Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  My father, now a professor at UC–Santa Barbara, and stepmother, with her odd name Margeeve, live in a California-style, that is to say modest forties bungalow in a valuable location on Miramar Avenue, with an ocean view and access to the beach, amid houses that are worth a lot more. Or I should say: our house, because of its situation, is worth a lot more than it’s really worth. Margeeve and Chester had the good fortune or vision to buy during one of the periodic declines in the value of real estate near the beach that follow a particularly destructive storm, and they were aided by a loan from an uncle of my father’s, William Eshrick, a Santa Barbara dealer in moldy European art—paintings dark and indistinct enough to look ancestral in the palatial haciendas of Montecito (a section of Santa Barbara lived in by those movie folk who think themselves too refined to live in L.A.). Tortured saints, especially Saint Sebastian, the one pierced by arrows, and heavily varnished landscapes are favored. Uncle William, now dead, had acquired a warehouse of indifferent Spanish and Italian examples of these gloomy subjects during the thirties, when more brilliant collectors were buying Impressionists and Expressionists, but he knew his market for art that was neither too distressingly religious nor too sentimental, and sufficiently crazed and cracked to look valuable. One of these was Roxy’s favorite painting, of Saint Ursula, the virgin martyr.

  Julia Manchevering was asking about one of Uncle William’s paintings (most of which had been sold at his death). In the course of writing a book about the iconography of Saint Ursula, she had been tracking the provenance of a certain painting, perhaps representing Saint Ursula, sold in the thirties by a dealer on the rue du Bac to, possibly, our uncle William Eshrick and still apparently in the inventory of his estate at the time of his death.

  Approximately 100 cm by 140 cm, representing a young woman, her hand upraised, sitting at a table. (Saint Ursula 889–891?) The saint (?) is looking to her right, toward the lighted candle, and behind her a treasure, including a royal symbol signification unknown, is barely illuminated in the candlelight.

  At this same time, coincidentally, in Margeeve’s art history class they had taken up the study of French seventeenth-century painting—cursorily, for it is not considered to be of much interest, though of more interest lately because the Getty Museum buys French painting, which it seems American museums didn’t used to do. I suppose the gloomy religiosity of Italian painting went better with the neo-Gothic mansions of the nineteenth-century American millionaires, or else the French emphasis on nymphs and people in swings having fun offended our ideas of seriousness, back then. But French painting is in fashion now.

  Armed with this new interest in French painting, Margeeve replied to the Getty that their description did indeed sound like the picture Roxeanne had taken to Paris with her, and presumably still had. She noted parenthetically to Dr. Manchevering that they had always thought her daughter Roxeanne resembled the woman in the painting. Daughter Roxeanne had given it to her French husband as a wedding present. A correspondence (unbeknownst to Roxy in Paris) had developed, in which the Getty lady hoped to borrow Saint Ursula, or at least to see it. She mentioned the possibility it was by a student of the French painter Georges de La Tour, and the Getty was planning an exhibition of his works.

  The painting was hanging over the fireplace in Roxy’s apartment on the rue Maître Albert, and before that had hung for years in Roxy’s room at home in Santa Barbara, but now has been crated and sent to Drouot, the auction house, for sale, breaking Roxy’s heart, for she loves this saint and used to tell her her secrets. Inside an ornate gold frame, Saint Ursula regards a dark future of proposed matrimony. She would rather be massacred. The painting is listed in the catalogue as “Sainte Ursule(?)” by “un élève de La Tour.”

  In physics class (dumbbell physics) I learned about how the displacement of atoms means that the existence of anything affects the existence of everything, and that’s how I imagine the painting of Saint Ursula, dislodging matter, making waves since the unknown seventeenth-century artist painted it.

  6

  The affairs of ordinary life cannot be forced to fit in with all our desires. It was sometimes awkward to have my every step marked out for me in advance and all my moments counted.

  —Constant, Adolphe

  IT IS A truth universally acknowledged that a young American person not fully matriculated must be in want of a job; Americans in Paris fell upon my neck like swains, with a plethora of paying tasks.

