The Cost of Living

by Mavis Gallant

  “That feeling won’t last,” said the girl. “He couldn’t help leaving, could he? Think of how it would be if he had stayed beside you and been somewhere else—as good as miles and miles away.” But I knew it was not Patrick but Collie who had gone. It was Collie who vanished before everything was said, turning his back, stopping his ears. I was thirteen and they were the love of my life. Sylvie said, “I wish I could be you and you could be me, for just this one crisis. I have too much blood and it never stops moving—never.” She squeezed my sister’s hand so hard that when she took her fingers away the mark of them remained in white bands. “Do you know what you must do now?” she said. “You must make yourself wait. Try to expect something. That will get the blood going again.”

  When I awoke the next day, I knew we were all three waiting. We waited for a letter, a telegram, a knock on the door. When Collie died, Louise went on writing letters. The letters began, “I can’t believe that you are dead,” which was chatty of her, not dramatic, and they went on giving innocent news. Mother and I found them and read them and tore them to shreds. We were afraid she would put them in the post and that they would be returned to her. Soon after Patrick had gone, Louise said to Sylvie, “I’ve forgotten what he was like.”

  “Like an actor,” said Sylvie, with a funny little face. But I knew it was Collie Louise had meant.

  Our relations became queer and strained. The final person, the judge, toward whom we were always turning for confirmation, was no longer there. Sylvie asked Louise outright for money now. If Patrick had been there to hear her, she might not have dared. Everything Louise replied touched off a storm. Louise seemed to be using a language every word of which offended Sylvie’s ears. Sylvie had courted her, but now it was Louise who haunted Sylvie, sat in her cupboard room, badgered her with bursts of questions and pleas for secrecy. She asked Sylvie never to talk about her, never to disclose—she did not say what. When I saw them quarreling together, aimless and bickering, whispering and bored, I thought that a cloistered convent must be like that: a house without men.

  “Did you have to stop combing your hair just because he left?” I heard Sylvie say. “You’re untidy as Puss.”

  If you listen at doors, you hear what you deserve. She must have seemed thunderstruck, because Sylvie said, “Oh my God, don’t look so helpless.”

  “I’m not helpless,” said Louise.

  “Why didn’t you leave us alone?” Sylvie said. “Why didn’t you just leave us with our weakness and our mistakes? You do so much, and you’re so kind and good, and you get in the way, and no one dares hurt you.”

  That might have been the end of them, but the same afternoon Louise gave Sylvie a bottle of Miss Dior and the lace petticoat and a piece of real amber, and they went on being friends.

  Soon after that scene, however, in March, Louise discovered two things. One was that Sylvie had an aunt and uncle living in Paris, so she was not as forsaken as she appeared to be. Sylvie told her this. The other had to do with Sylvie’s social life, métier, and means. Monsieur Rablis made one of his periodic announcements to the effect that Sylvie would have to leave the hotel—clothes, mirror, horoscopes, money box, and all. Monsieur Rablis was, and is, a small truculent person. He keeps an underexercised dog chained to his desk. While the dog snarled and cringed, Louise said that she knew Sylvie had an aunt and uncle, and that she would make Sylvie go to them and ask them to pay their niece’s back rent. Louise had an unshakable belief in the closeness of French families, having read about the welding influence of patriotism, the Church, and inherited property. She said that Sylvie would find some sort of employment. It was time to bring order into Sylvie’s affairs, my sister said.

  She was a type of client the hotel-keeper had often seen: the foreign, interfering, middle-aged female. He understood half she said, but was daunted by the voice, and the frozen eye, and the bird’s-nest hair. The truth was that for long periods he forgot to claim Sylvie’s rent. But he was not obsessed with her, and, in the long run, not French for nothing; he would as soon have had the money she owed. “She can stay,” he said, perhaps afraid Louise might mention that he had been Sylvie’s lover (although I doubt if she knew). “But I don’t want her bringing her friends in at night. She never registers them, and whenever the police come around at night and find someone with Sylvie I have to pay a fine.”

  “Do you mean men?” said my wretched sister. “Do you mean the police come about men?”

