“My uncle Edgar’s wife, my aunt Amélie. The family is in an uproar, you know.”
Had she been sent to tell me that her family knew about me and Edgar? What was I supposed to do? Blood drained from my head, so that at first I blurted, “Do you think—do you think they’ll say anything to my parents?” It was just something to say. I didn’t care what they said to my parents, I couldn’t shock my parents. It was I who was shocked.
Here I had been thinking about her, and about Roxy and Charles-Henri. Now I had a sensation that was like the moment in the surf when you have been borne to shore, the wave behind you lifting and buoying you up, when all at once the sea withdraws, the sand beneath you changes direction, water sucks you back, scrapes you over the sharp backs of shells, the firm bottom is gone. At this moment, the rich warm tide of French life turned, or, to change the metaphor, like a film running backward, I suddenly saw a jumble of images, of foie gras and buses, musical concerts in medieval churches, the windows of chocolate shops like museums, lacy G-string bikinis—all these things running backward pulling me back toward the beach-bunny movie that had been my life in the Santa Barbara reel.
All would be lost. The scenes I had been dreading—Margeeve and Chester finding out about how ill Roxy had been—were not the scenes I should have been dreading. My own life was to be ruined.
Was it Edgar I regretted? It seemed so, the man himself, whom I loved and who loved me as long as it didn’t get too disruptive and attract the scrutiny (amused? irate?) of his sister and wife and nieces and nephews. . . . Even in a panic I did not think, I did not make the mistake of thinking later, when I went over and over this conversation in my mind, that Edgar would fight for me or disrupt his life. No, I knew my place. I was a simple one-celled animal, the au pair girl, the junior player, without protection. I would be discarded. I knew that.
I hoped otherwise, of course.
“At first I thought, very strange, then I thought, not so strange,” Charlotte continued, lowering her voice still further. “My uncle has a bad reputation, you know. I suppose he is attractive, but very old, surely?”
Scenes flashed before me. The elderly man and young woman in a restaurant. He is handsome, well tailored, slightly florid, distinguished silver hair, perhaps slightly stout, hands lightly raddled. He is known, people look toward him trying to remember where they have seen him. Young smiling woman with him, neat in dark suit, hair knotted like a ballerina’s on the nape of her neck. Long neck, good nose, good profile, ladylike. Expensive bag. Up close, they would be heard discussing Prokofiev. They have been to the ballet. People looking couldn’t know that she is wearing stockings instead of pantyhose, held up with frilly black ribbon garters, and blue lace underwear, the artillerie de nuit he will help her wriggle out of later, when he will kiss, caress la foufoune, she will kiss, caress la bite, they will pass a sweaty, satisfying hour, but they will not skip dessert now; he is having salade d’agrumes, she is having clafoutis.
Are they in love? No one would think anything of the kind in any case, from their airy laughter. Perhaps each has a different definition. The young woman believes him wise, witty, paternal, worldly, cultivated, and a great lover. She believes he is the key to her future, though how this mechanism of fate might operate, she could not say. His power over her is not why she loves him. She usually dislikes people with power over her, even sexual power. She wants to be the one to have it. But he has sexual power too. It is not that she is passive, but that he has the ideas and dictates the rhythm. He is a sensualist and can teach that. She was always kind of grab-it-and-go, before. He has focus. For instance, when he focuses on the area of thigh between the top of the stocking and la foufoune itself, on that little crease at the top of the leg, it is as if he had never touched, kissed, admired that particular landscape before, never seen something so alluring.
Is he in love with her? She doesn’t know. He says it is a pleasure of his time of life to be attentive to the things he has always valued but not had the leisure to take slowly. These intense treats following upon quenelles de brochet, sauce Nantua and nougatine glacée, coulis de framboise, the music of Prokofiev, the thrilling bodies of the dancers, become inseparable, dance a kind of orgasm, dinner a forepleasure, the whole a kind of addiction. Did you have a good time in Paris, Isabel? Yes, I had a great, great time in Paris.
