Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  Roxy and I got there early, so that Roxy could sit comfortably and I could help Mrs. Pace by carrying books and Lilliane by putting out plastic cups. It’s wise to get there early if you hope to get a seat on the few chairs set up on the mezzanine in front of an oak table where the reader sits. The rest of the audience then packs standing up into the back of the mezzanine or sits on the metal stairs that lead down to the main room of the bookshop. In the case of very famous authors, people stand down there too, sometimes too crowded to budge, and a microphone amplifies the reader’s voice so they can hear.

  I had known that Mrs. Pace was a famous writer (and now had read some of her works) but was unprepared for the crush of admirers, not necessarily the ones who usually come to the Town Crier readings. Many were evidently her old friends, both French and American, and the reading couldn’t get under way promptly because she had to talk to them on her progress across the ground floor and up the stairs. I thought I had met a lot of the Americans in Paris; all of the people I had met were here—the Randolphs, Stuart Barbee, Ames; Tammy de Bretteville, more French-looking than a French lady in her Inès de la Fressange suit; the important cultural figure David Croswell (rich and philanthropic); Rev. Dragon, in charge of the American Church. But here also were unknown grand-looking businessmen and lawyers, very perfumed, in coats, and rather down-at-the-heels-looking men in their seventies, of whom she knew some in each group. There were women in couture and women in jeans. An elegant black woman in Armani (these couture diagnoses given by Mrs. Pace later), her Afro managed into a chignon, important gold jewelry, had formerly been a member of a Los Angeles street gang that carried guns and beat up people on buses. Now she lives in Paris and reads Céline, and Mrs. Pace invites her to dinner.

  Since that night I have learned that there are thirty thousand Americans in Paris living here or just hanging out, refugees from America like Roxy, people working, or people who just blundered in, like me.

  Lilliane effusively introduced Mrs. Pace, “the great American writer, honored by the President of the United States, the Library of Congress, Yale University, blah blah blah. . . .” Mrs. Pace listened to the entire encomium with an unchanging smile of wary vigilance. Then she settled her imposing body forward in her chair and began to read from her memoirs-in-progress, a safe little excerpt about visiting Paris in the forties and meeting Louis Aragon.

  In the discussion period afterward, she was asked what she said later were the usual things, such as “How do you think of what to write?”

  “Do you use a computer?”

  “No.”

  “What with the loss of faith and mass alienation, Joseph Campbell has said we need to invent new myths. Do you agree?” asked someone with a slightly New York accent.

  “It would be agreeable to me if people learned to do without religion and other myths and deal with reality,” she replied.

  “How do you remember everything, or do you take notes?”

  This was a question that interested her. She leaned forward. “I’ve never understood the proper role of memory in life. I feel I may have spent too long assembling the materials for my memoir and not enough just getting on with it, but I had a dread of being pulled back into the past, to the detriment of day-to-day life, as if you can’t live in two places. In principle, memory is to inform the present, by allowing you to learn from your mistakes. Why go back? I am not by temperament an historian. I would rather think about the present.”

  A French youth in leather jacket asked her, if that was the case, what she thought of the present French position on Bosnia. I couldn’t help but glance down the stairwell at Edgar, who could just be seen below, wearing a raincoat, face turned up toward the voices on the mezzanine, without possibility of mounting through the thickly gathered admirers. I thought of how just two nights ago I had seen him on a platform with two other men, at the mairie of the fourteenth Arrondissement, saying, “J’ai honte de cette lâcheté, cette indifférence, double langage, c’est tout.” Indifference, laxity, doubletalk.

  “Well, I think they are wrong in maintaining the embargo against the Bosnian Muslims,” she said. “They are being butchered without the means to defend themselves.”

  “Haven’t you ever read Black Lamb and Gray Falcon?” asked Ames Everett from the back of the mezzanine. “They’ve been at it in the Balkans for seven hundred years.”

