Free Overhead in a Balloon by Mavis Gallant Page A

naturally, like clusters of coral. All the apartments connected; one could walk from end to end of the floor without having to step out to a landing. They never locked their doors. Members of the same family do not steal from one another, and they have nothing to hide. Aymeric said this almost sternly. Robert’s wife had died, he added, just as Walter opened his mouth to ask. Death was the same thing as desertion.
    Walter did not know what to answer to all this, especially to the part about locks. A good, stout bolt seemed to him a sensible and not an unfriendly precaution. “And lead us not into temptation,” he was minded to quote, but it was too soon to begin that ambiguous sort of exchange.
    At that moment Walter’s employer appeared across the boulevard, at the curb, trying to flag a taxi by waving his briefcase. None stopped, and he moved away, perhaps to a bus stop. Walter wondered where he was going, then remembered that he didn’t care.
    “I hate him,” he told Aymeric. “I
hate
him. I dream he is in danger. A patrol car drives up and the execution squad takes him away. I dream he is drinking coffee after dinner and faroff in the night you can hear the patrol car, coming to get him.”
    Aymeric wondered what bound Walter to that particular dealer. There were other employers in Paris, just as dedicated to art.
    “I hate art, too,” said Walter. “Oh, I don’t mean that I hate what you do. That, at least, has some meaning – it lets people see how they imagine they live.”
    Aymeric’s tongue rested on his lower lip as he considered this. Walter explained that he had to spend another eleven years working for Trout Face if he was to get the full benefit of a twenty-year pension fund. In eleven years, he would be forty-six. He hoped there was still enjoyment to be had at that age.
    “When you are drawing retirement pay, I’ll be working for a living,” Aymeric said. He let his strong, elderly hands rest on the table – evidence, of a kind.
    “At first, when I thought I could pull my funds out at any time, I used to give notice,” Walter went on. “When I stopped giving notice, he turned mean. I dreamed last night that there was a bomb under the floor of the gallery. He nearly blew himself up digging it out. He was saved. He is always saved. He escapes, or the thing doesn’t explode, or the chief of the execution squad changes his mind.”
    “Robert has a book about dreams,” said Aymeric. “He can look it up. I want him to meet you.”
    A bout four weeks after this, Walter moved into two rooms, kitchen, and bathroom standing empty between Robert’s quarters and his mother’s. It was Robert who looked after the practical side of the household and to whom Walter paid a surprisingly hefty rent; but he was on a direct Métro line, andwithin reach of friendship, and, for the first time since he had left Bern to work in Paris, he felt close to France.
    That spring Robert’s mother had grown old. She could not always remember where she was, or the age of her two children. At night she roamed about, turning on lights, opening bedroom doors. (Walter, who felt no responsibility towards her, kept his locked.) She picked up curios and trinkets and left them anywhere. Once a month Robert and Aymeric traded back paperweights and snuffboxes.
    One night she entered her son’s bedroom at two in the morning, pulled open a drawer, and began throwing his shirts on the floor. She was packing to send him on a summer holiday. Halfway through (her son pretended to be asleep), she turned her mind to Aymeric. Aymeric woke up a few minutes later to find his aunt in bed beside him, with her finger in her mouth. He got up and spent the rest of the night in an armchair.
    “Why don’t you knock her out with pills?” Walter asked him.
    “We can’t do that. It might kill her.”
    What’s the difference, said Walter’s face. “Then shut her up in her own bedroom.”
    “She might not like that. By the way, here’s