Le Divorce Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Le Divorce

  A DUTTON Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1997 by Diane Johnson

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1303-2

  A DUTTON BOOK™

  DUTTON Books first published by The Penguin Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  DUTTON and the “D” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic Edition: August, 2003

  ALSO BY DIANE JOHNSON

  FICTION

  Health and Happiness

  Persian Nights

  Lying Low

  The Shadow Knows

  Burning

  Loving Hands at Home

  Fair Game

  NONFICTION

  Natural Opium

  Terrorists and Novelists

  Dashiell Hammett

  Lesser Lives

  With thanks to our French friends

  Especially Colette and Paul S.,

  Marie-Claude de B.,

  Hélène M., Mireille H., Françoise D.,

  and two Américaines in Paris:

  Linda and Michelle.

  Man isn’t at all one, after all—it takes so much of him to be American, to be French, etc.

  —Henry James to William Dean Howells,

  May 1, 1890

  PROLOGUE

  I am the doubter and the doubt,

  And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

  —Emerson

  I suppose because I went to film school, I think of my story as a sort of film. In a film, this part would be under the credits, opening with an establishing shot from a high angle, perhaps the Eiffel Tower, panning tiny scenes far below of the foreign city, life as watched from the wrong end of a telescope. Closer up, the place is identified by cliches of Frenchness—people carrying long baguettes of bread, old men wearing berets, women walking poodles, buses, flower stalls, those Art Nouveau entrances to the metro that seem to beckon to a nether region of vice and art but actually lead to an efficient transportation system, this contradiction perhaps a clue to the French themselves.

  Then, in a series of close shots we become aware that some of the people we are seeing are not French, that among all the Gallic bustle are many Americans. Far from their native land, their flavor changes ever so slightly as they absorb the new perfumes, just as the slightly toxic chemistry of Americans abroad erodes, just a little, the new place in which they find themselves.

  Some closeups of individual Americans:

  People hanging around American Express (one of them me, Isabel Walker, trying to get money from the Wall Machine).

  Two young women in jeans drinking coffee at a cafe. They glare at a man smoking, get up and move to a table farther away, disgust on their blandly pretty California faces. (These are Roxy, my sister, and me, Isabel.)

  A well-dressed couple with a camera, having a drink in the Ritz bar, reading maps, swaying with jet lag. These might also be Germans. Germans are the only nationality that can sometimes be mistaken for Americans, even quite close up.

  An elegant man reading the Herald Tribune at a sidewalk cafe. He too might be mistaken for European until he carefully removes the butter from the toasted tartine he has ordered, exposed by his pathological American fear of cholesterol.

  A handsome, rather stout woman in a mink coat buying oranges at a sidewalk fruit stall. She is speaking French but with a strong American accent. Her brilliant smile does not leave her face, though she is saying, “I was disappointed, Monsieur Jadot, with the fraises.”

  Charles de Gaulle Airport. A sort of space-age place with people arriving via moving conveyor belts in long tubes, pulling out their blue American passports, irritated at being asked to submit to the ritual of identifying themselves. They know who they are.

  In fact these are not generic Americans but some of the actual people in my story. The cast of characters. My sister Roxy and I are the two young women who move away from the smoker, the tourists in the Ritz bar are our parents, Chester and Margeeve Walker, newly arrived in Paris to support Roxy in her time of crisis. (Her French husband has left her, she is about to give birth, and we have at stake a large sum of money.) The man in the cafe removing butter from his toast is Ames Everett, one of my employers, but he might be any one of a number of American expatriates living in Paris, elegant and independent and detached, bearing some pentimento of past shame or failure like five o’clock shadow along the jaw. The stout woman is the venerated American writer Olivia Pace. The people arriving at the airport are our brother, Roger; his wife, Jane; another lawyer from his firm; and the other lawyer’s wife.

  There are, also, certain ghosts of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, James Jones—all of them here for something they could not find back home, possessed of an idea about culture and their intellectual heritage, conscious of a connection to Europe. Europe, repository of something they wish to know, and feel they are entitled by ancestry to know.

  All of us are wearing the same expression every American wears here, of wonderment mixed with self-satisfaction at having cleverly removed ourselves from the quotidian discomforts and dangers of life in America while at the same time bravely exposing ourselves to the exigencies of foreign money, a difficult language, and curious food, for instance tripe or andouillette.

  Everyone respectful of Roxy’s condition, and of her grief. Or disappointment might be a better word. Everyone respectful of her bravery in sustaining her great disappointment in life, a chagrin d’amour that lasts forever.

