Le Divorce (8 page)

“My father’s mother was a Communist,” I volunteered, pointedly. “In Minnesota. She died before I was born, but I’ve
heard the stories. She didn’t wish America ill; she wanted to help organize the farmers in Minnesota.”

He peered at me with a moment’s suspicion, calculated the chronology, and smiled.

“Dear Isabel,” he said. “That is history, and it is of history that I am speaking. The need to expunge all that, clarify, wash away the stain of treachery, the uncertainty of who, where, why. Things need to be brought out into the light of day so they can heal, you understand?”

This sounded rather New Age from a man of his years, but these were recognizable tenets, ones that Mrs. Pace herself promulgated.

“So much would be cleared up if we knew, for instance, the real role of Olivia Pace. If not a spy herself, certainly the lover of spies,” he went on.

“Mrs. Pace?” I said, beginning to understand the direction of his thoughts and the unconvincing benignity of his air to me.

“Her role in the late thirties through nineteen-forty-five.”

“It’s inconceivable that she did anything wrong,” I insisted.

“Inconceivable. I’m not at all suggesting it. In any case, there would be no consequences now. No one thinks of public accusations or legal actions—though I believe there is no actual statute of limitations on treason, high treason.” His voice, on the words High Treason, was unnaturally charged, allowing me to glimpse, beneath the urbane manner and the deliberate lightness of his tone, a fervid preoccupation.

“It has never seemed right to me that men go unpunished for crimes that may have cost lives, that may have jeopardized a whole way of life, and they sit today, some of them right here in perfect comfort. All those Englishmen, and . . .” He caught himself. “In the interest of history. Inconceivable that Olivia could have done anything purposefully. Unwittingly? One wonders. If you should happen to notice . . . in her files . . .”

There seemed nothing to say. Of course I would not snoop in Mrs. Pace’s files and report on them. The melodrama, the cloak and daggerness, appealed to me, however. As he saw, it was impossible for me to sympathize imaginatively with those old
passions. But it was sort of amusing, being asked to spy. And I found myself wondering if he were not right to think that old wounds should be healed. I suppose I was thinking of Roxy and Charles-Henri, but what goes for people must go for nations too?

In my state of vague emotional torment I decided that I wanted to be loved, and looked about me. . . . I studied my own heart and tastes and could not discover any definite preferences.

—Adolphe

T
HOUGH
I
HAD
reasurred Roxy that I was having fun in France, mostly I was working or babysitting all the time. But occasionally I went out with either of my two Frenchmen, Yves and Michel, and also a couple of Americans, one a guy I knew from Santa Barbara, Mark Lopez, the other a brother of a friend of Roxy’s, Jeff. Both of these men were like brothers; our fellow Americanness neutered us, and our dates were much taken up with cross-cultural notes and survival strategies. Mostly we went to films. Paris is good for film buffs, because anything you might want to see is playing. Sometimes we had dinner.

Scene: Yves and Isabel in a restaurant that reeks of cigarette and cigar smoke; you don’t know how they can even taste their food. Yves smoking like the rest.

Me: It’s really stupid to smoke. It’s the leading cause of death. Do you have to?

Yves:
Bah ouieeagh.
(I can’t spell phonetically these strange syllables that mean, Yes, I’m smoking, not smoking is a
con.
You crazy Americans.)

Me (primly): I’ll have the healthy fat-free sole and the steamed vegetable plate, please.

Yves:
Pavé au poivre, saignant
(thick steak, rare, dripping with butter and cream).

Me: Ugh (shudder).

Yves: They do a great
bavette
here, but even better at Balzar, there they use a beef from Normandy raised in a special manner on American maïs, you can also find this at L’Ami Louis. They do not import English beef here, on account of the
vache folle malady
, naturally, not allowing it to come to France which I support, but in truth, the English beef, one hates to say so, was very good—the Danes, also, though you would not expect, have an excellent
boeuf
 . . .

And he’s off discoursing about some esoteric aspect of beef, or it could be mushrooms or anything.

Also, they read comic books, Yves and his friends do, although studying at the university. These are not aspects of French culture they teach in the course I am taking at the
mairie
. I realize there is much I have to learn about France, but so do they have something to learn about America, whereas the only thing in America they care about seeing is
Lazvegaz
.

One night, Roxy and I had dinner at Charlotte and Bob’s. Three friends of theirs were there. Here is another, what I consider typical, French dinner conversation:

Marie-Laure: This is good. Where do you get it?

Charlotte: Rue Monge.

M-L: The Caveau du Fromage?

Charlotte: No, Kramer, opposite.

Jean: This is the original Epoisse. (Turning to me, in English) Try this. In my opinion, the Epoisses are the king of cheeses. The best cheeses of France.

