Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

“It’s an old story, you know,” she said. “Hardly worth the trouble of breaking off. He always takes me somewhere for my birthday.” She stopped, as if wondering how to explain what the old friendship was based on. She said, simply, “You know how it is. He got me young.”

“Do you love him?”

“No, nothing like that. I love you. But we planned this trip ages ago. I couldn’t be sure you would ever get to Paris. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. You’d like him, Potter. Honestly you would. He speaks three different languages. He’s independent — enjoys running his own business. I don’t even make a dent in his life.”

“Does he love you?”

“I keep telling you, it isn’t like that. We aren’t really lovers. I mean, not as you and I are. We sleep together — well, if we find ourselves in the same bed.”

“Try not to find yourself,” said Piotr.

“What?” She seemed as candid, as confident, as tender as always. Her eyes were as clear as a child’s. Her hand shook suddenly. What was coming now? The unloved childhood? The day her mother left her at Bishop Purse School? The school must have provided clean sheets and warm rooms and regular meals, but she was of a world that took these remarkable gifts for granted. His wife, younger then than Laurie was now, had stolen food for Piotr when he lay in a prison infirmary absolutely certain he was about to die. She had been a prisoner, too, dispatched as medical aide and cleaner. She stopped at the foot of his cot. When she started talking she couldn’t stop. He saw that her amber eyes focussed nowhere — her “in-looking eyes” he was to call them. Because of the eyes and the mad rush of words and the danger she was calling down on them he had thought, The girl is insane. Then sanely, quietly, she said, “I have some bread for you.” You could not compare Laurie Bennett with a person of that quality. All the same, Piotr had guessed: his wife was insane, but only with him. Danger had reached him after he seemed well out of it, only to be caught on the danger a couple create for each other.

“Look, Potter,” said Laurie. “If you mind all that much, I won’t go. I’ll talk to him.”

“When?”

“Now; soon. But I’d be sad. He’s a good friend. Why would he want to take me to Venice, except out of friendship? He doesn’t need me . He knows all kinds of interesting people. I’d be poorer without him — really alone.” She was already making women’s gestures of leaving, straightening the spoon in its saucer, gathering in whatever belonged to her, bringing her affairs close — protecting herself. “Don’t come to the train,” she said. “Drink your coffee, read the paper. Look, I’ve even brought it along. Keep the key to my room. You’ll stay there, won’t you? As we arranged? If you mind about the concierge seeing you — not that she cares — just use the garage instead of the front door. That’s how the married ladies in the building meet their lovers. I’ll write,” she said. “I’ll write to your hotel.”

He pushed his chair back. As he got to his feet his ankle gave way. “Oh, Potter, your poor ankle!” Laurie said. “I was on a sailing holiday when you broke it. I was at Lake Constance and I wasn’t getting my mail. I wasn’t seeing newspapers or anything, and when I finally got back to Paris someone told me there’d been this war on in the Middle East. All those dead and it was already over and I hadn’t known a thing — not about your ankle, not anything.” She smiled, kissed him, picked up her suitcase, and walked away. Without knowing why, he touched his forehead. He was wearing his beret, which Marek had implored him not to do in Paris; the beret made Piotr look like an out-of-town intellectual, like a teacher from the provinces, like a priest from a working-class parish. What did it matter? Any disguise would do to hide the shame of being Piotr.

Only a few men now were left in the café — Algerians reading want ads, middle-aged stragglers clearly hating Piotr because he was alone and demented, like half the universe. Later, he had no memory of having taken the Métro, only that when he came back up to daylight the rain had stopped. He walked on wet leaves. Like the married women’s lovers he entered Laurie’s building by way of the garage, slipping and sliding because the slope was abrupt and the soles of his shoes had grown damp. Her room was airless now, with sun newly ablaze on the shut window. He was starting a new day, the third day since this morning. His croissants were still on the table. He picked them up, thinking that it was better to leave nothing. Then he saw there was nothing much he could leave, because Laurie had packed his things. Piotr’s suitcase stood locked, buckled, next to the chair on which were folded the sheets they had slept in. Her neatness erased him. The extra towel on the shower rail might have been anyone’s. He was wiped out by her clothes’ hanging just so, by her sweaters and shirts in plastic boxes, by the prim order of the bouillon cubes and Nescafé and yellow bowls on a shelf, by the books — presents, probably — lined up by size beneath the window. He saw the review containing his poems, still honored by its dustproof bag. What he had never noticed before was that the bag also held a thin yellow book of verse, the Insel-Bücherei edition of Christian Morgenstern’s Palmström poems. Piotr had once translated some of these, entirely for pleasure. When he was arrested he had had scraps of paper in his pocket covered with choppy phrases in Polish and German that became entirely sinister when read by the police. “Well, you see,” said a blond, solemn Piotr of twenty years ago, “Morgenstern was not much understood and finally he was mad, but the poems in their way are funny.”

“Why a German?” The sarcasm of the illiterate. “Aren’t there enough mad Poles?”

“There soon will be,” said Piotr, to his own detriment.

Now, in Laurie’s room, even the yellow binding seemed to speak to him. Where had it come from? Someone, another doting Potter, had offered it to her, thinking, Love something I love and you are sure to love me. Who? The flyleaf said nothing. He turned the pages slowly and, on the same page as a poem called “The Dreamer,” came upon a color snapshot of two people in an unknown room. Piotr recognized Laurie but not the man. The man was fair, like Piotr, but somewhat younger. His hair was brushed. He wore a respectable suit and a dark-red tie. What Piotr saw at once about his face was that it was genuinely cheerful. Here, at last, caught by chance, was the bon naturel Piotr had hopelessly been seeking from woman to woman. Laurie, naked except for her wristwatch, sat on the arm of his chair, with her legs curled like the tail of a mermaid. One hand was slipped behind the man’s neck. She held a white shower cap, probably the very cap now hanging on a tap in the next room.

A casual happiness suffused this picture. Piotr was looking at people who did not know or really understand how lucky they were. A sun risen for the lovers alone shone in at the window behind them and made Laurie’s hair white and sparkling, like light seen through an icicle. Those were Piotr’s immediate, orderly thoughts. He sensed the particular eroticism of the clothed man and the naked girl and only then felt the shock, like a door battered in. The door collapsed, and Piotr saw whatever he had been dreading since he had dared to fall in love — solitude, cruelty, the loneliness of dying: all of that.

Laurie had deliberately left the picture for him to find. She had gone to a foreign bookshop, perhaps the place in the Rue du Dragon that she had pointed out to him, saying she once worked there for a week before they realized she spoke nothing but English, and chose the very book that was bound to catch his eye. She had then staged the picture. Piotr’s wife, in her calculated dementia, had recorded her own lovemaking with another man on a tape on which Piotr had been assembling the elements of a course in Russian poetry. Recalling this, he remembered that where his wife had been frantic Laurie was only heedless. The book and the picture were part of the blithe indifference of the two lovers, no more.