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Narrated by Kate Reading
Diane JohnsonUnabridged — 12 hours, 26 minutes
Narrated by Kate Reading
Diane JohnsonUnabridged — 12 hours, 26 minutes
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Immensely amusing, L'Affaire has the same mischievous wit and graceful style as Johnson's earlier Parisian works, but it is broader in cultural scope (the British have arrived), more ambitious in its narrative form and decidedly forward-looking.—Caryn James
Don't imagine that L'Affaire is either a laugh-out-loud or get aroused-all-over kind of comedy or sex farce. Hardly. In the first place, the book moves very slowly -- you will learn a lot about cooking and the Napoleonic Code. Johnson divides her attention almost equally among a half-dozen characters, imbuing the plot with dramatic richness, but at the cost of intensity. This is a leisurely, almost old-fashioned novel of manners, really, and one needs to relax and accept that. There's no urgency of any sort -- sexual or narrative. In her prose, as in her tale, Johnson seems to be aiming for an elegant urbanity: She's never exactly witty, but she hopes to sound worldly-wise and often succeeds. — Michael Dirda
In Le Divorce and Le Mariage, Johnson polished her skill for sophisticated social comedy involving the cultural disconnections of Americans in France. Here, she perfects it in a deliciously entertaining story of a group of people drawn together-and divided by-the sharply different laws of succession in France and Britain. Amy Hawkins, a beautiful, na ve, suddenly very rich Californian dot-com entrepreneur, comes to a posh ski resort in the French Alps as part of her plan for cultural self-improvement. When she generously pays for transporting the dying Adrian Venn, a publisher crushed in a landslide, back to his native England, her humanitarian gesture backfires with exquisite irony. Venn's two grown English children, his illegitimate French daughter, his new, much younger American wife and their toddler son become embroiled in a classic scenario of quarreling heirs, each seething with expectations at the expense of the others. Add a stuffy British solicitor who disdains French customs, his French counterpart who equally despises the English, an intellectual and TV personality who demonizes Americans, a lusty Austrian baron, a chic Parisienne hostess and other expertly drawn characters, and the comedy moves into high gear, but never at the expense of insights into human nature. Johnson's dexterity with plot builds astounding but credible complications, and she is adept at rendering a kind of fugal counterpoint in which each character misunderstands what each of the others thinks. Because love and money are never far apart in Johnson's oeuvre, four affairs take place, with mixed results. Johnson is more droll than Henry James, to whom she's been compared, and she's as witty as a modern-day Voltaire. Vraiment, L'Affaire, c'est irresistible! Author tour. (Sept. 29) Forecast: The August 8 release of Le Divorce from Fox Searchlight/Merchant Ivory will build instant interest in this novel, which should fly off bookstore shelves. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Long before George W. stirred up anti-French feelings in patriotic Americans, novelist Johnson had dissected Franco-American cultural misunderstandings and stereotypes with wit and flair in the delightful Le Divorce and Le Mariage. Her latest comedy of manners returns to familiar territory, this time throwing English attitudes into the mix. At an exclusive ski resort in the French Alps, English publisher Adrian Venn and his new, much younger American wife, Kerry, lie comotose in the hospital, the victims of an avalanche rumored to have been caused by low-flying American warplanes. Gathered at their bedside are Venn's two adult English children, his illegitimate French daughter, and Kerry's 14-year-old brother. When Amy Hawkins, a successful but idealistic young dot.com executive from California who has come to Europe to acquire a bit of culture before she starts her nonprofit foundation, generously pays for Adrian's transport back to England, she unwittingly sets off a legal avalanche. As French and English laws differ over questions of inheritance, Venn's heirs are soon embroiled in a classic family feud. Once again Johnson has concocted a tasty literary bonbon with fully drawn characters and incisive but hilarious insights into national differences. Bon appetit! [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/03.]-Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
