Paris, city of amusements, pleasures, etc., where four-fifths of the inhabitants are dying of unhappiness.
—Nicolas de Chamfort
UNLIKE MRS. PACE, Edgar did not believe in lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnians, conflicting in this with those French intellectuals who had taken the tack, believed in by Americans too, of letting the Bosnian Muslims defend themselves. Edgar believed in French intervention, through the NATO alliance, though he had begun to think it was too late even for that.
It became known that the Bosnian Serbs, having agreed to withdraw their cannons from around Sarajevo, were now stealing them back and trundling them off to bombard other villages and towns. This treachery affected Roxy as vividly as if these renegade guns were now pointed at the rue Maître Albert. Her color, already high and flushed with her pregnancy, deepened to a dangerous-looking plum, her eyes shot indignant fire, she tried to pick up conversations in the market, or sitting with Tammy or Anne-Chantal in the Brasserie Espoir.
Since Roxy’s troubles began, all the denizens of the Place Maubert have seemed singled out for domestic catastrophe, beginning with the dramatic elopement of Jérôme Lartigue, the theatrical designer, with an American editress, an act of midlife crisis that had struck all the neighborhood as being, at the least, un-French. Anne-Chantal, his wife of thirty years, was so stunned she did not speak for several weeks. The next to break up were Tammy de Bretteville (American like us) and her husband Hugues, and most recently Djuna and Serge, the Serbo-Croatian couple we had long thought riveted by political solidarity against the madness in their country (he had been the Serbian ambassador). They are so poor that they remain together in their same apartment, each shopping in the market at different hours, grim, with separate baskets of turnips and kale.
Both Tammy and Anne-Chantal had written eloquent letters for Roxy’s divorce dossier, but these women did not think much about politics.
“Such savagery, how can human beings act like that?” Roxy would moan at each new Serbian incursion, her mind reviewing all human perfidy. These days human perfidy was never far from her mind.
“Mais, the Serbs are all right,” said Anne-Chantal, “they were abused horribly in the war, hein? The Croats murdered millions of them, no wonder they want revenge.”
“Everyone’s ancestors were murdered by somebody,” cried Roxy. “What will happen in the world if people can’t forget the past?”
“And the Muslims, what do they want but a foothold for Islam in Europe, that deserves a thought, surely?” Anne-Chantal went on.
“That’s not true!” Roxy disagreed. “The Bosnian Muslims are perfectly secular.”
“Alors, I hope you are prepared to wear the veil?” said Anne-Chantal.
I was not getting along too well with Roxy. She had got very picky about what I was supposed to be doing, or what she supposed I was supposed to be doing, to help her; and in a rather small-minded way, I felt she ought to be grateful, not critical, it being after all not me who made her marry a Frenchman and launch into a divorce, pregnancies, financial problems, et cetera. I thought I was being nice. I thought I was being a prince to Roxy, actually. It seemed to me that I was the only stable parent poor little Gennie had, and that she shouldn’t be put all that time in the crèche, every day, and that with Roxy not working (for she sometimes skipped going to her studio and moped around the house), it wasn’t necessary.
“You watch her all day then,” snapped Roxy.
Of course, she was depressed, and things were going badly with the divorce. She was now thinking that if she hadn’t said anything about sending the painting home, no one would have thought about it. As it was, it had been identified by the lawyers as their only possession, apart from one or two old bureaus and a table from the Persands, that might have value, and thus would have to be divided between them, and thus would have to be sold.
Roxy proclaimed her indignation far and wide. “Outrageous,” the American community agreed. “Even in primitive societies the husband’s family gives back the dowry if they send the woman back to her own tribe.”
“Not always,” put in the anthropologist Rex Rhett-Valy in his reedy Bloomsbury voice. “In India among certain villagers, they keep the cows and burn the spurned bride besides.”
We in Paris did not fully appreciate at this time the emotional havoc being created in California by the vagaries of French law. Roxy’s picture had already been appraised by Stuart Barbee at forty thousand dollars. Antoine, Charles-Henri’s brother, was now suggesting a second valuation. “It is a normal thing, we all know that experts can vary quite widely in their opinions. Just to be sure what is correct.”
This had infuriated Roxy, because it implied that the Persands believed it to be worth more, and thought American appraisers were untrustworthy or in our pay, or thought Roxy was keeping the value low so she could more easily buy Charles-Henri out. But even at forty thousand, Roxy had no prospect of twenty thousand dollars to pay Charles-Henri his half, nor did they have enough property between them to count it against the value of the other things. She had telephoned Chester and Margeeve to ask them to help, knowing in advance that they’d say they didn’t have twenty thousand to spend on a depressing religious picture that belonged to them anyway.
Roger had gone bananas about this, absolutely ape. Though I doubt he had ever really looked at the picture, he had an active sense of its having come from our side of the family and in a way not being Roxy’s at all. Margeeve described it, but anyway I could imagine Roger’s particularly overbearing, vulgar way of fuming, egged on by Jane. “It’s mine and Isabel’s, what the fuck do I care about French law, it’s goddamned mine.”
Margeeve had half hoped Chester would be struck quixotically by the wish to ransom the picture, and in time for the Getty show, though she perfectly well knew they couldn’t spare the money, and if they could they’d spend it on something more sensible.
“Poor Rox,” she said, after one of the many phone calls. “She’s hoping for a miracle of Saint Ursula.”
