The Cost of Living

by Mavis Gallant

  I have wondered since about that bit of mischief. I suppose Patrick had given Sylvie a role to play, because it was the only way he could control her. She had found out, or he had told, and he had warned her not to hurt Louise. Louise was someone who must be spared. She must never guess that he and Sylvie had been lovers. They thought Louise could never stand up to the truth; they thought no one could bear to be told the truth about anything after a certain age.

  Sylvie, launched in a piece of acting, could not help overloading. “Do you know any other French people?” she said. “Never mind. There’s me.” She flung out her arms suddenly—to the mirror, not to Louise—and cried, “I am your French friend.”

  “She’s got a picture of herself sound asleep, curled up with no shoes on,” said Louise, talking in a new, breathless voice. “It must be the first thing she looks at in the morning when she wakes up. And she seems terribly emotional and generous. I don’t know why, but she gives you the feeling of generosity. I’m sure she does herself a lot of harm.”

  We were in Patrick’s room. Louise poured the daily soup into pottery bowls. I have often tried to imagine how he must have seemed to Louise. I doubt if she could have told you. From the beginning they stood too close; his face was like a painting in which there are three eyes and a double profile. No matter how far she backed off, later on, she never made sense of him. Let me tell what I remember. I remember that it was easy for him to talk, easy for him to say anything, so that I can hear a voice, having ceased to think of a face. He seldom gestured. Only his voice, which was trained, and could never be disguised, told that he did not think he was an ordinary person; he did not believe he was like anyone else in the world, not for a minute. I asked myself a commonplace question: What does she see in him? I should have wondered if she saw him at all. As for me, I saw him twice. I saw him the first time when Louise described the meeting in the consul’s widow’s drawing room, and I understood that the dazzling boy was only that droning voice through the wall. From the time of our grippe, I can see a spiral of orange peel, a water glass with air bubbles on the side of the glass, but I cannot see him. There was the bluish smoke of his Caporal cigarettes, and the shape of Louise, like something seen against the light…None of it is sharp.

  One day I saw Patrick and Sylvie together, and that was plain, and clear, and well remembered. I had gone out in the rain to give a music lesson to a spoiled child, the ward of a doting grandmother. I came up the stairs, and because I heard someone laughing, or because I was feverish and beyond despair, I went into Patrick’s room instead of my own.

  Sylvie was there. She knelt on the floor, wearing her nightdress (the time must have been close to noon), struggling with Patrick for a bottle of French vodka, which tastes of marsh water and smells like eau de cologne. “Louise says mustn’t drink,” said Sylvie, in a babyish voice; “and besides it’s mine.” They stopped their puppy play when they saw me; there was a mock scurry, as if it were Puss who had the governess role instead of Louise. Then I noticed Louise. She sat before the window, reading a novel, taking no notice of her brawling pair. Her face was calm and happy and the lines of moral obligation had disappeared. She said, “Well, Puss,” with our mother’s inflection, and she seemed so young—nineteen or so—that I remembered how Collie had been in love with her once, before going to Malaya to be killed. Sylvie must have been born that year, the year Louise was married. I hadn’t thought of that until now.

  “When Berlioz was living in Italy,” I said, “he heard that Marie Pleyel was going to be married, and so he disguised himself as a lady’s maid and started off for Paris. He intended to assassinate Marie and her mother and perhaps the fiancé as well. But he changed his mind for some reason, and I think he went to Nice.” This story rushed to my lips without reason. Berlioz and Marie Pleyel seemed to me living people, and the facts contemporary gossip. While I was telling it, I remembered they had all of them died. I forgot every word I had ever known of French, and told it in English, which Sylvie could not understand.

  “You ought to be in bed, my pet,” I heard Louise say.

  Sylvie went on with something she had been telling before my arrival. She had an admirer who was a political cartoonist. His cartoons were ferocious, and one imagined him out on the boulevards of Paris doing battle with the police; but he was really a timid man, afraid of cats, and unable to cross most streets without trembling. “He spends thousands of francs,” said Sylvie, sighing. She told how many francs she had seen him spending.

