Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  Behind my wish to give Edgar an expensive present was a wish to be thought of as someone sexy and generous, with perfect taste. Someone to be missed, regretted, and never forgotten. I had given the matter a lot of thought, made inquiries, and now had decided to give him a piece of faience, Old Nevers or Rouen or whatever. I had heard Mrs. Pace and Edgar discuss their collections, and I had heard Stuart Barbee admire Roxy’s dishes when he came to appraise her painting, so it was Stuart I had asked, about dealers and such, and where I might find something not too expensive. Of course he knew a dealer at the Marché aux Puces who specialized in the kind of thing I had in mind.

  I had the address in hand. Stall H. Martin, which had a look of permanence and expertise, was clearly one of the stationary establishments of the flea market which deal in objects of great price. There were beautiful platters and tureens in the window. I had copied the markings on the bottom of Mrs. Pace’s tureen, and thrust this at the man—a plump type in his forties, turning bald—and said, “Je voudrais, je cherche, un cadeau,” and so on, whereupon he immediately switched to English, as they usually do. He had an English accent, might even have been English, had that raddled, run-down English look too, of people who smoke too much and eat too much sugar and meat.

  “It’s a present for a friend who has a collection,” I said. “I’d like to get him something nice.” The man looked at me pityingly, I guess knowing I was in for a shock when he revealed his prices.

  “These things are dear,” he said. “They don’t come cheaply.”

  “I know,” I said. I had realized at least that much from the general reverence surrounding them.

  He studied the markings on my piece of paper. “I don’t have many pieces of this kind. I have a friend, there are dealers who do. My friend can sometimes lay hands on things like this—he knows the collectors. I could take your name. Are you American?”

  “Yes, American. I need—it’s for Christmas, I need it soon.”

  “Why don’t you look at these little assiettes, they’re Quimper, about a hundred years old, anyone would like them, what beauties.” He drew me to the window, to a set of small plates arranged like the most charming painting. I could see why people like dishes, so tangible and inviting to the fingertips. These had smiling birds on olive branches tied with bows.

  “A pitcher? Or a little vase?” I asked, thinking of something more important, rounder.

  “Where in America?”

  “Santa Barbara.”

  “Lucky you. Does your friend like Delft? I also have a charming little cow. Look at this,” he said, lifting down a platter. “This is late seventeenth century, one of the earliest pieces I have. Just a little repair here.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just know he was swept away by Old Rouen.”

  “I perhaps could get something,” he said. “My friend might. I have some photos, if you’d like to look at those. Mind, these are important objects, big money. Do you know what you’d like to spend?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that if Roxy’s picture sold well, some of the money ought to be mine. Then I could buy anything. I know it sounds goody-goody to say you haven’t thought of money, but I hadn’t, until then, where the picture was concerned, it had always been so thoroughly Roxy’s. Plus it had been hard to think of selling something that had always been on the wall of your house, it was like selling the doorknobs. But now I understood avarice, and my soul burned with the thought that I ought to have some of the picture money, and I relished the idea of buying something hugely expensive for Edgar, something, specifically, that cost as much as a Kelly.

  “Sometimes collectors put things on consignment—here are some pictures,” he said, bringing out a fat envelope of photographs. “What they are, dates and so on, are on the back.” Since I didn’t have much idea of what I wanted, there wasn’t much point in looking at them, but I turned them over out of politeness—tureens, platters, vases, little porcelain statues, all more or less important-looking, large and elaborate, and I was pretty sure out of my price range. One thing that struck me was that all these objects were photographed in rooms, on tables or sideboards, shown off to advantage.

  It was thus that I recognized Mrs. Pace’s tureen, because it sat on her sideboard in the dining room I knew very well. Unbelieving, I turned the photo over. Old Rouen, and all the same markings. It was all I could do to dissemble and pass on to the next photograph. Then came back to it, as if weighing it, to be sure I wasn’t mistaken. How could this be?

