The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant Read Free Book Online

with snapshots in which ghostly buildings floated on the surface of the Seine, and the steps of the Sacré-Coeur, transparent, encumbered the grass at Versailles. The snapshots she mounted and shielded with tissue in an album called “Souvenirs de France.”
    She was proud of the year, and of the fact that she had shivered in unheated picture galleries and not spent her time drinking milk shakes in the American Embassy restaurant; still, she felt her year no match for Mike’s. When her aunt, testing, asked him where he lived in Paris, he had replied, “Oh, St. Germain,” and Barbara had been ill with envy, unaware that he stayed at a recommended
pension
, the owner of which sent fortnightly reports to his mother.
    Glancing now at Mike shyly, as they walked along the upper road, Barbara caught from the corner of her eye the movement of her own earrings, Moroccan hoops she had bought, in the merciful absence of her aunt, from an Arab on the beach. With his sweaty fez and his impertinent speech, the Arab had seemed to Barbara the breathing incarnation of oil, greed, and problems. She had read a great deal in the winter, and she could have told anyone that Africa seethed, Asia teemed, and that something must be done at once about the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Spanish or Heaven only knew what would happen. She had also been cautioned that these difficulties were the heritage of youth, and this she acknowledged, picturing the youth as athletic, open-shirted, vaguely foreign in appearance, and marching in columns of eight.
    â€œStraight over there is the Middle East,” she said to Mike, placing him without question in those purposeful ranks. She pointed in the direction of Corsica, and went on, “All the Arabs! What are we going to do about the Arabs?”
    Mike shrugged.
    â€œAnd the Indians,” Barbara said. “There are too many of them for the food in the world. And the Russians. What are we going to do about the Russians?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Mike said. “Actually, I never think about it.”
    â€œI suppose you don’t,” she said. “You have your work to do.”
    He glanced at her sharply, but there was no need to look twice. He had already observed her to be without guile, a fact that confused and upset him. Her good manners, as well, made him self-conscious. Once, when she mentioned her school, he had not mentioned his own New York high school and then, annoyed with himself, had introduced it with belligerence. He might have saved himself the trouble; she had never heard of it and did not know that it was a public school. He blamed his uneasiness, unfairly, on the fact that she had money and he had not. It had not occurred to him, inexperienced as he was, placing her with the thinnest of clues, that she might not be rich.
    Mike was older than Barbara, although not by a great deal. He had come to France because the words “art” and “Paris” were unbreakably joined in his family’s imagination, the legend of Trilby’s Bohemia persisting long after the truth of it had died. When his high school art teacher, a young woman whose mobiles had been praised, pronounced that his was a talent not to be buried under the study of medicine or law, his family had decided that a year in Paris would show whether or not his natural bent was toward painting. It was rather like exposing someone to a case of measles and watching for spots to break out.
    In Paris, Mike had spent the first three weeks standing in the wrong queue at the Beaux-Arts, and when no one seemed able to direct him to the right one, he had given up the Beaux-Arts entirely and joined a class instructed by an English painter called Chitterley, whose poster advertisement he had seen in a café. It was Mr. Chitterley’s custom to turn his young charges loose on the city and then, once a week or so, comment on their work in a borrowed studio on the quai