  I said, “Money, money…it does bring happiness.” I wondered if Louise recalled that Berlioz had written this, and that we had quarreled about it once.

  Prone across the bed, leaning on his elbows, Patrick listened to Sylvie with grave attention, and I thought that here was a situation no amount of money could solve; for it must be evident to Louise, unless she were blind and had lost all feeling, that something existed between the two. The lark had stopped singing, but it had not died; it was alive and flying in the room. Sylvie, nibbling now on chocolates stuck to a paper bag, felt that I was staring at her, and turned her head.

  “My room is so cold,” she said humbly, “and I get so lonely, and finally I thought I’d come in to him.”

  “Quite right of you,” I said, as if his time and his room were mine. But Sylvie seemed to think she had been dismissed. She licked the last of the chocolate from the paper, crumpled the bag, threw it at Patrick, and slammed the door. I sat down and leaned my head back and closed my eyes. I heard Patrick saying, “Read this,” and when I looked again, Louise was on the edge of the bed with a letter in her hands. She bent over it. Her hair was like the sun—the real sun, not the sun we saw here.

  “It says that your visa is refused,” she said, in her flat, positive French. “It says that in six months you may apply again.”

  “That’s what I understood. I thought you might understand more.”

  She smoothed the letter with both hands and made up her mind about saying something. She said, “Come to Australia.”

  “What?”

  “Come to Australia. I’ll see that they let you in; I can do that much for you. You can stay with me in Melbourne until you get settled. The house is enormous. It’s too big for one person. The climate would be perfect for you.”

  Think of that courage: she’d have taken him home.

  He looked as if she had said something completely empty of meaning, and then he appeared to understand; it was a splendid piece of mime. “What would I do in Australia? I can hardly talk the language.”

  “I’ve seen people arriving, without money, without English, without anything, and then they do as well as anyone.”

  “They were refugees,” he said. “I’ve got my own country. I’m not a refugee.”

  “You were anxious enough to go to New York.”

  The apple never drops far from the tree; here was our mother all over again, saying something unpleasant but true. My dutiful sister, the good elder girl—I might have helped her then. I might have told her how men were, or what it was like in Paris. But I kept silent, and presently I heard him saying he was going home. He was going to the house in the Dordogne—the house he had shown her in the photograph. She may have been jealous of that house; in her place I should have been. He said that the winter in Paris had been bad for him; there hadn’t been enough work. Next season he would try again.

  “Your mother will be pleased to have you for a bit,” said Louise, accepting it; but I doubt if any of us can accept humiliation so simply. She folded the letter and placed it quietly beside her on the blanket. She said, “I’d better put Puss to bed,” and got to her feet. I don’t believe they had much to say to each other after that. He went away for a week, came back to us for a fortnight, and then disappeared.

  When I was recovering from that second attack of grippe, Louise made me go with her to the Faubourg St. Honoré to look at shops. Neither of us intended buying anything, but Louise thought the outing would do me good. Just as she wa
s convinced invalids wanted soda biscuits, so she believed convalescents found a new purpose in living when they looked at pretty things. We looked at coats and ski boots and sweaters, and we stared at rare editions, and finally, fatigued and stupid, gazed endlessly at the brooches and strings of beads in an antique jewelry store.

  “It can’t be worth such an awful lot,” said Louise, taking an interest in a necklace. The stones—agate, cornelian, red jasper—were rubbed and uneven, like glass that has been polished by waves. The charm of the necklace was in its rough, careless appearance and the warm color of the stones. I put one hand flat against the pane of the counter. When I took it away, I watched the imprint fade. I was accustomed to wanting what I could not have.

  “Do you like it, Puss?” said Louise.

  “Very much.”

  “So do I. It would be perfect for Sylvie.”

