Le Mariage Read online

  She was used to film people around, she even liked some of them. But she also began to have a feeling of fear and invasion, of petulant malaise. Had it started earlier, with Delia’s call, or before that with the news from Cristal? She didn’t ask herself if it had anything to do with Delia Sadler’s gruesome story. She thought it had to do with the men with Woly, or Woly himself. And Serge.

  Serge liked these visits from California, did not feel them as reproaches, though he knew they were intended that way: When may we expect your next film? Disguised as gossip: “Remember when Ray Stark used to wear those lime green jumpsuits?” “It’s like trying to get Bob Towne on the phone.” Serge, who had only spent two years in California, liked the inside talk. It reminded him of Poland and Chicago, sitting in cafes under tinted enlargements of Marie Sklodowska Curie and Konrad Korzeniowski. They would all sit up till two, then the Californians would drive back to wherever they were staying in Paris, probably the Intercontinental. Their voices kept her awake. Sometime later she heard a car, heard Serge come up, walk by her room. She did not expect him to come in, and he did not.

  Though it was autumn, she tugged open the long window of her bedroom, liking the cold air. Someone was still down there, smoking on the parterre. In the morning there would be cigarette butts in the pots of basil by the kitchen windows.

  Woly, smoking in the dark, standing there alone, saw her looking down.

  “Come down, Clara, would you, for a minute?”

  She hesitated, went downstairs in her robe and stood in the kitchen doorway. Woly didn’t look at her, really, but through her, staring behind her at the gray shapes of things in the thin moonlight.

  “Is he making progress, any, do you think? Do you have a sense of it? What’s he really doing?”

  “He doesn’t have a script, if that’s what you mean. I’m sure he told you that. His ideas—I think he’s very involved in something,” she said, irritated, and loyal to Serge. “He’s always working.”

  “There’s some high-level discontent,” he said. “He costs a lot.”

  “Drive carefully, going back. Will you be all right?” she said, turning aside this invitation to discuss what he knew anyway.

  “Yeah, I have a driver,” he said.

  Back in her room, she called Mother. One A.M. in France was a good time to get them in Oregon, four in the afternoon. But she only got the answering machine: “Cynthia Holly’s residence, Cristal speaking. We can’t come to the phone right now....” Clara imagined they were at the vet’s with Lady.

  Cristal wasn’t answering the phone because she was out digging in the garden. Digging a grave for Lady. Who was dead, of course. The four thousand dollars already in the mail, she hoped. She thought they probably wouldn’t ask to see the vet’s bill. Deal with that when the time came, and maybe the time would never come. Digging in the orchard, bits of damp leaf sticking to her ankles, ants and spiders, rotten nuts, tears streaming, bitter sobs for Lady, and for her own life, and Life.

  8

  Sunday Morning

  Anne-Sophie felt the illogic of her wish to be in her shop instead of home having a leisurely breakfast with Tim, but she prepared to go to work, as every Sunday morning. The fear was in a way worse now, the morning after. “I’m going. Je m‘en vais. It must be faced. It is necessary to get right back on the horse,” she said, and could see from his expression that Tim didn’t know what she was talking about. Then he understood. He could not imagine Anne-Sophie as the kind of girl to whom shocks and bloody visions could happen; it was so far from his view of her that he had almost forgotten, or expected that she had forgotten, the bloody corpse of Monsieur Boudherbe. She was disappointed at his lack of solicitude this morning, he suddenly realized from her pretty pout.

  Tim had spent the night (for they only half lived together—he had held on to his apartment to use as an office), but he was the least communicative of humans in the mornings until he’d read all the papers, and anyway people can’t share shock and bloody visions if they haven’t had them themselves. “Everything will be the same as usual this morning,” he said. “That’s the thing about accidents and gore, someone cleans them up and they’re gone.”

  She hoped not entirely gone. Though being at the flea market would remind her of the grisly sight of yesterday, she would find there her colleagues who had seen it too. There were things to be discussed, recollections to be augmented, fleshed out by other accounts. One could not tout voir in one instant of shocked perception, eyes immediately averting from the sticky slash across his throat. Some might have taken in his shoes, a detail of the room that she had missed.