I realized I could still fail to understand the words “my aunt is coming to lunch.” I could stonewall this. But I wanted to tell Charlotte, I love him! Feeling the words rise to my teeth was for me almost the first time I had thought them even to myself. Charlotte’s perfume and cigarette smoke dizzied me. I might, right there, have cast myself on Charlotte and said, What shall I do? If I did that, I might have had one ally at least, though a weak one, Charlotte herself the flake in her family. But I didn’t have the presence of mind, all was blotted out with dread of that lunch on Sunday, and, as I say, with the sensation of horrified loss, like watching your diamond ring go down the sink and nothing to be done.
When, later, I thought about what we did, how we laughed, those dinners, those discussions of Joubert, I could see that our love had a tangible, precious history of its own, and was part of his history too, like a piece of valuable family silver—and hope crept back.
But at this moment, with Charlotte, another part of me defiantly thought, Am I not a fighter? Isn’t that the American way? Am I just supposed to be terrified by Suzanne, and Edgar’s wife, and meekly go away? And at the same time I thought, I must be crazy, nothing has even happened yet, just calm down.
So I changed my tack. “I think Monsieur Cosset is a great man,” I admitted. “You know I go to a lot of his meetings? I hope no one thinks there’s anything wrong with that? I totally believe he is the only person doing anything about Bosnia. He thinks that France should intervene and so should the U.S. . . .”
This threw Charlotte a little, I could see her reviewing her English. What was I saying here? There was a silence.
“We haven’t met Madame Cosset, or maybe Roxy has,” I went on. “I do admire Monsieur Cosset your uncle.”
“She will be there on Sunday,” Charlotte repeated. “Moi, I go to Lyon, I am sorry not to meet your parents.”
In my mind I was screaming, “I love him. I will not give him up.” To Charlotte I said, “It’ll be nice to meet your aunt.”
29
THE NEXT DAY was Saturday, and Roxy and I had suggested an expedition to the Marché aux Puces, the flea market, for Chester and Margeeve. Roxy loves to browse in the Puces, and I had an errand I did not discuss. I still hoped to buy a piece of faience for Edgar’s Christmas present, a plan that now had a bitter poignancy, for I imagined fatalistically that I would present it after he had told me we would not see each other anymore, as my parting gift and eternal reminder.
Margeeve, it turned out, also had a long list of things she had promised to find for people in Santa Barbara, and the flea market was high on her agenda. Chester, officially hating shopping, went along with good enough grace. We took the bus, easier than the metro with Gennie and her stroller (poussette), in the mood of high optimism that always goes along with expeditions to this curious world where all may be found, or sold—drums, bijoux, jeans, African curios, porcelain, entire rooms of woodwork peeled off the walls of castles.
Roxy believes the 24 bus is the best bus in the world. From the Place de la Concorde, it turns east, passing between the Seine and the Louvre. On the walls of the Louvre are the crests of monarchs—all the Louis, Napoleon, and Napoleon III. Then it stops at the Samaritaine department store, then goes across the Pont Neuf by the Place Dauphine, where you can glimpse the peculiar little pie-shaped park with old gentlemen playing boules, then along the quai past the prefecture of police, where Inspector Maigret had his office, and across the river again in view of Notre Dame, and along the Boulevard Saint Germain to her stop, in the Place Maubert.
When people come to visit, her family or people she went to school with, she always takes
them on the 24 bus, and though they always seem to like it, none have appeared to feel the way she always feels riding it, almost overcome with delight that her own bus could run by the side of a place where Pierre Curie was killed by a carriage; in sight of the very place Marie Antoinette awaited her execution, and where Romans had marched before that. Or that she could live where Abélard walked, in the time of Chaucer, when nothing at all was happening in Santa Barbara, California, where history had not even begun.
It was sort of interesting to see Paris through the eyes of Chester and Margeeve. They seemed prepared to like the city, but to disapprove of the French, especially Margeeve.
“What’s appalling is the way the beggars have to assume a kneeling position that way, kneeling in Christian supplication, hands prayerfully folded. It’s horrible. Evidently you have to express your pitiful, abject condition before they will give you money.”
