Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  “Right,” Delia chimed fiercely. “Astonishing.”

  “That is another question,” said Persand stiffly. “The mayor thinks that perhaps the legal status of some of the roads on the perimeter of your property, if reexamined, could further diminish your surface. You may have counted easements, et cetera. He’s looking for another means of harrassing you.”

  Cray grunted. “Did my dogs annoy you?”

  “I saw them, monsieur. They saw me, also.”

  “There are eight dogs loose on the property, and their master is instructed to set them on intruders and on the intruders’ dogs. I am interested that they seem to be able to discern the difference between intruders and invited guests and friends such as yourself. Maybe it’s that welcome visitors come properly up the path. Or maybe the maître-chien somehow knows and signals.”

  “The mayor also has the power to condemn certain parts of your surface for the public easement, which might have the effect of lowering the measure of your hectares even further,” said Persand.

  This did affect Cray, who at last saw the point. He scowled, his eyes glittered, his jaw darkened as if his beard had suddenly surged. “So that’s their game,” he said.

  Persand turned to Clara. “And you, madame? You have survived the terrible ordeal of the prison? ”

  “It is something everyone should go through,” Clara said, smiling in a sprightly, almost Frenchwoman’s way. “You discover things about yourself, and you say and do things that are not like yourself at all. Things you would never do or say in the real world.”

  “I can imagine that. I suppose we all have an imaginative life we dare not let out.”

  “But in prison, it is free,” said Clara. “You can think of doing any forbidden thing.”

  The wedding plans continued smoothly, but the apartment problem worsened.

  “Tell Madame Flieu to take her planks with her,” the agent coolly advised Tim and Anne-Sophie, when Tim remonstrated about the extra charges. But it wasn’t so simple—they wanted the bookcases. It was a matter of coming up with the extra sum. Tim had a little money in an American account, and called his mother, who had a power of attorney to withdraw it.

  “These are attached!” Tim continued to complain to all and sundry. “The sellers can’t take things that are attached!” But it appeared they could, it was the French way, and all he and Anne-Sophie had bought, after all, were the walls. Any embellishment was a function of the goodwill of the seller, Madame Flieu. Tim could not master the irritation he began to feel about those bookcases, another instance of the sullying of their eventual nest by forces they could not control, as if heavy, ugly birds had thrust themselves in and squatted on the delicate eggs of marital contentment about to hatch. He and Anne-Sophie found refuge in especially passionate and frequent lovemaking, during which, once, Anne-Sophie said, “Oh, God, I’m horny.” This non-French expression, so unexpected in Anne-Sophie’s prim, London-tuned, slang-free English vocabulary, caught Tim unaware and struck him as funny, as it had been funny when she had said the thing about “fuck me.”

  It was days later, when he was there in the middle of the day, that he saw a copy of Sexus in her apartment. She’d been reading Henry Miller, the evident source of her rather hapless attempts to speak sexy English when they made love. He wondered again if something was wrong for her, or if she thought something was wrong for him. Had his interest in Clara followed them to bed? He wouldn’t have thought so, but it was hard to discuss sex without introducing something clinical and off-putting into an activity that had seemed spontaneous and happy. Just what he needed—another source of anxiety.

  For her part, Estelle was interested to learn about Tim’s trust fund, from which he was going to get the bookcase money. She had heard of this fiscal arrangement by which millionaire Americans supported their indigent sons or marriageable daughters.

  31

  Clara and Delia

  Whereas Clara had at first been sympathetic to Delia, she now began to find her irritating. Tim thought maybe she was annoyed by Cray’s fascination with the girl—they were always talking—or it could be that Clara rivalrously felt that her own problems far exceeded Delia‘s, which only consisted, after all, of an enforced stay in France in a luxurious château and a slight inquietude for her friend Gabriel, while Clara faced the probability of a further stay in prison, or so the French magistrate had made clear.

