The Cost of Living

by Mavis Gallant

  A moment later, in the dark, he heard his wife’s voice, so softly that he was not certain she had spoken at all.

  “I said,” Marian repeated, “is he coming too?”

  “Who?” said Charles, thinking, for a second, that she was talking in her sleep.

  “The party of the second part,” said his wife. “Young Lochinvar. The boy with the good family and the good school.”

  “No,” said Charles. “Why should he?”

  “I thought not,” said Marian. “I suppose she went back to school all alone, too?”

  “I suppose so,” said Charles, perplexed. “She cut her hair off,” he said, suddenly remembering this. “With a pair of nail scissors, I think.”

  “Oh?” said Marian. “Well, that isn’t too serious. It’ll grow. I’ll show her how to fix it. That, at least, I can do for her.” Her voice dropped and he wondered if she could possibly be crying. She was silent and a few moments later she said quietly: “God, I don’t like them.”

  “Who?” said Charles.

  “Men,” his wife said. It was quite unlike Marian to be dramatic: he wondered if the shock of the news had unhinged her, and if she were planning to talk like this, off and on, all night.

  “It’s the first inkling I’ve had that you hated men,” he said, smiling in the dark.

  Marian stirred in her bed. “I don’t hate them,” she said. “If I hated men, I’d probably hate women, too. I don’t like them. It’s quite different.”

  “I don’t see the difference,” said Charles, “but it doesn’t matter.” He sat up and switched on the light over his bed. His wife was crying. She had pulled the sheet up over her face and was drying her eyes on it.

  “You mean,” said Charles, “that you hate men because of this boy, this…” He stopped, realizing he must not undersell his daughter.

  “Weak, frightened, lying…” said Marian. “Thieves and rascals.” She sat up and, groping in the pocket of her dressing gown, found a handkerchief. “Thieves,” she said. She blew her nose. “And never any courage, not a scrap. They can’t own up. They can’t be trusted. They can’t face things. Not at that age. Not at any age.”

  “I think it’s going a little far to say you can’t trust any man, at any age,” said Charles.

  “I don’t know any,” said his wife.

  “Well,” he said, “there’s me, for instance.” When she did not reply, he said: “Well, it’s a fine time to find out you don’t trust me.”

  “The question isn’t whether I do or not,” said Marian. “I have to trust you. I mean, I either live with you, and keep the thing on the tracks, or I don’t. So then, of course, I have to trust you.”

  “It’s not good enough,” said Charles. “You should trust me out of conviction, not because you think you have to.”

  “All right,” said Marian.

  “No,” he insisted. “It’s not good enough. Say you trust me.”

  “All right,” said Marian. “I trust you. Don’t put the light out. I have to get some ice for my eyes. I’m working in the morning.”

  “I’ll get it,” Charles said quickly, glad to end the conversation. One couldn’t blame her if she sounded a little unreasonable, he thought. It would be a shock for any mother. He put the ice cubes in a bowl and carried them back through the dark apartment to their bedroom.

  Marian had stopped crying. “Put them in that gadget over there,” she said. “There, next to the lamp. That’s it.” She lay back again and Charles placed the mask of ice cubes across her eyes.

  “You see,” he said, “men are some use. Shall I get you anything else?”

  She shook her head, then she said: “You know who used to say that about men, ‘thieves and rascals’? My sister. You wouldn’t remember her. She didn’t come to our wedding. She didn’t want me to marry you. It broke her heart, I think. She went out to the West Coast, and she died before Joyce was born. I didn’t even know she was sick.”

  “Don’t start crying about your sister, for God’s sake,” said Charles. “It’s awfully late, and if you have a job in the morning…” Vaguely, he did recall a sister: a scowling female form that had chaperoned his early meetings with Marian and then disappeared.

  “She brought me up,” said Marian. “She thought I was so pretty. She used to wake me up in the morning, and say, ‘Little pretty one.’ She said it every day. Mother died…And Father was pretty useless. She went everywhere with me. I was seventeen when I started modeling. Father was dead against it. We lived in New Canaan then.”

