Le Divorce (12 page)

Toward Roxy I felt a little disloyal, because I was now dreaming of sleeping with a member of the enemy clan, like Juliet, bringing down on us who knew what troubling conflicts and temptations to betrayal. Plus she would think it simply very odd that I would be attracted to a man of seventy (which he must be, by my calculations). Biblical in its oddity. And I pitied her, for if her life was unraveling, I felt mine was knitting into a rich pattern.

Even liking France, I missed California some. It would have been nice to just get down and hear some music. Let’s face it, their music is not our music. And I missed the sound of the ocean, and I even missed seagulls, and the California light, driving, and Mexican food—maybe in reverse order. In France, though they think of themselves as having Mexican restaurants, they don’t know what Mexican food should be, and they wouldn’t like the real thing. They hate spices. On homesick days (PMS) I would wake up staring at the mean little window of Roxy’s
chambre de bonne
and feel like the girl in a book I loved as a child who was put up in the attic of her posh school after her father died and she didn’t have her school fees. Then I would remember that Rwandans were being chopped and hacked to death by the thousands and the newspapers had not told us the name of a single Rwandan; and mortar shells tore the limbs off little Bosnian kids (whose names we were sometimes told, them being European). I would remember that these places were close by. I could be in Bosnia in two hours, and Rwanda by tomorrow morning, but California was a distant island surrounded by water and sand.

Letters come from California in batches, as if they came on a boat or overland bound in a single trunk. I heard all at once from a couple of friends, my ex-boyfriend Hank, and there was a letter from Margeeve, which was a little odd, because it is
usually Chester who writes me, Margeeve who writes Roxy. This was however to me on the subject of Roxy:

Iz honey,

This is just to slip you a word apart from Roxy, that you should keep us informed. She sounds so addled on the phone—is she doing what she should re the lawyers and such, or is she drifting, as we all know what she is like. If it’s a question of money, we can help to a certain extent, which I’ve told her, what with credit line etc. but we can’t help unless we know what she needs. Would it help if you brought Gennie and came back here? Could she focus better on what she has to do? She says a dossier? Fill us in, Iz, and I hope you are having some fun in spite of all.

xx

Marg.

ps don’t let her just give in to everything they suggest if only for her eventual self-esteem. Jane says the same. xx

Needless to say, I showed Roxy this letter, as I thought she would appreciate it.

“I suppose I do sound addled,” she admitted. “I haven’t told them yet about the Persands objecting to us sending Saint Ursula. I know Margeeve has been counting on it, she’s thrilled, one of our pictures in an exhibition at the Getty. I’m caught between two armies.

“I can’t seem to work,” she added. “Words turn to mud. Nothing turns out. I feel it’s pregnancy, but I didn’t have this trouble when I was pregnant with Gennie. Hormones? It’s as if it’s hard to be creative in two ways at once.”

I pointed out that she had a lot on her plate.

One day when Gennie and I got home, Roxy said, with the special look on her face that she gets when she’s lying, “There’s a box for you.” A big orange box, tied in brown ribbon, was set alluringly on the desk, like a cake on an altar. “A messenger
brought it,” she added, watching me with interest. It’s nice to get presents, so I eagerly set about opening it. Roxy lingered in the doorway to the kitchen, trying not to seem too interested, as I pulled out a purse made of leather, caramel-colored, rather pretty, maybe slightly too ladylike, and a pair of black gloves with sheepskin inside. There was a card which, when I glanced at it, I jammed into my pocket like hot money. “I had it delivered,” I said, “it was so big, and I was going to the crèche for Gennie,” this lie leaping to my lips as if I were in practice at lying, which I wasn’t because I don’t usually bother.

“Hermès,” said Roxy. “It must have been expensive.”

“Yes, awfully,” I said, “but the man said it was last year’s model or something,” lie upon lie.

“Still,” said Roxy, reproachfully. Probably she thought it had come from a man, as it had, from Oncle Edgar. We had noticed it in a window. The card said “Bonjour, mademoiselle” and suggested an
exposition
the next week, rather an educational-sounding one about André Breton. Perhaps I was given it for being a
bonne élève
, for I had remembered to say
“Bonjour, monsieur,”
when greeting him, and not just
“Bonjour”
or even
“Bonjour, Monsieur Cosset.”
(No one, not even the magisterial Oncle Edgar has been able to make me understand the logic of this rule.) On the back of the card was also written, as I saw later, “against the onset of winter,” which I took to refer to the gloves, and
“bon anniversaire.”
I did not know how he could have known it would soon be my birthday. But I did know, now, that the special interest I felt between us was not just imaginary. I was wildly excited and had to keep my face as blasé as Marlene Dietrich.

