Carol, breathless with embarrassment, looked at the brick wall of the court. She twisted her fingers together until they hurt. How can they act like this in front of me, she thought, and in such a dirty room? The thought that they might be in love entered her head for the first time, and it made her ill. Felix, smiling, gave her a bowl of coffee, and she took it without meeting his eyes. He sat down on the bed beside Odile and said happily, “I’m glad you came. You both look beautiful.”
Carol glanced at Odile, thinking, Not beautiful, not by any stretch of good manners. “French girls are all attractive,” she said politely.
“Most of them are frights,” said Felix. No one disputed it, and no one but Carol appeared distressed by the abrupt termination of the conversation. She cast about for something to say, but Odile put her bowl on the floor, said again that she was tired, lay back, and seemed all at once to fall asleep.
Felix looked at her. “She really can shut out the world whenever she wants to,” he said, suggesting to Carol’s startled ears that he was quite accustomed to seeing her fall asleep. Of course, she might have guessed, but why should Felix make it so obvious? She felt ashamed of the way she had worried about Felix, and the way she had run after Odile, wanting to know her family. This was all it had come to, this dirty room. Howard was right, she thought. It doesn’t pay.
At the same time, she was perplexed at the intimacy in which she and Felix now found themselves. She would have been more at ease alone in a room with him than with Odile beside him asleep on his bed.
“I must go,” she said nervously.
“Oh, yes,” said Felix, not stopping her.
“But I can’t find my way back alone.” She felt as if she might cry.
“There are taxis,” he said vaguely. “But I can take you to the Métro, if you like.” He buttoned his shirt and looked around for a jacket, making no move to waken Odile.
“Should we leave her here?” said Carol. “Shouldn’t I say good-bye?”
He looked surprised. “I wouldn’t think of disturbing her,” he said. “If she’s asleep, then she must be tired.” And to this Carol could think of nothing to say.
He followed her down the staircase and into the street, dark now, with stripes of neon to mark the cafés. They said little, and because she was afraid of the dark and the Arabs, Carol walked close beside him. On the Boulevard de Grenelle, Felix stopped at the entrance to the Métro.
“Here,” he said. “Up those steps. It takes you right over to Passy.”
She looked at him, feeling this parting was not enough. She had criticized him to Howard and taught herself to ignore him, but here, in a neighborhood where she could not so much as find her way, she felt more than ever imprisoned in the walls of her shyness, unable to say, “Thank you,” or “Thanks for the coffee,” or anything perfunctory and reasonable. She had an inexplicable and uneasy feeling that something had ended for her, and that she would never see Felix, or even Odile, again.
Felix caught her look, or seemed to. He looked around, distressed, at the Bar des Sportifs, and the sportifs inside it, and said, “If you would lend me a little money, I could buy you a drink before you go.”
His unabashed cadging restored her at once. “I haven’t time for a drink,” she said, all briskness now, as if he had with a little click dropped into the right slot. “But if you’ll promise to take Odile to dinner, I’ll lend you two thousand francs.”
“Fine,” said Felix. He watched her take the money from her purse, accepted it without embarrassment, and put it in the pocket of his jacket.
“Take her for a nice dinner somewhere,” Carol repeated.
“Of course.”
“Oh!” He exasperated her. “Why don’t you act like other people?” she cried. “You can’t live like this all the time. You could go to America. Mr. Mitchell would help you. I know he would. He’d vouch for you, for a visa, if I asked him to.”
“And Odile? Would Mr. Mitchell vouch for Odile too?”
She glanced at him, startled. When Felix was twenty-five, Odile would be nearly forty. Surely he had thought of this? “She could go, too,” she said, and added, “I suppose.”
“And what would we do in America?” He rocked back and forth on his heels, smiling.
“You could work,” she said sharply. She could not help adding, like a scold, “For once in your life.”
“As cook and butler,” said Felix thoughtfully, and began to laugh. “No, don’t be angry,” he said, putting out his hand. “One has to wait so long for American papers. I know, I used to do it. To sit there all day and wait, or stand in the queue—how could Odile do it? She has her job to attend to. She has to help her family.”
