Overhead in a Balloon

PRAISE FOR
MAVIS GALLANT’S FICTION:

DRAMA
What Is to Be Done?
(1983)

ESSAYS
Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews
(1986)

FICTION
The Other Paris
(stories, 1956)
Green Water, Green Sky
(novel, 1959)
My Heart Is Broken
(stories, 1964)
A Fairly Good Time
(novel, 1970)
The Pegnitz Junction
(stories, 1973)
The End of the World
(stories, 1974)
From the Fifteenth District
(stories, 1979)
Home Truths
(stories, 1981)
Overhead in a Balloon
(stories, 1985)
In Transit
(stories, 1988)
Across the Bridge
(stories, 1993)
The Moslem Wife
(stories, 1994)
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant
(stories, 1996)

S
andor Speck’s first art gallery in Paris was on the Right Bank, near the Church of St. Elisabeth, on a street too narrow for cars. When his block was wiped off the map to make way for a five-story garage, Speck crossed the Seine to the shadow of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where he set up shop in a picturesque slum protected by law from demolition. When this gallery was blown up by Basque separatists, who had mistaken it for a travel agency exploiting the beauty of their coast, he collected his insurance money and moved to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Here, at terrifying cost, he rented four excellent rooms – two on the loggia level, and a clean dry basement for framing and storage. The entrance, particularly handsome, was on the
street side of an eighteenth-century
hôtel particulier
built around an elegant court now let out as a parking concession. The building had long before been cut up into dirty, decaying apartments, whose spiteful, quarrelsome, and avaricious tenants were forgiven every failing by Speck for the sake of being the Count of this and the Prince of that. Like the flaking shutters, the rotting windowsills, the slops and oil stains in the ruined court, they bore a Proustian seal of distinction, like a warranty, making up for his insanely expensive lease. Though he appreciated style, he craved stability even more. In the Faubourg, he seemed at last likely to find it: not a stone could be removed without the approval of the toughest cultural authorities of the nation. Three Marxist embassies installed in former ducal mansions along the street required the presence of armed policemen the clock around. The only commercial establishments anywhere near Speck’s – a restaurant and a bookstore – seemed unlikely targets for firebombs: the first catered to lower-echelon civil servants, the second was painted royal blue, a conservative colour he found reassuring. The bookstore’s name, Amandine, suggested shelves of calm regional novels and accounts of travel to Imperial Russia signed “A Diplomat.” Pasted inside the window, flat on the pane, was an engraving that depicted an old man, bearded and mitred, tearing a small demon limb from limb. The old man looked self-conscious, the imp resigned. He supposed that this image concealed a deep religious meaning, which he did not intend to plumb. If it was holy, it was respectable; as the owner of the gallery across the street, he needed to know nothing more.

Speck was now in the parish of St. Clotilde, near enough to the church for its bells to give him migraine headache. Leaves
from the church square blew as far as his door – melancholy reminders of autumn, a season bad for art. (Winter was bad, too, while the first chestnut leaves unfolding heralded the worst season of all. In summer the gallery closed.) In spite of his constant proximity to churches he had remained rational. Generations of highly intellectual Central European agnostics and freethinkers had left in his bones a mistrust of the bogs and quicksands that lie beyond reality perceived. Neither loss nor grief nor guilt nor fear had ever moved him to appeal to the unknown – any unknown, for there were several. Nevertheless, after signing his third lease in seven years, he decided to send Walter, his Swiss assistant, a lapsed Calvinist inching towards Rome, to light a candle at St. Clotilde’s. Walter paid for a five-franc taper and set it before St. Joseph, the most reliable intermediary he could find: a wave of post-conciliar puritanism seemed to have broken at St. Clotilde’s, sweeping away most of the mute and obliging figures to whom desires and gratitude could be expressed. Walter was willing to start again in some livelier church – Notre Dame de Paris, for instance – but Speck thought enough was enough.

O
n a damp October evening about a year after this, there could be seen in Speck’s window a drawing of a woman drying her feet (Speck permanent collection); a poster announcing the current exhibition, “Paris and Its Influence on the Tirana School, 1931-2”; five catalogues displayed attractively; and the original of the picture on the poster – a shameless copy of Foujita’s “Mon Intérieur” re-entitled “Balkan Alarm Clock.” In defiance of a government circular reminding Paris galleries
about the energy crisis Speck had left the lights on. This was partly to give the lie to competitors who might be putting it about that he was having money troubles. He had set the burglar alarm, bolted the security door, and was now cranking down an openwork iron screen whose Art Nouveau loops and fronds allowed the works inside to be seen but nothing larger than a mouse to get in. The faint, floating sadness he always felt while locking up had to do with the time. In his experience, love affairs and marriages perished between seven and eight o’clock, the hour of rain and no taxis. All over Paris couples must be parting forever, leaving like debris along the curbs the shreds of cancelled restaurant dates, useless ballet tickets, hopeless explanations, and scraps of pride; and towards each of these disasters a taxi was pulling in, the only taxi for miles, the light on its roof already dimmed in anticipation to the twin dots that in Paris mean “occupied.” But occupied by whom?

“You take it.”

“No, you. You’re the one in a hurry.”

The lover abandoned under a dripping plane tree would feel a damp victory of a kind, awarding himself a first-class trophy for selfless behaviour. It would sustain him ten seconds, until the departing one rolled down the taxi window to hurl her last flint: “You Fascist!” Why was this always the final shot, the coup de grâce delivered by women? Speck’s wife, Henriette, book critic on an uncompromising political weekly, had said it three times last spring – here, in the street, where Speck stood locking the iron screen into place. He had been uneasily conscious of his wellborn neighbours, hanging out their windows, not missing a thing. Henriette had then gone away in a cab to join her lover, leaving Speck, the gallery, her job – everything that mattered.