A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  He was pleased with the dream. No one was gifted with a subconscious quite like Wishart’s, tirelessly creative, producing without effort any number of small visual poems in excellent taste. This one might have been a ballet, he decided, or, better still, because of the black and white groupings and the unmoving light, an experimental film, to be called simply and cryptically “Wishart’s Dream.” He could manipulate this name without conceit, for it was not his own. That is, it was not the name that had been gummed onto his personality some forty years before without thought or care: “Wishart” was selected, like all the pieces of his fabricated life. Even the way he looked was contrived, and if, on bad days, he resembled nothing so much as a failed actor afflicted with dreams, he accepted this resemblance, putting it down to artistic fatigue. He did not consider himself a failed anything. Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled, and, in Wishart’s case, it had been a long flight. No wonder he looked wearing, he would think, seeing his sagged face in the glass. He had lived one of society’s most grueling roles, the escape from an English slum. He had been the sturdy boy with vision in his eyes—that picked-over literary bone. “Scramble, scrape, and scholarship” should have been written on his brow, and, inside balloons emerging from his brain, “a talent for accents,” and “a genius for kicking the past from his shoes.” He had other attributes, of course, but it wasn’t necessary to crowd the image.

  Wishart’s journey was by no means unusual, but he had managed it better than nearly anyone. Most scramblers and scrapers take the inherited structure with them, patching and camouflaging as they can, but Wishart had knocked his flat. He had given himself a name, parents, and a class of his choice. Now, at forty-two, he passed as an English gentleman in America, where he lived, and as an awfully decent American when he went to England. He had little sense of humor where his affairs were concerned, no more than a designer of comic postcards can be funny about his art, but he did sometimes see it as a joke on life that the quirks and crotchets with which he was laced had grown out of an imaginary past. Having given himself a tall squire of a father, who adored horses and dogs, Wishart first simulated, then genuinely felt, a disgust and terror of the beasts. The phantom parent was a brandy swiller: Wishart wouldn’t drink. Indeed, as created by his equally phantom son, the squire was impeccably bien élevé but rather a brute: he had not been wholly kind to Wishart, the moody, spindly boy. Wishart often regretted that he would never overtake the mighty Pa, in manliness, that is; he had already outrun him in brains. He said this to friends. The friends, seeing a clear-cut case, urged him to free himself from the shadow of Pa, and Wishart would promise to try. For a time he would try, as if the squire in his great boots had existed, as if there had been a moony Wishart in the garret reading Keats. Now that was surely a joke, or might have been, if only there had been someone to share it with. But Wishart had no witnesses. The only person out of the real past he remembered without disgust was a sister, Glad, who had become a servant at eleven and had taught him how to eat with a knife and fork. The joke was airtight; Wishart was safe. He had an innocent faith that the past, severed from him, could not persist in a life of its own.

