The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  Even the distraction caused by the birth of her child was a price she was ultimately prepared to pay. She did not intend to have a second one, after all – that would be too stupid – and this one would, before she knew it, be grown up enough for boarding school.

  Relishing her short freedom during the summer as much as she contemplated enjoyment of her longer future one, she threw herself headlong into the interim relationship with Ellis, a professional lover of mainly older women artists who came to the Colony every year to work and play.

  A New York Jew of considerable charm, intellectual pettiness, and so vast and uncritical a love of all things European it struck one as an illness (and who hated Brooklyn – where he had grown up – his parents, Jewish culture, and all he had observed of black behavior in New York City), Ellis found the listening silence of “the dark woman,” as he euphemistically called her, restorative – after his endless evenings with talkative women who wrote for Esquire and the New York Times. Such women made it possible for him to be included in the proper tennis sets and swimming parties at the Colony – in which he hoped to meet contacts who would help his career along – but they were also driven to examine each and every one of their own thoughts aloud. His must be the attentive ear, since they had already “made it” and were comfortable exposing their own charming foibles to him, while he, not having made it yet, could afford to expose nothing that might discourage their assistance in his behalf.

  It amused and thrilled him to almost hear the “click” when his eyes met those of the jazz poet. “Sex,” he thought. And, “rest.”

  Of course he mistook her intensity.

  After sitting before her piano for hours, setting one of her poems to music, she would fling open her cabin door and wave to him as he walked by on his way to or from the lake. He was writing a novella about his former wife and composed it in longhand down at the lake (“So if I get fed up with it I can toss myself in,” he joked) and then took it back to his studio with him to type. She would call to him, her hair and clothing very loose, and entice him into her cabin with promises of sympathy and half her lunch.

  When they made love she was disappointed. He did not appear to believe in unhurried pleasure, and thought the things she suggested he might do to please her very awkward at the least. But it hardly mattered, since what mattered was the fact of having a lover. She liked snuggling up to him, liked kissing him along the sides of his face – his cheeks were just beginning to be a trifle flabby but would still be good for several years – and loved to write him silly letters – scorching with passion and promises of abandon – that made her seem head over heels in love. She enjoyed writing the letters because she enjoyed feeling to her full capacity and for as long as possible the excitement having a lover brought. It was the kind of excitement she’d felt years ago, in high school and perhaps twice in college (once when she’d fallen for a student and once when she was seduced – with her help and consent – by a teacher), and she recognized it as a feeling to be enjoyed for all it was worth. Her body felt on fire, her heart jumped in her breast, her pulse raced – she was aware, for the first time in years, of actually needing to make love.

  He began to think he must fight her off, at least a little bit. She was too intense, he said. He did not have time for intense relationships, that’s why he had finally accepted a divorce from his wife. He was also writing a great poem which he had begun in 1950 and which – now that he was at the Colony – he hoped to finish. She should concentrate on her own work if she expected to win any more prizes. She wanted to win more, didn’t she?

  She laughed at him, but would not tell him why. Instead she tried, very gently (while sitting on his lap with her bosom maternally opposite his face), to tell him he misunderstood. That she wanted nothing from him beyond the sensation of being in love itself. (His stare was at first blank, then cynical, at this.) As for her work, she did not do hers the way he apparently did his. Hers did not mean to her what he seemed to think it meant. It did not get in the way of her living, for example, and if it ever did, she felt sure she would remove it. Prizes were nice – especially if they brought one money (which one might then use to explore Barbados! China! Mozambique!) – but they were not rewards she could count on. Her life, on the other hand, was a reward she could count on. (He became impatient with this explanation and a little angry.)

  It was their first quarrel.

  When he saw her again she had spent the weekend (which had been coming up) in nearby Boston. She looked cheerful, happy and relaxed. From her letters to him – which he had thought embarrassingly self-revealing and erotic, though flattering, of course, to him – he had assumed she was on the point of declaring her undying love and of wanting to run away with him. Instead, she had gone off for two days, without mentioning it to him. And she had gone, so she said, by herself!

  She soothed him as best she could. Lied, which she hated more than anything, about her work. “It was going so poorly,” she complained (and the words rang metallic in her mouth); “I just couldn’t bear staying here doing nothing where working conditions are so idyllic!” He appeared somewhat mollified. Actually, her work was going fine and she had sent off to her publishers a completed book of poems and jazz arrangements – which was what she had come to the Colony to do. “Your work was going swimmingly down at the lake,” she giggled. “I didn’t wish to disturb you.”

  And yet it was clear he was disturbed.

  So she did not tell him she had flown all the way home.

  He was always questioning her now about her town, her house, her child, her husband. She found herself describing her husband as if to a prospective bride. She lingered over the wiry bronze of his hair, the evenness of his teeth, his black, black eyes, the thrilling timbre of his deep voice. It was an exceptionally fine voice, it seemed to her now, listening to Ellis’s rather whining one. Though, on second thought, it was perhaps nothing special.

  At night, after a rousing but unsatisfactory evening with Ellis, she dreamed of her husband making love to her on the kitchen floor at home, where the sunlight collected in a pool beneath the window, and lay in bed next day dreaming of all the faraway countries, daring adventures, passionate lovers still to be found.

