A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  “He won’t use it. It wets his hair.”

  She expected Madame Roux to laugh, as she used to. As long as she laughed Shirley was able to play the role of the hopelessly absentminded wife of a middle-class Frenchman. Sometimes she scarcely gave Philippe time to get out of the house before running down with a new fantasy. In her stories she always put herself in the wrong, but Philippe, seen as a perpetual victim, soon became absurd. Madame Roux began to respond by tightening her mouth and looking past Shirley, out the window.

  Madame Roux snapped to, all at once practical. “You don’t want him bald, do you? One shower too many and his hair will rot.”

  “Mine hasn’t, and look at Renata’s! Anyway it’s not only that I leave towels all over the place. I think it has something to do with Philippe’s being bored at Le Miroir. He’s starting to cover the same stories over and over. There is some new television thing that interests him, but it will be just once a month. He’ll be interviewing people to see their effect on France or else the reverse—I couldn’t have been listening properly when he explained. Do you know what I think? I think he’d like to be free to write a novel about the Algerian War.”

  This brought them both to the verge of uncontrollable laughter: Shirley had so often smuggled whole sections of Geneviève’s A Life Within a Life down to the shop, and they had so often laughed themselves weak over Charles, Bertrand and Flavia, that the very words “write a novel” were enough to set them off. Madame Roux was the first to become serious again: “If Philippe is bored, that’s not your business.” She still had the power to astonish. “Your only business is to see that he gets off to work whether he likes it or not.”

  “I don’t even do that properly. He wakes me up. He makes the coffee. Sometimes I don’t even hear him leaving. He used to work at home. He doesn’t any more.”

  “You should be glad he is away all day instead of being underfoot.”

  “I should be out looking for a better job,” said Shirley. “That part-time store thing is no good.”

  “You don’t need a better job. Let him support you. You’ve supplied the apartment. The furniture is yours. All he did was move in. When you work, you are taking something away from a girl who may need it more than you. If you did not want to be married, you should not have chased after Philippe.”

  “Madame Roux! You know I didn’t!”

  “Marriage is made in bed,” said Madame Roux sternly, as if she had invented it.

  “If that were true there’d be nothing the matter with ours,” said Shirley, for Madame Roux knew everything, even that.

  “Then you’re even more ungrateful than I had thought,” said Madame Roux. “Thousands of girls would gladly be in your place, and they wouldn’t complain as you do.” This was to remind Shirley of the want of delicacy she had shown in marrying a Frenchman. The girls should have picketed the mairie, Shirley thought. Unfair! Unfair! Madame Roux leaned over the low table and asked the most personal question of all: “Wouldn’t it have been the same with your first husband? Be honest. Think.”

  “I can’t tell. We spoke the same language.” Pete, who did not exist, stood in past time with heavy light around him. He grasped someone’s bicycle. She could not see his mouth or his eyes. In a dream that frightened her Pete said, without seeming to speak, that some other person had died. She had thought, I have been married two years; then it was four; then six; but always she was thinking “married to Pete,” not to Philippe. Pete had never been older than twenty-one. If she lived enough, one day she would be older than his mother. She said, “I don’t know how it would have been. I don’t know. When Philippe and I talk English he’s at a disadvantage, and when it’s French I’m never sure. I understand every word, but do I understand what French means? I might know every word in a sentence and still not add up the meaning. And then, with Pete . . .” She would not have lived in a place partly furnished by strangers. The curtains would have been taken down, the carpets rolled and tied with string and put in the basement for moths to feed on. Here you built a life around other people’s leavings—your family’s, or people you had never seen but whose traces you might find in provincial museums. You built around a past of glass cases, shabby lighting, a foul-smelling guardian saying “It is forbidden.” No one could start from scratch until every room had been bombed flat as far as the horizon; and even then a residue in the mind would never be bombed away. She thought of Hervé, Philippe’s friend, who filled his new married life with nylon washable velvet, with plastic tablecloths, and declared, “All this is new, and so am I.”

