Le Mariage Read online

  Madame Louis d‘Argel

  (referring to Anne-Sophie’s paternal grandmother, the

  ancient lady living in Val-Saint-Rémy, where the wedding

  would be)

  Madame Philippe d‘Argel

  (they debated whether to put ‘en littérature Estelle

  d’Argel’ and decided against it)

  sont heureuses de vous faire part du mariage de

  Mademoiselle Anne-Sophie d‘Argel leur petite-fleur et fille,

  avec Monsieur Thomas Ackroyd Nolinger

  et vous prient ofassister ou de vous unir d’intention

  à la cérémonie religieuse qui sera célébrée vendredi le

  10 décembre, a 16 heures, en l‘église de St; Blaise,

  Val-Saint-Rémy. Le consentement des epoux sera reçu par

  Monsieur l’Abbé François des Villons, l‘oncle de la mariée,

  et le Right Reverend Edward Marks.

  Then on the overleaf, to be folded in such a way as to be the front when sent to America, it would read, in English: Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Franz Nolinger

  Mrs. Cecile Barzun Nolinger

  are happy to invite you to the wedding of their son and stepson

  Thomas Ackroyd Nolinger to Miss Anne-Sophie d‘Argel

  and then the rest of the information. Anne-Sophie thought it looked correct, but worried that people might not recognize her mother in the unfamiliar “Madame Philippe d’Argel,” nor Tim’s mother in “Mrs. Barzun Nolinger.” It had not actually crossed her mind that his mother might not use his father’s name.

  In any case, she needed to rush these proofs to Madame Aix, though today her mind was not completely on the wedding but rather on a new development with the American still camping in the flea market attic, still slipping out in the mornings. She had gone out to her stall even on the Tuesday and Wednesday, pottered, and read for a while, eye on the stairway. She was reading Jane Eyre, the story of a little French girl, Adèle, whose rich father, a surly Englishman, had locked his poor wife in the attic and had taken up with a puny, conniving governess. Early this morning, Thursday, when few people were around, saying ha-ha to danger in the French fashion, she decided to go up to the attic and confront the interloper.

  “What danger means to the French I have never understood,” Tim had written once. She had read this passage over several times. “They seem drawn to it in a way we are not. Perhaps it is to atone for the crucial national moment when by and large they avoided danger. Or perhaps, belonging to an old civilization gives a certain perspective that we, fragile in our optimism, and convinced that we have yet so much to teach, lack. We are prudent, they drive too fast, race cars across deserts, sail in little boats alone across the open sea, scale skyscrapers, tightrope-walk, assault their arteries with rillettes and patinate their lungs with Gauloises.” Estelle had congratulated him, he thought without irony, on this passage, but Anne-Sophie had found it completely untrue and unfair.

  Ignoring the possible danger of surprising a cornered felon, she found Monsieur Martin, the gardien, and instructed him not to unlock the door leading to the attic for the rest of the day. “If anyone wants to go up there, ask them to check with me,” she directed. When someone did, Monsieur Henron at about noon, she took charge. She, Henron, and Martin would go up together. Anne-Sophie marched up the attic steps with a pack of Marlboros clutched in her little hand. There, as she had known he would be, was the American, sitting on a chair. He had been reading a newspaper, but rose when he heard their steps. After a second of dismay, his smile was debonair, his manner composed, almost as if he had been expecting them. He spoke in accented French. He smiled at her and looked intently into her eyes.

  “Excusez-moi,” he said. “Someone must have locked me in. I was hoping someone would come before I had to spend another night here.”

  He smiled again, and with brisk aplomb he gathered his jacket and the newspaper and moved toward the stair. “Merci to have liberated me.” He had a dark, Byronic beauty. Anne-Sophie had read the poetry of Lord Byron and other Englishmen. She admired his insouciance.

  “Monsieur, please tell us what you are doing up here?” she began.

  “Is everything here?” cried Henron.

