Le Divorce (7 page)

My character had always been a subject that could flare up into a quarrel between Chester and Margeeve, once dramatically at the dinner table—a rare quarrel, I should add, for Chester and Margeeve are solid, but Margeeve thinks I have been raised to be too indifferent to my future, which she says betrays Chester’s covert sexism. My brother Roger was steered toward the law since grade school, but my future would look after itself. “You never took Isabel seriously, that is the truth, because she is a
girl,” snapped Margeeve on this occasion. My father said, “I have always taken Isabel seriously,” with a kind of sigh, “but I have never understood her,” and I remember saying, “That’s for sure.”

But I did understand, and they understood, that Roxy has a true literary talent and love for poetry, and would probably not be that great at anything else, plus being a poet allows you a lot of time to raise a family, teach a class, or (as I have noticed)
flâner
in the streets of Paris, which means mess around, with no guilty sense of being unoccupied. Lucky Roxy. And now she had a reason, her pregnancy, never to skip meals. From my point of view, her life should have been complete, except for the marital problem, which I continued to view as a temporary aberration.

So I pretended I hadn’t overheard anything.

“I saw Charles-Henri,” I said, when she had put down the phone. “I talked to him. I thought I should talk to him myself, maybe you were exaggerating things.”

“He came in to Paris? How was he?” She was newly alert.

“He says he’s fallen in love with someone. Did he tell you that?”

She didn’t answer.

“For me it was a big relief to hear that,” I said. “Oh, is that all, I thought.”

“All? All?” A rush of hysteria in her voice.

“Men get over that. People do. I always do.”

“Yes, he’ll get over it, the way he got over me, but it won’t have never happened, it can’t be undone. Yes, he told me he had met the love of his life. There’s nothing you can say to that.” So she had known all along. This was the one thing she could not forgive.

I was younger, and I cultivated the habit of keeping all my experiences and plans to myself, relying upon myself alone.

—Adolphe

I
T SHOULDN
’
T HAVE
surprised me that my parents were worried about my life plans. I admit I was baffled myself. I’d write a screenplay, I’d decided in film school. I’d direct. Perhaps I was meant to be an actress, or the girl who gets the coffee—this is what I was ending up as, after all. But of course Paris wasn’t “ending up” (I’d remind myself, lying in Roxy’s
chambre de bonne
), this was a beginning, or, properly speaking, Time Out. But I hadn’t realized that our folks were worried about me, and it made me sort of mad to think that other people looking at me saw things that worried them and then didn’t tell me so that I could reassure them, or deal with their fears.
I
knew I would be all right, but they didn’t. Crazy people must feel this gap between themselves and others, and the terminally ill must feel it. It’s horrible to have people worry about you, and it’s insulting besides. Or am I politically incorrect to think so?

Roxy was truly not so sure she would be all right. “Maybe I should get a divorce,” she began to say every day. I urged her at least to talk to Charles-Henri before taking such a step as that, and to talk to others. I was not sure how often they had actually
spoken in the time since my arrival—it was now more than three months. But she continued to refuse. “What’s there to discuss? There’s no point in protracting things. Infidelity will just happen again. The pattern of an unfaithful French husband, I know it all from my reading of Colette, Balzac, Zola. Pretty soon he’d have not this woman but another, a mistress permanently installed in another street, perhaps even a child, children, or he would chase the
au pair
girls, they would get younger and more gullible as he got older and older, or waitresses at McDonald’s or the girl in the market. I can’t bear to think of seeing him go through all that. And he would despise me more and more each time.”

Though she wouldn’t discuss it with him, she began to discuss it with other people, in my view a healthy development. The women of the Place Maubert, Tammy de Bretteville and Anne-Chantal Lartigue in particular, agreed with Roxy’s take on it. A pattern of infidelity once begun is never abandoned. But they also did not believe Roxy should divorce. In France you just put up with the way men are.

This was also part of Suzanne de Persand’s pitch. “
Le divorce
is always a mistake. Now you are hurt, you are wounded and
enceinte
, it is not a time to make a decision.” French husbands—like men everywhere—just always philander, she explained. “Why ruin your life and lose your social position over it?” Roxy condemned this attitude as Victorian, a vestige of a time when women were powerless and lacking in self-respect.

“That is so American,” sighed Suzanne impatiently. “Think of the children, their need for a father. Think of the inconveniences of single motherhood.” Suzanne thought Roxy was being impetuous and self-indulgent, but I knew it was just that her feelings were hurt with a mortal hurt.

Mrs. Pace also counseled patience. Roxy came to lunch one day when I was working for Mrs. Pace, and we all discussed it.

