Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  Like a spy she sought other secrets of French culture. Yet she was always being taken unawares. When the first dinner guest appeared with a bunch of flowers she realized she had never taken flowers to her hostesses. When an American guest brought them a bottle of wine, Charles-Henri said, offended, afterward, “Perhaps he thought he wasn’t going to get anything to drink.”

  (“The end of la civilisation française?” says l’oncle Edgar. “I suppose when it became ‘fromage ou dessert’ instead of ‘fromage et dessert.’”)

  She never unraveled the mysteries of all the cheeses, dozens in the market, round and reeking, leaking, swelling, dusted with pepper, wrapped in vine leaves, made from the milk of goats, cows, sheep, cooked or raw, hard or soft, each with a name that bore no relation to the names in her recipe books.

  And the cuts of meat. What on earth was gîte-gîte or macreuse?

  She thought French women were wonderfully chic. To me it appeared they all went around in drab beige raincoats, wearing identical plain scarves—English, Roxy said, from Burberrys. It’s funny, this fashion, considering that they think of the English as treacherous, hypocritical, and unwashed—exactly what the English think of them. Businesswomen, for instance Charlotte, who does public relations, wear little suits with short skirts and jackets, red or plaid, with lots of gold jewelry. The women my age are pretty, though, with very little makeup and great assurance.

  “Their bras are hopeless,” Roxy had written to me in Santa Barbara. “They are so small-breasted, it’s impossible for me, they have no tits at all, please send me four Olga ‘Vanity’ 34C’s, one ecru, two white, and one black.”

  With all this cultural progress Roxy had been making, what had gone wrong?

  If she thought any more about “not keeping” the baby, as she put it, she said nothing to me. It had been perhaps an empty threat, made in the hope that Suzanne would be so shocked in her Catholic soul that she would compel Charles-Henri to come home. When that did not happen, Roxy’s resentment of Suzanne began to grow, though it seemed to me that Suzanne had been sympathy itself.

  She telephoned regularly, and took us to lunch at Récamier. Even by now I’d been in France long enough to understand French views about the consoling properties of food. During the lunches Suzanne would rail not at Charles-Henri but at Charlotte, whom I took to be an avatar of Charles-Henri for the purpose of this conversation, another troublesome offspring with an underdeveloped sense of duty. Unlike the blatant Charles-Henri, Charlotte was making an attempt to conceal her doings from her husband, poor Bob, who (I guessed) must have some skeletons in his own closet, for Charlotte to be so open.

  It was surprising to me that Charlotte had taken up with an Englishman, given her views about their sportsmanship.

  “I don’t say a thing,” Suzanne said. “Charlotte has always been headstrong. Criticizing her is a mistake.” But what criticism would drive Charlotte to was left unsaid. I admired Suzanne’s self-control. In the same situation, Margeeve would have said plenty. I wondered when Roxy was going to tell Margeeve and Chester about her marital crisis. I ventured no opinion about what she should do, not wanting to drive her the wrong way, whatever way that was, and not believing it to be my business, nor myself equipped to know about marriage, or love, for that matter.

  The financial implications did occur to me. I wasn’t sure how Roxy was fixed. Would having a new baby require Charles-Henri to give her more money, or, with another mouth to feed, would she be harder up? In our family we can talk about money, since Chester is not in the business of chasing after it. He has all the purity of the academic and none of the temptations of academic scientists, so money is a neutral topic for us, like social policy or what’s for lunch. But Roxy had adopted something of the French reticence. Any mention of money seems to shock them; it is almost as bad, and maybe worse, than asking someone’s age.

  She still had not told me the real problem, whatever it was, between them. Was it sex, was it some odd cultural misfit—her Americanness, her cooking—did he philander or gamble? I did not know, but once, coming down in the night for something from the refrigerator, I could hear Roxy quarreling in French and crying on the telephone, and who else could it have been but Charles-Henri?

  8

  All we know about foreign cultures—and those closest to us are in a way the most inaccessible—is their surface glitter and misleading details.

