Le Divorce (27 page)

T
HROUGH SOME ASSOCIATION
of ideas, I had suggested we meet the man from Christie’s at Pile ou Face, a little restaurant not too far from the Hôtel Drouot, the auction house. The Christie’s man was Piers Janely, large, plump, and affable. I immediately saw he was a shade too large for Pile ou Face, taking up too much space in a discreet little room. He had a high-colored English face, and his voice had a range between upper-class loudness and the dealer’s smooth, confidential croon. I had forgotten or never had noticed the almost affected inflections of English English, which sounded odd and stagey against our own flat California accents. Hearing French around you all the time makes you more conscious of the accents of English. Like Piers, Roger and I are tall. The three of us moved, stooping, up the circular stairway.

Chester was going to the Louvre with Margeeve, said he would come for dessert if he could but not to count on it. He said he trusted us. Neither he nor I was sure why we were meeting this Christie’s guy anyhow, but Roger had been corresponding with him.

“Let me say at once that your picture is fabulous, marvelously beautiful,” said Piers Janely. “What would an
oeuf fermier
be? Just a boiled egg? Only in France could they serve you a boiled egg with such panache. Such effrontery, one might say. And the price! I think I’ll try the egg, to start.” All this said in a voice perfectly audible downstairs, I was sure.

“I’ve explained the legal situation,” Roger said to me.

“Knotty, but by no means the worst we’ve had to deal with,” Janely remarked. “Of course things are always worse when the French are involved.”

“They’re not involved, in the largest sense,” said Roger. “As I wrote you, the Louvre is not interested, which clears the way for export.”

“Then the
foie de veau
,
pommes mousseline
,” said Janely.

“Oh, you should have something more
cuisinée
,” I suggested. “How often do you come to Paris? What they do wonderfully here is
pintade au cerfeuil
, with some chestnuts.” I felt Roger studying me oddly.

“Let me look at the wine list,” Janely said. “I used to do a bit of wine, before moving into Old Masters.”

“They say the real wine experts are all English,” Roger said.

“Undoubtedly, it’s absolutely true. The French have very faddish notions and often overlook some quite amazing vintages.” He studied the wine list and waited for us to order. I had the eggs myself, being fond of the puree of morilles that comes with them, and the
croustade de poulet
, reflecting that I might be eating another big meal that night with Edgar. When Roger had ordered, Janely asked the waiter to bring us a red Trévallon, which I thought was an interesting choice.

“Your picture, I must say, from La Tour’s best period, in my mind, though by no means the period he is best known for,” Janely said presently. “In my opinion, La Tour.”

He waited for us to absorb this astonishing news.

“That doesn’t seem to be the general opinion,” said Roger presently, his voice husky, as a man’s becomes when he is torn with desire. “The school of La Tour, or a follower of La Tour is the most anyone will say.”

“Of course,” said Janely. “What do you expect? If they tell
you it’s a La Tour, the price will go out of sight and they’ll have to pay more for it. It’s that simple, frankly.”

“But the Louvre?”

“Suppose you were a museum,” Janely said. “You wanted to acquire, say, a Renoir some local people had found in their attic. I don’t say the Louvre would mislead in any way, I would never suggest—I mention the psychology of the situation. Before you proposed a price, would you go round first to tell them how valuable their Renoir was? Hardly.”

The simplicity, the obviousness of all this, struck me and Roger both.

“If they wondered whether it were really a Renoir at all, would you assure them it was? No, you would not. To preserve your own integrity, you might tell them you couldn’t be sure.”

“I see,” said Roger after a moment. “What do you think?”

“I think it is a very fine La Tour which in competitive bidding will achieve a very fine price. More than one person will know its value. Our catalog would state the case correctly.”

“What price range?” Roger asked, his voice husky with avarice.

“Perhaps a million pounds. We would advise a reserve of nearly that. That would mean it would not be sold under that sum.”

Roger and I both calculated the difference between a million pounds, even as split with the Persands, and the forty thousand of Stuart Barbee’s first estimate. I felt funny—the mere process of thinking about a huge sum of money introduces a kind of unpleasant excitement, a feeling of hectic interest, a hum in the brain. Tureens and beautiful clothes floated through unbidden. I tried to think of something more worthy, I imagined two million, split with the Persands leaving a million, split with Roxy and Judith—it would still come to five hundred thousand for Roger and me. A dizzying, empowering sum. It was to become Isabel the heiress instead of Isabel the dog-walker. I am detaching these thoughts from each other in order to put them down, but they occurred simultaneously, with the force of electric shock.

Either Roger was making the same calculations, or he was struck dumb by the mendacity of great institutions.

