Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  It had already been unlocked by the watchman when she got to work this morning, no way of knowing whether people had gone up or come down. Whether the American man had come down. The mystery unresolved deepened its charm, its vexing charm to distract her from the normal transactions of her Mondays. After lunch she went up there, alone, though with the precaution of telling Monsieur Pécuchet that she was going. No one was there. As before, she had the sense of an alien presence, though there was no real change or disarray. As before, this infected her with a dangerous excitement. It was almost with regret she rolled her shutter down at the end of the day and set out to do errands and have dinner with her mother, to discuss matters relating to the wedding. She had several errands.

  It was now October, and Anne-Sophie and Tim were to be married December tenth. Most of the arrangements had already been made by the efficient Anne-Sophie herself, in consultation with Tim and the marriage consultant, Madame Louise Aix, at the Bon Marché department store. Madame Aix was a bosomy black-clad woman with red hair and glasses on a string, and an air of seriousness that Anne-Sophie found reassuring after the slightly dismissive participation of her mother. But certain problems had arisen with the invitations. It was time, and even a bit late, to have ordered them, but the issues of format were by no means clear, given that one of the families was anglophone.

  Though Estelle agreed with the idea of marriage, Anne-Sophie never knew which detail of the traditional ceremony her mother would find ridiculous or unnecessary. She had laughed derisively when Anne-Sophie had broached the idea of a morning coat for Tim. Her heroine Raymonde, in Les Fruits, had protested going to the mairie and the church! “What do I want with stupid legalities,” etc., with her marvellous tempestuousness.

  So Madame Aix for her part had quickly seen in the motherless young career woman a need for advice and mothering. Their relationship had grown to where Madame Aix ventured counsel on a wider range of subjects than mere formal details. Madame Aix found herself in such a relationship with a number of young women, and often their mothers too, women worried to distraction by the realm of possible error a wedding opened up.

  “ Will you wear white? ” she had asked.

  Anne-Sophie thought so. Madame Aix frowned slightly. “It is so—jeune fille.”

  Did Madame Aix think of her as old? Anne-Sophie feared so, she feared it herself, knew she was slightly old for a first-time bride.

  “A very young girl in her teens might.” Madame Aix appeared to struggle for the tact needed. “It’s just that the significance of white, an ancient symbol of virginity, is so much part of our collective unconscious that a bride in white prompts speculation, if not amusement, and people draw their conclusions better not drawn. You see? Whereas, I would propose, ivoire, ivory satin, or even rose-ivoire. With your high color it will be very lovely and blushing, and, after all, nearly white.”

  To Anne-Sophie, and to Tim when asked, it was clear that the same customs prevailed in France as in America, of ignoring the symbolic significance of white when it came to choosing a wedding gown: Anne-Sophie’s white satin gown was coming from Ines de la Fressange on the Avenue Montaigne, where a school friend of Anne-Sophie’s was the head of public relations. The religious ceremony would be at St. Blaise, in the village of Val-Saint-Rémy, where Anne-Sophie’s grandmother, her father’s mother, still lived, though now quite senile. The cocktail reception would be across the square from the church at a little restaurant, Père Norand, and the dinner at Anne-Sophie’s grandmother’s house in the same village. Cases of champagne had been ordered from Monsieur Bra quer, who had been her father’s vintner, but it remained to be decided who would do the hors d‘oeuvres and where to honeymoon.

  Estelle was not much use in all this, and had complained about the hypocrisy and trouble a fancy wedding was—she would have preferred the registry, or barefoot in some tiny Alpine church. But of course, Dorothy Minor pointed out, Estelle was the soixante-huitarde of the family, while the younger people were the more conventional. Tim pitied Anne-Sophie Estelle’s detachment; he had the male belief that young women and their mothers collaborating on weddings should be very happy and close. He knew it had been so with his sister and his mother.

