Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  By eight-thirty the drinks crowd had begun to drift off, and those who had been invited to stay to dinner were led downstairs, where a long refectory table had been set for a score of favored guests. Madame la princesse was magisterially hospitable—so American that way. Tim believed his own presence was owing to Anne-Sophie, for she was popular with certain rich Americans, with her good English, her reliable taste in sporting prints and equestrian memorabilia, and, through a school friend, her good-connections to one of the couture houses. In fact, he was prized in his own right, for his cheerful good manners and good looks, but not quite as much as when he had not been engaged. The princess poured him a scotch, with a gesture that suggested she expected him to take it to the table, American style. Estelle d‘Argel sometimes thought Tim might drink a little too much. Anne-Sophie thought of this as typically Anglo-Saxon.

  The stricture against seating a couple together did not apply until they had been married for six months, so Tim and Anne-Sophie were seated together, and during dinner Anne-Sophie kept giving him anguished, significant nudges behind the low, rather prematurely Christmasy centerpiece—it was late October—as if she were unendurably brimming with news. The other dinner guests included Clara Holly, on Tim’s side of the table where he couldn’t embarrass her further by staring, as he probably would have done. The others avoided staring at her, looked anywhere but at her. She must have a lonely view of the world, he thought. The others were several people who could be counted on for big donations, some Herald Tribune people, and a British sculptor Tim sometimes played tennis with.

  After the soup (homard aux morilles), when the subject turned to the affairs of the day, and when she sensed the moment an audience was hers, Anne-Sophie d‘Argel said, “Moi? Pas grand-chose. A man was murdered at my feet today, that is all. His throat was cut and I nearly walked in his blood.”

  This, of course, had the desired effect. The company stopped talking and waited for an amplification of her extraordinary statement. She could see in Tim’s smile approving surprise at her narrative restraint, to have saved such a dramatic tidbit with such forbearance all the way through the aperitifs and first course.

  “Yes,” she said. “I was in my stand, my boutique in the Marché Paul Bert.”

  “She has an antique shop in the flea market,” said someone.

  “Yes, on the theme of the cheval,” she explained parenthetically. “Hunting prints, the old Hermès saddles, chandeliers made out of horseshoes, anything equestrian—sometimes quite funny. But the man, Monsieur Boudherbe, in the next allée. First I heard the explosive clatter of a metal shutter, as if in raising it he had suddenly let it crash like a guillotine. Then the screams. Zut, the screams ...”

  The screams did come back to her with appalling vividness. She would hear them for months. She had not called the police, she had alerted Raoul Pécuchet (Directoire furniture) on the other side of her. He had looked in on Boudherbe, then rushed to use her telephone, then they had taken the police to where Boudherbe lay. “His throat cut, and two Americans standing over him, their faces white as Limoges.”

  She answered the questions of the dinner guests as best she could. Had the Americans done it? Had they been arrested? She did not think so, nor had she learned their names. Was there a motive? Is the flea market in general a dangerous place?

  Talking about it was helping her manage the lurid memory of the sticky blood. She was not awfully pleased when Clara Holly said, “Well, how bizarre, I think I know something about this,” and quickly drew the attention of the company to herself.

  “It’s just a funny coincidence,” Clara said. “A woman called me this morning, from my hometown, in need of help, and it was—must have been—one of the Americans you saw. She was at the flea market and saw the murder.”

  She told the story.

  Anne-Sophie could not read Tim’s expression, but she noted the rapt expressions on the faces of other men. Clara did not seem to strike them as assertive and unfeminine.

  5

  La Virtue

  This was the same day Clara Holly got two calls from Oregon, and it seemed to her that two phone calls from Oregon in one day were too powerful an assault, too much interruption to the rather ritualized graciousness of the French life she led here. She felt rather sorry for herself, which was unusual. “What a nuisance. Well, at least,” she remarked brightly to her husband Serge, “self-pity has the merit that it is apt to be sincere.”

