Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  “Music,” I said. “Art exhibits.”

  “We have music and art exhibits, maybe on a smaller scale, okay,” Chester objected.

  “For example, I recently went to a Stockhausen concert in the IRCAM center, part of the Centre Pompidou,” I said.

  “Stockhausen! Stockhausen!” It was a red-flag word for Chester, apparently. “You think there has never been the music of Stockhausen in Santa Barbara, California, is that what you think? Could it be that we could never drag you to anything like that?”

  “You who went all the time to Stockhausen concerts,” I snapped.

  “Stockhausen, Beethoven, I didn’t see you there. The mall and the Planned Parenthood clinic.”

  “That’s uncalled for,” said Margeeve.

  We had dinner at Roxy’s, except for Roger and Jane, who were going to Taillevent with some lawyers they knew. I went up to bed rather early, needing to escape. It was Saturday night. I often stayed in on Saturday nights now, babysitting. Roxy was often invited out, and Edgar went to the country. I read a little and did my nails. I thought about the painting, and whether, as Margeeve had suggested this afternoon, one could not just take it. In an address, I had once heard Edgar say, “Joubert disait, ‘C’est la force et le droit qui règlent toutes choses dans le monde; la force en attendant le droit.’ ”

  I had noted these words in the idiotic phonetic way I hear the French language, and asked about them later. Had I understood? Force and Rightness control the world? Force while waiting for Right, he translated.

  “That worries you, chérie? It sounds like fascism?”

  About eleven, as soon as I had got into bed, victim of a strange agitation and the dread of the lunch at Chartres tomorrow, I got hungry again, and thought of apples on Roxy’s sideboard. I thought about taking the picture. I thought about apples. Since my room is on the fifth floor, under the eaves, and Roxy’s is on the second, you think twice before creeping down the narrow staircase. I tossed, turned, worked on my French lesson:

  Est-ce que vous travaillez à San Francisco? Oui, j’y travaille.

  Est-ce que vous cherchez un menuisier? Oui, j’en cherche.

  Est-ce que vous donnez les clés à la dame? Oui, je les lui donne.

  Either hunger or ambivalence kept me awake, lying there weighing whether it was worth it to get up and go down just for an apple, even though you know once the idea is planted, you might as well get up at once. Eventually I got up.

  I now own a satin nightgown and a negligee—a lace-trimmed flowered silk kimono—but it was not suitable for going out on the stairs in. I had been reading whatever books I could find about the lives of kept women, Gigi, Nana, the Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, Camille. Not that I was kept, exactly, but we did not go Dutch at dinner either. One of the books I had read—none of them, I must say, would encourage a person to lead that headlong, precarious sort of life—had actually given advice about lingerie, that is where I saw it called “the artillery of night.” Not that I had ever spent the whole night with Edgar.

  Anyway, I put on my coat over my artillery of the night and went out on the stairs. It was midnight. Below in the street I could hear some merry voices somewhere. Mademoiselle Lavois, on the third floor, leads a “vie irrégulière,” according to Madame Florian. I had a powerful feeling of wanting to be somewhere else, preferably California, instead of hungry, staying at home on Saturday night, climbing down some cold Parisian staircase in the middle of the night for a pitiful smidgin of food.

  I was not wearing shoes, so I suppose I did not make any noise on the stairs—the famous stairs where the pompiers had dragged Roxy, and where it seemed to me I could still see spots darkened by blood. My key was in my hand, but the door to Roxy’s apartment was open below me. Roxy stood in it, talking to a man whose back was to me, at first I supposed Chester, or Roger, even Charles-Henri. They became aware of me at the same moment, the man turning. I had not seen him before. I hung back.

  “Allez, donc, bonsoir,” he said to Roxy, and kissed her, three cheek kisses, sign of extra affection, and went on down the stairs.

  “Iz!” said Roxy. “I thought I heard someone.”

  “Starved,” I said. “I came for an apple. Who was that?”

