Tim was half American, half Belgian on his mother’s side and was called Tim instead of Tom by everyone but his mother. He had kept the pale tow-colored hair of childhood, and was one of those large pink-cheeked rugby-player types, unsuited by his European education for fitting into either culture, and more good-natured than his size would suggest. He was a journalist ostensibly, a wan derer, a dreamer perhaps. And perhaps slightly older than he appeared, which raised the possibility of a lost half-decade somewhere behind him.
Tim had known Cees a long time. They had met at prep school in Switzerland, Cees then a skinny curly-headed cynic, now something of a law-and-order zealot, and much fatter. From what anyone knew, Tim’s father had been an American representative of a hotel and car-rental chain, stationed in Europe. The family moved a lot, from London to Istanbul, so Tim mostly attended Swiss boarding schools. His American aunts had referred to this as being “sent away” but he himself had seen it as adventure. His Belgian mother looked on the separations from her son as normal though painful, a form of sacrifice exacted from herself, sacrifice being the nature of life. Tim always spoke with great affection of his mother, inadvertently giving the impression she was dead, though she lived in Michigan.
Always looking for stories, his only means of supporting the rather mondaine Paris life he led, Tim resolved to figure out a way of getting an interview with Serge Cray about his collection of ancient manuscripts and incunabula—an approach to Cray he had never seen tried. People were mostly interested in his films, or at the outside his personality, and not especially in his old books. Collecting as a logical extension of the role of auteur? Filmmaking as a form of collecting, in the sense that it was an accretion of images and ideas? Tim got out his notebook and wrote these notions down, since he suspected they were too flimsy to stick in his mind, like many of his ideas.
A young man given to irony and no illusions, in one sense he was a generic young man, for there are always dozens of Americans like him in Paris, clinging to the rather precarious livelihoods they have managed to score, for the pleasure of being there or because they have burnt their bridges and have no idea how to go back home now that they have let the moment go by for getting their MBAs or internships at their hometown radio stations or newspapers or lesser Condé Nast publications. But there was something extra about Tim Nolinger, something more than just the patina of a Swiss boarding school.
“The FBI is coming here,” Cees said. “That is a little bit rare. It is hard to see why it is of concern to them—a stolen manuscript from a private American library. Not a federal thing. They usually hand art theft on to the art people at Interpol. ”
“It might be a federal crime. American laws are complicated—state lines, jurisdictions. I went to an American law school for a year,” Tim said. “No Japanese or Arabs on this list of collectors, I notice.”
“I often forget you’re an American,” Cees said.
“Only half. But which half, I am asked, head or heart? Top or bottom?” Tim laughed, and took his leave. It was a question he didn’t himself know the answer to, he’d been in Europe so long.
Having promised his French fiancée to turn up at a soiree in Paris, he had booked a plane at sixteen o‘clock from Schiphol, which would get him back to France just in time to languish in the traffic at the nightmare rush hour.
Idea for a piece: the terrible traffic in Paris? It was a wonder more people weren’t killed. Deploring French traffic was not just rhetorical; their most important people were run over in traffic—Roland Barthes, and the head of Cartier, who stepped out of his shop on the Place Vendôme. Death in traffic a tradition going back at least as far as the husband of Madame Curie, mown down by a horsecab, his mind on his wife’s infidelity.
3
Anne-Sophie
The agreeable Tim Nolinger was the future son-in-law of the well-known French novelist Estelle d‘Argel (Les Fruits; Doric, Ionian; Plusieurs Fois), engaged to her daughter Anne-Sophie. What a misfit the two of them, Estelle and Anne-Sophie. Her daughter’s fiancé did not quite please the worldly and practical Estelle, who had greater ambitions for Anne-Sophie, had hoped for a count or a promising politician, or a future Academician, or at the least a sports figure—if from a respectable sport like tennis. Or at least someone French. Tim did play tennis, of course, but only as a form of recreation.