  “Darling, I know all this,” said Charles. “I just happened to have forgotten about Margaret.”

  “No, listen to this,” said Marian. “You can’t imagine what a beautiful kid I was. No, really you can’t. People used to stare at me on the street. I remember the men, mostly. They still look at me like that, like someone rubbing their dirty hands all over you. Only now it doesn’t frighten me. I was so beautiful that people hated me. Men hate beautiful girls, if they can’t have them.”

  “I don’t know where you picked up that idea,” said Charles. “Everyone likes you. Everyone.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Marian. “My sister was with me all the time. She used to sit and read a book all the while I was working. The men were so scared of her that no one looked at me twice. I never minded. They did the best they could, though: a shove here, a little pat there. Then, the same year, when I was seventeen, I fell in love with a photographer. He was a Dane, or rather, his parents were. I don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he was killed in the war.”

  She was silent for several minutes, and Charles, reaching overhead, put out his light. Then she began again: “We started passing notes, right under Margaret’s nose, like a couple of school kids. I started coming in town without her, afternoons, saying I was shopping or something. I could only manage it afternoons, of course. So we decided to go away together. Up to then, it had all been pretty innocent. We were going to see if we liked each other—he told me that was how it was done in Europe, though I don’t think he’d ever been there—and then we’d get married. We didn’t run very far. We went to Philadelphia.”

  “You’re making this up,” said Charles. “It doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Why?” said Marian. “Because now I don’t run off to Philadelphia with photographers? I’m trying to tell you, I was seventeen.”

  “Do you think that makes it better, or something?” said Charles. “A girl of seventeen…and I met you a year later.”

  “Well, it wasn’t too pleasant, if you’re looking for a moral,” his wife said. “In fact, I was so upset and frightened and unhappy that on the train when we were coming back to New York I said, ‘You needn’t look at me that way. It’s just as sinful for you as it is for me.’ He looked surprised, but he kept looking at me that funny way. Then he told me what they used to call me behind my back: this Lily Girl from New Canaan.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Charles.

  “Margaret met me at the door, when I got out of the taxi,” said Marian. “My father was upstairs, collapsing, or writing me out of his will. She took me in her arms. She kissed me. She said, ‘Little pretty one.’ She looked around and she said, ‘No, I guess he didn’t come with you.’ She put me to bed. She brought me my dinner, on a tray. She brushed my hair, and she said, once, under her breath, ‘Thieves.’ She never mentioned it again. No, not once. Until I said I was going to marry you. Then she called you a thief and a rascal.”

  “She didn’t even know me. Frankly, I think she sounds neurotic.”

  “She was wonderful. And I wasn’t even there when she died.”

  “I don’t see why you’re crying about it now,” said Charles. “If she died before Joyce was even born, that’s seventeen years. I wish you hadn’t told me all this. When I think that a while back you were saying men couldn’t be trusted. I’d certainly tell you…I mean, if something had happened nearly twenty years ago, I’d certainly tell you about it.
As if we weren’t upset enough about Joyce; or do you think this helps?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Marian. “I keep thinking about Margaret, and saying ‘Thieves,’ and bringing my dinner, and dying all by herself. I get it all mixed up with Joyce, being all by herself right now. Joyce sort of looks like her, something about the way she stands, something sturdy. Put on your light, will you? I’ve lost my handkerchief.”

  Charles looked at her critically. “You’ll never be able to work tomorrow,” he said. “Your eyelids are a mess.”

  “I don’t care,” said Marian. “Only I don’t want to look too funny for Joyce. Oh, I want her hair to grow! Don’t you see her, being alone, and cutting it off? Her femininity, because she’s been made ashamed of it, or afraid?”

  “Don’t start on that,” said Charles. “Don’t give her complexes she hasn’t got. It won’t mark her for life. It didn’t mark you. You made a happy marriage. And a career. Everyone respects you.”

