Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  At first I wondered if this was to be the time, in this crisis, that Roxy’s sentimentality, some defect of softness and illusion, would weigh against her. In the same spot, others (I) would leap from the lifeboat and swim strongly away, but she weakly drifts, confused, out to the fatal sea. It is true that she believed in Charles-Henri and he had hurt her, bewildered her, it was not what she expected, with the second baby due, its room ready, with a little chest for changing it, a blanket folded on top, strange garments ordained in the clinique instructions (belly bands?) readied, and a bright-colored mobile to suspend over its crib.

  She had wanted her whole life to live in France. I never understood why. Some instinct, some non-fit, had caused her from childhood to disapprove of the land and city of her birth. The way children believe they are changelings and not the children of their parents, so she believed herself displaced, sprung from another race. Besides the painting of Saint Ursula in her bedroom, she had a photographic poster advertising some costume film, Jules le Grand, of the Place de la Concorde in lamplight, with horse-drawn carriages on a rainy pavement. A romantic, rather banal scene, taken perhaps by someone upstairs in the Meurice Hotel. She also had a little metal Eiffel Tower a junior-high-school friend had brought back from summer travels, symbol of cultural blandishments I the little sister didn’t understand at all.

  It goes without saying that she had her junior year abroad, though not in Paris, in Aix-en-Provence. She loved it, though there were so many Americans there that she didn’t make much progress speaking French. All the same, she came home with a pleased, slightly secret look, as if she dared not share with us her new experiences of goose liver and escargots, and sex, which is what I imagined gave her this worldly, satisfied air; but it wasn’t sex, it was her new ability to distinguish between Gothic and Romanesque and to read Paris Match that pleased her. Now she couldn’t find food to suit her in Santa Barbara.

  Roxy had met Charles-Henri while hiking with friends in the Pyrenees. He seemed the ideal Frenchman, thin, curly-haired, and fair, always with a sweater or cravat picturesquely knotted around his shoulders or neck, and that resolute insouciance they all have. They corresponded for two years after her return to California; then, when Roxy was in graduate school, he came to visit and charmed all of us—such a good tennis player, taller than a lot of them (as Margeeve observed), and with perfect English. At the time, none of us had ever met a French person. Thus did our dreams for Roxy collude with our general ignorance of the French to approve him uncritically. Yet we were not wrong, he is very, very nice, and not a bad painter, and has behaved, given his initial crime, very well, or if not well at least with a courteous detachment. It is this detachment Roxy finds hardest to bear. Behaved well given the fact that it was he who did the running off, with a married Czech sociologist (which is how we always refer to her, though that is a bit unfair in several ways).

  This cultural disloyalty of Roxy’s—where did it come from? Nothing bad had happened to her in America. Why was she more charmed by the idea of Toussaint, for example, than of Halloween? Aren’t they the same? I don’t share her unqualified admiration for all things European. I see plenty that’s wrong. But that’s the curse of my nature. Even as a little girl, I lacked that endearing property of female credulousness.

  4

  I speak of that dread which seizes her when she sees herself abandoned by him who swore to protect her.

  —Adolphe

  AS FAR AS I knew, Roxy did not hear from Charles-Henri the rest of the week. For several days she refused to speak of the situation and adopted an artificially serene manner, visiting friends and introducing me into the life of Paris. She had not told Charles-Henri’s family that anything was wrong between them, but she would have to mention it the Sunday after I got there, when we were expected at lunch at the Persands’ and he would not be there with them.

  Roxy’s mother-in-law, Madame de Persand—Suzanne—is a vivacious matriarch close to seventy who expects her five children and their families to lunch every possible Sunday, including me during my stay in Paris. Suzanne is small, blonde, and worldly (most Frenchwomen over forty are blonde); her offspring are tall and good at sports: Frédéric, Antoine, Charlotte, Yvonne, and Charles-Henri, the youngest. Each is handsome and beautifully dressed and emanates the smell of cigarettes. Monsieur de Persand, I believe, managed a factory, manufacturing some item or substance, but I don’t know what. He is now retired and spends his time in Poland or Rumania with other retired Frenchmen directing the resurrection of factories and things that have fallen into disrepair. I have never met him. He did not come to Charles-Henri’s wedding, as if this rite, involving only the youngest of his sons, were too insignificant to cross the water for; or perhaps he disapproved of Americans—we never knew.

