Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  It occurred to Tim, watching Persand’s departure, that perhaps he’d exaggerated to himself the idea that there was some special thing between this guy and Clara Holly. On the other hand, the man looked especially uncomfortable, and reluctant about something. Tim’s thoughts kept returning inexplicably to the sight of that chance exchange in the tennis club—and with it a suggestion he did not bring to consciousness, that if anyone could have her, he, Tim, also could have her. He was aware of Anne-Sophie’s little hand in his raincoat pocket, looking for a handkerchief she’d put there.

  “I know this house, monsieur,” said the mayor to Cray. “It used to belong to the municipality. It was sold first in the seventies. The decision to sell was not mine, a predecessor’s.”

  “I bought it from an ad in Maisons et Châteaux,” said Cray sharply. “Never met the owner.”

  The mayor sniffed, perhaps at the memory of the previous owner, the one who presumably had stripped the building of its eighteenth-century grandeur.

  Clara had gone for towels. She came in with a stack of them. The hunters refused them, “Non, non, ça va. ” Tim and Delia also refused, but Anne-Sophie and Cray dried their faces.

  “Sherry,” cried Clara. “I insist that you drink some sherry and eat a sandwich while you dry, it’s dangerous to be so wet.” She did not quite know why she said this or was moved to be hospitable to these unfriendly forces. But she and Serge seldom had visitors, and it had something to do with a liking to have people in, and put her in mind of her first French social mistake, not asking people inside. The large Fourth of July outdoor barbecue to which they once invited the village, soon after they had moved here, had seemed instead to irritate the locals, who had been hoping to be asked to see the interior, confusing Clara, who had noted that many French celebrations were held outdoors, often in the same sort of tent she’d taken pains to organize.

  Now she was a little surprised when the mayor agreed they would drink a sherry, and not refuse a sandwich. She led them down a corridor to the large family room she had installed, a south-facing, sunny room open to the kitchen. Anne-Sophie followed, chattily giving them a little lecture incorporating notions she had gleaned from Tim: “It is the existence of the ‘family room’ that causes French people, failing to realize that there is a living room elsewhere in an American house, to believe that American kitchens are in American living rooms, hence the cuisine américaine with which they deface their own interiors.” Or so she was saying, in a tone of gentle affection for French ideas.

  Here they would dry off by a fire in the giant stone fireplace (not original to the room). Senhora Alvares would make sandwiches. Delia went to help her while the drowned hunters stood in a group in the middle of the room. Tim engaged one or two in a discussion of rain in October. It was often rainy at the outset of the season for petit gibier, pigeons and partridge, they said.

  Cray had disappeared. Tim had seen his frown when Clara had offered sherry, and took note of his significant glare at her. It had not deterred her hospitable impulse. She liked the sense of having people in her pretty house, here with the Aga stove brought from England for its radiant welcoming warmth, her little pantry where napkins were folded and stacked by the dozens, the image of order, and the pile of little cocktail plates people could hold on their knees.

  They found various ingredients appropriate for the construction of sandwiches, and Delia helped Senhora Alvares by spreading peanut butter and cutting off crusts. Clara too pitched in with the emergency sandwiches, spreading butter on the bread, slicing cucumbers—she was a lot like her mother, she supposed, remembering how Mother enjoyed fixing food for a big group, all the football parents or all the King’s Daughters or her bridge club or for after the library sale or when they closed the polls on election night.

  As she spread the butter she found herself thinking of the man, Antoine de Persand—just as well he didn’t come in, how could she have thought he would have any special reason to do so? What did it matter? She felt a little silly to have imagined that he would come in, that he would want to see her. Not that she would ever get mixed up in something like that. Like what? How embarrassing to have made this silly, unwarranted mental leap.

  Clara brought sherry, and Senhora Alvares passed the little glasses and the cocktail-sized plates and half-sized napkins with little roosters on them. Delia looked at these with professional interest, correctly identifying them as American, 1930s.

