Le Mariage Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 - Clara

  Chapter 2 - Tim

  Chapter 3 - Anne-Sophie

  Chapter 4 - What Anne-Sophie Saw

  Chapter 5 - La Virtue

  Chapter 6 - Delia’s Story

  Chapter 7 - Dernier Train

  Chapter 8 - Sunday Morning

  Chapter 9 - Hotel Le Mistral

  Chapter 10 - Goddess of the Hunt

  Chapter 11 - Will You Wear White?

  Chapter 12 - Tears at the Tennis Club Marne-Garches-la-Tour

  Chapter 13 - Who Is Tim?

  Chapter 14 - Where Is Gabriel?

  Chapter 15 - The Clipping Box

  Chapter 16 - Illuminating Manuscripts

  Chapter 17 - The Invitations

  Chapter 18 - The Houseguest

  Chapter 19 - At Madame du Barry’s

  Chapter 20 - Hospitality

  Chapter 21 - The Driad Apocalypse

  Chapter 22 - The Arrest of Monsieur Savard

  Chapter 23 - Confidences

  Chapter 24 - The Arrest

  Chapter 25 - Prison

  Chapter 26 - Have You Heard What Happened to Clara?

  Chapter 27 - The Prisoner

  Chapter 28 - Stir-Crazy

  Chapter 29 - Word from Gabriel

  Chapter 30 - Out on Bail

  Chapter 31 - Clara and Delia

  Chapter 32 - Cave Canem

  Chapter 33 - The Shadow of the Altar

  Chapter 34 - The Hunting World

  Chapter 35 - Take It Off, Take It Off

  Chapter 36 - Tim and Antoine Talk

  Chapter 37 - Public Opinion

  Chapter 38 - Lunch at the Persands

  Chapter 39 - A Walk in the Woods

  Chapter 40 - The American State of Mind

  Chapter 41 - Cécile

  Chapter 42 - Principles

  Chapter 43 - Self-Denial

  Chapter 44 - Lunch Date

  Chapter 45 - Chestnuts from Suzanne de Persand

  Chapter 46 - Pyramid Power

  Chapter 47 - Take Me to the Shining Shore

  Chapter 48 - Lust

  Chapter 49 - Oregon

  Chapter 50 - Guinevere Worries

  Chapter 51 - Snowbound

  Chapter 52 - Meanwhile Back in Paris

  Chapter 53 - Farewell to the New World

  Chapter 54 - Real Life

  Chapter 55 - Countdown to the Altar

  Chapter 56 - Rehearsal Afternoon

  Chapter 57 - The Crays Entertain

  Chapter 58 - The Rules of the Game

  Chapter 59 - Wedding Day

  Chapter 60 - The Beginning

  Acclaim for Le Manage

  “A subversive ... culture-clashing comedy of manners ...

  A bonbon of a novel as deliciously diverting as a visit

  to a French candy shop.”

  —USA Today

  “A witty romp.”

  —Elle

  “Supremely twisty storytelling meets bone-dry francophilic wit.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “The literary equivalent of a spring tonic: invigorating and

  uplifting, a burst of comic sunshine ... Inspired ... Johnson’s

  characters command our full attention ... Sophisticated drama.”

  -New York Daily News

  “Johnson [whips] love and marriage into a

  frothy souffle ... delicious.”

  -Entertainment Weekly

  “Another charming comedy of manners set in the City of Light.”

  -The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Entertaining ... Johnson takes delight in her characters.”

  —The New York Times

  “Filled with sharp observations ... In classic madcap fashion, Johnson stirs many characters and strands into Le Mariage.”

  -New York Newsday

  “A witty, farcical French soufflé ... You don’t have to be a francophile to enjoy this clever novel.”

  —The Arizona Daily News

  “Diane Johnson has 20/20 eyes for the absurd, an acute focus for

  incongruent moments that spark and fizz when wildly disparate

  people and cultures collide ... Delicious.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Plot meets panache in this intercontinental novel ... a comedic meditation on love and adultery.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “A delicious and delightful book ... Johnson is a serious

  social critic as well as a literary one ... She writes

  with charm and hilarity.”

  —The Sunday Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)

  “Johnson juggles a clever plot and complex characters with both

  wit and soul ... A sophisticated adventure and a sparkling

  comedy of manners.”

  —New York Post

  “Johnson is a beguiling writer and a master storyteller ...

