The Cost of Living (2 page)

Two sisters, two actors; two Anglo-Saxons, two French; three women, one man. The permutations are many, and Gallant choreographs these four principal characters in a dance of shifting alliances and betrayals, a knotting together and an unraveling of familial, cultural, and sexual ties. The walls of the hotel are thin, so that conversations are easily overheard, private moments routinely glimpsed. But there is little comfort in all this closeness. Instead there is a disconcerting lack of solidarity, as well as honesty, among the characters. Puss, Louise, Sylvie, and Patrick live a communal life in which things are borrowed, passed back and forth, exchanged: books, bathtubs, lovers, viruses. And money. In fact, the fifth character driving this story is money: the need for it, the ebb and flow of it, the unequivocal way it dictates our lives. But unlike books and bathtubs, money is seldom successfully shared. As Puss reflects, “Friendship in bohemia meant money borrowed, recriminations, complaints, tears, theft, and deceit.” The lingering effect of the story is as dark as the Paris winter, laying bare the precariousness of expatriate life, and a ruthless calculus of human relationships.

Following a stay of a few months in the hotel, Gallant moved in with a Parisian family; during our interview, she told me that she soon tired of living with expatriates, wanting instead to observe the French. She said that initially, as in “The Cost of Living,” she described the French through the eyes of foreigners. But even in an early story like “The Picnic” (1952), she begins to enter the mind of French characters in the description of Madame Pégurin, an elderly woman who loves her pets more than her own children, rattles the pages of
Le Figaro
, and tells the American children living in her house that she dislikes foreigners. The subtleties of how we perceive each other and ourselves are never lost on Gallant; of these children, at once innocent and ignorant, she writes, “But they, fortunately, did not consider themselves foreign, and had pictured instead dark men with curling beards.”

Though Gallant has lived in Paris now for nearly sixty years, she has remained attuned in her fiction to the shock of arrival, the discomfiture of the new, and alongside it, the eternal restlessness of human nature. She creates characters who yearn to live life abroad, as well as characters who must. There are women who follow their husbands to Europe, and those who flee them. There are children sent away to edify and find themselves, and children dragged along by their parents. Certain characters gladly jettison the past, considering their non-European upbringings a disease, while others cling stubbornly to food, language, and other customs. Louise, in “The Cost of Living,” goes out of her way to procure soda biscuits in Paris, convinced that they are necessary for nursing the grippe. As is frequently the case among expatriate communities, cultural affinities trump class distinctions, making for strange bedfellows in unfamiliar surroundings. In “Acceptance of Their Ways,” Mrs. Freeport, who cannot stand Italy “without the sound of an English voice in the house,” takes in an English paying guest: “In the hush of the dead season, Mrs. Freeport preferred Lily's ironed-out Bayswater to no English at all.”

Gallant's stories teem with characters unwilling fully to adjust, unable to take such things as family and homeland for granted. Instead there are makeshift families, adopted languages, improvised ways. But being foreign is not just a matter of crossing borders. The sense of being adrift, the absence of terra firma, is existential—perhaps not in the manner of Beckett or Camus, but with an impact that is nevertheless profound. Reality is vertiginous, these stories tell us, no matter where and how experienced. “Night and Day,” about a man emerging from anesthesia following an accident, hovers in the interstices of consciousness: the character, suffering from amnesia, is rootless in the most basic of ways. Bound to a hospital bed and lacking a past, he observes, “This is what it means to be free.”

Compounding the dislocation experienced by many of Gallant's characters is World War Two, the legacy of which permeates almost all of these stories, so much so that the war often serves as their unwritten prologues. The scars of war are fresh enough so that being Jewish in Europe remains shameful; children have lost their fathers in battle, and the American military is still present on European soil. The collective posture is one of frugality, of deprivation, and of doing without. Softening cauliflowers are salvaged from garbage cans, coffee grounds used more than once, chicken cooked in vinegar instead of wine. People have been forced to flee their homes, leaving everything behind: “all the tablecloths, the little coffee spoons!” This is the fate of Frau Stengel in “A Day Like Any Other,” a
Volksdeutsche
refugee from Prague who keeps a picture of Hitler pressed between two magazines. Others must open up their homes to boarders in order to make ends meet. The result is a thrusting together of people from mismatched worlds, a mis-en-scène Gallant exploits to stunning effect again and again. In addition to the devastation of history's recent past, the stories allude to the politics of France in the Fifties and Sixties: the country's diminishing status as a colonial power, beginning with Indochina's independence in 1954 and followed by the Algerian War of 1954–62. The student uprisings of 1968 (which Gallant writes about in her book of nonfiction,
Paris Journals)
, occur toward the end of this collection's timeline.

