Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  And there was the business of the bon coup. It wasn’t something that would have bothered me ordinarily. I’m inured to what they think of Americans. Yves introduced me to a friend who smiled in a friendly way and said to Yves, “Elle, le bon coup américain?” The phrase stuck in my mind. Maybe it was meant as a compliment, but I didn’t take it as a compliment, too puritan for that. I hardly needed a dictionary, the meaning is more or less the same in all languages, something like “the great American piece of ass.”

  In my low mood I would think of the futility of my life as factotum, girl Friday—dog walker and half-time girlfriend (“mistress”) and bon coup. I hated the passivity of this life, that I wasn’t doing anything about the future. All of Edgar’s public harangues about responsibility having finally got my attention, I decided to take a cooking class, and to volunteer for some cause.

  Roxy had figured out something to do about Bosnia. She threw herself into organizing, with some other American and some French women, a drive to send Tampax and lipstick to the women of Sarajevo. “Sometimes it’s little essentials that really make it possible to survive,” she said. “I was getting into such a state of solipsistic misery I was forgetting the people in the world with real problems.” In these words I heard the voice of Margeeve, who had said them verbatim over and over in our growing-up years. Roxy composed placards and leaflets, saw to the printing, and joined the corps of women who left them in bookstores and on walls. She spent hours on the phone talking to journalists and getting the announcement put in the papers. I suppose I thought it was slightly ridiculous at first, lipstick and tampons for a place where a mortar might kill you when you went out to pick them up. Eventually I saw that you’d get your period, bombs or not—if you were lucky and got your period. I suggested they send contraceptives instead, but they decided that was too controversial. The idea of the drive, finally, was that the women of France would be asked to buy extra quantities of these essential items and leave them at drop-off points in the streets and pharmacies; then Roxy and benefactor with trucks would come and pick them up.

  In the end, I spent two hundred and fifty francs on Tampax and left it at the Monoprix. Tons of lipstick to relieve suffering were collected. The rest of my efforts were similarly lowly, like helping to put up chairs at Edgar’s meetings, if I got there early enough, in the distant city halls of Ivry or Villemoisson-sur-Orge.

  I had various identities when Edgar presented me. At meetings, beforehand, in a city hall or church, “mon assistante, Mademoiselle Walker.” To someone who knew his family, “You know Mademoiselle Walker? Charles-Henri’s sister-in-law?” or “My nephew’s sister-in-law, from Santa Barbara, California.” I began to feel discontented with these identities, though I suppose I should have been pleased that he did not hide me. What was Mademoiselle Walker doing, really?

  His meeting nights were not nights we would make love. He was usually caught up afterward with media people or concerned citizens or cronies who were like-minded, and he would be preoccupied in any case. I would go home alone, or hang around on the fringe to hear him say, “I object to the hypocrisy of our politicians, madame, trying to claim humanitarian heroism with a few ground troops while privately holding that nothing must affect our relations with Germany or the treaty of Maastricht. In any case, no one talks of the morality of the situation. Not in this country—all is cynicism disguised as pragmatism.” Not in my country, either, I guess.

  Once Edgar came to Suzanne’s on Sunday. As usual I was assigned the duty of walking with the various children, today Frédéric’s children as well as Gennie and those of Antoine. Before lunch Edgar sat in the library talking to Suzanne. I could hear their companionable laughter as I got Gennie into her snow boots while the various wives supervised the lunch. No intimate glances passed between us at lunch.

  Then, to the table, he said, “I have two extra opera tickets for Tuesday. Poupette is not coming up. What about you, Suzanne? Roxanne?”

  (I knew by now that Edgar’s wife was named Amélie but was called Poupette and preferred staying in the country.)

  Suzanne said, “No, no, merci, I have such a week.”

  “The American girls, then. Roxeanne and Isabel.” Here he did turn and smile at me, a smile so perfect and avuncular I could almost not remember this was the man who so expertly caressed la foufounette.

  “I’ll have to sit at the end of a row, though, no one can get by me.” Roxy laughed, patting her belly.