  About his part in the wedding itself, Tim had only the normal male attitudes, cooperative, sentimental, and resigned. He had assented to the caliber of the champagne and the nature of the food, and had reservations about the religious side of it. Estelle derided his reservations, saying it was very American and literal of him to take religion seriously enough to have reservations. He did not in general see anything too different between American and French nuptials, either in their premises or their details—the bridal gown, the cake, the tent if it would have been summer, the striped awnings beneath which he had delivered several of his American friends after college into their new husbandly states. It was all something men went through, and he felt generally positive about the traditions as well as toward his choice of wife. Anne-Sophie had not visited America and Tim’s side of the family, but his father, often in Paris, had met the Argels, and indicated to Tim that he thought Anne-Sophie a lovely girl, despite the eccentric mother. His mother and Anne-Sophie had not met, though they had politely corresponded.

  Tim and Anne-Sophie came to Estelle’s a bit early, before the other guests, to discuss something important with Estelle, the apartment they had found. To have found an apartment at last was a great relief to both of them, as each had devoted what seemed like numberless afternoons to the ongoing project of the search for one big enough and nice enough and affordable, to accommodate their new married life.

  This had not been Tim’s favorite pastime. It was his appointed task to do the. preliminary looking on the days when Anne-Sophie could not; otherwise it was she who rushed out to get Le Figaro, scan the ads for three- or four-room apartments in the acceptable arrondissements (fifth, sixth, seventh) they had agreed on, with a glance at the first, second, eighth and ninth, and maybe the fourteenth but that would be getting too close to maman. From the few times they’d looked at things together it was clear that it was Tim who was temperamentally better suited to do it. The merest eccentricity in arrangements, the least ugly improvisation sent Anne-Sophie into paroxysms of discouragement and fear. “How can people live like that,” she would moan, feeling herself and Tim to be on a similar precipice, easily to be tipped over into a chasm of squalor and expedience. Not at all what she had dreamed for their perfect union; an ugly apartment would symbolize the compromises of this world, the mockery of human hopes. Tim had found her emotion puzzling; he had always thought that newlyweds would be indifferent to their surroundings. He pointed out they were just going to make love all the time. But he accepted that Anne-Sophie must be sheltered from too much apartment-hunting. Also, it was he who had the flexible hours.

  He had tried not to think too much of the practicalities of married life—he assumed he and Anne-Sophie would address them when necessary—but the process of looking for an apartment had brought practicality home to him in an uncomfortable way. Seeing the details of the lives of others, so forlorn and shabby, so rickety and extemporaneous, depressed him almost as much as it did her. French apartments were small. Laundry rooms were used as nurseries, kitchens were in closets. The cuisine américaine depressed him, it seemed too pointed a criticism of what the French apparently felt was the ruthless pragmatism of the American character: the kitchen in the living room where necessary. Never mind that in America kitchens were never in the living room, he felt that this label, cuisine américaine, pointed to some capability for improvisation in himself which he hoped never to have to use, but which would involve moral failing if he used it. It also seem to allege bad taste.

  In another way, the cuisine américaine spoke of the merry resourcefulness of the French to put the best face on having to have their kitchens in their living rooms, in the modern world where six apartments were carved out of some nice old private house once belonging to a haughty family. Trying to
inhabit and personalize their cubbies, people had painted their walls navy blue, or lowered their ceilings with fiberglass panels. There had been an era of orange and pink. How many flights would one walk up without an elevator?

  One particular day, Tim suddenly knew he had found their apartment, on the Passage de la Visitation—the name itself so charming, the arrondissement so correct. An apartment of four rooms, with a small kitchen. With an actual dining room, which he believed in having, as he had been brought up with dining rooms. And he’d come to learn the value the French put on certain things—windows, for one, which direction they faced, and whether there were any closets at all. The price was only a little too high for them, and he felt sure Anne-Sophie would like the herringbone floors, and the bedroom fireplace with its marble curlicues, the second WC, the large entry hall. His heart lifted with the optimistic sense of the future that only real estate can bring, and stepped up with the simultaneous anxiety that someone else would buy this place before Anne-Sophie could see it.

