When she saw the tiny, dusty, undeniably charming church, she had an immutable premonition of what would happen: the stream that ran fifteen meters behind it would rise and overflow its banks on the day of the wedding. That this had happened often enough was clear from the stains on the walls of the transept.
The lawyer from Biggs, Rigby, Denby, Fox left a message for Clara. She should call him at once. The French magistrate had handed down her view that Clara was guilty, technically if not actually, and though her actual guilt could not be fully proven, she would have to serve some kind of sentence, prison ferme, he was afraid, though there was a small window for an appeal. Sentencing would be tomorrow. He, Chris Oliver, was on his way over. She was not to despair, they had many strings in their bow....
At first, to the anguished Clara, this was only a minor and not unexpected grief. Parting from Antoine was so much worse. But the reality of prison soon asserted its due claim on her state of total misery. Nothing that the lawyer had to say, when he got there, was encouraging, but he spent a lot of time with the beautiful Mrs. Cray all the same, trying to calm her down.
On the plane, Tim had a couple of stiff bourbons, thinking it would be possible to shift his allegiance to bourbon; after the botanical mysteries of scotch, there was something fresh and uncomplicated about it, like mouthwash.
“Why is it called bourbon, though?” he said aloud. “Bourbon” suddenly sounded too French. It added to a certain reluctance he was aware of feeling to be returning to France. He remembered a fragment of a poem—he who had no head for poetry—it was by a Beat poet working in the bars and woods in Oregon:That short-haired joy and roughness—
America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.
Maybe he was more of an American than he thought. Or maybe it was just that what was in store for him in France, and the natural apprehensions all men are said to feel when getting married, was getting him down. The reality of the ceremony, and its imminence, and the rigors of the next few days had to be got through.
But, more than that, he was conscious of having enjoyed Oregon in a way, and he was still preoccupied with some of the problems they were leaving behind, even though, strictly speaking, they weren’t his problems—poor Mrs. Holly, the poor little child Tammi or whatever her name was, poor Cristal for that matter, and the other desperate people, and the cold and poverty, and the purity of their craziness. Tim could respect Cray’s preoccupation with all that, and the wish to tell about it and make it visible.
He also thought of Clara, of her glowing beauty and inscrutability, and of how he had felt her shiver when the hunters set upon her. Outwardly so composed, fear within, her emotions so smoothly packaged behind her lovely smile, like the smile of the Last Duchess. Maybe she maddened Cray, as the duke was maddened, with the indiscriminate way she bestowed her smiles. He ought not to be thinking of Clara at all. He glanced at Anne-Sophie; with her Dutch-girl fair coloring and Boucher cheeks, she suddenly looked like a marionette, though a charming marionette, slightly inanimate.
Ought one to marry when feeling reservations? But he had no reservations really, he didn’t think. He loved Anne-Sophie. All this was nerves and culture shock.
Anne-Sophie sat with American Vogue, House and Garden, and Bride magazine in the rearmost seat of the little cabin. They strapped in, and the plane began to taxi. The thing felt small, all at once, like a balsa-wood model, frail to have to go over a pole, over an ocean. She continued to be gnawed by the certainty she would never get back to France. The wind would blow them off course, they would crash, a Branch Davidian had put a bomb aboard to head off Monsieur Cray’s exposure of them in a film. Though it sounded as if he wanted to glorify them, so glowingly did he embroider on what he had seen with Delia at the fish camp, whatever a fish camp was.
“Delia’ll be coming over, I’ve arranged it with her mother. The best hips are done in England now with a kind of reconstituted natural bone. They grind it up and form it, like particle board,” Cray was saying of Delia. (Was there a liaison, Anne-Sophie wondered.)
