The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

by Mavis Gallant

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Tell me about Leget.”

  She stammered, “He thinks I’ve got … something. A presence. He said that the minute he saw me, when I walked in.… He said he had been hoping to talk to me, alone—to talk about me.”

  “Clever man,” he said. “I don’t blame him. I know what he means—I saw it when you were seventeen. It’s more than a face, more than drive. I thought then that I’d never been close to it before.”

  The child in her, told it was singular, felt a rush of love. She said with new urgency, “Are you better? Oh, I forgot to say … he asked who had brought me up. I told him I had no parents. He asked who was, well, responsible for me.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Of course. I said, my aunt.”

  “Your aunt! Did you happen to mention she was dead?”

  “I told him she’d died reaching for a drink, and how she was born pickled, and how her mind had never been original or sharp, but I loved her and owed her so much. She taught me how to sit and walk and move. Leget said, ‘Yes, but your general culture’—don’t make a face, darling, it’s not the same in French. I told him it was just old detective stories and that the time before I was born seemed a lovely summer day full of detectives rushing to save pretty girls. I never thought about love. I used to just think, When I meet the nice detective …”

  He had heard this many times. “Let me know when you do meet him,” he said.

  “Perhaps you won’t like me when I’m R and F,” she said. “So it won’t matter what I tell you. Perhaps you’d rather I just stayed what you called me once, Aunt Freda’s captive niece. You’re sick of hearing about her. You’re already sick of Leget, and I’m absolutely certain you’re sick of me.”

  He got up by rolling on his side and gripping the edge of the mattress. He was dressed except for his trousers, and in the abjection of pain did not mind looking foolish. He took his jacket off and as he did so heard the lining tear. He stood looking at the bookshelf nailed beside the bed, giving his attention to the tattered Penguins, and Sélections du Reader’s Digest, out of which Gitta proposed to improve her French. He looked at the Beaujolais he could not open, and the empty bottle of Haig. He said, and meant it now, “I am old and ill and poor.” He was thirty-nine. What seems to the traveler ten or twenty years, he remembered, may in real time be ten thousand. In the nineteen years Gitta will have to travel before she overtakes me—but she never will, not unless the lumbago turns out to be fatal. He was old and ill, and he would be poor because he would give everything from now on to his wife and children. He would never buy drink again except in duty-free airport shops. “I’ll have to do a hell of a lot of traveling,” he remarked.

  “What? Oh, you’re being silly. Please sit down. Or lie down. Or take something.”

  “It’s the same if I stand.” He began to explain that the aspirin he had swallowed earlier would not dissolve because he had nothing to wash it down with; and that pain was lodged like fishhooks beneath the skin. “But I’ll take one more aspirin,” he said, to appease Gitta rather than the pain.

  She was barely listening, looking intently now at the dark rain, or at her face on the window. She must have been recalling her triumph—her conquest. Turning to him slowly she said, “Why do you have your shirt tucked in that way? It looks funny.” She added, “I’ve never seen anyone else do that.”

  “You’ve been knocking around with a lot of damn foreigners in Paris,” he said. “Don’t even know how to keep their clothes on.”

  She came to him, awkwardly for a girl who had been taught how to move, and touched his head for fever. “It’s nothing. You aren’t sick at all.” Pain stuck to fragrance like glue; the scent of her hand became a source of uneasiness. Had he really expected to keep her to himself? He knew of one anguish, and that was the separation from his children; but Gitta had been a child, and more—they had been lovers since she was seventeen. He found the aspirin in an open suitcase and hobbled to the bathroom. Clutching the basin, he stood on one foot and flexed his knee.

  “Is it that bad?” she said, without sympathy because his forehead was cool. “You’re making a horrible face.” He looked, as if he had only one minute left, at the walls, which seemed newly papered, and the white ceiling.

  “I’m trying out the nerve,” he said, as though that meant anything. He reached up to the light over the mirror and he thought the nerve had frayed and split. He imagined a ragged sort of string tied round his spine. “It’s more like needles and pins now,” he presently said.

  “I thought men never had pains,” she said. “Only neurotic women.” He could not guess the direction of her thoughts, for their knowledge of each other was intimate, not general. “Who gave you the electric toothbrush?” she asked.

  “No one. I bought it.”

  “What did you want a thing like that for?” He realized that she thought she had caught him out and that his wife had given it to him—probably for Father’s Day, with a ribbon around it. She was still thin-skinned about his family, even now, after he had proved there was nothing but her. His children were altogether taboo; their very names carried misfortune. Giving her the cards to post—his attempt to bring about a casual order—must have seemed such a violation of safety that she was probably amazed at finding them both here, intact.

  He started to answer but the habit of clandestine holidays cut him short, for they heard a high-pitched exchange in English outside the door: “… sent in an unsealed envelope to save sixpence.” “I should have torn it up.” “So I did.”

  She smiled at him. The day was still safe; the complicity between them had from the beginning been as important as love.

