Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  And one of them said, “We’ve got the young woman, Doug.” Was that me?

  Knots of French police conferred with new Americans in EuroDisney security cars. I looked at my watch: eleven in the morning.

  Noon. One. At one-thirty, in acutest misery, I explained that I had to use the toilet. The young man got out of the car and came back with a policewoman. From this I figured that I was somehow in custody and not to go anywhere alone. I wasn’t worried, I was innocent of everything and had friends—did I not?—in high places. But it was odd and confers a queer sense of importance to be in custody. I could not see that any sign had been seen of Doug Tellman. There was much milling around. For some reason I wasn’t really scared about Margeeve and the others; it was too unlikely, too unbelievable, too like a fantasy drama enacted to suit the place. It was as if, when you are involved in a drama of the heart, real events have no significance.

  The policewoman, with no more idea than I about where we would find the toilets, led me off toward a promising low building at the edge of the service road behind us. “Do you speak English?” I asked her.

  “Very leetle,” she said.

  “Do they really think they are in danger? My mother and Gennie? He has no reason to hurt them. He doesn’t even know them.” As I said this, it crossed my mind that it was Suzanne he might hurt, if he realized who she was, mother of his hated rival. She shrugged.

  There were rest rooms. We took a pee, the policewoman too. It seemed unprofessional somehow. “Comment tu t’appelles, toi?” I asked her. These were the first words Yves had spoken to me, and a phrase I had mastered. I knew you could not ask Monsieur le Ministre in that familiar tone, but maybe a fellow woman? Even she looked a little startled, then amused.

  “Je m’appelle Huguette, moi,” she said. “Toi?” We walked back outside to the unchanged scene, through the crowd of yellow-slickered bystanders. An American said, “Hostage situation.”

  “Moi, je suis Isabel.”

  She led me toward the car. “Can’t I just stand here?” I pleaded. But she made me get in again. Some sort of odd machine, looking like one of those machines that toss tennis balls, was being wheeled into place. Another hour passed. I didn’t know if they had any idea whether he was really in there, but they continued to focus on this tower of the Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant. We waited and sat, with nothing happening to clarify my situation. Eventually, to pass the time, I told Huguette the story of the flea market, the tureen photo, and the theft of Mrs. Pace’s tureen; to my surprise she wrote some of it down.

  Eventually an older policeman came and put his head in the car. With him was one of the Americans in suits.

  “What can you tell us, mademoiselle?” asked the American. It was the first time in these several hours that anyone had asked me what I might know about what was going on. I told them my story in English, the EuroDisney man translating for the brisk French gendarmes. I explained how Mr. Tellman had asked me to get his car, and then when I got it, how the police stopped me, the part they knew.

  “He’s in there,” the Disney guy said. “He was spotted. Unknown whether anyone else is in there with him. He hasn’t made any demands, he hasn’t responded.”

  “My mother and another woman and a bunch of kids are with him,” I said.

  “Hostages, presumably.”

  “Am I under arrest or anything?” I asked.

  “Not for the moment. We will need to understand your role,” said the older gendarme, in perfect English.

  “I don’t have a role,” I insisted. “Can’t you see that?”

  “Mais non, Americans are totally inscrutable,” says Huguette to me. “Their smiles. They mask themselves with smiles. And they will not tell you their family name. ‘Just call me Marilyn,’ they say. It is very sinister.” But to me it was they, and the situation, that were inscrutable. For the first time, I began actually to worry.

  In the fog of concern and interest, in the suspended space capsule of the police car, while I was left to wonder what would happen, I thought of something Edgar once said: “You Americans imagine everything will work out for the best.” Is that true?

  “I used to ask myself why you believe that,” he had said. “It is not the message of Protestantism, or of history either.” The French are very hung up about Protestantism. They imagine it forms a whole world view, whereas to me it doesn’t seem like anything. Who is right?

  “Your founding fathers expressed a hope for the future and a commitment to preparing the conditions that would make possible the best outcomes. But somewhere along the way, hope was transubstantiated into belief incarnate. I believe you call it the Power of Positive Thinking,” he had said. “Of course French people have no such delusions that things will work out for the best.”

