Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  “Ask him now. He’s bound to be more generous before he gets married than afterward.” Ames laughed. “As the saying goes, if you want a bookkeeper, marry a French wife.”

  Arthur Pearlberg arrived before the others, and they stood talking affably. It was always surprising when the great lawyer, so small and gray behind his horn-rims, swelled to such immensities of eloquence as they had heard him do, and as he now did, about how the developing pattern of anti-Americanism in Europe, paralleled, paradoxically, the rise of antigovernment ferment at home in America.

  “And now if Americans aren’t to be safe at the post office.” Dorothy shuddered.

  “They aren’t safe in the post office in America, remember—you’ve heard of going postal,” someone reminded her.

  Tim and Anne-Sophie attended the fund-raising event and the musical part of the evening, comprised of art songs by Samuel Barber. Anne-Sophie, no more than ordinarily musical, was restless during these and remarked peevishly to Tim as they left, “American music is really rather ugly, admit it. Except for jazz and popular music. Once we heard Ferde Grofé and I thought I would die.”

  “Do you really think Samuel Barber is worse than Gabriel Fauré? Ravel? Do you willingly listen to l‘Enfant et les sortilèges?” snapped Tim. Luckily for his peace of mind, he had misread his suggested pledge and kicked in ten dollars with a great feeling of rectitude.

  A new aura of activity enveloped Cray, to do with cinema. He called several people who had worked on earlier projects with him, among them Les Chadbourne, the art director for Queen Caroline, and Gus Gustafson, a cameraman who had headed the second unit, to whom he talked about finding locations, if not in France then in Spain, that could serve as the American West. There were his long consultations with Delia, some discussions about the time to bring in a screenwriter. He seemed to move lightly in his heavy body now, he no longer drooped at the kitchen table reading. Clara couldn’t altogether tell whether all this had to do with his film or with their hunting issues, or whether in some way the two were intertwined, the one invigorating the other. Once or twice, he wanted to make love, a relatively infrequent event.

  “SuAnn isn’t crazy. Yes, she’s high-strung and gets excited, she might be disturbed when she’s not on her meds, but she’s not wrong about what’s going down around here. There are plenty of signs of what the Feds are planning when the problems start. See, that will be the excuse, the riots and the food shortages, then the Feds will move in. I don’t believe it’s no foreign government, of course not, it’s our own government. Though there are people who believe it’s foreigners, and now they’ve arrested SuAnn’s boyfriend over where you are, that makes you wonder if the French nation is in on it too.”

  “Delia is trying to find out about it,” said Clara vaguely.

  “Delia Sadler?”

  “Yes.”

  “The girl from here? She’s stuck on SuAnn’s boyfriend, she’s kind of a problem,” Cristal said.

  “Poor little thing, her hip...”

  “You want to talk to your mom?”

  “Just a word or two.”

  “People have seen tanks not far from Hood River. It’s much, much worse here than you think, you don’t know.”

  “Please let me talk to Mother, Cristal,” Clara said.

  43

  Self-Denial

  When Antoine de Persand did call, in a few days, he sounded neighborly but brusque. She thanked him for the lunch on Sunday. He asked, did she ever come into Paris during the week?

  “Lately, yes. We have a houseguest who is spending a lot of time at the Louvre. Well, you met her. I take her there most every day.”

  “Déjeuner one day? Maybe Thursday?”

  Her hesitation was real. She knew this was a bad idea. “All right.” A deeply satisfying passivity directed her responses.

  “Bien. One o‘clock at—say, Pierre Traiteur? It is on the rue de Richelieu across from the Palais Royal. It is near the Louvre, so that should be convenient.”

  “All right. Yes,” she said. “One, then. Goodbye,” and hung up. She hoped he would think her lack of conversation was something to do with a lurking husband, not basic dullness. Her excitement at this conversation was such that she half expected Serge to have been listening, wiretapping.