But they would never even get back to France. She would never be married. The tragic loss of bride and groom on the eve, practically the eve of their wedding, the people actually gathered in the church of Val-Saint-Rémy, the priest giving a eulogy instead of the marriage, Estelle’s exasperation at this ultimate mistiming ... Though she knew it was silly, Anne-Sophie could not control this sense of rising panic to be far from France in an unreliably small plane with strangers. Even Tim, someone she slept with and knew intimately, now seemed a cold, insensitive stranger. She found one of the monogrammed mohair lap robes, pulled it around her, and tried to listen to music.
Cray told them more about his drive with Delia up the Columbia River gorge to a fish camp where SuAnn Wilson was, with others. It had once been a sort of forties resort, with a tottering dock.
“I think even Delia was scared,” he said. He was pleased, they could see. “These people have guns. Ten or eleven families, they plan to go on to eastern Oregon, they’re hoping to buy land out there. The famous SuAnn? It doesn’t seem to matter if she’s crazy, she fit right in. They seemed like poor people, is all, just poor people with poor taste in TV programs and a liking for junk food. And they have guns, lots of them, big ones, all loaded, and they have the idea that something, if only the forces of history, are after them, in the form of their neighbors, and the police, and the federal government. They have their exemplary tales—the Branch David- ians, the Weavers—even the names are perfect. Remember the sixties group The Weavers? ‘Joshua, Row Your Boat Ashore.’ Tim, you’re too young, but Chadbourne?”
“Yes, sure, American group. Wasn’t it Michael, though?” he said vaguely.
“ ‘Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore,’ ” said Cray.
Chadbourne, numbering and labelling rolls of film and stowing them in a green cloth bag, went on talking to Cray of the things they had seen at the millennialists’ compound.
“We need a character like Delia,” Cray said. “Perfectly sophisticated and yet disbelieving nothing. Waiting to see. This character functions as narrator in effect, whom nothing surprises....”
“I need the gun store in downtown Lake Grove,” said Chadbourne. “All the flags everywhere. And then I’d like some helicopter views of the Columbia River Gorge....”
She thought all at once of Monsieur Boudherbe, and of the arbitrary nature of life. Someone could come and steal your money, murder you in your stall in the flea market. Your airplane would crash. You were going to marry this man instead of some other man. The orgasm was the orgasm, with one man or another. One spermatozoon and not another would do its work on your egg: France wanted Frenchmen. It was worse than depressing, it seemed so sad, so predetermined, what use was it all? Did one have options, or did you have to play the game?
At least she had stopped her senseless ravings of praise about the convenience and vigor of the American highway system and the remarkable cheapness of its goods, Tim thought. He was finding Cray’s exuberance irritating too, he wished they would both shut up. Talk of these crazies in their abandoned motel conjured too many sad images of poor folks that well-meaning people ought not to abandon, i.e., he himself ought not to fly complacently off without seeing them safely into better situations. He could not shake off his concern with the whole state of things in Oregon. Poor little Mrs. Holly and the other old people at the Adventist Hospital, the freezing icy towns and the valiant strugglers chipping ice and fumbling with chains, and a sort of doughty courage going on in the face of nature. And the little girl and Cristal, like characters out of Steinbeck, and he would have liked to see the bipolar SuAnn. It was the edge of the world in Oregon, a whole society dedicated to struggle—tire struggle, ice struggle, carburetor struggle, safety struggle, struggle against (or with) bombs, and assault rifles behind the fridge. Maybe struggle was the spirit of the millennium, but the desperation and the disproportionate overreactions got him down: flight, arms, police
patrols, all that development and asphalt in a state that was supposed to be Green ... No, it didn’t seem right to head off in a private jet to a big Eurotrash party—his own wedding—without adding his voice in protest somewhere in Oregon. France didn’t need him the way Oregon did.
“Of course it isn’t Delia’s story, I don’t know whose yet, probably the daughter‘s, SuAnn. Or Cristal? Shit, I forgot to ask about Lady. The dog. Clara will be sure to ask,” Cray was saying. “Shit, Tim, call somebody, will you, and find out about the dog? Just say Lady, the dog, they’ll remember.”
We didn’t make love once in America, Anne-Sophie thought. Making love puts a seal on a place. But we’ll be going back often.
