“You’re still up.”
“Now I’m in the habit,” Cristal said.
She was just putting the phone down when Serge came in with a fistful of clippings. “Here,” he said, showing her the article he had just taken from the Herald Tribune. He kept these clippings carefully together in a fireproof storage box, and it was nearly full.
“Four men, break-in, a gun shop in Kansas. That’s the farthest east so far,” he said.
Clara read it and put it on top of the stack. The question was where to set his hypothetical movie. He must have been discussing this the other night with Woly and the men from the studio. He had been discussing it for some years, filling up the box with clippings, and supposedly working on a script, but with little to show for it.
“Kansas? Wheat fields, those farmhouses, it could be very pretty,” she said by way of encouragement.
“If you put together in the last six months only what is reported, it’s a considerable civil armory these people have accumulated,” Serge said, “not even counting Waco or Oklahoma City.”
He imagined America as a nation in right-wing revolt, made up of desperado school boards, subversive Boy Scout troops, renegade Chambers of Commerce, Lions Clubs and Elks secretly arming—a nation on the brink of revolution. Serge would never argue with her about this, considered her disqualified by her Americanness from seeing it, or by her sex. The box of clippings told of gun shop robberies, bombs in village halls and bandstands, the occasional fully covered media-blown outrage: Waco, Ruby Ridge. Yes, true, she conceded there were the odd nuts, the tragedies. He imagined a film of enormous sweep, catching all this prairie angst, and it would by extension reflect all the protest lying in the hearts of all patriots in all the world, and the depravity of all oppression.
For film, for all its limitations when it came to the flexible expression of ideas, had the advantage of movement, and of width. He thought of the frame, and the screen, as infinitely wide, as expansive as the mind, did you but find the right image to fill it with. There were images for the abstractions of freedom, nature, the potentiality pushing outward inside the human breast toward the infinite, could you but find and express it, also all the comedy and beauty and sweetness of life. He always saw “life” as a man sitting contentedly against a sunny wall, sombrero pulled down over eyes that watched, with a smile. Wrapped in a blue cloak, the eyes alert. Then the organization of the frames, like steps in a game. So beautiful compared to the crampedness, crabbedness of books, with their yellowish paper and spotted spines, though these he loved too. He loved them for their role as forerunners of film, clumsy, flat, redolent of human commitment, effort, passion.
“Don’t forget the man is coming today, the journalist. His name is Tim Nolinger,” Clara said.
16
Illuminating Manuscripts
Tim took Anne-Sophie’s car for the various things he had to do today. He was no sooner behind the wheel than his portable phone rang. It was Delia, breathless and scared. “Someone tried to get in my room last night,” she said. “I know it—someone’s after me, someone’s got Gabriel ...” He calmed her down as best he could and told her to wait for him in the cafe next to the hotel, he couldn’t get there before one o‘clock.
His appointment with the Crays was this morning. He followed the directions to their place given him by the Paris business office of Monday Brothers Films. It was outside of Etang-la-Reine, nearer to Marne-Garches-la-Tour than he had realized, and not far either from Anne-Sophie’s ancestral village of Val-Saint-Rémy, off a side road through a wood of spindly trees planted in rows and large rhododendron shrubs. A beautiful large house, or small château, whichever you would call it, probably eighteenth-century, needing exterior ravalement, set in this pleasantly neglected forest of many hectares, with some English-looking flower gardens nearer the house, some asters still in bloom. You either approached it by coming up a long drive between imposing gates, or by parking on the main road, which had been built since the eighteenth century, so that one side of the house abutted it, and had in fact attracted a few nondescript graffiti. He sensed that one was meant to come in by the gates and driveway.
It was Clara Holly herself, not a maid, who came to the door, though he could hear a vacuum cleaner and voices elsewhere in other rooms. In the morning, in jeans, she appeared even more beautiful than the other night, her beauty more emphatically an innate physical quality and not some trick of costume or makeup—the large dusky eyes, the mouth without lipstick as deeply red as if bitten, the shiny, luminous skin. He couldn’t tell if she remembered he was coming.
