Le Divorce

by Diane Johnson

  “Maître Bertram is here, Roxy’s lawyer,” I observed.

  “Yes, I spoke to him. He says there is an important Poussin being sold here today as well.” That was probably why the under-minister of culture was here, looking after the patrimony of France.

  Behind rows of chairs where privileged bidders were sitting, standees closely thronged. I am tall, and yet, stuck in the back as we were, I could hardly see the podium. Roger, who is taller, was better positioned too, but neither of us could understand what was going on anyway. An auctioneer at a raised dais stood indicating a painting on an easel behind him. His explanations, in rapid French, would excite murmurs or silence, then people would mention sums of francs, inaudibly, several people, then at the end only two, and it would be abruptly over, with the sharp crack of the gavel and a rustle of comment from the audience. In this fashion, several paintings were whisked in and out and away before our eyes: a Watteau, an Inconnu, a Lapautre, a Bouguereau, a Rosa Bonheur.

  A groundling undertone of excitement mounted with each successive exchange, affecting me, perhaps Roger too, with an anxious wish it could be over. As so often, I had too much the feeling of being a powerless spectator caught up in an unwanted event. Could it be true that Saint Ursula would come in, meet her fate, and be gone in this summary way, even as Roxy lay groaning, unaware, in some clinic somewhere? The treachery of our action in letting the sale go on struck me only now.

  When a large mythological scene—hunters in togas chasing a deer—was brought in and placed reverently on the easel, the room became hushed. The important people were evidently not gathered as I had thought for our Saint Ursula, but for this Poussin. The auctioneer discussed it a moment in a somber, portentous tone: “A company of the followers of Diana—Regard the coloration. . . .

  “Am I bid six million to start?” he asked. A man two rows ahead of me made a tiny gesture that I could see from where I stood, but I could not see other bidders who nonetheless were there, driving up the price, up, up up, to forty million francs. When this price had been achieved, with no change of expression, when a long and even agonizing pause announced the end and the collapse of the rest, and the bang of the gavel completed the sale, the Poussin was carted from the room as unceremoniously as the painting of inconnu. The auctioneer permitted a sigh, a stretch, a pause. Ames Everett, seeing me, winked. The under-minister of culture nodded with a half smile, wondering, I was sure, where he had seen me.

  Other pictures, and finally Saint Ursula. My heart pounded to see her amused and slightly repelled expression. I tried to see Roger’s face but could not. I sensed his excitement all the same. We stood trembling in the crowd. “La Tour,” I heard the auctioneer say, but not école and not élève, though he could have, the words spun in my ears. “Do I hear two hundred thousand?” he said.

  It seemed no more than forty seconds before Saint Ursula was knocked down at ten million francs, a struggle between two bidders principally. One was the man standing with Ames and Stuart, the other, in his tweed sport coat and bow tie, an American, I was sure. I had no idea which had bought our painting. For a second I even had trouble calculating the amount in dollars. My heart was thundering. Almost two million dollars!

  It was only at this very minute that I realized we wouldn’t have to split it with the Persands, either. I wonder if Antoine realized that. I could see his expression of glassy shock, muttering to Frédéric. I calculated further. Let’s say split four ways—me, Roxy, Roger, Judith—there would ultimately if not immediately be for me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Surely Chester would advance me the price of a tureen—not Mrs. Pace’s, of course. I thought of all the other things I could do with a quarter of a million dollars. I wondered if this could do anything to make Roxy less unhappy. Probably it would make her feel worse, to profit somehow from the death of her beloved. I tried to leave the room, to breathe luxuriously in the hall, but I was packed too closely in. There were another ten pictures to sell, then it was over.

  “Isabel!” said Stuart Barbee, coming up to me when the crowd began to drift out. He was trying to smile, but his face was distorted with a misery I had seen earlier when he stood talking to Ames. “Isabel, I’m so happy for Roxeanne. She needs some luck, poor girl. . . .”

  “What’s the matter, Stuart?” I asked.

  “Conrad has been arrested,” he whispered. Conrad his friend the English hairdresser.

  “What for?”

