Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  Family dinner at home is easy enough to reconstruct. The discussion would be about Roger’s work, Chester’s work, and Roxy.

  My father, Chester the midwesterner, clings to what he imagines are California ways by barbecuing long after real Californians have given it up because of fears of the stomach cancers that afflict cultures that cook over charcoal fires. Indeed, Californians have pretty much given up meat. The carnivorousness of the French shocked me at first.

  “Really too bad about Roxy,” says Jane, whose concern about the emotional adjustments and maladjustments of our family is always a little suspect, tinged ever so slightly with self-satisfaction. “Are they getting some help?”

  “He says he’s incurably in love with someone else,” says Margeeve. “He wants a divorce.” Her tone held just an edge of mockery, as if she had said “he believes in God,” or “goes to church.”

  “I thought you couldn’t get a divorce in France,” says Roger.

  “That’s Ireland,” says Chester.

  “Oh. How long does it take in France?”

  “I have no idea,” says Chester. “A year? When’s the baby due?”

  “Not till December,” says Margeeve.

  “All that and Isabel on her hands too. Roxy has a lot on her plate,” says Roger, who is always sympathetic to his stepsister Roxy and doesn’t understand me at all.

  “I think it’s lucky Isabel is there, in a way. She’s bound to be a little moral support,” says Margeeve. (Here I can imagine them groaning and rolling their eyes.)

  “Roxy needs counsel. She should have an American lawyer, there are some good people in France, I’ll get a name.”

  “Is she seeing somebody?” asks Jane.

  “I shouldn’t think so, she’s six months pregnant, after all,” says Margeeve.

  “I meant, a therapist. Someone to help her through it.” In her métier, Jane naturally believes in human perfectability.

  Chester goes outside to bring in the chicken breasts.

  “We have a policy or strategy decision to make, in a way,” Margeeve goes on. “Or a philosophical decision: how do we actually stand on this?”

  “What kind of question is that? What does it have to do with us?” says Roger piously.

  “In our hearts, do we hope she stays with Charles-Henri?” It was clear that Margeeve was torn on this question, or she wouldn’t have polled the others. Chester, coming in, hears, frowns.

  “I don’t see anything wrong with Charles-Henri. I don’t see a role for our opinions anyhow. Roxy should have the husband she wants. You just wish she lived in California.”

  “Oh, that’s it, I know. Part of me thinks, great, Roxy will be coming back. Gennie. The baby. Part of me thinks it is swell to have grandchildren who live ten thousand miles away and don’t even speak English.”

  “Why don’t you spend some time over there? Lots of people would be thrilled to have the excuse of grandchildren in France. Besides, Gennie knows English. Roxy speaks English to her.”

  “It’s too bad not to see more of Gennie, and little X when she arrives,” Margeeve persisted.

  “Not a good reason to hope Roxy breaks up with their father, though,” Chester said. “Besides, we’d probably have to support them.”

  Margeeve looks sharply at Chester to see if he’s kidding. He’s not.

  “I do think we should offer to pay for counseling,” she says. “I suppose they have qualified professionals in France. Do you know anyone, Jane?”

  “They’re all Lacanians,” says Jane, doubtfully.

  “Did you realize that Roxy’s Saint Ursula might be rather valuable?” says Margeeve, to change the subject. “At least in the immediate context of the show the Getty is organizing, Source of Light: the School of La Tour. Paintings from that period where the subject is illuminated by a light source within the picture, rather than—you might think of Vermeer—from a window, or from a light source out of the canvas.”

  “The Getty wants Saint Ursula?” repeats Roger.

  “Just on loan. Isabel could bring it to California when she comes home.”

  “The Getty could certainly pay to crate it and ship it,” Chester said. “And insure it.”

  “Why do you call it Roxy’s Saint Ursula?” asks Roger. An ominous question, as it proves.