  She thought this but did not say it. What she had said was enough and she knew now what it must have sounded like when it was told back to Philippe; for Madame Roux, like James, could never explain what a story was about. As for Philippe’s wanting to write about Algeria, all he had remarked was that someone should, for he and Hervé had been in a war they had not believed in and that was not officially a war at all. They were not veterans and not entitled to pensions. Privilege, a token income, seats in the Métro, a certain amount of nostalgia and boasting, were allowed for veterans of both world wars, the survivors of Indo-China, the old soldiers of the Resistance. But the combattants of Algeria seemed like bad weather. They were not a useful memory. “We haven’t had our novelist,” he said to Shirley. She glimpsed his restlessness; it was the diamond flash of a window across the Seine. The window swung outward, a branch moved; someone lives in that house, has opened the window; the sun is warming that person’s arm. One day she and Philippe would grow silent and stout and she would stop looking for any meaning in these flashes. He said, “No one has come along to say that we were young or that our lives were interrupted or that we were unforgettable.” They were, in fact, already forgotten. Did he want to be that one who would say it? When she read his name in Le Miroir she thought that if she had never known him she would have imagined him sharp and voluble and disappointed. She did not share his life, not in the way she had expected to, but she could see it, she could watch him. Of course he was happy! He had suddenly wanted to be married and had met Shirley, who was free. He had wished for a wife unlike his mother, and in that, God knew, he had been gratified. When he spoke of his mother he was respectful: he described her first crippling arthritic pains and how she would not have a doctor but simply accepted suffering with the words, “My mother and grandmother were the same.” He recalled the delicious meals of his childhood and how he had been cautioned and made afraid of eating; he and Colette imagined their own stomachs awash with queer acids, poisonous and green. He remembered Thursday afternoons with Colette in a gravelly little square, marooned by streets he and his sister were not allowed to cross. They had played without toys and without getting dust on their clothes. Sad or happy memories? He did not say. “Beware of parpaillots,” said Madame Perrigny one Sunday afternoon, having slumbered in her chair after lunch. She slept, frowning lightly, as if she had closed her eyes to search for a name or a date in her memory. What did it mean? What were parpaillots? Nothing, said Philippe. It had a meaning, but none to worry over. His godfather had written a book about the Council of Trent and the manuscript, presented as a gift to Philippe on his tenth birthday, was still in the house. His mother read bits of it sometimes and must have gone to sleep dreaming. Parpaillots had something to do with that—with the Council of Trent. Of course he had happy memories; of course he was happy now. He was not poor by French standards, and he was considered fortunate by, for example, Hervé. In Hervé’s eyes he apparently earned money by doing nothing. His name was seen. His face gleamed on television sometimes. He could ring up other favored persons and say who he was, and they would at once write “Perrigny” in their appointment books. To Hervé, a technician in an electronics laboratory at the Science Faculty, his life was the life of a god. Philippe had a blinding headache at five o’clock every day. It was not because of eyestrain; it had nothing to do with sinus; one doctor said it might be the result of drinking strong coffee. No one really knew wh
y at five o’clock someone invisible pressed a pair of thumbs between Philippe’s eyebrows. He never complained. He let aspirin dissolve in water and drank the water slowly. He said he would not have been taken on at Le Miroir if his godfather had not been a close friend of one of the magazine’s principal shareholders. This was a formal kind of self-effacement, but Shirley wondered if it were true or not true, and if there was anyone she could trust. All this Shirley had told, yes, told to the arch-traitor and enemy, Madame Roux, and Madame Roux had repeated it back to him. Madame Roux was rat, serpent, lizard, spider, bitch, vixen, roach and louse; all the same, Shirley missed her.

  9

  Montreal, June 17th, 1963

  DEAREST GIRL:

  Last Sunday the Russians sent a girl your age into space. It makes me wonder about the long-range value of education as I’m sure Valentina never had anything like your advantages. Better a woman than that poor little dog.

  I want you to post me by first-class surface mail a concise history of Indo-China from 1887 to the present day with MAPS. I want it for Vincent, our janitor’s son, who is learning French now but finding his textbooks dull and boring. I told him I would get him something worthy of his attention from my daughter in Paris. I have asked Vincent what he is interested in. He does not know but does not want to “stick around here,” thus giving the green light to geography as an interest. I will give him my Harrap’s. He is fourteen but has never been taught how to read a map or use a dictionary. They will never send Vincent into space.

  Montreal, June 21st, 1963

  Cat Castle still in Paris but says nothing about you. She thinks it is going to rain the whole summer. You have not mentioned this. “Light filtering from a gray transparent sky” does not describe any sort of Weather, at least not to me. Nor would I care for it as an attempt at verse.