Two stories, “Willi” and “One Aspect of a Rainy Day,” are about German characters in postwar Europe, a subject which Gallant would explore more extensively in the 1973 collection,
The Pegnitz Junction
. The characters dream of home but cannot return, and are not made to feel at home in France, where they live. They exist without resident permits, without legitimacy, with little but memories of a previous life. Willi, a former prisoner of war, now serves as a consultant on films made about the Occupation; twenty years on, the horrors of the Holocaust are already material for the movies. “One Aspect of a Rainy Day,” about a German scholarship student, concerns a general strike and a political demonstration. Because of rain and an absent mayor, the demonstration is futile. “They might have been coming from anywhere—a cinema, or a funeral,” the narrator observes when the desultory group breaks apart. The story was published in 1962, the year after the Paris Massacre, when French police attacked roughly thirty thousand unarmed peaceful Algerian demonstrators. “Sunday Afternoon” also takes place during the Algerian conflict. Veronica, a nineteen-year-old girl from London, sits in her apartment in curlers and a bathrobe while her American boyfriend, Jim, who has forgotten why he fell in love with her, talks to a Tunisian friend about whether Algeria will go to the Communists. Veronica is excluded from the conversation, expected only to pour the coffee; the story is less about politics than about the chauvinistic world of men. Veronica resists autonomy, crying when Jim tells her that she's free. We know he will never marry her: “She was the homeless, desperate girl in Paris against whom he might secretly measure, one future day, a plain but confident wife.”

Veronica and Jim's casual cohabitation is an exception in this collection. Most of the couples are married, most of them unhappily. Infidelity runs through the stories as a matter of course. A wedding ring is flung, unforgettably, into the twilight. A number of the characters are either divorced or in overburdened, disillusioned relationships. Wives declare to their husbands that they do not like men. “Bernadette” is a particularly damning instance of a loveless marriage, and is also an indictment of domestic life in Fifties suburbia. The couple, Nora and Robbie, had once been campus liberals, writing plays, drinking beer out of old pickle jars, hoping to change the world. Now they live in a large pseudo-Tudor home outside Montreal, with a lawyer's salary, a live-in maid, and two daughters in boarding school. Nora's activism takes the form of cocktail parties, and Robbie, who serially seduces other women and is serially forgiven, is also seduced by sentimental literary images of the working class. Curious about the kitchen in which their maid, Bernadette, grew up, he asks her to describe it to him, and is told, simply, “It's big.” The reality—the table “masked with oilcloth…always set between meals, the thick plates turned upside down, the spoons in a glass jar…butter, vinegar, canned jam with the lid of the can half opened and wrenched back, ketchup, a tin of molasses glued to its saucer”—is impossible for Bernadette to articulate, or for her employer to comprehend.

Women of my generation, born after the mid-Sixties, were raised to believe that having a career and raising a family were not mutually exclusive pursuits, but for the women in Gallant's early stories, they almost always are. “You'll probably get married sometime, anyway, so what does it matter what you learn?” Mike asks Barbara, a teenaged girl who has failed out of one of New York City's best schools, in “One Morning in May.” His remark “strike[s] her into silence, ” but moments later Barbara wonders if Mike might be the solution: “It had occurred to her many times in this lonely winter that only marriage would save her from disgrace, from growing up with no skills and no profession.” This was a time before the pill, before the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment and
Roe versus Wade
. Gilles, in “The Burgundy Weekend,” remembers the women of the generation just prior to those landmark struggles and reforms:

