Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  Madame Cosset was not what I had imagined. I had expected someone small, faded, and well dressed. Aunt Amélie instead was large, bony, rambunctious, and, in gabardine pants and a mannish purple alligator polo shirt, the most underdressed person at lunch. She had short, smartly cut gray hair, was said to play tennis, though she didn’t today, and had gardener’s hands. I tried to imagine her and Edgar in bed together—rather, I tried to avoid imagining it. It was hard either way.

  Suzanne was obviously fond of her. They chattered together in animated French, pulling their spectacles off and on as they peered at culinary details in the kitchen, and switched to English in the living room with my parents. Madame Cosset brought a pan of string beans in and strung them, holding them on her lap. Edgar did not come.

  When I did not look at her, she looked at me, or so I felt, though not with bitter looks. I might even have been imagining her interest. It might have been that she did not look at me at all. But no, the two of them, Suzanne and Amélie, were looking at me together after Chester and I had absolutely beat the pants off Antoine and his wife, Trudi, on the dampish clay court, on the miraculously warm day. My stomach was starting to feel better. It seemed I would be looked at but that nothing would be said.

  The day, warm enough to play tennis, was cool if you were sitting still, so Margeeve stayed with Suzanne, Madame Cosset, and Charlotte in the glass room that looked out into the garden. Margeeve later told me, but not Roxy, that Suzanne said to her, “I am sorry about all this, the dispute between the children. Believe me, I do not like it.” That was the only specific allusion to the divorce, in the whole day.

  I had not seen Antoine, my opponent at tennis, since the day I spoke out about my belief that the Persands were ripping off Roxy and the rest of us. Now we faced each other over the net with, on my part, the wish to drive a tennis ball down his throat, and I couldn’t tell what he wished, for he smiled as usual, and is actually rather handsome, though he smokes nearly as much as Charlotte. But he hit his serves to me as hard as he could, and never hit to Chester, from some macho, sexist assumption that my father, though in his late fifties, would be a better player than I. Chester and I beat them handily, though Antoine would beat Chester in singles, I think. Chester lost his serve once, and I never did.

  Suzanne served champagne or Lillet for aperitifs. There was considerable directing of meaningful looks, looks whizzing around the room on all sorts of subjects. “You have a lovely home here,” said Margeeve, and Roxy darted her the look of shame I felt too. Presently Nathalie, the girl from the village hired to serve the lunch, came in and said, “Madame est servie,” a formula which had never, ever, been uttered before at these lunches and which I judged to be a subtly intimidating bit of pretension on Suzanne’s part to French formality. I saw Margeeve’s eyes go instinctively to Roxy, as if to follow her moves. Though Margeeve is a perfectly middle-class person, you could see she felt like she’d been a cocktail waitress or something.

  The menu was also designed to be impressive. Or was I being harsh here? Perhaps Suzanne was genuinely trying to give our parents a nice lunch? I could not say it had ever before been less than nice, but today the food, though served simply, was superbly delicious, beginning with foie gras of a good quality. I was getting to know something about foie gras, which Edgar especially liked. Perhaps his liking for it was in Aunt Amélie’s mind too, for the subject turned to Edgar, causing a churn in my stomach. I wish I could understand why simple spoken words have this power over my insides, as if they are tied to a string I have swallowed.

  “Where is Edgar, Amélie?” asked Suzanne.

  “Oh, Bruxelles. On dit. Presumably. On ne sait jamais,” said Madame Cosset with great insouciance. “I never any longer ask.”

  To my parents she explained, “My husband is in Brussels. He is sorry not to be here.” Was this meant for me, was it loaded with some kind of irony? I could not tell.

  “My brother occupies himself with politics,” Suzanne explained to my father. Antoine said something in French I didn’t understand, and the Persands laughed, quickly checking their laughter, as if it had been rude of them. Madame Cosset had shared the joke, whatever it was.

  “No, really, my uncle has done remarkable things,” said Antoine.

  “Well, we are so happy to receive you here, we are so desolate about—you know,” said Suzanne, raising her glass slightly to Margeeve.

  “So nice of you to have us,” said Chester. “And to meet Gennie’s aunts and uncles we hadn’t met. We are also sorry about . . .”

