Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  So he told them about seeing Clara Holly and a strange man at the Tennis Club Marne-Garches-la-Tour, near Boulogne. In the habit of playing tennis Monday afternoons, Fridays too if he could make it, he had been at his rather inconvenient and distant tennis club with Adrian Wilcox, the British sculptor. Tim usually beat Wilcox, but today Wilcox completely obliterated Tim, and was so pleased about this he suggested going into the bar for a couple of beers; he would want to rehash the game, and Tim was too good-natured to refuse. Wilcox invested winning and losing too heavily with metaphorical implications of decay and impotence, or, as today, having won, rejuvenation, art, and immortal life to take his wishes lightly.

  Agreeing, Tim said he just had to be in town in time for dinner with Anne-Sophie and her mother, the normal Monday night custom Adrian was well aware of. By way of hors d‘oeuvres they shared an assiette nglaise-so typically French to assign to this slightly guilt-making snack of sausage and rillettes an English origin—and a couple of beers. Tim was facing the door, so that he instantly saw Clara Holly come in. She was preoccupied-looking, even distraught. She didn’t see him.

  “What should I have done?” he wondered now. “Greeted her immediately, I now see. But by the time I decided, it was too late. I’d seen too much.

  “She was half in tears, and ordered what looked like a gin. That already put me at a disadvantage, that is, I thought she might not like to be seen crying and drinking straight gin alone in the bar.”

  “Zat is so American,” Estelle commented. She spoke English with a theatrically French accent—Anne-Sophie’s English was really much better than her mother’s; she had been sent to London summer after summer to perfect it. “Why should she mind? Has a woman no right to an aperitif in America? Is it so deeply compromising? ”

  “Well, I wasn’t being judgmental about the drink, but she seemed upset. You don’t like to intrude on some grief or distress.”

  “You must be the first newspaperman in the history of journalism ever to feel that,” Estelle remarked. She often made jibes at Tim’s profession, which was after all rather like her own.

  “She must be used to having a certain effect, she’s very pretty. The very pretty lead their lives in goldfish bowls,” Ames Everett said.

  “It could have been vodka,” Tim agreed.

  “I think you are awful, all of you!” cried Anne-Sophie gaily. “Condemning the poor woman as if she were an alcoolique. So she was drinking alone in the tennis club! Perhaps she had asked for a glass of water! I expect you will say she came in to pick up men, too.”

  “I’m trying to explain that my moment of hesitation in not greeting her was fatal, as it turned out, because you’ve guessed it. In a minute, a man came in, and sat beside her. I guess she hadn’t been expecting him, or didn’t like him—at first she nodded rather icily—but they seemed to have seen each other before. A Frenchman, a member of the club, I’ve seen him. Balding, handsome in a way, but about fifty, maybe less.”

  “Antique,” said Estelle, who was in her mid-fifties. “A man so ancient, how could it be anything but innocent?”

  “Whatever he said, she smiled at last.”

  Adrian and Tim ordered another beer, and by the the time they had drunk them, she was laughing. They were relative strangers, Tim thought, barely knew each other, but there seemed to be a context for their conversation. He felt awkward to be sitting there watching them, because something was happening to them, it was clear on their blazing faces. It was their faces that compromised them. Some self-conscious emotion had transfixed them.

  “Anyway, I finessed the moment I would have to acknowledge my presence, as it turned out, because I went to the men’s room before we left, and when I came out they were both gone.”

  “Had they left together?” asked Estelle.

  “I don’t know, and Adrian had his back to them.”

  “He was probably her broker, or her dentist,” Estelle said, defending this unknown Clara against the new suggestion, so Anglo-Saxon and prudish, that she had practically been discovered in flagrante.

  “Probably. He looked like a banker, something like that.”

  “How useful to have a lover who is a banker,” Anne-Sophie said. “One who makes real estate loans.”