  Waiting for Thursday, Clara fell into a kind of bemused trance of expectation. She expected that the text of this lunch would be him telling her “we mustn‘t” and “this is madness.” She could hear his arguments and had no counterarguments. On the other hand, there had been something in his resigned smile, in the woodland clearing, that suggested his misgivings were behind him. She didn’t care which way things came out; they would be together at least for lunch, the one person in the world she most wanted just to talk to and to feel was her friend.

  Life can light up in unexpected ways. There was a sparkle on things that could rout at least temporarily the dark specters of prison, Lars, Serge, and Mother, and it didn’t need to have anything to do with sex. What was her attitude really, now that she was faced with a clandestine lunch?

  On Wednesday, she awoke sweating with panic. It had come to her in the night that she had stolen the boiseries after all. “Boiseries” had always suggested fancifully carved panels of pale wood, or perhaps they were painted and gilded, with insets of Chinese wallpaper or murals by Watteau. But now her mind’s eye in dream-like sequence saw workmen dismantling what looked like battered pea-green plywood wallboards, maybe having some rectangular indentations such as a door might have. Were those the boiseries? Chilled, she thought of going in to Serge to ask him. He might remember. And what had happened to those green wallboards? She had supposed the dump, or firewood. Wallboards such as you saw when any old house was demolished, shreds of wallpaper sticking to them, covered with water stains and plaster dust, and the repellent detritus of past lives.

  She would call Tim Nolinger, tell him all this. Tell him she may have stolen the boiseries, though even if she had, that did not solve the question of who sold them at auction at Drouot. But if he could find the person who had bought them, maybe they could buy them back, and things would go easier.

  On Thursday morning, she woke with a lighter heart because of coming to the absolute resolve in the night not to have an affair with Antoine de Persand if the question should come up. It made no sense to begin a new relationship, -even if it were practical and moral. She might go to prison or be deported, she needed to focus on saving her life; it was a question of priorities as well as of virtue. There were some things she believed deeply in, and one was honoring your commitments in life, for instance marriage vows. She would apologize again for her thoughtless confession of love made from jail. A jailhouse confession. She rose, mentally purged and pure, rid of the prurient, inexplicable hopes of even the tiniest caress. She was Diana again, chaste, an antihuntress.

  Despite her fears for Gabriel and her constant consultations with America over his fate, Delia continued to want to spend a couple of hours a day at the Louvre. To Clara’s relief, this included the day of her lunch with Antoine, and so she needed no further excuse. Delia agreed to start out at noon.

  In spite of her pure intentions, Clara bathed and dressed carefully. She had her views of what a Frenchwoman would wear in this circumstance, a lunch date with an attractive man you weren’t going to have an affair with. What to wear had been an epiphany dating back some years, from her early life in France when once she’d seen, in a boutique, a rather plump and normal-looking middle-aged woman, neck beginning to fold, put out her head from the dressing room to ask for something, and one could see she was dressed in a black bustier trimmed with pink ribbons, black lace panties, and matching lace garter belt and stockings. Under her ordinary dress, this French housewife was dressed like the madam in a western, like a dance-hall girl!

  This had impressed Clara. The woman’s lingerie suggested realms of eros and of self-indulgence, and probably self-respect, an Oregonian had no notion of. Perhaps the woman had put o
n that sexy gear to impress shopgirls, but it didn’t seem to be that. She wore it for metaphysical reasons. Clara wore normal American underwear, Olga or Warner‘s, plain white.

  Now she rummaged in her drawer for panties and a bra that at least matched, to be hoped with a smattering of untattered lace. Of course she didn’t own a garter belt. She shivered a little; her room was cold, the château of Madame du Barry had been cold. This dressing up was stupid because there would be no lovemaking—never!—but inwardly she would be fortified by these pink satin matching components.

  She dropped Delia at the usual spot across from the museum and went to park in the underground parking and walk the little distance across the Tuileries, through the Place du Palais Royal, and up the rue de Richelieu, a region of Paris where gallantry and sexual encounters had flourished since the seventeenth century or before.

  Estelle had on the whole been disappointed in Cécile. Upon inspection, the clothes had been normal not expensive clothes, even allowing for American dowdiness, and there was the Belgian accent, and the rather tame aspirations. On the good side, she had appeared to admire Anne-Sophie, and be prepared to love her, and would not be a troublesome mother-in-law.

  “The father only comes the day before the wedding, I suppose very American male, always the fiction of busy,” she laughed to Cyrille Doroux. “Undoubtedly he mistreated poor Cécile—that’s maman—and the new wife will be showy. Tim has said nothing about his views of his stepmother. A mystery, and I hope not a disaster.”

  44

  Lunch Date

  Monsieur de Persand had just got to the restaurant and was talking to the maitre d‘hôtel, who evidently knew him (ate there often? with mistresses?). He wore a dark business suit and striped silk tie, and handed his briefcase to the girl in the vestiaire with the air of an habitué.

  “Ah,” he said, seeing Clara, “bonjour.”

  She smiled at him, and at the maître d‘hôtel, who demonstrated by the merest discreet but not impertinent millisecond of eye contact with Antoine that he was impressed with her beauty and Monsieur de Persand’s excellent judgment and good luck. Antoine bent over her hand. They followed the headwaiter to the table. A small restaurant, everybody visible to everybody else; people noticed the lovely woman in the smart suit and soignée pearls who dropped her purse. Face aflame, Clara sat down.

  Antoine de Persand appeared calm, experienced in the matter of settling into a good French lunch. “Aperitif? A porto?” They were speaking French, which increased her unease. Though she spoke French, by now almost perfectly, it could desert her at any stressful moment, and usually did.

  “A kir champagne,” he suggested. Her apprehensiveness grew. It was the aperitif of seduction and celebration.

  “How lovely you are, Clara. Clara, if I may.”

  “Antoine,” she agreed to this escalation, resolution a bit shaken by his own beauty, his cleft chin, his remoteness, his air of being a lofty beam in its sweep happening to fasten on her. Should she just say what she had to say immediately? Get it off her chest at once, apologize, explain that she had been vulnerable, who wouldn’t be, in prison, had not been herself? Yet how, explain the magnetic moment in the forest when she would have fallen into his arms?

  He ordered the drinks. They were given their menus, but he left his lying closed. “What do you hear about your case?”

  She told him what she knew of the progress of the juge d‘instruction, her decision coming up, the search for the truth of who had sold the boiseries.

  Antoine laughed. “You Americans have a bizarre idea of truth. In France, the judges don’t care about truth. What is truth, after all? Everyone’s truth is different anyhow. A French judge tries to arrive at a situation where people can get along. The lawyers too, they try for an arrangement where the people can vivre ensemble. Social equilibrium, social stability. That’s the whole point. Real truth doesn’t matter. Napoleon saw that.” He opened his menu.

  “It is because we are Americans, isn’t it, that they are persecuting us?”

  “There’s a pattern developing of hating Americans, yes. It seems to happen in cycles. At the moment, it’s in the form of trade disputes, and new objections to NATO. The French are always nationalistic, their right wing frankly so, and the left—well, it arrives at the same conclusions by a different route. It says let everyone be himself, thus let us be French, therefore down with Jurassic Park and other evidences of American cultural takeover.”

  She sighed. “All the same, I don’t understand how they can say we sold something we didn’t have.” She didn’t tell him about her dream, just two nights ago, that it was so. The panels of green plywood were as vivid today as that night. “What do you think we should do?”

  “You and I?” He smiled.

  “Well, I meant Serge and I, about all these difficulties?”

  “Ah. Here they make oeufs meurette especially well. The kidneys in mustard also.”

  “I’ll have a salad, then the steack de thon,” she said, barely looking.

  “Do you like a light red with the thon? Would you rather have a Pouilly Fumé?”

  “Red, by all means.” This appeared to exhaust the possibilities for discussion of the menu.

