Authors: Diane Johnson
Emile thought it was rather hard on Kip to be stashed in some school in Versailles – he was clearly happy to be here among familiar faces like Rupert and Crumley, and Amy Hawkins. Emile had known about her unfortunate interference in the matter of transporting Victoire’s father,
but hadn’t known until Kip told him that it was she who had organized the school and offered to pay his way back to America if he wanted to go back to his former one.
All, but especially Amy, were surprised to hear of the continuing interest of Parisians in Jeanne d’Arc, whose apparition was being talked of either as a ‘psychic aberration,’ a true ‘visitation,’ or an ‘American incursion,’ though always
entre guillemets,
as if each speaker feared making the wrong choice among these possibilities, given the impossibility of such an apparition at all. In the American newspapers, Amy had been following a growing protest in America, localized for now in Washington, but with voices newly raised in California, over the government’s lack of transparency when it came to military activities, now jeopardizing even Europe, which it had taken an Alpine tragedy to expose. In the teeth of a number of these small demonstrations, the President’s press secretary had issued a flat denial that any American planes had been anywhere near the Alps, let alone flying low enough to start an avalanche. Activists had countered with statements of disbelief, and hypotheses about planned escalations of war in the Mideast or the Balkans.
The serious French press was also hammering this view, predicting random invasions, perhaps even of Europe, so extreme was their apprehensiveness. The very most left-wing papers predicted illegal cooperation by the French government with the nefarious American plans. The popular French press was more drawn to stories of the apparition of Jeanne d’Arc herself than to discussions of her political significance. It was the occasion for many
essays on the ‘mystery of the Alps,’ and the manner in which it represented lingering superstition and symbolized national aspirations. ‘An apparition in the mind of an appointed one, the witness, is no less meant for the rest of us,’ opined Father Ruiz, the revered priest, in Lyon. Géraldine had passed on some clippings, which Amy, dictionary in hand, had laboriously translated.
‘The sainted Jeanne, whatever one may believe about her material presence, retains her inspirational power – her courage and candor, her belief in herself,’ Emile was saying to several admirers.
Apropos of Joan of Arc, Mr Osworthy had good news for Amy, gleaned from reading
Le Monde
on the train. ‘There was nobody there, under the snow, at least that they can find. They don’t rule out a grisly suprise in the spring.’
‘Good news,’ said Amy, wondering if he meant, as a subtext, You in particular will be relieved to hear there’s no one else dead up there. ‘How do they know?’
‘I believe they do probes, or radio waves. But there is some bad news, too, or at least cause for uneasiness. But I will ring you tomorrow. Something rather appalling has happened, concerning Kerry and Kip. I’ll ring you first thing in the morning.’
‘Well, what? You can tell me now.’
‘Kerry is acting strangely, combative, unhappy with the death of her husband.’
‘Seems natural.’
‘We’ll speak in the morning.’
Amy drifted off to look for Kip. ‘American culture, an
oxymoron,’ Emile was saying in English to someone. ‘However much they may want it, however flat their lives must be without it – hence the obsession with money – they mistrust culture in the European sense. Think of their inhuman treatment of their most brilliant writer, the neglected genius Poe.’
This was the first time Amy had heard the notion that Poe was the most brilliant American writer. The same Poe that had written ‘The Telltale Heart’? It was true that she could still remember her elementary school reading of that tale, more than one could say for most stories. She resolved to ask Sigrid to find a biography of Poe and FedEx it over.
At nine, people began to drift off to their dinners. Amy waited till all had gone to thank Géraldine profusely and say a special good night to Victoire, for whom she had had a sympathetic feeling since the moment of Victoire’s incipient tears in the hotel ladies’ room. Tonight, as then, Victoire was a miracle of poise and
soignée
(‘well-tended, well-groomed’) prettiness, but, as then, was distracted though playing to perfection the role of daughter of the house
(jeune fille de la maison),
leaving to her husband the task of talking to the serious politicians and businessmen.