  After dinner, Chester goes out to the patio to clean the barbecue, a ritual he strangely likes. Working without tools as he does in daily life, he likes these, his long-tined fork, the heavy workman’s leather-palmed gloves, and the wire-bristled brush he uses to scrape the bits of chicken and fish (formerly, steak) off the grill. He likes the smell of charcoal and lighter and grease. He is thinking about Roxy, his stepchild who is closer to him than either Isabel or Roger, his natural children. Some unspoken sympathy has always existed between him and Roxy. Her childhood scrapes had been the kind he got in himself, her reactions and deep seriousness were more like his, while Isabel, so restless and thoughtless, puzzled him. Even her talent for sports puzzled him. And Roger? Roger was like a form of his own worst side, aggressive and insensitive. Both his own children were; it was funny, they must have got it from Andrea, their disaster of a mother, for he himself was thoughtful and calm.

  Now he felt uneasy about the future for Roxy. He didn’t want her to be defeated by this divorce. Anyone could divorce, most people did, but most people, by the time they did divorce, devoutly wanted to be rid of the other person, the person they cannot imagine having loved and slept with, whose repulsive traits are now an embarrassment, reflecting as they do one’s own bad judgment, immaturity, or star-crossed role as one of nature’s victims. Roxy, from her tone, was being torn, uprooted, insulted, battered in her heart by the one-sided death of love. She might not recover. He didn’t know what to do for her, short of throttling the frog prince.

  14

  Without being aware of it I nursed in the depths of my being a longing for emotional experience, but as this found no satisfaction it alienated me from all the things which one by one aroused my curiosity.

  —Adolphe

  IN ALL PARIS family discussions, the character of Magda Tellman, Charles-Henri’s new love, began to take on importance. Charlotte Saxe and I discussed it. Magda was thirty-seven, which would make her a year older than Charles-Henri. I imagined her as dark and glaring, like Maria Callas, with incredible animal magnetism, a steely will, and astonishing sexual tricks. But what she was really like no one as yet knew, either her looks or her mind. Was she urging Charles-Henri to divorce so she could marry him? Was this desperate woman, seeing in him helpmate and salvation, the force behind his great rush to dump Roxy? What did he see in her that he didn’t find in beautiful Roxy, mother of his children? I tried to imagine the needs of Charles-Henri’s heart, I tried to find some clues to give my sister. But in my own heart I thought, how could she bear to have him back, anyhow, now? I know I have things to learn about patience and forgiveness, but not yet, as Saint Augustine said about wanting to be chaste.

  We heard that Suzanne had at first refused to meet Magda. And that then, with maternal pragmatism, she met her. She asked Charles-Henri to bring Magda to lunch at the Dôme, as if they were distant relatives meeting in a strange city, or friends of her children. Charles-Henri was in the restaurant early, solicitous, pushing in his mother’s chair, rearranging her napkin. Magda joined them directly from the Gare du Nord. A big-boned, exuberant Slav with long pale hair, pushing forty. Devout, maternal, in every way a surprising version of a femme fatale, a genre whose mannerisms she preserved only in cigarette smoking and drinking vodka as an aperitif at lunch.

  In letting Roxy know about this lunch, Suzanne made it clear that she would always love Roxy, and Roxy was not to get upset. “I left no misunderstandings about my views,” Suzanne said. “My son knows what my views are about his duty to his children. But I can’t say I detested her. A solid bourgeoise. The better classes of Slavs are still very nice. They usually speak good French. When I asked, rather pointedly, their plans of
marriage, she said they could not marry, she was croyante, they would have to have annulments. Astonishing, was it not?”

  After she heard this, Roxy very nearly took to her bed, she was so upset that Suzanne could even mention marriage to Magda and Charles-Henri, as if Magda’s presence in the ambient world of the Persands was now taken for granted.

  It became deeper autumn. There were several notable, strange events in the first weeks of October. In the Luxembourg Gardens the leaves, after a few days of being red and gold, fell quickly in the stiffening fall breezes, turned brown, and rattled along the paths with a particular sound like someone raking leaves in a graveyard. All blue left the sky as completely as if the world had tilted its face in some new direction; it was now the color of basement light. I would have thought this change in seasons would add to Roxy’s gloom, but it seemed perversely to please her at first, and I too began to understand why newcomers to California complain that they miss the seasons, for here was a sense that fall was good for the character, and that all afflictions would be recompensed by the coming of spring, eventually.

