A Fairly Good Time

by Mavis Gallant

  George kept the bead as if he had already known, when he was seven, that he was a sort of coward, and needed tokens in his hand. Soon after he had written the final, classic letter to Barbara he lost the bead. He put his hand in his pocket and the bead was gone. What remained was his habit of clutching air. He was still a coward, and too polite.

  George’s parents had followed the romance with Barbara first with indulgence and then with alarm. Now they could smile: George was not going to ruin his life with that girl. He thought they should have known better; he would never ruin his life over anybody. He had been accustomed for so many years to Barbara, to writing or telling her nearly everything, that it was to Barbara, now, he confided that his parents had got it wrong, and his mother had betrayed him to Aunt Bonnie. Then his eyes met the eyes of a girl coming toward them. The girl emerged in the most poetic way imaginable, out of the Paris night. That was the way he wanted something to happen; that was the thing he was ready for now. The girl held his gaze until she was level with the three of them and then she glanced away. She was fair, with high cheekbones, and wore a tight gray skirt and a suede coat.

  “Nursemaid,” said Aunt Bonnie into the night. “Millions of them come from Scandinavia every year. Warm little loves. They are supposed to be learning French.”

  She must always have been like that, a small bony cat waiting to jump. He decided to remember, in case it should ever be of any importance, that he had seen this girl on the Quai Anatole France. Aunt Bonnie moved with quick hopping steps, like a bird. She seemed to be enjoying the walk. She had always been the ailing one, but she had survived, and here she was, bobbing along, wound like a vine on the arms of two men, enjoying the night. The quai was quiet with the silence of a country road. Then they reached the Pont de la Concorde and the silence came to an end. A river of cars faster than the Seine ran past them and he saw at the other end of the bridge the lights of the Place de la Concorde strung unevenly, haunting and moving as the memory of lights across a lake, and the obelisk like a great lighted mast. “It’s wonderful,” he said dutifully. “But it sort of isn’t a city.” The answer, which should have come from Harris, was Aunt Bonnie’s. She said as if it were wrenched from the heart: “New York is the only city.” Her voice then resumed an artificial quaver; she had forgotten she was supposed to be an old lady. Now she remembered again. “If there was one thing my Florence hated, it was the way they light up all the monuments and things for the tourists. She said it made Paris seem like an old prostitute. She never would look. As a matter of fact, she hardly ever went out at night.”

  Half an hour earlier she had said that Florence loved the Paris night; but contradiction seemed to be typical of his aunt. She had told George that Harris was generous and kind, whereas in letters home she complained he was tight and thoughtless and had never given them—the women—a car. George couldn’t very well ask, Are you stingy? even though Harris was there and able to defend himself—unlike Flor, who was past choosing. Now he became physically aware of the absence of Flor. He wondered where she was: in a sort of convalescent place, he supposed, hospital disguised as hotel where there was a significance, unknown to him, in the sound of a tap turned on or the color blue. Wondering where she was really he suspected she was in no special place. She was not anywhere. It would be nice to believe she was happier, calmer, more loving than ever, but he thought she was not anywhere.

  The minute George went too far in his speculations he lost hold of the real situation. He could see three people walking, stopping for traffic, moving on; he could hear their voices, but he could not understand any of the things they said. That was normal; this had been a terrible day: there had been the journey from London, the transition, the idea of coming to Paris (“all unsuspecting . . .” as he kept telling himself), and then the telephone ringing in an unseen room, and Bob’s voice saying, “Your aunt isn’t here.” His aunt’s hand lay light now on George’s arm, but her left hand clutched her son-in-law’s sleeve, and he stroked her arm, muttering in his absent-minded way, “Don’t worry”—the steady answer for keeping his female family quiet. They seemed to be joined for life, and, before thinking and deciding not to say it, George said, “God, I feel sorry for you, Bob,” which would go down as another of the famous George remarks.

  “You don’t have to be,” said Bob after a moment. “I knew when I met Flor there weren’t two like her. She was never too much of anything. She had just enough. Just enough looks, just enough brains, just enough of what Bonnie here would call breeding.” Aunt Bonnie began to flash in all directions and even George thought his cousin and the whole family with her were being undervalued. He wanted to say, Flor isn’t queer from our side; as though Bob had anything to do with that! Well, Bob was being cool and objective now, but he hadn’t behaved that way two years ago, on his honeymoon, because George had met him and he had seen and he remembered. This was probably a way of not hurting himself more than he could help, this distant “just enough,” but George knew. Presently he realized that what Bob had said bore no relation to George’s remark. It was simply a statement given into the night.

