L'Affaire

by Diane Johnson

  But his head was spinning with new problems, that he’d have to sleep in Kerry’s room tonight or else bring Harry down to his, which would mean transporting all that baby gear. With this, it was as if he had pulled out the one thought that had held back the barrelful of other worrying thoughts, so that the other thoughts now came rushing out – about Harry’s clothes and how to pay the chambermaid if he could get her to help tomorrow, could he put it on the hotel bill, how many days would Kerry be in the hospital? Beneath all these thoughts was the main fear about Kerry, and, of course, Adrian, two immobile forms encircled by gurgling tubes and an eerie blue light in a strange Alpine hospital in a land where he could not speak to anybody.

  So he was really relieved when the next person who spoke to him was the pretty blond woman with long braided hair he had seen in the dining room sitting by herself. That had seemed funny to him. Mostly when people sat alone, they read a book or something, but she just sat in a sort of calm glow he had liked, compelling attention. Other people looked at her too. He thought she might be a foreign person, but now when she spoke, her voice was reassuringly American.

  ‘Hi, I’m Amy. I was just wondering if I could help you in any way.’

  6

  Amy Hawkins was in the process of changing her life. In a man it would be called a midlife crisis, but she was too young for that, and for her it was more an adventure, and a meditated series of philosophical decisions regarding which things were truly important, such as the meaning of it all, and the uses of charity. Till now, her main existential affair had been with the company she had helped start, and realizing this had opened her eyes to the fact that life was fleeting by with so much else left to do, and soon she would be thirty.

  Like many such revisionist moods this feeling came on after a life change: she had found herself unemployed. The company had been sold, she got an enormous sum of money, and now had to find other things to do. Two of her colleagues – the techie geniuses Chris and Neal – had found roles in Dootel, the company that had bought them out, but her own contribution – administrative oversight, writing the speeches, suggesting policy – was not definable or even transferable. As their good idea had taken fire, it had also been helped along by organizational strategies garnered from her taking an MBA course and two years of law. Not to mention her initial investment of ten thousand dollars. The ideas, the creativity had been her friends’, but the start-up money hers, the practical tactics hers too, and also occasional design suggestions, which they took more often than they realized. She had been important, she felt, her role becoming more and more responsible as the company grew.

  Though in some ways she knew she had come miles since it all started, in other ways she felt she had gone nowhere. When it all began, she was still gawky, a nerd herself, impatient to come into beauty and power, but now that she had, it was too late to reverse her secret earnestness or lose the common sense that had kept her useful in the practical affairs of a modest start-up. It was her common sense that had prompted her prudently to cash out her stock and options at the top of the NASDAQ, at the moment their company was acquired by Dootel for almost a half billion dollars.

  At first, a slight estrangement had existed between her and the other founding partners, Chris and Neal, over the size of her share of the buyout, which by contract was huge but they thought morally unwarranted. Things had been a little strained with Neal anyway since Amy and he had tried living together for a brief time, one of several serious affairs that had not worked out but had not distressed her much either. In the end, there was so much money that no one could complain. But Amy, unlike Chris and Neal, was faced with the lack of a new role. Of the two other partners, Ben had already invested in large tracts of land in Patagonia to set aside as a nature preserve, and Forrest had turned to extreme sports.

  Amy had travelled some – to the Greek islands, for instance – but it had not taken her long to realize that such trips were mere diversions and made no permanent alterations in her character, at least that she could feel. True, she now had an impression of, say, the difference between Ionic and Doric, but could have got the same from photos and books. She herself had not been changed, any more than by her several relationships with perfectly nice men who had not, somehow, touched her. She was embarrassed by her money, had not yet learned how to feel about it, and could not forget that nouveau riche was a term so dismissive that for English speakers it had been left in the original French, like terms for other harsh concepts – coup de grâce, or savoir faire.