  Some of my sister’s hardheaded common sense returned. She talked of making Sylvie a small regular allowance, which Sylvie was to supplement by finding a job. “Look at Puss,” Louise said to her. “Look at how Puss works and supports herself.” But Sylvie had already looked at me. Louise’s last recorded present to Sylvie was a camera. Sylvie had told her some cocksure story about an advertising firm on the rue Balzac, where someone had said she had gifts as a photographer. Later she changed her mind and said she was gifted as a model, but by that time Louise had bought the camera. She moved the listing in her books from “Necessary” to “Unnecessary.” Mice, insects, and some birds have secret lives. She harped on the aunt and uncle, until one day I thought, She will drive Sylvie insane.

  “Couldn’t you ask them to make you a proper allowance?” Louise asked her.

  “Not unless I worked for them, either cleaning for my aunt or in my uncle’s shop. Needles and thread and mending wool. Just the thought of touching those old maid’s things—no, I couldn’t. And then, what about my lessons?”

  “You used to sew for me,” said Louise. “You darned beautifully. I can understand their point of view. You could make some arrangement to work half days. Then you would still have time for your lessons. You can’t expect charity.”

  “I don’t mind charity,” said Sylvie. “You should know.”

  I remember that we were in the central market, in Les Halles, dodging among the barrows, pulling each other by the sleeve whenever a cart laden with vegetables came trundling toward us. This outing was a waste of time where I was concerned; but Sylvie hated being alone with Louise now. Louise had become so nagging, so dull. Louise took pictures of Sylvie with the new camera. Sylvie wanted a portfolio; she would take the photographs to the agency on the rue Balzac, and then they would see how pretty she was and would give her a job. Louise had agreed, but she must have known it was foolish. Sylvie’s bloom, divorced from her voice and her liveliness, simply disappeared. In any photograph I had ever seen of her she appeared unkempt and coarse and rather fat.

  Her last words had been so bitter that I put my hand on the girl’s shoulder, and at that her tension broke and she clutched Louise and cried, “I should be helped. Why shouldn’t I be helped? I should be!”

  When she saw how shocked Louise was, and how she looked to see if anyone had heard, Sylvie immediately laughed. “What will all those workmen say?” she said. It struck me how poor an actress she was; for the cry of “I should be helped” had been real, but nothing else had. All at once I had a strong instinct of revulsion. I felt that the new expenses in Louise’s life were waste and pollution, and what had been set in motion by her giving was not goodness, innocence, courage, or generosity but something dark. I would have run away then, literally fled, but Sylvie had taken my sleeve and she began dragging me toward a fruit stall. “What if Louise took my picture here?” she said. “I saw something like that once. I make up my eyes in a new way, have you noticed? It draws attention away from my mouth. If I want to get on as a model, I ought to have my teeth capped.”

  I remember thinking, as Louise adjusted the camera, Teeth capped. I wonder if Louise will pay for that.

  I think it was that night I dreamed about them. I had been dream-haunted for days. I watched Louise searching for Patrick in railway stations and I saw him departing on ships while she ran along the edge of the shore. I heard his voice. He said, “Haven’t you seen her wings? She never uses them now.” Then I saw wings, small, neatly folded back. That scene faded, and the dream continued,
a dream of labyrinths, of search, of missed chances, of people standing on opposite shores. Awaking, I remembered a verse from a folkloric poem I had tried, when I was Patrick’s age, to set to music:

  Es waren zwei Königskinder

  Die hatten einander so lief

  Sie konnten zusammen nicht kommen

  Das Wasser, es war zu tief.

  I had not thought of this for years. I would rather not think about all the verses and all the songs. Who was the poem about? There were two royal children, standing on opposite shores. I was no royal child, and neither was Louise. We were too old and blunt and plain. We had no public and private manners; we were all one. We had secrets—nothing but that. Patrick was one child. Sylvie must be the other. I was still not quite awake, and the power of the dream was so strong that I said to myself, “Sylvie has wings. She could fly.”

