Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  Delia and her companion Gabriel had agreed they would start out early this morning, by flashlight. They had separate rooms. She was awake and dressed, waiting for his knock. She heard him come along the corridor and whisper, “Delia? Ready?” She opened the door quietly, so as not to disturb people still sleeping, and stepped outside. A soft mood of dazzled love had for the moment softened her vexation over the passport. She and Gabriel had spent part of the night together, beginning with talking intensely, and finally making love. For the first time! But she didn’t mention that part to Clara Holly.

  Gabriel Biller—maps, prints, and drawings. Delia explained to Clara how she had come to Paris on business with Gabriel, and how together they had crept out in the cold dawn, really cold, walking up the rue Duhesme to the flea market.

  “We can get some coffee in the lobby, they have it ready early. A lot of dealers stay at this hotel,” Gabriel had told her. He had smiled at her. He too must have been thinking of the intimate passages of lovemaking that had swept them along in the night. He had a smile of unusually convincing sweetness and beauty. Delia had been hoping for months for something like that to happen, though she hadn’t put her desire to herself quite so specifically. Handsome Gabriel, with a moronic live-in girlfriend back in Oregon, and now he was Delia’s lover too, if only for now on this sudden trip. She didn’t say this to Clara.

  Gabriel and she were the only Americans staying in the hotel, Gabriel not really American but maybe some kind of Slav. There was a sort of mystery there. Though he had lived in Oregon since high school, and claimed to be nearly as much a stranger as she in Paris, he seemed to know Paris. Maybe it was because he came to Europe every year for the art fair in Maastricht.

  Heart’s desires—coming to Europe, getting off with Gabriel—must be paid for, certainly, but she had not thought the price would be this high. She didn’t tell her feelings for Gabriel to Clara Holly—so what if Clara was married to the great director Serge Cray, big deal. What was she doing with her life, anyway? Nothing you heard about in Lake Oswego.

  The flea market had not been what she expected. It was a limitless city of forlorn or, rarely, sumptuous objects, and all of them incongruous in the early morning, with the rattle of corrugated iron shutters being rolled up and the scrape of tables and chairs being moved into the alleys, and dealers shouting to each other, and the smell of croissants and coffee. She had never seen in actuality this rather ridiculous gold and black French furniture, or so many marble statues or dismembered marble mantels or so many plinths, seen by just walking by, and crystal chandeliers glittering though it was morning, and cracked urns, peeling rocking horses, doorknobs.

  Gabriel had the address of a certain warehouse where his contact, a Frenchman, was waiting on some matter of business Gabriel had described but rather vaguely. Something he was selling. He had a map of the area. They were looking for the Passage de Sains. Street of health? Sanity? Delia walked along with him, as amazed as on an Oz road by the richness of things, the exuberance of the dealers, the general tarnish, heavy smoking this early in the morning, and staggering prices.

  She herself would be buying antique linens and green pottery. She kept only to those. Her niche, stall, shop, at the Sweet Home Antiques Barn in Sweet Home, Oregon, was like a little garden of lace and flowers and illustrations from old children’s books. She (and her partner Sara Towne) sold stacks of folded napkins tied in bundles, and long lisle stockings, sunbonnets and green pitchers and plates shaped like leaves. Visions of a sweeter, simpler world to come.

  As they walked, her eyes took in the things she would come back for, green faience platters, tablecloths draped over screens. Her heart had lifted at all this abundance, and the prospect of adventure, never mind having been duped and stolen from yesterday, just as many people had warned when they heard she was going to France.

  They found their way easily with the map, through a neighborhood of African stalls selling cloth, mud-caked masks, and modern carvings. Did one lovely object, some real talisman, exist among them? Delia would have stopped to look, but Gabriel walked on. Was he that sort of man, who walked ahead and expected the woman to keep up, and without looking back to see if she was? Did the sidewalk habits of men bear any relation to their behavior in bed? She was embarrassed at this inadvertent thought, but—what a good idea the trip had been, all opening out before her, the future, the profusion of beautiful things in the world. Never mind his dumb live-in girlfriend SuAnn, with her ancient VW van and her hag mother, Cristal, always bringing in little bits of junk to palm off for a couple of dollars.

