Going Ashore

by Mavis Gallant

  For her part, Bonnie was finding her withering Marchbanks tedious. His pursy prejudices no longer seemed delicious humor. He made the mistake of telling her a long, name-studded story of school politics and someone trying to get his job. It established him in reality – a master afraid for his grubby post – and reality was not what Bonnie demanded. She had enough reality on her hands: in the autumn that girl would be twenty-five.

  Wishart tried to get back on their old plane. “Distract her,” he said lazily. “Move on. Divert her with culture. Inspect the cathedrals and museums. Take her to the Musée de l’Homme.”

  “You don’t meet any men in museums,” said Bonnie, as if this were a sore point. “Anyway, what’s the good? She only comes to life for slobs.” After a moment she said quietly, “Don’t you see, that’s not what I want for Flor. I don’t want her to marry just anybody. It may sound funny to you, but I don’t even want an American. They’ve always let me down. My own brothers – But I don’t want to go into it again. I want a European, but not a Latin, and one who has lived in the States and has had the best of both. I want someone much older than Flor, because she needs that, and someone I can trust. That’s what I want for my girl, and that’s what I meant when I said proposals don’t grow on trees. Neither do men.” But what did Wishart know about men? He was a woman-haunter, woman’s best friend. She put on her sunglasses in order to hide her exasperation with him, because he was a man but not the right person.

  Her expression was perfectly blank. There was no doubt now, no other way of interpreting it. In spite of his recent indifference to her, she had not changed her mind. Wishart was being offered Flor.

  He had never been foolish enough to dream of a useful marriage. He knew that his choice one season might damn him the next. He had thought occasionally of a charming but ignorant peasant child, whom he could train; he had the town boy’s blurry vision of country people. Unfortunately, he had never met anyone of the kind. Certainly his peasant bride, who was expected to combine with her exceptional beauty a willingness to clean his shoes, was not Flor.

  This was not the moment for false steps. He saw himself back in America with a lame-brained but perfect wife. Preposterous ideas made him say in imagined conversations, “The mother was a charmer; I married the daughter.”

  He forgot the dangers, and what it would be like to have Bonnie as a mother-in-law. A secret hope unfurled and spread. He got up, and in a blind, determined way began to walk across the beach. Not far away the lovers lay on the sand, facing each other, half asleep. Flor’s arm was under her head, straight up. He saw Bob’s back, burned nearly black, and Flor’s face. They were so close that their breath must have mingled. Their intimacy seemed to Wishart established; it contained an implicit allegiance, like a family tie, with all the antagonism that might suggest as well. While he was watching, they came together. Wishart saw that Flor remained outside the kiss. Two laurels with one root. Where had he heard that? Each was a missing part of the other’s character, and the whole, in the kiss, should have been unflawed.

  Flor wondered what it was like for a man to kiss her, and remembered words from men she had not loved. It was a narcissism so shameful that she opened her eyes, and saw Wishart. He was the insect enemy met in an underground tunnel, the small, scratching watcher, the boneless witness of an insect universe – a tiny, scuttling universe that contained her mother, the popeyed Corsican proprietor of this beach, the fleurs et couronnes, her mother’s procession of very best most intimate friends. (Before Wishart a bestial countess, to whom Flor, as a girl, had been instructed to be nice.) In a spasm of terror, which Bob mistook for abandonment, she clung to him. He was outside this universe and from a better place.

  Wishart returned to Bonnie and sank down beside her on the sand, adjusting his bony legs as if they were collapsible umbrellas. If he continued in error, it was Bonnie’s fault, for she went on again about men, the right man, and Flor. The wind dropped. Cannes settled into the stagnant afternoon. The fleurs et couronnes were down from their naps and chattering like budgerigars. Bonnie had been polishing her sunglasses on the edge of a towel. She stopped, holding them, staring. “Last night I dreamed my daughter was a mermaid,” she said. “What does it mean? Wishart, you know all about those things. What does it mean?”

  “Ravissant,” said one of her court. “I see the blue sea and the grottoes, everything coral and blue. Coral green and coral blue.”

  “There is no such thing as coral blue,” said Wishart mechanically.

  “And Florence, la belle Florence, floating and drifting, the bright hair spread like –”

  “She sang and she floated, she floated and sang,” took up a minor figure who resembled a guppy. At a look from Bonnie he gave a great gasp and shut up.

  “It was nothing like that at all,” said Bonnie snappily. “It was an ugly fishtail, like a carp’s. It was just like a carp’s, and the whole thing was a great handicap. The girl simply couldn’t walk. She lay there on the ground and couldn’t do a thing. Everybody stared at us. It was a perfectly hopeless dream, and I woke up in a state of great distress.”

