Le Divorce (22 page)

To me she had been genuinely friendly, and seemed to feel the difficulties of my situation, coming in on this family turmoil, not speaking French, no prospects in life, etc. Like Mrs. Pace she seemed to feel an urge to polish me up, though where Mrs. Pace would directly criticize my clothes or tell me my gloves were dirty, Suzanne employed the powers of praise and encouragement. (“Your hands are so pretty when you wear nail polish, Isabel,” or “How amazingly long your legs are in high-heeled shoes, Isabel.”) Yes, I had a pair of gloves now, and a pair of fuck-me shoes. On the day I went to see Suzanne, I was wearing all this gear, which I had worn to lunch with Mrs. Pace at a restaurant we had gone to (Pierre Traiteur, where I let her think I’d never been before. I’d ordered
oeufs à la neige.
Mrs. Pace said, “I think you’ll find they pronounce it
euff à la neige
, Isabel.”).

After lunch I picked up Gennie and took her to the Avenue Wagram for her weekly visit to her grandmother. This was my chance to explain to Suzanne about Roxy’s fragility. I told Suzanne that Roxy was taking the sale of the picture very hard, talked about how it was bad for her condition, and said that I thought the sale should be delayed. Or could I myself undertake a promise to pay for it, over a period of years? Or maybe the two families should get together when Margeeve and Chester got here (I did not mention Roger) and talk the whole matter over?

“You and I should not become involved in these property issues, Isabel,” Suzanne said. “The sooner it is over with, the better. The lawyers will work it all out. I’m sure Roxeanne is upset, but it won’t affect her pregnancy.”

“I’m afraid my brother might get involved,” I insisted, wanting to add, you don’t know Roger. “My brother the lawyer. It just seems too bad to get everyone hysterical, I’ve never had the feeling that Charles-Henri would care if things were worked out some other way.”

Suzanne shrugged. “Poor Charles. He has a league of troubles. The husband of his
petite amie
is very unpleasant, you
know, Roxeanne’s lawyers are very determined, and now there is your brother—
alors.
Dare we say these are the wages of sin?”

I longed to tell her the truth: Roxy wanted to die, that has to be thought of. But shame prevented me, and the fear I would be betraying my sister, and thus my family, by revealing the weakness, the great failure of nerve in Roxy. It was maybe even something that they could use against her, say to take Gennie away.

Suzanne had shown no interest in the legal arrangements between Charles-Henri and Roxy, but I suppose it should not have surprised me that financially prudent French people—Suzanne, even Edgar—would be reluctant to concede something that would lose them money—money for the French side, you could say. Then she said something else. What Suzanne said next opened up everything for me:

“It is a French picture, after all,” she said. As if pictures had nationalities! A French picture. I was shocked. I could see that a museum director might have to decide a picture’s nationality, in order to put it in one room or another, the Italian or the French room, the sixteenth- or the seventeenth-century room, according to the arbitrary systems of classification museums use. But Suzanne meant that Roxy had no claim to the picture that had scowled down from her girlhood on the gum wrappers and litter of barrettes on her dresser just because, some centuries ago, way before there was an America, the person who painted it had lived, maybe, in the same general region where people from whom Suzanne was descended had also lived, maybe. This terrible idea gave me a glimpse into the stupid Serbs, crazed Irishmen, all those moronic brutes in the Balkans, all those fanatic Arabs in their identical costumes, all deranged by this really limiting idea, the dismal, lazy-minded habit of nationality, and I saw that I would never understand it. Maybe I had some sort of crude New-World mentality that prevented me from seeing the charm of belonging to any nation at all. Moreover, in Suzanne’s eyes I might as well be a Japanese, carting off her Renoirs and Boulle cabinets to put in my paper house across the sea. (“I have heard the houses in California are made of wood!” Charlotte had once said to me, brightly exclaiming over this curiosity.)

Even Edgar was not above nationality, for though he deplored the divisions of Serb, Croat, and Muslim in the former Yugoslavia, it was to French patriotism or French self-interest he was appealing, in trying to get France to step in and break it up. Later, also, when we discussed the painting, he disagreed with me.

“If places were divested of the qualities that distinguish them, as expressed by the artifacts they produce, there would be no way of telling Dubrovnik from Detroit,” he said. So to him it did matter where something came from.

