Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  “What were you thinking of?” I heard the anger in my screechy tone, a hiss, not the tone I planned to take but evidently the tone she expected.

  “I’m sorry, Iz,” she said. “I don’t know.” She sounded so feeble, so baffled and repentant, that I tried to think of how to soothe her. But she closed her eyes again and seemed to drift away.

  A doctor stood behind me (fairly young, somewhat attractive). He motioned me back toward the waiting room and said in English, “She will be all right. Her wounds were finally rather superficial. You could say a symbolic rather than a deeply purposeful act, but that does not mean we take this lightly.”

  “No,” I said.

  “She will soon put an infant into the world. We are concerned for the state of her pregnancy. You are her only relative?”

  “Well, here in Paris.”

  “What about the husband?”

  “Divorce,” I said. “There’s just me.”

  “We will decide how long to keep her, to be sure there is no repetition,” said the doctor. “Of course we could introduce psychoactive drugs, but that will be a decision later for a psychiatrist. For the moment such medication is hors de question because of the child. Anyway, I myself think any temporary psychosis of preeclampsia should disappear when the child is born. When is her due date?”

  “Not for another month.”

  “The husband is French?” the doctor asked. “The father of this child? Shouldn’t you call him anyway? He should know the pregnancy could be dangerous.”

  “She was told that. I think she told him.”

  “Who is her gynecologue? We will call him, but you should call the husband.”

  “Yes, all right,” I said. But I hadn’t really decided whether to call Charles-Henri, or Suzanne. I was inclined at that point to wait to see if Roxy had gone crazy or maybe this was just some aberration of pregnancy, some destabilizing rush of birth hormones or panic. Instead I would be beside her. But I was scared to learn this way that there were such reserves of rage and desperation in Roxy, and that these are invisible even to a loved one, and especially to a selfish insensitive sister like me.

  Of course I would call Margeeve and Chester, though I wasn’t sure what to tell them. I could imagine their reproaches. But I had noticed. I had noticed she was getting depressed, I just hadn’t understood where she was on that scale.

  “You, mademoiselle, are you all right?” asked the doctor suddenly, taking my elbow and drawing me over to the seats. “I am going to bring you a coffee and a sandwich,” he said. Strangely, I felt tears start into my eyes at this kindness.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “It’s just a shock. Je suis . . .” I didn’t even know a French word for it.

  Roxy said nothing more all afternoon, though I sat by her bed asking her questions or just trying to sound there for her. At six-thirty I went back to get Gennie and took her home to the apartment, and made her supper from stuff in the fridge. There was a black emptiness to the apartment. I tried to clean up the rug in Roxy’s room, and the trail of spots where they had carried her out. Gennie kept saying, “Where’s Mama?” She says Mah-maw, like a French child. I suppose she is a French child.

  At about nine, Suzanne de Persand telephoned for Roxy. I could have, perhaps should have, told her Roxy was in the hospital, but instead I just said she’d gone out. Then I sat looking at the telephone for a long time, calculating the time in California (noon) and tempted by the comfort of talking to our parents. But they were not home. I had forgotten. This was their week for a reunion of hikers in Yosemite. Ben, the student that lives with them, answered instead.

  “No,” I said, “it’s not about anything special.”

  In the end, I told the one person I thought Roxy would most want to know, Charles-Henri. Of course he was aghast, distressed, instantly at my disposal. “Mon Dieu, she isn’t herself, she was also very emotional during pregnancy with Geneviève. Where is she, I must see her. Would that be good, or would it be worse for her?”

  Good, I thought. I hoped his heart would melt when he saw her, and I hoped that was what Roxy wanted. He arrived at the hospital promptly, solicitous and concerned, charming in turtleneck sweater and jeans, painterly tousled hair. I saw why Roxy loved him.

  Did Roxy really love him? Or was it, I used to ask myself, something else more territorial, the jealousy of a lioness turned inward on herself? Roxy had never liked to lose things, she would rage, would make us all quail when she mislaid her purse or gym clothes. To see her lying wanly in the Hôpital Salpetrière was not enough to bring him back to her, but I think seeing him reassured Roxy that he was in her life all the same.