  “You have never seen anything like the dead body of Monsieur Boudherbe,” Anne-Sophie insisted. Yes, she would much prefer being, today, with the others who’d been through it, better than discussing it with a blase journalist skeptic. She wondered about the two Americans, about whether they were in jail. Indeed, the company of others whose souls now contained this knowledge of mortality was preferable to any blithe and insincere commiseration she might receive from those who hadn’t seen it, especially Tim. She’d been offended, a little, by how the people at Dorothy Minor’s had taken it in stride, failing to insist she go away for a week to Evian or Quiberon, failing to imagine she might now have night-mares for the rest of her life. Americans, she had read, had such things as “grief counselors,” who probably didn’t really help but whose presence would at least dignify the ordeal you’d been through. She was generally very pro-American.

  “I’ll come with you as far as the Gare du Nord. I want to interview the two American witnesses,” Tim said, sensing that she didn’t particularly want him to go with her. Also, the Americans might have a tale to tell. “She said it was a Hotel Le Mistral?”

  Ordinarily Anne-Sophie would have called her mother the next day to gossip about the princess’s party, but she was still too scared and distracted to phone. She expected, also, to be disappointed in her mother’s response. Instead, it was the princess who called Estelle d‘Argel to talk over the party, as was their custom, for though Estelle never liked to come to these American things, she liked to hear about them. She had the dim view of human character natural to her and to novelists in general, and Dorothy had the dim view (perhaps natural to rich people) that the world was fuller of sponges and social climbers and the fickle than perhaps it is, and they both enjoyed reviewing social occasions from these points of view.

  They were old friends, though generally Estelle did not socialize with Americans. Like most novelists, she was a bourgeoise with moderate habits and intemperate views on many subjects, in her case especially Anglo-Saxons. Her principal dislike was the English, but she did not have much good to say of Americans either, exceptions made for the princess, Dorothy Minor Sternholz, perhaps the art collector Ames Everett, and Tim Nolinger to an extent. Could her mother’s aversion to Americans be why Anne-Sophie had taken up with one? Estelle found Tim presentable, good-looking, if too much like an Englishman, and she privately thought his well-muscled body and what appeared to be wholesome sensuality might be somewhat lost on Anne-Sophie. Dommage.

  She also appreciated his attempts to tell funny stories about things encountered in his line of journalism; and when his American father, a hotel man, came to Paris, he took them all to dinner somewhere nice like Lasserre. Also, Tim was good-natured, was well enough educated (Swarthmore), and had some of the advantages of being American (cheerfulness) without altogether seeming one. The downside was, he didn’t have money, and it seemed to her that he was a little too old to be just now settling down, as if there were something in his past—for he must be in his late thirties. But perhaps she was out of touch with the chronology of success.

  “I noticed that Tim found Clara Holly very attractive,” remarked Dorothy, who liked Clara. Did she mean that Anne-Sophie should be forewarned? “She is attractive, of course.”

  “Oh, he probably won’t take up with other women until after they’re married,” said Estelle, but she
took the warning. A little red flag positioned itself in her mind to wave at the mention of the name Clara Holly, possible threat. Why else would Dorothy even have said such a thing concerning her dear Anne-Sophie? As an intellectual and a novelist, Estelle was naturally also a person of unusual pessimism, even malice, qualities that had worsened with age, so that though her old friends took on faith a good heart, new acquaintances were startled, even appalled, at the things she said. Her novels, of course, retained the characteristic mixture of earthy sensuality and astute judgments about human nature that had made her reputation. But she was always baffled about Anne-Sophie.

  “Anne-Sophie is so rebellious,” Estelle had often said to the princess, “but if I approve of her high spirits I must expect rebellion. Rebellion and high spirits go together.” To others it seemed that Anne-Sophie was docility itself, too much so. But people expected rebellion would break out one day, and perhaps it was this her mother sensed too. In the meantime Anne-Sophie had smoothly surmounted the expected hurdles of life—had got her own apartment, boutique, a cat, had dated, at some unspecified point lost her virginity, all of these transitions without ostentation and without confiding in her mother, to whom, eventually, she introduced Tim and announced her engagement. So now here was Anne-Sophie, tamely getting married at last to an extremely presentable fellow.

