The Cost of Living (6 page)

Mike had brought his painting things along on the picnic, for, as Barbara's aunt had observed with approbation, he didn't waste an hour of his day. Barbara carried the picnic basket, which had been packed by the cook at Pension Bit o' Heather and contained twice as much bread as one would want. Around her shoulders was an unnecessary sweater that she had snatched up in a moment of compulsive modesty just before leaving her room. She carried her camera, slung on a strap, and she felt that she and Mike formed, together, a picture of art, pleasure, and industry which, unhappily, there was no one to remark but a fat man taking his dog for a run; the man gave them scarcely a glance.

Rounding a bend between dwarfed ornamental orange trees, they saw the big hotel Barbara's aunt had told them about. From its open windows came the hum of vacuum cleaners and the sound of a hiccuping tango streaked with static. The gardens spread out before them, with marked and orderly paths and beds of brilliant flowers. Barbara's aunt had assured them that this place was ideal for a picnic lunch, and that no one would disturb them. There was, on Cap Martin, a public picnic ground, which Barbara was not permitted to visit. “You wouldn't like it,” her aunt had explained. “It is nothing but tents, and diapers, and hairy people in shorts. Whenever possible in France, one prefers private property.” Still, the two were unconvinced, and after staring at the gardens and then at each other they turned and walked in the other direction, to a clearing around a small monument overlooking the bay.

They sat down on the grass in the shade and Mike unpacked his paints. Barbara watched him, working over in her mind phrases that, properly used, would give them a subject in common; none came, and she pulled grass and played with her wristwatch. “We're leaving tomorrow,” she said at last.

“I know.” After some peering and indecision he had decided to face the hotel gardens instead of the sea. “I may not stay much longer, either. I don't know.”

Barbara, bound to her aunt's unyielding cycle of city, sea, and mountains, marveled at his freedom. She fancied him stepping out of his hotel one morning and suddenly asking himself, “Shall I go back to Paris now, or another day?” and taking off at once for Paris, or Rome, or Lisbon, or, having decided he had had enough of this, his parents' house.

“My father thinks I should go to Venice and Florence, now that I'm south.” He spoke with neither enthusiasm nor resentment; had his father ordered him home, he would have set off with the same equable temper.

“Then you might go to Italy soon,” Barbara said. He nodded. “I'm going home in September,” she said. “My mother's coming for the summer, and we're going back together. I guess I'll go back to school. I have to do something—learn something, I mean.”

“What for?”

“Well, it's just that I have to do
something
. It's different for you,” she said, helplessly. “You have something to do. You've got—” She blushed, and went on, with resolution, “You've got this art to do.”

Startled by her reminder of his vocation, he dropped his arm. He knew he would have to decide very soon whether to go on with painting or begin something else. If someone who knows would come along and tell me what to do this minute, he thought, I would do whatever he said.

Barbara, believing him in contact with some life of the spirit from which she was excluded, looked at him with admiration; and when he did not move for a moment longer, she focused her camera and took his picture, so that her album called “Souvenirs de France” would include this image of Mike looking rapt and destined, his eyes secretively shadowed, high above the sea.

“It's different for me,” Barbara said, forgetting once more to wind her film. “I can't do anything. There's nothing I'm good at. I'm really dumb in school.” She laid her camera in the shade. “Really dumb,” she repeated, shaking her head at the thought. Confronted with ruled examination paper, the electric clock purring on the wall, she was lost—sometimes she was sick and had to leave the room; sometimes she just wrote nonsense. At school, they had tested her for aptitudes and found only that she liked to cook and had played with dolls until it was a scandal; her mother had had to give the dolls away. Anybody could cook and grow up to be a parent, the brisk, sallow student psychologist from N.Y.U. who had tested her implied, and he had then written something terrible—Barbara could only imagine the summing up of her inadequacies—that had been shown to all her teachers and to her mother.

“You should worry,” Mike said. “You'll probably get married sometime, anyway, so what does it matter what you learn?”

The effect of this was to strike her into silence.

