L'Affaire

by Diane Johnson

  ‘These historic pieces from the most important castles of Bavaria’ – he indicated the tablecloths present – ‘have been treated in this fashion, as you can see from the perfection of their preservation. The earliest is late eighteenth century, thought to have been in the collection of the empress, though without the imperial monogram – apparently marked with her maiden monogram. The other two are nineteenth century, the one from the English royal household, the other from an important bourgeois Swiss household. The Statler Collection, of which I have the honor to be the curator, has the bulk of surviving imperial linen in Austria today, and an important collection of European linens from foreign royal households, for instance Siamese and Nepalese linens imported originally from Holland in the early sixteenth century.’

  Amy, despite herself, was struck by the romantic image in her imagination of wide-gowned women spreading sheets by moonlight. Nowhere to do that in her Palo Alto condo, but she’d be buying a house eventually. Her mind pictured a vast armoire and folded linen in it. No doubt there was some essential significance to linen she had never been aware of, connecting you to human and especially female history.

  After an agonizing debate with herself, involving a stern interior lecture about money in general, her own ample supply of it, and her plan to devote herself to cultivating such graceful virtues as hospitality, she bought three tablecloths, one an immense sea of snowy damask, eighteenth century; another vast embroidered blue with a scalloped border; the third an historic cloth of hem-stitched ecru, formerly in the possession of a minor Bavarian nobleman, and dozens of napkins for each, at a total cost of nine thousand dollars, this sum itself reassuring as to the perfection of her choices, the eventual success of her dinner parties, though the price was plenty shocking to her practical side. The combined weight of these cloths was such that Mr Hoffmanstuck himself bore them to her room for her. She told herself she ought to be thrilled, but really she had a feeling of dismay at her temerity, especially when elsewhere, though not in Valméri, people were starving. She knew she would have to get over these paradoxical compunctions and learn to spend money casually.

  At dinner, heart still beating with the rashness of her purchases, she had sat as she had promised at the table with young Kip and his little charge, Harry. Though she had no experience with children, she seemed to have a better instinct than Kip for straightening the child’s bib and dabbing at the smears of spinach on his cheeks. Rather grandly, the distinguished kitchen had concocted purees and other baby dishes for Harry. Yet the evening was long for Kip and Amy both.

  Dinner was okay, Kip thought, helping Harry eat took up some time, but then getting him to bed and all – that was no easier than it had been last night. He was never going to become a parent, for sure. Amy had found herself wishing there were at least another grown-up at the table. She had learned that Kip was from Oregon, and that, having no real home after the death of his parents, he had been sent to a boarding school in Squaw Valley, California, dedicated to ski and snowboard competitions, and getting you through the SATs eventually. This school was being paid for by Adrian, his sister’s husband, a very nice guy, in Kip’s view. Adrian had also paid for this trip, at the semester break. Amy assured him she was familiar with Squaw Valley, had skied there herself years ago.

  Their conversation, after it had surveyed his school, his hopes, the fate of his parents, and the medical situation, had faltered. ‘Tomorrow, if it’s nice, and Harry’s baby-sitter works out, you and I can make a few runs,’ she proposed. Kip politely agreed, though he knew there were few adults at the hotel, from what he had seen, who were at his level, and he’d be obliged to modify his speed and go on skis, not snowboard. But he didn’t really mind, and he was glad to have Amy to talk to, someone concerned for his situation.

  ‘Harry doesn’t know what’s happening,’ Kip confided. Of course not, Amy started to say, but she saw that it was because Kip was young himself that this surprised him. Children must attribute sentience to fellow children in a way adults don’t. She was touched at her own perception that this tall male being was still a kid, as close to Harry’s age as to hers, or, as she was nearly thirty, closer.

  ‘The hotel guy wanted me to go through Adrian’s stuff, before the people from England came. I didn’t like to do it, but what if I need something, like for Harry?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I took some money,’ he confided. She could see it was on his mind. ‘I’m keeping track, though.’