  Wishart had been so disturbed by the kiss that moved into blankness. He could not form a coherent thought. What interested him, finally, was the confirmation of his suspicion that Flor was a poseuse. How conceited she had been, lying there exploring her own sensations as idly as a tourist pouring sand from one hand into the other. He recalled the expression in her eyes – shrewd, ratty eyes, he thought, not the eyes of a goddess – and he knew that she feared and loathed him and might catch him out. “It won’t do,” he said to Bonnie. “It wouldn’t do, a marriage with Flor.” He heard the words, “She has a crack across the brain,” but was never certain afterward if he had said them aloud.

  Bonnie turned her pink, shadowed face to him in purest amazement. She noticed that Wishart’s eyes were so perturbed and desperate that they were almost beyond emotion – without feeling, like those of a bird. Then she looked up to the sky, where the plane was endlessly and silently writing the name of a drink. She said, “I wish he would write something for us, something useful.”

  His mistake in thinking that Bonnie considered him an equal and would want him for her daughter had been greater than the gaffe about Flor. Everything trembled and changed; even the color of the sky seemed extraordinary. Wishart was fixed and paralyzed in this new landscape, wondering if he was doing or saying anything strange, unable to see or stop himself. It was years since he had been the victim of such a fright. He had believed that Bonnie accepted him at his value. He had believed that the exact miniature he saw in her sunglasses was the Wishart she accepted, the gentleman he had glimpsed in the store window that first day. He had thought that the inflection of a voice, the use of some words, established them as a kind. But Bonnie had never believed in the image. She had never considered him anything but jumped-up. He remembered now that she had never let him know her family back home, had never suggested he meet her brothers.

  WHEN BONNIE DARED LOOK AGAIN, Wishart was picking his way into the sea. He was wearing his hat. He did not mind seeming foolish, and believed eccentricity added to his stature. After standing for a time, knee-deep, looking, with the expression of a brooding camel, first at the horizon and then back to shore, he began to pick his way out again. The water was too dirty for swimming, even if the other bathers had left him room. “Large colored balls were being flung over my head, and sometimes against it,” he composed, describing for future audiences the summer at Cannes. “The shrieking children of butchers were being taught to swim.”

  Farther along the beach, Bob Harris carried two bottles of beer, crowned with inverted paper cups, down to Flor. Bonnie watched without emotion. Their figures were motionless, printed against her memory, arrested in heat and the insupportable noise.

  Everyone around Bonnie was asleep. The sirocco, unsteady, pulled her parasol about on the sand. Sitting, knees bent, she clasped her white feet. There was not a blemish on them. The toes were s
traight, the heels rosy. She had tended her feet like twin infants, setting an example for Flor. Once, exasperated by Flor’s neglect, she had gone down on her knees and taken Flor’s feet on her lap and shown her how it ought to be done. She had creamed and manicured and pumiced, while Flor, listless, surreptitiously trying to get on with a book, said, “Oh, Mama, I can do it.” “But you won’t, honey. You simply don’t take care of yourself unless I’m there.” She had polished and tended her little idol, and for whom? For a Turk not sixty-three inches high. For Bob Harris in tartan trunks. It was no use; the minutes and hours had passed too quickly. She was perplexed by the truth that had bothered her all her life – that there was no distance between time and events. Everything raced to a point beyond her reach and sight. Everyone slid out of her grasp: her husband, her daughter, her friends. She let herself fall back. Her field of vision closed in, and from the left came the first, swimming molecules of pain.

  Wishart, returning from the sea, making a detour to avoid being caught up and battered in a volleyball game, came up to Bonnie unobserved. Patting his yellowed skin with a towel, he watched the evolution of his friend’s attack. Her face was half in sun. She twisted to find the shadow of the rolling parasol. Bitter, withdrawn, he was already pulling about himself the rags of imaginary Wishart: the squire father; Mrs. Sebastian, rolling in money above the Grand Canal. Bonnie believed she was really dying this time, and wondered if Flor could see.

  Flor said, “I think Mama has one of her headaches.”

  “You two watch each other, don’t you?” Bob Harris said.

  A haze had gone over the sky. She finished her beer, spread her striped beach towel a little away from him, and lay still. He had told her that his father had telephoned from Paris, and that this time it was an order. He was leaving soon, perhaps the next day. This was July. The summer, a fruit already emptied by wasps, still hung on its tree. He was leaving. When he had gone, she would hear the question, the ghost voice that speaks to every traveller: “Why did you come to this place?” Until now, she had known; she was somewhere or other with her mother because her mother could not settle down, because every rented flat and villa was a horrible parody of home, or the home she ought to have given Flor. When he had gone, she would know without illusion that she was in Cannes in a rotting season, that the rot was reality, and that there was no hope in the mirrored room.

