The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

by Mavis Gallant

  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 docto’rs 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 1950s 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.

  The doctor heard him out. “I think it is just something I call bachelor’s ailment,” she said. “You ought to have a mistress, if only to give you something real to worry about.” Perhaps she meant this kindly, but even a doctor can have curious motives, especially one who shows her gums when she laughs, and whose husband gets up early to avoid being alone with her. “Do you want to see someone at my clinic?”

  “No. It will go away.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He delivered his third lecture through a tight, cindery throat. The room was filled with students this time, smoking, fidgeting, reading, whispering. He wondered what they were doing indoors on a glowing day. They showed little interest and asked only a few of their puzzling questions. After the lecture a plump man who introduced himself as a journalist invited Piotr to the terrace of the Brasserie Balzar. He wore a nylon turtleneck pullover and blazer and a large chrome-plated watch. Piotr supposed that he must have been sent by Marek—one of his cousin’s significant connections. The reporter drank beer. Piotr, whose vitals rejected even its smell now,
had weak tea, and even his tea seemed aggressive.

  The reporter had a long gulp of his beer and said, “Are you one of those rebel poets?”

  “Not for a second,” said Piotr fervently.

  “What about the letter you sent to Pravda and that Pravda refused to print?”

  “I have never written to Pravda,” said Piotr.

  The reporter scribbled away, using many more words than Piotr had. Piotr remarked, “I am not a Soviet poet. I am a Polish lecturer, officially invited by a French university.”

  At this the reporter wrote harder than ever, and then asked Piotr about the Warsaw Legia—which Piotr, after a moment of brick wall, was able to recognize as the name of a football team—and about its great star, Robert Gadocha, whom Piotr had never heard of at all. The reporter shook Piotr’s hand and departed. Piotr meant to make a note of the strange meeting and to ask Marek about the man, but as he opened his pocket diary he saw something of far greater importance—today was the sixteenth of October, the feast day of St. Jadwiga. His hostess, whose name this was, had particularly wanted him to be there for dinner. He went to a Swiss film about a girl in love with a married dentist, slept comfortably until the renunciation scene, and remembered when he came out that he would have to bring his hostess a present. Buying flowers, he glanced across the shop and saw the Austrian. He was with an old woman—his mother, perhaps. She moved back and forth, pointing and laughing in a way Piotr took to be senile. As she bent her topknot over calla lilies Piotr saw the Austrian clearly. Oh, it was the same man, with the wide forehead and slight smile. He gave the babbling old woman all his attention and charm. But when he and Piotr stood side by side, each of them paying—one for lilies, one for roses—Piotr saw that he was older than the Austrian in the picture, and that his arms and shoulders were stiff, slightly paralyzed. The senile old mother was efficient and brisk; it was she who carried the flowers. The Austrian was back in Venice, where he belonged. Is that where I want him, Piotr wondered.

  The entire apartment, even Piotr’s part of it, smelled of food cooking. The doctor had waved and tinted her hair and darkened her lashes. Her husband was dressed in a dark suit and somber tie. His gift to his wife, a pair of coral earrings, reposed on a velvet cushion on the dining-room table. The guests, remnants of the couple’s old, happy days in the Resistance, sat stiffly, drinking French apéritifs. They were “little” Poles; Marek would not have known their names, or wished to. Their wives were French, so that the conversation was in French and merely polite. No one came in unexpectedly, as friends usually did for a name day. St. Jadwiga, incarnated in Paris, seemed to Piotr prim and middle-class. From Heaven his mind moved naturally to Venice, where he saw a white table and white chairs on the edge of a blue square. But perhaps Venice was quite other—perhaps it was all dark stone.

  He had trouble swallowing his drink. A demon holding a pitchfork sat in his throat. Sometimes the pitchfork grazed his ear. The three men and Jadwiga soon slipped into Polish and reminiscences of the war. The French wives chatted to each other, and then the doctor drew their chairs close to the television set. She had been one of a delegation of doctors who that day had called on the minister of health; if they looked hard they might see a glimpse of her. All seven stared silently at the clockface now occupying the screen. The seconds ticked over. As soon as the news began, the doctor’s husband began closing the shutters and drawing the curtains. It was a noisy performance, and Piotr saw that the doctor had tears in her eyes. Piotr thought of how this sniping went on night after night, with guests or without. He stared at lights reflected on the glassy screen, like fragments of a planet. A clock on the marble mantel had hands that never moved. The mirror behind the clock was tipped at an angle, so that Piotr could see himself. His hostess, following her most important guest’s gaze, cried that the clock worked perfectly; her husband kept forgetting to wind it! At this everyone smiled at Piotr, as if to say, “So that is what poets wonder about!”

