Le Mariage
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1 - Clara
Chapter 2 - Tim
Chapter 3 - Anne-Sophie
Chapter 4 - What Anne-Sophie Saw
Chapter 5 - La Virtue
Chapter 6 - Delia’s Story
Chapter 7 - Dernier Train
Chapter 8 - Sunday Morning
Chapter 9 - Hotel Le Mistral
Chapter 10 - Goddess of the Hunt
Chapter 11 - Will You Wear White?
Chapter 12 - Tears at the Tennis Club Marne-Garches-la-Tour
Chapter 13 - Who Is Tim?
Chapter 14 - Where Is Gabriel?
Chapter 15 - The Clipping Box
Chapter 16 - Illuminating Manuscripts
Chapter 17 - The Invitations
Chapter 18 - The Houseguest
Chapter 19 - At Madame du Barry’s
Chapter 20 - Hospitality
Chapter 21 - The Driad Apocalypse
Chapter 22 - The Arrest of Monsieur Savard
Chapter 23 - Confidences
Chapter 24 - The Arrest
Chapter 25 - Prison
Chapter 26 - Have You Heard What Happened to Clara?
Chapter 27 - The Prisoner
Chapter 28 - Stir-Crazy
Chapter 29 - Word from Gabriel
Chapter 30 - Out on Bail
Chapter 31 - Clara and Delia
Chapter 32 - Cave Canem
Chapter 33 - The Shadow of the Altar
Chapter 34 - The Hunting World
Chapter 35 - Take It Off, Take It Off
Chapter 36 - Tim and Antoine Talk
Chapter 37 - Public Opinion
Chapter 38 - Lunch at the Persands
Chapter 39 - A Walk in the Woods
Chapter 40 - The American State of Mind
Chapter 41 - Cécile
Chapter 42 - Principles
Chapter 43 - Self-Denial
Chapter 44 - Lunch Date
Chapter 45 - Chestnuts from Suzanne de Persand
Chapter 46 - Pyramid Power
Chapter 47 - Take Me to the Shining Shore
Chapter 48 - Lust
Chapter 49 - Oregon
Chapter 50 - Guinevere Worries
Chapter 51 - Snowbound
Chapter 52 - Meanwhile Back in Paris
Chapter 53 - Farewell to the New World
Chapter 54 - Real Life
Chapter 55 - Countdown to the Altar
Chapter 56 - Rehearsal Afternoon
Chapter 57 - The Crays Entertain
Chapter 58 - The Rules of the Game
Chapter 59 - Wedding Day
Chapter 60 - The Beginning
Acclaim for Le Manage
“A subversive ... culture-clashing comedy of manners ...
A bonbon of a novel as deliciously diverting as a visit
to a French candy shop.”
—USA Today
“A witty romp.”
—Elle
“Supremely twisty storytelling meets bone-dry francophilic wit.”
—Harper’s Bazaar
“The literary equivalent of a spring tonic: invigorating and
uplifting, a burst of comic sunshine ... Inspired ... Johnson’s
characters command our full attention ... Sophisticated drama.”
-New York Daily News
“Johnson [whips] love and marriage into a
frothy souffle ... delicious.”
-Entertainment Weekly
“Another charming comedy of manners set in the City of Light.”
-The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Entertaining ... Johnson takes delight in her characters.”
—The New York Times
“Filled with sharp observations ... In classic madcap fashion, Johnson stirs many characters and strands into Le Mariage.”
-New York Newsday
“A witty, farcical French soufflé ... You don’t have to be a francophile to enjoy this clever novel.”
—The Arizona Daily News
“Diane Johnson has 20/20 eyes for the absurd, an acute focus for
incongruent moments that spark and fizz when wildly disparate
people and cultures collide ... Delicious.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Plot meets panache in this intercontinental novel ... a comedic meditation on love and adultery.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A delicious and delightful book ... Johnson is a serious
social critic as well as a literary one ... She writes
with charm and hilarity.”
—The Sunday Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)
“Johnson juggles a clever plot and complex characters with both
wit and soul ... A sophisticated adventure and a sparkling
comedy of manners.”
—New York Post
“Johnson is a beguiling writer and a master storyteller ...
Le Mariage is a near-perfect novel.”