  “What Flor had more of I think was a kind of purity,” said Aunt Bonnie sadly. “You know, Georgie, when she was little, she never asked me one embarrassing question, you know what I mean, and as she wasn’t the kind of girl other little girls would tell anything nasty to, well, she was spared all the shocks. She was fortunate,” said Aunt Bonnie, “she grew up without any shocks. I don’t suppose you did,” she said, plucking at George’s sleeve. Bob was abandoned. Georgie was her boy now. He saw that he was being made to change roles with Flor, and that George, who had grown up safely at home, over-loved and overspoiled, was to be fitted out as his cousin—parents divorced, brought up just anywhere, breaking years of silence to send her father letters of abuse, quarreling in public with her mother and having public remorse. They were creating an unmarred Florence, and through her a spotless Bonnie; no one was to be blamed for anything. “I wouldn’t have wanted a son,” Aunt Bonnie said. “Your daughter’s your daughter all your life. You know what your mother wrote me last spring, Georgie? She wrote, ‘It’s hard to understand it but he’ll soon be finished with us.’ And you were what, eighteen? Why, Flor at eighteen was like a little baby. She was never finished with me.”

  George thought, She is now.

  Of course, he had said it. This time his reaction over the blunder was against the others. He was sick of his mistakes. He was sick of Aunt Bonnie and sick of Flor. If he had still owned the bead he would have got rid of it now. He would have reached out his hand and left it on the low wall beside the quai. He was sick of his aunt and he didn’t like her. She was silly and mischievous and he didn’t like her at all. It was all wrong, because she was in trouble now and he was part of the family; but there was no justice in liking and not liking people. He loved his parents, but here he was in Paris, without them. What his mother had said in the letter was true: he would soon be finished. He had loved Barbara but when he went to college he shook her off—couldn’t shake her off fast enough. Hate might be easier than love, but he had never hated anybody and as far as he knew only one person had ever hated him, and that was Flor. He had seen it when he was seven and she was fourteen, and it was all the way she had turned her head and let him see her eyes. Perhaps she hated him because he was smug and fat and his parents adored him; or perhaps he was reading too much into that memory and she had behaved the way an impatient girl of fourteen might be with any small cousin who was a pest and a brat. His vanity was crucially engaged, for it was hard to swallow, even now, that, twelve years ago, Flor had hated Georgie Fairlie, whom everyone was supposed to love.

  Aunt Bonnie brought him down to earth. It was one of her switches from nonsense to truth. Her voice would alter at such times and would become hard, practical, quite funny, a little bit hoarse, as if she were the sort of woman who might call a waitress “dear.” She had levels of voice for her levels of truth. Now she dropped into reality a
nd her voice hardened and fell. She seemed closer to George, and he had the feeling of walking with someone he knew, not watching three unknown people pacing into the foreign night. “You know, Georgie,” said his aunt, turning to him, laughing like a girl, “one time Flor got herself mixed up with a fellow from Egypt. He said he had been something or other once, or his father had been. I never knew a girl like her for getting in with people who had been something but weren’t now. He said that when all the troubles in the Middle East were over he would take Flor to Egypt and he would show her the nightclub where King Farouk used to go and where he used to go himself when he was a young bachelor. I may say he wasn’t a bachelor any more but that was another of Flor’s specialities, she always met them too late in more ways than one. Flor said what happens in this nightclub, and he said, oh you see such lovely girls. In this club you see toutes les Miss de l’Europe. Now, to Flor une Miss was a governess, but it turned out he didn’t mean that. He meant Miss Oslo, Miss Vichy Water, Miss Baden-Baden. That was what he wanted to show my Flor, Georgie, toutes les Miss de l’Europe.”

  George laughed and then thought of Harris and stopped. They seemed to have been walking all night, halting, waiting for green lights, walking again. Harris was their guide. George was ashamed to look at him after Aunt Bonnie’s story, but when they were on the Pont de l’Alma, obeying Aunt Bonnie’s order to stop and see how beautiful the lighted bridges were, Bob leaned forward a little so that George could see his profile without seeming to stare. He was not the sleek, eager young man he remembered from the wedding trip, two years before, but someone soft and patient with the empty profile of the blind. He heard Harris say, “I used to wish we could be simple, but she couldn’t be simple with the life she’s had.” The Seine was moving faster; the reflection of bridges cracked and shook. Bonnie took no notice of this plain provocation on the part of Bob and George guessed she hadn’t heard: she had, though, for, choosing her moment, she said in an invalid’s voice, “I can’t ever tell you how sweet Florence was, George. Sweet and simple. And she was a high-spirited attractive girl. She could have had any one of a dozen tremendous men. A man tried to drown himself over Flor when she was only sixteen. Up there . . .” and she raised George’s arm with her own to point back the way they had come.

