Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  “I suppose she is apprehensive about the sale?” Ames said, and I thought again, as I had thought several times, he is unusually interested in the sale of our picture.

  “Is she glad to see your parents?”

  “She hasn’t seen them yet. They seem to be lost between Lille and the Hôtel des Deux Continents. She’s apprehensive, though. She thinks they think she should go back home, to California, right away, just clear out.”

  “Oh, I hope not,” he said. “She wouldn’t, would she?”

  “She has to do something. Charles-Henri has fallen in love. He wants to remarry.”

  “What is this fashion for marriage? Marriage is so tacky and unnecessary,” Ames complained. “Remarriage seems complete lunacy.”

  Strange to say, the Thursday of our parents’ arrival—in my mind the beginning of the end—was the very same day I understood what people were saying in the metro. It was like the moment in some magic tale, when you find the ring, or swallow the potion, and you can suddenly understand what the birds are saying. I understood French people, and they said:

  “I wonder if Gérard will buy a Saab for his next voiture?”

  “I doubt it, he always buys Peugeot.”

  All day the magic held. Near me as I drank a cup of coffee in the Brasserie Espoir, two women in their fifties chatted, and their words came as clear to my ears as if they were Americans:

  “You never know with Michelle, that’s just the way it is, and you have to come down on one side or other, but it isn’t easy.”

  “It’s true.”

  “You could say I’ve had enough, but what can you do, yet, it’s true.”

  “Her mother, et cetera, isn’t it?”

  “I told them.”

  Later, when I had time to think about it, I would wonder if it was worthwhile understanding after all. Maybe it is better to go along in soundproof isolation? It was something of a disappointment to discover that all those words, so alluringly expressed in dramatic, unintelligible, and unreproducible sounds, organized themselves into banalities one might hear on the bus in Santa Barbara (if one took buses there). But the pleasure of being in on it, at last, initiated, thrilled me all the same. From then on I eavesdropped like a spy.

  Roxy had been to see Saint Ursula. At the auction house Drouot, they had let her into a salesroom upholstered in faded velvet to stand alone in front of her painting, the symbol of her life in Paris, the symbol of happiness, the symbol of what private passages of love I don’t know, just as I didn’t know but imagined the pain and rage in her heart at the vanishing of these things.

  She had been shocked by the new possibility the painting could be sold in a few days, hors catalogue, as a special latecomer to a long-scheduled sale of important pictures, which Drouot thinks is the proper company for our picture. The sale would be a week from Friday. No, she said, she didn’t plan to go, what if Charles-Henri were there? Let the others go, our parents, our brother Roger, her friend Ames Everett. Ames said he would be there to be sure it went correctly. But I knew she would be there in her heart.

  Roxy, seeming outwardly to have that cowlike placidity they say comes on in late pregnancy, has observed the gathering forces without outward complaint. For the past few days she has come home, pulled herself up the stairs, let herself in (exact reenactment of the fateful day Charles-Henri left) and rested as instructed by the sage-femme. She would sit on a chair and close her eyes. She has read, in the personals column of the Herald Tribune want ads, the words

  May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be adored, glorified, loved and preserved, throughout the world, now and forever. Sacred Heart of Jesus, pray for us. Saint Jude, worker of miracles, pray for us. Saint Jude, help of the hopeless, pray for us.

  Say this prayer nine times a day for nine days and your prayers will be answered. This never fails. Publication must be promised.

  She would close her eyes and begin to say, or rather think these words, nine times. When she got to the end, she couldn’t be sure what it was she ought to ask for, and so would content herself with a vaguely benign hope that things would work out. She didn’t want to confront fate, or Saint Jude or whoever, too directly, by asking anything too hard like that Charles-Henri should see the light. She was not even sure who Saint Jude was, she was only a new Catholic, and what did “publication” mean? But it was soothing to say over, nine times.

  Margeeve and Chester, bused in from Lille, had waked in the middle of the night in the Hôtel des Deux Continents, eyes staring open, the curse of jet lag, and then again at ten-thirty, shocked at themselves to have slept so late and stiff from this really uncomfortable bed.

