Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  “But when I had you in my sights, there was a fraction of a second—I could see how it could happen, the irresistible impulse, it could happen—”

  “I’m sorry, Serge,” she said.

  “I understand, Clara. You’ve been upset, you had this ghastly prison experience, Lars—I understand you very well.”

  Oh God, thought Clara, I’m being forgiven. It was the most difficult moral position she could imagine. Was forgiveness the same as getting permission to go on? It was that he didn’t care a whole lot, she suddenly saw. Wounded vanity, maybe, but basically he wanted to get this over, to get on with his movie, his manuscripts. A little warmth of relief crept back into her breast.

  “I’ve always known—you were so young, inexperienced—I always knew you would eventually stray a little if you had any gumption at all. That doesn’t make it easier, I’m hurt of course....” He droned on. She got the gist and couldn’t hear any more, her ears humming, relief drowning out his words.

  “Good night, Serge,” she murmured.

  “I’ll come up with you,” he said. Together they looked in at Lars. As she foresaw, he then came into her room. Contritely she loosed her lavish breasts, and laid her nightgown aside, wondering if this was a large or a small price to pay; in any case she was not alone among womankind in paying it to keep her inner reservations in peace, her forward plans unencumbered. Serge made love to her with an attention and passion he had not shown for months. For Clara it was too late, but luckily he didn’t notice.

  Tim escorted Anne-Sophie, Estelle, and Madame d‘Argel back to the Argels’ house. He himself was staying at the little hotel where he had put up Dick Trent, just on the square opposite the church. He kissed the ladies decorously.

  “Ha ha.” Estelle was laughing. “The great moment when he pointed the gun and Antoine de Persand jumped, and the thing was sewn with a white thread.”

  Anne-Sophie was still steamed. “Stupid theatricals at our wedding party. It’s so sordid and out of place....” Fuming on about it. Finally she broke off abruptly, as if stirred by some thought, and said, “I hope you will never want to shoot me, Teem.” Now she was smiling lovingly; all the same, he knew what she meant, the hope they would never get to that pass, infidelity, anger. “Good night, Teem, don’t forget the registry at eleven.”

  “Right,” he said vaguely, took his leave, and walked across the darkened cobbled square, remembering only now that he had left the wedding present at the Crays’ and would have to get it in the morning. As he went down the corridor of the hotel, he could clearly hear whispers and female giggles coming from Dick Trent’s room.

  59

  Wedding Day

  Tim was amazed to find that the official helping them with the civil formalities at the city hall was the mayor himself, the longtime adversary of Cray whom they had seen at last night’s rehearsal dinner in his hunting costume. The mayor, however, did not acknowledge the connection by any reference to the events of the night before. He gravely showed them where to sign and attest, and indicated that Tim and Anne-Sophie were in fact now married in the eyes of France. It didn’t really seem like it, the whole thing had taken only minutes, though they gazed in one another’s eyes, kissed, looked around at their parents, grinned stupidly. They were separated almost immediately, in any case, by the need for Anne-Sophie to go and dress for the church.

  They kissed goodbye perfunctorily, and Anne-Sophie drove Estelle and Cécile back to Madame d‘Argel’s. Tim and Graves Mueller, who was his witness, decided to go to a bar-brasserie for a pression which turned into several. Tim couldn’t help it, his mind kept returning to the horse figurines, wondering why Anne-Sophie would give them to him. He hosted his friends and his parents at the club in Marne-Garches-la-Tour for lunch, and the hours crept toward the ceremonial hour of four.

  “Or, as they say, ‘sixteen hundred,’ which sounds so much like a bombing raid,” he complained to the others.

  The little eleventh-century Romanesque church of St. Blaise at Val-Saint-Rémy had been added onto in the nineteenth century, with attractive stained glass showing such scenes as the reception of Robert le Pieux, roi de France, by St. Henri, and other scenes from history, all so familiar to Anne-Sophie from the countless times she’d attended this church with her grandmother. Her favorite was Saint Evêque Wolfga. The interior could have been too small and dark for an important wedding, but the big rose window was behind the altar instead of in the transept, so that even with the gray and now stormy weather, enough light was admitted to strike the bride with a flattering pinkish cast, and there was something festive, intimate, and agreeable for a wedding ceremony notwithstanding.

