Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  Roxy: When was that?

  Charlotte: Oh, in the Middle Ages. Perhaps in the sixteenth century. Perhaps the Princesse de Clèves would not have eaten cheese.

  Roxy (always thoughtful): I suppose that’s behind the idea that nice women should only take one cheese. Too much cheese would make them into nymphomaniacs. Are men allowed to take more than one cheese?

  (I look down at my plate where I have taken five cheeses, one of each on the cheese plate, and accepted seconds of Epoisse besides. I would have thought it was polite to sample each of their cheeses. But I am constantly making politeness mistakes.)

  Jean: The orange crust is from a natural but odd bacteria. When it comes to the organism in Amis du Chambertin, they couldn’t get it to grow anywhere but in that particular part of Burgundy. When it became such a success, the fabricant tried to move his factory, built a fine new one, but the orange crust wouldn’t grow in the new place. He had to enlarge the old one, and each new cellar they dug, it had to communicate with the old one, and remain empty for a while until the moisissure had a chance to establish itself.

  Bertrand: I still like a chèvre.

  All: Oui! Non! Sec! Frais!

  Relations between Roxy and the Persands kept on as before, Sunday lunches, friendly phone calls, and on Tuesdays when I picked up Gennie at the crèche, I would take her to see her grandmother. Suzanne is worried about Gennie not speaking enough French, surrounded as she is by Anglophone aunt and mother, with Charles-Henri so derelict in his duty.

  We had begun to garner details about Magda Tellman, Charles-Henri’s new love. Charles-Henri had met her, a Czechoslovakian sociologist married to an American employee of EuroDisney, last year while painting in the Dordogne, where the Tellmans were renting a place on vacation. One can only imagine how their passion came to blaze up. What she looked like we did not know. So far as we had heard, Suzanne had continued to refuse to see her.

  About this time I had two strange encounters. The first was with Mr. Tellman, Magda’s husband, one day as I was coming home.

  To get into Roxy’s building, you enter a code on the numbered buttons outside, you hear a click and push open the thick door, which then closes behind you, and a little lighted button shows you where to push to turn on the lights for the hallway and the stairs. You then go down the hallway to the end, where a glass door separates you from the stairs. You unlock this door. The mailboxes are in the hall to the left before you go through the glass door, the garbage cans are in a room inside the glass door on the left. In olden days, and in some buildings still, a concierge instead of the glass door would intercept visitors and accept parcels.

  On this particular day, I came in and slammed the street door behind me, groping inside for the light button, for even on the brightest day it’s dark in the hall, with its walls of stone and ancient timbers exposed, rather affectedly, to remind you that they have been there since 1680. As I came nearer to the mailboxes, my eyes getting used to the gloom, I saw that a man was sitting on the mail ledge. He got up, slowly, as if he were hurt, or old, though he was perhaps in his forties, dressed in a suit.

  “Are you Roxeanne?” he asked, in an American accent. I said nothing, and then as he moved toward me, I hurriedly said, “I’m Isabel.” Looking back on it, it was kind of cowardly to disavow being Roxy, diverting some risk to her instead of me. I should have said I was Roxy, standing in for her, for there was something frightening about the man. But I don’t think this menace, the slick of some interior spillover blazing in his eyes, was apparent to me in the first moment I saw him. I had simply been surprised to be addressed at all, and was struck silent.

  “Why?” I added. I wondered if I should go outside again, he looked so immoderate and somehow dangerous. To get out the door again, you have to push an electrical button on the wall, then, lunging for the door, operate a catch as soon as you hear it click. I have never understood the rationale for this arrangement, common to all doors of all French apartment buildings. I hesitated. He scared me. It came to me the man was probably drunk, some smell of alcohol and anger came off him, and he was American.

  He smiled. “You’re the sister.”

  “Are you a friend of Roxy?”

  “You could say. You could say we have something in common. I thought I’d like to meet her.”

  “You haven’t met?”

  “Haven’t met.”

  “I don’t think she’s home. . . .”

  “I’m the husband.”

  “Sorry?” I wasn’t following. I was thinking about turning flatly around and opening the door. I just wanted to get away from this guy, and I certainly wasn’t going to let him meet Roxy.

  “I’m the husband of Magda Tellman. ‘The husband.’ ”

  Magda Tellman. It just didn’t at that instant mean anything to me, though I realized in another split second that Magda was the woman Charles-Henri had fallen in love with.

  “Why don’t you leave a note?” I said. “I have to go now. Just write her a note and put it in the box, with your phone and stuff.”

  “Yeah, I’ll leave her a note.” He smiled at my brilliance. Why did I feel afraid of him? When I turned my back on him, to open the street door, I half dreaded a blow on the back of my head. Then later, when he had gone, I came back in and looked to see if he had written a note. He had, unfolded, on a “From the Desk of” paper. It said “Mrs. Persand, Be aware that I’m never going to divorce Magda, if you want to plan accordingly.” Roxy never commented on this.

  After Roxy had begun to talk more openly about getting a divorce, I went with her to a meeting of American women, where she thought she might get some helpful advice. From the first, it was clear that the agenda of their meeting was just to kick back and complain about the French, especially French mothers-in-law, with their insistence on Sunday lunch, their meddlesome helpfulness, their hostility to Americans and to daughters-in-law in general. Despite these agitations, it was restful, in a way, to be in a gathering of American women. No matter what one thinks of one’s compatriots, there is undeniably a rapport that cannot be explained. When you meet another American you exchange a glance of understanding. Who you are, your basic cultural assumptions, are known. If you were speaking French, you would tutoyer each other from the first. You wouldn’t necessarily like these other Americans, but even the ones you don’t like, you always like them better in France than you would like them if you were both back in America.

  At the same time, Americans are critical of each other here. They are snobbish about each other’s French, for example, much meaner than a French person would be. They laugh at each other’s answering-machine pronunciation. The former French teachers are the worst. (Roxy spends hours in Grévisse’s Bon Usage. “Maybe I’ll just say ‘Laissez un message,’” she finally decides.)

  The American women planned programs at which such things as French taxes and French divorce laws were discussed, and the names of helpful avocats were shared. From this group I had the strange impression that legal difficulties were universal for Americans here, that we were all prisoners of strange objectionable laws and stranger customs, the first of which was marriage itself.

  “Whatever you do,” they said, “don’t leave the house. That makes you the guilty one. That way, they can get you for desertion—they have some other name for it. It happened to Tammy de Bretteville, and she was left without a dime, just because she went to Nice for the weekend. And she had paid for the apartment!”

  “If you did get divorced, would you go back to America?” I asked Roxy on the way home.

  “No, of course not,” she said vehemently. “Everything makes me happy here. Except, well, you know—the situation. But the buildings. The buses. I even love the pigeons with their little red feet. My heart goes out to the spindly ones. Some pigeons don’t thrive as well as others. Sometimes I drop a piece of my croissant for them. I try to give it to the spindly ones before the fat ones see. But people stare at you so outraged. Did you know they have a sports club w
here they actually catch the pigeons? Tammy de Bretteville told me about it. Then they let them out, old fat street pigeons, and as they flutter lethargically up, the French shoot them for target practice. That’s their idea of sport. I was struck dumb when I heard this. It wasn’t even for reducing the population of pigeons, which you could possibly understand. It’s some deficiency in sensibility.”

  She must be really depressed, I thought, to be raving on like this about pigeons. “It’s better than shooting people, like we do at home,” I pointed out.

  Roxy had been talking of divorce, but when Charles-Henri wrote her a stiff little note saying that he would like a divorce, Roxy replied: “But I can’t divorce. I’m Catholic.” And there was no good saying, Roxy, don’t be like that, because she was like that. I didn’t try to argue. No divorce became Roxy’s policy as surely as divorce had been her policy last week. Suzanne, who had continued to think that the whole thing would blow over after the baby was born, was relieved at Roxy’s position, that there would be no divorce.

  Margeeve and Chester, in California, were not so sure.

  Because of the strange experience of hearing my name from the beggar of Notre Dame, I had formed the habit of listening and feeling apprehensive when crossing in front of the great cathedral, feeling the eyes of the carven saints on me, and the beggar, always there, turning his blind stone eyes toward me, holding his cup. But he never spoke again. But then one day as I was walking Gennie home, slowly because for some reason I did not have the stroller, Gennie on her little legs, me impatient, I again heard someone say “Isabel.” Almost fearfully, I looked around at the beggar, and saw, just near him, coming out of Notre Dame in the horde of tourists, Oncle Edgar, the Persands’ uncle, coming toward me, still limping slightly but walking more briskly than he had at the time I had met him. He gave Gennie a kiss and shook my hand. He was dressed rather grandly in a light suit, in his buttonhole some sort of charity flower that I had seen people selling on the quai.

  “La petite Geneviève. Bonjour, mademoiselle.”

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Cosset,” I said, startled.

  “You should just say, ‘Bonjour, monsieur,’” he said. “I saw you another day, coming this way,” he added. This confused me. Had it been he, not the blind man, who spoke? Or had he told the man to speak? Or neither? And why was I not to use his name?

  “Unless you are pressed, we have time to offer Geneviève an ice cream.” He lifted Gennie up, and carried her as we continued on our way. I had an unaccustomed attack of shyness, maybe from seeing him on television, and couldn’t think of anything but to answer his questions like a child, yes I was content with my time in Paris, yes Roxy was doing okay. We installed ourselves at the Vues de Notre Dame, the cafe where I had met Charles-Henri.

  “Apéritif? Café?”

  We both had coffee. He had an instant of silence, during which it perhaps sank in that he had condemned himself to a half hour with a wiggly three-year-old and a California au pair girl, non-French-speaking.

  “I think it’s great the way you stick up for the Bosnians,” I heard myself say, in the most horrible Valley Girl voice, a voice that fell on my own ears as if I were hearing a skit on Saturday Night Live. My remark seemed to startle, then to amuse him.

  “Do you? Thank you. Why do you think so?”

  This Socratic maneuver struck me silent again. Why did I think so? But I am a good student, and know how to give the professor what he himself has said.

  “You’d think people would remember history,” I said. “The First World War started like that, with Balkan conflicts.” He made no comment.

  “And the moral issues. How can we just stand by and permit terror and rape?” This was the argument I really believed.

  “You are right.” He smiled, perhaps without irony. His views exactly. “Gennie, mange ta glace comme ça. And do you think that the Europeans alone, or that the Americans too, should fight the Serb?”

  “The Americans too,” I said. “But the Europeans have to start, or else the UN, or Americans won’t come in like they did in World War One, or Two.” Mrs. Pace’s good little historian.

  “Though it may surprise you, I was not alive during the First War,” he began, smiling. “I was born in 1925, and thus was just old enough to have served in the Second War. Later I served in Indochina.”

  Indochina! Something thrilling in that. Though I am not usually ill at ease with men (au contraire, Roxy would say), I was ashamed of how silly I sounded, how impudent to be talking of war and European politics to a man who had stood at the side of the President of France (I had seen them on television, in Lyon for a ceremony).

  At this memory, Oncle Edgar and the President of France, as we were speaking, I felt my palms moisten with deepened self-consciousness. I felt young and absurd, and my heart gave me that unpleasant unease I used to feel hoping a certain guy would talk to me or ask me out. I was aware of a male power over me that I have always resented. This elderly Frenchman, so full of will, experience, moral force, political passion, was affecting me like a man. How totally odd, I thought afterward, walking Gennie home, how almost embarrassing. But of course he couldn’t have guessed my inappropriate emotions.

  12

  The two wretched creatures who alone in the world knew each other and alone were capable of consoling each other, now seemed to be irreconcilable enemies bent on mutual destruction.

  —Adolphe

  WHEN CHARLES-HENRI MADE it known that he wanted to divorce, Roxy at first did nothing, took no steps, in no way tried to resolve the issue. I thought it might be a kind of inertia hormone that goes with pregnancy. Except for strange outbursts, about pigeons or a metro strike, she even seemed happy enough most of the time, going to her studio, portfolio in hand, attending her seminar on Thursday nights, having Sunday lunches in the bosom of Charles-Henri’s family, for it was she (we) and not Charles-Henri who continued to go to these occasions. “I know Suzanne wishes Charles-Henri would pick up Gennie and come himself, but he hasn’t even suggested it,” said Roxy. The lunches were civil, and neither divorce nor Charles-Henri were ever discussed. As far as we could learn, Suzanne still had not yet met or even seen the Other Woman, Magda Tellman.

  Following Charles-Henri’s request for a divorce there had been several weeks of uncertainty and discussion, always initiated by him or his mother. Suzanne would call to talk to Roxy in person, always expressing support, and Charles-Henri would telephone to plead or threaten, conversations that would leave Roxy tearful and furious. “These are your own kids, Charles,” she would say, or “Over my dead body!” At last, convinced by Suzanne that she had better find out what her rights were, Roxy did consent at least to go with Charles-Henri to meet with a lawyer suggested by Monsieur de Persand, a Maître Doisneau. I think that is why she consented to go to the lawyer, it was a chance to see her husband. She dithered about what to wear. She wanted to look her best for Charles-Henri. I had not realized that vanity would continue during the misshapen months of pregnancy. If I am ever pregnant, I don’t expect to care what I look like.

  Maître Doisneau was a darting, slender man behind a large desk, who explained to them what they would have to do. “In general, in a divorce matter, it is in everyone’s interest to agree,” he said. “If the two of you make a motion together, I can prepare it, and it is all simple. The court follows your wishes as to the distribution of property, you wait several months, we enter a second motion to say that you are still of the same opinion, the court grants a divorce and you are free.”

  “When—when would remarriage be permitted?” asked Charles-Henri, with fatal insensitivity.

  “You could remarry in a week or so. Madame de Persand, of course, could not marry until after the birth of your child.”

  This shocked Roxy. The unfairness of the female lot, of European sexism, of her particular fate, stabbed at her heart. She said fiercely, “That’s unbelievable! You mean that the law is different for men and women?”

  “For obvious
reasons,” said Maître Doisneau, seeming to indicate Roxy’s pregnant belly.

  “It isn’t obvious to me! I could marry as soon as I wanted in California, and France could not stop me!” Roxy snarled, wishing at that moment for a California suitor so she could leave France, marry immediately, and give Charles-Henri’s child another man’s name. Charles-Henri and Maître Doisneau exchanged glances of masculine commiseration.

  “There is no property to speak of,” said Charles-Henri, sliding smoothly along. “I would return any gifts given to me, and of course I don’t want anything from the apartment. Oh, the things that come from my family, perhaps. I would let my parents decide if there is anything that shouldn’t go out of the family.”

  “Your children are your family,” Roxy snapped. “Things going to your children are not going out of your family.”

  “I was thinking of things going to the U.S.,” he apologized.

  Roxy was suddenly wary. She sensed the peril of being in a strange language in a strange land. She sensed an alliance between Maître Doisneau and Charles-Henri, the natural sympathy of countrymen, or of males, arising from their similar views on neckties and black socks, from their both knowing the three hundred sixty cheeses, from their impression of the strange smell of women and their shared hatred of a woman’s tendency to cry.

  “I’m not going to the U.S.,” said Roxy. “I’m staying right here. And I expect you to support me and your children.”

  “We have talked about divorce by mutual consent. There is also,” said Maître Doisneau, discerning trouble, “there is also divorce ‘for cause.’ In such a case, one of you is the innocent spouse, and must have proof of the other’s guilt.”

  Perceiving from their silence that they had not planned to take this tack, he amended himself. “Excuse me for employing such a term, ‘innocent,’ I mean only in the legal sense. If you are divorcing by mutual consent, naturally I do not need to know details of the events which have brought you to the law. In such a case no one is guilty or innocent. But when . . .”