A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  Shirley’s hand swept across the page, over the dead list, and all at once she thought of Rose O’Hara. She saw her long face, her soft, piled-up hair; she guessed at Rose’s secrets. Next time I see Rose I’ll talk to her, she decided. I’ll tell her about Philippe and Madame Roux and I’ll tell her things even she doesn’t know about James. I’ll tell her about Claudie and her glue-pot of a family. I’ll be Renata, and Rose can be me. But she knew that where James was concerned she was unlikely to “tell.” In that case there was no point in telling Rose anything. How much more useful it might be to separate her summer and winter clothes! She saw a heap of clothing on her bed: sweaters in plastic cases, unmatched stockings knotted together, coats she could not wear because the buttons had been removed at the cleaners and were in the pockets, wrapped in brown paper envelopes. More than half the garments she owned were useless because some part of them had gone astray. Here was a green silk dress with seven tiny buttonholes at the back of the neck, and five of the buttons missing. Buttons would have to be specially made. Somewhere in Paris existed a shop where they would match the silk—perhaps take a sliver from the hem. Would it not be simpler to give the dress away to Renata, thus transferring the problem? No, she remembered; the errand is everything. If I conquer the errand I subdue life. I shall take a bus or a taxi to this shop after finding out where it is, if such a shop exists. In the meantime, the dress will be hanging in a non-season, between the summer and the winter clothes. One day the shop will ring me and say the buttons are ready. I shall cross Paris once again and collect the buttons and sew them on, providing I have found thread the same shade of green. That is what growing older is about; that is what the movement of time means. My mother is a button-matcher; so is Mrs. Castle, so are Rose, Renata, Papa and Maman Maurel, certainly Marie-Thérèse and Philippe. Pete? I don’t know. Yes, I do know. Pete too. Also, Madame Roux; probably Sutton McGrath, Marcel Proust, Geneviève, Colette and Madame Perrigny. Everybody except Claudie and me, and Claudie thinks I am. She wants to be like me. I wanted to be like Philippe, and Claudie would like to be me. All right, Mother, Mrs. Castle: I start a new life. I become thrifty and careful. I sum up the past and so make a future possible. Both are imaginary, but never mind. I am plain. I give examples of what I mean. I am plausible and I keep it short.

  She drew a line through the dead list from corner to corner and on the page that followed wrote, “How It Happened,” but crossed that out too, remembering the way Mrs. Castle had proceeded in Pons. She lettered, “WHY P. LEFT ME AND HOW I LOST MY JOB.” She had been standing, bending over the table, as she used to when reading Philippe’s personal mail. Now she sat down, imitating him, even to his way of looking at a pen as if there were bound to be something the matter with it.

  “Four explanations,” she wrote.

  “One, where I was on the Saturday night.

  “Two, about James.

  “Three, Pete—one or two things.

  “Four, how I happened to write my mother a personal letter.”

  Feeling that some exergual phrase was needed to lend meaning to her explanations, she added, out of memory: “The possession of the signs of sexual privilege is the important thing, not the quality nor the enjoyment of them” (Lucky Jim). It did not measure up to a quotation from Kant or Dostoievski or Claude Levi-Strauss, but all the same it accounted for a great many actions she could remember, and might even be the complete answer to Mrs. Castle’s question, “Why are you always in such a hurry to get married, I wonder?” It was the dead period of daylight, midafternoon—the time of day when she always felt slightly nauseated. She thought she might as well begin with:

  1. WHERE I WAS ON THE SATURDAY

  This is where I was on the Saturday you waited all night for me. First you thought I had gone to a party, then I suppose you thought I was with a man. All I had to do was creep into the room where Renata was sleeping it off and call you. All I had to say was, “Renata’s tried to scare me.” I could have added, “Please come and get me,” and you would have come. I think so. Instead I sat by myself in Renata’s kitchen looking at a few books I found in her john. Don’t ask me why I didn’t walk out of a mess that wasn’t my making. It seemed to me I had no choice.