  Eventually, she supposed, she would learn to be rich, but for now she hoped to grow from a corporate drone into being a better, more aware human being, more creative at her work, a better woman in the area of domestic accomplishments she hadn’t had time for but felt she would enjoy, skills like skiing she had always wanted to improve. She would pay more attention to her friends and relatives, develop more disciplined personal habits, and perhaps have a baby (big question mark).

  She’d been accused of frivolity when she announced that before taking up a new job as director of her personal foundation, she planned to spend some time in Europe learning to cook and speak French. Frivolity was what she hoped for. She wasn’t troubled by the shallowness of these pursuits; looked at one way, everything was shallow, and from another perspective everything had innate interest and the power to enlarge. For now she was in the perfect zone of receptivity. Above all, her resolutions concerned the acquisition of knowledge, or rather, culture, in its broadest sense, though she was under no illusion that she could do more than a crash course.

  What had caused her sudden consciousness that she lacked a sense of the world was not entirely clear to her, but she dated her quest for self-improvement from a chance remark overheard in an antique shop. She’d been in Seattle, with a morning to kill before her plane, and was browsing in the old streets near the art museum. A part of town in transition – upscale book shops alongside pawnshops and gun dealers, English antiques, vendors of clocks and nautical instruments, local designers. In one shop, the owner was talking to someone else, Amy was listening, couldn’t help overhearing.

  ‘Why is this stuff so overvarnished like this, it’s ruined,’ said the woman who had come in a few minutes before. ‘You have some nice English pieces here, but they’re ruined.’

  ‘That’s how they like it around here. It’s the dotcommers. They don’t know anything, and they think it ought to be shiny. So we revarnish it.’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ mourned the woman. ‘Can’t you explain it to people? Concepts of the original, concepts of restoration?’

  ‘No one has taught them anything. If it weren’t for Martha Stewart the whole culture would be down the drain. It’s amazing the things they don’t know. They don’t know ironing, or how to set a table. Their mothers didn’t teach them, their mothers worked. Their mothers didn’t know!’

  ‘They can afford people to teach them. Consultants, decorators.’

  ‘They don’t know what they don’t know, so they don’t think of asking.’

  This was no instant epiphany for Amy, it had merely stimulated her to wonder who ‘they’ were – presumably people of her own age who had made money in the dotcom world, as she had herself. More tantalizing was the question of the knowledge they, or she, didn’t have, the questions they didn’t ask. In a way this didn’t trouble her – it was obvious there was a lot of stuff she didn’t know and questions she hadn’t asked. She knew what she needed to know. But it was interesting to wonder what these two blue-haired women knew, or felt they knew, that she didn’t. Things about antique furniture, yes, but their tone, and the reference to the housework guru Martha Stewart, implied a wider store of lore usually purveyed by mothers, equated with culture itself, endangered at that. And Amy didn’t know any of it.

  From then on, daily, the world brought her new evidence of her lack of culture, her ignorance and inexperience – and that of her colleagues, for sure. She thought they were worse than she because they did
n’t think of asking big questions. She felt in a way that it was her patriotic duty to refute by her own example the things people were always saying about Americans, that they were too self-absorbed and had no head for history, nor any culture to speak of.

  It was this that had brought her to her idea about about promoting mutual aid, both the idea and the great book by that name. Prince Kropotkin’s simple observation had always excited her, never mind the political implications. Their teacher, Miss Steinway, hadn’t stressed them or perhaps hadn’t detected the protosocialist ideas that would have alarmed the parents of the nice young ladies in her charge. Or maybe not. As the author of Mutual Aid was a prince, Prince P. Kropotkin, how subversive could he have been? Of course the idea of mutual aid was more complicated than just charity or simple cooperation. It implied a whole philosophy, a rooted behavior. The pioneers had shown it at barn raisings and sewing bees. (Prince Kropotkin had not mentioned these superb American examples that had allowed her forebears to conquer adversity and eventually everything else.)