  She had been out gathering the late asters and lingering tomatoes from her garden—lady of leisure amid her emblems of order. There were tomato worms lurking beneath the withering stems, to be sure. Among the things that were worrying her: her elderly mother, Serge’s artistic funk (which had now lasted nine years), the departure of her young son Lars to England to school, the beginning of the hunting season, and an ennui that had lately weighed on her, partly, she knew, because of the situation in Oregon she couldn’t do anything about. She was ordinarily energetic, had mastered French subjunctives, had read all of Gertrude Jekyll, understood the preparation of foie gras frais..

  Then, today, the weekly phone call from Cristal in Oregon, a day early, ranting and tearful as always. Today it was that her mother’s dog Lady had been hit by a car, and wasn’t dead but would cost four thousand dollars in vet’s bills, or should they have her put down?

  “I love your mom but I can’t take this anymore, it’s not right to dump all these cares on me all the time,” Cristal was whining as usual. Clara could always imagine her drying her tears the instant she got off the phone. Or else she was really on this thin edge, a really unstable person, in which case Clara ought to find someone else to care for her mother. Nothing was simple.

  “Try to save her,” Clara said. Yes, of course she would send the money. Of course save Lady—silly, adorable one-eyed Border collie. Clara wasn’t sure if her mother really noticed the dog anymore, this effort was for Cristal, and for Lady herself, of course. She asked to speak to her mother, but of course Mrs. Holly was in bed.

  Nothing easier to predict than that Serge would agree to the four thousand dollars for the vet. She didn’t bother to ask him. His passionate concern for animals was well known, was taken by certain critics and viewers to be the index of his lack of concern for humans, his essential coldness, this in turn explaining the perfection of his films. Clara understood the underlying assumption here, that humaneness excludes perfectionism, but she did not agree that these opposites applied to her husband Serge Cray.

  Who was still, ten o‘clock, reading at the breakfast table. Most days he was up at seven, busying himself in his office. In his mind, Cray was working. He was an artist and therefore was always working. But the darker and more complex his vision became, the more the means of its expression eluded him. He was not comfortable writing, for one thing, and therefore had to depend on writers, who were always problematic. Political difficulties impeded progress—the chaos in Russia, for example, when plans for an historical film (Rasputin, the story so rich in metaphorical power for today) had been well advanced. Increasingly exigent voices at Monday Brothers studio he found rattling—not the infinitely trustful and trustworthy voice of Woly, Wolford Bierman, but others behind Woly.

  Today Serge was reading The Man Without Qualities at the kitchen table. He had been reading it on and off for years, as long as she had known him. Thirteen years.

  “Lady was hit?” He looked up. Clara could see him imagining the screech of wheels, the dog’s scream, the moaning animal’s shuddering limbs. His imagination was vivid, visual, explicit, his face expressive, his scowls like thunder itself, his tender empathy with the animal kingdom showing in his strange eyes.

  “Spinal operations would be needed and so on,” she said, herself passionately fond of Lady, whom Mother had brought home as a puppy, maybe as a sort of substitute daughter, just when Clara had been given the great chance, was going off. to France to be in a movie.

  Then the other call, about noon, was also from an Oregonia
n, a young woman, Delia, “you-don‘t-know-me-but,” but Delia was calling from Paris, sounding hysterical. Clara was used to getting phone calls from other Americans. They were always a nuisance, and they had always got her phone number from her mother. They would identify themselves as friends of her family, or her third-grade teacher, and their passports had been stolen on the way in from the airport, or perhaps she could suggest some restaurants/exhibitions /where to get the best exchange rate? Unspoken would be their hope of getting a glimpse of her fabled château and/or the reclusive Cray.

  This call had several of the expected ingredients. Delia’s folks, the Sadlers, did live down the road from Clara’s mother in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and Delia’s passport had been stolen. But Delia Sadler’s third trouble had startled Clara—that the poor young woman had been involved that morning in a gruesome murder in the marché aux puces—all these things happening to her since she arrived in France the day before.

