunatic, Fascist — No, not even that. Nothing was wrong except that he did not love her. That was all.

She lugged her suitcase as far as the road and sat down beside it. Overnight a pocket of liquid the size of a lemon had formed near the anklebone. Her father would say it was all her own fault again. Why? Was it Sarah’s fault that she had all this loving capital to invest? What was she supposed to do with it? Even if she always ended up sitting outside a gate somewhere, was she any the worse for it? The only thing wrong now was the pain she felt, not of her ankle but in her stomach. Her stomach felt as if it was filled up with old oyster shells. Yes, a load of old, ugly, used-up shells was what she had for stuffing. She had to take care not to breathe too deeply, because the shells scratched. In her research for Professor Downcast she had learned that one could be alcoholic, crippled, afraid of dying and of being poor, and she knew these things waited for everyone, even Sarah; but nothing had warned her that one day she would not be loved. That was the meaning of “less privileged.” There was no other.

Now that she had vanished, Roy would probably get up, and shave, and stroll across to the Reeves, and share a good old fry-up. Then, his assurance regained, he would start prowling the bars and beaches, wearing worn immaculate whites, looking for a new, unblemished story. He would repeat the first soft words, “Don’t be frightened,” the charm, the gestures, the rituals, and the warning “It won’t always be lovely.” She saw him out in the open, in her remembered primrose light, before he was trapped in the tunnel again and had to play at death. “Roy’s new pickup,” the Reeves would bawl at each other. “I said, Roy’s new one … he hardly knows how to get rid of her.”

At that, Sarah opened her mouth and gave a great sobbing cry; only one, but it must have carried, for next thing she heard was the Reeves’ door, and, turning, she saw Tim in a dressing gown, followed by Meg in her parachute of a robe. Sarah stood up to face them. The sun was on her back. She clutched the iron bars of the gate because she had to stand like a stork again. From their side of it, Tim looked down at her suitcase. He said, “Do you want — are you waiting to be driven somewhere?”