L'Affaire (46 page)

‘I don’t understand why you’re always talking about me and my national characteristics as if Americans were all puritans and all the same. Have you ever been to America?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Emile.

‘I have,’ remarked the baron Otto. ‘Several times to New York and once to Florida.’

‘I’ll get them to give me some supper, if it’s not too
late,’ Emile said. ‘Won’t you join me, the two of you, have a
digestif
? I suppose you’ve dined already.’

Amy, seeing her chance to escape being alone with the baron, eagerly acceded. Seeing Emile had animated every conclusion about him that had plagued her during the past weeks, sexual turmoil and also her disturbing sense of a person she wanted as a friend. They took a table in the bar, and Emile waved for Madame the barman/cook. Otto and Amy had brandies, Otto handing Amy hers from waitress’s little tray with an almost proprietorial assurance. Amy’s heart began to pound with the desire that Otto go to bed and leave her alone with Emile, to whom she had as usual already said something combative – to whom, she could understand very clearly, she wanted to be very nice indeed. She wanted to sleep with him. Was there a chance of this?

‘Falling down, a ruin, a catastrophe,’ Otto began to describe his professional opinion of the state of the château, she supposed, but it could be a description of her uneasy mental condition. Otto settled in for an elaborate real-estate chat.

‘We should have a bottle from the estate vineyard, I’m afraid I don’t know what it’s called,’ Emile said. He asked the woman, who brought a bottle, conducting a jocular discussion in French that Amy couldn’t follow.

‘I wonder whether in general Prince Kropotkin would have approved of your project of buying the château and establishing the Venn heirs there. This would not be unlike Godwinian anarchism, but more like a monarchy,’ said Emile, with a smile. The words and the smile smote her heart directly. She knew he was intending them to, the
allusion to the prince a direct message. She felt jubilation and panic in about equal proportion.

‘I hope she will not buy it. I have strongly advised against it,’ Otto said. Fortune hunter, he said to himself indignantly of Emile, guessing what he thought was Emile’s game, to influence Amy to buy the château and set his wife up there. And he was probably trying to sleep with Amy into the bargain – why else confront her here in an isolated hotel? Shameless. His chivalrous nature, such a natural part of his métier of real estate man, was stirred, and of course his affection for Amy.

Of course I won’t buy it, Amy was thinking. Cold rooms, bricks, moats, are not for me. It was suddenly clear what she wanted, or, rather, clear that the château would never provide it, things would probably go wrong the way her other forms of helping had gone wrong. Instead of disappointing her, this moment of realism and self-discovery – could it lead to others? – was liberating, exhilarating, and told her that the heart has its directions you did ill to disregard, even if you must occasionally overule it. Her heart was fixed on Emile, so that it could be broken, and feelings, sadness, passion, all could rush into the breach. Her excitement grew.

‘Communal living was an approved form of mutual aid, but he would have wished us to own the property in common, which is going a bit far,’ she said. ‘I’m too much a capitalist for that.’ Go to bed, Baron Otto. Emile, too, was gazing with something like exasperation at Baron Otto, who was calling for a beer. The baron for his part had begun to respond rather coldly to Emile and
Amy’s prattle, clearly irritated by the presence of Emile and baffled by it, too, as by the appearance of a rowdy dog or importunate child.

‘Grand ou demi?’
the waitress asked.

‘Grand.’
The baron began to discourse on the state of the roof, and drainage problems inherent in old moats, however dry. Thoughts of Emile kept intruding on Amy’s concentration. She distracted herself by going room by room through the château in her mind.

He would never leave Amy to the mercy of this predatory con man, Otto thought. Americans were naive and ambitious, always overestimating their powers. Women were always being taken advantage of by men of this type. ‘The pipes alone, almost entirely lead, fifty thousand euros at a start.’ He could not repress his private recollections of Amy, lovely creature, whom he remembered himself to have satisfied satisfactorily, as far as he could tell. ‘To say nothing of the eave drains, which should be lined with copper… Amy, you must be tired. You musn’t let us keep you up. We can discuss all this tomorrow.’

‘Oh, I’m fine, I was just thinking of having another glass…’ she protested. Emile poured her another glass.

