The Cost of Living

by Mavis Gallant

  Because of the strike, none of the traffic signals were working. Cars came from every direction. It was when they were trying to cross the main street of the town, the highway into Paris, that some of the group began to stamp in rhythm—three beats and three more—O. A. S. as-sas-sins. Everyone knew what three-three stood for, even without the syllables.

  Now Stefan felt tricked and stubborn, as his brother might have done during the oath-of-allegiance ceremony eighteen years before. “Is Germany with us?” his comrades had asked. They knew he couldn’t stay behind; but he hadn’t come out on the streets to stamp and shout and risk his career for something that had nothing to do with him. Saying nothing, he thought he was saying everything. If the police came now, he would not even have time to explain, “I am a guest of France and deeply regret…” Then he noticed he was not the only one who was silent. Some were shouting and some were still, but no one knew what anyone thought, or what the silence contained. His own father had never known what Günther believed or why he behaved in a certain way.

  When they turned up the hill to the laboratory, another group of marchers suddenly came around a corner and upon them. Both groups stopped and the slogans died in the rain. The men and women looked at each other. What had the others been shouting? Were they shouting and tramping the three beats and three, which made them friends, or had they been marching to the three-and-two that were Al-gé-rie Fran-çaise? Neither group had heard the other. Were they mortal enemies or close friends? At any rate, they weren’t either of them the police. They stared as long as the silent minute in the city hall. Nothing happened; the groups passed without trouble. They mingled, parted, re-formed their lines, one going up the hill to the laboratory, the other along perhaps to the lycée; they had the look of teachers. No one stamped or called now. They were men and women in the rain. They might have been coming from anywhere—a cinema, or a funeral.

  Foreign papers exaggerate; Stefan’s mother sent him such anxious letters from Berlin! He would write tonight and tell her not to worry. Nothing was as serious as it seemed from the outside. Moreover, his superiors thought highly of him, and his work was going well.

  1962

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON

  ON A WET February afternoon in the eighth winter of the Algerian war, two young Algerians sat at the window table of a café behind Montparnasse station. Between them, facing the quiet street, was a European girl. The men were dressed alike in the dark suits and maroon ties they wore once a week, on Sunday. Their leather jackets lay on the fourth chair. The girl was also dressed for an important day. Her taffeta dress and crocheted collar were new; the coat with its matching taffeta lining looked home-sewn. She had thrown back the coat so that the lining could be seen, but held the skirt around her knees. She was an innocent from an inland place—Switzerland, Austria perhaps. The slight thickness of her throat above the crocheted collar might have been the start of a goiter. She turned a gentle, stupid face to each of the men in turn, trying to find a common language. Presently one of the men stood up and the girl, without his help, pulled on her coat. These two left the café together. The abandoned North African sat passively with three empty coffee cups and a heaped ashtray before him. He had either been told to wait or had nothing better to do. The street lamps went on. The rain turned to snow.

  Watching the three people in the café across the street had kept Veronica Baines occupied much of the afternoon. Like the Algerian sitting alone, she had nothing more interesting to do. She left the window to start a phonograph record over again. She looked for matches, and lit a Gitane cigarette. It was late in the day, but she wore a dressing gown that was much too large and that did not belong to her, and last summer’s sandals. Three plastic curlers along her brow held the locks that, released, would become a bouffant fringe. Her hair, which was light brown, straight, and recently washed, hung to her shoulders. She was nineteen, and a Londoner, and had lived in Paris about a year. She stood pushing back the curtain with one shoulder, a hand flat on the pane. She seldom read the boring part of newspapers, but she knew there was, or there had been, a curfew for North Africans. She left the window for a moment, and when she came back she was not surprised to find the second Algerian gone.

  She wanted to say something about the scene to the two men in the room behind her. Surely it meant something—the Algerian boys and the ignorant girl? She held still. One of the men in the room was Tunisian and very touchy. He watched for signs of prejudice. When he thought he saw them, he was pleased and cold. He could be rude when he wanted to be; he had been educated in Paris and was schooled in the cold attack.

