Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  A stiff, even prim man across the table in his beautiful suit, almost blue-black with the faintest stripe, perfect white collared shirt, grayish tie, smelling faintly of shaving soap. He seemed to her the most desirable man she had ever met. In his dark, remarkably fringed eyes she sensed a sort of pain or longing at some sincere level beneath the cynical very French social manner, pleasantries and gallantries and careful choice of wine. Civilization is painful, she thought, holding us in our chairs. She wanted to know—she asked—how he got the scar on the back of his hand (excuse to touch it). She asked about the talents of his children.

  The coffee came. Persand called for the bill. They looked at each other with infinite regret and a certain consoling feeling of rectitude, kissed cheeks in the correct French manner, but three kisses, rather lingering, implanted on her perfumed cheek not in air, and Antoine was given his briefcase.

  “Well, Madame Cray,” he said. They had not really argued about how it was not meant to be, him taking one side, her the other, then switching sides, going over all the reasons, moral and familial and the rest, though they could have, they knew them by heart. She shrugged and smiled, and thanked him again for lunch.

  Anyway, where could it end? It’s better not to begin, she thought again, quashing the tentative arguments, the same ones she had run through herself, on the brevity of life, the fugitive nature of happiness, the imperatives of desire once love has been spied out—Eros, that god who reveals his face only to the luckiest mortals, of whom there are so few.

  Once outside, Clara looked at her watch. How possible that it was nearly four? Delia would have long since exhausted her short attention span for Art. Clara hurried toward the Louvre. She found she had a headache of terrible intensity, she who never had headaches. This one had begun in a knot at the back of her neck—was that the brain stem, among some primitive functions there like breathing?—and proceeded like an earthquake fault between the two halves of her skull up over the top of her head to a point between her eyes. On either side of the splitting pain, a dull expanding ache she had never felt before. It was so sudden—could be some sort of weird aneurism, you heard those could strike young women. She felt she must get home or throw up, she must lie down. She bypassed the long line of restive tourists waiting to get in, explained to the guard her missed rendezvous, and looked around the pyramidal space for Delia.

  45

  Chestnuts from Suzanne de Persand

  Tim had called Cees for news of Gabriel, wishing to be reassured that the luckless American incarcerated in Amsterdam hadn’t been rubber-hosed or extradited.

  “A strange detail,” Cees told Tim. “Did you have any idea Cray has been funding an Oregon terrorist group? ”

  Tim thought this could not be, though Delia might have hit him up for a donation to one of the causes she had told him she was involved in.

  “Yes, yes. A check for—not much, but four thousand dollars, has turned up in the account of someone linked to a group suspected of bombing a church in Lake Grove, Oregon, several years ago.”

  “You people are marvellous,” Tim said, unable to fit this together at all.

  “There were eight hundred churches bombed last year in America, what does this mean, do you think, Tim? ”

  “No idea,” Tim said cheerfully. “The spread of anticlericalism?” He hadn’t noticed in Cray any special animus against religion. No, it wasn’t possible that Cray was supporting Oregon church bombers.

  In Etang-la-Reine, Cray, having lunched with Chadbourne, the British art director, was just going up to his workroom when Madame de Persand was announced. His first impulse was to have Clara deal with her, but there was something in particular Delia had told him that caused him to change his mind, and anyway Clara was at the Louvre. But the visitor was the mother, not the wife, of the affable neighbor Antoine de Persand. She was dressed in a gray tweed tailored suit, with decorations in the buttonhole which must denote some service to France.

  “Monsieur Cray, so nice to see you again. I hope you’ll forgive my popping in like this. I have brought Madame Cray some chestnuts, I left them in the hall.”

  “Uh—sit down, madame. I take it you have some business to discuss,” Cray said, ignoring this neighborly proffer of chat about chestnuts. “We seem to be the object of some neighborhood enmity here. Did the dogs bother you? ”

  “Your man prevented them.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ll speak frankly,” said Madame de Persand, sitting down. “I was most surprised when my son announced his idea of selling you two hectares of our land.”

