Le Divorce (17 page)

Paris, city of amusements, pleasures, etc., where four-fifths of the inhabitants are dying of unhappiness.

—Nicolas de Chamfort

U
NLIKE
M
RS.
P
ACE
, Edgar did not believe in lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnians, conflicting in this with those French intellectuals who had taken the tack, believed in by Americans too, of letting the Bosnian Muslims defend themselves. Edgar believed in French intervention, through the NATO alliance, though he had begun to think it was too late even for that.

It became known that the Bosnian Serbs, having agreed to withdraw their cannons from around Sarajevo, were now stealing them back and trundling them off to bombard other villages and towns. This treachery affected Roxy as vividly as if these renegade guns were now pointed at the rue Maître Albert. Her color, already high and flushed with her pregnancy, deepened to a dangerous-looking plum, her eyes shot indignant fire, she tried to pick up conversations in the market, or sitting with Tammy or Anne-Chantal in the Brasserie Espoir.

Since Roxy’s troubles began, all the denizens of the Place Maubert have seemed singled out for domestic catastrophe, beginning with the dramatic elopement of Jérôme Lartigue, the
theatrical designer, with an American editress, an act of midlife crisis that had struck all the neighborhood as being, at the least, un-French. Anne-Chantal, his wife of thirty years, was so stunned she did not speak for several weeks. The next to break up were Tammy de Bretteville (American like us) and her husband Hugues, and most recently Djuna and Serge, the Serbo-Croatian couple we had long thought riveted by political solidarity against the madness in their country (he had been the Serbian ambassador). They are so poor that they remain together in their same apartment, each shopping in the market at different hours, grim, with separate baskets of turnips and kale.

Both Tammy and Anne-Chantal had written eloquent letters for Roxy’s divorce dossier, but these women did not think much about politics.

“Such savagery, how can human beings act like that?” Roxy would moan at each new Serbian incursion, her mind reviewing all human perfidy. These days human perfidy was never far from her mind.

“
Mais
, the Serbs are all right,” said Anne-Chantal, “they were abused horribly in the war,
hein
? The Croats murdered millions of them, no wonder they want revenge.”

“Everyone’s ancestors were murdered by somebody,” cried Roxy. “What will happen in the world if people can’t forget the past?”

“And the Muslims, what do they want but a foothold for Islam in Europe, that deserves a thought, surely?” Anne-Chantal went on.

“That’s not true!” Roxy disagreed. “The Bosnian Muslims are perfectly secular.”

“
Alors
, I hope you are prepared to wear the veil?” said Anne-Chantal.

I was not getting along too well with Roxy. She had got very picky about what I was supposed to be doing, or what she supposed I was supposed to be doing, to help her; and in a rather small-minded way, I felt she ought to be grateful, not critical, it being after all not me who made her marry a Frenchman and launch into a divorce, pregnancies, financial problems, et cetera.
I thought I was being nice. I thought I was being a prince to Roxy, actually. It seemed to me that I was the only stable parent poor little Gennie had, and that she shouldn’t be put all that time in the crèche, every day, and that with Roxy not working (for she sometimes skipped going to her studio and moped around the house), it wasn’t necessary.

“You watch her all day then,” snapped Roxy.

Of course, she was depressed, and things were going badly with the divorce. She was now thinking that if she hadn’t said anything about sending the painting home, no one would have thought about it. As it was, it had been identified by the lawyers as their only possession, apart from one or two old bureaus and a table from the Persands, that might have value, and thus would have to be divided between them, and thus would have to be sold.

Roxy proclaimed her indignation far and wide. “Outrageous,” the American community agreed. “Even in primitive societies the husband’s family gives back the dowry if they send the woman back to her own tribe.”

“Not always,” put in the anthropologist Rex Rhett-Valy in his reedy Bloomsbury voice. “In India among certain villagers, they keep the cows and burn the spurned bride besides.”