  Rue de Lille

  Mavis Gallant

  Mavis Gallant (b. 1922) is a Canadian author. She has written two novels as well as numerous collections of stories, and is often cited as one of the best living short story writers. She was elected Companion of the Order of Canada in 1993 and, in 1989, was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, often debuting there before subsequently being published in a collection.

  My second wife, Juliette, died in the apartment on Rue de Lille, where she had lived – at first alone, more or less, then with me – since the end of the war. All the rooms gave onto the ivy-hung well of a court, and were for that reason dark. We often talked about looking for a brighter flat, on a top floor with southern exposure and a wide terrace, but Parisians seldom move until they’re driven to. “We know the worst of what we’ve got,” we told each other. “It’s better than a bad surprise.”

  “And what about your books?” Juliette would add. “It would take you months to get them packed, and in the new place you’d never get them sorted.” I would see myself as Juliette saw me, crouched over a slanting, shaking stack of volumes piled on a strange floor, cursing and swearing as I tried to pry out a dictionary. “Just the same, I don’t intend to die here,” she also said.

  I once knew someone who believed drowning might be easy, even pleasant, until he almost drowned by accident. Juliette’s father was a colonel who expected to die in battle or to be shot by a German firing squad, but he died of typhus in a concentration camp. I had once, long ago, imagined for myself a clandestine burial with full honors after some Resistance feat, but all I got out of the war was a few fractures and a broken nose in a motorcycle accident.

  Juliette had
thirty-seven years of blacked-out winter mornings in Rue de Lille. She was a few days short of her sixtieth birthday when I found her stretched out on the floor of our bedroom, a hand slackened on a flashlight. She had been trying to see under a chest of drawers, and her heart stopped. (Later, I pulled the chest away from the wall and discovered a five-franc coin.) Her gray-and-dark hair, which had grown soft and wayward with age, was tied back with a narrow satin ribbon. She looked more girlish than at any time since I’d first met her. (She fell in love with me young.) She wore a pleated flannel skirt, a tailored blouse, and one of the thick cardigans with gilt buttons she used to knit while watching television. She had been trained to believe that to look or to listen quietly is to do nothing; she would hum along with music, to show she wasn’t idle. She was discreet, she was generous to a sensible degree, she was anything but contentious. I often heard her remark, a trifle worriedly, that she was never bored. She was faithful, if “faithful” means avoiding the acknowledged forms of trouble. She was patient. I know she was good. Any devoted male friend, any lover, any husband would have shown up beside her as selfish, irritable, even cruel. She displayed so little of the ordinary kinds of jealousy, the plain marital do-you-often-have-lunch-with-her? sort, that I once asked her if she had a piece missing.

  “Whoever takes this place over,” she said, when we spoke of moving, “will be staggered by the size of the electricity bills.” (Juliette paid them; I looked after a number of other things.) We had to keep the lights turned on all day in winter. The apartment was L-shaped, bent round two sides of a court, like a train making a sharp turn. From our studies, at opposite ends of the train, we could look out and see the comforting glow of each other’s working life, a lamp behind a window. Juliette would be giving some American novel a staunch, steady translation; I might be getting into shape my five-hour television series, “Stendhal and the Italian Experience,” which was to win an award in Japan.

  We were together for a duration of time I daren’t measure against the expanse of Juliette’s life; it would give me the feeling that I had decamped to a height of land, a survivor’s eminence, so as to survey the point at which our lives crossed and mingled and began to move in the same direction: a long, narrow reach of time in the Rue de Lille. It must be the washy, indefinite colorations of blue that carpeted, papered, and covered floors, walls, and furniture and shaded our lamps which cast over that reach the tone of a short season. I am thinking of the patches of distant, neutral blue that appear over Paris in late spring, when it is still wet and cold in the street and tourists have come too early. The tourists shelter in doorways, trying to read their soaked maps, perennially unprepared in their jeans and thin jackets. Overhead, there are scrapings of a color that carries no threat and promises all.

  That choice, Juliette’s preference, I sometimes put down to her Calvinist sobriety – call it a temperament – and sometimes to a refinement of her Huguenot taste. When I was feeling tired or impatient, I complained that I had been consigned to a Protestant Heaven by an arbitrary traffic cop, and that I was better suited to a pagan Hell. Again, as I looked round our dining-room table at the calm, clever faces of old friends of Juliette’s family, at their competent and unassuming wives, I saw what folly it might be to set such people against a background of buttercup yellow or apple green. The soft clicking of their upper-class Protestant consonants made conversation distant and neutral, too. It was a voice that had puzzled me the first time I’d heard it from Juliette. I had supposed, mistakenly, that she was trying it on for effect; but she was wholly natural.

  The sixteenth-century map of Paris I bought for her birthday is still at the framer’s; I sent a check but never picked it up. I destroyed her private correspondence without reading it, and gave armfuls of clothes away to a Protestant charity. To the personal notice of her death in Le Monde was attached a brief mention of her father, a hero of the Resistance for whom suburban streets are named; and of her career as a respected translator, responsible for having introduced postwar American literature to French readers; and of her husband, the well-known radio and television interviewer and writer, who survived her.