  “Maître Bertram, my avocat,” she said, in a tone of feigned lightness, no invitation to discuss it. It was a funny hour for a lawyer to turn up. “That was fun today,” Roxy said. “I think they had a good time. It’s nice having them here after all.”

  “I thought it would be, sort of,” I said.

  “I just don’t want them, you know, stirring things up, tomorrow at lunch, for instance. Just don’t let them get on the subject of the picture, or the divorce or anything.”

  “I’m always such a leader of the conversation.” I laughed.

  “If it should come up.”

  I like it in The Sun Also Rises when Jake Barnes says of life, “I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it.” That was how I felt, there were so many puzzles. I guess I could count on one hand the number of sleepless nights I have had in my life, usually with stomachaches, but this was one, a sleepless night when all passed in review—Roxy and Maître Bertram on that kind of terms, our parents in Paris, the photograph of Mrs. Pace’s tureen in the flea market, and Sunday lunch tomorrow when I would somehow be exposed. As what? As a silly young woman, a troublemaker, as foolish and deluded, exploitive (the Kelly), gullible, unscrupulous . . . Of these characterizations, or self-characterizations, which did I most mind? To be thought, to have been, foolish, undoubtedly. But how had I been, how was I being, foolish? Falling in love with a man, however unsuitable or unlikely, is not entirely within one’s conscious control. Was I in love with Edgar? I always came back to that, because although I thought so, I did not know. The distance in age, in culture, in worldly situation, was too great for that to be an entirely appropriate designation.

  And the photograph, the photograph of the tureen was back on my mind.

  The French are always saying “that is true” (c’est vrai) or “that is not true.” It is a simple way of looking at things. But what they don’t explain is how to behave in the face of truth. Must one bow to it, or resist it? And does it account for all the aspects of everything? For instance, Charles-Henri no longer loves Roxy, c’est vrai, but what about Maître Bertram?

  30

  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.

  WE HADN’T SEEN much of Roger since his arrival. He had been busy all day Friday with French lawyers, and American lawyers in France, and he went to the Louvre on Saturday instead of coming to the flea market with us; but he had announced he wanted to talk to us all on Sunday before we went to Chartres for lunch. He and Jane came to Roxy’s at ten on Sunday morning. Margeeve and Chester walked over from their hotel on the Ile Saint-Louis, looking happy as honeymooners. Roxy made coffee, and we assembled in the living room, with its conspicuously bare mantel.

  “Let me put you in the picture,” Roger said. “It looks likely we can enjoin the Friday sale. It’s not that unusual to intervene at the last minute, the auction people simply announce at the auction that the picture’s been withdrawn. I don’t know if they alert major clients who would be coming from abroad. That’s issue number one, enjoining the sale. Number two, the issue of ownership, based on Isabel’s and my challenge, and Dad’s naturally, has yet to be ruled on. Is that picture Roxy’s, was it not just a loan to her from us? The de Persands have kind of steamrolled this settlement business, just assuming the picture belonged to Roxy, thus to Roxy and Charles-Henri. But it’s not a settled issue, not even in French law. In California, it would most definitely not be community prop
erty.

  “But meantime, they may have in fact done us a service, in that the picture is out there, getting known in the art market, and there seems to be buyer interest from museums and dealers. We’ve already learned that it’s worth more than we thought. These things have a way of escalating. The thing may turn out to be worth a lot more than we thought. Apparently Antoine de Persand got somebody from the Louvre to look at it. Isabel, you were there, right?”

  “Actually, Roger,” said Margeeve, who had appeared to be thinking of something else, and whose tone was strangely remote, “since California, as you point out, is a community property state, that picture would be half mine before it was yours and Isabel’s.”

  A beat, while Roger assessed the meaning and, above all, the tone of this, deciding whether it revealed some unsuspected avarice on the part of Margeeve. But it seemed she was only defending Roxy’s moral right to have taken the picture. She waved her hands dismissively, indicating she had no more to say, and sat back.