  1

  If we do not find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new.

  —Voltaire

  I THINK OF life as being like film because of what I learned at the film school at USC. Film,
with its fitful changefulness, its arbitrary notions of coherence, contrasting with the static solemnity of painting, might also be a more appropriate medium for rendering what seems to be happening, and emblematic too perhaps of our natures, Roxy’s and mine, and the nature of the two societies, American and French. The New World and the Old, however, is too facile a juxtaposition, and I do not draw the conclusions I began with. If you can begin with conclusions. But I suppose we all do.

  I am, as I said, Isabel Walker, a young woman abroad who, in several months in Paris, has learned enough to be considerably changed—and is this not in fact the purpose of young Americans going abroad? To make them think of things they never thought of? I should explain who I was.

  I had come to France planning to spend some months babysitting my pregnant sister Roxeanne’s three-year-old, Geneviève (Gennie), reading books in French that I didn’t expect to like much (had read a bit of Rabelais in school and thought it was disgusting, with its talk of farts and twats), and under the cover of being a help to Roxy, hoping to get some of my rough California edges buffed off that the University of Southern California had failed to efface. Leaving college (I had not actually graduated) ordinarily points one to the future, whereas France was not the future, it was only temporizing and staving off the day I would have to make real decisions. When I dropped out of college I became aware that the people in my world, usually so understanding and fond of me, had now a certain hardness of expression when asking me what I planned to do, as if they expected a serious and detailed answer, and my friends, as they awaited the results of their MCATs and LSATs, tended to avoid my eyes. I’ll be working on my screenplay, I would tell them, and I’ll be helping Roxy with her new baby, and I want to investigate the European film scene. But these statements only earned me a moment of silent scrutiny from my inquisitors before they changed the subject.

  I arrived in Paris as scheduled—it is now six months ago—by coincidence the day after Roxy’s French husband, Charles-Henri, walked out on her. I took a taxi from the airport, Roxy having explained that she didn’t drive a car in France because she didn’t want to take the time to go to traffic school. That seemed strange to me, since Roxy as a true Californian has been driving since she was sixteen. I couldn’t even imagine a society where a young housewife wouldn’t drive.

  I had never before been abroad, unless you count Tijuana. Stumbling off the plane, I was too excited to be tired from the long flight. I felt an almost unpleasant thrill of apprehensiveness when the man stamped my passport, sort of as if I had been asked to jump the space between two roofs. Would I make it?

  Everyone was speaking French. I had known they would be, of course, but had failed to anticipate my dismay. “Don’t get too Frenchy,” my father had told me when they took me to the plane. “Remember ‘jus plain English’s good enough for a ’Merican.’ ” This was a literary allusion to Kipling’s “Why the Leopard Changed His Spots.” (“Jus plain black’s good enough for a———”—a word Margeeve had carefully whited out of our copy, and naturally we had never pronounced.) No chance of me changing my spots, though—I would never understand French, so I was now cut off from human communication.

  My wits were in a turmoil of concern about the correct pronunciation of “Maître Albert,” Roxy’s street, lest the taxi man take me somewhere else altogether, and whether he would be surly, the way they are reputed to be, and, more generally, was coming to France a mistake and false detour in life? Roxy must have been watching from her window when I got there, or heard the rattle of the taxi in the street, and came out the big green wooden doors to meet me. She paid the taxi and kissed me. The taxi man leered amiably at both of us.

  I was a little shocked by the stairwell of Roxy’s apartment building, the peeling walls, the drab, sinking oaken treads. By now I have learned the beauty and value of seventeenth-century staircases and Louis Quinze furniture, but that first day, after the endless trip, I admit I had the feeling Roxy had come down in the world, from a California perspective, into a patch of bad luck. Or rather, I could imagine that our parents, especially Margeeve, would feel that way. I felt subtly co-opted by the secret that Roxy was living in reduced circumstances, here in this foreign place, and I wasn’t to tell.

  My sister Roxy—my stepsister really—is a poet. This is not an avocation but a vocation she trained for at the University of California at Irvine, and later at the University of Iowa. She has had a volume of poetry published by Illinois Wesleyan, and many poems in magazines. To tell the truth, I have always slightly resented the way our parents have encouraged her in this frivolous, totally unremunerative occupation, while urging me toward various careers such as accounting and personnel management—which means learning to interview people and assign them jobs—and computer service representative, to name only three of the peculiarly repellant occupations they, having heard of them for the first time in their lives, were willing to consecrate me to, so desperate were they to find something for which I might be fitted.

