Le Divorce (32 page)

G
OING HOME
, G
ENNIE
and I shared a taxi with my parents, the first moments we had been alone. They were shocked, of course, but mostly were concerned for Roxy and, it seemed to me, not above feeling at some level that Charles-Henri had brought down righteous vengeance on himself for his treatment of their daughter. There was a note of that, though they would have denied it. “It’s amazing, the workings of fate,” Margeeve sighed. Fate being, as I knew, a sometime code for divine judgment, which of course she didn’t usually believe in.

“This was a day I won’t soon forget,” Margeeve kept saying.

That night I slept on Roxy’s sofa, in case she should call out in the night, but she didn’t. I rose early, before she was up, and fed Gennie. When Margeeve and Chester got there, I said I had an errand, and went to the flea market to look at the stolen tureen. It was a way of keeping my mind off things. There is nothing your mind can do with a fact as immutable and unacceptable as death anyway, and I was denied the distraction of doing the busy work of death, Antoine and Roxy herself did all that, calling people, and giving statements. In
Libération
, which I
read on the 85 bus, I found an account of a gunshot murder, by an irate American employee of EuroDisney, of his wife’s lover (name not mentioned) and the attempted murder of his wife. He had been arrested after a hostage drama at the park itself, according to this account, and was being held.

It was Mrs. Pace’s tureen, as I had known it would be. Stolen for a client (me) by thieves (who?) unaware of the coincidence that I myself had taken their photograph of it. But who had given them the picture, and the orders?

I asked to see more photographs. He had thirty or so in an envelope and laid them out before me. It wasn’t long before I found what I was looking for, as detectives say in books: photos of Suzanne’s living room at Chartres, featuring a nice array of faience plates that hang on the wall. “The Persands have wonderful old dishes,” I had said to Stuart Barbee. Stuart had seen the things they had given Roxy. They—someone Stuart knew—had “visited” and taken photos.

That Stuart Barbee could be involved in a ring of porcelain thieves seemed a bit farfetched, and so did the apparent fact that the porcelain thieves had been interested in the very files of Mrs. Pace that I had been asked to spy into, which would have to mean that Cleve Randolph was involved, even more farfetched. It would have to mean that the CIA was running a French porcelain thievery ring. To puzzle over this funny idea provided a certain amount of distraction I was grateful for, though I didn’t get far with a solution. But I did call the number of Huguette, the policewoman, at her bureau and leave a message, as I’d promised I would.

I was stupefied at the price of the tureen, twenty thousand francs, around four thousand dollars. I thought I had better leave its recovery to the police. I temporized by telling the dealer I’d have to see if I could get enough money together.

I have to admit I was thinking of maybe some slightly less expensive tureen, in view of the way things were turning out with Edgar. On the other hand, maybe the right existential
geste
would be to buy the really ruinous one for him. There were lots of tureens in the world, also pitchers and plates. I would just have to see.

Then I went back to Maître Albert, to the muted closeness of a morning after death. I was glad Charles-Henri had already removed his own things from Roxy’s apartment so we didn’t have to look at his shoes and his hairbrush. No one close to me had died before.

Roxy so brave, being beautifully brave. Admired by all for her grave dignity, the way she was bearing up, the imminence of her confinement. Her friends from around the Place Maubert brought
tartes
and pâtés. The day was flat, odd, long. Charles-Henri lay in a police morgue somewhere. They told us it might be a long time before the police would give him up for burial. Edgar brought the Abbé Montlaur to visit Roxy.

Roger reported in the afternoon that his employers were attempting to get Doug Tellman released on bail with a writ of habeas corpus.

“Yes, Isabel, habeas corpus exists in France,” said Edgar ironically when I exclaimed on the impossibility of that. “You Americans seem to believe that only Americans are unequivocally blessed. That all other nations on earth are constrained by the feebleness of their moral energy or the benightedness of their institutions.” Like last night, his tone was angry at me, as if he regretted knowing Americans. His tone burned deeper into the hollow burn in my stomach the death had brought on.

“I do?” I said.

“You Americans have the conviction—perhaps because you have been endlessly told it—that you are the freest nation in the world, which is hardly true. If one mentions, say, your murder rate, you say, ‘That is the price we pay for freedom,’ but one might like to ask, freedom for what? Freedom to walk safely down the street is not a freedom you have.”