  Roger answered her objection. “Even if Chester inherits the picture after his marriage, you are not entitled to half as community property, because it’s an inheritance. Anyway, you don’t want to be suing Roxy, even technically, so I would not advise you to be a party to the suit.”

  “Of course, how ridiculous,” said Margeeve. “I’m not suing any of you.” She sat back again. Was she disappointed? Roger went on.

  “The Louvre. Apparently if the Louvre had wanted the picture, they could ask the Ministry of Culture to refuse to issue an export license. French pictures in some categories cannot leave the country. National treasures. Not the case here, though—luckily for us, for that would limit the number of buyers, would rule out Americans, Japanese.”

  “Well, it’s unbelievable, our own picture we sent to France . . .” began Margeeve. “How can they tell us we can’t take it home again?”

  “What I’m working up to, is that I think that we should go ahead and sell the picture in any case. Possibly in London. I’ve done a little homework. There’s interest, there’s been exposure, the market is good right now. There are certain advantages about London—taxes, notably. So I’ve been in touch with Christie’s, you know, as in Sotheby’s and Christie’s? Tomorrow we’re having lunch with the Christie’s guy, or I am at least, and you should come too, Dad and Margeeve. The actual sale would have to wait until the ownership issue is settled, but meantime the picture would be out of France, which I think wise, in case they change their mind about our right to export it.”

  “What if you can’t enjoin the sale here?” asked Chester.

  “We can challenge the sale. We could also challenge the de Persands after the sale, if we can’t stop the sale itself. I’m not sure how fast the courts can act here, they’ve had the issue for two weeks. We’re at a disadvantage, I don’t need to tell you, as foreigners, even with a French lawyer.”

  Here Margeeve directed an imploring look at Roxy, as if hoping she would come to her senses and abandon her ill-advised admiration of foreign lands and people, degenerate predilections that had brought all this down on us. This would never have happened, she seemed to be saying, if. . . .

  “Oh, God, let’s just sell it and get it over with,” Roxy said, abruptly. “What’s the difference? I can accept that, by coming to France, I signed on to these French rules, and I’m willing to abide by them and take the consequences.”

  An eruption of irritation in the room at Roxy’s obtuseness.

  “Is it that you don’t get it, Roxy, or are you just pretending not to? It isn’t just your money going down the drain here, we all have a stake,” Roger said. “The picture belongs to all of us. Us more than you.”

  “None of you had any problems with my taking ugly old Saint Ursula until there was money involved,” said Roxy. I noticed that her cheeks had lately developed a pattern of redness, I think called the mask of pregnancy, which flared now, giving her a piratical, desperado look.

  “Yeah,” Roger said, “but now there is and we do.”

  “If you were going to make all this fuss, why didn’t you do it before this?” Roxy complained.

  A confusion of acrimony and opinion ensued, from which I could sort out only that Roger wanted to wrest the picture from the French and sell it at Christie’s, Margeeve was apologetic at Roxy’s seemingly willful refusal to think justly and financially about the rest of us, Chester evinced mild discomfort, however he might feel privately, I nursed my hope for the ten thousand dollars I might reasonably expect, a part of which would be spent on faience, and Jane backed Roger.

  “The de Persands are not missing any bets here,” Roger observed. “The brother’s fine hand—he’s Antoine?—is everywhere, even more so than Charles-Henri’s lawyers. Antoine’s taking quite an active role. I’m quite sure they all know what’s going on and what the stakes are.”

  “We should get the eleven-forty train,” I pointed out. “We’re invited for one o’clock.”

  I think my parents were vaguely pleased when Gennie, usually a good, perhaps too docile, little girl, pitched a fit and said she hated Sundays. I thought she had sensed the irritability that was overtaking the conversation, but my parents took it to mean she hated the Sunday visits to Suzanne, and I noticed Roxy didn’t correct this impression.

  31

  Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l’offense, Et ce n’est pas pécher que pécher en silence.