  The place they were looking for was shut. A scatter of handbills lay at the door, the corrugated shutters over the windows were fast. She didn’t understand quite why Gabriel found this so upsetting.

  “Shit,” he said several times, and walked back and forth and around the corner, looking for something or someone. Then he had tried the door, and it opened, surprising him so that he lurched to the inside, catching himself on the jamb. He pushed the door wider open and stepped into a cavernous warehouse space stacked with furniture and cartons. Delia stepped in after him. In the dim early light, it was a magic cavern, a backstage, a magician’s attic. Pictures in broken gilt frames and furniture were stacked along the walls to teetering heights, draped with padded cloths. Pieces of faded fresco suggested windows, vistas beyond, a palm tree made of tin grew from a box in the corner, a herd of heads of antlered animals were hung along the rafters. This mysterious world suggested all the places Delia had never been.

  “Hello,” Gabriel said, looking around. “Allô?”

  They must have both seen at the same moment, in the corner beside the palm, the legs sticking out from under the quilted packing cloth, and the blood soaking it. She hadn’t screamed, she didn’t think, wasn’t a screamer. Instead they were drawn toward this unnatural sight, reluctant to look and drawn toward it both, perhaps a person still alive. They would have to move the cloth. Gabriel would have to move it. Like a pair of dancers they moved together slowly toward the legs, the blood.

  But he had stopped, catching her arm, and looked around them. Of course he was right, what if someone was still in here?

  “I need to look around. He had some money for me.”

  “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

  “No, this is too complicated. I don’t even know how to call them. I’ll just look for it. Nobody knows we’re here.”

  She didn’t think the man could still be alive, there was something strange about the way the legs were flopped that could not belong to a living man. There was too much blood. And yet.

  And yet, it was too late to search or to escape either. As they eased backward to the door, they could hear the crowd of excited French voices approaching behind them in the street, the door opened, and two policemen came in in their round box hats, staring balefully at Delia and Gabriel cowering together amid the debris of chairs and rolled-up rugs. Other people pushed in behind, a man in a blue apron, a well-dressed blond woman, another who could be her younger sister, and a tiny Arab man.

  “Shit,” Gabriel said. Delia sensed his impulse, the stiffening of his body for flight, and the simultaneous recognition that they were trapped at the scene of a French murder under the gaze of gathering police agents. Delia did not feel a sense of personal danger; for herself it was not as bad as the theft of her passport. When something awful has happened but not to you, it gives you a free feeling. But Gabriel was white and shaking.

  Gabriel indicated the corpse’s feet—for it must be a corpse—and said to the police, “Nous sommes des Etats Unis,” surprising Delia. It was one thing to say to a waiter, as they had last night, “Oui, merci,” and another to speak to a purpose in a moment of crisis in the French language. One of the newcomers pulled the bloody canvas the rest of the way off of the corpse, and it stared up at Delia, glittering pupil-less eyes, contorted mouth, black blood still flowing from the throat. For a second the room lurched around her.

  “ ‘Fo
r the second angel dumped his cup into the sea, and the sea became like the blood of a dead man,’ ” Delia said to Clara. “You know, the Apocalypse, it felt like the Apocalypse.” But Clara had never read the details of the Apocalypse.

  Delia could gather from the gestures and gasps that the dead man was someone most of the people there knew, the proprietor of the shop, and that no one had heard anything amiss, and that then the younger blond woman—she in the Chanel-like suit, polished nails, smoking like a chimney—had called someone else who had come to look. When the police indicated Delia and Gabriel, heads shook, they had not been seen around, were doubtless telling the truth, whatever Gabriel was telling in his French; Delia couldn’t understand, she just sensed he was believed. Heads nodded. The attitude of the police did not seem unduly suspicious of them. Twelve or fifteen people, counting the policemen, nodding with chagrined regret at this example of mortality and violence in a corner of their safe, comprehensible world.