  “You don’t think it’s a good idea.” This was a statement, not a question.

  “He is so good-hearted, he would naturally want to help a neighbor. The whole thing has gotten out of hand, the hunting contretemps and the matter of defacing the château both. Very vexing for you, I know. However, I am quite sure I have some influence with monsieur le maire, Mayor Briac, and I think I can be of help.”

  “We need all the help we can get.”

  “For one thing, I am prepared to tell him that we, on our side, having more than twenty hectares, will also no longer permit hunting on our property, deviating from our practice in previous years, if he does not cease his determined effort to hunt over here. Since our two properties adjoin in such a way as to make it impractical for people to hunt your woods without access to ours, that should ensure that they let you alone. You see the point of my threat? He can’t but agree. There is no need for you to buy, nor for us to sell. If I say so, they will not hunt on your land.”

  “That would be very handsome, Madame de Persand. But what do you have against the sale?”

  “Just the usual things. We have a large family, there are a number of grandchildren, it just would not be responsible to sell land at this stage.”

  Cray laughed. “I understand that. And is your son always such a nice neighborly guy?” Cray was remembering that Delia had remarked, after the lunch at the Persands’ house, “Obviously Mr. de Persand is very turned on by Clara, did you notice that?”

  Suzanne de Persand said nothing. Something in her manner suggested that her son was in no way a nice guy, and his inexplicable behavior now filled her with concern.

  “In the matter of the mayor’s persecution of my wife, madame, I’m sure you know we did not deface this house.”

  “Yes, that is a more difficult issue. I have been inquietée about poor Madame Cray,” said Madame de Persand. “Nothing has occurred to me yet, because the forces of justice, once invoked, are hard to restrain. We must think.”

  46

  Pyramid Power

  Clara found Delia sitting almost in the center of the vast ground-floor space of the massive glass pyramid covering the subterranean entrance to the Louvre. She was sitting with her coat and big purse and notebook all in a mound, so that people had to walk around her. It was surprising the guards let her camp there like this, but there was a camplike air about the vast space, bright even in the gray late-autumn light, people milling around, coming up off the long escalator or stepping onto the down one to descend deeper into the ancient palace, people standing waiting, eating, or reading their guidebooks, assembling their tour groups in the luminous structure that came to a point above them.

  “Hello, Delia, are you ready?” Clara asked, fighting tears, wondering if pain showed on her face.

  “Could I stay ten more minutes? I didn’t get started on time because first I went inside and saw the Venus de Milo,” Delia said. “I thought I should at least see some of the art.”

  What was she talking about? “Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

  “Well, more for the treatment,” Delia said. “An hour a day is recommended, or, you know, as long as you can sit. The Louvre? ”—seeing Clara’s incomprehension—“The powers of pyramids? Concentrating the universal energy? I’ve been doing it more than a week. If I could do it another week, I can definitely feel I could be well.”

  “Oh God, Delia,”
Clara said, touched all the same. Tears came again to her eyes, and she wanted to laugh despite the horrible pain in her head. Pyramid power! “I’ve noticed you’re walking better.” She hadn’t really, but whatever placebos might be worth, she thought, why not? Then the tears almost overbalanced the laughter. She had to get a Kleenex from her purse. How her head hurt.

  When they were back in Etang-la-Reine, she could not master her tears, and hurried to her room.

  In only a few minutes, Serge knocked at her bedroom door. “Clara—something unpleasant has happened in Oregon. Come out.” But he came in. Sitting on her bed, she waited to hear the news without surprise. Something had happened to her mother, brought on, she understood, in the great karmic way of things, by her flirtation.

  “My mother?” It was inevitable that she would have to pay for her infractions of duty and loyalty, and for acknowledging the desires of her heart. Had this been something her mother had obscurely suggested to her all her life, that one way or another we must pay?