  And Amy had been raised to believe in giving something back, so ever since high school she had had in mind that she’d like someday to devote her personal resources – money, in particular – to furthering the work of mutual aid by making P. Kropotkin’s writings better and more generally known. She thought something along the line of the Gideon’s, a copy of his great work in every hotel room. This and other activities would be the focus of the foundation she had established and would run when she got back to California, when she was herself a better-rounded person.

  Promoting mutual aid, like personal roundedness, seemed a manageable, definable goal, a worthwhile and virtuous goal, a goal she believed in, setting aside P. Kropotkin’s totally ridiculous political philosophy, which, however, had probably been appropriate for his day and Russian nationality. She herself yielded to no one in her enthusiasm for the kind of American capitalism that had rewarded her brainy, creative friends and even herself for her useful but stolid role in their fortunes. America was the best country, hands down, but it didn’t have everything, and nothing precluded your trying to acquire some of the delightful features Europeans seemed to have built into their lives, like the long, long ski runs. You just didn’t find these in Aspen.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ she said efficiently to Kip. ‘So far it’s all rumor.’

  ‘Number one, you’ll need a baby-sitter,’ she decided, when he had finished telling her about Kerry and Harry and Tamara, the cross chalet girl. Kip was disappointed she herself didn’t offer to baby-sit, for she radiated competence, but even so his eyes stung with gratitude that there was another American who would know what to do. He could have cried, but he knew he was too old.

  7

  Amy had already had breakfasted and was putting on her ski clothes when the phone rang. It was her worldly and kindly advisor, Géraldine Chastine, the friend of her friend Pat’s aunt, calling from Paris in a state of excitement. She had just read in the morning paper that Adrian Venn had been buried in an avalanche. Adrian Venn was someone Géraldine knew. Had Amy heard any details?

  It had not crossed Géraldine Chastine’s mind that anyone she knew could be caught in an avalanche, even less that the avalanches would change the life of her daughter Victoire. But a shock lay in store for her when she turned on the TV news that morning. Of several people engulfed in the Alpine catastrophes, Adrian Venn was famous enough to be mentioned by name as a headline: ‘Noted English Publisher Among Victims in Alpine Slide.’ She felt a pulsation of some note of satisfaction.

  She was surprised at her own reaction. Now she found that as she stared at the TV and searched on other channels for more details, she was breathing shallowly, rapidly, like an animal, her cheeks scalding. The memory of her brief time with Adrian Venn was suddenly resurrected with the same visceral distress he had caused her then. Venn had provided her with her sole experience of being hated, of being mistreated, of being exposed to sarcasm and derision, of being bruised and slapped, all this thirty years ago but as present to her now as it had been then, though it had lain hidden for all the time in between. She could once more hear his English voice with its sneering imitation of her accent, uttering cruel remarks about her housekeeping, personal things.

  She was glad her husband, Eric, was at the office, he would be bound to notice how shocked she was, not at the death but at being pulled into this state by something she had long since thought behind her. It had been inside her all this time, probably poisoning her and bringing on cancer, as evil emotions were known to do. Her life was in peril, in a way, unless she could evict these feelings. She struggled to master them at once.

  The unforgettable thing was that she, her person, had disgusted him. Once he had asked her to bathe, though she had just bathed. ‘All women smell horribly,’ he had said once. ‘Not just you. You haven’t noticed? Females. Men just overlook it, they have to.’ Other smells had upset him too – ineffable intrusions of the material world on his consciousness otherwise focused on words, beauty, drawings, or books. Even then he had been specially fascinated by calligraphy, and poems in shape of words, and the strange forms of exotic alphabets.

  She had never told anybody about this shame, and had only borne it for a few months. Being asked to bathe was something she had never forgiven, it pressed on her breast even now. And because of this passage in her life, she had always felt herself to have had a shameful past, had felt this shadow of distance between her and other women of her age and class and background. No, it wasn’t Victoire’s birth that had given her this shame that drove her even now, it was that she had had the bad judgment to have taken up with Adrian Venn.

