The Cost of Living Read Free

grounds used more than once, chicken cooked in vinegar instead of wine. People have been forced to flee their homes, leaving everything behind: “all the tablecloths, the little coffee spoons!” This is the fate of Frau Stengel in “A Day Like Any Other,” a
Volksdeutsche
refugee from Prague who keeps a picture of Hitler pressed between two magazines. Others must open up their homes to boarders in order to make ends meet. The result is a thrusting together of people from mismatched worlds, a mis-en-scène Gallant exploits to stunning effect again and again. In addition to the devastation of history’s recent past, the stories allude to the politics of France in the Fifties and Sixties: the country’s diminishing status as a colonial power, beginning with Indochina’s independence in 1954 and followed by the Algerian War of 1954–62. The student uprisings of 1968 (which Gallant writes about in her book of nonfiction,
Paris Journals)
, occur toward the end of this collection’s timeline.
    Two stories, “Willi” and “One Aspect of a Rainy Day,” are about German characters in postwar Europe, a subject which Gallant would explore more extensively in the 1973 collection,
The Pegnitz Junction
. The characters dream of home but cannot return, and are not made to feel at home in France, where they live. They exist without resident permits, without legitimacy, with little but memories of a previous life. Willi, a former prisoner of war, now serves as a consultant on films made about the Occupation; twenty years on, the horrors of the Holocaust are already material for the movies. “One Aspect of a Rainy Day,” about a German scholarship student, concerns a general strike and a political demonstration. Because of rain and an absent mayor, the demonstration is futile. “They might have been coming from anywhere—a cinema, or a funeral,” the narrator observes when the desultory group breaks apart. The story was published in 1962, the year after the Paris Massacre, when French police attacked roughly thirty thousand unarmed peaceful Algerian demonstrators. “Sunday Afternoon” also takes place during the Algerian conflict. Veronica, a nineteen-year-old girl from London, sits in her apartment in curlers and a bathrobe while her American boyfriend, Jim, who has forgotten why he fell in love with her, talks to a Tunisian friend about whether Algeria will go to the Communists. Veronica is excluded from the conversation, expected only to pour the coffee; the story is less about politics than about the chauvinistic world of men. Veronica resists autonomy, crying when Jim tells her that she’s free. We know he will never marry her: “She was the homeless, desperate girl in Paris against whom he might secretly measure, one future day, a plain but confident wife.”
    Veronica and Jim’s casual cohabitation is an exception in this collection. Most of the couples are married, most of them unhappily. Infidelity runs through the stories as a matter of course. A wedding ring is flung, unforgettably, into the twilight. A number of the characters are either divorced or in overburdened, disillusioned relationships. Wives declare to their husbands that they do not like men. “Bernadette” is a particularly damning instance of a loveless marriage, and is also an indictment of domestic life in Fifties suburbia. The couple, Nora and Robbie, had once been campus liberals, writing plays, drinking beer out of old pickle jars, hoping to change the world. Now they live in a large pseudo-Tudor home outside Montreal, with a lawyer’s salary, a live-in maid, and two daughters in boarding school. Nora’s activism takes the form of cocktail parties, and Robbie, who serially seduces other women and is serially forgiven, is also seduced by sentimental literary images of the working class. Curious about the kitchen in which their maid, Bernadette, grew up, he