Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  Then he got up and poured himself a cognac, and said, “Isabel, I’ll be going to Zagreb for a couple of months, to help with the negotiations there.” After a moment of chill, I wasn’t surprised. I ought to feel that it was good—I was happy he was being useful to his country as he should be, where he could help. It was a tribute to the potency of his thought, and validated my admiration once again. Yet I was being abandoned, and it was as I expected, and it made me angry and scared.

  “What will I do?” I said. “Will you want me when you come back?”

  He appeared to think about this, though I have no doubt he had thought about it already. “You will not always want me, my dearest Isabel. We must think of that. Perhaps this is the natural time to part.”

  I heard this with the sinking of heart that comes when you are told something you were afraid of, the test you know you flubbed and now must see the low mark, written in your record for all time.

  “No, I don’t think that at all. I’ll wait, I’ll come with you. . . .”

  “Of course we will always love each other. But you will not always want me. I know, if you do not,” he said. “It was your Emerson, I think, who said, ‘every hero becomes a bore at last.’ ”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” I said.

  Edgar has the idea of, uses the word, destiny. Applies it to himself. “I’m afraid this useless preaching is my destiny,” he said once of his television appearances and town meetings. “At one time I thought my destiny would be as a statesman.” Now his destiny was coming to pass.

  Destiny seems a grandiose word for “future,” though. Maybe you have to be religious to use it, or a statesman, as he said. Maybe you have to be as old as he, when the idea of “future” is not so comfortable. The words stayed in my mind, because I had never thought of myself as having a destiny, though of course I had a future, anyone does except the immediately doomed. Roxy was destined to live in France, a destiny conferred upon her, inadvertently, with her French first name. Hers a manifest destiny. Mine? Whatever mine was, I couldn’t be sorry Edgar was going to Zagreb, for his sake. He wanted it so much, and he might really help there. Yet it fit in too well with the dignified slow-motion collapse of my French world, and the death of my hopes. At first I had no words of protest or reproach. Maybe I was too stunned. I was the immediately doomed.

  “You are young, beautiful, and wise,” he continued. “You will not always want me, Isabel.” Of course the words shot to my lips: And you are an ugly old fool. But I didn’t say them. We talked brightly of the relations of the Bosnian Muslims with the Croatians.

  So. On with the soutien-gorge, the combi satinée, slip dentelle, bas-collant, fuck-me shoes, and out into the night.

  Fighting tears of chagrin, I walked home alone along the Boulevard Saint Germain. It was clear that he was saying more than just that he would be away in Zagreb; he was saying goodbye. He was dumping me. That accounted for his extra tenderness and somewhat portentous manner, accounted for certain things he had said I had not understood. I had been thick, as usual. I had resisted knowing. Goodbye forever, he was saying. Being dumped and being blamed for it: “You will not always want me, Isabel.”

  It was windy and cold now in Paris, December, the weather too ominous a metaphor for May-December lovers, and it was black as midnight by seven-thirty—dix-neuf heures trente, but I would never learn to think of time that way. My spirits chafed at the flatness of the world. I had on my old down coat Margeeve had brought over for me, but I shivered, becoming angry where I should have been reassured by Edgar’s lovemaking. He was vain of his lovemaking because it denied age; he had just wanted to prove his vigor, and now it would be proved in Yugoslavia, which was what really counted for him, his patriotism was really narcissism—I was having that sort of thought.

  The headlights flashed reflections in black puddles of cold rain. Usually, miserable weather in Paris makes you think of human courage—defiant umbrellas, resourceful buses—and for that it is cheering. But tonight the rain described my solitude (“il pleut dans ma chambre, il pleut dans mon coeur”). From the street, looking up, I could see only the ceilings of the lighted apartments above, but even the ceilings, ornate with plaster fruit, lighted by fairy chandeliers, suggested opulent contentment from which I was excluded. I imagined the truffled chickens, the families at table, laughter, all the young women who could play the piano. Even Charlotte could truffle a chicken and play “Für Elise.”

