Le Mariage Read online

  Delia sat awhile longer watching the progress toward evening, lights going on, the desk clerk scouring the ashtrays in the tiny lobby. She couldn’t help herself from watching the door for Gabriel, but he never came; after another hour he hadn’t come.

  How do you know when a man is sincere in what he’s saying to you? A woman just knows, Delia thought. Of course you have to ask, sincere about what? It wasn’t love or commitment she required, so why this certitude that Gabriel also had begun to feel love, if that wasn’t too big a word for the way she felt, her passion building during their morning exchanges at the Antiques Barn in Sweet Home, Oregon, of hello or the few times he helped her unload a box of green dishes bought from someone’s attic. Requited and fulfilled during the ardent hours last night, kisses more than expert: sincere, somehow.

  Delia reflected that kisses, like toothache, were unrecoverable. What you remembered were the words you described them in. Fabulous, wondrous? It had been a night to influence the future, that had been implicit in his embrace. Her breast burned as if beneath his fingers. She had felt love before, though not often, but this was different and holy.

  Which was how she knew something had gone wrong, some problem, he wouldn’t just disappear like this leaving her stranded in this French hotel without explanation.

  Her room was too horrible to go up to. It came to her she was uneasy in her room. There, it seemed, someone could force the cardboard door, and with no one in the corridors, no one to hear, could come in and do whatever. She could not see exactly what they would do. She couldn’t really believe anyone was trying to hurt her. And they wouldn’t come and try to hurt her with these FBI men around. Frank and Frank, and the journalist. They all seemed like creeps but harmless. The journalist was handsome, at least.

  She reviewed all the comforting telephone conversations she by now had had with Sara, her mother and father, her brother Boyd still at home. There had been an envious note in their commiserations—envious that she has having an adventure in far-off Paris. She agreed that this was an adventure, but there were these disquieting elements, mainly the disappearance of Gabriel. The money, the passport, being confined to a sleazy hotel—all those would be straightened out.

  Yet the man in the flea market had been lying there dead all the same, and he had something to do with Gabriel, and Gabriel was gone. She kept trying to break through to a sense of peril, even of reality, but she could not. Some thick brain fog kept impeding thought. Murder, theft, FBI sleuths, even movie stars had failed to dislodge a heavy miasma of fatigue and lethargy. It came to her that this was probably jet lag, deferred the last two nights by the bracing distraction of Gabriel’s company but now hitting her like sleep serum in her veins. Her eyes sagged as if beanbags were attached to her lids. She’d come on Friday, this was Sunday. It was four P.M., the devil daytime hour of jet lag. You heard, under no circumstances nap. Coffee, she thought, a walk around the block, they wouldn’t put her in prison for that.

  She limped outside and looked up and down the rue. It was always painful to walk but not a pain she noticed anymore, just the one hip, congenital. This was almost the first moment she had had a chance to study a Paris street. The past two days, including the stimulating blur of her adoration of Gabriel, murder, being stolen from, emotions of astonishment, then fear, people coming at her, new faces, talk—all this now receded a little. A bus going by, taxis rattling, more people on the street than in Sweet Home or even downtown Portland. She looked a long time in the window of an African couturier who displayed bright costumes in printed cotton, with wonderful headdresses and lavish skirts. She thought about these for export, decided they wouldn’t do for Oregon, not even at its most folkloric. Who wore these in Paris? Paris, France, an alien place where she could speak to no one.

  For reassurance she thought about the Americans she’d already met—the two FBI Franks, Clara Holly, Tim Nolinger—wondering briefly how it would be to sleep with him, then embarrassed at the thought. It seemed as if her libido, now liberated by Gabriel or by France, had begun raging around uncontrollably looking for objects of desire, like Frankenstein’s monster. Of course, she was mad at Gabriel for not being here. It was him she was afraid for. Her heart speeded up. Where was he?