  That is all I can tell you: I am not Louise. She came out of the shop with a wrapped parcel in her hand, and said in a matter-of-fact tone that the stones were early-eighteenth-century seals, that the man had been most civil about taking her check, and that the necklace had cost a great deal of money. That was all until we reached the hotel, and then she said, “Puss, will you give it to her? She’ll think it strange, coming from me.”

  “Why won’t she think it just as odd if I give it?” I called, for Louise had simply moved on, leaving me outside Sylvie’s door. I felt cross and foolish. Louise climbed slowly, one hand on the banister. I know now that she went straight upstairs to her room and marked the price of the necklace under “Necessary.” It was not the real price but about a fifth of the truth. She absorbed the balance in the rest of her accounts by cheating heavily for a period of weeks. She charged herself an imaginary thousand francs for a sandwich and two thousand for a bunch of winter daisies, and inflated the cost of living until the cost of the necklace had disappeared.

  I knocked on Sylvie’s door, and heard her scuttling about behind it. “Come in!” she shouted. “Oh, it’s you. I thought it was the horrible Rablis. I can’t let him in when I’m not properly dressed, because…you know.” She had pulled on a pair of slacks and a sweater I recognized as Patrick’s.

  “Louise wants you to have this,” I said.

  She took the box from me and sat down on the bed. She was terrified by this gift. Even the sight of the ribbons and tissue paper alarmed her. I saw that in terms of Sylvie’s world Louise had made a mistake. The present was so extraordinary and it had been delivered in such a roundabout fashion that the girl thought she was being bought.

  “My sister chose it for you on an impulse,” I said. I felt huge and uniformed, like a policeman. “It seems to me a ridiculous present for a girl who hasn’t proper shoes or a decent winter coat, but she thought you’d like it.”

  She lifted the necklace out of its box and held it over her head and let it fall. She was an actress, true enough—Sarah Bernhardt to the life. But then she turned away from me, leaning on her hands, straining forward toward the mirror, and she stopped pretending. I saw on her impudent profile surprise and greed, and we understood, together, at the same moment, what could be had from women like Louise. Sylvie said, “Your sister must be very rich.”

  That jolted me. “Consider the necklace a kind of insurance if you want to,” I said. “You can sell it if you need money. You can give it back when you don’t want it anymore.” That stripped the giving of any intention; she was not obliged to admire Louise, or even be grateful.

  She wore the necklace every day. It hung over her plastic coat, and on top of Patrick’s old sweater. One night she fell up the stairs wearing it, and a piece of jasper broke away. The necklace had a grin to it then, with a cracked tooth. Louise scarcely noticed. Now that she had given the necklace away, she scarcely saw it at all. Giving had altered her perceptions. She walked in her sleep, and part of her character, smothered until now, began to live and breathe in a dream. “I’ve hardly worn it,” I can hear her telling Sylvie. “I bought it for myself, but it doesn’t suit me.” She said it about the tweed skirts, the quilted dressing gown, the stockings, the gloves, all purchased with Sylvie in mind. (She never felt the need to give me anything. She never so much as returned my scarf until she went back to Australia, and then it was simply a case of forgetting it, leaving it behind. She also left her trumped-up accounts. Sylvie abandoned her empty bottles and a diary and a dirty petticoat; my sister left my scarf and her false accounts. The stuff of her life is in those figures: “Dentist for S.” “Shoes for S.” “Oil stove for S.” I was touched to find under “Necessary” “Aspirin for Puss.” She had listed against it the price of a five-course meal. The two went together, the giving and the lying.)

  The days drew out a quarter-second at a time. Patrick, who had been away (though not to the house in the Dordogne; he did not tell us where he was), returned to a different climate. Louise and Sylvie had become friends. They were silly and giggly, and had a private language and special jokes. The most unexpected remarks sent them off into fits of laughter. At times they hardly dared meet each other’s eyes. It was maddening for anyone outside the society. I saw that Patrick was intrigued and then annoyed. The day he left (I mean, the day he left forever) he returned the books I’d lent him—Yeats, and the other poets—and he asked me what was happening between those two. I had never known him to be blunt. I gave him an explanation, but it was beside the truth. I could have said, “You don’t need her; you refused Australia; and now you’re going home.” Instead, I told him, “Louise likes looking after people. It doesn’t matter which one of us she looks after, does it? Sylvie isn’t worth less than you or me. She loves the stage as much as you do. She’d starve to pay for her lessons.”

