The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (46 page)

She cut off the thread and went on, “Leget is young to be married. I mean, so definitely married.”

“There’s no age limit.” He was not yet divorced. He had jumped without a net—at his time of life! When he had talked gently to her in the old days, at the beginning, it had been about herself. Now, as he composed a new message in which he figured, she heard the word “compulsive,” or perhaps it was “impulsive”—she could not take it in. She felt utterly an impostor, sewing for a grown person who ought to look after his own clothes, as if sewing were a translation of devotion. He was unwell, of course, and out of his element. Inactive, he seemed to disappear. We are all selfish, she decided. She had been devoted to her aunt, but selfishness was a green fly, unobserved, the color of the leaf. She murmured, as she had many times in the past two days, “Don’t leave me,” but it was only a new exorcism. She had shed her talismans—oh, mistake! If he made love to her, that might be a way out of their predicament; it seemed, in fact, the only way. But when he crept onto the bed, behind her back, it was only because he’d had enough of sitting in the chair.

“I’m not going out,” she said suddenly. “Ring downstairs and see if they can send someone out to the café for you.”

She turned and saw that he was watching her closely. Just as his hand went to the telephone she said, “Darling, a hideous thing happened today. I didn’t tell you. When I was coming home after seeing Leget, the rain started pelting, so I stopped in a doorway, and some man, a sort of workingman, was there, in the dark. I had the feeling if I said
‘Partez!’
he would go, and I was ashamed to think it—to think he was inferior, I mean. All at once he moved between me and the street, and when I looked back I saw the building was empty—it was being torn down from the inside. The outside walls were all that was left. I got my back against the wall, and as he walked toward me I pushed him away with both hands, with all my might. He opened his mouth—it was full of blood. He sort of fell against me; some of it got on my coat. He staggered back and fell in a heap, and I left him. I walked away very slowly to show I wasn’t frightened, but I was so upset that I went in a café and had a drink and watched their television for about an hour. I was afraid if I came straight back to you I might be hysterical and it might bother you.”

“You probably aren’t hungry then, are you?” he said.

“Of course I’m hungry. I’m as hungry as you are. You know perfectly well I haven’t eaten the whole day.”

He seemed to take it for granted she was making this up—she could tell. He had known her to do it before, when she was anxious to change the meaning of a situation, but in those days she had been living with her aunt, and trying to make her life seem vivid and interesting to him.

“Why didn’t you shout, or call someone?”

“Because I wanted to show him I wasn’t afraid of him.”

“Weren’t you?”

“I wanted to kill him. I was murderous.”

“That’s understandable,” he said. “You’ll realize tomorrow, or when you wake up in the night, that you were frightened. What shall I ask them to fetch you from the café? A ham sandwich? Two sandwiches?”

“I don’t care.” She was bitterly offended, alone, astray, for he was making little of the danger she had been in. All he seemed to have on his mind was food. He spoke into the telephone, explained that he was very ill. Sandwiches, he said, and he knew the French for “corkscrew.”

She said, “What if it isn’t real? What if I made it up?”

“Even if you have, it’s frightened you. You’ve frightened yourself.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I wasn’t in on it.”

“Aren’t you frightened that I wanted to kill someone?”

“I haven’t got round to that,” he said. “If you invented it
only
to frighten me, I’ll try to respond.”

“All right. I made it up to worry you, let’s say. But there’s blood on the sleeve of my coat. As for you, you only got this lumbago because you don’t want us to be happy. Now that your wife knows, you don’t enjoy making love to me.”

“Be an angel,” he said. “Don’t say too much more now.”

“As long as Aunt Freda had me,” she said, “you had me and all the rest. She kept me for you. And she didn’t mind your being married, because it meant I’d never leave her. There, that’s what I think. Do you want to go back? Aunt Freda said men never leave home unless their wives are hell.”

“My wife wasn’t hell.”

“Then there’s no explanation, is there?”

“There bloody well is, and you know what it is.”