  “That one? One like that?” the man asked.

  “Yes, like this,” I said. “This is what I want.”

  “That is a major piece,” he said, taking the photo and studying it. He handed it back. It was now I realized that this could easily be a photograph I myself had taken; I had taken just such views of her rooms, and given the film to Stuart Barbee. One in particular had been just this shot, of her specially prized tureen, the candlestick moved to one side.

  “Something on that order,” I said.

  There are some things that defy explanation, and are too odd, too creepy, to think about directly. I thanked the man and rose, said I would be thinking about what exactly I could pay, what I wanted, I would come back. I must have rushed off in a manner he thought odd. There were lots of explanations, of course, the most obvious being that Mrs. Pace had thought of selling her tureen. Somehow, though, I think I would have known about that.

  “Thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” says Mrs. Pace. “That is the characteristically French way of thinking about anything.” My thesis was that some sort of scam involved Mrs. Pace’s tureen. The antithesis was that she planned to sell it, and had somehow entered it into the world list of salable items through which it had become known to this guy. There was something I was missing, but I never got it. One night I dreamt a synthesis, but it was too odd to survive the morning review.

  I decided not to mention any of this to Mrs. Pace for the moment. All the same, a few days later, I called the guy and told him I wanted the tureen in the photo, or one just like it. He said it might take a few weeks.

  About Bosnia, there was the difference between Roxy and me that whereas hers was the indignant sympathy of a bleeding heart, mine was an awakened life of the head, if you like, a fascination with the great board game of realpolitik, and my own part in it, humble as it was, setting up chairs. Had I cared about the USC football team? Had I been excited by the slimy creatures in freshman Marine Biology? Possibly. I had a memory of other excitements but they had been paltry compared to this.

  Sex was part of it. If desire is electrical energy charging up your cells, which is what it feels like, then not having sex would be to produce something corrosive in you, like what leaks out of old batteries. So whereas our affair was at first, for me, about politics, about the romance of political morality, it became about sex too. Appetite comes with eating, said Rabelais. A very experienced man knows things I didn’t know.

  Once, giving in to my demands, Edgar said, “Dear God, think how funny everyone thought the fate of your Nelson Rockefeller.” Nelson Rockefeller was a New York governor, apparently, who died at the home of his young mistress, everyone said while doing it.

  Perhaps this is just a hot-blooded time in life. Or perhaps I had the extra interest in lovemaking that went with political involvement. But it also went along with the rest of life being a little boring, for I found my walks with Gennie or Scamp or the two of them boring, found helping Stuart Barbee and Con empty their cave boring, painting their dining room boring. I had an overqualified feeling, whereas an affair with a sophisticated man of state is a challenge. And Mrs. Pace was a challenge.

  But basically, it was the mysteries of heavy Serbian matériel that absorbed me, and also those of la foufoune and la bite—the pussy and cock—and the dinner that followed the mysteries, with its own elaborate rituals and elaborated refinements, works of genius in cabbage (Saint Jacques aux choux à l’orange, chou
farci). And now, my little cabbage . . .

  La foufoune, a word I learned from Yves, made Edgar laugh when I used it, though shortly afterward he inquired, peevishly, where I could have heard such words. I could see that his impulse was to make me explain, and that he mastered the impulse.

  We had agreed to be discreet, so it surprised me that we went everywhere in public—movies, meetings, restaurants. Perhaps there was a convention by which, if you didn’t live in Paris, what you did in Paris was overlooked.

  At a certain point, making love, you stop thinking about the other person and think of yourself, or if think is not the right word, feel—but not emotion, I mean sensation—when you want the feeling to go on and on, sensations of the hand, the lips, the cock. I began to want it in the mornings when I woke up, only he was of course not there. I was a cat in heat. I even slept a time or two with Yves, which seemed easier than breaking off with him, and made me feel better, too, which was odd, because you would think that being in love, as I was with Edgar Cosset, would make one less, not more, inclined to do flighty stuff like that.