An avalanche in the Alps brings together a disparate group for much debate over cultural differences in Johnson's latest novel of ideas (Le Divorce, 1997, etc.). The closest thing to a main character-Johnson has a habit of skipping willy-nilly from one person's perception to the next, and they all blur together quite quickly-is Amy Hawkins, a fantastically wealthy dot-com executive from Palo Alto. Having so much money leaves Amy plenty of free time and a desire to see the world, which is what has brought her to a French Alps ski resort. Tragedy has just struck, however, in the form of a massive avalanche that has left a married couple from Amy's chalet in comas. Wanting to help out like a good American, she appoints herself de facto guardian of Kip, younger brother of coma victim Kerry. A nasty hullabaloo erupts over what's going to happen to the couple, especially seeing since Kerry's much older husband, Andrew, is not only unlikely to ever regain consciousness but is quite well-off and has other progeny flying in to stand watch over him and haggle over what to do. This is all backdrop for Johnson's primary aim: to set an American woman of a certain age, very successful, extremely bright, and well educated, in the midst of well-to-do French society (the only not-rich people here tend to be serving wine to the speaking characters) and watch what happens. This leads to quite a few good tossed-off observations on the acrimonious divide between French and American societies, as well as some promising extramarital sexual entanglements. If only any of this were in the least bit entertaining. The much-lauded Johnson, a three-time NBA Award nominee, has a gift for smart gab, but it's never quiteas smart as she thinks, and the turgid lack of credible people or any forward momentum is a fatal flaw. If L'Affaire were a dinner companion, she (or he) would be quite learned but, sadly, a terrible bore. Author tour
In Le Divorce and Le Mariage, Johnson polished her skill for sophisticated social comedy involving the cultural disconnections of Americans in France. Here, she perfects it in a deliciously entertaining story of a group of people drawn together—and divided by—the sharply different laws of succession in France and Britain… Johnson's dexterity with plot builds astounding but credible complications, and she is adept at rendering a kind of fugal counterpoint in which each character misunderstands what each of the others thinks. Because love and money are never far apart in Johnson's oeuvre, four affairs take place, with mixed results. Johnson is more droll than Henry James, to whom she's been compared, and she's as witty as a modern-day Voltaire. Vraiment, L'Affaire, c'est irresistible!”—Publishers Weekly
“Like the wildly successful Le Divorce and Le Mariage, Johnson's latest novel explores the strange alchemy that occurs when American and European social mores collide… Johnson's novel is exactly the kind of intricate, bittersweet comedy of manners her many fans have come to expect.”—Booklist
"Immensely amusing… devilishly on target."—The New York Times Book Review
"An international confection in which each flavor remains distinct, the comedy high, the suspense sharp." —Los Angeles Times
"Full of tip-top invention [and] lightness of touch that has nearly disappeared from literary fiction, comic or otherwise… a pleasure."—The Atlantic
“An engaging story of Americans abroad and the cultural mayhem that follows in their wake. Johnson's trademark ability to deliver insightful observations on cultural stereotypes makes the novel delightfully entertaining. This fresh and sophisticated satire brings each character's motivations and prejudices sharply into focus, making the reader aware that perhaps we are all more alike than we care to think.”—Joni Rendon, BookPage
Blair Brown's voice--a balance of earnest and amused--is just right for this tasty trifle. American innocent Amy Hawkins, having made millions in Silicon Valley, has gone abroad to acquire language and culture. During her stay at a Swiss ski resort, an avalanche leaves a wealthy Englishman and his young American wife hovering near death at a local hospital. The man's potential beneficiaries gather. When Hawkins leaps in to help the family, lust, greed, pride, and prejudice wreak havoc. Displaying an impressive array of accents, Brown moves smoothly among an enjoyably flawed cast of characters. It’s all a bit Jane Austen with a Gallic flair! E.S. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940159706874 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 06/03/2003 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
All of Europe had been fascinated for the past few days by televised images of avalanches descending in the wake of storms on certain ski resorts and pretty villages in the Alps. Caught for the screen by cameramen safely distant, the snowy plumes were as beautiful as waterfalls or clouds, and thrilling, too, in that it always stirs the human heart to watch nature assert her propensity for malicious destruction.
Despite the usual preventive measures taken with dynamite and seismograph, some ancient chalets were engulfed completely, some modern structures of concrete were imploded in a bizarre fashion never before studied. In one place, inhabitants were killed with the power of a tidal wave or volcano; in others, the possibility of life beating faintly in an air pocket under an eave stimulated massive rescue efforts organized from the Austrian, Italian, and Swiss Alpine patrols as well as the local French ones. Yet, with characteristic resolve, ski lifts stayed open when they could, and skiers, having booked their precious vacances d’hiver, still ventured resolutely out onto the slopes that were open.