  Dinner was further delayed because of a television feuilleton everyone in the room except Piotr had been following for seventeen weeks. A girl named Vanessa had been accused of euthanasia on the person of her aunt, named Ingrid, who had left Vanessa a large fortune. Anthony, a police detective from the Sûreté whose role it was to bully Vanessa into a hysterical confession, was suspected by all in the room (save Piotr). Anthony was a widower. His young daughter, Samantha, had left home because she wanted to be a championship swimmer. Anthony was afraid Samantha would die of heart failure as her mother, Pamela, had. Samantha did not know that at the time of her mother’s death there had been whispers about euthanasia. The detective’s concern for Samantha’s inherited weakness was proof to everyone (except Piotr) that he had been innocent of Pamela’s death. The dead aunt’s adopted son, Flavien, who had been contesting the will, and who had been the cause of poor Vanessa’s incarceration in the Santé prison, now said he would not testify against her after all. Piotr’s France, almost entirely out of literature, had given him people sensibly called Albertine, Berthe, Marcel, and Colette. This flowering of exotic names bewildered him, but he did not think it worth mentioning. He had a more precise thought, which was that if his throat infection turned out to be cancer it would remove the need for wondering about anything. He invented advice he would leave his children: “Never try to make an unhappy person happy. It is a waste of life, and you will defeat your own natural goodness.” In the looking glass behind the stopped clock Piotr was ugly and old.

  Before going to sleep that night he read the account he had written of his love for Laurie. It had turned into a long wail, something for the ear, a babbling complaint. Describing Laurie, he had inevitably made two persons of her. Behind one girl—unbreakably jaunty, lacking only in imagination—came a smaller young woman who was fragile and untruthful and who loved out of fear. He had never sensed any fear in Laurie. He decided he would never write in that way about his life again.

  He was pulled out of a long dream about airports by his own choked coughing. His left lung was on fire and a new pain, like an electric wire, ran along his arm to the tip of his little finger. He tried to suppress the coughing because another burst would kill him, and as he held his breath he felt a chain being forged, link by link, around his chest. The last two links met; the chain began to tighten. Before he could suffocate, a cough broke from him and severed the chain. He was shaking, covered in icy sweat. Panting, unable to raise himself on an elbow because of the pain, he gasped, “Help me.” He may have fainted. The room was bright; the doctor bent over him. She swabbed his arm—he felt the cold liquid but not the injection. He wanted to stay alive. That overrode everything.

  Piotr awoke fresh and rested, as though nothing had happened in the night. Nevertheless he let his hostess make an appointment at her clinic. “I still think it is bachelor’s ailment,” she grumbled, but she spoke with a false gruffness that meant she might be unsure.

  “It is a chill in the throat,” he said. Oh, to be told there were only six weeks to live! To settle scores; leave nothing straggling; to go quietly. Everything had failed him: his work (because it inevitably fell short of his vision), his marriage, politics, and now, because of Laurie, he had learned something final about love. He had been to jail for nothing, a poet for nothing, in love for nothing. And yet, in the night, how desperately he had craved his life—his own life, not another’s. Also, how shamefully frightened he had felt. Laurie had told him once that he was a coward.

  “All married men of your kind are scared,” she had said, calmly. This took place at the small table of one of the drugstores she favored. Piotr said he was not married, not really. “I’ll tell you if you’re married and scared,” she said. She looked at him over a steaming coffee cup. “Supposing I bought a Matisse and gave it to you.”

  “How could you?”

  “We’re imagining. Say I went without a winter coat to buy you a Matisse.”

  “A Matisse what?”

  “Anything. Signed.”


  “For a winter coat?”

  “Can’t you imagine anything, Potter? Your lovely Matisse arrives in Warsaw. You unwrap it. It is a present from me. You know that it comes with my love. It’s the sign of love and of going without.” The trouble was that he could see it. He could see himself unrolling the picture. It was the head of a woman. “Would you hang it up on the wall?”

  “Of course.”

  “And tell people where it came from?”

  “What people?”

  “If your wife came to see you, what would you say?”

  “That it came from Paris.” “From someone who loved you?”

  “It isn’t her business,” said Piotr.

  “You see?” said Laurie. “You’d never dare. You’re just a married man, and a frightened one. As frightened as any. You’re even scared of an ex-wife. The day you can tell her where your Matisse came from, the day you say, ‘I’m proud that any girl ever could have loved me that much,’ then you’ll know you’ve stopped being a scared little guy.”

  The Matisse was as real to him now as the car in which she had rushed away from the airport. Laurie could never in a lifetime have bought a Matisse. “Matisse” was only a name, the symbol of something famous and costly. She could accuse Piotr of fear because she was not certain what fear was; at least, she had never been frightened. Piotr thought this over coolly. Her voice, which had sung in his mind since her departure, suddenly left him. It had died on the last words, “scared little guy.”

  How silent my life will be now, Piotr said to himself. Yet it seemed to him that his anguish was diminishing, leaving behind it only the faint, daily anxiety any man can endure. A few days later he actually felt slow happiness, like water rising, like a tide edging in. He sat drinking black tea with Maria in her cramped little flat full of bric-a-brac and sagging divans. He saw sun on a window box and felt the slow tide. Maria was talking about men and women. She used books for her examples and the names of characters in novels as if they were friends: “Anna lived on such a level of idiocy, really.” “If Natasha had not had all those children …” “Lavretsky was too resigned.” Piotr decided this might be the soundest way of getting at the truth. Experience had never brought him near to the truth about anything. If he had fled Warsaw, forsaken his children, tried to live with Laurie, been abandoned by her, he would have been washed up in rooms like Maria’s. He would have remembered to put clean sheets on the bed when he had a new girl in the offing, given tea to visitors from the home country, quoted from authors, spoken comic-sounding French and increasingly old-fashioned Polish until everyone but a handful of other émigrés had left him behind.