Anne-Sophie, a concern to her mother, was the American community’s ideal young Frenchwoman, trim, confident, flirtatious, cheerful, enterprising, with her little shop. After attending Sciences-Po, she might have assisted a government minister or become an attaché de presse at a publishing house, but drifted instead into dealing in horsey artifacts, a hobby since girlhood. Anne-Sophie’s stand, Cheval-Art, formerly belonged to a Monsieur Lavalle who, as he aged, spent less and less time there and over the years had pretty much turned the business over to Anne-Sophie, especially the bookkeeping and the buying; he would come in occasionally on Monday afternoons to take a turn at the stand. Their association had begun when she was still at school, and hung about, little by little betraying a knowledge, remarkable in a jeune falle, of Niderviller horse figurines and antique tack. At first her mother had mistrusted Monsieur Lavalle’s intentions regarding Anne-Sophie, but she needn’t have, for Lavalle was altogether gay.
Anne-Sophie, at home in her small apartment on the rue Saint-Dominique, was preparing to bathe. Rosy and compact, her breasts the little pink-tipped breasts of a Boucher nymph, she brought to mind a particular picture in the Musée du Luxembourg. Nipples just peeking out of the suds. Perhaps a polished toe surfacing at the faucet end. Anne-Sophie lined up the stuff she used for her elaborate baths: bath oil, soap, shampoo, rinse, crème de gommage, razor, pumice.
But tonight she felt too devastated, and at the same time excited, to unscrew the tops and embark on the long, absorbing ritual which might lull her mind into a sense of the ordinary after the shocking events of the day. These she wanted to keep a keen memory of, for Tim, when she met him at the princess’s party. His journalist instincts would prompt questions she wanted to be able to answer. She had noticed everything, she thought, in case Tim should ask something specific, like “What was the guy wearing?” Gray shirt, blue knitted gilet, blue knitted tie soaked in blood! When it came to Tim Nolinger, Anne-Sophie had a Frenchwoman’s sense of vocation—but she was also an expert in hunting prints and a very good businesswoman.
Anne-Sophie had from her novelist mother Estelle two versions of maternal lore on how to lead life. On the one hand were the lessons of the real life Anne-Sophie saw being lived by her mother and father, her brother and herself; on the other was the general philosophy she found expressed in Estelle’s works, which represented a reality at once more sophisticated, more cynical, and more exacting. For instance, the comtesse Ribemont in Against the Tide says, “Never make a man feel guilty,” whereas at home, her mother had often ignored the countess’s principles by snapping at her husband, “You might have called, I’ve been frantic,” or “Where have you been?”
Of the two, Anne-Sophie had concluded that the countess was probably right. There had been nothing really wrong between her parents, just a certain detachment Anne-Sophie found disappointing. Daily life could be led more beautifully, more passionately; Anne-Sophie had therefore patterned her behavior and beliefs on things her mother had written. “Pay attention to the petits soins,” Madame Godchaud, the worldly grandmother in Plusieurs Fois by Estelle d‘ArgeI, tells her granddaughter who is about to be married. The little details of grooming. That meant obsessive depilation and having dainty lingerie. So Anne-Sophie was careful of the petits soins both by nature and by the study of her mother’s works, whereas in life Estelle had never mentioned such things, beyond the usual admonitions about clean underwear.
Patterning yourself after books can make you seem rather literal-minded, unable to figure things out for yourself, so Anne-Sophie was taken by some people to be too literal-minded. And someone interested in horses, in the common mind, wa
s bound to be earthy and simple—a girl cannot be both horsey and flighty. So Anne-Sophie was misunderstood as a sensible outdoorsy girl, when in fact she also had a yearning for luxe and frivolity.
She clamped her mirror between her knees to keep it out of the suds and worked on her eyebrows, but her mind wasn’t on them. She was thinking of the gruesome sight she had seen that day in the flea market.
