She knew too that going to jail to keep hunters from killing the fawn on your lawn did not keep them from killing the fawn, was sentimental, was only a small blow against a cruelty so pervasive, so entrenched, and so minor compared to the suffering of people—she knew all that. Her headache had not really abated, and now it threatened a renewed intensity.
“Oh, I know, you’re perfectly right,” she said.
48
Lust
“Goodbye, goodbye,” Clara said, embracing them all, when the taxis arrived to take them to the airport of Le Bourget. “Call me all the time, I won’t budge, I’ll be waiting by the phone.” Tears stood in her eyes at what they might find, and at her own failure as a daughter not to be there to help her mother.
When they had gone, she wrote Lars, morosely read yesterday’s Le Monde, and drank her morning coffee. She let Senhora Alvares answer the door. Her heart leapt with amazement when Antoine de Persand came in, looking exceedingly grim, though he kissed her politely on each cheek.
“Come in, won’t you sit down?”
He followed her a few steps into the salon. “I’d like to see your husband, madame—Clara—if I may? It appears my mother has been here to see him, with a monstrous proposal.”
“Monstrous? Good heavens, surely not!”
“Unacceptable, in any case. Idiotic.”
“Doesn’t that seem the simplest way?” Clara asked, unable to see anything humiliating about Madame de Persand’s proposal.
He shook his head, his dark face darkened further. “I’ve been a member of the hunt, even the secretary, for probably twenty years. To suddenly tell my longtime companions—the entire village—that they can no longer hunt on my land? Impossible, it’s impossible. There has to be a sale, and quietly, if it’s done at all. And there’s the matter of handling my mother. She can’t in fact impede the sale, but ... I can’t tell you how infuriating and embarrassing this is....”
“My husband is away for a few days,” Clara said.
A silence. The silent moment extended. As soon as she said these words, she heard them with full orchestration, with all the clashing cymbals, the drumrolls of significance, the beautiful climactic chords, and he too appeared to have heard, or felt, these drums in the visceral way one hears drums.
With the possibilities so clear, the objections melted away, the defenses equally. “Immortal words, ‘my husband is away,’ ” said Persand. “Boccaccio and so forth. Many plays begin that way.” He paused uncertainly.
“There begins many a tale,” she agreed.
“For how long?” “
“Three days, possibly longer.”
They looked at each other. It seemed fruitless to delay; they were going to act now and face the consequences later, so be it.
“Then ...”
“Yes,” Clara agreed, appearing composed, the wild elation continuing to grow.
“I ...”
“Oh ...”
Antoine glanced toward the kitchen.
“Senhora Alvares,” Clara called, “could you pick up the papers, and the things I ordered at the butcher?”
Senhora Alvares put her head into the room. She did not miss much. She had no expression.
“Right now?”
“Yes, I said I’d be in about ten, and the bread too.”
When they heard the front door close, Clara put her hand on his arm. They began to climb the stairs. “Just this once, to get over this terrible feeling,” Clara said.
“Yes, once.”
After a few steps, he put his hand lightly on her elbow. At the top of the stairs, they kissed hungrily and began to tear at their clothes, which fell in a trail to Clara’s room, and with sighs they sank onto her bed, at last, God, how altogether starved they’d been. He gasped with admiration at Clara’s luxuriant bosom, she at his imposing and ready penis; she opened her legs directly.
They did not even hear Senhora Alvares when she came back, in a couple of hours, having taken her time in the village. She heard the moans and thumps, the ecstatic screams, from madame’s room. She gathered up madame’s blouse and monsieur’s tie, and hung them on madame’s doorknob.
It was nearly three when they came down to lunch, eyes never leaving each other, wearing smeary, satisfied smiles, hands drawn to touch when Senhora Alvares was not serving at table. I’ll talk to her later, Clara thought. They were both a bit stunned, she and Antoine, by their sexual appetites, and what this very vigorous interlude must say about what they’d been missing, or were feeling for each other. When they looked at each other, they tended to laugh for no reason, or for all the secret reasons they didn’t need to discuss.