“We’re like children, aren’t we?” she said. “In a way?”

Knowing more than she did about children, he said, sadly, “No, not at all.”

She started to answer, “If anything goes wrong now, I suppose I have no one to blame but myself,” which came out, without her meaning it that way, “no one to love but myself.”

She was frightened, as he had predicted, in the night. She supposed that the man who had come out of the shadows of the courtyard and was now blocking her way to the street intended to kill her. “I don’t need to die,” she said, meaning that she did not want to be transformed; that life was manageable. He stood with his arms spread, hands dangling, as though imitating a clumsy bird. “Oh, look,” she cried. “It isn’t fair!” for the bus she wanted slipped away from the curb. No one could see her in here, and there was nothing left of the queue she had abandoned so as to shelter from the rain. “I’m late as it is,” she said. It seemed her only grievance.

She supposed he knew no English. “If only I’d said ‘Get out’ the instant I saw you,” she raged at him. “You’d have gone. You’d have respected the tone. All you deserve from me is commands. ‘Get out,’ I ought to have said. ‘Get out!’ ”

The steps of his curious bird dance brought him near. He stretched his mouth so that she saw the bloody gums. He had been in a fight. She smelled the breath of someone frightened; she saw his eyes. She understood that he had no plans for her: He was drunk and vacant, like her aunt. She remembered the subdual of drinks, the easy victories. “I’m going out that door,” she said. Her triumphs over her aunt had been of this order. Feelings about other people she had never specifically understood sent her toward him—into his arms, he might have thought. He was afflicted with the worst of curses—obscurity, a life without meaning—while she would never be forgotten, unless she let some fool destroy her. When they were almost as close as lovers she pushed him away, one hand on the other and both on his throat. He should have fallen back and cracked his head and made an end to it, but instead he knelt, sagged; his face, in passing, knocked against the sleeve of her coat. “Oh, you’ll be all right,” she said. She spoke in the
jeune Anglaise
voice she had only that day been advised to lose.

“Partez
,”
she
said softly in the dark, and again, a little louder,
“Partez!”
and then, as he began to come awake, “Would you be very unhappy? Would you miss me? Is it true you don’t believe a word I say?”

R
omanians notoriously are marked by delusions of eminence and persecution, and Madame Gisèle does not encourage them among her clientele. She never can tell when they are trying to acquire information, or present some grievance that were better taken to a doctor or the police. Like all expatriates in Paris, they are concerned with the reactions of total strangers. She is expected to find in the cards the functionary who sneered, the flunky who behaved like a jailer, the man who, for no reason, stared too long at the plates of the car. Madame Gisèle prefers her settled clients—the married women who sit down to say, “When is my husband going to die?” and “What about the man who smiles at me every morning on the bus?” She can find him easily: There he is—the jack of hearts. One of the queens is not far away, along with the seven of diamonds turned upside down. Forget about him. He is supporting his mother and has already deserted a wife.

Amalia Moraru has been visiting Madame Gisèle for two years now. She has been so often, and her curiosity is so flickering and imprecise, that Madame Gisèle charges her for time, like a garage. Amalia asks questions about her friend Marie.

“Marie used to be so pretty,” Amalia begins, taking no notice of Madame Gisèle’s greeting, which is “You again!” “Thirty years ago we used to say she looked French. That was a compliment in Bucharest. You know, we are a Latin race in that part of the country.…”

Madame Gisèle, who is also Romanian but from one of the peripheral provinces, replies, “Who cares?” She and Amalia both speak their language badly. Amalia was educated in French, which was the fashion for Bucharest
girls of her background thirty years ago, while the fortune-teller is at home in a Slavic-sounding dialect.

“Marie must be very ill now,” Amalia says cautiously, “to have stopped looking so French. Last night in the Place du Marché St.-Honoré, people were staring at her. She smiles at anyone. My husband thinks she has lost her mind. Her legs are swollen. What do you see? Heart trouble? Circulation?”

