They looked like they needed money. “Do you have money?” He didn’t have much money in dollars himself, but he gave it to her, thirty-five dollars, he wasn’t sure why.
“Just stick around, Cristal, until we look around,” the officer said.
“I’d like to send one of my people up here tomorrow,” said Cray to the officer, “to take some documentary photos. The decor is perfect, the yard, those things stiff on the clothesline.”
Chadbourne and Anne-Sophie went back to the inn to make their sandwiches. It was colder than before. Mr. Barrater was falling behind in keeping the fireplaces burning, and they were inefficient anyway. Anne-Sophie stood for a long time with her back to hers, but it waned. She thought she might just get into bed and read or something. It was beginning to get dark.
“I think we should get into bed, Les,” said Anne-Sophie, looking at the pudgy Chadbourne, his round body radiant with oxidizing calories. Chadbourne agreed. They took off their shoes and got into Anne-Sophie’s bed, the door scrupulously left open so Mr. Barrater could come in with logs. They put the comforter from Chadbourne’s bed on top of hers. Then, because it was four, the afternoon nadir for their deranged biorhythms, they fell asleep.
Tim was briefly disconcerted, when he and Cray got back about seven, to find Anne-Sophie and Chadbourne huddled in bed. But then, that was a good thing about French people, Tim thought, no false prudery in an emergency.
The sleepers stirred and sat up.
“Oh, zut, I slept, now I’ll be awake all night,” Anne-Sophie complained.
“Jesus, it does seem colder in here than outside,” Tim said.
“Maybe we could get dinner in bed,” Chadbourne suggested.
Serge waited until ten—seven in the morning in France—before phoning Clara to tell her her mother was safe, though in the hospital. Clara sat up in bed, tears overbrimming her eyes and running down her cheeks. She dabbed at them with the sheet. She had miraculously escaped retribution this time, her mother was safe.
“You’re going to have to do something about Cristal, though,” Serge said. “The woman is obviously batty.”
He didn’t tell her about the guns and Semtex.
Waking at four, Anne-Sophie had to fight back a wave of desolation. She was six thousand miles from France, in the freezing dark of a strange country. She stared at the moonlit wall, where she could read the cross-stitched sampler that said “Kissin’ don’t last, cookin’ do.” The exact opposite of what the countess Ribemont in Against the Tide would say. The countess said, “All men really require is extravagant admiration of their genitals.” Anne-Sophie was in a world turned inside out and backward.
The sleeping Tim seemed to her to have strangely metamor phosed into an American cowboy. From his suitcase had come a puffy anorak from L. L. Bean, in which he lost any vestige of European cosmopolitanism. He spoke English all the time, even to her—she realized she had rarely heard him speak English except at the Crays‘. Here he said “yeah” and also, once, “okey-dokey.” He bought a bottle of bourbon whiskey to drink in the room. His handsome features seemed oddly to have melted or lost definition, so that he resembled the men on Oregon billboards, fair, bland, and beefy, with their small noses and strong chins.
In a few days he would be her husband. They would live in an apartment on the first floor even if on a chic street, on uncertain incomes, just thank God not in Oregon.
Yet Oregon was so lovely, if cold. She knew she was just rattled by the lack of electricity, a sense of nature’s ferocity that fortunately did not apply in Paris, the sense of being on the edge of a distant continent from which some did not return. She told herself again that Oregon is really very beautiful, with lovely wide streets and convenient gas stations ... No doubt in summer many golf courses, a great plus, and the food really good. How she wished she would fall back asleep and maybe tomorrow a thaw, and the chance to view American objets and antiquités.
For his part, Tim told himself it was only the discomfort of their situation that contributed to his poor impression of Oregon. He had expected it to be more—ecological. It prided itself on ecology, did it not? Unlike the blighted, deserted towns of Michigan, the robust, cheerful little towns of Oregon had the reputation of being close to nature, citizen-friendly; their only social enemies were Californians, and the strange plague of gypsies that had somehow found its way here. It was a land of individuals, of freedom. With, alas, all that that implied of bad organization and inconvenience, ugly shopping centers, uncontrolled suburbs, fast food plazas, between which the lovely large trees struggled and an occasional natural weed asserted itself. Why could these people not see what they were doing to the place?
