The Cost of Living (47 page)

And now it was Nadine who was undervalued—not just the machine. Nadine had painted a slogan in favor of these people only a few houses away. She took out her change purse and paid for ducks, strawberries, and asparagus—standing very straight, granddaughter of Madame Arrieu and of a national hero for whom streets had been named.

On their way home, Nadine said to Jérôme, “Tell me—what do you think of me?” She wore a leather skirt, leather sandals, there were leather buttons on her blouse. The blouse was transparent. She had not dared to leave off her brassiere, in case Marcelle were to notice and inform her grandmother.

Jérôme said, “Whatever happened, I always liked women.”

“All?”

“In a way, yes. Even that farmer's wife—what was her name? Pierrette? If she had said something to me…”

“Something friendly?” said Nadine, without sarcasm. She was considering this as a possibility, a way of looking at people.

“Well, friendly
too
. I could have found her charming. It could work. It could work with almost anyone.”

“Then why do you stay with your wife?” said Nadine.

“Because she is my wife,” said Jérôme.

There was a finality about this, a warning almost, that closed the subject. All the same, she was sure he had told her something Lucie would never know. She understood that he had no use for her, Nadine, because he had no use for any one person. She wanted to dash ahead and throw pebbles or kick at stone doorsteps. But she walked along quietly thinking, I hope I won't grow old too suddenly. She stopped and said, laughing, “Well, kiss me,” for that was all she knew about rites.

Lucie sat alone at the Scrabble board putting together highscoring words in the best places. She jumped up when she heard the two, wishing this was her house and that she could welcome strangers to it. The minute Nadine saw Lucie, she seemed reminded of an obligation, or a promise. She hung her head and muttered, “I have to fetch my grandmother at the station.”

“I know,” said Lucie. “They told me in the kitchen. Her train is after one.”

“I am sorry to leave you here,” said Nadine, as though Lucie had not been alone for much of the morning.

“Oh, but I'd love to come!” said Lucie. “Just to see—a French railway station.”

“It is twenty-six kilometers from here, on a boring road. I have something to do in the town,” said Nadine. Please don't come, but at the same time please don't think I don't want you, she was also saying.

Lucie wondered if Nadine and Jérôme had quarrelled, if their tense teasing at breakfast had gone straight through to hatred.

“Is it a town with a wall and two towers?” said Jérôme.

“You don't see the towers from the road,” said Nadine. “Not the road I take. The old ramparts are there,” drawing a half-moon from card table to window with her sandal, “but we drive this way, to the station, which is outside the walls, in the new town.” That road ran along the edge of the carpet.

“I know the town,” said Jérôme. “I might want to buy a house there. I'm thinking of coming back to France to live. Also,” turning to Lucie, “I think we should get back to Paris. Go and pack. We can take a train from the station.”

“Oh,” said Nadine, flushed, staring from one to the other. She stated the most important objection first: “There is lunch, and the two ducks. And also…my grandmother…she will think I haven't been nice to you.”

“We leave tomorrow afternoon, Jérôme, when Gilles stops by to fetch us,” said Lucie. Sometimes everyone around her seemed half the size people ought to be. No one could handle Jérôme the way Lucie could—doctors had praised her for it. And it was all instinct on her part, or so she had been told. The more mysterious Jérôme seemed to those other half-sized people, the more Lucie seemed to grow tall.

He seemed under a strain just now; perhaps it had to do with Nadine's lowering of interest. He didn't take a sleeping pill last night, Lucie remembered. He walked round the room. She tidied the Scrabble letters; put the lid on the box; was supreme in her confidence.

Nadine now looked like a girl who might go in for spells of weeping. She muttered that she would get the car out. It was a car they used here in the country, just for running to the station. Not the best environment for Lucie's white dress. Also, the Girards would have to wait and be bored while Nadine did her errands.

“My husband is never bored,” said Lucie, saying something she believed profoundly.

4

The car, of a make Lucie did not recognize, and whose shape she associated with the automobiles of her earliest childhood, was fit for a junk-heap. She appraised the worn seat covers, the torn rubber matting on the floor.