  She’s painted flowers, orange, red, orange-yellow, all over her kitchen. She hasn’t put a shade or anything over the bulb on the ceiling, and when you’re tired the room seems to whirl round and round, and if you’re shortsighted like me, it hurts your eyes and makes you feel sick.

  It was the Saturday of the holiday weekend and I think Renata and I were the only people in the building. The kitchen was cold as a cellar. I had my raincoat, and I had wrapped an anorak of Renata’s round my legs. My purse had already been ransacked for what it might hold in the way of entertainment. What I had found was a piece of paper covered with your handwriting. I was obliged to tear it up later, for reasons I’ll explain. (I feel as if I had all the time in the world.) What you had written was more or less this:

  THE PLAYS OF TOFOLU GROUPE

  I met Mr. Groupe and he had nothing to say. He had nothing to say because he was numb with brandy, can’t understand five words of French, and does not, in any case, seem given to human speech. This means I have no interview and nothing to write. Nevertheless, I want to mention something about Mr. Groupe’s work, and its effect on young playwrights everywhere in the world.

  Thanks to Tofolu Groupe we no longer know what it means to be bored. The word has been eliminated. The chill, blank misery that overcomes us at a play, an exhibition of paintings, or a film, we take to be normal response to any of these events. Absence of tedium is spreading to every walk of life. On all sides one now hears “I am never bored,” as if this boast were a token of enlightenment instead of the sign of a cloudy and ignorant mind. The major problem of our generation is not a breakdown of communication, as Mr. Groupe would have us think, but that there is too bloody much of it. (These were not your exact words, Philippe, and I have certainly lost something in translating them, but the idea is close.) Owing to the ease of travel, the teaching of languages, psychology, and sociology to underdeveloped students, the growing number of spiteful, nervous amateurs eager to analyze the conduct of their loved ones and broadcast their conclusions, we now understand all too well, and grasp all too quickly, what the other person is driving at. The source of present-day problems in France, as in Mr. Groupe’s Ireland, is complete comprehension. We are at the point of no return, where a happy friendship, a cloudless sexual union, can be achieved only with someone whose language one never can and would never wish to know.

  This, Philippe, you had stroked out with a blue pencil, followed by:

  TOFOLU GROUPE: THE SOUNDLESS CRY

  What animal does Tofolu Groupe resemble—could it be the llama, silent and aristocratic and ba? Released from the prison of order and the servitude of logic we are in the domain of ba. We recall that the theater of Tofolu Groupe leads us to the edge of the cliff. Groping for the shabby security of language as we have known it, we ba and ba in vain. Before us in emptiness—the inexistence of love and friendship, the vacuum of ba and ba and ba. Vertigo seizes both mind and body. We peer over the edge. Who will hold us back? Ba.

  I spread this on the kitchen table. I squinted because of the ferocious light and underneath what you had written I added, “Honestly, Philippe, the first draft is better. If I were you, I wouldn’t call it ‘The Soundless Cry,’ because you’ve already called something else that, I forget what, I think your piece on the declining Hungarian birth rate.”

  As soon as I had scribbled my comment I realized I could not slip this back among the papers on your desk. I had taken it by accident. I was looking for letters from Geneviève, to tell you the truth. I know she is only a friend, but I wouldn’t be looking for letters if you were sleeping with her. I mean that—I would feel that something had happened and it was none of my business. You see, what goes on between you is much more puzzling. I don’t get it. Why should she tell you about how her
husband does or doesn’t, and where and how and how often? Why should you then inquire in an exquisite prose-poem if it is physical or moral revulsion she feels? How do you know she feels any at all? Kindly explain moral revulsion (Ba).

  Why did I take this particular piece of paper? To write a shopping list or take down a message for you. I do this often, though I know you’ve given me notebooks of all sizes, some with perforated pages, some for making lists, and I know you keep a tumbler full of pens and pencils for me next to the telephone, hoping I won’t take something of yours and then lose it. You’ve put a slate and pencil in the kitchen, and a goddamn notebook even in the bathroom. I know, I know. I carry the pens and pencils away to the wrong places, and one day I find everything all together—say, in a drawer of that chest in the hall, where early in the morning with a towel wrapped around me, I’ve so often written what passes for a laundry list. Everything in one drawer—all the pens and the slate and the little books and thick scribblers, like this one, where I am setting down every plausible thing I can think of.