“Ours just say fuck you, give me money,” said Chester.
“Ours have dignity, put it that way,” Margeeve said.
“We like ours to be belligerent so we can hate them and not blame ourselves for their plight,” Chester disagreed.
“I think it’s sanctimonious for a society to demand abjection,” Margeeve said.
“They have very few homeless here,” Roxy put in sharply. “It is a benevolent society and they have a big social safety net.”
“Those beggar women with small children on their laps, it’s appalling,” Margeeve said, “immobilizing small children for hours on end like that.”
Being with them made me realize how many things I had come to understand and take for granted, things that must have seemed strange to me too, at first. For instance, going to the flea market on the bus, Chester suddenly said, “Doesn’t it bother you? Just sitting here?” And it was true, the bus was standing stock still in the street, unable to pass a van parked on the side. Roxy and I hadn’t even noticed. Roxy was talking to Margeeve, my mind was focused on the prospect of Sunday lunch at Suzanne’s tomorrow. Buses never moved very fast.
It was not that I minded meeting Edgar’s wife Amélie, I had no problems with that. A wife of thirty years, a woman between fifty and sixty, by my calculation, represents—what? Nothing I could horn in on, and no threat to me either. But I was imagining the assembly at the table as a tribunal of censorious judges denouncing me in their foreign tongue, Jezebel/Isabel. Edgar probably wouldn’t even be there. I had been lost in thinking about this, while my father was fretfully squirming around.
“We’ve been stuck here for ten minutes,” he said. We saw he was right. Behind us a string of cars was forming, exasperated people leaning out of their windows, horns tooting. A man in some sort of military uniform spoke in at the bus driver’s window, expostulating, with gestures, and the bus driver reacted angrily. “Passer? Peux pas,” he said belligerently. “Demandez mon nom.” Roxy translated the altercation for Chester and Margeeve. Chester fidgeted and grumbled about the stupidity of the van driver. Roxy laughed happily to hear Chester be typical of himself, and said, “I’m so glad you guys are here.” But what struck me was how Roxy and I had got used to buses being stopped, and hadn’t even noticed.
Our parents kept calling our attention to how we had changed, for instance then, and they kept remarking on my clothes, which, though it was true I now had some dresses, really hadn’t changed that much, allowing for the differences in climate and so on, or so it seemed to me. From what they said to me, I could imagine the conversation behind my back:
“It’s funny, Roxy is the same, but Iz has changed a lot,” Chester would say.
“Well, Iz had farther to go. Roxy was always kind of herself, however pregnant and forlorn now.”
“She looks so . . . Iz, I mean.”
“Soignée is the French word,” Jane would say. Jane knows French.
“I was completely unprepared for it. What is the explanation?”
“She has always liked to be in the swim, and here the swim is soignée.” (Margeeve.)
“She looks like the star of a British porn film, you know, the beautiful, cruel nanny, with her hair up like that, sober little dark dress,” Roger would say. (This had actually been an observation of Yves’s.)
“Well, I wouldn’t know. I have never seen a British porn film.” (Chester.)
At least I felt, from the way they looked at me, as if they thought I might be doing something like porn films on the side. They had a quizzical, suspicious and hopeful look when they looked at me, as if all this grooming and the odd French phrase were too good to be true and thus probably to be deplored.
Roxy is scornful of the flea market, evidence of human materialism on a scale unimaginable to either of us before coming to France. I suppose it could be that America just hasn’t had a long enough history to accumulate all those objects. And so many of them ugly! Though I have to admit, my eye had begun to be accustomed to bronze panthers, plaster cupids, infinitely mended plates, hinges, mattresses, jeans, mirrors in their hundreds torn from the chimney breasts of all Paris, marble busts, torn canvases, chandeliers, medallions, seventeenth-century prints (a specialty of Ames Everett), deco lamps, things that cost thousands of dollars, and nothing that didn’t cost at least thirty francs. I had long since begun to think in francs.