“Besides, Saint Ursula came from Austria or maybe Britain,” I said. I resolved then and there with Suzanne that even though I was American, a member of a nation, and thus couldn’t help but be afflicted by all those limitations other people saw as “American,” I was going to ditch the curse of nationality and not think of myself as anything at all.

Suzanne gave me another cup of tea, in her thin cups with little gold fleurs de lys around the rim. This was the moment when her eye fell upon my Kelly bag, which I had never taken to Chartres on Sundays. Sometimes you see someone see something, see the light of understanding, shock, ripple their lids. What she understood, or saw in the Kelly, I didn’t know, but I could tell that my handsome, caramel-colored handbag registered, and that more than raising a question like “What is Isabel doing with an expensive bag like that?” it seemed to explain something for her.

She tightened her mouth into a little precise smile, and when she told me goodbye, I thought her tone had become cold. She was patting the breast of her pretty navy suit as if she had had some shock and was trying to fan her heart. I supposed she must be thinking the purse must have come from a man, and I was not the nice
jeune fille
she had thought me. Well, that was true. I was used to people realizing that.

“How nice for you to see your parents after all these months,” said Suzanne tightly. “They arrive on Wednesday? You must bring them to lunch next Sunday, to Chartres.”

Put none but Americans on guard tonight.

—George Washington

S
TRANGE TO SAY
, I had run into the husband of Charles-Henri’s
petite amie
again, at the Randolphs’. An odd, repellent encounter. I was helping Peg pass the drinks and hors d’oeuvres, and recognized him. This time he was not drunk or in any way belligerent and wore a stylish corporate suit, a regular international lawyer, American like the other guests, who collectively were wearing a lot of aftershave. He didn’t recognize me at first, then made the connection.

“Oh, right, you’re the little sister. I guess it’s true, I’ve heard about you.” He looked me over, then lowered his voice. “Come in the kitchen a sec, I’d like to talk to you.” Or course I went, hoping for some tidbit about Charles-Henri.

“You know where they keep things, just sweeten this Pimm’s Cup or whatever it is,” he said, handing me his drink.

“In the cupboard over the fridge,” I said.

“You’re a beautiful girl,” he said. “You know, a discreet, good-looking American girl could clean up at our place. We’re trying to make it a full-service destination, you follow me? A place say Germans, businessmen, would arrange to have their
board meetings. We want to expand our meeting facilities. Maybe you’d come to a party one of these days?”

I was fixed on “clean up,” thinking dog-walking was as low as I’d sink, chambermaid was not in my plans.

“We’re expecting some German and Danish businessmen, they’ll want to come in to Paris, see the town, have dinner, they’ll especially want someone with them to show them around. American girls titillate them especially, don’t ask me why.”

“I don’t think . . .”

“A kind of private escort venture, pay very, very well. Plus a good dinner, shows, you know. You’d have fun. All you have to do is look good and be sweet. I’m not suggesting anything else.”

“I’m kind of busy,” I said, shocked by what I thought he was suggesting.

“Here’s my card,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. You wouldn’t be working for EuroDisney. I didn’t mean to suggest that. It’s a private enterprise. Think about it.”

Private enterprises abounded. Behind our backs, in preparation for their voyages, various things had been put in motion in California. Roger had found, in the international section of the library of Barney, Gehegan, Bryer and Walker, seven possible avenues of approach to the problem of the painting, the most promising of which remained to challenge its ownership in an American and then a French court, and to insist that it had never formed a part of Roxy’s
dot
or
biens
and was simply something she had taken with her, like her shoes or a valise, without intending to share or give it. There was no gift in writing, and it was an inheritance, therefore not part of community property, at least in California.

He would also have to get an injunction against the sale in a French court, and to this end contacted Duncan, Cribbe and Crutcher, an American firm with offices in Paris, which represented several oil companies, EuroDisney, Warner Brothers, Century 21 Realty, and many other American enterprises, and had French lawyers on its staff. He had several phone conversations with their expert Renée Morgan, a Frenchwoman with American legal training, and would follow up on this when he
got to Paris. Meantime, he had got an injunction in the U.S. Federal Court, fourth district, enjoining the sale of the painting at Drouot while its ownership was in dispute.