  They must have simultaneously realized that Roxy might in some way be affected by these remarks about her marital situation, as though they were criticizing her looks or wits in front of her.

  I noticed that Margeeve, though rather younger than Madame Cosset or Suzanne, was being handed the dishes first, as the oldest woman. It has always seemed tactless to me to allude to a woman’s age this way, but perhaps the dubious honor came from her status as guest? Was she irritated or pleased? And after the foie gras a new cultural misunderstanding loomed, for the main dish was a pair of roasted chickens, which smelled delicious and shone with brown glazing like a magazine photo and were of course, in my parents’ minds, just chickens, a rather cheap food in Santa Barbara.

  Roxy, usually so unperceptive, also saw how Chester and Margeeve would misunderstand chickens and hastened to praise these birds (which are indeed different from ours; theirs are expensive, tasty, and allowed to spend their lives running around in a barnyard). “Oh, what heaven, Suzanne,” she said. “Did you get these poulets from around here? I wish I had a good poulterer. Half the art of cooking in Paris consists in knowing where to go to get things, doesn’t it?”

  Poulterer? In this archaic word I saw the depth of Roxy’s tenseness, perhaps even matching my own. To me what was plain was that Roxy, having been wronged by the Persands, was all the more determined to be loved by them, and to behave wonderfully. Having wronged her, they were all the more determined to have her good opinion. Love reigned, much to the confusion of Margeeve and Chester. They must be seeing that they’d never get Roxy away, but if they did, they hadn’t given up. Since their arrival they’d kept bringing up the beauty of Yosemite or the beach, telling how Margeeve had found a float, like a giant bubble, washed up right in front of the Miramar, things like that, in hopes of making California sound magical. But now Roxy was determined that the Persands and our parents must love each other too.

  Here came a peculiar interruption. Nathalie appeared at the door of the dining room with a sweating, apologetic, smiling man who proffered a bottle of wine. Antoine rose, the man stepped into the room.

  “Monsieur, excuse me for deranging you but I wanted to bring you this in thanks for saving my panier,” said the visitor, though of course in French.

  “Ah, the panier,” said Antoine. “Not at all.”

  “The panier and all the couverts and assiettes and a bonne terrine de lapin,” the man said. “They told me at the station where you could be found.”

  “De rien, de rien, but it is nice of you to think of us,” said Antoine. There was more conversation, but in faster French.

  “. . . be off, bonjour, mesdames, messieurs, excusez-moi . . .” After a few more words, he retreated with Nathalie and would not be dissuaded, would not sit down.

  “I found his picnic basket on the train,” Antoine explained to my parents. “We left it with the stationmaster, it was nothing at all.”

  “It’s correct of him to bring a bottle, how nice, how unnecessary, c’est gentil,” they said over and over. Their asperity, any incipient disagreement or squabbles, and the subject of chickens, now vanished before this reassuring evidence that there was still correct behavior in the world, selfless goodwill—theirs in saving his picnic basket, his in rewarding them.

  “It isn’t bad at all,” said Antoine, reading the label on the bottle. “I’ll open it, we had better leave it for the cheese.”

  “Roxeanne is a perfect fran
çaise. Do you know?” said Suzanne presently to Margeeve. Here she lowered her voice and adopted a tone of special gaiety, as if to signal that one was not to mind too much what she was going to say. “If I had been shown a catalogue from which to choose daughters-in-law—here is Roxeanne, an American, here is Trudi, a German girl, here is une française—I have to admit I would have chosen the French girl, naturally, Edwige, my eldest son Frédéric’s wife. I would have not thought of a German girl or an American.” Here she looked with deliberate fondness at Trudi and Roxy. “But they are so much more françaises than Edwige, she can’t make a croque-monsieur. Frankly she is completely nulle at housekeeping, she is a professor in Montpellier.” I was wondering, of course, what she would think of a Czech daughter-in-law, should Charles-Henri marry Magda. Perhaps everyone was wondering, for there was an anxious stir as one could hear the real anxieties in Suzanne’s voice, a kind of quiver of intensity.