  “In a way,” said Serge. “She seems to have been kidnapped.”

  “Oh God!”

  “Delia’s mother called. I talked to her. Nothing to do with the police, it may be nothing. Come down, Delia can tell you.”

  Clara hurried down the stairs to hear Delia’s account.

  “My mother called to say that she’d stopped by your mom’s house because there was some activity in the driveway, people carrying things in—at first she thought out, a burglary. Anyhow, my mom wondered, and she thought maybe someone new was moving in, and she just hadn’t heard that your mom had, you know, maybe moved. So she just put her head out of the car window and asked where Cristal was, and some guy said Cristal was gone, and they were just putting some stuff in the basement. And then she said—my mom said—where’s Mrs. Holly, and he said, with Cristal. After that he just said he didn’t know anything more, so my mother called here to find out from you.”

  “Did she call the police?”

  “I don’t think so, I think she thought you might know the explanation.”

  “Something is obviously wrong! We have to call the police. I’ll have to go there!” Clara cried, feeling at the pit of her stomach the wrongness and danger, and remembering all the weird things Cristal had been saying lately.

  The last thing she had said was, “Something will happen pretty soon. I want you to know we’ll be safe here. There are people who have promised to protect your mom and me.” These words came to her as clearly as when Cristal had spoken them.

  “Probably you should definitely go,” Delia agreed. “My mother is not an alarmist.”

  “I’ll go, of course,” Clara said, organizing her thoughts: airplanes, schedules, probably a night flight tonight. “There must be someone I can call meantime.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting?” Serge pointed out. “You’re under indictment in France. You can’t leave France.”

  It was true, of course. It would be jumping bail. She would become an international felon. Distress mingled with an obscure relief. “You go, then,” she pleaded. “Somebody must go right now.”

  To her surprise, Cray said, “I think that would be best. I’ll go. Delia and I will go.”

  “It’s not surprising,” Delia said. “I think Gabriel’s arrest has meant big changes in plans. People will be scared of what he’s going to say. They’ll move sooner than they’d planned.” But she could not or would not explain, and Cray would not press her. He seemed to delight in her most enigmatic pronouncements, and to feel that like delphic utterances they should not be too carefully examined lest their fundamental meaninglessness be revealed, and their force lost.

  47

  Take Me to the Shining Shore

  “You are spending every minute with the Crays,” Anne-Sophie had snapped last night as they waited for a taxi in the midnight street, after a dinner party of mostly French friends of hers. As the wedding approached, her friends had come to accept the new reality of Tim as a permanent addition to their set, and had begun to invite them relentlessly.

  “We are moving in a few days, your mother is coming back, there are so many things to be done, you can’t imagine, now the flowers, I have to spell out every little detail for you—what is so fascinating about the Crays, oh, ha, don’t answer that.”

  “Mostly it’s Gabriel,” said Tim, untruthfully. “I feel like it’s our fault the poor guy is in jail—my fault. I feel like I have to do what I can to help, I have to live with myself.”

  “You have to move your books, only you can do that and put them on the shelves the way you want them.”

  “Yes, in the famous bookcases,” Tim snapped.

  Now Tim was putting books in the bookcases, his resentment subsiding in the fascination of the task, books he had forgotten, books he hadn’t got around to reading. Anne-Sophie was in the newly painted kitchen when Tim’s cell phone rang. It was Cray. Cray put forward a case for Tim accompanying him on a trip, three days maximum, to Oregon, Cray to look into a problem with Clara’s mother, Les Chadbourne the art director to look at some locations, Delia to show them some of her alternate thinkers and New Age paranoids in the Sweet Home Antiques Barn and incidently to return home. Cray would continue to pay Tim, of course, on the same basis he was paying for the detective work on the boiseries. There’d be a story in it too. Tim thought of all the reasons this was a big drag, and said okay despite them, dreading Anne-Sophie’s reaction. They would be going in the morning, probably, or as soon as Monday Brothers could send the plane.