  “But Louise mustn’t take that seriously,” he said. “There are thousands of girls like Sylvie in Paris. They all have natural charm, and they don’t want to work. They imagine there’s no work to acting. Nothing about her acting is real. Everything is copied. Look at the way she holds her arms, and that quick turn of the head. She never stops posing, trying things out; but acting is something else.”

  I took my books from him and put them on my table. I said, “This is between you and Sylvie. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  They were young and ambitious and frightened; and they were French, so that their learned behavior was all smoothness. There was no crevice where an emotion could hold. I was thinking about Louise. It is one thing to go away, but it is terrible to be left.

  I wanted him to go away, or stop telling me about Sylvie and Louise, but he would continue and I had to hear him say, “The difference between Sylvie and me is that I work. I believe in work. Sylvie believes in one thing after the other. Now she believes in Louise, and one day she’ll turn on her.”

  “Why should she turn on her?”

  “Because Louise is good,” he said. This was the only occasion I remember when he had trouble saying what he meant. We stood face to face in my room, with the table and books between us. We had never been as near. Twice in that conversation he slipped from “vous” to “toi,” as if our tribal marks of incompetence gave us a right to intimacy. He stumbled over the words; stammered nearly. “She’s so kind,” he said. “She asks to be hurt.”

  “It’s easy to be kind when you’re an heiress.”

  “Aren’t you?” I stared at him and he said, “Women like Louise make you think they can do anything, solve all your problems. Sylvie believes in magic. She believes in the good fairy, the endless wishes, the bottomless purse. I don’t believe in magic.” He had stopped groping. His actor’s voice was as fluid and persistent as the winter rain. “But Sylvie believes, and one day she’ll turn on Louise and hurt her.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” I said. “You keep talking about hurting and being hurt. What do you think my life is like? It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “Sylvie would leave Louise alone if you told her to,” he said. “She isn’t a clinger. She’s a tough little thing. She’s had to be.�
�� There was the faintest coloration of class difference in his voice. I remembered that Louise had met him in a drawing room, even though he lived here, in the hotel, with Sylvie and me.

  I said, “It’s not my affair.”

  “Sylvie is good,” he said suddenly. That was all. He said “Sylvie,” but he must have meant “Louise.”

  He left alone and went to the station alone. I was the only one to watch him go. Sylvie was out and Louise upstairs in her room. Unless I have dreamed it, it was then he told me he was ill. He was not going home after all but to a place in the mountains—near Grenoble, I think he said. That was why he had been away for a week; that was where he’d been. As he said those words, water rushed between us and we stood on opposite shores. He was sick, but I was well. We were both incompetent, but I was well. And I smiled and shook hands with him, and said goodbye.

  In a book or a film one of us would have gone with him as far as the station. If he had disappeared in a country as big as Russia, one of us would have learned where he was. But he didn’t disappear; he went to a town a few hundred miles distant and we never saw him again. I remember the rain on the skylight over the stairs. Louise may have looked out of her window; I would rather not guess. She may have wanted to come down at the last minute; but he had refused Australia, which meant he had refused her, and so she kept away.

  Later on that day, she did something foolish: she stood in the passage and watched as his room was turned out by a maid. I managed to get her to sit on a chair. That was where Sylvie found her. Sylvie had come in from the street. Rain stood on her hair in perfect drops. She knelt beside Louise and began chafing her hands. “Tell me what it is,” she said softly, looking up into her face. “How do you feel? What is it like? It must be something quite real.”

  “Of course it’s real,” I said heartily. “Come on, old girl.”

  Louise was clinging to Sylvie: she barely listened to me. “I feel as though I had no more blood,” she said.