  He called her at work and made an appointment with the agent for them both to come back that afternoon. She was dismayed before they were even inside by the discovery that the apartment he wanted her to see was on the premier étage, one floor up—the American second floor. Plenty high up and still not so high you had to get in an elevator, a great advantage in Tim’s mind, completely unacceptable in hers.

  “It will be dark,” she said.

  “No, it has good light,” he said. “When I was here it was getting morning sun.”

  “I never imagined living on the premier étage,” she said, a remark he found completely inscrutable.

  “It’s charming, you’ll see,” he said. “There’s the guy.” The agent solemnly shook their hands, more or less overtly sized Anne-Sophie up, and gave Tim an important, conspiratorial smile. They climbed the stairs.

  “Monsieur was the first person to visit this apartment,” the agent said to Anne-Sophie.

  Inside, her manner gave no indication of her views. She looked with censorious thoroughness into the closets and inspected the floors with scientific attention to the width of the cracks between the boards and how many of them would have to be replaced.

  When they were outside, they stepped apart from the agent, and she said “Très bien, by and large.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “Yes, I liked it. There are problems though. The street is très bien, but the premier étage!”

  “I like being one floor up. Not right on the street but not in the elevator all the time.”

  “You don’t understand the French attitude about the premier étage.” This was said affectionately, as if he were an educable child.

  “How can I understand? It’s completely irrational,” he said. After some rational discussion, centering on the prestige of the street, charm, and useful features especially a bibliothèque, a handsome set of built-in bookshelves, they decided to go back to the agent’s office and make an offer. They knew they shouldn’t hesitate, as really good apartments got snapped up on the spot.

  Anne-Sophie’s father, a doctor, had been dead for a decade, but Estelle had stayed in the family apartment, a large nineteenth-century apartment in Montparnasse in which all the rooms were oval and painted tasteful shades of gray. Estelle had a new book coming out, and a photographer there to take the jacket photo had stayed longer than expected, so that when Anne-Sophie and Tim arrived it was in time to hear Estelle saying to the photographer: “Of course, I have no sense about men, I’ve never understood them, my heart is constantly being broken.” A startled instant of reflection showed on Anne-Sophie’s face, though she had long since learned to separate her mother’s fictional persona, the warm, worldly sensuous woman who narrated her works, from the comfortable family member who scolded her about her career choices and had been more or less happily married to her father.

  From the hall where Elvira had let them in, they could see the expression of passionate chagrin on Estelle’s face, presumably to do with her own inept conduct of love affairs, though so far as Anne-Sophie knew, her mother’s only boyfriend was the elderly academician, Cyrille Deroux. The photographer was packing his gear. Tim and Anne-Sophie had no further clue as to the subject of their conversation, for Estelle then saw them and gave a cry of greeting. She was wearing jeans and a photogenic sort of ruffled shirt.

  “Ah! Ma fille, Anne-Sophie, et son fiancé Monsieur Nolinger! she explained. They smiled at the photographer, and dipped their heads in greeting. He struggled to collapse some sort of giant silver foil umbrella into a tiny packing case. Estelle embraced them.

  “Anne-Sophie has undergone the most horrific trauma in the past days, the appalling murder in the puces, did you hear of it?” she asked her photographer friend. The event was recounted even as the silver umbrella, having a mind of its own, snapped back to its full size with an indignant report, and the poor man was obliged to wrestle with it anew. “That apparatus reminds me,” Estelle said, “of the diaphragms of one’s fertile days.”

  Tim and Anne-Sophie ignored the poor photographer, whose struggles they sensed must embarrass him. Estelle, herself embarrassed at being caught playing the novelist in front of Anne-Sophie—she always tried to downplay that side of her life en famille—briskly launched them into the aperitifs and listened to their account of the apartment, which she agreed sounded good. This was important because she would be advancing part of Anne-Sophie’s share of the purchase price.