“Did anyone hear the thunder last night?” said Nadine.

There was no reply. Lucie, who had not had enough to eat for breakfast, was deep in a vision concerning the physical symptoms of hunger. She saw a stomach contracting and digestive juices pouring forth. Think about something else, she commanded, but all that she could see was home and her own table spread.

“The station,” said Nadine, parking with her back to it. She did not trust these two to know a station when they saw one. “I shall meet you here, at the car, in one hour. Can you remember that?”

“We could help with your errands,” Lucie said.

“They would bore you. My grandmother wants to have an extra key made for her gate. It is an old lock, over one hundred years old. No locksmith wants to be bothered. I know one who might.”

“On a Sunday?” said Lucie—not prying, but simply interested.

“On a Sunday I am certain to find him at home. Don't lose your way if you walk about. Try to stay on the main street. The stores will stay open until one o'clock, if you want to look in windows. Please notice the number of the car—then you can recognize it.” She was so anxious to get away that Lucie could feel the strain of it. Something tugged at Nadine, like the moon at the sea. Nadine didn't go to the church this morning, said Lucie suddenly. Neither did the two old servants. It isn't just Jérôme and myself.

She and Jérôme stood together, children abandoned, next to a row of parking meters in front of a provincial station, and watched Nadine trotting away. She had changed her blouse, Lucie noticed, and tied her hair back with a brown velvet ribbon. “Why is a key so important when she has guests to consider?” said Lucie. “What errand can she have that will take her an hour?” Nadine broke into a run. The ribbon came loose. “It's a lie about the key,” Lucie said. “I don't believe it. She's going to meet someone. I'm sure it's a man. Probably married. Why else would she make such a mystery of it? Poor Nadine. She must be an orphan. She never mentions her parents—did you notice that, Jérôme? She forgot to put a coin in the meter. Do you think we should? Maybe you don't have to on Sundays. Who were her parents? Did you know them? I never heard you say that Madame Arrieu had any children.”

“One stepdaughter,” said Jérôme. “She had a husband, but he took cyanide. The two towers are on the far side of the town,” he said. He raised a hand, wiping out of the present parking meters and cars. He began to walk, Lucie following. He seemed to have forgotten that she was with him. They turned into a street shaded by plane trees; the street presently became too narrow for trees, or even for people walking together. Lucie fell behind, pushed and jostled and sometimes separated from Jérôme by a Sunday provincial crowd. “I remember all of this,” Jérôme said, but not really to her. He looked at his face on a plate glass window. “I remember,” he said, walking again.

The antique china shop with plates against blue silk, said Jérôme. The tobacconist's with the yellow mailbox outside. The mailbox used to be another color—I think it was blue. (Lucie saw that he was once more beginning to count something on his fingers.) The fishmonger with the trays of cracked ice. The pastry shop. The café. The second café. The chapel.

“Jérôme, there is a sign saying Concert on the door,” said Lucie, close behind him. She was bothered by the Sunday crowd, whose indifference to strangers seemed to her hostile. She wanted Jérôme to stop and rest and even a church would do, even though he said he had finished with religion. All the wrong omens for the day were in place, Jérôme's constellations of disaster: Jérôme not listening, looking at his face in a shopwindow as if he had forgotten what he was; Jérôme tearing paper, fiddling with breadcrumbs, saying he wanted to buy a house in France when they could barely even afford this trip.

Now he had come to a halt before another window and he stared in some puzzlement at stacks of men's shirts in magenta and blue. “Well, what do you think?” he asked, though not quite of Lucie. “I could easily live in this place. Look,” he said, moving on. “Look at that.” It was a glass bottle twisted in shape, as if it had been wrung out to dry. “In the old days they lowered iron shutters on Sunday. There must be less stealing now. Or else they never close.”

“What was it for?” said Lucie. “That useless bottle?”

“To give to friends.”