Chester and Margeeve hardly knew whether to react with aversion or delight, or that combination of the two by which they would enjoy it thoroughly because they knew it couldn’t happen in California, just as the French react to Las Vegas—affecting to love it, they still wouldn’t want it in France. We could observe their astonishment as we wandered in the acres of alleys of African carvings, old clothes, a million vases and statues. I guess I like the idea that things don’t die but go on living, recycled, and have a kind of immortality, but Roxy hates it that the human owners die, and she says that objects living on beyond their owners depress her.
“Objects should commit suttee,” she said.
“I agree,” said Margeeve, but Chester objected that objects have a talismanic and memorial quality that keeps their owners alive. I liked it when our parents went on like this, rapping about nothing. It was a nice afternoon for all of us, strolling in the flea market like a family of regular American tourists, dread of tomorrow forgotten, no painful agenda of international legal dispute, no disappointments looming for Roxy, no tragedy and death.
“You can understand them collecting all this junk,” Margeeve said, “they’ve had so many wars. When people lose everything, the smallest things become important.” This made Roxy laugh, though somewhat bitterly. In the end, it was Margeeve who made the first purchase, a little brooch with a picture of Charles de Gaulle on it. It seemed like a funny thing for her to want.
While the others had lunch, I went to find the tureen man in Stall H. Martin, in the Marché Paul Bert. I was glad to get away from them for a while, with my own thoughts about meeting Edgar’s wife tomorrow. I knew I was overdramatizing my situation, imagining a heavy scene of public denunciation, then renunciation, reproaches by an angry wife, and the sordid shock of Edgar pretending there had been nothing between us. The sting of anticipated anguish is almost worse than the real. I was imagining the embarrassment of my parents, Roxy’s derision, Suzanne’s disappointment. At the center of these imaginings was always Edgar’s detachment. The new idea that he didn’t love me as much as I loved him intensified my passion, making more poignant the certainty of its end, tomorrow, or soon.
On the heels of such thoughts, my more combative side would assert itself, the side that resolved, as I wandered in the allées of the Puces while Roxy, Jane, and our parents took the menu at sixty-eight francs at the Resto Péricole, exclaiming over the excellence of the lamb, the succulence of the white beans, the modest price, the surprising geniality of the waiter no matter what you had heard, while Jane, an ovo-vegan, ate Margeeve’s tourte au Maroilles and everybody’s crudités—my combative side resolved that I wasn’t going to just give up.
“Of course I remember you, d
ear,” the dealer said. “I think I am close to laying my hands on that tureen. Very pricey, be prepared. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”
“I think I might be getting some money,” I explained. The whole intricate scam was not clear to me then, or of course I would have alerted Mrs. Pace.
On the way home, the whole family fell into a lively quarrel in loud voices on the public bus. Perhaps Chester and Margeeve, having spent their lives saying “shhhh” to us, now had a sense they couldn’t be understood because they were speaking English.
“I think we should withdraw the painting from the sale, roll it up, put it in a suitcase and take it with us,” Margeeve began by saying. I heard a quaver of emotion in her voice. Perhaps something in the flea market had upset and moved her. Even Chester was looking at her with some puzzlement.
“How could they stop us? It’s ours. We’d just go into the auction house and get it,” she went on. (I had actually thought of doing that, of rescuing it for Roxy.)
Chester was looking uneasy, and Roxy sullen.
“It’s my life,” she said. “I’m not going to become a criminal here. I have to live here.”
“La France is not going to come chasing after it, after all,” Margeeve said. “Isabel could just bring it.”
“I’m not coming home,” I said.
Now everyone jumped on me. “And when your money runs out? Work permit? Green card?” And above all, “Why not?” Roxy looked as if she appreciated me drawing their fire.
“I’m starting to like it here,” I said. “I came to learn something about Europe and to learn French, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“Oh, honey,” Margeeve said, oddly dabbing at her eyes.
“I can do things that I can’t do at home,” I added.
“Like what?” they asked, truly baffled, though you would have thought it was evident.
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