Unaware for the moment of the dangers at the higher reaches, Amy Ellen Hawkins, a dotcom executive from Palo Alto, California, had defied the usual injunction never to ski alone. She was trying out new parabolics, an innovation since she had last been on the slopes, and she had thought she had time for a run or two while the light was good, even though the snow was already falling. In the several days she had been here, the terrible weather had mostly impeded any skiing at all, and now that her jet lag had worn off, she was too restless and eager to stay indoors any longer.
Amy was an experienced skier, but wished to be better. She had chosen the Hôtel Croix St. Bernard in Valméri, France, for a couple of weeks’ stay as part of a personal program of self- perfection, an almost superstitious way of placating the gods for her recent good fortune. Humbly, she would seek mastery of deferred skills like skiing, cooking, and speaking French, and she saw no reason she should not approach them with the discipline and effectiveness that had marked her career in the decade since she left college.
By the time Amy reached the top of the chair lift that swayed up the mountain above the hotel, the cell phones of the liftmen still higher above were crackling with warnings. Visibility had already deteriorated markedly, the new sort of ski turned out to have an independent wish to turn despite her, requiring an effort of understanding she had not expected, and the terrain was steeper than an intermediate/advanced slope would be at Squaw Valley, with strange intervals when she could not determine whether she was going down or up—not a whiteout exactly, but an eerie one- dimensional landscape that seemed to have no undulations or contours. A cool-headed person, she kept her nerve, reminding herself of the reassuring facts of gravity. If she was sliding, she must be going downhill, and she allowed her skis to carry her. Now, face stung with snow, she was just thankful to have finally made her way in the failing light down the difficult slope on which she had found herself and was stashing her skis by the entrance to the ski room at the Hôtel Croix St. Bernard, shaken and sobered by this immediate lesson and suddenly aware of the reverberations of what sounded like dynamite in the distance.
She saw that though it was still early afternoon, many people had come in already, forty pairs of skis or more were wedged into the wooden grid, poles jammed into the deepening snow. (The amenities of the hotel included the van from the station, a ski room where boots were warmed, a technician, and the custom of arranging the guests’ skis outside next to the ski run in the mornings.) Unlike Amy, the other guests seemed mostly to be Europeans and must know something about the weather that she had missed. She looked back at the slope she had just struggled down, now hardly visible in the snowfall, and it occurred to her she had narrowly escaped death.
“Miss Hawkins!” It was the man who had been referred to as “the baron” who was greeting her, scraping the snow-packed bottoms of his boots against his bindings and frowning at her. She knew who he was, but was startled that he knew her name. With her good memory for faces, she had already begun to sort out the people who had been in the hotel van with her coming up from Geneva, or in the ski room when she got outfitted. This was an Austrian, or maybe German, baron. Also in the ski room this morning had been an English publisher and his family, an American man—Joe, a pair of elderly women from Paris, and two Russian couples she had not spoken to. Most of the people at the hotel were French or Germans, mysteriously alien, to her great satisfaction.
“People have come in early,” she said, feeling herself flush at being faced with this censorious person. Amy sometimes felt reticent, though she was not timid. Her success in corporate life had come about the way some actors who stammer and blush in private life come to power and authority onstage. In private, her sweet smile was found pliant and endearing. She was also modest and sociable and, now, surprisingly rich, as had happened to not a few in her same year at Stanford.
“Indeed. The warnings are posted everywhere.” The baron rolled his eyes at the hopeless naïveté of her observation, from his expression wondering if in behalf of local tourism he ought to take this woman in charge. “Didn’t you see them? They’re written in English as well as French.” “Oh yes, of course, I hurried in, but I wasn’t sure of the route,” she said. She was still shaken by her adventure, and by the fact that she hadn’t seen the warnings, though she had scrupulously read the posted times for closing of the lift she had been on, not wanting to miss the last ascent. She usually didn’t make mistakes, it was a point with her. She was also a little irritated by his suggestion that signs would have to be written in English for her to understand them.
Of course that was more or less true. She was about to protest that, A. she could read French, somewhat, and B. thank you, but her tendency to reject authority didn’t extend to ignoring posted warnings about avalanches, any more than sharks or riptides, she simply hadn’t seen them. Instead, she said nothing, and smiled her pretty, candid smile.