  I could do nothing and had lost everything: Edgar, my family, and France (for I saw too clearly how the boat was nearing the shore, the gangplank would soon be let down, my trunks stowed for the voyage back). Back to my family—but they were all strangers after all; I had not got over my pique at them for their reaction to hearing about Edgar and me, for making fun of my love and my fears, for taking me so lightly. If they loved me, or even knew me, they could not have said, “Their roué of an uncle has seduced our flower Isabel,” and laughed. Were not all their thoughts about me revealed in that sarcastic remark of Margeeve’s? (Had my father at least protested in his heart, thinking how could she say that to Isabel?) As if they were still focused on my sexual behavior in high school, or on some definition of me that didn’t take into account my qualities of . . .

  Of what? When it came to an answer, my mind was a blank. I knew myself to have qualities, but was made to face, in the solitude of icy rain on the Boulevard Saint Germain, just crossing the rue Saint Jacques, that they were not apparent to anyone else. Could everyone in the world be wrong and I right? What had I done or not done in my life, to have them take me so lightly when they took Roger and Roxy and even Judith so heavily? What do you have to do in the world to break through to seriousness? These useless questions seemed of cosmic importance to me.

  To me and perhaps to the roué uncle, of whom I was the victim, his family thought, while my family thought he was mine. There was something funny in that, if I’d been inclined to laugh. My spirits one minute would lift to magnanimity. If I was only his victim, last fling, expedient mistress of the moment, I didn’t care. The heart has its own imperatives, Edgar’s as much as mine. A stab of gratitude to Edgar brought tears to my eyes. Why? Because he thought me worth telling things to, about Clausewitz and Marshal Ney. Because I sensed that our conversations were over. They would not survive the stares and whispers of our families, nor the distance between Paris and Zagreb. Yet—some Frenchman had written—“absence diminishes commonplace passions and enhances great ones.” Thus I wavered between anger and understanding, and between despair and hope. After all, he had not positively said it was over, only that maybe it should be.

  Hope took various forms. Maybe—for I had always been able to construct a better scenario—maybe I had underestimated the extreme urbanity and tolerance of the French (think of Charlotte’s marital sabbatical, for example)? Maybe they would learn to take us for granted. A vision came to my mind of years from now, on the lawn at Chartres, Sunday lunch, Isabel and Edgar a settled couple, Isabel tucking a lap robe over his knees as he sits in his wheelchair, Suzanne calling them in to lunch. Amélie has gone on a cruise to Egypt.

  Yet, a future pushing an elderly gentleman in a fauteuil roulant, would that be enough for me? Somebody else said, “He who lives upon hope will die fasting.” What would become of me? That was really the gist of my self-indulgent misery—pity for Isabel seule. A saying of Sartre’s had powerfully struck me, if only because it seemed to have so much more force in French than when I had heard it in Sunday school in Miami, Ohio: “L’important n’est pas ce qu’on fait de nous, mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu’on a fait de nous.”

  Was it possible I had begun to think in French?

  I was disconcerted by the way events, instead of coming to a head as they would in a film, seemed to recede like the sea of Faith in Matthew Arnold’s poem. I could hear the long, withdrawing roar. Perhaps Edgar and I would never say goodbye; the days between our meetings would simply drag out, he would spend more
time in Brussels, or Bosnia, and I—where? My future had not announced itself. I seemed condemned just to blunder along, nauseated like Sartre’s hero by the flatness of the world. The Persands would never confront me, no voice would be raised at me ever, there would be no climaxes, courtroom or salesroom dramas, no acrimony would ever find expression—the world as flat beneath my feet as the moving sidewalk in the Chatelet metro, which seeming to take me somewhere, would only take me to the next station. This flatness was called civilization. In France, even the frisky American spelling of civilization with a z had been softened to Civilisation.

  Maybe I should go to EuroDisney and fuck German businessmen for money as Mr. Tellman had suggested.

  Just kidding.

  I tried to tell myself there were things to look forward to: Roxy’s baby and maybe some money from Saint Ursula. But these thoughts were not enough to dispel my misery.