  During the week, Suzanne lives in a big nineteenth-century apartment on the Avenue Wagram, with dark Santa Barbara–ish oil paintings, an inherited tapestry, an array of faience plates on the walls, and correct Louis Quinze furniture covered in faded brocade or fraying needlepoint. The furniture, with its curves and chipped gilding, so like the former grandeur of a rundown Westwood motel, looks very odd and pretentious to the American eye when you first come to France, until you remember that this is their normal furniture, the Louis were their kings.

  Suzanne also has a small château with a tennis court, near Chartres, where the family would gather on weekends. So far, every French person I have met comes with three pieces of real estate—two in the country (one from each side of the family) and the Paris apartment. This place near Chartres did not descend from Charlemagne, however, but had been bought in the 1950s, following a successful business venture by Monsieur de Persand. Roxy and Geneviève and I took the Chartres train on Sunday, with Gennie dressed in her proper little dark blue dress and white stockings, and Roxy wearing rouge, me with my tennis bag, according to Roxy’s instructions. I still remember Roxy’s rouge, it was as if she felt she needed some symbol of brightness, an external antidote to the pallor and terror in her soul.

  Her French family still call Roxy l’américaine, by which they seem to mean that her qualities are typical of us, each with its positive and negative aspect: frank/tactless, impetuous/heedless, fresh/gauche, generous/spendthrift. She got a lot of points in their view from buckling down to the French language with fair success, and secured their hearts by deciding to convert to Catholicism. “You are Protestant, I suppose,” Madame de Persand had asked, at their first meeting. “But nothing peculiar, not Quaker or anything like that?”

  Roxy will not brook loose cultural insults.

  “President Herbert Hoover was a Quaker,” she said.

  “Oh, of course, one of your most notable presidents,” Madame de Persand agreed with hasty politeness, as if she treasured this important fact. The question remained.

  “My parents are Congregationalists,” said Roxeanne, and Madame de Persand had still looked mystified. Then she must have concluded she would rather not know the peculiarities of a cult she’d never heard of, and the subject was dropped. The Persands did Roxy the credit of imagining her conversion was done from wifeliness and that, going against the grain of a stout Protestant nature, it represented a spiritual sacrifice. But in fact Catholicism suited Roxy all along—especially the music and priestly raiment. Chester and Margeeve, needless to say, were horrified.

  We siblings were all surprised when the issue of Charles-Henri’s Catholicism seemed to weigh on the minds of our liberal and nonreligious parents, especially Chester. Some unarticulated Protestant aversion, deeply submerged, now surfaced, invoking an imaginary destiny for Roxy of ceaseless child-bearing, daily mass. They vividly pictured her dressed in rusty black, clutching a rosary, waddling on her knees across the forecourt of Lourdes.

  “But I’m not becoming a Catholic,” Roxy objected. “Anyway, I think you are thinking of Ireland. It’s Ireland that’s priest-ridden, not France. In France they invented the morning-after pill.”

  “I remember the Ca
tholic kids, growing up,” said Margeeve, supporting Chester. “When it became five minutes after midnight Friday night, they stuffed themselves with hamburgers.”

  We were wholly baffled by this seeming non sequitur. She tried to explain. “They weren’t supposed to eat meat on Fridays, so they could hardly wait. It seemed so hypocritical. Why belong to a religion you don’t feel wholehearted about?”

  “Charles-Henri is not religious,” Roxy reassured them. This turned out to be true; he was indifferent to where he was married. They were married in the Congregational Church, with a reception afterward in our parents’ garden, and then celebrated in France at an elegant reception (according to Roxy) at the Persand country house. Charles-Henri’s mother and one sister, Yvonne, came out for the wedding in California, but none of us went to the party in France. So when Roxy eventually converted to Catholicism, it was not at any urging from Charles-Henri. It was her love of liturgy and form.