“The pistes are plainly marked.” His tone was still censorious. Her kind of beauty, he was thinking, was peculiarly American, the beauty lent to a face by an optimist’s temperament. Optimism however unwarranted. He could see she was a person with high hopes. In looks she might also have been an Austrian mädchen, with her thick braid of caramel-colored hair, bright cheeks, and a dimpled face of unusual sweetness. Her half-breathless alert quality must come from an awareness of the constant possibility that her high hopes could be dashed. It was essential in his line of work, property development, to be good at reading faces and perceiving dashed hopes.
She was also glad no one here would know how well she was fixed. Though she was delighted with her money, it embarrassed her too; it had led to a modest celebrity in Palo Alto, and even to an extent in San Francisco, and she would not want here that odd sensation of being recognized even in a restaurant she’d never been to before.
Amy and the baron stamped into the ski room, where the ski attendant was listening, frowning, into the telephone, and other skiers, ranged along the benches taking their boots off, seemed to be waiting in silence for some announcement from the television set in the corner. The rescuers being interviewed on television had an air of slightly self-conscious heroism, knowing their own lives to be endangered by the still unstable snow conditions and ongoing snowfall. Men in red parkas stood beside helicopters and patted Rottweilers on leashes. In other valleys, during this disastrous week, fourteen Austrians were known to be dead, an unknown number of Swiss, three in France so far, and thousands of tourists were expected to be pinned in the Austrian Alps by the weather conditions and blocked roads.
Amy waited politely until a Russian lady extricated her feet with a grateful sigh from her enormous orange boots and carried them off to the warming rack. The baron was now leaning in with the ski attendant at the telephone as if news would come with volume audible to bystanders. The atmosphere in the ski room, Amy now saw, was one of attending a collective fate, as at a soccer match. A flush of wonder and happiness filled her when she thought of the dreadful weather and the wonderful acts of community Europeans were capable of, with their evolved, socialized governments and sense of noblesse oblige—not that she wanted socialism in America. But she admired all these trilingual people hushed in their concern about the fate of motorists on the road to Valméri, though of course Americans in the same circumstances would be concerned too.
“They are afraid the road will collapse the other side of Les Menuires,” said the ski man finally. Amy looked back outside but the sky was calm slate, against which thick distinct flakes gathered their numbers and danced off in a mounting wind without seeming to land on the already deep snowbanks.
“Is the storm worse? Is there something to do?” she asked the baron.
“No, no, there are road crews. But I have to get to Paris tonight on the six o’clock train.” He frowned. Gallic shrug from the ski attendant, who called the baron “Otto.” There was a general discussion of the condition of the local roads, making Amy feel amazingly lucky to be safely here.
Now the face of the young hotel manager, Christian Jaffe, appeared at the door. Something in his expression added to the hushed mood of expectancy that today replaced the ebullience with which skiers normally came in, pleased to have survived another day, high colored from the cold and exertion, laughing. Jaffe’s pale face struck the others as it did Amy, as something luminous and portentous, his indoor pallor startling next to the bronzed cheeks of the skiers. Perhaps it was also the slightly mortuary effect of his business suit among the parrot-colored ski garments, yellow or red or blue, or in Amy’s case pale silver-gray.
Talk fell off, but when Jaffe didn’t see whom he was looking for, he ducked out again and the talk rose up, questions about the weather, something needing tightening, a boot problem, a cacophony of languages. The hill was closed now, lifts shut down, and there were rumors of other avalanches in the adjoining valley of Méribel. Skiers stood in their boots in the lower lobby outside the ski room watching through the windows as the snow continued to fall. Two Russian girls spoke an odd, thick English to the ski man, English being the only language they had in common with him, in wheedling tones, cajoling a better forecast for tomorrow. Thinking of the baron, whom she had found out was Austrian, Amy resolved that after she learned French she would go on to German. A language related to English, how hard could it be?
Drinks were served in the lobby, from a long table covered with a white cloth or by waiters from the dining room walking among the guests with little trays. A hot fire in the large fireplace drove people from its immediate vicinity to cluster nearer the door, where the owner, Chef Jaffe, and Madame Jaffe in her Tyrolean-style suit of loden-green, greeted and chatted, helping the guests to get to know each other, and trying to deal with anxious questions regarding avalanches.
