Le Divorce (28 page)

Then, outside Roxy’s apartment, I heard a chaos of raised voices. The mood of family acrimony, which had erupted several times before, was fully upon them. Inside, it was explained to
me: Charles-Henri had appeared not an hour since to tell Roxy he had agreed that Saint Ursula should not be sold, should instead be settled on Gennie and the baby to come, thus effectively removing it from the realm of the divorce.

Roxy had just told the others. “It’s what I wanted all along! That solves everything! I knew he’d do the right thing when he really focused on it,” she said, her face radiant. All was right with the world. The picture could be withdrawn from Drouot, could hang in its accustomed place over the mantel, all could be as before except for the cost of insuring it for eighty thousand dollars. That would be expensive but she’d manage. I could imagine her feeling of reprieve, her sense of being smiled on by fortune again.

Then Roger had said, “Roxy, no way.”

No way are you going to appropriate property worth several million dollars belonging to Chester, Isabel, and me for the use of you and your children.

They all began to talk at once.

Roxy: That picture was given to me when Uncle William died and we all chose pictures.

Roger: What bullshit, you can never get away with saying that. He wasn’t even your uncle.

Margeeve: Roger, if you take that attitude I will remind you that half that picture belongs to me because I am married to Chester, you said so yourself. It was Chester who inherited the picture. So it’s half mine.

Roger: No way, Margeeve, I explained that to you.

Jane: What about Fritz, after all? Why should Roxy’s children and not Fritz . . . ?

Me: (timidly) Let Roger tell you about our lunch with the Christie’s guy. . . .

Chester: (in defense of Roxy) I’m not so sure Uncle William’s will didn’t stipulate that everyone could pick out something he or she liked.

Roger: Not children by marriage, I hardly think. People not even related to him.

Me: Roxy! It’s worth millions of dollars. Come on!

Margeeve: I’m not so sure I would want to sell it. We could
loan it to a museum for safekeeping. What good is money, really, and it would just go to taxes, isn’t it better to have an art treasure and do good with it?

Chester: How ridiculous. This is ridiculous.

And much, much more. What was new, a note we had never heard before, was the note of asperity between Chester and Margeeve, but I couldn’t guess who blamed whom.

“I can’t believe this, we are bickering about the birthright of an unborn child,” Roxy cried, amid the chorus of our shouts, mine as loud and greedy as anyone else’s. So much for my handsome resolution as I mounted the stairs.

I never would have guessed how they felt, all the odd ways they felt. I guess it doesn’t say much for me and Roger that we were holding out for money but, caught up in it, I certainly didn’t think that Roxy could hog the painting for her children, and said so, over and over, with increasing bitterness, all of us bitter where we had been a happy family (and would be again, no doubt). Thus I learned something about the poison of money. In the end, the collective weight of our indignation convinced Roxy she would have to refuse Charles-Henri’s offer, and the sale, whether at Drouot or Christie’s, would proceed.

“We should weigh withdrawing the picture from the sale at Drouot,” Roger decided. “On the grounds we are considering that offer. While we wait on a ruling about whether it belongs to the
biens
, as they call it, of the marriage.”

“I thought you might leave me at least one thing I loved,” Roxy cried.

Alone, in my room, I swung from despair to rage, thinking about Edgar and my own docility. Had he admired my docility, the absence of reproaches, the dearth of tears? Could I just be dismissed like that, with a casual announcement that we were no longer anything to each other? Were my compliance and good sense so perfectly to be relied upon? I who had given up almost all other social life, who had sacrificed . . . It was self-pity in the most extreme degree. The berating speeches I composed in my mind sank into speeches of entreaty, speeches and then letters.
All night I wrote angry and imploring letters in my head, about how I wanted to be with him always.

The trouble was that the word
always
immediately suggested its opposite, finite mortality—probably to be encountered sooner by him than by me. It was a reminder of his age and my youth, and of me having to minister to infirmities he’d rather not think about. I tried to say: I want to be with you under any conditions, or let me just be your secretary and aide-de-camp. But all remonstrances came out wrong, with the suspicion that Edgar was right that sooner or later we would part. He had told me to read a French novel called
Adolphe
, and in it Adolphe says, “Woe to the man who in the first moments of a love-affair does not believe that it will last for ever!” I tried to remember what I had thought from the first, and, it was true, from the first I had always had the intimation of troubles to come. What a curse it was to have a critical and objective nature, how I envied Roxy her unreflective passions, her life of an artist, authorized to rearrange reality.