  “Lake Oswego,” Clara said.

  Eventually, warmed and dried, the mayor shook Clara’s hand, then Tim‘s, Anne-Sophie’s, and even Delia‘s, and then each of his men performed this ritual, a protracted few minutes of handshaking and au revoirs. They went out to their cars. At the end, the Frenchmen had seemed convivial and made pleasant conversation about the weather, the village bibliothèque, the little collapsed bridge at the crossroad and the plans at last to repair it. Hunting had not been mentioned. Clara noted this scrupulous reluctance to abuse their hospitality.

  She set about restoring order, aided by Anne-Sophie and Delia. They gathered the glasses and plates, the crumpled serviettes, the ashtrays. Women, thought Tim, seemed to find something enjoyable about cleaning up after guests. Clara in particular wore a satisfied air. On the platter a half dozen sandwiches remained—most of the peanut butter sandwiches they had made.

  “I noticed no one asked whether this was a smoking household,” Delia said, frowning at an ashtray.

  They became aware that Serge Cray had come down and was surveying with a directorial eye the dismantled scene of plates, glasses, and crumpled napkins as the females picked them up. He noticed what Tim had noticed too—that the peanut butter sandwiches had all been left. One, on a plate, had a bite out of it. Cray smiled and said sarcastically to his wife, “Only you would serve peanut butter to a bunch of Frenchmen.”

  She smiled a little, turned away, it might have been without noticing, but the unpleasant tone of this phrase shocked Tim with its unintended revelations about Clara Holly and her husband, and maybe about marriage itself? He had never devoted much thought to the everyday side of marriage, with its inevitable small rancors and collective joys or disappointments. The rude things you might hear yourself saying to your wife? So far he had never said anything rude to Anne-Sophie—hadn’t felt the impulse to. At the doors of consciousness, however, were several of her irritating traits. Smoking, for one. And sometimes, failing to recognize a simple but Anglo-Saxon cultural reference. “Satchmo?” These had now (only you!) revealed their landmine potentiality.

  The revelation that the husband was cruel and curt raised in him a stab of chivalrous feeling for Clara. He wanted to reassure this poor beautiful lady that all men would not disparage and condemn her and that peanut butter sandwiches were well within the purview of human hospitality. He had the impulse to take her in his arms and soothe her—anyone would.

  Anne-Sophie too recognized something alarming and disappointing in Cray’s mean phrase. Only you would do une telle bêtise. With two words a man could humiliate you, and so unfairly, since it had been the girl Delia who had made these sandwiches which, though repulsive and looking like caca, were surely harmless and well meant? Madame Cray had almost appeared not to notice, as if her husband’s habit of making rude criticisms no longer had the power to wound, so much had she suffered.

  So! This was marriage! It was the hint of female subjection that alarmed Anne-Sophie. She, Anne-Sophie, would have cracked a dish over his head. Instead Clara Holly had affected not to notice—perhaps really did not notice—that her husband had made a rude, a withering remark to the effect that she was the stupidest woman in the whole world. Only you! And then too he had made this observation in front of other people—Tim, the Oregonian girl, and some new man who had been introduced as a garden designer and was still there. Anne-Sophie’s breast burned with sisterly commiseration.

  Her eye caught Tim’s. She saw there, she hoped, an implicit commitment to love her and never speak to her that way. Their a
ccord would be perfect. She was thinking how handsome her loved one was, how she loved him, how lucky they had met. If only she were as pretty as he deserved! If only she were always good-natured and calm, as Madame Cray evidently was. These notes were the chord of her love for her intended husband. Only you!

  “Peanut butter is too American for them or what?” asked Delia, thinking, who cared what the mayor thought anyhow? What assholes. How horrible to be married to someone fat, even if famous, who pitched a fit over a peanut butter sandwich and spoke to you like that in front of others, or even in private.

  “It’s one of those cultural gulfs,” Clara said.