  Tim didn’t ever really feel comfortable at these domestic dinners with his future mother-in-law, unlike many Frenchmen who would enjoy them, gossip and food both, and now he felt mildly ashamed of himself for having told the story about Clara Holly to people who knew her. No doubt it had been an innocent meeting, now turned by him into gossip or low-key scandal. But he had been touched by it in some way. Seeing emotion in others always touched him; he knew it to be the worst propensity for a journalist. If someone had tears in her eyes, his eyes filled. When he saw desire, he felt it. Anyone would desire that beautiful woman, it wasn’t so weird of him.

  At about ten, Tim’s portable rang. He discreetly stepped away from the table for a moment or two, then returned and settled uneasily into his tarte aux pommes. It was the American woman, Delia. “She’s scared,” he explained. “She says there’s no one in the hotel, the manager’s not there, and she’s hearing noises. I told her to go sit in the cafe next door until the desk clerk comes back. The hotel’s not very nice. I’ll look in on her tomorrow morning.”

  13

  Who Is Tim?

  They drove home, Tim’s long legs tucked up uncomfortably in the front seat of Anne-Sophie’s Mini, its canvas top unrolled where she had earlier transported a screen. In the night air they could feel the chill of approaching winter.

  “I wonder if we ought to go up to the hotel where the American girl is staying?” Anne-Sophie said.

  “She’ll be all right.”

  “Maman was nice about the apartment. I’ll show it to her tomorrow if I can get the agent. ”

  A certain apprehensiveness crawled in Tim’s stomach; he’d forgotten the apartment.

  “Comme je suis contente.” Anne-Sophie sighed. She was expansive in her feeling of happiness and love, generated by the new apartment, the approval of her mother, their American friends Dorothy and Ames, both Protestant but not too puritan, Tim’s interesting profession that prompted dramatic phone calls during dinner, a promised future of harmony, against which the plight of the American girl saddened her.

  “The poor thing. What is her name?” she asked.

  “Who?” he cried guiltily, for his thoughts were a welter, on the rash venture of the apartment, and on Clara Holly—on her expression as she had looked at the handsome man and the self-conscious redness had risen to suffuse her neck and face.

  “The American woman who called? Who found poor Monsieur Boudherbe dead?”

  “Delia.”

  “What is she afraid of tonight, exactly?” Anne-Sophie asked.

  “She didn’t say. I don’t know why she called me, except she thinks of me as a fellow American in a wasteland of Frogs, and I had given her my phone numbers.”

  “What could happen in a French hotel at ten at night? Nothing. La pauvre,” Anne-Sophie said, wondering if she should mention having seen the other American, the man, in her depot attic, and somehow not wanting to. “Of course we must help. I remember how frightened and pale she looked, looking at the dead body.”

  “No doubt,” Tim agreed.

  “There were two,” said Anne-Sophie, “a man and a woman.”

  “I didn’t see the guy, he’d gone somewhere to change money.”

  Anne-Sophie paused. Eventually she asked, “Are you really going to interview Serge Cray?” Tim knew it impressed her that in his line of work he sometimes had access to famous artists and politicians.

  Tomorrow.“

  “I could see that you were falling into one of your hopeless quarrels with Maman,” Anne-Sophie said after another moment. Tim and Estelle did sometimes argue about politics, each taking extreme positions, his usually to the left, notwithstanding his association with Reliance magazine. At first, he couldn’t remember any incipient quar
rel, though there had been a tentative discussion of the American character, which had been averted.

  “We French are often criticized for being elliptical,” Estelle had said, in a leading tone, moments before the arrival of Ames and Dorothy.

  “Elliptical? You mean not straightforward? Devious?”

  “Put it as you will. I am saying that, au contraire, we are much more straightforward than Americans, with their implaccable, unfathomable smiling. Their orthodontics. Their claiming to love each other, then murdering each other at the lift of a foot.” But Tim hadn’t been in the mood to be maneuvered into defending the American murder rate.

  “Why are the French accused of being elliptical?” he had mildly answered, thinking, though, that this conversation was a good example of elliptical. “They can be very direct.”

  “Oh, you are thinking of Anne-Sophie,” said Estelle, herself having always deplored Anne-Sophie’s fatal lack of nuance. In Estelle’s view, Anne-Sophie was directness itself, and with her bluntness came a complete failure to understand flirtation; it was perhaps this that had suited her to an American fiancé.