  ‘Yes, it’s okay, you have to have a way of paying for things,’ Amy agreed. ‘Does he seem to miss his mom?’

  ‘He cries a lot at night. He wakes up.’

  Later, Amy had a couple of drinks in the village with Paul-Louis, her new ski instructor. Amy had signed up with the handsomest ski instructor, because it was not strictly true that she didn’t intend to meet men, she just intended not to get seriously involved with one. This didn’t rule out having some fun, and she had decided beforehand that a ski instructor, with whom she would enroll for the two-week session, would likely be her choice of companion. To be an après-ski escort was an accepted role for a ski instructor, one he would have had experience with and therefore be uncomplicated about. She hoped for someone good looking and also French, which, keeping in mind her wish for cultural breadth, would put any relationship into the realm of research. By now she had also the poet Robin Crumley (‘well known in England,’ the princesse had whispered); she ruled out Joe Daggart, who was attractive but American – he had rather vaguely described his job in Geneva as ‘extradition negotiator.’ She also reserved the Baron Otto option, though he was somewhat older, probably in his forties, and Austrian, which was not far from being a German.

  In the long run, men weren’t in her plan. When Amy’s good fortune had become known in her family (why did they think of it as ‘good fortune’ instead of ‘Amy’s brilliant coup’?), after suggestions about how she might help out her needy sister Nan, and a few of her cousins, came the cautionary tales about the notorious bad judgment of rich women when it came to men; and there was also that dreaded hazard for female heiresses, the gigolo, and the fortune hunter.

  Her aunt Sarah pressed on her biographies of forlorn Doris Duke, pathetic Barbara Hutton, Peggy Guggenheim, and there were Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. There were elderly maidens taken in by scoundrelly young male factotums – gardeners and secretaries who schemed eventually to inherit. There were the much married who squandered their fortunes in alimony and payoffs for a succession of handsome but sleazy Eurotrash racing-boat husbands. (Did they never meet some nice doctor or accountant?) There were smoking, alcoholism, suicide, and deaths under suspicious circumstances. There were nice American heiresses married off to English lords who betrayed them and took their money, girls stranded in Europe bereft of their fortunes by sexist, retrograde European marriage laws. There were fragile, vulnerable actresses and tense women CEOs. There seemed to be no examples of ordinary happiness.

  ‘Here, honey, I picked this up somewhere, I thought you might find it interesting,’ her mother and aunts were always saying. Amy didn’t read these books, but she glanced at the jacket copy and more than once leafed through to the ending, or far enough to get the idea. Paradoxically, such tales had not induced a mistrust of men – she got along with men – but only scorn for the women who had let themselves get so messed up. She understood the historical reasons for this – they were mostly women without professions or interesting work, socialized in a day when being married defined you; even geniuses like Georgia O’Keeffe had been born under the influence of the universal belief that a woman must be married. And the rich ones probably had hideous overprotected childhoods. Everyone knew you couldn’t be born rich and be well adjusted.

  But in her case, as she didn’t plan to marry just yet, there was no need to forgo male company in the meantime. She hoped she would recognize insincerity when she met it, but it was important to preserve wonder and joy, and not become suspicious and paranoid. She kne
w all this, and was not suspicious or paranoid by nature, so was not apt, she hoped, to fall prey to one of the unlovely fates. And her heart, she knew, was impervious.

  This was not in her view a good thing. At some level, she wished for her heart to be broken, or in some other way to indulge the potentiality for emotion and passion that she knew must lie somewhere beneath her practical commonsense surface. At least she hoped it did, and from time to time wondered if, maybe, it didn’t, and she really was just a stable, contented, commonsensical person with no depths at all. It was her greatest fear.