  Another person to survive her was my first wife. One night when Juliette and I were drinking coffee in the little sitting room where she received her women friends, and where we watched television, Juliette said, again, “But how much of what she says does she believe? About her Catholicism, and all those fantasies running round in her head – that she is your true and only wife, that your marriage is registered in Heaven, that you and she will be together in another world?”

  “Those are things people put in letters,” I said. “They sit down alone and pour it out. It’s sincere at that moment. I don’t know why she would suddenly be insincere.”

  “After all the trouble she’s made,” said Juliette. She meant that for many years my wife would not let me divorce.

  “She couldn’t help that,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know. It’s what I think. I hardly knew her.”

  “You must have known something.”

  “I haven’t seen her more than three or four times in the last thirty-odd years, since I started living with you.”

  “What do you mean?” said Juliette. “You saw her just once, with me. We had lunch. You backed off asking for the divorce.”

  “You can’t ask for a divorce at lunch. It had to be done by mail.”

  “And since then she hasn’t stopped writing,” said Juliette. “Do you mean three or four times, or do you mean once?”

  I said, “Once, probably. Probably just that once.”

  Viewing me at close range, as if I were a novel she had to translate, Juliette replied that one ought to be spared unexpected visions. Just now, it was as if three walls of the court outside had been bombed flat. Through a bright new gap she saw straight through to my first marriage. We – my first wife and I – postured in the distance, like characters in fiction.

  I had recently taken part in a panel discussion, taped for television, on the theme “What Literature, for Which Readers, at Whose Price?” I turned away from Juliette and switched on the set, about ten minutes too early. Juliette put the empty cups and the coffeepot on a tray she had picked up in Milan, the summer I was researching the Stendhal, and carried the tray down the dim passage to the kitchen. I watched the tag end of the late news. It must have been during the spring of 1976. Because of the energy crisis, daylight saving had been established. Like any novelty, it was deeply upsetting. People said they could no longer digest their food or be nice to their children, and that they needed sedation to help them through the altered day. A doctor was interviewed; he advised a light diet and early bed until mind and body adjusted to the change.

  I turned, smiling, to where Juliette should have been. My program came on then, and I watched myself making a few points before I got up and went to find her. She was in the kitchen, standing in the dark, clutching the edge of the sink. She did not move when I turned the light on. I put my arms around her, and we came back to her sitting room and watched the rest of the program together. She was knitting squares of wool to be sewn together to make a blanket; there was always, somewhere, a flood or an earthquake or a flow of refugees, and those who outlasted jeopardy had to be covered.

  Words

  Carol Shields

  Carol Shields (1935–2003) was an American-born Canadian writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Governor General’s Award in Canada. Shields published ten novels, three collections of poetry and five collections of short stories.

  When the world first started heating up, an international conference was held in Rome to discuss ways of dealing with the situation.

  Ian’s small northern country – small in terms of population, that is, not in size – sent him to the meetings as a junior observer, and it was there he met Isobel, who was representing her country as full-fledged delegate. She wore
a terrible green dress the first time he saw her, and rather clumsy shoes, but he could see that her neck was slender, her waist narrow and her legs long and brown. For so young a woman, she was astonishingly articulate; in fact, it was her voice more than anything else that he fell in love with – its hills and valleys and its pliant, easy-sided wit. It was a voice that could be distinguished in any gathering, being both sweet and husky and having an edging of contralto merriment that seemed to Ian as rare and fine as a border of gold leaf.

  They played truant, missing half the study sessions, the two of them lingering instead over tall, cool drinks in the café they found on the Via Traflori. There, under a cheerful striped canopy, Isobel leaned across a little table and placed long, ribbony Spanish phrases into lan’s mouth, encouraging and praising him when he got them right. And he, in his somewhat stiff northern voice, gave back the English equivalents. table, chair, glass, cold, hot, money, street, people, mouth. In the evenings, walking in the gardens in front of the institute where the conference was being held, they turned to each other and promised with their eyes, and in two languages as well, to love each other forever.

  The second International Conference was held ten years later. The situation had become grave. One could use the word crisis and not be embarrassed. Ian – by then married to Isobel, who was at home with the children – attended every session and he listened attentively to the position papers of various physicists, engineers, geographers and linguists from all parts of the world. It was a solemn but distinguished assembly; many eminent men and women took their places at the lectern, including the spidery old Scottish demographer who years earlier had made the first correlation between substrata temperatures and highly verbalized societies. In every case, these speakers presented their concerns with admirable brevity, each word weighted and frugally chosen, and not one of them exceeded the two-minute time limitation. For by now no one really doubted that it was the extravagance and proliferation of language that had caused the temperature of the earth’s crust to rise, and in places – California, Japan, London – to crack open and form long ragged lakes of fire. The evidence was everywhere and it was incontrovertible: thermal maps, and measurements, sonar readings, caloric separations, a network of subterranean monitoring systems – all these had reinforced the integrity of the original Scottish theories.