—Salon.com
“Johnson’s characters are flawed, and all the more human for that, as they jostle for their share of affection in an imperfect world ... [She] once again opens a window on the world of American expatriates in Paris.”
—The Washington Times
“Rendered with a wicked wit ... Hilarious.”
—The Seattle Times
“With piercing insight and urbane humor, Johnson explores
the enigma of Gallic life through the baffled eyes
of Americans abroad.”
—Nylon
“With Le Mariage, Johnson lays claim to the legacy of Henry James.”
—amazon.com
“Delightful... [Imbued with] a contemporary satirical wit ... Thrown into the entertaining mix is Johnson’s perceptive and witty insights on love, marriage, and Anglo-French relations.”
-Library Journal
ALSO BY DIANE JOHNSON
FICTION
Le Divorce
Health and Happiness
Persian Nights
Lying Low
The Shadow Knows
Burning
Loving Hands at Home
Fair Game
NONFICTION
Natural Opium
Terrorists and Novelists
Dashiell Hammett
Lesser Lives
PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
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Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Previously published in a Dutton edition.
First Plume Printing, April 2001
Copyright © Diane Johnson, 200
0
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:
Johnson, Diane.
Le mariage : a novel / by Diane Johnson.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-15389-5
1. Journalists—France—Paris—Fiction. 2. Americans—France—Paris—Fiction.
3. Paris (France)—Fiction. 4. Art thefts—Fiction. 1. Title.
PS3560.O3746 M37 2000
813’.54—dc21 99-089849
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Version_3
To the memory of Alice Adams and William Abrahams
What the artist calls good, the object of all his playful pains, his life-and-death jesting, is nothing less than a parable of the right and the good, a representation of all human striving after perfection.
—Thomas Mann, Homage to Kafka
1
Clara
It was widely agreed among the other Americans in Paris that Clara Holly had the ideal life here, and people also agreed that if her good fortune had distanced her slightly from the normal lot of Americans, even from human beings generally, it hadn’t made a monster of her as often seems to happen to women in her category—beautiful, rich, well married, far from her Oregon beginnings. Sometimes women in this category, married to Europeans, are seen to acquire unplaceable mid-Atlantic accents and a certain amnesia about being American except for eight weeks spent on Martha’s Vineyard every summer.
“And sometimes fortunate people can come to feel that they have earned their good fortune,” remarked the princess Sternholz, nee Dorothy Minor from Cincinnati, of Clara, though she liked her.
Clara Holly remembered her roots, yet would rather not, and almost never went back to the U.S. When in Paris she belonged very much to the American world that exists like a specialized form in a complex ecosystem, dependent on its hosts but apart from them, extending mossily from the Marais to Neuilly, the stodgy suburb to the northwest, and into the delightful countryside between Saint-Cloud and Versailles—so Marie Antoinette in its pretension to wildness, nature, and simplicity.
Clara and her husband Serge Cray, the renowned if now somewhat reclusive director, live out there, near the village of Etang-la-Reine, in a château of exceptional beauty that had once briefly belonged to Madame du Barry. This was a decrepit structure that had somehow escaped the notice of the ministry of such things, fallen into further decay, briefly become a bed-and-breakfast, and been bought by a newly rich Russian who sold its boiseries and cheminées-its panelling and fireplaces. After Serge Cray bought it, he directed the refurbishment, using studio carpenters and props from his costume film Queen Caroline, and Clara had thrown herself into restoring the gardens, going into Paris only a couple of times a week to shop or see an art show or go to a party.
Clara was always planning to go back to Oregon—her widowed mother lived in Lake Oswego, to whom she spoke almost daily—but somehow she didn’t go more, than every year or two. This was partly because of Cray, who could not go to America because of some income tax matter, a running battle with the IRS that did not quite warrant extradition.
Cray had some view that she would be held hostage. The idea of her going always threw him into one of his fits of gloom. He was Polish to his boots, though after the age of twelve he had been raised in Chicago. It wasn’t so much her absence he would mind—they got lost in their rooms and corridors and saw little of each other—it was that America could attach a piece of his property: Clara.
Whether it could or couldn‘t, Clara respected his fears. They tallied with her own, which over the years had grown exaggerated from reading American newspaper accounts of violence, handguns, road accidents, and crime.