  “For burglary.”

  How it worked I figured perfectly: Stuart gave Conrad photos and tips. Unknowingly? Conrad gave the photos to a dealer friend who showed them to clients. Then Conrad went and burgled the things that clients asked for. I wondered, had it been Conrad who had “visited” Suzanne after we told Stuart about all her beautiful stuff?

  I considered extorting from Stuart at least Mrs. Pace’s tureen. I could say, get it back or I will tell everything. I’ll describe how I took the photo, gave it to you, then triggered its theft by promising to buy it from the dealer. Get it back or I will involve you. But then I thought it might be better not to let him know my role; we would get it back through the police anyway. But what was Stuart’s role? And the connection with Mrs. Pace’s files? It still seemed funny to imagine the CIA running a porcelain burglary ring.

  “He was just standing there, outside a house in Chartres, and the flics came up and grabbed him,” Stuart went on.

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” interrupted the under-minister of culture in the rustle of the crowd. “Miss Walker, am I right? So you interest yourself in the art treasures of France?”

  I guess I don’t believe in God, at least not as much as Roxy does; all the same, it is hard not to believe this little consolation was sent by some benign cosmic intent. The under-minister was talking to me! And that was not all. I was glad I had dressed up, and was carrying the Kelly.

  “I had to see the fate of my little La Tour,” I said with what I hoped was immense composure.

  “Indeed! Your La Tour? I came because I was interested to see what would happen with the great Poussin. As to the La Tour, we had hoped . . . yours, you say?” Smooth diplomat’s charming smile, concealing concern.

  “It belonged to my family.” I was conscious of Stuart’s ironic look. Well, didn’t it?

  “Indeed! Extraordinary. Do you know who the buyer was?”

  “No, not yet. Have you met my brother and sister-in-law?” For the jubilant Roger, Jane at his elbow, had made his way to my side. They and the under-minister (Monsieur LeLay) exchanged bonjours.

  “I wonder about the export situation? Obviously it is a national treasure. It appears there was a moment of inattention at the Louvre. We must look into it—the Louvre will review it,” Monsieur le Directeur etc. went on. “I wonder that they didn’t review it before this. I will look into it.” I felt myself grow wary. Could they bring up the export license thing again?

  “Perhaps—I hope you are not pressed, mademoiselle? Would you consider having lunch with me, for I would very much like—in my role at the ministry—to hear the history of this lovely French picture, how it came to be in your family and so on. Today, or some other time soon, what do you say?”

  Covertly, I studied him. It seemed to me this was not the diplomat but the man talking. I accepted, of course, though not for today. I explained that my sister was having a baby.

  “Give me your numéro de téléphone, mademoiselle,” he said, pulling out his elegant little carnet from Hermès.

  Baby Charles-Luc was born that afternoon, weighing three and a half kilos—the phone was ringing as the ecstatic Roger, Jane, and I came into Roxy’s. An easy delivery, mother and baby doing well. We headed for the clinic to meet the baby, and tell Roxy the news.

  At the burial on Monday, a cold, funereal day, Roxy was very beautiful in a black suit I hadn’t seen before, which must from the way it fit her slightly stouter figure have been new. She carried the baby, little Charles-Luc, wrapped in dimity and lace, as if this were a christening rath
er than a funeral. At one point she handed him (a minute, wizened, red creature) to Chester, who gazed at him proudly, and Roxy occupied herself with Gennie, who fidgeted in her little fur-trimmed blue coat, overawed by the collection of relatives and mourners gathered in the cold winter morning among the imposing granite-winged monuments of the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

  Of course Magda would not come to the obsèques, we had heard she was still in the hospital. Nonetheless I looked for a mysterious person in a black veil lingering on the fringes behind the willow shrubs. The scene made me think of the funeral of John F. Kennedy, which I had seen a newsreel of. I think Roxy was remembering it too, though neither of us was born then, for she seemed to borrow her demeanor of dignified, grieving widow from the performance of Jackie. She knelt at the grave. Behind her, standing a little apart from the Persands, was Maître Bertram. There were Madame Cosset with Antoine and Trudi, Yvonne, Charlotte and Bob, Frédéric but not his wife, Suzanne, also in black, and—I was most curious—Monsieur de Persand, a tall, thin man with a white mustache and a restless, angry expression when he glanced at us and at our uninhibited New World sobbing. How correct they were in their mourning garments. How correct they had been all the way through.