  The Cafe Flore: I am keeping my rendezvous with Ames Everett. That was Ames Everett de-buttering his toast in the prologue, for I see him doing this as I approach. An elegant, rich, fattish gay person was how I had categorized him.

  “Good,” he says. “What will you have? Menthe à l’eau? Perrier? A drink? Coffee.”

  Having never had it, I choose menthe, which proved to be mint-flavored green mouthwash.

  Ames explained that he would like someone to walk his dog Scamp every afternoon. People have never told me why they don’t just hire French people to do things like this, though Stuart Barbee told me how much a Frenchman would have charged to paint his dining room—six thousand francs, more than a thousand dollars, amazing indeed. I paid myself twenty-five dollars an hour and it cost him $250.00. So one explanation is that it’s cheaper to hire Americans; also, I had an idea that language counted, even among those who speak perfectly good French. Of course language would count when it came to sorting literary papers, as I do for Mrs. Pace; she on the other hand complains that I am too young. When I had to ask what a Trotskyite was, she looked at me for a long moment, turning over in her mind, I could see, whether to fire me or educate me.

  But I think that language counts in a more important way when it comes to choosing, for instance, someone you trust with your dog. I think Ames Everett trusts me with his dog more than he would have someone who thought of Scamp as a mere chien.

  “There are circles within circles here in Paris,” Ames observes over our menthe. “American circles, I am not even speaking of the French. There are the businessmen Americans, they keep to themselves, unless they have French connections. Banks. EuroDisney. The lawyer Americans, having of necessity to have something to do with the French. The Franco-Americans, couples of whom one is one and one the other, usually American wives, French husbands. These women tend to have an annoying veneer of Frenchiness, a kind of inside manner I myself find irritating. The journalists and writers. That’s my set, and the art historians, and the trust-fund socialites, living elegantly. The French love them the best, of course.

  “You must tell me what you are running away from. Every American in Paris is running away from something,” Ames said, at this first rendezvous, with the slight sneer that seems permanent in his voice, a querulous lightness. “Usually I never bother figuring out what in particular. The reasons, when you learn them, are usually too boring. Behind the immediate reasons, though, is another reality.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s what you eventually find out. That is the fun of it. You would be surprised, sometimes.” He smiled at me. They all, even Roxy, like to treat me like the naive, the ingenue, the over-confident newcomer for whom big, shattering lessons are in store. I, in any case, am not running away from anything, I hadn’t especially wanted to be here. I said so.

  “What is your reason, then, if not your reality?” I insisted.

  He said, “I came to get away from AIDS. You can’t imagine what New York was like in the early eighties, a death a week among your friends; you couldn’t bear for the phone to ring. I hoped it wouldn’t come here. It has, of course.”

  “Drugs are coming here too,” I said. “You can buy crack at metro Saint Michel.”

  “It isn’t easy being an American,” he said. “That is the final reality. It is hard. It is a moral obligation we come here to escape. We are too sensitive—I speak of us expatriates, though I hate to use that word. When we do go back, we see what we see, and it is hard on us.” He sighed.

&n
bsp; The Flore is right on the Boulevard Saint Germain, amid tourists drinking espresso and regulars reading Libération, a smell of coffee and newsprint. The pavement was still wet from an afternoon rain, the sky was its characteristic Parisian gray, the air hung diesely and damp, slightly redolent of dogshit. I could see the beauty, which might be reason enough to come here. But I wondered what Ames’s reality under his reason was, and why the special rancor he bore America, for he never failed to badmouth it, though he’s famous there, even revered, in his coterie.

  “How is Roxeanne?” Ames asked. “I thought she looked tired. I must introduce you to Stuart Barbee, I think he needs some work done around his place. Do you read French? Have you seen Libération today?”