  Suzanne turned to the kitchen door, caught the eye of Nathalie, and Nathalie brought in the cheese. “Gennie, darling, no cheese for you, just run into the garden,” said Suzanne to Gennie. “Your girls are so different,” she continued, looking now at me. “Isabel from Roxy.” Now I saw what was on the agenda. Me.

  “It is Isabel l’américaine, maman,” Antoine said with a laugh. I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean.

  “Oh, shush, Antoine,” Trudi said.

  “Both so charming in different ways,” said Suzanne.

  It crossed my mind they might not actually know that Roxy and I are stepsisters with not a drop of blood between us. Perhaps Roxy had never explained it.

  “Yes, quite different,” Margeeve said.

  “Isabel is so enterprising,” Antoine went on.

  “Antoine,” said Trudi.

  “Americans are enterprising in general, I believe,” remarked Madame Cosset. “Enterprising and practical.”

  I resented this. Practical, we try to slit our wrists, we wander the earth, we die for love. I wondered what practical means in French, maybe something quite different. What about enterprising?

  “Americans think of French people as rational,” said Chester, rather uncomfortably. “Rationality, the Age of Enlightenment. Thermidor.”

  “Of course she is very strong, Isabel. It is strong to be practical,” said Antoine. Trudi said something to him in French.

  “The American girl is a famous type, of fearless ingenuity,” said Madame Cosset. “I have a friend—the Countess Cortenoux, you know her, Suzanne—who clings to the belief they are all heiresses out to claim French husbands, but in my opinion those days are finished.”

  “I think of the French as very practical,” put in Margeeve. “I suppose rational is the same thing.”

  “Mother, I don’t think one can generalize at all about national characteristics,” said Roxy. “Really.” Imploringly.

  Margeeve stared into the carcass of the chicken with an expression of aggrieved innocence, for it had not been she who started this train of talk.

  “Je chasse,” said Antoine, gallantly changing the subject. “I hunt. Do you hunt?”

  “Well, no—what do you hunt?” asked Chester.

  “The deer.”

  “Shoot them, I suppose?” Chester agreed, gloomily.

  “Mais non, the birds are shot, the stag we hunt with dogs. It is very beautiful—the horses, the dogs, the scent, the hunters in their coats. The curé comes to bless the dogs. You run the noble stag to ground, that is the idea. He becomes exhausted and can no longer run.”

  We, the Americans, were struck into silence, an embarrassing instant too long, wondering if we understood.

  “What happens then?” asked Margeeve.

  “Then the dogs kill the stag. You have the expression ‘in at the kill,’ that is what that refers to.”

  Further silence, during which we were collectively appalled, and they had an intimation that we were appalled, though they cannot have known how much.

  “Do people ever get killed, you know, fall off a horse or anything?” asked Margeeve.

  “Non, not usually, though, regrettably, sometimes.”

  “Oh, good,” said Margeeve, “that makes it a little more even then.”

  “Are you planning to go to Roland Garros?” asked Chester hurriedly of Antoine.

  “They are certainly being ‘practical’ about Roxy’s picture,” went on Margeeve, returning to the subject of the French character.

  “Hard to get tickets! Terribly hard to get them!” cried Antoine.

  “They were offering them in California, through the American Tennis Federation. Roland Garros–Queen’s Cup–Wimbledon tour, you have to sign up this far in advance, though,” Chester said. “Three weeks, I forget the cost, it wasn’t cheap.”

  “Roxy will have noticed already, she is a perfect française, so developed in her instincts. . . .” began Suzanne. “While Isabel . . .”

  “We are thinking of going sea-kayaking in Patagonia,” cried Chester.

  Isabel, Isabel. Why was my name suddenly so current? Several people spoke at once, in French, protesting, a snort of laughter from Antoine, I could not hear what Madame Cosset had said. I was distracted just then with an insight I am not sure I had had before. I imagined the company as the octet of the opera I had seen, where everyone steps forward and sings about his own concerns, for instance Roxy would be singing, “Charles-Henri, l’amour, despair,” and Antoine would be singing a duet with Madame Cosset, “Isabel, home-wrecking little slut,” and Charlotte would be singing, “Poor me, why did I go to London, it is so cold there.” Suzanne: “What shall I do to keep this scene from deteriorating? Do not take my grandchildren away.” My parents: “Why can’t we just take our daughters and our picture and get out of here?” Trudi? Well, I don’t know what she’d be singing. The point was that no one was sharing his or her feelings in the encouraged California way, and this was called “politeness” or “civilization.” Everyone knew what everyone was thinking all the same, or I thought I did. I learned something from this, about keeping one’s counsel, about smiling, about civilization, indeed.