  It crossed my mind to wonder how I would have felt if it had been Roxy and Suzanne to go with Edgar to the opera on Tuesday, his and my consecrated night. When I asked him about that later, regretting the jealous tone that crept into my voice, he said Suzanne was well known to hate opera.

  I had never been to an opera, though Roxy had, in Paris. They had operas in California, in Los Angeles at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I had just never been taken to one. This was called Maria Stuarda, about Mary, Queen of Scots, a great heroine for the French, and was held at the Bastille, which is not the building the populace attacked at the time of the Revolution, since they did succeed in tearing that down; this is a sort of whale-shaped glass modern structure, a huge auditorium for operas and dance.

  It was thrilling. Edgar and the other men there wore le smoking. It was not the first time I had seen a group of men in evening dress. Proms in high school, for instance; but there the rented suits had looked sort of inappropriately old on boys you saw every day in jeans, their tuxes making them very handsome (I thought at the time) but skinny and sort of geeky too. I was unprepared for the grandeur of grown-up men in evening clothes—jowls, odor of cigar, their portliness, their burliness expressive of their powers, their very presence, their solemn dressed-up attendance at a musical occasion, expressive of their regard for culture and their considerable disposable wealth. Edgar named people we saw: there a socialist presidential candidate, there the current minister of culture, and his predecessor, there a famous dress designer, there the director of the Bastille. It was aphrodisiac to me. Some people (Roxy) are excited by history. For me it was this immediacy of power, this richness not of money but of significance, of opulent testimony to politics. My spine warmed along its length, the music made my throat catch. I even loved the consorts of the famous men, women trim in their pouffy Lacroix lamé dresses, their hair a uniform blond. I am dark, dark. I thought the most beautiful woman there was Roxy, rosy and radiant in a gray silk Mother Hubbard, the only thing she had big enough to wear over her belly. Every man looked at her, I thought envying the man that had got her like that. Perhaps if they didn’t know, they thought it was Edgar. She leaned on his arm on the steps.

  “Mes nièces américaines,” he said to Monsieur le Directeur du Cabinet of the Ministry of Culture. “Madame de Persand, Mademoiselle Walker.”

  “Américaines, bravo,” said le Directeur to us. “Mes hommages, madame,” making to kiss Roxy’s hand. She looked happy.

  If I let myself really think about Roxy, my stomach would still roil with fear at how close she had come, at how she had wanted death, at how this meant I could never again understand her. Irremediable strangeness had come down between Roxy and me, or rather between me and every other human being, for I saw I couldn’t know them, nor they me, and we were all alone, just as Jean-Paul Sartre seemed to be saying in a book of his I was struggling to read, La Nausée, about a man for whom thinking about anything makes him sick.

  Edgar shook his head and said, “Read Voltaire, my child, or the maxims of La Rochefoucauld.”

  Between the acts something really amazing happened, which would not seem to have any significance except to me, an ordinary civil transaction, a conversation, polite and urbane. I mean—the Directeur of the Ministry of Culture talked to me!

  “The mise en scène reminds one of Piranesi,” Roxy said. Edgar was saying that Marie, Queen of Scots, was surely one of the silliest women in history, he hoped not because of her sojourn in France.

  “Are you surprised to find the subtit
les in English as well as in French, mademoiselle?” asked the Directeur of me. A well-built, youngish, balding man with a Frenchman’s long eyelashes. “What the previous Ministre de la Culture must think of that I cannot imagine,” he went on, lowering his voice and indicating a man standing near. “He is the great architect of linguistic purity in France, the great crusader against English.”

  “He has an expression of pain,” I agreed, for the former culture minister had assumed at that instant a look as if he had sat on a pin.

  “You must visit the old Palais Garnier while you are here,” my minister said. “We still all love it the best. Still in use for dance, if you care for dance, and soon to be a home to opera again.”

