Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  “You make a moral argument about Bosnia but deny the force of a moral argument in the family.”

  “What I say about Bosnia is a pragmatic argument from history,” he said. “We are not going to quarrel, you and I, chérie, about Roxeanne’s canapé and an ugly saint.”

  “You’ll talk about sex but not about money,” I objected.

  “Of course—I am French,” he said. “You Americans are always getting everything backward.”

  Edgar would attend a meeting every couple of weeks or so, sometimes more often, gatherings held usually in a city hall or church hall, indistinguishable from the same beige, metal-chaired institutions in America. There were often roundtable discussions, four or five men from the area, Edgar, sometimes a woman, discussing issues of politics and public policy. Of course I didn’t understand most of what was said, but the themes began to clarify themselves. These were: the lessons of history, and the role of religious conviction. I gradually came to understand that Edgar was religious, at least officially, believed in God and the Catholic religion, in a not preoccupied but nonetheless sincere way.

  At first I was shocked by this. In California, you wouldn’t go out with anyone openly religious, because someone who talks about God automatically comes across as a hypocrite. But there was also the French hypocrisy, if that is the word—or inconsistency is a better one—in believing in a religion and conducting this rather unconcerned adultery. I brought up this issue in a general way with Mrs. Pace, without mentioning Edgar and me.

  “Well, their piety is more evolved,” said Mrs. Pace. “In America we have only two forms, as Matthew Arnold said: the bitter and the smug. In France, it appears, there is a third type, the worldly.”

  “The genuine?” I wondered.

  “I suppose they are all genuine. Bitterness is always genuine. And there is nothing so fervently genuine as the sense of being right. Smugness, autrement dit. Why not worldly but genuine?”

  (Edgar himself, on this subject, quoted Molière:

  God, it is true, doth some delights condemn,

  But ’tis not hard to come to terms with Him.)

  My soul, just now, was gripped with these very afflictions of bitterness and a sense of being right. I had never felt more American. I had a fight with Yves about it. He had a strange view of American history. He saw it as all controlled by J. Edgar Hoover. “He had something on everyone in Washington, and they had to ask him if it was all right for Kennedy to run,” he explained. “He also picked Eisenhower. He was a homosexual, so he was paranoid. He was scared of Bobby Kennedy, though, so he had him executed.

  “There are people here who want America to control France,” he said. “They want us to watch cartoons and they want to paint Disney things all over, and we’re all supposed to drink Coca.”

  “No one makes you, you just do,” I objected. “I wouldn’t watch cartoons myself, how come you do?”

  “You have an immunity to it, from growing up on it. Here it just sweeps through, like measles through the Amazon.” How weird to be culturally menaced by a Disney movie, I thought; I can think of more invidious things than that.

  “The French are just cultural pushovers,” I said.

  “Americans smile too much,” he said. “You smile too much.” After that I tried to cut down on smiles.

  Early in December, about two weeks before Roxy’s due date, which was also the scheduled date of the Drouot sale, an irony that Roxy would call attention to, we got a call from Margeeve and Chester. They were making reservations and would be here in a week. Would we arrange a hotel and let them know the address, nothing too dumpy, but not too expensive either; Margeeve suggested the Deux Continents, remembered from a trip years ago.

  Our emotions were mixed, Roxy’s and mine. Mine at least were mixed with pleasure at the prospect of seeing them (of them seeing me, with my new French phrases, nail polish, demure ballerina hairdo). Are we alone among American daughters in feeling fond of our parents? From my reading, I gather it to be the case. I felt pleasure and dread. I dreaded what they would say when they found out about Roxy’s illness (for this is how I had come to think of it), I dreaded their inevitable outrage at her situation, and the hell they would raise about losing the painting. I dreaded an escalation of emotions and conflict. I dreaded what they would say to me. I felt pleasure and dread; Roxy claimed to feel nothing but dread, mostly because of Roger.