  “They told us not to leave the hotel, so okay,” Delia said to Clara. She sighed a heavy, jet-lagged sigh. “I haven’t. Gabriel said he was going to change money, and he hasn’t come back yet. But he hasn‘t, like, left.”

  In the end there wasn’t really much Clara could do. She gave Delia a few hundred francs and told the woman at the desk that she should look after her and that Clara would be paying.

  “Your name, madame?”

  Clara remembered that Serge had said not to give her name. “Mrs. Camus,” she said. “Mrs. Albert Camus.”

  “Gabriel will be back, obviously,” Clara assured Delia. “He isn’t going to leave you alone, he probably just went about his business, or to make calls. He speaks French, you say, so he’s not at a loss.”

  Delia Sadler did not seem convinced of this, but of course anyone would seem still troubled who had gone through two such terrible days.

  “Now she’s sort of a prisoner, but at the hotel, and she hasn’t got a passport,” Clara told the assembled company. She hoped someone would have a constructive idea about this. Could she herself, for example, go pick up the passport at the consulate and take it to Delia? Might the consulate send it over if they understood that Delia was under orders from the French police to stay put? Though not of course a suspect? Various people made suggestions.

  “Poor Monsieur Boudherbe, with whom I used to dine every Saturday noon,” said Anne-Sophie, plaintively, eclipsed, such a pretty girl, not used to being eclipsed. It did not escape Anne-Sophie that the Americans, inured to violence and blood, on account of television and the conditions of their society, seemed to feel sorrier for the girl stuck at her hotel than for the murdered man. Even Tim appeared to be absorbed in this tale told by Clara Holly, whom Anne-Sophie had heard used to be some sort of actress. Anne-Sophie had met her once before, here. Now that Anne-Sophie noticed, Tim was watching Clara Holly intently. She could see Clara was or had been good-looking enough, but she could take better care of herself; her skin was slightly rough, as if she worked in the garden, and she had had acne or smallpox, had the tiniest scars, the kind of thing they cover up on the screen. Yet Anne-Sophie could see that Tim was struck by Clara’s beauty.

  Professor Hoff, as these professors were apt to do, used the events as a point of departure for his cultural theories. The two Americans, if they had not actually committed the murders, were bound to be under suspicion because of French attitudes about America, and in fact had probably done it, some sort of drug deal, which the French had to become less naive about. They could not be complacent about the strength of their cultural values, as surely their own behavior in the Second World War or the recent events in Kosovo would have shown them. The sooner their own flaws were faced—it was now practically too late—the sooner a healing social consensus with which to combat the National Front, the right-wing political threat gaining support for its Nazi values and hatred of Algerians—... Anne-Sophie stopped listening.

  7

  Dernier Train

  Going back to Etang-la-Reine on the last train, Clara felt quite pleased with herself. For one thing, she’d been helpful to Delia, fellow Oregonian, and life affords so few occasions for self- congratulation. She liked to be able to help, and when it was sort of a nuisance, she was the more glad to do it. She sometimes felt the need to earn her good fortune, but she lacked opportunities. When they had moved to Etang-la-Reine, she had tried to do modest good works in the neighborhood, donating old clothes or library books, but her efforts always went slightly awry. Eventually she realized that unlike the country people around Lake Oswego, around Etang-la-Reine the people were all well off, with professional lives in Paris.

  In the train thinking of Oregon, picturing the weedy ditches along Kendall Road, the goldenrod and blackberry bramble, and tiny daisies and bleuets—no, bleuet was the French word. In exile you lose the English names for birds and flowers. Robin redbreast. Mums. She thought of the wild hedges of thorn and camellia. She thought of how her mother let her lawn go dry in summer, to save water—really to save it growing, so as not to have to cut it, to spare the racket of the mowers and the expense of the yard boy.