  Would things work out for the best? Or would a maniac Disney lawyer harm my mother, Suzanne, and three little children? Since I was an American, I naturally believed he would harm them, exactly the opposite of what Edgar had said I would believe. All the hostage dramas I had seen on the evening news, every bit of footage of drive-by shooters and 7-Eleven busts, came to me, and they all turned out badly, with the miscreants and sometimes the hostages shot by police or burned alive. It was the French who seemed insouciant. Fascinated, cramped, and beginning to be wretched, it seemed to me that the French police were almost casual, almost unconcerned. They seemed prepared to camp under the windows of the tower forever.

  Minutes, hours, slowed interminably. Eventually my mind drifted above the incoherent scene to the future, where a number of things became clear. I would go to Bosnia, or at least Zagreb. Why not? Either with Edgar or with a relief organization. I could drive a truck, I could be Edgar’s assistant, or secretary to a delegation, I could be a reporter, I could make documentary films. In this way doing something worthwhile to make things come out for the best. It seemed beautifully clear, and it eased my mind to have at least one thing beautifully clear. The projection was as actual as a memory, me detached from my family and what used to be my country in a no-man’s-land of turmoil and adventure which was beginning here, today, at EuroDisney. I would sleep with Doctors without Borders, and Bosnian Muslim diplomats. I would take dictation and write up my observations. I would help those poor women in kerchiefs. I would find homes for the rape babies no one wants. Edgar was right about responsibility and courage, that they are the things you have to have. I hoped I would turn out to have them.

  It was another forty-five minutes before anything noticeable happened. Without warning, something was tossed out the window and landed heavily at the feet of a police inspector. Experts approached it gingerly, dogs sniffed it. It was Margeeve’s purse. “It’s my mother’s purse!” I told the policewoman, Huguette, who had stayed with me in the car, and she quickly went off to tell the others. Now the somber men were looking inside it, and smirking at Margeeve’s hankie and roll of Clorets.

  Inside the purse a note in Margeeve’s handwriting: “We’re coming out—don’t shoot.” The forces shouted the news down the ranks. The tourist crowd, a shifting population at the periphery of a cordoned-off area, heard and picked up the cry: the children are coming out. The women he was keeping to ensure his own safe passage somewhere. Where did they suggest? The experts exchanged looks of relief and satisfaction. One danger averted, the children unharmed, and a dialogue begun, always the finest of signs.

  The sight of Margeeve’s purse made real to me her plight in a way I had not really been able to feel before. I could imagine her fingers being wrested from it, or her proffering it, suggesting he put the note inside. She is clear headed, I couldn’t imagine her going to pieces, she would be calm, Suzanne too, they would occupy themselves with the children. I was sure they were all right. Yet, were they?

  “There is no course of action to suggest,” said the gendarme to the Disney representatives. “He must come out. We make him understand he will not be harmed. Make him understand he must send the women out.”

  “He could go t
o Algeria, or Iraq,” someone said.

  “We are ready for the children,” said the megaphone.

  Presently, at the foot of the tower of Sleeping Beauty a little crooked door opened and, to my relief, Paul-Louis came out, gravely leading Marie-Odile and Gennie by their hands. The police trained drawn guns on them nonetheless. Paul-Louis blinked at the array of police and cordons and film equipment, and drew himself up slightly taller, a brave little boy. Marie-Odile and Gennie looked relatively unconcerned and certainly unhurt. They were enveloped by officials, and I then couldn’t see them from where I sat captive in the police car.

  “Don’t you want me to talk to my niece?” I asked Huguette, my keeper. “I’m her aunt, I take care of her, she’ll be glad to see someone she knows.”

  “Yes, a good idea,” she agreed. “Come along.” She opened the car door for me, as if she were a man.

  When she saw me, little Gennie ran to me, saying something over and over in her hard-to-understand baby-talk French.

  “What does she say?” asked the policemen, and I had to explain I couldn’t understand her.