“Barbee, the guy who came for the Getty—wasn’t he an independent appraiser? He had nothing to gain or lose, that was just insurance.”

“Hmmm, rather,” said Janely.

“Who do we get to tell us, then?” Roger asked.

“We have, obviously, a point of view opposite to the museums and dealers. Like you, we want to sell at the maximum price. We don’t serve our own interests by overestimating, however, and most of the time we are close to predicting the actual sales price. Sometimes sales disappoint, sometimes they exceed our estimate—that is what happens most often. We are accurate because we are confident about our attributions and we know the market. We have to. There is no doubt in my mind that you have a good early La Tour and it could be worth as much as a million pounds.”

“Drouot would have more experience, surely, with French painting?”

Janely raised a brow. “I don’t pretend to know what liaisons prevail among the French institutions. It’s safe to say Drouot is playing it safe.”

“I would feel more comfortable at Christie’s,” Roger admitted.

“This is extraordinary,” said Janely of his soufflé. “The French really are matchless.”

Chester climbed the stairs just as we were finishing, so we had another coffee with him. Mr. Janely paid the bill.

“A million, Dad,” Roger told Chester. “Mr. Janely is sure it’s a La Tour.” At this, Chester just looked uncomfortable.

We were rocked, thrown, Roger and I, by this lunch, and didn’t have much to say to each other walking back toward the Place Maubert, each lost in thought, counting our riches, plotting our actions, trying to stifle those improper hopes now springing up that had so carefully been bred out of us by our parents and their strictures against greed. (Well, I never noticed that these had weighed much with Roger anyhow.) We didn’t at
all disagree that Saint Ursula ought to be sold at Christie’s. After a discreet interval following its withdrawal from the sale at Drouot, it would come blazing out as a La Tour and the Louvre would have already signed off on it. We were each thinking of what the money would mean to us, and Roger was probably thinking of how we could get out of having to split it with the Persands. I agreed they had no right to it really.

I do thank you for your efforts, which have done me good, and all the more so because they will not cost you any sacrifice, I hope. But don’t let us talk about the future, I beg of you.

—Adolphe

I
WAS LOOKING
forward to seeing Edgar that night on his return from Brussels—just for a drink, not a proper assignation, because I had a lot to tell him—all this, and the news that both our families knew about our affair. If he didn’t know that already. I was scared of this conversation, because it would be a moment when he might say we had better not go on.

We met about six in the bar at the Lutétia.

“I had coffee with Charlotte,” I said directly. “She says the Persands and everyone know about us and are in an uproar. My parents also—Suzanne told them.”

Edgar appeared startled. He tasted his scotch. “Well, does that spoil it for you,
chérie
?”

“Not for me. I was thinking of you. Of your wife.” His wife was not a forbidden topic, yet we had never talked of her. That was a point of pride with me.

He shrugged. “Inhibiting but not absolutely fatal.” There did seem a glint of irritation, though, at the prospect. Discussions, perhaps ultimatums. Perhaps he knew exactly what to expect. “How did they know, I wonder?”

“She didn’t say. I was too stunned to ask. I can’t imagine.”

“Never mind, Isabel.
Pas de problème.
We will ignore what Charlotte told you, as if she had not told it to you.”

Could we? I wondered. Can you unknow something? Would we ever get them out of the bedroom with us? Or would we always feel their eyes, their irritation, even their laughter? (I had not forgotten the malicious amusement of my parents.) They had all intruded on the perfect private intimacy of our world.

“Or will it be more amusing, the better to
épater
the respectable?” Edgar went on. Amusing was the word we had started out with. In the semidarkness of the bar, his magisterial presence reassured me, but the shadow across his face did not. “Is it sweet to shock? Don’t worry, little one, what we have cannot be taken away.” He meant this to be reassuring, but I was not reassured.

“Tomorrow night we’re invited to Mrs. Pace, me and my family, I mean,” I said. Tomorrow, Tuesday, was the night we usually met. Edgar looked at his watch.

“Let’s go to my rooms for an hour,
chérie
. I have to go out later, but not until nine.”

This was what I wanted, to be in his arms, yet this break with our Tuesday tradition made me feel more at sea than I had been feeling.

As Edgar went to get his coat, I heard (understood) an elegant Frenchwoman say to her companion at the table behind us, “It isn’t true that the American girls who come here are all heiresses,
riche et bien placée
the way it was even in the fifties. Today you don’t know who they are, they come from states you never heard of. It isn’t true, either, that Americans don’t speak French. My dear, they
all
speak it,
exécrablement
.”