  At first Clara had made allowances for Delia, thinking that although handicapped people often were sardonic and skeptical, overlaid with a slightly hypocritical patience—natural enough—this Delia seemed genuinely sweet, even rather passive, a person on hold. Maybe she was waiting for the operation that would allow her life to begin. As Clara’s own growing up had been one of unencumbered running and jumping, and needing no one’s forbearance, she would not judge Delia.

  But it struck her that Delia seemed to have an amazing capacity to do nothing. They all noticed it. She could sit in a chair motionless for hours. They wondered if it was because her hip hurt her that she had cultivated this quality of inertia. Yet when she moved, she merely limped and did not seem to be in undue pain. She didn’t like French television, didn’t read, would watch CNN for brief bouts, inevitably ending with snorts of indignation and sighs of national shame at the intellectual level of CNN.

  “CNN is not as stupid as this in the U.S.,” she would say. “It’s as if they think if you aren’t in America you must be dumb.”

  She did help around the house, answering the telephone or carrying cups to the kitchen. And she would talk for long periods with Cray. Who knew what they were doing? Tim assumed they were just talking, but he had found out in life that the last people on earth you would have thought were fucking, were fucking after all. Still, he didn’t think they were. The lumbering, fat Cray and the bird-boned young woman—it was almost as unimaginable as to think of Cray and Clara.

  Delia seemed to think of herself as a victim, and of legendary proportions. She had enthusiastic conversations on this theme with the people back home, which he and the Crays were at liberty to overhear. Tim noticed she had given up putting her calls on her credit card; instead of faithfully reciting the endless digits for each call, she now dialed direct at any hour with a calm show of entitlement. Perhaps Serge had told her to. She also was in contact with countless people in Paris, whose phone numbers had been forthcoming by the dozens from people in Oregon, each of whom seemed to have an American friend living here. By this means Delia’s plight also became widely known in the American community, and became thought of, even, as being as dire as Clara’s. The girl who can’t get her passport because of the mysterious misapplication of French bureaucracy was somehow connected to Clara Holly facing prison for the theft of historic panelling.

  The U.S. consulate had assured Delia that the delay of her passport was probably nothing more serious than an administrative glitch whereby the French police had forgotten about her and therefore had forgotten to lift their request to the Americans to hold it back, or to notify the French immigration authorities that they had no more need of her. The French immigration authorities in turn, therefore, had not rescinded their request to the American authorities.

  Tim suspected that someone still wanted to hold on to Delia until her friend Gabriel surfaced. And one day he did.

  “Did you hear that Mademoiselle Décor is going to cover Tim Nolinger’s wedding? His fiancée is a French socialite, but you’ve heard about him too? Are you invited?” Vivian Gibbs was asking Maydie Bailey at a co-meeting of Democrats and Republicans, to celebrate Thanksgiving and to review the rights of foreigners in France in the wake of Clara Holly’s problems.

  “Are the invitations out?” Maydie asked warily.

  “I love a French wedding. I went to one which went on for six days....”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know Tim that well,” confessed Maydie.

  “Why are the French so backward about the Internet?” Delia sighed, having no luck with the Minitel
, the primitive French version.

  “Well, they were so far ahead with the Minitel, everyone in France was online locally, so they just didn’t notice the Internet until now. Then there’s their thing about keeping out American culture—that made them skeptical of the Internet.”

  “So why do they have McDonald’s then? Why did they choose McDonald’s instead of the Internet?”

  “There is no explanation,” said Cray.

  Anne-Sophie, finding Henry Miller hard going, was giving him up. She had been looking for anatomical slang words in English, to upgrade her erotic vocabulary, as suggested by the countess Ribemont in Against the Tide: “There is no secret to making a man happy: it’s as simple as an aphrodisiac tone of voice, and a vocabulaire dur, alors. Use the words he has always dreamed of hearing you say.” Finding what these were, however, was far from easy, and trying one or two of Miller’s phrases had not had much of an effect on Tim, she had concluded. In fact she found the English vocabulary very deficient in general, when it came to a woman’s anatomy too, so lovingly describable in French—praline, petit pain, l‘as de trèfle, lucarne enchantée—while the words used in English seemed rather unpleasant.

