Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  Then, virtually as the train moved into the station, Margeeve turned to me and said directly, “Iz, I understand you’ve gotten mixed up with an old uncle of the Persand family?” Here she seemed to strive for a glare of maternal concern and disapproval, but something behind her expression did not seem that outraged. Of course, they no longer wrung their hands over my morals, so perhaps it hadn’t shocked them.

  But I was shocked. I hadn’t thought they knew.

  “Who told you that?” I looked over at Roxy, who also had a shocked look on her face.

  “Suzanne talked to me. Mother to mother. I just throw this into the hopper of our French experience,” said Margeeve. “Iz, she was very apologetic for mentioning it. On the terrace, just as we were leaving.”

  Margeeve recounted the scene. She and Suzanne were sitting in the little glass room that adjoins the terrace, filled with ferns and aspidistra, lined with photographs and little drawings by various Persands, Suzanne busying herself pouring them another coffee and passing the sugar (in cubes). “There is something a little delicate I would like to mention,” she had said to Margeeve. “With the others not here.” She sighed. “We are so fond of both Roxeanne and now of Isabel too, it has been lovely to have her here these months and so wonderful for Roxeanne, especially—how do you say—pendant the pregnancy and the problems. She is a lovely girl.”

  “Thank you, we think so,” said Margeeve. “Of course.”

  “Yes, so willing and so cheerful. She is amazing with all the little children, she is delightful, on Sundays, she takes them for walks and is so good with them.”

  “Really? I mean, I’m happy to hear it.”

  “How to explain. I feel you and I can talk. The two grand-mères. You have not met my brother, I believe, Monsieur Cosset, but he is a person quite well known in France for his political comments, a personnage. He is actually quite eminent. I am afraid, though, that he has something of a reputation as a tombeur.”

  Margeeve did not immediately follow this apparent non sequitur, but sensed Suzanne’s confidential mood, and there was something she herself had wanted to bring up—the picture. Listening for an opening interfered with her ability to pick up on Suzanne’s hints.

  “We have a situation in our family, which I hope you’ll understand. It concerns the painting, it isn’t really Roxeanne’s,” said Margeeve.

  “Oh?” Suzanne in her turn disconcerted by what appeared to be a change of subject.

  “That’s why my son has started the lawsuit, it’s really a matter that concerns our family, did Roxy have a right to bring it to France? You see?”

  Suzanne did not. “I know the French have a reputation for understanding these things, but let me assure you my brother’s philandering over the years has far exceeded the normal, and has caused much pain to poor Amélie, though I think she is perfectly resigned to it by now.” Here she must have perceived that Margeeve had not understood.

  “We are afraid my brother has taken advantage of Isabel. I would be so sorry if Isabel might be hurt by someone much older, and more experienced, and I’m afraid a little unscrupulous where young women are concerned.”

  Margeeve was bound to attend to the idea of Isabel being hurt. Suzanne continued.

  “Of course when she goes back home it will seem less painful,” continued Suzanne, “assuming it is painful at all, but Isabel has such an open, helpful nature, we all love her and would not want her to be wounded by someone who, in all candor, has not always been very nice to women.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Margeeve vaguely.

  “I would think if she were to return to America . . . after Roxeanne’s delivery, of course. We will see that Roxeanne gets the help she will need. . . . If Isabel went back to California, I have no doubt the whole thing would fade from her mind, she is bound to have many admirers in California. . . . Perhaps in time she will understand. . . .”

  Now, in the train, my humiliation was total. I had a vision of Suzanne saying to Antoine or Charlotte, “Did you see Isabel’s sac? Mon Dieu, is it possible, Edgar up to his old tricks?” And I understood Margeeve’s expression, which was disapproval mixed with amusement. My father, who had looked up from reading the Pariscope, had a more ambiguous scowl of attention. Roger and Jane were politely silent. Roger I suppose was wondering how this new news would help our case. “Well, are you asking me to explain it, or what?” I said, crossly. I was imagining their dismay.

