A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  “I don’t always get the meaning in French. Not awfully well. I’m sorry. I’m certain you know much more than I do. Were you the one who went all over the place with a notebook asking for the Museum of Roman Antiquities? Because there isn’t one, you see. So there was no reason, just because some person couldn’t direct you to a place that doesn’t exist, for writing, ‘Once again centuries of European culture and tradition were trampled underfoot!’ ”

  “I was not there,” he said. “I worked from information supplied.”

  “By the guy with the notebook?”

  “By a girl named Geneviève Deschranes.”

  Instant jealousy was what the name provoked: the name, and the way he said it. I said, “So you screamed at a distance?” I was suddenly conscious of my voice, my way of speaking. I felt ludicrous, ungraceful—barbarous. “I’d better get dressed,” I said. “I haven’t even offered you a drink. Do you want one? Everything is in the kitchen.”

  When we went out three quarters of an hour later I left a light burning. I had hastily made my bedroom and the bathroom neat; I knew we would be coming back. He hadn’t said a word and I hadn’t either, but I knew. We went by the Hotel Montalembert—where we are now—and I said, “I always salute the Montalembert and the Pont-Royal, because it was in one or the other that Fabrice took a room for Linda.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Don’t you know The Pursuit of Love? It was part of my folklore too. When I was eleven or twelve, and still riddled with idiot thoughts about Parisian behavior, I had no time for love stories that didn’t end with betrayal or dying. I swore I would never settle for anything less.”

  “I do not know them,” he said severely. He must have thought I was describing close friends. He seemed suspicious, just as I had been of the horrible Geneviève and her notebook.

  I began reciting the meeting in the railway station, how Linda, sitting on her luggage in her mink coat, said, “Je suis la fille d’un lord anglais,” but Philippe merely looked darker, and sorry he had ever met me. Whenever I thought I was exercising a talent for irony he thought I was being intolerably arch. We went on being at cross-purposes for a long time, in that sense. What we were not in any contradiction about was our desire to get the ritual public dinner over with and get to bed. Rain came down on us like stones, like that cloudburst a little earlier this morning. Two girls dashed out of the Montalembert to a taxi. I thought, as always, that I looked a mess. I felt humble at the sight of their pale dresses, their light fragile shoes; they were like girls I had seen in Italy once. They were charmed: rain fell all around them without deflating their hair or splashing their clothes.

  “It’s something wished for them at their christening,” I said, and Philippe did not reply, having sensed by now that I was nervous. His knowledge of it made me panic but instead of keeping quiet I went on: “Later, Fabrice threw Linda’s mink coat in a wastebasket and brought her sables. That’s a French lover for you. But maybe you have to have the mink ready to be thrown away first. I mean, would you give sables to a girl who just had an old raincoat to get rid of?”

  He opened the door of a restaurant in one of the streets running down to the Seine, murmuring something about being certain Americans never went here. Neither then nor later could I persuade him that I was anything else. I was—by voice, dress, manner and speech—immutable. We hung up our wet coats and squeezed past the bar. The owner of the restaurant, whose name was Aristide, and who knew me well, greeted Philippe by his name and pretended he had not seen me. I was thankful, for I wanted Philippe to think he had shown me a place foreigners had never heard of, though it was now in most of the guidebooks. I did not tell him that Aristide and Suzanne had been my friends once, and how hardworking they had seemed—how worthy of my help and affection. At first they had been so poor that they bought food for one meal at a time, calculating, as a computer would have done for them, what people were likely to order, or even if anyone was likely to turn up. Sometimes they were still washing dishes at three in the morning, and I sat with them, drinking their Armagnac and cautioning them against tuberculosis and nervous breakdowns. I brought customers to them, and their success, finally, was a little bit mine. (This is the place: Suzanne is the blonde behind the bar.) I saw that Philippe glanced back at the zinc counter which was half covered with cakes and fruit tarts and a great bowl of strawberries and a crock of pears in syrup. He was looking at the food, not at Suzanne. As for Suzanne, she was measuring with her eye the amount of cream spooned over a plate of strawberries by a new, small, sleek waiter. She looked up and saw me looking, but took no notice of me. One day I must have done something displeasing to them. They stopped making me welcome. Around the same time, the prices rose and the cream thinned. First I mourned them, then I forgot all about them. When I stopped coming here they simply stopped being real people. I could no more say when the friendship ended than fix the exact moment of falling asleep. When I saw them again I was merely astonished that anyone I forgot could still go on existing.

  “The owner is very commercial,” said Philippe, meaning this as a compliment. He was praising Aristide’s social gifts, his manner of making customers feel important and secure.

  We were wedged at the end of a long table, face to face, next to a cold radiator. Being new to each other, we looked around for some source of conversation. We examined a painting composed of lacquer and burned matches without speaking. Neither knew how the other felt, and each was afraid of being taken for a Philistine. A small notice above our table explained that the picture was part of the restaurant’s private collection, and that a prize for the best painting of the season would soon be established and a jury selected and made known. I wanted to tell Philippe that this had been my idea too, that I had said it to them as a joke, but Philippe at once began to talk about something more interesting. He said, “Your gesture with the sandwich was so touching . . . your trying to hide it. Did you think I wasn’t going to give you anything to eat?”