  The bells (early eighteenth century) sounded the hour of three-thirty, their ominous—for so they seemed—call to the assembly, and people who had been sheltering in their cars from the icy rain began to move inside.

  “Alors, ” said Madame Wallingforth. “This weather, you know what it is, don’t you? The Americans use so much of the world’s energy—I heard this on France Inter—they use so much, it creates a kind of suction that destabilizes all the weather patterns, a kind of vortex over the continent of North America that can affect us even over here.”

  The arrival of Clara Holly Cray alone, without her husband, caused a certain amount of stir, because gossip had travelled fast, and the mayor, among others, had been sitting near enough to Monsieur Cray, the crazy American hunting opponent, to notice who it was Cray had had momentarily in his sights, and to observe the little exchange between him and Persand—the lucky devil. He had repeated the story to his companions as they walked home later. Now Cray had not come to the church. Possible irrevocable estrangement was envisioned and word of it had spread.

  “You heard what happened last night at the rehearsal dinner? Her husband threatened to kill her, and three of her lovers wrestled the gun away,” whispered Estelle’s publisher, Monsieur Lepatre, to Anne-Sophie’s colleague Monsieur Lavalle.

  “Three lovers?”

  “The bridegroom, apparently his father as well, and the local squire.”

  “What a menace to the neighborhood! But if she goes to prison, as I hear she will, at least the local wives can sleep unafraid.”

  It was even more delicious when Antoine de Persand, old friend of Anne-Sophie’s family, arrived with his mother but not his wife, and then did not sit with his mother but on the other side of the church, the ostensible reason being that the bride’s side was full. He helped his mother into a pew, then sat down next to Madame Cray with perfect accustomed ease, as though the two belonged together, and though they did not touch or betray any intimacy, Madame Cray’s flushed sidelong glance at him made her emotion clear.

  People could not guess what Antoine de Persand might have said to the women of his household, but to all appearances, and judging from Trudi’s absence, it wasn’t a pledge to reform. As he sat down by Clara, their relationship might almost be a settled thing, one of those social facts people accept with a wink, referring to the well-known Wednesdays (or whenever) of two people, married to others, whose irregular love had been sanctified by a kind of community consensus, this being France, Europe, the Old World, and almost the new millennium.

  Or they would soon tire of each other, go on to other relationships, other turmoil. Human nature was more like that. But Clara and Antoine, apart from strong sexual appetites, had rather calm, loyal natures, so perhaps they would endure.

  A certain consternation developed among the Mademoiselle Decór photographers, who had promised to lurk discreetly at one end of the transept, when they discovered that water had begun to trickle in, seemingly through the wall itself, and roll on toward the feet of the congregated people. Tim and Graves stood in the chapel, waiting for the moment they should stand at the altar. Tim felt sick, a normal feeling, his father had assured him. He reached for his handkerchief; he was sweating. He thought again of the horse figurines. What had she been thinking of? He had spent quite a bit on an emerald ring. He cursed hi
mself for this sort of thought.

  “Just cold feet,” he said to Graves.

  “Not surprising, you’re standing in the icy water,” Graves observed, rather pleased with the joke. But, there being no immediate French counterpart of the expression, “cold feet,” the photographers took it literally. In a panic they tried to find something for the people at the altar to stand on.

  “Monsieur’s feet are cold,” Madame Aix whispered anxiously. “The bride will be wearing little shoes, she will get pneumonia if you cannot find at least a mat.”

  Anne-Sophie, with her mother, maid of honor, and others in her retinue, had finished dressing at her grandmother’s house. Anne-Sophie’s heart began beating powerfully with the idea this was all a terrible mistake, but her uncle Guy leaned in at the doorway of the bedroom, smiled at the acreage of tulle and flowery scents, and said the car was ready.