  As he was leaving, Charles-Henri spoke to me in the hall. His face was drawn and concerned. He sighed. “She telephoned, you know, but I didn’t think she’d do it, any more than she has before. I misjudged, I might have prevented this. Of course, it’s not going to change anything. You make sure Roxeanne understands that.” Under his sweetness, perfect hardness, the absolute security of men that their desires have the right of way. Only later did it register, as Charles-Henri and the doctor both seemed to understand, that if she telephoned him, she must have expected him to find her before she died. A symbolic gesture.

  Roxy stayed in the hospital over the weekend, being given hot soup that had potassium and other substances in it. She was morose, or rather pensive, and seemed as shocked as I, or professed to be shocked, by what she had done. “I was just overwhelmed with a crushing sense of futility,” she explained. “It wasn’t even me so much, it was the world.” In a sane tone of wonderment.

  I was wary. You hear that seriously suicidal people dissemble. They want to get away to try it again, and they pretend to be well.

  “The world, all that horror.”

  “But why that morning, Roxy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice trembling with fear, at capricious moods from some unknown place in the personality that could carry you away. “It was a morning like any other. I’d talked to Maître Bertram the night before, and the divorce was on my mind, I’d been thinking how can I go through with all that, and then when I woke up in the morning, it wasn’t a frenzy or anything, it was a cold decision that seemed very logical at the time, that I didn’t need to go through with it.”

  She appeared to feel this would reassure me, but of course what I thought was, if she could be seized by a thought like that once, she could again, I’d have to stay with her all the time, she’d have to have psychiatrists, and could she be trusted not to hurt Gennie or the new baby?

  Sensing my fright, Roxy tried to reassure me. “I’m fine, really, Iz, I’m fine now.”

  Though she apologized, at no time did she say, “That was silly, I would never do it again,” and in fact she wouldn’t discuss it after this one conversation. Once she even said, in a dreamy, mad tone, “I love being pregnant,” stroking her by now huge half-round of a belly. “It’s funny to have your body change shape this way, it makes you feel like a genie or a shape-shifter.” It was weird to hear her say this, as if nothing had happened at all. Yet there remained something strange behind her eyes.

  Perhaps she only wanted to be in the hospital, to be taken care of like this, for now she seemed contented. If it weren’t for the little bandages on her wrists, smaller each time they were changed, you would not imagine suicide or psychiatric crisis. Over the next two days, I almost began to doubt what had happened, and she began to deny it—that is, to be in denial, pretending it hadn’t exactly happened, or had been a kind of accident, as if she had slipped on a rug.

  She made me promise not to tell the Persands, and she must have made Charles-Henri promise that too, for they never spoke of it. I think she imagined I would have already called our parents, but I had not. Maybe she was crying out that she just couldn’t go through with the divorce-related things right now, and maybe I should have alerted the Persands that the divorce arrangements were too much for her. Maybe they could call them off for a while. I could
put the matter in some urgent way—Roxy is in the hospital, ill with stress, I don’t think she is strong enough for a court process.

  Eventually I decided coldheartedly on the Sylvia Plath explanation. What I didn’t fully understand was how much she minded the sale of the painting of Saint Ursula, for it symbolized how she had lost her gamble for adventure in life, she was going out of the marriage with less than she came in with, she was a loser.

  25

  Suicide is less an act than a tale of the soul.

  —M. Jouhandeau, Chroniques maritales

  THE HOSPITAL BEGAN to talk about letting her go home on Tuesday, but they made me understand they were concerned about two issues, her ongoing psychiatric care and the high-risk pregnancy. In the case of her mental state, the doctors decided it was what they called a “crisis reaction” and would not likely recur. Apparently there are people who have a suicidal impulse once in their lives, when something happens they cannot stand. If they are standing on a bridge just then, they’ll likely succeed in killing themselves, but if they have no real means to do it, the impulse passes, and when their lives improve, they soldier on like everybody else. This is why suicide hot lines and so forth are for people with a one-time impulse, while nothing much can be done for the chronically depressed who long for death and save up pills. Or so the handsome doctor explained to me.