  Sylvie. When she had anything particularly foolish to say, she put her head on one side. She sucked her fingers and grinned and narrowed her eyes. The grime behind her ears faded to gray on her neck and vanished inside her collar, the rim of which was black. She said, “I wonder if it’s true, you know, the thing I’m not to mention. Do you think he loved her? What do you think? It’s like some beautiful story, isn’t it?...[hand on cheek, treacle voice]. It’s pure Claudel. Broken lives. I think.”

  Cold and dry, I said, “Don’t be stupid, Sylvie, and don’t play detective.” Louise and Collie, Patrick and Louise: I was as bad as Sylvie. My imagination crawled, rampant, unguided, flowering between stones. Supposing Louise had never loved Collie at all? Supposing Patrick had felt nothing but concern and some pity? Sylvie knew. She knew everything by instinct. She munched sweets, listened to records, grimaced in her mirror, and knew everything about us all.

  Patrick had been pushed to the very bottom of my thoughts. But I knew that Sylvie was talking. I could imagine her excited voice saying, “Patrick was an actor, although he hardly ever had a part, and she was good and clever, nothing of a man-eater…” I could imagine her saying it to the young men, the casual drifters, who stood on the pavement and gossiped and fingered coins, wondering if they dared go inside a café and sit down—wondering if they had enough money for a cup of coffee or a glass of beer. Sylvie knew everybody in Paris. She knew no one of any consequence, but she knew everyone, and her indiscretions spread like the track of a snail.

  Patrick was behind a wall. I knew that something was living and stirring behind the wall, but it was impossible for me to dislodge the bricks. Louise never mentioned him. Once she spoke of her lost young husband, but Collie would never reveal his face again. He had been more thoroughly forgotten than anyone deserves to be. Patrick and Collie merged into one occasion, where someone had failed. The failure was Louise’s; the infidelity of memory, the easy defeat were hers. It had nothing to do with me.

  The tenants of the house in Melbourne wrote about rotten beams, and asked Louise to find a new gardener. She instantly wrote letters and a gardener was found. It was April, and the ripped fabric of her life mended. One could no longer see the way she had come. There had been one letter from Patrick, addressed to all three.

  A letter to Patrick that Sylvie never finished was among the papers I found in Sylvie’s room after she had left the hotel. “I have been painting pictures in a friend’s studio,” it said. “Perhaps art is what I shall take up after all. My paintings are very violent but also very tender. Some of them are large but others are small. Now I am playing Mozart on your old record-player. Now I am eating chocolate. Alas.”

  Patrick wrote to Sylvie. I found his letter on Monsieur Rablis’ desk one day. I put my hand across the desk to reach for my key, which hung on a board on the wall behind the desk, and I saw the letter in a basket of mail. I saw the postmark and I recognized his hand. I put the letter in my purse and carried it upstairs. I sat down at the table in my room before opening it. I slit the envelope carefully and spread the letter flat. I began to read it. The first words were “Mon amour.”

  The new tenant of his room was a Brazilian student who played the guitar. The sun falling on the carpet brought the promise of summer and memories of home. Paris was like a dragonfly. The Seine, the houses, the trees, the wind, and the sky were like a dragonfly’s wing. Patrick belonged to another season—to winter, and museums, and water running off the shoes, and steamy cafés. I held the letter under my palms. What if I went to find him now? I stepped into a toy plane that went any direction I chose. I arrived where he was, and walked toward him. I saw, on a winter’s day (the only season in which we could meet), Patrick in sweaters. I saw his astonishment, and, in a likeness as vivid as a dream, I saw his dismay.

  I sat until the room grew dark. Sylvie banged on the door and came in like a young tiger. She said gaily, “Where’s Louise? I think I’ve got a job. It’s a funny job—I want to tell her. Why are you sitting in the dark?” She switched on a light. The spring evening came in through the open window. The room trembled with the passage of cars down the street. She looked at the letter and the envelope with her name upon it but made no effort to touch them.

  She said, “Everything is so easy for people like Louise and you. You go on the assumption that no one will ever dare hurt you, and so nobody ever dares. Nobody dares because you don’t expect it. It isn’t fair.”

  I realized I had opened a letter. I had done it simply and naturally, as a fact of the day. I wondered if one could steal or kill with the same indifference—if one might actually do harm.

