A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  •

  Claudie said calmly, “Madame Perrigny has friends who want to invite Alain for the rest of the summer. They live in a healthy country place and they like children.”

  Shirley, sitting next to Papa, was trying to talk to him as if she had never met him before, and he was answering as if it was no effort for him to imagine he never had. The others were gripped in discussion. Shirley described to Papa a television program she had never seen (Philippe’s) and how Philippe felt about it. He seemed to be listening; his eyes went from her face to his plate, but like Shirley, he was attending to something quite different.

  “Completely out of the question,” Papa said.

  “What would it cost?”

  “Nothing,” said Claudie.

  “They must be after something.”

  “Is it only for the summer?”

  “Maman could have a holiday.”

  “A rest—at last.”

  “What about the Family Allowance?”

  “Are they French?”

  “Haven’t they any children of their own, poor things?”

  “Do they own their house?”

  “Do they own any other property?”

  “Any heirs? Godchildren?”

  “Would Alain pick up a Belgian accent?”

  “They know of course we would be doing them a favor? He is not a ward of the State! It would be intolerable to have them think such a thing.”

  “The air would be better for him.”

  “The air of Paris gives you cancer.”

  “Of the larynx.”

  “Of the lungs.”

  “How many acres? How many rooms in their château? Their villa, then. What do you mean by house?”

  “A house with a garden is a villa, Claudie. Don’t be stupid.”

  “They must be told he is allergic to nearly everything.”

  “Are you perfectly sure they are Catholics?”

  “What do you mean, Claudie, by another form of life around the place? Oh, doves. How charming.”

  “Alain is going to play with doves!”

  “I suppose they saw a picture of Alain and fell in love with him. Which photo did you show them, Claudie?”

  “We must visit him every weekend.”

  “It is only for six weeks,” Shirley put in.

  “Alain, your little cousins will envy you.”

  “What about the Family Allowance?”

  “It is such a small sum, it would be insulting of us to offer it.”

  “Maman should send flowers.”

  “Why? They should send them to her.”

  “It would be a gesture—chocolates.”

  “If they have a garden they don’t want flowers. As for chocolates.”

  “Maman must write a charming letter.”

  “What about the family allowance?”

  Originally it had been turned over to Claudie. Then Papa instructed his wife to keep it, because Claudie either lost the money or spent it on herself or bought Alain a monstrous woolly monkey that frightened him so he went blue in the face. It would be mortally insulting to offer money to these cultivated, wealthy people in their Burgundian château.

  “After all, they want Alain for their own pleasure.”

  “If they went to a public charity and asked for a child they’d be given a miserable orphan.”

  “With alcoholic parents.”

  “Parents in prison.”

  Alain looked from face to face. Papa had left the table and stood by the uncurtained window.

  “They bottle their own wine?” asked Gérald. “Vineyards?”

  “Where? In Burgundy?”

  “Probably in Burgundy. The best vineyards in Burgundy have been bought by Belgians.”

  “That is true. In fact there is a new generation of children in Burgundy completely blond. On account of the Belgian blood, you see. All these Belgians.”

  “They buy wine in bulk at a cooperative,” said Shirley, but her voice was lost. “And they bottle it. That’s all.”

  She understood Claudie’s desire to get away. Even the distant sound of traffic suggested other, richer lives. They were marooned around a table. Papa had left the circle and now he spoke quietly from the window. His back was to them and they did not hear the first words. Gérald’s voice was still heavily going on about the Belgians in Burgundy. First Shirley, then the others heard: “. . . for Claudie to grow up. Then it was Alain. When he grows up, I shall be too old. If he goes, I can leave now. If he stays, I stay.” Now he turned and looked at them.

  A cry of “Papa!” and Claudie leaped, it seemed, for his throat but at the last second changed her mind and flung her arms around his neck. He faced the family with great Claudie clinging and sobbing. He sought Shirley’s eyes. She understood: this scene is played to me. She tried to put into her answering look, I give up—you win. He had won. That was the end of the project. Claudie never mentioned it again, and she left the apologies and explanations for the Van Tongs up to Shirley.

  10

  SHIRLEY played back the scene in the Maurels’ kitchen, this time giving herself one or two good lines.

  “As a token of friendship and particular esteem,” she said, “I will let you decide how you shall be cooked. Would you like to be fried in oil or would you prefer to be cooked in the stewpan with tomato sauce?”

  All her private dialogues were furnished with scraps of prose recited out of context, like the disparate chairs, carpets and lamps adrift in her apartment. She carried her notions of conversation into active life and felt as if she had been invited to act in a play without having been told the name of it. No one had ever mentioned who the author was or if the action was supposed to be sad or hilarious. She came on stage wondering whether the plot was gently falling apart or rushing onward toward a solution. Cues went unheeded and unrecognized, and she annoyed the other players by bringing in lines from any other piece she happened to recall.