Clara led him into a superbly proportioned salon simply painted plain white—it must in its day have had boiseries and gilt—and left him standing by the fireplace. The room had a sparse but inhabited quality, as if the vanished eighteenth-century furniture were still there in spirit. Objectively visible were some classic, even predictable modern pieces—Eames leather lounge chair, Mies coffee table, Noguchi lamp, the inevitable Warhol stood against the wall, and the bright blue of an Yves Klein Venus.
Seeing her brought back the events of the previous day. It was strange, he’d been shocked to see Clara Holly so unguarded, sitting at a bar like a tart in a film, even if it was the bar of a completely correct tennis club which she probably was a member of. His mind kept going back over the scene; it was of no importance, but it had been intruding on his thoughts more than he liked. When the Frenchman talked to her, she had been as flushed as a maiden. An old friend? No, he would swear a stranger, that had been clear from the tentative manner of their falling into conversation, and her smile had been reluctant at first. He thought of her drinking gin and laughing, and of how her expression, now so politely impassive, had been stirred and excited when talking to the man. She had rather childish dimples. It might have been a scene from a film; he could imagine someone saying “cut” and she would have reverted to the detached civility of her manner to him now.
He thought it was peculiar how the idea of a person’s character can have been influenced by the movies one had seen—or was it the other way round, that film has taken from life the image of a woman sitting at a bar looking sad, and then perking up when some man talks to her, using it as shorthand to question her character? He should ask Cray about this archetype that film avails itself of, books too—all those Hammett and Chandler heroines. Ah, but it wasn’t the heroines who sat at bars, those were the bad girls, the temptresses, even the murderesses. They were never good.
Women at bars never up to any good, that was the lore, and had flouted his earlier view of her as correct, calm, poised, rather chaste in her reserve. Was he at some level worrying about Anne-Sophie, wondering if she would ever—did ever—sit at bars, say in country inns when on buying trips? Certainly she must, why not? What was the matter with him? He thought of Emma Bovary. Would Anne-Sophie be unhappy after they Were married? Was Clara Holly unhappy? When she looked at him and said she’d just go let Serge know he was here, he was painfully conscious of her allure and of how this was a sort of illicit reaction in himself, an engaged and committed man.
In a few minutes, Serge Cray pawed and puffed his way in, bearlike, pent up, tossing his head with huffs and chuffs. Tim hadn’t expected this radiant animal energy—the man’s film style was languid, even precious. In person Cray seemed to be bursting out of a cave. It was hard to imagine his association (not to put a clearer name to it) with the flowery, abstracted Clara. Hard to imagine their embraces, but it was always hard to imagine anyone’s embraces.
Cray was a stout man of medium height, or shorter by a little, burly, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a green alpaca sweater and cords and copper bracelets on both wrists. A glittering, wary expression in his eyes was extraordinary, but maybe only if you were looking for some evidence of his genius. Seriously, Tim asked himself, if this man were, say, selling ice cream or fixing,the pipes, would you notice anything special about him? Yes, the eyes were strange. It was not an illusion.
“Leonardo was superhuman, don’t you agree? There is something megalomanic about collecting Leonardos. Leonardos are for megalomaniacs. Bill Gates buys Leonardos. Could you say about the queen of England ‘megalomania’? Probably not, one of her ancestors began that collection. I met the man once who looked after the queen’s Leonardos....
“Come this way, upstairs. I never show people this stuff, but I will this time, at Clara’s urging,” Cray said, without other introduction. “Come this way. I believe she thinks I lack for fellow collectors and the chance to talk about my treasures. That must be why she asked you here.”
