Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  “I would say, first of all, not so fast,” he advised Roxy. “The jurisdiction is by no means clear. For one thing, a bequest or a gift is not community property. You were married in California, a community-property state, so in principle there’s no net gain to a divorce here, but a California court would be more likely to recognize the moral situation. You hear that French courts, when it comes to property, are perfectly indifferent to unwritten understandings and that sort of thing. I think we ought to explore the idea of Roxy coming home, eventually suing for divorce in California. That would render moot the issue of whether she could bring the painting back here, besides. And it could clarify custody issues, since a California court would probably award custody to the American.”

  “The only trouble with that is that she intends to go on living in France,” Chester pointed out.

  “Let Roger talk. She thinks that’s what she wants right now,” said Margeeve, never for one moment doubting that Roxy would ultimately return to America, like a normal person.

  Another short scene at about the same time, which we couldn’t then have known about, relating to our painting by an élève de La Tour:

  The sixteenth Arrondissement. A very large room, book-strewn, a few pieces of inherited Directoire furniture and a splendid terre cuite by Clodion of three muses encircled, one missing an arm.

  “Have you seen the La Tour?” asks Stuart Barbee of Phil Jacob. They are in Stuart’s apartment. Jacob is the elderly American art expert, longtime resident of Paris, who famously had been the friend of Soutine.

  “Absolutely not,” says Jacob. “It’s much better if it has never been looked at by me.”

  “How so?”

  “The Persand family already asked me to value it and I said I was too busy. Just my looking at it drives the price up. I’m sure they realized that. The mere act of my looking at it brings the piece into the realm of the possibly authentic La Tours.”

  “At whose behest, may I ask, did you turn them down?” Stuart laughs.

  “No, you may not ask.” Jacob too laughs. “Besides, you know very well. Have you seen our friend Desmond, by the way?”

  Things between Roxy and me continued to be not perfect. The handsome leather Kelly continued in some way to come between us, to her symbolizing my disloyalty.

  But Roxy was behaving strangely in general. The day before the first terrible event, she had come home excited, odd, flushed, babbling as if on drugs.

  “I went to Chartres,” she said. “When I went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to see the Della Bella drawings, it was closed, so I just thought, bon, I’ll go to Chartres instead and see if I can’t find her. Otherwise it’ll be a week before anyone can look for her again. I’m not even sure when Charlotte put her there. She wouldn’t have any idea of how to find Suzanne’s house, she’d always lived in Neuilly. She’d just wander in the woods, following a bird or hiding from a fox.”

  Only then did I realize she was talking about Charlotte’s cat. “I don’t think foxes eat cats,” I assured her.

  “A cat could climb a tree, it’s true. Oh, Iz, I know I’m not going to die, people don’t die from childbirth anymore, but I feel I’m going to. How long can a cat live in the wild on her own?”

  “Well, indefinitely. A resourceful cat,” I said.

  “Anyway, I didn’t find her. I did find a cat. It was dead, I guess struck by a car. It was wearing a collar. Its eyes were bulging out. But it was a ginger cat, not Siamese.”

  Now she was saying, “I should have talked to that guy, Magda’s husband. I should have tried to calm him down and listened to what he had to say. Maybe he knows something, could think of something. I walked on all the paths near where we park, Charlotte would have parked there too. Now look at my ankles. I guess I have to go to the doctor. Ankle swelling can mean a lot of things. Somebody’s lovely ginger cat, wearing a collar, some family missing her.

  “It can’t be good for a pregnant woman to see death. I felt that. It can’t be just an old wives’ tale that things affect the baby, because I have such a sense of having conveyed something horrible to him. If it’s too horrible or he is too frail, he won’t want to be born. I feel it as a sort of heaving drilling sensation here.” She touched her side, where the distension of her belly began.

  “And now look at my ankles, it’s some sort of toxin that can kill you, the baby too, I know it.”

  “Maybe we should call the doctor,” I said. “Or Suzanne.”