  10

  Goddess of the Hunt

  Outside of Paris, with the autumn, with the shrivelling leaves and stiffening breezes, with the graying light came the unmistakable signs of the hunting season. Dead pheasants hung in the butchers’ windows, brought in by the first shooters, tiny black wounds barely noticeable in their sumptuous plumage, leaden eyes staring open. A new pack of spotted dogs rushed to the fence at the neighboring farm to bay at Clara’s car. People in vaguely Tyrolean costumes, with epaulets and brass buttons, drove up and down the lanes; everyone was wearing smart, shined riding boots.

  Clara and Serge were agreed about stopping the wanton and cruel killing of deer and partridge on their ample hectares, a practice traditionally enjoyed with great fanfare by the local hunters during the season. Serge defiantly went out with his own shotgun to look over his allées and check the chains that secured their gates. It was the invasion of his sacred precincts as much as the slaughter of the animals that angered him, though he was no hunter either. Had been taken rabbit hunting by an uncle near Cicero, Illinois, and could still remember the gunpowder smell of the dead stiffening creatures lying on the oily cement of the garage. Then he had cried because what had been alive was now dead, and that they hadn’t had to kill what they did not need, secret tears to avoid the derision of the uncle.

  And Clara, though she had a fur coat, was sufficiently an Oregonian to have also objected to the hunting rituals in the neighborhood, especially where they affected their property, people with guns crashing through their gardens, horses occasionally, horns, baying dogs, the destruction of flowers. Once Clara was sure she had heard the crashing of a stag through the underbrush, the creature dismayed, hurtling, breaking its hooves against branches, and the hounds baying, in their own wood, this was last year. There had been horns, certainly. How was it possible that barbarous troops like figures from a tapestry, like the chorus of an opera, could blast their horns in her wood? And then she had seen the stag, or another stag, dead, being carried off in the village, quite a small animal, and someone had told her it was the hunter who killed it with a knife, the dogs did not rend it with their teeth as she had feared, and as you would think from the paintings in the Louvre; she had seen paintings in the Louvre of dogs tearing the flanks of the exhausted, anguished stag.

  In a way she had been shocked to learn that the whole elaborate ritual of hunting—dogs, red coats, horses—was done in France, which seemed too, well, too small a country to let people loose with weapons in, and anyway she had always thought of it as an English barbarity, especially the red coats and the dogs baying like the hounds of hell. It was true that hunters killed animals in Oregon, but they dispatched their prey mercifully with rifles, and only wore red to keep from shooting each other.

  In general she and Serge had decided, or rather she had taken the lead from Serge, to keep a low profile among the locals, downplay their own foreignness, blend in with France. More than this, they tried to be good citizens and neighbors, always contributing to local fund-raising events, even church ones, though neither was Catholic and Serge was Jewish. The amount of their contributions was carefully calculated in the hope of seeming neither miserly nor ostentatious, despite which they always had the feeling of getting it wrong. When it came to the hunting issue, though, principle was not to be sacrificed. Serge was definitely at one with her on this, or she with him—they both objected. Every year he had had his own lawyer write a letter to the master of the local hunt, notifying them they were not to hunt on his property, and every year the locals had resisted, with delegations and appeals, and had hunted as they pleased, claiming that until the matter was adjudicated, tradition would prevail. Men had ranged these woods for centuries, and that was the tradition.

 
“It is considered an act of great valor to give the coup de grace,” the mayor had said, that first year that a delegation of men in sweaters and neckties had come to talk to Serge, and he had made Clara talk to them instead.

  “You mean you can just come onto our property?” she had asked.

  “In pursuit, if they have already wounded the animal, certainly,” said the mayor. “By law. It would be inhumane, an unforgivable cruelty to let him die slowly, he receives the arme blanche. Madame,” added the mayor, clearly irritated that it was she and not Serge hearing them. But she had afforded them a ceremonious hearing, in the salon, still a bit of a mess at that period from the studio carpenters who were continuing the repairs and repainting.

  Every year for four years they had had one of these stiff encounters with the local mayor. In the meantime they had put heavy chains across the paths at the perimeter of the property, and built a strong gate across the road. They had been advised by their lawyers they perhaps had no right to do this. “If you had more hectares they would not have the right—it’s the Loi Verdeille—to hunt on your place. You seem to have just below the minimum hectares required to keep them off. Then there’s the status of certain rights-of-way across your land.” Serge had discussed patrol dogs, but they hadn’t yet got any because of the feelings of their house dogs, Taffy and Freddy, mild yellow Labs who were no use at all at keeping out strangers.

