The Cost of Living (24 page)

He got down from the train, holding his artfully bashed-up suitcase, and saw, in the shadow of the station, Mrs. Bonnie McCarthy, his American friend. She was his relay in the South of France, a point of refreshment between the nasal sculptress in London, who had been his first hostess of the season, and a Mrs. Sebastian in Venice. It would have been sweet for Wishart at this moment if he could have summoned an observer from the past, a control to establish how far he had come. Supposing one of the populated waves of his dream had deposited sister Glad on shore? He saw her in cap and apron, a dour little girl, watching him being greeted by this woman who would not have as much as spat in their direction if she had known them in the old days. At this thought he felt a faint stir, like the rumor of an earthquake some distance away. But he knew he had nothing to fear and that the source of terror was in his own mistakes. It had been a mistake to remember Glad.

“Wishart,” his friend said gravely, without breaking her pose. Leaning on a furled peach-colored parasol, she gave the appearance of living a minute of calm in the middle of a hounding social existence. She turned to him the soft, myopic eyes that had been admired when she was a girl. Her hair was cut in the year's fashion, like an inverted peony, and she seemed to Wishart beautifully dressed. She might have been waiting for something beyond Wishart and better than a friend—some elegant paradise he could not imagine, let alone attain. His admiration of her (her charm, wealth, and aspirations) flowed easily into admiration of himself; after all, he had achieved this friend. Almost tearful with self-felicitation, he forgot how often he and Bonnie had quarrelled in the past. Their kiss of friendship here outside the station was real.

“Did you get my telegram?” he said, beginning the nervous remarks that preceded and followed all his journeys. He had prepared his coming with a message: “Very depressed London like old blotting paper longing for sea sun you.” This wire he had signed “Baronne Putbus.” There was no address, so that Bonnie was unable to return a killing answer she would have signed “Lysistrata.”

“I died,” Bonnie said, looking with grave, liquid eyes. “I just simply perished.” After the nasal sculptress and her educated vowels, Bonnie's slight drawl fell gently on his ear. She continued to look at him gaily, without making a move, and he began to feel some unease in the face of so much bright expectancy. He suddenly thought, “Good God, has she fallen in love?,” adding in much smaller print, “With me?” Accidents of that sort had happened in the past. Now, Wishart's personality being an object he used with discretion, when he was doubtful, or simply at rest, he became a sort of mirror. Reflected in this mirror, Bonnie McCarthy saw that she was still pretty and smart. Dear darling Wishart! He also gave back her own air of waiting. Each thought that the other must have received a piece of wonderful news. Wishart was not envious; he knew that the backwash of someone else's good fortune can be very pleasant indeed, and he waited for Bonnie's tidings to be revealed. Perhaps she had rented a villa, so that he would not have to stay in a hotel. That would be nice.

“The hotel isn't far,” Bonnie said, stirring them into motion at last. “Do you want to walk a little, Wishart? It's a lovely, lovely day.”

No villa, then; and if the hotel was nearby, no sense paying a porter. Carrying his suitcase, he followed her through the station and into the sudden heat of the Mediterranean day. Later he would hate these streets, and the milling, sweating, sunburned crowd; he would hurry past the sour-milk-smelling cafés with his hand over his nose. But now, at first sight, Cannes looked as it had sounded when he said the word in London—a composition in clear chalk colors: blue, yellow, white. Everything was intensely shaded or intensely bright, hard and yellow on the streets, dark as velvet inside the bars.

“I hope you aren't cross because Florence isn't here,” Bonnie said. “She was perishing to meet your train, but the poor baby had something in her eye. A grain of sand. She had to go to an oculist to have it taken out. You'll love seeing her now, Wishart. She's getting a style, you know? Everyone notices her. Somebody said to me on the beach—a total stranger—somebody said, ‘Your daughter is like a Tanagra.'”

“Of which there are so many fakes,” Wishart remarked.

He did not have a great opinion of his friend's intelligence, and may have thought that a slight obtuseness also affected her hearing. It was insensitive of her to mention Flor now, just when Wishart was feeling so well. From the beginning, their friendship had been marred by the existence of Bonnie's daughter, a spoiled, sulky girl he had vainly tried to admire.