  Indignation and defiance are healthy emotions, I believe. But Roxy couldn’t sustain them. She took Gennie to the Luxembourg Gardens and sat transfixed, not brooding about her problems but just immobile there, flattened by inertia and depression, wondering what she did wrong. Déprimé is the French word for depressed. Suzanne noticed that Roxy was déprimée, and I mentioned it to Chester and Margeeve. But none of us understood how depressed she really was, torn by religious principles, spite, injured pride, anxiety, the mysterious toxins of pregnancy.

  Sunday afternoon. The Catholic service on Radio France has given way to “Fréquence Protestante,” and the stately intonations of the Latin mass are replaced by goofy happiness music, and people are being interviewed about how they feel. Are some American qualities—self-indulgence and optimism are two that I begin to see characterize us—are these somehow connected to Protestantism?

  I have lunch with l’oncle Edgar, at Drouant, in the restaurant (as opposed to the cafe). The restaurant Mrs. Pace tells me, when I mention it casually, has two stars in the Michelin Guide. She is very interested in restaurants. While at lunch, someone he knows sees us, which amuses him.

  “He assumes I have a taste for fruit vert,” he says, a remark I don’t understand. (Later I ask Roxy, and it means underage girls. Should I be complimented?) He does not introduce me.

  At first I thought that his invitation to lunch, besides its conspiratorial function, might be owing to nostalgia for the company of a young woman, or a liking to be seen with one, an interest in young people and their lively doings, yet it seemed to me that he himself had a more powerful and conspicuous life than most young people do. I would say the same of Mrs. Pace, too. We wrongly tend to think that old people depend on us. Eventually I was to discover that the simplest explanations are the best.

  I told him about my life, in response to his questions. It seemed odd to be confiding in a man, one is so used to men confiding in you. I told him about Mrs. Pace, whom he’d heard of, and whom he said he’d like to meet sometime. I told him about Stuart Barbee and the Randolphs. I did not tell him about life in California, low-riders, greasers, or the two times I got “in trouble” in high school, which was not due to mentally retarded recidivism, just contraceptive bad luck. I did not tell him about dropping out of film school. People talk about knowing who they are: maybe I know who I am and maybe I’m just finding out, but I didn’t want Oncle Edgar to find out, for sure. Yet I didn’t masquerade as an innocent or try to live up to some conception of charming young womanhood he might have had, dating from vanished times.

  We ate: pied de cochon en salade, salade de crabe, rôti d’agneau (he had a veal chop), fromage (he skipped the fromage), gâteau aux trois chocolats. I don’t know what it cost, because my menu had no prices on it.

  He did, of course, as I expected, bring up the Roxy–Charles-Henri situation, and reported of Magda (for he had been invited to the lunch) that she had an unexpected forlorn quality and thick ankles “like an English girl’s,” and drank vodka before lunch like a Russian. He explained to me—it was perhaps his mission to explain—that Suzanne would have to stand behind her son, however regretfully, in any instance where you took sides. Of course no such issues would come up, he was sure. It was just that Suzanne would not be prepared to see Charles-Henri ruin his life. I said I would explain this to Roxy.

  I supposed it was inevitable that I would come to be used as a go-between, since I did go between, among, these different worlds in Paris—between the French family world of the Persands and those of my two suitors Yves and Michel; the American literary world of Ames Everett and Mrs. Pace, the international art world of Stuart Barbee, the trust fundies and diplomats like the Randolphs. My access to these worlds was lowly—I would carry books back and forth between Mrs. Pace and Ames Everett; I would bring news to Roxy from Charlotte re The Situation; I even took photos at Mrs. Pace’s, at the behest of Stuart Barbee, who somehow had promised her biographer, somebody he knew, to ask her if she would allow it. She was not inclined at first to allow photographs, but there is a side of her that is vain of her beautiful furniture and porcelain and pleased that they should be seen, or that she should be seen in their context. Not that I am much of a photographer, but I used Ames’s no-brain camera with an automatic flash.