  21

  The Driad Apocalypse

  Cray motioned to Tim to come back upstairs. When they had shut themselves in Cray’s study, he said, his strange eyes glaring excitedly behind his thick glasses, “Yesterday someone called me about a manuscript, I assume the one taken from the library in New York. Exactly as predicted.”

  Tim nodded, gratified. It was indeed happening as Cees had said it would.

  “The price is high, five hundred thousand dollars. The conditions are the usual ones—I don’t tell the police and so on.”

  “Have you?”

  “I’ve accepted the conditions. It seemed to me the responsible thing would be to buy the thing, take it out of the hands of the thieves at least. I’m not worried about the money—the library’s insurance will cover it, I’m sure, or there’ll be a reward. I’ll restore it to its owners, of course. I temporized. The man was to have called again this morning for my answer and with instructions—he hasn‘t, as yet. Someone will have to deliver the money and pick up the document, something I don’t want to do myself.”

  “You want me to do it?” Tim said, thinking without hesitation, why not? There was nothing illegal, or dangerous either, probably. And there was a story in it. They would alert Cees, of course.

  “ Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Just let me know when, and how I’ll know if it’s the authentic document.”

  “You can study what I have. Interpol sent a Xerox of the stolen manuscript along with the original alert.”

  Tim examined the Xerox, and the information sent along from the American authorities. A spotted handwritten document in Latin, apparently Xeroxed from a microfilm, the words light, the background black.

  “There are clever forgeries, of course. They might try to sell a fake.”

  “Maybe I should look again at some original manuscripts from the period.” Neither the original nor the clever forgery would look anything like this.

  Cray shrugged and turned to his cabinets.

  Tim thought about what to do. Given the events of the past week, it seemed reasonable to wonder if the theft, the murder in the flea market, and the disappeared American had some connection to each other, though it was hard to imagine what, since the American had been with Delia at the time of the murder, as innocent as she, and was now presumably in the hands of the French police and hence could not be the person calling Cray.

  Cristal took the four-thousand-dollar check written by Serge Cray for Lady’s vet to the Ben Franklin Bank and put it in her account, saving a thousand out in cash. Looked at the five stacks of twenties on the counter as the teller counted them out, thinking it was more money than she had ever had at once. She folded the deposit slip carefully and put it in her purse. The cash she put in the bottom of her grocery bag in case someone should snatch her purse. Her daughter SuAnn always kept all her money in cash and paid her bills, even the doctor, in cash, it was one of the convictions of the group she was a member of, and you couldn’t object, it was a good principle, or would be in a perfect world. In a perfect world no one stole from you or was bipolar either. SuAnn was involved in a struggle for a perfect world.

  Cristal was jittery driving back to Mrs. Holly’s with a thousand dollars in a bag like that, but nothing happened. Mrs. Holly was watching television in the den, so she took the stacks of bills and put them in Mrs. Holly’s bedroom closet under the bedpan and foam bedpad they’d had to use that time, repellent gear no one would look under or want to touch.

  If Clara should ask what about Lady, she could say she died after the surgery, after the bill was paid. Yes, that’s what she’d say.

  So that when next they talked, and Clara fell into a mood of self-reproach about not coming home, as she often did, Cristal deflected any talk of Clara coming home.

  “I’ll come over,” Clara said, choking with remorse about who knew what.

  “No, that’s okay, you should come in December for her birthday, that’d make her so happy.”

  “Yes, December, that’ll give me time to get my husband used to the idea,” Clara agreed.

  “Yes, only a month.”

  22

  The Arrest of Monsieur Savard

  The next morning, Saturday, a flea market day, Anne-Sophie, having only a portfolio of prints to carry, took the bus to Clignancourt and walked through the still-dark streets to the Marché Paul Bert. An air of excitement reigned there. Many of the dealers were already open, people unloading nested chairs tied with clothesline, and a gilt mirror of unprecedented size that looked like it would crush the gallant little Arabs in blue work clothes bent under its weight, and Huguette Marsac waving them along. But the buzz mainly emanated from a congregation of fellow antiquaires in their yellow imperméables, corduroy collars turned up against the chill, rubbing their cold fingers and talking animatedly.