Tim was distracted by the thickness of his glasses, which magnified his eyes into a mesmerizing glare. The staircase was wide and steep, with a corridor at the top leading to, it appeared, several bedrooms. Cray unlocked one of them. “Precaution. These locks. There is a certain amount of burglary in France.
“She thinks I lack for fellow aficionados,” Cray continued. “Of course I’m not in the Bill Gates league moneywise, buying Leonardos and Gutenbergs. There’s no challenge in that even if you could afford it.”
“No,” agreed Tim, seeing that no response was required.
“Which in particular did you want to see? ”
“Just, I don’t know, what you have, no one thing in particular,” Tim said. “I don’t know that much about manuscripts. If you have one that would resemble the one that was stolen in New York.” He assumed the police had already contacted Cray about the theft, and the possibility he might be approached.
Cray had a cabinet with wide, shallow drawers with lids and dust covers. The first was labelled “Apocalypse.”
“There were a number of these copies in the Middle Ages, of apocalyptic prophecies, variously illuminated. Some of which have come true, down through the ages, some of the details of which ... For instance, the Holocaust, that was foretold. I find them especially fascinating, not to say alarming, as we draw closer to the millennium.”
Tim dutifully inspected a large stiff vellum, brown-spotted, in unreadable Latin, and then some other foxed sheepskin pages encased in linen swaddling.
“Acid-free linings and the rest of it. All the most advanced conservation techniques. Naturally I am not the expert, someone at the British Museum advises me.”
“Very important.”
“I’ll tell you something else interesting that Interpol told me. Four or five of these Apocalypse manuscripts have been stolen this year, mostly from Spanish monasteries, one from the Isle of Wight. Before the art theft registry thing, this would not have been apparent, but now the coincidence or coordination is apparent. No one knows if it’s coincidence or by plan.”
“As we draw closer to the millennium,” Tim agreed carefully. “Interest grows.”
“And you are interested in biblical prophecies? Are you a believer?” Cray asked.
“Not exactly,” Tim admitted.
“Don’t misunderstand,” Cray said. “Moi non plus. I’m a skeptic, not a believer. All the same, we must behave as if we believe. I know if I were a believer, I would give time and money to what I believed in—religion, politics. So I do it anyway, with or without believing. Give money, anyhow. I’ve read a certain amount of theology and political theory, I’ve decided on a rather arbitrary set of convictions, then I stick to them. Not based on faith, on decision—which is not so subject to temperament, and not as shaky as faith. Would you characterize your own faith as unshakable?”
Tim was somewhat nonplussed at this abrupt excursion into schoolboy philosophy. He muttered that he too had thus far avoided subscribing to any one rigid moral system. Together at the same minor Swiss boarding school, he and Cees had had a chemistry teacher, the same one who said that mixed nationalities were like unstable compounds. He said, in another context, that whatever you think you know absolutely as a fact, is the thing you must most distrust. Tim had taken this to heart, so although he had not given up some absolute notions, such as that, say, it was absolutely wrong to kill, he otherwise had discarded any moral tenets that seemed too fanciful, like those concocted by religions, in favor of a rock-bottom instinctive decency—no lying or anything worse, no unkindness, obviously no murder or theft.
Beyond that, he was ruled by a kind of mild hedonism and a sense of responsibility only for things specifically entrusted to him, and not too much to spare for the great world, which did seem beyond the efforts of one hand-to-mouth writer, though he noticed a sometimes exercised tone creep into his writing on certain obvious subjects—African massacres or political corruption in France. If he had thought anyone actually read what he wrote, he would probably have indulged this polemical streak at greater length.
“What is the general gist of these manuscripts?” he asked.
“The end of the world, of course, in more or less specific detail, sometimes quite colorful, like the Spanish prophecies of fire dragons who will spread the fire by igniting forests with their scaly, incendiary tails. Here’s a little picture of a fire dragon.”
The morning went by almost before Tim realized it. Cray was a compelling companion, with a vast amount of lore.
