A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  By the time Madame Maurel had ended this ramble, Shirley was so far from the point (Claudie) that there was no hope of getting back. She wondered why Madame Maurel insisted so much on Papa’s financial extravagance, the high cost of everything, and how poor they were even though they were rich; then she remembered one subject no one had ever touched on—Shirley’s first meeting with Claudie and the money Shirley had paid that Sunday in the restaurant.

  Papa’s attempt to live with his uncle recalled to Shirley Philippe’s return to his mother, but Shirley did not possess Madame Maurel’s means of getting him back.

  “Even a patient person can hate his wife sometimes,” Shirley said. “I can imagine that. But surely only death can interfere with . . .”

  “What?”

  “Well, love,” said Shirley, embarrassed at bringing up the word in this room. “Love has nothing to do with money. If it has, then I’m wrong about everything. If it were true, I’d be so wrong I’d have to start all my life over.”

  •

  “Maman is bad for Alain,” Claudie said. “Yesterday he came into the bathroom as I was having my bath. He looked at me for a long time and he said, ‘Not pretty,’ and went out. Now, I am particularly lovely in my bath, and if he had been brought up correctly he would have recognized it. He may have been using ‘pretty’ in a moral sense, meaning that it is not good to be naked. You must not forget that the Alsatian my sister married is a Protestant. Perhaps my mother has been contaminated, and Alain through her. For Alain’s sake I ought to be fighting the Protestant mentality. I’d like to know what he says to Maman when he has a bath with her.”

  “He shouldn’t be having baths with his grandmother . . .”

  “He thinks she is his mother,” Claudie explained again.

  “. . . and he shouldn’t sleep with her, because when he does he is replacing Papa.”

  “How else can he grow up?” said Claudie, slightly puzzled now.

  “He must go away from here,” Shirley must have said in desperation.

  Not only were his future attitudes to women in question, but his personal habits were lamentable. His pot was carried into any room he chose, at any hour; he whiled away much of the day by sitting on it, gazing now into space, now at a comic book the pages of which were turned for him by Mémé, when she was around. He seemed unable to put on his own pants, and since the women of the family were apt to forget about them, he wandered around the apartment displaying a red circle on a bare bottom, like a Chinese insult.

  In spite of three attentive generations of women, it was obvious he was lonely and bored. When he was given a toy he took it apart; when it was ruined he said he had nothing to do. Because he was destructive, the toys his grandfather gave him were put on a high shelf in a kitchen dresser “for later on.” That left him with nothing but the pot until June, when the family—after much bickering and changing of plans—acquired television. The set went out of order almost at once because of Alain’s fiddling with the knobs. No one scolded him. The cost of repairs immediately became part of the household expenses, while a dinkytoy with its wheels off made them feel bankrupt. One day Alain climbed up on a chair and tugged at the glass door behind which his toys were kept, visible but out of reach. The wood frame had been newly painted; the door stuck. As he tugged, half the dresser came crashing down. His chair fell sideways so that he was not badly hurt, save for a scraped bruise over an eye, but the fall knocked the wind out of his lungs. He took seconds drawing breath and expelled the breath in a howl. Women came running from everywhere. Maman and Mémé screamed at each other, while Marie-Thérèse, very white, piled broken dishes. She seemed to be adding up the losses, for her lips moved. Claudie stood in the hallway muttering, “He’s all right, he’s all right.”

  Papa said, “Alain is not to have any dessert.”

  Picking up a cue from the women, the child screamed, “My head is bleeding!”

  “Put something on the cut,” Shirley said to Marie-Thérèse, the sanest of the family. Calling “Hot water!” “Alcohol!” “Cotton!” the cavalcade of grieving women bore him away to the bathroom.

  Shirley turned to Papa and said, “He might have been killed.” She was shaking.

  “I know. That is why he must be taught not to climb on furniture.”

  “Why don’t they keep his toys where he can get at them? You never punish him normally, so why shout about dessert?”

  “He has broken half the dishes,” said Papa, meaning the chipped, coarse, brown china they used at breakfast. “Do you want me to congratulate him?”

  They sounded married. Without speaking, without having looked at each other, they had gone widely around courtship and arrived. “I am told that you enjoy giving advice,” he said. “Now I have heard an example of it. You have no children, at least none that we know of. Are you qualified to have an opinion about Alain? Are you competent?”

  “Yes, I think I am.”

  “Have you loved anyone?”

  “Is this a real question?”

  “Yes. Tell me.”

  “If I’ve loved . . . My God, so many people. A Czech, but he went back to his own country. Another man, sort of like you. He rented houses in Cassis for a summer with his wife and children and godmothers and grandmothers. His wife was only supposed to care about the children, but that turned out not to be true. I wanted to spend that summer somewhere around Cassis but he was frightened. He said, ‘Can’t you see that I’ve got all these children and grandmothers and godmothers around?’ I remember another man who wanted to take me to Luxembourg because he had to go there on business, and after we had been there and it did nothing but rain, he said to me rather hurriedly, as we were saying good-bye at an airport, ‘Now darling that was your birthday present for next year.’ ”

  “Is that all?”

