Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  Cray for his part seemed irritated by Gabriel. “I’m throwing the bastard out on Saturday, forty-eight hours from now, regardless if he’s made himself clear or not. This isn’t a flophouse. Besides, I’m not taking a chance on pissing off the French, in view of Clara’s problem. They accept you if you fudge the letter of the law, but flagrant defiance is not well received. If they’re looking for him, I’m not harboring him.”

  “So far as I can find out, no one’s looking for him, unless he’s got the manuscript,” Tim said. He noticed that Cray said “Clara’s problem” and not “our problem.” “Maybe we should just ask him, has he got the fucking manuscript?”

  “Saturday he goes, manuscript or not.”

  Soon after this, at the Tennis Club Marne-Garches-la-Tour, Tim was surprised to be greeted in a friendly way by Antoine de Persand, who was changing into tennis clothes in the locker room. He was naked, putting on his jockstrap. Unwillingly, Tim looked at him—a strong guy, about his own height, with the pale torso and brown limbs of a tennis player, muscled, with a heavy penis, though he turned modestly aside when Tim came in. Persand made him promise to join him for a beer after their respective matches. After his hour with Adrian, Tim wandered into the lounge area. Persand, now in street clothes, was standing at the bar, broodily drinking a beer. He greeted Tim and ordered more beer. Tim thought of various things Persand could be wanting to say to him. It would be about the Crays. They moved to a table.

  “I heard about the episode in the village. Deeply shameful. Lucky thing that you were there. My wife was in the post office and saw it.”

  “It might have turned ugly, but it didn‘t,” Tim agreed. He strangely found himself unwilling to indulge Persand’s plain wish to hear all about the incident at the post office, but he did, describing it in more detail. What, after all, did he have against Persand?

  “Feeling is strong against the Crays, even among people who don’t hunt. I don’t include myself. I have nothing against them. I understand Americans. I have an American sister-in-law, for one thing,” Antoine said. He didn’t have to explain what the strong feelings were about. Meddlesome foreigners go home.

  “I think the Crays are pretty stunned—her arrest, the attack, and so on. Of course they had nothing to do with removing the boiseries and fireplaces from their house.”

  “We’ve invited them to lunch on Sunday. I hope you and Anne-Sophie can come too. I haven’t congratulated you on your fiançailles. We’ve known Anne-Sophie since she was a little girl, you know. Her father was my father’s doctor.”

  “You heard she was bitten by one of Crays’ dogs?”

  He hadn’t heard. Persand looked at him, as if trying to guess how this would have affected Tim’s relations with Cray. They chatted a bit more. Against his inclination, Tim began to like Persand. He seemed gentlemanly and depressed. Tim waited for what he expected, some mention of Clara. This followed.

  “Very hard for Madame Cray, I imagine,” Persand said presently. “It seems unjust that she take the brunt of the man’s intransigence.”

  “I believe she agrees with him. They’re both opposed to hunting.”

  Persand said nothing to this. He mentioned other things—a proposed change in the dues at the club, Chirac, the longevity of the late René Lacoste, in his day the greatest tennis player of France, as an argument for tennis playing. Persand was charming, but Tim felt wary, and too aware of the unspoken subject, Clara. He accepted the invitation to lunch.

  37

  Public Opinion

  In the villages of Etang-la-Reine and in nearby Val-Saint-Rémy, in all the commune of Val-Lanval, and as far as Paris, local sentiment was engaged on the issues of the boiseries and the hunting both. In a matter of days, in the minds of the hunters of the commune of Val-Lanval, Clara Holly had become the symbol of America eroding the rightful heritage of France. The word déplumer, to defeather, was seized on in the press for its apt allusion to fowl and fowl play. Critical articles about the Crays appeared in the local Le Quotidien; also a sentimental piece on Madame du Barry’s legacy to the neighborhood, and the crime of obliterating it by remodelling her house.

  Almost immediately after Clara’s release pending the preparation of the dossier, French politicians and the French press also got involved in l‘affaire Cray. The Green press seized on one fact that came to light: that the hunters of the commune of Val-Lanval were shooting—ducks, mainly, but also some species more endangered than ducks—ahead of the date approved by the European Community and longer. This splendid opportunity to attack the right-wing French president for caving in to chauvinist special-interest hunting groups. did not go unused, as Le Monde put it. CHIRAC DEFIES STRASBOURG FOR RIGHT TO SHOOT.

  On the other hand, the right-wing press attacked the socialist minister of the environment in the name of law and order, for not cracking down on these illegal game practices humiliating to the good name and honor of la France. Thus newspaper opinion from the perspectives of both left and right tended to be against the hunters.

  But popular French opinion was quite understandably also against the Crays for monument desecration. There were some factions that believed the Crays were being treated lightly because of his fame, and others who thought the system was socking it to them for the same reason, inspired by the film protectionists.

  The court date was set for Clara’s tribunal to report on December 7. The American ambassador, Charlie Nolan, protested to the French minister of justice that American citizens with their papers in order were being unfairly prosecuted for things they could not possibly be guilty of. “Egad, Jean-Louis, the poor devils had not even bought the place yet!” The socialist minister of the environment protested to the press that Americans who had desecrated French national monuments were being specially protected by the president’s opposing party—Americans who did not scruple to occupy and deface national monuments, and impede the hunting traditions of France, and must be punished. And so on.

  Brussels announced that it would consider a complaint about the French violation of EC rules in the matter of the shooting dates, as a sort of amicus in the action brought in Strasbourg, so in a sense the issue was joined all over Europe.

  L‘affaire Cray, said Clovis Mornay, a leading French intellectual, on a panel on French television’s Canal Plus on l’antiaméricanisme, was a perfect example of how the innate American desire for hegemony, expressed by private citizens as much as in actions by the state, was attempting to interfere with the centuries-old traditions of France. It also was an example of Hollywood arrogance, and Hollywood was itself an informal arm of the American state, perhaps even, covertly, an actual arm.

  “Their ultimate goal is the simplification of the French mind, to prepare it for reprogramming by American moralizers. First you must obliterate history—in this case a tradition of hunting in this country probably going back to the Bronze Age.”

  “Yes, there’s something to what he says,” said Estelle to her longtime friend Cyrille Doroux, the academician. “The American lack of subtlety. Their minds are simpler.”

  “Decidedly.”

  “Even Tim, though very nice, has something of that tendency to oversimplification.”

  “They never think politically,” agreed Monsieur Doroux. “Only moralistically, Mornay is quite right.”

  38

  Lunch at the Persands

  Anne-Sophie was not pleased that Tim had agreed to a country lunch at the Persands on Sunday. She had to work, she complained; she had a business, Sunday was her most important day. Was this a foretaste of his expectations when they were married, that she would drop everything on any Sunday for a trivial social engagement, or to oblige Serge Cray? But when the day was fine, she relented, provided Tim would drive her to the flea market at six A.M. in the pitch darkness, and return at noon to pick her up after his errand at the Hotel Le Mistral.

  This was the morning he had promised to try to redeem Gabriel Biller’s bags. Cray had postponed his confrontation with the man
pending the success of this venture, and Biller had figured that if Tim went on Sunday morning, at the change of clerk, there was a chance that the new desk person would be someone who had seen neither Tim nor Gabriel. To be certain, though, Tim carried Gabriel’s credit card and driver’s license, and though he and Gabriel looked nothing alike in person, the thuggish photo could be either of them or anyone else of a nice-looking, thirtyish, male sort, the coloring ambiguous.

  There was no problem at all. The man behind the desk had never seen Tim or Biller. He calculated the charges, opened the luggage room, and brought out the jacket and rucksack and small suitcase, which Tim remembered was not locked. In the car he glanced inside it. There were a few papers, and nothing looking like a valuable medieval manuscript. He put it all in the trunk and went to pick up Anne-Sophie.

  Monsieur Lavalle had not come in as he had promised, Anne-Sophie said, so she had to roll down her shutter for the rest of the day, doubtless losing enormous revenue. She had the slightly self-satisfied air of someone who is behaving handsomely. Tim kissed her, careful not to press her injured arm, which had been re-dressed in an even bigger roll of batting and tape, and they headed toward the Porte de Saint-Cloud.

  Until the lunch invitation, Clara had not realized the Persand place adjoined theirs in one spot where there was no fence. Through the woods one could just see a pleasant stone manor house, eighteenth century, mansarded, on a sizeable number of hectares, although probably fewer than once had belonged to it. She and Tim had walked along the property line one day earlier in the week, looking for the explanation of Persand’s saying that he was their neighbor. Waking the day after that, she put her opera glasses in the pocket of her Eddie Bauer jacket and walked in the woods alone before Delia and Serge got up. But of course it had been Wednesday, and no one lived in the Persands’ place during the week.

  When she realized it was his house, she had felt a sense of embarrassment almost as strong as when she had spoken so boldly to him in the prison visiting room, those impulsive words that, since then, she had gone over and over in her mind, hoping to find room for ambiguity in them, so that he, in reviewing their meeting, might think she had not at all meant what she had meant. He would see he had been mistaken to think she meant anything, let alone a bold sexual overture. Alas, her words had not been ambiguous at all.

  Today Cray, stout and no great walker, announced that he and Delia would drive to the Persands‘. “I’m not really invited,” Delia protested, “I don’t think they meant me.” But Cray insisted she was coming. He seemed not to mind when Clara said she would rather walk through the woods. The day was crisp and sunny, a day for tramping over the fallen leaves, for enjoying the fugitive dappled motes of light through the thickets. The woods were silent, with no sounds of hunter or hunted. She set out in advance of the others, and would meet them there.

  Thinking of this now, when she came to the Persand land, she could see the back of the stone house, a tennis court, tricycles. Surely he didn’t have young children? Her heart raced in consternation. That would mean a young wife. Perhaps a second wife? Grandchildren were not impossible. Her spirits were in a considerable turmoil generally, on the one hand hoping she would notice something disappointing that would diminish her fascination with him and on the other hoping there would be a significant moment, perhaps a moment alone with him—she thought of scenes in film in which the lord of the manor shows the heroine the billiard room or wine cellar.... She feared equally that Madame de Persand would be beautiful and that she would be ugly, which would remind her that Monsieur de Persand was after all only a middle-aged banker from next door. She derided herself for these really infantile emotions. Nothing in the least like this had ever happened to her.

  As she walked around to the front, she could see that Tim and Anne-Sophie were there already, and Serge’s Land Rover was just pulling into the drive. The door was opened at once, by Monsieur de Persand, in khaki pants and an open shirt like an American. She had a quick impression she herself was overdressed in a smart pantsuit and cashmere sweater. She looked beyond him to see what Anne-Sophie, the perfect Française, was wearing and was relieved to see she was wearing the same.

  Clara smiled at Antoine with distant friendliness; he might have been the boulanger. She put her jacket on the pile of jackets on a little canapé in the hall and looked around. A comfortable country house with a certain air of disorder—innumerable mud boots of all sizes, umbrellas, and a nice but chipped porcelain vase on the table. Beyond, in the next room, she saw books, and curtains a century old of faded puce velour beside the long windows. But she was not able to sustain the smile of perfect indifferent friendliness she had hoped for, for inwardly her heart had lurched at the sight of the boots—those must be his, calf-high, for riding or hunting, boots bringing thoughts of his strong calves, of a man’s strong thighs, of men riding, of white breeches, of—She felt herself flush. Was she in such a state of heat and vulnerability as to be provoked by even mud boots into this painful state of desire? His handshake was friendly, without pressure. He did not kiss her on both cheeks as he might have, perfectly customary between neighbors. She felt that desire was just another humiliation in store for her; probably there were others too; she was doomed to live in torment like someone in Dante. She smiled radiantly.

  There were antlers at one end of this hall, she noticed, over a wide door leading to the salon, where Persand led them now, with affable, welcoming, rather general words for Serge and Delia who had entered too.

  “Madame my mother is here this weekend, my daughter, also one or two of my nephews, as usual,” he explained. “We use the house all winter when the weather is good like this.”

  Anne-Sophie, in the salon, was already greeting an older blond woman, small and handsome, wearing a skirt and high-heeled city shoes. For a second Clara wondered, could this be Monsieur de Persand’s wife? But of course it was his mother. “My wife, Trudi,” he went on now, of another woman who came in, in her mid-forties, hair brown with blond streaks like half the women in France, smiling in a friendly way.

  “I’m Trudi, welcome,” she said, clearly less comfortable than her husband with English.

  The older Madame de Persand spoke it with great precision. “We’ve been rather negligent neighbors, I am sorry to say. We have been reclusive but now we are resolved to reform. We heard about the appalling way you were treated at the post office, madame.”

  “Thank you, it was a harmless thing really,” Clara said.

  “It was appalling,” Tim Nolinger agreed. “I thought we had a possibly ugly incident on our hands.”

  “Tim was very gallant.” Clara laughed. She looked more closely at Trudi, who was taller than she; an attractive woman, but there was nothing special about her.

  Antoine turned to Serge and Delia, still lingering by the salon door.

  “What will you drink?” He suggested that they usually drank kir vermouth at this hour, on this day of the week. An orderly Sunday lunch—Clara began to relax a little.

  “I know it is usual for people of my age to rail against the manners of the modern age,” the older Madame de Persand went on, “but really! And do not think I imagine that those were simple farmers, no, those were our bourgeois neighbors in their weekend clothes. Or some of them were. Of course they were imitating the recent episode with the cabinet minister, amusing themselves. They would not behave like that in town. Déplorable.”

  “It was awful, the how do you say? the bad manners—I saw it all,” Trudi agreed. “I was inside the poste. I was going to call the police—I had my portable. Then monsieur broke it up.” She smiled at Tim. “Of course, I don’t think they really meant Madame Cray any harm.”

  “I was sure they would not hurt me,” said Clara loftily, though she had not been sure.

  “We might almost play tennis today,” Antoine remarked. “Did you bring your things? ” Tim was the only one who had tennis stuff in the car, so they had to play singles.

  In the garden room
, a glassed-in addition looking into the garden, the others had their kirs. It seemed to Clara the talk was entirely of misfortune. Besides the incident at the post office, there was Anne-Sophie’s arm, a blight in a small champagne vineyard still owned by the Persand family, the general deterioration of things in the Balkans. Tim and Antoine played a set of singles, the players visible from here, Tim perhaps prevailing, though not soundly enough to irritate his host. The women could tell the game was amicable and well matched.

  How beautiful men were at play, Clara thought. She thought of Greek vases, of the naked men with javelins or wrestling.

  The long oval dining table could extend, she inferred from the leaves that stood unceremoniously against the wall, to huge proportions. Today they were merely eleven: Serge and Clara, Delia, Anne-Sophie and Tim, Trudi and Antoine, two nephews, a demure fourteen-year-old daughter named Garance, and Madame de Persand. Clara was put on Antoine’s right, with Anne-Sophie on his left. Madame de Persand had Cray and Tim; the others ranged up and down the sides, with Trudi amid them, closest to the kitchen and in a position to keep order among the teenagers.

  Clara watched with interest and the triflingest pang as Antoine shelled the bandaged Anne-Sophie’s moules for her, which caused him to turn more often to Anne-Sophie than to her. Did Anne-Sophie find him attractive? Was she as aware as Clara of his manly allure? Or was it her reflex flirtatiousness that made her dimple up at Antoine and laugh, it seemed to Clara, a bit too much? Yes, there was definitely some extra sparkle to Anne-Sophie’s smile, some consciousness of her own femininity. Antoine turned to Clara with hostlike regularity, interrupting Anne-Sophie’s chatter to pass Clara a dish or make some polite inquiry.