  But Margeeve was laughing! “Madame de Persand apologizing that her horrible roué of a brother had seduced our young flower Isabel. They are very consternated and concerned,” Margeeve went on. Roxy too began to laugh. Chester’s face darkened slightly. I found it irritating that my virtue or lack of it should be a matter of family levity, and said so.

  “ ‘We would so hate it if poor Isabel as well as Roxy should be made unhappy by someone in our family.’ She wanted us to speak to you, of course. To save you, I guess.” Her smile, her light tone—I quickly understood that Margeeve was happy for me to be the instrument of discomfiting the Persands. She seemed to have no curiosity about Edgar himself, or what I might be feeling. She was treating the whole thing as a joke because the Persands were treating it seriously, thinking I was the victim of their most disreputable relative. I found it a bit disquieting, in truth, to think that he was disreputable, because Edgar, though he had never concealed his past, had not stressed, either, that it was anything but the normal past of a Frenchman, eyes on duty, church and government, family, and dinner. Perhaps it was not.

  What I minded more, though, I have to admit, was this laugh my family was now having, about me as an instrument of their revenge. There was something coarse about it. I had never seen them before in that light, and perhaps it was unfair to see them that way now, indulging in a little laugh at the people who were after all taking them for a lot of money, for thinking that their Isabel could not take care of herself. A small triumph, after all, but I did not like it to be at my expense. I knew what I felt and knew, and could not explain any of it to them, about Edgar, about my heart. I knew what they would say if I told them I was in love and meant to have my way. They would say I had said all that before.

  “He’s seventy at least!” Roxy was exclaiming to Margeeve and Chester. “I had no idea! How could I? She”—meaning me, as if I weren’t there—“has never said a word. He sends expensive presents, of course. I’ve seen those.” Roxy looked distressed and defensive, as if she had been caught lying down on the job, the job of looking after the unreliable Isabel. I could tell them something about her.

  “Well, it’s true,” I snapped, “but it’s none of their business, or yours, for that matter.” Then their eyes changed. I could see that they were saying something to themselves to the effect that it had never been any good trying to reason with Isabel.

  “You’ve been trying to make it hard for me the whole time you’ve been here,” cried Roxy, turning savagely to me. “How could you do something like that? No wonder the Persands are being so difficult.” And she went on, much raving of this kind, about the effect of my affair on her; and she was comforted by Margeeve and even Chester for this shock to her delicate poet’s system.

  “You girls are both coming home,” Chester said.

  33

  THROUGH SOME ASSOCIATION of ideas, I had suggested we meet the man from Christie’s at Pile ou Face, a little restaurant not too far from the Hôtel Drouot, the auction house. The Christie’s man was Piers Janely, large, plump, and affable. I immediately saw he was a shade too large for Pile ou Face, taking up too much space in a discreet little room. He had a high-colored English face, and his voice had a range between upper-class loudness and the dealer’s smooth, confidential croon. I had forgotten or never had noticed the almost affected inflections of English English, which sounded odd and stagey against our own flat California accents. Hearing French around you all the time makes you more conscious of the accents of English. Like Piers, Roger and I are tall. The three of us moved, stooping, up t
he circular stairway.

  Chester was going to the Louvre with Margeeve, said he would come for dessert if he could but not to count on it. He said he trusted us. Neither he nor I was sure why we were meeting this Christie’s guy anyhow, but Roger had been corresponding with him.

  “Let me say at once that your picture is fabulous, marvelously beautiful,” said Piers Janely. “What would an oeuf fermier be? Just a boiled egg? Only in France could they serve you a boiled egg with such panache. Such effrontery, one might say. And the price! I think I’ll try the egg, to start.” All this said in a voice perfectly audible downstairs, I was sure.

  “I’ve explained the legal situation,” Roger said to me.

  “Knotty, but by no means the worst we’ve had to deal with,” Janely remarked. “Of course things are always worse when the French are involved.”

  “They’re not involved, in the largest sense,” said Roger. “As I wrote you, the Louvre is not interested, which clears the way for export.”