And this must have been around the time that the Getty woman, Julia Manchevering, collected her colleagues into her office, dimmed the lights, pulled down the projector screen, and showed them the slide of Saint Ursula that Margeeve had sent them months before.

“This is being sold at Drouot,” she said. “In a divorce. I think we should look at it.”

“Lorraine, around 1620, I should say,” said the seventeenth-century expert Rand Carruther.

“Not a La Tour, though, surely,” someone said.

“Why not? Nothing wrong with it if you say it was painted before 1641.”

“Someone ought to take a look at it.”

“What attribution by Drouot? What reserve?”

“Ecole of. They haven’t fixed the reserve. It’s come up rather suddenly. When Stuart Barbee looked at it for us, to estimate the insurance, he valued it at forty thousand. There must be something wrong with it, it’s being sold so modestly, but I still think it wouldn’t hurt to look at it.”

“No problem about an export license?”

“The Louvre has apparently said it has no interest in it and won’t oppose an export license.”

Their eyes met. The Louvre not being interested could mean two contradictory things—either that it wasn’t any good, or that the Louvre hoped to get it for themselves or another French museum for a low price by claiming it wasn’t any good.

Thus a Getty art expert, as well as Roger and Jane and our parents Chester and Margeeve, would be descending on Paris on Wednesday. We had made a reservation for Chester and Margeeve at the Deux Continents, but Roger was staying at the George V. I was strangely apprehensive, but Roxy’s mind seemed suddenly more attuned to her inner state than to issues of art ownership, and she was happy her parents were coming. Her mind was on the baby that would soon be born, she seemed
to be listening for its stirring, or for the vestige of a labor cramp, with her mother here.

On Wednesday, which seemed to drag with the suspense of their arrival, we got a call about five from Lille. Their plane had landed there because of a strike at Charles de Gaulle Airport, and they would be coming to Paris by a special Air France bus. We were not to wait up for them if it got late; just go to the hotel, dead with jet lag, and would call us in the morning. Reprieve.

On Thursday morning I went off early to walk Scamp, with a date to meet Roxy at ten. Usually Ames Everett did not talk to me very long, but today he was interested in the parental visit, and in Roxy’s state of mind. Her state of mind was a general preoccupation of the American community now, it seemed to me, as her time approached and her deserted marital state became more poignant, and more emblematic of the risks Americans take getting mixed up with French people here. Many people had been asking about Roxy.

“I suppose she is apprehensive about the sale?” Ames said, and I thought again, as I had thought several times, he is unusually interested in the sale of our picture.

“Is she glad to see your parents?”

“She hasn’t seen them yet. They seem to be lost between Lille and the Hôtel des Deux Continents. She’s apprehensive, though. She thinks they think she should go back home, to California, right away, just clear out.”

“Oh, I hope not,” he said. “She wouldn’t, would she?”

“She has to do something. Charles-Henri has fallen in love. He wants to remarry.”

“What is this fashion for marriage? Marriage is so tacky and unnecessary,” Ames complained. “Remarriage seems complete lunacy.”

Strange to say, the Thursday of our parents’ arrival—in my mind the beginning of the end—was the very same day I understood what people were saying in the metro. It was like the moment in some magic tale, when you find the ring, or swallow
the potion, and you can suddenly understand what the birds are saying. I understood French people, and they said:

“I wonder if Gérard will buy a Saab for his next voiture?”

“I doubt it, he always buys Peugeot.”

All day the magic held. Near me as I drank a cup of coffee in the Brasserie Espoir, two women in their fifties chatted, and their words came as clear to my ears as if they were Americans:

“You never know with Michelle, that’s just the way it is, and you have to come down on one side or other, but it isn’t easy.”

“It’s true.”

“You could say I’ve had enough, but what can you do, yet, it’s true.”

“Her mother, et cetera, isn’t it?”

“I told them.”

Later, when I had time to think about it, I would wonder if it was worthwhile understanding after all. Maybe it is better to go along in soundproof isolation? It was something of a disappointment to discover that all those words, so alluringly expressed in dramatic, unintelligible, and unreproducible sounds, organized themselves into banalities one might hear on the bus in Santa Barbara (if one took buses there). But the pleasure of being in on it, at last, initiated, thrilled me all the same. From then on I eavesdropped like a spy.