  Am I running away from something in America, as Ames suggests? I didn’t think so. I supposed I was a prototypical American, not down on it like Ames and Roxy; but I will admit I began to be happy, these months in France, despite my mistrust of the whole society. Soon I had, besides the dog-walking job for Ames, the task of helping Olivia Pace sort her papers; I housesat for some CIA types who were away in Provence, and arranged apartments for friends of Roxeanne (usually American divorcées over here to attend the Cordon Bleu and change their lives). I’ve been writing a little advice column for the American Church Weekly Messenger—where to find what—and occasionally I teach an aerobics class at the American Center as a substitute instructor.

  I thought then how I would hate it if Roxeanne just packed up and left before I was ready.

  And now I think I have met the love of my life, but it is a grotesque and doomed situation. I did not plan for anything like this to happen.

  7

  Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path.

  —Montaigne

  SUZANNE DE PERSAND had come to see Roxy directly on the Monday. She came solemnly dressed in a navy linen suit, with her decorations in the lapel, as if she were going to some high state occasion, and spoke in English, because I was there.

  “I have talked to my son,” she said, accepting an herbal tea. “I am very unhappy about his behavior. Add to this, the behavior of Charlotte. I don’t know where it comes from. From their father perhaps.”

  “What about Charlotte?” Roxy roused herself from her lethargic mood.

  “What indeed? She has a liaison—it is too stupid. And with an Englishman! What I want to say to you, Roxeanne, is just to be sensible. You are aware that when the wife is pregnant, sometimes the husband—the nine months gets to seem long to him. He thinks it will never end, and some young and slender woman makes him think of happier times. He supposes he is thinking with his emotion, but it is really biological, his male need.”

  “If you mean about making love, you can do it up until the last two weeks,” said Roxy irritably.

  “Really? Tiens! That is surely unwise. In my day the doctors did not permit it. In any case, the forme, great ugly belly. Yes, sugar please. Hein! Original! Georges’s cousin Hortense also uses grains of sugar instead of cubes.”

  “It’s not up to me, it’s Charles-Henri’s deal,” said Roxy.

  “That is what I am trying to say. Expect nothing until the baby is born, then you can see. Maybe it will be a boy.”

  “A boy? An heir? I can’t believe this, I’m in a novel by Balzac,” snapped Roxy. Suzanne had the grace to laugh a little and finished her cup.

  “This has happened to other women, often, and by far the best course, they would most of them tell you, is to just go on with life as it unrolls,” she said.

  “I ask myself, is it wise to have this baby,” said Roxy suddenly, with a savage canniness. “It’s early. Maybe I shouldn’t go through with it. It’s stupid to bring a baby into an unstable home.” I recognized the wildness under her tone as being the real Roxy, dramatic and hysterical, but there was also an instant of calculation in her voice as she looked to see how this implied threat would affect Suzanne.

  Suzanne did seem startled, began to speak, stopped, gauging, I could see, the best way to handle a distraught foreign girl.

  “I’m thinking of not going through with it,” Roxy repeated.

  “Luckily you have weeks to decide something so large,” Suzanne said slowly, watching Roxy as she might a skittish wild animal. “You wouldn’t want to make that decision quickly.”

  I saw how smart Suzanne is, how she sensed Roxy’s panic and her stubborn streak, and wanted to avoid animating it with preaching or argument. But she had turned pale. Roxy had scared her. Her eyes met mine for an instant, and I could see that she would have liked to ask me if Roxy would do something like that. But of course, she did not know me, or how I would stand. How did she stand, for that matter?

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, ma chérie,” she said. “Bon courage. These things arrive, with men, and then pass.”

  “Frenchmen are spoiled by their mothers,” observed Roxy, when Suzanne had gone. “Charles-Henri can just do no wrong in her eyes.”

  “He’ll come back,” I predicted to Roxy. “You’ll have to decide whether you want to forgive him. And of course you will.”

  “It isn’t a question of forgiving him,” she said. “I don’t own him. He has his heart and I have mine, and it’s mine I have to live with.” With that she dumped the sugar into the sink.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Didn’t you hear her? ‘Hein. Granular sugar, how original.’ Meaning, bizarre American ways. Meaning, why don’t you have sugar cubes like a French girl?”