We in Paris did not fully appreciate at this time the emotional havoc being created in California by the vagaries of French law. Roxy’s picture had already been appraised by Stuart Barbee at forty thousand dollars. Antoine, Charles-Henri’s brother, was now suggesting a second valuation. “It is a normal thing, we all know that experts can vary quite widely in their opinions. Just to be sure what is correct.”

This had infuriated Roxy, because it implied that the Persands believed it to be worth more, and thought American appraisers were untrustworthy or in our pay, or thought Roxy was keeping the value low so she could more easily buy Charles-Henri out. But even at forty thousand, Roxy had no prospect of twenty thousand dollars to pay Charles-Henri his half, nor did they have enough property between them to count it against the
value of the other things. She had telephoned Chester and Margeeve to ask them to help, knowing in advance that they’d say they didn’t have twenty thousand to spend on a depressing religious picture that belonged to them anyway.

Roger had gone bananas about this, absolutely ape. Though I doubt he had ever really looked at the picture, he had an active sense of its having come from our side of the family and in a way not being Roxy’s at all. Margeeve described it, but anyway I could imagine Roger’s particularly overbearing, vulgar way of fuming, egged on by Jane. “It’s mine and Isabel’s, what the fuck do I care about French law, it’s goddamned mine.”

Margeeve had half hoped Chester would be struck quixotically by the wish to ransom the picture, and in time for the Getty show, though she perfectly well knew they couldn’t spare the money, and if they could they’d spend it on something more sensible.

“Poor Rox,” she said, after one of the many phone calls. “She’s hoping for a miracle of Saint Ursula.”

“What I can’t grasp,” said Chester, in a tone that revealed his real irritation, “is why he gets anything at all, when he’s the guilty party and he doesn’t even pretend otherwise.”

“I don’t understand that either,” Margeeve admitted.

“Maybe you should just bring it home with you,” Roger said to me on the phone. “How could they stop you?”

Would it have made a difference if I had? It would have been simple enough back then. Would it have averted tragedy? I was too selfish and too indifferent to the situation to think of interrupting my pleasures, my nice life in France.

“I can’t come home right now, I’m helping Mrs. Pace with something, I promised, I, obligation, jobs . . .” I was stammering with horror at the idea of going back to California. “Why don’t you come get it?”

“Maybe I will,” Roger said. His rage was not at me, of course, but there were overtones in the timbre of his bellowing that resurrected childhood quarrels, between us, Roxy and Judith, and the occasions where our parents had taken sides unfairly with their own kids—though they had been scrupulous, usually, about not falling into that trap.

At his offices, Roger was looking into other issues of international law and art property. Roxy and I would hardly know our dear brother Roger in the company of his lawyer colleagues, cupidity sparkling in their talk. Roger’s attitude to the painting was as an object of value belonging to our family, but also, in the company of his colleagues, a case, a test of law and cleverness, a patriotic issue and a personal challenge.

“I would say, first of all, not so fast,” he advised Roxy. “The jurisdiction is by no means clear. For one thing, a bequest or a gift is not community property. You were married in California, a community-property state, so in principle there’s no net gain to a divorce here, but a California court would be more likely to recognize the moral situation. You hear that French courts, when it comes to property, are perfectly indifferent to unwritten understandings and that sort of thing. I think we ought to explore the idea of Roxy coming home, eventually suing for divorce in California. That would render moot the issue of whether she could bring the painting back here, besides. And it could clarify custody issues, since a California court would probably award custody to the American.”

“The only trouble with that is that she intends to go on living in France,” Chester pointed out.

“Let Roger talk. She thinks that’s what she wants right now,” said Margeeve, never for one moment doubting that Roxy would ultimately return to America, like a normal person.

Another short scene at about the same time, which we couldn’t then have known about, relating to our painting by an
élève de La Tour:

The sixteenth Arrondissement. A very large room, book-strewn, a few pieces of inherited Directoire furniture and a splendid
terre cuite
by Clodion of three muses encircled, one missing an arm.