  But this was the closest they had come to a subject of dispute, this particular night. It always slightly irritated Anne-Sophie that her mother would talk to Tim about subjects she didn’t bring up with Anne-Sophie—general topics, adult talk, as if Anne-Sophie were still a child or hopelessly unintellectual, while Estelle and Tim were writers, and it was that, not their future legal bond, that seemed to bring them together.

  Yet it wasn’t that Estelle was a writer—it was what she wrote about that was sort of a problem for Anne-Sophie. It was often fascinating, but also appalling and intimidating. When she was younger, she had pored over certain passages, for instance the description in Estragon of Maude’s young lover Pablo, with his “enchanting rosette of an anus, surrounded by the most tender and adorable ebony hairs, and when she, arching ecstatically beneath him, could just manage to reach and could just insert the tiniest bit of her little finger into it, this sent him into such amusing paroxysms of delight—not, luckily, the ultimate one until her own pleasure was vertiginously achieved, but ...”

  Without putting it to herself specifically, Anne-Sophie was left wondering if Tim would really like a finger up his asshole, but even if so, it was physically impossible, given their respective heights; she could not reach it. And there were several other problematic passages, and the unthinkable questions they raised.

  To her actual daughter, Estelle had always given only the most mundane advice, for instance another piece of advice as universal as the maternal strictures on clean underwear: the one about how one should marry for love, but it was just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one. Easier by far, some would have said, but not Estelle, who despite her own comfortable bourgeois style of life had a romantic view of poverty as liberating, even noble. Whatever her reasons, until recently she hadn’t asked Anne-Sophie too pointedly what Anne-Sophie might have gleaned of any distant Fitzger aldesque midwestern lawns, columned porches, fireflies, safe deposit boxes full of long-term certificates of deposit and whatever else she had begun to hope for from Tim. For poverty, however noble, is not necessarily something you want in the family.

  “As you know,” she said to her friends Dorothy Minor and Ames Everett, when Anne-Sophie and Tim had left, “I have no intuition, absolutely no common sense, am absolutely the worst judge of human nature....” This was one of her vanities, for though she was astute, she liked to pretend that she had meager powers of observation and filled her books from the wellsprings of the heart. She seemed to feel that there was something a little vulgar and prying about mere observation.

  They had no idea who Tim was, really. Now her concern was animated because Anne-Sophie had shown her the little flashlight marked with the name Nolinger, and because an apartment would have to be paid for. And of course, being literary, Estelle was aware of the many archetypal tales—the student prince, Cinderella—wherein the foreign stranger, once he has arranged to marry your daughter, turns out to be a rich and noble person in his own land.

  “I have no sense of these things, but I am so determined that Anne-Sophie be happy. If the wretched Teem makes her unhappy I will personally kill him.”

  “Why should he?”. Ames asked. “He’ll treat her wonderfully. It always seems to me the slightly rootless Tim must long for the stable peace of a French family and the effective ministrations of an organized French wife, or he ought to.”

  “Why are you having worries now?” Dorothy asked.

  Estelle hesitated. She hated to be thought of as showing any interest in money at all. She was not avaricious—she scorned money, or at least people who tried too obviously to get it, and the characters who tried to get it in her books came in for a great deal of misfortune, for instance Monsieur Todeaux in Plusieurs Fois. Up until now, even with only eight weeks to go until the wedding, the liste de mariage formed and most of the arrangements, she had shared the curious constraint—perhaps very French—about making inquiries about Tim. There was also a little of the French belief that all Americans were rich. So she could hardly justify showing too much interest in Tim’s “background” now, except as a kind of maternal curiosity, for what good mother does not wish her child supported by a safe income?

  “Something a little delicate. We know Teem, and his father is a delightful man, so American, in the hotel business, there has never been any mystery about this. Paragon Hotels.”

  “I met the father one time,” Ames agreed. He saw how Estelle and Anne-Sophie could have no idea of Tim’s social background—neither had ever even been to America.

