Happy, I bought a Figaro—in Roxy’s view too conservative, but easiest to read, and struggled with the news from Bosnia. Edgar occasionally writes an article on Thursdays. I found I had actually met in person two of the people mentioned on pages one and two of Le Figaro! I exulted in the realization that if only I could speak French (an impossibility), I could in theory remind two important French people that I was Isabel Walker, that we had met when . . . etc., etc. That is, I would have a basis to speak to a former cabinet minister and an archbishop! I found this thrilling, for back in California, Isabel Walker knew no one at all.
Coffee (café au lait) finished, I went along to the rue Maître Albert and operated the front door code, trying to remember if Roxy had seen me wearing these clothes yesterday, by which she would know that I had been out all night, and decided: Who cares, I’ll go directly to her place rather than to my own room to change.
Otherwise I might have gone straight up to my room.
Instead I went into her apartment and right to the kitchen. Not seeing her, I might have gone upstairs after all, but I didn’t, I looked in the fridge, and put the Figaro on the table for her to read when she got home. I might have, might have, I say, to frighten myself all over again with the narrowness and fragility of chance.
It was then I heard a thump, the only word I can think of to describe the heavy soft sound of something not brittle being dropped, or of a person falling, as when as children we would hear one of the others fall out of bed.
I wandered back into the living room, simultaneously wondering what the noise was and thinking that Roxy must have taken Gennie to the crèche rather early. Looking back, I can’t account for the series of deductive thoughts, or the impulse, or the reasons, that impelled me to persist in having a look. I had no particular reason, but I did just knock on Roxy’s bedroom door and, hearing nothing, opened the door, glanced inside, and there saw Roxy lying by the side of her bed in a pool of blood. Just as it is always described, a thick, viscous puddle, with her arm and cheek lying in it.
Hemorrhage, I thought, that filmic phrase now all too explicably real. I rushed in and touched her. Her arm was warm and she stirred, her shadowed lids flickered as if she were pretending. I couldn’t remember what 911 was in French, but the fire department was marked on the phone, and I dialed that, gasping, “My soeur, sang, hurry vite,” and, the best I could do, “Venez rapidement, s’il vous plait.” I gave them the address, and I had the impression they were coming. I tried to lift Roxy up and drag her onto the bed, but I couldn’t, it was as if she had been absorbing the pond of blood she was lying in and was weighed down by it, the way a sponge is heavy. A sticky, blood-soaked pillow, lurid as a horror film, lay on the floor under her, ketchupy, almost fake. I expected to see a fetus or something horrible from inside her.
I went into the bathroom for a towel, and only then, coming back, did I realize that the blood was not coming from her vagina, as I had supposed, but from her wrists. She had big slashes in both her wrists, and on the backs of her hands where she may have started too tentatively, forgetting that you have to open the big veins in the front of your wrists. If you really want to die. The blood oozed out of the openings, horrible flaps, and it bubbled like foam. My own hands, wet with Roxy’s blood, left fingerprints on her cheek where I touched her, and on her neck where I tried to feel her pulse. One of her wrists was slashed more badly than the other, and this I wrapped tightly with a green wool scarf from her dresser. There was somewhere to press on the human arm, I knew. Tourniquet, that must be a French word, but I couldn’t think how to do one.
Thus did my world, outlook, character, and destiny change, all at one moment.
I had, luckily, the impression or illusion of clear thoughts at that moment, was thinking tourniquet, 911, upper arm. I tied the leg of some pantyhose above her elbow and twisted it tight with a pen, wondering whether, if she died, the bleeding would immediately stop. Did the blood gushing out of her wrists mean she was alive? And I was wondering if the baby would die before Roxy or after, or instead of, and how much time did the baby have? And I was thinking that it was odd that Roxy would want to kill her baby after all this time, and also that this was some kind of bizarre accident. But of course you don’t slash both wrists by accident, and the backs of the hands.
Blood has a particular, sour and fruity, smell.
I bound up her second wrist with another stocking. Then I remembered that I hadn’t given the fireman the building code, and rushed to the window, and there indeed they were, though I hadn’t heard any siren. They were staring up at the windows.