The idea of life without Edgar put me at sea again after months of life harmoniously arranged. It made me have a bout of nausea, horribly barfing in the little WC outside the door of the African family’s room. My problems seemed worse for having known happiness. I had learned one lesson from Mrs. Pace, though, a real American lesson: Whatever happened, I would smile.

Early the next morning, Tuesday, Roxy came up to my room. It was hard for her to climb stairs now, she had gained nearly forty pounds. Standing in my doorway, for a second it didn’t seem to be Roxy, just a heavy female figure, Woman, it could be from Rumania or Split, fleeing from mortar. It was her shapeless brown cloak that made her look like an unfamiliar Slav, and her slightly swollen face, become round and puff-eyed.

“Mrs. Pace wants you to call,” she said. “Also—Iz, I don’t think it’s as strange as the others do, I wanted to say before they came over. About Uncle Edgar. They haven’t met him, they just hear ‘seventy.’ ”

“I suppose,” I said. “I don’t care anyway.”

“I didn’t realize you needed a father figure that much. Probably you think Chester paid more attention to me than to you.” (I did think that, but I didn’t care.)

“I am interested in his politics,” I said.

“I envy you, actually. Not Uncle Edgar, but, I don’t know, I envy you a passion.”

“Rox, you’ll be thin again,” I said. I wondered about Maître Bertram, and that strange little moment on the stairs.

“Oh, I know,” she said. Her sighs lacked conviction. People say that at the end of pregnancy you don’t think you ever will be as you were.

I went down to Roxy’s apartment and called Mrs. Pace. She told me they’d been burgled, and she wanted me to come over quickly. I rushed to her apartment to find a scene strangely reminiscent of the day at Chartres when the Persands had been “visited.” Mrs. Pace had been both visited and burgled. A policeman dusted for fingerprints and Robert Pace, in his dressing gown, was already on the phone to the insurance. They had been out late the night before and had not looked around when they got in. Then at seven this morning they had noticed that things were gone from the sideboard. Of course I knew the tureen would be gone. I should have spoken up before.

Mrs. Pace (carefully dressed, stockings, suit, pin in the lapel) said, “I need you, Isabel, just to take a calm look around and help me compile a list of the things that are gone. They say you always fail to notice things yourself, you are too distraught and angry. I’ve noticed the obvious things, of course. All the things on the sideboard—tureen, silver teapot, Bow platter. Then the VCR, and the little table in the hall. What’s very strange is my files, which couldn’t possibly interest a French burglar.

“Burgling seems such a French crime,” she added, her detachment never deserting her. “Domestic, focused on material objects, requiring a certain power of discrimination, and non-violent. But the interest in my files does elude me.”

“They were probably just looking for hidden jewelry,” I suggested, dismayed at my own role.

Table, tureen, Bow platter. Almost nothing else was gone,
though eventually we noticed the absence of a good little Claude drawing that hung in the powder room. The years 1940–1952 had been pulled from her files and lay on the desk. As I was putting them back, I saw that 1950 was gone.

“What happened in 1950?” I asked, for we hadn’t got to the definitive stage of our sorting.

“Old Communist Party stuff. That was the year I was treasurer—Oh, I do mind about my faience, Robert,” she cried. “I mind terribly about that.”

It was funny that I minded too, as if it had been us who had been burgled. I felt the same indignation and sense of violation. I saw it all as a part of a pattern of loss that had begun to form out of the indistinct materials of life and impose itself on me.

I remembered all at once that Cleve Randolph had wanted to look in Mrs. Pace’s files, though of course there could be no connection. What did all this mean?

I rushed home to get ready for our expedition to EuroDisney. As I was putting Gennie’s coat on, I got a call from the antiques dealer at the flea market. He had a tureen. It was rather, though perhaps not exactly, like the one I wanted, and perhaps I’d like to make a date to come and see it? I said I’d come soon, I’d call him.

But whoever it is who has thus determined the course of our life has, in so doing, excluded all the lives we might have led instead of our actual life.

—Proust,
The Past Recaptured

N
OW
I
MUST
pick my way carefully among the events of the next few days, which would further change our world and change us. Of course, I know that each event in life changes the next, so that you can say this of any sequence of things that happen. But “catastrophes have a somber way of sorting things out,” said Victor Hugo. Could we have avoided this one, if we had listened?

An expedition had been planned to EuroDisney. Margeeve and I were bringing Gennie, and Suzanne de Persand was also bringing two of Charlotte’s children—Paul-Louis and Marie-Odile. Roxy had planned to come along, but at the last minute she said she didn’t feel well enough.

