Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  “I think we can have confidence in Tim Nolinger,” said Clara. “He strikes me as competent, a responsible person, he’s supposedly trying to find out where Gabriel is and so on.”

  “Competent and responsible aren’t the same thing, though,” Delia pointed out.

  The naturally beautiful seem to fall into two camps, those who think nothing of their looks and those who think of nothing else. Clara was one of the former, yet when she waked this same morning after the visit of the hunters, she had looked a long time at herself in the mirror. She was still wondering why the nice Frenchman who had been so kind after the meeting (he was called Antoine de Persand) hadn’t come inside with the others. She had expected he would come in, they would have exchanged a few harmless words, he would have seen her pretty house and eaten a sandwich.

  Had she let herself go? If she’d continued in films she would have had to monitor the tiny changes, the incursions of a decade; but the isolation of her situation, her preoccupation with little Lars and his problem, had put them out of her mind until now. She was alarmed to find that a power she had had, she perhaps had no longer, and vowed to renew her plan to garner the beauty and sexual secrets of Frenchwomen, and put them in a little book. Struck by how much they seemed to know, she had mischievously started compiling such a book a few years before, thinking she needed a project; but now she would also apply these secrets, if she found out any. It occurred to her that Anne-Sophie d‘Argel would be a good source, so lively, fresh, and pretty, obviously the repository of centuries of French female wisdom. She wondered where she had put the notebook where she’d begun noting things down. She wondered if Madame Antoine de Persand was very beautiful.

  Tim and Anne-Sophie found their new connection to the Crays and their charge Delia not entirely welcome. When he had first heard about the thefts, Tim had planned to go to Spain to visit the two monasteries and a library in Seville from which Apocalypse manuscripts had been stolen by a man with German credentials costumed as a monk. In all three thefts, leaves from the writings of St. John about the end of the world were the object. Tim had assembled information about all this from newspaper reports, the Internet, and Cees. But now he had agreed to act as Cray’s agent in acquiring the latest stolen manuscript delaying his Spanish trip.

  He asked himself why, and answered to his own satisfaction that his line of work required him to let things lead where they would, up to a point, and the possible stories and articles to come out of it were well worth the expenditure of a couple of weeks.

  The association with Cray had another upside too. There was the proposal that Cray would pay him for his time—would in fact put him on the Monday Brothers Films payroll for the period involved as an assistant on the film Cray was planning. Cray assured Tim that this was normal practice, in case Tim had scruples, before Tim could analyze whether he did or not. It was easy—he’d welcome the pay; he was a man about to be married.

  He drove out to the Crays’ each day at noon, when the commuter traffic was over, and hung around for an hour or two. Tim was surprised at how easily he slid into this arrangement, and it made him think generally about questions of vocation. He knew he wouldn’t want to spend his life as anyone’s assistant, but did he in fact have anything better to do? Shouldn’t he have a long project? Write a novel? About what? Or a book about European politics? All he really knew much about was being in France—its history, wines, social conditions. Maybe he should learn something systematic about medieval manuscripts. But then he’d have to learn Latin....

  In any case, his travel plans had evidently now to be put on hold, waiting for the thieves to contact Cray again, and he needed to resolve the whereabouts of the missing Oregonian, presumably in police custody and therefore not the German monk thief or manuscript seller. Though he had agreed to do both of these things—deal with the thief and find Gabriel—he unfortunately had no particular contacts in the French police. But he had a friend with the New York Times who did, and she had reported back this morning that while several Americans were in custody in Paris—shoplifting, a visa problem, and assault—none of them was Gabriel Biller. Meantime, Cees in Amsterdam confirmed that none of the other people on the list of collectors had been contacted. As nothing else was happening, Tim wrote a restaurant review for the Wine Observer and spent some time in the library, where he was always happy, reading about the Apocalypse.