  As for the draft of your interview with Tofolu Groupe, I tore it up and flushed it away. Once I had written on it, it was no good to you, and I knew my comments were always stupid. You’ve told me so many times not to take your things—your sweaters, your comb, above all, the stuff on your desk.

  After I’d got rid of T. Groupe I had nothing to do, so I started cutting my hair a bit with Renata’s nail scissors. The operation was well under way before I remembered I had sworn to you I’d stop hacking at my hair once and for all and let it grow.

  Part of the problem is that you have the habit now of saying “What’s wrong?” before I’ve even had time to know if anything isn’t right. I am not complaining, just pointing it out. You also said once, “You’ve done this before often enough—you ought to know what you’re doing.” I replied, but as a joke, “My father did it differently.”

  It wasn’t true at the beginning (what you keep questioning about) but I think this winter it became true. It was such a cold winter—I feel we’re still in it. The canals and rivers froze and there were no fresh vegetables in Paris. I saw a picture of a market stall in the morning paper and under the picture was written, “The dreaded rutabaga has again made its appearance . . .” When people talk to me about the Occupation of Paris they mention the dreaded rutabaga, so I took a magnifying glass to the picture, and what do you suppose I found? Turnips! Swedes! So that is the dreaded rutabaga! For future hard winters let me advise you: don’t dread the Swede—learn how to cook it. You need pepper, butter. No butter—yes, of course. In a really hard winter there’s no butter.

  I prefer dark to daylight or any kind of light.

  I’ve never understood the movies where people meet for the first time and then there’s a cut to a shot of them in bed. The girl always looks rather swoony and grateful, though all she may have to be grateful to is some hairy little monkey wearing a St. Christopher medal and smoking a Gauloise. Nobody in movies ever runs out of cigarettes or has to look for parking space. When a girl is leaving her husband she never has to go down to the basement to look for a suitcase. There will be a brand new one right there. She will open any drawer at random and find in it, beautifully folded, every stitch she needs for running away. She packs without looking. I like to think that when she opens the suitcase she finds nothing but tablecloths. I wonder if people in real life think they’re above reproach? I suppose they do. They’ve found out they can get away with murder.

  I could hear Renata breathing—snoring, it was. I was distressed for her, knowing how she would have hated knowing there was a witness to this or to anything that made her seem vulnerable. By now fatigue, boredom and worry had made me hungry. It was the starvation point of the middle of the night, when you begin to feel cold and shivery and to long for something like onion soup. Renata’s kitchen never held much in the way of comfort. All I could find was a bottle of French vodka, two-thirds empty, and a small wedge of Port du Salut cheese. The cheese looked new; I thought I had better save it for Renata. The doctor had said I was to give her milk to drink when she woke up. There was none in the house but cheese seemed close enough. Her refrigerator contained cold rice in a Fortnum and Mason pudding bowl, two hard-boiled eggs with cracked shells, a jar of Elizabeth Arden cleansing cream, a diaphragm in a box of gardenia talcum powder, twelve pairs of stockings, and a carton of Benson and Hedges. No pot, no pills in Paris: as Renata says, we are a generation behind in the City of Light, and we live the way our mothers did, on drink and diaphragms. I shut the refrigerator door and went back to the books. One was a paperback about torture in Algeria, the second a book of poems, and finally a novel by some friend of Renata’s. I leafed through the least harassing of the three, wishing she would wake up or else that Karel Brock would arrive to replace me as a Renata-sitter. I was afraid to leave her, for I thought that if she came to and found herself deserted she might start all over again with her suicide, this time more competently. I imagined her stumbling barefoot out here to her kitchen and seeing on her felt bulletin boards the overlapping views of brutality and pain she cuts out of newspapers and tacks up there to gaze on during breakfast. She seems to like that everyday street scene of police tearing into a crowd. The picture is usually taken from high up, from the top of a building perhaps, and the crowd streaks off to three corners of the photograph.