  “Are you coming to Paris later on?” he asked. His father was waiting; he spoke with a sense of urgency, like someone trying to ring off, holding the receiver, eyes wandering around the room.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where we’ll go from here, or how long Mama will stay. She and Wishart always finish with a fight, and Mama loses her head and we go rushing off. All our relations at home think we have such a glamorous life. Did you ever go out in the morning and find a spider’s web spangled with dew?” she said suddenly. “You’ll never find that here. It’s either too hot and dry or it rains so much the spider drowns. At my grandmother’s place, you know, summers, I used to ride, oh, early, early in the morning, with my cousins. All my cousins were boys.” Her voice was lost as she turned her head away.

  “Flor, why don’t you go home?”

  “I can’t leave my mother, and she won’t go. Maybe I don’t dare. She used to need me. Maybe now I need her. What would I do at home? My grandmother is dead. I haven’t got a home. I know I sound as if I feel sorry for myself, but I haven’t got anything.”

  “You’ve got your mother,” he said. “There’s me.”

  Now it was here – the circumstance that Bonnie had loathed and desired. He moved closer and spoke with his lips to Flor’s ear, playing with her hair, as if they were alone on the beach or in his room. He remembered the basement room as if they would never be in it again. He remembered her long hair, the wrinkled sheets, the blanket thrown back because of the heat. It was the prophetic instant; in it was the compression of feeling that occurs in childhood and in dreams. Wishart passed them; his shadow fell over their feet. They were obliged to look up and see his onion skin and pickled eyes. They were polite. No one could have said that they had agreed in that moment to change the movement of four lives, and had diverted the hopes, desires, and ambitions of Bonnie and of Bob’s father, guides whose direction had suddenly failed.

  WISHART WENT BACK TO HIS HOTEL. It was the hour when people who lived in pensions began to straggle up from the sea. Whole families got in Wishart’s way. They were badly sunburned, smelled of Ambre Solaire and Skol, and looked as if they couldn’t stand each other’s company another day. Wishart bathed and changed. He walked to the post office and then to the station to see about a bus. He was dryly forgiving when people stepped on his feet, but looked like someone who will never accept an apology again. He sent a telegram to an American couple he knew who had a house near Grasse. He had planned to skip them this year; the husband disliked him. (The only kind of husband Wishart felt easy with was the mere morsel, the half-digested scrap.) But he could not stay with Bonnie now, and Mrs. Sebastian had put him off. He summed up his full horror of Cannes in a heart-rending message that began, “Very depressed,” but he did not sign a funny name, for fear of making the husband cross. He signed his own name and pocketed the change and went off to the station. This time he and Bonnie were parting without a quarrel.

  That night there was a full moon. Bonnie woke up suddenly, as if she had become conscious of a thief in the room; but it was only Flor, wearing the torn bathrobe she had owned since she was fourteen and that Bonnie never managed to throw away. She was holding a glass of water in her hand, and looking down at her sleeping mother.

  “Flor, is anything wrong?”

  “I was thirsty.” She put the glass on the night table and sank down on the floor, beside her mother.

  “That Wishart,” said Bonnie, now fully awake and beginning to stroke Flor’s hair. “He really takes himself for something.”

  “What is he taking himself for?”

  Bonnie stroked her daughter’s hair, thinking, My mermaid, my prize. The carp had vanished from the dream, leaving an iridescent Flor. No one was good enough for Florence. That was the meaning of the dream. “Your hair is so stiff, honey. It’s full of salt. I wish you’d wear a bathing cap. Flor, have you got a fever or something?” She wants to tell me something, Bonnie thought. Let it be anything except about that boy. Let it be anything but that.

  AT DAWN, Wishart, who had been awake most of the night, buckled his suitcase. No porter was around at that hour. He walked to the station in streets where there was still no suggestion of the terrible day. The southern scent, the thin distillation of lemons and geraniums, descended from the hills. Then heat began to tremble; Vespas raced along the port; the white-legged grub tourists came down from the early train. Wishart thought of his new hostess – academic, a husk. She chose the country behind Grasse because of the shades of Gide and Saint-Ex – ghosts who would keep away from her if they knew what was good for them. He climbed into the bus and sat down among workingmen who had jobs in Grasse, and the sea dropped behind him as he was borne away.

  In the rocking bus, his head dropped. He knew that he was in a bus and travelling to Grasse, but he saw Glad, aged twelve, going off at dawn with her lunch wrapped in an apron. What about the dirty, snotty baby boy who hung on her dress, whose fingers she had to pry loose one at a time, only to have the hand clamp shut again, tighter than before? Could this be Wishart, clinging, whining, crying “Stay with me”? But Wishart was awake and not to be trapped. He took good care not to dream, and when the bus drew in at Grasse, under the trees, and he saw his new, straw-thin hostess (chignon, espadrilles, peasant garden hat), he did not look like a failed actor assailed with nightmares but a smooth and pleasant schoolmaster whose sleep is so deep that he never dreams at all.