“There are literally millions of men chasing her,” Bonnie said. “I've never seen anything like it. Every time we go to the beach or the casino—”

“I'm surprised she hasn't offered you a son-in-law,” he said. “But I suppose she is still too young.”

“Oh, she isn't!” Bonnie cried, standing still. “Wishart, that girl is twenty-four. I don't know what men want from women now. I don't even know what Flor wants. We've been here since the eighth of June, and do you know what she's picked up? A teeny little fellow from Turkey. I swear, he's not five three. When we go out, the three of us, I could die, I don't understand it—why she only likes the wrong kind. ‘Only likes,' did I say? I should have said ‘only
attracts
.' They're awful. They don't even propose. She hasn't even got the satisfaction of turning them down. I don't understand it, and that's all I can say. Why, I had literally hundreds of proposals, and not from little Turkeys. I stuck to my own kind.”

He wanted to say, “Yes, but you were among your own kind. The girl is a floater, like me.” He sensed that Bonnie's disappointment in what she called her own kind had affected her desires for Flor. Her own kind had betrayed her; she had told him so. That was why she lived in Europe. Outside her own kind was a vast population of men in suspenders standing up to carve the Sunday roast. That took care of Americans.

They walked on, slowly. A store window they passed reflected the drawn, dried expression that added years to Wishart's age but removed him from competition and torment. He found time to admire the image, and was further comforted by Bonnie's next, astonishing words: “Someone like you, Wishart, would be good for Flor. I mean someone older, a person I can trust. You know what I mean—an Englishman who's been in America, who's had the best of both.”

He knew that she could not be proposing him as a husband for Florence, but he could have loved her forever for the confirmation of the gentleman he had glimpsed in the window, the sardonic Englishman in America, the awfully decent American in England. He slipped his hand under her elbow; it was almost a caress.

They reached the Boulevard de la Croisette, crossed over to the sea side, and Bonnie put up her parasol. Wishart's good humor hung suspended as he looked down at the beaches, the larva-like bodies, the rows of chairs. Every beach carried its own social stamp, as distinct as the strings of greasy flags, the raked pullulating sand, and the squalid little bar that marked the so-called “students' beach,” and the mauve and yellow awnings, the plastic mattresses of the beach that were a point of reunion for Parisian homosexuals. Wishart's gaze, uninterested, was about to slide over this beach when Bonnie arrested him by saying, “This is where we bathe, Wishart, dear.” He turned his head so suddenly that her parasol hit him in the eye, which made him think of her falsehood (for it was a falsehood, unquestionably) about Flor and the grain of sand. He looked with real suspicion now at the sand, probably treacherous with broken bottles, and at the sea, which, though blue and sparkling, was probably full of germs. Even the sky was violated; across the face of it an airplane was writing the name of a drink.

“Oh, my sweet heaven!” Bonnie said. She stood still, clutching Wishart by the arm, and said it again. “Sweet heaven! Well, there she is. There's Flor. But that's not the Turk from Turkey. No, Wishart, her mother is to have a treat. She's got a new one. Oh, my sweet heaven, Wishart, where does she find them?”

“I expect she meets them in trains.”

From that distance he could admire Bonnie's girl, thin and motionless, with brown skin and red hair. She leaned on the low wall, looking down at the sea, braced on her arms, as tense as if the decision between this beach and some other one was to decide the course of her life. “She does have extraordinary coloring,” he said, as generously as he could.

“She gets it from me,” said Bonnie, shortly, as if she had never noticed her own hair was brown.

The man with Florence was stocky and dark. He wore sneakers, tartan swimming trunks of ample cut, a gold waterproof watch, a gold medal on a chain, and a Swedish-university cap some sizes too small. He carried a net bag full of diving equipment. His chest was bare.

“Well, I don't know,” Bonnie said. “I just don't know.”