  It was an American who had killed him. I knew they were not forgetting that. Nor had his American wife been able to prevent it, with her inadequate arts. Members of a childish nation—I knew what they thought—cradle of killers and art thieves. (And of porcelain thieves, they would have said, had they known.) How much better, they must have been thinking, if the Marquis de Lafayette had never gone over there.

  How beautiful Roxy was, Roxy who was now theirs forever, widow of their son, mother of their grandchildren—the widow a hallowed person in France, I gathered, emblem of fidelity and patient grief. She stood a little apart from the Persands and also from our parents, solitary in her sorrow except for the attentive Maître Bertram.

  “ ‘Je suis la ténébreuse, la veuve, l’inconsolée,’ ” she whispered, kneeling by the grave, paraphrasing (she told me later) some lines of Nerval. “ ‘Pleurez! Enfants, vous n’avez plus de père.’ ”

  Maître Bertram assisted her to rise with a light, solicitous grasp of her elbow. Her expression of grief contained inner serenity, a luminous certitude. Perhaps she had everything she wanted. I was given a glimpse of Roxy, just then, as someone who always will get what she wants.

  “Oh, Iz,” whispered Margeeve when the clods began to fall, “now Roxy can come home.” Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t.

  She had no need to choose. She had everything she wanted. L’américaine. She could have everything. She had helped herself. She had borne and survived, and would continue, no doubt. She could choose among continents, languages, religions, and roles.

  Not to speak of myself, but I was thinking of how perfect Roxy was, a lily of the field, and of how she had what she wanted. I thought of Mary and Martha. In our days of going to Sunday school (we had to when we were your age, Margeeve and Chester had explained when we asked them why they didn’t go) the story of Mary and Martha was one of the many Biblical stories from which I had drawn a moral the opposite of the one intended, and was on the wrong side, as in the novels of Henry James, which Mrs. Pace had suggested I read. I knew you were supposed to be Mary; but Roxy was Mary.

  41

  One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.

  —Montaigne

  CONFINED, IMMURED BY grief, the conventions of bereavement and the new baby, we became aware only slowly, through Roger via his fellow lawyer contacts, that the situation of Tellman, arrested by the French police, had drawn the sympathy and indignation of the American community. Mrs. Pace confirmed that this was so. And I thought from her tone that she shared in part the general view that Tellman, a disturbed person, was being treated more harshly in French law than an enraged French lover would be treated—say, a fiery Corsican or a North African or an African, beings whose murderous rages would be taken for granted and responded to, if not with forgiveness, at least with a touch of condescending leniency congruent with the less civilized mores of their respective countries. A rich American lawyer excited unspoken enmities, implacable agendas of retribution.

  The indignation of the American community on Tellman’s behalf was fueled mainly by his lawyer colleagues, who recited the humiliations the poor guy had been made to suffer by his tarty Czechoslovakian wife and her insolent Frenchman lover—indignities greater than anyone could bear, let alone a fragile person like Doug, with his valiant struggle against some substance abuse problems he’d been able to handle until all this struck.

  We had heard that there would be a meeting of interested Americans to consider organizing a protest on Tellman’s behalf: letters to the newspapers, delegations to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, perhaps intervention at the ambassadorial level. I did not expect when I went for my regular afternoon at the Cleve Randolphs to find a foregathering of concerned Americans there—the same EuroDisney people who had been there during their cocktail party, a dozen lawyers, Stuart Barbee and Ames Everett, David Croswell, the Reverend Dragon, Mrs. Pace, and even the American ambassador, Leo Burleigh, whom I had seen only from afar. It was for these that Peg Randolph had asked me to pick up some party food at the traiteur.

  I came in as diffidently as a maid, carrying the pink boxes, and sidled toward the kitchen.