“In America,” said Carol, “she would make more money, she could help them even more.” But she could not see clearly the picture of Felix and Odile combining their salaries in a neat little apartment and faithfully remitting a portion to France. She could not imagine what on earth Felix would do for a living. Perhaps he and Odile would get married; something told her they would not. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s really your own business. I shouldn’t have said anything at all.” She moved away, but Felix took her hand and held it.
“You mean so well,” he said. “Odile is right, you know. I ought to have been killed, or at least disappeared. No one knows what to do with me or where I fit. As for Odile, her whole family is overdue. But we’re not—how does it go in American papers, under the photographs?—’Happy Europeans find new life away from old cares.’ We’re not that, either.”
“I suppose not. I don’t know.” She realized all at once how absurd they must look, standing under the Métro tracks, holding hands. Passersby looked at them, sympathetic.
“You shouldn’t go this way, looking so hurt and serious,” he said. “You’re so nice. You mean so well. Odile loves you.”
Her heart leaped as if he, Felix, had said he loved her. But no, she corrected herself. Not Felix but some other man, some wonderful person who did not exist.
Odile loved her. Her hand in his, she remembered how he had kissed Odile’s palm, and she felt on her own palm the pressure of a kiss; but not from Felix. Perhaps, she thought, what she felt was the weight of his love for Odile, from which she was excluded, and to which Felix now politely and kindly wished to draw her, as if his and Odile’s ability to love was their only hospitality, their only way of paying debts. For a moment, standing under the noisy trains on the dark, dusty boulevard, she felt that she had at last opened the right door, turned down the right street, glimpsed the vision toward which she had struggled on winter evenings when, standing on the staircase, she had wanted to be enchanted with Paris and to be in love with Howard.
But that such a vision could come from Felix and Odile was impossible. For a moment she had been close to tears, like the Christmas evening when she found the mistletoe. But she remembered in time what Felix was—a hopeless parasite. And Odile was silly and immoral and old enough to know better. And they were not married and never would be, and they spent heaven only knew how many hours in that terrible room in a slummy quarter of Paris.
No, she thought. What she and Howard had was better. No one could point to them, or criticize them, or humiliate them by offering to help.
She withdrew her hand and said with cold shyness, “Thank you for the coffee, Felix.”
“Oh, that.” He watched her go up the steps to the Métro, and then he walked away.
Upstairs, she passed a flower seller and stopped to buy a bunch of violets, even though they would be dead before she reached home. She wanted something pretty in her hand to take away the memory of the room and the Arabs and the dreary cafés and the messy affairs of Felix and Odile. She paid for the violets and noticed as she did so that the little scene—accepting the flowers, paying for them—had the gentle, nostalgic air of something past. Soon, she sensed, the comforting vision of Paris as she had once imagined it would overlap the reality. To have met and married Howard there would sound
romantic and interesting, more and more so as time passed. She would forget the rain and her unshared confusion and loneliness, and remember instead the Paris of films, the street lamps with their tinsel icicles, the funny concert hall where the ceiling collapsed, and there would be, at last, a coherent picture, accurate but untrue. The memory of Felix and Odile and all their distasteful strangeness would slip away; for “love” she would think, once more, “Paris,” and, after a while, happily married, mercifully removed in time, she would remember it and describe it and finally believe it as it had never been at all.
ACROSS THE BRIDGE
We were walking over the bridge from the Place de la Concorde, my mother and I—arm in arm, like two sisters who never quarrel. She had the invitations to my wedding in a leather shopping bag: I was supposed to be getting married to Arnaud Pons. My father’s first cousin, Gaston Castelli, deputy for a district in the south, had agreed to frank the envelopes. He was expecting us at the Palais Bourbon, at the other end of the bridge. His small office looked out on nothing of interest—just a wall and some windows. A typist who did not seem to work for anyone in particular sat outside his door. He believed she was there to spy on him, and for that reason had told my mother to keep the invitations out of sight.
