Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  He remembered the next, memorable, shocking sequence, when the birds flew overhead, and the little rabbit made the wrong decision and ran toward the hunters. The smiling, rich, well-off people raised their guns with seeming indifference, much more interested in what they were saying than in the shooting, and picked him off; then slaughtered everything else that moved. Everyone was a wonderful shot. What he had blocked out was the twitching corpses of the rabbits, the flutters of the downed, dying birds—and how the scene went on and on, shot after shot, dying animals one after another shuddering in the leaves. One was the little creature that had looked so brightly at the camera moments before, dead now. The horrifying length of the sequence was worthy of Cray himself, whose reluctance to leave a scene was one of his most characteristic mannerisms, almost a film tic. Behind him, someone—Tim would have said his stepmother Terry—said, “Oh really.”

  On the screen, the beaters and some of the shooters began to walk across the field picking up the corpses. Cray, back in the room, cut the projector and turned on the lights again. For an eerie moment, they were the company in the film, this was the hall of the little marquis, these were the guests, now dressed in dinner clothes, reviewing an entertainment of which they had been a part that afternoon. An eerie effect, one that surely Cray was aware of.

  It was not lost on the mayor. He resisted Cray’s gambit, whatever it was. “Alors?” he said. “One of the great landmarks of French cinema, thank you, monsieur.”

  Cray, however, was looking at Clara. Tim followed his eye. Clara had pressed Lars to her bosom, to keep him from seeing the horrid movie scene. She sat, her hand over her mouth, as if the sight of the twitching, dying rabbits had made her sick to her stomach. “Are you all right?” Cray called down the table to her. Without answering, Clara started to rise.

  He knows, she was thinking, that was the message of the shooting of the rabbits, he wants to upset or even shoot me, like the sister rabbit whom the filmmakers had so pitilessly brought down. She had seen it in his expression just now. She was not exactly afraid, but Serge had a side of violence, or wished he did, was drawn to it in his own films, and it was an ugly thing to have shown this film tonight.

  “In America, is it not, monsieur, they kill people, not rabbits?” said the mayor, who had evidently been composing this insult as a parting shot, and now rose to deliver it with a self-satisfied smile. But the timing was off, and it failed to wound with the force he had hoped.

  “It’s an allegory of marriage. Think of the rabbits as husbands,” Cray said to the table. “All the women are very good shots, ha ha.”

  The rabbit was really shot, Clara thought, killed for the film.

  Someone at Cray’s end asked him a question Tim couldn’t hear. Raising his voice so as to be heard generally, Cray went on, “No. Now, of course, we wouldn’t actually shoot the animals. It wouldn’t be allowed, and if you did, the film couldn’t be shown. The production people would have to find me some short-acting paralytic agent to give the bunnies, something that would make them twitch but they’d wake up from. Knocking the birds out of the air would be harder.” His tone was sardonic.

  Yes, he knows, Clara told herself, and into her heart crept not fear but instead the irrational hope that, as he knew, secrecy and forbearance would not be needed, and she could be with Antoine as often as she liked.

  The room suddenly seemed to Tim a stage set not for his own wedding party but for another drama altogether. Was his imagination just disordered about tomorrow, projecting on Cray some rancor he didn’t actually feel? For Tim was remembering the rest of the Renoir film. The loyal retainer, husband of the maid, seeing the wife and the lover in the summerhouse, says something like “Je vais les descendre, tous les deux. ” And eventually he shoots the lover.

  Yes, “I’m going to kill them both” was what the character in the film had said.

  Despite himself, Tim looked to see where Clara and Anne-Sophie were. It didn’t take too much imagination, only a little insider information, to see what was happening, or maybe going to happen here. Cray had some idea, correct or incorrect, about his wife and Antoine de Persand. Since Tim had had the same idea, he reached this conclusion easily. It appeared that Persand also remembered the rest of Rules of the Game. Tim noticed him staring pensively at the shotgun, which Cray now picked up from under his chair. This did introduce a general uneasiness, though it looked like he was going to illustrate some cinematic point, and it was unthinkable that the thing would be loaded.