It irritated him that Anne-Sophie seemed to admire it. Was she being diplomatic or sincere? He wanted to shake her and say, “Come on, level with me, you can be honest.”
“Oh, Teem, I have been to Circuit City.” She sighed. “It is heaven, what is left for me in life?” When she heard herself utter this outrageous hyperbole, she had the grace to laugh.
Cray did not want to leave before he could meet some of the characters of his movie, correct the exaggerations of his imagination, fine-tune the details of their rhetoric, observe their normality. “Caricature is the enemy of the painful realism I intend for the style of the piece,” he said. They would visit SuAnn, if Delia was right about where she was living.
It was a kind of compound, formerly a little cabin court of small cottages in a semicircle off a street in Westmoreland. A variety of old vans and autos were pulled up to the various cabins or on the grass in the side yard. At random, they knocked on a door and asked for SuAnn. The plump, rather normal-looking woman had not seen her, thought she might be with her mother. “Come in, though, it’s cold out, maybe I can call someone who knows. She might be in the hospital again.” They stepped into the little house. Four children sat on tiny chairs in the living room.
“We’re having school,” she said. “We’re home-schooling them.”
“Good, very good, excellent,” said Serge Cray, all but rubbing his hands.
“You realize there are human beings on this earth, formed by alien sadistic child-rearing methods, who do not resemble us in any way, you hope they are of another species. Like the people in Rwanda, for instance, who hack each other up. No, we school our own,” said the woman matter-of-factly. “Would you have some coffee?”
“Tell me a little about the curriculum,” said Cray happily.
52
Meanwhile Back in Paris
Clara saw that Antoine was a nice man. That would not have been a prerequisite—he was a handsome man—but it ensnared her love absolutely. He was her male equivalent, a modest, correct person until now leading a correct life—“quiet desperation” being too ridiculously dire a phrase for two privileged people to claim. A correct life, a pleasant life, and then suddenly a life infused with drama and self-indulgence, born of desires heretofore unexamined. Only for three days, they promised themselves, and then a future of glimpsing each other in the village, smiles, the pledge of a certain permanent place in the heart. That would have to be it. But their hearts raged against this cold projection, or at least hers did.
God knew what Antoine was saying to his wife, or at his bureau, to explain his odd absences, his sudden departures without explanation, so unexpected in a dignified, self-controlled man. At his bureau, the secrétaires exchanged sly smiles.
He came for breakfast, they made love, they had lunch and made love, they went to an early dinner, they walked in the woods. They laughed and talked, their hands on each other—they had a lot to catch up on. They had a sense of Plato watching from Beyond with a gratified smile that these two people, some kind of test case, had proved his theory. Antoine could not spend the night, of course. Clara tossed with longing in the night, and stayed up till two to talk to Oregon again, with Serge’s reassuring news that her mother was safe.
Antoine came out from Paris in the morning and took Clara over to his house.
They walked there through the woods, the Rottweilers incurious, now used to them.
“I just want to see you there. I want to see you in my house. We’ll be alone. They don’t come out here in the middle of the week.” Like Clara, he was enjoying the sense of kicking over the traces. He had been the designated good boy of his family, the Boy Scout and peacemaker, had almost never been unfaithful to Trudi, and had certainly never been a source of anxiety to her, or to his mother, or to any female, till now....
She would not look at the antlers in the hall, their symbolic power over her life too potent to examine. He brought a Gevrey-Chambertin 1985 from the cellar, she sautéd the wild mushrooms gathered by villagers, he made toast to put them on. They ate in the kitchen, talking, and eventually made love on the living room sofa. Perhaps he thought the sight of the connubial bed would be too distressing to her, or he could not be quite that sacrilegious, she didn’t know, but was just as glad not to see the two pillows, the two night-stands, the toothbrushes in the bathroom.
Actually by now, the end of the third day, with Serge coming home tomorrow, the idea of the end was getting harder to bear. Why was it that the prospect of a future without pleasure, a hypothetical deprivation, could threaten the pleasure at hand?