  Roxy’s blood on the stairs at 12 rue Maître Albert would always catch me up, if I was thinking of myself, dark reproachful spots saying it’s Roxy who must be watched over and guarded, she is the flower. You Isabel are a tree, sturdy and rooted, whatever they think. (La Fontaine has a saying, though, that the rose bends in storms but trees are blown over.) Roxy is brave really, just that one lapse or outburst, now she is soldiering on, to have her new child alone, for in the end no one is going to help her—not Margeeve and Chester at their breakfast with their papers and tea, they aren’t going to be making all the formula and putting on the little shoes and worrying, and neither am I, however much I might intend to, and neither is Charles-Henri on his weekend visits, nor Suzanne. . . . At thoughts like this I would remember the picture. What if we really got a million dollars? That would save Roxy. Say what you like about money, that it’s disgusting or a taint, it would make all the difference for Roxy between grimness and a life of art. Elated with selflessness, I climbed the stairs sincerely thinking I would give Roxy my share of Saint Ursula. “Have no truck with first impulses,” said I think Talleyrand, quoted by Edgar in one of his speeches: “for they are likely to be Good.”

  Then, outside Roxy’s apartment, I heard a chaos of raised voices. The mood of family acrimony, which had erupted several times before, was fully upon them. Inside, it was explained to me: Charles-Henri had appeared not an hour since to tell Roxy he had agreed that Saint Ursula should not be sold, should instead be settled on Gennie and the baby to come, thus effectively removing it from the realm of the divorce.

  Roxy had just told the others. “It’s what I wanted all along! That solves everything! I knew he’d do the right thing when he really focused on it,” she said, her face radiant. All was right with the world. The picture could be withdrawn from Drouot, could hang in its accustomed place over the mantel, all could be as before except for the cost of insuring it for eighty thousand dollars. That would be expensive but she’d manage. I could imagine her feeling of reprieve, her sense of being smiled on by fortune again.

  Then Roger had said, “Roxy, no way.”

  No way are you going to appropriate property worth several million dollars belonging to Chester, Isabel, and me for the use of you and your children.

  They all began to talk at once.

  Roxy: That picture was given to me when Uncle William died and we all chose pictures.

  Roger: What bullshit, you can never get away with saying that. He wasn’t even your uncle.

  Margeeve: Roger, if you take that attitude I will remind you that half that picture belongs to me because I am married to Chester, you said so yourself. It was Chester who inherited the picture. So it’s half mine.

  Roger: No way, Margeeve, I explained that to you.

  Jane: What about Fritz, after all? Why should Roxy’s children and not Fritz . . . ?

  Me: (timidly) Let Roger tell you about our lunch with the Christie’s guy. . . .

  Chester: (in defense of Roxy) I’m not so sure Uncle William’s will didn’t stipulate that everyone could pick out something he or she liked.

  Roger: Not children by marriage, I hardly think. People not even related to him.

  Me: Roxy! It’s worth millions of dollars. Come on!

  Margeeve: I’m not so sure I would want to sell it. We could loan it to a museum for safekeeping. What good is money, really, and it would just go to taxes, isn’t it better to have an art treasure and do good with it?

  Chester: How ridiculous. This is ridiculous.

  And much, much more. What was new, a note we had never heard before, was the note of asperity between Chester and Margeeve, but I couldn’t guess who blamed whom.

  “I can’t believe this, we are bickering about the birthright of an unborn child,” Roxy cried, amid the chorus of our shouts, mine as loud and greedy as anyone else’s. So much for my handsome resolution as I mounted the stairs.

  I never would have guessed how they felt, all the odd ways they felt. I guess it doesn’t say much for me and Roger that we were holding out for money but, caught up in it, I certainly didn’t think that Roxy could hog the painting for her children, and said so, over and over, with increasing bitterness, all of us bitter where we had been a happy family (and would be again, no doubt). Thus I learned something about the poison of money. In the end, the collective weight of our indignation convinced Roxy she would have to refuse Charles-Henri’s offer, and the sale, whether at Drouot or Christie’s, would proceed.