“Have you seen the La Tour?” asks Stuart Barbee of Phil Jacob. They are in Stuart’s apartment. Jacob is the elderly American art expert, longtime resident of Paris, who famously had been the friend of Soutine.

“Absolutely not,” says Jacob. “It’s much better if it has never been looked at by me.”

“How so?”

“The Persand family already asked me to value it and I said I was too busy. Just my looking at it drives the price up. I’m sure they realized that. The mere act of my looking at it brings the piece into the realm of the possibly authentic La Tours.”

“At whose behest, may I ask, did you turn them down?” Stuart laughs.

“No, you may not ask.” Jacob too laughs. “Besides, you know very well. Have you seen our friend Desmond, by the way?”

Things between Roxy and me continued to be not perfect. The handsome leather Kelly continued in some way to come between us, to her symbolizing my disloyalty.

But Roxy was behaving strangely in general. The day before the first terrible event, she had come home excited, odd, flushed, babbling as if on drugs.

“I went to Chartres,” she said. “When I went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to see the Della Bella drawings, it was closed, so I just thought,
bon
, I’ll go to Chartres instead and see if I can’t find her. Otherwise it’ll be a week before anyone can look for her again. I’m not even sure when Charlotte put her there. She wouldn’t have any idea of how to find Suzanne’s house, she’d always lived in Neuilly. She’d just wander in the woods, following a bird or hiding from a fox.”

Only then did I realize she was talking about Charlotte’s cat. “I don’t think foxes eat cats,” I assured her.

“A cat could climb a tree, it’s true. Oh, Iz, I know I’m not going to die, people don’t die from childbirth anymore, but I feel I’m going to. How long can a cat live in the wild on her own?”

“Well, indefinitely. A resourceful cat,” I said.

“Anyway, I didn’t find her. I did find a cat. It was dead, I guess struck by a car. It was wearing a collar. Its eyes were bulging out. But it was a ginger cat, not Siamese.”

Now she was saying, “I should have talked to that guy, Magda’s husband. I should have tried to calm him down and
listened to what he had to say. Maybe he knows something, could think of something. I walked on all the paths near where we park, Charlotte would have parked there too. Now look at my ankles. I guess I have to go to the doctor. Ankle swelling can mean a lot of things. Somebody’s lovely ginger cat, wearing a collar, some family missing her.

“It can’t be good for a pregnant woman to see death. I felt that. It can’t be just an old wives’ tale that things affect the baby, because I have such a sense of having conveyed something horrible to him. If it’s too horrible or he is too frail, he won’t want to be born. I feel it as a sort of heaving drilling sensation here.” She touched her side, where the distension of her belly began.

“And now look at my ankles, it’s some sort of toxin that can kill you, the baby too, I know it.”

“Maybe we should call the doctor,” I said. “Or Suzanne.”

How strange, I thought, that we had to look to Suzanne for mothering, even while she was engaged in trying to take Roxy’s things and in feeding her rival. We both needed a mother, but Roxy especially. I had Mrs. Pace.

The appetite grows by eating.

—Rabelais

R
OXY WAS DISTRAUGHT
, but I was happy. I realized it in the course of my yearly soul-searching, which for me isn’t New Year’s but occupies about five minutes on October twenty-third, my birthday. I came home late from hearing Edgar at a meeting in the fourteenth Arrondissement. It was not cold, not particularly, but it was frosty, and the moon was out, silvering the scene with a rimy mist, a glowing, promising light, and there were as many people in the street as at noon, and it made me happy.