She drew her knees up and examined her dusty sandals; she pulled at her skirt so that it covered her legs, and drew her sweater close. Does he mean to
him
, she wondered. 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. Her own mother did nothing all day, but she was excused by having once been married. It was the image of her aunt that Barbara found distressing—her aunt filling her day with scurrying errands, writing letters of complaint (Bus conductors were ruder than before the war. Why did young girls shrink from domestic service? The streets of Paris were increasingly dirtier) to the “Letters” column of the Continental
Daily Mail
. But who would marry me, Barbara had thought. From her reading she knew that she would never meet men or be of interest to them until she could, suddenly and brilliantly, perform on the violin, become a member of Macy's Junior Executive Squad, or, at the very least, take shorthand at a hundred and twenty words a minute.

She peered up at Mike now, but he was looking only at his canvas, daubing in another patch of perfectly red geraniums. “For a while, they thought I could act,” she said, offering him this semiprecious treasure. “I had a radio audition last year, when I was still fifteen. Really,” she said quickly, as if he were about to round on her with complete disbelief. “My speech-class teacher was nice. When my mother came to school to see why I wasn't doing so well, she met all my teachers. This teacher, Mr. Peppner, told her—something. He's the only man teacher in the whole school.” She frowned, wondering once again what Mr. Peppner in his polished dark blue suit had found to say to Mrs. Ainslie; probably she, moist-eyed and smelling expensive, had been so warm, so interested, that Mr. Peppner had had no idea he was being treated like a meritorious cook and had said something extravagant. A few days later, Barbara's mother had asked to dinner a bald young man in spectacles, who had stared hard at Barbara and said, gracefully, that her coloring was much too delicate for television but that he would make an appointment for her with someone else.

“It's not that my mother wanted me to work, or anything,” Barbara explained to Mike, “but a friend of hers said it would give me poise and confidence. So I went to be tested. I had to read lines in a play. There was someone else being tested, a man, and then there was a girl, a real actress. She was only helping. My name in the play was Gillian. It was called ‘The Faltering Years.'”

Mike had never heard of it.

“Well, neither did I, but they all seemed to know it,” Barbara said. “I don't think it was one of the great plays of our time, or anything like that. Of our time,” she repeated thoughtfully, having frequently read this phrase on the jackets of books. “Anyway, I had to be this Mayfair debutante. I was the girlfriend of this man, but I was leaving him.”

“For a rich lord?” Mike said, smiling.

“No,” she said, seriously. “
He
was the lord, only poor. I was leaving him for a rich industrialist. I had to say, ‘Peter, won't you try to understand?' Then he said something. I forget what. Then I had to say, ‘It isn't you, Peter, and it isn't me. It's just.' The line ended that way, but like a question. That was my main part, or most of it. Then I went away, but I was sorry. They skipped all that. Then the man being tested had this big scene with the actress. She was the nurse to his sick mother, who wins his heart. I forget what
they
said.”

“It sounds to me like she had the best part,” said Mike.

“She was around thirty,” Barbara said. “I think she was the director's girlfriend. He took her to lunch afterwards. I saw them going out. Anyway, at the end I had to say to her, ‘You love Peter very much, don't you?' And she had to say, ‘Terribly.' Just the way she said that, the director told me, showed she was an actress. I guess he meant I wasn't. Anyway, they said I'd hear from them, but I never did.”

“It's the craziest audition I ever heard of,” Mike said. He stopped working and turned to look at her. “You a Mayfair debutante, for God's sake. It wasn't a fair audition.”

She looked up at him, troubled. “But they must know what they're doing, don't you think?” At this reminder of knowledge and authority, Mike agreed that they probably did. “Are you hungry?” she asked. She was tired of the conversation, of exposing her failures.

The sun was nearly overhead, and they moved under a parasol pine. “There's nothing to drink,” Barbara said apologetically, “but she put in some oranges.”