‘Géraldine is so hoping everything will work out for all the Venns and – your wife – and everyone,’ she said. ‘Did you see the press? Those beautiful old machines, the old-fashioned typefaces? There is something so romantic about fine printing…’

‘On the contrary, I think my mother-in-law is rather of the same opinion as the baron,’ said Emile. ‘She thinks you would make a mistake to buy it, and she thinks I have powers of persuasion. Dissuasion.’

‘I think you probably do.’ Amy smiled her sweetest, dimpled smile.

‘She wished me to dissuade you.’

‘Just so, Madame Chastine was concerned about you making a mistake,’ the baron agreed.

‘I on the other hand tend to think you should buy it, if you can afford it,’ Emile said.

All this seemed confusing; she had thought Géraldine approved of the affair. ‘Did she ask you to come down here?’

‘Géraldine suggested I have a talk with you,’ agreed Emile vaguely.

‘I told her I’d come have a look,’ said the baron.

‘You came all the way because of me?’ Amy began to find this irritating. After all, she could make her own decisions.

‘I wanted to see the place. And Persand suggested I come down, since I had to see the
notaire
anyway. Persand is opposed to Americans buying French real estate,’ said Emile. ‘I suppose I am, too, in general. But there are Americans one would want to see more of.’ Both Emile and the baron, seizing on that happy turn of phrase, beamed at Amy. The combination of beauty, a big fortune, and enlightened social thinking was an assemblage of qualities Emile had never before encountered; he couldn’t blame himself for being dazzled. If he could get rid of this Austrian.

Fortune hunter, lecher, this was deplorable, thought Otto.

It was hopeless, Amy saw, these men were going to keep each other in view till midnight. ‘Good night!’ she
said, and got up. ‘Thanks so much. It’s incredibly sweet of you both.’ She hoped her glance at Emile would be readable. She smiled again and left them.

‘Would you like a cigar?’ the baron was saying to Emile.

In her room, Amy, putting on her nightgown, weighed whether to leave it off entirely. Europe! where she could behave as she pleased. In a high state of excitement, she wondered what she would do if after all it was the baron who should tap on her door. She didn’t think it would be. Her excitement was more than sexual, it was a sort of sense of being on a life cusp, between what and what, she had no idea, but she had glimpsed it earlier, strands of self-understanding knotting into a strong frond that she could depend upon without giving it a self-indulgent amount of thought in future.

Fortunately it was Emile who knocked at the door. Standing modestly aside, despite herself she glanced down the hall, half expecting to see Otto also tiptoeing toward her door, as in the play she had seen by Feydeau, one of the few theatrical events Géraldine had sent her to which she had understood – people tiptoeing down corridors carrying their shoes, and hiding under beds. Emile came in and took her in his arms.

After some time, when neither of them had anything more to wish for – the phrase was Stendhal’s – Emile said, ‘I was trying to explain how I fell in love with you – in a way. It could have been either your air of mystery, or the fascination of your alien tribe, but in fact it was when I saw you being nice to some fat Americans in front of the Invalides.
No, not love “in a way,” I fell completely in love with you. You were concerned to save the honor of the French. Well, it was actually before that. Once, in Valméri, you wore your hair down at dinner. Do you remember? It was then I saw your beauty for the first time.’

Amy did remember, it was the night she had slept with the baron. So, evidently Géraldine was right about the importance of hair as about everything, including how amusing Emile would be in private, as she had just learned.

‘Well, of course I had remarked it before, at that lunch and even before. You are “noticeable,” after all,’ Emile went on. Amy was quite content to be praised for any attribute by such a perfect creature.

‘For me, it was when you didn’t kill the lobster,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t know it right then. I only let myself know it when I heard Victoire had left you – you see how scrupulous I am. So you don’t think I should cut my hair?’

‘Perhaps shoulder length,’ he agreed, as if he had given it some thought. That was when she knew he was truly French, member of an alien tribe.

‘Do you think it’s too late for us?’ she wondered. ‘I’m going back to California.’ Tears sprang to her eyes, surprising her. Emile held and kissed her with considerable conviction. Amy clung to him, but a shred of self-preserving instinct remained to her to protect her heart. Emile seemed to feel the same wariness.

‘Must you go back?’

‘Yes, I don’t belong in France, I know that.’

‘Any more than I do, I suppose. We are both outsiders. That’s our opportunity.’