  Clara Holly had become less distant, was at least polite, would drink a cup of coffee with him before Cray came down and ask questions about his life, or the wedding, like a hostess.

  “Serge has given me some of your articles to read,” she said. “They’re very interesting!”

  Tim was complimented and surprised that Cray had read his stuff, but it went with the man’s reputation for excessive thoroughness. “In Concern?”

  “In a magazine called Reliance. It struck me that you and Serge have similar politics,” Clara said.

  “I don’t know that I have any politics,” Tim said. “I try to be objective, even for Reliance.”

  “I don’t think being a journalist excuses you from having politics,” she objected.

  Another time, she brought up the wedding.

  “Your wedding is nearby, in Val-Saint-Rémy,” she said.

  “In six weeks,” he agreed.

  “Anne-Sophie is so delightful. So French! Americans are just clods next to them. The French seem to know everything about—well, everything important. Gastronomy. Eros.” Her mention of Eros quickened Tim’s pulse just a little.

  “I’ve always thought this house would be nice for a wedding reception,” she added presently. “It’s too bad we didn’t know you back when you were making the plans. I’d love it if you were having it at our house.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I guess it’s long since been decided.”

  “Do you feel your life’s beginning or ending?” She asked this with a lightness of tone that was meant to mitigate the solemnity of this painful question. He’d asked it himself, and answered it.

  “Beginning, mainly.”

  “I read somewhere that for most men in the world, their wedding is the most important thing that will ever happen to them, and almost the only time they’ll get new clothes and be the center of attention.”

  “What an appalling idea. But, isn’t it true for women too?” he asked.

  “Oh, women have childbirth,” she said.

  Tim was in fact slightly worried about a detail of his life with Anne-Sophie. Anne-Sophie, until now a merry and ardent mistress, had seemed suddenly to become insecure about the sexual side of their life, despite his being thoughtful and aware of this, he hoped, and always reassuring her about her beauty and sexiness. So far they had not had any of the problems you heard plagued some people—frigidity, premature ejaculation, lack of desire, and probably there were other things. At first, sensing her concern, he’d feared some deficiency of his own, but he also wondered whether it might be because of the lurid sensuality of Estelle’s writing that Anne-Sophie had begun to find things a bit flat. Though Estelle’s language was ladylike, her literary personae descended from Huysmans or Pater, and were given to disquisitions on the difference between parfum vert and parfum fruité, or the range of sensations peculiar to the inner thigh. Her protagonists hinted at languorous but insistent sexual appetites in a sophisticated monde where the orgasm was discussed at luxurious hashish parties. (“Ah! the greedy pulse of le bouton, the tiny tympanum at the centre of the universe! curling the toes in that delicious rictus ...”) All this could well have put Anne-Sophie off somehow.

  Then Tuesday morning when they were making love Anne-Sophie had said, in English (he remembered that detail especially, for they always spoke French together when talking of love), “I want you to fuck me as if you had never had me before.” He had been startled, even while trying to oblige, at this completely out-of-character declaration, and in his brain there lodged an echo. Was this maybe an English translation of one of Estelle’s lines? Or was
Anne-Sophie getting tired of their usual range of positions (basically, him on top or her on top) and in need of something more? En levrette? What did this predict for long years together? He had no answer, but noted the development.

  She had also become exigent about her car, claiming to need it, often on days he’d asked to borrow it, so he couldn’t go out to the Crays’ as often as he had been doing. He understood that this was a symptom of something, he just didn’t know what, perhaps only the strain of impending marriage.

  “I think it is a little bit normal, I fear, before the wedding, for men to get restless and wistfully to eye other women,” Madame Aix assured Anne-Sophie, who was telling the older woman about certain concerns she had about Tim, especially that he was spending all this time at the Crays’ and often mentioned Mrs. Cray. “I hear this all the time.”

  “I don’t think there is anything to it, but ...”

  “I hear horror stories. Men go off with their former girlfriends, they take up with dancers and prostitutes—it’s a kind of panic reaction.”