  During the second of my inattention, the conversation had evidently taken a turn, a dread topic, an idea had briefly boiled up, Roxy’s voice suddenly stood out saying, “I suppose the moment has come to say . . .” But now a horrible, burning silence seemed to strike dumb everyone at the table. The moment had evidently come but in French, and passed, and I had missed it. Now they were staring in stricken silence. I tried to guess from Margeeve’s expression what had been said, or from Roxy’s stricken frown. I knew it had been about me, though it hadn’t.

  Finally Madame Cosset spoke, in husky tones of shock. “This Beaufort is not right!”

  “No, it has a peculiar, smoky taste,” Suzanne gasped.

  “Yes, it’s not right,” they shouted together. Antoine took some from the plate and tasted it.

  “No, it’s not good,” agreed Trudi in an anxious whisper. Perhaps she, who was not a française, had been charged with bringing it.

  “Supposedly a very good Beaufort,” said Suzanne crossly. “I shall certainly speak to Monsieur Compans myself. But all is not lost, for the Reblochon is good. Servez-vous.”

  The meal ended (glace vanille, sauce caramel), Suzanne led us from the table for coffee in the salon. Roger, Antoine, and Chester installed themselves on the sofas. Jane asked for the bathroom. (Terrible faux pas. The French appear never to pee. Roxy rolled her eyes at me.) Since I had to too, I went to show Jane. “A very nice lunch,” she whispered. “I think they’re quite nice.” Typical of a shrink to be oblivious to tension and angst. Nor did she notice the beautiful old bedroom wallpaper of birds and vines, and she took offense at the bidet, which she at first took to exemplify French sexism by being a toilet without a seat, just for men.

  As we came downstairs, through the glass doors I saw Suzanne and Margeeve talking on the terrace. Trudi had vanished to the kitchen, and Antoine was coming out with the coffee on a little tray. Marg
eeve turned around as she heard us come down, and looked at me. Her expression was worried and tense.

  “We should be going,” Roger said presently. “Jane and I, anyhow. We’re going to hear vespers at Notre Dame.”

  “We should be going,” everyone cried. We assembled our jackets and purses.

  Nothing had happened, really. Madame Cosset shook my hand. Did I imagine her little smirk, her knowing smile? She shook the hands of all the Americans, and Suzanne kissed us.

  32

  ON THE TRAIN, free of the strains, we all relaxed a little, like actors on a set between takes.

  “A very nice lunch,” said Margeeve noncommittally. She appeared abstracted. “They really don’t seem mercenary in the ordinary sense.”

  “I would never suggest to a client they have lunch with the adversary,” Roger observed. “The danger is not so much that fighting will break out, it’s that harmony will break out. People never like to believe the worst.”

  Is that true? I had a lot to think about.

  Roxy, for her part, seemed relieved and even ebullient to have the afternoon over with. Harmony, as she deeply desired, had broken out. But her happiness was short-lived, because Margeeve had not finished.

  “Roxeanne, I think you should come back to California immediately,” she said.

  “We’ve been over that,” Roxy protested.

  “As soon as you can travel. I know the airlines would never take you now. It’s just ridiculous to think of staying, this is not your culture, these are not your relatives, I don’t think you can count on them. Of course they love Gennie, they’ll love the baby, but how are you going to support your children? What kind of life would you have here, the divorced wife hanging around like a kind of fifth thumb?”

  “I’ve thought about it and thought about it. I’m not coming home,” Roxy said. And so on. I am abridging the conversation. This quarrel about Roxy’s future took up the forty-five-minute journey from Chartres to the Gare Montparnasse. Of course, we were none of us saying what was in our hearts except Roxy, who kept repeating her objections to going home, saying, “What would I do there?” and “My children are French.”