  “Yes, I see it all, the missing pieces are all here now, I can begin, we can get under way,” Cray joyfully told Woly on the telephone. “You can start over there by organizing the second unit for the helicopter shots. I’ve begun work on a rough script.”

  32

  Cave Canem

  Gabriel suddenly turned up on the day Anne-Sophie was unexpectedly injured. Tim and Anne-Sophie had been invited out to Etang-la-Reine to lunch with the Crays and Delia, and had been asked to bring Anne-Sophie’s famous mother Estelle, of whom Cray was an admirer, or so he said. Tim would also have expected Anne-Sophie and Delia to have much in common, both involved in the antiques business, but he had never once heard them talk shop. Perhaps it didn’t occur to them that they had this bond.

  Anne-Sophie was excited—thrilled—at the prospect of lunching with the famous Cray, despite his behavior the first time they had met. Tim considered French people very overly film-struck. In the French mind, Cray was a great auteur of legendary significance. And as Anne-Sophie was in some ways a compendium of received French ideas, she had never got over being amazed that Tim was seeing Cray so often, in a position of trust and intimacy. On the other hand, the Crays were impressed that Anne-Sophie was the daughter of Estelle d‘Argel.

  It was a Sunday, Anne-Sophie’s busiest day, but she had arranged for Monsieur Lavalle to mind the stall, and they arrived about one o‘clock. Senhora Alvares was there, though she didn’t usually work on Sundays, and a waft of lunchtime cooking encouraged them as they walked warily up the steps, no dogs in evidence. Estelle declared herself ravished by the late flowers and general woodsy ambiance, and the encouraging smells of food.

  Meeting Cray, Anne-Sophie was at her most Watteau-esque, rosy and dimpling; Cray, alas, was more taciturn than usual, impervious to pretty women. Tim wondered if that might not be a characteristic of all directors, who are inundated with them. Still, he was civil to Tim, and even warm and welcoming to Estelle, whom he addressed formally as “madame,” as if he were French, “Asseyezvous, je vous en prie, madame,” and so on.

  They were sitting on the terrace outside the kitchen in a drizzly burst of late November sun; they had all had the same impulse to catch as much of it as they could and store it against the oncoming winter. At first, Clara was nowhere to be seen. When she did drift in, she was civil but distant, especially to Cray. It was clear she had not recovered from her jail ordeal, and perhaps that was to be expected, and was perhaps irritated at having people to lunch. They sat rather stiffly at first.

  “Ah, the waning of nature in autumn, such a pointed commentary on human life, it simply makes you burst with defiant libido,” Estelle began, but it was a line the others did not pick up. Tim made the mistake of telling about the bookcase imbroglio, shocking himself with how his resentment came out about the five thousand dollars, and the hated sellers, the people named Flieu.

  “Provencaux by their name,” said Estelle, as if that explained everything. “Niçois, perhaps.” Tim had often noticed how she and other French people spoke of “les Niçois” or even “the French” as if describing another group of people altogether. He used to believe this was a sign of alienation, but eventually figured out that it was a craftily inverted symbol of social solidarity—as well as a literal translation, as one must use the article in French.

  “I know it was just my misunderstanding of the real estate customs, but that doesn’t make it easier,” he said.

  “You have to be very specific with the French,” said Cray. “They’ll find a loophole if there is one.”

  “It’s the principle,” Tim added lamely.

  Estelle laughed. “With Americans, it is always principle,” she said. “It is their most disagreeable characteristic.”

  “If you could back out of it now, would you?” Clara asked. Her tone was pensive, as if she were thinking of something else.