  Jim Bertrand, whose flat this was, and Ahmed had not stopped talking about politics since lunch. Their talk was a wall. It shut out young girls and girlish questions. For instance, Veronica could have asked if there was a curfew, and if it applied to Ahmed as well as the nameless and faceless North Africans you saw selling flowers or digging up the streets; but Ahmed might consider it a racial question. She never knew just where he drew his own personal line.

  “I am not interested in theories,” she had taught herself to say, for fear of being invaded by something other than a dream. But she was not certain what she meant, and not sure that it was true.

  Jim turned on a light. The brief afternoon became, abruptly, a winter night. The window was a black mirror. She saw how the room must appear to anyone watching from across the street. But no one peeped at them. Up and down the street, persiennes were latched, curtains tightly drawn. The shops were a line of iron shutters broken only by the Arab café, from which spilled a brownish and hideous light. The curb was lined with cars; Paris was like a garage. Shivering at the cold, and the dead cold of the lined-up automobiles, she turned to the room. She imagined a garden filled with gardenias and a striped umbrella. Veronica was a London girl. At first her dreams had been of Paris, but now they were about a south she had not yet seen.

  She moved across the room, scuffling her old sandals, dressed in Jim’s dressing gown. She dropped her cigarette on the marble hearth, stepped on it, and kicked it under the gas heater in the fireplace. Then she knelt and lifted the arm of the record-player on the floor, starting again the Bach concerto she had been playing most of the day. Now she read the name of it for the first time: “Concerto Italien en Fa Majeur bwv 971.” She had played it until it was nothing more than a mosquito to the ear, and now that she was nearly through with it, about to discard it for something newer, she wanted to know what it had been called. Still kneeling, leaning on her fingertips, she reread the front page of a Sunday paper. Is Princess Paola sorry she has married a Belgian and has to live so far north? Deeply interested, Veronica examined the Princess’s face, trying to read contentment or regret. Princess Paola, Farah of Iran, Grace of Monaco, and Princess Margaret were the objects of Veronica’s solemn attention. Their beauty, their position, their attentive husbands should have been enough. According to France Dimanche, anonymous letters might still come in with the morning post. Their confidences went astray. None of them could say “Pass the salt” without wondering how far it would go.

  When Jim and Ahmed talked on Sunday afternoon, Veronica was a shadow. If Princess Paola herself had lifted the coffeepot from the table between them, they would have taken no more notice than they now did of her. She picked up the empty pot and carried it to the kitchen. She saw herself in the looking glass over the sink: curlers, bathrobe—what a sight! Behind her was the music, the gas heater roaring away, and the drone of the men’s talk.

  Everything Jim had to say was eager and sounded as if it must be truthful. “Yes, I know,” he would begin, “but look.” He was too eager; he stammered. His Tunisian friend took over the idea, stated it, and demolished it. Ahmed was Paris-trained; he could be explicit about anything. He made sense.

  “Sense out of hot air,” said Veronica in the kitchen. “Perfect sense out of perfect hot air.”

  She took the coffeepot apart and knocked the wet grounds into the rest of the rubbish in the sink
. She ran cold water over the pot and rinsed and filled it again; then she sat down on the low stepladder that was the only seat in the kitchen and ground new coffee, holding the grinder between her knees. At lunch the men had dragged chairs into the kitchen and stopped talking politics. But the instant the meal was finished they wanted her away; she sensed it. If only she could be dismissed, turned out to prowl like a kitten, even in the rain! But she lived here, with Jim; he had brought her here in November, four months ago, and she had no other home.

  “I’m too young to remember,” she heard Ahmed say, “and you weren’t in Europe.”

  The coffeepot was Italian and composed of four aluminum parts that looked as if they never would fit one inside the other. Jim had written instructions for her, and tacked the instructions above the stove, but she was as frightened by the four strange shapes as she had been at the start. Somehow she got them together and set the pot on the gas flame. She put it on upside down, which was the right way. When the water began to boil, you turned the pot right way up, and the boiling water dripped through the coffee. You knew when the water was boiling because a thread of steam emerged from the upside-down spout. That was the most important moment.