  “Don’t worry,” said Flor’s husband soothingly. “Don’t worry about a thing.” He got his little group moving again and they went on. They were crossing into a different part of the city and Bob seemed rekindled with every step. This was his country: shops, nightclubs, well-dressed girls. He was emerging from the role that had been forced on him; he left off being soft and patient, neutral and blind. It had been their fault. They had excluded him. After all, he was the husband. George wanted to tell him, You know about Aunt Bonnie; it’s only because I’m family, I use family words, I’m home. How could he explain that when she had said, “You’re a real Fairlie,” it left out Bob but took in Flor? Or what a comfort it was now, on the Pont de l’Alma, when everything said was wrong or hurting, to know that his features were armor and his behavior a shield? He tried to remember Flor, so as to place her in the family ranks; but her face kept avoiding him, like the girl seen that night and already lost. He supposed Flor was pretty; people said so. He forgot that he had once said so too. Now he thought, She had too much McCarthy in her, her eyes were too green. Then the face turned abruptly toward him and he could see her eyes, her mouth, and the part of her hair. He remembered Flor being very pretty, and proud, and he remembered her lifting her thick hair with her hands and looking around—as George’s mother said, “knowing it.” She couldn’t help knowing; she probably looked in mirrors. “Flor was all Fairlie,” Aunt Bonnie had said during dinner, as though Florence were dead. If she went on like that, in no time she would believe, and make George agree, that her daughter’s hair was blond, her eyes blue. Flor was not anywhere now, so perhaps it didn’t matter. Perhaps it was courtesy to accept the mother’s mistakes. But he was stubborn and he knew that his isolated memories of Flor were right and Aunt Bonnie’s fantasies wrong. He knew that Flor had red hair and a cold bad temper and perhaps didn’t, or couldn’t, care much for anything outside the span of the necklace. Bob, encased in silence and false calm, knew even more; but it was better not to explore that country. “I thought about Flor,” said George, meaning that he had thought about her all the time, and it was almost true, but nobody heard him. They were skirting the Place de l’Alma and starting up the Avenue Montaigne and Bob was coming to life and Aunt Bonnie diminishing, going down. George sounded like his aunt, inconsequential. When the three separated that night, Flor would be lost. Their conversation and their thoughts were the last of the old Flor. If she was cured, she would be different. He was sure of that.

  “You two boys have got to go back for the car,” Aunt Bonnie said. “George, you’ve been a real comfort.”

  Bob said softly, “I’m glad you came.”

  They meant it. They would have been glad of anything. They were standing still on a quiet, dark street. This was where Bob and Aunt Bonnie lived. He recognized the double doors leading into the courtyard. He had come there that afternoon, looking for them. “Don’t come up,” Aunt Bonnie said. “I can get up and into the apartment by myself. I can get out of my clothes and into my bed without any help, and that’s all I’m going to do. I’m going to do less and less now. Less and less.”

  Bob said, “Don’t worry, you’ll last longer than any of us.” He sounded kind.

  “Did the walk help you, George?” said Aunt Bonnie, before turning away.

  “Help me?”

  “I thought you’d had too much to drink, dear. I thought the night air would do you good. That’s why I made us all walk.” Suddenly she roared with laughter and said, “I must say, I used to adore drunks, I mean witty drunks. I must have, because I married one. Good gracious, when I think of Stanley holding forth, sometimes on the chair and sometimes under it . . .” She kissed George and she went in behind the double doors. George and Harris were alone. George wasn’t certain how to behave. He might have said, I’m not drunk, you know, but he was afraid that Bob might answer, Don’t worry. George was visiting Paris and Bob was forced to entertain him; it amounted to that. The whole family rose up saying, This man is in hell, be considerate, be decent. There was a lesser but distinct theme: He had no business marrying her. Keep him in his place. George ignored the whisper but he had heard it all the same. It seemed to him that the only atonement he could make was to give Florence back to her husband; to hand her back. Harris gave him an opportunity. They walked back to the Avenue Montaigne and stood on the curb. Harris was watching out for taxis. Suddenly he said, “They might let you see Flor. I could ask. She might recognize you. It would be a good thing. You were pretty close, weren’t you?”

  This was George’s chance and he said the most considerate thing he could think of, which was: “To tell the truth, I hardly knew her. I think in my whole life I only saw my cousin six times.”

  Handing her back, he renounced all claim to her. She was outside the family. Harris seemed unaware of the magnitude of the stroke. He put up his hand for a cab, which drew up, and they got in. George was silent. Something had gone wrong. They rolled back the way they had walked and on the bridge George had an authentic hallucination. He saw Aunt Bonnie and Flor and the girl on the Quai Anatole France as one person. She was a changeable figure, now menacing, now dear; a minute later behaving like a queen in exile, plaintive and haughty, eccentric by birth, unaware, or not caring, that the others were laughing behind their hands.

 

 

 
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