  “The boy says they’ve not had lunch,” put in Huguette. I hadn’t either, it occurred to me. I offered to take the children and feed them.

  “Yes, get them out of range,” said the American man who evidently spoke for the group of American Disney people who were taking part, chiefly by shouting “Yo, Doug” at intervals toward the windows of the tower.

  This is how we’re having Mickeyburgers and chocolate shakes when, after an hour, Margeeve and Suzanne come out, almost without announcement, shaken but composed. They confirm my story, that I was not an accomplice, I was simply persuaded by Tellman to go get his car. A new shift of police come on, and the old ones come into the restaurant where the children, the policewoman, and I are sitting, and everyone sits down together and orders Mickeyburgers.

  “He never told us why he was holding us. We got the idea he had committed a crime,” Margeeve was explaining volubly to the police. “He tried to get Suzanne to think of someplace he could hide. He didn’t hurt us.” She was very up, thrilled by her adventure. “He had a gun, that’s how he kept us there.”

  They were appalled to hear what he had done to Magda. I watched Suzanne, to see if I could guess her deepest feelings, but amazement was all I could read.

  I wanted badly to hang around at this point, to see the drama played out, but it was clear someone needed to take the children home. Luckily (it seemed) Suzanne and Margeeve, energized by their ordeal, seemed up to getting back to Paris on their own with the children. How strange it is that the privileges conferred by being at the center of a drama are so fleeting. No Disney limousine to drive them back to Paris, no police car for them, but only a journey on the little perimeter train, then a taxi at the main gate, hailed by a policeman, the single concession to their brief star status as hostages. Life is capricious, proffering an instant of importance, then turning its back. Warhol’s proverbial fifteen minutes. I walked with them to the taxi stand, and then back to the scene with the policeman. Of course I wanted to see the dénouement. Lights had begun to come on in the park, the festive air of night mounted, bands began strolling, people began going into the restaurants for snacks and wine.

  When the policeman and I arrived back at the Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant, it appeared that Tellman had surrendered. He was sitting on the ground outside the tower, surrounded by police and the Disney officials. He seemed smaller, his spine sagged, his beard had sprouted, giving a gray cast to his skin, something was spilled down his shirt, and it appeared he was sobbing. He didn’t look at me. Someone put something over his shoulders. There appeared to be a disagreement between the Disney men and the police, something that caused the Disney men to back off, shouting angrily. After a while, Tellman was put into the little Renault where I had been made to sit, and driven off. The police had lost interest in me. I watched for a while and then went on foot toward the entrance, amid the roving bands and cavorting men in lion costumes. In Paris, by now or soon, Suzanne would be learning about the death of her youngest son, but I did not know, as yet.

  37

  WE HAD LEFT about eight-thirty in the morning, Roxy, relishing the quiet day, had taken her time getting dressed. Having concluded she was not going into labor, and with a cheerful sense of relief to be rid of the rest of us, she decided to treat herself to hot chocolate at the Brasserie Espoir. She put on her coat and went downstairs. On the stairs she could hear a murmur of voices below her, and when she came into the front hall, she found it crowded with gendarmes, and little, violet-clad Madame Florian, hysterical, being seen to by a strange nurselike policewoman. Drawn to the drama, Roxy peered where the others were looking. The door to the poubelles in the utility room under the stairs was braced open with a trash can, and she could see the inert legs of an apparently lifeless corpse visible behind or perhaps in the trash bins.

  For a second her head rang with horror and excitement. She had heard the sirens but had not imagined them coming to this quiet building, where the only noise is the occasional shouting of Mr. Moabi, an Algerian oil dealer on the fourth floor who screams at business associates over the phone. Then came the odd idea that the lifeless body was Charles-Henri, struck down by divine justice. She was both afraid and certain that this was so. A new throng of gendarmes packed into the dim hallway. Madame Florian, wearing her coat, was sitting on the steps recounting the discovery in her high, childlike cadences to a person with a notebook. She had seen only the legs, she had been afraid to go in.