  “Three days!” cried Anne-Sophie. “Perfect. I can buy some Americana at that place of Delia‘s, she will know where, and, my dearest, I can see with my own eyes your native land, though not Michigan. Is Oregon very different from Michigan?” For Tim was always going on about American regional differences.

  “Not so different,” he agreed. “Both northerly, with pine trees and bears.” He could see no reason to object to Anne-Sophie going along, though he didn’t know the size of the Monday Brothers plane. He called Cray back.

  Estelle was astonished and quite encouraged by Anne-Sophie’s madcap plan to take a three-day trip to Oregon in America a week before her wedding. This spontaneous, unexpected, and impulsive idea indicated, Estelle hoped, a new freedom, a spontaneity, an adventurousness in Anne-Sophie rather as she had always hoped. Perhaps Tim would be good for Anne-Sophie after all. She was not free from maternal concern about the small private plane, however.

  “I wonder if the Americans will be, well, like Tim, alors—their jackets won’t match their pants, they’ll wear tennis shoes in town, that sort of thing,” said Anne-Sophie happily.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m happy to be going home, except I worry about leaving Gabriel,” Delia said. “In a way it’s so disgusting here, I mean it’s beautiful, but if you think about it, it’s disgusting too. Take you, two people living in a giant mansion big enough for twenty, everyone around here is rich, the food is death food of fat and cream, people have servants, they make the black people sweep the streets, or the Algerians—and America might as well not exist. No one here knows anything about America, and the Americans who live here are the worst, they forget what it’s like at home where people are hungry and angry, and the whole country is shifting like a big mountain with some sort of geologic activity pushing up from inside it, it’s just going to split open like a big baked potato. At least Serge wants to wake people up. He can imagine it, no other American I’ve met here can imagine it, and no French person can imagine it, no way.” She had a cheerful, expectant, almost radiant expression as she recited these conclusions.

  “Prairie angst in Kansas among the creationists, polygamist anger in Utah, killer cops and soldiers of fortune hiding out in Montana, those poor loonies in Texas that got fried,” Serge suggested, like a hovering parent prompting a bright child.

  “And the Feds were using inflammable gas, they lied about that. They intended to burn those people up!” cried Delia excitedly.

  “And the Frenc
h have problems of their own. The National Front, the skinheads,” said Serge.

  “Yeah, but I’m not talking about people like that. Not racists or white supremacists,” Delia said. “None of the people I know are into that. Those people are out there, but we don’t have anything to do with them. Not that that makes any difference to the government. Talk about hate groups—the government hates everybody. They don’t mind who they kill, you could be racist or you could be religious....”

  They continued in a rather festive frenzy of denunciation. Listening to them, Clara felt apologetic that she had been thinking only about the killing of deer. The modesty of her indignation struck her. Still, you have to object to the evils you find to hand. She’d never even seen violence against a person. The episode at the post office, against herself, had been the closest she’d come.

  “I would say you’re disgusting if it wasn’t rude to say it—disgusting in the sense of rolling in luxury and giving nothing back,” Delia said, turning to Clara.

  No doubt she was. Clara thought of something she had seen in the metro. On the curved vault of the wall, a giant poster for the African charity Alliance Faim. Two images of a smiling African girl of about seventeen. In the first, she was haggard, her teeth in her shrivelled gums were huge, and there was something diseased about her watery eyes. The same girl with “100 francs of your donation” was beautifully plumper, her gums no longer showed, she glowed with health. But what struck Clara was that the girl smiled in both pictures. Even when starving, she was a human being hoping that her life would turn around. Maybe she was thinking that having your picture taken could turn your life around, and of course in her case it did, since they would have had to give her food and medicine so she could be well for the second picture.

  Clara did not like photographers, especially the ones who would pause to snap the dying child, the quivering antelope about to be pounced on, but would not save him, nor take the child to shelter, saying there were too many. Clara knew it was not the photographer who gave the girl the hundred francs.