  “Then the foie de veau, pommes mousseline,” said Janely.

  “Oh, you should have something more cuisinée,” I suggested. “How often do you come to Paris? What they do wonderfully here is pintade au cerfeuil, with some chestnuts.” I felt Roger studying me oddly.

  “Let me look at the wine list,” Janely said. “I used to do a bit of wine, before moving into Old Masters.”

  “They say the real wine experts are all English,” Roger said.

  “Undoubtedly, it’s absolutely true. The French have very faddish notions and often overlook some quite amazing vintages.” He studied the wine list and waited for us to order. I had the eggs myself, being fond of the puree of morilles that comes with them, and the croustade de poulet, reflecting that I might be eating another big meal that night with Edgar. When Roger had ordered, Janely asked the waiter to bring us a red Trévallon, which I thought was an interesting choice.

  “Your picture, I must say, from La Tour’s best period, in my mind, though by no means the period he is best known for,” Janely said presently. “In my opinion, La Tour.”

  He waited for us to absorb this astonishing news.

  “That doesn’t seem to be the general opinion,” said Roger presently, his voice husky, as a man’s becomes when he is torn with desire. “The school of La Tour, or a follower of La Tour is the most anyone will say.”

  “Of course,” said Janely. “What do you expect? If they tell you it’s a La Tour, the price will go out of sight and they’ll have to pay more for it. It’s that simple, frankly.”

  “But the Louvre?”

  “Suppose you were a museum,” Janely said. “You wanted to acquire, say, a Renoir some local people had found in their attic. I don’t say the Louvre would mislead in any way, I would never suggest—I mention the psychology of the situation. Before you proposed a price, would you go round first to tell them how valuable their Renoir was? Hardly.”

  The simplicity, the obviousness of all this, struck me and Roger both.

  “If they wondered whether it were really a Renoir at all, would you assure them it was? No, you would not. To preserve your own integrity, you might tell them you couldn’t be sure.”

  “I see,” said Roger after a moment. “What do you think?”

  “I think it is a very fine La Tour which in competitive bidding will achieve a very fine price. More than one person will know its value. Our catalog would state the case correctly.”

  “What price range?” Roger asked, his voice husky with avarice.

  “Perhaps a million pounds. We would advise a reserve of nearly that. That would mean it would not be sold under that sum.”

  Roger and I both calculated the difference between a million pounds, even as split with the Persands, and the forty thousand of Stuart Barbee’s first estimate. I felt funny—the mere process of thinking about a huge sum of money introduces a kind of unpleasant excitement, a feeling of hectic interest, a hum in the brain. Tureens and beautiful clothes floated through unbidden. I tried to think of something more worthy, I imagined two million, split with the Persands leaving a million, split with Roxy and Judith—it would still come to five hundred thousand for Roger and me. A dizzying, empowering sum. It was to become Isabel the heiress instead of Isabel the dog-walker. I am detaching these thoughts from each other in order to put them down, but they occurred simultaneously, with the force of electric shock.

  Either Roger was making the same calculations, or he was struck dumb by the mendacity of great institutions.

  “Barbee, the guy who came for the Getty—wasn’t he an independent appraiser? He had nothing to gain or lose, that was just insurance.”

  “Hmmm, rather,” said Janely.

  “Who do we get to tell us, then?” Roger asked.

  “We have, obviously, a point of view opposite to the museums and dealers. Like you, we want to sell at the maximum price. We don’t serve our own interests by overestimating, however, and most of the time we are close to predicting the actual sales price. Sometimes sales disappoint, sometimes they exceed our estimate—that is what happens most often. We are accurate because we are confident about our attributions and we know the market. We have to. There is no doubt in my mind that you have a good early La Tour and it could be worth as much as a million pounds.”

  “Drouot would have more experience, surely, with French painting?”

  Janely raised a brow. “I don’t pretend to know what liaisons prevail among the French institutions. It’s safe to say Drouot is playing it safe.”