  They had added that Roger was coming, with Jane, removing any possibility that they saw this trip as a friendly, supportive visit. They were coming to make war, or at least legal trouble, or, as they probably saw it, justice. They would not leave their child to the vagaries of foreign law, or the antique institutions of male privilege.

  “Does Gennie have her own passport? An American one, I mean?” Margeeve asked. “She should have that.” I considered this an ominous question. Perhaps they planned to kidnap Gennie?

  Roxy and I had no need to say anything to each other, though I was aware of certain unsaid misapprehensions I let stand. For instance, I hadn’t told Roxy that I hadn’t told Margeeve and Chester about her suicide attempt. Perhaps she would be glad, but perhaps she wanted them to know, wanted someone in charge to know.

  I don’t like to ask favors from people—it never turns out, and they always hate you afterward—but I had always felt Suzanne de Persand’s goodwill, and with Roxy’s new depression and the ominous arrival of Roger, I could see that the time had come to talk to her. I thought she might help. She liked me well enough. To Roxy her attitude was more complicated, ex-wife of her favorite son, foreigner, etc., even though, given all this, she had been resolutely supportive, no doubt with the aim above all of keeping in touch with Gennie and the new baby no matter what happened.

  To me she had been genuinely friendly, and seemed to feel the difficulties of my situation, coming in on this family turmoil, not speaking French, no prospects in life, etc. Like Mrs. Pace she seemed to feel an urge to polish me up, though where Mrs. Pace would directly criticize my clothes or tell me my gloves were dirty, Suzanne employed the powers of praise and encouragement. (“Your hands are so pretty when you wear nail polish, Isabel,” or “How amazingly long your legs are in high-heeled shoes, Isabel.”) Yes, I had a pair of gloves now, and a pair of fuck-me shoes. On the day I went to see Suzanne, I was wearing all this gear, which I had worn to lunch with Mrs. Pace at a restaurant we had gone to (Pierre Traiteur, where I let her think I’d never been before. I’d ordered oeufs à la neige. Mrs. Pace said, “I think you’ll find they pronounce it euff à la neige, Isabel.”).

  After lunch I picked up Gennie and took her to the Avenue Wagram for her weekly visit to her grandmother. This was my chance to explain to Suzanne about Roxy’s fragility. I told Suzanne that Roxy was taking the sale of the picture very hard, talked about how it was bad for her condition, and said that I thought the sale should be delayed. Or could I myself undertake a promise to pay for it, over a period of years? Or maybe the two families should get together when Margeeve and Chester got here (I did not mention Roger) and talk the whole matter over?

  “You and I should not become involved in these property issues, Isabel,” Suzanne said. “The sooner it is over with, the better. The lawyers will work it all out. I’m sure Roxeanne is upset, but it won’t affect her pregnancy.”

  “I’m afraid my brother might get involved,” I insisted, wanting to add, you don’t know Roger. “My brother the lawyer. It just seems too bad to get everyone hysterical, I’ve never had the feeling that Charles-Henri would care if things were worked out some other way.”

  Suzanne shrugged. “Poor Charles. He has a league of troubles. The husband of his petite amie is very unpleasant, you know, Roxeanne’s lawyers are very determined, and now there is your brother—alors. Dare we say these are the wages of sin?”

  I longed to tell her the truth: Roxy wanted to die, that has to be thought of. But shame prevented me, and the fear I would be betraying my sister, and thus my family, by revealing the weakne
ss, the great failure of nerve in Roxy. It was maybe even something that they could use against her, say to take Gennie away.

  Suzanne had shown no interest in the legal arrangements between Charles-Henri and Roxy, but I suppose it should not have surprised me that financially prudent French people—Suzanne, even Edgar—would be reluctant to concede something that would lose them money—money for the French side, you could say. Then she said something else. What Suzanne said next opened up everything for me:

  “It is a French picture, after all,” she said. As if pictures had nationalities! A French picture. I was shocked. I could see that a museum director might have to decide a picture’s nationality, in order to put it in one room or another, the Italian or the French room, the sixteenth- or the seventeenth-century room, according to the arbitrary systems of classification museums use. But Suzanne meant that Roxy had no claim to the picture that had scowled down from her girlhood on the gum wrappers and litter of barrettes on her dresser just because, some centuries ago, way before there was an America, the person who painted it had lived, maybe, in the same general region where people from whom Suzanne was descended had also lived, maybe. This terrible idea gave me a glimpse into the stupid Serbs, crazed Irishmen, all those moronic brutes in the Balkans, all those fanatic Arabs in their identical costumes, all deranged by this really limiting idea, the dismal, lazy-minded habit of nationality, and I saw that I would never understand it. Maybe I had some sort of crude New-World mentality that prevented me from seeing the charm of belonging to any nation at all. Moreover, in Suzanne’s eyes I might as well be a Japanese, carting off her Renoirs and Boulle cabinets to put in my paper house across the sea. (“I have heard the houses in California are made of wood!” Charlotte had once said to me, brightly exclaiming over this curiosity.)

  Even Edgar was not above nationality, for though he deplored the divisions of Serb, Croat, and Muslim in the former Yugoslavia, it was to French patriotism or French self-interest he was appealing, in trying to get France to step in and break it up. Later, also, when we discussed the painting, he disagreed with me.

  “If places were divested of the qualities that distinguish them, as expressed by the artifacts they produce, there would be no way of telling Dubrovnik from Detroit,” he said. So to him it did matter where something came from.

  “Besides, Saint Ursula came from Austria or maybe Britain,” I said. I resolved then and there with Suzanne that even though I was American, a member of a nation, and thus couldn’t help but be afflicted by all those limitations other people saw as “American,” I was going to ditch the curse of nationality and not think of myself as anything at all.

  Suzanne gave me another cup of tea, in her thin cups with little gold fleurs de lys around the rim. This was the moment when her eye fell upon my Kelly bag, which I had never taken to Chartres on Sundays. Sometimes you see someone see something, see the light of understanding, shock, ripple their lids. What she understood, or saw in the Kelly, I didn’t know, but I could tell that my handsome, caramel-colored handbag registered, and that more than raising a question like “What is Isabel doing with an expensive bag like that?” it seemed to explain something for her.

  She tightened her mouth into a little precise smile, and when she told me goodbye, I thought her tone had become cold. She was patting the breast of her pretty navy suit as if she had had some shock and was trying to fan her heart. I supposed she must be thinking the purse must have come from a man, and I was not the nice jeune fille she had thought me. Well, that was true. I was used to people realizing that.

  “How nice for you to see your parents after all these months,” said Suzanne tightly. “They arrive on Wednesday? You must bring them to lunch next Sunday, to Chartres.”

  27

  Put none but Americans on guard tonight.

  —George Washington

  STRANGE TO SAY, I had run into the husband of Charles-Henri’s petite amie again, at the Randolphs’. An odd, repellent encounter. I was helping Peg pass the drinks and hors d’oeuvres, and recognized him. This time he was not drunk or in any way belligerent and wore a stylish corporate suit, a regular international lawyer, American like the other guests, who collectively were wearing a lot of aftershave. He didn’t recognize me at first, then made the connection.

  “Oh, right, you’re the little sister. I guess it’s true, I’ve heard about you.” He looked me over, then lowered his voice. “Come in the kitchen a sec, I’d like to talk to you.” Or course I went, hoping for some tidbit about Charles-Henri.

  “You know where they keep things, just sweeten this Pimm’s Cup or whatever it is,” he said, handing me his drink.

  “In the cupboard over the fridge,” I said.

  “You’re a beautiful girl,” he said. “You know, a discreet, good-looking American girl could clean up at our place. We’re trying to make it a full-service destination, you follow me? A place say Germans, businessmen, would arrange to have their board meetings. We want to expand our meeting facilities. Maybe you’d come to a party one of these days?”

  I was fixed on “clean up,” thinking dog-walking was as low as I’d sink, chambermaid was not in my plans.

  “We’re expecting some German and Danish businessmen, they’ll want to come in to Paris, see the town, have dinner, they’ll especially want someone with them to show them around. American girls titillate them especially, don’t ask me why.”

