Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  “Burgling seems such a French crime,” she added, her detachment never deserting her. “Domestic, focused on material objects, requiring a certain power of discrimination, and non-violent. But the interest in my files does elude me.”

  “They were probably just looking for hidden jewelry,” I suggested, dismayed at my own role.

  Table, tureen, Bow platter. Almost nothing else was gone, though eventually we noticed the absence of a good little Claude drawing that hung in the powder room. The years 1940–1952 had been pulled from her files and lay on the desk. As I was putting them back, I saw that 1950 was gone.

  “What happened in 1950?” I asked, for we hadn’t got to the definitive stage of our sorting.

  “Old Communist Party stuff. That was the year I was treasurer—Oh, I do mind about my faience, Robert,” she cried. “I mind terribly about that.”

  It was funny that I minded too, as if it had been us who had been burgled. I felt the same indignation and sense of violation. I saw it all as a part of a pattern of loss that had begun to form out of the indistinct materials of life and impose itself on me.

  I remembered all at once that Cleve Randolph had wanted to look in Mrs. Pace’s files, though of course there could be no connection. What did all this mean?

  I rushed home to get ready for our expedition to EuroDisney. As I was putting Gennie’s coat on, I got a call from the antiques dealer at the flea market. He had a tureen. It was rather, though perhaps not exactly, like the one I wanted, and perhaps I’d like to make a date to come and see it? I said I’d come soon, I’d call him.

  35

  But whoever it is who has thus determined the course of our life has, in so doing, excluded all the lives we might have led instead of our actual life.

  —Proust, The Past Recaptured

  NOW I MUST pick my way carefully among the events of the next few days, which would further change our world and change us. Of course, I know that each event in life changes the next, so that you can say this of any sequence of things that happen. But “catastrophes have a somber way of sorting things out,” said Victor Hugo. Could we have avoided this one, if we had listened?

  An expedition had been planned to EuroDisney. Margeeve and I were bringing Gennie, and Suzanne de Persand was also bringing two of Charlotte’s children—Paul-Louis and Marie-Odile. Roxy had planned to come along, but at the last minute she said she didn’t feel well enough.

  We were all solicitude. “Do you think it could be the baby coming?”

  No, Roxy said, discouraged, it didn’t feel like labor coming on; but all the same, it seemed too hard to trudge over the acres and acres of some amusement park in the cold weather. We thought, and said to each other once we got on the RER train, that she probably just wanted a day to herself without us and without Gennie.

  I had been feeling a snobbish disapproval of going to EuroDisney. I couldn’t imagine Europeans going there, let alone us, with such a place of our own in California, if we had happened to want to go to it, which we didn’t. Oh, Chester and Margeeve had taken us when we were kids, of course, and of course we had loved it, then.

  To get to EuroDisney takes about forty minutes on the train, to the east of Paris. Since Gennie didn’t have a hereditary knowledge of Mickey Mouse and Donald, she wasn’t too excited. She was much more a French than an American child. I supposed they said things like ooh-la-la to her at the crèche, for she says ooh-la-la, and she obviously doesn’t get these French phrases from Roxy, who speaks to her only in English. But today she knew we were going on an outing and it was special because her other grandmother and little cousins were there too.

  “How pretty it is!” said Suzanne politely as we approached a set of pink buildings through a park of rhododendrons already in bloom, and poinsettias for the approaching holidays, and artfully sprayed snow at the corners of the windows. I had expected that EuroDisney would be an embarrassing, envious, derivative collection of cardboard castles, an American dream of old-world splendor, so I was surprised that it was so pretty, with a wedding-cake pink hotel that somehow looked familiar, Victorian turnings and Tiffany glass. It was American. I had expected to feel a rush of cultural indignation, a sort of humiliated, apologetic feeling that America had put over anything this dumb on Europeans. But it was hard to object to.

  “It looks like the Del Coronado, that hotel in San Diego?” Margeeve said. “It looks like it’s modeled on one of our California hotels,” she explained to Suzanne.