  “Oh, I’ll tell her about it,” said Marian. “I should have talked to her before, but she seemed such a kid. I’ll talk to her. I’ll tell her how to live in the world with them as decently as one can.”

  “With who?” said Charles.

  “With all of you,” said his wife.

  Charles turned off his light. “I don’t see where I come into this at all,” he said. He turned over to lie on his side, his sense of injury wrapped around him like an eiderdown. “Try to sleep,” he said. “From the sound of your voice, you’ve given yourself a cold.”

  His wife did not reply. She was overwrought, Charles decided. As for her story, he scarcely knew whether to believe it or not. It’s so plainly out of character, he thought, recalling their blameless courtship. She was never that interested in men, and she thinks all photographers are morons. But then, he thought, she may have made it all up so that I wouldn’t be too hard on Joyce. He wanted to suggest this to Marian, but he was afraid of provoking another scene. He said, kindly: “Good night,” and his wife whispered something back.

  At last he fell asleep, undisturbed, leaving his wife to think and to weep alone in the dark, under her mask of ice cubes.

  1956

  BERNADETTE

  ON THE HUNDRED and twenty-sixth day, Bernadette could no longer pretend not to be sure. She got the calendar out from her bureau drawer—a kitchen calendar, with the Sundays and saints’ days in fat red figures, under a brilliant view of Alps. Across the Alps was the name of a hardware store and its address on the other side of Montreal. From the beginning of October the calendar was smudged and grubby, so often had Bernadette with moistened forefinger counted off the days: thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six…That had been October, the beginning of fear, with the trees in the garden and on the suburban street a blaze of red and yellow. Bernadette had scrubbed floors and washed walls in a frenzy of bending and stretching that alarmed her employers, the kindly, liberal Knights.

  “She’s used to hard work—you can see that, of course,” Robbie Knight had remarked, one Sunday, almost apologizing for the fact that they employed anyone in the house at all. Bernadette had chosen to wash the stairs and woodwork that day, instead of resting. It disturbed the atmosphere of the house, but neither of the Knights knew how to deal with a servant who wanted to work too much. He sat by the window, enjoying the warm October sunlight, trying to get on with the Sunday papers but feeling guilty because his wife was worried about Bernadette.

  “She will keep on working,” Nora said. “I’ve told her to leave that hard work for the char, but she insists. I suppose it’s her way of showing gratitude, because we’ve treated her like a human being instead of a slave. Don’t you agree?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’m so tired,” Nora said. She lay back in her chair with her eyes closed, the picture of total exhaustion. She had broken one of her nails clean across, that morning, helping Bernadette with something Bernadette might easily have done alone. “You’re right about her being used to hard work. She’s probably been working all her life.” Robbie tried not answering this one. “It’s so much the sort of thing I’ve battled,” Nora said.

  He gave up. He let his paper slide to the floor. Compelled to think about his wife’s battles, he found it impossible to concentrate on anything else. Nora’s weapons were kept sharp for two dragons: crooked politics and the Roman Catholic Church. She had battled for birth control, clean milk, vaccination, homes for mothers, homes for old people, homes for cats and dogs. She fought against censorship, and for votes for cloistered nuns, and for the provincial income tax.

  “Good old Nora,” said Robbie absently. Nora accepted this tribute without opening her eyes. Robbie looked at her, at the thin, nervous hand with the broken nail.

  “She’s not exciting, exactly,” he had once told one of his mistresses. “But she’s an awfully good sort, if you know what I mean. I mean, she’s really a good sort. I honestly couldn’t imagine not living with Nora.” The girl to whom this was addressed had instantly burst into tears, but Robbie was used to that. Unreasonable emotional behavior on the part of other women only reinforced his respect for his wife.