  Afraid of missing the moment, the girl leaned on the edge of the table, which was crowded with luncheon dishes; pushed together, behind her, were the remains of the rice-and-tomato, the bones and fat of the mutton chops. The Camembert dried in the kitchen air; the bread was already stale. She did not take her eyes from the spout of the coffeepot. She might have been dreaming of love.

  “You still haven’t answered me,” said Jim in the next room. “Will Algeria go Communist? Yes or no.”

  “Tunisia didn’t.”

  “You had different leaders.”

  “The Algerians are religious—the opposite of materialists.”

  “They could use a little materialism in Algeria,” said Jim. “I’ve never been there, but you’ve only got to read. I’ve got a book here…”

  Those two could talk poverty the whole day and never weary. They thought they knew what it was. Jim had never taken her to a decent restaurant—not even at the beginning, when he was courting her. He looked at the menu posted outside the door and if the prices seemed more than he thought simple working-class couples could pay he turned away. He wanted everyone in the world to have enough to eat, but he did not want them to enjoy what they were eating—that was how it seemed to Veronica. Ahmed lived in a cold room on the sixth floor of an old building, but he needn’t have. His father was a fashionable doctor in Tunis. Ahmed said there was no difference between one North African and another, between Ahmed talking of sacrifice and the nameless flower seller whose existence was a sacrifice—that is to say, whose life appears to have no meaning; whose faith makes it possible; of whom one thinks he might as well be dead. All Veronica knew was that Ahmed’s father was better off than her father had ever been. “I’m going to be an important personality,” she had said to herself at the age of seventeen or so. Soon after, she ran away and came to Paris; someone got a job for her in a photographer’s studio—a tidying-up sort of job, and not modeling, as she had hoped. In the office next to the studio, a drawer was open. She saw 100 Nouveaux Francs, a clean bill, on which the face of young Napoleon dared her, said, “Take it.” She bought a pair of summer shoes for seventy francs and spent the rest on silly presents for friends. Walking in the shoes, she was new. She would never be the same unimportant Veronica again. The shoes were beige linen, and when she wore them in the rain they had to be thrown away. The friend who had got her the job made up the loss when it was discovered, but the story went round, and no photographer would have her again.

  The coffeepot spitting water brought Jim to the kitchen. He got to the stove before Veronica knew what he was doing there. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking about shoes.”

  “You need shoes?” He looked at her, as if trying to remember why he had loved her and what she had been like. His glasses were thumb-printed and steamed; all his talk was fog. He looked at her beautiful ankles and the scuffed sandals on her feet. He had come from America to Paris because he had a year to spend—just like that. Imagine spending a whole year of life, when every minute mattered! He had to be sure about everything before he was twenty-six; it was the limit he had set. But Veronica was going to be a great personality, and it might happen any day. She wanted to be a great something, and she wanted to begin, but not like Jim—reading and thinking—and not like that girl in taffeta, starting her experience with the two Algerians.

  “I think I could be nearly anything, you know.” That was what Veronica had said five months ago, when Jim asked what she was doing, sitting in a sour café with ashes and bent straws around her feet. She was prettier than any of the girls at the other tables. She had spoken first; he would never have dared. Her wrists were chapped where her navy-blue coat had rubbed the skin. That was the first thing he saw when he fell in love with her. That was what he had forgotten when he looked at her so vaguely in the kitchen, trying to remember what he had loved.

  When he met her, she was homeless. It was a cause-and-effect she had not foreseen. She knew that when you run away from home you are brave—braver than anyone; but then you have nowhere to live. Until Jim found her, fell in love with her, brought her here, she spent hours on the telephone, ringing up any casual person who might give her a bed for the night. She borrowed money for bus tickets, and borrowed a raincoat because she lost hers—left it in a cinema—and she borrowed books and forgot who belonged to the name on the flyleaf. She sold the borrowed books and felt businesslike and proud.