  “That doesn’t mean they should be permitted to go on,” said Mrs. Pace. I had heard Edgar say the same.

  “What would you do, Olivia?” complained Rex Rhett-Valy in his whiney British voice. Mrs. Pace was silent, for if she didn’t know something she wouldn’t bluster.

  Here Roxy broke in, her face red, her hand held up as if she were hoping to be called on at school. “I’d round up all the Serb men and the older boys, and then I’d remove the younger boys to other countries where they could grow up with decent values and forget their repulsive ethnic obsessions.” At this other people began to contribute opinions, everyone at once, without listening to each other. I tended to hear the familiar voices among the throng of others.

  “We should just build a wall around the place and say, ‘Call us when you’re done,’ ” said Rhett-Valy.

  “They’ve been at it for centuries, like the North and South Koreans,” said Stuart Barbee.

  “Yet, there are worse things than dying for your country,” said Cleve Randolph.

  “Dying for nothing would be one,” said Roxy.

  “Like our men in Vietnam,” added Mrs. Pace. “Men who died for nothing.” At this provocation, the room erupted into another fury of objection, agreement, and accusation. Roxy looked at me frightened, as if she’d dug up a hand grenade.

  “It was people like you who made sure they were dying for nothing,” shouted Cleve Randolph at Mrs. Pace. “Protesters. Sneerers like you.”

  “We owe our country something,” agreed Stuart Barbee.

  “It was our duty to our country to stop it from an immoral war,” said Mrs. Pace.

  “It’s because of people like you our country has fallen into the hands of a redneck draft dodger now,” shouted Cleve Randolph.

  “Did any of these people serve in Vietnam?” wondered Rhett-Valy, near me, to no one in particular. Mrs. Pace regained control.

  “Women, more than half the population of America, did not believe in that war,” she said in a tone of great asperity. “These revisionists now bleating about ‘draft dodgers’ have forgotten that those young men in the sixties had mothers and sisters who told them it was an immoral war. Whatever their senators and draft boards may have told them, men do not usually defy the wishes of women.”

  “Yes, exactly. Women feel a sense of duty too!” said Roxy from the audience.

  “I never would have allowed Drew and Choco to serve in Vietnam,” Mrs. Pace went on, with her great conviction of right. “I considered it was my duty to my country to divert it from its wicked course.” Mrs. Pace looked at me and I jumped. I was a million miles away, reflecting that men defy the wishes of women all the time.

  “Should humanity tolerate people who would bomb a hospital?” shouted Roxy, thinking perhaps of Bosnia again.

  “Like your beloved Stalin,” shouted Cleve Randolph at Mrs. Pace.

  “I was a Trotskyite,” smiled Mrs. Pace with her famous smile.

  I can hardly describe what happened next, it developed so quickly, like a boulder coming at you down a slope. Amid shouts of Lenin! Trotsky! Vietnam! Draft-dodger! Serb, Croat, Muslim! calm American people began to get to their feet, and to shout and push on the stairs. The accumulated rancor, wherever it had come from—from history, evidently—was palpable as heat. People denounced each other and clattered their chairs. I saw that Stuart Barbee was attempting to descend the stairs, pushing others who indignantly pushed back, and the Englishman Rhett-Valy was saying “I say!” over and over, menaced by a young woman with an umbrella. Cleve Randolph was shaking his fists and continuing his diatribe against Mrs. Pace.

  �
�We could have got the job done and got out, it was people like you,” he kept saying. Someone struck him. Peg—Mrs. Randolph—caught my eye, but it was as if she no longer recognized me, she was raptly involved in the general rising mood. Lilliane herself was downstairs crying mesdames! messieurs! with an expression of growing bafflement and panic. Donald Jose Minikan, the sporting goods heir, whom I now observed at one corner of the room, appeared to be thinking of how to rescue Mrs. Pace, extending his arm to her over the crowd as if with the strength of his forearm he could lift her up and safely out of the melee. “Yes, that’s the point, Dien Bien Phu,” said a young Frenchman to me. “Nobody learned the lesson of Dien Bien Phu.”