There was something elegiac about
les galipettes
, too, and at the climax I sobbed, from the anguishing keenness of my sense of impediment and release, but also because at that moment I was sure it was the last time. “
Bonjour tristesse
/ You are written in the lines of the ceiling.” He stayed inside me a long time when it was over, holding me tenderly.

Then he got up and poured himself a cognac, and said, “Isabel, I’ll be going to Zagreb for a couple of months, to help
with the negotiations there.” After a moment of chill, I wasn’t surprised. I ought to feel that it was good—I was happy he was being useful to his country as he should be, where he could help. It was a tribute to the potency of his thought, and validated my admiration once again. Yet I was being abandoned, and it was as I expected, and it made me angry and scared.

“What will
I
do?” I said. “Will you want me when you come back?”

He appeared to think about this, though I have no doubt he had thought about it already. “You will not always want me, my dearest Isabel. We must think of that. Perhaps this is the natural time to part.”

I heard this with the sinking of heart that comes when you are told something you were afraid of, the test you know you flubbed and now must see the low mark, written in your record for all time.

“No, I don’t think that at all. I’ll wait, I’ll come with you. . . .”

“Of course we will always love each other. But you will not always want me. I know, if you do not,” he said. “It was your Emerson, I think, who said, ‘every hero becomes a bore at last.’ ”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said.

Edgar has the idea of, uses the word, destiny. Applies it to himself. “I’m afraid this useless preaching is my destiny,” he said once of his television appearances and town meetings. “At one time I thought my destiny would be as a statesman.” Now his destiny was coming to pass.

Destiny seems a grandiose word for “future,” though. Maybe you have to be religious to use it, or a statesman, as he said. Maybe you have to be as old as he, when the idea of “future” is not so comfortable. The words stayed in my mind, because I had never thought of myself as having a destiny, though of course I had a future, anyone does except the immediately doomed. Roxy was destined to live in France, a destiny conferred upon her, inadvertently, with her French first name. Hers a manifest destiny. Mine? Whatever mine was, I couldn’t be sorry Edgar was going to Zagreb, for his sake. He wanted it
so much, and he might really help there. Yet it fit in too well with the dignified slow-motion collapse of my French world, and the death of my hopes. At first I had no words of protest or reproach. Maybe I was too stunned. I was the immediately doomed.

“You are young, beautiful, and wise,” he continued. “You will not always want me, Isabel.” Of course the words shot to my lips: And you are an ugly old fool. But I didn’t say them. We talked brightly of the relations of the Bosnian Muslims with the Croatians.

So. On with the
soutien-gorge
, the
combi satinée
,
slip dentelle
,
bas-collant
, fuck-me shoes, and out into the night.

Fighting tears of chagrin, I walked home alone along the Boulevard Saint Germain. It was clear that he was saying more than just that he would be away in Zagreb; he was saying goodbye. He was dumping me. That accounted for his extra tenderness and somewhat portentous manner, accounted for certain things he had said I had not understood. I had been thick, as usual. I had resisted knowing. Goodbye forever, he was saying. Being dumped and being blamed for it: “You will not always want me, Isabel.”

It was windy and cold now in Paris, December, the weather too ominous a metaphor for May-December lovers, and it was black as midnight by seven-thirty—
dix-neuf heures trente
, but I would never learn to think of time that way. My spirits chafed at the flatness of the world. I had on my old down coat Margeeve had brought over for me, but I shivered, becoming angry where I should have been reassured by Edgar’s lovemaking. He was vain of his lovemaking because it denied age; he had just wanted to prove his vigor, and now it would be proved in Yugoslavia, which was what really counted for him, his patriotism was really narcissism—I was having that sort of thought.

The headlights flashed reflections in black puddles of cold rain. Usually, miserable weather in Paris makes you think of human courage—defiant umbrellas, resourceful buses—and for that it is cheering. But tonight the rain described my solitude (
“il pleut dans ma chambre, il pleut dans mon coeur”
). From the
street, looking up, I could see only the ceilings of the lighted apartments above, but even the ceilings, ornate with plaster fruit, lighted by fairy chandeliers, suggested opulent contentment from which I was excluded. I imagined the truffled chickens, the families at table, laughter, all the young women who could play the piano. Even Charlotte could truffle a chicken and play “Für Elise.”

I could do nothing and had lost everything: Edgar, my family, and France (for I saw too clearly how the boat was nearing the shore, the gangplank would soon be let down, my trunks stowed for the voyage back). Back to my family—but they were all strangers after all; I had not got over my pique at them for their reaction to hearing about Edgar and me, for making fun of my love and my fears, for taking me so lightly. If they loved me, or even knew me, they could not have said, “Their roué of an uncle has seduced our flower Isabel,” and laughed. Were not all their thoughts about me revealed in that sarcastic remark of Margeeve’s? (Had my father at least protested in his heart, thinking how could she say that to Isabel?) As if they were still focused on my sexual behavior in high school, or on some definition of me that didn’t take into account my qualities of . . .