  Of course she needed him, she said to herself. Without him, she would never have known about love, only about gratitude, affection, claustrophobia. She sat on the bed and spread the torn coat on her knee. The lining was rent under the arm; with difficulty she joined the ragged seams. The material seemed stiff and old, and it was unpleasant to handle. Intellectual sweat, she said deep within her mind.

  “The first time you saw me with Aunt Freda you said, ‘She is using you as a femme de charme,’ remember? But she had been kind, as always, and she’d bought me a sumptuous velvet skirt and a leather jacket, and I didn’t see why I couldn’t wear them together. I must have been a sight. I thought all you could see were my bitten nails.”

  “You and your aunt were too tied up,” he said. “Too dependent on each other.” He sounded as if the aunt were to blame for a flaw in Gitta; at least that was the meaning she selected. She could have straightened out the right and wrong of it, but what would their lives become, with so many explanations? She imagined them, a worn-out old couple in a traveler’s climate, not speaking much—explanations having devoured conversation long ago—pretending to be all right when anyone looked at them. “Women are bad for each other,” he said. She thought he was describing her life without him, but perhaps it was another woman’s—he’d had nothing but daughters. She felt, obscurely, that a searing discussion had taken place.

  Settling into an armchair he groaned sincerely. He said, “Well, you liked old Leget. That’s a good thing.”

  She looked up and said simply, “I told you. I worship him. I would do anything he asked.”

  “Don’t ever tell him that.”

  “I mean it. I worshiped his films before I ever knew you knew him. It’s talent I love. I’d do anything.”

  “So you said. What has he asked you to do?”

  “It’s just one scene, to tell you the truth. I … I sort of sleepwalk through American Express. Don’t laugh. Stop it! I don’t mean walking in my sleep. You know how sometimes you feel no one can see you, because you are so intent—looking for a friend, let’s say—and suddenly you wake up and notice everybody staring? I can’t explain it the way he does. Actually, I don’t need to say anything. I just am. I exist. I’m me, Gitta.”

  “You aren’t you if you don’t open your mouth. Also, i
f you don’t talk, it means he pays you a good deal less.”

  “Don’t be so small. You know very well I am paid and how much. It doesn’t come out of his pocket. I’m not some little tart he picked up in the Café Select.”

  “I’m going to be sorry I introduced you to Leget,” he said. “You’re doting.”

  “He doesn’t care for women,” she said primly, and, as if one statement completed the other, “He has his wife.”

  She wondered if he was trying to tell her she owed him the interview. But she remembered all that she owed him, particularly now, when he had given up everything for her—his children, and the room he was used to working in, and his wife answering the telephone (she could imagine no other use for her), and perhaps his job. He might go into a news agency here, but it was a comedown. That might be the greatest loss of all; it was the only one he mentioned. But she was astute enough at times to guess he might not speak of what bothered him most. How could she match his sacrifice? She had rid herself of everything that might divert a scrap of her love; she had thrown away a small rabbit with nylon fur, a bracelet made of painted wooden links, both highly charged with the powers of fortune. It was not enough; she was frightened without her talismans, and they were still not on an equal footing. She often said to him now, “Never leave me.”

  She cut off the thread and went on, “Leget is young to be married. I mean, so definitely married.”

  “There’s no age limit.” He was not yet divorced. He had jumped without a net—at his time of life! When he had talked gently to her in the old days, at the beginning, it had been about herself. Now, as he composed a new message in which he figured, she heard the word “compulsive,” or perhaps it was “impulsive”—she could not take it in. She felt utterly an impostor, sewing for a grown person who ought to look after his own clothes, as if sewing were a translation of devotion. He was unwell, of course, and out of his element. Inactive, he seemed to disappear. We are all selfish, she decided. She had been devoted to her aunt, but selfishness was a green fly, unobserved, the color of the leaf. She murmured, as she had many times in the past two days, “Don’t leave me,” but it was only a new exorcism. She had shed her talismans—oh, mistake! If he made love to her, that might be a way out of their predicament; it seemed, in fact, the only way. But when he crept onto the bed, behind her back, it was only because he’d had enough of sitting in the chair.

  “I’m not going out,” she said suddenly. “Ring downstairs and see if they can send someone out to the café for you.”

  She turned and saw that he was watching her closely. Just as his hand went to the telephone she said, “Darling, a hideous thing happened today. I didn’t tell you. When I was coming home after seeing Leget, the rain started pelting, so I stopped in a doorway, and some man, a sort of workingman, was there, in the dark. I had the feeling if I said ‘Partez!’ he would go, and I was ashamed to think it—to think he was inferior, I mean. All at once he moved between me and the street, and when I looked back I saw the building was empty—it was being torn down from the inside. The outside walls were all that was left. I got my back against the wall, and as he walked toward me I pushed him away with both hands, with all my might. He opened his mouth—it was full of blood. He sort of fell against me; some of it got on my coat. He staggered back and fell in a heap, and I left him. I walked away very slowly to show I wasn’t frightened, but I was so upset that I went in a café and had a drink and watched their television for about an hour. I was afraid if I came straight back to you I might be hysterical and it might bother you.”

  “You probably aren’t hungry then, are you?” he said.