  I knew I was changing. I also began to have vulnerable emotional feelings, like a woman, and could understand Roxy’s ravings about destiny and luck. I never used to exert myself with men to be amusing or even nice; being pretty and doing it with them was enough. But now I was really trying. With my dictionary I labored through accounts of the war in Le Monde Diplomatique, and love advice in Frou-Frou magazine.

  Le sexe n’est pas l’unique zone érogène de l’homme. Le plaisir érotique, c’est aussi une question de technique . . . Prenez l’initiative! On peut prendre son pied en s’empalant sur la partie de son anatomie que . . . Goutez chaque centimètre de peau. . . . il faut l’étonner. . . .

  I learned, for instance, that if you drink a little tisane of orange and rosewater or mint, it perfumes your own juices. I feel I never would have found that out in Santa Barbara. I learned this French erotic secret from Janet Hollingsworth, with whom Roxy and I had coffee one afternoon. “I’ve ferreted out a good one,” she said. “Did you know that . . . ?” Quite a lot of tisane, though—a whole teapotful is required, she said.

  21

  Paris, city of amusements, pleasures, etc., where four-fifths of the inhabitants are dying of unhappiness.

  —Nicolas de Chamfort

  UNLIKE MRS. PACE, Edgar did not believe in lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnians, conflicting in this with those French intellectuals who had taken the tack, believed in by Americans too, of letting the Bosnian Muslims defend themselves. Edgar believed in French intervention, through the NATO alliance, though he had begun to think it was too late even for that.

  It became known that the Bosnian Serbs, having agreed to withdraw their cannons from around Sarajevo, were now stealing them back and trundling them off to bombard other villages and towns. This treachery affected Roxy as vividly as if these renegade guns were now pointed at the rue Maître Albert. Her color, already high and flushed with her pregnancy, deepened to a dangerous-looking plum, her eyes shot indignant fire, she tried to pick up conversations in the market, or sitting with Tammy or Anne-Chantal in the Brasserie Espoir.

  Since Roxy’s troubles began, all the denizens of the Place Maubert have seemed singled out for domestic catastrophe, beginning with the dramatic elopement of Jérôme Lartigue, the theatrical designer, with an American editress, an act of midlife crisis that had struck all the neighborhood as being, at the least, un-French. Anne-Chantal, his wife of thirty years, was so stunned she did not speak for several weeks. The next to break up were Tammy de Bretteville (American like us) and her husband Hugues, and most recently Djuna and Serge, the Serbo-Croatian couple we had long thought riveted by political solidarity against the madness in their country (he had been the Serbian ambassador). They are so poor that they remain together in their same apartment, each shopping in the market at different hours, grim, with separate baskets of turnips and kale.

  Both Tammy and Anne-Chantal had written eloquent letters for Roxy’s divorce dossier, but these women did not think much about politics.

  “Such savagery, how can human beings act like that?” Roxy would moan at each new Serbian incursion, her mind reviewing all human perfidy. These days human perfidy was never far from her mind.

  “Mais, the Serbs are all right,” said Anne-Chantal, “they were abused horribly in the war, hein? The Croats murdered millions of them, no wonder they want revenge.”

  “Everyone’s ancestors were murdered by somebody,” cried Roxy. “What will happen in the world if people can’t forget the past?”

  “And the Muslims, what do they want but a foothold for Islam in Europe, that deserves a thought, surely?” Anne-Chantal went on.

  “That’s not true!” Roxy disagreed. “The Bosnian Muslims are perfectly secular.”

  “Alors, I hope you are prepared to wear the veil?” said Anne-Chantal.

  I was not getting along too well with Roxy. She had got very picky about what I was supposed to be doing, or what she supposed I was supposed to be doing, to help her; and in a rather small-minded way, I felt she ought to be grateful, not critical, it being after all not me who made her marry a Frenchman and launch into a divorce, pregnancies, financial problems, et cetera. I thought I was being nice. I thought I was being a prince to Roxy, actually. It seemed to me that I was the only stable parent poor little Gennie had, and that she shouldn’t be put all that time in the crèche, every day, and that with Roxy not working (for she sometimes skipped going to her studio and moped around the house), it wasn’t necessary.