  “California, yes, I imagine California to be like this, I saw only Santa Barbara, you know,” Suzanne agreed. “This is actually very charming, this hotel here, though you hear the food is not good.”

  Now I try to remember what we did the hour or so before the strange event. I believe we had a nice time, it was all so decorative and sweet, an idealized America, and I had to admit it was nice to be back in America, especially America refined to its ideal essence of gingerbread porches and Tiffany glass, and harmless anthropomorphic bunnies and mice, amiable dwarves, optimistic fables, Santas and handsome cowboys, choo-choos, hitching posts. I know we are supposed to mind that, but it’s hard not to appreciate, while you’re there, the absence of gum wrappers and assault weapons. Or so I imagined.

  We went on the little western train that took us into the Sierra Nevada and through scenery that looked like Tahoe—none of it seemed exotic to us, but Suzanne often said “very pretty” and Gennie laughed to see dance-hall girls and villains. We went into the castle of Sleeping Beauty. “La Belle au Bois Dormant,” Suzanne explained to the children. We took pictures of each other and went on the Pirates ride.

  My French world had fallen with a crash, like the lurches of my stomach on this stupid ride, clinging to Gennie, who screamed at the glaring faces of the cutthroats and the realistic crocodiles.

  Now I saw that my love for Edgar had been just like this, a kind of insulated make-believe. Yet while, when we came out of EuroDisney, we would be the same as before, I was not the same for my time with Edgar in the make-believe world of France. I had changed beyond reclaim, though I could not say how. I mourned over our last conversation, then I rallied and groped for rays of hope that we might go on somehow. His announcement had come too hard on the heels of me telling him we were discovered for there to be any connection; he was going to Zagreb, that was all. Then I plunged. He had been going to tell me for a long time that things were at an end, and it was coincidence that our families had found out now. How had they found out? Was it the Kelly? How much was our picture worth? Was the man in the flea market planning to sell me Mrs. Pace’s tureen? These questions consequential and inconsequential swirled around in my head with the dizzying progress of the little barque that bore us across the Spanish main.

  It was just then, standing among the pirates of the Caribbean, looking at the rocking of the little distant ships on the blue main, that one of the pirates came up to us and spoke. His eye was deep and baleful, his grinning, piratical mouth like the mouth of a shark. Despite myself, when he laid his hand on my arm, I jumped. You don’t expect the scenery to accost you, it was like the moment in a horror movie when the eyes of the portrait move.

  “Little sister, isn’t it? This is a break.” Long John Silver, the Jolly Roger—after a second his features became those of Magda Tellman’s husband, the lawyer. He smiled, and smiled at Margeeve and Suzanne.

  “This is my mother, and . . .” I hesitated, remembering his drunken violence. Now he seemed calm, but I wondered if it was wise to mention Suzanne’s name, or Gennie’s and the other children. It wasn’t a full-fledged thought, something just stopped me from introducing them. It seemed strange that he could be here, dressed in a loose white shirt, tucked out, like a pirate’s blouse, but of course he had some connection with this place.

  “I’m glad to see her,” he said, almost jovially, to Suzanne and Margeeve. “I need her to help me with something. While she’s gone, I’ll show you ladies around a bit.”

  They appeared startled, l
ooked at me for confirmation that I knew this guy.

  “That’s okay,” I began to say, “we were just going to the Futureland, or whatever it’s called.”

  “Listen,” he said, taking my arm too firmly and leading me a step or two away, “I want you to go get my car for me. There’s a reason I can’t go myself right now. I’ll tell you right where it is. This would help me out a lot.”

  I was so used to all the stuff I did for people as factotum and gofer, I was ready promptly to say “sure,” but instead something made me hesitate, and I said sorry, I couldn’t. He tightened his grasp on my arm. I began to see he was nervous; he was sweating, though it was cold and he had no coat on. With the hand that wasn’t holding me, he fished in his pants pocket and got his wallet out. He let go of me and pulled something out of it, a picture of himself encased in plastic, with writing—some kind of badge, which he pressed into my hand.