Victoire’s children, so unlike children at home, were models of some French concept of childhood, putting their little faces up to be kissed by the adults and saying, ‘
Bonsoir, madame,’
like fully functioning citizens of this party. Amy admired the way they weren’t shuffled off with a baby-sitter and that they repaid the trust placed in them by behaving well. Though because of Harry, Amy was more aware of children than before, she was not sure how
she felt about them generically, and was pleased to feel an actual affectionate impulse toward these pretty, dark little girls. The Abboud family seemed to embody some ideal not quite American but more in the Platonic sense of the way families were meant to be – sons-in-law cooperated in the family project, even when it was for some friend of the mother-in-law. On Sunday afternoons in Palo Alto, the guys would be watching football.
‘It was a joy,
bien sûr,
and thank you for the lovely tulips. But did you think we didn’t have enough flowers?’ Géraldine said.
Kip had continued to avoid Amy, so that finally she accosted him. ‘Why are you hiding from me?’
‘I’m not,’ he said.
‘Is it something about Kerry?’ Amy asked, remembering what Osworthy had just told her.
‘I can’t help it if she’s weird’ he said evasively, and she let it drop. Mr Osworthy would tell her soon enough. She insisted on inviting Kip to dinner after the party, partly because she guessed that he would like to stay away from his boarding school as late as allowed, and she wanted to cheer him up a little, and partly because she feared Otto’s offer of seeing her home. Sure enough, Otto was waiting for her outside, and if he was chagrined to find Kip, he didn’t show it, but took her arm and chatted to them both. They dined in a brasserie on the Ile Saint-Louis. Kip seemed uncomfortable – perhaps it was the presence of the baron – and hurried through his dinner. Amy knew he must be lonesome at his school without even Harry to talk to, which could explain his taciturn manner, as he
talked about his French class and the problems posed by the fact that kids his age in France were farther along in math – though far behind in computers. He finally confided some of his worries about Kerry.
‘They won’t let her go home,’ Kip said. ‘Her château, where she lives – they say no one can go inside now.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it won’t be hers. Posy and the others get it. Maybe they’ll let her stay in it, but it depends on what Adrian signed or something.’
‘Doesn’t Harry get a share? They can’t just put Harry out in the street. Anyhow, they seem nice, it’s hard to believe…’ Amy said, very shocked. ‘Let me find out.’ She was thinking that perhaps Posy and Rupert didn’t realize that Kerry had no place to go. ‘I can call Mr Osworthy. He probably just hasn’t thought.’
They put Kip on the metro at eleven, and Otto walked Amy home through the courtyard of the Louvre and over the Pont Royal. Lights on the other bridges were reflected in the black water of the river. A
bateau-mouche
washed them with its powerful lights. He came upstairs with her, not to her surprise and, in a funny way, in accordance with her hope; though she didn’t plan to sleep with him, his familiar face at Géraldine’s in the sea of thin, well-made-up, and crisply barbered unfamiliar French faces had somehow warmed her. She was lonesome herself. He admired her new apartment in effusive, slightly professional terms – ‘Hmmm, north facing but you will have sun from the south in the kitchen and bedroom, and it is well that the bedroom is not on the quay. Quite a pretty color – what do you call it?’
‘Robin’s-egg blue,’ Amy said. ‘Something else in French; it’s copied from the Grand Trianon.’
‘We must talk,’ he said, as they gazed reverently at this so meditated and authentic color.
‘Drink?’ Amy proposed. ‘Sit down, please…’
‘It’s Fennie,’ he began when they had sat down. ‘My wife. As you know, she is very difficult. I do not see how we can go on, you and I. She is going to come to Paris with me in future… In fact, she is here now, at the Hôtel du Louvre. I told her I had a business engagement… I felt I must see you before – before our hearts become too entangled. More entangled.’
Startled, Amy began to protest that her heart was not entangled, but that seemed tactless, and not even entirely true. Now that he had ruled it out, she felt she at some level might have been watching to go to bed with the baron again, on his visits to Paris, not to mention during winter months in Valméri. She could see a future of occasional intercourse, coupled with reliable real estate advice, ultimately perhaps a chalet… After all, he was the only person to have presented himself. He wore his overcoat of loden green with silver buttons. She smiled to conceal her conflicted feelings and said she understood. Baron Otto brightened when he saw there was to be no scene, and accepted an after dinner
gennepi,
which Amy had brought with her from the mountains.