“That might be a sort of Protestant problem,” Antoine said, “but it is a problem for me too.”
“It isn’t as if we were in love, this is just—is just ...” The sense of being wildly gone in love was not one they had either of them expected ever to have. There were other words than love—addiction, desire—they used instead. Yet despite the circumspection of their vocabulary, Clara knew she and Antoine were out of control, were in a state of anguished rapture. It was as if they’d been told they had only three days to live—the duration of Cray’s trip. Since the world was coming to an end in three days, who cared what you did? Was it a time for caution and self-control?
And was the impulsive affair the sweeter for its foregone conclusion? At any rate, the precious moments brought meaning to so many things they hadn’t understood. They talked about these things. Clara knew she would be a better mother now, and a better wife in future, even if it was hard to describe how. Even if it was only sex and pleasure he had taught her about, those were mighty things she now understood the value of. Antoine seemed so gleeful about his own metamorphosis from staid banquier to romantic lover, he swore he didn’t plan to revert, was now a permanent outlaw, in his heart. People crossed over. Had she crossed over?
Late on the third afternoon, Clara heard from Serge, who had just got up, that he and the others would be leaving later that day from Oregon, in order to arrive in Paris tomorrow before noon. This would be her last night with Antoine. They must have a festive dinner—she would take him to the great restaurant Taillevent. He would have to make an excuse to his wife, then they could make love somewhere, his office or a hotel, for farewell. You would think they’d have got tired of all this fucking, but they hadn’t.
Clara in a plain black dress was nonetheless almost too conspicuously beautiful for Antoine to feel quite comfortable even in a restaurant where he was not well known. She stood out like Venus; no one looking at her wouldn’t think of venery; he prayed for a discreet table but was pleased too, and a little dazed, to be the possessor of this creature. Neither was hungry, they realized, had somehow to get through three courses, what a mistake to be addressing haute cuisine with divided attention; great restaurants were for the settled and bored.
Clara knew if they started talking about their parting, she’d cry, so embarrassing in a restaurant, so she smiled and spun general topics. Antoine was good at general topics. Literature?
“Adultery is the great subject of nineteenth-century literature,” he observed. “Even of medieval literature, when the context is secular.”
“I love adultery,” said Clara. “A hymn to adultery.”
“An acquired taste, certainly.”
“Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina—it always ends badly!” she suddenly remembered. Every other topic too had a way of leading straight to the questions of the longing of their bodies, and the perfect congruence of their interests, against the certainty that they would never meet again like this; this was the last of their secret life.
53
Farewell to the New World
Highway crews with shovels and salt had worked through the night, so that by this morning most roads were passable, though electricity was still out in many sectors. The visitors decided to use what they had of their last day in Oregon to top up their experience with the things they most wanted to see or do. Cray wanted to see more of Delia’s believers, millennialists, and Moonies, and perhaps more of Delia herself. Anne-Sophie wanted Native American artifacts and any item patterned in buffalo check. Chadbourne wanted to photograph exteriors in some of the little towns nearby, and since this could be done in the course of Anne-Sophie’s antiques search, she and he would go together. The pleasant Mrs. Sadler would drive them.
Tim was the only one who continued to worry about Clara’s mother, and Cristal and the poor little granddaughter. He started by going to the Adventist Hospital to see Mrs. Holly. Emergency generators were keeping at least this one area of the place warm, and patients in various stages of illness, attached to standing racks and tubes, had been grouped together in a sort of dayroom. Nurses moved among them, relatives in overcoats were allowed to survey from doorways but were not encouraged to throng in, as if they would soak up too much of the heat.
Tim saw Mrs. Holly slumped vacantly in her chair, near enough to where he stood that he could talk to her. He reminded her who he was, Clara’s friend from France, had seen her yesterday. She seemed to brighten at the idea that someone knew her.
“Where’s Cristal?” she wanted to know. Tim didn’t know.
“This has happened before. Cold snaps,” she said. “Cristal knows what to do when we re·home, but they put us out, did you hear about that? ”
“Who were they?”
“Some men. They said they wanted to put some things in the kitchen.” She had an incurious, accepting tone, the absolute pragmatism of the old.