  Le Mariage is a near-perfect novel.”

  —Salon.com

  “Johnson’s characters are flawed, and all the more human for that, as they jostle for their share of affection in an imperfect world ... [She] once again opens a window on the world of American expatriates in Paris.”

  —The Washington Times

  “Rendered with a wicked wit ... Hilarious.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “With piercing insight and urbane humor, Johnson explores

  the enigma of Gallic life through the baffled eyes

  of Americans abroad.”

  —Nylon

  “With Le Mariage, Johnson lays claim to the legacy of Henry James.”

  —amazon.com

  “Delightful... [Imbued with] a contemporary satirical wit ... Thrown into the entertaining mix is Johnson’s perceptive and witty insights on love, marriage, and Anglo-French relations.”

  -Library Journal

  ALSO BY DIANE JOHNSON

  FICTION

  Le Divorce

  Health and Happiness

  Persian Nights

  Lying Low

  The Shadow Knows

  Burning

  Loving Hands at Home

  Fair Game

  NONFICTION

  Natural Opium

  Terrorists and Novelists

  Dashiell Hammett

  Lesser Lives

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Previously published in a Dutton edition.

  First Plume Printing, April 2001

  Copyright © Diane Johnson, 200
0

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:

  Johnson, Diane.

  Le mariage : a novel / by Diane Johnson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-15389-5

  1. Journalists—France—Paris—Fiction. 2. Americans—France—Paris—Fiction.

  3. Paris (France)—Fiction. 4. Art thefts—Fiction. 1. Title.

  PS3560.O3746 M37 2000

  813’.54—dc21 99-089849

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  Version_3

  To the memory of Alice Adams and William Abrahams

  What the artist calls good, the object of all his playful pains, his life-and-death jesting, is nothing less than a parable of the right and the good, a representation of all human striving after perfection.

  —Thomas Mann, Homage to Kafka

  1

  Clara

  It was widely agreed among the other Americans in Paris that Clara Holly had the ideal life here, and people also agreed that if her good fortune had distanced her slightly from the normal lot of Americans, even from human beings generally, it hadn’t made a monster of her as often seems to happen to women in her category—beautiful, rich, well married, far from her Oregon beginnings. Sometimes women in this category, married to Europeans, are seen to acquire unplaceable mid-Atlantic accents and a certain amnesia about being American except for eight weeks spent on Martha’s Vineyard every summer.

  “And sometimes fortunate people can come to feel that they have earned their good fortune,” remarked the princess Sternholz, nee Dorothy Minor from Cincinnati, of Clara, though she liked her.

  Clara Holly remembered her roots, yet would rather not, and almost never went back to the U.S. When in Paris she belonged very much to the American world that exists like a specialized form in a complex ecosystem, dependent on its hosts but apart from them, extending mossily from the Marais to Neuilly, the stodgy suburb to the northwest, and into the delightful countryside between Saint-Cloud and Versailles—so Marie Antoinette in its pretension to wildness, nature, and simplicity.

  Clara and her husband Serge Cray, the renowned if now somewhat reclusive director, live out there, near the village of Etang-la-Reine, in a château of exceptional beauty that had once briefly belonged to Madame du Barry. This was a decrepit structure that had somehow escaped the notice of the ministry of such things, fallen into further decay, briefly become a bed-and-breakfast, and been bought by a newly rich Russian who sold its boiseries and cheminées-its panelling and fireplaces. After Serge Cray bought it, he directed the refurbishment, using studio carpenters and props from his costume film Queen Caroline, and Clara had thrown herself into restoring the gardens, going into Paris only a couple of times a week to shop or see an art show or go to a party.

  Clara was always planning to go back to Oregon—her widowed mother lived in Lake Oswego, to whom she spoke almost daily—but somehow she didn’t go more, than every year or two. This was partly because of Cray, who could not go to America because of some income tax matter, a running battle with the IRS that did not quite warrant extradition.

  Cray had some view that she would be held hostage. The idea of her going always threw him into one of his fits of gloom. He was Polish to his boots, though after the age of twelve he had been raised in Chicago. It wasn’t so much her absence he would mind—they got lost in their rooms and corridors and saw little of each other—it was that America could attach a piece of his property: Clara.