I opened the window and screamed out the code. My screaming voice was like the screech of a panicked animal, nothing to do with my slowed-down, deliberate actions. It seemed only seconds until several firemen were looking down at Roxy. When they noticed her belly they were galvanized. Enceinte. They began to shout at each other, and to cart her downstairs, not on a stretcher but lumpily by the arms and legs, her body like a large potato between, her hair raking through the mess of her own blood. Blood had now soaked through the scarves and stockings I had wrapped around the wounds.
They had a stretcher at the bottom of the stairs. Here they laid her and began to put better bandages on, and a mask over her mouth and nose with, I guess, oxygen. Some yellowish water in a bottle on a stand was attached to her. Events collapsed into each other, as in a film being run too fast. Relieved of the need to act, I became sick to my stomach, and my ears rang ominously, so that I had to sit down a few seconds on the curb and put my head between my knees until this passed. The skinny, vociferous Madame Florian, on the first floor, came storming out of the building, complaining, I assume about the blood on the stairs. Some time passed, maybe five minutes. I had got up now and was looking at Roxy. Her eyes were still closed, but I could see that she was breathing. They picked her up and loaded her into their ambulance, more like a van. I tried to climb in too, but they pushed me off and said, “Pas de place.” Stupefied, I watched as they drove off with my dying sister, I had no idea where.
Now I was enveloped by the scrum of passersby—two men in business suits, a child with a school satchel strapped to his back, a green-suited street worker who made me sit back down. The child stared at the blood drying on my dress and arms. Le sang. Then Madame Florian stood me up again and drew me inside, talking volubly, waving her arms. I saw she wanted me to change my dress. So fucking French, worrying about what to wear, I wildly thought. In the foyer drops of blood were smeared where we had stepped. I couldn’t think at all. Madame Florian marched me up the stairs, me having no volition. She held my hand like a child’s, and Roxy’s blood came off on her. Blood is unbelievably smeary and sticky, and it was everywhere. If my hand were wet with the blood of a stranger, I would worry about AIDS, but Madame Florian was above that.
“Hospital, I have to go to the hospital,” I was saying as she pushed me in at Roxy’s door. I rushed to the kitchen to clean my arms, and put the dress in the sink.
“Oui, oui, Salpetrière,” she said, watching me. I found something to wear from Roxy’s closet, and took my purse from the living room. Madame Florian came with me to the taxi rank and to my surprise got in with me, saying to the driver things of which I understood only “centre des urgences.” In the cab I could think again, over the fast noisy beating of my heart: Roxy tried to kill herself. Or has killed herself.
All this had occupied perhaps fifteen minutes, and the drive only a few minutes more, past the little zoo where I sometimes took Gennie. At the hospital, Madame Florian waved at the driver to stay and walked with me into the foyer, where she spoke on my behalf. I was the sister of Madame de Persand who had just come in? They replied, and I did not hear any words like morte or mourir.
Madame Florian shrugged away my mercis. “Restez là,” she said, “and they will talk to you.” They did, and I understood enough: Roxy was receiving a blood transfusion, she was alive, I should wait awhile, but she was probably not in danger. Madame Florian
hovered, watched me, and moved slowly off.
So I had time, while watching, to try to understand. Roxy had tried to kill herself! Why had I not noticed that she was in such a desperate or deranged frame of mind? How could I have been so wrapped up in my own affairs not to have noticed something like that? I had had no idea.
I had had no idea. Strangely, I heard my own voice saying that aloud, as I was imagining in my mind that I was saying it to Margeeve and Chester. Toward Roxy I felt, or perhaps it was later I felt this, the fury you do feel toward someone who has put you through a scare, but for myself I felt the deepest chagrin and shame, and a sort of seasick disorientation, as if I would never again know whether I was right or wrong side up. How could I have been so happy and oblivious when Roxy was so miserable? A cry for help. A suicide attempt is a cry for help and I hadn’t helped.
These were the sorts of reproach and anguish that floated, drifted through my thoughts to avoid directly focusing on what if she died, which was so unthinkable and was what she had been trying for.