  At the beginning, in the old days, before he had been intelligent enough to settle for the squire and had hinted at something grand, he had often been the victim of sudden frights, when an element, hidden and threatening, had bubbled under his feet, and he had felt the soles of his shoes growing warm, so thin, so friable was the crust of his poor world. Nowadays, he moved in a gassy atmosphere of goodwill and feigned successes. He seemed invulnerable. Strangers meeting him for the first time often thought he must be celebrated, and wondered why they had never heard of him before. There was no earthly reason for anyone’s having done so; he was a teacher of dramatics in a preparatory school, and once this was revealed, and the shoddiness of the school established, it required Wishart’s most hypnotic gifts, his most persuasive monologue, to maintain the effect of his person. As a teacher he was barely adequate, and, if he had been an American, his American school would never have kept him. His British personality—sardonic, dry—replaced ability or even ambition. Privately, he believed he was wasted in a world of men and boys, and had never bothered giving them the full blaze of his Wishart creation; he saved it for a world of women. Like many spiteful, snobbish, fussy men, or a certain type of murderer, Wishart chose his friends among middle-aged solitary women. These women were widowed or divorced, and lived in places Wishart liked to visit. Every summer, then, shedding his working life, a shining Wishart took off for Europe, where he spent the summer alighting here and there, depending on the topography of his invitations. He lived on his hostesses, without shame. He was needed and liked: his invitations began arriving at Christmas. He knew that women who will fret over wasting the last bit of soap, or a torn postage stamp, or an unused return ticket, will pay without a murmur for the company of a man. Wishart was no hired companion—carrier of coats, fetcher of aspirin, walker of dachshunds. He considered it enough to be there, supplying gossip and a listening ear. Often Wishart’s friends took it for granted he was homosexual, which was all to the good. He was the chosen minstrel, the symbolic male, who would never cause “trouble.” He knew this: it was a galling thought. But he had never managed to correct it. He was much too busy keeping his personality in place so that it wouldn’t slip or collapse even in his dreams. He had never found time for such an enervating activity as proving his virility, which might not only divert the movement of his ambitions, but could, indeed, take up an entire life. He had what he wanted, and it was enough: he had never desired a fleet of oil tankers. It sufficed him to be accepted here and there. His life would probably have been easier if he had not felt obliged to be something special on two continents; but he was compelled to return to England now, every year, and make them accept him. They accepted him as an American, but that was part of the buried joke. Sometimes he ventured a few risks, such as “we were most frightfully poor when I was a child,” but he knew he still hadn’t achieved the right tone. The most successful impostures are based on truth, but how poor is poor, and how closely should he approach this burning fact? (Particularly in England, where the whole structure could collapse for the sake of a vowel.) These were the trials that beset poor Wishart, and sometimes caused him to look like a failed actor who has had a bad dream.

  He got down from the train, holding his artfully bashed-up suitcase, and saw, in the shadow of the station, Mrs. Bonnie McCarthy, his best American friend. She was his relay in the south of France, a point of refreshment between the nasal sculptress in London who had been his first hostess of the season and a Mrs. Sebastian in Venice. It would have been sweet for Wishart at this moment if he could have summoned an observer from the past, a control to establish how far he had come. Supposing one of the populated waves of his dream had deposited sister Glad on shore? He saw her in cap and apron, a dour little girl, watching him being greeted by this woman who would not as much as have spat in their direction if she had known them in the old days. At this thought he felt a faint stir, like the rumor of an earthquake some distance away. But he knew he had nothing to fear and that the source of terror was in his own mistakes. It had been a mistake to remember Glad.

  “Wishart,” his friend said gravely, without breaking her pose. Leaning on a furled peach-colored parasol, she gave the appearance of living a minute of calm in the middle of a hounding social existence. She turned to him the soft, myopic eyes that had been admired when she was a girl. Her hair was cut in the year’s fashion, like an inverted peony, and she seemed to Wishart beautifully dressed. She might have been waiting for something beyond Wishart and better than a friend, some elegant paradise he could not imagine, let alone attain. His admiration of her (charm, wealth, aspirations) flowed easily into admiration of himself: after all, he had achieved this friend. Almost tearful with self-felicitation, he forgot how often he and Bonnie had quarreled in the past. Their kiss of friendship outside the station was real. />
  “Did you get my telegram?” he said, beginning the nervous remarks that preceded and followed all his journeys. He had prepared his coming with a message: “Very depressed London like old blotting paper longing for sea sun you.” This wire he had signed Baronne Putbus. (There was no address, so that Bonnie was unable to return a killing answer she would have signed Lysistrata.)

  “I died,” Bonnie said, looking with grave liquid eyes. “I just simply perished.” After the nasal sculptress and her educated vowels, Bonnie’s slight drawl fell gently on his ear. She continued to look at him gaily, without making a move, and he began to feel some unease in the face of so much bright expectancy. He suddenly thought, Good God, has she fallen in love? adding in much smaller print, with me? Accidents of that sort had happened in the past. Now, Wishart’s personality being an object he used with discretion, when he was doubtful, or simply at rest, he became a sort of mirror. Reflected in this mirror, Bonnie McCarthy saw that she was still pretty and smart. Dear darling Wishart! He also gave back her own air of waiting. Each thought that the other must have received a piece of wonderful news. Wishart was not envious; he knew that the backwash of someone else’s fortune can be very pleasant indeed, and he waited for Bonnie’s good tidings to be revealed. Perhaps she had rented a villa, so that he would not have to stay in a hotel. That would be nice.