“I have myself been divorced,” Mrs. Pace observed, “and I’m not sure it solves a great deal. Though it does permit you to marry someone else. In my experience the soundest procedure is to have the someone else lined up beforehand.”

I was the only one of Roxy’s confidantes who wasn’t so sure she was wrong. What about love? How can you stay married to
someone who loves another better than you? What about the future, perhaps with another mate? She had her whole life in front of her, in the phrase. I tried to slow her down, we all did, but part of me thought she just ought to bag this marriage and get on with her life.

I was working for Olivia Pace three times a week. Mrs. Pace became a famous writer when she was very young, in the 1940s, and hence had by now outlived many of the important literary figures whom she had known and slept with back then. Judging from the number of letters she got, the world was looking forward to her memoirs, and she was starting to pull things together to write them. My job was to organize papers and facts, in folders marked by date, year by year. A folder might contain letters, any newspaper clippings she happened to have saved, copies of what she wrote at the time, and a list of things she had bought, if she remembered, like “blue silk Cardin suit, 1972,” or “first Dior, 1959,” or “Sheraton sideboard, Bristol, 1948,” or a review article from any of several little magazines she wrote for.

What I liked best about my days at Mrs. Pace’s was that we had a sort of working lunch at which she identified objects and people’s names that I couldn’t identify on my own. It was then I heard her stories. The reason she liked me, I think, was because I had known the name of a character in Conrad’s
Victory
. I knew and she didn’t; therefore she respected me and looked at me thereafter with new eyes, as someone more promising than she had thought. She considered me educable. In fact, we had used Conrad’s
Victory
in a film class on adaptation, but I had never actually read it.

For my part, I fell under the spell of her encouragement, for she was a woman who had not been caught in the character traps I considered that other women I knew had fallen into, for instance Margeeve, who had never really used her brains that I could see, and hence has a certain restless troublemaking quality of dissatisfaction even though I think she is happy. Even Roxy, with her trustful, romantic view of men, was sort of an underachiever, except for the occasional poem, and poems are short. It only just comes to me now that Roxy’s starry-eyed view of men
probably originated in my father’s gallant rescue of her mother, Margeeve, from the cold rigors of single motherhood and battered wifedom.

Mrs. Pace, it appeared, had had all the perks of female life—rich husbands, children, Givenchy dresses, lots of Haviland china. She had also had the perks of male life—the pleasures of sexual misdeeds (or call them exploits, like a man) as well as the intellectual pleasures of writing, of having opinions, of having her opinions listened to—the masculine pleasures of independent thought and judgment on general subjects, not including the Woman’s Lot, which didn’t interest her. Her example made me understand what, perhaps, I had been looking for in film school: autonomy, though that was not the place to find it. In my case, I had been already too far gone down the road of conventional female socialization to relish the technical side of film—the lighting, the questions of Steadicam or handheld camera, the dub, the cut, the mix.

This left me with, precisely, a kind of blank spot when it came to what to do with my life. Mrs. Pace did not worry about me but felt confidence in me, and so she became my idol, for I suppose that is the right word, overwrought though it may be, for someone who makes you want to please them and be liked by them, whose regard you care for. What I felt for Mrs. Pace I didn’t feel for Chester and Margeeve or my siblings; on them, I bestowed affection, in varying degrees, without caring much what they thought of me.

But Mrs. Pace was a mighty person. She said what people were. And if she said someone was a fool, that didn’t necessarily mean that she held it against them. It depended on what kind of fool. She was the first person I had met who told the absolute, even if politically incorrect, truth, and it was usually a truth I felt in my heart already. She would not be afraid to say that we do not really like, say, the handicapped people taking up all the parking places. But she was a moral force too, and she would also say we ought not to act on our feelings. She taught me that it is not abnormal to have bitter or illiberal reactions to things, but it is just wrong to act on them, and that people get no moral credit for the hypocritical way they conceal such things as racism
even from themselves. Only when you confront your racism can you expunge it, she would say. “The truth I don’t say will make you free,” she said, “but it is better than piety, because you know where you stand with it.”

Through Mrs. Pace I got a number of jobs. One was house-sitting for the Randolphs, Cleve and Peg, a couple in their sixties who I thought fit into what Ames Everett calls trust-funders, but Mrs. Pace said, “Spooks, actually.” When I was horrified, she added, “They’re very nice, of course.” And the Randolphs were nice. Retired CIA—or do you ever retire?—
plus
a trust fund, judging from the splendor of their apartment on the Place des Vosges. Mrs. Pace quite liked them. “We were all CIA,” Mrs. Pace reminded me. “The CIA came to Wellesley at our graduation and offered each girl a job and a camera and the sense of doing her patriotic duty. I accepted, of course, but my post was to have been Guatemala City, so I backed out.”