  She stole without noticing she was stealing, at first. Walking with Jim, she strolled out of a bookshop with something in her hand. “You’re at the Camus age,” he said, thinking it was a book she had paid for. She saw she was holding La Chute, which she had never read, and never would. They moved in the river of people down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and he put his arm round her so she would not be carried away. The Boul’Mich was like a North African bazaar now; it was not the Latin Quarter of Baudelaire. Jim had been here three months and was homesick.

  “It’s wonderful to speak English,” he said.

  “You should practice your French.” They agreed to talk French. “Vous êtes bon,” she said, gravely.

  “Mais je ne suis pas beau.” It was true, and that was the end of the French.

  They held hands on the Pont des Arts and looked down at the black water. He wanted to take her home, to an apartment he had rented in Montparnasse. It was a step for him; it was an event. He had to discuss it: love, honesty, the present, the past.

  Yes, but be quick, I am dying of hunger and cold, she wanted to say.

  She knew more about men than he did about women, and had more patience. She understood his need to talk about a situation without making any part of the situation clear.

  “You ought to get a job,” he said, when she had been living with him a month. He thought working would be good for her. He believed she should be working or studying—preparing for life. He thought life began only after it was prepared, but Veronica thought it had to start with a miracle. That was the difference between them, and why the lovely beginning couldn’t last, and why he couldn’t remember what he had loved. One day she said she had found work selling magazine subscriptions. He had never heard of that in France; he started to say so, but she interrupted him: “I used to sell the Herald Tribune on the street.”

  Soon after that, Jim met Ahmed, and every Sunday Ahmed came to talk. Jim wondered why he had been so hurt and confused by love. He discovered that it was easier to talk than read, and that men were better company than girls. After Jim met Ahmed, and after Veronica began selling magazine subscriptions, Jim and Veronica were happier. It was never as lovely as it had been at the beginning; that never came back. But Veronica had a handbag, strings of beads, a pink sweater, and a velvet ribbon for her hair. Perhaps that was all she wanted—a ribbon or so, the symbols of love that
he should have provided. Now she gave them to herself. Sometimes she came home with a treasure; once it was a jar of caviar for him. It was a mistake—the kind of extravagance he abhorred.

  “You shouldn’t spend that way,” he said. “Not on me.”

  “What does it matter? We’re together, aren’t we? As good as married?” she said sadly.

  If they had been married, he would never have let her sell magazine subscriptions. They both knew it. She was not his wife but a girl in Paris. She was a girl, and although he would not have let her know it, almost his first. He was not attractive to women. His ugliness was unpleasant; it was the kind of ugliness that can make women sadistic. Veronica was the first girl pretty enough for Jim to want and desperate enough to have him. He had never met desperation at home, although he supposed it must exist. She was the homeless, desperate girl in Paris against whom he might secretly measure, one future day, a plain but confident wife.

  “What’s the good of saving money? If they come, they’ll shoot me. If they don’t shoot me, I shall wait for their old-age pensions. Apparently they have these gorgeous pensions.” That was Veronica on the Russians. She said this now, putting the hot coffeepot down on a folded newspaper between the two men.

  For Ahmed this was why women existed: to come occasionally with fresh coffee, to say pretty, harmless things. Bach sent spirals of music around the room, music that to the Tunisian still sounded like a coffee grinder. His idea of Paris was nearly just this—couples in winter rooms; coffee and coffee-grinder music on Sunday afternoon. Records half out of their colored jackets lay on the floor where Veronica had scattered them. She treated them as if they were toys, and he saw that she loved her toys best dented and scratched. “Come next Sunday,” Jim said to Ahmed every week. Nearly every childless marriage has a bachelor friend. Veronica and Jim lived as though they were married, and Ahmed was the Sunday friend. Ahmed and Jim had met at the Bibliothèque Nationale. They talked every Sunday that winter. Ahmed lay back in the iron-and-canvas garden chair, and Jim was straight as a judge in a hard Empire armchair, the seat of which was covered with plastic cloth. The flat had always been let to foreigners, and traces of other couples and their passage remained—the canvas chair from Switzerland, the American pink bathmat in the ridiculous bathroom, the railway posters of skiing in the Alps.