  It was Huguette who interrupted herself to give Anne-Sophie the news. “Monsieur Savard, stall ninety in Allée Four, has been arrested for the murder of poor Monsieur Boudherbe! Are you stunned? ”

  She was stunned. Only yesterday the American was being carted off—she had assumed for questioning about the murder. Now Monsieur Savard, a mild, distant, but exemplary dealer in small bronzes, had been definitively accused.

  “It appears they went to his apartment last night and arrested him!”

  Rumors swirled and fell like tides throughout the day, and with the waning sun of the afternoon. Monsieur Boudherbe and Monsieur Savard had been partners in a crooked scheme gone wrong, a criminal enterprise like drugs, arms for the Irish or Algerians, Russian prostitutes, the theft of art treasures from emerging Eastern European nations. Or, they were lovers and it was a jealous quarrel—though nobody had ever thought of the stout, tobacco-stained Monsieur Boudherbe in the role of sexual animal, Monsieur Savard even less. By the end of the day, it was known definitely that Savard had been found to have three million francs in his drawer at home, probably stolen from Boudherbe.

  Anne-Sophie was thoroughly staggered. “Ce n‘est pas possible, ” she said again and again. She had constructed for the romantic-looking American a desperate role as intruder, victim of police injustice, stranded prisoner, even as guilty fugitive from a ruder, more dangerous land. She was sure he was a murderer too.

  But the regret she felt that he was not also a murderer was made up for by the excitement of having misjudged Monsieur Savard. This misprision introduced a whole new shaken appreciation of the limits of human intuition. Her respect for the police went up; they were seen to be keen in their impartial search for truth, impartial even to the extent of arresting a Frenchman instead of the tempting American étranger. Had they let the American go? Anne-Sophie acknowledged to herself that she’d better alert Delia about these new developments. She realized, though, that she didn’t have the Crays’ phone number and would have to wait for Tim to come home.

  23

  Confidences

  Over the next week, life fell into a new but fairly regular pattern. Out at the Crays‘, Delia had come down early the first morning, a little relieved to find no one up, and yet dismayed to be alone lest she be thought to be snooping in their kitchen. She was thinking about her new hosts Clara and Serge Cray. Mr. Cray was clearly a pig where his wife was concerned. She began to see there were upsides and downsides to having a famous but temperamental husband. The maid or cleaning wo
man who had been there yesterday, small and wide, came in at eight and nodded from across a gulf of language.

  “Bonjour,” said Delia, conscious that this was the very first word she’d spoken in French apart from merci.

  “Bom dia,” said the woman in a language Delia didn’t recognize. The woman made coffee and gave Delia a plate of croissants.

  She had lain awake in the night ordering in her mind the things she had to do today. Now, safely away from the hotel, she must call the consulate, notify her parents she’d moved and give them the new phone number, tell Tim her money hadn’t come, and call the airline, for it was tomorrow she was to have gone home on her one-week nonrefundable ticket. It seemed a kind of catch-22 situation, no passport, no hope—unless she could get some sort of attestation that would let her reschedule her ticket, which you practically had to die to get, but probably a police order would count as much as death.

  When Clara came down, a reassuring figure in her bathrobe though rather blowzy in Delia’s opinion, the dowdy effect of a big bust when you weren’t wearing a bra, Delia explained all her problems to her.

  “And Gabriel too, his ticket was nonrefundable.”

  “We’ll make some calls,” said Clara vaguely, thinking that though she had feared the intrusion of Delia, it was sort of nice finding someone in the kitchen to chat with in the morning.

  “I can’t just go home without knowing where he is and what’s happened to him.”

  “Do you love him?” Clara asked. “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend, exactly,” Delia said. “He lives with someone else, she’s slightly crazy, I think it’s mostly that he feels sorry for her, and worries about sending her right over the brink.”