  “We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that this is an American citizen,” Cleve Randolph was saying. “They are presuming him guilty until he can prove his innocence, which is totally un-American to begin with. Guilty until proven innocent—that’s what’s so intolerable about the Napoleonic code.”

  When people saw me, the room fell as silent as a library. Faces turned to look at me; I could almost hear knuckles crack. Peg Randolph came toward me, wearing an expression suitable to be seen by the grieving, as I must be supposed to be doing, sister-in-law of the victim, and the heroine in her own right of, or at least participant in, the drama of the Tower.

  “The man needs psychiatric help,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, sidling nearer to the kitchen door so I could get on with putting little slices of smoked eel pâté on a platter and black olives in her Limoges bowls.

  “Crime of passion,” the others went on.

  “What would you do if someone was shtupping your wife?” said someone.

  “And there’s another principle involved: Can foreign governments just do what they want with an American citizen?”

  “I’m afraid they can,” interjected the American ambassador, vainly trying to calm them. “Think of the boy who was caned in Singapore. The president pleaded for clemency, and even that did not avail.”

  “Just shows the contempt our president is held in,” said Cleve Randolph. “And you can see why.”

  “American nationals are bound by the laws of the country they are in,” repeated the ambassador. “The issue is that we are dealing with a disturbed individual here, and he needs psychiatric help. He wasn’t really responsible for this admittedly horrible crime.”

  “Stuart Barbee’s friend Conrad has been arrested too,” whispered Peg into the kitchen.

  “Basic human rights,” I heard Ames Everett say, heard everyone saying much, much more, voices raised, faces indignant. I thought of a discussion I had had with Edgar about basic human rights. (“People who believe in Human Rights today are the same people who twenty years ago—longer ago than that, now—believed in Workers. Then Workers moved to the right, as they got a little money, and it was necessary to put the matter more broadly.”) Of course, I had never met a Worker.

  I remembered the riot in the Town Crier. Now I noticed that people wore their names on paper stick-on badges, evidently distributed by the EuroDisney people, and the badges also bore the likeness of Mickey Mouse.

  There was another hush of embarrassed silence when I—sister to the widow of the victim, etc.—came in with the brie and pâté of smoked eel. They imagi
ned that of course I would want him executed. Of course I didn’t want him set free; but the thing was, I could see that they were right, he was a disturbed person. Child of my parents, of California, of America, I could see they were right that he needed help. Was this goodness or apathy? I wondered what Roxy felt.

  I liked the bland and benevolent faces of my countrymen, handsome as pilots or the men in jewelry ads. The accent of one’s birthplace lingers in the mind and in the heart as it does in one’s speech, said La Rochefoucauld.

  It seems we all try to get beyond America—but something keeps pulling us back. Will I escape the magnetism, the undertow? I thought so, for a while at least, but I wasn’t so sure about Roxy.

  I had the thought that none of us would be eating pâté of smoked eel if we were in Santa Barbara. By now I had eaten eels, and snails, and tripes, and brains, and winkles and cockles, and oysters, and salsify, and cèpes, and little teeny birds plunged whole into pots of foie gras that you ate head and all. What was Tellman eating in his jail cell? What did people get to eat in Sarajevo?

  In any case, I couldn’t stay for the discussion, as I had promised to pick up new cases of donated Tampax and lipstick for Sarajevo, and then I was meeting Chester and Margeeve and the others for dinner. They were leaving tomorrow. Edgar had been in Zagreb since Sunday. I hoped my heart would not ache forever. I am not sure.

  All of these Americans transplanted to France, they too probably had eaten those poor little birds—are they called greves? Grebes? Merles? What do the animal rights people say about them? The animal rights people disapprove of foie gras. Of the way the goose is forced to swallow grain, how it is stuffed down his gullet through a funnel, engorging his liver. What did I feel about foie gras? Are Americans still Americans when they are transplanted, or do they become something else, like, say, Lieutenant Calley, or like me, for that matter, a person without a country, planning to go to Zagreb, planning to lunch with an under-minister of culture, planning to drink a lot of orange tisane, planning to really buckle down to studying French?