  She could picture the Sadler house farther along the road, a bungalow with blue eaves and rooms added on at the side, set well back from the road. Were there a lot of Sadlers? Frank the one in her class, and JoAnne in the class behind. Mrs. Sadler always toiling on the borders of the lawn, green all summer. As with most expatriates, the longer she was away, the more curious, even precious these morsels of memory became.

  Now Cristal, mother’s caretaker—Cristal had explained that the correct word was caregiver—wanting to keep the lawn green, wanting extra money to pay the yard person, probably her cousin or some other member of her hapless family. Clara had sent the money, of course, just as she had now sent the four thousand for the vet, it didn’t matter to Serge.

  She thought about Lady, the dog, poor thing, at least she could be saved.

  She didn’t think much about the murder Delia Sadler had spoken of. It seemed improbable, even imaginary. The wildflowers of Kendall Road were more present to her mind. For her the pleasure was to think of Oregon. Though she didn’t in the least want to leave France, her husband, her home, she liked to think of it. Seeing the Sadler face was a little like going back to Oregon. I should go back, she thought, as she always did after talking to her mother.

  “Go later,” Serge would often say, but it wasn’t so simple. Her home was in France now, and in truth, Oregon was always boring and dusty, with nothing to do but walk out to the barn and look at the old harnesses. She didn’t have any friends in Lake Oswego anymore. Take walks with Lars, and scratch her ankles in the bramble, and watch Oprah with her mother, and all she could ever stand was a week of this.

  Sometimes she thought: He wants me to go. He likes to have the place to himself, though it’s vast and we’re hardly stepping on each other. He believes I look at him as if to ask what he’s working on, whereas I do not ask, and he is always working on something. If only he would do something. Maybe if I were out of the way....

  But when she proposed a trip, he always said no, don’t go, which suited her exactly.

  She took a taxi from the station. Her house stood against the winter moon like a dark castle, no lights on in the courtyard. When she was not in the house (the French would call it a château, but she couldn’t bring herself to), she thought of it as it had been when they first saw it, empty and despoiled, its shutters flapping, rats’ nests and pigeon droppings on the stairs—and on the plaster of the walls, in red chalk, little sketches of flowers and festoons done by the eighteenth-century craftsmen, to be executed by the carvers of the boiseries.

  It was those little drawings she had fallen in love with, loved that glimpse into the orderly and homely workings of the builders of old. Though the place had belonged to Madame du Barry, who had her head cut off in the revolution, her ghost had long since been exorcized, if ever it walked there. Clara could never find anything of her in the bricks and falling plast
er. Then the studio carpenters had swarmed over the place, painters, the art director—so exactly like a set was it, to the Hollywood workers at least. The opulent scale seemed normal to them; to her it had seemed overwhelming, at first.

  She saw an orange Mercedes stretch in her forecourt as they pulled in. She remembered that people from the studio in Los Angeles were going to visit him today. As she came into the house, she heard voices from the kitchen, Serge’s and others. Hollywood visitors seemed to come more often lately, as the interval between his films extended, and his silence became more and more expensive for them. These delegations were headed by his friend Woly Bierman, a short, jokey man who always wore blue jeans, white shirt, gold chain, in the manner of the studio executives of the seventies, rather than the Japanese-style dark suits worn by his younger colleagues. There were always three or four of these with Woly.

  Woly came out into the hall with Serge when they heard Clara, and embraced her. He wore strong American cologne. “Hello, gorgeous.” Though she was used to Woly’s jocularity, he seemed relatively somber tonight, perhaps sobered by bad studio numbers. She went back into the kitchen with them. Serge had been sitting with them in the kitchen, drinking coffee, talking about anything but film—California gossip, the declining state of things in America, cars. The housekeeper, Senhora Alvares, had nobly stayed up, and had brought out some of the gingerbread Clara always ordered from the American store on the rue de Grenelle. She retired promptly, once she was sure Clara had noticed this exceptional late help.

  The conversation was elliptical, cursory, to do with whatever they had been talking about—it could have been the plot of a film. Mostly they just went on in an insincere way praising the gingerbread, as if she were a woman susceptible to praise of her housekeeping. She told them goodnight and went upstairs.