  “We have to get another hotel, we’re too old for this,” said Margeeve.

  “That means me getting us another hotel, I know,” sighed Chester. Margeeve always wanted to change rooms, tables, this was the first time hotels, but he had to agree, little hot room, the radiator sputtering all night, pinging, an odor of benzoin.

  “Did you sleep?”

  “I woke up at four.” The heure blanche of jet lag. “I took a Halcion.”

  “You should have waked me. I’d have given you a jet-lag treatment,” said Margeeve.

  “We better call Roxy, she’ll wonder what’s happened to us.”

  “Much as I’m eager,” said Margeeve, “I sort of dread it. What kind of shambles we are going to find.”

  “The reality of Roxy’s housekeeping.” Chester laughed. “The reality of Isabel’s course of self-improvement. The reality of French legal customs. You never liked reality.”

  “What has reality done for me? Well—everything for me, but not so much for the girls.”

  “The girls are fine. You know they are. Otherwise we would have heard. We would have sensed it. You’d have been on the first plane.”

  “I can’t wait to see Gennie. Of course, she won’t know us,” Margeeve said.

  It had been six months since we had seen them, so I expected them to look different. In a sense they did, in a sense reassuringly the same, just standing in a new light, reflected as it were from Notre Dame and the rippling Seine. Margeeve’s blue suit, a normal California blue, was just a shade too blue, Chester was unfamiliarly dressed in his dark give-a-lecture-at-an-eastern-college suit, which he never wore in Santa Barbara. He was bearded, something he went back and forth on, so that we the family had ceased to register the alternations, always disappointing him the mornings he would appear with a newly bare chin. Now I noticed the beard was there—beards are the exception here—making him look foreign, maybe slightly eastern European. Together they looked foreign, but perhaps only to our eyes, and unmistakably American. We rushed to embrace them at the exit to the metro.

  “Well!” they said, beaming, we were all beaming. “Rox, you look like an elephant, it must be triplets.”

  Her long-sleeved blue blouse had ruffled cuffs covering her wrists.

  “Iz, you look great, honey, you look so French!” I didn’t ask what that meant.

  We proceeded to Roxy’s apartment. Of course I had underestimated Margeeve; she didn’t hate Roxy’s peeling stairwell as much as I had, but exclaimed enthusiastically about its picturesque qualities and great antiquity.

  “This is the salon,” Roxy said. “There was a bureau, you know, in the American sense. A chest, but it’s gone to be sold.”

  “We know what a bureau is,” Margeeve said.

  The empty place over the fireplace seemed to scream at me, but not at Margeeve and Chester. Now they found everything pretty and seemed amazed at seeing Roxy in this new light—Roxy the competent matron, maîtresse de maison, in her own realm. The only other time they had visited, Roxy and Charles-Henri were still living in his student apartment.

  “Is Gennie at her play school? I hope you can keep her out one day. We want to take her to Disneyland.”

  “How much time have you got, Roxy, what does the doctor say?” asked Chester, anxiously regarding Roxy’s swollen form.

  “We’ve moved to the Hô
tel Saint-Louis, on the Ile Saint-Louis, it’s a cute little place,” Margeeve said. “That’s why we weren’t at the Deux Continents.”

  “I’ll make some coffee,” Roxy said, seeming happy to slip into this hostess role, seeming happy to have our parents there at last, seeming happy they could see her in her chosen place, even like this.

  “Now start from the beginning,” Chester said, “bring us up to date on the legal things. Roger and Jane get here this afternoon.”

  “Keep Roger out of it!” Roxy suddenly screamed. “I don’t want him. Please stop meddling in it, everything is fine.”

  “Roxy!” cried Margeeve. “Remember it isn’t only your picture, it’s Chester’s, it’s Roger’s and Isabel’s, it isn’t for you to say. Roger should do what he can.”

  “I don’t want you to meddle, just bug out,” she screamed.