Of what? When it came to an answer, my mind was a blank. I knew myself to have qualities, but was made to face, in the solitude of icy rain on the Boulevard Saint Germain, just crossing the rue Saint Jacques, that they were not apparent to anyone else. Could everyone in the world be wrong and I right? What had I done or not done in my life, to have them take me so lightly when they took Roger and Roxy and even Judith so heavily? What do you have to do in the world to break through to seriousness? These useless questions seemed of cosmic importance to me.

To me and perhaps to the roué uncle, of whom I was the victim, his family thought, while my family thought he was mine. There was something funny in that, if I’d been inclined to laugh. My spirits one minute would lift to magnanimity. If I was only his victim, last fling, expedient mistress of the moment, I didn’t care. The heart has its own imperatives, Edgar’s as much
as mine. A stab of gratitude to Edgar brought tears to my eyes. Why? Because he thought me worth telling things to, about Clausewitz and Marshal Ney. Because I sensed that our conversations were over. They would not survive the stares and whispers of our families, nor the distance between Paris and Zagreb. Yet—some Frenchman had written—“absence diminishes commonplace passions and enhances great ones.” Thus I wavered between anger and understanding, and between despair and hope. After all, he had not positively said it was over, only that maybe it should be.

Hope took various forms. Maybe—for I had always been able to construct a better scenario—maybe I had underestimated the extreme urbanity and tolerance of the French (think of Charlotte’s marital sabbatical, for example)? Maybe they would learn to take us for granted. A vision came to my mind of years from now, on the lawn at Chartres, Sunday lunch, Isabel and Edgar a settled couple, Isabel tucking a lap robe over his knees as he sits in his wheelchair, Suzanne calling them in to lunch. Amélie has gone on a cruise to Egypt.

Yet, a future pushing an elderly gentleman in a
fauteuil roulant
, would that be enough for me? Somebody else said, “He who lives upon hope will die fasting.” What would become of me? That was really the gist of my self-indulgent misery—pity for Isabel
seule
. A saying of Sartre’s had powerfully struck me, if only because it seemed to have so much more force in French than when I had heard it in Sunday school in Miami, Ohio:
“L’important n’est pas ce qu’on fait de nous, mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu’on a fait de nous.”

Was it possible I had begun to think in French?

I was disconcerted by the way events, instead of coming to a head as they would in a film, seemed to recede like the sea of Faith in Matthew Arnold’s poem. I could hear the long, withdrawing roar. Perhaps Edgar and I would never say goodbye; the days between our meetings would simply drag out, he would spend more time in Brussels, or Bosnia, and I—where? My future had not announced itself. I seemed condemned just to blunder along, nauseated like Sartre’s hero by the flatness of the world. The Persands would never confront me, no voice would
be raised at me ever, there would be no climaxes, courtroom or salesroom dramas, no acrimony would ever find expression—the world as flat beneath my feet as the moving sidewalk in the Chatelet metro, which seeming to take me somewhere, would only take me to the next station. This flatness was called civilization. In France, even the frisky American spelling of civilization with a
z
had been softened to Civilisation.

Maybe I should go to EuroDisney and fuck German businessmen for money as Mr. Tellman had suggested.

Just kidding.

I tried to tell myself there were things to look forward to: Roxy’s baby and maybe some money from Saint Ursula. But these thoughts were not enough to dispel my misery.

Roxy’s blood on the stairs at 12 rue Maître Albert would always catch me up, if I was thinking of myself, dark reproachful spots saying it’s Roxy who must be watched over and guarded, she is the flower. You Isabel are a tree, sturdy and rooted, whatever they think. (La Fontaine has a saying, though, that the rose bends in storms but trees are blown over.) Roxy is brave really, just that one lapse or outburst, now she is soldiering on, to have her new child alone, for in the end no one is going to help her—not Margeeve and Chester at their breakfast with their papers and tea, they aren’t going to be making all the formula and putting on the little shoes and worrying, and neither am I, however much I might intend to, and neither is Charles-Henri on his weekend visits, nor Suzanne. . . . At thoughts like this I would remember the picture. What if we really got a million dollars? That would save Roxy. Say what you like about money, that it’s disgusting or a taint, it would make all the difference for Roxy between grimness and a life of art. Elated with selflessness, I climbed the stairs sincerely thinking I would give Roxy my share of Saint Ursula. “Have no truck with first impulses,” said I think Talleyrand, quoted by Edgar in one of his speeches: “for they are likely to be Good.”