Roxy had been to see Saint Ursula. At the auction house Drouot, they had let her into a salesroom upholstered in faded velvet to stand alone in front of her painting, the symbol of her life in Paris, the symbol of happiness, the symbol of what private passages of love I don’t know, just as I didn’t know but imagined the pain and rage in her heart at the vanishing of these things.

She had been shocked by the new possibility the painting could be sold in a few days,
hors catalogue
, as a special latecomer to a long-scheduled sale of important pictures, which Drouot thinks is the proper company for our picture. The sale would be a week from Friday. No, she said, she didn’t plan to go, what if Charles-Henri were there? Let the others go, our parents, our brother Roger, her friend Ames Everett. Ames said
he would be there to be sure it went correctly. But I knew she would be there in her heart.

Roxy, seeming outwardly to have that cowlike placidity they say comes on in late pregnancy, has observed the gathering forces without outward complaint. For the past few days she has come home, pulled herself up the stairs, let herself in (exact reenactment of the fateful day Charles-Henri left) and rested as instructed by the
sage-femme
. She would sit on a chair and close her eyes. She has read, in the personals column of the
Herald Tribune
want ads, the words

May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be adored, glorified, loved and preserved, throughout the world, now and forever. Sacred Heart of Jesus, pray for us. Saint Jude, worker of miracles, pray for us. Saint Jude, help of the hopeless, pray for us.

Say this prayer nine times a day for nine days and your prayers will be answered. This never fails. Publication must be promised.

She would close her eyes and begin to say, or rather think these words, nine times. When she got to the end, she couldn’t be sure what it was she ought to ask for, and so would content herself with a vaguely benign hope that things would work out. She didn’t want to confront fate, or Saint Jude or whoever, too directly, by asking anything too hard like that Charles-Henri should see the light. She was not even sure who Saint Jude was, she was only a new Catholic, and what did “publication” mean? But it was soothing to say over, nine times.

Margeeve and Chester, bused in from Lille, had waked in the middle of the night in the Hôtel des Deux Continents, eyes staring open, the curse of jet lag, and then again at ten-thirty, shocked at themselves to have slept so late and stiff from this really uncomfortable bed.

“We have to get another hotel, we’re too old for this,” said Margeeve.

“That means
me
getting us another hotel, I know,” sighed
Chester. Margeeve always wanted to change rooms, tables, this was the first time hotels, but he had to agree, little hot room, the radiator sputtering all night, pinging, an odor of benzoin.

“Did you sleep?”

“I woke up at four.” The
heure blanche
of jet lag. “I took a Halcion.”

“You should have waked me. I’d have given you a jet-lag treatment,” said Margeeve.

“We better call Roxy, she’ll wonder what’s happened to us.”

“Much as I’m eager,” said Margeeve, “I sort of dread it. What kind of shambles we are going to find.”

“The reality of Roxy’s housekeeping.” Chester laughed. “The reality of Isabel’s course of self-improvement. The reality of French legal customs. You never liked reality.”

“What has reality done for me? Well—everything for me, but not so much for the girls.”

“The girls are fine. You know they are. Otherwise we would have heard. We would have sensed it. You’d have been on the first plane.”

“I can’t wait to see Gennie. Of course, she won’t know us,” Margeeve said.

It had been six months since we had seen them, so I expected them to look different. In a sense they did, in a sense reassuringly the same, just standing in a new light, reflected as it were from Notre Dame and the rippling Seine. Margeeve’s blue suit, a normal California blue, was just a shade too blue, Chester was unfamiliarly dressed in his dark give-a-lecture-at-an-eastern-college suit, which he never wore in Santa Barbara. He was bearded, something he went back and forth on, so that we the family had ceased to register the alternations, always disappointing him the mornings he would appear with a newly bare chin. Now I noticed the beard was there—beards are the exception here—making him look foreign, maybe slightly eastern European. Together they looked foreign, but perhaps only to our eyes, and unmistakably American. We rushed to embrace them at the exit to the metro.

“Well!” they said, beaming, we were all beaming. “Rox, you look like an elephant, it must be triplets.”

Her long-sleeved blue blouse had ruffled cuffs covering her wrists.