Though she wouldn’t discuss it with him, she began to discuss it with other people, in my view a healthy development. The women of the Place Maubert, Tammy de Bretteville and Anne-Chantal Lartigue in particular, agreed with Roxy’s take on it. A pattern of infidelity once begun is never abandoned. But they also did not believe Roxy should divorce. In France you just put up with the way men are.
This was also part of Suzanne de Persand’s pitch. “Le divorce is always a mistake. Now you are hurt, you are wounded and enceinte, it is not a time to make a decision.” French husbands—like men everywhere—just always philander, she explained. “Why ruin your life and lose your social position over it?” Roxy condemned this attitude as Victorian, a vestige of a time when women were powerless and lacking in self-respect.
“That is so American,” sighed Suzanne impatiently. “Think of the children, their need for a father. Think of the inconveniences of single motherhood.” Suzanne thought Roxy was being impetuous and self-indulgent, but I knew it was just that her feelings were hurt with a mortal hurt.
Mrs. Pace also counseled patience. Roxy came to lunch one day when I was working for Mrs. Pace, and we all discussed it.
“I have myself been divorced,” Mrs. Pace observed, “and I’m not sure it solves a great deal. Though it does permit you to marry someone else. In my experience the soundest procedure is to have the someone else lined up beforehand.”
I was the only one of Roxy’s confidantes who wasn’t so sure she was wrong. What about love? How can you stay married to someone who loves another better than you? What about the future, perhaps with another mate? She had her whole life in front of her, in the phrase. I tried to slow her down, we all did, but part of me thought she just ought to bag this marriage and get on with her life.
I was working for Olivia Pace three times a week. Mrs. Pace became a famous writer when she was very young, in the 1940s, and hence had by now outlived many of the important literary figures whom she had known and slept with back then. Judging from the number of letters she got, the world was looking forward to her memoirs, and she was starting to pull things together to write them. My job was to organize papers and facts, in folders marked by date, year by year. A folder might contain letters, any newspaper clippings she happened to have saved, copies of what she wrote at the time, and a list of things she had bought, if she remembered, like “blue silk Cardin suit, 1972,” or “first Dior, 1959,” or “Sheraton sideboard, Bristol, 1948,” or a review article from any of several little magazines she wrote for.
What I liked best about my days at Mrs. Pace’s was that we had a sort of working lunch at which she identified objects and people’s names that I couldn’t identify on my own. It was then I heard her stories. The reason she liked me, I think, was because I had known the name of a character in Conrad’s Victory. I knew and she didn’t; therefore she respected me and looked at me thereafter with new eyes, as someone more promising than she had thought. She considered me educable. In fact, we had used Conrad’s Victory in a film class on adaptation, but I had never actually read it.
For my part, I fell under the spell of her encouragement, for she was a woman who had not been caught in the character traps I considered that other women I knew had fallen into, for instance Margeeve, who had never really used her brains that I could see, and hence has a certain restless troublemaking quality of dissatisfaction even though I think she is happy. Even Roxy, with her trustful, romantic view of men, was sort of an underachiever, except for the occasional poem, and poems are short. It only just comes to me now that Roxy’s starry-eyed view of men probably originated in my father’s gallant rescue of her mother, Margeeve, from the cold rigors of single motherhood and battered wifedom.
Mrs. Pace, it appeared, had had all the perks of female life—rich husbands, children, Givenchy dresses, lots of Haviland china. She had also had the perks of male life—the pleasures of sexual misdeeds (or call them exploits, like a man) as well as the intellectual pleasures of writing, of having opinions, of having her opinions listened to—the masculine pleasures of independent thought and judgment on general subjects, not including the Woman’s Lot, which didn’t interest her. Her example made me understand what, perhaps, I had been looking for in film school: autonomy, though that was not the place to find it. In my case, I had been already too far gone down the road of conventional female socialization to relish the technical side of film—the lighting, the questions of Steadicam or handheld camera, the dub, the cut, the mix.
