Home Truths by Mavis Gallant

off to order their meal. He seemed so at ease, so certain of other people and their reactions – at any moment he would say he was the ambassador of a place where nothing mattered but charm and freedom. Sarah was not used to cold wine at noon. She touched the misty decanter with her fingertips and wet her forehead with the drops. She wanted to ask his motives again but found he was questioning hers – laughing at Sarah, in fact. Who was she to frown and cross-examine, she who wandered around eating pizzas alone? She told him about Professor Downcast and her father – she had to, to explain what she was doing here – and even let him look at her father’s letter. Part of it said, “My poor Sarah, no one ever seems to interest you unless he is
    no good at his job
    small in stature, I wonder why?
    ‘Marxist-Leninist’ (since you sneer at ‘Communist’ and will not allow its use around the house)
    married or just about to be
    in debt to God and humanity.
    I am not saying you should look for the opposite in every case, only for some person who doesn’t combine all these qualities at one time.”
    “I’m your father’s man,” said Roy Cooper, and he might well have been, except for the problem of height. He was a bachelor, and certainly the opposite of a Marxist-Leninist: he was a former prison inspector whose career had been spent inan Asian colony. He had been retired early when the Empire faded out and the New Democracy that followed no longer required inspection. As for “debt to God and humanity,” he said he had his own religion, which made Sarah stare sharply at him, wondering if his idea of being funny was the same as her father’s. Their conversation suddenly became locked; an effort would be needed to pull it in two, almost a tug-of-war. I could stay a couple of days or so, she said to herself. She saw the south that day as she would see it finally, as if she had picked up an old dress and first wondered, then knew, how it could be changed to suit her.
    They spent that night talking on a stony beach. Sarah half lay, propped on an elbow. He sat with his arms around his knees. Behind him, a party of boys had made a bonfire. By its light Sarah told him all her life, every season of it, and he listened with the silent attention that honored her newness. She had scarcely reached the end when a fresh day opened, streaky and white. She could see him clearly: even unshaven and dying for sleep he was the ambassador from that easy place. She tossed a stone, a puppy asking for a game. He smiled, but still kept space between them, about the distance of the blue tablecloth.
    They began meeting every day. They seemed to Sarah to be moving toward each other without ever quite touching; then she thought they were travelling in the same direction, but still apart. They could not turn back, for there was nothing to go back to. She felt a pause, a hesitation. The conversation began to unlock; once Sarah had told all her life she could not think of anything to say. One afternoon he came to the beach nearly two hours late. She sensed he had something to tell her, and waited to hear that he had a wife, or was engaged, or on drugs,or had no money. In the most casual voice imaginable he asked Sarah if she would spend the rest of her holiday with him. He had rented a place up behind Nice. She would know all his friends, quite openly; he did not want to let her in for anything squalid or mean. She could come for a weekend. If she hated it, no hard feelings. It was up to her.
    This was new, for of course she had never
lived
with anyone. Well, why not? In her mind she told her father, After all, it was a bachelor you wanted for me. She abandoned her textbooks and packed instead four wooden bowls she had bought for her father’s sister and an out-of-print Matisse poster intended for Professor Downcast. Now it would be Roy’s. He came to fetch her that day in the car that was always parked somewhere in shade – it was a small open