  “Do we have any idea if this is a big hotel business? Do we know the scale of it?”

  “Paragon Hotels, it’s a chain—why?”

  “Could it be connected to the name of Nolinger-Webb?”

  “That’s a hotel chain, car rentals and such. I very much doubt that Tim is the principal scion of Nolinger-Webb, if that’s what you’re hoping,” Ames hastened to say, it occurring to him for the first time that maybe he was. Could Tim be a hapless younger son, a disowned rebel from the great airport services fortune? Still, any whiff of a major American fortune always drifted over to Paris, and none had wafted in to wreathe and perfume Tim.

  “But you are not sure!” said Estelle in what sounded a very encouraged tone.

  “Nolinger is not a common name. It could be the same family, but that still wouldn’t tell us if Tim’s father is distantly connected to it or intimately connected. One would have to ask him. Anyway, I don’t get it. These are Tim’s keys?”

  “No, no, nothing to do with Teem, but it set me to wondering about the name. I could hardly ask Anne-Sophie—but I wonder if she has any idea if Teem is connected to a chain?”

  “They must have discussed their families,” said Ames. “She probably has a very clear idea, Anne-Sophie is eminently clear.”

  “It’s very vulgar, isn’t it, to be reassured by the idea of a big chain lurking in Teem’s family tree? All the same ...” Ames could hear that Estelle was indeed reassured. “What do you think? He has good manners, but then his mother is French-speaking. Also he went to school in Switzerland. He was brought up in Istanbul or some odd place like that. What does that tell us? Nothing.”

  “Those years his father spent in Istanbul say ‘distant cousin’ to me, at best—but why don’t you ask him?” Ames suggested.

  “Ask him! Impossible.”

  “It’s a nice family, Maman, really,” Anne-Sophie had said once. “I’ve seen pictures of where his parents lived, a very pleasant white house made of wood, in America, but most of the time they were in Europe on account of his papa’s work, and you have met Monsieur Nolinger.”

  “His portefeuille—you call it the ‘beelfold’? That used to be an infallible index of a man’s affluence, but now it is often made of an ambiguous nylon. The same with shoes, by Reebok or Neeck. I can get no clue,” she complained to the princess Dorothy and Am
es.

  Ames remarked to Dorothy, in the taxi going home, “It hadn’t occurred to me, heir to a great fortune. But there is something slightly off and mysterious about Tim. Could that be it?”

  “More likely a prison term,” Dorothy disagreed.

  She and Ames laughed with the slightly guilty pleasure of people who knew themselves to be breaking a sacred taboo—the taboo among Americans abroad against investigating each others’ former lives back in America or questioning the version of himself that each expatriate has the right to put forward unquestioned.

  “And then there’s Clara Cray and the mysterious man,” said Dorothy.

  “Tell me more about this person who, as you said the other morning, seems so to have fascinated Teem,” Estelle had asked as they parted. Few French people had seen the obscure Hollywood film, which fixed her identity in her hometown and for the odd film buff as Clara Holly; the French thought of Clara as Madame Cray, in the normal way. Estelle had already conceived an abstract dislike for this woman, in Anne-Sophie’s behalf, and from some Frenchwoman’s reflexive mistrust of other women in general, except for certified friends, and no exceptions for friends where men were involved. “Blond?”

  “No, no, short dark hair—curly. She has rather deep color and a very large bust, like an Italian actress.”

  “She does, doesn’t she?” Ames Everett agreed.

  14

  Where Is Gabriel?

  Tim and Anne-Sophie found Delia Sadler sitting at a little marble-topped table in a shadowy corner of the cafe next to the Hotel Le Mistral, an empty coffee before her. She looked forlorn, agitated and scared. Her thin little shoulders in a ribbed shirt seemed to tremble slightly and she was scrubbing at the table with her napkin, trying to order and calm herself. When she saw them she smiled and waved, relieved. It was Anne-Sophie who barged briskly over to Delia, exclaiming, “I was there, you know, I saw you! At the puces. I saw the whole thing! What a terrible sight!”