  “Prostitutes! Quelle horreur. Certainly not, not Tim.”

  “No, certainly, but I wanted you to know there is a wide range of behavior. It’s not so strange to find him looking wistfully at other women.”

  It had got her to thinking about the whole problem of keeping a man sexually interested for a lifetime. Wild, uninhibited behavior was always advised. Maybe more soixante-neuf? They occasionally did this, but she sensed that Tim preferred the soixante to performing the neuf, a universal male characteristic according to the countess Ribemont, one that should not be endlessly indulged.

  “Did you realize that Tim Nolinger is the Nolinger-Webb heir?” said Dorothy Sternholz to Vivian Gibbs at the hairdresser (Nigel Coiffure, the Englishman). “You’d never have known that, he’s a modest, a sweet boy.”

  “I didn’t know, but it doesn’t surprise me,” Vivian said. “Though would I say modest and sweet? I think he has a somewhat princely air, if only because he seems so at home in the world, and, like a prince, he seldom has money in his pocket.”

  24

  The Arrest

  Clara and Delia fell into the habit of talking in the mornings over coffee. Clara would talk about her little boy, Lars, or she would reminisce about Lake Oswego to refresh her memory of certain landmarks, however banal, like the Safeway or the so-called City Hall or the Ben Franklin Bank, none of which Delia found that remarkable, though she was willing to correct or update Clara’s memory of them. These conversations appeared to increase Clara’s pleasure at being in France, which gave Delia the feeling she was abetting the crime of nonpatriotism.

  It took them no time at all to establish that the vanished Gabriel’s live-in girlfriend was none other than Cristal’s crazy daughter SuAnn—unstable, medicated, given to strange causes and beliefs, and, to boot and especially, a Y2K person. This connection to Cristal gave them another, unforeseen, bond.

  Clara began to be aware that Delia’s emotions had somehow transferred to her, reposing in Clara her need for a friend, her confidences, her fears about the things that were happening. It seemed natural. Clara could see the young woman was a little frail, far from home and family, and had the generally dependent nature of a youngest child, and also her handicap, whatever that meant to her. Delia virtually followed her around, and Clara often slowed her pace to accommodate the girl’s slower walking.

  Clara took her to the American consulate to discuss the passport, there being no reason now not to issue it, since someone had been arrested in the flea market affair. At the consulate, the clerks had not heard from the French police, but said they might now reissue the passport. Clara and Delia had the feeling that the clerks in the consulate liked to defy the French authorities when they were on sure ground doing so.

  “But I really want to go to the Louvre, that’s why I came over really,” Delia kept saying, and Clara promised to take her soon.

  For her part, Delia learned quite a bit about Clara, not from anything Clara confided—Clara was almost strangely self-composed —but by inference. Delia figured out that her life was not just a glamorous piece of cake, though it wasn’t hard either. Apart from the giant house, it was rather normal, or even tinged with sadness, on account of the curt, remote husband and the little boy sent away to school and not even allowed to have e-mail, only a letter once a week. Yet she was a good, hardworking wife, with an almost puritanical view of marriage. She would never be unfaithful to her husband, she said, and once when they were talking about a particular Lake Oswego scandal, she had said, “Why would she throw everything away like that for a moment of pleasure? It doesn’t make sense. What would be the point? You’d only end by making yourself unhappy, never mind your husband. Sex is sex, after all, with one person or another.”

  Once when Delia talked about her business, antique linen and green plates, and making her way in the world, Clara said, “I don’t know, I was married when I was twenty, I’ve never really been on my own. I probably wouldn’t know what to do.”

  Delia wondered if it was time to mention God to Clara Holly.

  Delia, even now not sleeping beyond five o‘clock in the morning, usually waited till seven before coming down. The sky was still black, the moon bright when she heard a car drive up, heard the rasp of the hand brake. It seemed too early for anyone to call, and even creepier that someone should ring at the front door, but she went to answer it.

