Le Divorce (2 page)

I was welcomed at this court with the curiosity naturally inspired by any stranger who comes and breaks into the restricted circle of monotonous etiquette.

—Benjamin Constant,
Adolphe

I
WOULD LIVE
in a small room in the attic of Roxy’s building, like Sara Crewe. Roxy took me up there, two further flights of stairs from her apartment. The last flight narrowed and the wooden treads were unvarnished. We had to squeeze ourselves against the wall to make way for a man in a white gown, his skin so black it was almost purple. Roxy must have felt my involuntary startle, for she said, when he had gone by, “You don’t have to be afraid of them here, you know, they’re nice Africans.” There was a tinge of mockery in her voice, not against me but against an America where you are afraid.

There were other rooms up there, former maids’ rooms under the slanted roof, and a single toilet, in the hall, and no bathroom at all. Roxy assured me that the other rooms were just used for storage or as studios, no one living there except the African family, hence they and I would be the only ones using the toilet, and I could bathe down in her apartment. Of course I was mad at her for not revealing these sordid conditions before I came, but she truly seemed to have no sense of adversity, and the room itself wasn’t so bad, though small. You could look out the
dormer window into the picturesque little crooked street. But as she had said, there was no closet.

Though it was only ten in the morning, she told me to go to sleep for a couple of hours, so I could make it through till night. But I couldn’t sleep, I was speeded up as if on diet pills or No-Doz. I could feel my heart beating as I lay there, sun piercing in the window, thinking it had been a mistake to come, and also that what I really wanted to do was go out and look around the streets. Roxy had said I shouldn’t get up until noon, so I tried to endure lying there. Then I got up instead and snuck down the four flights of stairs and out into the street, feeling illicit, as I had always done with Roxy, already disobeying her, thirty minutes after getting here.

I walked down the rue Maître Albert to the end where I had seen the cathedral of Notre Dame, recognizable from some coasters Margeeve had always had, and sat on a little wall by the river admiring it, thinking I wouldn’t go any farther on account of the probability of getting lost. It wouldn’t actually matter if you got lost, it was all so magical, with strangers going by speaking their strange tongue, and a little shop with feathered headdresses from the Amazon, and one with old toys, balconied buildings and Citroëns—these were my idea of French. Those big-leafed trees, and bookstalls along the Seine, and guys in berets on scooters, as in old Audrey Hepburn movies. Notre Dame sat on its island across a litle bridge; more bridges arched in the distance up and down the river, and boats came by, their loudspeakers announcing the names of this
pont
or that. People waved at me from the decks, as if I were a Parisian. There were pink tablecloths on tables spread out in the street, where people drank coffee, reading newspapers strangely called
Figaro
and
Libération
, their dogs at their feet glaring at each other. Liberation, I thought. Liberation!

I changed my watch. Nine hours later than California. A waking day. I had missed a day of my life. At noon I went back to Roxy’s apartment for a bath and some lunch, and after that I did feel better. We sat in her living room. She embraced me again.

“Oh, Iz, I’m so happy you’re here. What do you think?” she asked. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

I thought she meant her rather dark little apartment. “I like the beams in your ceilings,” I said politely. They were in truth quite Santa Barbaran, brown heavy beams.
“Poutres apparantes,”
she said. “Ours are the real, bearing ones. So many apartments these days just have fake ones, for show.” This was the first of the cultural mysteries I would encounter. Why would they have fake beams in seventeenth-century buildings?

In the afternoon we walked across the river to pick up Gennie at her day-care place. She didn’t remember me, but she had only been one year old when Roxy had brought her to California. Now she was three, and she seemed like a nice little kid, only intermittently bratty, with Charles-Henri’s curly hair. The hard thing about her was, she spoke both French and baby talk, so I couldn’t exactly talk with her. She understood English, though. Roxy always speaks it to her. I don’t know why Gennie had chosen French to speak.

