Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  Eventually of course when Roxy did call Dad and Margeeve to say that she and Charles-Henri were “having trouble,” they put on airs of suitable dismay and commiseration. But Roxy found their unsurprise galling, since she herself had not got over her surprise, would never get over it, that just when she had thought everything was perfect, it turned out not to be.

  Roxy, not knowing how much I had discussed with Chester and Margeeve about her situation, was surprised too to get a call from Margeeve one day saying, “Roxy, don’t let Charles-Henri take the picture.”

  “The picture?”

  “Saint Ursula. In case he comes to move out his stuff, he shouldn’t get the idea it’s his.”

  Roxy, who had expressly given it to him, was dumbfounded and puzzled. “He wouldn’t do that, it’s right here, in the apartment. You’ve never liked him, have you?”

  9

  There are good marriages, but no delightful ones.

  —La Rochefoucauld

  ROXY HAD CLUNG like an old reactionary to her view that their life had been perfect, but through chinks in her stories I began to see certain things that explained the trouble—from my outsider’s view of marriage nothing unusual, just the regular things. Her descriptions of past events would include the mention of “the weekend Charles-Henri was in Nice” and things of that sort, from which it seemed to me that Charles-Henri had too often been away painting or visiting family members. It seemed to me that Roxy had been left alone a lot with Gennie, and I knew her well enough to imagine the petulance in her tone when he came home. She hinted once that Charles-Henri had not wanted kids. Also, they had money problems, and Roxy, devoting herself relentlessly to poetry, would never do anything so obvious and useful as to get a job. Having kids is a good excuse not to earn money, I can see that; to mantle yourself in motherhood, especially in France, is to be very snug—motherhood a cloak under which to write, just as when we were younger she used to write by flashlight under the covers. And perhaps two artists always compete, for time to work and for the right to be the pampered one. Why must human relationships have these binary tensions built into them, the pretty versus the plain, the smart and the dumb, the child and the grownup?

  On the other hand, to take Roxy’s part, it was selfish of Charles-Henri not to want a child. What did people do before they had these hard choices to make, when babies just arrived?

  By September she had fallen into a quieter, even more depressed mood, but instead of focusing on her own problems, now it was the war in Bosnia that mesmerized her. French television and Euronews carried daily coverage of Slavs in headscarves weeping along roadsides, and ruins, and corpses in ditches. Roxy was especially fascinated with one recurrent image, one that had become for the television people a kind of emblem of the stupid war. She was captured by the Romeo and Juliet story that accompanied the grisly image, of a Serb boy and Muslim girl or vice versa, lovers, shot by one side or the other in a no-man’s-land as they tried to flee across a foreground of rubble and barbed wire, their bodies photographed lying there (in jeans and tennis shoes), and their families afraid to crawl out to get them.

  “The hypocrisy of America, going to war to protect a bunch of Arabs who mutilate women, and then refusing to help these poor Bosnians,” Roxy would rave. “Letting the Serbs go on raping the women. Uncle Edgar is right, the cowardice of the French is incredible. Don’t they remember World War I? Don’t they remember Chamberlain? How can they let this go on?”

  Of course this line of thinking was influenced by the public pronouncements of Oncle Edgar. He was always denouncing his country’s policy in the pages of Le Figaro or on TV. Suzanne would call us whenever he was going to be on. Even without speaking French, I could easily grasp the essentials of his discourse: horreur, scandale, honneur, honte.

  I could see that Roxy, ordinarily not a pretentious person, thought of her situation as something doomed on the Bosnian scale, and I could see that her self-pitying mood was mixed with malice, the imagined satisfaction of seeing Charles-Henri’s lifeless abandoned corpse in a no-man’s-land.

  Still she didn’t confront him or confide in me. I thought she must be preparing her moves, or else it was some lethargy of pregnancy. Once there was a scare when her ankles began to swell. I can still see her, sitting on the sofa (canapé) sobbing, “These are not my legs, these are piano posts, I can’t even feel them.” The doctors worried that it could presage a condition called preeclampsia and made her stop eating salt and go every two weeks for a checkup. When she was put into elastic stockings she felt better, but even when it seemed her condition could be grave, she would not let anyone tell Charles-Henri.

  Eventually, I resolved to talk to Charles-Henri myself. I had found out where he was, because I had run into Charlotte de Persand Saxe, Charles-Henri’s sister. Mrs. Pace had suggested I go to an exposition of the painters who called themselves Nabis. These turned out to be Vuillard and Bonnard, and some others I’d never heard of. My favorite was the one named Vallottan, because each of his gray street scenes and rainy landscapes featured a bright spot of red, in a scarf or umbrella, for me symbolizing the arrival of unexpected and sometimes felicitous events in life. And just as I was thinking this, there, felicitously at the same exposition, was Charlotte, wearing a red dress and smelling delightful. Charlotte is one of those Frenchwomen who are permeated with perfume from head to toe. I made a mental note to ask Roxy’s friend Janet, the one who is writing a book about French women, how they do this.

  Charlotte was with an Englishman she introduced as Giles Wheating, a name I had vaguely heard. British journalist? The “liaison” her mother had mentioned? But there was nothing of embarrassment or furtive surprise in their manner. I simply asked her where Charles-Henri was and she told me, and gave me a phone number in the country near Illiers. There’s a sort of trailer there belonging to the Persand family, where he painted and gardened. “We will have to have a coffee sometime soon and talk more about it,” she added.

  Later the same day, I called up Charles-Henri, who was perfectly civil on the phone, with only the slightest apprehensiveness in his tone, and he seemed delighted to make a rendezvous for the following day.

  Though the Cafe Vues de Notre Dame is near their apartment, it is so big and touristy that it could be considered neutral and safe to meet in, not unduly Roxy’s turf or provocative of memories. I sat at the back of the sidewalk terrace, a little sheltered but still open against the smoke. Charles-Henri turned up a second after I had got there and ordered myself a coffee. He had a new scar on his chin, but was otherwise unchanged from the attractive man I had met in California, rather pale, a slight blue undertone to his skin, as if his beard, if it grew out, would be black, at odds with his fair eyelashes. He had the same engaging smile, replaced instantly with a frown of sincerity, and gave me three cheek kisses, familially.

  “La petite Isabel! Ça va?” I am tall, but in France anything is petite if you want it to seem negligible, like a petit problem, or a petite invoice. “It’s so nice of you to meet. I know how angry you are at me, my mother is too, and you can imagine how I feel about all this.”

  “I’m just meddling, really. I’m in the dark,” I said. “Roxy doesn’t tell me anything. I just thought maybe there’s something I could do.”

  “How’s my dear little Gennie? I hope to see her soon, I just haven’t known how to work it out with Roxy, when I can visit and so on. I miss her so much.”

  “She misses you,” I said, regretting the accusing tone as this slipped out. “She’s fine. She asks for you, but then she forgets. She’s only three.”

  Charles-Henri: “Oh, mon Dieu. Are you having something?”

  Me (not understanding): “Huh?”

  Charles-Henri: “I might have a sandwich, I didn’t have lunch.” Having been a number of weeks in France, I should have been aware of how at any awkward point in a conversation, the subject reverts to food. He waved at the waiter and ordered. “Sandwich rillettes.”

  “Your family is
being really nice, really supportive,” I said. “The point is, no one seems to know what’s the matter, between you and Roxy, I mean.” I was being as direct as possible.

  “Ah. There’s nothing wrong between us,” he said, and seeing my surprise, added a protestation about how much he loved Roxy and Gennie.

  “Maybe I’ll have a sandwich,” I said. “Jambon fromage.” He waved for the waiter. There was a silence, the transition, the waiter again. How can you ask pointed questions without asking them pointedly? Like, why are you being such an asshole, if you love them so much?

  “I feel absolutely in the wrong. I am the culpable one, there’s no question,” he said. Why is it men love to confess to badness? They have learned that women love to forgive—or so they think. In reality, no one ever forgives anything, that I can see.

  “Couldn’t you, you know, seek counseling? Don’t they have marriage counseling here?”

  “Isabel, there’s nothing I can do about this. I—I’ve met the woman of my life, the love of my life, it’s an inevitability. I want to be only with her. That would be hard for any woman to understand, and I know that Roxy doesn’t understand.”

  I felt a big relief at this. It was as Charles-Henri’s mother had diagnosed, he’d got a crush on someone, a temporary effect of Roxy’s pregnancy, and all Roxy would have to do, if she could forgive him, was to have the baby and wait it out.

  He could not forbear to talk about his new love. “Magda Tellman. She was formerly a teacher of sociology in Nantes. She’s very brilliant. Married to an American, isn’t that comic, in a way? A coincidence, each of us married to an American. The Tellmans are separated, we’re separated. So symmetrical a situation.”

  He went on, tensely, trying to convince me, I wasn’t sure of what. “I know it sounds unnecessary, extreme, romantic in the bad sense, it’s just that there’s nothing I can do. Believe me, there’s a certain relief in that. To arrive for once in life at a certainty. Certitude?”

  “Either,” I said. I pitied him his romantic heart, as I pitied Roxeanne hers. At that moment I was glad I hadn’t got one.

  He did not seem to lose interest in being there talking to me. He continued to ask questions about Roxy, but I think he really wanted to talk to someone about Magda, about this wonderful thing (despite the complications) love. About how it removed all element of choice, and about how well he was painting. About how good could come out of bad. Eventually, we said goodbye. My questions remained. Had Charles-Henri told Roxy about his passion in these same exorbitant terms? Was it a shame to her so humiliating that she didn’t want even me to know? Could I mention to her that I had seen him, and that I knew about Magda (what a name!)?

  Something odd happened as I was walking over to get Gennie at the crèche. I was crossing the esplanade in front of Notre Dame. This windswept stretch, crowded with tourists gawking up, knotted around, strangled with cameras, is always best avoided. After a month or so, I no longer got the religious shiver I got at first (though I am not religious), and so I usually walk on the other end to miss the people, but on this day I did walk on the near side, just outside the little fence that designates the forecourt, and I paused a second to meet the eyes of the angular stone apostles that line the facade.

  A beggar always stands right here, and it is always the same beggar (or “homeless person”). Dark-skinned, he appears to be an Indian or Pakistani, or Gypsy, and blind. Always there, his cup stretched out, leaning on a cane, wearing a hooded sweat-shirt, like someone in the Bible, his apparently unseeing eyes without pupils, as white as moons.

  I have always noticed him because, regarding the exit to Notre Dame Cathedral, I have thought, Is this not the pre-eminent, the reigning, begging place in Paris if not the world? Wouldn’t there be competition for this lucrative slot, with the whole world’s sinners guiltily stealing by him, traipsing in and out of the great building, feeling penitence? Is there a sociology of beggars, in which rank and seniority promote you to such precincts? Or are beggars like, say, pigeons, condemned to grow up where they hatch, indifferently assigned by fate to the pickings of barren, seedless alleys or abundant parks? This beggar, in any case, by whatever right or tolerance, has Notre Dame to himself.

  And, as I walked by and glanced up, and then inadvertently at him (for I hate his white eyes), he said, “Isabel.” This frightened me so much that I quickened my step and walked on toward the Hôtel de Ville, my fear and fascination growing, searching for explanation—coincidence, someone else speaking. This event has not yet been explained.

  I came into Roxy’s apartment quietly, thinking about what it could mean. Roxy was on the phone, speaking in English, therefore to an American friend or, as it proved, to someone in our family, either Chester or Margeeve. I heard her mention Roscoe, their cat, and Ralphie the dog. I wasn’t listening especially, until I heard my own name. Hearing your name cuts through thoughts like a bullet through a cloud.

  “She’s doing better,” Roxy was saying. “She’s had some dates. She has about ten odd jobs—but I think she’s trying to use them as a way of getting out of babysitting. And she still won’t say a word of French.”

  This was unfair, since I had babysat every single time I was asked, and I said bonjour almost promiscuously. As they went on talking, it became clear that they had been conspiring all along, discussing my doings, my progress, my state of mind. “Olivia Pace thinks highly of her, apparently she’s a real help,” Roxy was saying. “She walks my friend Ames’s dog, stuff like that. I think she’s doing fine.”

  Of course I should have seen it before. In their minds, I was the problem, not Roxy, I was the subject they’d been putting their heads together about. I hadn’t been sent to help Roxy, Roxy had been enlisted to look after me, the ne’er-do-well little sister with her aimless attitude to the future. I’m sure they were hoping I’d meet a nice European count, or maybe I’d become interested in teaching English as a Second Language. At worst, I’d learn to speak French. I was aghast. I felt a sort of angry and embarrassed flush in my cheeks, as if I’d found a bloodstain on the back of my dress and realized it had been there all afternoon.

  My character had always been a subject that could flare up into a quarrel between Chester and Margeeve, once dramatically at the dinner table—a rare quarrel, I should add, for Chester and Margeeve are solid, but Margeeve thinks I have been raised to be too indifferent to my future, which she says betrays Chester’s covert sexism. My brother Roger was steered toward the law since grade school, but my future would look after itself. “You never took Isabel seriously, that is the truth, because she is a girl,” snapped Margeeve on this occasion. My father said, “I have always taken Isabel seriously,” with a kind of sigh, “but I have never understood her,” and I remember saying, “That’s for sure.”

  But I did understand, and they understood, that Roxy has a true literary talent and love for poetry, and would probably not be that great at anything else, plus being a poet allows you a lot of time to raise a family, teach a class, or (as I have noticed) flâner in the streets of Paris, which means mess around, with no guilty sense of being unoccupied. Lucky Roxy. And now she had a reason, her pregnancy, never to skip meals. From my point of view, her life should have been complete, except for the marital problem, which I continued to view as a temporary aberration.

  So I pretended I hadn’t overheard anything.

  “I saw Charles-Henri,” I said, when she had put down the phone. “I talked to him. I thought I should talk to him myself, maybe you were exaggerating things.”

  “He came in to Paris? How was he?” She was newly alert.

  “He says he’s fallen in love with someone. Did he tell you that?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “For me it was a big relief to hear that,” I said. “Oh, is that all, I thought.”

  “All? All?” A rush of hysteria in her voice.

  “Men get over that. People do. I always do.”

  “Yes, he’ll get over it, the way he got over me
, but it won’t have never happened, it can’t be undone. Yes, he told me he had met the love of his life. There’s nothing you can say to that.” So she had known all along. This was the one thing she could not forgive.

  10

  I was younger, and I cultivated the habit of keeping all my experiences and plans to myself, relying upon myself alone.

  —Adolphe

  IT SHOULDN’T HAVE surprised me that my parents were worried about my life plans. I admit I was baffled myself. I’d write a screenplay, I’d decided in film school. I’d direct. Perhaps I was meant to be an actress, or the girl who gets the coffee—this is what I was ending up as, after all. But of course Paris wasn’t “ending up” (I’d remind myself, lying in Roxy’s chambre de bonne), this was a beginning, or, properly speaking, Time Out. But I hadn’t realized that our folks were worried about me, and it made me sort of mad to think that other people looking at me saw things that worried them and then didn’t tell me so that I could reassure them, or deal with their fears. I knew I would be all right, but they didn’t. Crazy people must feel this gap between themselves and others, and the terminally ill must feel it. It’s horrible to have people worry about you, and it’s insulting besides. Or am I politically incorrect to think so?

  Roxy was truly not so sure she would be all right. “Maybe I should get a divorce,” she began to say every day. I urged her at least to talk to Charles-Henri before taking such a step as that, and to talk to others. I was not sure how often they had actually spoken in the time since my arrival—it was now more than three months. But she continued to refuse. “What’s there to discuss? There’s no point in protracting things. Infidelity will just happen again. The pattern of an unfaithful French husband, I know it all from my reading of Colette, Balzac, Zola. Pretty soon he’d have not this woman but another, a mistress permanently installed in another street, perhaps even a child, children, or he would chase the au pair girls, they would get younger and more gullible as he got older and older, or waitresses at McDonald’s or the girl in the market. I can’t bear to think of seeing him go through all that. And he would despise me more and more each time.”