  “The hotel isn’t far,” Bonnie said, stirring them into motion at last. “Do you want to walk a little, Wishart? It’s a lovely, lovely day.”

  No villa, then; and if the hotel was nearby, no sense paying a porter. Carrying his suitcase, he followed her through the station and into the sudden heat of the Mediterranean day. Later, he would hate these streets, and the milling, sweating, sunburned crowd; he would hurry past the sour-milk smelling cafés with his hand over his nose. But now, at first sight, Cannes looked as it had sounded when he said the word in London, a composition in clear chalk colors, blue, yellow, white. Everything was intensely shaded or intensely bright, hard and yellow on the streets, or dark as velvet inside the bars. Bonnie seemed to be leading him somewhere. He supposed it had to do with her surprise.

  “I hope you aren’t cross because Florence isn’t here,” Bonnie said. “She was perishing to meet your train, but the poor baby had something in her eye. A grain of sand. She had to go to an oculist to have it taken out. You’ll love seeing her now, Wishart. She’s getting a style, you know? Everyone notices her. Somebody said to me on the beach—a total stranger—somebody said, Your daughter is like a Tanagra.”

  “Of which there are so many fakes.”

  Like many people who are too much concentrated on their own persons, Wishart sometimes believed he was invisible and could not be heard. He did not have a great opinion of his friend’s intelligence, and may have thought that a slight obtuseness also affected her hearing. It was insensitive of her to mention Flor, now, just when Wishart was feeling so well. From the beginning, their friendship had been marred by the existence of Bonnie’s daughter, a spoiled, sulky girl he had vainly tried to admire. He remembered her as a preener and head-tosser—that long tail of carrot hair! There was a wounding memory of her posturing on a beach and looking as though she had bitten a lemon every time Wishart opened his mouth. She had a jerky, resentful way of speaking and a detestable American voice. Wishart was an amusing mimic, and would have sacrificed any personality save his own for the sake of a story. Re-created by Wishart, Bonnie emerged sounding like Zasu Pitts. “And the daughter,” he would say. “When she parts those perfect lips to speak. Oh!” And he would close his eyes in remembered pain. “But then she is perfect. Why should Aphrodite utter?” This way of going on was one of his few errors. He was not sure of his ground, had it all at second hand. Even as a pose it was out of date.

  “There are literally millions of men chasing Flor,” Bonnie said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Every time we go to the beach or the casino . . .”

  He realized with boredom—boredom that was like having a dry biscuit stuffed in one’s mouth—that they were going to talk about Venus-Flor. “She worships me,” Bonnie used to tell him. “That girl simply worships me.” But as far as Wishart could tell, it had always been Flor on the altar with Mama at her feet.

  “I’m surprised she hasn’t offered you a son-in-law,” he said, knowing that this praise of Flor was leading up to a complaint. “But I suppose she is still too young.”

  “Oh, she isn’t,” Bonnie cried, standing still. “Wishart, that girl is twenty-four. I don’t know what men want from women now. I don’t even know what Flor wants. We’ve been here since the tenth of June, and do you know what she’s picked up? A teeny little fellow from Turkey. I swear, he’s not five three. When we go out, the three of us, I could die. I don’t understand it, why she only likes the wrong kind. Only likes, did I say? I should have said only attracts. They’re awful. They don’t even propose. She hasn’t even got the satisfaction of turning them down. I don’t understand it and that’s all I can say. Why, I had literally hundreds of proposals, and not from little Turkeys. I stuck to my own kind.”

  He wanted to say, Yes, but you were among your own kind. The girl is a floater, like me. He sensed that Bonnie’s disappointment in what she called her own kind had affected her desires for Flor. Her own kind had betrayed her; she had told him so. That was why she lived in Europe. Outside her own kind was a vast population of men in suspenders standing up to carve the Sunday roast. That took care of Americans. They walked on, slowly. A store window they passed revealed the drawn, dried expression that added years to Wishart’s age but removed him from competition and torment. He found time to admire the image, and was further comforted by Bonnie’s next, astonishing words:

  “Someone like you, Wishart, would be good for Flor. I mean someone older, a person I can trust. You know what I mean, an Englishman who’s been in America, who’s had the best of both.”