  —Régis Debray, Charles de Gaulle

  DAYS WORE ON, busy for me, slow for Roxy, I guess. Her pregnancy wasn’t showing yet, though she was more than four months along. For me, even walking on the street was a kind of social adventure. Conversations with bus drivers and old women. Me explaining that I don’t speak French; cheerful laughter, pointing, sign language. Beautiful, famous touristic sights like Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe. Great dogs. I met a lot of dogs, walking Scamp. But frankly there is a huge dogshit problem in Paris. In all, I tried to see what made Roxy so crazy about the place, and only partly succeeded. I could see that it was pretty, with lots of movie theaters and good food. But I hated the traffic, the way you had to look where you were stepping, the way they all smoked their brains out, and the way it rained even in summer, which seemed totally strange to me.

  I don’t know if I was much help to Roxy at first. It’s not so easy to be newly arrived in a country whose language you don’t know and whose customs you either mistrust or fear. For instance, I feared the famous Parisian rudeness, though this never materialized. And it took time getting myself settled in Roxy’s really uncomfortable, hot, low-ceilinged maid’s room in the attic. In my heart, my situation was a bit too much like a maid’s. Every day I helped Roxy get Gennie ready for her day-care center, and after they’d gone I did the breakfast dishes, afternoons I picked her up from this day-care center (called a crèche), and was very conscientious about helping. Truly, I didn’t mind—but I sort of did.

  Roxy in turn had been conscientious about introducing me to her friends and neighbors in and around the place, trying to make me feel at home, and making me register in a French class, held three afternoons a week at the town hall of the fifth Arrondissement. She was exerting herself to be nice to me in a way I had hardly expected, and that I appreciated, for I found more daunting than I expected the rapid French phrases, the forms I had to fill out, written in a bureaucratese inscrutable in any language. I even dreaded walking into the class where I would ostensibly learn to understand, in time. I had never thought of myself as shy, but when I had to say bonjour something sealed up my throat, as if people would catch on that I was only pretending to speak French.

  I know I am dumb about speaking French, but the French aren’t so great at English. Our words have no significance for them. For instance, all the proper French ladies at the gym do their aerobics to American music, but they don’t hear it. There’s a rap song that goes “He’s a sexy motherfucker,” and this doesn’t cause them to miss a beat. These are words they don’t know.

  Talking of gyms, Roxy’s view is that the style of exercise is an indication of national character: in California, high-impact aerobics, that is, mindless pounding to loud rock music drowning out thought (“Happy Nation/Livin’ in a Happy Nation”); in France, narcissistic perfecting of the Fesses-Ab-Cuisses, or the Bras-Buste-Epaules class, or jazz dancing but with no regard for the beat.

  I appreciated Roxy’s niceness, liked it that after years of being the irritating little sister I was suddenly for her an object of gratitude and solicitude (she couldn’t do without me). For this reason I didn’t too much mind the faint superiority with which she now discoursed in a foreign tongue I would never master, or the proprietary air with which she explained which merchants came on which day to the market in the Place Maubert.

  Roxy and Charles-Henri lived—Roxy lives—just off the Place Maubert in the fifth Arrondissement. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, it is the scene of an open market. Long tables under awnings are set up, stout merchants behind them with food and flowers, a man
selling porcelaine blanche, another offering to mend chairs. Across the Boulevard Saint Germain is a little fountain and some benches, and the Brasserie Espoir, romping dogs, clochards. In former days, a statue of Etienne Dolet (whoever that was) stood there, melted down or removed in the Revolution or some war. I found an old print of it in a book by André Breton which was too difficult to read.

  Her Place Maubert friends are Anne-Chantal Lartigue, a Frenchwoman, and Tammy de Bretteville, an American married to a French lawyer. When I arrived, they were both, so far as I could see, happily married women. I tried to look at them through the eyes of Janet Hollingsworth, to divine their tricks, their special Frenchness, but they seemed like regular women to me, though they did wear more beautiful shoes than us Americans in our tennies.

  The days wore on with Roxy in her strange state of denial, neither trying to communicate with Charles-Henri, to reproach or persuade him, nor taking any other action, and refusing to disclose her state of affairs to her friends. To them, Roxy must have seemed calm, as if nothing were wrong. If you are calm when something is wrong, people think you are cold and unfeeling. But of course Roxy was crying, and feeling awful, however cheerful she was looking with her market basket and gradually swelling belly in the Place Maubert, meeting Anne-Chantal or Tammy de Bretteville as usual. As Roxy’s waistbands slowly wouldn’t fit, the Charles-Henri situation continued in her mind to have the same inevitability as her pregnancy, the same sense of a foregone conclusion, of there being no way back, no way of not going through with it; and where most women would have fought for their marriage, whatever that may mean, she continued to behave with bitter apathy.

  “I’m just not ready to tell anyone,” Roxy said, for days running. “How can I? All the implied I-told-you-so’s. I couldn’t stand it.” (Our sister Judith, who had always referred to Charles-Henri as “the frog prince,” would surely say I told you so.) She didn’t phone anyone. I worried about her. I felt that she ought to tell her friends, so they could give her advice on how these matters are handled in France.

  One night, when Roxy and Gennie and I were having supper in the Brasserie Espoir, Roxy said, “Iz, I apologize for sweeping you into my marital problems. I know you aren’t having a good time, but you are being incredibly sweet. I know I’m just being a bitch and a drip.”

  “Well, I wish you’d cheer up, Roxy. Fuck Charles-Henri. Go back to California. Get a boyfriend.”

  “Sure, four months pregnant.”

  “That will end.”

  “I know. I know I’ll get it together, but right now, I don’t actually care what happens, and I’m sick of thinking about it. Are you having any fun at all?”

  I was having some fun. I’d met some men. Conversations with men cannot, apparently, be avoided even should you want to. Men talk to us and we can’t stop them. But the type of man is somewhat in my control. For instance, if I wear my hair—it is black, long, and frizzy—down to the middle of my back, and stride along in jeans and hiking boots, certain kinds of men will speak to me. North African boys try to pick me up. Loose American Girl, goes their thinking; maybe she will. “Adventure?” they whisper in the metro. “If you don’t do things when you are young you will have a lifetime of regret,” explained a lonely young Moroccan.

  “Je ne regrette rien,” I say, laughing, for it is my most secure French phrase, from the old Edith Piaf tapes Roxy used to play. But they don’t understand the reference.

  If I do up my hair and wear my glasses, the men will be subtly more prosperous looking—smooth businessmen and visiting Germans. If I wear a scarf around my neck, I will be taken for a French girl. Scarf, no scarf, hair up or down. Thus, controlling my destiny, I made the acquaintance of two attractive men, a wiry economist named Michel Breaux (hair up) and a student, very black-turtleneck, Yves Dupain, whom I met in line at a movie (hair down). I would spend a free afternoon now and again going to the movies with Yves, or go to supper with Michel—and sometimes more, with either of them—afterward feeling a little guilty about Roxy, as though I were betraying her. I couldn’t bring myself to discuss love or sex with her. Perhaps I imagined these topics would unnerve her. I could imagine her standing before me, widening waistline and eyes in tears, a living illustration of the perils of sex and love.

  Making it with Yves the first time, I wondered if I would notice anything different about a French person in bed. What I was remembering was once, I think it was after Roxy and Charles-Henri were engaged, when Chester had said at dinner, “The French they are a funny race,” and he and Margeeve laughed and laughed, so that we demanded to know why, and finally Chester said: “The French they are a funny race / They fight with their feet and fuck with their face.”

  I remember that Roxy and I were sort of embarrassed and shocked, not by the rhyme but by Chester saying it, in front of us. Even as worldly as we both were, Roxy and I, we didn’t think Chester should be.

  “All the girls in France / Wear tissue paper pants. . . .” added Margeeve.

  “I see London, I see France, . . .” said Roxy.

  But with Yves and Michel nothing unusually French had happened, except that afterward Yves once had asked solicitously, “As-tu pris ton pied?”—which I understood, with my limited language skills, as “had I taken my foot?”

  I guess it means, was it fun? It was, and I was having enough fun generally—the occasional date with Yves or Michel, the occasional movie, the challenge of getting along here. Sometimes I felt as if I actually belonged in France. For instance, one night, as I was flipping the dial, looking for someone speaking slow French (my hope was that I could learn it as a child learns language, by soaking it up, though I knew in my heart this would not work and was a way of justifying not going to the class), I saw a familiar face, a large, white-haired old man in a suit, sitting with other men at a table, some sort of moderator speaking to them each in turn and now saying, “Et alors, M. Cosset?” and the large man began to speak in a familiar voice, and he was l’oncle Edgar, Charles-Henri’s uncle! He began a vigorous discourse, thunderous of brow, which of course I understood not a word of.

  “What’s he saying?”

  “He’s talking about Bosnia,” said Roxy. “He’s very interested in Bosnia.” I listened. Even if you couldn’t understand it, what he was saying rang with indignation and authority.

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a kind of warmonger. He used to be an engineer. Then he was in the Chamber of Deputies,” she said, drifting through the room.

  “But what does he say?”

  “He says France has betrayed the UN resolutions, its own promises, and the Helsinki treaty,” Roxy said.

  “What does he want?”

  “War,” said Roxy. “If it were up to Uncle Edgar, he’d have the French bombing Belgrade.”

  Of course we didn’t approve of war, Roxy and I. Children of a California professor, we had never even met anyone who had approved of the Vietnam war. Yet—it is hard to explain—I found it thrilling to think that someone connected to us was in a position to comment publicly on national policy, even in a bellicose way. In California, we just live in our backwater, far from councils of government, so that knowing Oncle Edgar brought us closer to French national policy than we could ever come to American, and this gave me a vicarious feeling of influence and involvement. (Once, in college, I did go to hear the congressman from Santa Barbara, a balding young man who smiled all the time and sweated. But I didn’t meet him, exactly.)

  From the first I had found Roxy’s state of mind unnerving, but I think it was only when I heard her talk of abortion pills that I took seriously her belief that her marriage was over. Before that it had been easy to see a gap between her emotions and the facts of her case; this was a marital tiff exaggerated by the hormones of pregnancy or by the resentful fatigue of an overworked young mother. I knew Roxy well enough to know she was impulsive and in some views spoiled. (It was part of the lore of our family that Margeeve’s girls were spoiled, while Roger and I
were little soldiers, and there is some truth in this.) But Roxy’s storms were really her nature, not products of maternal indulgence. She had impossible ideals of conduct, and she had thought that knights and princes existed and that Charles-Henri was one of the latter. And now she knew otherwise, and was acting as if all were decided, divorce, life over—it was as if she were relieved to get through the biggest crisis of her life so lightly and quickly. But I could see she had trouble saying the actual, fateful words: Charles-Henri has left me.

  I tried to stiffen her myself, and I tried to think how to tell our parents. Finally, one day when Roxy was out, I called them. They heard my report of Roxy’s troubles without surprise, and Margeeve even said, “I knew something like that would happen,” exactly as Roxy had predicted. They evidently had believed something like this would happen. Their own lives, their divorces, the lives and divorces of people they knew, had taught them not only to expect marital troubles for their offspring but to believe them inevitable, and even a positive good, leading to eventual happiness with a predestined mate you would not have been ready for the first time around. This had been their experience. My father with Roger’s and my difficult mother, and Margeeve with her irascible, practically criminal, alcoholic husband, Roxy’s and Judith’s father—both had become tempered and wise from these bad experiences and, from the time they met, got along with each other as God had intended couples to do. We four children were therefore more the products not of broken homes but of a happy one, and if the psychologists were right, that should predispose us to happy marriages in turn. Thus did certain facts of social nature—divorce—dispute with the home-healing benefits of our nurture, a contradiction that was resolved if you accepted the first divorce as a boon. It is only if you view divorce as catastrophe that it is so.

  I am trying to explain that Chester and Margeeve were somewhat detached about Roxy’s plight and didn’t react with the dismay she herself felt. I’m sure they also had a wish, conscious or unconscious, to see her back home in America where God intended Americans to be and where they always ended up, think of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gerald Murphy, and a whole lot of others who came to France but went home again.