  “I was just suddenly hungry,” I lied. “I sometimes skip meals, and then . . .”

  We were wasting time. He said, “I do too. I was brought up to think far too much about food. I know there are people who do not let a day go by without counting out meat and eggs and butter and bread, and I suppose they are normal—probably. A long drive in the country that has no point to it but a long, slow meal is my idea of hell. But that isn’t at all what I want to say to you. What is a young, pretty widow doing in a foreign country? Why, at the party where I met her, was she wearing dark glasses? Does she hide behind them? Her hair is true chestnut, and it would be striking if it were longer. Why does she cut it as if she were leaving for military service? All these rude questions have a reason, and you are certainly as conscious of it as I am. Otherwise you would not have bothered to see me again. I have another question—I hope not the last. Between the time I met you and today, I have been asking other questions about you. Your friends tell me that you give everything away. Why do you give everything away? It sounds like a kind of imbalance. Has anyone ever tried to stop you?”

  I was off-balance and I began trying for a sentence in French: “About the glasses, I just don’t see all that well . . . They aren’t just sunglasses, and I lost the others, the real ones.”

  “Who is responsible for you?” he said, holding the menu. “Is anyone?”

  Now at that point I still didn’t know what his name was. I had been told, but I’d forgotten. He stared at me as if he had to have an answer before he could deal with the waiter.

  The answer that came to mind was, “At my age?” but “No one who can stop me giving everything away,” was what I said. This had a double sense in English. It meant, also, giving away the end of a story, revealing the point too soon.

  This conversation and the knowledge of what it was really about had cut my appetite, but not Philippe’s: he ate a large slice of pâté with bread and butter, sole in cream, and strawberries, as if he had all the rest of his life to consid
er me. He spooned two strawberries on to my plate and insisted I taste them; I wondered if he had been raised to think that women need to be coaxed. It seemed to me an extraordinary physical gesture, as if we were already lovers. I didn’t sense then that we could not be friends. I don’t know why, but we never became friends. I smoked while he ate tranquilly, and then we talked about each other. As we spoke I was sweeping away forever a Yugoslav who was translating the correspondence of Gide into Croat, and a lesser figure, an American Fulbright scholar who couldn’t choose between me and some lawyer down in Aix-en-Provence. His choice was made for him that evening without his knowing it, and his voice, saying “But honestly, I owe this guy such a lot,” faded and was lost until now, as I re-create it for the sake of telling you this. My hand trembled slightly as I lifted it to my hair. (That was unusual, and that is why I remember it. My hand shook when Madame Roux handed me a letter from your sister not long ago, too.) My hair had been wet by the rain, and, yes, it must have been ugly. I wished I were of surpassing beauty, but not for myself—for Philippe.

  •

  To Marie-Thérèse Shirley said, “My husband brought me to this restaurant the first time we ever went anywhere together. He asked me if I would let my hair grow long, and I said I would. But I was impatient and would forget what I had promised.”

  Shifting the parcels on the chair beside her, Marie-Thérèse only said absently, “Claudie dries her hair with her head in the oven. The cost of the gas . . .” Looking up, she fixed her light eyes on Shirley in her curious unseeing way and said, “Do you know when I last ate in a restaurant? When Gérald’s family was here for the baby’s christening. They are Alsatians—great eaters.” Shirley felt a brief astonished fright. Marie-Thérèse was probably so unused to speaking, so unrehearsed with her private stories, that she had to start from the beginning every time. “Yes, they make a cult of eating,” she said. “We went to a restaurant where they could have the sort of food they are used to. I couldn’t take anything more than tea for days afterward. It was the waste that sickened me. Nothing can cure me of the idea that food left over is wasted and that food eaten is also wasted in a way. Yes, the waste. All that money going into people. But being in a restaurant, here, with you, that is amusing. I am not conscious of waste. I am sure you eat in charming places every day. Your life must be charming. I envy you your charming life. Tell me, how does one go about finding a restaurant on a charming street?”

  A current of air that had been chilled by rain rushed in every time the door was opened. The two shivered suddenly in their light dresses. Every other woman seemed appropriately dressed. The summer street was metamorphosed into autumn; should rain fall again, there would be a roof of umbrellas. Everyone else had been warned. Marie-Thérèse had become distant now, as if remembering how Shirley earlier had called her poor. They were not speaking in their true voices; their true voices must be lingering still on the street. The street and the day had been struck with their impression. They were not only here in the restaurant, but also on the corners of streets they had crossed. Like Shirley’s parents, cycling with bluebells, they were immortal in the afternoon. She could have said to Marie-Thérèse, “I love you,” but that would have frightened them both. “I shall get Claudie home to you,” she said. “That’s a promise.” Marie-Thérèse accepted the promise, but nothing more; the summer day when she had eaten well, drunk good wine, and said what she wanted to someone who listened, was already as unreal as the nightmare in which she saw herself sleeping with such ugly ears.