  The day we went to Chartres, Roxeanne was almost as frantic at the prospect of having to tell Suzanne about Charles-Henri’s leaving her as at the event itself. She knew that Charles-Henri would not have said anything, would not have wanted to confront his mother with unpleasant news, or ruin Sunday lunch, or have discussions. Of course Suzanne immediately saw that Charles-Henri was not with us, and from Roxy’s expression divined her concern, and said during the air kisses, “Alors, where is mon enfant?” and Géneviève said, “I’m here, grand-mère,” but of course Suzanne meant Charles-Henri, her youngest son.

  “Are we the first? I had wanted to have a little word with you,” Roxeanne said.

  “No, Antoine is here with the children. Trudi is still in the country.” Trudi is the German wife of Antoine. Antoine is quite attractive, tall and slightly balding. “And of course here is your sister Isabel,” she said, turning to embrace me, for Roxy had forgotten me, I guess.

  Charlotte and her family arrived. Charlotte is an impatient beauty in her late thirties, upper lip slightly protruding over the lower (orthodontia relatively unimportant here, compared to Santa Barbara), fair hair in a pony tail, a habit of pulling on it, tossing her head like a horse. Her children are rather pale and subdued in comparison to her, with strings of names: Paul-Louis, Jean-Fernand, Marie-Odile—if I have strung them together rightly. The other siblings of Charles-Henri were not there. At the far end of the garden, in a canvas chair, sat an elderly man wearing a straw hat as wide as a milkmaid’s, who waved pacifically from afar and was explained to be l’oncle Edgar, Suzanne’s brother.

  They all treated me with great kindness, speaking English slowly, with the stately vowels of British television commentators. Taking me over the house, Charlotte showed me a large book that was said to date from, as she called him in her careful English for my benefit, Lewis the Fourteenth. “Righto,” said Charlotte’s husband, Bob, using chipper Brit slang. Despite his name, Bob is French. When they spoke to Roxy, they spoke in French, and I have to admit it sounded funny to hear her speak in this foreign and unintelligible way, and rather affected, as in the joke: “Pretentious? Moi?”

  In the hot June weather, tennis was decreed. Antoine played Charlotte’s husband, Bob; then Charlotte and I played with Antoine and Bob, with Bob as my partner. They were good players, and somehow this took me by surprise. Why should it have? I suspect they were surprised that I am a good player. (Tennis champion was another of my family’s hopes for me, blighted by my hate of practicing.) L’Oncle Edgar applauded from his vantage under the trees. Roxy seemed pleased by my victory. She doesn’t play at all, even when not pregnant. She sat at a little table on the flagstones outside French doors leading to the dining room, talking to Suzanne, wearing the fixed smile of elaborate graciousness that she seemed to imagine rendered invisible her feelings of panic and despair.

  Whatever her emotions, Roxeanne was obliged to dissimulate with civility and calm, through the kir vermouth that was served before lunch, through the soupe aux moules, the leg of lamb with white beans, the salad, the cheese, the tarte aux fraises. Suzanne had nodded to the girl who was helping to remove Charles-Henri’s place, and no one so much as asked about him. Had they any reason to wonder? Might he not just be away on business, or tied up somewhere?

  L’Oncle Edgar, it turned out, was not unimaginably old, but a burly, imposing man in his late sixties, maybe seventy, tall and white-haired, with deep-set eyes and the nose of a Vichy general, very handsome in a way. When we went in to lunch, he limped slowly toward the house. Then I could see he had an ankle in a cast, but what had happened to him was not explained.

  By now I was embarrassed that they were all making this polite effort to speak English, all of them compelled to use a language not their own because of one person’s inability to speak theirs. “Oui” and “non” I tried to say through my nose when l’oncle Edgar, beside whom I was sitting, would ask me if I wanted more cheese or meat. I was imitating French in hopes they would think I understood it and they could lapse back into speaking it.

  “Eet ees very amusing about your senator,” said Oncle Edgar. I did not at first know what he meant.

  “The chap who kept the diaries,” said Antoine.

  “Detailing how he patted the knees of young women, detailing his erotic hopes, perhaps, and now he has to turn these private musings over to the public court,” said l’oncle Edgar.

  They all laughed. “No, no,” said Charlotte, “he turns them over to the other senators, I believe.” It was not clear whether comment was expected from Roxy or me.

  “Yes, extraordinary,” agreed Suzanne, “and it is supposed he’ll have something to say about his friends.” They all laughed, a merriment somewhat mysterious to me at that time. I would learn it had to do with our reputation for native prudishness and their native toleration of certain things of this world, like old senators with young women.

  “Zut, I would hate for my colleagues to read what I thought of them,” added Oncle Edgar.

  The Persands were so pleasant, laughed so charmingly, they were so uniformly good-looking in their fancy wood-paneled room—yet I did not feel entirely welcomed. I felt young. I felt that a nurse would be sent in to take me out of the room when my sayings had ceased to amuse them. It was with relief that I saw their resolution about speaking English drain away with the second bottle of red wine. “Eleanor of Angoulême was not, as is often thought, the niece of . . .” said l’oncle Edgar, and that was the last thing I understood, as they all began to discuss some episode of French history, with violent gesticulations, in French.

  After lunch, we had coffee on the terrace. Charlotte smoked incessantly. That seemed strange, as keen as she was on tennis. She was telling me about her sojourn in England, when she was fourteen, and how the English cheated at tennis. I did not believe that. “Their line calls were very dubious,” she was saying severely. By now I know that the things that French people say about the English are probably like what they say about Americans when we aren’t around. What we call “French leave” they call filer à l’anglaise. And a kitchen in the living room is called cuisine américaine—why I don’t know. And of course the vice anglais.

  Antoine smoked in the garden while tossing a ball to his little boy. Roxeanne was evidently planning to stay at the end of the afternoon, in order to have a private word with Suzanne. When someone proposed a walk to the antiques fair going on in the town, I took Geneviève and went off with the others, Roxy insisting she preferred to stay behind to help with cleaning up. In the Persand family, such offers are accepted. The day had assumed a cast of normality, no sense of a looming catastrophe, and it even took on, at the antiques fair, an air of propitiousness, because Antoine found a sort of cabinet he had been hoping to find.

  But when we got back and were walking into the courtyard, we were met by none other than Charles-Henri himself, looking pale and thunderous, not like the blithe and slightly distracted man I had met. He seemed astonished to see us. Perhaps he had hoped to see his mother alone, but he might have expected we would
all be there. I thought at first maybe he had come to see Roxy and tell her it had all been a mistake. I hoped this, but my hopes were useless. He kissed his mother in a perfunctory way, greeting the rest of us, and drove off immediately in his Range Rover. It was days before Roxy heard from him, her husband, the love of her life.

  In the train, riding back to Paris, Roxy burst into tears, like a person in a movie, and wailed into her scarf. We were surrounded by French families, whose children toddled in the aisles and stared at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s dumb, I know. It never occurred to me that he might turn up there today, it took me aback, I handled it so badly.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing,” was all she would say. I had the feeling that he had told her something. Then she said, in a bitter, concentrated tone, “He told me the one thing I can never forgive.” But she wouldn’t say what it was.

  5

  I am too American myself, and lack juices.

  —Henry Adams

  EXCEPT FOR THIS problem of Roxy’s, Paris was kind of promising. Then, I had no premonitions, no glimpse of the future. Looking back, it must have been at about this same time—when Roxeanne’s troubles began, and when I arrived in Paris to help her—that our mother, Margeeve Walker back in Santa Barbara, got a letter from a Julia Manchevering, resident art historian at the Getty Museum.

  Santa Barbara is a city of mythological dimension in the minds of the French because of a soap opera called Santa Barbara, which airs on French television, dubbed in French, involving the lurid social complications usual in soap operas, among uniformly blond, rich Californians, set against scenes of sunny surf and Washingtonia palm and bougainvillea-bright patios. A place not Los Angeles, not northern, quasi-Spanish, old Californian, bland. I actually spent most of my childhood in the Midwest, where my father taught political science at a small college, but we moved to California when I was twelve when he married Margeeve. I loved our new home better.