  When Roxy says her first months of marriage were hard, she didn’t mean anything negative about the French or Charles-Henri. She thought him the perfect husband, polite, helpful, and ardent. “The Anglo-Saxon male style is entirely different, all those obligatory football games and beer, their lack of interest in household matters, their notion that it would be somehow unmanly to take an interest in the dishes or tablecloths,” she said. “Charles-Henri is capable of appreciating a soup tureen. His uncle Edgar collects seventeenth-century faience.”

  She is right that French men seem to have a pleasant air of collaboration with women, an air of being in the business of life together—marriage, society. It is quite unlike the atmosphere of strained toleration or active dislike between the sexes we seem to have at home. But when I said this once to Roxy’s friend Anne-Chantal Lartigue, who lives near us across the Place Maubert, she sniffed.

  “Don’t be deceived,” she said. “They are cads, like other men, spoiled by their mothers, unfaithful and evasive.” Of course, being French she ought to know, but possibly she doesn’t understand what other men are like—the non-French ones, like Americans, or the Muslims, say, who are said to seem nice until they get you back to Turkey or Algeria. The French love reading about the disastrous adventures of young Frenchwomen who marry Algerians, make the mistake of returning to the native villages, and are then locked up with the goats in purdah and abused by their mothers-in-law, who take away their shoes and their passports.

  Of their intimate life, Roxy and Charles-Henri’s, I have no idea. Roxy was discreet and solemn about that.

  She says when she was first married, she threw herself into French life, French housekeeping, French cooking, puzzling over the literal translations of recipes—how to decorticate a nut, make an onion sweat. Measures that she had thought an affectation of American foodies, M. F. K. Fisher groupies and people moving on beyond Julia Child, she now discovered to be the actual household standard in many French homes, and moreover seemingly done without effort. Women doctors came home late from the hospital and whipped up potage aux moules, pigeon rôti, salade, fromage, dessert. Did they really follow from scratch the recipe that directed them to plumer, vider, flamber les pigeons?

  Actually it was not foodiness, or competitiveness, that made her obsessed with the cooking. What charmed her and drove her was the existence of a standard. There was no such thing as, hey, do it your way, though the recipes à ma façon implied individuality—along with expertise and autho
rity. She liked the idea of things being long and difficult. Sometimes, having bought, opened, cooked the oursins and passed them through a sieve and added them to a pâté de poissons, she was disappointed, but only at her own inability to discern the difference they made. It was Mrs. Pace who pointed out to me the attraction of things rigorous and demanding. “The ballet is the only métier that requires discipline from women,” she said, “or was in my day. Now you could run the marathon. In my day, after you won the Latin prize, there was nothing left for you.”

  Roxy became an accomplished cook, but tact and diffidence prevented her from seeming too accomplished when feeding French people. (In this she followed the example of Mrs. Pace. I remain a little skeptical about the French. They pretend to love food so much, but why do they go to McDonald’s?) Roxy could never find out what they really ate when at home, unobserved by Americans like her. She watched them in the supermarkets. From there, it appeared they ate the same on weeknights at home alone as when she and Charles-Henri were invited to dinner: hors-d’oeuvre, entrée, plat, salade, fromage, dessert. “But they do buy a lot of things frozen,” she revealed, satisfied.

  Charles-Henri was the most undemanding and encouraging of husbands, appreciating all her efforts, but also happy to eat sandwiches and frozen pizza, helpful with setting the table and making mayonnaise. “For heaven’s sake,” he reassured her, “it doesn’t matter what you serve. Serve American dishes. People are interested in them. Serve pizza.” (Looking back, she now mistrusts his blithe detachment.)

  “There are no American dishes,” Roxy stormed. “Pizza is Italian.”

  “Apple pie,” he said. “Trente-et-un flavors. Pumpkin pie.”

  “I hate pumpkin pie. We all do.”