  Now, though she had not known herself to be a vengeful person, she found herself thinking, Good: if he dies, Vee will have some money.

  Because her father had been a diplomat in America, Géraldine had gone to college there, and had now developed a sort of professional specialty, acting as a personal organizer and counselor for the many American women who came to Paris wishing to change their lives, learn to cook, acquire French, or simply meet Frenchmen, after unpleasant and/or lucrative divorces back home. There were a lot of these, along with the odd widow, and because all of them needed to find Parisian gyms, personal trainers, language teachers, and cookery schools, Géraldine had made a good thing out of it. She was now well known in both the French and the American communities in Paris, and trusted.

  At first she had advised people from simple good nature – she had good connections and liked being of help. Because of this, her classmates at Wellesley had begun to call on her, or direct their friends to call on her, with increasing frequency. She had always been glad to help; she understood the personal dissatisfactions and the specifically Paris-based projections of hopes for a new life that brought a certain number of Americans to Paris each year to reinvent themselves. When the calls had become too numerous for her to handle, gradually a fee structure had evolved. It had shocked some of them a little, at first, to be asked to pay for friendly advice from a friend of a friend, but they came to see it as reasonable.

  As her business expanded, Géraldine brought in some American women living in Paris to help her. She knew Americans who were going away leaving apartments to rent, knew the directors of cooking schools, knew interior decorators of both nationalities, penniless teachers of French, and so on. By now she had a little Mafia of American women who had shops, or did personal shopping, or interior decoration, or taught Pilates System exercises to the newer arrivals, who were always so relieved to be able to avoid speaking French. This activity kept her busy and surrounded by friends. Putting people together with people they should meet suited Géraldine’s motherly and worldly nature, and made a little money, though Eric was well off, was an executive at L’Oréal, a cosmetics firm.

  Géraldine had often sent people to Monsieur Jaffe’s cooking school at the Hôtel Croix St Bernard in the summers – for instance, very recently she had sent another American woman there for t
he skiing who had had a wonderful time. So she knew the place would be perfect for Amy. She had understood something about Amy’s situation from her school friend, who on the telephone seemed a bit reserved about l’Américaine in a way that hinted at much: ‘She’s a girl who has done very, very well, and thinks she’d like to spend six months or so over there. She’s apparently done so well… I guess she thinks she’s earned a little time off…’ Of course, neither of them really knew how well was well, or, more to the point, what the girl’s taste was.

  Even before meeting Amy, she had marshalled her troupe of decorators and real estate ladies to begin preparing Amy’s apartment in Paris, for it was in the Paris phase of Amy’s sojourn that Géraldine expected to do her the most good. First of all she had called her friend Tammy de Bretteville, who had a private real-estate consultation business serving other Americans, primarily on the Web. ‘Be on the lookout for an apartment de standing, with a couple of bedrooms. An American friend is sending me a darling girl – at least she sounds darling, and she’ll be needing something, I’m told she will want something quite nice.’

  ‘Will she lease or buy? If we find something right away, Mr Albinoni would be free in March to do the kitchen,’ Tammy said. ‘I’ll pencil in March.’

  ‘Louis Which?’ Wendi Le Vert, the interior designer, had wondered about the general emphasis of the decor.

  ‘Tous les Louis, I would think,’ said Géraldine, ‘with contemporary accents.’ When she finally met Amy, briefly, at the Aéroport Charles de Gaulle where Amy was to change planes for Geneva, though she thought her lovely looking, so dimpled and creamy-skinned, she also understood that Amy had no taste of any kind, and it was this she wanted to remedy. Amy interested her – the girl’s unpretentiousness, evident intelligence, and somewhat unfilled mind, a remarkable tabula rasa ripe for European impressions and perhaps emotional experiences. Géraldine’s clients were usually hoping for a sentimental adventure; but she had not detected in Amy the usual restless qualities that signalled such a need.