  “Of course I’m hungry. I’m as hungry as you are. You know perfectly well I haven’t eaten the whole day.”

  He seemed to take it for granted she was making this up—she could tell. He had known her to do it before, when she was anxious to change the meaning of a situation, but in those days she had been living with her aunt, and trying to make her life seem vivid and interesting to him.

  “Why didn’t you shout, or call someone?”

  “Because I wanted to show him I wasn’t afraid of him.”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “I wanted to kill him. I was murderous.”

  “That’s understandable,” he said. “You’ll realize tomorrow, or when you wake up in the night, that you were frightened. What shall I ask them to fetch you from the café? A ham sandwich? Two sandwiches?”

  “I don’t care.” She was bitterly offended, alone, astray, for he was making little of the danger she had been in. All he seemed to have on his mind was food. He spoke into the telephone, explained that he was very ill. Sandwiches, he said, and he knew the French for “corkscrew.”

  She said, “What if it isn’t real? What if I made it up?”

  “Even if you have, it’s frightened you. You’ve frightened yourself.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I wasn’t in on it.”

  “Aren’t you frightened that I wanted to kill someone?”

  “I haven’t got round to that,” he said. “If you invented it only to frighten me, I’ll try to respond.”

  “All right. I made it up to worry you, let’s say. But there’s blood on the sleeve of my coat. As for you, you only got this lumbago because you don’t want us to be happy. Now that your wife knows, you don’t enjoy making love to me.”

  “Be an angel,” he said. “Don’t say too much more now.”

  “As long as Aunt Freda had me,” she said, “you had me and all the rest. She kept me for you. And she didn’t mind your being married, because it meant I’d never leave her. There, that’s what I think. Do you want to go back? Aunt Freda said men never leave home unless their wives are hell.”

  “My wife wasn’t hell.”

  “Then there’s no explanation, is there?”

  “There bloody well is, and you know what it is.”

  “We’re like children, aren’t we?” she said. “In a way?”

  Knowing more than she did about children, he said, sadly, “No, not at all.”

  She started to answer, “If anything goes wrong now, I suppose I have no one to blame but myself,” which came out, without her meaning it that way, “no one to love but myself.”

  She was frightened, as he had predicted, in the night. She supposed that the man who had come out of the shadows of the courtyard and was now blocking her way to the street intended to kill her. “I don’t need to die,” she said, meaning that she did not want to be transformed; that life was manageable. He stood with his arms spread, hands dangling, as though imitating a clumsy bird. “Oh, look,” she cried. “It isn’t fair!” for the bus she wanted slipped away from the curb. No one could see her in here, and there was nothing left of the queue she had abandoned so as to shelter from the rain. “I’m late as it is,” she said. It seemed her only grievance.

  She supposed he knew no English. “If only I’d said ‘Get out’ the instant I saw you,” she raged at him. “You’d have gone. You’d have respected the tone. All you deserve from me is commands. ‘Get out,’ I ought to have said. ‘Get out!’ ”

  The steps of his curious bird dance brought him near. He stretched his mouth so that she saw the bloody gums. He had been in a fight. She smelled the breath of someone frightened; she saw his eyes. She understood that he had no plans for her: He was drunk and vacant, like her aunt. She remembered the subdual of drinks, the easy victories. “I’m going out that door,” she said. Her triumphs over her aunt had been of this order. Feelings about other people she had never specifically understood sent her toward him—into his arms, he might have thought. He was afflicted with the worst of curses—obscurity, a life without meaning—while she would never be forgotten, unless she let some fool destroy her. When they were almost as close as lovers she pushed him away, one hand on the other and both on his throat. He should have fallen back and cracked his head and made an end to it, but instead he knelt, sagged; his face, in passing, knocked agai
nst the sleeve of her coat. “Oh, you’ll be all right,” she said. She spoke in the jeune Anglaise voice she had only that day been advised to lose.

  “Partez,” she said softly in the dark, and again, a little louder, “Partez!” and then, as he began to come awake, “Would you be very unhappy? Would you miss me? Is it true you don’t believe a word I say?”

  QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

  Romanians notoriously are marked by delusions of eminence and persecution, and Madame Gisèle does not encourage them among her clientele. She never can tell when they are trying to acquire information, or present some grievance that were better taken to a doctor or the police. Like all expatriates in Paris, they are concerned with the reactions of total strangers. She is expected to find in the cards the functionary who sneered, the flunky who behaved like a jailer, the man who, for no reason, stared too long at the plates of the car. Madame Gisèle prefers her settled clients—the married women who sit down to say, “When is my husband going to die?” and “What about the man who smiles at me every morning on the bus?” She can find him easily: There he is—the jack of hearts. One of the queens is not far away, along with the seven of diamonds turned upside down. Forget about him. He is supporting his mother and has already deserted a wife.

  Amalia Moraru has been visiting Madame Gisèle for two years now. She has been so often, and her curiosity is so flickering and imprecise, that Madame Gisèle charges her for time, like a garage. Amalia asks questions about her friend Marie.