“It was smoothly done.” Cray laughed, walking up to the cockpit. “This trip. In, out, mom rescued, plans in place for the second unit, and the IRS none the wiser that I was there at all.”
“Can you really prefer Georges Gershwin to Delibes?” asked Anne-Sophie, who was listening to the earphones, of Tim, querulously.
55
Countdown to the Altar
It was well before noon when they landed, which meant they had almost a full day ahead, luckily, for there was much to do about the wedding, now three days away. Tim went to their apartment, but Anne-Sophie had the taxi take her straight to Estelle’s; she would meet Tim before dinner and the events of the evening, and meantime Tim would try to reach his father and stepmother, who presumably had arrived.
The phone was ringing when he let himself in—Cees calling from Amsterdam to say that Gabriel was on a hunger strike because extradition papers had been filed by the U.S. Attorney demanding his return to the state of New York. Gabriel was claiming that the U.S. would try to bring him back and then charge him with a capital crime.
“If he can prove that, Dutch law would forbid extradition,” Cees explained. Tim said he would tell all this to Serge Cray, but actually, since Delia’s departure, Gabriel had ceased to interest any of them, though Tim was still burdened with a mild sense of guilt for his own complicity in jailing him. If the guy was guilty of some capital offense, however, did that put a different, more permissible face on his own collaboration?
There were messages from Tim’s mother, who was back in town at the Lutétia. Tim’s father and stepmother were at the Duc de Saint-Simon, which was very reassuring to Estelle’s theories about his wealth and eminence, and also suggested a certain connaissance, though in fact this hotel had been arranged by Tim because it was around the corner from the Passage de la Visitation.
It had always been foreseen that the presence in Paris of Jerry Nolinger and his second wife at the same time as Cécile, Tim’s mother, would be awkward. Estelle had consulted various friends about how to handle it—the situation arose more and more often in France now too. Madame Aix suggested a common solution. It was a kind of division of labor. Thus Dorothy Sternholz had spoken for Jerry and Terry Nolinger the following night, and had invited some French friends and a few people in the American community. Estelle, she and Dorothy agreed, could deal with Cécile Nolinger and some of Tim’s college friends from America. The bridal couple would join Estelle for dinner, but drop in at Dorothy’s for coffee afterward.
Anne-Sophie had a shock when, out of some apprehension she could not explain, she tried the dress on and found that it didn’t fit at the waist. It was impossible to button the forty little buttons along the side. Estelle heard her scream and came running in. Seeing the problem, and thinking for a moment that Anne-Sophie might be pregnant, Estelle surprised herself by beaming and feeling a grandmotherly joy she had not expected to feel. “Ma chérie!”
But it was only the three days in America.
“It must be something they put in the food,” Anne-Sophie wailed. “They are very fat, Maman. What shall I do?”
They grimly examined the darts and the other side seam, in hopes of finding enough to let out, but there was nothing extra anywhere. Visions of embarrassing piecing brought tears to Anne-Sophie’s eyes. The problem with the sleeve over her wounded arm was bad enough; though the arm had resumed almost its normal size, the sleeve had had to be let out.
“Nothing to eat for the next three days, la pauvre,” Estelle prescribed merrily.
The maître-chien came to Cray as he alit from the taxi, and presented his report. “Madame has had a number of visitors, but there have been no hunters,” he reported. “There have been no problems. The monsieur who was here so often is recognized as a neighbor, and they do not molest him. No hunters have tried to broach the property, no one shooting. Here are the hours and dates of all the activity.”
Cray reviewed this report for a long time, reading and rereading it. He thanked the maître-chien.
Tim heard Anne-Sophie talking to her friends, singing the praises of America. “No, we didn’t get to Las Vegas, but it is a nation of readers. Je t‘assure, I saw many bookshops, and every single person has a car. A huge one. I bought some ravissantes engravings of birds by a Français, Jean James Audubon, they are very admired in America....”