  “When you’ve done it, you can take the ladies to the Disneyland Hotel for a sumptuous lunch, on me, all the comps. Look, take this, this entitles you to all the comps in the park.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he grabbed me again. “It’s a white Opel, rented, and it’s parked against the west fence in Frontierland. I don’t remember the license, if there are more than one, you’ll have to try the key. Just get on the train right here, at Fantasyland—no, it’d be faster to walk. Walk that way, following the tracks, till you get to Frontierland. Here are the keys.”

  “Look . . .” I said.

  “Do it,” he said, and there was something in his tone that compelled me. Perhaps there was something threatening in his voice, perhaps it was the intensity of the pressure of his fingers, or the way he looked at Gennie. In a foreign land, Americans oblige each other more freely than we might perhaps do at home. I told myself it was not so strange to be helping him out. But I’m sorry to say it was the complimentary pass that convinced me.

  “Drive it along the service road to where we can see you from the Sleeping Beauty tower, that’s where we’ll be. It’ll only take you fifteen minutes and it will help me a lot. Meantime I’ll show them some interesting insider stuff.”

  “Isabel?” cried Margeeve.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes. This is Mr. Tellman,” I said. I walked, though irritated and uneasy, in the direction he had shown me, at the perimeter of the park.

  It seemed to take longer than fifteen minutes. I walked through a landscape of pines and scrub sage, as if I were in California. As if I were in California wearing seven-league boots, traversing huge tracts of landscape in a stride. An old jeep rusted in a gully, there were cactus and longhorns. Over a rise I saw the silvery bleached timber of a redwood bunkhouse. I might be in Tahoe. Presently, distantly, behind the little rustic railroad station, through the mountainous thickets, I could discern a parking lot. I had walked perhaps twenty minutes. I took a path, the wrong path, then another which crossed under the tracks of the miniature railroad. Then I was among parked service vehicles, little trucks and electric trolleys, some oil drums, some large trash receptacles. A white Opel sat, almost alone, at one side against the fence. It was unlocked. There was the service road along which I was to drive. I found I was apprehensive, as if I were stealing this car. It was too strange to feel right. Yet what could be wrong, in full daylight in EuroDisney amid thousands of people? Rangers in cowboy hats watched me open the car. I knew they were French—French people worked here—but they looked American in their Stetsons and boots. As I pulled around toward the service road, a Sheriff’s car, a Plymouth car that said “Sheriff,” pulled across the exit and men got out carrying guns, but these were French policemen, and the guns were pointed at me.

  I got out of the car with my hands up. What American moviegoer wouldn’t know to do that? People watched from above, from the trestle of the miniature train, watching this typical American tableau. Maybe they thought we were part of the living diorama of American life.

  The gendarmes made me sit in their car while they parked the Opel again. They asked questions. What was I doing? Whose car was the Opel? Where was the man who had rented it? What connection to me? I could speak French better now than when Roxy had slashed her wrists. I could say a few words, anyhow. I could make them understand about the guy, how I knew him, that he was with my mother and my little niece, and a small, blonde Frenchwoman and two of her other grandchildren.

  The trouble was, I wasn’t sure they believed me. In any case, they made me sit with them.

  36

  O bizarre suite d’événements! Comment cela ’ est-il arrivé? Pourquoi ces choses et non pas d’autres?

  —Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro

  LIKE A BADLY edited film, the montage of ensuing events was hard to follow, so rapidly and incoherently did it unfold, so badly did I understand the muttered French, the air of urgence and importance with which the men climbed out, and got back in the cars, unlocked and prepared their guns, spoke over their radios. We drove along the service road where Tellman had told me to take the Opel. Two other cars crawled slowly behind us, and two were waiting at the rear of a different landscape, trees fancifully pruned, delineating arrival in Fantasyland. The sugary, pointed pink and blue towers of the castle projected above the trees. Most of the visitors to Fantasyland had now donned yellow slickers with pictures of Mickey Mouse on them, bought from the souvenir store in expectation of the rain that had been threatening. A few drops fell. I didn’t see Margeeve or Gennie, or Tellman. “I think they are in the tower,” I told the gendarmes. “When I left, they were going there.”