That same night, Madame Lemomja, the African mother, came down to babysit, and Roxy took me to a party at the home of Olivia and Robert Pace. Olivia Pace was the writer and reigning American intellectual in Paris, senior in this hierarchy even to Ames Everett, and Robert Pace was the leading wealthy person of the earnest trust-fund type, not counting some supremely rich notables that hobnob with the French couturiers and Eurotrash from Monaco, whom we were not in a position to know. I was to sense among all the rest of the Americans in Paris a certain camaraderie, even a certain affection, a clinging together in the face of a foreign culture—one that we all had chosen, however temporarily, but felt to be alien all the same.

This was a fateful dinner for me, in that I met several of my future employers—Mrs. Pace herself, Mr. Pace (always smoothly in the background passing drinks), Ames Everett, and the art historian Stuart Barbee. When we walked in, I was conscious of the collective scrutiny, and of being compared to Roxy. It was then I began to realize that she was different in Paris, a popular person with an independent status—an attractive young American poet, sociable and sweet, the husband a French painter, expecting
their second child. I mean, she was more of a personage in Paris than in Santa Barbara where she’d grown up, as no one thinks anything of you where you grow up.

The Paces have a top-floor apartment in one of those grand buildings on the rue Bonaparte. Everybody in the American community hopes to be asked here. Olivia Pace is interested in the abstraction Beauty, and her rooms are self-consciously beautiful. Charming paintings and flowers, but in the English or American fashion, no French furniture at all. The food is always luxurious, but not too French. Mrs. Pace considers it pretentious of someone not French to go too far in that direction. (This night we had asparagus, salmon hollandaise, and strawberries with thick sourish cream.) Apart from a few French spouses, almost all her guests are English or American, so there is no question of what language will be spoken (though when Nathalie Sarraute comes, everybody speaks French). There is always some new American academic couple on sabbatical, or new American writer, to lend variety and be a subject of gossip. There is the grand English anthropologist with his double-barreled name, and the famous English literary widow with her sweater out at the elbows to symbolize the evil days that have brought her to the pass of living in France, where, however, she appears very cheerful. There was even me.

These days, I help the maid Yolande pass the hors d’oeuvres, and am entitled by my intimacy with Mrs. Pace to answer familiar questions put by the guests (“It’s through the door off the hall at the right.”). But that night, all was strange to me, a blur of jet lag and new faces.

First among my new acquaintances was Ames Everett. He is the translator whose name is on many English versions of the great works of French scholarship and philosophy. His cleverness at unraveling the most baffling intricacies of the French subjunctive and reknitting them into bright English phrases while—he swears—preserving perfectly the French nuances, has brought him a huge income as well as reputation. Deserved, I believe. I have sometimes sneaked a peek into his English version of something I’m supposed to read in French before certain occasions—more of this later—and no one has ever accused me of
getting it wrong. He looked me over rather boldly (him being gay, though, obviously), as if assessing the strength of my limbs. Looking at him, I saw a young middle-sized plumpish man wearing a Nehru jacket and a monocle on a ribbon around his neck. I imagined him inspecting me through it minutely, like a butterfly collector.

“Roxeanne has talked about you. The little sister. She said I might speak to you about offering you a job. You’ll be wanting jobs?”

“Sure, part time,” I said, warily I suppose.

“Meet me at the Flore tomorrow at three. Roxy will explain where the Flore is.”

“Well . . .”

“Forgive me!” he said. “Abrupt and task-oriented as I am, I should have welcomed you to Paris at least, and I can confide that all of Roxy’s friends are glad to think she’ll have her sister here to help her. Another baby! It seems so odd, all this reproduction. One had almost forgotten about reproduction, artifact of a simpler age.”