  Supposing she had asked Monsieur Maurel if he wanted to be fried in oil? Even if he had remembered anything at all about Pinocchio he would certainly have been startled at her suddenly declaiming in English. He could never have guessed how shy and uncertain she was in French. It was true that French literature had once been her major subject, but here again a mistake had been made, for the authors she had been taught to consider important had turned out to be despised in Paris, at least by Philippe’s generation. Colette and Giraudoux were neither read nor mentioned, Gide seemed to have been all but forgotten, and Camus was more admired abroad. Philippe had confused her by saying kindly that, like all foreigners, she was fifteen to twenty years out of date, and then by praising Gone with the Wind (all that a novel should be) and The Grapes of Wrath (appreciated even by Hitler as portraying the real America). Shirley had never dared tell him how close she had once felt to a Giraudoux novel about a shipwrecked girl—another Shirley, perhaps—who, alone on her deserted island, tried to let herself perish of sunstroke and by drowning and even, by recalling everything base and vile in the world, of indignity. But death had no use for her, and finally she was given the promise that she would one day buy trick spiders and imitation grass-hoppers and exploding cigars for her children in a shop close to the Place de la Madeleine. “J’étais sauvée,” said the girl simply, and Shirley believed her. The only uncertainty in Shirley’s mind was exactly where the promise had come from. “God,” said Giraudoux carelessly, but Shirley supposed he had said that for want of vocabulary.

  What similar, lunatic assurance could uphold her now? The summer was a tightrope. Somehow or other she had to reach the other side. She smiled in the dark in James’s bed and put all her trust in the city that exists in memory, children who do not exist at all, and in the cheerful hoax. I have always been saved, she said to herself, but then remembered the tortured evenings when Philippe had made her meet his friends, how she had been daunted by the wave of hostility that rose to greet the stranger in Paris. Nothing seemed to be considered rude or preposterous if i
t was said to someone like her. “We wanted to give you beans and jam for dinner to make you feel at home, but my wife refuses to do American cooking”—that was how Hervé, Philippe’s best friend, had welcomed her. Another of Philippe’s friends had told her contemptuously that he had been given whipped cream with roast beef in Washington; had interviewed a chef in California who had never tasted asparagus and thought it was a weed; had talked to a painter in Chicago who had never heard of Braque. Attempting to reply was like fighting out of quicksand. This particular friend’s American adventures had been collected in a widely selling book, which in itself was considered a positive answer. She was ashamed to remember now that she had minded, had nagged back, had let herself be hurt. The question of asparagus and Braque had been one of her rare disagreements with Philippe; they had discussed it for some reason even on their wedding day. It remained in her mind as their most passionate exchange. They had been married for less than an hour, they were in a café on the Place St. Sulpice, Shirley was pregnant, and the words “whipped cream and roast beef” made her throat sting with nausea. Why had she let herself be defeated, forgetting she was destined to be saved?

  On the morning of Whitsunday, sitting on the edge of her bed reading her mother’s letter, she had applied names to her conduct—deceitful, filthy, careless, damaging, corrupt. True? If true, then she might as well lay her head on a rock and die of sunstroke. In Berlin, she remembered, she had forgotten her password, but death had entered and then left her, and it would have been shameful to have remembered, as magic, “J’étais sauvée.”

  •

  Now followed a brief summer season of parties. The Maurels were part of Shirley’s life, though they may not have known it. She thought that two worlds, theirs and James’s, should be made to overlap. The Maurels wanted airing, contact with a livelier universe, while the Mediterranean contingent kept complaining that they never met anyone French. They were asked to meet in Shirley’s living room, candle-lit for the occasion, one Sunday at six o’clock. Even Papa had come. Perfectly at his ease, he treated the women with unexpected charm and gallantry, and talked nothing but common sense to the men. He did not address a word to any member of his own family, of course, and to Shirley he was only just polite. She knew that he watched her and that it was for his approval that she had dressed. There was a complicity between them, as though they were slightly hostile lovers. It was now merely a question of where and when. Warned by Claudie that her family expected the party to replace a meal, Shirley had summoned her Scandinavian caterer, dropped after the disaster with her sister- and mother-in-law. Gérald stationed himself at the table on which the cold supper was laid and remained standing there with his mouth full of herring and bread and butter until his wife led him away. As for the rest of the family, unlike the Perrignys, they would try anything new providing they did not have to live with it, pay for it, or be reminded of it too often. The party went well: the Greeks thought they were better than the Maurels because they were more modern, and at least looked richer, while the Maurels knew they were superior because they were not foreign. This assumption of consequence made everyone cordial. Later the Maurels continued to ask about the Greeks, remembering their names and following whatever Shirley could reveal about their lives with interest. They did not wish to know them any better, but they accepted them as people they might hear about from time to time. “How is James?” Maman would ask, rather coyly. He had told Madame Maurel about the Greek evzone doll made into a lamp. The bulb under the skirt produced a comical effect when lighted. Gérald was interested in the idea, but Marie-Thérèse would not have had it in the house. Alone of the family, Marie-Thérèse suspected Shirley and seemed to wonder what Shirley wanted with them all.

