Le Divorce (19 page)

Also her baby. I remembered how months ago she had said to Suzanne maybe she shouldn’t go through with having the baby. These words now took on a different meaning.

Nurses and orderlies looked at me, relative of
la suicidée
. The nurses wore little veils like nuns. They approached me as they would a relative of someone in mortal anguish, or a sinner, with kindness and tact, with soft voices. Danger and death have the power to transcend language. I understood perfectly what they were telling me; Roxy was being prevented they hoped from going into shock. They were considering a caesarean section if certain changes appeared on the fetal monitor. The child was
perfectly well. A baby lives longer than the mother, seizing the good of the last molecules of oxygen in the blood until it has no more hope either.

I went on sitting in the waiting room, festering with fear and anger. A young doctor gave a thumbs-up sign that her condition was improving in some way, and this was like setting up a drip flowing into my system, like the bottle over Roxy’s bed, of anger and relief.

At first, I planned to call Chester and Margeeve. I wanted them to tell me what to do. I suppose I wanted support. But something held me back, something besides the fact that it was still the middle of the night in California. What held me back was the thought that Roxy might not want me to tell them. I wouldn’t have, if I were her. When she came to herself, she might not want to be treated forever like an unstable histrionic depressive whom people were afraid to leave alone.

But maybe that was how she did want to be treated, so as never to be alone. The famous cry for help.

The only help I’d given had been a little babysitting. My anger and relief drained off, leaving a sort of exhausted vacuum into which, very soon, again flowed the bitterest self-reproach. I kept coming back to: how could I have not noticed that Roxy was in a desperate frame of mind, with signs of weird derangement creeping into her thoughts? I had been too wrapped up in my own life.

I thought of calling Suzanne or Charles-Henri. Is that what Roxy wanted? Or had she really wanted out of life? I didn’t know, I didn’t know, and huddled miserably in the waiting room, peeking in from time to time through the curtains of her bed, third in the semicircle of curtained beds, where she lay, eyes shut and a little frown line between her eyes as if she disapproved of all the ministrations, or had her thoughts fixed beyond, in the abstracted repose of death.

Now I see I was afraid to call Chester and Margeeve, because they would be angry at me. Sent to help Roxy, Isabel never notices her to be on the point of suicide. Another of Isabel’s fuckups. Instead she blah blah blah, all the stuff I
was doing—sins of self-indulgence, sins of indifference, sins of insensitivity.

Usually I am not prone to feeling guilty. Years of being the bad little sister had made me defensive instead, and perhaps unreasonably emotionally defiant. Margeeve and Chester were not guilt-producing parents, either (though my brother Roger had always been, in my view, a sanctimonious nag, and more attached to our new sisters than to me). Besides, feeling guilty never seems to make you better.

Why was I sitting surrounded by strange magazines (for instance one newsmagazine devoted to the business and profession of clairvoyance) in the bare, tidy, direct discomfort of this French hospital feeling guilty and sorry for myself? The inappropriateness of my emotions did nothing to make them go away. And why was I thinking about Roger? Because it was too horrible thinking about Roxy. Because some cork had been pulled in my spirit and all this stuff was leaking in. Frantically I rationalized—Roxy had been concealing her state of mind and lying to me. She had not been crying for help, on the contrary had put up an elaborate front of cheerfulness on all those Sundays with the Persands, and going to her studio as if nothing were wrong. How could I have known she was trying to be like Sylvia Plath? When I had this thought, it was the first time I had a corollary, doubting thought: Is Roxy as good a poet as Sylvia Plath? What did I know?

One is never as happy as one thinks, nor as unhappy as one hopes, to reverse the maxim of La Rochefoucauld. They do say that when people decide on suicide, sometimes they cheer up. All the same, there must have been signs and I hadn’t seen them. I loved Roxy so much I wanted to kill her, I was so furious at her. How can I express my shame at these self-absorbed thoughts that kept chasing the thoughts of Roxy lying there unconscious on machines like one of those women in a coma who are kept alive so they can give birth? Is shame the same as guilt?

In adversity, the worst misfortune is to have been happy.

—Boethius

I
T WAS NOW
noon, an odd time for a hospital vigil. I was conscious of being hungry and then suddenly I thought of Gennie, whom Roxy had taken to the crèche and who must be picked up by three-thirty. On the heels of this thought came a new one, so instantly chilling and horrible that I had to stand and pace, shivering, as if I had a cramp, trying to put down, erode, blight the thought: What if she hadn’t taken Gennie to the crèche? What if Gennie’s little murdered corpse were somewhere in the apartment? I both couldn’t and could take this possibility seriously. Roxy would never hurt Gennie, and yet depressed women did horrible things, and I had seen her willingness to hurt her new child and herself.

I knew I had to go to the rue Maître Albert at once, if only to control this sickening panic, a panic so intense I prayed somehow to lose consciousness until I could be back there, so as not to have to endure the time in between. I tried to think of faster means of reassurance, like calling the crèche, but I had no idea of the number, or how you called directory assistance, or even what the crèche was called. I took a vow to learn French. I
tried to think where I had been in the apartment. Was there anywhere Gennie could have been without my seeing? I’d been in the bedroom twice, the kitchen, the living room. Only Gennie’s room, where she would logically be.

