Le Divorce (13 page)

For the young man is handsome, but the old man is great.

—Victor Hugo

T
HOSE FEW DAYS
before my definitive assignation with Edgar, I know I was worried about one thing in particular in my own life. Because I like to look at handsome young men (look at and more), I worried about the body of an old man: How would he look without his clothes? Would this put me off? I so hoped not, I wanted to be in a state of unqualified desire. I guess I was thinking with dread of the pale senior citizens in their black socks on the beach in Santa Barbara, with their thick middles, red forearms, backs covered in white fuzz.

Now I know something about the vanity of French men, especially men who like women, and I know that they keep themselves up. (Quite a few dye their hair, though.) Or perhaps it’s not vanity but courtesy that keeps them in shape. Roxy says it’s simply the superiority of the French diet, but she thinks everything French is superior. (She may have soured on French husbands.) I think it has something to do with the cooperation of the sexes in France, so unlike the state of war we have at home, where everyone gets fat from despair and hostility, in order to erotically deprive their loved ones.

Roxy’s fragile temper had a new strain put on it. She had been to see Maître Bertram, her lawyer, about the Saint Ursula situation. Could she send it to the Getty Museum or not? Maître Bertram had agreed with Antoine de Persand, had told her it would be unwise to ship Saint Ursula to the Getty.

“It could seem like a trick to get it out of France, and that would jeopardize the rest of the divorce. It would seem like an act of bad faith, however correctly you intend it. It could even invite charges and imprisonment,” he said. He cautioned her against so much as criticizing Charles-Henri. In France, for a statement like “Charles-Henri is a pig and is trying to steal my painting,” she could be sentenced to jail for calumnious talk.

Eventually, Charles-Henri, to his credit, called her to say it was all the same to him what she did with Saint Ursula, he wasn’t behind this new frustration, it was simply Antoine, trying to be correct, and the lawyers, with their careful ways.

“Tell them, then. You can tell them you don’t care,” Roxy said. I don’t know what he said in reply. Saint Ursula herself seemed newly to wear an expression of combative smugness. But the self-satisfied smile with which she prayed to keep her virginity, and her indifference to those treasures heaped up in her chamber, were those of a natural ascetic to whom, therefore, renunciation cost nothing. I could not help but feel how she would have despised my relatively pragmatic response to the Kelly.

I left it to Roxy to nerve herself up to tell Margeeve and Chester that she couldn’t send the painting to the Getty Museum. She knew this would infuriate and disappoint. I hadn’t realized how much Margeeve would care. She had never loved Saint Ursula or the Getty; the picture was really Chester’s, coming from his side of the family, and she had no hereditary interest in it; and she had only just taken up the study of art, though I could see she might dislike losing face with the Getty if she had been in a long correspondence with them. I was actually ignorant of, or underestimated, the degree to which she had relished the wonderful, status-building grandeur of having a painting you own in a major or even minor museum exhibition. I
just wouldn’t have thought that Margeeve would have cared about status and grandeur.

Cut to California: Margeeve is talking to Roxy on the telephone, and I can easily infer Margeeve’s side of the conversation.

“Of course, Rox, if it would cause legal problems, we shouldn’t do it,” says Margeeve mildly. “I just hope they haven’t printed the catalogue. But they must have legal glitches like this with every exhibition—insurance problems, whatever. Maybe I’ll tell the Getty woman that they could directly approach the French lawyers or the French government or something like that, with a guarantee to return it to France. I’m sure there are legal routes.”

This reassured Roxy, who said it was nice of Margeeve to be so calm about it. Margeeve, of course, would have done a slow double burn later, while fixing the salad. French injustice and meddlesome highhandedness came through to her. This was their, her, Roxy’s, a Walker family painting and the Walkers wished to lend it to an American museum, period. French strangers were interfering. Not even French strangers with right and good on their side, but relatives of the enemy, people she had never seen, people who were ruining her daughter’s life and now hers.

Chester was sympathetic. He would always be indignant on Roxy’s behalf, for in his eyes she can do no wrong, unlike me. But he was now also touched to realize how much the museum show meant to Margeeve.

“We’ll call Roger. He’ll have some advice, I’m sure.”