The reception was at the undeniably grand rooms of an elderly American, the princess Dorothy Minor Sternholz, married to Blaise. Sternholz was not a French prince, of course, but something more easterly, perhaps Lithuanian or Czech, his a flimsy, distant title more imposed on him than claimed. (The French love titles, their revolutions notwithstanding. For that matter, Americans do too.) Blaise Sternholz the prince, the publisher of a sporting newspaper and a member of the International Olympic Committee, had been raised in the Sixteenth Arrondissement and had never been to Lithuania. Dorothy was a permanent fixture among Americans in the City of Light, and had notable art works acquired during a period before her marriage when, on the evidence of a number of paintings she posed for, she appears to have known quite a few French artists quite well.
The American community in Paris was something of a world unto itself. Americans there had their charities, their futile long-distance involvement in American politics, their periodic attempts to disseminate American wisdom, thought, and literature to France as in the days of Tom Paine, their English-language cooking classes, their music, their American Church and American Cathedral, their knot of French friends, their effusive celebrations of the slightly has-been American celebrities who turned up here, their embassy presided over by someone amusing sometimes—the new ambassador being viewed warily after the radiant hospitality of the last one—and the special store where they could buy their peanut butter and popcorn. Perhaps there were no natural contradictions between the French landscape and the Americans who inhabited it so diffidently, but it often seemed that Americans would do well to stay out of what they did not understand. Or was it they who brought the harm?
Arriving at Dorothy’s party before Tim, Anne-Sophie embraced the Americans of her parents’ age assembled there. Everyone kissed her in the French fashion. Especially intent kisses from Olivia Pace’s elderly husband, the rich Robert Pace, did not escape her, nor his squeeze of her hand; he was what the French call a vieux beau.
Dorothy crossed to give her the usual two kisses. The princess’s affection for Anne-Sophie stemmed in part from fellow feeling. Whereas Anne-Sophie’s real mother was so unlike Anne-Sophie that she had never understood her, Dorothy did. Anne-Sophie’s interest in horses put her in mind of her own interest in sports, and she often remembered the sense of unfeminine deviance and mar ginality that went with it, though Anne-Sophie was French femininity itself. Dorothy prided herself on being a great expert on French attitudes and culture, knowledge largely gleaned from her husband, whom she had met as a member of the U.S. Olympic rifle team forty years before.
Anne-Sophie raised her delightful chin, slightly dimpled like a child‘s, and gazed around the room for people more amusing to talk to. Disappointment. The usual suspects, and no other French people except the hopeless Madame Wallingforth. With despair she scanned the pretty rooms in deep salmon pink, curtained in green, candelabra of French vermeil, oil paintings of American subjects, especially barns and petits bateaux, large sofas in lime green, growly Anglo voices, that tall red-eyed anthropologist, and the pretty secretary or whatever she was, about whom, always, many rumors, the usual drab professor in bow tie and the plump wife—was this a reception for one of the bow ties, a famous economist or historian, was that it?—someone who had written a book, another book, about France? Zut, they produced them endlessly, anglophones and their books. Even Tim threatened to write one.
“Your reprehensible Tim telephoned to say he’ll be late,” Dorothy told her. “He’s stuck in a taxi from the airport.”
“Tant mieux, I’ll have revenge then before he gets here.” Anne-Sophie laughed and made a beeline for the good-looking black actor Sam Strait.
4
What Anne-Sophie Saw
When Tim eventually found himself as promised in these same high, vast pink rooms, their long windows festooned in green damask and thickly glazed against the heavy traffic on the rue du Bac, his heart sank at the boredom in prospect. His own set was raffish and motley, not usually American, and—from journalists to gym teachers—not always people he expected Anne-Sophie to like. She on the other hand had a collection of bon-chic-bon-genre young women (and men) she had been at school with, well-brought-up Parisians strayed into disparate walks of life by now, and also the occasional holdover from her horsey period, old riding teachers and stable managers, universally dull.
The spindly chairs were arranged in the French way around the edges of the room, as at dancing school. On none of these could he immediately see Anne-Sophie, but she was someone who would be dancing, not sitting. This was not a dance, of course, just a benefit cocktail party for the American Library—was that it? Or a book party. He couldn’t remember. In their gabardines and worsted blazers, the mostly American guests looked like forlorn time-travelers in the grandiose eighteenth-century space.