  It was Clara who managed the affairs of the château without complaint, almost as a form of atonement for a certain restlessness she felt sometimes. She thought of herself as having made a mistake in life. She had no particular name for it, just a mistake. Maybe it was overreaching—setting out to be an actress, thus making a claim of superior beauty and worthiness of being seen, a claim on the attention of others. Or else her mistake had been not sticking to acting, letting herself be dissuaded in the name of wifedom and motherhood.

  Or was it in marrying someone she didn’t truly love? Of course she loved Serge, but not in that swept-away, sexual way she tended to doubt really existed. Had she married in bad faith, for conventional reasons like pregnancy, or because he was famous, which is easy to confuse with love? She had been young. The mistake, whatever it was, though, was a decade behind her and she was used to it, she was comfortable. Only, sometimes, when she read something slightly New Age, about getting clear or about atonement, she paid attention.

  So, in atonement, this year as in other years, it was she who would receive the delegation, obey the summons to the mairie in response to the letters, writs, forfeits, contraventions, that were laid on them about their chains and gates. This year’s ritual confrontation was today.

  She went looking for Serge, hoping he would come with her to the meeting. The mayor, members of the local hunting association, and a magistrate were coming.

  “Don’t discuss anything. We have lawyers to talk to their lawyers. Just tell them our position is unchanged, tell them to ask the local stags to run somewhere else,” Serge said, barely looking up from the television. In Georgia, a twelve-year-old had shot up the schoolyard, killing four other children, and the images of consternation now appearing on CNN absorbed Serge, who sat watching at the kitchen table. An ambulance, men with stretchers, a neighbor and one of the teachers sobbing to the reporter, cut to the principal making an announcement about grief counseling, cut to a crowd around a woman lying on the ground.

  “The mother of the shooter,” Serge said. “Fainted.”

  Clara thought of Lars, almost this age, and of how there had been an incident like this in England, Scotland maybe, anyhow the British Isles, where Lars was, though now they had tightened the gun laws there. Her throat constricted with fear for Lars.

  “There’s something wrong with the people, in the town, look at them,” Serge said. “They look retarded.”

  “They’re all fat,” Clara said. “The fatness is what always strikes me when I go home.”

  “These people are fatter than other Americans,” Serge said, sunk in thought about this. “They look mentally defective because they look as if they were all fed in the same mental institution. Even the children.”

  Clara said, stiffly, “I’m sure they’re just as sad as if they were thin.” Serge was not thin.

  This year’s meeting would be in the office of the regional manager of the commune of Lanval, above the Mairie/Bibtiothèque Municipale, a small converted building in a patch of wood outside the village. One entered through the library, where Clara nodded at the usual women; she used to come here to check out library books, but by now had read the small stock in English, by Poe, William Styron, Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, and Erica Jong.

  Men were waiting in the room at the top of the stair. It was plain she was meant to sit a little apart in the one vacant chair by the window. They rose as she came in, a collection of local men, ruddy, sturdy in corduroys and country jackets, one in jeans—the committee, she supposed—and here was a man she had once thought was the librarian but had eventually learned was the mayor of Etang-la-Reine, Monsieur Briac. They were dressed like peasants and farmers, but she knew they were all stockbrokers and engineers, registered to vote out here at their country houses. Most Frenchmen were engineers, it seemed to her. These were all hunters, in any case. She smiled. She was used to the power of her smile, especially on a group of men, but this time it did not have a palpable effect, the atmosphere was too strained, the subject of la chasse too solemn, Serge’s hectares too critical to the orderly management of the sport in this region.

  The points were the usual ones, beginning with the point about the effective management of the deer population, each year on the verge of crowding out human civilization if not culled. She smiled and observed that there were more humane methods of population control than running each deer to ground and stabbing it. Her acerbic tone deteriorated the atmosphere rather quickly. A stout man by the door barked in irritation. The protests rose, the arguments, the usual arguments, marshalled as usual.