  “I don’t think . . .”

  “A kind of private escort venture, pay very, very well. Plus a good dinner, shows, you know. You’d have fun. All you have to do is look good and be sweet. I’m not suggesting anything else.”

  “I’m kind of busy,” I said, shocked by what I thought he was suggesting.

  “Here’s my card,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. You wouldn’t be working for EuroDisney. I didn’t mean to suggest that. It’s a private enterprise. Think about it.”

  Private enterprises abounded. Behind our backs, in preparation for their voyages, various things had been put in motion in California. Roger had found, in the international section of the library of Barney, Gehegan, Bryer and Walker, seven possible avenues of approach to the problem of the painting, the most promising of which remained to challenge its ownership in an American and then a French court, and to insist that it had never formed a part of Roxy’s dot or biens and was simply something she had taken with her, like her shoes or a valise, without intending to share or give it. There was no gift in writing, and it was an inheritance, therefore not part of community property, at least in California.

  He would also have to get an injunction against the sale in a French court, and to this end contacted Duncan, Cribbe and Crutcher, an American firm with offices in Paris, which represented several oil companies, EuroDisney, Warner Brothers, Century 21 Realty, and many other American enterprises, and had French lawyers on its staff. He had several phone conversations with their expert Renée Morgan, a Frenchwoman with American legal training, and would follow up on this when he got to Paris. Meantime, he had got an injunction in the U.S. Federal Court, fourth district, enjoining the sale of the painting at Drouot while its ownership was in dispute.

  And this must have been around the time that the Getty woman, Julia Manchevering, collected her colleagues into her office, dimmed the lights, pulled down the projector screen, and showed them the slide of Saint Ursula that Margeeve had sent them months before.

  “This is being sold at Drouot,” she said. “In a divorce. I think we should look at it.”

  “Lorraine, around 1620, I should say,” said the seventeenth-century expert Rand Carruther.

  “Not a La Tour, though, surely,” someone said.

  “Why not? Nothing wrong with it if you say it was painted before 1641.”

  “Someone ought to take a look at it.”

  “What attribution by Drouot? What reserve?”

  “Ecole of. They haven’t fixed the reserve. It’s come up rather suddenly. When Stuart Barbee looked at it for us, to estim
ate the insurance, he valued it at forty thousand. There must be something wrong with it, it’s being sold so modestly, but I still think it wouldn’t hurt to look at it.”

  “No problem about an export license?”

  “The Louvre has apparently said it has no interest in it and won’t oppose an export license.”

  Their eyes met. The Louvre not being interested could mean two contradictory things—either that it wasn’t any good, or that the Louvre hoped to get it for themselves or another French museum for a low price by claiming it wasn’t any good.

  Thus a Getty art expert, as well as Roger and Jane and our parents Chester and Margeeve, would be descending on Paris on Wednesday. We had made a reservation for Chester and Margeeve at the Deux Continents, but Roger was staying at the George V. I was strangely apprehensive, but Roxy’s mind seemed suddenly more attuned to her inner state than to issues of art ownership, and she was happy her parents were coming. Her mind was on the baby that would soon be born, she seemed to be listening for its stirring, or for the vestige of a labor cramp, with her mother here.

  On Wednesday, which seemed to drag with the suspense of their arrival, we got a call about five from Lille. Their plane had landed there because of a strike at Charles de Gaulle Airport, and they would be coming to Paris by a special Air France bus. We were not to wait up for them if it got late; just go to the hotel, dead with jet lag, and would call us in the morning. Reprieve.

  On Thursday morning I went off early to walk Scamp, with a date to meet Roxy at ten. Usually Ames Everett did not talk to me very long, but today he was interested in the parental visit, and in Roxy’s state of mind. Her state of mind was a general preoccupation of the American community now, it seemed to me, as her time approached and her deserted marital state became more poignant, and more emblematic of the risks Americans take getting mixed up with French people here. Many people had been asking about Roxy.