Margeeve thinking: Why am I upset? I can’t believe I’m this upset. There ought to be something Roger can do, some legal thing, he must know someone in France that could put up some insurance, we could send an affidavit. Museum to museum something could be done. The Getty could put in the request through the Louvre. She was feeling, she recognized, the sharp hunger-pang of disappointment over something she hadn’t known she really wanted, like something half eaten and mislaid. In her mind’s eye she had seen Saint Ursula on the white gallery wall, with the words “Private Collection” or maybe even “
Collection of Prof. and Mrs. Chester Walker, Santa Barbara,” or at worst, “Collection of M. and Mme. Charles-Henri de Persand, Paris.” It was not as if she would boast aloud, it would be a private pleasure, a sense of civic participation. Was she just a vulgar status-seeker? Standing before the painting beside some stranger, would the words “that’s my daughter Roxeanne’s” escape her lips? Garrulous old women were always telling you something about their children. She was ashamed to see that the temptation would be enormous. In whatever case, she had counted on having a painting in the Getty show, and was now to be disappointed, humiliated really, because she had promised, as if it were hers to promise.

She had hoped for expiation and legitimacy, had never felt quite legitimate since her divorce, since showing the bad judgment to put that extra
e
in Roxeanne’s name, since a car accident in 1956 that had been her fault and she had denied it successfully, since not going enough to PTA meetings, since not being loving enough or generous enough. She squelched these habitual themes of self-reproach.

All animals mistrust man, and they are not wrong.

—Rousseau,
Confessions

O
N
S
UNDAY MORNINGS
I sleep in, wake about ten. A riff of church bells is what wakes me, coming from Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet, whose parishioners are excommunicated Catholic fundamentalists, I think. They are said to stand for everything bad and fascist, but the bells sound holy. I also hear cars and buses, someone playing the recorder, voices in the street. Later, cooking smells will arise, the garlic-parsley smell of snails, and roasting chicken from the couscous restaurant. Across the street, someone in the garret opposite mine opens her tall windows. The sun strikes her windows in the morning, mine in the afternoon, and thus I am in shadow now, while she hitches her chair into the pool of warm light and basks, doing her nails. I wonder what she is thinking of, and what it would be like to live in her pale French body instead of mine, still with its vestiges of California tan.

Roxy and Gennie and I are going later to Chartres to lunch with the Persands. It’s civilized, the continuing bond between Roxy and the Persands, their reassurance that to them she continues to be the mother of their grandchild, an immutable
relation. Even Antoine continues to be friendly to her, unapologetic for his meddling opinions about Saint Ursula. Roxy is friendly to them in turn. She has a need to feel that some bonds are indissoluble. So we continue to go to the Persands, either to Chartres or the apartment on the Avenue Wagram, for Sunday lunches, though I have often begged off because (frankly) in the role of supervising Gennie, I was too often relegated to playing games with Charlotte’s and Antoine’s sets of children too, like a super-nanny or au pair girl, and I would end up feeling mad at Roxy, since she did nothing to correct the situation and let it be thought that I love children and am just a big little girl at heart. I don’t actually like children that much, though I like Gennie, of course. At such times I would look at all the Persand family and couldn’t help but wonder what they would think if they knew what I was thinking of doing with their uncle Edgar. This delicious reservation added spice to the flat duties of child care, at least.

On this particular Sunday we were at the house near Chartres, arriving to find Suzanne, Antoine and Trudi, and the youngest daughter, Yvonne, in disarray and consternation, talking to a stranger with a notebook who proved to be a policeman. Suzanne, still soberly dressed from the train in her tweed country clothes, distractedly explained that they had been “visited.” At first I understood this as “visitation,” perhaps a supernatural event, but it emerged that “visit” was a gentle euphemism for being broken into, though nothing had been taken. “One was visited,” cried Suzanne, “despite the
blindage
of the
porte
, despite the system of alarm!

“As soon as I came into the hall, I knew something was wrong,” she told the inspector. “I said to myself, what if the visitor is still here?” No one was there, but things had been moved, were different, there was, as Suzanne kept saying, the impression of someone’s presence, I could feel it too, the well-known sense of violation. “And then the insult that they found nothing worth taking?” She laughed, reverting to her Frenchwoman’s resolute gaiety, taking the policeman by the arm into the salon.