  “It is axiomatic in the theater,” Cray said. “It is a maxim of Chekhov, that the gun you see in the first act must go off in the third.”

  This was chilling enough. Still, Tim found it hard to make the next leap. In the aftermath of bloody scenes, people often said, “ couldn’t believe it was happening,” or “I didn’t think he would really do it.” The weighing of possibilities and probabilities was delicate. What had a person to lose, to gain? How crazy was he, or how angry? How much did he hate? Tim couldn’t guess what Cray was planning to do.

  Luckily Serge is not one of those men, thought Clara, thinking of all the tales of murdered Saudi sisters, Sicilian blood feuds, battered women in shelters, lovers gunned down. Still she felt her head grow light. Was there danger to Antoine? But of course there was no danger, this was civilization, France, the twentieth century. Anyway, he didn’t know the name of her lover, even if he believed she had one.

  Serge did not think of women as property. Did he? Had no archaic sense of violated manhood. Did he? She thought of the trophy antlers on all the walls of all the local manors. She didn’t know how he knew, but she knew he knew.

  Antlers, horns, age-old symbols so maddening to men. Why?

  “Now, this shotgun is the operative symbol tonight. This is not the first shotgun, I believe, to appear at a wedding, ha ha.” Cray looked through the open barrels. An intimation of alarm, not full-blown, rippled around the table, in the form of giggles and “shshsh.”

  He has often said a man has a right to defend his property, Clara thought. Regarding the newspaper clippings, he was always on the side of people defending their property. She didn’t know Serge, really. He would not shoot at her with Lars sitting right here, but she had to expect vengeance, she saw that. He would make no effort to keep her out of prison. With the thought of jail the future clouded, ended. One might as well be dead; yet she would get through it.

  These thoughts tumbled through her mind, projections of her guilty feelings. Her mind raced. Senhora Alvares was suddenly at her elbow, drawing Lars away. Clara smiled reassuringly at her child, and sent him out of the room, kissing him and making the little fluttering signs with her hands, her eyes never leaving Cray. He would not shoot me with Lars nearby, she was thinking, but now he can.

  “A wedding is, by definition, act one,” Serge was saying calmly. At this he put two shells into the barrels and closed the gun with a definitive click. “Though for some of the guests, tonight may be act three of a different drama.”

  “Attention, monsieur, ” said the mayor, rising and stepping back.

  Cray lifted the gun, aimed over the heads of the guests at one of the splendid gilt chandeliers hanging from the ceiling of the salon beyond, and fired one barrel. The chandelier was revealed to be of papier-mâché; some bits of it were torn by the buckshot and drifted down.

  “Ah,” Cray said.

  Chairs scraped back, people objected, angry voices rose, and laughter too. Some stood and stepped away from the table, but everyone continued to watch with interest, not sure this was not the beginning of a skit or entertainment.

  Now he will shoot me, Clara thought. Her body shrank, cringed, in spite of her spirit.

  Cray turned back to the table, still holding the shotgun. Tim was on his feet, thinking that he must try to get the gun. Feeling people move toward him, Cray rapidly brought the gun up again, looked down it around the table, until he had Clara in his sights. People screamed. As Tim dived toward him, so did Antoine de Pers
and, and, surprisingly, Jerry Nolinger, Tim’s father, who was nearest of the three to Cray. Cray made no effort to retain the gun, releasing it to Nolinger, and smiling his knowing and sarcastic smile at Persand, whose picturesque dive from eight feet away was seen by everybody.

  “I didn’t really doubt that it was you,” Cray said.

  The whole thing was over in seconds. In the sheepish mood of anticlimax, people moved back to the table, trying with concerted insouciance to act as if nothing had happened.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Cray said to his guests. “Didn’t mean to frighten or disturb, go on, go on. Little joke, didn’t mean... There is dancing.” Out of the corner of his eye, Tim noticed Cees returning some object, perhaps a gun, to his pocket.