‘You should go back to your room. Being together just makes it harder,’ Amy said. But he stayed the rest of the night – it was irresistible after all – both of them firmly agreeing that what they were doing didn’t count, and would not interfere with their various real-life resolutions.

‘What is your mysterious secret?’ Emile asked at some point.

She wasn’t quite sure what he meant; she was boringly transparent to herself. It could be her money, she knew – it was the one thing she couldn’t talk about, a kind of shameful secret.

They were never sure they didn’t hear the baron – or someone – outside her door in the wee hours; whoever it was must have heard the noisy moans and cries within.

40

Back in Paris, Amy had walked around for a few days in a dream state, wandering through the Jardins de Luxembourg or the Bon Marché without looking at anything, her resolutions wavering. At moments she dreaded going back to Palo Alto with a visceral panic. Once she heard herself give a great hiccupping sob in the Monoprix. She knew the future, unwelcoming and bleak: she would never again see Emile; the love of her life was behind her; the years to come held nothing in particular to look forward to but good works, which she didn’t find as satisfying as she ought. Was her unhappiness relative, because she had had little to trouble her in life? Her eyes filled with self-pity that she would always be outside, excluded, and that by her riches she had put herself beyond deserving any form of consolation. Who could feel sorry for her, one of the luckiest people on earth?

She knew she didn’t really want a château. It had been a stupid idea. She was not a châtelaine, and not even a European, she was someone who hadn’t even got around to furnishing her condo. Her authentic self was not an exile in a tower; like it or not, she was an American person from Palo Alto, there was no getting around this. A château would be a burden far from her interests and abilities, a sort of pretentious diversion from her real life.
She thought of her colleague Ben, stranded on his vast tracts in Patagonia, and of the forlorn, bored expression in his eyes when he came back to California, as he rarely did now.

What was the fine line between boredom and depression? Could whole nations be depressed? Bored? Walking along the Paris streets, looking at the thinner bodies of French people and thinking about their longer lives: were they less bored than Americans? Was it because they could see things at eye level, walking along, instead of being trapped in cars? Or did they feel limited, shackled by the lack of wheels?

Of course she bore in mind the disappointment she was causing to Victoire, Posy, Rupert, Kerry, and Harry, and even herself, though the decision not to buy lightened her, too, routing the specter of the leaky, giant, cold edifice reproachfully looming in her consciousness, if not also in her unconscious, where the primitive real estate gene still emitted its disturbing dream influence. She was going against her own principles of mutual aid, not to do something so clearly for the general good.

Amy had been reassured by Emile that Géraldine would be pleased that she wasn’t buying the château. Nevertheless, she explained her decision to Géraldine with some trepidation. ‘Baron Otto says not to buy it, everyone seems to say it would be unwise,’ she apologized.

Géraldine had heard this already – had had phone calls from Emile, Baron Otto, the consternated Pamela, and the desperate Rupert. She had asked Emile if it was he who had talked Amy out of the château affair.

‘I? No, I haven’t talked to her about it,’ he said, not quite untruthfully.

‘I’m sure you are right,’ said Géraldine to Amy now. She was relieved but didn’t wish to seem too pleased.

‘I have mixed feelings. I can imagine so many people happy there, little Harry, Victoire… In so many ways, I can see it ...’

‘I’m sure you’re longing to be at home,’ said Géraldine. ‘It must be lovely, all those palm trees and beaches.’ She was thinking that Amy didn’t really look like she was longing to go home. There was now something about her, at once a glow and something triste. Géraldine would like to keep her a few months longer. Amy was on a cusp, clearly, and could fall either way, but probably would fall back into California’s simple, even barbaric ways; she had told Géraldine about take-out food, for example.

‘Not really,’ said Amy, thinking of freeways, Burger Kings, gas stations, traffic, garage door openers, resentful Salvadoreans doing the hedges, war, religious fundamentalists in A-frame churches with vinyl siding, all the anger and ugliness she knew she would find at home these days. She thought of the Ukiah of her childhood, hot and dusty, where you could ride your bike everywhere, and of Palo Alto today. But you couldn’t escape, that was the probability, you could only try to become better at being where you were. Roots were nonsense. What a lot of trouble she had gone to, to discover only this rather banal and simple truth.