The serious business of getting lunch was settled down to, nonetheless. As it was now October, and the day too rainy for
tennis, I walked with the children and Antoine in the wood, while Roxy, Suzanne, Trudi, and Yvonne toiled in the kitchen. Here was perhaps an adequate trade-off. Getting out of the kitchen, in the beautiful rainy wood, I didn’t mind keeping an eye on the children as they ricocheted along the paths, their laughter rippling everywhere, like a sound track of childhood. At first I had thought the French forests were puny, especially now with the leaves falling off, leaving only a dainty pattern of bare branches and the odd trembling yellow leaf attached. In California, we have the redwoods, and stands of pine and Douglas fir, heavy forests of giant fallen logs rotting in soft strata of needles and beetles. These are more like forests in paintings by Corot (as you would expect). Now I have come to feel there is something more welcoming in these. In ours, when you come on beer cans riddled with bullets, it’s sort of frightening. You think of crazies lurking with guns or, when you come on patches of clear-cut, you think of the devastation of the planet.

“Their Alps are much more rugged than our Rockies,” Roxy had pointed out to me with her reflex Europhilia.

Now, walking single file behind Antoine, Gennie stuck close to me, clinging to my hand, influenced by her recent introduction to Red Riding Hood, as well, perhaps, as by Roxy’s violence. I didn’t bring up the matter of Saint Ursula to Antoine. I wanted to reproach him for interfering. I wanted to say, “Roxy would return the painting, which after all is hers. What’s the problem? Don’t you know what it means to Margeeve? Don’t you know it really belongs to Chester, it isn’t even Roxy’s, and it isn’t any of your business? Don’t you know Charles-Henri doesn’t care?” But the convention was, at these lunches, that the problems between Roxy and Charles-Henri belonged to another realm of life and could not be mentioned. Also, I thought of Antoine as an elder, a man approaching fifty, not a confrere to be lashed out at. I didn’t know him, I’m trying to say, and now I had come to think of him as a bad person, motivated by greed, out of a story by Balzac. Yet I said nothing. Was I becoming co-opted by my planned liaison with Antoine’s uncle?

Resenting my own reticence, I plodded along after him, keeping an eye on Paul-Louis, Jean-Fernand, Marie-Odile,
Jean-Claude, Cyrille, Irène, and Gennie. Antoine himself, I noticed, seemed unconcerned about the children, who were safely visible in their plaid shirts and bright dresses, but he was peering intently into the underbrush, and from time to time up a tree, staring at knots or clumps as if expecting them to move. I assumed he was bird-watching, and asked what he thought he saw.

“Nothing,” he said at first. Later he sat on a rock in the center of the clearing and stared like a scout for Indians at every break in the vegetation within the semicircle of his view. Only now did I notice that his expression was grim and severe.

“I am looking for the cat of Charlotte,” he said.

“Her cat is lost?” I didn’t understand, because Charlotte lived in Neuilly, far from the forest of Chartres.

“Mother is upset enough, especially now with this affair of being visited. You have to admire her, she’s trying hard to hold things together. The cat is just the last straw.”

One disadvantage of not speaking their language is that I miss out on understanding many things as they pass. You are in the position of a child listening to half-understood adult talk, things go by you. I thought this must be one of those situations, because I had not heard anything about a cat.

“Uh, what color cat?” I said.

“It is a little Siamese cat.”

I could think of plausible scenarios, cat leaping out of cat carrier and dashing into the woods. And now I could hear that the children were calling “meeenou, meenou.”

He got to his feet and resumed tramping the path.

“What could a cat eat in the
forêt
here? She might catch a bird,” he said.

“Little mice, I suppose. Wood creatures.”

“Thousands of cats are released every year, it is criminal. They do not thrive, they starve. Every August, French people leave their animals to fend for themselves in the forest. Dogs, tied to trees, starving. It is horrible, horrible.”

“Horrible,” I echoed, not understanding.

“Yes, they think a pet is just for a season, then it is expendable like a pair of shoes. But Charlotte knows better.”

“In America too, people are often cruel to cats,” I assured him, though I had learned that it did not ingratiate you with the French to claim to share their social problems. This challenges either their belief that their problems are worse, or their belief that American ones are so much worse that a comparison is insulting.

“Trudi belongs to a group that rescues them,” Antoine said.

I still did not understand what Charlotte’s cat was doing here, but was constrained from asking, assuming, however, that it had been left here, which seemed strange.

“The cat knows Paul-Louis, of course, she might come out if she hears him. The other children should stop calling.” He spoke to the children, evidently telling them to shut up.