  “I’m pleased with my idea of selling you two hectares in back of me. Though my mother may make trouble about it, I’m afraid. Nonetheless, that will settle the hunting issue. There are plenty of French people on your side, by the way, plenty who oppose hunting. We are not an entire nation of killers.”

  “Why are you doing this, exactly?” Clara asked.

  “You have the normal American directness.” He laughed. “Probably basically because I am in love with you. I hate to think of you languishing in prison.” This was said flirtatiously, not, it appeared, altogether seriously. “I want to oblige you. Of course I don’t especially want to oblige your husband. Au contraire.” This too was said in such a light tone it took her breath away. A tone that said it was not to be taken seriously, or only a little.

  “We should talk about—what we have to talk about and just get it over so we can enjoy our lunch,” said Clara, unable, with American directness, to bear the slow evolution of such an important conversation, especially now that it had been taken to heights of candor, however lightly said, and must not be allowed to continue its visceral hold, its potential for disturbing and unleashing hot promptings. “I’m sorry I spoke to you that way that day, I was just ... mistaken.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” nodding to the waiter to pour the wine.

  “I mean, I meant it,” she said, “but it isn’t anything we can do anything about, so it would have been less unruly not to have said it.” Less unruly, moins indiscipline. Why did everything have to be said negatively and backward in French?

  “Why had I even come to the prison? Because I had to see you. Because I was already in the grip of ‘wild thoughts.’ I agree a rather inconvenient passion.” He smiled to indicate that there were guillemets, quotation marks, around “passion.” He seemed as regretful as she, only he appeared to have come to the opposite conclusion now, and seemed to be saying that perhaps they should act on their attraction. She shook her head firmly to indicate that it was not to be, and introduced some bland inquiry. Beside hunting, did he ski, or sail?

  They launched into a getting-acquainted conversation. He didn’t know where she was from or that she had a deaf child; she didn’t know what he did for a living, exactly, or that he was in charge of Roxy de Persand’s affairs—an American Clara knew slightly. He asked her how long she had been married to Cray, and about Lars. Did she cook? Was it she who saw to the lovely gardens? They didn’t talk further about their feelings. Beyond or above that kind of confessional conversation, so mined with traps for exaggeration and insincerity, they didn’t know each other well enough.

  They did not talk about their spouses or whether they were unhappy or happy. Clara strove for the gaiety she so admired in Frenchwomen, and truly felt elated at the evolution of a new fri
end, the luck of them being neighbors, both dog lovers and admirers of the work of La Tour. Clara did not know many Frenchmen, she realized. They saw visitors from California, admirers of Cray, other Americans, like Tim Nolinger or the Paces, Episcopalians, for sometimes Clara had the impulse to hear music at the American Cathedral, and journalists—but not French men except Mayor Briac or the commerçants of the village. She knew French women somewhat better.

  Persand knew American women, all right—his late brother’s family—and found them often exasperating, with their insincere, expensively aligned smiles. Clara too smiled in this American way when something amused her; otherwise he thought she had a beautifully pensive demeanor.

  That showed her depth of feeling, someone over whom real shadows hung, of which he gained fugitive glimpses through her merriment. He liked it that she loved to eat, appreciated each thing and ate it up. In New York, where he went occasionally, people ate only half of what was on their plate, wastefully and rudely; he always noticed this, a carryover from childhood training by parents who had been through the war. People who went through the war never left things on their plates. She ate everything, and was so beautiful, and had such an unfulfilled, yearning center—or so it seemed, not that one could know—in need of awakening.

  Eventually they were having a lovers’ conversation—two people who had never even kissed, dissecting the circumstances of their meeting, each syllable of things they had said to each other, and what they had meant. It must stop, of course. Yet she had a racing sensation of freedom, as if on a sailboat in a high wind, hurtling toward a shoal. They desired each other so much, they could say, but now in lieu of becoming lovers, they would become friends. That in itself would be a precious and neighborly manifestation of good fortune. She thought he might conceivably be relieved by this outcome.