  A soprano voice from somewhere, the choir loft presumably, began to sing a song by Aaron Copland that chilled Tim with irritation, even as he knew it for the signal for him to do something, come out and stand by the altar. Graves tugged his arm. “Valley of love and delight,” sang the voice in a heavy French accent. “Everything is going to come out all right.” And, more ominously, “Turn, turn.” Turn, turn was the refrain, but it was too late to turn.

  The voice receded, the music changed to the marche nuptiale of Wagner. Somehow, to the diffuse and, to her ears, funereal organ strains, Anne-Sophie walked down the aisle on the arm of her uncle Guy. Tim and others lurked at the altar, all the Americans seeming by their squirming inattention not to realize this was the processional. They were used to the one called “Here Comes the Bride.”

  She glanced at the autel in the side chapel as she walked along, and what she saw confirmed her feeling of dismay—the painting of Mary and many symbols of virginity, lilies and such, whose message she had unwisely been indifferent to until today. There, also, Mary Magdalene. Did Mary Magdalene regret giving up her former raffish life? Her eyes filled.

  She thought of the pilot of the Monday Brothers’ plane, of the handsome Gabriel, wherever he was, of Antoine de Persand, and other men she would not now sleep with. She knew she had to summon enough adrenaline to run away; she waited for an infusion either of adrenaline or of certitude, but neither came to relieve her. A kind of potentiality was removed from the world, an inevitable flatness set in. There was Tim, handsome, rather rosy, as from drink, wearing a tense, panicked smile and the unaccustomed gray costume. Above her, from the rose window, Christ beamed benignly, surrounded by angels, no iconography there that would especially alarm Protestants, thank God, but Tim certainly looked to her overborne anyway.

  As he stood at the altar watching Anne-Sophie coming toward him down the aisle, Tim’s heart quailed, but he saw also that Anne-Sophie was lovely. The people were more numerous on the French side, naturally—a raft of Anne-Sophie’s cousines, friends, uncles, brother, Estelle in a silverish dress sitting in front, with her mother-in-law and her sister, and Monsieur Doroux the academician. Suzanne de Persand looking unusually grim. Perhaps people’s own experience of marriage could be read at such occasions as this, marriage a kind of Rorschach test.

  He could also make out the faces in the audience on his side of the aisle, his friends beaming soberly, their wives in hats; other journalist and tennis friends from Paris, Cees and Marta, his parents and stepmother—these last had apparently swallowed their dispute (which arose from Cécile’s continuing alimony) and sat in the same row—and a few rows behind them on the aisle, Clara, looking radiant, and next to her, her little boy and—Persand, by God.

  The abbé said something quietly to Anne-Sophie and Tim that neither heard clearly, and then aloud to welcome the guests. Several members of the choir sang out, and here Anne-Sophie did take in the words:Dieu vivant, Dieu très haut

  Tu es le Dieu d‘amour

  The words in French of the Mass had a rather soporific effect, combatting the rising rush of the whole experience, these rival sensations producing something like focus for whole instants at a time. Between them Tim drifted off, not thinking about anything except the wish that it be over, the hope that he might not stumble, that the ring would appear and so on—the normal stage fright, he supposed. He could feel the gazes of the audience, the collective weight of their experience of marriage. He heard Anne-Sophie clear her throat.

  The Protestants became restless, waiting for the exchange of vows and of rings, the only part they would recognize of a Mass and in French to boot, though they all agreed it was very beautiful. All knew enough French to concur with the sentiments:

  Porter à deux bonheur et misère

  Tourner vers le même horizon

  Les yeux éclaires d‘une même lumière

  Chanter une même chanson ...

  Now the salient vows to marry them in the eyes of God, and the definitive words by the priest, the exchange of rings. Father Marks, the Anglican, stepped forward and said in English, “Do you Thomas Ackroyd take this woman Anne-Sophie Laure Marie to be your lawfully wedded wife?” and he croaked, “I do.”