  Not everyone could hear what Cray had said, and it must have appeared to be no more than an incident where the gun-wary Nolingers and Antoine de Persand had moved responsibly to take the weapon from someone unused to guns, someone a little drunk perhaps. But some people took their leave in a few minutes, all the same, including the Persands, the two Mesdames de Persand looking grim. Clara, eyes as transfixed as an animal’s at night, had not moved, but now she rose and left the table.

  She had seen that Antoine loved her and had risked death.

  She walked to the foyer with various departing guests, chatting with her usual poise, with calm conversation, thanking them for coming, bidding them come again. All remarked on her aplomb—she must have had an anxious moment, with the gun, however accidentally, pointed right at her. From the corner of his eye, Tim thought he had seen her put her hand up, futile against being shot.

  “Shit, I would have been under the table,” said Graves’s wife Sue.

  Antoine couldn’t have known Serge wouldn’t fire (or would he have?), thought Clara, and he had wanted to save her, and now perhaps his wife, seeing what Serge believed, would believe the same thing. She was sorry if trouble came down on Antoine. Or was she? She would have to think about this later.

  Antoine had not spoken to her the whole evening, not even when they arrived, and not upon leaving. They had left so abruptly, there was no time even for that exchange of looks she had hoped to feed upon: eternal love, eternal desire. Yet he had come tonight, and had bravely sprung at Serge.

  So, however, had Tim’s father, whom she didn’t even know. It was the action of a normally chivalrous man, of anyone brave. Tim Nolinger too had been moving toward Serge. She saw the scene indelibly, she would always see it.

  L‘Abbe Des Villons saw the Persands out, his arm around Trudi, who he saw would need spiritual guidance and consolation after a scene she too had understood perfectly: Antoine and the neighbor’s wife. Madame Suzanne de Persand, livid, would not speak to Antoine.

  It is hard to deal with excitement in a foreign language, and one of the aftereffects of the unforeseen moment of drama was that bilingual accord broke down completely. French people spoke to other French people, and the anglophones drew together to talk to each other. Tim and Anne-Sophie persuaded their friends to stay a while longer for the dancing. Anne-Sophie and Tim danced the first dance, but she avoided his eyes.

  The Americans especially crowded around Jerry Nolinger, asking for his account of what had crossed through his mind at the moment he moved toward the armed man, et cetera.

  “The incredible bravery of Jerry Nolinger,” whispered Dorothy Sternholz to Terry Nolinger. “A real American aristocrat.”

  “It was a stage thing, it was staged,” one of the French people said.

  Perhaps it was, for Cray did not behave like a dangerous man who had almost succumbed to a murderous impulse, but more like a man with a Hitchcockian mind who had just demonstrated some Aristotelian principle of the drama or cinematic effect. He wandered among the guests with a pleased little smile, inviting them with studied courtesy to have more champagne. He did not look at Clara.

  She was sorry he knew, sorry, paradoxically, that now Serge would think less of her honesty, of her character. She felt defiant, but it was more the defiance born of centuries of men controlling women. Can you defy what hasn’t expressly been forbidden? Can you have an illicit love affair and also a feeling of perfect rectitude and justification at the same time?

  She foresaw that at leisure, perhaps in the night, a decade of small grievances against Serge would find admittance that she hadn’t allowed in before, his coldness, distance, the fault of not being that attractive, let’s face it, probably people had always wondered how she could stand sleeping with Serge; how had she, anyhow? Thus her heart hardened along the lines dictated by its desires.

  It was not lost on those who had followed the contretemps that Cray was angry with his wife, for which there was a common, well-known explanation, especially in cases where the wife is so much younger and better looking than the husband.

  “Usually money is an equalizing factor,” observed Estelle to Madame Wallingforth. “Cray’s money and fame would balance mere biology, but only up to a point.” .

  “He was often very mean to her, I have seen it,” said Anne-Sophie. “Once when we were there, he called her the stupidest woman in the world.”