Won’t you change the destiny of my life

And bring good weather to my late winters?

—François Mainard

I
THINK NOW
that it was peculiar of him to have taken me to a boring, improving art exhibition—a bit of supervised culture before the main event—but I recognize that I bring out the didactic in people, that I have, perhaps, an irresistible quality of clay. And Edgar has a streak of the puritan, like many French people, though puritan is what they accuse us of being. Though I don’t know why they should be surprised if we are puritans, as we are children of a nation started by puritans. It is more surprising to find in them, the vaunted hedonists, this quality of didacticism and the need to employ their time in improving ways.

We went to dinner at Pierre Traiteur (foie gras and
raie aux câpres
), and over dessert he said, “I have long since given up luring young women to my rooms on other pretexts in hopes that things will take their course. We must decide if you will become my mistress.”

I suppose the word “mistress” startled me, connoting sex, captivity, dinners at Maxim’s, lavish presents—begun I suppose with the handbag—the elaborate set of rules suggested in the
opera
La Traviata
, of which I had seen a video, with Maria Callas. An entirely dismal role in life, in which the mistress goes broke, is insulted, is heartbroken, and dies. Also, I am used to sexual advances being more spontaneous, and so I was startled, and temporized, murmuring, “What does that mean?”

“It means we become lovers, and spend a certain amount of time together, like this evening, amusing ourselves. It was your writer Addison, or Sheridan maybe, who deplored the passing of the good old days when amusing a woman was enough to have your way with her. Nowadays it is perhaps not enough, but amusement I suppose is still the point. I know you amuse me, and I think I can amuse you. And there is the fact that I desire you. You are a beautiful young woman.”

I thought “amuse” sounded condescending, as in “amusing little trifle,” but I had already discovered that words in French have a different intensity, less or more.
Je le déteste
, they say, meaning, I mildly dislike it;
je l’adore
means it’s okay. If something is really great you have to say it’s not bad,
pas mal
. Also you have to use the words suitable for your station in life. If not, people gasp and laugh.

Amuse, then—what did it mean? Much is spoken of desire, whatever its origin, that odd feeling in the thighs and rush of blood. I felt that too, and understood it. But in my experience, not enough is spoken about curiosity. I was conscious once again of wondering—of wishing to know—how it would be to go to bed with Oncle Edgar. I am often curious about men that way, and I am glad to have been born in a day and age when I can satisfy my curiosity without too much risk of ruined reputation, of pregnancy, or of heartbreak.

In all these months, through all Roxy’s trials, adventuring in a strange land, it never occurred to me that it could be my heart that might be broken.

At that moment it was more than curiosity, I was also conscious of Edgar’s large male body, and his connection to distant wars in Indochina, his knowledge of erotic murmurings in other languages, his acquaintance with statesmen. These things seemed part of his glamour, which seemed in turn to explain my stir of
anticipation, or whatever it is, when you know you want someone, even, surprisingly, an elderly gentleman.

“But I’m having my period,” I said. “This isn’t a good time to begin.” This made him laugh. It did sound crude and lacking in feminine reticence, as I heard when I said it.

As I wished, when I wished, he said.

When the flower gypsy came in, he bought red rosebuds. “These should be camellias, of course,” he said. “Dumas.”

Until he suggested I go to bed with him, I do not think I had really been sure this was what he had in mind, though I knew it had crossed my mind, and there was the matter of the handbag. I had sensed his interest but thought it was too weird. Consciously I was surprised, at myself and at the situation. I thought of Maurice Chevalier movies, of
Gigi.

Now it doesn’t seem weird at all. When I say that I love and desire him, I know that other things are involved besides sex. I admire his force and his experience, for instance. He has fought Chinese bandits in the hills of Taiwan, and Russians in Afghanistan. Sex has more to do with it than I could have imagined, but maybe there is also something you could call sexual suggestion, wherein the romantic idea of Chinese bandits operates directly on the nerve endings through the mechanism of the penis. Or maybe it’s more direct even than that. There are sensations that one cannot write about or describe, and realms of the imagination whose importance, though dumbly felt, is beyond understanding.

At this particular dinner, nothing was mentioned about the growing tension between our two families, but we agreed that circumspection was required. And that we would not tell our respective families what was to happen. This was my suggestion. It made him laugh merrily. “It would not have occurred to me to mention this to our families, my dear.
Au contraire
.”