  “You watch her all day then,” snapped Roxy.

  Of course, she was depressed, and things were going badly with the divorce. She was now thinking that if she hadn’t said anything about sending the painting home, no one would have thought about it. As it was, it had been identified by the lawyers as their only possession, apart from one or two old bureaus and a table from the Persands, that might have value, and thus would have to be divided between them, and thus would have to be sold.

  Roxy proclaimed her indignation far and wide. “Outrageous,” the American community agreed. “Even in primitive societies the husband’s family gives back the dowry if they send the woman back to her own tribe.”

  “Not always,” put in the anthropologist Rex Rhett-Valy in his reedy Bloomsbury voice. “In India among certain villagers, they keep the cows and burn the spurned bride besides.”

  We in Paris did not fully appreciate at this time the emotional havoc being created in California by the vagaries of French law. Roxy’s picture had already been appraised by Stuart Barbee at forty thousand dollars. Antoine, Charles-Henri’s brother, was now suggesting a second valuation. “It is a normal thing, we all know that experts can vary quite widely in their opinions. Just to be sure what is correct.”

  This had infuriated Roxy, because it implied that the Persands believed it to be worth more, and thought American appraisers were untrustworthy or in our pay, or thought Roxy was keeping the value low so she could more easily buy Charles-Henri out. But even at forty thousand, Roxy had no prospect of twenty thousand dollars to pay Charles-Henri his half, nor did they have enough property between them to count it against the value of the other things. She had telephoned Chester and Margeeve to ask them to help, knowing in advance that they’d say they didn’t have twenty thousand to spend on a depressing religious picture that belonged to them anyway.

  Roger had gone bananas about this, absolutely ape. Though I doubt he had ever really looked at the picture, he had an active sense of its having come from our side of the family and in a way not being Roxy’s at all. Margeeve described it, but anyway I could imagine Roger’s particularly overbearing, vulgar way of fuming, egged on by Jane. “It’s mine and Isabel’s, what the fuck do I care about French law, it’s goddamned mine.”

  Margeeve had half hoped Chester would be struck quixotically by the wish to ransom the picture, and in time for the Getty show, though she perfectly well kne
w they couldn’t spare the money, and if they could they’d spend it on something more sensible.

  “Poor Rox,” she said, after one of the many phone calls. “She’s hoping for a miracle of Saint Ursula.”

  “What I can’t grasp,” said Chester, in a tone that revealed his real irritation, “is why he gets anything at all, when he’s the guilty party and he doesn’t even pretend otherwise.”

  “I don’t understand that either,” Margeeve admitted.

  “Maybe you should just bring it home with you,” Roger said to me on the phone. “How could they stop you?”

  Would it have made a difference if I had? It would have been simple enough back then. Would it have averted tragedy? I was too selfish and too indifferent to the situation to think of interrupting my pleasures, my nice life in France.

  “I can’t come home right now, I’m helping Mrs. Pace with something, I promised, I, obligation, jobs . . .” I was stammering with horror at the idea of going back to California. “Why don’t you come get it?”

  “Maybe I will,” Roger said. His rage was not at me, of course, but there were overtones in the timbre of his bellowing that resurrected childhood quarrels, between us, Roxy and Judith, and the occasions where our parents had taken sides unfairly with their own kids—though they had been scrupulous, usually, about not falling into that trap.

  At his offices, Roger was looking into other issues of international law and art property. Roxy and I would hardly know our dear brother Roger in the company of his lawyer colleagues, cupidity sparkling in their talk. Roger’s attitude to the painting was as an object of value belonging to our family, but also, in the company of his colleagues, a case, a test of law and cleverness, a patriotic issue and a personal challenge.