By a common silent decision, the two rejected the beach and turned and came toward Bonnie. They made an impression as harsh and unpoetical as the day. The sun had burned all expression from their faces—smooth brown masks, in which their eyes, his brown and hers green, shone like colored glass. Even though Wishart had never dared allow himself close relations, he was aware of their existence to a high degree. He could detect an intimate situation from a glance, or a quality of silence. It was one more of his gifts, but he would have been happier without it. Pushed by forces he had not summoned or invented, he had at these moments a victim's face—puzzled, wounded, bloodless, coarse. The gap between the two couples closed. Bonnie had taken on a dreamy, vacant air; she was not planning to help.

“This is Bob Harris,” Florence said. “He's from New York.”

“I guessed that,” Bonnie said.

It was plain to Wishart that the new man, now sincerely shaking hands all around, had no idea that Mrs. McCarthy might want to demolish him.

Every day after that, the four met on Bonnie's beach and lunched in a restaurant Bonnie liked. If Wishart had disapproved of the beach, it was nothing compared to the restaurant, which was full of Bonnie's new friends. Wine—Algerian pink—came out of a barrel, there were paper flags stuck in the butter, the waiters were insolent and barefoot, the menu was written on a slate and full of obscene puns. Everyone knew everyone, and Wishart could have murdered Bonnie. He was appalled at her thinking he could possibly like the place, but remembered that her attitude was the result of years of neuter camaraderie. It didn't matter. On the tenth of July he was expected in Venice. It was not a pattern of life.

It seemed to Wishart that Bonnie was becoming silly with age. She had developed a piercing laugh, and the affected drawl was becoming real. Her baiting of Bob Harris was too direct to be funny, and her antagonism was forming a bond between them—the last thing on earth she wanted. Bob had the habit of many Americans of constantly repeating the name of the person he was talking to. Bonnie retaliated by calling him Bob Harris, in full, every time she spoke to him, and this, combined with her slightly artificial voice, made him ask, “Is that a Southern accent you've got, Mrs. McCarthy?”

“Well, it just might be, Bob Harris!” Bonnie cried, putting one on. But it was a movie accent; she did it badly, and it got on Wishart's nerves. “Well, that's a nice breeze that's just come up,” she would say, trailing the vowels. “We're certainly a nice little party, aren't we? It's nice being four.” Nice being four? Nice for Wishart—the adored, the sought-after, Europe's troubadour? He closed his eyes and thought of Mrs. Sebastian, Venice, shuttered rooms, green canals.

Then Florence burst out with something. Wishart guessed that these cheeky outbursts, fit for a child of twelve, were innocent attempts to converse. Because of the way her mother had dragged her around, because she had never been part of a fixed society, she didn't know how people talked; she had none of the coins of light exchange. She said in an excited voice, “The Fox, the Ape, the Bumblebee were all at odds, being three, and then the Goose came out the door, and stayed the odds by making four. We're like that. Mama's a lovely bumblebee and I'm fox-colored.” This left Wishart the vexing choice between being a goose and an ape, and he was the more distressed to hear Bob say placidly that it wasn't the first time he had been called a big ape. All at once it seemed to him preferable to be an ape than a goose.

“Have you got many friends in Paris, Bob Harris?” said Bonnie, who had seen Wishart's face pucker and shrink.

“Last year I had to send out one hundred and sixty-nine Christmas cards,” said Bob simply. “I don't mean cards for the firm.”

“The Bambino of the Eiffel Tower? Something real Parisian?”

Bob looked down, with a smile. He seemed to feel sorry for Mrs. McCarthy, who didn't know about the cards people sent now—nondenominational, either funny or artistic, depending on your friends.

He stayed in one of the spun-sugar palaces on the Croisette, and Wishart's anguished guess had been correct: Flor went to his room afternoons, while Bonnie was having her rest. The room was too noisy, too bright, and it was Flor who seemed most at ease, adjusting the blind so that slats of shade covered the walls, placing her clothes neatly on a chair. She seemed to Bob exclusive, a prize, even though the evidence was that they were both summer rats. He had met her in a café one afternoon. He saw his own shadow on her table, and himself, furtive, ratlike, looking for trouble.

Wishart had decided that Bob was no problem where he was concerned. His shrewdness was not the variety likely to threaten Wishart, and he took up Flor's time, leaving Bonnie free to listen to Wishart's chat. He did not desire Bonnie to himself as a lover might, but he did want to get on with his anecdotes without continual interruptions.