Others:
Non! Oui!
Amis du Chambertin! Livarot! Vacherin!

Marie-Laure: Jean thinks he is original, but Brillat-Savarin also said the Epoisses were the best cheese, and he said it first.

Bertrand: So, you go up to the rue Monge?

Charlotte: Saturdays.

Jean: The orange crust is important. . . .

Charlotte (to us): Yes. Did you know that the Camembert
has a white crust because white was considered more refined for women? Although at one period of history, people didn’t think women should eat cheese at all. The fermentation could be harmful to their reproductive potential. And it imparted, perhaps, an
odeur
. . . .

Roxy: When was that?

Charlotte: Oh, in the Middle Ages. Perhaps in the sixteenth century. Perhaps the Princesse de Clèves would not have eaten cheese.

Roxy (always thoughtful): I suppose that’s behind the idea that nice women should only take one cheese. Too much cheese would make them into nymphomaniacs. Are men allowed to take more than one cheese?

(I look down at my plate where I have taken five cheeses, one of each on the cheese plate, and accepted seconds of Epoisse besides. I would have thought it was polite to sample each of their cheeses. But I am constantly making politeness mistakes.)

Jean: The orange crust is from a natural but odd bacteria. When it comes to the organism in Amis du Chambertin, they couldn’t get it to grow anywhere but in that particular part of Burgundy. When it became such a success, the fabricant tried to move his factory, built a fine new one, but the orange crust wouldn’t grow in the new place. He had to enlarge the old one, and each new cellar they dug, it had to communicate with the old one, and remain empty for a while until the
moisissure
had a chance to establish itself.

Bertrand: I still like a
chèvre
.

All:
Oui! Non! Sec! Frais!

Relations between Roxy and the Persands kept on as before, Sunday lunches, friendly phone calls, and on Tuesdays when I picked up Gennie at the crèche, I would take her to see her grandmother. Suzanne is worried about Gennie not speaking enough French, surrounded as she is by Anglophone aunt and mother, with Charles-Henri so derelict in his duty.

We had begun to garner details about Magda Tellman, Charles-Henri’s new love. Charles-Henri had met her, a Czechoslovakian sociologist married to an American employee of
EuroDisney, last year while painting in the Dordogne, where the Tellmans were renting a place on vacation. One can only imagine how their passion came to blaze up. What she looked like we did not know. So far as we had heard, Suzanne had continued to refuse to see her.

About this time I had two strange encounters. The first was with Mr. Tellman, Magda’s husband, one day as I was coming home.

To get into Roxy’s building, you enter a code on the numbered buttons outside, you hear a click and push open the thick door, which then closes behind you, and a little lighted button shows you where to push to turn on the lights for the hallway and the stairs. You then go down the hallway to the end, where a glass door separates you from the stairs. You unlock this door. The mailboxes are in the hall to the left before you go through the glass door, the garbage cans are in a room inside the glass door on the left. In olden days, and in some buildings still, a concierge instead of the glass door would intercept visitors and accept parcels.

On this particular day, I came in and slammed the street door behind me, groping inside for the light button, for even on the brightest day it’s dark in the hall, with its walls of stone and ancient timbers exposed, rather affectedly, to remind you that they have been there since 1680. As I came nearer to the mailboxes, my eyes getting used to the gloom, I saw that a man was sitting on the mail ledge. He got up, slowly, as if he were hurt, or old, though he was perhaps in his forties, dressed in a suit.

“Are you Roxeanne?” he asked, in an American accent. I said nothing, and then as he moved toward me, I hurriedly said, “I’m Isabel.” Looking back on it, it was kind of cowardly to disavow being Roxy, diverting some risk to her instead of me. I should have said I was Roxy, standing in for her, for there was something frightening about the man. But I don’t think this menace, the slick of some interior spillover blazing in his eyes, was apparent to me in the first moment I saw him. I had simply been surprised to be addressed at all, and was struck silent.

“Why?” I added. I wondered if I should go outside again, he looked so immoderate and somehow dangerous. To get out the
door again, you have to push an electrical button on the wall, then, lunging for the door, operate a catch as soon as you hear it click. I have never understood the rationale for this arrangement, common to all doors of all French apartment buildings. I hesitated. He scared me. It came to me the man was probably drunk, some smell of alcohol and anger came off him, and he was American.

He smiled. “You’re the sister.”

“Are you a friend of Roxy?”

“You could say. You could say we have something in common. I thought I’d like to meet her.”

“You haven’t met?”

“Haven’t met.”

“I don’t think she’s home. . . .”

“I’m the husband.”

“Sorry?” I wasn’t following. I was thinking about turning flatly around and opening the door. I just wanted to get away from this guy, and I certainly wasn’t going to let him meet Roxy.