He was off to Avignon in the morning, we would meet in a few days. It seems he lives in Avignon and keeps a
pied-à-terre
in Paris. I did not ask, no one had ever told me, whether there was a Madame Cosset in Avignon. It was not that he would not tell me things, it was that I was afraid to ask. When he kissed me in the taxi, I liked it. Which was a great relief, as I had already
made up my mind that I was going to bed with him. It was a serious kiss, not the kiss of an uncle. But not a French kiss either.

Roxy did something rather odd, for her, uninterested in material objects as she is. “I went to Hermès,” she said. “Well, I happened to be in there. I promise I wasn’t snooping, Iz, but anyway, it’s called a ‘Kelly.’ After Grace Kelly, I guess. Your purse.”

“It’s ladylike, Grace Kelly was ladylike, it’s probably that,” I agreed.

“Iz, do you know what that purse cost?”

“No, don’t tell me,” I said. It is much better not to know the value someone sets on you. It could only be too little or too much.

“I know you didn’t buy it for yourself,” she went on.

As I’ve said, I don’t usually lie. I shrugged instead. “No, someone gave it to me. I did someone a favor.” She knew I wasn’t going to tell her, so she dropped it, it seemed without rancor. I was sure she had her theories, but I was sure they wouldn’t be right.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to accept expensive presents from men?” she added after a bit.

I laughed. “Not really. No one ever foresaw that I would get an expensive present from a man.”

“Anyway, you should give it back.”

“Ha ha. Anyway, he wouldn’t take it. Anyway, why shouldn’t one take an expensive present from a man, if he wants to give it to you?”

“It puts you in the position of having to do what he wants.”

“But if you happen to want to?”

Here she was stymied. “If you both want the same thing, he doesn’t need to give you the expensive present,” she said.

“But he wants to. It isn’t a payment or bribe. I’d sleep with him anyway. The point is, it’s a present.”

“Then I suppose you can accept it.” Her tone was suddenly wistful, as if she was thinking that she was now, with her swollen belly and a reddish rash on her cheeks, beyond the
chance of getting expensive presents from someone who just wanted to give them.

For my part, I saw that if Edgar were younger, he wouldn’t have the custom of giving expensive presents, that doing so was a relic of a vanished world. Actually, it was Mrs. Pace who pointed this out.

“How delightful,” she said, noticing the Kelly. Not that I carried it much, it was kind of ladylike, but in a nice, useful big size. “You must have an admirer. Let me see. And he must be French, and of a certain age. The charming customs of a vanished day.” I remembered that she has a closetful of expensive but old purses, in ostrich, alligator, lizard, every kind of endangered creature.

“It takes me back.” She smiled. But when they saw I wasn’t going to talk about the Kelly, both she and Roxy seemed to lose interest.

If men don’t give women this kind of sexual bribe present anymore, the tradition at least persists that they do. When I understood this aspect of it, I was sort of embarrassed. I once tried to discuss it with Edgar himself. Was it a bribe for sex? After all, I would have done it for free, if I wanted to, or not, and it is a rather degrading concept of female autonomy to suppose otherwise.

Edgar laughed. He said that I was the descendent of heavy-handed mercantile American Calvinists who think in terms of payment and bribe. Some things are gifts and ennoble the giver, or are anyway integral to men’s sense of their role.

Something disturbing happened shortly after this. One afternoon I had filled in for the aerobics instructor at the American Center, so Roxy had picked up Gennie and was already home when I came in about seven. I heard them in the kitchen, Gennie crying, screaming almost, a terrible wail, and Roxy’s voice loud and angry, as if Gennie had scared her by hurting herself. I thought of fire or scalding, and hurried in. Gennie’s face was blazing red and Roxy’s wore an expression of uncontrollable rage. I saw then that Roxy must have hit Gennie, and her hand was raised to do it again. The poor little girl ran to me, and Roxy began to sob: she hated Gennie, Charles-Henri, whom this
terrible brat exactly resembled, her life, me, the world. This torrent of raving abuse and misery continued as we stood there, me somewhat riveted by Roxy, blaming her not for feeling this way—things can get too much for anybody—but for taking it out on Gennie. I hadn’t imagined she could do that.

We went into the living room, Gennie and I. Despite myself, I was thinking of Roxy’s entire history of a selfish penchant for misery. She’d always had it, and I’d never understood it. I knew she was more sensitive than I, on thinner ice always, and that I was just not empowered by nature to understand it or be that way myself. Cruder clay. She wept in diminishing fits in the kitchen and banged things around. I comforted Gennie, whispering “sshhh,” and we hid out until the storm passed. At home, growing up, Roxy ordinarily apologized after her fits, but this time she didn’t. There was the mark of her hand on Gennie’s fat, tear-stained little cheek.