This left me with, precisely, a kind of blank spot when it came to what to do with my life. Mrs. Pace did not worry about me but felt confidence in me, and so she became my idol, for I suppose that is the right word, overwrought though it may be, for someone who makes you want to please them and be liked by them, whose regard you care for. What I felt for Mrs. Pace I didn’t feel for Chester and Margeeve or my siblings; on them, I bestowed affection, in varying degrees, without caring much what they thought of me.
But Mrs. Pace was a mighty person. She said what people were. And if she said someone was a fool, that didn’t necessarily mean that she held it against them. It depended on what kind of fool. She was the first person I had met who told the absolute, even if politically incorrect, truth, and it was usually a truth I felt in my heart already. She would not be afraid to say that we do not really like, say, the handicapped people taking up all the parking places. But she was a moral force too, and she would also say we ought not to act on our feelings. She taught me that it is not abnormal to have bitter or illiberal reactions to things, but it is just wrong to act on them, and that people get no moral credit for the hypocritical way they conceal such things as racism even from themselves. Only when you confront your racism can you expunge it, she would say. “The truth I don’t say will make you free,” she said, “but it is better than piety, because you know where you stand with it.”
Through Mrs. Pace I got a number of jobs. One was house-sitting for the Randolphs, Cleve and Peg, a couple in their sixties who I thought fit into what Ames Everett calls trust-funders, but Mrs. Pace said, “Spooks, actually.” When I was horrified, she added, “They’re very nice, of course.” And the Randolphs were nice. Retired CIA—or do you ever retire?—plus a trust fund, judging from the splendor of their apartment on the Place des Vosges. Mrs. Pace quite liked them. “We were all CIA,” Mrs. Pace reminded me. “The CIA came to Wellesley at our graduation and offered each girl a job and a camera and the sense of doing her patriotic duty. I accepted, of course, but my post was to have been Guatemala City, so I backed out.”
For someone so associated with leftwing causes in her youth (I was learning about Trotsky, Stalin, Wobblies, etc.), she now seemed comfortable with a wide political spectrum. (As long as the people were rich, I am tempted to add—but then, in a sense, all the Americans I saw were rich. Even the backpackers, sandaled and out of funds, were standing in the American Express line to tap some affluent stateside source of money. I soon learned that I didn’t really understand what comprised wealth. The symbols reliable in Santa Barbara, cars for example, were unreliable or missing here, and all the apartments looked small to my eyes. In the beginning I would assume people were hard up, and Roxy would laugh and say, “Are you kidding?”)
It was not the CIA Randolphs but another client, employer, whatever I am calling them, Stuart Barbee, who most surprised me. I had supposed that all the Americans living in Paris were there because they preferred it, and so had contrived their lives to be there. But there were a certain number who seemed to hate France and wistfully to long for America, as if from some cruel exile. So it was with Stuart Barbee, the art historian whose dining room I painted. A rangy man in his fifties, slight southern accent. I think he used to be Ames Everett’s boyfriend, but now he’s with an English hairdresser named Conrad, or Con, whose name is a huge joke because con means something rude in French. Stuart seemed always to be testing my attitudes. “This rainy weather in late summer must make you long for California, Isabe
l. September is so beautiful there. I spent a month at the Getty once. So beautiful, and the ocean—I’m mad for the ocean. Are you? I can imagine you surfing in a bikini.” (Unconvincing leer.) Or, “My god, these people, the way they sabotage the lowly hamburger.” Or, “It isn’t easy sitting by while your country falls into the hands of a redneck draft dodger. It almost makes me want to go back and get involved in precinct work, or maybe work for Ross Perot.”