  For a child of a family of intellectuals and professionals, Anne-Sophie’s commercial streak was something of a mystery, not altogether admired by Estelle—it was at once too practical and too small-time. With her looks, Anne-Sophie could have had amazing sexual adventures, not that Estelle would have encouraged them, but she would have tolerated more flamboyance on Anne-Sophie’s part. Would have preferred it. So Estelle was pessimistic about Anne-Sophie. How had she happened to have a horsey child who kept a shop, and in the flea market, at that; why at age thirty hadn’t Anne-Sophie married, why must she now settle for a penniless journalist? Estelle could not be expected to relinquish a natural parental dream of Anne-Sophie getting married, grandchildren and the rest of it, and was cautiously jubilant—against her nature—when Anne-Sophie got engaged. But she could have wished the fiancé to be more solvent, entirely French, and to have attended a grande école.

  “J‘imagine, at your age, you’ll have to take fertility drugs, triplets alors, quelle horreur,” Estelle had said when Anne-Sophie told her mother that she planned to marry.

  “People over thirty have babies all the time, Maman,” Anne-Sophie said, “with very few cases of triplets.”

  “In any case, I hope you’ll wait till after the wedding....”

  Dorothy and Estelle passed to the subject of Anne-Sophie’s bad experience in the flea market the day before. Dorothy was surprised to learn that Anne-Sophie had not told her mother about it. Estelle was not surprised, but she was concerned for the state of Anne-Sophie’s psyche.

  “They say the memory of something like that gets worse with time. She’s still in shock,” said Estelle. “It’ll come back in after-shocks for a long time.”

  “Post-traumatic stress syndrome,” said Dorothy, who kept up with American medicine.

  At her flea market stall, Anne-Sophie hardly remembered having rolled down her shutter yesterday after the murder, and now she was almost scared to roll it up again, half expecting to find another body on the floor inside, or some other new gruesome sight, suite of the terrors afoot in the marché aux puces. As she was unlocking, some people, buyers or tourists, came across the allée to wait for her to do it, waiting to come in, buyers in the ordinary way, unaware of the mortal drama there yesterday, yet she almost felt afraid of them too. They were English people, by their clothes.

  “We got your name,” the woman said. “A friend of ours bought some Stubbs prints?”

  “Oh, yes, je me souviens,” Anne-Sophie assured them. “Very nice condition, they did well. Just one minute here.” She pushed the shutter up all the way and fastened the rod. The day had begun. Across the sawdust-covered lane, Monsieur Boudherbe’s large depot stood open, and police were going in and out. Anne-Sophie could see the activity clearly from her desk at the rear of her space, but something held her back from approaching the open door and looking in. Monsieur Boudherbe’s corpse, naturally, was no longer there; they’d taken him away yesterday. Some blood left on the floor might still be there. Alain Grau stuck his head in to confirm this. They would talk it over in detail later, at lunch, when they pulled a table out from Madame Colombe’s stall, set it equidistantly from their doors, and sat around it to eat a spread of saucisson and salade, as was their habit every weekend. Her wooden horses and the two statues of jockeys stood guard holding a little sign reading DÉJEUNER.

  Anne-Sophie’s stand and the others along Allée Onze backed up to a long two-storey warehouse of cement block whose main floor was taken up in part by Boudherbe’s depot, and whose upstairs formed a kind of storage attic for the dealers of the various stands appended to it. Though individual spaces were loosely delineated, there was no formal partitioning, and all the dealers stuck their wares up there at random, under a prevailing honor system that prevented one dealer from mistaking his neighbor’s dusty ar moires, stacks of chairs, canvases awaiting restoration. All this stuff together constituted an ensemble of ghost objects like souls in an attic waiting to be born. “I think I may have something like that upstairs,” Anne-Sophie could say to a client and, if it was heavy, could count on her colleagues to help her haul it down the narrow stairs. This afternoon it was she who was helping Monsieur Grau, who wanted to bring down a marble plinth.