At Estelle’s cocktail everyone remarked how beautiful Anne-Sophie was in her little dark green silk suit. Looking a bit stuffed into it, perhaps, the coat unbuttoned. But how radiant, and the wedding two days away. They looked so happy, she and Tim; she was admired by all his college friends who had flown over—some balding a little, developing paunches, but still young men, with nice wives. They had thought Tim would never take the plunge. The friends admired Anne-Sophie’s mother too, so trim and spontaneous, serving such great food, such elegance, the table, the fabulous flowers, the toasts.... Jerry Howarth, Graves Mueller, Dick Trent, Peter French were there. Still others would be at the ceremony—everyone he knew in America who could get away tried to organize a little vacation at the same time, a few days in Paris or in cute hotels in Normandy.
The American friends talked to the French couples, Anne-Sophie’s friends, who had been invited to Estelle’s. All the Franco-American conversations seemed to work. French people were much more friendly than advertised, often stopping you on the street when you were staring at your map, to volunteer information. They had been surprised. Cécile, Tim’s mother, they knew already, of course, from summer visits in Michigan during college, the time the five friends got jobs picking blueberries and harvesting tomatoes. A number of Estelle’s friends were there, including the academician Cyrille Doroux, which impressed Cécile, though she had never read a word of his esteemed works.
Anne-Sophie ate nothing and took three sips of champagne.
“The thing is,” she said to her friends Victoire and Céline, “everyone in America has a private automobile because there are no trains. It is so vast, there is almost no way of getting from here to there. They had to get rid of trains because of a buffalo problem, something like that, the corpses of the buffaloes on the tracks—but this was a long time ago of course, and they just got out of the habit of trains. Hence it is nearly impossible to get to certain places in America. One is called South Dakota—it is romantic, no?”
“You won’t believe this,” whispered his old friend Dick Trent, the only one of his friends unmarried, “that Frenchwoman over there, the most beautiful girl here—except for Anne-Sophie—her name is Pussy. Yowee! Can you believe that!” He was only in part burlesquing the role of Animal-House American. Tim wondered if he himself was losing his sense of the ridiculous possibilities of Anglo-French faux-amis, never having registered the American connotations of Anne-Sophie’s friend Phyrne having Pussy as a nickname.
“Oui, we had an adorable trip to America, all the Americans speak French, it is quite a surprise,” Tim overheard Anne-Sophie saying.
“Anne-Sophie is a great girl,” Dick emphasized. “She was telling me about her flea-market thing.”
“It’s a slightly mysterious thing,” Tim said. “It looks like awful junk to me, but she sells it for a fortune.”
Estelle, with her gift for seeming hospitable, and knowing most of her guests were American, was makin
g a great show of things she had heard Americans like, like ice cubes. The maid hired for the evening walked among them regularly with ice bucket and tongs, bringing out a sort of rage reaction in Tim, at Estelle but also at the Americans, who accepted the ice cubes and put them into their kirs champagne or glasses of Perrier. Whole giant, catastrophic international incidents had probably been started by something like this.
At the princess Dorothy Sternholz‘s, in the high pink rooms on the rue du Bac, the guests were mostly French tonight, influential people who might enjoy meeting the senior Nolingers, with a few Americans thrown in—the dean of the American Cathedral, the cultural attaché from the embassy, those friends of Dorothy who had the famous garden in Gordes. They had dined downstairs and were now in the salon having coffee when the young couple arrived. Everyone loves a young couple on the brink of the altar, everyone yearns and dreams and confronts his private reservations about their compatibility, or about the institution of marriage itself. Edward Marks nominally counted as Tim’s minister, and the ceremony was to be conducted by both him, almost in the role of acolyte, and a Catholic priest in Val-Saint-Rémy. This was one of Madame Aix’s most creative ideas, and Anne-Sophie had thought it very suitable. She had also arranged for certain strains of Aaron Copland to be played, thinking fretfully, though, can he really prefer Aaron Copland to Berlioz?
Le Mariage Page 30