  He listened for Anne-Sophie to say the same. The rest receded back into French, a language he spoke perfectly but for some reason could no longer understand. They knelt, moved and daunted by the solemnity of the cadences, and by the collective force of the audience’s will as it directed its approbation toward them. Tim, feeling the unfamiliar ring, remembered his father always saying, “A gentleman does not wear jewelry.” Anne-Sophie, clutching her bouquet, stole a glance at the pretty though smallish emerald and the new gold band on her finger.

  When the priest blessed Anne-Sophie and Tim, Clara’s eyes filled with tears. She saw she had been leading a shallow life, tense and self-involved, but now, she resolved that would all change. Her short martyrdom in prison for the cause of animals would purge her of vice. She had once been struck by some words of Colette: Vice is bad things done without pleasure. Did that mean that pleasure was virtuous? She thought so. Or did it mean that the bad we do with pleasure is virtuous? That sounded more like the marquis de Sade, or some other of those warped French philosophers. Antoine would know.

  “I can’t believe it, they’re passing the hat!” observed Jerry Nolinger in a whisper during the offertory. “These people don’t miss a trick!”

  Singing, praying, it still wasn’t over. L‘Abbé Des Villons gave them communion, even Tim. Some of the older people trundled up to take communion alongside them. Prayer. Magnificat, Magnificat Magnificat anima mea Dominum. They were blessed. They were called on once again to sign their names—dear God! This signing alarmed Tim all over again. The strains of Bach, then of Beethoven—the Hymn to Joy? Impossible hypocrisy, why hadn’t he reviewed the music? He thought he heard Estelle saying, “There’s nothing as depressing as a wedding.” They rushed through the congregation, onto the icy damp stones of the porch.

  60

  The Beginning

  If only they could now thank l‘Abbé Des Villons, wave goodbye to everybody, submit to being pelted with rice, and be transported to Mallorca by thought waves. Alas, they were only going as far as the Trianon Palace in Versailles this first night, then on for a few days in Bilbao and Lisbon, and there was still the reception to get through with its anxious moments at the end, when those not invited to the dinner afterward would surely show no inclination to leave, thus awkwardly delaying the real festivities. There was the relentless weather and the rising river. Some of the local guests who were also parishioners were asked to stay a few moments to help move the pews to the back of the sanctuary as the water mounted higher in the choir, Mademoiselle Decor photographers taking advantage of this hiatus for some posed photos of Anne-Sophie at the church door.

  And then there would be the dinner with its excruciating toasts and skits, the departure—happily Tim and Anne-Sophie could take the lead here, but there would still be the thank-yous and exchanges, the intolerable ennui of the interval between the end of the ceremony and the time when
the guests would turn up at the cocktail reception at the end of the square, and again as they strayed in to dinner (Pussy Lautremont and Dick Trent, Clara Holly and Antoine de Persand principal among those skipping the cocktail but appearing at the dinner, and at that among the last to arrive).

  The dazed bridal couple had now got through most of these events, as far as the dinner. The guests, well served at the reception, were meant to sit down more or less right away when everyone had arrived at Madame d‘Argel’s house. Eighty people were expected, at eight rented tables set up in the living room and dining room. A little card at each place announced the menu:

  Salade de langoustines et parfait de canard à l‘huile de

  noix, Brioche tiède

  Navarin d’agneau

  Buffet des desserts “à l‘américain”

  Petits Fours

  Local women from the boulangerie and the restaurant had been hired to produce the dinner and serve it. In the kitchen, scarves tied around their heads, they put the fires on under the pommes purées and the sauce, while the agneau simmered in the ovens.

  Antoine de Persand, the squire of the neighborhood, normally reserved and autocratic, came in a smiling, don‘t-give-a-damn mood, with compliments for all, solicitude for his mother, and a perfectly open regard for Madame Cray, whose place card he was seen to exchange, moving her from where she had been expected to sit, with her husband (not there) at Tim’s father’s table, to his own. This seemed to some observers to be the last effrontery, considering Suzanne de Persand was also sitting at that table; it was not correct to associate your mistress and your mother. Fortunately, Madame Aix, moving through with a seating chart, saw the error and returned the cards to their predestined places.