  It would suffice for Roxy, they thought, to get her through the divorce and the remaining month of her pregnancy, which looked to be still threatened with preeclampsia which could even in part explain her behavior. With her physiology back to normal, the doctor predicted, and some counseling, someone to talk to—she must be lonesome, for she was an étrangère, after all, though her French was, he allowed, excellent—all would be well.

  But when I saw they were going to release her, I was frightened anew. I would tell Edgar, I decided, and Mrs. Pace, either of whom might have a view about what I’d better do. Margeeve and Chester would be gone on their trip another week. Meantime I took Roxy some books from Mrs. Pace’s, and coped with Gennie over the weekend.

  In the end, I told Mrs. Pace but not Edgar. Some family pride prevented me, some wish to protect Roxy from the faint possibility he would tell the rest of the Persands, or the fear that he, like my parents, would think I had been negligent about noticing Roxy’s state of mind. I called him to tell him I couldn’t meet him on Tuesday, but I just said Roxy was ill.

  “Now that does astonish me,” Mrs. Pace said, when I had told her the story. “Roxeanne of all people, so resolutely adjusted and Francophile.”

  “I know.”

  “It was odd, the way she acted at my reading, crying out about the horrors of Bosnia. I thought at the time she’d had a little extra wine. She’s off balance. But it was obviously something she heard at the lawyer’s that threw her.”

  “The coo duh grah,” I said, trying a French phrase.

  “The last straw, you mean,” she said. “It is an entirely different thing. The coup de grâce—pronounce the c in grace, by the way—is not the same thing as the last straw, Isabel. Look it up. But what was it she found out from the lawyer?”

  “Nothing new. I talked to her when she got home. They talked about the sale of Saint Ursula, her beloved painting. It has to be sold because it turns out to be worth something, and she can’t afford to pay Charles-Henri his half of its value.”

  “She felt ready to die of bitterness.” Her sympathetic tone implied she herself had often been at the brink of suicide for reasons of rage and chagrin. Her view now was that I should stick close to Roxy until she delivered the baby, when her body and psychology would return to normal, and meantime she, Olivia, would pitch in with invitations and distractions.

  On Tuesday night Roxy came home from the hospital. She lay on the sofa, and we watched L’Opinion on Canal Sept, just a head shot of Edgar himself for twenty minutes with the interviewer off camera, him telling about adventures in Africa and Mindanao, and his period under Giscard d’Estaing as a subminister of some fiscal department. I understood little of this, but I did understand what he was saying about Bosnia, since I had heard those views numerous times. It crossed my mind to wonder whether he would have had to cancel our Tuesday if I had not, for this program, or whether it was on tape.

  “You have to hand it to Uncle Edgar,” Roxy said. “The rest of the Persands may be frivolous and lazy, but he really isn’t.”

  “He’s not a Persand, he’s a Cosset,” I pointed out, realizing I should not appear to have thought about it.

  “True, but they get their laziness and frivolity from Suzanne, and she is his sister. You tend to forget he has actually been a statesman. Unlike the rest of them he’s actually had a public career.”

  But of course her mind wasn’t really on Edgar, or on me. She was dreamily holding Gennie on her knees with her cheek against the child’s hair.

  “I love being pregnant again,” she said. “Iz, put your hand on my belly. I think the new little one needs to know other people want him. Charles-Henri used to do that, pat my belly and speak to Gennie, but now no one speaks to this little one.”

  This seemed so off the wall, I fell into the mood I had been trying to stave off, of intensifying panic, and not knowing what to do, and wanting to be in the arms of the elderly gentleman I was watching on the TV, and mad at Roxy for being crazy—for grabbing all the craziness just now so that I had to be with her and be stuck with her secret and do the worrying about what would become of her, and of me. I put my hand on her belly, which felt like an overinflated basketball, hard and inorganic. I couldn’t feel a baby underneath but spoke to it anyhow, saying, “Not too much longer, little friend, better enjoy it where you are.”