  At the sound of the intemperate American ravings, the few French people (many of whom, Lilliane told me, have no interest in American letters but come to improve their English, the way they also attend AA meetings at the American Church), and the prudent of whatever nation, began to increase their efforts to escape. A red-haired woman was jostled, stumbled, half fell between the ladderlike open treads, her leg in an opaque stocking of loden green dangling into the room below like a mossy twig, and this person was uttering a series of abandoned cries. I was pinned behind the oak table with Mrs. Pace as, in the jostle, the table was pressed against us. The metal stairs rang. Down below, the melee seemed to expand into a throng of heads and heaving fists. Edgar, lost from sight amid it, had now appeared near us on the mezzanine and taken Roxy by the arm, helping her down the stairs, his other arm, elbow first, protecting them.

  Screams rose from downstairs, as from cattle in a burning barn, when an entire bookcase was pulled over, people pinned beneath, and a heap of limbs and books sticking out from under, like the witch in her red shoes, with Lilliane screaming an operatic top note of mesdames! messieurs!

  This scary accident focused the gallant to assist the victims, while the sensible fled out the door. Gingerly, Mrs. Pace and I pushed back the table now crushing our thighs and slid out from behind it. Mrs. Pace was smiling with great enjoyment.

  “My word, who would have thought these passions remain so vital?” she said. “It’s rather a disappointing ending to the soirée. I had several more pages I planned to read. I had expected the indignation would come when I described Jean-Paul Sartre. I was going to read the part where I had to comment the day he died. ‘Wasn’t he a giant?’ they asked me on French television, and when I pointed out he was really very short, they didn’t play it. They never can stand the truth.”

  “The French?” I said.

  “Despite their vaunted rationalism. Well, Americans aren’t any better, as we have seen,” she conceded.

  Everyone gathered in confusion in the street outside, waiting to see if the police or pompiers had been called, or deciding what to do for dinner. “Just like the night of the reading in support of Salman Rushdie,” someone said.

  “That was because everyone was afraid to go inside,” someone else said.

  “I’d like you to meet my mother-in-law’s brother, Monsieur Cosset,” said Roxy to Mrs. Pace.

  “But of course I know Monsieur Cosset,” said Mrs. Pace, extending her hand, which he, astonishingly, made as if to kiss, which I had never seen him do, though I had seen it done, a sort of tug upward of the hand and a bob of the head over it. I must say, it floored me the first time I realized this was not just the province of effete aristocrats in costume movies, a gesture invented by American filmmakers to symbolize European forms of subjection and obeissance they had fled to avoid, but an actual vestigial custom. How weird!

  “All this time, Edgar, I never realized you were related to Roxeanne,” said Mrs. Pace.

  “Merci de m’avoir sauvé.” Roxy smiled at Oncle Edgar, deliberately (perhaps) switching the conversation into French, which excluded me.

  I gathered, however, that we were all going back to Mrs. Pace’s, including Edgar, who now seemed to be appended to Roxy, committed to seeing her safely home. I couldn’t help but wonder, as we walked the few blocks and ascended to the Pace apartment, under what circumstances he and Olivia Pace had known each other. Had he been one of her zillions of lovers, for example? Would Olivia’s files reveal this eventually? Now, it seemed, what they had in common was political moral zeal, for the conversation, carefully steered back into English by Edgar, returned to Bosnia.

  “At the time we completely sympathized with the bombing of Cambodia,” he was saying. “You imagine you can tear down things and start afresh. We know you can only rebuild on the ruins of what has gone before. Each new edifice must use old bricks, old stones, the rubble of old sites.” I remember he said this, as the conversation ranged among the various errors and miscalculations of history, and the peculiar inability of Americans (in Edgar’s view) to deal with it.

  “Baggage is another metaphor,” Roxy said. “We are always told to get rid of our old baggage.”