  Her passport stolen, that standby among the troubles being experienced by Americans who telephoned her, was easy to deal with. Less so was Delia’s incoherent story about some guy she was traveling with, and someone she didn’t know with his throat cut, and the French police. Clara could hear that the girl was in trouble, panicked and demanding, though it wasn’t clear what Clara was meant to do about it. Go and see her, of course, in some hotel near the Gare du Nord—the police had told Delia not to leave the premises—and talk to the police in the French language.

  Clara said she remembered the Sadlers. “You must be younger? Frank was the one in my class.”

  “He’s the oldest. I’m twenty-four,” Delia said, and she sighed desperately. She was staying in the Hotel Le Mistral, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. Clara said that as she was coming into Paris anyway, she would stop by to see her and help if she could. The girl was trying to sound brave and resourceful. She was scared, obviously, and grateful to have someone she knew to talk to.

  “You don’t know her?” Serge had asked Clara as she left. “Nice of you to look after her.” He was thinking that Clara, though acerbic, was thoughtful of others; that she had a good character, for someone so photogenic; and, regretfully, that her character did not interest him really. Docility and stability (not that she had them, it was just the category she occupied for him) had the defect that they were uninteresting and unobjectifiable, there was nothing visual, and no conflict. They were like potatoes or celery. Good character could not be the subject of a film, for instance, or even a book.

  “I know the family,” Clara said. “They live on the road down from Mother.”

  “Don’t get mixed up in it,” Serge said. “Don’t give your name,” he said. Sometimes he found Clara was too trusting—too, if you like, Oregonian.

  She widened her eyes, those remarkable eyes that might have been her fame, very oversized eyes, gray with a luminosity he sometimes didn’t like, as if she were on the point of tears. Their expression now could mean “okay, I won‘t,” or else “there you go again being paranoid.”

  “I’ll call you later,” she said.

  In the train Clara thought of Delia’s story. She felt a distinct reservation about becoming involved with this girl, this problem. In principle she was happy to help out, and also she had a number of other errands, and a party to go to later, so to stop in at the Hotel Le Mistral was not putting herself out much. But perhaps, regarding helping others, one had a saturation point that her mother and Cristal had already soaked up for today.

  She tried to be good. Lately goodness had been on her mind. It was not insinuated there by a sense of guilt. Guilt hadn’t been emphasized in her family. Instead she had been encouraged to be good on principle, because it was right to give back something to an imperfect world that had unaccountably been good to her. But this was always somewhat hard to keep in mind.

  Also, what was meant by goodness had changed or evolved. In childhood it had meant obedience; in high school it meant chastity. Now in her thirties it meant charity and helpfulness to others. Her resolutions increased with her fortunes, but she had to admit she herself had not grown in virtue that she could feel, so that when she had a bona fide, not too taxing opportunity to help another, she took it, and would go into Paris to help any fellow American like a shot. She also had strong feelings about being an excellent wife, her chosen career, and so worthwhile in her present circumstances.

  And of course she liked going into Paris—does personal enjoyment dissolve the virtue somehow? Etang-la-Reine was generic posh and might be anywhere, whereas Paris, with its fluted lamp-posts trimmed in gold and its lacy iron balconies, was French and always reminded her that she truly was living in this delightful exile.

  Probably, Serge had a kind of real virtue. He contributed large sums to various political causes, though he was vague about what they were. Clara hoped they weren’t the ones that ended up helping the IRA, those truly wicked people who, though white and English-speaking, behaved as if they came from the third world.