This was the first general social occasion of the new week, so most people didn’t know each other, and stood with expectant, cooperative smiles. Amy looked around. One or two little old ladies glowed with diamonds, making her think of cat-burglar movies. Over there, a very heavy Russian wife was astoundingly bemedalled, decorations up and down her bosom. Amy had her usual sense of cocktail party hopefulness, knowing intellectually that the room would be as full of fools and bores as any party, but always with the belief that among these particular people some would be worldly, kindly, and friendly, and that kindred spirits would emerge. Why wouldn’t they? She struggled to suppress a surge of love for them—not these particular people, but for the powers of human organization, our gregarious natures, the kindliness of our impulses to share food and talk to each other, the sweetness of agreeing to dress up for others. Sometimes she saw these activities as products of the struggle for power, as Darwin might have, or at least Herbert Spencer, but for tonight she was touched by the sight of humans wishing to be liked by others and to make them lovely things to eat.
She saw this cocktail party and parties in general as aspects of mutual aid, a subject of her passionate interest since high school, when she had joined the Mutual Aid Club, an extracurricular activity frankly designed to embellish the chances of getting into good colleges, in this case by taking pets, small children, and CD players to old persons’ homes to cheer the elderly residents. The faculty advisor was a Miss Steinway, and Miss Steinway had in her own youth come under the influence of the works of an old Russian anarchist, P. Kropotkin, whose idea was that contrary to the teaching of Darwin, the human species had progressed not through competition but through mutual aid; that this was true of other species, too, ants and baboons and all sorts of creatures; that whereas individuals might compete for food, successful species had insured survival by developing highly elaborate forms of cooperation, and that in imagining every being locked in a struggle for survival of the fittest, Darwin had it wrong or had been misinterpreted.
Amy had already decided that at the end of this European period of narcissistic self-improvement, she would establish and fund a foundation for propagating the ideas of Prince Kropotkin. But that was eventually. For now, she accepted a soft-boiled egg—no, it was an eggshell filled with eggy custard, with caviar on top—and smiled around her.
“Like Queen Victoria,” a man said to her, with a kind of Kentucky accent, looking with her at the bemedalled Russian. She recognized him as the American who been in the van from Geneva with her. She had also seen him in the ski room, but he did not appear to ski. Anyhow, he would solve the other cocktail-party problem, whom to talk to, for one must not be standing by oneself, a rule he evidently also believed in, edging nearer. This man would do, attractive and open-looking. “Joe Daggart,” he said.
She smiled at him. “I took an oath, coming over, not to talk to other Americans. Should I break it?”
“What have you got against Americans?” he asked.
“Well, nothing, naturally. It’s just that I know them already,” Amy said, noticing his glance at her shoes. “Since I am one, I want to meet other people. But I’ll count you as an other.”
He worked in Geneva, but often came here to stay, for the skiing and food. Companionably, they waded into the assortment of people, introduced themselves, smiled, agreed that the day had been unusual. It was disconcerting to notice that people switched into English when either she or Joe Daggart spoke, when they had been talking some other language to each other, but of course it was necessary, if she was to talk to them. Joe, she noted, could speak French. Her disadvantage strengthened her resolve to get to work on languages.
In general, everyone was nice, though there were one or two moments that surprised, even daunted. “Isn’t it awful, so much smoking?” she had said at one point in a low voice to Joe. “Why aren’t they all dead?”
“It’s typical French bravado. Since Americans think it’s bad for you, the French have to show us what sissies we are.” He spoke loudly enough that all could hear, and looked around him combatively. A nearby woman took him up. “French cigarettes don’t cause cancer, you know. Cancer is caused by the additives put there by the American tobacco companies. This is well known, only of course the tobacco companies don’t allow this fact to be published in the United States.”
“Really?” Amy wondered, thinking that it could even be true.
The speaker was a glittering woman with dark auburn hair, wearing high heels with her narrow evening pants, and she introduced herself as Marie-France Chatigny-Dové. This conversation led directly to another faux pas on Amy’s part.
“I think you are quite right, you two, to come in here as if nothing had happened. Of course it isn’t your fault,” said Madame Chatigny-Dové presently.
Amy didn’t understand what she was talking about, and her blankness must have shown. “The perfidy of American tobacco companies?”
“American planes yet again dropping things willy-nilly, not caring who might die on the ground,” explained another woman, in a mid-European accent. “Quite an irony that one of the people buried in the snow actually was an American. I’m sure your pilots didn’t think of that beforehand.”