  She couldn’t remember whether she or Paul-Louis had proposed the drink. He explained the village of Valméri like a tour guide: it had kept its timbered, indigenous structures, two-storied dwellings with stalls on the lower floors to winter cows in, their warmth and odors rising to comfort a shivering family during the freezing months. Most of these barn levels had now been converted to mother-in-law apartments or for lodging skiers during the winter. There were small hotels, galleries for art, and expensive retail objects – watches, furs, elaborate ski costumes, boots. A post office, meteorology station, railroad ticket agent, ski rentals, the cinema, concert hall and skating rink, a dozen restaurants, and the vast building that housed the ski gondolas which nested at night like spoons. A mood of frivolity in every bar reigned amid the faint odor of what smelled like grass to Amy – but could have been the local tobacco, or even linament. Otherwise it didn’t seem a very wild scene – there was probably more cocaine in Silicon Valley, by far – but this was restful and here she felt less square than she felt, or used to feel, in the high-tech, high-stakes world at home.

  Paul-Louis had a regular hangout where they went, drank a couple of beers, and shouted over the lame European hip-hop. He walked Amy back fairly early, they had another beer in the bar of the Croix St Bernard, and then Amy said good-night and went off to do her French lesson and go to bed, tired and bemused. All was working out as she had hoped, almost. Here were interesting people enough, knowledge in the abstract, and experience. Culture, as she had imagined it – a rich concoction of art and music discussed in old languages with assured taste – wasn’t here exactly unless you counted the refinements of the dining room, but culture could wait for Paris.

  The tablecloths, she decided, were on track, but Paul-Louis had been a little disappointing. In their nightly talks, her financial manager, Sigrid, had laughed, and elaborated on her advice to go have affairs in the no-fault climate of a European ski resort. ‘Why else go there?’ Sigrid tended to think men were good for one thing only, but Amy often liked them for themselves. Not that he wasn’t attractive – he was, very, with his deep tan and prominent European nose. But, flattered by her evident interest in him, he had spent the evening telling her of the procedures necessary for getting into pharmacy school, how many of the exams he had passed, or flunked the first time, how shaky his future if he weren’t to pass the next one, the difficulties of living in Aix if you were used to the Savoie, how many of his friends had just opted to stay in the Alps at ski-related jobs, in his view relatively dead end, plus many ended up dead eventually, in avalanches and other accidents, as had happened to the brother of a friend. She did manage to pin him down on a couple of her issues, such as the new parabolics, or her problem unweighting into the left turn, but things were far from moving toward the romantic. However, she told herself, the ice was broken, and things could develop slowly if they were meant to.

  She was impressed by Europeans, definitely – their education, the breadth of their culture. Even Paul-Louis had more general information than she did. But she was also disoriented. So much to do, so little time, as Winston Churchill said, of something or other. Despite herself, she knew about corporate buyouts. What did she know about poetry, about meter and stanza form, music, tradition, masterpieces? About world religion, Hinduism, Buddhism? The white-wine glass, the red-wine glass? What was a godet? What was the line between despair and cynicism, between taste and vulgarity – a word she had often heard used about the houses her friends were building? How to make a soufflé such as the remarkable soufflé of cheese and anchovy they had been served at dinner? She recognized that it was not going to be easy to be rich, it was a project and a job, and she knew she must now be wary of the capricious frivolity that often overtook people in her situation. She had seen her friends suddenly take up hot-air ballooning and expensive incunabula. How much more virtuous her own aims, how much less attainable.

  13

  After a dinner of omble in wine, pommes dauphine, eaten in a depressed, inattentive mood, Posy and Rupert Venn went to sit in the lounge bar, where people congregated for coffee and drinks, and a pianist and a bass player took requests for old American show tunes and more Russian folk music. They chose a banquette against the end wall away from the bar, around which merry guests circled on their drinks missions, and away from the musicians, who were improvising the Russian songs. She recognized ‘The Volga Boatman.’ The people singing tearfully in deep Boris Gudenov voices must be Russians. Rupert drank a beer and then suddenly said he was going to bed. He had to get up early for the unwanted excursion to Father’s coffer. He had a put-upon air that irritated Posy.

  ‘I hate to go. I have the feeling Father will die if I don’t watch him,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be watching for the two of us,’ Posy assured him.