We were all solicitude. “Do you think it could be the baby coming?”

No, Roxy said, discouraged, it didn’t feel like labor coming on; but all the same, it seemed too hard to trudge over the acres and acres of some amusement park in the cold weather. We thought, and said to each other once we got on the RER train,
that she probably just wanted a day to herself without us and without Gennie.

I had been feeling a snobbish disapproval of going to EuroDisney. I couldn’t imagine Europeans going there, let alone us, with such a place of our own in California, if we had happened to want to go to it, which we didn’t. Oh, Chester and Margeeve had taken us when we were kids, of course, and of course we had loved it, then.

To get to EuroDisney takes about forty minutes on the train, to the east of Paris. Since Gennie didn’t have a hereditary knowledge of Mickey Mouse and Donald, she wasn’t too excited. She was much more a French than an American child. I supposed they said things like ooh-la-la to her at the crèche, for she says ooh-la-la, and she obviously doesn’t get these French phrases from Roxy, who speaks to her only in English. But today she knew we were going on an outing and it was special because her other grandmother and little cousins were there too.

“How pretty it is!” said Suzanne politely as we approached a set of pink buildings through a park of rhododendrons already in bloom, and poinsettias for the approaching holidays, and artfully sprayed snow at the corners of the windows. I had expected that EuroDisney would be an embarrassing, envious, derivative collection of cardboard castles, an American dream of old-world splendor, so I was surprised that it was so pretty, with a wedding-cake pink hotel that somehow looked familiar, Victorian turnings and Tiffany glass. It was American. I had expected to feel a rush of cultural indignation, a sort of humiliated, apologetic feeling that America had put over anything this dumb on Europeans. But it was hard to object to.

“It looks like the Del Coronado, that hotel in San Diego?” Margeeve said. “It looks like it’s modeled on one of our California hotels,” she explained to Suzanne.

“California, yes, I imagine California to be like this, I saw only Santa Barbara, you know,” Suzanne agreed. “This is actually very charming, this hotel here, though you hear the food is not good.”

Now I try to remember what we did the hour or so before
the strange event. I believe we had a nice time, it was all so decorative and sweet, an idealized America, and I had to admit it was nice to be back in America, especially America refined to its ideal essence of gingerbread porches and Tiffany glass, and harmless anthropomorphic bunnies and mice, amiable dwarves, optimistic fables, Santas and handsome cowboys, choo-choos, hitching posts. I know we are supposed to mind that, but it’s hard not to appreciate, while you’re there, the absence of gum wrappers and assault weapons. Or so I imagined.

We went on the little western train that took us into the Sierra Nevada and through scenery that looked like Tahoe—none of it seemed exotic to us, but Suzanne often said “very pretty” and Gennie laughed to see dance-hall girls and villains. We went into the castle of Sleeping Beauty. “La Belle au Bois Dormant,” Suzanne explained to the children. We took pictures of each other and went on the Pirates ride.

My French world had fallen with a crash, like the lurches of my stomach on this stupid ride, clinging to Gennie, who screamed at the glaring faces of the cutthroats and the realistic crocodiles.

Now I saw that my love for Edgar had been just like this, a kind of insulated make-believe. Yet while, when we came out of EuroDisney, we would be the same as before, I was not the same for my time with Edgar in the make-believe world of France. I had changed beyond reclaim, though I could not say how. I mourned over our last conversation, then I rallied and groped for rays of hope that we might go on somehow. His announcement had come too hard on the heels of me telling him we were discovered for there to be any connection; he was going to Zagreb, that was all. Then I plunged. He had been going to tell me for a long time that things were at an end, and it was coincidence that our families had found out now. How had they found out? Was it the Kelly? How much was our picture worth? Was the man in the flea market planning to sell me Mrs. Pace’s tureen? These questions consequential and inconsequential swirled around in my head with the dizzying progress of the little barque that bore us across the Spanish main.

It was just then, standing among the pirates of the Caribbean, looking at the rocking of the little distant ships on the blue main, that one of the pirates came up to us and spoke. His eye was deep and baleful, his grinning, piratical mouth like the mouth of a shark. Despite myself, when he laid his hand on my arm, I jumped. You don’t expect the scenery to accost you, it was like the moment in a horror movie when the eyes of the portrait move.

“Little sister, isn’t it? This is a break.” Long John Silver, the Jolly Roger—after a second his features became those of Magda Tellman’s husband, the lawyer. He smiled, and smiled at Margeeve and Suzanne.