  So it hit the fan, and only twenty minutes after they got here. I supposed it was just as well that the acrimony should all come out then and there. Roxy cried and stormed, but we could see it would not prevent Roger’s arrival, and the inquiries at law, and a clash with the Persands, and all the other horrors as yet unenumerated. The chasm opened at our feet, then mercifully someone pulled a rug over it.

  The rancor, that is, was glossed over quickly by the parents’ evident pleasure to be on vacation in Paris, their delight in Gennie, such a beautiful child, they said, beyond the ability of photos to show—had rotten Roxy taken any photos. We rode together on the 24 bus. “Walking back, we will cross the front of Notre Dame Cathedral,” Roxy told them happily, delighted with the role of Paris tour guide, recovering her composure.

  With them there, I could feel myself regressing by the minute, me saying graceless things like “be careful of the pigeon shit.”

  “I love it here,” Roxy said, on the bus. “It’s so civilized. And my children are French, of course. I’ll stay; but sometimes I miss California. But then I’m on the bus and I see an old building where d’Artagnan lived. There was really a d’Artagnan and his house is still there! Then I’m so thrilled I don’t care what happens to me here. I’ve loved d’Artagnan since I was eleven.”

  “Look at those ridiculous hats,” said Margeeve of the round-hatted soldiers standing on the corner. “French history seems like a long series of ridiculous hats.”

  “Who do we have like d’Artagnan, no one,” protested Roxy.

  When Chester and Margeeve walked back to their hotel to change for dinner, Chester said, “Margeeve, I’m not looking at this as if it were my painting. You’re missing the whole point. I don’t care about this painting, I wouldn’t recognize the damn thing.”

  We had organized their social schedule so tightly they resisted, assuring us they had things touristic and nostalgic they wanted to do, and by no means required us. All the same, there was to be a dinner at Mrs. Pace’s, and Sunday lunch with the Persands, a reading at the Town Crier, a concert at the American church. Tonight we were all to go to dinner with Roger and Jane at their hotel.

  There the same effect of strangeness colored Roger and Jane even more highly than it had Margeeve and Chester, perhaps because they were more fixed in my mind as siblings, not grownups, and now were seen to be solemn, prosperous adults, comfortable in hotels, checked in at the George V, a fancy Californiate hotel on the Avenue George V—I say Californiate, for I still have to keep reminding myself that our hotels are copying them, not the other way around.

  I wore my high heels and carried the Kelly. The walls of their room were upholstered in turquoise fabric stretched inside ornate frames, and the TV was hidden in an antiqued armoire. Roger and Jane looked worldly in this surrounding, and I suddenly realized my brother is a hotshot lawyer in a suitable dark suit. I saw that Roger must earn a lot of money.

  We had drinks, Roxy insisting on Porto, which only someone French would drink before dinner and she was only doing to make an inconvenience and shock them that, as a française, she was not forbidden to drink alcohol during pregnancy. “Let me fill you in about the picture,” Roger said. “I spent the afternoon at the offices of Duncan, Cribbe and Crutcher, the firm representing us here. They had already filed a petition in the French court to enjoin the sale until the American court can rule on its status as marital property. The French court has not yet ruled. Then the French court will have to agree on the jurisdiction, but at least nothing can happen until then. Curious detail—DCC know the husband of the woman Charles-Henri is mixed up with.”

  “Magda,” said Roxy.

  “Something with EuroDisney, and apparently pissed off beyond belief, not inclined to give her a divorce, but that’s his problem, not ours.”

  “You mean the sale isn’t going to happen? Next Friday?” Margeeve asked.

  “It’s possible they’ll rule by then, with a stipulation pending the outcome. Museums often take things under those conditions.”

  “Museums?” we said, thunderstruck. This was the first mention of museums, after the dismissive attitude of the Louvre.

  “It’s not impossible,” Roger said. “According to what I am told. That a museum might want this picture.” This news seemed especially to thrill Margeeve.

  In the dining room, we studied the long and ornate menus.

  “Is it okay to drink the tap water here?” asked Jane suddenly.

  “Sure, of course, this isn’t Istanbul,” Roxy said, taking this personally, frowning.