“They didn’t say why? ”
“They might have said, I didn’t hear,” she said.
How strange, thought Tim, to be so untroubled by powerless-ness. Is that age? Or is it some American equanimity, some lack of imagination about bad things that can happen?
Tim tried to find out from the nurse what would become of Mrs. Holly when the electricity went back on, but of course she didn’t know. It was easy to foresee that Mrs. Holly would be put in some nursing home, or left here, and she seemed to see this too, it showed in the bend of her contracted old spine, the forward, disconsolate droop of her head. She must once have looked like Clara. What would Clara think seeing her mother here, blanket over her bony little knees, breathing the vaguely uriniferous air? Mrs. Holly had not much notion of who Tim was, but accepted his ministrations as he tucked the blanket more snugly around her legs.
“Thank you, that’s better. Do they say the weather’s better? ”
“Not much, Mrs. Holly. Looks like you’ll be better off here for a few days.”
“You come back and see us. Is Clara warm? ”
“Yes, I’m sure she’s warm,” Tim said, preparing to leave. “Is there something to read? Would you like anything?”
“There’s nine hours’ difference between here and Paris,” Mrs. Holly wistfully said.
He left, oppressed with thoughts of futility and age, and though he knew Clara had had no choice but to stay in France, he thought the worse of her anyway, for leaving this poor old lady to chance and neglect. He wondered if the warm smiles the nurses were beaming him were because he was almost the only man in here; the others attending to their elderly relatives were all female.
Before leaving the TualatInn, they had various phone calls to make and receive. Tim called his father’s house in Grosse Pointe, to be told that Jerry and Terry Nolinger had already left for
the wedding in France.
Cray arrived, fresh from visiting Delia’s friends. He was high with joy and energy, infused by the weird energy of the fanatics.
“You’d think these people would be furtive, secretive. Not at all, no, no! Open! They have convictions. ‘No works are good works other than those which God Himself has so designated.’ Nor do the works of the creature—that’s us—count toward a crown in heaven. Why the guns, then, I asked.”
“Why the Semtex?” Tim asked.
“The answer,” said Cray, “is you don’t know which of your inner promptings are from God Himself, so you have to act with a broad scatter, like a shotgun. They seem to believe, also, that God favors the militant.”
“It’s about religion then, not patriotism?”
“No, it’s the same thing,” said Cray. “America is God’s country. And why now? Because of the Apocalypse. The Mark of the Beast, the Whore of Babylon—these people are as literal-minded as they were at the first millennium. Great stuff!”
Delia had come with Cray to say goodbye to the others, which she managed to do without any suggestion that she had liked them. But now she had a smile for each of them, even Tim, whom she had avoided being alone with since he had twisted her arm. She hugged Serge. There was no clue as to whether those two bodies had been entwined in more heated conjunctions. She hugged Anne-Sophie, hesitated and hugged Tim, and even Chadbourne, as if not wanting to rudely leave him out. Good luck, they said.
“Could you kind of let me know if Gabriel gets safely back to America?” Tim asked.
54
Real Life
Madame Aix, very excited by the Mademoiselle Decor coverage, had involved herself, in Anne-Sophie’s absence, with many of the wedding details Anne-Sophie would ordinarily have seen to. She was frantic at Anne-Sophie’s unexpected and unorthodox absence this close to the day of the ceremony, and exasperated at Estelle d‘Argel’s indolence, though Estelle did agree to help take the flowers and several boxes of champagne glasses hired for the occasion, these things light enough to be carried on the train, and she had all along planned to host a cocktail-buffet two nights before the wedding. (For this, she did not involve Madame Aix.) Madame Aix found herself wishing she could expose this fraudulent excuse for a novelist, this unnatural mère, reveal to the world her detachment and lack of effort. She would never, ever, buy her books again. Eventually, she took the afternoon and went herself by train to Val-Saint-Rémy to look at the church and estimate the difficulties for the caterers and photographers, things Estelle should have done. Since, to a certain extent, the honor of her bureau was at stake, Madame Aix didn’t want to leave anything to chance.
Le Mariage Page 29