  Outside stood two men who carried radios or phones, and a woman police officer. In her nightie and robe (one of Clara’s), Delia shivered in fear. She had known they would come for her.

  But the first man said, “Madame Clara Cray, vous êtes en état d‘arrestation. ”

  Delia stared and said, “Uh—I guess you want Clara.”

  “Je regrette, il faut que je vous prenne en garde a vue,” the man went on saying.

  Delia backed away from the door, and they came in. Miraculously, Clara was up too, and stood behind her, looking sleepy. Though she could not understand what they were saying, Delia could tell from Clara’s expression that it was Clara they’d come for.

  Clara was just standing there with a look of amazement and indecision on her face. She indicated her robe, the need to get dressed. All that was plain enough. The visitors said something, and she turned to Delia. Her voice was shocked.

  “Could you wake up Serge and tell him to come down? I don’t know if I have to go with them? ” Then she spoke in French again to the men, and started up the kitchen stairs, followed by the police-woman. Baffled, Delia went as fast as she could up the main staircase, and knocked on Serge Cray’s bedroom door. Behind her the men stayed in the hall, watching the women up the stairs.

  Cray gave a groan, she heard the thrash of bedclothes. The door opened and Cray peered out. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt that was pulled up over his fat belly, and exuded the smell of sleep.

  “Some police have come and it looks like they’re arresting Clara,” Delia whispered. “I mean I guess they’re police. They look like police.” Cray came further out of his door and peered at her, blinking like a mole through his thick glasses.

  “You better come down. I guess it might have something to do with me being here?” Delia added. “She sort of made herself responsible at the hotel? And the consulate? They’re in the hall. Clara’s getting her clothes on.”

  “It’s the fucking hunting.” Cray snorted and started down the stairs to the kitchen, his heavy body suddenly agile as a pony. He thought of the chains in his woods, possibly illegal considering the law—some fucking loi or other—about enclosure. His American lawyers hadn’t been sure about the chains.

  Then there was the other loi, the Loi Verdeille. This law, the one that most exasperated Clara and him, maintained that hunters and strangers had the right to come and hunt on your private property under circumstances defined, as far as he could tell, as broadly as possible, resulting in practically total freedom to shoot near your living-room windows, rattle
the china in your cupboards, assault your sensibilities with the corpses of once lordly animals dragged through your bloodstained shrubbery. There were these private-property issues involved which outweighed with him even the objections to hunting, and he would not shrink from getting his lawyers further involved if that’s what the locals wanted. His temper began to rise.

  He hadn’t seen these two men before, and they weren’t in police clothes. Clara wasn’t there. “Messieurs? What’s all this?” he asked them. “What do you want with my wife? I’ve made my position plain to monsieur the mayor, and in any case my position has nothing to do with my wife.” His dark skin darkened further with an angry flush, like a furious, fat gypsy.

  “It is Madame Cray who is cited,” said the first man politely. They were looking anxiously up the stairs, as if fearing her escape.

  “Please sit down,” said Cray, leading them into the salon. “I’ll telephone my people.” It was only seven-thirty; who knew what time the lawyers got in, in no way before ten. “Delia, you could give them some coffee.” The men did not sit down. Given to abrupt exits, Cray now left without another word. Delia waited for the men to indicate if they wanted coffee. But maybe they hadn’t understood. They stood with wooden faces.

  “Cafe?” she asked. They shook their heads no and tried to wear amiable expressions, as if to smooth and pacify the rearing awkwardness. They smiled at Delia, to underline their commendable Gallic tact.

  Clara came down, in a suit and stockings and heels, sort of churchgoing clothes. What did you wear to be taken away by police in?

  “Did you tell Serge?”

  “He was here,” Delia said. “He went back upstairs to call the lawyer or something. ‘His people,’ he said.”