“Overwork. What makes you think
you
look French?”

A long glance in the magic hand mirror, lying face upward on the table, assures Amalia that if she does not seem French it is entirely to her credit. Her collar is pressed, her hair is coiled and railed in by pins. She tries something else: “I have Marie’s new X rays—the ones she’s had taken for the Americans.”

“I’ve already told you, I am not a doctor.”

“You could look at them. You can tell so much from just a snapshot sometimes.”

“I can in a normal consultation. You brought me a picture once. You said, ‘This is my old friend in Bucharest. Do you see a journey for her?’ ‘Everyone travels,’ I told you. But I did look, and I did see a journey.…”

“You even saw the broken lightbulbs in the train, and the unswept floors,” says Amalia, encouraging her.

“I know what Romanian trains have been like since the war. Your friend came to Paris. What more did you want?”

“Why hasn’t she said anything about the money certain people owe her? What does Marie think about certain people when she is alone?”

Madame Gisèle will not look in the hand mirror, or the ball, she will not burn candles to collect the wax, because Amalia pays a low rate for her time. She does keep one hand on the cards, in case a question should be asked she feels she can answer. The seven of hearts would indicate the trend of Marie’s most secret thoughts, but Madame Gisèle cannot find it. When she does, nothing around it makes sense.

“Succès légers en amour,”
announces Madame Gisèle, who is accustomed to making such statements in French.

“Jesus Maria. We are talking about an old woman. Try again.”

“Cadeau agréable.”

“She buys presents, but I’ve already told you that. What is she thinking
this minute?”

“Cut the cards yourself. Left hand … 
Naissance,”
says Madame Gisèle, examining
the result. “Monday is a bad day. Go home and come back on a Friday.”

Amalia supposes that on this April day Marie is collecting more information about herself for the Americans. Marie hopes to emigrate before long. From time to time she receives a letter requesting a new piece of evidence for her file. She is enjoying April, or pretends to. She waddles to the flower market when she can, and has already brought Amalia the first yellow daffodils of the year. “Make a wish,” says Marie. Her teeth are like leaves in winter now. Does she really think the Americans will let her into the country with that ruined smile? “The first daffodils—wish on them, Amalia. Wish for something.” Marie is always wishing. Amalia could understand it in a young person, but at Marie’s age what is it all about?

This is not a pleasant April. Some mornings the air is so white and still you might expect a fall of snow, and at night the sky expands, as it does in December.

“Marie is lucky,” Amalia remarks to Madame Gisèle. “She came here when there was plenty of work, and nobody thinks of saying ‘refugee’ anymore. She has her own passport. Dino and I have never had one. She doesn’t know how things were for us fifteen, sixteen years ago. We gave a pearl ring for one CARE parcel, but it had been sold three times and there was nothing in it except rancid butter and oatmeal.”

Madame Gisèle is trying again for the seven of hearts. Amalia feels a draft and tugs the collar of her coat around her neck. All over Paris the heating has been turned off too soon. Marie must suffer with the cold. She is a
corsetière
, and kneels to fat women all day. Her legs, her knees, her wrists, her fingers are bloated—she looks like a carving in stone.

“Rendez-vous la nuit,”
says Madame Gisèle. “Look, I am sick of your friend Marie. Either she knows and is laughing at us or it is you bringing low-class spirits in the room.”

“Not laughing—wishing.”

On an April evening Marie, in slow march time, approaches her house and sixth-floor room in the Place du Marché St.-Honoré. Her legs are thick as boots. Crossing the street she suddenly stands still and begins to watch the sky. You would think her mind was drifting if you could see her, choosing to block traffic at the worst moment of the day, staring at the new moon and the planet Venus. She is making a wish. Amalia, who lives on the same
square, has seen her doing it. Marie stares as if the sky were a reflecting sheet; perhaps what Marie sees against blue Venus is the streaky movement of cars behind her, and the shadow of her own head.