  The worst punishment I can imagine must be solitary confinement with nothing for entertainment except news of the world. I’d rather race spiders, though they scare me, or write limericks on my fingernails. My only nightmare (if you hate dreams just skip this) has to do with normal people turning into animals. I am with one, two, three, men. All at once I notice a change in their expressions; their eyes are like dogs’, then wolves’. I think that if I go on speaking I can force them to be normal again, but my words are incoherent to them and they take my voice to be a threat. They can’t understand what I am saying. They can’t listen or reason. They are unpredictable and cruel. They can’t help it. They can only hide or attack. In the dream I am not attacked. Are you surprised? I am the rescuer. I am a rescue party. Yes, I save someone, anyone, even you sometimes. It is summer in a city along a river. I walk in the streets with the victim, saved now, but no good to anyone. He is saved, but useless, a zombie. This dream is not worth a cent, and my father would not have heard about it for under a thousand dollars.

  The novel by Renata’s friend was about a plane accident. This plane has to land on a mountain peak in a snowstorm, and the crew and passengers, guided by a large black poodle, make their way to a mysterious Austrian ski lodge. This is adversity, and because of adversity the real character of every passenger is shown for what it is. The ski lodge is owned by an actor who says he has been expecting them. The actor is a neo-Nazi. The pilot of the plane is Mephistopheles, and the air hostess is Margareta. A passenger named Dr. Clark is Faust. The poodle assumes a sinister attitude on page 102 and tells the neo-Nazi that his wife is secretly the daughter of a famous rabbi and magician. A misprint in the book made it “rabbit” but the next page had it right.

  Around three o’clock in the morning I heard a rat at the door. I sprang up to let the rat in. It was Renata’s faithful and beloved companion, Karel Brock. He stood panting (six flights, no elevator after midnight) with his hand over his heart.

  “Don’t make so much noise,” I think I said. “She’s sleeping it off.”

  Karel came in and unwound yards of scarf. He looked (but only about the neck) as if he had been to school in Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales or New Zealand. Karel tries to show through his clothes that he’s an artist, but sure of his footing, not a bum. He had on a putty-colored cap, a short belted coat, black pants and a black sweater, and soft leather boots. He has shaved his new little beard. Karel has short hair, not long. He looked fierce on account of the boots and because his haircut seemed so military. He appeared bold enough to knock me down and walk over my dead body into the other room, where Renata lay sleeping.
But he just—no, this doesn’t interest you. He barely glanced into the studio part of the flat. Renata’s bed looked like Juliet’s tomb. The studio has a glass roof by way of a ceiling. Even on a starless night there is always a certain amount of light. The sky is never black. You discover that if you ever sleep outside or under glass. Sometimes at Renata’s, through the glass and dead leaves and dirt, you can see pigeons—the shape of their feet.

  “Who’s been here?” said Karel.

  “A doctor from next door. I got his number from the police. He wasn’t too happy about it. He said just to let her sleep and give her some milk when she woke up. He didn’t want to be mixed up with her or with me.”

  I had also called the Poison Bureau. You call the ordinary police and they say, “Oh, you want the Poison People.” But the Poison People never turned up. They just said to keep in touch. They didn’t think it was all that serious from my description. I said she had taken a kind of super-aspirin. She had ground them down to powder because that was the way Marilyn did it last summer. Renata always thought she looked a bit like her, though she pretended she didn’t. She’d say, “Oh, so-and-so said I looked like Marilyn, what a ridiculous thing to say.” Actually, although Renata was about ten years younger, she seemed older than Marilyn. Something about her mouth or her eyes. She had ground the pills down with the back of a spoon and had put a few more in the coffee grinder. I found powder all over the place. I tasted it. It was like salt mixed with baking soda. I know the flavor because my mother didn’t believe in toothpaste. She thought toothpaste contained what she called chemicals. My mother didn’t know what “chemical” meant, but I had to do my teeth with salt and soda until I got married and left home.