  He knew that she could not be proposing him as a husband for Florence, but he could have loved her forever for the confirmation of the gentleman he had glimpsed in the window, the sardonic Englishman in America, the awfully decent American in England. He slipped his hand under her elbow; it was almost a caress. They reached the Croisette, crossed over to the sea side, and Bonnie put up her parasol. Wishart’s ballooning good humor hung suspended as he looked down at the beaches, the larvae bodies, the rows of chairs. Every beach carried its own social stamp, as distinct as the strings of greasy flags, the raked, pullulating sand, the squalid little bar that marked the so-called students’ beach, and the mauve and yellow awnings, the plastic mattresses of the beach that was a point of reunion for Parisian homosexuals. Wishart’s gaze, uninterested, was about to slide over this beach when Bonnie arrested him by saying, “This is where we bathe, Wishart, dear.” He turned his head so suddenly that her parasol hit him in the eye, which made him think of her falsehood about Flor and the grain of sand. He looked with real suspicion now at the sand, probably treacherous with broken bottles, and at the sea, which, though blue and sparkling, was probably full of germs. Even the sky was violated: across the face of it an airplane was writing the name of a drink.

  Bonnie has fallen into that one, he thought: Queen Bee of a pansy court.

  “Oh, my sweet heaven,” Bonnie said, unaware of Wishart’s busy brain. She stood still, clutching Wishart by the arm, and said it again: “Sweet heaven. Well, there she is. There’s Flor. But that’s not the Turk from Turkey. Now, Wishart, her mother is to have a treat. She’s got a new one. Oh my sweet heaven Wishart where does she find them?”

  “I expect she meets them in trains.”

  From that distance he could admire Bonnie’s girl, thin and motionless, with brown skin and dark red hair. She leaned on the low wall, looking down at the sea, braced on her arms, as tense as if this decision over a beach was to decide the course of her life.

  “She does have extraordinary coloring,” he said, as generously as he could.

  “She gets it from me,” said Bonnie, sh
ortly, as if she had never noticed her own hair was brown.

  The man with Florence was stocky and dark. He wore sneakers, tartan swimming trunks of ample cut, a gold waterproof watch, a gold medal on a chain, and a Swedish university cap some sizes too small. He carried a net bag full of diving equipment. His chest was bare.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Bonnie said. “I just don’t know.”

  By a common silent decision the two rejected the beach and turned and came toward Bonnie. They gave an impression as harsh and unpoetical as the day. The sun had burned all expression from their faces, smooth brown masks in which their eyes, his brown, hers green, shone like colored glass. Even though he had never dared allow himself close relations, Wishart was aware of their existence to a high degree. He could detect an intimate situation from a glance, or a quality of silence. It was one more of his gifts, but he could have been happier without it. Pushed by forces he had not summoned or invented, he had at these moments a victim’s face—puzzled, wounded, bloodless, coarse. The gap between the two couples closed. Bonnie had taken on a dreamy, vacant air; she was not planning to help.

  “This is Bob Harris,” Florence said. “He’s from New York.”

  “I guessed that,” Bonnie said.

  It was plain to Wishart that the new man, now sincerely shaking hands all around, had no idea that Mrs. McCarthy might want to demolish him. Perhaps it seemed suitable, almost proper, that he should meet Flor’s mother now. Wishart’s anguished guess had been in order: after days of what had seemed to Bob interminable pursuit, Florence had come to his room. He stayed in one of the sugary palaces on the Croisette: the room was too noisy, too bright, and it was Flor, in the end, who had seemed most at ease, adjusting the blind so that slats of shade covered the walls, placing her clothes neatly on a chair. She seemed to him exclusive, a prize, even though the evidence was that they were both summer rats. He had met her in a café one afternoon. He saw his own shadow on her table and himself, furtive, ratlike, looking for trouble. But he was already forgetting this, and his slight disappointment in her, and in the untender afternoon. He was forming an evasive figure who was only partly Flor; he remembered a half-darkened room and a secret relation on another level of the day. He noticed that Flor kissed her mother anxiously, as if they had been parted for days, or as though he had taken Flor to another country. The affection between the two women pleased him. His own mother, having died, had elevated the notion of motherhood. He liked people who got on with their parents and suspected those who did not.