Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

Sometimes the doctor had breakfast with Piotr. She told him how she had studied medicine in France, and about the war and the Resistance, adding, inevitably, “You are too young to remember.” She said, “My husband was brave in that war. But he does not understand an educated woman and should never have married one.” What she really wanted to talk about was Piotr and his wife. She looked, she stared, she hoped, she waited. Piotr was used to that.

He gave his second lecture, in French, in a basement classroom. This time he had a row of well-dressed, perfumed Frenchwomen — the inevitable femmes du monde attracted by the foreign poet — including, to his surprise, the pregnant girl from the fatal dinner party. A number of students, lowering as though Piotr intended in some way to mislead them, slumped at the back of the room. After the lecture a young man wearing a military-service haircut got up to ask if Piotr considered himself right-wing. Piotr said no.

“I heard they only let Fascists out.”

“I have not been let out like a dog,” said Piotr amiably. “I am here like any ordinary lecturer.”

A girl applauded. One of the well-dressed women called him “Maître.” Piotr pulled his beret down to his ears and scuttled out to the street. The students had been suspicious, the women distant and puzzled. What did they expect? He remembered Laurie’s smile, her light voice, how suddenly her expression could alter as one quick wave of feeling followed another. He remembered that she had loved him and tried to make him happy, and that he was on his way to the doctor’s silent flat. The stone in his chest expanded and pressed on his lungs. All that prevented him from weeping in the street was the thought that he had never seen a man doing that. In his room, he was overtaken. He was surprised at how warm tears were — surely warmer than blood. He said to himself, “Well, at least I am crying over something real,” and that was odd, for he believed that he lived in reality, that he had to. The stone dissolved, and he understood now about crying. But the feverish convalescence that followed the tears was unpleasant, and after a few hours the stone came back.

And so continued the most glorious autumn anyone in Paris could remember. The rainy morning of Laurie’s departure had given way to blue and gold. And yet when Piotr, a haunter of anonymous parks now, sat with his back in shade, he felt a chill, as if the earth were tipping him into the dark. Marek, forgiving him for his French dinner fiasco, invited him to a new restaurant in the Latin Quarter. Piotr had the habit of eating anything put before him without tasting or noticing much. He could hear Laurie’s voice mockingly describing their meal: “Mushrooms in diesel oil, steak broiled over moldy straw, Beaujolais like last year’s vinegar.” The other diners were plain-looking couples in their thirties and forties with Le Monde or Le Nouvel Observateur folded next to their plates. He noticed all this as if he were saving up facts to tell Laurie. The cousins’ conversation was quiet gossip about Poles. They recalled a writer who had once been such a power in Warsaw that his objection to a student newspaper had sent Piotr to jail and Marek into exile. Now this man was teaching in America, where he was profoundly respected as someone who had been under the whip and survived to tell. He still had his sparse black teeth, said Marek, whose knowledge of such details was endless, and the university at which he taught had offered to have them replaced by something white and splendid. But the fact was that the writer who had broken other men’s lives in the nineteen-fifties was afraid of the dentist.

Marek ordered a second bottle of wine and said, “Every day I wonder what I am doing in Paris. I have no real friends. I have enemies who chalk swastikas on my staircase. I speak seven languages. My maternal grandmother was the daughter of a princess. Who cares about that here? Perhaps I should go back to Poland.” This was a normal émigré monologue; Piotr did not attempt to reply. They walked in the mild night, along bright streets, threading their way past beggars and guitar players, stopping to look at North African pastry shops. Piotr was troubled by the beggars — the bedraggled whining mothers with drugged, dozing babies, the maimed men exhibiting their blindness and the stumps of arms and legs for cash. “Yugoslav gangs,” said Marek, shrugging. He reminded Piotr that begging was part of freedom. Men and women, here, were at liberty to beg their rent, their drink, their children’s food. Piotr looked at him but could see no clue, no double meaning. Marek had settled for something, once and for all, just as Piotr had done in an entirely other existence. As they neared the Seine he had a childlike Christmas feeling of expectancy, knowing that the lighted flank of Notre Dame church would be reflected, trembling, on the dark water. He was forgetting Laurie — oh, surely he was! He decided that he would write about their story, fact on fact. Writing would remove the last trace of Laurie from his mind and heart. He was not a writer of prose and only an intermittent keeper of diaries, but he began then and there taking the cool historical measure of Laurie and love. He felt bold enough to say something about Laurie Bennett, and something else about Venice.

“Oh, Laurie — Laurie is in Florence,” said Marek. “I had a card.” Between Piotr’s ribs the stone grew twice its size. “She travels,” Marek went on. “An older man gives her money.” He dropped the only important subject in the world to go on talking about himself.

“The older man,” said Piotr. “Is he her lover?”

“She has never produced him,” said Marek. “You always see Laurie alone. I have known her for years. You can never look at Laurie and look at another man and say ‘sleeping with.’ But this man — she was so innocent when she first came to Paris that she tried to declare him to the police as her source of income and nearly got herself kicked out of the country. That was years ago now.”

Years ago? Piotr had never questioned her real age. Laurie looked young, and she talked about her school days as if they were just behind her. Perhaps she was someone who refused to have anything to do with time. In that case her youthfulness implied a lack of understanding: Just as she spelled words wrong because she did not know what words meant, she could not be changed by time because she did not know what change was about.

Piotr awoke the next morning with a flaming throat and a pain in his left shoulder. He could scarcely get his clothes on or swallow or speak. His hostess sat wearing a wrapper, hunched over a pot of strong tea. Today was Sunday.

“Mass in the morning, horse races in the afternoon,” she said, referring to her husband, who had vanished. Piotr remembered what Marek had said about the illegitimate child. The doctor gave Piotr dark bread, cream cheese, and plum jam, and waited to hear — about his wife, of course. She never stopped waiting. From the kitchen he could see the room he had just left. He thought of his bed and wished he were in it, but then he would be her prisoner and she might talk to him all morning long.

Outside, above the courtyard, thin autumn clouds slid over the sun. He could hear the cold sound of water slopped on the cobblestones and traffic like a dimmed helicopter. His life seemed to have solidified overnight. Its substance was translucid, like jasper. He was contained in everything he had ever said and done. As for his pain, it was an anxious mystery. My shoulder, my throat, my ribs: Is it a fatal angina? Cancer of the trachea? Of the lungs? The left side of his body was rotting with illness within the jasper shell of his life.

He said to the doctor, “I may have caught a chill.” He heard himself describing every one of his symptoms, as if each were a special grievance.