Well, at least it was an answer. But is that what people give each other here? she wondered. Is that what you are expected to bring when you are invited for a weekend? “We can't go on walking up and down the street,” she said. “We could sit in that little church. Just for a minute.”

It was small, a pink and white room with an almond pastry ceiling. “A private chapel,” said Jérôme. “A patrician family with a resident priest. Corsicans. Transplanted Italians. The Stations of the Cross are even uglier than in Quebec.” He perceived something Lucie had not noticed—the bare altar, the absence of a crucifix and of a sanctuary light.

He thinks I am praying, said Lucie. He won't interrupt me, because he never does the worst thing, but he is standing behind me despising me. She tried to clear her memory of shop windows; all her closed eyes could see were twisted bottles, magenta shirts. That is what you do on a holy day when there is no God, she said. You walk up and down and let strange people push you and you talk about what you might want to buy. I should have married a doctor after all, she said against her clasped hands. I would have been perfect for a doctor. I would have learned Spanish. Doctors like going to Mexico for their holidays. I could have answered the phone.

Jérôme knew that something had taken place in the chapel. The street had emptied and they could walk side by side now, but they had more trouble walking together than ever before. When they came to a corner, they collided, each attempting to cross in a different direction.

“Do you see that policeman?” said Jérôme, speaking to Lucie, only to her, now that she had stopped trying to listen. “I'm sure he was here twenty years ago. Look at his face. Red and stupid. Look at him with his red nose. Why won't you look? I remember this café,” he went on. “We came here after a film.” It was a café where they served nothing except pancakes. The waitresses wore Breton costumes, here, miles from the sea. It reminded him of the baroque ceiling in the chapel. The street was all a mistake, as if it had been knocked together by a child.

At home everything looks the same, said Lucie. We don't want these landslides, this strangeness. Who is “we”? What film? Was it Madame Arrieu? He doesn't want to see her again. He's afraid of seeing her. That is why he spent the night walking around the room instead of sleeping.

Nadine had left the car unlocked and the key stuck in the ignition; it showed how anxious she had been to get away from the Girards. Jérôme and Lucie sat in the back of the car holding hands. He told her about a girl he had brought to this town, a long time ago. Corinne was the girl's name. As soon as he had seen the Breton café the memory returned. Corinne worked in a bookshop in Montparnasse. She wanted Jérôme to think about nothing but her, and when she saw that he was interested in differences of opinion—oh, and in himself, and in girls in general, because they were unlike himself, they belonged to a different culture—Corinne could not understand it. Lucie was not like Corinne, he said. She had a natural goodness that welled up like a spring. Even if she wanted to be selfish and to put herself first, she would not know how to begin. He meant every word of this; she was not to forget what he was telling her now. “Even when you're asleep, you're better than other women,” he said.

This
was felicity. No one but Lucie knew what Jérôme could be like. He told her things he had never told anyone; even the doctors had said so. She gave him the simplest, most loving response she could think of, which was, “You didn't sleep well last night. You must be tired. Did you take anything this morning? Not even an Equanil?”

“For God's sake, stop asking me how I am,” he shouted, and he flung out of the car and left her just as Nadine and her grandmother came walking across the square.

Through shock and horror that suddenly seemed like rain on a window, Lucie saw this new person—saw her sunglasses, her straw summer handbag, her linen suit; watched her greeting Jérôme, who now strolled back to the car as though he had left it for no purpose but this meeting. With the quick tally came a feeling of injustice, of unfairness, as though Lucie had been harshly treated. She could not attach the conviction to any one word or event. Jérôme was often impatient when she turned the conversation to his health, a turning she found too natural to avoid. Was it Lucie's fault if she had not looked her best yesterday? And what ought to be her best now, at the age of twenty-eight? Her sturdy blond beauty had suffocated under hospital training, and then this marriage. Was it Lucie's fault? Jérôme's?

“My grandmother,” said Nadine.

“Did you have a good dinner last night?” said Madame Arrieu, shaking hands. “Are you pleased with your room? Did this child take good care of you?” Settled in, her profile to Lucie, she said, “Nadine, have you written your parents?”