  “I’d just as soon not get an upset tummy. You’re probably used to it,” Jane snapped.

  “Really, it’s okay.”

  “Why is everyone drinking bottled water, then?” Jane insisted.

  “They think it helps the kidneys or the stomach,” Roxy said. “It’s a health idea. A status thing.”

  “Yes? Well, let’s have some bottled,” Jane said warily.

  Looking at this family, my family, set off, to be sure, by their best clothes and the luxurious surrounding of the hotel dining room, they didn’t drive me as crazy as they usually did, except for Jane. It was as if the slightly imposing presence of the waiter, the gilded boiseries, the forêt of verres and fourchettes had gilded the family too with a kind of temporary cosmopolitan patina. Even Jane was looking less lady-shrink than usual, in that she usually dresses like Greer Garson as Madame Curie but was now wearing a short-skirted French dress, stockings, hair done, gold necklace—looking French, completely. We can’t be such total hick idiots if two of our number live in Paris, said our glances. I felt better about us all, though the others glared at me for pointing out that a tourtière was not a turtle. Of course they were saying to themselves, how would Isabel know? I didn’t point out—how could I—I’d probably been to more fancy French restaurants by now than the rest of them put together.

  At the end, Roger, paying the bill, said, “The tip is included.”

  “You leave something anyhow,” I said.

  “No. That’s the whole point of having the tip included, I think it’s a very rational system,” Roger said.

  “Maybe twenty francs,” Roxy agreed with me.

  “Fuck it, fifteen percent has already been added,” Roger said.

  “Maybe in a simple place, you add, Isabel, but here, when you’ve already paid a fortune for dinner . . .” said Margeeve.

  “Nearly seven hundred dollars, if I may say so,” Roger said, his voice trembling a little.

  “I have some tens.” Roxy scrambled in her purse and gave three dix-franc coins to me. I put them on the little plate with the bill. Roger’s jaw clenched, and Chester looked embarrassed. I knew Edgar would leave about a hundred francs in these circumstances, but who would listen to me?

  28

  Whoever you may be, never discuss with another the interests of your own heart; the heart alone can plead its own cause and plumb the depths of its own wounds.

  —Adolphe

  “IT IS I, the renegade Charlotte,” said Charlotte de Persand Saxe over the telephone in tones of great gaiety, late Friday afternoon. Chester and Margeeve had go
ne with Roxy to the crèche, to be introduced as responsables authorized to pick up Gennie.

  “Roxy isn’t here,” I said. “How are you? Are you in Paris?”

  “I am calling you. I am here, on my way to Lyon. I thought maybe if you had time for a coffee? I thought, you could tell me the family news.”

  This was surprising, since I would be the least informed of anyone in the family, the most unable to distinguish discord from lively discourse, say in discussions at the table. For instance, I still did not really understand how things stood with Charlotte and her husband Bob. What had been, surely, a sexual scandal—her “liaison,” as Suzanne had put it, with an Englishman—had now subsided to some mythology about “Charlotte’s job in London.” Bob appeared from time to time at Sunday lunch, and the children were often there. I had even stopped holding anything against Charlotte about the cat (Roxy had not), because I assumed I had somehow missed the explanation. In a way, I was getting used to being slightly out of it, and it was restful, I suppose like being deaf, where the wits can wander in inner reflection.

  We met in the Vues de Notre Dame. “It is difficult being in London,” she sighed, lighting another cigarette seconds after stubbing out the first, and pouting flirtatiously at the waiter. It seemed to me her hair was paler, and she had gained a pound or two. “The English have so little sense of plaisir, and it is so gray there. But the work is interesting. I miss the children, but they are coming on their holidays. How is your French getting along?”

  She had heard that our parents had arrived. She had heard about developments concerning Saint Ursula. She too deplored Antoine’s interference, and she worried about Charles-Henri.

  Then, abruptly, she said, her eyes on me, “My aunt is coming to lunch on Sunday.” At first I didn’t understand, and my blankness must have showed, for she leaned forward.