After lunch, they went back upstairs for a time. Antoine left about five. As he left, he fixed her with an intense, rather anguished look, and said, “I had always thought, more or less, that a man has to deny himself joy.”
49
Oregon
Anne-Sophie was comfortable aboard the Monday Brothers’ Hawker-Siddley 800 six-passenger executive jet, and did not experience a moment’s anxiety. The pilot exuded both competence and deference, and spoke in the drawling American way all pilots speak. The seats were leather, and wide. The copilot brought tables that they might dine, the smell was of new car, or luxury boutique. There was a tiny galley, and a bar. Beneath them, through the window, the brilliant Old World lay; a France of castles and fields and the nuclear reactors in Picardy lay like a board game. They would fly west, west, to the New World.
She was thrilled. She knew it was not Tim’s plane, nor his standing that had put them here, yet here they were, so it was in some sense him, the people he knew. Becoming quite close to Serge Cray, it seemed to her, had brought them closer to the world of private planes, a rarefied world not really theirs but amusing to try on.
Eventually she peeked into the cockpit and was received with a welcoming grin. The pilot was beguiled by her French accent.
“Ooh, is that Eeng-land?”
“Yup.”
Cray was a restless flier, unbuckling his seat belt to stand up in the aisle, or playing solitaire. Tim tried to work on his piece for Concern on the plight of African immigrants in France. They had wine with lunch, and salmon pate, and trim little sandwiches ordered earlier from Fauchon, after which he slept. Chadbourne and Cray had desultory conversations about what visuals to look at in Portland. Delia’s eyes were riveted the whole time on the little digital airspeed indicator winking at them in the cabin, urging them through the sunlit sky, taking her home.
They had left Paris at seven that morning, their trajectory intersecting with the receding clock in its bewildering way, through seasons and away from night, earlier and earlier according to the clock, so that when they stepped into the rainy, morose Oregon day they were puzzled but full of vigor, and it was still only ten in the morning.
Anne-Sophie was thrilled at last to see the reality of America. Despite what you heard and read, the country that had in part formed her darling Tim must have vast ranks of intelligent and benign citizens, and calm communities and scenic beauty, for Tim was intélligent, gentil, beau. From the first, her impression was favorable—the sympa, unpretentious little hangar, the affable official who glanced at their passports, the clean-enough ladies’ room where she straightened up. Delia’s mother and father came to meet them. They were like Americans in a movie—the papa wore a buffalo-check shirt, the maman a print dress, they both wore anoraks. Their car, a large jeeplike vehicle, was called an Explorer.
They embraced Delia with relieved elation, as if she had just been released from unjust imprisonment in a foreign jail.
“Delia, honey, you’re walking so well!” said Dad.
“Great pleasure to meet you,” said Mrs. Sadler to Cray. “I just loved Queen Caroline.” Rather self-consciously they said bonjour to Anne-Sophie, and to Tim, evidently thinking he was French too.
The Sadlers said there was no more news about Mrs. Holly and Cristal Wilson. They had talked to the police and to some of D
elia’s friends at the Sweet Home Antiques Barn. The police were not too concerned. Their inquiries had revealed that the people moving things into Mrs. Holly’s house had been SuAnn Wilson and a couple of other dealers, and SuAnn had said that Cristal and Mrs. Holly had gone to Hood River on a little trip.
“I’m not so sure, though, and I know Clara must be frantic,” said Mrs. Sadler sympathetically. “Neither SuAnn or Cristal are one hundred percent, in my opinion.”
The Sadlers of course wanted to hear all about France, and the perils Delia had endured there. They could not seem really to believe that she had spent a whole month in a luxurious château, though here was the famous Cray, they had seen the private jet—it was all amazing and delightful. Delia herself now seemed disposed to view her return as a narrow escape, and her sojourn in the grand French château no more than a usual condition of life. In France, danger was everywhere. Her friend Gabriel had been obliged to hide from hostile French police, she herself had been menaced in a hotel, authorities had refused to renew her passport when it had seemed to be missing—
Although it was cold and rainy, there were flowers blooming everywhere. Anne-Sophie exclaimed on the beauty of the planting they saw along the edges of the freeway and in the divider strip as they drove, and the abundance of green everywhere. All was verdant, piney, even the grass was fresh and new; it was as if Oregon was in an eternal spring held in good condition by the chill temperature, like flowers in a florist’s fridge. Anne-Sophie thought everything beautiful, as in Sylvie et Bruno. “Yes, the rhododendrons will be early this year,” Mrs. Sadler agreed.