I recounted this last conversation to Mrs. Pace at lunch. She sniffed. “Draft dodger? This revisionist sanctimoniousness about Vietnam does astonish me. Why it should be coming up now I don’t know. Imagine resurrecting the term ‘draft dodger,’ an expression not even used in the Vietnam period, as I remember. A Second World War term, maybe even First World War. Look in the OED. I think it’s being used now by men who are no longer attractive, to get at a younger president. Would I have allowed my son Drew to go to Vietnam? Of course not. Luckily his number was a safe one.” She warmed to this subject, laying her napkin next to her plate and touching her pearls.
“You wouldn’t remember, you were too young, Isabel, but people could see with their own eyes that those little Vietnamese children were not a threat to the free world. And yet deaf presidents would not hear this. America was resisting its leaders, as we so wished young Germans had done. We saw our leaders as cruel men crazed by the exciting momentum of their own blood lust. It was one of the few wars in history where women really played a pacific role.”
I must have looked puzzled at this, so she went on to explain.
“Ordinarily I don’t give females too much moral credit. They seem as bad as anyone else. In fact they are not usually considered independent moral beings, in the sense of having to make choices, except where sexual transgressions are concerned. Perhaps not even then—‘the woman taken in adultery.’ Hmmn. And most are not very responsible, we must admit. Though they are made to accept the consequences all the same.”
I remarked that it sometimes seemed to me she didn’t have a whole lot of respect for women.
“Well,” she sighed, “I have sympathy, but that is not the same thing as respect. I understand their historical circumstances. Centuries of oppression create a kind of fog in the brain. Look at—other groups. No one makes women defer to their husbands and refuse to think about world events, just as no one makes an underclass take drugs.
“But it would be a mistake to underestimate the force of female opposition to that war. This time, it wasn’t a question of women blubbering on the sidelines as the boys marched off, women were serious objectors. Remember ‘girls say yes to boys who say no’? No, you wouldn’t remember that, of course. There was a general effort on everybody’s part to help people not go into the army. It was not only that you did not want young men to be killed, you wanted your country to stop doing something so wicked. People have forgotten that resistance was not only the sensible but the virtuous course.”
Soon after this, Cleve Randolph asked me to sit down, and made me the following little speech: “You wouldn’t remember, you are too young, Isabel, but the Communist threat was very real, in the thirties. Many people thought we would go that way. They wanted it. Not the workers, not the real Americans, farmers and honest people, but the intellectuals so-called. It appealed to them, their phony commerce with the proletariat, their self-satisfied sense of fraternity, their—I grant you—idealism, finally their corruption. Their sense of anger at our American values and ideals deepened, they became bitter, they became willing to betray us, America, almost for the pleasure of it. Even after it was clear that Stalin was a monster, even after some of them acknowledged this and went with Trotsky—you are too young to remember all this—even now, they wish America ill.”
“My father’s mother was a Communist,” I volunteered, pointedly. “In Minnesota. She died before I was born, but I’ve heard the stories. She didn’t wish America ill; she wanted to help organize the farmers in Minnesota.”
He peered at me with a moment’s suspicion, calculated the chronology, and smiled.
“Dear Isabel,” he said. “That is history, and it is of history that I am speaking. The need to expunge all that, clarify, wash away the stain of treachery, the uncertainty of who, where, why. Things need to be brought out into the light of day so they can heal, you understand?”
This sounded rather New Age from a man of his years, but these were recognizable tenets, ones that Mrs. Pace herself promulgated.
“So much would be cleared up if we knew, for instance, the real role of Olivia Pace. If not a spy herself, certainly the lover of spies,” he went on.
“Mrs. Pace?” I said, beginning to understand the direction of his thoughts and the unconvincing benignity of his air to me.
“Her role in the late thirties through nineteen-forty-five.”
“It’s inconceivable that she did anything wrong,” I insisted.
“Inconceivable. I’m not at all suggesting it. In any case, there would be no consequences now. No one thinks of public accusations or legal actions—though I believe there is no actual statute of limitations on treason, high treason.” His voice, on the words High Treason, was unnaturally charged, allowing me to glimpse, beneath the urbane manner and the deliberate lightness of his tone, a fervid preoccupation.