  Montreal, June 29th, 1963

  Cat has seen the Moscow Theatre of Satire in Paris but did not see you among the “frumpy provincial-looking audience.” She saw The Baths by Maiakovsky and some other thing all in Russian. It was “heavy going.” Daughter Phyllis worried lest “Mum make some foolish sunset marriage now.”

  Have been reading some new material recently come to light, a vindication of the Peterloo Massacre. You are the age Effie Gray was when she up and left. Thank God I was always available for questioning, should you have needed it, and no one can say you got married in the dark, at least not the first time. When Cat married Ernie Castle she sent her mother a telegram from Lake Louise a couple of days later and Mrs. Pryor hot-footed it up there and took Cat home and explained to her in the train what she should have told her before. Cat had nice thick hair. She wore those peek-a-boo shirtwaists long before anybody, but with not much to show.

  Montreal, July 3rd, 1963

  I want you to send me a book called the ANNEE TERRIBLE BY VICTOR HUGO. This is a book of POEMS about the Franco-Prussian War 1870–71. Do not send unless the print is large and there is an ENGLISH TRANSLATION on facing page for each page of French. You will say that no such book exists, but I shall answer, “Have you looked?” There is no logical reason for this book not to exist as I describe it.

  Who are these “new friends”? Who is this child? When you type do not then scribble all over the typing.

  Montreal, July 10th, 1963

  Instead of coming to stay with me in August, as invited, Cat is going to Three Rivers with some dentist’s son she met on a train. Cat is not always clear even in English, and they are French-Canadians. She must be out of her mind. Cat’s French? Laughable. Daughter Phyllis “trembles to think.” Daughter Phyllis was and still is a dim little body, in my opinion. Cat has been in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Austria, Bavaria, Scotland, England, and France, and if she can’t be understood when she says “pass the salt” in Three Rivers then I just don’t know.

  Montreal, July 16th, 1963

  Re your questions concerning Cat’s marriage to Ernie. Cat’s one idea was to get off the prairies. Her one wish was to live in a place where she would never again see a grain elevator. After about a year Ernie made her live in some town where the only thing in sight was a grain elevator, and when Cat would do something the other ladies didn’t like, such as play ball on a Sunday (in her own yard), they made her feel it. Ernie was away a lot and she met some doctor. She already had Howard, or was it Kenny, on the way, so nothing came of the doctor. The world knew but Ernie didn’t. She was the first woman to smoke cigarettes out on the street, and the first to go back to college every now and then, when it suited her, leaving Ernie with Howard, Kenny, Phyllis, and finally foolish little Nelson. Ernie settled all he could on the children because he thought she was unreliable. Destroy this letter.

  By now Shirley had forgotten Renata. The source of her summer troubles had been supplanted by Claudie and the Maurels. Waiting for Philippe to make a sign of forgiveness had become part of living, just as their living together had been her life. Messages from Shirley to Philippe continued to appear, on and off, in the personal column of the Paris Herald-Tribune, but as it was a notorious mailbox for homosexuals she supposed that Philippe would consider the two names a coincidence; in any case, she doubted if Madame Perrigny was a subscriber or if she even knew that such a paper existed. The Maurel family were still trying to overtake their first failed invitation. Shirley had now sat down to four meals in their dining room, each a disaster. The Maurels quarreled so violently that no one save Gérald had time to swallow. Only Shirley seemed to be distressed by it; to the Maurels, normal conversation was either a whine or a scream. Except for Papa, who never looked at her, and Marie-Thérèse, who mistrusted Shirley with all her heart, Shirley had become every-one’s tutelary saint. It was not in spite of her being foreign, but because of it. She would walk straight through their lives, and they knew that one day they would never have to think about her again. She was a stranger who carried absolution from either remorse or recollections. It was to Shirley that Claudie confided her anxiety over Alain. He was a deplorable little monkey. When addressed, he would tilt his head to one side, screw up his mouth, hold his hands as if his wrists were wax, and roll from one foot to the other. Maman spoke to him in the third person with a honeyed insistence that was close to dislike: “Does he want his steak cut in little, little bits?” He was too lazy to feed himself and had never been encouraged to do so. He opened his mouth, sucked each mouthful listlessly, and swallowed as much as possible whole. His hazel eyes were empty and bright as glass; but when he was harassed and frightened by Marie-Thérèse’s children, his eyes whitened and he seemed blind. Left alone, he would stand dreaming and staring and masturbating. Maman or Marie-Thérèse were forever snatching his hand and slapping it scarlet. If one woman slapped, the other expressed pity; their directives and instructions, always in contradiction, fell like a melting flurry—nothing reached him. Sobbing, he would again clutch at the too small, too tight, babyish pants they made him wear. Claudie treated him as if he were a man she had met in a café. When he said something stupid she would shriek a special, high-pitched laugh she kept for the family. She seemed to think he was twenty-five and ironic. He could not decipher the alphabet or count to fifteen. He knew who Charles Aznavour was and had some notion concerning the Infant Jesus, but had never been read to. Enquiring, Shirley was told he would be given books when he was old enough not to leave fingerprints all over them, and that no one had time for reading.

