Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [80]
Now, with the insult, he felt he had lost her. Marie-Neige would scarcely acknowledge him. But there was a moment at his wedding when she surprised him by touching his shoulder and, as he turned, slipped into his arms wordlessly to dance. He was more startled than was courteous. But she did not seem to care. He said something to break the tension, nothing really, a bit of small talk, but she did not answer him, just looked up and watched his face, watched this essential friend who was now finally married, like her, who had once said they would not talk about it. Her expression then was the quizzical and knowing look an animal can give, as if she already knew what excuse or evasion he would provide. So he forgot words for the rest of the dance and held her not too close, in order that he could look at her properly. He could feel the ‘bumps’ his mother had joked about years before. She wore, of course, a simple cotton dress, but one he had never seen. And her thick black hair was combed precisely, clean as the night. He leaned forward and smelled it. The smell of the river. Marie-Neige had taken care, even with this simplicity, in preparing herself for his wedding. It could be she had spent as much time as the bride. And now they were dancing, both of them unconcerned with any rules to do with steps, and remembering it had been his mother who had taught both of them how to waltz.
He thought her beauty came because of her familiarity to him, though this was not the person he had grown up with. When he put the two mental photographs of her onto a stereoscope, side by side, he could see echoes of a look. But there was also a tug in him, a recognition that within this woman was a private nature he always felt close to. It was not just her face and body. He assumed he was marrying the face and body he wanted and desired. But here was something much larger, more confusing, here was a whole field, yet more intimate, a heart that was beyond him, who had chosen Porthos among the musketeers, and he had never understood why.
And as the music ended he saw her, like a woman in a romance, pull from her cotton sleeve a note that she pushed into his breast pocket. It would burn there unread for another hour as he danced and talked with in-laws who did not matter to him, who got in the way, whose bloodline connection to him or his wife he could not care less about. Everything that was important to him existed suddenly in the potency of Marie-Neige. He could tell what the shallow frieze of the wedding party that surrounded them would continue to be, and yet the one he knew best—he could not conceive how she would behave or respond to him in a week, or even in an hour. She had stepped into more than his arms for a dance, had waited for the precise seconds so it was possible and socially forgivable—the sunlit wedding procession, the eternal meal—and she had passed him a billet-doux as if they were within a Dumas. The note she had written said Good-bye. Then it said Hello. And then it reminded him that A message sent by pigeon to The Hague can sometimes change everything. She had, like one of those partially villainous and always evolving heroines, turned his heart over on the wrong day.
Night Work
Time passed before he saw her again. Lucien and his bride left Marseillan and journeyed north, to the forests of southern Brittany, then Paris, and when they returned three months later the formality of his relationship with Marie-Neige had hardened again. He had entered the central and