“It has never seemed right to me that men go unpunished for crimes that may have cost lives, that may have jeopardized a whole way of life, and they sit today, some of them right here in perfect comfort. All those Englishmen, and . . .” He caught himself. “In the interest of history. Inconceivable that Olivia could have done anything purposefully. Unwittingly? One wonders. If you should happen to notice . . . in her files . . .”
There seemed nothing to say. Of course I would not snoop in Mrs. Pace’s files and report on them. The melodrama, the cloak and daggerness, appealed to me, however. As he saw, it was impossible for me to sympathize imaginatively with those old passions. But it was sort of amusing, being asked to spy. And I found myself wondering if he were not right to think that old wounds should be healed. I suppose I was thinking of Roxy and Charles-Henri, but what goes for people must go for nations too?
11
In my state of vague emotional torment I decided that I wanted to be loved, and looked about me. . . . I studied my own heart and tastes and could not discover any definite preferences.
—Adolphe
THOUGH I HAD reasurred Roxy that I was having fun in France, mostly I was working or babysitting all the time. But occasionally I went out with either of my two Frenchmen, Yves and Michel, and also a couple of Americans, one a guy I knew from Santa Barbara, Mark Lopez, the other a brother of a friend of Roxy’s, Jeff. Both of these men were like brothers; our fellow Americanness neutered us, and our dates were much taken up with cross-cultural notes and survival strategies. Mostly we went to films. Paris is good for film buffs, because anything you might want to see is playing. Sometimes we had dinner.
Scene: Yves and Isabel in a restaurant that reeks of cigarette and cigar smoke; you don’t know how they can even taste their food. Yves smoking like the rest.
Me: It’s really stupid to smoke. It’s the leading cause of death. Do you have to?
Yves: Bah ouieeagh. (I can’t spell phonetically these strange syllables that mean, Yes, I’m smoking, not smoking is a con. You crazy Americans.)
Me (primly): I’ll have the healthy fat-free sole and the steamed vegetable plate, please.
Yves: Pavé au poivre, saignant (thick steak, rare, dripping with butter and cream).
Me: Ugh (shudder).
Yves: They do a great bavette here, but even better at Balzar, there they use a beef from Normandy raised in a special manner on American maïs, you can also find this at L’Ami Louis. They do not import English beef here, on account of the vache folle malady, naturally, not allowing it to come to France which I support, but in truth, the English beef, one hates to say so, was very good—the Danes, also, though you would not expect, have an excellent boeuf . . .
<
br /> And he’s off discoursing about some esoteric aspect of beef, or it could be mushrooms or anything.
Also, they read comic books, Yves and his friends do, although studying at the university. These are not aspects of French culture they teach in the course I am taking at the mairie. I realize there is much I have to learn about France, but so do they have something to learn about America, whereas the only thing in America they care about seeing is Lazvegaz.
One night, Roxy and I had dinner at Charlotte and Bob’s. Three friends of theirs were there. Here is another, what I consider typical, French dinner conversation:
Marie-Laure: This is good. Where do you get it?
Charlotte: Rue Monge.
M-L: The Caveau du Fromage?
Charlotte: No, Kramer, opposite.
Jean: This is the original Epoisse. (Turning to me, in English) Try this. In my opinion, the Epoisses are the king of cheeses. The best cheeses of France.
Others: Non! Oui! Amis du Chambertin! Livarot! Vacherin!
Marie-Laure: Jean thinks he is original, but Brillat-Savarin also said the Epoisses were the best cheese, and he said it first.
Bertrand: So, you go up to the rue Monge?
Charlotte: Saturdays.
Jean: The orange crust is important. . . .
Charlotte (to us): Yes. Did you know that the Camembert has a white crust because white was considered more refined for women? Although at one period of history, people didn’t think women should eat cheese at all. The fermentation could be harmful to their reproductive potential. And it imparted, perhaps, an odeur. . . .
Le Divorce Page 7