  Roxy too was afraid to look again into the gloom of the utility room, but could not avoid seeing the form being covered with a cloth, some centimeters of a denim leg and foot protruding from the bin. Now she was filled with the opposing certitude that one is never to be delivered by magic from the untenable or unbearable but must go through it to the end. Charles-Henri would not be struck by death in order to deliver Roxy from the moral disadvantages of being a deserted wife in a strange land, no. And she loved Charles-Henri and did not really want him dead. All the same, a scary feeling, almost of happiness, gnawed in her, not that it was Charles-Henri, for of course it couldn’t be, but she was somehow happy that at least this bolt from God, a body in the poubelles, would divert all attention, especially her own, bringing days and days of animated inquiry and gossip and the exchange of rumor in the Place Maubert, and she would not be able to think about Charles-Henri all the time.

  Next, with sickened certitude, it came to her that the body must be Tommy Smithers, an American boy who had lived in my room in the garret before me, always drunk and waiting for money from home, perhaps slightly schizophrenic, somebody’s unbearable son out of sight out of mind, pathetic Tommy who tried to borrow money from her again last week and whom she heard weeping on the stairs.

  She had believed there were such things as murder mainly in America, or so they were always saying here: it is so violent, your country—people carrying guns as in a cowboy movie, the streets clotted with fous, with madmen, as in Taxi Driver or with gangsters as in Bonnie and Clyde—these were historical personages, no?

  It was like the American procedure, she supposed, watching a policeman who took fingerprints from the trash door and the front door. Another policeman stood at attention outside while it was going on, as bland and friendly as the young men who guard President Mitterrand, in the next street.

  When she told the police her name they looked at her long and speculatively: une américaine. Did she know the dead individual? Had she heard nothing? What had she been doing last night around eleven? But they did not make her feel that they suspected her, they were courteous and dispassionate, nor did they tell her who he was, how old, how he had died. To their questions, she recited the names of the others in the building—her sister Isabel, the African family, Mademoiselle Lavois on the third floor, Mr. Moabi, and Madame Florian, whom they had met. Isabel, her sister, lived in the attic room, and an American, Tommy Smithers, had lived there b
efore that. The officers nodded and wrote these things down. Then she wondered if the dead man could be Mr. Moabi, always so combative and apoplectic on the phone, surely inciting people to kill him.

  “The body must have been left there by someone who knew the code to the street door, and who had a key to the trash room,” said the detective.

  “Not necessarily, sometimes we leave the little door open at the side,” Roxy said. “The men can then take the poubelles directly out into the street without entering the building.”

  “Ah,” he said, writing this down.

  “Are you sure it isn’t Mr. Smithers? He lived in the chambre d’étudiant.”

  “Excuse us now, madame, we will call on you a little later.”

  “I will go to the Brasserie Espoir,” Roxy said.

  Outside in the Place Maubert, all was normality. Still stunned and excited, she went to sit at one of the little terrace tables at the Brasserie Espoir, the brasserie dog underfoot, the waiters in clean morning aprons, a smell of coffee, of croissants, an aroma of the smug consensus that this was a morning arranged as mornings should be arranged, in a society that has grasped the meaning of morning, watching the mothers in their sensible shoes pushing the strollers, trailing dachshunds.

  “Bonjour,” said Anne-Chantal Lartigue, kissing her quickly and sitting down beside her. “I am glad to see you. The men are repairing the electrical minuterie, so the code to my building will not operate, and I am not allowed to enter for another half hour. Isn’t that stupid?”

  “Someone was found dead in our building, disposed of in the trash,” Roxy told her in a wondering voice.

  “Really? Who on earth?”

  “They didn’t tell. Madame Florian found him.”

  Anne-Chantal laughed merrily to think of Madame Florian and a corpse. Only then did Roxy begin to feel how unnatural was this gaiety that seemed to attend the death of a stranger, or perhaps even someone known to them, in her own hallway. But it is a way that French have, too, of dealing with grave things, the way the Chinese are said to laugh when you fall down in an embarrassing way and may have hurt yourself.