  Visible signs of the coming holiday season had already replaced the back-to-school mood of early autumn. Gennie had a little caped coat and knitted hood, like the children in a book I’d had when I was little, I couldn’t remember which, but in it they chased hoops with sticks. The gray light and the gray stones of the Paris buildings gave a monochromatic gloom to the streets, but there was a corollary gaiety to the interiors, the lavish gilt and mirrors of the pâtisseries, the array of cakes and bonbons, glazed chestnuts, and chestnuts roasting in braziers at street corners, plucked off the coals by subdued men with asbestos bare fingers. All humanity wore thick coats. I continued to be troubled by my not suffering when Roxy was.

  What made me feel most guilty was not the Capulet-Montague feature of my affair with Uncle Edgar, which was continuing even as relations with the Persands worsened (though our ostensible affection remained), nor was it sex itself. For some reason I felt especially guilty about the pleasure and interest I took in the restaurants we went to. This fascination grew in me in a way I felt could not be quite good, was perhaps a perversion, one I sensed Edgar and I encouraged in each other, a shared secret. Edgar first sensed it in me—an interest beyond the normal—when he realized I had read up on a certain restaurant and knew what the chef’s specialties were. This might of course be a good courtesan’s normal preparation, finding out what her lover likes and so on, but since he himself is interested in restaurants (but does not always indulge himself, in food), he was not unhappy to patronize ever new, distant and vaunted eating places, now with the excuse of pleasing me. This pursuit also had the merit of getting us out of the center of Paris and farther from the likelihood of him being seen.

  Californians are interested in restaurants too, nothing odd about that. Why is it I feel within myself that my interest has exceeded what is quite nice? For instance, I found myself spending 180 hard-earned francs on a new guide to Paris restaurants when Roxy already had Gault et Millau and the Guide Michelin (last year’s) and I should have earmarked the money for relief for Sarajevo. No, there was nothing generically strange about a Californian liking restaurants, but I knew it would be easy for me to go over the top. Just as in bed, we extend the things we do, we go a little further, without discussion, to prolong or repeat the moment of pleasure (s’éclater
).

  The scar on Roxy’s left wrist was visible like a vivid bracelet or mark left by a torturer; that on the right was a pale white line. Both were covered by the long sleeves she kept pulled down. No one else would see them or know, but for me these traces were a continual reproach. I watched her, I stayed home much more now. We watched French television, which is as stupid as American television, is in fact American television, most of it, B cop shows and old bad movies.

  After a while her bitterness and apathy seemed to lighten. She said it was her biology, the prospect of birth taking her over, with waves of warm nest-building hormones, placid as a cow. “My problems will all come back, I suppose,” she said, “but now I can’t be bothered to worry. It’s strange that I can work now. Usually a little anxiety makes you work better, it’s usually necessary, even, but too much wipes you out.”

  She said she was working well, and she sold a poem to some Midwestern literary magazine, I think Michigan, or Ohio. I have to admit that with Roxy’s spirits seeming to lift, or not to descend further, mine sagged a little more, as they had done ever since her suicide attempt. It began to be cold in Paris, and I wasn’t used to cold. If it were California I’d be skiing, but this was day after day of rain and darkness, swallowing up the day earlier every afternoon, dark again by four, still dark at eight in the morning, as if you were north of the Arctic Circle. The lofty statues in the Place de la Concorde now loomed like black, menacing shapes wet with the constant rain. You had to remember to wear shoes and coats you didn’t mind getting wet. There was a day of beauty in late November when it snowed. I was coming across the Place de la Concorde on the 24 bus, at dusk just when the lanterns went on, and flakes of snow drifted down in this pinkish gray half-light, and it was so beautiful, tears sprang to my eyes. Then I realized they weren’t tears for beauty, they were just tears. It was I who was sad, just under the surface, where the sight of something fragile like a snowflake seemed unbearably to predict its loss.