  In the storage area something seemed wrong, disturbed. She could not have said what emanation of disorder, or displacement of shrouded furniture, or mere derangement of the molecules of the attic space chilled her, communicated danger. Someone had been there, and it was easy to imagine it had been, say, the murderer. Grau felt it too, at least he looked around with extra attention. But nothing, no one was there. And people went in and out all day, moving things, taking down their stock, storing something or recovering it, things changed all the time. Grau shrugged. Anne-Sophie could not resist opening an armoire door wider to half peek inside, where there was no one, of course. They each took an end of the column and struggled with it down the stairs.

  For a Sunday, it was rather a slow day, but with the weather growing colder, the heaviest season of tourism was behind them now. In slow times Anne-Sophie read a great deal. The usual lot of a shopkeeper included long hours when there was no one much around. She loved the active part of her metier—the finding of things to sell, trading with other dealers, country markets, the annual trip to Provence. She also liked the sociable part—her colleagues, their lunches, the slightly déclassé side of it she would not have encountered in the daily life of an attaché de presse, for example. But she didn’t really like waiting on customers and she hated the sitting around, so she read.

  She read with a love of reading seemingly incongruous in a girl who loved horses. She read English well. At the moment she was reading a book by Henry James, a man who had spent a lot of time in France. This was a book about a French girl whose mother is having an affair with a younger man, American. The girl is in danger of being married off to someone she doesn’t love, basically so the embarrassing mother can carry on in an unsuitable way with the young lover, taking long weekends in country inns and such. Fortunately, an older American man comes and breaks up the affair on the grounds that the lover has to go home and tend to his duties at the family factory. But it is too late for the girl. Anne-Sophie suspected that the girl had a crush on her mother’s lover.

  After lunch and throughout the afternoon Anne-Sophie, half unconsciously, found herself eyeing the passage leading to the upstairs depot, to see who came and went. No one unusual, no one unauthorized. At four, she went back upstairs to have another look.

  This time, she noticed something she hadn’t noticed before, a porte-clefs, a key chain, with two car keys and a little flashlight inscribed with the name of some Am
erican company: Nolinger-Webb Rent-a-Car, Portland, Oregon. It was the key ring presumably of the person hiding in the attic. This confirmed her impression that someone had been up there and he was American.

  She was somewhat pleased to notice the surname Nolinger existing in some independent context. She had been sure Tim was the only Nolinger on earth and that she, therefore, was singularly cursed with this hard-to-say name, which Tim pronounced with a series of hard glottals or whatever they were, Anglo-Saxon sounds she herself was incapable of pronouncing, a disadvantage when it came to your own name, or what would be your name; she and Estelle pronounced it Tim Nolanjay which she privately thought a much prettier way of saying it. She had thought of calling herself by various softer combinations: Nolinger-d‘Argel, or d’Argel-Nolinger, which was an easier elision. However, you could not hold an accidental matter like his surname against your betrothed, a man so exemplary in other ways, and she was unaware of the homonyms invoked by her and her mother’s pronunciation of his first name. To his ears, his first name in their pronunciation sounded like “teem.”

  Anne-Sophie thought Tim superb, ideal apart from his income and sometimes a certain vague, detached quality more or less common to all men except—this she had gathered from the works of Estelle d‘Argel—except jealous men, and even they, between bouts of their irrational ffliction, .were probably distractable and preoccupied, like Tim. In general, she believed, Anglo-Saxons were less prone than Frenchmen to jealousy, though eccentricity they had in abundance. She could have wished Tim were more interested in horses, but, unlike her mother, she was not at all disappointed that he wasn’t French. She thought it a great adventure to have a husband who wasn’t French, especially since the defects of French husbands were so plain to all. And Tim had a pretty game of tennis, and his articles seemed very clever—she could not be the best judge of this, their being in a foreign language where she was sure to miss a number of points, but people said they were clever. Eventually he would write an important book. But anyway love should not yield to rational analysis.