Le Mariage Read online

  Delia recognized her, the pretty blond young woman smoker, who was still smoking. Anne-Sophie always smoked, as if a cigarette were ballast to hold her upright. Tim saw Delia’s eyes recognize Anne-Sophie, then take in the cigarette, then look behind Anne-Sophie at him. She was puzzled at the conjunction of Tim the helpful American reporter and the young Frenchwoman she had seen at the flea market.

  “This is Anne-Sophie,” Tim explained.

  “I saw you that morning,” Anne-Sophie reminded her, extending her hand.

  Delia Sadler looked a little disoriented by all this, seeming to wonder what Anne-Sophie was sticking her hand out for, for an instant before shaking it. Did women shake hands in America? Tim couldn’t remember. She looked happy to see them. “I’m sorry to have bothered you, I shouldn’t have called, I just panicked. I think they’ve got Gabriel. My colleague,” she explained.

  Anne-Sophie sat down and waved for the waiter. “Je prends un café. ”

  “Have another coffee,” Tim said to Delia. “Une bière, s‘il vous plait. So what happened?”

  She began her tale.

  Unsuspicious by nature, certain of her basic security and rights and status as an American citizen even without passport, and beloved of Gabriel Biller, Delia had nonetheless woken up this morning feeling even more embattled than yesterday. She had thought back on the FBI men and the newspaperman Tim-they had all seemed to want something from her she wasn’t capable of giving in the way of information and theories, cooperation, keys. Though they had begun in the guise of friendliness, they had soured on her and abandoned her. The men named Frank had told her to hang on, they’d be back to see how she was coming along.

  “But they didn’t come back today, I spent the whole day here, this was my fourth day in France. I wanted at least to go to the Louvre, that was the whole point of coming,” she complained. “I was going to go every day, for a week, I’ve only got four more days.”

  In the morning, she had dawdled over her coffee in the tiny breakfast room off the lobby of the hotel until the maid began to glare at her. Dealers and salesmen slurped their coffees, ate their bricklike chunks of jamless untoasted bread, there was no orange juice. She thought of her passport, and of how the FBI men had said to the guy Tim, “You probably shouldn’t write about this case, not that you would want to, there’s not really much here, but the French are touchy, and a news story could complicate things for Miss Sadler here.”

  Tim had doubted this, but seemed to accept, as a sort of compliment to the powers of journalism, the idea that it could affect legal procedures, bring international complications.

  “I wondered about that too,” he said now. “Why would I want to write about it, and why shouldn’t I?”

  “This morning I still had the five hundred francs Clara Holly had loaned me on Saturday, but by now I’d begun to get good and sick of the hotel restaurant, where I could put food on the bill, so I told myself some money would come soon from Oregon, so at lunchtime I decided to go somewhere else to eat, not far enough to count as leaving the scene.” The shabby street was lined with small cafes, and there was a largish brasserie on the corner, Le Bon Tabac, another of those cross-cultural mysteries.

  “In Oregon you would instantly go out of business if you called a restaurant The Good Tobacco,” she said.

  She had sat at a table outside, for it was sunny enough to cut the chill October air, and being visible outside would prove she hadn’t meant to run away, in case the police came. Being vegetarian, she ordered a cheese sandwich, which turned out be enormous, a whole half a baguette, which was great because it would last an hour if she nibbled it slowly. Twenty-two francs. Once she was installed and served, her mind fastened on her plight, on the whereabouts of Gabriel, on the side of all this she’d be telling about once she got home.

  When she got back to Oregon, she’d tell about the man dead in the flea market of course. She could also tell about the disgusting thing that happened in the rest room, in the basement of this brasserie when she went down to pee. As she recounted this episode to Anne-Sophie and Tim, she watched them closely, as if to see whether it shocked them.

  “It was a unisex rest room, the kind with individual little cubicles with solid doors, but they were all taken, and they cost two francs. Two francs! So I hung around waiting for someone to come out, so I could go in. Eventually a man came out, but when I tried to catch the door and thereby save the two francs, he resisted. Well, imagine! So selfish! That would never happen in America. At home another woman would pass you the door without letting it latch, I don’t know about men!”