  The watchman broke in with further expostulations, threatening him. Monsieur Martin was feeling guilty, Anne-Sophie imagined, for having let a non-professional be up there all these nights. “Please explain, monsieur, what you were doing there!”

  Without replying, the man went down the stairs, trying to conceal his haste under a calculated calmness.

  Anne-Sophie lingered a second to look around the storeroom. Her heart fluttered just a little. Disappointment was already setting in. The mysterious guest was leaving. She would learn no more about the mystery of his presence. Here were the cardboard container from his pommes frites, some orange peels, a serviette. He could have been here for days—he had been peeing into a ceramic umbrella stand, with a plate for a lid to stifle the sharp ammonia stench that bit her when she hesitantly lifted it.

  When she and Henron came downstairs, some policiers were already holding the American by his arms, and Monsieur Martin was gesturing and speaking, the American angrily responding in passable French.

  “If I’d been running away, I wouldn’t be here, would I?”—defending himself, exasperation in his voice and, she thought, fear. Anne-Sophie, seeing this, was flooded with remorse to have rousted him.

  Then the police took him away somewhere, and none of the be-holders could say why. These hadn’t appeared to be the usual police charged with the security of the flea market but those attending the murder of Monsieur Boudherbe. The American glanced over his shoulder as they led him off, looking at her, a significant communication if she had known how to interpret it. Reproach? Pleading? There was poetry, anguish, intimacy in his backward glance.

  Anne-Sophie had the usual French predisposition to champion victims of bureaucracy and indifference, or the suspected criminal, or those oppressed by police brutality. Such generous sympathies are a moral luxury all but gone now in America, Tim would have said. But how should he know? He was always in France.

  So, having caused the American’s discovery, her impulse was to do what she could to save him from the clutches of the police, first by protesting that she had had no objection to his being in their attic. She found phrases of slashing indignation racing through her mind, addressed to the officious policemen. But since the ones who had led the unfortunate man away could not be denounced, she was obliged to direct her denunciations at those remaining in the still-taped-off cavern of Monsieur Boudherbe’s storeroom. They told her she was uninformed about the situation. They would not say where it was the man had been taken.

  Anne-Sophie’s indignation grew with her sense of having turned him in; she was a collaborationist! She tried to undo her work.

  “As a witness and neighbor, je vous assure,” she could swear that he had only just arrived at the murder scene and had nothing to do with it. Nor were she and her colleagues troubled by finding him in their attic. “Non, non, nothing was stolen from any of us.”

  The officers listened impassively to the agitated, pretty young woman with the short plaid skirt, pretty legs, and Hermès scarf bearing pictures of stirrups and buckles. The sergeant lit her cigarette, his hand lingering on hers, and assured her they had nothing to do with the man’s arrest, it was another division entirely, which had been hunting him for a number of days.

  “Mademoiselle should not reproach herself.”

  “Quand même,” “ she said, disconsolate.

  18

  The Houseguest

  Leaving Madame Aix, stirred by unease, indeed guilt, at her recent role in the arrest of the poor American, Anne-Sophie nonetheless stopped at the butcher and exerted all her concentration on what to buy for dinner. At the butcher’s she bought a demi-kilo of tendron de veau with a blanquette in mind. At the vegetable stand, little carrots, little turnips, a handful of pearl onions. Blanquett
e de veau was one of her most successful dishes, nearly foolproof and greatly liked by Tim. They would have boiled rice, and strawberries for dessert, with sugar but no cream—a good dinner, after which they would make love, two activities firmly associated both in life and in literature, as in the works of Estelle d‘Argel, say where the worldly Anglaise Madame Foster cautions against serving cream or spices if sex is envisioned afterward.

  Why should this be? This brought to Anne-Sophie’s mind the rest of the passage in Les Fruits, a most humiliating one in which her mother launches into a particularly minute discussion of crème feminine, as she calls it, and, with her vaunted specificity, compares it not just to some delicate marine scent but to haddock fumé, which messed up Anne-Sophie’s confidence regarding personal hygiene for years—she had been about eighteen when she first read Les Fruits....