“
Enfant!
” I cried at the nurse, pointing at my watch. “Crèche.”

“You can go,” she said in English. “Your sister is doing stable, it’s okay.”

I looked again into Roxy’s curtained cubicle, where she was sleeping or expiring, attached to the bottle and machines.

“Une heure,”
I said, tapping my watch again. She shrugged. I fled.

There was a taxi rank in front of the hospital but no taxis came. I weighed walking, it was not really far, then a taxi did come. I was conscious of my body’s adrenalin, like an odd drug—it was like trying to conduct real life when stoned, keeping an elaborate pretence of sobriety, close to passing out but somehow upright, with smiles for the taxi driver, saying the address in a calm voice. It took four minutes to drive to the rue Maître Albert, during which I suspended my imagination, my power to evoke a scene of Roxy killing Gennie. Where could I have got this power to evoke horrific images? From the movies of course.

Madame Florian must have been watching or listening for me, for she popped out of her apartment on the first landing as I came up the stairs.
“Comment va-t-elle?”

“Okay,” I said. “Blood transfusion.”

She nodded. They can all speak more English than they let on. I let her follow me up the stairs, I must have wanted someone behind me, in case I found—something. I both thought I would and thought I wouldn’t, expectation and dread exactly suspended in a kind of hum of fear, my head feeling funny with all the blood drained out of it. I marched right into Gennie’s bedroom, which was orderly with no sign of Gennie in it. I looked in the closets all the same. I thought I could smell blood everywhere in the house, a close, yeasty odor.

I then taxied to the crèche. I was rapidly spending all my money on taxis. Gennie was there, in the tidy room with blocks
and benches, in a remodeled section of an old school building, where a dozen kids of more or less three, Gennie’s age, ran around more or less continually or sat to learn songs and drink juice. Gennie had taught me the songs (
“Ainsi font les marionnettes”
). Now she was sitting on the floor facing another little girl, and they were building something in the corral formed by their fat little legs.

“The
mère
is
malade
,” I said. “Hospital.
Hôpital
.”

“Tout se passe bien? Garçon ou fille?”
asked the crèche woman, beaming.

I shook my head.
“Malade. Malade,”
I said. We established that I could leave Gennie there until six-thirty. Then I got the 67 bus back to the hospital. On the bus I began to cry, it was totally embarrassing.

At the hospital, Roxy had come to, and now was lying tensely, eyes open, looking at the monitors she was attached to. When I poked my head through the green curtains, she saw me and gave a wan smile. But then she closed her eyes as if she didn’t want to talk.

“What were you thinking of?” I heard the anger in my screechy tone, a hiss, not the tone I planned to take but evidently the tone she expected.

“I’m sorry, Iz,” she said. “I don’t know.” She sounded so feeble, so baffled and repentant, that I tried to think of how to soothe her. But she closed her eyes again and seemed to drift away.

A doctor stood behind me (fairly young, somewhat attractive). He motioned me back toward the waiting room and said in English, “She will be all right. Her wounds were finally rather superficial. You could say a symbolic rather than a deeply purposeful act, but that does not mean we take this lightly.”

“No,” I said.

“She will soon put an infant into the world. We are concerned for the state of her pregnancy. You are her only relative?”

“Well, here in Paris.”

“What about the husband?”

“Divorce,” I said. “There’s just me.”

“We will decide how long to keep her, to be sure there is no
repetition,” said the doctor. “Of course we could introduce psychoactive drugs, but that will be a decision later for a psychiatrist. For the moment such medication is
hors de question
because of the child. Anyway, I myself think any temporary psychosis of preeclampsia should disappear when the child is born. When is her due date?”

“Not for another month.”

“The husband is French?” the doctor asked. “The father of this child? Shouldn’t you call him anyway? He should know the pregnancy could be dangerous.”

“She was told that. I think she told him.”

“Who is her
gynecologue
? We will call him, but you should call the husband.”

“Yes, all right,” I said. But I hadn’t really decided whether to call Charles-Henri, or Suzanne. I was inclined at that point to wait to see if Roxy had gone crazy or maybe this was just some aberration of pregnancy, some destabilizing rush of birth hormones or panic. Instead I would be beside her. But I was scared to learn this way that there were such reserves of rage and desperation in Roxy, and that these are invisible even to a loved one, and especially to a selfish insensitive sister like me.

Of course I would call Margeeve and Chester, though I wasn’t sure what to tell them. I could imagine their reproaches. But I
had
noticed. I had noticed she was getting depressed, I just hadn’t understood where she was on that scale.

“You,
mademoiselle
, are you all right?” asked the doctor suddenly, taking my elbow and drawing me over to the seats. “I am going to bring you a coffee and a sandwich,” he said. Strangely, I felt tears start into my eyes at this kindness.

“I’m okay,” I said. “It’s just a shock.
Je suis . . .
” I didn’t even know a French word for it.