  How strange, I thought, that we had to look to Suzanne for mothering, even while she was engaged in trying to take Roxy’s things and in feeding her rival. We both needed a mother, but Roxy especially. I had Mrs. Pace.

  22

  The appetite grows by eating.

  —Rabelais

  ROXY WAS DISTRAUGHT, but I was happy. I realized it in the course of my yearly soul-searching, which for me isn’t New Year’s but occupies about five minutes on October twenty-third, my birthday. I came home late from hearing Edgar at a meeting in the fourteenth Arrondissement. It was not cold, not particularly, but it was frosty, and the moon was out, silvering the scene with a rimy mist, a glowing, promising light, and there were as many people in the street as at noon, and it made me happy.

  If ever you dare say you are happy. Not that you say yes, this is happiness; it is more that looking back on the previous months, I could see I had changed in a way consistent with a person who was happy, thoughts taken up with events and subjects external to myself. Reviewing my character, I was smugly self-congratulatory about my fidelity to my jobs with Ames Everett, the Randolphs, and others, jobs I no longer needed and wanted to dump as they intruded on the afternoons. Especially I wanted to dump my dog-walking of Scamp. Though I had grown fond of Scamp, and Gennie liked Scamp too—so sometimes I would walk him over to the crèche when I picked her up, thus fulfilling two of my routine duties at once—I felt I could do more important things. I only kept on because I had agreed to, and I suspected I was only wanted so Ames could have this guy in in the afternoon, his gym instructor, for sex.

  I was happy. I had sex, mystery, romance, and instructional topics. The probably unhappy denouement of a preoccupying affair—for how could it end otherwise?—was still I hoped far off. I had challenges: the French language, new reading, little nudges of cultural improvement from Mrs. Pace, even my new fondness for little Gennie. I was surrounded by beauty (Paris) and art, and had begun to experience, for the first time in an authorized way, a life of the mind. However rudimentary my life of the mind, it was definitely more evolved than what had been encouraged (or rather, subtly discouraged) in high school in Santa Barbara, and at the University of Southern California, at least in the film school, at least for women.

  You can be anything you want to be, Isabel, people had always said to me. Everyone—Chester, Margeeve, my teachers. They were always saying that, and I always knew it wasn’t true. It was a conspiracy of delusion. “A healthy, pretty American girl—you can be anything you want to be.” But what did I want to be? I didn’t want to be anything. That is, each reasonable possibility, given that I was not to be a ballerina, pianist, doctor, or movie star, was too disgusting: personnel manager? psychologist? What horrors were suggested to me.

  Roxy always wanted to be a poet, so it was easy for her. But I had never wanted to confine myself to anything. No role was adequate to a big curiosity I had, not about anything in particular, just a huge sense of curiosity. Not that anyone would have believed me if I had tried to describe it. “You could find out about a lot of things if you’d get up before noon,” they would have said.

  So I am trying to characterize the magic, satisfaction, and slight vainglory of my mood at the time of my birthday. Things were interesting almost for the first time I could remember. I had suddenly come to feel that California was not interesting, not because there were not books and lovers and jobs, concerts and Frederick’s of Hollywood, but someone had to show you where to find and how to consume these cultural advantages. If you didn
’t know where to look, you could pass your whole life with no sense of what you were missing. I was conscious that if I tried to explain this to Chester and Margeeve, they would turn on me in a fury and point out how they had tried to take me since childhood to improving cultural events and I had preferred to sulk at home and smoke dope.

  Not that I was not still a loyal Californian, but I knew that in California, though I might have been able to find, say, this book I was reading by a Turk named Bilge Karasu, at home I would not have read a book by someone named Bilge.

  I could now say, in a conversation with someone Edgar knew, provided they spoke English, “Well, I’m reading the Turkish modernist Bilge Karasu, Calvino, the Dutchman Cees Nooteboom.” And so I was, in translation, of course. Once or twice I detected a faint lift of the eyebrow of l’oncle Edgar, and cooled it on talking like that.