“Minou, Minou,” called Paul-Louis.

“We must go back. We’ll come out again after lunch,” said Antoine. I now perceived his real agitation, or anger, as if a child had been lost.

When we came in, I washed Gennie’s hands and walked toward the kitchen. I heard Roxy saying, “Isabel is just like that. She is so competitive, when we were little, we went to a gymnastics class, and then she would go to another gymnastics class at the Y, on another day, for extra practice, so she could be the best in our class.”

It hadn’t been quite like that. I wanted to rush in to explain. The funny thing was, only later did I realize that Roxy must have said all this in French. Perhaps things said about yourself penetrate the language barrier and burn directly into your brain. Why were they talking about me?

Suzanne served a
ragoût d’homard
from a beautiful tureen. It came to me that, as I admired Mrs. Pace for her brilliance and intellectual assurance, I admired Suzanne for her reflex hospitable vivacity. I was surprised by the realization that until coming here I had not admired any particular women, for though I loved Margeeve I often thought she was silly, and my real mother was a disaster. Perhaps one or two of my teachers, in grade school, that was all, and no one since.

Suzanne, a perfect Frenchwoman, overseeing vast family meals, monitoring her investments, paying attention to the
petits
soins
, those mysterious details of female upkeep even Janet Hollingsworth could not find out about, and flirting at any age with any male because it is a form of politeness. I began to see how Roxy, from their point of view, might be thought a little casual and uncoiffed. She should be more seductive, not such a straight-shooter. She could lighten her hair, for example, or put nail polish on.

I was wearing nail polish, I don’t know why. Well, I knew why. If I were telling an American story, to mention nail polish would be to signal that it was not a serious story, was meant to be read under the hair dryer. But in a French story it is a revealing, spiritual detail. Also, French men think American women are too understated, and ought to be flirtatious. They think we don’t try, but they don’t realize that in America, if you dress flirtatiously, you get blamed for any bad thing that might happen to you.

In fact Roxy tended to bite her nails in secret, though now, in pregnancy, she seemed at her most beautiful, and her nails had grown out some despite her unhappiness.

The French are odd at the table. Usually they are very elaborate in the way they pass the dishes, the men giving each dish to the lady next to him before he serves himself, and the platter traveling thus twice around the table, to every woman before any man is served. I suppose no man has ever tasted his food hot. Secure in their social privilege, the men are stately in their politeness, seeming to say by their forbearance that they can endure eating cold food.

Also, the dishes seem to start with the oldest lady guest. I can imagine that some women, for instance Mrs. Pace, would not like this designation one bit. And sometimes at table, French people are infected by mad gaiety. I am never sure what has started this, but suddenly they are throwing pieces of bread to each other up and down the table—polite people who have changed for dinner, throwing bread as in a boarding house.

Inevitably at Suzanne’s Sundays there were some of their relatives—schoolboys, grandchildren, nephews or nieces, uniformly polite, each with a few words of English. (Once, though, when
Frédéric’s father-in-law, a count, stopped by to return a book, I was not presented to him.) Though Edgar had never been present after the first day, today there was a cousin, Pierre, I thought I heard Cosset, a young man in his twenties with clean pink cheeks, a schoolboy look, nice short haircut, good manners. Only halfway through lunch, which had degenerated into one of these bread-throwing occasions, did I realize he could be Edgar’s son. Studying him, I thought I could see a resemblance. But there was no fatal attraction, no operatic complication of my feelings. It was still the father I wanted. It came to me that if this Pierre were twenty or so, and his father were, say, seventy, then Madame Cosset must be quite a bit younger than Edgar. This Pierre seemed on good long-term terms with the Persands, had clearly had jolly romps since childhood with the cousins, here at Chartres or at the seaside somewhere. His presence heightened the piquancy of my erotic life, the feeling of delicious secrecy.

At table there was an empty seat, someone expected but not there. I hoped it might be Oncle Edgar, but halfway through the soup, Bob arrived, Charlotte’s husband. There was an affectionate flurry of sympathetic greetings as he slipped into his chair, at least the soft sound was affectionate rather than hearty, was also inquisitive and urgent. Something had happened which Bob told them about, with much shaking of his head, as if in disbelief, and rueful laughter tempered by a slightly choleric tone to his complexion. A blond man anyway, given to flushes. Of his discourse I understood nothing, of course, except, at one moment: