16

For the young man is handsome, but the old man is great.

—Victor Hugo

THOSE FEW DAYS before my definitive assignation with Edgar, I know I was worried about one thing in particular in my own life. Because I like to look at handsome young men (look at and more), I worried about the body of an old man: How would he look without his clothes? Would this put me off? I so hoped not, I wanted to be in a state of unqualified desire. I guess I was thinking with dread of the pale senior citizens in their black socks on the beach in Santa Barbara, with their thick middles, red forearms, backs covered in white fuzz.

Now I know something about the vanity of French men, especially men who like women, and I know that they keep themselves up. (Quite a few dye their hair, though.) Or perhaps it’s not vanity but courtesy that keeps them in shape. Roxy says it’s simply the superiority of the French diet, but she thinks everything French is superior. (She may have soured on French husbands.) I think it has something to do with the cooperation of the sexes in France, so unlike the state of war we have at home, where everyone gets fat from despair and hostility, in order to erotically deprive their loved ones.

Roxy’s fragile temper had a new strain put on it. She had been to see Maître Bertram, her lawyer, about the Saint Ursula situation. Could she send it to the Getty Museum or not? Maître Bertram had agreed with Antoine de Persand, had told her it would be unwise to ship Saint Ursula to the Getty.

“It could seem like a trick to get it out of France, and that would jeopardize the rest of the divorce. It would seem like an act of bad faith, however correctly you intend it. It could even invite charges and imprisonment,” he said. He cautioned her against so much as criticizing Charles-Henri. In France, for a statement like “Charles-Henri is a pig and is trying to steal my painting,” she could be sentenced to jail for calumnious talk.

Eventually, Charles-Henri, to his credit, called her to say it was all the same to him what she did with Saint Ursula, he wasn’t behind this new frustration, it was simply Antoine, trying to be correct, and the lawyers, with their careful ways.

“Tell them, then. You can tell them you don’t care,” Roxy said. I don’t know what he said in reply. Saint Ursula herself seemed newly to wear an expression of combative smugness. But the self-satisfied smile with which she prayed to keep her virginity, and her indifference to those treasures heaped up in her chamber, were those of a natural ascetic to whom, therefore, renunciation cost nothing. I could not help but feel how she would have despised my relatively pragmatic response to the Kelly.

I left it to Roxy to nerve herself up to tell Margeeve and Chester that she couldn’t send the painting to the Getty Museum. She knew this would infuriate and disappoint. I hadn’t realized how much Margeeve would care. She had never loved Saint Ursula or the Getty; the picture was really Chester’s, coming from his side of the family, and she had no hereditary interest in it; and she had only just taken up the study of art, though I could see she might dislike losing face with the Getty if she had been in a long correspondence with them. I was actually ignorant of, or underestimated, the degree to which she had relished the wonderful, status-building grandeur of having a painting you own in a major or even minor museum exhibition. I just wouldn’t have thought that Margeeve would have cared about status and grandeur.

Cut to California: Margeeve is talking to Roxy on the telephone, and I can easily infer Margeeve’s side of the conversation.

“Of course, Rox, if it would cause legal problems, we shouldn’t do it,” says Margeeve mildly. “I just hope they haven’t printed the catalogue. But they must have legal glitches like this with every exhibition—insurance problems, whatever. Maybe I’ll tell the Getty woman that they could directly approach the French lawyers or the French government or something like that, with a guarantee to return it to France. I’m sure there are legal routes.”

This reassured Roxy, who said it was nice of Margeeve to be so calm about it. Margeeve, of course, would have done a slow double burn later, while fixing the salad. French injustice and meddlesome highhandedness came through to her. This was their, her, Roxy’s, a Walker family painting and the Walkers wished to lend it to an American museum, period. French strangers were interfering. Not even French strangers with right and good on their side, but relatives of the enemy, people she had never seen, people who were ruining her daughter’s life and now hers.

Chester was sympathetic. He would always be indignant on Roxy’s behalf, for in his eyes she can do no wrong, unlike me. But he was now also touched to realize how much the museum show meant to Margeeve.

“We’ll call Roger. He’ll have some advice, I’m sure.”

Margeeve thinking: Why am I upset? I can’t believe I’m this upset. There ought to be something Roger can do, some legal thing, he must know someone in France that could put up some insurance, we could send an affidavit. Museum to museum something could be done. The Getty could put in the request through the Louvre. She was feeling, she recognized, the sharp hunger-pang of disappointment over something she hadn’t known she really wanted, like something half eaten and mislaid. In her mind’s eye she had seen Saint Ursula on the white gallery wall, with the words “Private Collection” or maybe even “Collection of Prof. and Mrs. Chester Walker, Santa Barbara,” or at worst, “Collection of M. and Mme. Charles-Henri de Persand, Paris.” It was not as if she would boast aloud, it would be a private pleasure, a sense of civic participation. Was she just a vulgar status-seeker? Standing before the painting beside some stranger, would the words “that’s my daughter Roxeanne’s” escape her lips? Garrulous old women were always telling you something about their children. She was ashamed to see that the temptation would be enormous. In whatever case, she had counted on having a painting in the Getty show, and was now to be disappointed, humiliated really, because she had promised, as if it were hers to promise.

She had hoped for expiation and legitimacy, had never felt quite legitimate since her divorce, since showing the bad judgment to put that extra e in Roxeanne’s name, since a car accident in 1956 that had been her fault and she had denied it successfully, since not going enough to PTA meetings, since not being loving enough or generous enough. She squelched these habitual themes of self-reproach.