  This man shut his door firmly instead, and then when she tried to put a two-franc piece in the latch, she found it was still locked and resisting her money. The man languidly washed his hands at the basin and went upstairs.

  Then, while she was waiting for the other toilet to be free, the first door opened again, and out came a woman. From the same stall where the man had been! It shocked her. Perhaps everyone knew this place, Le Bon Tabac, where the stalls were soundproof and people could rent them for two francs to screw or do drugs or whatever they were doing! She tried to imagine doing it standing on a toilet.

  The woman, in her twenties, hadn’t looked like a hooker. There was no aura of abandon or defeat; she looked rather smug, in fact, and patted her hair in the mirror, smiling a smile at her reflection that contained no clues to her mood.

  Anne-Sophie and Tim laughed at this story, and their laughter seemed to shock Delia even more.

  She had gone back upstairs and ordered a coffee, seven francs, and tried to string that out. Then she went across the street to a sidewalk cafe and had another coffee—“cafe”—six francs fifty centimes. There were things to learn! How strange that unless you were a murder victim (of course) there was an interest in the tiniest mystery of travel, there was a richness to things, like a rich brocade, but also a tarnish, like the antique table napkins she sold in bundles back in Oregon, monogrammed sometimes with the initials of a bride, but also bearing faded stains that wouldn’t come out from tea parties long ago. All that she saw from her little table of black formica in the wall aperture of Café Le Destin, half indoors, half out, bore the faded stains of other centuries. The butcher shop had a blackboard in its window, with writing on it in chalk, the handwriting illegible even if you knew French.

  Wandering on, she began to wonder if spending money on a magazine would be worth it, since she couldn’t read it. She spent a long time at the newsstand, comparing the prices of magazines. Because she couldn’t read any of them, she wanted to find the one with the most photographs for the money. Finally she bought Marie Claire, twenty-five francs, and went to sit in the hotel lobby to look at it. She kept thinking about the odd fate of being a whore who had to screw in toilets, and of a society that let that happen. Revolting, sinister things about France were beginning to pile up.

  In fact, the horrors of France had begun to assume a kind of abstract fascination. She had a little notebook that she wrote them down in, beginning with having her wallet and passport stolen but that was just the beginning. Hotel: the mattress was thin, the room ugly, and the desk clerk had a snooty, hostile manner even though she could speak English. And though she could speak English she often pretended not to. And the employees at the American consulate were not American but French, probably owing to some French law. She had witnessed their browbeating scorn for a poor old man ahead of her in line, an old harmless man, not well dressed, his yellowish white hair stringy. He was trying to get a birth certificate or something about his late wife’s social security. He wanted to marry again and needed some paper about his dead wife.

  “Don’t want to lose her pension?” the girl had sneered.

  “Well ...”

  “We like to keep every bit we can get,” the girl pressed, with dreadful contempt.

  “As if it were her business,” Delia objected, “as if the money were coming out of her pocket. ‘You want to make sure you get all the pensions
coming to you,’ is what the desk girl said, in this mocking tone.” The bureaucrats laughing at him, this was another instance of hated government interference, insensitivity. “What did she know about the poor man’s life?”

  By four in the afternoon she was sick with sleepiness again. How long could jet lag go on? She knew she oughtn’t to sleep, but she couldn’t stay up anymore. She had a cold sensation of mercury leaking out of her brain stem and rising to the top of her head obliterating thoughts, now soaking her eyeballs in nightshade or hemlock. She told herself that maybe one good afternoon nap would clear these impediments. She thought of sleep tortures.

  Sleep. She yielded up to this powerful idea and crossed the lobby of the Hotel Le Mistral. The irritable woman at the desk eyed her. Delia couldn’t tell if she was well disposed toward her or not. It had been brave of the woman to refuse to let the FBI men into Gabriel’s room, that had been the correct thing to do. On the other hand, she might not like Americans or tourists. She didn’t seem as if she did. As Delia passed the desk, the woman said in a horrid voice, “You know, madame, even if monsieur does not use his room, he pays as long as he has not given it up.”

