Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path.
—Montaigne
SUZANNE DE PERSAND had come to see Roxy directly on the Monday. She came solemnly dressed in a navy linen suit, with her decorations in the lapel, as if she were going to some high state occasion, and spoke in English, because I was there.
“I have talked to my son,” she said, accepting an herbal tea. “I am very unhappy about his behavior. Add to this, the behavior of Charlotte. I don’t know where it comes from. From their father perhaps.”
“What about Charlotte?” Roxy roused herself from her lethargic mood.
“What indeed? She has a liaison—it is too stupid. And with an Englishman! What I want to say to you, Roxeanne, is just to be sensible. You are aware that when the wife is pregnant, sometimes the husband—the nine months gets to seem long to him. He thinks it will never end, and some young and slender woman makes him think of happier times. He supposes he is thinking with his emotion, but it is really biological, his male need.”
“If you mean about making love, you can do it up until the last two weeks,” said Roxy irritably.
“Really? Tiens! That is surely unwise. In my day the doctors did not permit it. In any case, the forme, great ugly belly. Yes, sugar please. Hein! Original! Georges’s cousin Hortense also uses grains of sugar instead of cubes.”
“It’s not up to me, it’s Charles-Henri’s deal,” said Roxy.
“That is what I am trying to say. Expect nothing until the baby is born, then you can see. Maybe it will be a boy.”
“A boy? An heir? I can’t believe this, I’m in a novel by Balzac,” snapped Roxy. Suzanne had the grace to laugh a little and finished her cup.
“This has happened to other women, often, and by far the best course, they would most of them tell you, is to just go on with life as it unrolls,” she said.
“I ask myself, is it wise to have this baby,” said Roxy suddenly, with a savage canniness. “It’s early. Maybe I shouldn’t go through with it. It’s stupid to bring a baby into an unstable home.” I recognized the wildness under her tone as being the real Roxy, dramatic and hysterical, but there was also an instant of calculation in her voice as she looked to see how this implied threat would affect Suzanne.
Suzanne did seem startled, began to speak, stopped, gauging, I could see, the best way to handle a distraught foreign girl.
“I’m thinking of not going through with it,” Roxy repeated.
“Luckily you have weeks to decide something so large,” Suzanne said slowly, watching Roxy as she might a skittish wild animal. “You wouldn’t want to make that decision quickly.”
I saw how smart Suzanne is, how she sensed Roxy’s panic and her stubborn streak, and wanted to avoid animating it with preaching or argument. But she had turned pale. Roxy had scared her. Her eyes met mine for an instant, and I could see that she would have liked to ask me if Roxy would do something like that. But of course, she did not know me, or how I would stand. How did she stand, for that matter?
“I’ll call you tomorrow, ma chérie,” she said. “Bon courage. These things arrive, with men, and then pass.”
“Frenchmen are spoiled by their mothers,” observed Roxy, when Suzanne had gone. “Charles-Henri can just do no wrong in her eyes.”
“He’ll come back,” I predicted to Roxy. “You’ll have to decide whether you want to forgive him. And of course you will.”
“It isn’t a question of forgiving him,” she said. “I don’t own him. He has his heart and I have mine, and it’s mine I have to live with.” With that she dumped the sugar into the sink.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Didn’t you hear her? ‘Hein. Granular sugar, how original.’ Meaning, bizarre American ways. Meaning, why don’t you have sugar cubes like a French girl?”
When Roxy says her first months of marriage were hard, she didn’t mean anything negative about the French or Charles-Henri. She thought him the perfect husband, polite, helpful, and ardent. “The Anglo-Saxon male style is entirely different, all those obligatory football games and beer, their lack of interest in household matters, their notion that it would be somehow unmanly to take an interest in the dishes or tablecloths,” she said. “Charles-Henri is capable of appreciating a soup tureen. His uncle Edgar collects seventeenth-century faience.”
She is right that French men seem to have a pleasant air of collaboration with women, an air of being in the business of life together—marriage, society. It is quite unlike the atmosphere of strained toleration or active dislike between the sexes we seem to have at home. But when I said this once to Roxy’s friend Anne-Chantal Lartigue, who lives near us across the Place Maubert, she sniffed.
“Don’t be deceived,” she said. “They are cads, like other men, spoiled by their mothers, unfaithful and evasive.” Of course, being French she ought to know, but possibly she doesn’t understand what other men are like—the non-French ones, like Americans, or the Muslims, say, who are said to seem nice until they get you back to Turkey or Algeria. The French love reading about the disastrous adventures of young Frenchwomen who marry Algerians, make the mistake of returning to the native villages, and are then locked up with the goats in purdah and abused by their mothers-in-law, who take away their shoes and their passports.
Of their intimate life, Roxy and Charles-Henri’s, I have no idea. Roxy was discreet and solemn about that.
She says when she was first married, she threw herself into French life, French housekeeping, French cooking, puzzling over the literal translations of recipes—how to decorticate a nut, make an onion sweat. Measures that she had thought an affectation of American foodies, M. F. K. Fisher groupies and people moving on beyond Julia Child, she now discovered to be the actual household standard in many French homes, and moreover seemingly done without effort. Women doctors came home late from the hospital and whipped up potage aux moules, pigeon rôti, salade, fromage, dessert. Did they really follow from scratch the recipe that directed them to plumer, vider, flamber les pigeons?
