The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant Read Free Book Online Page A

d’Anjou. Mike painted with sober patience the bridges of the Seine, the rain-soaked lawns of the Tuileries, and a head-on view of Notre Dame. His paintings were large (Mr. Chitterley was nearsighted), askew (as he had been taught in the public schools of New York), and empty of people (he had never been taught to draw, and it was not his nature to take chances).
    â€œVery
interesting
,” said Mr. Chitterley of Mike’s work. Squinting a little, he would add, “Ah! I
see
what you were trying to do here!”
    â€œYou do?” Mike wished he would be more specific, for he sometimes recognized that his pictures were flat, empty, and the color of cement. At first, he had blamed the season, for the Paris winter had been sunless; later on, he saw that its gray contained every shade in a beam of light, but this effect he was unable to reproduce. Unnerved by the pressure of time, he watched his work all winter, searching for the clue that would set him on a course. Prodded in the direction of art, he now believed in it, enjoying, above all, the solitude, the sense of separateness, the assembling of parts into something reasonable. He might have been equally happy at a quiet table, gathering into something ticking and ordered the scattered wheels of a watch, but this had not been suggested, and he had most certainly never given it a thought. At last, when the season had rained itself to an end (and his family innocently were prepared to have him exhibit his winter’s harvest in some garret of the Left Bank and send home the critics’ clippings), he approached Mr. Chitterley and asked what he ought to do next.
    â€œWhy, go to the country,” said Mr. Chitterley, who was packing for a holiday with the owner of the quai d’Anjou studio. “Go south. Don’t stop in a hotel but live on the land, in a tent, and paint, paint, paint, paint, paint!”
    â€œI can’t afford it,” Mike said. “I mean I can’t afford to buy the tent and stuff. But I can stay over here until August, if you think there’s any point. I mean is it wasting time for me to paint, paint, paint?”
    Mr. Chitterley shot him an offended look and then a scornful one, which said, How like an American! The only measuring rods, time and money. Aloud, he suggested Menton. He had stayed there as a child, and he remembered it as a paradise of lemon ice and sunshine. Mike, for want of a better thought, or even a contrastive one, took the train there a day later.
    Menton was considerably less than paradise. Shelled, battered, and shabby, it was a town gone to seed, in which old English ladies, propelling themselves with difficulty along the Promenade George V, nodded warmly to each other (they had become comrades during the hard years of war, when they were interned together in the best hotels, farther up the coast) and ignored the new influx of their countrymen—embarrassed members of the lower middle classes, who refused to undress in the face of heat and nakedness and who huddled miserably on the beach in hot city clothing, knotted handkerchiefs on their heads to shield them from the sun.
    â€œ
Not
the sort of English one likes,” Barbara’s aunt had said sadly to Mike, who was painting beside her on the beach. “If you had seen Menton before the war! I had a little villa, up behind that hotel. It was shelled by the Americans. Not that it wasn’t necessary,” she added, recalling her origins. “Still—And they built a fortification not far away. I went up to look at it. It was full of rusted wire, and nothing in it but a dead cat.”
    â€œThe French built it,” Barbara said. “The
pension
man told me.”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter, dear,” her aunt said. “Before the war, and even when it started, there was nothing there at all. It was so different.” She dropped her knitting and looked about, as if just the three of them were fit to remember