  “Tell Louise not to do anything more for me,” she said. “Not even if I ask.”

  That night she vanished. She took a few belongings and left the rest of her things behind. She owed much rent. The hotel was full of strangers, for with the spring the tourists came. Monsieur Rablis had no difficulty in letting her room. Louise pushed her bicycle out to the street, and studied the history of music, and visited the people to whom she had introductions, and ate biscuits in her room. She stopped giving things away. Everything in her accounts was under “Necessary,” and only necessary things were bought. One day, looking at the Seine from the Tuileries terrace, she said there was no place like home, was there? A week later, I put her on the boat train. After that, I had winter ghosts: Louise making tea, Sylvie singing, Patrick reading aloud.

  Then, one summer morning, Sylvie passed me on the stairs. She climbed a few steps above me and stopped and turned. “Why, Puss!” she cried. “Are you still here?” She hung on the banister and smiled and said, “I’ve come back for my clothes. I’ve got the money to pay for them now. I’ve had a job.” She was sunburned, and thinner than she had seemed in her clumsy winter garments. She wore a cotton dress, and sandals, and the necklace of seals. Her feet were filthy. While we were talking she casually picked up her skirt and scratched an insect bite inside her thigh. “I’ve been in a Christian cooperative community,” she said. Her eyes shone. “It was wonderful! We are all young and we all believe in God. Have you read Maritain?” She fixed her black eyes on my face and I knew that my prestige hung on the reply.

  “Not one word,” I said.

  “You could start with him,” said Sylvie earnestly. “He is very materialistic, but so are you. I could guide you, but I haven’t time. You must first dissolve your personality—are you listening to me?—and build it up again, only better. You must get rid of everything material. You must.”

  “Aren’t you interested in the stage anymore?” I said.

  “That was just theatre,” said Sylvie, and I was too puzzled to say anything more. I was not sure whether she meant that her interest had been a pose or that it was a worldly ambition with no place in her new life.

  “Oh,” said Sylvie, as if suddenly remembering. “Did you ever hear from him?”

  Everything was still, as still as snow, as still as a tracked mouse.

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “I’m so glad,” said Sylvie, with some of her old overplaying. She made motions as though perishing with relief, hand on her heart. �
��I was so silly, you know. I minded about the letter. Now I’m beyond all that. A person in love will do anything.”

  “I was never in love,” I said.

  She looked at me, searching for something, but gave me up. “I’ve left the community now,” she said. “I’ve met a boy...oh, I wish you knew him! A saint. A modern saint. He belongs to a different group and I’m going off with them. They want to reclaim the lost villages in the South of France. You know? The villages that have been abandoned because there’s no water or no electricity. Isn’t that a good idea? We are all people for whom the theatre…[gesture]…and art…[gesture]…and music and all that have failed. We’re trying something else. I don’t know what the others will say when they see him arriving with me, because they don’t want unattached women. They don’t mind wives, but unattached women cause trouble, they say. He was against all women until he met me.” Sylvie was beaming. “There won’t be any trouble with me. All I want to do is work. I don’t want anything…” She frowned. What was the word? “…anything material.”

  “In that case,” I said, “you won’t need the necklace.”

  She placed her hand flat against it, but there was nothing she could do. All the while she was lifting it off over her head and handing it down to me I saw she was regretting it, and for two pins would have taken back all she had said about God and materialism. I ought to have let her keep it, I suppose. But I thought of Louise, and everything spent with so little return. She had merged “Necessary” and “Unnecessary” into a single column, and when I added what she had paid out it came to a great deal. She must be living thinly now.

  “I don’t need it,” said Sylvie, backing away. “I’d have been as well off without it. Everything I’ve done I’ve had to do. It never brought me bonheur.”

  I am sorry to use a French word here, but “bonheur” is ambiguous. It means what you think it does, but sometimes it just stands for luck; the meaning depends on the sense of things. If the necklace had done nothing for Sylvie, what would it do for me? I went on down the stairs with the necklace in my pocket, and I thought, Selfish child. After everything that was given her, she might have been more grateful. She might have bitten back the last word.