  Was it Claudie or Shirley who first decided the child should be taken away? “He ought to leave Maman but not me,” said Claudie, “because he loves me physically.” Shirley thought this was reason enough for his going, though Claudie seemed to look on it as the only justification for his remaining where he was. Shirley discovered that he had no bed of his own. At one time he had slept with his great grandmother, Mémé, then with Claudie. Sometimes, if Papa was away on a business trip, Alain would move in with Maman.

  “That part is quite normal,” Claudie explained. “He thinks Maman is his mother.”

  “
Who does he think you are?”

  “Another mother.”

  Shirley felt as if she and she alone had to rebuild a demolished house. She tried to make Claudie understand that Alain should not be sleeping with several generations of women.

  “Speak to Maman,” said Claudie morosely.

  “Why don’t you speak to her? He is yours, and what you women are doing is disastrous.” Shirley went back to Early Church doctrine: “Do you know about Freud?”

  Claudie gave a look as if to say she had known about Freud in several previous incarnations and did not need a reminder. “Maman will listen to you,” she said.

  Shirley too thought Madame Maurel would listen, but she doubted if she would act. Once, interceding on Claudie’s behalf over some harsh rule Papa had laid down, Shirley had learned that Madame Maurel was proud of the difficulties of her marriage and willing to discuss them. They had sat primly in the living room while Madame Maurel described Papa’s behavior. Many men do not like being spoken to in the morning, but Monsieur Maurel would not tolerate conversation even after his breakfast. It annoyed him to have to say “good-bye” as he left the house. When Maman had been as young as Claudie was now, she had got into the habit of weeping in the morning and saying that he did not love her. One day he dressed and departed and then let her know he would be staying with his favorite uncle, a lawyer and bachelor, for a few days. Papa remained with the uncle on and on. Maman dined with them every evening. Her place at their table faced a gold-framed painting of Vesuvius erupting all over a party of revellers, and when she started to dream about this painting she knew she was sliding into a way of life chosen by Papa. Papa and his wealthy uncle began to speak of their summer in Biarritz and of sending Maman to Divonne-les-Bains to take the nervous-breakdown cure. She poured coffee in the uncle’s drawing room, sitting under a marble statue of a naked woman who held a lamp in her arms. The uncle laughed at some joke about marble buttocks with Maman there in the room—she still a bride and an eminently neglected one. She poured their coffee and passed cups for the last time. She did not return to her confessor, who had been promoting nothing except prayer and patience, but spoke this time to her own father. In one conversation with the bachelor uncle her father obtained Papa’s return. Maman now learned that she was wealthy, quite as rich as the uncle. She had known that her dowry included a pharmacy on the rue La Boëtie, and urban property in Lyon and in Paris, but these were simply male holdings slipping from one tutor to another. As a married woman she was not allowed a bank account of her own; she could not pawn anything worth more than ten dollars; in both her civil and her religious weddings, words had been addressed to her to remind her of her subservient position, her duty. Now her father dinned into her head that she was rich, rich, and she got up from the interview understanding, at last, that money is power. It had not changed their relationship on the surface: Papa remained irascible, and she was just as morbidly afraid of spending as when she had thought herself helpless and poor. It was Papa who squandered on pastries and on dinkytoys; it was Maman who had invested in this apartment. She feared him, she humored him, and he was rude and indifferent to her, but what did it matter. Her father had bought him for her and had purchased the very best. He was an engineer, which was an elite profession in France. Good profession, good family, no money, foul temper—oh, the best of husbands. Listening to her, Shirley had to suppress certain Canadian memories, such as the story about engineers shambling up to get their degrees, knees folded, knuckles grazing the floor.