Now thirty-two, Clara had been married for a dozen years, but hadn’t acted since that first film, when she met Serge, and when she gained a little bit of cult fame for a daring dance scene. In truth, her dancing had not been as memorable as her nubile beauty, just out of her teens, black curls and a voluptuousness that was close to plumpness. She became thinner with marriage and motherhood. Lars, their eleven-year-old son, was at school in England, to Clara’s distress and over her objections, it being Cray’s view that English education was superior to French for a boy with Lars’s handicap. Mrs. Holly, Lars’s ailing grandmother, agreed it was a shame to send a child so young off without his mother, and in her opinion Clara wasn’t happy; but the husband was overbearing, as these film people are. Mrs. Holly would say all this to her caregiver Cristal. “There’s nine hours’ time difference between here and France,” Mrs. Holly would always add, it being so odd to think of Clara all the way on the other side of the world where it was dark when the sun shone in Oregon.
Clara was controversial in the American community. The natural suspicion people are apt to feel of above-average beauty was allayed by her apparent modesty and intelligence. A certain loftiness was attributed to shyness, so that people could almost forget about how she looked. Some felt sorry for her because of Lars, deaf from birth, and of how she must miss him, while others remarked that into each life some rain must fall. Yet there was also the fact, undeniable, that the possessors of good fortune tend to take it for granted and then to expect it, and Clara was no exception. In her own view, she may have felt she had mysteriously earned her looks, wealth, and good fortune by the conscious exercise of virtue.
2
Tim
The night the American journalist Thomas Ackroyd Nolinger met the former actress Clara Holly in Paris—without, he says, special presentiment at the time—he had by coincidence been talking about Serge Cray that very morning in Amsterdam in connection with an interesting crime. Nolinger, European stringer for the American conservative newsmagazine Reliance (and also, using his initials TAN, for the liberal monthly Concern; he was more or less untroubled by the ideological contradiction), contributor to the English literary magazine The Weekly, occasional reviewer for the TLS, film buff, restaurant critic, and would-be novelist, had been sitting in the Cafe Prolle in Amsterdam reading through the pile of stuff his helpful magistrate friend Cees had brought him, and noticed something that touched on Clara, or actually her husband, little suspecting he’d be meeting her later the same day.
The crime that interested Nolinger was the theft of a valuable medieval manuscript from the Morgan Library in New York. Though far away, it connected surprisingly to his own life when he read, in the list Cees gave him of prominent collectors of incunabula and illustrated manuscripts, not only the well-known name of Serge Cray, the reclusive director, but the names of a couple of people he had actually met in Frankfurt. These were people the criminals might be expected to try to sell their stolen loot to.
The list of manuscript collectors had been
compiled by Interpol, with the cooperation of the International Booksellers Association, from auction catalogues and records of private sales. None of the people on the list had ever been associated with stolen material, Cees explained, and they were not suspected in the recent theft, but all would be contacted by Interpol and made aware of the disappearance of the Driad Apocalypse should it be offered for sale to any of them. “The Americans have some reason to think the manuscript will be sold in Europe,” said Cees. “That’s why the list concentrates on European collectors.”
Tim went to Amsterdam from time to time to be filled in like this, smoke some grass, have a few beers with Cees, and gather such information as was floating around formally or informally about Belgian sex rings, Luxembourgian assassination plots, hardening Swiss drug enforcement policies, art thefts, terrorist smuggling attempts. Tim had nothing special to do with any of this—he was not a crime reporter and didn’t plan an expose—but he still made the train journey from Paris every few months to hear Cees’s stories. One of these days he would do something with them for Reliance, if he could find an American angle. Reliance always liked hearing how much more corrupt and criminal Europe was than America, though they didn’t like hearing how much better the trains were. Reliance regarded trains as crypto-communist, requiring as they did state subsidies.
Regarding crime in general, theories floated vaguely in Tim’s mind, solid enough to make a little essay: criminal conspiracy as a way of imposing order on the random materials of the chaotic world. Crime required focus, as did perversion; in that sense both represented Order. The psychological soulagements of crime—what was the English word for soulagement? He often lost words, which hurtled unrecoverably into some slot between his English and his French, a great disadvantage for someone who made his living writing.