  “Does he still have the gun?”

  “Gun? I didn’t see a gun,” I said. “Je n’ai pas vu—a gun.” What was the word?

  I hoped he didn’t have one. I knew he was volatile. The fact of his craziness came over me in hindsight—his grip on my arm, the sweat on his forehead. And now he had Gennie. How had I gone off like that, with such docility, leaving her there? Margeeve, Suzanne, left with a crazy person. The gendarmes frowned, they were grim.

  I began to understand the story from what they told each other. He was an American, he had tried to kill his wife but had not succeeded. She had managed to crawl to a neighbor, she had managed to tell them he was crazy and that he had a gun. She might die, was expected to die. Thus he was a murderer. They looked at me, as if watching for my reaction. Was I his girlfriend, in on the plot? American, they said. Gun-crazy, he had shot her, but she didn’t die. Not yet. “You are the petite amie?”

  “Your boyfriend,” they said to me. “You are going to call out to him.” But they wouldn’t let me get out of the car. From there, I thought I saw Tellman’s malevolent eye looking out of the window of the tower, but it could have been a cardboard pirate too. The police surrounded the tower and herded the people in yellow slickers away, families and mothers with strollers, herded them toward Peter Pan’s Flight, saying that the Pirates were closed now, shooing them all away.

  “Dumbo, Dumbo est ouvert!” someone cried. “Dumbo est ouvert!” The tourists rushed off toward the Dumbo ride.

  “He is American? He speaks English? Does he speak French? Do the ladies speak French?” One of the policemen asked me this, in heavily accented English. I explained again who they were. I didn’t even try to explain who he was: my sister’s former husband’s lover’s former husband. Had he really tried to kill Magda?

  I told them about my mother, my sister’s mother-in-law, my three-year-old niece being in there, two other little kids. I wondered if they were scared, I wondered if they really were even in there, and whether he would hurt them. Even if he had hurt Magda, why would he hurt them?

  Once I thought I heard a wailing far off that could be Gennie. I tried to be a blank, I tried not to think, but I also had to think what to do. I had to pee horribly. Maybe that is an effect of fear. Fear plus a powerful and inappropriate ennui. It seemed we had been sitting there for hours. I almost wished something would happen but nothing did.

  “Let me call to my mother,�
�� I said.

  “Allez-y,” said the gendarme, pushing me out of the car. “Stand here, no closer, I am going to give you a microphone.”

  They fussed with a large megaphone on a cord, then held it in front of me. When I cleared my voice, a great cough ricocheted among the towers of the Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant.

  “Margeeve,” I called, my voice booming back at my ears. Nobody answered. Maybe she wasn’t in there. “Encore,” somebody said. I called again, but when no one answered they put me back in the car.

  I am sitting in this police Renault at the opening of the service road. A young gendarme waits with me. I am rigid with unanswered questions: Are they waiting to know if I can be a help some way? Do they think I am involved? Why can’t I go up closer, where the others, men wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, have assembled? This is not per se terrifying, since the French police often dress that way for very casual riots along the Boulevard Saint Germain. But the air now is of a situation, of a crisis, of grave crime. Other men in ordinary suits arrive, I take them to be Americans, who stand unarmed and unprotected and shout up at the teeny mullioned fairy-tale windows: “Yo, Doug. Doug, it’s all right, man. Talk to these people.” I am sure I hear a distant wailing that could be Gennie.

  The yellow slickers have drifted back from Dumbo and form an outer circle beyond the reach of the police. Dogs are brought. Two German shepherds. The crowd parts respectfully to let them and their handlers through. The dogs watch the tower too. Why?

  “Yo, Doug, this isn’t the way, man. Come on out. No one will shoot.”

  “Send out the little girl, Doug. You don’t need more trouble. And the women.”