At noon he took his leave and headed for the Hotel Le Mistral. The clerk, as predicted, was scandalized at the idea of opening the room of the vanished monsieur, until she came to see the sense of it. Monsieur had been gone since Saturday afternoon, nearly four days, without indicating his intention to be absent. It did not strictly speaking violate any hotel law to open a room and take the things out when it appeared that the renter had disappeared and had no intention to pay. But she would not consent to Delia’s taking Gabriel’s luggage; it would be locked into the luggage room, that was correct hotel practice, and the clerk demanded that they come with her to supervise its removal so the hotel would not be liable nor suspect.
Delia went with the clerk, and Tim with them both, curious. Like Delia, he half expected to find the room had been tossed by the people Delia had heard the night before, but it was in only normal disorder, a jacket laid across the bed, fresh soap left by the maid, a suitcase open on the luggage rack, a paper sack and a small rucksack on the dresser, razor and comb on the shelf in the bathroom.
“Close the cases and we’ll put them downstairs,” the clerk said as Tim took his leave of the young Oregonian captive. “Monsieur has to pay, nonetheless, the four nights, plus the late occupancy charge for today, or someone does.”
In a low voice, as if she feared being overheard by the hotel, Delia told him she was resolved not to stay here another night. “There is something so definitely not okay.”
“It could be, that could be,” Tim had to agree.
“I’d go to some other hotel, but my money still hasn’t come, I know they’re stopping it some way. And they don’t always tell me if I get phone calls or else they’re stopping them too.”
Tim could think of nothing to suggest except that she spend the night with Anne-Sophie.
17
The Invitations
It wasn’t that Estelle was heartless or indifferent, she was just not good at ceremonies, or that was her own explanation. She had sometimes talked to Tim about the wedding, so that he found himself in the role of go-between, between her and her daughter, explaining her misgivings to Anne-Sophie. She confided to him that she hated letting Anne-Sophie down by not being able to rise to a sense of occasion, let alone be really helpful, by knowing about the ceremonial details, or at least by having inspired, creative ideas about decor and the wedding dinner.
“It takes a sense of play, of fantasy, I know all that, it is just that a love of ceremony was left out of me. Au contraire, rituals driv
e me to tears of skepticism, at the misplaced hopes, the ultimate doom of all hopes. Yet I am as full of hopes as you are, Tim dear, for your lovely mariage. Why should it not be perfect? ”
“It’ll be perfect,” Tim assured her. “Anyhow, Anne-Sophie loves doing the plans and she’s a well-organized woman.”
“Isn’t she? I marvel, really, she is so etonnante. I almost cannot intrude on her perfection.” He couldn’t tell if she was being ironic.
Regarding the invitations, it had been necessary for Estelle to write to Madame Nolinger, even both Mesdames Nolinger, in Michigan, unless Tim could supply certain information as to how his parents would want their names expressed. He had never dwelt on their divorce, and wasn’t sure either Anne-Sophie or Estelle had fully realized his parents were divorced, even though they had two different addresses in Michigan. Also there were questions of whether there were any titles, degrees, military decorations that should be mentioned. Had his father served in the war, for example? (As an enlisted sailor in the last year of it, he knew.) He was able to say that his father had served, and that though he believed his father had received a master’s degree in theater arts at an early age, he doubted that he would want this mentioned on the invitation. As to his mother, he had never heard of any title or decoration of hers that could ornament the pages of the thick vellum leaflets being printed up.
Estelle thought it better to write to his parents directly, which she had planned to do anyway, regarding whether there were anything she could do about the hotels, and what relatives would be coming. She was not entirely confident of her written English, so wrote in French to Tim’s mother. The reply had been disappointing, though, as Madame Nolinger had volunteered very few things of interest except that she had graduated from the Académie du Sacré Coeur in Bruxelles. Anne-Sophie was now taking the replies to the invitation consultant.
Madame Aix concluded that the invitation would begin:
Le Mariage Page 11