If ever you dare say you are happy. Not that you say yes, this is happiness; it is more that looking back on the previous months, I could see I had changed in a way consistent with a person who was happy, thoughts taken up with events and subjects external to myself. Reviewing my character, I was smugly self-congratulatory about my fidelity to my jobs with Ames Everett, the Randolphs, and others, jobs I no longer needed and wanted to dump as they intruded on the afternoons. Especially I wanted to dump my dog-walking of Scamp. Though I had grown fond of Scamp, and Gennie liked
Scamp too—so sometimes I would walk him over to the crèche when I picked her up, thus fulfilling two of my routine duties at once—I felt I could do more important things. I only kept on because I had agreed to, and I suspected I was only wanted so Ames could have this guy in in the afternoon, his gym instructor, for sex.

I was happy. I had sex, mystery, romance, and instructional topics. The probably unhappy denouement of a preoccupying affair—for how could it end otherwise?—was still I hoped far off. I had challenges: the French language, new reading, little nudges of cultural improvement from Mrs. Pace, even my new fondness for little Gennie. I was surrounded by beauty (Paris) and art, and had begun to experience, for the first time in an authorized way, a life of the mind. However rudimentary my life of the mind, it was definitely more evolved than what had been encouraged (or rather, subtly discouraged) in high school in Santa Barbara, and at the University of Southern California, at least in the film school, at least for women.

You can be anything you want to be, Isabel, people had always said to me. Everyone—Chester, Margeeve, my teachers. They were always saying that, and I always knew it wasn’t true. It was a conspiracy of delusion. “A healthy, pretty American girl—you can be anything you want to be.” But what did I want to be? I didn’t want to be anything. That is, each reasonable possibility, given that I was not to be a ballerina, pianist, doctor, or movie star, was too disgusting: personnel manager? psychologist? What horrors were suggested to me.

Roxy always wanted to be a poet, so it was easy for her. But I had never wanted to confine myself to anything. No role was adequate to a big curiosity I had, not about anything in particular, just a huge sense of curiosity. Not that anyone would have believed me if I had tried to describe it. “You could find out about a lot of things if you’d get up before noon,” they would have said.

So I am trying to characterize the magic, satisfaction, and slight vainglory of my mood at the time of my birthday. Things were interesting almost for the first time I could
remember. I had suddenly come to feel that California was not interesting, not because there were not books and lovers and jobs, concerts and Frederick’s of Hollywood, but someone had to show you where to find and how to consume these cultural advantages. If you didn’t know where to look, you could pass your whole life with no sense of what you were missing. I was conscious that if I tried to explain this to Chester and Margeeve, they would turn on me in a fury and point out how they had tried to take me since childhood to improving cultural events and I had preferred to sulk at home and smoke dope.

Not that I was not still a loyal Californian, but I knew that in California, though I might have been able to find, say, this book I was reading by a Turk named Bilge Karasu, at home I would not have read a book by someone named Bilge.

I could now say, in a conversation with someone Edgar knew, provided they spoke English, “Well, I’m reading the Turkish modernist Bilge Karasu, Calvino, the Dutchman Cees Nooteboom.” And so I was, in translation, of course. Once or twice I detected a faint lift of the eyebrow of l’oncle Edgar, and cooled it on talking like that.

Once or twice Mrs. Pace said, “Isabel, you have good sense about books, would you say the Nooteboom works?” or some other such question, and we would have an interesting literary discussion. She was not patronizing, she seemed to enjoy it, and she would tell me if my ideas were too wide of the mark.

I sensed that my cultural progress, or at least my improved disposition, was being viewed with great relief by Roxy and communicated in furtive asides to Margeeve and Chester. For instance: I am sitting with my friend Yves and a thousand other people in an auditorium in the Centre Pompidou. From audio speakers mounted high on the four walls come a variety of singing children’s voices, burbling brook sounds, a cacophony of long organ chords, like the music of the spheres clashing—catastrophic astral sounds. The voices come now from the left, now from the right, now behind me, as if they were popping out from behind trees. The music is in some ways disturbing and reminds me of the lost cat being there stuck inside the speakers.
In other ways it is watery, soothing music. I think of Charlotte’s cat, of poor Roxy’s ankles, of Edgar, of how unlikely I would have been in Santa Barbara to hear the music of Stockhausen. It seems, this scene, to epitomize my new Paris life.