They ate their lunch in silence, like tired Alpinists resting on a ledge. Barbara screwed her eyes tight and tried to read the lettering on the monument; it was too hot to walk across the grass, out of their round island of shade. “It's to some queen,” she said at last, and read out: “‘
Elizabeth, impératrice d'Autriche et reine de la Hongrie
.' Well, I never heard of her, did you? Maybe she stayed at this hotel.” Mike seemed to be falling asleep. “About Hungary, you know,” she said, speaking rapidly. “One time, I went to a funny revue in Paris with my aunt. It was supposed to be in the war, and this lady was going to entertain the Russian ambassador. She wanted to dress up her little dog in the Russian costume, in his honor, but she had only a Hungarian one. So she called all the embassies and said, ‘Which side of the war is Hungary on?' and nobody knew. So then she finally called the Russian ambassador and she said, ‘I want to dress my little dog in your honor but I have only a Hungarian costume. Do you know which side the Hungarians are on?' And the ambassador said, ‘Yes, I do know, but I can't tell you until I've talked to Moscow.'” Barbara looked anxiously at Mike. “Do you think that's funny?”

“Sure.”

Neither of them had laughed.

“Do you remember the war?” he asked.

“A little.” She got up as if she were suddenly uncomfortable, and walked to the edge of the grass, where the Cap fell away sharply to the sea.

“I remember quite a lot,” said Mike. “My father was in Denver the whole time—I don't know why. We stayed home because they couldn't find us a place to live there. When he came home for leaves, we—my brother and I—wouldn't mind him, we were so used to our mother. When he'd tell us to do something, we'd ask her if it was all right.” He smiled, remembering. “Was yours away?”

“Well, mine was killed,” she said diffidently, as if by telling him this she made an unfair claim on his attention. “I was only five when he went away, so I don't remember much. He was killed later, when I was seven. It was right before my birthday, so I couldn't have a party.” She presented, like griefs of equal value, these two facts. “People are always asking me—friends of my mother, I mean—do I remember him and what a wonderful sense of humor he had and all that. When I say no, I don't remember, they look at me and say –” Her voice went up to an incredulous screech: “‘But it can't be that long ago!'”

“Well, it is,” Mike said, as if he were settling a quarrel. He stood up and moved beside her. Together, they looked down to the curving beach, where the sea broke lightly against the warm rocks, and the edge of the crumbling continent they had never seen whole. From above, they could see that beside each of the tumbled hotels a locked garden, secure against God knew what marauders, had gone wild; they could distinguish the film of weeds that brushed the top of the wall, the climbing roses that choked the palms. Above, out of their vision, was the fortification that had offended Barbara's aunt, and down on the beach was the aunt herself, a dot with a sunshade, knitting forever.

Say we might get married later, Barbara willed, closing her eyes against the quiet sea and the moldering life beside it. But Mike said nothing, thinking only of how dull a town Menton was, and wondering if it had been worth two weeks. He had been taught that time must be reckoned in value—and fiscal value, at that. At home, he would be required to account both for his allowance and for his days and weeks. “Did you get anything out of Menton?” his father would ask. “Was it worth it?”

“Oh, yes,” he might tell them. “I worked a lot, and I met a rich girl.”

His parents would be pleased. Not that they were vulgar or mercenary, but they considered it expedient for young artists to meet the well-born; they would accept, Mike was certain, the fact of his friendship with Barbara as a useful acquirement, justifying a fortnight of lounging about in the sun. When he thought of Barbara as a patroness, commissioning him, perhaps, for a portrait, he wanted to laugh: yet the seed of the thought—that the rich were of utility—remained, and to rid himself of it he asked her sharply if she had brought her bathing suit.

Stricken, looking about as if it might be lying on the grass, she said, “I didn't think—But we can go home and get it.”

They gathered up their scattered belongings and walked back the way they had come. Barbara, in her misery, further chastened herself by holding a geranium leaf on her nose—she had visions of peeling and blisters—and she trotted beside Mike in silence.

“Do you write letters?” he said at last, for he had remembered that they both lived in New York, and he felt that if he could maintain the tenuous human claim of correspondence, possibly his acquaintance with Barbara might turn out to be of value; he could not have said how or in terms of what. And although he laughed at his parents, he was reluctant to loosen his hold on something that might justify him in their sight until he had at least sorted out his thoughts.