  “We should weigh withdrawing the picture from the sale at Drouot,” Roger decided. “On the grounds we are considering that offer. While we wait on a ruling about whether it belongs to the biens, as they call it, of the marriage.”

  “I thought you might leave me at least one thing I loved,” Roxy cried.

  Alone, in my room, I swung from despair to rage, thinking about Edgar and my own docility. Had he admired my docility, the absence of reproaches, the dearth of tears? Could I just be dismissed like that, with a casual announcement that we were no longer anything to each other? Were my compliance and good sense so perfectly to be relied upon? I who had given up almost all other social life, who had sacrificed . . . It was self-pity in the most extreme degree. The berating speeches I composed in my mind sank into speeches of entreaty, speeches and then letters. All night I wrote angry and imploring letters in my head, about how I wanted to be with him always.

  The trouble was that the word always immediately suggested its opposite, finite mortality—probably to be encountered sooner by him than by me. It was a reminder of his age and my youth, and of me having to minister to infirmities he’d rather not think about. I tried to say: I want to be with you under any conditions, or let me just be your secretary and aide-de-camp. But all remonstrances came out wrong, with the suspicion that Edgar was right that sooner or later we would part. He had told me to read a French novel called Adolphe, and in it Adolphe says, “Woe to the man who in the first moments of a love-affair does not believe that it will last for ever!” I tried to remember what I had thought from the first, and, it was true, from the first I had always had the intimation of troubles to come. What a curse it was to have a critical and objective nature, how I envied Roxy her unreflective passions, her life of an artist, authorized to rearrange reality.

  The idea of life without Edgar put me at sea again after months of life harmoniously arranged. It made me have a bout of nausea, horribly barfing in the little WC outside the door of the African family’s room. My problems seemed worse for having known happiness. I had learned one lesson from Mrs. Pace, though, a real American lesson: Whatever happened, I would smile.

  Early the next morning, Tuesday, Roxy came up to my room. It was hard for her to climb stairs now, she had gained nearly forty pounds. Standing in my doorway, for a second it didn’t seem to be Roxy, just a heavy female figure, Woman, it could be from Rumania or Split, fleeing from mortar. It was her shapeless brown cloak that made her look like an unfamiliar Slav, and her slightly swollen face, become round and puff-eyed.

  “Mrs. Pace wants you to call,” she said. “Also—Iz, I do
n’t think it’s as strange as the others do, I wanted to say before they came over. About Uncle Edgar. They haven’t met him, they just hear ‘seventy.’ ”

  “I suppose,” I said. “I don’t care anyway.”

  “I didn’t realize you needed a father figure that much. Probably you think Chester paid more attention to me than to you.” (I did think that, but I didn’t care.)

  “I am interested in his politics,” I said.

  “I envy you, actually. Not Uncle Edgar, but, I don’t know, I envy you a passion.”

  “Rox, you’ll be thin again,” I said. I wondered about Maître Bertram, and that strange little moment on the stairs.

  “Oh, I know,” she said. Her sighs lacked conviction. People say that at the end of pregnancy you don’t think you ever will be as you were.

  I went down to Roxy’s apartment and called Mrs. Pace. She told me they’d been burgled, and she wanted me to come over quickly. I rushed to her apartment to find a scene strangely reminiscent of the day at Chartres when the Persands had been “visited.” Mrs. Pace had been both visited and burgled. A policeman dusted for fingerprints and Robert Pace, in his dressing gown, was already on the phone to the insurance. They had been out late the night before and had not looked around when they got in. Then at seven this morning they had noticed that things were gone from the sideboard. Of course I knew the tureen would be gone. I should have spoken up before.

  Mrs. Pace (carefully dressed, stockings, suit, pin in the lapel) said, “I need you, Isabel, just to take a calm look around and help me compile a list of the things that are gone. They say you always fail to notice things yourself, you are too distraught and angry. I’ve noticed the obvious things, of course. All the things on the sideboard—tureen, silver teapot, Bow platter. Then the VCR, and the little table in the hall. What’s very strange is my files, which couldn’t possibly interest a French burglar.