  Delia shrugged and kept on going.

  “So far, I’m not impressed with the friendliness of people in France, frankly, including the people at the American consulate,” she said to Anne-Sophie and Tim.

  She had taken off her jeans and lain down on the bed in the rest of her clothes, as a pledge of her intention to get up in an hour or so maybe, then she fell into a stonelike sleep. Sometime later, no way of telling what time, she was awake, as awake as if it were morning, though a pattern of neon light coming through the shade from some sign outside flashed on the ceiling and told her it was night. “I had no idea what time it was, but my brain was clear and noonlike, and right away I became aware of sounds through the wall from Gabriel’s room. Maybe it was these that had woken me. I could hear drawers sliding open and shut. Now I think it was the two FBI guys,” she said. “They wanted to look in his room, and they found some way to get in.”

  Anne-Sophie and Tim advanced objections and questions. Why would the FBI want to go into Gabriel’s room, he who had nothing to do with the French murder and had been with her that night? Why would Gabriel murder an unknown antique dealer? She began to feel the fragility of her certitude, and even of her safety, depending as it did on an absence of malice, on cooperation, on goodwill from all concerned. From the Franks, specifically.

  “I know it sounds paranoid, but it crossed my mind that the killer saw me and Gabriel arrive at the flea market, and thought we had seen him. So he stalked and murdered Gabriel, and would be looking for me too. That was just my paranoid thought. But he wouldn’t try to kill me in the lobby of the Hotel Le Mistral. Or would he?” So she sat in the lobby, not going upstairs, her room too little and with ugly blond furniture, thin green bedcover, hard chair and ripply mirror that made her look as if her face swam, and she thought of calling Tim.

  “I’ve been sitting here trying to figure it out. Something’s happened, Gabriel’s just gone, disappeared, and I think someone’s got him, the police or the murderer of the man in the market, and they could hurt me too.”

  Tim still didn’t know if he agreed. Why should it be any more than bad luck or bad timing, unless she was involved in whatever it was—drugs would be the likeliest thing, or possibly art theft, since this was a flea market crowd.

  “Why couldn’t it be he himself who went in his room?” Tim asked, but Delia seemed injured by the suggestion that Gabriel would sneak back without telling her.

  It couldn’t be him of course, or why wouldn’t he have tapped on her door, and who would he be talking to? Maybe the two Franks.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t stay there,” Anne-Sophie put in. “We could find you somewhere else to stay and let the police know your whereabouts. Move to another hotel meantime, where you’d feel safer?”

  “Then Gabriel couldn’t find me, if—if he comes back.”

  In my attic, thought Anne-Sophie, thinking of Gabriel. She felt a connoisseur’s pleasure in knowing something the others didn’t. In a sense Gabriel was hers, like any secret, like finding an undervalued object at a jumble sale. Was it disloyal of her not to tell Tim? She didn’t know, she only knew that it was hers to think about, and in the meantime no doubt this American girl had nothing to fear, for after all this was France, unless these Americans were all drug runners, though the young woman didn’t look like a criminal, and it would be too bad if such a good-looking man was.

  “He hasn’t checked out?” Tim asked. “Would the hotel let you into his room? He might have some money there. He might have left a clue. Could you tell if anything had been moved?”

  “I don’t think they would open his room—they didn’t let the FBI guys in. We could ask, though. You could ask them like you did before, in French? Tell them it’s an emergency, he’s disappeared? I could keep his stuff in my room, at least we wouldn’t have to pay for two rooms,” she said.

  “Well,” said Tim, “they wouldn’t do it tonight anyhow. We’ll go back with you now and wait till the desk clerk comes back. Meantime don’t worry. Nothing much could happen in a French hotel.”