“What I can’t grasp,” said Chester, in a tone that revealed his real irritation, “is why he gets anything at all, when he’s the guilty party and he doesn’t even pretend otherwise.”
“I don’t understand that either,” Margeeve admitted.
“Maybe you should just bring it home with you,” Roger said to me on the phone. “How could they stop you?”
Would it have made a difference if I had? It would have been simple enough back then. Would it have averted tragedy? I was too selfish and too indifferent to the situation to think of interrupting my pleasures, my nice life in France.
“I can’t come home right now, I’m helping Mrs. Pace with something, I promised, I, obligation, jobs . . .” I was stammering with horror at the idea of going back to California. “Why don’t you come get it?”
“Maybe I will,” Roger said. His rage was not at me, of course, but there were overtones in the timbre of his bellowing that resurrected childhood quarrels, between us, Roxy and Judith, and the occasions where our parents had taken sides unfairly with their own kids—though they had been scrupulous, usually, about not falling into that trap.
At his offices, Roger was looking into other issues of international law and art property. Roxy and I would hardly know our dear brother Roger in the company of his lawyer colleagues, cupidity sparkling in their talk. Roger’s attitude to the painting was as an object of value belonging to our family, but also, in the company of his colleagues, a case, a test of law and cleverness, a patriotic issue and a personal challenge.
“I would say, first of all, not so fast,” he advised Roxy. “The jurisdiction is by no means clear. For one thing, a bequest or a gift is not community property. You were married in California, a community-property state, so in principle there’s no net gain to a divorce here, but a California court would be more likely to recognize the moral situation. You hear that French courts, when it comes to property, are perfectly indifferent to unwritten understandings and that sort of thing. I think we ought to explore the idea of Roxy coming home, eventually suing for divorce in California. That would render moot the issue of whether she could bring the painting back here, besides. And it could clarify custody issues, since a California court would probably award custody to the American.”
“The only trouble with that is that she intends to go on living in France,” Chester pointed out.
“Let Roger talk. She thinks that’s what she wants right now,” said Margeeve, never for one moment doubting that Roxy would ultimately return to America, like a normal person.
Another short scene at about the same time, which we couldn’t then have known about, relating to our painting by an élève de La Tour:
The sixteenth Arrondissement. A very large room, book-strewn, a few pieces of inherited Directoire furniture and a splendid terre cuite by Clodion of three muses encircled, one missing an arm.
“Have you seen the La Tour?” asks Stuart Barbee of Phil Jacob. They are in Stuart’s apartment. Jacob is the elderly American art expert, longtime resident of Paris, who famously had been the friend of Soutine.
“Absolutely not,” says Jacob. “It’s much better if it has never been looked at by me.”
“How so?”
“The Persand family already asked me to value it and I said I was too busy. Just my looking at it drives the price up. I’m sure they realized that. The mere act of my looking at it brings the piece into the realm of the possibly authentic La Tours.”
“At whose behest, may I ask, did you turn them down?” Stuart laughs.
“No, you may not ask.” Jacob too laughs. “Besides, you know very well. Have you seen our friend Desmond, by the way?”
Things between Roxy and me continued to be not perfect. The handsome leather Kelly continued in some way to come between us, to her symbolizing my disloyalty.
But Roxy was behaving strangely in general. The day before the first terrible event, she had come home excited, odd, flushed, babbling as if on drugs.
“I went to Chartres,” she said. “When I went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to see the Della Bella drawings, it was closed, so I just thought, bon, I’ll go to Chartres instead and see if I can’t find her. Otherwise it’ll be a week before anyone can look for her again. I’m not even sure when Charlotte put her there. She wouldn’t have any idea of how to find Suzanne’s house, she’d always lived in Neuilly. She’d just wander in the woods, following a bird or hiding from a fox.”
Only then did I realize she was talking about Charlotte’s cat. “I don’t think foxes eat cats,” I assured her.
“A cat could climb a tree, it’s true. Oh, Iz, I know I’m not going to die, people don’t die from childbirth anymore, but I feel I’m going to. How long can a cat live in the wild on her own?”
“Well, indefinitely. A resourceful cat,” I said.
“Anyway, I didn’t find her. I did find a cat. It was dead, I guess struck by a car. It was wearing a collar. Its eyes were bulging out. But it was a ginger cat, not Siamese.”
Now she was saying, “I should have talked to that guy, Magda’s husband. I should have tried to calm him down and listened to what he had to say. Maybe he knows something, could think of something. I walked on all the paths near where we park, Charlotte would have parked there too. Now look at my ankles. I guess I have to go to the doctor. Ankle swelling can mean a lot of things. Somebody’s lovely ginger cat, wearing a collar, some family missing her.
“It can’t be good for a pregnant woman to see death. I felt that. It can’t be just an old wives’ tale that things affect the baby, because I have such a sense of having conveyed something horrible to him. If it’s too horrible or he is too frail, he won’t want to be born. I feel it as a sort of heaving drilling sensation here.” She touched her side, where the distension of her belly began.
“And now look at my ankles, it’s some sort of toxin that can kill you, the baby too, I know it.”
“Maybe we should call the doctor,” I said. “Or Suzanne.”
How strange, I thought, that we had to look to Suzanne for mothering, even while she was engaged in trying to take Roxy’s things and in feeding her rival. We both needed a mother, but Roxy especially. I had Mrs. Pace.