‘Of course we will stay fast friends, and I will do everything in my power to help you, with property, or advice – I am utterly yours,’ he said.
When he had gone, she thought –
brooded
was maybe the word – about the baron, about Géraldine’s party, the
various dressed-up people, the hors d’oeuvres of stuffed quail eggs and salmon on toast squares, and especially the way she could not compete – even if she had cared to – with Otto’s married state. Someday she hoped to understand the peculiar institution of marriage, with its jealousies and proprietary emotions she never had felt, and did not wish to feel yet. Perhaps that was the trouble – her heart had never been broken or even grazed.
Still, husbands. What a bunch! She hoped Victoire, who was so nice, would be able to manage her handsome, doubtless troublesome, quarrelsome, probably – like Otto – unfaithful husband. You heard about philandering European men, and from the evidence, if Otto, Emile, Adrian Venn, and the French lawyer were typical, a low opinion of them was about right. Yet these men all seemed relatively blithe. Those of her male Palo Alto colleagues who were unfaithful to their wives suffered, went to shrinks, publicly discussed their anguish, and inevitably divorced, creatures of some American, Protestant form of the superego that wouldn’t let them just get away with it. Was it ever wise to marry?
But there was something to trouble her about what had just happened with baron Otto, all the same. If she had been chagrined not even to get started with her ski instructor Paul-Louis, it was even more demoralizing to be dumped after one encounter, as if the initial tryout had failed to please, or that he had found her too American, lacking in some basic erotic skill or attitude. Had her episode with the baron in a way gone too well, too weddedly, perhaps?
Amy had never had doubts about her own sexual
adequacy, but now she began to fear that some chasm of cultural difference, of which she knew only the native tradition, made sexual intercourse something quite different in different countries. She thought of those odd Japanese prints where fully dressed people thrust their organs out of the folds of kimonos into the concealed orifices of others – was that the reality, or an artistic convention? She thought of the television film in which the naked French girls had stood on their heads. Or the Almodóvar film, shown in polite Palo Alto theaters, where the heroine receives cunnilingus while dangling from a clothesline. Was there something peculiarly Spanish there? Or not?
Or even worse – new thoughts chilled her – had Otto simply realized she was never going to buy a ski chalet? She didn’t believe in being emotionally vulnerable – that was no way to be – but still these thoughts disturbed and worried her. One of the worries was that she didn’t feel keenly enough her adventure with Otto.
Yet, she was troubled by an unnamed erotic turmoil. It was not midnight, and she felt the smallness of her apartment, a sense of confinement not to be looked at too deeply lest it lead to confronting her ambivalence about her whole project here. She put on her coat and went outside to look at the view up and down the Seine, as she often did. She loved the way in Paris a woman could walk around at night with no worries, unlike in Palo Alto. She had no explanation for the problem in Palo Alto that wasn’t too politically incorrect to be directly thought of. She often felt, being here, that she had to censor some area of her consciousness to avoid certain
pointed realizations she was not ready for about America.
Standing on the Pont du Carrousel over the black river to see arcs of lights on the bridges on both sides, like a scene and its mirror image in infinite regression – this was surely one of the most splendid sights in all the world. Was the beauty of the surroundings a positive value, like cooperation, for which society should bear the collective cost? The French apparently thought so. Prince Kropotkin had not been very interested in beauty, as she remembered.
She felt, rather than saw, someone approach, then made out Emile Abboud coming toward her, his collar turned up, his woolen scarf wrapped around his neck, walking briskly from the direction of Géraldine’s. He raised a hand in greeting. It was somehow unsettling to run into someone she knew in the middle of the night in Paris, especially Abboud, whom she had earlier seen in the bosom of his family, and, despite her reflections about the safety of Paris, she felt a crawl of fear, as if he would menace her. Or was it a start of guilt, as if she had been caught at something?
‘Bonsoir, mademoiselle,’
he said. ‘
Est-ce que la soirée vous a plu?’
speaking absentmindedly in French.