  She looked up the address, an unfamiliar part of Paris, and took a taxi from the station through a busy, narrow street behind the Gare du Nord peopled with a brightly draped population of Africans and Algerians to the Hotel Le Mistral, grotty and formica-fronted, with a little placard in the window advertising the prices, without douche, with douche, WC commune, WC privee. When she asked at the desk for Mademoiselle Sadler, a young woman got up from a plaid chair in the small orange and mirrored lobby and approached, limping badly. Listing like a ship, in fact. Delia Sadler—a tiny, delicate person, as if the vigor of the Sadler line had petered out when it got to her. Pale shadowed skin, wispy, di sheveled, curly reddish brown hair, little wire glasses. Of course, people always looked their worst for a couple of days after getting off planes. Yet she had a Sadler look Clara recognized. She had the same look her brothers and sisters had, in this smaller format, same cow-brown eyes and Jersey-colored hair, though Frank and the others were husky, large people. She smiled tentatively.

  Clara liked seeing familiar faces and all they brought back of nostalgic memories, watching Frank at Oswego Lakers football games in high school and so on. Had he been the center or an end? Mrs. Sadler had been revered for her habit of giving out, at Hal loween, whole Snickers bars. Seeing people from Lake Oswego intensified Clara’s pleasure in being out of there.

  “I’m Delia,” the girl said. Delia had never actually seen Clara’s movie. There had just been the one and then Clara had married and dropped out. Yet she was familiar-looking, just as Clara recognized Delia’s Sadlerness.

  They shook hands. Clara suggested they go have a coffee and Delia could tell her what was going on. She was surprised to note the severity of Delia’s limp. She had never heard the Sadlers had a handicapped child. Perhaps a recent accident?

  “It’s my defective hip,” said Delia, making Clara blush that the girl could have read her exact thought as she was having it. “I’ll have to get a plastic one eventually, but they want to wait as long as possible because of my age, because they only last so long before you have to do them over.”

  Except for this confidence, the girl said little, seemed bound in a carapace of fear. Clara tried to draw her out. “How do you like France?” she asked, ridiculously, when they had been served in the cafe next to the hotel. Delia was putting a lot of sugar in her coffee, and staring at it. Then she did look up.

  “It’s just great. I get my things ripped off yesterday the minute I arrive, I spend the rest of my whole first day in a passport office, and my second day I see a man with his throat cut.”

  “I’m sorry.” Clara laughed at her own stupid question, and sounded as if she was laughing at the comedy of a man with his throat cut. “Please tell me all about it.”

  When she had, Clara wasn’t sure she believed her. There was just something the young woman seemed to be holding back.

  6

  Delia’s Story

  Delia told Clara her tale.

  “Our plane got in about seven yesterday morn
ing. But I felt okay, alert. I’d had some sleep on the plane, I didn’t feel too bad. Even so, I must have been out of it, because I have no idea when it could have happened. That my passport was stolen. I suppose it was on the train coming in from the airport. But no one bumped me or anything suspicious. At first I thought I’d left it in the taxi, but Gabriel—my business associate, the man I came over with—paid the taxi, so I wouldn’t have got my wallet out then. But it was gone all the same, all the credit cards, and my passport.

  “The blood. That was what I can’t get out of my mind, and the dead, staring eyes.”

  So that first day, Friday—yesterday—she had to spend applying for a new passport instead of having a look around Paris. The trip was planned as kind of a fast business trip, but she had hoped to work in daily visits to the Louvre, and instead she spent the whole day at the American consulate. “Gabriel—I don’t know what he did. He went to the Louvre, I guess. Then he came for me at the consulate, and we had dinner.”

  Also gone were her Oregon driver’s license, dealer’s license, swimming-pool membership card. She should have left that stuff at home. Such thoughts as this added to her anxiety about the problems now facing her—no money, quasi-imprisonment in this hotel, and the memory of the black blood and dead staring eyes of the murder victim.

  “Luckily I could cancel the credit cards, I had the numbers in my Filofax. But they won’t send your Visa card to anywhere but your permanent address. Isn’t that stupid? What do they expect you to do?”

  “So then, this morning?” Clara Holly’s voice was the voice of an actress playing a role of kindly encouragement.