Cray too seemed to feast on every detail of the drive in from the airport—the freeway, the four-wheel-drive vehicles passing them. He kept nudging Chadbourne and pointing things out. “I haven’t been in the U.S. for twenty years almóst,” he said several times. “It’s twenty years since I’ve been here.”
“Teem, chéri, I want to go to the supermarché, for sure,” whispered Anne-Sophie to Tim. “The Mall, all the typique things.”
“The cars are so beeg,” she said aloud.
“That’s what strikes me too. By God, it’s really important to have a look for yourself. The eye forgets,” cried Cray. “Look there, Chadbourne, look at that!”
“Quelle belle rivière,” remarked Anne-Sophie, as they crossed the river. “What is it called? The Willamette? Un nom français!
“The Americans are wonderful drivers!” she exclaimed. “See how they stop for pedestrians. And how they wait for people turning left-really, it’s very well organized. The French should learn from this!”
They would stay, except Delia, in a new bed-and-breakfast Mrs. Sadler knew of in downtown Lake Oswego, five minutes from Mrs. Holly‘s, overlooking the pretty lake itself. Cray in his own setting had never seemed that odd to Tim, but in Oregon the man’s secretiveness and eccentricity stood out. He registered at the TualatInn under the name Stan Carson, he wanted an inner room instead of looking out on the pretty if wintry lake, he made the others make all the phone calls.
Mrs. Sadler left them to get settled, hoping they would be comfortable there, and promised to drive them around once they got unpacked. “There are nice hotels in downtown Portland, but not so convenient, you’ll be wanting to go over to the Holly house right away,” she said.
The TualatInn was a refurbished Victorian house, furnished with brass beds, oak washstands with decorated china washbasins, Laura Ashley fabrics, and an infinite number of crocheted covers and hooked rugs done by the proprietor, Mrs. Barrater.
“Adorable,” Anne-Sophie exclaimed. “I love the houses made of wood! Charming!”
Now they saw in what the skills of a great director consisted. In the little parlor of the TualatInn, Cray assembled, assigned, and organized a three-day program designed to find Mrs. Holly, scope out locations for a film, and also enter the bastions of the black-helicopter people and survivalists and religious fundamentalists, as many as Delia could come up with. Anne-Sophie and Delia would begin looking for these this afternoon. He summoned a sergeant from the Lake Oswego police, a locksmith to open the locked kitchen door of Mrs. Holly’s house, and a couple of people Delia knew who knew the country roads. The finding of Mrs. Holly, it seemed to Tim, was distinctly second on Cray’s agenda behind looking at the details of American premillennial protest. But they would begin at Mrs. Holly’s. And despite the fact that sleepiness and jet lag were already overtaking them, they would begin now, not stopping to unpack.
“This can’t take more than three days, because I figure I have about three days before the press gets hold of it that I’m here, and then the IRS and the rest of it,” Cray said.
Mrs. Holly’s house sat on a little knoll off a country road lined with blackberry bramble and rimed winter grass, and substantial houses discreetly separated from each other by a zoning requirement of two acres of land. Her house had a deserted air— shades pulled and garage shut, a few flyers and newspapers lying on the steps up a long drive. Cray and Tim, driven by Mrs. Sadler, followed the police car up the driveway, which turned behind the house, where one was meant to enter, but it too was shut, and the low gate to the patio was locked. The policeman reached over the fence and did something to the lock, and the gate swung open.
It was clear to Tim as they arrived at the house that Cray had never been here before, had never visited Clara’s mother, and wasn’t particularly curious about her disappearance. Tim was curious—hoped to see Clara’s room, some sign of how she had been in high school, maybe baby pictures. He had that form of romantic curiosity about Clara that Anne-Sophie seemed to have about him. She was extrapolating from Oregon a view of the way things must have looked in Michigan, where her imagination now had Tim growing up, though in fact he had spent very little time there.