I had been taken to see him there once or twice. On the wall were two photographs of Vincent Auriol, president of the Republic, one of them signed, and a picture of the restaurant where Jean Jaurès was shot to death; it showed the façade and the waiters standing in the street in their long white aprons. For furniture he had a Louis Philippe armchair, with sticking plaster around all four legs, a lumpy couch covered with a blanket, and, for visitors, a pair of shaky varnished chairs filched from another room. When the Assembly was in session he slept on the couch. (Deputies were not supposed actually to live on the premises, but some of those from out of town liked to save on hotel bills.) His son Julien was fighting in Indochina. My mother had already cautioned me to ask how Julien was getting along and when he thought the war would be over. Only a few months earlier she might have hinted about a wedding when Julien came back, pretending to make a joke of it, but it was too late now for insinuations: I was nearly at the altar with someone else. My marrying Julien was a thought my parents and Cousin Gaston had enjoyed. In some way, we would have remained their children forever.
When Cousin Gaston came to dinner he and Papa discussed their relations in Nice and the decadent state of France. Women were not expected to join in: Maman always found a reason to go off to the kitchen and talk things over with Claudine, a farm girl from Normandy she had trained to cook and wait. Claudine was about my age, but Maman seemed much freer with her than with me; she took it for granted that Claudine was informed about all the roads and corners of life. Having no excuse to leave, I would examine the silver, the pattern on my dinner plate, my own hands. The men, meanwhile, went on about the lowering of morality and the lack of guts of the middle class. They split over what was to be done: Our cousin was a Socialist, though not a fierce one. He saw hope in the new postwar managerial generation, who read Marx without becoming dogmatic Marxists, while my father thought the smart postwar men would be swept downhill along with the rest of us.
Once, Cousin Gaston mentioned why his office was so seedily fitted out. It seemed that the government had to spend great sums on rebuilding roads; they had gone to pieces during the war and, of course, were worse today. Squads of German prisoners of war sent to put them right had stuffed the roadbeds with leaves and dead branches. As the underlay began to rot, the surfaces had collapsed. Now repairs were made by French workers—unionized, Communist-led, always on the verge of a national strike. There was no money left over.
“There never has been any money left over,” Papa said. “When there is, they keep it quiet.”
He felt uneasy about the franking business. The typist in the hall might find out and tell a reporter on one of the opposition weeklies. The reporter would then write a blistering piece on nepotism and the misuse of public funds, naming names. (My mother never worried. She took small favors to be part of the grace of life.)
It was hot on the bridge, July in April. We still wore our heavy coats. Too much good weather was not to be trusted. There were no clouds over the river, but just the kind of firm blue sky I found easy to paint. Halfway across, we stopped to look at a boat with strings of flags, and tourists sitting along the bank. Some of the men had their shirts off. I stared at the water and saw how far below it was and how cold it looked, and I said, “If I weren’t a Catholic, I’d throw myself in.”
“Sylvie!”—as if she had lost me in a crowd.
“We’re going to so much trouble,” I said. “Just so I can marry a man I don’t love.”
“How do you know you don’t love him?”
“I’d know if I did.”
“You haven’t tried,” she said. “It takes patience, like practicing scales. Don’t you want a husband?”
“Not Arnaud.”
“What’s wrong with Arnaud?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” after a pause, “what do you know?”
“I want to marry Bernard Brunelle. He lives in Lille. His father owns a big textile business—the factories, everything. We’ve been writing. He doesn’t know I’m engaged.”
“Brunelle? Brunelle? Textiles? From Lille? It sounds like a mistake. In Lille they just marry each other, and textiles marry textiles.”
“I’ve got one thing right,” I said. “I want to marry Bernard.”
My mother was a born coaxer and wheedler; avoided confrontation, preferring to move to a different terrain and beckon, smiling. One promised nearly anything just to keep the smile on her face. She was slim and quick, like a girl of fourteen. My father liked her in flowered hats, so she still wore the floral bandeaux with their wisps of veil that had been fashionable ten years before. Papa used to tell about a funeral service where Maman had removed her hat so as to drape a mantilla over her hair. An usher, noticing the hat beside her on the pew, had placed it with the other flowers around the coffin. When I repeated the story to Arnaud he said the floral-hat anecdote was one of the world’s oldest. He had heard it a dozen times, always about a different funeral. I could not see why Papa would go on telling it if it were not true, or why Maman would let him. Perhaps she was the first woman it had ever happened to.