The music of Stockhausen, who is I suppose German, is replaced by that of an Englishman that is much nicer. Yves’s eyes have rolled back in his head with the effort of listening to this new music. Yves resembles all the other members of the audience, slightly rumpled, intense—an audience indistinguishable from such an audience at USC, I suppose. The difference is that this audience includes Isabel Walker, who before would never have consented to be seen with the nerds.

I mention Frederick’s of Hollywood for I now wear expensive French underwear, the tartiest I could find. Their bras are fine for me because I am not as big on top as Roxy. I toyed with the idea of a garter belt and stockings (framing the V of the crotch, the French expression for setting off being
mettre en valeur
) but thought that might be going too far. I wore
slips brasiliens
,
curaçaos
,
culottes de soie
,
pointus
. . . .

I think some people know subliminally about me and Edgar. Mrs. Pace, Roxy, Ames Everett. They know I’m involved with someone, but no one suspects who. I think Ames finds it disgusting. As I leave him, as I move along on my rounds, late for my job at Olivia Pace’s, I imagine him thinking: She’s not at all virtuous like Roxeanne. Isabel is a little tart, actually, you can smell it sometimes, smell it on her, mindless sex, despite her airs of intellectual precocity.

I imagine this is how he thinks of me, because he seems to know if I’ve been in bed with someone, and his manner becomes distant, even though he isn’t the least interested in women. He might be Herod, I Salome. He seems both repelled by and drawn to what he perceives as my propensity for vice but is really just an afternoon toss with my secret lover.

Edgar was a focused lover, passionate and funny, though it’s hard to say why funny. He made me laugh in bed, and gave me pleasure. Neither by itself is enough to make you fall in love. Even together, there must have been something else. It pleased me that he was known, that people spoke to him. France is a
small country, and they all watch the same televised roundtable discussions and read the same three newspapers. I know the newspapers had something to do with my eagerness for his arms on Tuesdays. I liked the way he looked at all the parts of me. He said he remembered every mole on every woman he had ever slept with (did not say how many this was), that he just happened to have this kind of explicit visual memory.

Sometimes I was afraid I was too easily pleased in bed to remain interesting to Edgar, assuming men enjoy the challenge of awakening frosty ice princesses, as I have heard they do. Making me come can’t be much of a challenge, I am not frosty. I find I can’t pretend not to come, though I could, by putting my mind to other things, keep from actually coming. But that is too great a sacrifice, even with the goal of becoming a great courtesan, if frigidity is what is required of them. Am I impeded by my crude, direct sexuality from interesting a sophisticated, nuanced lover?

I tried once to discuss this with Edgar, though he was lacking some crucial vocabulary in English. It did at least make him laugh.

Sometimes it makes me laugh to think of the God’s-eye view of us, me with my legs wrapped around the neck of an elderly man, sweaty hair spread on pillow, or, alternatively, me on my elbows and knees, being taken from behind, bracing myself with my forearms, his body covering mine in such a way that he can caress my clit as well as fuck me, a double stimulation, rather like being fucked by two men at once, say two Turkish soldiers, like the ones in the book by Bilge Karasu, Turkish modernist recommended by Mrs. Pace, where the dark city is a metaphor of the soul.

That book is about torture and political repression, germane to Edgar’s interests. I tried to find it for him in French. In it, nameless torturers nightly choose, arbitrarily, a delightful young man in the street, and set upon him to kill him, and when they are finished, he is nothing but a mound of pulverized flesh. Others come and put sawdust over the bloody mess. The sight of his carcass inspires fear, terror, and submission in the people. Of
course, Gorazde must be like that, the images Roxy watched mesmerized on the television news. Roxy watched reality on TV, but refused to read a literary account of torture, saying it was “too horrible.”