  She knew she was only postponing the moment when she would have to tell the young woman at the Hotel Le Mistral that her friend had been found and lost, and was probably in the hands of the police. She faced it that she had to go over to the Hôtel,Le Mistral at once but she did not. She was considerably amazed to find Delia in her own living room.

  “Someone was trying to get in my room!” Delia explained, in a voice now firm with conviction. “I know it sounds paranoid, but I saw the handle move on my door last night, and there was someone waiting in the street every time I looked, the same man. So Tim brought me here.”

  “Someone might well have tried your door,” Anne-Sophie pointed out. “Hoping for the best. It happens to me all the time, when I’m in the South. I have a little thing to secure the door.”

  Delia sat in the living room while she fixed dinner. Tim came about seven-thirty and poured them glasses of port. He held his questions as Anne-Sophie told them both about the arrest of the American man, and about her part in it, and about how all week she had thought about the man hiding in her attic, wondering if he were still there, and thinking that he was probably Gabriel. She could not explain her failure to have mentioned him before now. Perhaps it was curiosity to see what would happen, or fear of looking foolish if she were only imagining he was there, or a desire that the man be safe and not arrested, or an unwillingness to give this American girl what she wanted, though she hoped this was not the reason she found she could not speak.

  “Or perhaps he is a dangerous murderer and I will get a medal!” She laughed, so preposterous was this idea. Delia didn’t seem to understand she was only joking; all at once tears stood in the girl’s eyes and her voice trembled with rage.

  “I knew he wouldn’t just leave me stranded that way,” she cried. “He doesn’t speak French, he’s got an unrefundable ticket, he—”

  “He speaks French quite well!” objected Anne-Sophie. “Tim will find out where he is.”

  Anne-Sophie carefully skimmed the simmering bouillon in which the cubes of veal were emitting their furzy scum.

  “Why didn’t you tell him where I was?” Delia was asking.

  “But he knew where you were.”

  “We have to get him a lawyer,” Delia persisted. “How do I do that? Should I call the American consulate? Even if I had my passport, I couldn’t just leave him....”

  She talked on in this fashion; her anguish was only natural. Anne-Sophie put the carrots and tiny vegetables into the broth and listened to Delia’s story.

  The night after the murder, her second night in France, was still vivid now. Delia had lain awake far into the night thinking over how Gabriel had come into her room and sat on the bed. There was nothing else to sit on but the hard chair, and Delia had sat beside him as he kept going over it and over it. He was more shaken than she by the day, she knew from his preoccupied stare into the corner of the room, his frown. “Oh, shit, why would they kill the guy? Who would do that?” His dismay had seemed greater than the ugliness of the sight would explain. Delia had seen that it might be more than human feeling that dictated his sighs. He sweated as if in fear.

  “Who? Gabe, tell me?”

  “Who? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it, but Christ!”

  “Does it have anything to do with you?”

  “Me, no, how could it?” he said. “Still, there he was dead, and I was supposed to go see him, he was the person I was supposed to deal with.”

  There was no mistaking Gabriel’s fear. He was foreign-born, no doubt he had seen horrors, and all of them were brought back. She had never seen horrors, so was less troubled. Sure it had been gruesome—she had turned her eyes away, she would never forget the sight—yet the curious unreality, the unlikeliness, kept her from feeling much for the unknown clay at her feet.

  She had comforted him. She did not tell Anne-Sophie and Tim the rest. How suddenly they were kissing. In his kisses some intimation of wild regret, of fear and mystery. Her sense of danger arose from the lack of playfulness, the strength of his grip on her shoulder. His fervent murmurings made her feel she was his buoy, his mooring on some sea washing around them. He was strong. His eyebrows nearly met over his black eyes, like the eyes of the corsair in a poem, her favorite childhood poem. Had she not always sensed this wildness behind the disguise of a bookseller? And that there had always been more between them than the cheerful collegiality with which they had planned the trip? And then they were undressed, and there was much more than cheerful collegiality. It was the most wonderful night of Delia’s life, to date.