  But I admire Roxy’s poems, I don’t mean otherwise. I wish I could find two screwy words and put them together so that they fizz, like she can. It always surprises me to read Roxy’s poems, because in person, the way she talks, she just sounds like a normal person, you wouldn’t have thought her thoughts would be odd and complicated.

  There are people whose lives progress like one of those charts of heart attack, serrated peaks and valleys like shark’s teeth, and my sister Roxeanne is such a person. I loved her from the moment we met, at the marriage of my father to her mother when I was twelve and she seventeen. As we grew up, I adored the way she rushed home from school, slammed the door of her room and wept histrionically. Later there were her school prizes and being the valedictorian, her causes and theses, her poetry and passionate seriousness—and then the surprising glamour of her romantic marriage to the charming Frenchman, and now the surprising drama of their breakup.

  We are so different, my stepsister and I, that people don’t compare us, and that has kept us friends. Hence my mission, for so it could be called, to come to Paris to help her with the new baby soon to arrive, and now, it seemed, to support her in this crisis. Ordinarily I would not be someone very good at babysitting. But I have always been good at helping Roxy; it was always I who picked up both our clothes and straightened our closets.

  Roxy looked well, I thought, and only a little stouter than when I’d seen her last summer, not really showing yet. Her hair was cut to shoulder length, straight across the bottom, like pictures of Joan of Arc. Her hair and eyes are exactly the same light brown as a lovely forest animal’s, and her skin was lit from within like a rosy parchment lampshade. I had never seen her look so well, but there was something distracted about her manner.

  “Charles-Henri is in the country,” she told me immediately. At first, that was all she told me about his absence. But I was too jet-lagged to take in much. A heavy hemlockian sleepiness was already seeping in on me.

  “You look wonderful, Izzy,” she said. “Don’t you love Paris? I know you will. Give me that bag. Is that all you brought? Good thing—your room hasn’t got a closet. I forgot to tell you, no closets in France. Gennie’s at her day care.” And so on.

  Her apartment was small, white-painted, with an antique chest of drawers missing some sections of its inlaid wood, and a leather sofa, and several of Charles-Henri’s large abstracts. There was a stone fireplace with our family’s painting of Saint Ursula over it, her dreamy smile seeming to welcome me, a familiar face from my own past, like a family photograph. I had always thought the woman in the painting was a princess accepting the rich tributes of a wealthy wooer, but Roxeanne has always said she is Saint Ursula, the virgin/warrior saint. I suppose this shows Roxy’s nature, exigent and chaste, despite her pregnancy and the romantic nature of her predicament. Saint Ursula was a fourth-century virgin who was massacred eventually, but in this painting, in a contemplative moment in her chamber, she reposes, a book on her lap, disdaining a heap of gifts fr
om the king who wishes to marry her. Two handmaidens standing behind her seem sternly supportive. The room is dark except for a candle on the table at her elbow, and it is the glow of this candle, softly illuminating her face and incidentally the gold and jewels behind her, that has brought up the name of Georges de La Tour.

  I believe Roxy loved this picture better when we did not know the girl was Saint Ursula, nor the painter La Tour (if it was)—before it had value, before it became the center and symbol of acrimony.

  2

  I was welcomed at this court with the curiosity naturally inspired by any stranger who comes and breaks into the restricted circle of monotonous etiquette.

  —Benjamin Constant, Adolphe

  I WOULD LIVE in a small room in the attic of Roxy’s building, like Sara Crewe. Roxy took me up there, two further flights of stairs from her apartment. The last flight narrowed and the wooden treads were unvarnished. We had to squeeze ourselves against the wall to make way for a man in a white gown, his skin so black it was almost purple. Roxy must have felt my involuntary startle, for she said, when he had gone by, “You don’t have to be afraid of them here, you know, they’re nice Africans.” There was a tinge of mockery in her voice, not against me but against an America where you are afraid.

  There were other rooms up there, former maids’ rooms under the slanted roof, and a single toilet, in the hall, and no bathroom at all. Roxy assured me that the other rooms were just used for storage or as studios, no one living there except the African family, hence they and I would be the only ones using the toilet, and I could bathe down in her apartment. Of course I was mad at her for not revealing these sordid conditions before I came, but she truly seemed to have no sense of adversity, and the room itself wasn’t so bad, though small. You could look out the dormer window into the picturesque little crooked street. But as she had said, there was no closet.