Actually it was not foodiness, or competitiveness, that made her obsessed with the cooking. What charmed her and drove her was the existence of a standard. There was no such thing as, hey, do it your way, though the recipes à ma façon implied individuality—along with expertise and authority. She liked the idea of things being long and difficult. Sometimes, having bought, opened, cooked the oursins and passed them through a sieve and added them to a pâté de poissons, she was disappointed, but only at her own inability to discern the difference they made. It was Mrs. Pace who pointed out to me the attraction of things rigorous and demanding. “The ballet is the only métier that requires discipline from women,” she said, “or was in my day. Now you could run the marathon. In my day, after you won the Latin prize, there was nothing left for you.”
Roxy became an accomplished cook, but tact and diffidence prevented her from seeming too accomplished when feeding French people. (In this she followed the example of Mrs. Pace. I remain a little skeptical about the French. They pretend to love food so much, but why do they go to McDonald’s?) Roxy could never find out what they really ate when at home, unobserved by Americans like her. She watched them in the supermarkets. From there, it appeared they ate the same on weeknights at home alone as when she and Charles-Henri were invited to dinner: hors-d’oeuvre, entrée, plat, salade, fromage, dessert. “But they do buy a lot of things frozen,” she revealed, satisfied.
Charles-Henri was the most undemanding and encouraging of husbands, appreciating all her efforts, but also happy to eat sandwiches and frozen pizza, helpful with setting the table and making mayonnaise. “For heaven’s sake,” he reassured her, “it doesn’t matter what you serve. Serve American dishes. People are interested in them. Serve pizza.” (Looking back, she now mistrusts his blithe detachment.)
“There are no American dishes,” Roxy stormed. “Pizza is Italian.”
“Apple pie,” he said. “Trente-et-un flavors. Pumpkin pie.”
“I hate pumpkin pie. We all do.”
Like a spy she sought other secrets of French culture. Yet she was always being taken unawares. When the first dinner guest appeared with a bunch of flowers she realized she had never taken flowers to her hostesses. When an American guest brought them a bottle of wine, Charles-Henri said, offended, afterward, “Perhaps he thought he wasn’t going to get anything to drink.”
(“The end of la civilisation française?” says l’oncle Edgar. “I suppose when it became ‘fromage ou dessert’ instead of ‘fromage et dessert.’”)
She never unraveled the mysteries of all the cheeses, dozens in the market, round and reeking, leaking, swelling, dusted with pepper, wrapped in vine leaves, made from the milk of goats, cows, sheep, cooked or raw, hard or soft, each with a name that bore no relation to the names in her recipe books.
And the cuts of meat. What on earth was gîte-gîte or macreuse?
She thought French women were wonderfully chic. To me it appeared they all went around in drab beige raincoats, wearing identical plain scarves—English, Roxy said, from Burberrys. It’s funny, this fashion, considering that they think of the English as treacherous, hypocritical, and unwashed—exactly what the English think of them. Businesswomen, for instance Charlotte, who does public relations, wear little suits with short skirts and jackets, red or plaid, with lots of gold jewelry. The women my age are pretty, though, with very little makeup and great assurance.
“Their bras are hopeless,” Roxy had written to me in Santa Barbara. “They are so small-breasted, it’s impossible for me, they have no tits at all, please send me four Olga ‘Vanity’ 34C’s, one ecru, two white, and one black.”
With all this cultural progress Roxy had been making, what had gone wrong?
If she thought any more about “not keeping” the baby, as she put it, she said nothing to me. It had been perhaps an empty threat, made in the hope that Suzanne would be so shocked in her Catholic soul that she would compel Charles-Henri to come home. When that did not happen, Roxy’s resentment of Suzanne began to grow, though it seemed to me that Suzanne had been sympathy itself.
She telephoned regularly, and took us to lunch at Récamier. Even by now I’d been in France long enough to understand French views about the consoling properties of food. During the lunches Suzanne would rail not at Charles-Henri but at Charlotte, whom I took to be an avatar of Charles-Henri for the purpose of this conversation, another troublesome offspring with an underdeveloped sense of duty. Unlike the blatant Charles-Henri, Charlotte was making an attempt to conceal her doings from her husband, poor Bob, who (I guessed) must have some skeletons in his own closet, for Charlotte to be so open.
It was surprising to me that Charlotte had taken up with an Englishman, given her views about their sportsmanship.
“I don’t say a thing,” Suzanne said. “Charlotte has always been headstrong. Criticizing her is a mistake.” But what criticism would drive Charlotte to was left unsaid. I admired Suzanne’s self-control. In the same situation, Margeeve would have said plenty. I wondered when Roxy was going to tell Margeeve and Chester about her marital crisis. I ventured no opinion about what she should do, not wanting to drive her the wrong way, whatever way that was, and not believing it to be my business, nor myself equipped to know about marriage, or love, for that matter.
The financial implications did occur to me. I wasn’t sure how Roxy was fixed. Would having a new baby require Charles-Henri to give her more money, or, with another mouth to feed, would she be harder up? In our family we can talk about money, since Chester is not in the business of chasing after it. He has all the purity of the academic and none of the temptations of academic scientists, so money is a neutral topic for us, like social policy or what’s for lunch. But Roxy had adopted something of the French reticence. Any mention of money seems to shock them; it is almost as bad, and maybe worse, than asking someone’s age.
She still had not told me the real problem, whatever it was, between them. Was it sex, was it some odd cultural misfit—her Americanness, her cooking—did he philander or gamble? I did not know, but once, coming down in the night for something from the refrigerator, I could hear Roxy quarreling in French and crying on the telephone, and who else could it have been but Charles-Henri?