The Cost of Living (37 page)

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.

Ahmed liked talking to Jim, but he was uneasy with liberals. He liked the way Jim carefully said “
Ak
med,” having learned that was how it was pronounced; and he was almost touched by his questions. What did “Ben” mean? Was it the same as the Scottish “Mac”? However, Jim's liberalism brought Ahmed close to his mortal enemies; there were Jews, for instance, who wrote the kindest books possible about North Africa and the Algerian affair. Here was a novel by one of them. On the back of the jacket was the photograph of the author, a pipe-smoking earnest young intellectual—lighting his pipe, looking into the camera over the flame. “Well, yes, but still a Jew,” said Ahmed frankly, and he saw the change in Jim—the face pink with embarrassment, the kind mouth opened to protest, to defend.

“I don't feel that way, I'm sorry.” Jim brought out the useful answer. In his dismay he turned the book over and hid the author's face. He was sparing Ahmed now at the expense of the unknown writer; but the writer was only a photograph, and he looked an imbecile with that pipe.

Ahmed's attitudes were not acquired, like Jim's. They were as much part of him as his ears. He expected intellectual posturing from men but detested clever women. He judged women by merciless, frivolous, secret rules. First, a girl must never be plain.

Veronica was not an intellectual, nor was she plain. She moved like a young snake; like a swan. She put a new pot of coffee down upon the table. She started the same record again, the same coffee-grinder sound. She stretched her arms, sighing, in a bored, frantic gesture. He saw the rents in the dressing gown when she lifted her arms. He could have given her more than Jim; she was not even close to the things she wanted.

Jim knew Ahmed was looking at Veronica. He wondered if he would mind if Ahmed fell in love with her. She was not Jim's; she was free. He had told her so again and again, but it made her cry, and he stopped saying it. He had imagined her free and proud, but when he said “You're free” she just cried. Would the fact that Ahmed was his friend, and a North African, mean a betrayal? It was a useless exercise, as pointless as pacing a room, but it was the kind of problem he exercised his brain with. He thought back and forth for a minute: How would I feel? Hurt? Shocked?

In less than the minute it was played out. Ahmed looked at Veronica and thought she was not worth a quarrel with his friend. “
Pas pour une femme
,” Sartre had said. Jim was too active in his private debate to notice Ahmed's interest withdrawn. Ahmed's look and its meaning were felt only by the girl. She turned to the window, with her back to the room. Suffering miserably, humiliated, she pressed her hands on the glass. The men had forgotten her. They laughed, as if Ahmed's near betrayal had made them closer friends. Jim poured his friend's coffee and pushed the sugar toward him. She saw the movement in the black glass.

She knew that Jim's being an American and Ahmed a North African made their friendship unusual, but that was apart. She didn't care about politics and color. They had nothing to do with her life. No, the difficulty for Veronica was always the same: when a man was alone he wanted her, but when there were two men she was in the way. The admiration of men, when she was the center of attention, could not make up for their indifference when they had something to say to each other. She resented the indifference more than any amount of notice taken of another woman. She could have made pudding of a rival girl.

“The little things are so awful,” said Jim. “Look, I was on the ninety-five bus. The bus stopped because they were changing drivers. There were two Algerians, and without even turning around to see why the bus stopped where it shouldn't, they pulled out their identity papers to show the police. It's automatic. Something unusual—the police.”

“It is nearly finished,” said Ahmed.

“Do you think so? That part?”

In one of the Sunday papers there was a new way of doing horoscopes. It was complicated and you needed a mathematician's brain, but anything was better than standing before the window with nothing to see. She found a pencil and sat down on the floor. I was born in '43 and Jim in '36. We're both the same month. That makes ten points in common. No, the ten points count against you.

“Ahmed, when were you born?”

“I am a Lion, a Leo, of the year 1939,” Ahmed said.

“It'll take a minute to work out.”

Presently she straightened up with the paper in her hand and said, “I can't work it out. Ahmed, you're going to travel. Princess Margaret's a Leo and she's going to travel. It must be the same thing.”

That made them laugh, and they looked at her. When they looked, she felt brave again. She stood over them, as if she were one of them. “I can't tell if I'm going to have twins or have rheumatism,” she said. “I'm given both. Actually, I think
I'll
travel. I've got to think of my future, as Jim says. I don't think Paris is the right place. Summer might be the time to move on. Somewhere like the Riviera.”