“I’m the husband of Magda Tellman. ‘The husband.’ ”

Magda Tellman. It just didn’t at that instant mean anything to me, though I realized in another split second that Magda was the woman Charles-Henri had fallen in love with.

“Why don’t you leave a note?” I said. “I have to go now. Just write her a note and put it in the box, with your phone and stuff.”

“Yeah, I’ll leave her a note.” He smiled at my brilliance. Why did I feel afraid of him? When I turned my back on him, to open the street door, I half dreaded a blow on the back of my head. Then later, when he had gone, I came back in and looked to see if he had written a note. He had, unfolded, on a “From the Desk of” paper. It said “Mrs. Persand, Be aware that I’m never going to divorce Magda, if you want to plan accordingly.” Roxy never commented on this.

After Roxy had begun to talk more openly about getting a divorce, I went with her to a meeting of American women, where she thought she might get some helpful advice. From the first, it was clear that the agenda of their meeting was just to
kick back and complain about the French, especially French mothers-in-law, with their insistence on Sunday lunch, their meddlesome helpfulness, their hostility to Americans and to daughters-in-law in general. Despite these agitations, it was restful, in a way, to be in a gathering of American women. No matter what one thinks of one’s compatriots, there is undeniably a rapport that cannot be explained. When you meet another American you exchange a glance of understanding. Who you are, your basic cultural assumptions, are known. If you were speaking French, you would
tutoyer
each other from the first. You wouldn’t necessarily like these other Americans, but even the ones you don’t like, you always like them better in France than you would like them if you were both back in America.

At the same time, Americans are critical of each other here. They are snobbish about each other’s French, for example, much meaner than a French person would be. They laugh at each other’s answering-machine pronunciation. The former French teachers are the worst. (Roxy spends hours in Grévisse’s
Bon Usage
. “Maybe I’ll just say
‘Laissez un message,’
” she finally decides.)

The American women planned programs at which such things as French taxes and French divorce laws were discussed, and the names of helpful
avocats
were shared. From this group I had the strange impression that legal difficulties were universal for Americans here, that we were all prisoners of strange objectionable laws and stranger customs, the first of which was marriage itself.

“Whatever you do,” they said, “don’t leave the house. That makes you the guilty one. That way, they can get you for desertion—they have some other name for it. It happened to Tammy de Bretteville, and she was left without a dime, just because she went to Nice for the weekend. And she had paid for the apartment!”

“If you did get divorced, would you go back to America?” I asked Roxy on the way home.

“No, of course not,” she said vehemently. “Everything makes me happy here. Except, well, you know—the situation. But the buildings. The buses. I even love the pigeons with their
little red feet. My heart goes out to the spindly ones. Some pigeons don’t thrive as well as others. Sometimes I drop a piece of my croissant for them. I try to give it to the spindly ones before the fat ones see. But people stare at you so outraged. Did you know they have a sports club where they actually catch the pigeons? Tammy de Bretteville told me about it. Then they let them out, old fat street pigeons, and as they flutter lethargically up, the French shoot them for target practice. That’s their idea of sport. I was struck dumb when I heard this. It wasn’t even for reducing the population of pigeons, which you could possibly understand. It’s some deficiency in sensibility.”

She must be really depressed, I thought, to be raving on like this about pigeons. “It’s better than shooting people, like we do at home,” I pointed out.

Roxy had been talking of divorce, but when Charles-Henri wrote her a stiff little note saying that
he
would like a divorce, Roxy replied: “But I can’t divorce. I’m Catholic.” And there was no good saying, Roxy, don’t be like that, because she was like that. I didn’t try to argue. No divorce became Roxy’s policy as surely as divorce had been her policy last week. Suzanne, who had continued to think that the whole thing would blow over after the baby was born, was relieved at Roxy’s position, that there would be no divorce.

Margeeve and Chester, in California, were not so sure.

Because of the strange experience of hearing my name from the beggar of Notre Dame, I had formed the habit of listening and feeling apprehensive when crossing in front of the great cathedral, feeling the eyes of the carven saints on me, and the beggar, always there, turning his blind stone eyes toward me, holding his cup. But he never spoke again. But then one day as I was walking Gennie home, slowly because for some reason I did not have the stroller, Gennie on her little legs, me impatient, I again heard someone say “Isabel.” Almost fearfully, I looked around at the beggar, and saw, just near him, coming out of Notre Dame in the horde of tourists, Oncle Edgar, the Persands’ uncle, coming toward me, still limping slightly but walking more
briskly than he had at the time I had met him. He gave Gennie a kiss and shook my hand. He was dressed rather grandly in a light suit, in his buttonhole some sort of charity flower that I had seen people selling on the quai.