  This conversation was remarkable in at least three ways. I felt a flush rise from the neckline of my rather low dress, of surprise, momentary insecurity, and pleasure. One, it meant I had given responses in French convincing enough to make him suppose I could be talked to. Two, Edgar’s friends did not usually speak, beyond bonjour, mademoiselle, to someone so young and assistant-like, meaning I must appear more grown-up, more equal tonight. Three, it was supposed I would have an opinion on the opera, therefore I must be wearing a plausible expression of sentience. I did have an opinion, though I did not deliver it. (I loved, loved, loved the opera.) It was enough to be included in the conversation without any airs of remarkable condescension from Monsieur le Directeur. This was an important psychological moment for me, maybe the first in which I knew I would get along in life. The Directeur went on saying things of this idle sort, an attentive man to a woman, an under-minister of the government of France, in the entracte, at the Opera, in Paris, to Isabel Walker of Santa Barbara—to me!

  As we took our seats again, Edgar touched my elbow with an air of practiced possession. I am sure it was involuntary, this proprietary gesture, this brief impulse to claim and steer me, and he quickly withdrew his hand. Probably no one noticed. Did Roxy notice? I didn’t think so. In her happiness—an evening at the opera, ministers, men, enjoying the perquisites of being a de Persand—she had never looked so radiant. You felt that her infant must be benefiting in the womb from some improved condition of her blood, and even, if they can really hear in utero, from the music of Donizetti, confirming human genius and the exuberant promise of life.

  26

  One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.

  —La Rochefoucauld

  THOUGH I WAS happy that night, my low spirits persisted. I had begun to mind that this was the longest I had ever been away from my family, perhaps I was actually missing them—hence this sadness and emptiness I was feeling more and more, filled only by Edgar—sex and dinner, the eternal compact by which he offered counsel and reassuring encouragement, he stroking my hair, I parting my legs.

  Charles-Henri was coming now on Saturdays to pick up Gennie. He took her to the country, then would deliver her on Sunday to Chartres, where we would pick her up at lunch. Roxy managed never to see him on either day. I would get Gennie ready on Saturdays, he would be gone by the time we got to Chartres. Roxy had seen him only three times since the day he left: when he accidentally came to Sunday lunch on my first day at Chartres, and at the first meeting with the lawyer, and in the hospital. They did speak on the telephone, but in French, things to do with Gennie’s schedule. I could always tell by the tight bitterness of Roxy’s voice, a slight whine in it, that it was he.

  I suppose I’ll have a baby someday, but for now it seems like a good way to bring down some man’s hate on you. You have done something to him, deprived him of some youthful happiness and autonomy. And of course he has done the same to you. I have noticed no one ever wants to give their babies back, but they aren’t so happy afterward, either, like Roxy.

  I talked to Charles-Henri several times after our meeting in the Vues de Notre Dame, and he was pleasant, but distant. The drama of his life lay elsewhere for him now, you could tell, with Magda Tellman and his painting. He didn’t seem to care about details of the settlement, was leaving it all to Antoine and Maître Doisneau. I suppose that blithe spirits and an indifference to material reality are an irritation in a husband, but they were what was nice about Charles-Henri, and though I officially hated him for being so cruel to Roxy, I liked him actually, and half hoped he would be happy.

  The French lawyers did not consider Stuart Barbee’s valuation of Saint Ursula reliable, and had agreed that each side should have an independent appraisal of Roxy and Charles-Henri’s property. I gathered that if the two appraisals did not agree, the court would look at them, but if they did, the divorce would go ahead with the understanding that the finances had been worked out.

  The French appraisers came in mid-November, Antoine de Persand with them. Roxy refused to be there, so I had to let them in and hear their murmurs without understanding much of what they said. Antoine was friendly but didn’t translate what the experts were saying. To me, he said, “Isabel, ça va? This is a nasty business, isn’t it?”

  “Très jolie, superbe,” said a mustached man of the chest of drawers. This was good, because if he put a high value on it, it could offset the painting; Roxy could just give up the Persand chest and keep the Walker painting. They looked at Roxy’s dishes, at the table and ordinary household objects like the television and rugs, including Roxy’s bedroom rug where I could discern, though they probably could not, the rusty tinges of rinsed-away blood. Several times they returned to the chest, pulled out the drawers, hunted for a signature.