  “I would feel more comfortable at Christie’s,” Roger admitted.

  “This is extraordinary,” said Janely of his soufflé. “The French really are matchless.”

  Chester climbed the stairs just as we were finishing, so we had another coffee with him. Mr. Janely paid the bill.

  “A million, Dad,” Roger told Chester. “Mr. Janely is sure it’s a La Tour.” At this, Chester just looked uncomfortable.

  We were rocked, thrown, Roger and I, by this lunch, and didn’t have much to say to each other walking back toward the Place Maubert, each lost in thought, counting our riches, plotting our actions, trying to stifle those improper hopes now springing up that had so carefully been bred out of us by our parents and their strictures against greed. (Well, I never noticed that these had weighed much with Roger anyhow.) We didn’t at all disagree that Saint Ursula ought to be sold at Christie’s. After a discreet interval following its withdrawal from the sale at Drouot, it would come blazing out as a La Tour and the Louvre would have already signed off on it. We were each thinking of what the money would mean to us, and Roger was probably thinking of how we could get out of having to split it with the Persands. I agreed they had no right to it really.

  34

  I do thank you for your efforts, which have done me good, and all the more so because they will not cost you any sacrifice, I hope. But don’t let us talk about the future, I beg of you.

  —Adolphe

  I WAS LOOKING forward to seeing Edgar that night on his return from Brussels—just for a drink, not a proper assignation, because I had a lot to tell him—all this, and the news that both our families knew about our affair. If he didn’t know that already. I was scared of this conversation, because it would be a moment when he might say we had better not go on.

  We met about six in the bar at the Lutétia.

  “I had coffee with Charlotte,” I said directly. “She says the Persands and everyone know about us and are in an uproar. My parents also—Suzanne told them.”

  Edgar appeared startled. He tasted his scotch. “Well, does that spoil it for you, chérie?”

  “Not for me. I was thinking of you. Of your wife.” His wife was not a forbidden topic, yet we had never talked of her. That was a point of pride with me.

  He shrugged. “Inhibiting but not absolutely fatal.” There did seem a glint of irritation, though, at the prospect. Discussions, perhaps ultimatums. Perhaps he knew exactly what to expect. “How did they know, I won
der?”

  “She didn’t say. I was too stunned to ask. I can’t imagine.”

  “Never mind, Isabel. Pas de problème. We will ignore what Charlotte told you, as if she had not told it to you.”

  Could we? I wondered. Can you unknow something? Would we ever get them out of the bedroom with us? Or would we always feel their eyes, their irritation, even their laughter? (I had not forgotten the malicious amusement of my parents.) They had all intruded on the perfect private intimacy of our world.

  “Or will it be more amusing, the better to épater the respectable?” Edgar went on. Amusing was the word we had started out with. In the semidarkness of the bar, his magisterial presence reassured me, but the shadow across his face did not. “Is it sweet to shock? Don’t worry, little one, what we have cannot be taken away.” He meant this to be reassuring, but I was not reassured.

  “Tomorrow night we’re invited to Mrs. Pace, me and my family, I mean,” I said. Tomorrow, Tuesday, was the night we usually met. Edgar looked at his watch.

  “Let’s go to my rooms for an hour, chérie. I have to go out later, but not until nine.”

  This was what I wanted, to be in his arms, yet this break with our Tuesday tradition made me feel more at sea than I had been feeling.

  As Edgar went to get his coat, I heard (understood) an elegant Frenchwoman say to her companion at the table behind us, “It isn’t true that the American girls who come here are all heiresses, riche et bien placée the way it was even in the fifties. Today you don’t know who they are, they come from states you never heard of. It isn’t true, either, that Americans don’t speak French. My dear, they all speak it, exécrablement.”

  There was something elegiac about les galipettes, too, and at the climax I sobbed, from the anguishing keenness of my sense of impediment and release, but also because at that moment I was sure it was the last time. “Bonjour tristesse / You are written in the lines of the ceiling.” He stayed inside me a long time when it was over, holding me tenderly.