“The avalanche,” said someone else by way of explanation, seeing Amy’s baffled expression. Amy, somehow thinking they were joking, laughed good-naturedly. Her laughter produced an array of astonished expressions on every nearby face. Americans laughing at how they have killed innocent skiers! Yet again, they might have added, for no one had forgotten an Italian incident of some years before. The red-haired woman turned and hurried over to Baron Otto, as if appalled to be in the presence of someone as callous as Amy.
“Mon Dieu,” other people said. Amy quickly understood her gaffe; these people seriously believed U.S. airplanes had set off an avalanche.
“It can’t be true,” she protested. “No one who knows anything about physics could believe ... I don’t believe it.” It occurred to her that loud noises were routinely used to set off avalanches. “There have never been avalanches this early in the season. How else can you explain it?” “I saw them myself, saw the cornice tremble just after they came over.”
“It can’t be true,” Amy insisted, but people had moved on, turned away, withdrawn. She found that her heart was pounding irrationally. Why had she so stupidly laughed?
“If we live over here long enough, finally we come to appreciate other Americans,” said Joe Daggart at her elbow. “Our jokes, shared status of pariah.”
She turned to him gratefully, but what might have been a promising and instructive conversation was soon interrupted or augmented by the intrusion of another man, who now languidly strolled up to them. She had seen him in the lobby and guessed correctly from his height, purplish cheeks, and shock of pinkish-white hair that he was British.
“Robin Crumley,” he said. “I couldn’t help but overhear you speaking American. You know, divided from us by a common language.”
She tried to guess his age—late forties or even fifty. He wore a sort of sagging pinstripe suit, and had a high, slightly quavery voice. He had said he was a poet, or perhaps he had said “the poet,” but it was hard to imagine him saying his poems in that voice. Crumley dismissed the unpleasant little moment that had just passed. “Pay no attention to them, my dear. For all his vaunted rationality, the Frenchman is a compendium of received opinions, unlikely to think for himself.” Amy smiled gratefully at this assurance. “I know the Venns,” he added. “Him, slightly, a terrible business. He is an Englishman.”
“Oh?” said Amy. She had not heard of the Venns.
“Quite surprised to see them here. I’m travelling with the Mawleskys. Prince de Mawlesky. Over there. Did you meet them?” He nodded discreetly toward a small couple standing at the drinks table, each of the pair with shining dyed black hair. Amy hadn’t met them, but they had been pointed out—people had not failed to mention the hotel’s small store of princes and barons. They had for Amy a sort of stagy unreality, making her think of Masterpiece Theatre. But of course these people weren’t actors, they actually existed. Somehow there was a warming satisfaction to being in the same place as titled people, the better to verify the existence of European history, the reality of alternative social structures, the arbitrariness of being an American at all, when but for the discontent of some ancestor you might have been speaking French this minute, or Romanian or Dutch.
She herself might have been speaking Dutch; some of her ancestors were Dutch, back in the time of Peter Stuyvesant, though who knew what had been mixed in since. Her family had no tradition of remembering Europe at all, but in her Palo Alto set, European ancestors were somewhat unfashionable, and the idea of finding your European roots had been attacked as incorrect Eurocentricity, and worship of a passé civilization of wicked colonialists; but she was interested in finding out about them. She hoped to combat the national failing of being too uninterested in history, though part of her agreed—why dwell on history when it couldn’t change anything? It would be interesting to meet a prince, she decided, but what would you say to him?
“Where did you ski today?” she asked Mr. Crumley.
“Ski? Moi? I don’t ski, dear, but I have a taste for the snow, a feeling for the magic mountain, for the health-giving properties of mountain air.”
She wondered if he were ill. The idea cast him in a romantic light, a poet in the Alps for his health. He looked quite sound, if elderly. She wondered if he drank, which she had observed all English people to do quite a bit, at least the ones who came to Palo Alto. Robin Crumley swooshed two champagnes off a passing waiter’s tray and handed one to her.
“And you, a Yank obviously, what brings you here?”
“Well—the skiing.”
“How tiresome, it means you’ll be away all day and you won’t have lunch with me. However, some night you must join the Mawleskys and me for dinner. So hard about the Venns. Still, they are alive, if barely, and that’s something. Of course, heaven knows for how long. Buried alive, always a fate for which I have had a particular dread. Skiing is for fools, really.”