Roxy said nothing more all afternoon, though I sat by her bed asking her questions or just trying to sound there for her. At six-thirty I went back to get Gennie and took her home to the apartment, and made her supper from stuff in the fridge. There was a black emptiness to the apartment. I tried to clean up the rug in Roxy’s room, and the trail of spots where they had carried
her out. Gennie kept saying, “Where’s Mama?” She says
Mah-maw
, like a French child. I suppose she is a French child.

At about nine, Suzanne de Persand telephoned for Roxy. I could have, perhaps should have, told her Roxy was in the hospital, but instead I just said she’d gone out. Then I sat looking at the telephone for a long time, calculating the time in California (noon) and tempted by the comfort of talking to our parents. But they were not home. I had forgotten. This was their week for a reunion of hikers in Yosemite. Ben, the student that lives with them, answered instead.

“No,” I said, “it’s not about anything special.”

In the end, I told the one person I thought Roxy would most want to know, Charles-Henri. Of course he was aghast, distressed, instantly at my disposal. “
Mon Dieu
, she isn’t herself, she was also very emotional during pregnancy with Geneviève. Where is she, I must see her. Would that be good, or would it be worse for her?”

Good, I thought. I hoped his heart would melt when he saw her, and I hoped that was what Roxy wanted. He arrived at the hospital promptly, solicitous and concerned, charming in turtleneck sweater and jeans, painterly tousled hair. I saw why Roxy loved him.

Did Roxy really love him? Or was it, I used to ask myself, something else more territorial, the jealousy of a lioness turned inward on herself? Roxy had never liked to lose things, she would rage, would make us all quail when she mislaid her purse or gym clothes. To see her lying wanly in the Hôpital Salpetrière was not enough to bring him back to her, but I think seeing him reassured Roxy that he was in her life all the same.

As he was leaving, Charles-Henri spoke to me in the hall. His face was drawn and concerned. He sighed. “She telephoned, you know, but I didn’t think she’d do it, any more than she has before. I misjudged, I might have prevented this. Of course, it’s not going to change anything. You make sure Roxeanne understands that.” Under his sweetness, perfect hardness, the absolute security of men that their desires have the right of way. Only later did it register, as Charles-Henri and the doctor both seemed
to understand, that if she telephoned him, she must have expected him to find her before she died. A symbolic gesture.

Roxy stayed in the hospital over the weekend, being given hot soup that had potassium and other substances in it. She was morose, or rather pensive, and seemed as shocked as I, or professed to be shocked, by what she had done. “I was just overwhelmed with a crushing sense of futility,” she explained. “It wasn’t even me so much, it was the world.” In a sane tone of wonderment.

I was wary. You hear that seriously suicidal people dissemble. They want to get away to try it again, and they pretend to be well.

“The world, all that horror.”

“But why that morning, Roxy?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice trembling with fear, at capricious moods from some unknown place in the personality that could carry you away. “It was a morning like any other. I’d talked to Maître Bertram the night before, and the divorce was on my mind, I’d been thinking how can I go through with all that, and then when I woke up in the morning, it wasn’t a frenzy or anything, it was a cold decision that seemed very logical at the time, that I didn’t need to go through with it.”

She appeared to feel this would reassure me, but of course what I thought was, if she could be seized by a thought like that once, she could again, I’d have to stay with her all the time, she’d have to have psychiatrists, and could she be trusted not to hurt Gennie or the new baby?

Sensing my fright, Roxy tried to reassure me. “I’m fine, really, Iz, I’m fine now.”

Though she apologized, at no time did she say, “That was silly, I would never do it again,” and in fact she wouldn’t discuss it after this one conversation. Once she even said, in a dreamy, mad tone, “I love being pregnant,” stroking her by now huge half-round of a belly. “It’s funny to have your body change shape this way, it makes you feel like a genie or a shape-shifter.” It was weird to hear her say this, as if nothing had happened at all. Yet there remained something strange behind her eyes.

Perhaps she only wanted to be in the hospital, to be taken care of like this, for now she seemed contented. If it weren’t for the little bandages on her wrists, smaller each time they were changed, you would not imagine suicide or psychiatric crisis. Over the next two days, I almost began to doubt what had happened, and she began to deny it—that is, to be in denial, pretending it hadn’t exactly happened, or had been a kind of accident, as if she had slipped on a rug.

She made me promise not to tell the Persands, and she must have made Charles-Henri promise that too, for they never spoke of it. I think she imagined I would have already called our parents, but I had not. Maybe she was crying out that she just couldn’t go through with the divorce-related things right now, and maybe I should have alerted the Persands that the divorce arrangements were too much for her. Maybe they could call them off for a while. I could put the matter in some urgent way—Roxy is in the hospital, ill with stress, I don’t think she is strong enough for a court process.

Eventually I decided coldheartedly on the Sylvia Plath explanation. What I didn’t fully understand was how much she minded the sale of the painting of Saint Ursula, for it symbolized how she had lost her gamble for adventure in life, she was going out of the marriage with less than she came in with, she was a loser.