I had not deserved this lecture, particularly. “I don’t think those things.” I perceived that I was being held responsible for all the deficiencies of my tribe. Even the Abbé Montlaur had a frosty expression of assent to Edgar’s words. “You mean Americans, you don’t mean me,” I protested.

“You are very American, Isabel,” Edgar said.

“Since France is so obsessed with
liberté
, no doubt they’ll let him out,” I said.

“I killed him,” shouted Roxy histrionically. We saw she had been dozing and had come awake with these words as if from a dream. “He was coming back to me. I know it. Why else was he there, in the building, last night?”

If she thought he was coming back to her, so much the better, though that made for an unbearable irony too, that he should have been struck down just then. Maybe he was. I was relieved Roxy had not really killed him. That was part of the moral strength of her position. Even the Persands knew that she had not killed him, his own erotic caprice had led him into death. It was an American who had killed him, though. An American with a handgun. We were all aware of that.

May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be adored, glorified, loved, and preserved, throughout the world, now and forever. Sacred Heart of Jesus, pray for us. Saint Jude, worker of miracles, pray for us. Saint Jude, help of the hopeless, pray for us.

Say this prayer nine times a day for nine days and your prayers will be answered. This never fails. Publication must be promised.

Lying in her drugged half-sleep, it had come to Roxy that she had killed him with this prayer. She had said it nine times a day for nine days and God had looked into her heart, divined the unspoken, completely unconscious wish there, and answered it.

It had not escaped me that when they all spoke of what had happened—to the press, to their friends, to the anxious, the shocked, the religious, the merely curious—they said
l’américain
. They did not say that Charles-Henri had been killed by his mistress’s husband. No, they always said he had been killed by
un américain
. Edgar put it that way, so did Anne-Chantal, so did Suzanne, so did the official spokesman Antoine, and so did the newspaper.

Roxy in her heart thinking about the efficacy of prayer and about how God works in mysterious ways. She wished to discuss a certain issue with a priest. Telling Margeeve she wanted to be alone, in the late afternoon she walked across the Pont de l’Archevêché and through the gardens of Notre Dame and into the vast, somewhat dank interior.

There, to Roxy too was given a glimpse into the future. Only slowly it began to dawn on her that she was a widow and that a widow was something different from a divorcée. That she could have her chest of drawers back from Drouot, and Saint Ursula, there wasn’t going to be any divorce.

How she fought the inexorable warm feeling of relief that flooded over her, for it meant she must be a monster. She analyzed, took the temperature of this emotion, to make sure she wasn’t in any sense happy or glad Charles-Henri was dead. She thought about what black clothing she had in her closet.

Relief different from gladness. Of course, she told herself, she was not glad, she was devastated. She fled to church, unable to bear the undistracted access that repose afforded to the turmoil of her wicked thoughts of relief, as one by one the real advantages of this lucky tragedy sank in upon her.

When she came back again from Notre Dame, a walk of a few minutes, she looked excited, even radiant. Not because she had seen a priest, she said, but because her waters had broken, on the ancient pavings of the cathedral, and she was bound to go into labor soon. The drama of this coming event, its risky testimony to the future, the noble effort required of her now, the putting forth of another hostage to fortune, reassured her, reassured all of us. The delicate perfume of high excitement overpowered the heavy odors of the floral tributes and ritual pâtés and cheeses that suffused the apartment. Margeeve telephoned Suzanne. We inquired after Roxy’s contractions, and spoke to shocked mourners on the telephone, balancing the emotional expenditures appropriate to life and death.

About midnight that night, when she had had a few definitive twinges, Chester and Margeeve took Roxy to the
clinique maternelle
.

I washed up the coffee cups and wineglasses that littered the
tables, and slept another night on Roxy’s sofa, manning the phone. Nothing woke me but my own troubled dreams. I dreamt of Santa Barbara, the corner of Morales and Tenth Streets, a certain gas station there. My car had run out of gas, and I was walking to this gas station when another car passed me, almost grazing me, coming up on me from behind, frightening me. I was wondering if the driver meant to kill me or if it had been an accident. Then the gas station man came out and said, “You don’t know who that was, do you?” This dream was so vivid, the pale, bright light of Santa Barbara so vivid, and the sea smell, that I was really there, and for an instant, waking up on a sofa in Paris, I was disoriented and panicky. The phone was ringing.

Dawn was at hand, and I could already make out objects in the landscape.

—Adolphe

I
T WAS
F
RIDAY
and it was Roger on the phone, his voice suavely businesslike, as if one down day for a death was the limit and now we must be up to speed. “Today’s the sale. Are you coming?”

In the confusion and anguish of the past days, I would have forgotten the picture, Drouot, the money, but Roger had whispered to me the night before, “Isabel, I think we go through with the sale, before any new legal conditions obtain. This way it can be argued that selling it was Charles-Henri’s intention as well as Roxy’s, because God knows what complications if the Persands get the idea it’s part of Charles-Henri’s estate. This way there’s no question of us appearing to do anything he hadn’t sanctioned beforehand. In the circumstances, I think we just get it sold now, whatever Roxy says, before whatever new conditions of her legal life set in,
fait accompli
, as the locals say.”

What had gone on behind the scenes we had no way of knowing, but at Drouot, officials had assured him that with major picture dealers and museum curators already on their way to attend, the sale would be brilliant. Perhaps whiffs of museum
gossip, hints of the presence of a Christie’s man speaking to Roger—for whatever reason, they had also now proposed a much higher reserve than the eighty thousand dollars they had originally set. The alluring promise of money has tangible effects, even on auctioneers, and they had clearly been influenced by Christie’s confident attribution (as revealed to them by Roger).

“If nothing is happening with Roxy, I’ll come with you,” I said.

There was no word from or of Roxy, but Chester, at their hotel, said she had been put to bed with indolent cramps and had not been in vigorous labor when they left at three. He sounded sleepy and slightly cross to have been waked up.

“Aren’t you coming to the sale?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll see what Margeeve wants to do. She’ll probably want to stay with Roxy.”

“I’ll go on with Roger,” I said.

“We don’t need to be there,” Chester said. “It isn’t as if we were going to bid on it.”

I needed to be there. I had a sort of superstitious feeling that I needed to be everywhere, to control everything, it was all getting out of control, or would, if I didn’t watch it and note it; I had to be everywhere at once.

We could hardly get into the room where the paintings would be sold. In the atmosphere of commerce and luck, in the poker-playing deadpan gambling atmosphere of an auction house, mere humanity seemed to play only a minor role. Inanimate things reigned, money ruled, competition festered, elation soared. A hundred objects were being carted away or carted in, throngs of people buzzing in French jammed doorways to the various salons, people gazed at rings in glass cases, and battered harpsichords.

Ours was a hot-ticket sale, it seemed, attracting a graver and more barbered crowd than those who had gathered to buy the attic odd-lots in the
salle
opposite, but who jostled each other viciously all the same. Pushing my way into the room, I became aware that here and there were familiar faces I had not noticed at first. Stuart Barbee and Ames Everett were there, talking to a
heavy well-tailored gray man and—something a little surprising—Antoine and Charlotte de Persand, with Charles-Henri’s lawyer Maître Doisneau. Here also was Maître Bertram. There was Monsieur Desmond, the man who had appraised Saint Ursula for the Louvre, and there were a group of men in bow ties and tweed sport coats that could be (for all I knew) from Santa Barbara. Perhaps from the Getty. There was even—it took me a minute to remember who that youngish, balding, familiar man with the long eyelashes was—Monsieur le Directeur du Cabinet, whom I had met at the opera, the under-minister of culture! Now that did astonish me, as Mrs. Pace would say. In a dark suit, double vents, standing to one side in voluble conversation with two other dark-suited men, who had both put their briefcases on the floor, making me think of spy films where they are going to switch the cases. Monsieur Desmond went over to them.

I waved over someone’s shoulder to Antoine de Persand and Charlotte. “I didn’t realize you’d be coming.”

Antoine frowned a little, as if he were surprised to see me, and weighed his answer for what seemed a long moment.

“I suppose it is up to me now, to see that Roxeanne’s
affaires
are conducted correctly and to look after the interests of my niece and the baby,” he said, shrugging unhappily. “What is correct, of course, that is not so easy to say.” He jostled his way closer to me.

“The baby is on the way!” I cried. “Maybe here by now!”

“Yes, your mother called. Suzanne has gone to the
clinique
. A baby will ease her heart a little.”

“Maître Bertram is here, Roxy’s lawyer,” I observed.

“Yes, I spoke to him. He says there is an important Poussin being sold here today as well.” That was probably why the under-minister of culture was here, looking after the patrimony of France.

Behind rows of chairs where privileged bidders were sitting, standees closely thronged. I am tall, and yet, stuck in the back as we were, I could hardly see the podium. Roger, who is taller, was better positioned too, but neither of us could understand what was going on anyway. An auctioneer at a raised dais stood
indicating a painting on an easel behind him. His explanations, in rapid French, would excite murmurs or silence, then people would mention sums of francs, inaudibly, several people, then at the end only two, and it would be abruptly over, with the sharp crack of the gavel and a rustle of comment from the audience. In this fashion, several paintings were whisked in and out and away before our eyes: a Watteau, an
Inconnu
, a Lapautre, a Bouguereau, a Rosa Bonheur.

A groundling undertone of excitement mounted with each successive exchange, affecting me, perhaps Roger too, with an anxious wish it could be over. As so often, I had too much the feeling of being a powerless spectator caught up in an unwanted event. Could it be true that Saint Ursula would come in, meet her fate, and be gone in this summary way, even as Roxy lay groaning, unaware, in some clinic somewhere? The treachery of our action in letting the sale go on struck me only now.

When a large mythological scene—hunters in togas chasing a deer—was brought in and placed reverently on the easel, the room became hushed. The important people were evidently not gathered as I had thought for our Saint Ursula, but for this Poussin. The auctioneer discussed it a moment in a somber, portentous tone: “A company of the followers of Diana—Regard the coloration. . . .

“Am I bid six million to start?” he asked. A man two rows ahead of me made a tiny gesture that I could see from where I stood, but I could not see other bidders who nonetheless were there, driving up the price, up, up up, to forty million francs. When this price had been achieved, with no change of expression, when a long and even agonizing pause announced the end and the collapse of the rest, and the bang of the gavel completed the sale, the Poussin was carted from the room as unceremoniously as the painting of
inconnu
. The auctioneer permitted a sigh, a stretch, a pause. Ames Everett, seeing me, winked. The under-minister of culture nodded with a half smile, wondering, I was sure, where he had seen me.

Other pictures, and finally Saint Ursula. My heart pounded to see her amused and slightly repelled expression. I tried to see Roger’s face but could not. I sensed his excitement all the same.
We stood trembling in the crowd. “La Tour,” I heard the auctioneer say, but not
école
and not
élève
, though he could have, the words spun in my ears. “Do I hear two hundred thousand?” he said.

It seemed no more than forty seconds before Saint Ursula was knocked down at ten million francs, a struggle between two bidders principally. One was the man standing with Ames and Stuart, the other, in his tweed sport coat and bow tie, an American, I was sure. I had no idea which had bought our painting. For a second I even had trouble calculating the amount in dollars. My heart was thundering. Almost two million dollars!

It was only at this very minute that I realized we wouldn’t have to split it with the Persands, either. I wonder if Antoine realized that. I could see his expression of glassy shock, muttering to Frédéric. I calculated further. Let’s say split four ways—me, Roxy, Roger, Judith—there would ultimately if not immediately be for me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Surely Chester would advance me the price of a tureen—not Mrs. Pace’s, of course. I thought of all the other things I could do with a quarter of a million dollars. I wondered if this could do anything to make Roxy less unhappy. Probably it would make her feel worse, to profit somehow from the death of her beloved. I tried to leave the room, to breathe luxuriously in the hall, but I was packed too closely in. There were another ten pictures to sell, then it was over.

“Isabel!” said Stuart Barbee, coming up to me when the crowd began to drift out. He was trying to smile, but his face was distorted with a misery I had seen earlier when he stood talking to Ames. “Isabel, I’m so happy for Roxeanne. She needs some luck, poor girl. . . .”

“What’s the matter, Stuart?” I asked.

“Conrad has been arrested,” he whispered. Conrad his friend the English hairdresser.

“What for?”

“For burglary.”

How it worked I figured perfectly: Stuart gave Conrad photos and tips. Unknowingly? Conrad gave the photos to a dealer friend who showed them to clients. Then Conrad went
and burgled the things that clients asked for. I wondered, had it been Conrad who had “visited” Suzanne after we told Stuart about all her beautiful stuff?

I considered extorting from Stuart at least Mrs. Pace’s tureen. I could say, get it back or I will tell everything. I’ll describe how I took the photo, gave it to you, then triggered its theft by promising to buy it from the dealer. Get it back or I will involve you. But then I thought it might be better not to let him know my role; we would get it back through the police anyway. But what was Stuart’s role? And the connection with Mrs. Pace’s files? It still seemed funny to imagine the CIA running a porcelain burglary ring.

“He was just standing there, outside a house in Chartres, and the
flics
came up and grabbed him,” Stuart went on.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle,”
interrupted the under-minister of culture in the rustle of the crowd. “Miss Walker, am I right? So you interest yourself in the art treasures of France?”

I guess I don’t believe in God, at least not as much as Roxy does; all the same, it is hard not to believe this little consolation was sent by some benign cosmic intent. The under-minister was talking to me! And that was not all. I was glad I had dressed up, and was carrying the Kelly.

“I had to see the fate of my little La Tour,” I said with what I hoped was immense composure.

“Indeed! Your La Tour? I came because I was interested to see what would happen with the great Poussin. As to the La Tour, we had hoped . . . yours, you say?” Smooth diplomat’s charming smile, concealing concern.

“It belonged to my family.” I was conscious of Stuart’s ironic look. Well, didn’t it?

“Indeed! Extraordinary. Do you know who the buyer was?”

“No, not yet. Have you met my brother and sister-in-law?” For the jubilant Roger, Jane at his elbow, had made his way to my side. They and the under-minister (Monsieur LeLay) exchanged
bonjours
.

“I wonder about the export situation? Obviously it is a national treasure. It appears there was a moment of inattention at the Louvre. We must look into it—the Louvre will review it,”
Monsieur le Directeur etc. went on. “I wonder that they didn’t review it before this. I will look into it.” I felt myself grow wary. Could they bring up the export license thing again?

“Perhaps—I hope you are not pressed, mademoiselle? Would you consider having lunch with me, for I would very much like—in my role at the ministry—to hear the history of this lovely French picture, how it came to be in your family and so on. Today, or some other time soon, what do you say?”

Covertly, I studied him. It seemed to me this was not the diplomat but the man talking. I accepted, of course, though not for today. I explained that my sister was having a baby.

“Give me your
numéro de téléphone
,
mademoiselle
,” he said, pulling out his elegant little
carnet
from Hermès.

Baby Charles-Luc was born that afternoon, weighing three and a half kilos—the phone was ringing as the ecstatic Roger, Jane, and I came into Roxy’s. An easy delivery, mother and baby doing well. We headed for the clinic to meet the baby, and tell Roxy the news.

At the burial on Monday, a cold, funereal day, Roxy was very beautiful in a black suit I hadn’t seen before, which must from the way it fit her slightly stouter figure have been new. She carried the baby, little Charles-Luc, wrapped in dimity and lace, as if this were a christening rather than a funeral. At one point she handed him (a minute, wizened, red creature) to Chester, who gazed at him proudly, and Roxy occupied herself with Gennie, who fidgeted in her little fur-trimmed blue coat, overawed by the collection of relatives and mourners gathered in the cold winter morning among the imposing granite-winged monuments of the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

Of course Magda would not come to the
obsèques
, we had heard she was still in the hospital. Nonetheless I looked for a mysterious person in a black veil lingering on the fringes behind the willow shrubs. The scene made me think of the funeral of John F. Kennedy, which I had seen a newsreel of. I think Roxy was remembering it too, though neither of us was born then, for she seemed to borrow her demeanor of dignified, grieving widow
from the performance of Jackie. She knelt at the grave. Behind her, standing a little apart from the Persands, was Maître Bertram. There were Madame Cosset with Antoine and Trudi, Yvonne, Charlotte and Bob, Frédéric but not his wife, Suzanne, also in black, and—I was most curious—Monsieur de Persand, a tall, thin man with a white mustache and a restless, angry expression when he glanced at us and at our uninhibited New World sobbing. How correct they were in their mourning garments. How correct they had been all the way through.