  Once or twice Mrs. Pace said, “Isabel, you have good sense about books, would you say the Nooteboom works?” or some other such question, and we would have an interesting literary discussion. She was not patronizing, she seemed to enjoy it, and she would tell me if my ideas were too wide of the mark.

  I sensed that my cultural progress, or at least my improved disposition, was being viewed with great relief by Roxy and communicated in furtive asides to Margeeve and Chester. For instance: I am sitting with my friend Yves and a thousand other people in an auditorium in the Centre Pompidou. From audio speakers mounted high on the four walls come a variety of singing children’s voices, burbling brook sounds, a cacophony of long organ chords, like the music of the spheres clashing—catastrophic astral sounds. The voices come now from the left, now from the right, now behind me, as if they were popping out from behind trees. The music is in some ways disturbing and reminds me of the lost cat being there stuck inside the speakers. In other ways it is watery, soothing music. I think of Charlotte’s cat, of poor Roxy’s ankles, of Edgar, of how unlikely I would have been in Santa Barbara to hear the music of Stockhausen. It seems, this scene, to epitomize my new Paris life.

  The music of Stockhausen, who is I suppose German, is replaced by that of an Englishman that is much nicer. Yves’s eyes have rolled back in his head with the effort of listening to this new music. Yves resembles all the other members of the audience, slightly rumpled, intense—an audience indistinguishable from such an audience at USC, I suppose. The difference is that this audience includes Isabel Walker, who before would never have consented to be seen with the nerds.

  I mention Frederick’s of Hollywood for I now wear expensive French underwear, the tartiest I could find. Their bras are fine for me because I am not as big on top as Roxy. I toyed with the idea of a garter belt and stockings (framing the V of the crotch, the French expression for setting off being mettre en valeur) but thought that might be going too far. I wore slips brasiliens, curaçaos, culottes de soie, pointus. . . .

  I think some people know subliminally about me and Edgar. Mrs. Pace, Roxy, Ames Everett. They know I’m involved with someone, but no one suspects who. I think Ames finds it disgusting. As I leave him, as I move along on my rounds, late for my job at Olivia Pace’s, I imagine him thinking: She’s not at all virtuous like Roxeanne. Isabel is a little tart, actually, you can smell it sometimes, smell it on her, mindless sex, despite her airs of intellectual precocity.

  I imagine this is how he thinks of me, because he seems to know if I’ve been in bed with someone, and his manner becomes distant, even though he isn’t the least interested in women. He might be Herod, I Salome. He seems both repelled by and drawn to what he perceives as my propensity for vice but is really just an afternoon toss with my secret lover.

  Edgar was a focused lover, passionate and funny, though it’s hard to say why funny. He made me laugh in bed, and gave me pleasure. Neither by itself is enough to make you fall in love. Even together, there must have been something else. It pleased me that he was known, that people spoke to him. France is a small country, and they all watch the same televised roundtable discussions and read the same three newspapers. I know the newspapers had something to do with my eagerness for his arms on Tuesdays. I liked the way he looked at all the parts of me. He said he remembered every mole on every woman he had ever slept with (did not say how many this was), that he just happened to have this kind of explicit visual memory.

  Sometimes I was afraid I was too easily pleased in bed to remain interesting to Edgar, assuming men enjoy the challenge of awakening frosty ice princesses, as I have heard they do. Making me come can’t be much of a challenge, I am not frosty. I find I can’t pretend not to come, though I could, by putting my mind to other things, keep from actually coming. But that is too great a sacrifice, even with the goal of becoming a great courtesan, if frigidity is what is required of them. Am I impeded by my crude, direct sexuality from interesting a sophisticated, nuanced lover?

  I tried once to discuss this with Edgar, though he was lacking some crucial vocabulary in English. It did at least make him laugh.