  “I’m thinking.” She was thinking that Philippe had asked the same questions after they were lovers. Monsieur Maurel wanted to know everything before. He was old. Like Mrs. Castle gobbling éclairs in Pons, he knew about time and waste and that only the core of a situation mattered. She and Philippe still had time: they must have—how, otherwise, could they stand this separation? “I’m thinking back to another one. Ages ago. He was too old for me. He drank and he would ring up in the middle of the night. My mother would answer. She didn’t like all that phoning. He married a pretentious girl, his idea of someone innocent. She was frightened by his drinking and that gave him an excuse to pity her, so I think they got along.”

  “You find the conversation amusing?” said Monsieur Maurel.

  “Yes, in a way. I’m sorry. Is it serious? Well, you mean love, don’t you? Oh, why isn’t there a French word for ‘like’?” She said the word in English, which made him blink, and she thought, He really does look like that comedian Louis de Funès; I don’t dare ask if they’re related. “Now if it were like, I could say I had affection for a Greek I know. I can’t think of anything else to tell you. Not here in your kitchen.”

  “I would like to ask who had loved you. I thought you were married?”

  “My husband loved me,” she said, “but he abandoned me without any warning.”

  “Why did you come here today?” he said. “What interests you about my daughter and my wife? Could you not confine your friendship with Claudie to restaurants and cinemas? As a family we must bore you. We are not good company. I have seen how you translate every word we say before your mind can take it in. We have the worst table in Paris, so it can’t be the food that tempts you. Why do you keep coming back? Is it because you want me to make love to you?”

  “Probably,” she said.

  “I have no time for you,” he said. “Not even an hour.”

  •

  She went on speaking to him after he had left the room.

  She picked up Alain’s chair, she swept the floor, and she said to herself, You think you’ve insulted me. A sexual slight is a slap in the face, to you. But all you are afraid of is having to take your clothes off.
Like James you probably need something, but you don’t dare tell me what it is. Where did you imagine it could happen? I wonder. In my flat during your lunch hour? No—that would be under Philippe’s roof, and if we were found out you would be involved. That is called adultery in the conjugal domicile and it is very, oh, very serious. You were trained by your rich old uncle and so what you dream of, I should guess, would be one of those “luxurious furnished studios” near the Bois de Boulogne. The concierge is elegant; he gives the man the key but never looks the woman in the face. If he were on the rack he couldn’t identify her. It would be so much more comfortable than anything you’ve ever had at home—the marvelous bed and the spotless bathroom and the soft towels and the delicious meals around the clock. You would pretend to be scornful. How you would sneer and how you would admire the waiter out of an old Lubitsch movie, the bogus luxury! I can see the thick looped curtains, the pale carpet. Let me invent a detail for you—miniature flags waving over langouste en mayonnaise, a tribute to the mingling of nations. “I have no time for you.” Imagine having made up a situation just because you had a good exit line. Imagine thinking, imagine saying it! Oh, poor little engineer! Poor Papa!

  •

  Soon after this, Claudie told Shirley that she was in love and might at any minute depart for foreign places with the lover. She could not tell his name or reveal their plan. Shirley would meet him soon. They would require her help. Meanwhile, Alain’s future must be established. Shirley agreed. That scene in the kitchen had been lamentable. Without Claudie (not that she had ever been much use to him) Alain would be the sole object of a tormented grandfather whose spoiling had something unpleasant about it, and of an insect-minded grandmother who secretly loathed him. Shirley examined her address book as if she were a nineteenth-century aristocrat searching through the Gotha for a sound alliance, and went straight through without any luck whatever until she came to the V’s, where “Van Tong” arrested her. Chinese? No, Hubert Van Tong was an unfrocked Belgian priest who had been living for some years with a sculptress from Vancouver; the sculptress’s mother and Mrs. Norrington had been old university friends, but now each disapproved very much of the other’s daughter. The sculptress, whose name was Virginia, no, it was Felicity, no, Honor, Honor it was, had abandoned two children of her own the day she received a grant for study abroad. She had often expressed remorse during the seven years since she had last seen them and might welcome starting over with Alain, who so evidently needed someone. Honor was said to have been a good mother; anyone who had known her before her flight to Europe always added to her qualities, “and she was so marvelous with those children!” The Van Tongs lived two hours by train from Paris in a charming town covered with roses. Hubert was a kind, quiet man who had the habit of saying, “Yes, I agree,” which would be a change from Papa. Shirley wrote and was at once invited to bring Claudie to lunch. Behind the gray façade of an ordinary village house Shirley and Claudie found a courtyard filled with white geraniums. Claudie spent the day with most of her clothes off lolling in the little garden and admiring the studio, which contained Alain’s future foster mother’s welding equipment. Cats and doves, killers and victims, were the pets of the house. Pig iron and used bicycle parts spilled out of the studio to the court. It looked to Shirley like debris after an accident: she thought of hillsides strewn with women’s shoes, ripped handbags, combs. “The kind of unexpected ingredient you find in the soup in Belgium,” said Van Tong genially. He and Honor would be charmed to have Alain at least as a summer guest. They seemed to think he would be no more bother than one of the cats. Claudie put on her clothes unwillingly and embraced her new, intimate friends as if they were her family and she were emigrating. On the way back to Paris she remarked, “Alain will grow up surrounded by such good taste.” Shirley had not considered that. She imagined Alain carrying his little pot out to the garden and vacantly watching cats leap at doves.

