Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

“Cézanne was a Freemason,” Piotr heard him saying. “So was Braque. So was Juan Gris. So was Soutine. No one who was not a Freemason has ever had his work shown in a national museum.”

The pregnant girl’s social clockwork gave her Piotr along with the next course. “Is this your first visit to Paris?” she said. Her eyes danced, rolled almost. She tossed her head, as a nervous pony might. Where the rest of the table was concerned, she and Piotr were telling each other something deliciously amusing and private.

“It is my third trip as an adult. I came once with my parents when I was a child.” He wondered if his discovery of chestnut meringues at Rumpelmayer’s tearoom in 1938 was of the slightest interest.

“The rest of the time you were always in your pretty Poland?” The laugh that accompanied this was bewildering to him. “What could have been keeping you there all this time?” In another context, in a world more familiar, the look on the girl’s face would have been an invitation. But what Piotr could see, and the others could not, was that she was not really looking at him at all.

“Well, at one time I was in prison,” he said, “and sometimes translating books, and sometimes teaching at a university. Sometimes the progression goes in reverse, and your poet begins at the university and ends in jail.”

“Have you ever had veal cooked this way before?” she said, after a quick glance to see if their hostess was ready to take on Piotr again. “It is typically French. But not typically Parisian. No, it is typically provincial. Eliane likes doing these funny provincial things.” She paused again. Piotr was still hers. “And where did you learn your good French and your charming manners?” she said. “In Poland?”

“The hardest thing to learn was not to spit on the table,” said Piotr.

After that both women left him in peace. But of course he was not in peace, for Marek was watching. He did not reproach Piotr, but Piotr knew he would not be invited to a French evening again.

Perhaps because he had slept too much in the afternoon, he found that night long and full of dark misery. He awoke at the worst possible hour, at four, when it was too late to read — his eyes watered and would not focus — and too early to get up. He heard the chimes of the hotel clock downstairs striking five, then six. He slept lightly and woke on the stroke of seven. His body had taken over and was trying to show him that the nonchalance about Laurie had been a false truce. Feeling dull and sick, he shaved at the basin in his room, and asked the maid to unlock the door down the hall so that he could have a bath. He entered the steamy room, with its cold walls and opaque windows, reminding himself that Laurie was a foreign object, that he had a life of his own, that he had a center of gravity. His body reacted to this show of independence with stomach cramps and violent nausea. His mouth went dry when he returned to his room to find a breakfast tray waiting. The skin around his mouth felt attacked by small stinging insects. A headache along his hairline prevented him from unfolding the morning paper or reading a letter from home. The day was sunny, and he saw now that the commonplace sayings about crossed love were all true: the weather mocked him; he craved darkness and rain. His unhappiness was a disease. Strangers would see signs of it, and would despise him.

He loved her. For more than two years now his waking thought had been Is there a letter? He wanted to reach across to her, straight to Venice, but she had to want him — otherwise he was a demand, a claim, a dead weight on her life; he was like the soft, curled-up, dejected women who seemed to make an equal mess of love and cigarette ash. Laurie was in Venice, on a snowy beach. (The Venice of his imagining was all blue and white.) She lay immodestly close to a cloudy man. Piotr could not really see him. Perhaps he was placid, like the Austrian, or thin and worried, like Piotr. Perhaps he was a disgusting boulevardier with cheeks like boiled shrimp. “He speaks three languages … enjoys running his own business.” Oh, inferior, callous, stupid!

Piotr told his diminished self, My poems are translated into … I have corresponded with … been invited by … I can lecture in Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, German, English, French, and I can also …

Laurie had assured Piotr that no one, ever, had been like him. She had said, “To think that until now I thought I was just one more frigid North American!” Piotr had believed. He wanted to compose a scream of a letter: Where are you? Why don’t you send me a telegram, give me a sign? I haunt the hotel office where mail is kept. I mistake the hotel bill for a message saying you have come back. They say that mail from Italy is slow, but I see other people receiving letters with Italian stamps. I wake at dawn wondering if today will be the day of the letter.

His torment was intensified by the number of mail deliveries; there were three a day, with a fourth for parcels (should she show she remembered him by sending a book). The porter, sorting letters, would see Piotr hovering and call, “Nothing!” and Piotr would scurry away as if he had been caught in some shameful voyeur posture. He now heard and saw “Venice” everywhere: When he bought fruit he found it stamped on an orange. He even said, “God,” though until now he had thought there was no God to hear him.

Piotr had still not received any money from the university. He was used to administrative languor, but the francs his cousin had advanced him were melting fast and Piotr did not want to ask Marek for more. The day came when he decided to leave his hotel and move in with the doctor and her husband. Marek approved of the address, which was close to the école Militaire; he had unearthed what he thought of as useful information: the doctor and her husband had emigrated to France, separately, before the war. They had met in a Polish Resistance network operating out of Grenoble. The marriage was not a happy one. The husband had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter, with whom he spent every Sunday. The doctor was certain to fall in love with Piotr, Marek said.

Piotr did not care for the street, which seemed to him frozen and hostile. There was a desperate, respectable shabbiness about the house. Laurie would never have lived there. In the icy stairwell an elevator creaked on swaying cables. The halls were dim. Tenants rode in the lift and crossed in passageways without speaking, staring flatly. He imagined each high-ceilinged apartment occupied by one person, living alone, working in a ministry, eating ready-made food on the edge of a table at night. His hostess welcomed him as an old acquaintance and made up his bed in the room she had once used for private consultations. Vestiges of the old regime remained — the powerful lights overhead, the washbasin in a corner, a leather folding screen. Under his bed he discovered a case of books. None were newer than the early nineteen-fifties; probably it was then that the couple’s marriage had broken down. The French bindings had gone from white to yellow. There were a number of volumes about the war. Piotr, a decade or so younger than the heroic generation, had always been faintly irritated by them.

The doctor was on the staff of a clinic in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, where she now had an office and received her private patients. She gave Piotr a ring of house keys and the key to a letter box downstairs in the court. This led Piotr to new hauntings. He could not bring himself to cross the courtyard without peering through the slot of the box, even if he had looked only half an hour before. He expected word from Laurie at any time: his old hotel might easily receive a special-delivery letter and send it around by messenger. Sometimes a gleam of light on the metal lining of the box could have been a letter, and the hope he felt almost made up for the disappointment. He also had a new worry: a lump, like a large black stone, filled his chest. He felt it when he woke up in the morning. The first thing he heard was an alarm clock in the doctor’s bedroom shortly before six, and then he would become aware of the stone. He would hear the doctor’s husband getting up and listening to the six-o’clock news in the bathroom. He was small and bald and polite to Piotr. He did not really have to get up before six. He simply did not want to be alone with his wife more than he had to. The doctor actually said so to Piotr, staring at him craftily and boldly, obviously hoping for some oblique, similar confidence about his wife. Piotr noticed that when the pair were alone they argued in French. It was their language for reproach and for justification. He would remember how he had parted from his wife and given up his children so that the children would not have to hear adult violence from their dark bedroom. Often in the night Piotr heard the doctor’s singsong complaint, which had an almost poetical rhythm to it. She said that her husband was a miser who did not love her. He deprived her of money; he deprived her of warmth. If the husband replied — a low grumble of words in which Piotr caught “never” and “idea” — her voice became discordant, choppy, like a child banging crazily on piano keys. He heard, “Some men are cruel, but at least they are intelligent. How you must be gloating. You think you have come out of this safely. Well, you may not have a chance to gloat for long.”