“You say that Bernard has written to you,” she said, in her lightest, prettiest, most teasing manner. “But where did he send the letters? Not to the house. I’d have noticed.”
No conspirator gives up a network that easily. Mine consisted of Chantal Nauzan, my trusted friend, the daughter of a general my father greatly admired. Recently Papa had begun saying that if I had been a boy he might have wanted a career in the Army for me. As I was a girl, he did not want me to do anything too particular or specific. He did not want to have to say, “My daughter is …” or “Sylvie does …” because it might make me sound needy or plain.
“Dear Sylvie,” my mother went on. “Look at me. Let me see your eyes. Has he written ‘marriage’ in a letter signed with his name?” I looked away. What a question! “Would you show me the letter—the important one? I promise not to read the whole thing.” I shook my head no. I was not sharing Bernard. She moved to new ground, so fast I could barely keep up. “And you would throw yourself off a bridge for him?”
“Just in my thoughts,” I said. “I think about it when Arnaud makes me listen to records—all those stories about women dying, Brünnhilde and Mimi and Butterfly. I think that for the rest of my life I’ll be listening to records and remembering Bernard. It’s all I have to look forward to, because it is what you and Papa want.”
“No,” she said. “It is not at all what we want.” She placed the leather bag on the parapet and turned it upside down over the river, using both hands. I watched the envelopes fall in a slow shower and land on the dark water and float apart. Strangers leaned on the parapet and stared, too, but nobody spoke.
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“Papa will know what to do next,” she said, altogether calmly, giving the bag a final shake. “For the time being, don’t write any more letters and don’t mention Bernard. Not to anyone.”
I could not have defined her tone or expression. She behaved as if we had put something over on life, or on men; but that may be what I have read into it since. I looked for a clue, wondering how she wanted me to react, but she had started to walk on, making up the story we would tell our cousin, still waiting in his office to do us a good turn. (In the end, she said the wedding had to be postponed owing to a death in Arnaud’s family.)
“Papa won’t be able to have Monsieur Pons as a friend now,” she remarked. “He’s going to miss him. I hope your Monsieur Brunelle in Lille can make up the loss.”
“I have never met him,” I said.
I could see white patches just under the surface of the river, quite far along. They could have been candy papers or scraps of rubbish from a barge. Maman seemed to be studying the current, too. She said, “I’m not asking you to tell me how you met him.”
“In the Luxembourg Gardens. I was sketching the beehives.”
“You made a nice watercolor from that sketch. I’ll have it framed. You can hang it in your bedroom.”
Did she mean now or after I was married? I was taller than she was: When I turned my head, trying to read her face, my eyes were level with her smooth forehead and the bandeau of daisies she was wearing that day. She said, “My girl,” and took my hand—not possessively but as a sort of welcome. I was her kind, she seemed to be telling me, though she had never broken an engagement that I knew. Another of my father’s stories was how she had proposed to him, had chased and cornered him and made the incredible offer. He was a young doctor then, new to Paris. Now he was an ear specialist with a large practice. His office and secretary and waiting room were in a separate wing of the apartment. When the windows were open, in warm weather, we could hear him laughing and joking with Melle Coutard, the secretary. She had been with him for years and kept his accounts; he used to say she knew all his bad secrets. My mother’s people thought he was too southern, too easily amused, too loud in his laughter. My Castelli great-grandparents had started a wholesale fruit business, across from the old bus terminal at Nice. The whole block was empty now and waiting to be torn down, so that tall buildings could replace the ocher warehouses and stores with their dark red roofs. CASTELLI was still painted over a doorway, in faded blue. My father had worked hard to lose his local accent, which sounded comical in Paris and prevented patients from taking him seriously, but it always returned when he was with Cousin Gaston. Cousin Gaston cherished his own accent, polished and refined it: His voters mistrusted any voice that sounded north of Marseilles.
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant Page 17