  All at once, as if she met him, Claudie said, “What do you think of Philippe’s new program?”

  “What program?”

  “On TV. It’s only for the summer, but Gérald has found out from a man he knows that if it goes well they will keep it on. Does he like it?”

  “Very much.”

  They were alone in a red plush compartment. Shirley had paid for first-class travel. Claudie sighed, for this was bliss to her, and said, “You lead such separate, mysterious lives. You each seem to have your own friends. I suppose you talk in the privacy of the night?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Do his friends meet you?”

  “Not often.”

  “It sounds to me like the ideal marriage,” Claudie said. “Gérald thinks so too, but not Maman.”

  “Claudie, you have no right to discuss my husband,” said Shirley. Presently she said, “What does your father think?”

  Claudie laughed and said, “We shall see.” There was nothing but candor in her answering look.

  •

  Papa had not yet come in. The chintz curtain that was tacked across the dining-room window at night lay folded on a table. Shirley had discovered that no one could agree with anyone else about the dining-room curtains, and so this temporary system had become a permanent arrangement. Marie-Thérèse’s crepe soles squeaked on the floor, but the passage of her shoes from floor to carpet and carpet to linoleum were all she had to declare. She and Gérald had been told about Claudie’s secret; that was why they were here, and why they had gone to the unheard-of expense of hiring a baby-sitter for the youngest child. They had brought the great-grandmother, who was back from Lyon and staying with them. Nothing about the Ziffs so much as hinted at what they thought and felt. Gérald stood near the table, waiting, like a horse, and Claudie lay sprawled reading a paperback life of Jung. Alain and the four Ziff boys played in a bedroom, supervised by whimpering old Mémé. Claudie laughed loudly and immoderately at some light-hearted passage in the boyhood of Jung. It was a high-pitched and deliberately irritating laugh, but her mother’s voice, talking quietly to her older sister—a counterpoint in every way—was the only reaction. Leaving Claudie to her merriment. Shirley began doing whatever seemed needed in the kitchen, and thought, Even if that isn’t the way they want their bread cut, at least I have done it. After a time, feeling ignored, Claudie joined them. She gave Shirley a look of high amusement and said, “You look like a maiden aunt,” and Shirley indeed felt old and thin. Claudie was quicker and more efficient than any of them, than even calm Marie-Thérèse, or Maman, who dropped and chipped whatever she touched. Claudie was showing what she could do when she chose. Shirley thought, Here we are, four women, preparing a meal that won’t even be very good, trying to be on time for a bad-tempered man.

  Was it true that he kept Maman on a tight food allowance, as she had suggested? What about Maman’s income? They were to start with a vegetable broth, the liquid in which carrots and leeks had boiled, reduced with a handful of vermicelli. The vegetables, in a pool of liquid, were set aside, keeping warm. Little medallion veal steaks would follow, and green salad with the dark streaks Philippe and his family would never eat, believing snails had been spreading snail poison. Cheese, applesauce. Twelve-degree red ink wine, sold by the liter. The first meal Shirley had ever eaten here seemed like a banquet. She supposed she must be one of the family now.

  “Claudie, pay attention!” said Marie-Thérèse. “Your friend has cut her hand with the breadknife.”

  In a quick look, Shirley tried to find the slight edge of exchange they had begun the day Alain had fallen off his chair; but Marie-Thérèse seemed to dread the idea that any conversation could ever take place between them. Maman looked at Shirley’s hand, at the globe of dark blood. Claudie said, “Something has made you nervous, Shirley,” and took the knife.

  Papa was home! The great-grandmother instantly appeared and moaned some sort of senile warning as Claudie turned on the hall light. Mémé had only recently been cured of her habit of replacing with forty-watt bulbs anything stron
ger: Papa could not stand the sight of his wife squinting and frowning over her sewing, as if she were trying to pick ants out of the stitches. Marie-Thérèse’s children gathered in the hall in a condition of subdued chaos, glancing anxiously at their mother, who frightened them very much. Maman touched the little dove pin at her throat for comfort. This heart-clutching fear—she has it five evenings a week all her life, Shirley thought. Gérald appeared from the dining room. His face was a study in perplexity, distress and physical want. The door opened. “Papa! Papa! Papa!” screamed the children. Monsieur Maurel closed his eyes.