The others had not come in yet. He’d volunteered to baby-sit because he was conscious of his brother-in-law Adrian’s generosity bringing him along on this trip. Now, four o’clock, Adrian and Kerry weren’t back, and little Harry was crying and bored. Kip bobbled him around on his knee and said things like “Now, now, buddy,” and “This is the way the farmer rides” to no avail. Eventually he put on his Walkman and ignored Harry’s whines, but as the afternoon dragged along, he was obliged to address the matter of a bottle for Harry and some cereal for Harry, and eventually, changing Harry. Ick.
At four forty-five, Adrian and Kerry still hadn’t come back. Kerry was his sister, Adrian her elderly husband, surprisingly spry for someone his age—he was still on the slopes, and evidently had fathered Harry. Kip found Adrian self-involved and demanding, like many old persons, but Adrian was nice to him, and Kip was sensible of that.
Kip’s own room, damp from the shower steam, now smelled like dirty Pampers and talcum powder. Adrian and Kerry had a suite for themselves and the baby, but Kip had felt uncomfortable there, their stuff all around, and had thought Harry could crawl around in his room while he read or something. He called their room yet again. He had no special apprehensions, was puzzled more than worried. As the light fell outside the window, and the snowdrifts turned a gray-blue, his room darkened.
Later he put on his Walkman again and took Harry out into the corridors. Harry had only recently learned to walk, and occasionally doddered into the walls or sat down with a plop, so that the back of his coverall was sopping from where the carpets were wet with the snow off people’s shoes and boots. Kip found it hard to walk as slowly as Harry. People smiled at this nice boy Kip, for being in charge of a little tot.
They dawdled up and down the green-carpeted corridors of the lobby floor. Harry raced, fell, giggled with mad baby merriment. Outside the cardroom, Kip saw that Christian Jaffe, the chef’s son, who managed the front desk, was following them, tentatively, wearing a grave expression, the expression of an adult who was facing the need to discipline you. He saw that Christian Jaffe was probably only a little older than he, maybe nineteen. Behind Christian was one of the daughters, the plain one, hands clasped at her waist. Kip knew something was wrong, and that it involved him and Harry. He picked up Harry and waited.
“Monsieur Canby, there has been some bad news,” Christian said. “I suggest we go upstairs. Come up to the office.”
Kip obeyed, not asking what the bad news was, not wanting to hear it yet. He had a crawl of apprehension in his stomach. It must have to do with Kerry and Adrian. The daughter reached out her arms to take Harry, and without words they moved up the stairs, past the pool table and coffee lounge, into the small room behind the front desk. The daughter saw Kip installed in a chair, then left, carrying Harry.
“This is very bad news,” Christian said. He sat down and faced Kip. “Mr. and Mrs. Venn have been taken in an avalanche. We were just telephoned.”
“Taken?”
“Swept away. Excuse me, my English.”
Kip heard this without grasping it. Taken or swept? “But I just saw them. They were going to have lunch, they were just there on La Grange,” a simple run down to a cluster of houses at the bottom of the western slopes. Well, a couple of hours ago.
We never know where an avalanche or other act of God might capriciously, or purposefully, strike us, said Christian Jaffe’s look.
“Are they dead? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, no!” cried Jaffe, happy to be able to adjust the bad news upward. “They are still alive, thanks, God, but their condition is not so good. A helicopter is coming to take them to the hospital in Moutiers. Has done so.”
Now Kip felt his face getting red with relief, Kerry not dead. He realized that he’d been expecting bad news all afternoon, dread resonating with the distant echo of dynamite along the snowy ridges. But broken legs had been more in his mind. “Where?” he asked, as if it mattered. “They didn’t explain. They found them a few hours ago, but we weren’t notified because the rescuers had no idea what hotel they were staying in. They—we always advise avalanche detection devices when people are skiing hors piste, but—but they weren’t ski- ing hors piste, they were quite low down, I only heard that they weren’t hors piste.” A quaver of concern suggested anxiety about the liability issues.
“But will they be okay?”
“They—I gather the condition of Monsieur Venn is—grave. They were buried in snow for an unknown length of time, many minutes, an hour.”
Kip’s eyes stung. This was bad. He didn’t know how to feel or react. He felt the weirdness of Adrian and Kerry buried like corpses in the snow. Was it really them? Should he go and look at them? His stomach turned—he bet that they wanted him to identify Adrian and Kerry. He sat, jammed with thoughts and amazement. At least Kerry wasn’t dead.