  Looking back now, she could see he had been scared to death, and in kisses there is something that combats fear. She raked and combed now through all their words for some clue to what might have happened to him, what it all might mean and what to do now.

  “We could call Madame Cray,” Anne-Sophie agreed, warming to the thrill and danger of harboring a fugitive against the explicit instructions of the flics, thus atoning in part for her role in turning in the man. “She is interested in helping you. Tim says her house is very large, it is outside of Paris, maybe you could stay there.”

  Delia sighed. Panic seemed to rise up in her again. A young law-abiding American female was something of a stranger to peril, except in parking lots and the like, when you watched yourself. Yet now she was a wanted person, in that she’d violated the French policemen’s strictures to stay put, and the FBI too, in a country where she didn’t speak the language and had no money. Here she was in this strange woman’s apartment—should she have stayed at the hotel? However murky, however dusty the corners, however alien the creepy fingers on the door handle, there was something generically reassuring about a hotel, its hotelness, its rules whereby she wasn’t allowed to walk off with Gabriel’s stuff, the desk clerk, tireless toiling chambermaids, not that they seemed to toil all that much.

  It now was borne in upon her that she was in a much worse situation than at the hotel, because now she was somewhere where no one, not even she herself, could find her, in some Paris apartment of which she didn’t know the address or phone number.

  The young couple, having installed Delia Sadler on their sofa, lay chastely down to sleep in the bedroom and slept badly. Anne-Sophie woke at one and lay awake. The sleeping Tim took up most of the bed. There was something alien about a large foreign presence occupying your territory, your personal bed. This would happen for the rest of their lives. She willed away any trace of disloyalty in this reflection. Tim was working on a story that sounded so interesting, about the simultaneous theft of several ancient manuscripts to do with the end of the world. With the end of the world in mind, it was reassuring to have a large man in bed with you.

  Beds in America, she had heard, came in vast sizes, even round. She and Tim had discussed briefly whether they would have the normal French bed of 140 centimeters such as they were now lying in, or would they adopt the more modern 150? The latter, they agreed, or even 160, though it was harder to get sheets for 160, but easier in America.... Why does the mind awake idle over such subjects?

  Following the story of the manuscript theft, he might have to go to Spain, to visit the m
onasteries where the thieves had gone, pretending to be monkish scholars, and made off with the treasured parchments. She would not be one of those silly, insecure wives who minded when their husbands went off on faraway missions. Never ask a man where he’s been, said the countess Ribemont in Against the Tide.

  By leading the party into the flea market attic, she felt like Pandora who had hesitated to open, then had opened, the box of furies or imps. There was the imp of remorse as she saw the police arrest the Byronic young American, her frustration as she tried to protest that she was not lodging a complaint against him but found no one to listen, and now the fact that she had taken in charge the young American woman, had given her dinner and a sofa to sleep on for the night, thus incurring an obligation and probably committing a crime. Such thoughts tormented her until two, when she fell asleep at last.

  Tim woke up at four, trying to remember a dream. Having a beautiful woman in the afternoon ... in a hotel room ... As it took fleeting form in his imagination, he remembered there was a hot breeze blowing through an open window, and song would come in. Then he remembered that such musings were already illicit, he was a man about to be married. For the woman was Clara Holly, plum-toned and voluptuous, not the rosy, pert Anne-Sophie. Was he to confirm the dreadful Freudian problem about a wife never being an object of desire?

  But the sleeping Anne-Sophie did excite, first his tenderness, then his desire. Unfortunately she was really out cold, and who knew what their visitor could hear, however furtively they might make love. What the hell were they going to do with Delia? And how was he to go about finding her friend, as Anne-Sophie so trustfully believed he could do? Fully awake to the forthcoming problems, it seemed to him he would never sleep again. Then Anne-Sophie made a promising stir and sighed as if she were waking. Tim stroked her temple, then her breasts, tentatively. She woke a little and reached out for him. She whispered to him. It could be done if they did it very quietly, without a sound to wake their visitor.