For someone so associated with leftwing causes in her youth (I was learning about Trotsky, Stalin, Wobblies, etc.), she now seemed comfortable with a wide political spectrum. (As long as the people were rich, I am tempted to add—but then, in a sense, all the Americans I saw were rich. Even the backpackers, sandaled and out of funds, were standing in the American Express line to tap some affluent stateside source of money. I soon learned that I didn’t really understand what comprised wealth. The symbols reliable in Santa Barbara, cars for example, were unreliable or missing here, and all the apartments looked small to my eyes. In the beginning I would assume people were hard up, and Roxy would laugh and say, “Are you kidding?”)

It was not the CIA Randolphs but another client, employer, whatever I am calling them, Stuart Barbee, who most surprised me. I had supposed that all the Americans living in Paris were there because they preferred it, and so had contrived their lives to be there. But there were a certain number who seemed to hate France and wistfully to long for America, as if from some cruel exile. So it was with Stuart Barbee, the art historian whose dining room I painted. A rangy man in his fifties, slight southern accent. I think he used to be Ames Everett’s boyfriend, but now he’s with an English hairdresser named Conrad, or Con, whose
name is a huge joke because
con
means something rude in French. Stuart seemed always to be testing my attitudes. “This rainy weather in late summer must make you long for California, Isabel. September is so beautiful there. I spent a month at the Getty once. So beautiful, and the ocean—I’m mad for the ocean. Are you? I can imagine you surfing in a bikini.” (Unconvincing leer.) Or, “My god, these people, the way they sabotage the lowly hamburger.” Or, “It isn’t easy sitting by while your country falls into the hands of a redneck draft dodger. It almost makes me want to go back and get involved in precinct work, or maybe work for Ross Perot.”

I recounted this last conversation to Mrs. Pace at lunch. She sniffed. “Draft dodger? This revisionist sanctimoniousness about Vietnam does astonish me. Why it should be coming up now I don’t know. Imagine resurrecting the term ‘draft dodger,’ an expression not even used in the Vietnam period, as I remember. A Second World War term, maybe even First World War. Look in the OED. I think it’s being used now by men who are no longer attractive, to get at a younger president. Would I have allowed my son Drew to go to Vietnam? Of course not. Luckily his number was a safe one.” She warmed to this subject, laying her napkin next to her plate and touching her pearls.

“You wouldn’t remember, you were too young, Isabel, but people could see with their own eyes that those little Vietnamese children were not a threat to the free world. And yet deaf presidents would not hear this. America was resisting its leaders, as we so wished young Germans had done. We saw our leaders as cruel men crazed by the exciting momentum of their own blood lust. It was one of the few wars in history where women really played a pacific role.”

I must have looked puzzled at this, so she went on to explain.

“Ordinarily I don’t give females too much moral credit. They seem as bad as anyone else. In fact they are not usually considered independent moral beings, in the sense of having to make choices, except where sexual transgressions are concerned. Perhaps not even then—‘the woman
taken
in adultery.’ Hmmn.
And most are not very responsible, we must admit. Though they are made to accept the consequences all the same.”

I remarked that it sometimes seemed to me she didn’t have a whole lot of respect for women.

“Well,” she sighed, “I have sympathy, but that is not the same thing as respect. I understand their historical circumstances. Centuries of oppression create a kind of fog in the brain. Look at—other groups. No one
makes
women defer to their husbands and refuse to think about world events, just as no one makes an underclass take drugs.

“But it would be a mistake to underestimate the force of female opposition to that war. This time, it wasn’t a question of women blubbering on the sidelines as the boys marched off, women were serious objectors. Remember ‘girls say yes to boys who say no’? No, you wouldn’t remember that, of course. There was a general effort on everybody’s part to help people not go into the army. It was not only that you did not want young men to be killed, you wanted your country to stop doing something so wicked. People have forgotten that resistance was not only the sensible but the virtuous course.”

Soon after this, Cleve Randolph asked me to sit down, and made me the following little speech: “You wouldn’t remember, you are too young, Isabel, but the Communist threat was very real, in the thirties. Many people thought we would go that way. They wanted it. Not the workers, not the real Americans, farmers and honest people, but the intellectuals so-called. It appealed to them, their phony commerce with the proletariat, their self-satisfied sense of fraternity, their—I grant you—idealism, finally their corruption. Their sense of anger at our American values and ideals deepened, they became bitter, they became willing to betray us, America, almost for the pleasure of it. Even after it was clear that Stalin was a monster, even after some of them acknowledged this and went with Trotsky—you are too young to remember all this—even now, they wish America ill.”