His brutal condescension shocks our ears, revealing a misogyny that has since become less socially acceptable. Though marriage tended to be a girl's only option for establishing herself in adulthood, it was often a premature one. Nineteen-year-old Cissy, in “Autumn Day,” is an example of this: unsure of herself, fuzzy about the facts of life, dressed in Peter Pan collars and drinking sugary alcoholic drinks. Her husband, ten years older, is more of a parent than a sexual partner, telling her what to do and how to behave: “Don't talk war. Avoid people on farm. Meet Army wives. Go for walks.” True to their time, in most of these marriages the husband works and the wife stays home to raise the family (the fashion model in “Thieves and Rascals,” afraid to cry because she has a photo shoot the next morning and does not want puffy eyes, is an exception). Alongside economic dependence for women in traditional marriages, there are women who depend on other women (“The Cost of Living” and “Acceptance of Their Ways”) and men who depend on women (“Travelers Must Be Content”). The dependency in these relationships is not so much emotional as literal, and it frequently turns parasitic. Characters in these stories may not connect to each other, but they need each other to survive.

Human dependency is at its most basic when it comes to children, and this book is filled with them. Only they have little to count on. Children are deemed a nuisance, a burden, “a remote, alarming race.” This was an era when people began families young, when they were still essentially children themselves. Mothers resent their offspring for turning them ugly and spoiling their figures. Chaperones are typical, children left in the care of friends, extended family, and hired help. Or they are shipped off to boarding school (Nora, the wife in “Bernadette,” sends away her daughters because she “didn't trust herself to bring them up”). There is a refusal, on the part of parents, to accept their children as they are. In “Thieves and Rascals,” the father is annoyed that his daughter is “gauche and untidy,” and that her Swiss governess has not groomed “a model little girl, clean and silent as a watch.” Between mothers and daughters, there is often competition—mothers wanting to be mistaken for their daughters' sisters, for example—and there is also some meanness. In “The Wedding Ring,” the mother tells her brunette daughter to cover her head with a hat lest the sun turn her hair into a “rusty old stove lid.”

Perhaps these parents are feckless, perhaps they too young or self-centered to care for offspring, perhaps they are simply undeserving of them. Whatever the reason, parents maintain a distance from their children, physical as well as emotional, relinquishing their responsibilities, or regarding them as an afterthought. Even when aware of their shortcomings, parents have little motivation to change. “We can't lie here and discuss her character and all her little ways,” the mother in “Thieves and Rascals” says to her husband, after their daughter has been expelled from boarding school for spending a weekend in a hotel with a young man. “Evidently neither of us knows anything about them. We can talk about what lousy parents we are. That won't help either. We might as well sleep, if we can.”

While this was not an era when mothers chose to raise children without partners, as they are free to do today, there is a significant number of single mothers in these pages. Two are women of lesser economic means, and both happen to be Canadian. Bea, in “Malcolm and Bea,” who lives with her father and sisters in a house “behind a dried-up garden” with “seven Dwarfs on the fake chimneypiece,” bears a child out of wedlock, having slept with its father “only the once.” Bernadette, who does not even know the name of the man who impregnates her, is a maid. The rest are single because they are widows, or divorced, or because their husbands are fundamentally absent. “The Rejection” turns the tables on the single-mother theme; here we see a divorced father and his daughter, utterly estranged. For the most part, though, the spouseless parents are women, both young and middle-aged. Mrs. Tracy in “Madeline's Birthday,” who only sees her husband on weekends, presents a relatively quotidian version, while Laure, in “The Burgundy Weekend,” mother to two daughters in Paris, only sees her husband, who lives in New Haven, two months out of the year. In “Travelers Must Be Content,” Bonnie is divorced and living in Europe with her teenaged daughter, Flor. In “A Day Like Any Other,” Mrs. Kennedy's husband is convalescent, indulging “an obscure stomach complaint and a touchy liver” (and meanwhile smuggling wine to his bedside). He forces his family into a peripatetic lifestyle, retreating from one nursing home to the next, and hardly interacting with his daughters: