Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  At table there was an empty seat, someone expected but not there. I hoped it might be Oncle Edgar, but halfway through the soup, Bob arrived, Charlotte’s husband. There was an affectionate flurry of sympathetic greetings as he slipped into his chair, at least the soft sound was affectionate rather than hearty, was also inquisitive and urgent. Something had happened which Bob told them about, with much shaking of his head, as if in disbelief, and rueful laughter tempered by a slightly choleric tone to his complexion. A blond man anyway, given to flushes. Of his discourse I understood nothing, of course, except, at one moment:

  “Avez-vous trouvez le chat?”

  On the way home Roxy interpreted, with a certain malice, the significance of Bob’s despair and explained the search for Minou. Charlotte had accepted a job in England, with an English publishing house, a mere pretext in Bob’s view to get off with the English man, and had decamped without the children, having first, in an act of supreme emotional sadism, set free Bob’s beloved cat.

  “Symbolizing that she is another such creature yearning to be free. He would have taken care of the cat, after all. He thinks she did it because she knows he loves the cat. She thinks he loves the cat better than he loves the children, et cetera. What a family!”

  Maybe Roxy could marry Bob, was my thought. My mind was on Charlotte and her Englishman, the vagaries of the obdurate human heart, and the strange spectacle of someone else’s passionate misery. I could imagine Charlotte at her dressing table, smoking madly, reading the flight schedule. Roxy, Charlotte, Bob—I wondered what the matter was with Bob, what her objections to him were, and how she could be cruel to a cat.

  Roxy said they all had seen it coming. Things other people saw coming were to me out of the blue. All that had gone before, in the family, between Charlotte and Bob, Charlotte and the Englishman, Charlotte and her parents, I could only imagine, though for the others it may have been an ongoing saga. I was excluded by my lack of French from having any sense of the process, the stages, the stepping stones, as over a brook, by which Charlotte and Bob—or Roxy and Charles-Henri—had arrived at this pass, as revealed in passing remarks or discussions at Suzanne’s table.

  Suzanne epecially had now a martyred, beleaguered matriarchal air, struggling for gaiety in the teeth of an onslaught. I made a mental note to ask Janet Hollingsworth about this gaiety fetish.

  “I don’t entirely blame myself,” Suzanne sighed at tea on Wednesday. “It is my fault that both Charles-Henri and Charlotte are self-indulgent, perhaps. But the times encourage disruption. Divorce is practically a fashion these days. I blame American films. Women working. Charlotte imagines she can support herself no matter where. She’ll have to face reality eventually.

  “Something else has happened, too,” she continued. “Even more terrible. There is an article in Le Figaro mentioning Georges’s brother.” Georges is Monsieur de Persand.

  “How so?” asked Roxy.

  “Mentioning a Persand and Pétain in the same sentence. I have called Edgar. He will know what to do.”

  I asked Edgar later why this was so tormenting to Suzanne. “One does not mention Pétain and one’s relatives in the same breath,” he explained. “If it were the nineteenth century—or even the nineteen-twenties—I suppose I would have to fight a duel, if Georges wouldn’t.”

  It was the plight of the cat that tormented Roxy. “They die, you know, a housecat can’t really get along in the wild,” she kept saying. “But how long can they live? We should go look for it, Antoine and the others have to work, but you and I could go tomorrow.”

  18

  Woe to the man who in the first moments of a love-affair does not believe that it will last forever! Woe to him who even in the arms of some mistress who has just yielded to him maintains an awareness of trouble to come and foresees that he may later tear himself away!

  —Adolphe

  EDGAR AND I had dinner at Le Bellecour the following Tuesday. (Ravioli de courgettes, veal chop, gratin de fruits rouges.) Nothing impedes me from eating, but my mind wasn’t on it, I just wanted to get the sex over with, to get it behind us, to know the worst or the best.

  The first time, though often carried by enthusiasm, is never the best. Yet there has to be a first time. I still had certain fears—would I hate an old man’s white fur? An old smell? But Edgar did not smell old, he smelled briskly of bay rum or shaving soap. Impotence? But then presumably this whole matter would not have presented itself. His bearing, his tall soldier’s body perfectly erect, his deep-set eyes—these things reassured me.

  Edgar himself seemed blithely relaxed, and consumed every smidgin of his sauce (lotte à la crème de safran) with that curious instrument they have, half spoon, half fork. (I should explain that from the time of our first lunch, I had taken to noting down the French names of the things we ate. I could not have explained why.)

  In the end, it was natural and easy. Though the night was cool, we walked to his pied-à-terre, on the rue de Bourgogne. He showed me the kitchen and where the bathroom was. I didn’t know if I was supposed to undress, was more used to sort of being undressed by another. When I came out he had taken off his coat and poured us each a cognac. I sat next to him on the sofa. So. He was clumsy with the buttons of my blouse and waited for me to do it. By now I was mad with curiosity and impatience so I kissed him and reached directly for his fly.

  “Attends, attends,” he said, catching my wrist.

  He knew what I wanted, and also, it appeared, what he wanted, for at a certain point his concentration seemed to shift to his own pleasure, and his eyes changed, but not before he knew about me. I think he had been uncertain—he told me this some time later—whether he was taking a worldly mistress or a maiden. His unfamiliarity with Americans, and Californians, of my age, might make that a question, though a question soon answered. A part of my own pleasure, apart from the reliable physiologic one, arose from just this difference in our ages and conditions. That which had worried me before now intensified the odd passion I felt. Reassured, I felt that to be made love to by a large, handsome, white-haired man with his large engine (or whatever word Milton would have used in Paradise Lost, which I once had to read some of, horrible) and whose speaking might as well have been in tongues—it was like being fucked by God. I was thrilled, my body was made of honey.

  Sometimes we had the conversation lovers have: What did he first like about me? How did he decide to make his suggestion? (“At my time of life, one has been in love a few times and knows better than to leave it to its own mysterious and fatal ways—you have to help Love along.”)

  When I told him I was swayed by his political and military exploits he was amused and remarked that these were the pursuits of a type of belligerent and dominant male he had heard was out of fashion with modern women.

  And by his not being American, I said.

  “Something that defines a billion people,” he said. “On the other hand I am charmed by your Americanness.”

  “That is to say bluntness, freshness, and naïveté,” I said.

  “By no means. Those are not qualities I admire, especially.”

  One thing I appreciated at first was that he had no wish to tell me his problems, with his wife or whatever, and he appreciated that I had no wish to hear them. Perhaps he didn’t have any problems. (Eventually I wanted to hear them.) He said he never permitted himself to accept oral sex. It was a kind of discipline. Pas de soixante-neuf. I imagined he could easily change his mind about that.

  Even before our affair had officially begun, I had started to struggle through articles in newspapers in which Edgar was mentioned. I wrote out paradigms of the verbs avoir and être in all the tenses, and just with learning these made some progress. But if we met someone he knew and we had a drink, after the theatre, say, I didn’t understand a word they said. This drove me crazy. I’ve always been an included, insider person, in charge, even, but now I was excluded and probably thought to be backward. Bonjour, monsieur, bonjour, madame. I could do thes
e phrases very confidently, and quickly added au revoir (monsieur, madame) to my repertoire. But more would not come out of me, except to Edgar, to whom I could muster je t’aime in a playful tone.

  My slowness with language made me respect Roxy for the seeming ease with which she had changed countries, languages, and religions. When I told her this, she just bitterly said it was a mark of a bad character, a person should rest what she is.

  I have noticed she has begun to use French words like “rest” when she speaks English. We would say “stay or remain”: people should “stay” as they are. But do we believe that? I don’t.

  It must have been about now that Stuart Barbee said to his friend, the Louvre art expert Alain Desmond, that he had seen a fine picture at Roxy’s, in the process of valuing it for the Getty, the subject a woman praying, the handling of the light reminiscent of the school of La Tour. Would he like to see it?

  “By no means, mon cher,” said Desmond. “I would then have to say if it was or wasn’t. It’s better for our institution not to come down on one side or another, in cases of uncertain attribution. In case.”

  “In case?”

  “In case it may come up for sale,” said Desmond mischievously. In case it’s a vrai, he meant. If it’s a vrai, one would rather pay the price of an élève of, école of, or d’après.

  “Quite, I understand,” said Stuart.

  “You might get me a copy of the photograph, though,” Desmond said.

  And in fact it was going to come up for sale. This was the newest development in Roxy’s divorce. Step by step:

  1. Convinced by Charlotte, her friends, and her lawyer that she would get a better settlement if she sued for divorce “for cause,” Roxy had accepted the inevitable and decided on doing that.

  2. Charles-Henri, faced with the prospect of being divorced for cause, had rescinded his perfect docility and retained the original lawyer, Maître Doisneau, who informed Roxy’s lawyer, Maître Bertram, that either Roxy consent to a normal down-the-middle modern divorce, or Charles-Henri would not permit her to use his name and would ask for custody of the children. Since everyone knew that he would have an advantage in a custody hearing in a French court, given the French sentiment that children should be the property of the French parent, Roxy had consented to a normal down-the-middle divorce, but now she was bitter at having been outmaneuvered and betrayed. Just as the French ladies in the Place Maubert, and the American wives at the wives’ group, had told her she would be.

  “It is always like this,” observed Maître Bertram, with gloomy satisfaction. “People start out in agreement. Then, the hardening.”

  L’endurcissement. The hardening. Perhaps that is only another word for experience or for growing up. An Englishwoman at tea at Mrs. Pace’s said to me, “French women are clever, but they’re hard. They look hard.” I could see how they must seem so; Englishwomen are so much softer and rounder than the trim little Frenchwomen with their perfect makeup. Frenchwomen must seem monsters of calculation to get that scarf on every time. But they had to learn to calculate because of the hardness of the laws.

  Down the middle meant that Roxy would have to credit Charles-Henri with half the value of the picture or somehow come up with half its value to give him when they came to calculate the split.

  She raged at this, and dreaded having to tell Margeeve and Chester. She thought desperately of plots—false break-ins wherein the painting would be stolen—or of mailing it back to California rolled in a tube. She thought of asking Tammy de Bretteville to take it when she went home to Portland, Oregon, for Christmas.

  Or me taking it, saying it was mine. She’d say she couldn’t do anything with me (headstrong Isabel), I would just put it in my suitcase and be gone in the night. She went to the Bon Marché to look at suitcases it might fit in. But I said I didn’t want to go back to California. I didn’t tell her why. How I wish now that I had done it. But would that have changed anything?

  I didn’t go around carrying the Kelly bag, but reserved it for dress-up occasions or when going out with Edgar. For one thing, I now worried about losing it or having it snatched. For another, Roxy. When I would dump my wallet and such into it and prepare to go out, I could see Roxy glare at it, or avert her eyes. It was an irritation to her, it caused distress. For this reason, I tried to conceal it from her notice as much as possible. I knew that it symbolized infidelity, in this case mine to her, by not telling her where I got it. It was as tantalizing as the box to Pandora, and it hurt her, for I had always in the past told her even my most gruesome, frightening, or humiliating adventures. It also, perhaps, symbolized the infidelity of men in general, especially French ones. She knew the donor must be French, for only Frenchmen would know the brand names—Baccarat, Cartier, Hermès. (And maybe a Japanese would.) And it was so clearly the gift of a man to a woman not his wife, it probably made her wonder what Charles-Henri gave Magda (if he gave her anything, being modern).

  Gifts to women—one of those traditional observances that have shrunk down to ceremonial size, the size of a theater ticket or ring.

  I could see that the Kelly was the artifact of a day when life was different for women, and that in Roxy’s mind, formed by the novels of—who? I don’t know, Zola? Anita Loos?—it was a better life back then. She saw herself as a victim of new forms of female disadvantage (though I would have argued she was the victim of the old form of disadvantage, hostage as surely as Mrs. Julius Caesar or Mrs. Mark Antony—or Madame Edgar Cosset—to male erotic caprice). There was a Madame Cosset, of course, and two sons, near Avignon.

  Roxy hated that she could be expected to fend for herself and her children. Her resentment of her condition seemed to grow each day with the size of her belly and with the size of the dossier she continued to assemble, detailing her own perfections and the failures and faults of Charles-Henri.

  We developed something of a routine, Edgar and I. On Tuesday nights, sometimes on Friday if he did not go down to the country, we met in the late afternoon to make love, then went somewhere for dinner or the theatre. In America you would go to the theatre first and then make love (Calvinism?), but this way is better, when your senses are alert and you are not tipsy and sleepy. No theatre in French, though, I drew the line there, because I didn’t understand a word, just the ends of the sentences, as in blah-blah-blah-blah déjà! blah-blah n’est-ce pas?, as though trains were hurtling past drowning out most of the sense.

  We might be grandfather and granddaughter, so politely, so gravely does he seat me, help me with my coat, with no gesture of the erotic, nothing but the most decorous intimacy. Of course everyone knows what we are, but no one smirks or winks, we fit an established human paradigm—old, powerful man, young woman. I fancy he can’t help but notice certain looks of congratulation directed at him by other men. Sometimes, though, I think I see a flicker of grandfatherly boredom from Edgar and my stomach knots up with the wish to please. Or perhaps I just imagine his instants of inattention. He returns his attention to me with a smile. My stomach knots up because that’s where I seem to feel things. As a child I got stomachaches, called by the family “Isabel’s stomachaches,” and I still do.

  Then I exert myself to say something amusing, if I can think of it. Or I ask questions about France. That always seems to please him, he enjoys answering and explaining the meanings of words and how things work in France.

  I began to think of buying him a present, to keep things even. I also intensified my efforts to read in French, or sometimes French books translated by Ames.

  It was not my fresh youth (the cliché) that stimulated him. For one thing, I was rather experienced, after all, and for another, he was not old, had not entered the psychological space “age” where he would be charmed by the disparity, incongruity, and rejuvenating potential of our relation, or surprised that a pretty young woman would be interested in him. He had not begun to experience what Mrs. Pace says all old people experience, invisibility to the opposite sex. Women look at him. He is an imposin
g man who has recognition and influence and, apparently, some money, though this I do not know for sure. He had never stopped being attractive to women, so he saw nothing surprising, or nothing too surprising, in my choice. In a way what most charmed me in our affair, what fired my imagination most, was what interested him the least. His history, so ineluctably allied to his smooth good looks and somewhat remote charm, was devastating to me. Nor had he begun to experience any physical diminution, or only what was gradual and imperceptible, nothing pronounced. The slowness of gait had disappeared with the healing of his ankle (though there remained a certain stateliness). Some concerns about the prostate, whatever that is. It’s funny to note, in view of what we know about the harmful effects of sunlight, which gives freckles and wrinkles, that what is kept mostly inside the pants shows little effects of aging and looks at seventy what it must have looked at twenty.

  I invented a regular job to tell Roxy why I couldn’t babysit on Tuesday nights. All through the weekends and Mondays, my mind stayed strangely on the prospect of Tuesday. There is a sense in which intermittent happiness spoils the rest of life, when it ought to spill over into it, igniting it all into a blaze of joy.

  19

  We have evoked history and here it is. . . . we march on all bent over with this baggage. . . . The past kills the future.

  —Michelet

  ENGLISH-SPEAKING, LITERARY Paris is organized around spiffy little bookshop run by a Frenchwoman, Lilliane, who studied at Berkeley, understands American writing, and reveres Mrs. Pace. When American writers have books come out in France (very few do, it seems, and then only ones you never heard of), they go to Lilliane’s bookshop, the Town Crier, to read aloud. Roxy and I went there a time or two to listen to poets Roxy knew. Well-known novelists would draw a crowd of Americans and French alike, jammed in among the bookshelves and jostling on the stairs, this crowding giving to the place an air of intellectual urgency and literary-historical importance, as if it were James Joyce himself about to read. When a volume of Mrs. Pace’s essays came out, she therefore went to the Town Crier to read from it, though she decided just beforehand to read some unpublished passages from her memoir-in-progress instead. “Robert thinks I should try them out on this captive audience,” she explained. Mr. Pace had not come to hear the results of this experiment, was on a business trip.