  “So you think Persand is her lover?” wondered Tim, thinking about Anne-Sophie’s role in the Driad manuscript, and that he’d never understand that, or her, or women, or what Persand’s secret was, to have lured Clara into his bed, if that indeed was the implication of the little drama, which could also have been simple chivalry.

  “I would never say this to Suzanne,” said Madame Wallingforth, laughing, to Estelle, “but really, her sons should stay home. Look what happened to Charles-Henri.”

  “Especially with Americans involved. Their outlook is so un-evolved,” said Mayor Briac, who had stayed on, chatting with the ladies and quite enjoying the discomfiture of the Crays and the general confusion.

  “Not to say primitive,” agreed Monsieur l‘Abbé, coming back.

  “Out here,” said Anne-Sophie to Tim. “I have something for you—my wedding present to you, I wanted to give it you tonight, tomorrow will be so—”

  “It’s cold out here, it’s pouring rain,” said Tim. “You haven’t got a coat.”

  “Does a woman feel cold on the eve of her nuptials?” This rather sweet thing was said, however, in a tone of crisp asperity. Once they had stepped out on the terrace, Tim saw that Anne-Sophie was shaking with fury, not cold. He touched her cheek. She turned it away from his hand. They sheltered away from the icy drips off the awning.

  She said, enraged, “Going for the gun—how brave of you! But how—how—now the wedding is raté, gâché, spoiled, a complete anticlimax, no one will ever remember anything but this appalling scene, of crazed Americans—sorry, but yes, with their guns waving around, and you might have been shot.”

  “A memorable night? Tim suggested.

  “All revolving around Clara, the darling Clara with her tumultuous bosom, with maddened, jealous, lovesick men all around including the groom—”

  “Don’t be silly, Anne-Sophie,” Tim said, sensing from an irrational note in her voice the extent of the impending storm.

  Anne-Sophie mastered herself, remembering full well the maxims of the countess Ribemont with regard to suggesting to men that other women were beautiful or desirable: “Men are infinitely suggestible. Never plant anything in their minds about the beauty of other women. But be sure never to claim another woman is ugly either, for he will not agree with you, and by suggesting plainness you provoke him to her defense. It is a strategic error to mention other women at all.”

  “Désolée,” “ she said, mastering herself, with her sweet smile. ”It’s just that we don’t get married every day. I feel a little that she has breathed on my star. Of course you do not understand.“

  In fact, Tim didn’t. He didn’t even understand the expression, and anything seemed trivial compared to a tragedy averted, the onset of painful scenes for the Crays and the Persands, bleak inexplicable passions all around, jail—these all seemed so much more importa
nt than Anne-Sophie’s feeling slightly upstaged. “Pull yourself together, it’ll be fine.” It was the wrong thing to say, but his mind wasn’t on tact.

  “Yes, so brave to stop a bullet for Clara, think how sad, no groom at all, the people all gathered—”

  “It doesn’t sound so bad to me,” Tim said, “though I hadn’t quite contemplated death as a way out of this.” He meant this more as a sort of joke, and yet they both realized its utter accuracy. Anne-Sophie fixed him with a flinty stare of complete understanding. Tim saw an inscrutable glint in her eye, an implacable hardening.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. She shoved the cadeau de mariage at him and stalked back into the party. Tim put the package, beautifully wrapped in bridal silver paper, with his coat, planning to open it later.

  If there were those who like Tim were uneasy about what would happen between the Crays, no one gave in to the fear. With the last guests gone, the caterers swarmed around dismantling the tables and bundling the napkins. It was not quite like being alone together. As the candles were put out, the huge room became somber. “Leave one,” Clara said. She helped gather the napkins and did not look at Serge until he planted himself in the kitchen door in front of her.

  “Did you think I’d shoot you?” he asked.

  Her mind raced. “I didn’t know.” The most prudent answer.

  “I might have. I didn’t plan to, only to do the little Agatha Christie/Hitchcock number, where the real murderer cracks under the tension. Of course, not murder in this case. Not that I didn’t know who your boyfriend was anyway.