  Presently, when James gave a farewell party because his sisters and brothers-in-law were leaving Paris, he casually invited the Maurels and the Ziffs. Here they drew the line: enough was enough. Claudie was permitted to go, but on condition she spend the night in Shirley’s apartment. Her father did not want her to cross Paris alone at a dangerous hour. In spite of his conversation with Shirley he still seemed to think that her flat was the safest place in Paris. As a substitute for Papa, Maman, Gérald and Marie-Thérèse, and so that James would not be disappointed, Shirley summoned Renata. She gave Claudie only as much information as seemed needed to keep Claudie from asking questions: Renata was twenty-five, she was a painter of portraits of rich women—a true vocation that had manifested itself when she was still very young—and now she earned a fat living in a milieu notorious for getting things free. That in itself showed she was remarkable. She was closely attached to her mother, who lived in America, and with whom she kept up a tense exchange of letters beginning, “Your brave and gallant attitude . . .” She was also very pretty and supremely elegant. This last was contradicted by Renata’s arriving dressed in a Victorian orphan’s uniform and with her long hair strained back. She wore no makeup and seemed pale and severe. She began speaking at once about her suicide attempt, taking it for granted Claudie would have been told of it, and was obviously gratified at the girl’s excitement and awe. She did not ask where Philippe was. Renata and Shirley gave no sign of having ever known much about each other. Their forced closeness and its climax had given them the need to start over as acquaintances. The two visitors sat on Shirley’s bed while she dressed. Claudie had bought for this occasion new underclothes and a new toothbrush. She told Renata that she expected the party to change her life.

  Renata took Claudie’s broad hand and read her fortune. “A tragedy is behind you,” she announced. “You have come through the worst. You are in love, but you will meet someone more suited to you later on. I see two, no, three marriages. Perhaps one child, not more. Your first lover will always remain the love of your life. But he is married to someone else.”

  “That could apply to anyone,” Shirley remarked. She could see that Claudie was dazzled and wondering if the change had already begun. She stared at her palm and then at Renata.

  Bored with Claudie, Renata walked around the room. She pushed Shirley away from the mirror gently, and released her hair. The Victorian orphan had been a mood, nothing more. From the bathroom she called, “How does Philippe see to shave in this light?” and “You’re so sloppy, Shirley, yet there’s nothing personal in your house. This is like a room in a hotel waiting for the next lot of strangers.”

  “We can’t all have lived-in bathrooms.”

  Renata wandered back and said, “You both look splendid”—this because she now looked so much better.

  They walked upstairs, slightly edgy and solemn, although they were only going to a party. Claudie said, “I’ve never been up here before. What is all this?”

  “A leftover from the Algerian War,” said Shirley. “The man who lived in that apartment had his door blown in by a bomb.”

  “Why?” said Claudie.

  “I don’t know. The war was still on. The man had to move out.”

  “What had he done?”

  “I keep telling you—I don’t know. He must have done something. Madame Roux thought he had. She hated the Algerians. She was all for the paratroops. I wasn’t for anybody.”

  “I was for the FLN, of course,” said Renata with a contempt Shirley could not explain to herself—for who or what was the object? Shirley? Ben Bella? The French? “Philippe wrote some marvelous things in Le Miroir about his own experiences in the army. That was how they came to hire him, I’m told. It was probably his apartment the fascists were after. They made a mistake and blew up the wrong one.”

  “I didn’t know him then. He didn’t live here.”

  “Shirley, how can you be married to a man like Philippe and not understand anything?”

  “He never asked me what I knew.” Women had starved so that Shirley might vote; a girl in Algeria, a patriot, had been horribly mutilated with a broken bottle by laughing young men who were proud of their European culture. But revolution belonged to her mother; to Philippe; it was a night witho
ut signposts in which you were lost. How can Renata take sides when she is always on the way to a party? Claudie had been listening closely: anything to do with Philippe seemed to rivet her attention. Shirley, looking up, caught sight of two dim faces drawing back from the stairwell. “I keep seeing strange men on this staircase,” she said. “I wonder if they’re left over from that winter when all the flats were bombed?”

  “It’s only that couple next door to James,” said Renata. “Some old maid and her brother. If you would only remember to wear your glasses!”

  “That couple wouldn’t be here now. They go away every summer.”

  “Then they’ve sublet. Shirley, stop fussing.” She said to Claudie, “Shirley likes everything as dramatic and complicated as possible. You should hear her—‘Orange juice destroys all the calcium in your system.’ ‘The air in Paris is polluted and we will all die of pneumonia.’ Now it’s ‘Someone is watching me on the stairs.’ Never listen to Shirley.”

  “Oh, but I do listen,” Claudie cried. “I have never listened as much to anyone.” When the others laughed she seemed bewildered.

  “It’s quite true about the orange juice,” Shirley remarked. “I heard someone explain about it at a meeting Philippe took me to.”

  “Try to make a good impression on James, Claudie,” said Renata. “He’s looking for a wife. He has tried all of us, Shirley included. He would love to take someone unknown and exotic back to Greece. She will have to be young—you are. She should have a dowry. I’m certain you will have. And she ought to be virgin, or nearly. Are you, or nearly?”