  —Molière

  THOUGH THE PERSANDS were, despite our apparent good relations, the enemy, we exulted in the grandeur of their Chartres house. That is, we exulted in how it would astonish Jane. The idea persisted with her that Europeans lived in postwar privation in bombed-out buildings, even though she could see that was far from the case, just as she was charmed by the market in the Place Maubert but seemed to regard it as a thing for peasants to bring their wares to, rather than as a resource for Roxy’s bourgeois neighbors. “Those poor women lugging their groceries through the streets,” she would say, brow knitted with sympathy for prosperous matrons in Max Mara suits, their shopping caddies loaded with champagne and pâté. “Women’s lives are always the hardest in any society.” I wondered if I had been like that when I first came, making erroneous judgments based on innocent American notions. Roxy exulted a little, too, to think how the Chartres château would impress Chester and Margeeve, who had been intimating that Roxy had fallen into the hands of impoverished European fortune hunters, like a victim out of Henry James.

  The Persands have gates, a wall, and a paved forecourt where the family parks. There is a half acre or so in back, where the tennis court is. The taxi from the station let us off in the street to walk through the door in the wall and up a path at the side. The house is two stories high, a simple rectangle of pale stone, with regularly spaced French doors on the ground floor, long windows above, and a mansard roof with third-floor rooms in it, with ivy climbing on the shutters. It is imposing, undeniably. In Santa Barbara, we did not have a tennis court or pool, we did not have ancestral faience, we did not have a country château at all.

  As we drove up, I could see we had slightly misjudged. The château did not daunt, it infuriated Margeeve and Chester, whose sense of injury was heightened by the idea, seeing their house, that the Persands must be unbelievably rich. Roxy quickly observed that you can never tell with the French, because of the way things come down to them. Of course it was never just plain folks who lived in the Persands’ château in the seventeenth century, but neither are the Persands as rich as movie directors or the lords of Beverly Hills, they just bought it at a good real estate moment long ago. Americans, me at first anyway, find European grandeur confusing, because it doesn’t necessarily mean people are rich. Certain kinds of fancy French hôtels particuliers, which would only be imitated in the U.S. in theme parks, are for the French regular family homes, dating from days when all houses were big, and stone was the only thing to build with, and mirrors were put in because there weren’t electric lights. Inside, things are run down
in a way I like, the marquetry peeling, the old damasks a little faded, lots of antique stuff around, much shabbier than Montecito.

  Now I was idly considering how Margeeve and Chester would react to the Persands themselves trying not to think about what unpleasantness might develop, beautiful surroundings or not. On the train my stomach had hurt in fear of meeting Amélie Cosset, but also I feared—though ashamed of this, I had to admit to myself that I feared—being embarrassed by my family. I had thought I was too old for that particular, humiliating form of disloyalty I used to feel all the time, but no, it flooded in on me—a too lively sense of Margeeve’s royal blue suit, Chester’s unfashionable beard. I knew what a bad person I was for feeling this, a bad, ungrateful, immature person with shameful values, and to make it worse, Margeeve slipped her hand through my arm as we walked over the cobbles and said, “I am so proud of you, Iz.”

  It was instantly apparent to Roxy and me that the Persands must have had one of those family meetings we had just had, and had agreed that they would all behave with unimaginable perfection, warmth, charm, robust cheer, manifest affection for Roxy and me. Antoine and Trudi were there, Suzanne of course, Charlotte, though she had said she wasn’t coming, and Edgar’s wife, Aunt Amélie—Madame Cosset. All were smiling, ironed, correct.

  “Welcome, welcome,” Suzanne said, full of warmth and smiles, kissing my parents on both of their cheeks. “How nice to see you after all this time, aren’t you thrilled with Gennie, don’t we have an adorable child here to be the grandparents of?” Of course, resolutely blithe as she always was, she made no reference to the family problems, the divorce, or them ripping off Roxy’s picture.

  “Isn’t Roxeanne a wonderful mother?” she said to Margeeve. “Geneviève is an absolute dream.” I could see that Margeeve was not impervious to this. Gennie herself was not impervious and danced around us shouting “moi-moi-moi” or something in her hard-to-understand baby-talk French.