“What would you do there?” said Ahmed.

“Sell magazine subscriptions,” she said, smiling. “Do you know I used to sell the
Herald Tribune
? I really and truly did. I wore one of those ghastly sweaters they make you wear. If I sold something like a hundred and ninety-nine, I could pay for my hotel room. That was before I met Jim. I had to keep walking with the papers because of the law. If you stand still on a street with a pile of newspapers in your arms, you're what's called a kiosk, and you need a special permit. Now I sell magazine subscriptions and I can walk or stand still, just as I choose.”

“I've never seen you,” said Ahmed.

“She makes a fortune,” said Jim. “No one refuses. It's her face.”

“I'm not around where you are,” said Veronica to Ahmed. “I'm around the Madeleine, where the tourists go.”

“I'll come and see you there,” said Ahmed. “I'd like to see you selling magazine subscriptions to tourists around the Madeleine.”

“I earn enough for my clothes,” said Veronica. “Jim needn't dress me.”

She could not keep off her private grievances. As soon as his friend was attacked, Ahmed turned away. He looked at the books on the shelf over the table where Jim did his thinking and reading. Jim was mute with unhappiness. He tried to remember the beginning. Had either of them said a word about clothes?

She could go on standing there, holding the newspaper and the futures she had been unable to work out. There must be something she could do. In the kitchen, the washing up? The bedroom? She could dress. In the silence she had caused, she thought of questions she might ask. “Ahmed, are you the same as those Algerians in the café?” “Am I any better than that girl?”

They began to talk when Veronica was in the bedroom. Their voices were different. They were glad she was away. She knew it. Veronica thought she heard her name. They wanted her to be someone else. They didn't deserve her as she was. They wanted Brigitte Bardot and Joan of Arc. They want everything, she said to herself. In the bedroom there was nothing but a double bed and pictures of ballet dancers someone had left tacked to the walls.

She returned to them, dressed in a gray skirt and sweater and high-heeled black shoes. She had put her hair up in a neat plait, and her fringe was brushed out so that it nearly touched her eyelashes.

Jim was in the kitchen. He had closed the door. She heard him pulling the ladder about. He kept books and papers on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard. She sat down in his chair, primly, and folded her hands.

“You are well dressed these days,” said Ahmed, as if their conversation had never stopped.

“I'm not what you think,” she said. “You know that. I said ‘around the Madeleine' for a joke. I sometimes take things. That's all.”

“What things? Money?” He looked at her without moving. His long womanish hands were often idle.

“Where would I ever see money? Not
here. He
doesn't leave it around. Nobody does, for that matter. I take little things, in the shops. Clothes, and little things. Once a jar of caviar for Jim, but he didn't want it.”

“You'll get into trouble,” Ahmed said.

“It's all here, all safe,” said Jim, coming back, smiling. “I'm like an old maid, you know, and I hate keeping money in the house, especially an amount like this.”

He put the paper package on the table. It was the size of a pound of coffee. They looked at it and she understood. She was older than she had ever been, even picking Jim up in a café. There it is: money. It makes no difference to them. It is life and death for me. “What is it, Jim?” she said carefully, pressing her hands together. “What is it for? Is it for politics?” She remembered the two men in the café and the girl with the thick innocent throat. “Is it about politics? Is it for the Algerians? Was it in the kitchen a long time?” Slowly, carefully, she said, “What wouldn't you do for other people! Jim never spends anything. He needs a reason, and I'm not a reason. Ahmed, is it yours?”

“It isn't mine,” said Ahmed.

“Why didn't you tell me it was here, Jim? Don't you trust me?”

“You can see we trust you,” said Jim.

“We're telling you now.”

“You didn't tell me you had it here because you thought I'd spend it,” she said. She looked at the paper as if it were a stuffed object—a dead animal.

“I never thought of it as money,” said Jim. “That's the truth.”

“It's anything except the truth,” she said, her hands tight. “But it doesn't matter. There's never a moment money isn't money. You'd like me to say ‘It isn't money,' but I won't. If I'd known, I'd have spent it. Wouldn't I just! Oh, wouldn't I!”

“It wasn't money,” said Jim, as if it had stopped existing. “It was something I was keeping for other people.” Collected for a reason, a cause. And hidden.

None of them touched it. Ahmed looked sleepy. This was a married scene in a winter room; the bachelor friend is exposed to this from time to time. He must never take sides.