Had she? Had she really meant it or was this just a cry for help? Did she know I would come in and would find her? Thus did I try to belittle or explain away as histrionics what she had done. Then I would reverse myself. Or maybe she had counted on me not coming in and finding her—I couldn’t remember what I had said I was doing today. I didn’t even know if she was alive.
Also her baby. I remembered how months ago she had said to Suzanne maybe she shouldn’t go through with having the baby. These words now took on a different meaning.
Nurses and orderlies looked at me, relative of la suicidée. The nurses wore little veils like nuns. They approached me as they would a relative of someone in mortal anguish, or a sinner, with kindness and tact, with soft voices. Danger and death have the power to transcend language. I understood perfectly what they were telling me; Roxy was being prevented they hoped from going into shock. They were considering a caesarean section if certain changes appeared on the fetal monitor. The child was perfectly well. A baby lives longer than the mother, seizing the good of the last molecules of oxygen in the blood until it has no more hope either.
I went on sitting in the waiting room, festering with fear and anger. A young doctor gave a thumbs-up sign that her condition was improving in some way, and this was like setting up a drip flowing into my system, like the bottle over Roxy’s bed, of anger and relief.
At first, I planned to call Chester and Margeeve. I wanted them to tell me what to do. I suppose I wanted support. But something held me back, something besides the fact that it was still the middle of the night in California. What held me back was the thought that Roxy might not want me to tell them. I wouldn’t have, if I were her. When she came to herself, she might not want to be treated forever like an unstable histrionic depressive whom people were afraid to leave alone.
But maybe that was how she did want to be treated, so as never to be alone. The famous cry for help.
The only help I’d given had been a little babysitting. My anger and relief drained off, leaving a sort of exhausted vacuum into which, very soon, again flowed the bitterest self-reproach. I kept coming back to: how could I have not noticed that Roxy was in a desperate frame of mind, with signs of weird derangement creeping into her thoughts? I had been too wrapped up in my own life.
I thought of calling Suzanne or Charles-Henri. Is that what Roxy wanted? Or had she really wanted out of life? I didn’t know, I didn’t know, and huddled miserably in the waiting room, peeking in from time to time through the curtains of her bed, third in the semicircle of curtained beds, where she lay, eyes shut and a little frown line between her eyes as if she disapproved of all the ministrations, or had her thoughts fixed beyond, in the abstracted repose of death.
Now I see I was afraid to call Chester and Margeeve, because they would be angry at me. Sent to help Roxy, Isabel never notices her to be on the point of suicide. Another of Isabel’s fuckups. Instead she blah blah blah, all the stuff I was doing—sins of self-indulgence, sins of indifference, sins of insensitivity.
Usually I am not prone to feeling guilty. Years of being the bad little sister had made me defensive instead, and perhaps unreasonably emotionally defiant. Margeeve and Chester were not guilt-producing parents, either (though my brother Roger had always been, in my view, a sanctimonious nag, and more attached to our new sisters than to me). Besides, feeling guilty never seems to make you better.
Why was I sitting surrounded by strange magazines (for instance one newsmagazine devoted to the business and profession of clairvoyance) in the bare, tidy, direct discomfort of this French hospital feeling guilty and sorry for myself? The inappropriateness of my emotions did nothing to make them go away. And why was I thinking about Roger? Because it was too horrible thinking about Roxy. Because some cork had been pulled in my spirit and all this stuff was leaking in. Frantically I rationalized—Roxy had been concealing her state of mind and lying to me. She had not been crying for help, on the contrary had put up an elaborate front of cheerfulness on all those Sundays with the Persands, and going to her studio as if nothing were wrong. How could I have known she was trying to be like Sylvia Plath? When I had this thought, it was the first time I had a corollary, doubting thought: Is Roxy as good a poet as Sylvia Plath? What did I know?