  “I think I would. I’d like to find another place, and start by building my own bookcases.” As he spoke he realized it was true, he hated their apartment.

  Anne-Sophie stared at him amazed. “Alors, Tim,” she said, “it was you who loved it all along! I never wanted to be on the first floor! ”

  With an unusual display of tact, if it was not insensitivity to the potential unpleasantness of this discussion, Cray himself became talkative. He had sudden bursts of gaiety, like a man who usually lived on a desert isle, and this mood came upon him now. He liked to talk about things most people give up talking about after college—moral issues, the meaning of life, art, psychology. He had a scorn of psychoanalysis, though conceded it might be all right for others. “So you find out you hated your father, or that you’re gay”—odd example, Tim thought—“what does it matter? You have the power to act as you will.” Well, maybe.

  But Tim liked it that he would talk unselfconsciously about art. Film was the art of images. Words had no place, almost no place, in it; the most important image in the modern world was the explosion, the way in the Renaissance the image was the triangle (why, Tim never understood), or the garotte. As the world had been created by the cohesion of matter, so it would disappear when the process reversed. He asked, did he think this was imminent, in the manner of the apocalyptic prophecies of St. John? He couldn’t say.

  When Cray began to talk like this, about art and apocalypse, Clara excused herself and went to see about something in the kitchen, and Anne-Sophie, who was still upset at hearing Tim’s real view of their apartment, got up and wandered into the garden, around the house where vegetables were planted out of sight of the more formal area in front. She took her book.

  Today she had been reading a story that had begun promisingly enough with a poor French girl just after the war who had barely enough to eat, and luckily met an American man who took her for a big meal at a restaurant where he knew all the other people, and just when she was wondering if she’d have to sleep with him, or with which of them, the book disappointingly veered off to become the story of the man character, Jake, who was not at all like Tim, and a sleazy Englishwoman, Lady Brett. Anne-Sophie had somewhat lost interest in these people but read lazily along, trying not to think of what Tim had said. It said on the jacket this stupid book was required reading for every college freshman in America, imagine!

  They heard her scream.

  They leapt up and dashed around the corner of the house, Tim in the lead. Anne-Sophie was sitting, stunned, on an iron garden chair, a strange man bending over her bleeding arm. The husky Tim grabbed him and threw him a few feet across the gravel, to the man’s great surprise. Tim then saw from the innocent shock of his expression and Anne-Sophie’s second scream that this hadn’t been appropriate. The arm was laid open, and blood saturated her white blouse and jeans in pulses with the beating of her heart. Tim hesitated, would have taken her in his arms, but fea
red to jar her and increase her pain. All began to shout at once and stare, horrified, not knowing whether or how to stanch the wounds. They all continued to shout shouts of more or less simultaneous dismay:

  “What happened?”

  “Tim!”

  “She’s bitten, he bit her!” the stranger said, getting up. “The dog bit her!”

  “Oh, mon Dieu” (Estelle).

  Cray came lumbering around the corner with Delia limping at his side. Now Anne-Sophie was sobbing. The strange guy had a handkerchief (weird detail!) and handed it to her for a bandage.

  “Gabriel!” cried Delia, seeing the man Tim had shoved. Gabriel Biller was here at last.

  Tim swore. Her arm was raked with tooth marks, though perhaps superficial. “Those fucking dogs,” he fumed helplessly at Cray, his eyes unable to move from the ribbons of blood soaking into Anne-Sophie’s sleeve. But it was not one of the contract Rottweilers, it was a Cray house dog, a yellow Labrador, the mild-mannered Freddy, warily standing by the hedge, teeth bared.

  “Freddy! Sit,” said Cray, peering at Anne-Sophie’s arm. The pretense of being in command when it is too late. “He’s had his rabies.”

  Anne-Sophie still sobbed but, they now saw, more in shock than pain. How especially unsettling for her to be attacked by a dog—a woman who considered she had perfect rapport with animals.