  The hotel was certainly not very elegant, Anne-Sophie agreed, as they passed through the dimly lit lobby, but she reflected that she herself had stayed in worse places in the country, on buying trips. She understood that Delia was probably especially timid because handicapée. “Would you like to borrow my portable téléphone?” she asked. “Then you could call for help directly if there’s no one at the desk.” She gave Delia her cell phone and instructions about numbers for the police. Then they went with her to her room and looked in it—empty. Delia’s sigh revealed her conflicted desire to leave and stay, and that she was afraid, but she gamely bid them good night.

  15

  The Clipping Box

  The first thing in Clara’s thoughts Tuesday morning was not her little boy, as it usually would be, but the French hunter she had talked to the day before, Monsieur de Persand. She had left the confrontation at the library already agitated, thrown into a state of emotion she couldn’t account for, by her meeting with the mayor and the hunters. And then came her encounter in the tennis club with the balding Frenchman who had spoken to her at the meeting. Had he followed her? Was it coincidence he had come into the Tennis Club Marne-Garches-la-Tour? Fate or design? Did she care which? At any rate, he had been nice, trying to cheer her up and make her laugh, saying that his friends were terrible shots, for one thing.

  “Where were you?” Serge had asked when she got home. “I thought you’d come home right after the thing.” And she had felt a little stab of irritation, to be quizzed as if he had guessed at her state of mind, about a meeting he hadn’t bothered to go to.

  “It was upsetting,” she said. “I don’t know why—there was nothing new. For a while I didn’t trust myself to drive.”

  And this morning her thoughts were still on the way she felt herself to have lost emotional equilibrium, at the meeting and then later, talking to the man. The few minutes of flirtation, the attraction, had caught her unaware. Perhaps the encounter had startled him too. He hadn’t had the air of a man who usually prowled after women in tennis lounges.

  He was married, wore a ring. She certainly was. Before putting the whole thing out of her mind, she allowed herself to dwell for just a self-indulgent instant or two this morning on his very long eyelashes, some men did have them, and the unexpressed power that went with baldness, the power that underlay, perhaps also, the myth (or reality?) of extra virility that supposedly went with it. If the man is handsome otherwise, she thought, baldness is strangely compelling. Large gray eyes, rather heavy-lidded, she imagined them staring down other men in boardrooms. She shook off the reverie. Why was she even thinking like this? A bourgeois of no interest, possibly the executive of an insurance company, maybe a banker.

  She was still thinking about him when the phone rang, and it wa
s Cristal, blighting any further moment of solitary reflection she might have wanted before Serge came down. It was unusual for Cristal to call first thing in the morning, and it meant she was up late in Oregon—insomnia or crisis. Clara felt the familiar tug of fear.

  “I’m getting some help with my anger,” Cristal said. “It won’t always be like this. Sometimes I can’t breathe.”

  “What are you angry about? Mother? I know she can be trying. Is she all right?”

  “Your mother is an angel, she is sweetness itself. We have such good times together, she‘s—I think of her as my dearest friend.”

  “I don’t understand, then.” It seemed to Clara that Cristal was getting much more tiresome than before.

  “I know I’m too emotional, I’m too emotional, out of damages that happened to me in the past. Plus the strain of my daily life, it’s not your mother, but it’s SuAnn, she’s on some new medication, it’s not helping, and ...”

  Cristal’s daughter SuAnn was manic-depressive and was frequently hospitalized. She had a little girl. Clara understood how that would be a strain for Cristal. Because of Lars, she knew the constant knot in the breast of something unsolved, the concern for your child, the longing. But Cristal was very whiny all the same. Clara was always sending money.

  “Cristal, let me know if I can help. You know I’ll help. Should SuAnn see someone new? New doctor?”

  “I can’t see just throwing more money at it. Your money, ha ha. She’s already seeing the best doctors, they’re using her for a guinea pig, far’s I can see. Let’s just drop it.” She went on to report on Mrs. Holly, who was asleep.

  “All right,” Clara said, thankful to drop it.

  “The doctor gave her some new medication, she goes to sleep earlier, thank God. Your mom I mean.”