Americans weren’t popular this season, or rather, even less popular than usual. The U.S. was embarked on a rescue mission in the Balkans that was seen by the French as a barely submerged drive for world domination. One of the few French guests, Madame Wallingforth, pointed this out to Tim as soon as he came in.
Though he was not often in the U.S., he explained to Madame Wallingforth, he knew in his bones that it wasn’t desire for conquest but its opposite that made his countrymen behave as they did. “Americans want to make everything shipshape so we can be let alone—like a man who has to shave before he can read the paper.”
Madame Wallingforth sniffed. “Americans have colonial designs and always have had.”
Except that he’d said he’d meet Anne-Sophie here, he’d have cancelled. He had no particular interest in Professor Hoff, Froff, whatever his name was, had had lunch with the aged and sociable princess very recently, and would have liked to go to his computer to research a couple of angles in the matter of the Morgan Library theft.
But he soon saw it was serendipity that had brought him. There was Serge Cray’s woman (wife or mistress?)—exactly the person to approach about getting to meet Cray. Clara Holly, instantly recognizable if you had seen her one movie, could be a dozen years ago, with its memorable dance. Clara Holly, first standing somewhat hesitantly in the doorway, clearly thinking she might not come in, then making for one of the little gilt chairs. She sat down and made some adjustment to her shoe.
She was older than the exquisite girl of Swan Dinner but had not really changed, except in the way movie actors always seem changed in the flesh, to smaller, older, with normal human variations of skin tone or errors of dress. He moved closer and presented himself—or introduced himself, as Americans say, though it would seem rather risque to say in French.
“Bonjour, Clara,” Dorothy was saying. “I didn’t think you were coming.”
“I wasn‘t, but then since I’d come into town anyway ...”
“Are you staying for dinner afterward?” They did their cheek kisses.
“I suppose, why not? Your dinners are always so delicious,” Clara agreed. “Why you exert yourself on the food I can’t imagine, since you know people would come for the booze anyway.”
“I’m Tim Nolinger,” Tim said. “Miss Holly, may I just speak to you for two seconds?”
This obsequious but intrusive approach was a mistake, because she sensed a journalist or a fan, and her smile congealed professionally. “Of course, hello,” she said, putting out her hand.
Tim admitted to being a journalist, recited his credentials in hopes that one from the potpourri would appeal to her. European stringer for the American conservative newsmagazine Reliance, etc. He did not add film buff, restaurant critic, and the rest, but we
nt straight to the point, her husband’s collection and the Amsterdam police list.
Clara Holly seemed relieved not to be being asked personal questions about herself, or about Cray, and relaxed a little. Tim thought her powerfully good-looking, early to middle thirties, and the only imperfections he could see were two tiny pocks on her forehead. Having predetermined that she was bound to be either one of the two things, haughty or elfin, that actresses always were, he put her down for haughty and failed to register something more intelligent and satirical as well. So much for his newsman’s instinct.
“You could come out and talk to Serge,” she agreed. “He loves to show off his documents.” Tim doubted that—Serge Cray did not have the reputation of a garrulous collectionneur. But he seized on the invitation, pleased at the success of his gambit. Then she dashed any sense of intimacy or special favor by telling him to call Cray’s business office.
“The people there have his schedule and can give you directions if he says yes.” She smiled again and escaped him.
Eventually he spotted Anne-Sophie, who, true to form, had now found the three other French people in the room and was knotted with them in one corner, talking furtively, defying her promise to persevere with the English-speakers in order to combat and conquer her anxieties about her English, although it was perfectly good.
The French people who turned up at these American occasions were usually compromised by some circumstance of their lives: they had worked for American companies, or had spent a year of childhood in an English-speaking country, or were Protestant, which always gave them a slight air of illegitimacy. He didn’t join them, but caught Anne-Sophie’s eye across the room; she sent an air kiss. He thought, as he always did, how much he liked her looks (she was like him a pale blonde), her blooming skin, her slightly pop-eyed and shiny look of Fragonard, Watteau—but tonight she also had a rattled, stunned quality that made her big eyes wider than usual.
Le Mariage Page 2