  13

  ON A WALL in the courtyard a child had scrawled with chalk NAST DATTE FI HYBT, which meant, in code, that Philippe had come back to her. It was the final communication leading up to his return. Marie-Thérèse had been a messenger. Not for nothing had Shirley been led to choose that particular restaurant. She reviewed each prophetic phase of this day’s weather: the morning as dry as grass, the wind, the rain, the cold, and now a shadow over the streets like the darkness of lilacs. She knew he would be there as she slid her key in the door. He was; he sat in the living room letting the telephone ring as if it would be spying for him to answer it now. Beside him, on the sofa, was a blue dufflebag, stuffed and laced tight. She frowned and said fiercely, “So you’ve come back!” He could not know that this was only the hellfire preacher in Cold Comfort Farm addressing his cringing flock. Once again, fatally this time, she had reflected their life in a joke he could never share, framed with a private folklore he knew nothing about.

  Dearest Mother,

  I saw Philippe a few minutes ago. He came to pick up one or two things and to talk about our divorce. It went quite well. He is always polite. We will divorce on grounds of “reciprocal wrongs.” He was very generous about taking the blame for things I had never complained of or even thought about. If we had children this question of “reciprocal wrongs” would be useful, because you get to share their custody, being equally bad parents. As it is, for us it just means it will be faster and cheaper. You can’t divorce in August, there’s no one around to divorce you, they are all taking their holidays then, but a man Philippe knows can pull some strings and have our divorce by October. We have to appear before someone and say we do not want a reconciliation, whether or not this is true. Apparently this person watches you closely and if there is the slightest hesitation he sends you home to think it over. Philippe hopes that for once I will remember where I am and what I am doing and not let my mind wander and that I won’t say too much. I am to answer questions quietly and briefly with a calm, determined expression. Nor am I to show too much hostility. The judge is watching for hostility too. He wants determination and sadness.

  Philippe has met a girl he likes. He thought it was right to tell me. I expected her to be a girl he already knew, but he seemed surprised I would think it. When we were together he never looked at anyone but me.

  Please do not start believing and saying Philippe left me for some other person. It is not the case. The two things are separate. The new girl is new, new, new. He is not going to do anything headstrong and intends to wait at least a year.

  I hope you can read my writing this time. Philippe has taken both typewriters. I have been leading up to this in my letters—at least I tried to.

  He and I can’t see each other again because of collusion.

  I meant to ask him why he had married me, so that I could tell other people. But perhaps no one will ask me that any more now. I wanted to tell him that I was not sure why he had left me. I haven’t behaved in any way that was not predictable from our first conversation. Well, I said nothing. I’m about as I always was, so please don’t worry.

  Shirley ended her letter there. She could have added, “He has done me one favor. He had me watched—yes, watched. So I wasn’t paranoid when I kept seeing strange men on the stairs. He has what he calls ‘evidence,’ but as I am agreeing to everything and not making trouble nor asking for money, he is willing to go along on the grounds of reciprocal wrongs. What made him think I would ask him for money?” All that had been prophetic out of the day, finally, was something she had said to Marie-Thérèse about a man cutting his losses. Philippe had cut his as impulsively as he had gambled. She understood now why there could never be a trace of her exchange of stories with Marie-Thérèse. She saw her short life with Philippe pulled out of the ground and left dying. The threadlike roots tried to draw strength from thin air. She thought of the permanent shadows left on walls in Japan after the explosion. She and Philippe were without shadow. They were soundless; they had dissolved.

  •

  Her last conversation with James in Paris was all but drowned out by the radio which James kept on at top level, perhaps hoping it would prevent his having to listen to Shirley. He had turned in his rented television set, sold his Braun stereo speakers to Madame Roux at a price she considered a bargain and that James knew to be a profit for himself, and had kept nothing but a transistor he was taking back to Greece. For the fourth or the fifth time he explained, “You
put the apartment in Philippe’s name when you married him.”

  “It wasn’t in anyone’s name. There was never a lease.”

  “Philippe had a lease. Madame Roux gave him a lease.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “He probably did and you forgot.”

  “How could Madame Roux give him a lease? She was only the go-between.”

  “Shirley, she was the landlady.”

  “Then why didn’t she just come out and say so?” James sighed, and she said, “I know—it’s like educating a horse. I feel like one of those white horses trying to waltz.”

  James said, “Madame Roux owns your apartment. I owned this one. I sold it to her. I tried to interest Philippe in buying yours, but it was too late. I was trying to protect you. Now she owns most of the building.”

  “How about the Australian? What does he own?’

  “Which Australian?”

  “Sutton McGrath. Remember, Madame Roux had everyone sign a petition about his guitar? He lives up on the sixth floor in one of the maids’ rooms. Who owns it?”

  “I have never met an Australian,” said James, “but my guess would be that Madame Roux owns quite a lot of the sixth floor. She tried to sell me your apartment. I would have been your landlord.” At this suggestion of intimacy between them he looked briefly toward the bedroom, but had already changed his mind even before she said, “No, please, let’s straighten this out.” He was on his way to Greece not for a holiday, but to live, to pick up a life abandoned for a five-year holiday. She was part of the holiday; so was Rose.