Mavis Gallant - From the Fifteenth District

“Is he still young enough for that?” said Piotr. “To create a whole life?”

“He’s younger than you are, if that’s young.”

“I thought it might have been a much older person,” said Piotr. “Your first friend of all. He took you home for holidays, out of Bishop Purse.”

“ That one. No-o-o. What finally happened with him was, his wife got sick. She got this awful facial neuralgia. It made a saint out of him. Believe me, Potter, when you get mixed up with a married man you’re mixed up with his wife, too. They work as a team. Even when she doesn’t know, she knows. It’s an inside job. They went all over the place seeing new doctors. She used to scream with pain in hotel rooms. It’s the sickness of unhappy wives — did you know?”

“I know about the ailment of bachelors. I thought you said it was the Venice person” — he was about to say “the Austrian” — “who knew you when you were young.”

“Everybody got me young, when it comes to that. Oh,” she said, suddenly alert, sitting up, dry-eyed, “don’t sit there looking superior.”

“I am standing,” said Piotr. “I am here like a dog on its hind legs with a bowl of soup.”

She took the bowl, with a scowl that would have meant ingratitude had its source been anything but mortification. “Well,” she said abruptly, “I couldn’t count on you, could I? You come and go and you’ve got those children. Who do they live with?”

“Their mother.”

A tremor, like a chill, ran over her, and he recalled how she had trembled and spilled her coffee long ago. “How old are they?”

“Twelve and six.”

“Why did you have the second one?” (Her first sensible observation.) “Girls?”

“Two boys.”

“I hope they die.”

“I don’t,” said Piotr.

“Do they love you?”

He hesitated; where love was concerned he had lost his bearings. He said, “They seem to eat up love and wait for more.”

“Is there always more?”

“So far.”

“They’re like me, then,” said Laurie.

“No, for children it is real food. It adds to their bones.”

“Then it’s not like me. I soak it up and it disappears and I feel undernourished. Do they like you?”

“They are excited and happy when they see me but hardly notice when I go.”

“That’s because you bring them presents.” She began to cry, hard this time. “They won’t need you much longer. They’ve got their mother. I really need you. I need you more than they do. I need any man more than his children do.”

Piotr found sheets in the wardrobe and made the bed; he found pajamas in one of her plastic boxes, and the Polish sleeping potion in the bathroom. He counted out the magic drops. “Now sleep,” he said. Something was missing: “Where is your white watch?”

“I don’t know. I must have lost it. I lost it ages ago,” she said, and turned on her side.

Piotr hung up Laurie’s bathrobe and emptied the ashtray. He rinsed the yellow bowl and put it back on the shelf. He still had to break the news of his going; he did not feel banished but rather as if it were he who had decided to leave, who had established his own fate. Who gave you the “Palmstroem” poems, said Piotr silently. Another Potter? The man who had you at fifteen and then shipped you to Europe when you started getting in his way? Was it the Austrian? The man in Venice who suddenly feels he is sinning and can’t bear to touch you? At the back of his mind was a small, anxious, jealous Piotr, for whom he felt little sympathy.

Laurie, though fresh from a shower, had about her a slightly sour smell, the scent that shock and terror produce on the skin. She was young, so that it was no worse than fresh yeast, or the odor of bread rising — the aura of the living, not yet of the dead. He remembered his wife and how her skin, then her voice, then her mind had become acid. “Am I plain?” she had said. “Am I diseased? Don’t you consider me a normal woman?” You are good, you are brave, you are an impeccable mother to your children, but I don’t want you, at least not the way you want me to, had been his answer. And so she became ugly, ill, haunted — all that he dreaded in women. It seemed to him that he saw the first trace of this change in the sleeping Laurie. She had lost her credentials, her seal of aristocracy. She had dropped to a lower division inhabited by Piotr’s wife and Piotr himself; they were inferiors, unable to command loyalty or fidelity or even consideration in exchange for passion. Her silvery world, which had reflected nothing but Piotr’s desperate inventions, floated and sank in Venice. This is what people like Maria and me are up against, he thought — our inventions. We belong either in books or in prison, out of the way. Romantic people are a threat to civilization. That man in Venice who wanted to make a nurse of poor Laurie was a romantic, too, a dangerous lunatic.

Laurie lay breathing deeply and slowly, in a sleep full of colored dreams — dreams of an imaginary Matisse, a real Lake Constance, a real Venice, dark and sad. “On a sailing holiday at Lake Constance …” Even now, when it no longer mattered, the truth of this particular dream clamped on Piotr’s chest like the ghost of an old pain. Quietly, in order not to disturb her, he took one of his pink placebos. He thought of how frightened she would be if she woke to find him in the grip of an attack — she would be frightened of nearly everything now. He could still see the car hurtling all over the map as Laurie tried to run away from him and what she called “the situation.” He could see it even though the journey had been only in her imagination, then in his. She had flown to Zurich, probably, and been met by, certainly, the man whose business was watch straps, or even … It doesn’t matter now, he said. She had been telling the truth, because her mind had been in flight.

He lay down beside her and, reaching out, switched off the light. The pattern of reflected street lights that sprang to life on the ceiling had, for three nights long ago, been like the vault of heaven. After tonight Laurie would watch it alone — at any rate, without Piotr. Poor Laurie, he thought. Poor, poor Laurie. He felt affection, kindness — less than he could feel for his children, less than the obligation he still owed his wife. Out of compassion he stroked her darkened hair. No one but Piotr himself could have taken the measure of his disappointment as he said, So there really was nothing in it, was there? So this was all it ever was — only tenderness. An immense weight of blame crushed him, flattened him, and by so doing cleansed and absolved him. I was incapable of any more feeling than this. I never felt more than kindness. There was nothing in it from the beginning. It was only tenderness, after all.

His mother had come of age in a war and then seemed to live a long grayness like a spun-out November. “Are you all right?” she used to ask him at breakfast. What she really meant was: Ask me how I am, but she was his mother and so he would not. He leaned two fists against his temples and read a book about photography, waiting for her to cut bread and put it on a plate for him. He seldom looked up, never truly saw her — a stately, careless widow with unbrushed red hair, wearing an old fur coat over her nightgown; her last dressing gown had been worn to ribbons and she said she had no money for another. It seemed that nothing could stop her from telling him how she felt or from pestering him with questions. She muttered and smoked and drank such a lot of strong coffee that it made her bilious, and then she would moan, “God, God, my liver! My poor head!” In those days in Budapest you had to know the black market to find the sort of coffee she drank, and of course she would not have any but the finest smuggled Virginia cigarettes. “Quality,” she said to him — or to his profile, rather. “Remember after I have died that quality was important to me. I held out for the best.”