“I guess I should go to the hospital,” he said finally. “If that’s where they are.” “Yes, I thought you would want that. We’ll try to make it down to Moutiers. My sister will look after the child.” Christian, evidently having ready a recitation of what they were prepared to do to help, some lesson learned in hotel school about service, concern, humanity.
In the car, Kip asked Christian Jaffe over and over to tell him the story, exploring the phrases for additional information, but Jaffe knew no more than had been told. Dug out of the snow, Adrian more dead, Kerry more alive, some delay in notifying the hotel because at first there had been no way of telling where they were staying.
“But they found a ski to go on, with the rental number, only one ski, but they could trace it.”
With Christian Jaffe, he approached and paused in the doorway. A figure nearest them, mounded in wraps, could be Kerry. Another machine sighed in the corner under another mound of dark blankets. They entered. There were no doctors, just a couple of nurses pottering with the tubes and watching the monitors. It seemed the consultations were over, the measures implemented, the accident victims were now absorbed into the routine of the nighttime shift. No one stopped them coming closer.
The nearer figure was Kerry. Kip stared and stared at her closed eyes as if to warm them awake with his mounting hot panic. He felt some obstacle to grasping this, a thick, shocked feeling. He could not believe her eyes wouldn’t open, conspiratorially, when she realized it was him looking down at her. But she was like a stone, machines wheezing around her. The other mound must be Adrian.
Maybe he shouldn’t look at her. People hate it when you look at them asleep. There were several nurses, coming in and out, looking at him, but no doctor talked to him. Kip wondered what he should do, perhaps sit there beside her into the night? But the nurse urged him out after only a few moments.
Christian Jaffe, smoking in the corridor, pulled up his collar, and with a motion of his head meant to include Kip, moved toward the exit at the end. He looked anxious to start back. “The late seating will be beginning, I ought to be there,” he said. “The guests will have heard by now of the accident.” Such news introduced collective excitement and anxiety, with the resulting increase in food-related complaints, and wines sent back, and general querulousness.
Kip wondered where the doctor was, and why no one had talked to him, the brother. He looked around for the doctor or someone to talk to. He didn’t speak French.
“She’s not going to die or anything?” he asked Christian Jaffe. “Could you ask how she is?” Jaffe spoke to the nurse just coming out. “Non, non,” the woman said. Kip understood that much, though not the rest.
“She says she is in a stable coma, but she is still very cold.” This sounded contradictory to Kip, but what did he know? He guessed she meant Kerry was not going to die and that there was no point in sitting there. A doctor stepped into the hall and shook hands with Jaffe. Turning to Kip, he said in English, “Monsieur Venn is not good. His brain shows very little activity. But he is very cold, and so it is too soon to say. Madame Venn is much younger, and also was the first to be rescued, and there we have more hope.”
Kip’s stomach unknotted with relief. Kerry okay. He didn’t really care about Adrian. Christian Jaffe spoke again to the doctor.
“Madame Venn is your sister?” the doctor asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you perhaps know who will be the appropriate person to make the decision—uh— decisions—in the case of Monsieur Venn? A member of his direct family?” Kip had no idea, and it only came to him later in the car what the Decision might be. But Kerry would get better and be able to make the Decision for herself.
In the car, the questions in Kip’s mind, as numerous as the snowflakes that hurled themselves against the windshield, almost cancelled themselves out, leaving an anxious blankness, a passive resignation as cold as a field of snow. Kip saw that the person in charge was him, Kip, there was no one else, but that didn’t mean he knew what to do. With their parents dead, he and Kerry only had one relative, an uncle in Barstow, California. She also had Adrian and Harry, but he, Kip, only had Kerry, though now he had responsibility for Harry, who would probably cry all night. What would they do? He looked at Christian Jaffe, grimly driving up the narrow winding road against the increasing snowfall and the dark, and he knew he would have to decide himself what to do.
Presently Jaffe spoke: If there were people who should be notified, if they needed to be present, the hotel could accommodate them, or arrange it. “Their own doctors, perhaps, or their lawyer.” But of course Kip didn’t know who those functionaries might be. Christian Jaffe suggested he look through Adrian’s papers. Kip said he would; but he knew he would feel funny about it.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "L'Affaire"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Diane Johnson.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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