One is never as happy as one thinks, nor as unhappy as one hopes, to reverse the maxim of La Rochefoucauld. They do say that when people decide on suicide, sometimes they cheer up. All the same, there must have been signs and I hadn’t seen them. I loved Roxy so much I wanted to kill her, I was so furious at her. How can I express my shame at these self-absorbed thoughts that kept chasing the thoughts of Roxy lying there unconscious on machines like one of those women in a coma who are kept alive so they can give birth? Is shame the same as guilt?
24
In adversity, the worst misfortune is to have been happy.
—Boethius
IT WAS NOW noon, an odd time for a hospital vigil. I was conscious of being hungry and then suddenly I thought of Gennie, whom Roxy had taken to the crèche and who must be picked up by three-thirty. On the heels of this thought came a new one, so instantly chilling and horrible that I had to stand and pace, shivering, as if I had a cramp, trying to put down, erode, blight the thought: What if she hadn’t taken Gennie to the crèche? What if Gennie’s little murdered corpse were somewhere in the apartment? I both couldn’t and could take this possibility seriously. Roxy would never hurt Gennie, and yet depressed women did horrible things, and I had seen her willingness to hurt her new child and herself.
I knew I had to go to the rue Maître Albert at once, if only to control this sickening panic, a panic so intense I prayed somehow to lose consciousness until I could be back there, so as not to have to endure the time in between. I tried to think of faster means of reassurance, like calling the crèche, but I had no idea of the number, or how you called directory assistance, or even what the crèche was called. I took a vow to learn French. I tried to think where I had been in the apartment. Was there anywhere Gennie could have been without my seeing? I’d been in the bedroom twice, the kitchen, the living room. Only Gennie’s room, where she would logically be.
“Enfant!” I cried at the nurse, pointing at my watch. “Crèche.”
“You can go,” she said in English. “Your sister is doing stable, it’s okay.”
I looked again into Roxy’s curtained cubicle, where she was sleeping or expiring, attached to the bottle and machines.
“Une heure,” I said, tapping my watch again. She shrugged. I fled.
There was a taxi rank in front of the hospital but no taxis came. I weighed walking, it was not really far, then a taxi did come. I was conscious of my body’s adrenalin, like an odd drug—it was like trying to conduct real life when stoned, keeping an elaborate pretence of sobriety, close to passing out but somehow upright, with smiles for the taxi driver, saying the address in a calm voice. It took four minutes to drive to the rue Maître Albert, during which I
suspended my imagination, my power to evoke a scene of Roxy killing Gennie. Where could I have got this power to evoke horrific images? From the movies of course.
Madame Florian must have been watching or listening for me, for she popped out of her apartment on the first landing as I came up the stairs. “Comment va-t-elle?”
“Okay,” I said. “Blood transfusion.”
She nodded. They can all speak more English than they let on. I let her follow me up the stairs, I must have wanted someone behind me, in case I found—something. I both thought I would and thought I wouldn’t, expectation and dread exactly suspended in a kind of hum of fear, my head feeling funny with all the blood drained out of it. I marched right into Gennie’s bedroom, which was orderly with no sign of Gennie in it. I looked in the closets all the same. I thought I could smell blood everywhere in the house, a close, yeasty odor.
I then taxied to the crèche. I was rapidly spending all my money on taxis. Gennie was there, in the tidy room with blocks and benches, in a remodeled section of an old school building, where a dozen kids of more or less three, Gennie’s age, ran around more or less continually or sat to learn songs and drink juice. Gennie had taught me the songs (“Ainsi font les marionnettes”). Now she was sitting on the floor facing another little girl, and they were building something in the corral formed by their fat little legs.
“The mère is malade,” I said. “Hospital. Hôpital.”
“Tout se passe bien? Garçon ou fille?” asked the crèche woman, beaming.
I shook my head. “Malade. Malade,” I said. We established that I could leave Gennie there until six-thirty. Then I got the 67 bus back to the hospital. On the bus I began to cry, it was totally embarrassing.
At the hospital, Roxy had come to, and now was lying tensely, eyes open, looking at the monitors she was attached to. When I poked my head through the green curtains, she saw me and gave a wan smile. But then she closed her eyes as if she didn’t want to talk.
Le Divorce Page 17