The police had no objection to Cray, the son-in-law, going inside Mrs. Holly’s house, though they hadn’t done so themselves when Mrs. Sadler had finally called them yesterday. Then, at dusk, they had shone flashlights around the shrubbery and seen nothing amiss.
Mrs. Sadler came in along with the rest of them. As soon as the locksmith had opened the door and they went into the kitchen, they all could feel that something was different or wrong. Mrs. Sadler, who had been there before, confirmed it. Junk had been stored in Mrs. Holly’s dining room—a welter of Exercycles, wet bars, televisions, stuffed toys—objects that by no possibility could have belonged there. Mrs. Sadler and Delia both uttered protests in Mrs. Holly’s behalf. People had moved Mrs. Holly’s furniture, it was an outrage, what did it mean? It seemed to mean something both sad and sinister. The tattered antler chandeliers and candlesticks, plaster lamp bases and cheap furniture covered with sheets were things that could only be valued by someone who had not much else to value. There was something desperate about saving this junk, let alone putting it in the dining room of some old lady, a sort of house invasion, you heard of those.
They were somewhat reassured to find that Mrs. Holly’s bedroom was neat and her toilet articles gone, as if she had packed in an unhurried manner for a trip. But it was a little thing to cling to.
In the kitchen, wedged between the fridge and the corner, covered with a chenille bedspread, they found three assault rifles and two shotguns.
“All right, you folks, you’re right,” said the officer with satisfaction, “I guess this is a police matter, we’ll take it over. I guess the first thing is find Mrs. Holly.” He began to fiddle with his radio.
Cray stepped into the living room to call Clara on his cell phone.
“The damned thing doesn’t work,” he complained.
“American cell phones don’t work anywhere else in the world, and European ones don’t work here,” Tim reminded him. “Like the televisions. It was never foreseen that an American might be abroad wanting to phone.”
“I’ll need to use the phone before it gets too late in France,” Cray said to the police officer. Then he remembered. “I guess I pay the woman’s damn phone bill, at that,” he said, a
nd picked up Mrs. Holly’s phone.
Clara had apparently been sitting by the phone, for she answered immediately. Tim heard Cray tell her that they had arrived in Oregon, and that her mother was not found, but also that people were not too worried, no one feared foul play or danger; the locals felt that Cristal Wilson was not dangerous. Judging from Cray’s replies, Clara received the news about her mother with distress but anxious hope.
With the evidence of real criminal intent, it now became plain that the police did not want the Cray party around, and so Mrs. Sadler drove Cray and Tim back to the TualatInn to wait for Chadbourne and Anne-Sophie, whom Delia had taken to the Sweet Home Antiques Barn. Tim went out to rent a car.
The Antiques Barn was a scene of some disorder, which did not strike Anne-Sophie as being too odd for a location consecrated to antique dealing, with its attendant pickup trucks, moving vans, items of furniture draped in padding being carried and stowed. These places were always confusion. Yet many people seemed to be moving out of the Sweet Home Antiques Barn. Stalls‘stood empty, with sawhorses or abandoned chairs blocking the entrances. Delia would not explain it.
Her business partner, Sara Towne, a plump girl in a granny dress, rushed to embrace Delia, and Anne-Sophie too, though they had never met. It was a sisterly welcome, to do with their shared metier. “I always knew it would be a good thing for Delia to do this trip, see how much better she is, I know it’s owing to you, it was fabulous, it sounded fabulous....” she went on. Anne-Sophie did not understand all the references, but she rejoiced in the Antiques Barn, which was full of delicious Americana including many things pertaining to horses. She bought tin trays with pictures of horses or horseshoes, lamps with horse bases, a lamp made out of a stirrup, mugs with famous champions painted on, objects formed from horseshoes. Things equestrian seemed to be a preoccupation of the whole culture. Anne-Sophie had not realized this, had always thought Americans were more interested in cars, though now when she thought of it, she saw those were named after horses, like Mus tang and Bronco and Pinto.
Le Mariage Page 27