  ‘Yes, but what if he dies when I’m not there?’ They agreed that could happen, but didn’t believe it would. In his heart, Rupert believed that Posy would somehow mess up the job of sitting by Father’s bedside; on the other hand, it was only he who could speak French to Mr Delamer.

  *

  When Posy sat alone in the bar, people spoke pleasantly to her, she to them, but nothing ripened into a conversation, nor did she care. She saw Kip come in, order a Coke, and sit at one end of the bar. Posy might have talked to him but didn’t – she knew she wasn’t being very nice to Kip, but she supposed she was angry about Harry’s existence, and the wife’s, neither thing Kip’s fault. She couldn’t bring herself to get involved with him or to go down to the hospital one more time tonight, which she supposed she ought to. Now the American blonde with the long braid who had sat with Kip at dinner entered with a tan chap who looked like a ski instructor. Posy admired the poise and confidence of American girls – sometimes verging on the brash – admired their boyish clothes. This one was talking to Kip and motioned him over to sit with them. Posy wondered what their connection was, Americanness, no doubt.

  Her mood, between grief and a passive, rather comfortable acceptance of waiting at this hotel, suited her. There was nothing she could do but sit smoking in an agreeable Alpine refuge, and she had the feeling of anonymity and freedom that vacationers experience, despite this not being vacation but a painful family trauma. Making an effort to stop thinking about her own situation, she directed her attention outward, and couldn’t help noticing the handsome man who sat down near her reading a newspaper from the rack of newspapers on sticks.

  Posy, looking at him, experienced a strange visceral turmoil, out of the blue having the irrational image of herself putting her lips to his brown throat, where his collar was open, where a pulse must beat, feeling his life at her lips. She shivered; it was the image of herself as a vampire. Had she been staring? His dark eyes met her blue stare; she looked at her shoes, her breath taken away by the horrible inappropriateness of her thoughts at this time, but it must have something to do with Father, mustn’t it, these thoughts of life beating, life force? Death and – this – were related; it was all in Thomas Mann, it was in nature.

  Despite these compunctions, Posy smiled. He nodded civilly and looked again at his paper, evidently considering whether conversation was inevitable, then looked up again, acknowledging her empty glass.

  ‘Would you like something? I’m just getting myself a cognac,’ he said in French. He was amazingly good looking, she thought.

  ‘Non, merci,’ she said.

  ‘A brandy?’ he repe
ated in English. ‘Please, allow me.’

  ‘Oh, well, thanks,’ she reconsidered, recognizing that this simple exchange, the essence of a classical pickup, would commit her to conversation and to staying up awhile longer, though she was actually dead tired after driving through the night last night. He went over to the little bar and came back with two cognacs in big snifters.

  ‘I’m Emile Abboud,’ smiled the handsome man, his face somehow harmonizing a manly square jaw with graceful curves of eyebrow, lashes, cleft chin shadowed with beard, upcurving lips displaying a smile of astounding whiteness. She heard his name as Abbot, or maybe Booth, and he had pronounced it with a certain flourish, as if she ought to have heard it before.

  ‘I’m Posy,’ she said.

  ‘Anglaise ou américaine?’

  ‘English.’ And she certainly wasn’t going to struggle on in French. His English was fine, she saw, even his accent was not too pronounced.

  ‘So I thought. I was just now reading the words of your prime minister, so sycophantic in his pro-American effusions. Do you find him so? Sycophantic and pro-American? A lackey to the American president, a bully and a liar?’

  ‘I suppose he is,’ Posy admitted. ‘I’ve given up thinking about politics. Politicians are so dreadfully boring.’ Though she was not in the habit of picking up men in bars, it came to her as almost primal knowledge that since they were required to expend so many words, and get through so many minutes of conversation, before reaching the right stage of alcohol-abetted friendliness, the right feeling of camaraderie, attraction, and accord that could then run to further things, or not – this was only an incubation period, and they might as well talk about politics while coming down with the full-blown thing. But politics wasn’t her strongest subject. For instance, who was the prime minister of France? She was suddenly blank on that.