  “Sure, I don’t care,” Roxy had said, acceding to the request by the Getty Museum to allow one of their experts to photograph her Saint Ursula painting, with a view to borrowing it for their Source of Light exhibition. “It’s kind of nice to think of her getting her due after living all this time in obscurity at our house.” It turned out to be Stuart Barbee who came to look at the painting, photograph it, and determine the amount of insurance that would be necessary in sending it to California. Back to California. He told Roxy it should be insured for forty thousand dollars, which thrilled her. She called Margeeve and Chester, with the glee one feels in hearing that something you have has value you never imagined.

  Stuart Barbee also admired Roxy’s dishes, “old faience” which had come from the Persands. I wished he hadn’t admired them so fervently, for now she would feel worse if she had to give them back. Roxy must have had that on her mind too.

  “The Persands have endless old dishes,” she said. “She’d let me keep these for Gennie. And the Persand furniture—they have so much great furniture, I know they’d never miss these things I have.”

  “I admire the French for their cheerful acquisitiveness, their respect for the creations of man’s hand,” said Ames Everett, who had come in to tea.

  “Yes, the French love things more for their beauty or their totemic significance than for their value,” Roxy agreed.

  “Whereas Americans affect disdain for material objects, as if it weren’t quite nice to collect, or have,” Ames Everett said. “Yet they are great consumers. The French are materialists without being consumers. I respect that.”

  The lawyer, Maître Bertram, told Roxy to begin getting together a dossier of letters and testimonals to her own guiltless excellence and Charles-Henri’s wicked faithlessness. She hated to do this, the more so because he told her to get letters from French people, not just Americans, and she found it hard and embarrassing to ask, as if she were asking them to betray their country. One or two actually refused, saying they did not want to take sides. Anne-Chantal Lartigue loyally agreed to write one, to say that Charles-Henri was neglectful and had left the family home, and that Roxy was a devoted mother. “I will say you are a saint,” she promised. Mrs. Pace agreed to write one, but this made Roxy and me both a little worried, as Mrs. Pace is so resolutely truthful she would probably say something devastating, for instance about Roxy’s cooking, which though not bad is not French, or she might mention that Gennie goes to the crèche. But we should not have worried, because Mrs. Pace is a novelist, too, and in the end her letter made Charles-Henri seem a monster of indifference and cupidity, without th
e slightest lie.

  Another strange event: Roxy also met the husband of Magda Tellman, or I suppose it was he, the same man I had met in the foyer of our building. “Something bizarre happened,” she said one day, looking shaken. “I was coming out of the Closerie des Lilas and this man came up to me and asked me if I was Roxeanne de Persand. He was American, and seemed to be drunk, so I guess I shrank from him, and he started to berate me, standing there on the sidewalk.”

  “Tellman,” I said. “Magda’s husband.”

  “So he said. Shouted at me on the sidewalk, outside the Closerie des Lilas, saying I should listen to him and know what side my bread is buttered on. But he didn’t explain, he just screamed at me that I should be listening to him, I was just another dumb cunt. I almost felt he was threatening me, as if it had been me that wronged him. It was scary, and French people passing by didn’t understand what he was saying, so no one offered to help.”

  Then the most unexpected thing of all. Suzanne telephoned. “I have something to bring up—it is a little delicate,” she said, voice dripping with hypocritical tactfulness and false regret (in Roxy’s account). “Antoine has surprised us all very much by feeling that it would be improper to send Saint Ursula to that Getty museum. While the lawyers are deciding its ownership.”

  “Unbelievable,” said Roxy.

  “I suppose I have no choice but to agree, as Antoine understands legal matters much better than I. But I said I would tell you,” Suzanne went on.

  Roxy, already so fragile she would go off at the slightest thing, clenched her teeth and twisted up her face while she was talking to Suzanne. “That’s astonishing!” was all I heard her say, as meekly as can be, but when she put the phone down, her eyes blazed like a cat’s in a headlight.