  There was the matter of the law, which permitted pursuit onto private property of game that was in the course of being hunted, a condition left undefined. They had discussed this with their lawyers. So had Serge, but it was here, she knew, they were most vulnerable, and had chosen the path of deterrence with the physical impediments of gates, chains, piles of brush across roads.

  She had heard all this before, they had said it before. Her mind fastened on the tapestry on the wall behind the mayor: Three plump, shimmering female nudes slept in a forest, in abandoned, sprawled positions with parted legs, surrounded by the corpses of rabbits and squirrels. A pack of dogs, held in check by a cherub, waited for the goddesses to wake, and from the gloom of the overhanging branches, satyrs stared down at the voluptuous breasts, inviting clefts, and lavish buttocks of the beauties.

  A man sitting near her, following her eye, said, “Diane la chaste et ses nymphes, d‘après la toile de Rubens. Diana the goddess of hunting.”

  Clara felt a start of blood in her cheeks. Despite herself she glanced at the speaker, a tall, balding Frenchman in a khaki jacket, very handsome.

  “The tradition of the hunt,” Mayor Briac was saying, “the formal tradition as we know it, for, obviously, man has hunted from time immemorial—the formal tradition was codified under Louis XIV, who was also a great scholar and encouraged the great naturalists like Buffon....”

  Clara shifted restlessly. Invoking the centuries of tradition, the history of France, royal privilege, did not seem fair or germane either to the reality of cruelty, suffering, blood lust, the love of killing so easily transferred to one’s fellow human beings. She had copied something down from a painting by Dürer, and found it in her purse, prepared to read it out:

  Qui tue la bête par plaisir plus que par nécessité offense le Père. He who kills animals for pleasure offends God.

  But the scrap of paper stayed in her hand, hand limp with self-consciousness, she could not speak. Perhaps it was the leering satyrs of Rubens’s imagination, or the n
aked sex of the sleeping Diana and her maidens, in their defenseless sleep so like the dead prey. How odd that this picture, pointedly associating hunting and sex, should depict the goddess of chastity. What did the word vénerie mean to the French? She was all at once uncomfortable, miserable, at being in this room with a dozen male hunters. Predators. In the bright autumn sun coming through the long windows, dust motes danced as the room heated up. Worse than discomfort, it was misery, welling up from she knew not where. She stared at the floor to avoid looking at any of the pictures; a row of sporting prints showed hunters, hunters, hunters, and their prey. They ill-for pleasure.

  Tuer par plaisir. The association with pleasure was suddenly clear to her. Plaisir with its sexual connotations. Male energy warmed the room, charged the dust motes like ions of some alien force, stifling her, frightening her. An unfamiliar and brutal sensation pulsed at the bridge of her nose, as if a hole, a shot, pierced right there. Her eyes filled, she remembered this sensation, it was tears. She was going to cry. Her throat swelled, the first tear spilled, the hand of some unnameable sorrow or exasperation pressed her breast. She quickly stood, feigning disarray, allergy, she knew not which, or why.

  “Thank you,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m late—I’ll leave you—I’m not in agreement—my husband—”

  She stumbled out, her adversaries too astonished to do more than half rise and watch her. The woman at the library desk wavered between a rhetorical farewell—“Bonne fin d‘après-midi, madame”—and saying nothing. Clara bolted across the gravel forecourt and climbed into her car.

  11

  Will You Wear White?

  On Mondays the flea market remained open but somehow folded in on itself with a quiet sigh of pleasure that the Sunday strollers had gone back to work, the knots of tourists were gone. Now dealers talked to each other, or to the few people who came back to look again at the vase, little table, terra cotta bust that had drawn them the day before. Serious transactions unfurled, cash in envelopes moved from breast pockets to desk drawers, pâté and carottes rapées perfumed the air with garlicky pungence. Anne-Sophie had lunch with a print dealer from Lyons in the Resto Per golèse, but it was all she could do to tear herself away from the vantage point of her stand, with its full view of the corridor leading to the stairs, where she could see anyone who went up or came down from the grenier.