  “Ce n’est pas signée,” remarked one. I guessed that was bad, meant less valuable than if it had been.

  Another man altogether came, from the Louvre, to look at the picture, and shook his head. “Ecole de La Tour. It is not of interest to us.” Hearing him say this, I felt aggrieved in spite of myself, at this denigration of our saint, and because this meant the sale could go ahead at auction. The Louvre did not want it, and so would not impede an export license, opening the way for buyers outside of France—Japanese, for instance, or American.

  It was here, on the day the Louvre man came, that I have to admit I spoke up to Antoine, words just blaring out, surprising even me. “It’s so tacky, Charles-Henri taking Roxy’s picture. She doesn’t want anything of his, she wouldn’t take something from him that he’d had since he was little.”

  Antoine was startled, and I judged (with satisfaction) annoyed or stung, and surprised. The Louvre man, a Monsieur Desmond, looked hurriedly away, staring at the picture with the rapt visual attention of a deaf person. I kept on.

  “It’s not bad enough that he should dump her when she’s pregnant, he takes her property too. Also, you would think he would want his children to have the furniture and picture someday, not some stranger buying them. He’s just being a terrible shit, or he’s getting bad advice.”

  “Charles-Henri has left this up to me,” Antoine said, slowly.

  “You, then, are being a terrible shit,” I said.

  I guess I was as surprised as Antoine that, not counting what Roxy and Charles-Henri might have said to each other, the first words of bitterness between our two families should have come from me, and after all this time. I know it sounds Californian if I say I believed we ought to let them know how we felt. How I felt. Until now they could even have thought we did not mind. Antoine was shamed into silence, I guess.

  Nevertheless, the painting, the bureau, the dining-room table and some engravings were taken off to Drouot, the auction house, by a commissaire-priseur. Now that there was no chance of Roxy keeping her picture, it was necessary to switch to hoping that everything would sell as well as possible so that there would be as much money as possible to split. Meanwhile Roger had had an idea that might perhaps work: He and I were to sue Roxy and Charles-Henri, who because they were not yet divorced could be sued as a couple, thus encumbering the picture with legal difficulties and enjoining a sale. Roxy was enthusiastic about this idea. It would be a weird situation, me living companionably with Roxy while suing her
, and her egging it on.

  In the meantime, Drouot would be putting Saint Ursula in a catalogue, and so on, to be sold with other pictures of its genre, when enough had been collected, at a date as yet unscheduled. With an agreement in place about splitting the proceeds of an auction, the divorce could proceed without waiting for the sale.

  “Don’t sell these little bits of faience,” the commissaire-priseur had told Roxy, who was there when they came. “You won’t get much for them, and they’re awfully pretty,” he said. “You’d do better to keep them.”

  “Tell that to my husband,” Roxy sniffed.

  Drouot, the auction place, feeling that Saint Ursula would slot nicely into a sale already scheduled of northern French painting, which was to take place within the month, decided to prepare a brochure to be sent to those who had already received the finished catalogue. They expected Saint Ursula to sell well, and had stipulated a reserve of eighty thousand dollars. At that figure, Roxy knew she would never be able to buy out Charles-Henri. Roxy called Margeeve and Chester and pleaded with them for a loan of forty thousand, but of course they were just floored.

  It was horrible, the gap left by the absent furniture when it was gone, the reproachful bareness, the articulate void telling of failure. I continued to sting and seethe as much or more than Roxy about the total injustice of them taking Saint Ursula. Her enhanced value introduced a new element of cupidity and greed into the normal rancor of divorce. This I could mention to Edgar, though I still had not told him about Roxy slitting her wrists.

  “Women are too protected from the consequences of their actions,” he said. “It always shocks them when there are consequences.” Is this true? He meant, Roxy must have known that by taking a piece of property off to France, she was subjecting it to French law. But this doesn’t address the total wickedness of the Persands ignoring that it was in our family, that it belongs to more people than just Roxy, that it means a lot to us and nothing to them, and so on. I said all this. He shrugged. There is a Gallic shrug. There is a French attitude to laws about property.