Another person I met then was Janet Hollingsworth, a ruined-looking American beauty who told me she was writing a book about French women. She had a certain weary air of disapproval that suggested she had suffered at their hands. I must watch them, she said, and garner their secrets, though some of these were so profound as to defy discovery by mere Americans, little tendencies passed along from mother to daughter, assumptions so natural they might not even be able to articulate them. I gathered she meant things about fascination, sex, arts of seduction, but she did not say so, may have been talking about culinary secrets, or perhaps all of the above. There was a competitive edge to her tone, as if she herself had vied with them in rivalrous dramas for the fortune of a department-store heir or cabinet minister. To tell the truth, I was sorry to see an Anglo-Saxon so convinced that women need wiles and arts, and that the only quarry worth hunting was men. I told myself that she had spent too much time on the Continent, and had thus missed the modern mood of self-sufficiency and of being loved for yourself, or not—of being in any case without duplicity. But she was
a lesson in herself, rather like the old courtesan grandmother in
Gigi
, a reminder of former days when American girls with money or style came over here and hunted for European husbands, counts or Rothschilds, as in novels by Henry James. It made you glad not to be living in an earlier day.

“Just their scarves alone, an entire chapter,” Janet said. It is true they are never seen without scarves, I had noticed that already. “Knot in front, one end in front, other end over the shoulder; looped around double, ends tucked in; over the shoulders outside the coat, like a shawl; tied in back.
Châle, foulard, écharpe
—only think of the number of words they have, and in a language with a very sparse vocabulary.”

“Do they tell their secrets?” I asked.

“Bulimia.” She leaned closer. “Bulimia is one. Oh, we can learn from them. One I know, I heard from a tender friend, a man, is that they pay great attention to
les petits soins
. Someone should talk to Roxy about that. She always looks so awful.”

“Roxy is beautiful,” I objected.

“Of course, but her nails! And no scarf. She goes around in jeans, like an American, or in those awful flower-child clothes.” She grinned. Maybe she was kidding.

After dinner Mrs. Pace, like the others, seemed to make a point of talking to me. I eventually realized this was not a tribute to me so much as to my novelty, my dilution of the small American pond. One drop in a bucket of Americans makes much more difference than a drop in the sea of French people.

“These cups are the old Meissen—that is, notice that the saucers have no indentations,” Mrs. Pace said, handing me a demitasse of frightening fragility. “Do you plan to stay long in Paris?”

“At least until after the birth of Roxy’s baby,” I said.

“You must come over some morning next week and let me talk to you about a project I’m involved in, organizing my papers and so on. Roxy says you might be good at something like that.”

“Does she?” That surprised me very much. But it is true that I know the alphabet. We agreed I’d go on Monday.

That night, when people asked where Charles-Henri was, Roxy would say “in the country” with every appearance of cheerfulness, but as we were walking home she uttered heavy sighs. I was impressed that you could walk home alone at eleven, no problems or menace. Jet-lagged as I was, I would have liked to stop in one of the myriad of bistros and bars we saw, full of people eating and smoking and laughing. But seeing the happiness and animation of others affected Roxy badly. Tears stood in her eyes, and she suddenly said, “Charles-Henri has left me,” in a voice of tragedy I knew very well. I knew it so well, I discounted it a little.

She told me the story. It was a few weeks before my arrival in Paris. She’d been at her French doctor’s
clinique
, waiting for the
sage-femme
, a sort of helpful female advisor-to-the-pregnant that they have here. She was looking at the chart of gestation, thinking she didn’t want to know if it was a boy or girl. She was three months along, and had just told us about this second pregnancy. Charles-Henri was not pleased. Gennie had just turned three.

Then coming home on the 24 bus, in the unseasonably sultry weather, she felt a little funny. She had waited at the stop on the Place de la Concorde. In front of the American consulate she saw the usual assortment of people—young ones in khaki she took to be American, some stouter, surlier ones, apparently eastern European, some hollow-eyed Middle Easterners, some Africans in dashikis—milling around with signs for disparate causes, protesting the American bombing of Baghdad, the decision of the FDA to allow a French abortion pill to be tested in the U.S., the repatriation of Haitians, action and inaction in Bosnia. The consulate guards stood with general vigilance without really paying attention to these people, who are just part of the atmosphere of protest and unrest surrounding America. Roxy didn’t think she looked American anymore.