“This is my mother, and . . .” I hesitated, remembering his drunken violence. Now he seemed calm, but I wondered if it was wise to mention Suzanne’s name, or Gennie’s and the other children. It wasn’t a full-fledged thought, something just stopped me from introducing them. It seemed strange that he could be here, dressed in a loose white shirt, tucked out, like a pirate’s blouse, but of course he had some connection with this place.

“I’m glad to see her,” he said, almost jovially, to Suzanne and Margeeve. “I need her to help me with something. While she’s gone, I’ll show you ladies around a bit.”

They appeared startled, looked at me for confirmation that I knew this guy.

“That’s okay,” I began to say, “we were just going to the Futureland, or whatever it’s called.”

“Listen,” he said, taking my arm too firmly and leading me a step or two away, “I want you to go get my car for me. There’s a reason I can’t go myself right now. I’ll tell you right where it is. This would help me out a lot.”

I was so used to all the stuff I did for people as factotum and gofer, I was ready promptly to say “sure,” but instead something made me hesitate, and I said sorry, I couldn’t. He tightened his grasp on my arm. I began to see he was nervous; he was sweating, though it was cold and he had no coat on. With the hand that wasn’t holding me, he fished in his pants pocket and got his wallet out. He let go of me and pulled something out of
it, a picture of himself encased in plastic, with writing—some kind of badge, which he pressed into my hand.

“When you’ve done it, you can take the ladies to the Disneyland Hotel for a sumptuous lunch, on me, all the comps. Look, take this, this entitles you to all the comps in the park.”

When I didn’t say anything, he grabbed me again. “It’s a white Opel, rented, and it’s parked against the west fence in Frontierland. I don’t remember the license, if there are more than one, you’ll have to try the key. Just get on the train right here, at Fantasyland—no, it’d be faster to walk. Walk that way, following the tracks, till you get to Frontierland. Here are the keys.”

“Look . . .” I said.

“Do it,” he said, and there was something in his tone that compelled me. Perhaps there was something threatening in his voice, perhaps it was the intensity of the pressure of his fingers, or the way he looked at Gennie. In a foreign land, Americans oblige each other more freely than we might perhaps do at home. I told myself it was not so strange to be helping him out. But I’m sorry to say it was the complimentary pass that convinced me.

“Drive it along the service road to where we can see you from the Sleeping Beauty tower, that’s where we’ll be. It’ll only take you fifteen minutes and it will help me a lot. Meantime I’ll show them some interesting insider stuff.”

“Isabel?” cried Margeeve.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. This is Mr. Tellman,” I said. I walked, though irritated and uneasy, in the direction he had shown me, at the perimeter of the park.

It seemed to take longer than fifteen minutes. I walked through a landscape of pines and scrub sage, as if I were in California. As if I were in California wearing seven-league boots, traversing huge tracts of landscape in a stride. An old jeep rusted in a gully, there were cactus and longhorns. Over a rise I saw the silvery bleached timber of a redwood bunkhouse. I might be in Tahoe. Presently, distantly, behind the little rustic railroad station, through the mountainous thickets, I could discern a parking lot. I had walked perhaps twenty minutes. I took a path,
the wrong path, then another which crossed under the tracks of the miniature railroad. Then I was among parked service vehicles, little trucks and electric trolleys, some oil drums, some large trash receptacles. A white Opel sat, almost alone, at one side against the fence. It was unlocked. There was the service road along which I was to drive. I found I was apprehensive, as if I were stealing this car. It was too strange to feel right. Yet what could be wrong, in full daylight in EuroDisney amid thousands of people? Rangers in cowboy hats watched me open the car. I knew they were French—French people worked here—but they looked American in their Stetsons and boots. As I pulled around toward the service road, a Sheriff’s car, a Plymouth car that said “Sheriff,” pulled across the exit and men got out carrying guns, but these were French policemen, and the guns were pointed at me.

I got out of the car with my hands up. What American moviegoer wouldn’t know to do that? People watched from above, from the trestle of the miniature train, watching this typical American tableau. Maybe they thought we were part of the living diorama of American life.

The gendarmes made me sit in their car while they parked the Opel again. They asked questions. What was I doing? Whose car was the Opel? Where was the man who had rented it? What connection to me? I could speak French better now than when Roxy had slashed her wrists. I could say a few words, anyhow. I could make them understand about the guy, how I knew him, that he was with my mother and my little niece, and a small, blonde Frenchwoman and two of her other grandchildren.

The trouble was, I wasn’t sure they believed me. In any case, they made me sit with them.