  Whether it could or couldn‘t, Clara respected his fears. They tallied with her own, which over the years had grown exaggerated from reading American newspaper accounts of violence, handguns, road accidents, and crime.

  Now thirty-two, Clara had been married for a dozen years, but hadn’t acted since that first film, when she met Serge, and when she gained a little bit of cult fame for a daring dance scene. In truth, her dancing had not been as memorable as her nubile beauty, just out of her teens, black curls and a voluptuousness that was close to plumpness. She became thinner with marriage and motherhood. Lars, their eleven-year-old son, was at school in England, to Clara’s distress and over her objections, it being Cray’s view that English education was superior to French for a boy with Lars’s handicap. Mrs. Holly, Lars’s ailing grandmother, agreed it was a shame to send a child so young off without his mother, and in her opinion Clara wasn’t happy; but the husband was overbearing, as these film people are. Mrs. Holly would say all this to her caregiver Cristal. “There’s nine hours’ time difference between here and France,” Mrs. Holly would always add, it being so odd to think of Clara all the way on the other side of the world where it was dark when the sun shone in Oregon.

  Clara was controversial in the American community. The natural suspicion people are apt to feel of above-average beauty was allayed by her apparent modesty and intelligence. A certain loftiness was attributed to shyness, so that people could almost forget about how she looked. Some felt sorry for her because of Lars, deaf from birth, and of how she must miss him, while others remarked that into each life some rain must fall. Yet there was also the fact, undeniable, that the possessors of good fortune tend to take it for granted and then to expect it, and Clara was no exception. In her own view, she may have felt she had mysteriously earned her looks, wealth, and good fortune by the conscious exercise of virtue.

  2

  Tim

  The night the American journalist Thomas Ackroyd Nolinger met the former actress Clara Holly in Paris—without, he says, special presentiment at the time—he had by coincidence been talking about Serge Cray that very morning in Amsterdam in connection with an interesting crime. Nolinger, European stringer for the American conservative newsmagazine Reliance (and also, using his initials TAN, for the liberal monthly Concern; he was more or less untroubled by the ideological contradiction), contributor to the English literary magazine The Weekly, occasional reviewer for the TLS, film buff, restaurant critic, and would-be novelist, had been sitting in the Cafe Prolle in Amsterdam reading through the pile of stuff his helpful magistrate friend Cees had brought him, and noticed something that touched on Clara, or actually her husband, little suspecting he’d be meeting her later the same day.

  The crime that interested Nolinger was the theft of a valuable medieval manuscript from the Morgan Library in New York. Though far away, it connected surprisingly to his own life when he read, in the list Cees gave him of prominent collectors of incunabula and illustrated manuscripts, not only the well-known name of Serge Cray, the reclusive director, but the names of a couple of people he had actually met in Frankfurt. These were people the criminals might be expected to try to sell their stolen loot to.

  The list of manuscript collectors had been
compiled by Interpol, with the cooperation of the International Booksellers Association, from auction catalogues and records of private sales. None of the people on the list had ever been associated with stolen material, Cees explained, and they were not suspected in the recent theft, but all would be contacted by Interpol and made aware of the disappearance of the Driad Apocalypse should it be offered for sale to any of them. “The Americans have some reason to think the manuscript will be sold in Europe,” said Cees. “That’s why the list concentrates on European collectors.”

  Tim went to Amsterdam from time to time to be filled in like this, smoke some grass, have a few beers with Cees, and gather such information as was floating around formally or informally about Belgian sex rings, Luxembourgian assassination plots, hardening Swiss drug enforcement policies, art thefts, terrorist smuggling attempts. Tim had nothing special to do with any of this—he was not a crime reporter and didn’t plan an expose—but he still made the train journey from Paris every few months to hear Cees’s stories. One of these days he would do something with them for Reliance, if he could find an American angle. Reliance always liked hearing how much more corrupt and criminal Europe was than America, though they didn’t like hearing how much better the trains were. Reliance regarded trains as crypto-communist, requiring as they did state subsidies.

  Regarding crime in general, theories floated vaguely in Tim’s mind, solid enough to make a little essay: criminal conspiracy as a way of imposing order on the random materials of the chaotic world. Crime required focus, as did perversion; in that sense both represented Order. The psychological soulagements of crime—what was the English word for soulagement? He often lost words, which hurtled unrecoverably into some slot between his English and his French, a great disadvantage for someone who made his living writing.