  “That’s what’s the matter with you Americans. In your baggage was some nice old stuff. Old family recipes, say. Why assume the old baggage was filled with triste mementos and dirty socks? French people have no such delusions. They know that if you throw away your baggage you will be bare.”

  “Optimism, illusion, are good qualities all the same,” Roxy said.

  “I don’t really agree,” said Mrs. Pace. “They have a fatuous side.”

  “Nor I,” said Edgar. “When he is disappointed, the American goes into a rage. As you did in Somalia, say. A fit of childish impotence. While realism—if you expect what is likely to happen, you are never disappointed.”

  That’s right, I thought. That is my philosophy. Maybe it’s why I’ve begun to feel at home in France. Roxy is the American, after all. All the same I felt obliged to say that I myself had had nothing to do with Somalia, why lump all Americans in together, Europeans were always doing that.

  “This is beautiful, Olivia, what is this?” Edgar asked. He was looking at her handsome soup tureen, which occupies in a queenly way the top of the sideboard in her dining room.

  “Old Nevers. You might think Rouen, from the glaze.”

  “No, I didn’t think Rouen, because of the underglaze,” he said. “But those must be Rouen,” he said, indicating a pair of vases.

  “Levasseur, Rouen. ‘Aux Oiseaux,’ ” said Mrs. Pace happily.

  I was feeling a blaze of negative emotion this particular night, an unworthy, petulant unhappiness I would not have liked to admit to. Part of me understood why Edgar would rescue the heavily pregnant Roxy, but part of me was hurt that he had not so much as looked my way. I know I am not the sort of person who gets rescued, because I am not, in the mind of others, the sort of person who gets hurt. Only in my own mind does this possibility arise with, I have to admit, increasing frequency. That I will get hurt.

  So I felt jealous that Edgar had seen to Roxy with not a glance for me, and jealous of an imagined past in which Mrs. Pace had had a part, however slight, that they could speak of now, jealous of their two minds stuffed with political facts and the confidence of their opinions, of their right to have opinions. I was even jealous of their age, and of their knowledge of the past—of the past I had never thought of—Vietnam, the Balkans, World War Two, all the things that had made people smash up the Town Crier. Why had these things not come to my notice in California? Where was California? Why was I so outside the life of the world?

  Much later, I asked Cleve Randolph about this night. I was helping the Randolphs cut little squares of bread to make into canapes, and skewering bits of bacon and chicken liver together for their cocktail party. “Why was it so important to have gone to Vietnam but not important to stop the forces of evil in Bosnia?”

  “Vietnam was going Communist,” he said.

  “So what was so bad about Communism?” I asked. No one had ever actually said. Grayness was all I had figured out. Just as no one had ever actually explained what exactly the Europeans had against Jews. The Communists didn’t seem to me nearly as bad as the Serbs. “I mean, they didn’t have rape camps.” I still
think the answers to these questions are not self-evident.

  “The Communists killed many more people than Hitler,” he finally said, tersely. “Stalin killed millions.”

  “But he’s been dead for years,” I pointed out.

  Edgar had actually answered my question with something he had said on the radio. The point is to resist despotism in all its forms; all despots are alike or become alike, and their poison spreads. Which, today, meant Serbs. I could see that I have much to understand about history and, specifically, how it is transmitted in such a burning form.

  20

  The magic of love—who could ever describe it? Certainty of having found the one being destined for us by nature, sudden light shed upon life itself and apparently explaining its mystery, unsuspected value conferred upon the most trifling circumstances, flying hours whose details elude the memory through their very sweetness. . . .

  —Adolphe

  I WAS CHANGING, in my blood and energy, and it had to do with Edgar, though I could not have said how. In part it was the excitement of political consciousness. Perhaps in other circumstances I could have been turned on to something else. Perhaps if Edgar had been a stockbroker, I would have thrilled to the thrum of the ticker tape and learned to read the Dow.