The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (149 page)

Whispered echoes, mean gossip, ignorant assurances reach his ears. Mme. Parfaire when she descends the curving staircase clutches the banister, halts every few steps, wears a set expression. Strands of hair hang about her face. Even in her wan and precarious condition, popular sentiment now runs, she finds enough strength to open her windows and sustain the life of pigeons. Garbage-throwing, once seen as a tiresome and dirty habit, has become a demonstration of selflessness. Once a week she totters across the Seine to the Quai de la Mégisserie and buys bird food laced with vitamin E, to ensure the pigeons a fulfilled and fertile span. “Residents are again reminded …” is viewed with a collective resentment. Not long ago an anonymous hand wrote “Sadist!”—meaning Grippes.

Yesterday he happened to see her in the lobby, talking in a low voice to a neighbor holding a child by the hand. She fell silent as Grippes went by. The women watched him out of sight; he was sure of it, could feel the pressure of their staring. He heard the child laugh. It was clear to him that Mme. Parfaire was doped to the eyes on tranquilizers, handed out in Paris like salted peanuts, but he could not very well put up a notice saying so. People would shrug and say it was none of their business. Would they be interested in a revelation such as “Mme. Parfaire wants to spend her last years living in sin, or quasi-sin, or just in worshipful devotion, with the selfish and disagreeable and eminently unmarriageable Henri Grippes”? True, but it might seem unlikely. As an inventor of a great number of imaginary events Grippes knows that the reflection of reality is no more than just that; it is as flat and mute as a mirror. Better to sound plausible than merely in touch with facts.

He had just finished cleaning the window when the siren began to wail. He looked at the electric clock on top of the refrigerator: twelve sharp. Today was a Wednesday, the first one of the month. He could hear two distinct tones and saw them as lines across the sky: a shrill humming—a straight, thin path—and a lower note that rose and dipped and finally descended in a slow spiral, like a plane shot down. Five minutes later, as he sat drinking coffee, the warning started again. This time, the somewhat deeper
note fell away quite soon; the other, more piercing cry streamed on and on, and gradually vanished in the bright day.

Stirring his coffee, using his old friend’s spoon, Grippes thought of how he might put a stop to the pigeon business, her nighttime fantasies, and any further possibility of being wakened at an unacceptable hour. He could write a note inviting himself to lunch, take it upstairs, and slide it under her door. He would go as he was now, with the plastic jacket on top of a bathrobe. Serving lunch would provide point and purpose to her day. It would stop the downward spiral of her dreams. Composing the note (it would require tact and skill) might serve to dislodge “Residents are again reminded …” from his typewriter and his mind.

He pictured, with no effort, a plate of fresh mixed seafood with mayonnaise or just a bit of lemon and olive oil, saw an omelette folded on a warmed plate, marinated herring and potato salad, a light ragout of lamb kidneys in wine. He could see himself proceeding along the passage and sitting down on the chair where, as a rule, he spent much of every night and writing the note. From the window, if he leaned a bit to the right, he would see the shadow of the Montparnasse tower, and the office building that had replaced the old railway station with its sagging wooden floor. Only yesterday, he started to tell himself—but no. A generation of Parisians had never known anything else.

An empty space, as blank and infinite as the rectangle of sky above the court, occurred in his mind, somewhere between the sliding of the invitation—if one could call it that—under her door and the materialization of the omelette. The question was, How to fill the space? He was like someone reading his own passport, the same information over and over. “My dearest Marthe,” he began (going back to the first thing). “Don’t you think the time has come …” But
he
did not think it. “Remember that woman who said she had known van Gogh?” She had no connection to their dilemma. It was just something he liked to consider. “You should not be living alone. Solitude is making you …” No; above all, not that. “Perhaps if one of those nephews of yours came to live with you …” They were all married, some with grown children. “I think it only fair to point out that I never once made a firm …” The whine of the dissembler. “The occasional meal taken together …” The thin edge. “You know very well that it is against the law to feed pigeons and that increasingly heavy fines …”

How good it would be to lie down on the kitchen floor and let his inspiring goddess kneel beside him, anxiously watching for the flutter of an
eyelid, as he deftly lifts her wallet. As it turns out, there is nothing in it except “Residents are again reminded …” Like Grippes, like the prosecutor, like poor Marthe, in a way, his goddess is a victim of the times, hard up for currency and short of ideas, ideas of divine origin in particular. She scarcely knows how to eke out the century. Meanwhile, she hangs on to “Residents are again …,” hoping (just as Grippes does) that it amounts to the equivalent of the folding money every careful city dweller keeps on hand for muggers.