  The Knights had been married nearly sixteen years. They considered themselves solidly united. Like many people no longer in love, they cemented their relationship with opinions, pet prejudices, secret meanings, a private vocabulary that enabled them to exchange amused glances over a dinner table and made them feel a shade superior to the world outside the house. Their home held them, and their two daughters, now in boarding school. Private schools were out of line with the Knights’ social beliefs, but in the case of their own children they had judged a private school essential.

  “Selfish, they were,” Robbie liked to explain. “Selfish, like their father.” Here he would laugh a little, and so would his listeners. He was fond of assuming a boyish air of self-deprecation—a manner which, like his boyish nickname, had clung to him since school. “Nora slapped them both in St. Margaret’s, and it cleared up in a year.”

  On three occasions, Nora had discovered Robbie in an affair. Each time, she had faced him bravely and made him discuss it, a process she called “working things out.” Their talks would be formal, at first—a frigid question-and-answer period, with Robbie frightened and almost sick and Nora depressingly unreproachful. For a few nights, she would sleep in another room. She said that this enabled her to think. Thinking all night, she was fresh and ready for talk the next day. She would analyze their marriage, their lives, their childhoods, and their uncommon characters. She would tell Robbie what a Don Juan complex was, and tell him what he was trying to prove. Finally, reconciled, they were able to talk all night, usually in the kitchen, the most neutral room of the house, slowly and congenially sharing a bottle of Scotch. Robbie would begin avoiding his mistress’s telephone calls and at last would write her a letter saying that his marriage had been rocked from top to bottom and that but for the great tolerance shown by his wife they would all of them have been involved in something disagreeable. He and his wife had now arrived at a newer, fuller, truer, richer, deeper understanding. The long affection they held for each other would enable them to start life again on a different basis, the letter would conclude.

  The basic notion of the letter was true. After such upheavals his marriage went swimmingly. He would feel flattened, but not unpleasantly, and it was Nora’s practice to treat him with tolerance and good humor, like an ailing child.

  He looked at the paper lying at his feet and tried to read the review of a film. It was hopeless. Nora’s silence demanded his attention. He got up, kissed her lightly, and started out.

  “Off to work?” said Nora, without opening her eyes.

  “Well, yes,” he said.

  “I’ll keep the house quiet. Would you like your lunch on a tray?”

  “No, I’ll come down.”

  “Just as you like, darling. It’s no trouble.”

  He escaped.

  Robbie was a partner in a firm of consulting engin
eers. He had, at one time, wanted to be a playwright. It was this interest that had, with other things, attracted Nora when they had been at university together. Robbie had been taking a course in writing for the stage—a sideline to his main degree. His family had insisted on engineering; he spoke of defying them, and going to London or New York. Nora had known, even then, that she was a born struggler and fighter. She often wished she had been a man. She believed that to balance this overassertive side of her nature she should marry someone essentially feminine, an artist of some description. At the same time, a burning fear of poverty pushed her in the direction of someone with stability, background, and a profession outside the arts. Both she and Robbie were campus liberals; they met at a gathering that had something to do with the Spanish war—the sort of party where, as Nora later described it, you all sat on the floor and drank beer out of old pickle jars. There had been a homogeneous quality about the group that was quite deceptive; political feeling was a great leveler. For Nora, who came from a poor and an ugly lower-middle-class home, political action was a leg up. It brought her in contact with people she would not otherwise have known. Her snobbishness moved to a different level; she spoke of herself as working-class, which was not strictly true. Robbie, in revolt against his family, who were well-to-do, conservative, and had no idea of the injurious things he said about them behind their backs, was, for want of a gentler expression, slumming around. He drifted into a beer-drinking Left Wing movement, where he was welcomed for his money, his good looks, and the respectable tone he lent the group. His favorite phrase at that time was “of the people.” He mistook Nora for someone of the people, and married her almost before he had discovered his mistake. Nora then did an extraordinary about-face. She reconciled Robbie with his family. She encouraged him to go into his father’s firm. She dampened, ever so gently, the idea of London and New York.