  Sometimes it makes me laugh to think of the God’s-eye view of us, me with my legs wrapped around the neck of an elderly man, sweaty hair spread on pillow, or, alternatively, me on my elbows and knees, being taken from behind, bracing myself with my forearms, his body covering mine in such a way that he can caress my clit as well as fuck me, a double stimulation, rather like being fucked by two men at once, say two Turkish soldiers, like the ones in the book by Bilge Karasu, Turkish modernist recommended by Mrs. Pace, where the dark city is a metaphor of the soul.

  That book is about torture and political repression, germane to Edgar’s interests. I tried to find it for him in French. In it, nameless torturers nightly choose, arbitrarily, a delightful young man in the street, and set upon him to kill him, and when they are finished, he is nothing but a mound of pulverized flesh. Others come and put sawdust over the bloody mess. The sight of his carcass inspires fear, terror, and submission in the people. Of course, Gorazde must be like that, the images Roxy watched mesmerized on the television news. Roxy watched reality on TV, but refused to read a literary account of torture, saying it was “too horrible.”

  23

  “Yonder,” I said to myself, “some poor wretch may be struggling on in grief, or wrestling with death . . . the certain end which brings neither consolation nor peace.”

  —Adolphe

  IT WAS SOON after my birthday that I stayed one Thursday night at Edgar’s. He had gone on the last train to Avignon, and I was lazing around his apartment, trying to read a book I found on his nightstand. (Tocqueville. “I am ashamed to say I have never read him,” he said. “To confess, I was never much interested in the United States, I just thought them a lost cause. But now that I have become the friend of an American, I find it fascinating. He has an enviable gift for aphorism. And what do you make of this, Isabel? ‘In France, simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachment which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the State. But in America nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues.’ ”)

  We had been talking about whether American movies should be kept out of France. Edgar thought they should.

  “If they’re so bad, why do people go see them? If you love peace and order so much,” I objected.

  “This is an essential difference: You Americans think that if people want something, it must be allowed. Then you punish yourselves with ugliness for indulging what you actually despise. It is that paradox that will destroy you, or so says the philosopher.

  “We French know that people want not what is good but what is easy, and to give in to the lazy side of human nature is not so admirable. We give permission to be saved from our worst nature, or to challenge our better selves, to put it that way.”

  “France is groaning with luxury,” I pointed out. “It is much more luxurious and gourmandish than we are.”

  “Well, and then we reward ourselves for our good character.”

 
Such discussions made me uneasy. Was I a compendium of all American faults and virtues after all? When Edgar had gone, I got to reading Tocqueville myself. Tocqueville says, “The happy and the powerful do not go into exile.” Was this true? Applying it to Roxy and me?

  Eventually I fell asleep. When I woke up it was morning. I didn’t worry about this, as Roxy doesn’t expect me to be home nights if we haven’t prearranged that I was needed to babysit, and she doesn’t check as to whether I am. I sometimes didn’t go down to her apartment to have breakfast until after she had left for the crèche with Gennie, so she didn’t always expect to see me in the morning.

  Paris is clean and wet in the mornings with the ministrations of street sweepers in bright green uniforms who slosh the flooded gutters with their plastic brooms and make little river dams out of pieces of old carpet. As I came up out of the metro at almost exactly eight-thirty, the fat-bristled machines were just swishing by, the Brasserie Espoir had a few people drinking coffee or taking a coup de rouge, a man rushed by pulling on his blue work smock. The streets were otherwise deserted. At nine-thirty suddenly people would materialize behind counters and desks, without ever seeming to have got there. It took me a long time to understand that this is because they work near where they live, there’s not so much commuting. This morning, a smell of croissants and coffee, a patch of pinkish gold in the sky, an irresistible temptation to hang out a few minutes at the Brasserie Espoir, just thinking about Paris and love. Love is a mystery anyway. What makes that woman love that weedy little male over there? That fat Frenchman is tenderly handing down the bus step that particular little gray-haired oriental woman with duck feet in her flat beige Mary-Jane shoes—how did they meet? The very peculiarness of love elated me on every bus ride, every walk through the Jardin du Luxembourg, instances on every hand of love’s blindness and its charm, and my own part in it.