  12

  Tears at the Tennis Club Marne-Garches-la-Tour

  When Tim came to dinner, Estelle tended to invite other Americans, usually Dorothy Sternholz and sometimes Ames Everett. This had the effect of making Tim feel more, rather than less, strange, emphasizing his non-Frenchness as if his odd nationality had to be considered. Soon, when the princess Sternholz and Ames Everett had sipped their port for a few minutes, she led everyone to the table.

  “We are having something delicious, of my own invention, that is, you will tell me what you think.” Estelle was not a great cook, but prided herself on straightforward ingredients of perfect quality, rather as did her creation the countess Morilly, in her books, which were apt to digress into rhapsodies on a courgette or betterave. “This is an omelette aux truffes, but what you might think is an extravagance is not, for these are Chinese truffles! Really, they smell identical and the vegetable man swears they have the same parfum in the dish. So we’ll see!

  “I hope Teem will eat eggs? I know how Americans are.”

  Anne-Sophie realized she had never seen Tim eat an egg, but had no idea whether this was by conviction or because she had never offered him one. The question was put to Tim, who absently declared himself ready to eat eggs, Ames and Dorothy too. In reality, his heart was a turmoil of anxiety about what he and Anne-Sophie had just done in pledging themselves to a hugely expensive real estate transaction.

  Everyone gave the dish a suitable moment of reverence. Estelle had a Frenchwoman’s way of presenting each favor, each dish, each idea, as if it were done especially for the lucky guest. Perhaps that was the essence of literary style too, Tim thought. “I want you to have this delicious confiture aux groseilles,” Estelle would say, as she might say, “I want you to have this rare, perfect adjective,” and she was right that the confiture, or the adjective, would seem an especially delicious one, even if Anne-Sophie remarked later with slightly unfilial cattiness that it came like other jam from the Monoprix.

  “Anne-Sophie,” said the princess Sternholz presently, “may we know about the wedding dress? ”

  “Yes of course! I am very happy with it. From Ines de la Fressange. Well, it has a bustier in soie blanche, covered with a sheer tulle caraco, long sleeves, round neck, and then the skirt is organza, with silk ribbons. Completely simple, but pretty, I think.” Tim was surprised that she said she was happy with it, for Anne-Sophie had a Frenchwoman’s way of saying “Oh, it’s just a little nothing much” at a compliment, where an American would say “Thanks.”<
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  Her mother grinned at Tim. The two of them shared, or Estelle assumed they did, a patient but rather patronizing view of all this ceremonial fuss. Luckily Anne-Sophie did not notice. When she caught them in these conspiritorial glances, always initiated by Estelle, she was apt to pout childishly and complain to Tim later that she was being treated like a child, a femme-enfant.

  “You have to get married in something,” Tim now said loyally, ignoring Estelle’s smirk, “and the guests expect a pretty dress.”

  “We are having a most traditional wedding,” said Estelle, with asperity, to Ames and Dorothy. “I believe Anne-Sophie has not yet introduced Teem to the idea of what he is going to have to wear.”

  “Men like to dress up,” Anne-Sophie asserted. “Only think of their uniforms and hunting outfits. Kilts. Headdresses. It’s clear, men are never happier than when dressed in costumes.”

  When the argument over this had subsided, a lull in the conversation prompted Tim to fill it. It usually fell to him, who was more in the world than Anne-Sophie, restricted to her stand all day, or than Estelle working at her sedentary art, to provide anecdote or gossip. Tim often embroidered stories for Estelle, for her universe of desperados. He continued to hope for her absolute approval as the husband for Anne-Sophie. And Estelle liked his stories, and made him feel at such times that he was more perceptive than other men. She sometimes even seemed to fear he might in time be a bit bored by Anne-Sophie. In his view, she constantly underestimated Anpe-Sophie.