Le Divorce

23

“Yonder,” I said to myself, “some poor wretch may be struggling on in grief, or wrestling with death . . . the certain end which brings neither consolation nor peace.”

—Adolphe

IT WAS SOON after my birthday that I stayed one Thursday night at Edgar’s. He had gone on the last train to Avignon, and I was lazing around his apartment, trying to read a book I found on his nightstand. (Tocqueville. “I am ashamed to say I have never read him,” he said. “To confess, I was never much interested in the United States, I just thought them a lost cause. But now that I have become the friend of an American, I find it fascinating. He has an enviable gift for aphorism. And what do you make of this, Isabel? ‘In France, simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachment which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the State. But in America nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues.’ ”)

We had been talking about whether American movies should be kept out of France. Edgar thought they should.

“If they’re so bad, why do people go see them? If you love peace and order so much,” I objected.

“This is an essential difference: You Americans think that if people want something, it must be allowed. Then you punish yourselves with ugliness for indulging what you actually despise. It is that paradox that will destroy you, or so says the philosopher.

“We French know that people want not what is good but what is easy, and to give in to the lazy side of human nature is not so admirable. We give permission to be saved from our worst nature, or to challenge our better selves, to put it that way.”

“France is groaning with luxury,” I pointed out. “It is much more luxurious and gourmandish than we are.”

“Well, and then we reward ourselves for our good character.”

Such discussions made me uneasy. Was I a compendium of all American faults and virtues after all? When Edgar had gone, I got to reading Tocqueville myself. Tocqueville says, “The happy and the powerful do not go into exile.” Was this true? Applying it to Roxy and me?

Eventually I fell asleep. When I woke up it was morning. I didn’t worry about this, as Roxy doesn’t expect me to be home nights if we haven’t prearranged that I was needed to babysit, and she doesn’t check as to whether I am. I sometimes didn’t go down to her apartment to have breakfast until after she had left for the crèche with Gennie, so she didn’t always expect to see me in the morning.

Paris is clean and wet in the mornings with the ministrations of street sweepers in bright green uniforms who slosh the flooded gutters with their plastic brooms and make little river dams out of pieces of old carpet. As I came up out of the metro at almost exactly eight-thirty, the fat-bristled machines were just swishing by, the Brasserie Espoir had a few people drinking coffee or taking a coup de rouge, a man rushed by pulling on his blue work smock. The streets were otherwise deserted. At nine-thirty suddenly people would materialize behind counters and desks, without ever seeming to have got there. It took me a long time to understand that this is because they work near where they live, there’s not so much commuting. This morning, a smell of croissants and coffee, a patch of pinkish gold in the sky, an irresistible temptation to hang out a few minutes at the Brasserie Espoir, just thinking about Paris and love. Love is a mystery anyway. What makes that woman love that weedy little male over there? That fat Frenchman is tenderly handing down the bus step that particular little gray-haired oriental woman with duck feet in her flat beige Mary-Jane shoes—how did they meet? The very peculiarness of love elated me on every bus ride, every walk through the Jardin du Luxembourg, instances on every hand of love’s blindness and its charm, and my own part in it.

Happy, I bought a Figaro—in Roxy’s view too conservative, but easiest to read, and struggled with the news from Bosnia. Edgar occasionally writes an article on Thursdays. I found I had actually met in person two of the people mentioned on pages one and two of Le Figaro! I exulted in the realization that if only I could speak French (an impossibility), I could in theory remind two important French people that I was Isabel Walker, that we had met when . . . etc., etc. That is, I would have a basis to speak to a former cabinet minister and an archbishop! I found this thrilling, for back in California, Isabel Walker knew no one at all.

Coffee (café au lait) finished, I went along to the rue Maître Albert and operated the front door code, trying to remember if Roxy had seen me wearing these clothes yesterday, by which she would know that I had been out all night, and decided: Who cares, I’ll go directly to her place rather than to my own room to change.

Otherwise I might have gone straight up to my room.

Instead I went into her apartment and right to the kitchen. Not seeing her, I might have gone upstairs after all, but I didn’t, I looked in the fridge, and put the Figaro on the table for her to read when she got home. I might have, might have, I say, to frighten myself all over again with the narrowness and fragility of chance.

It was then I heard a thump, the only word I can think of to describe the heavy soft sound of something not brittle being dropped, or of a person falling, as when as children we would hear one of the others fall out of bed.

I wandered back into the living room, simultaneously wondering what the noise was and thinking that Roxy must have taken Gennie to the crèche rather early. Looking back, I can’t account for the series of deductive thoughts, or the impulse, or the reasons, that impelled me to persist in having a look. I had no particular reason, but I did just knock on Roxy’s bedroom door and, hearing nothing, opened the door, glanced inside, and there saw Roxy lying by the side of her bed in a pool of blood. Just as it is always described, a thick, viscous puddle, with her arm and cheek lying in it.

Hemorrhage, I thought, that filmic phrase now all too explicably real. I rushed in and touched her. Her arm was warm and she stirred, her shadowed lids flickered as if she were pretending. I couldn’t remember what 911 was in French, but the fire department was marked on the phone, and I dialed that, gasping, “My soeur, sang, hurry vite,” and, the best I could do, “Venez rapidement, s’il vous plait.” I gave them the address, and I had the impression they were coming. I tried to lift Roxy up and drag her onto the bed, but I couldn’t, it was as if she had been absorbing the pond of blood she was lying in and was weighed down by it, the way a sponge is heavy. A sticky, blood-soaked pillow, lurid as a horror film, lay on the floor under her, ketchupy, almost fake. I expected to see a fetus or something horrible from inside her.

I went into the bathroom for a towel, and only then, coming back, did I realize that the blood was not coming from her vagina, as I had supposed, but from her wrists. She had big slashes in both her wrists, and on the backs of her hands where she may have started too tentatively, forgetting that you have to open the big veins in the front of your wrists. If you really want to die. The blood oozed out of the openings, horrible flaps, and it bubbled like foam. My own hands, wet with Roxy’s blood, left fingerprints on her cheek where I touched her, and on her neck where I tried to feel her pulse. One of her wrists was slashed more badly than the other, and this I wrapped tightly with a green wool scarf from her dresser. There was somewhere to press on the human arm, I knew. Tourniquet, that must be a French word, but I couldn’t think how to do one.

Thus did my world, outlook, character, and destiny change, all at one moment.

I had, luckily, the impression or illusion of clear thoughts at that moment, was thinking tourniquet, 911, upper arm. I tied the leg of some pantyhose above her elbow and twisted it tight with a pen, wondering whether, if she died, the bleeding would immediately stop. Did the blood gushing out of her wrists mean she was alive? And I was wondering if the baby would die before Roxy or after, or instead of, and how much time did the baby have? And I was thinking that it was odd that Roxy would want to kill her baby after all this time, and also that this was some kind of bizarre accident. But of course you don’t slash both wrists by accident, and the backs of the hands.

Blood has a particular, sour and fruity, smell.

I bound up her second wrist with another stocking. Then I remembered that I hadn’t given the fireman the building code, and rushed to the window, and there indeed they were, though I hadn’t heard any siren. They were staring up at the windows.

I opened the window and screamed out the code. My screaming voice was like the screech of a panicked animal, nothing to do with my slowed-down, deliberate actions. It seemed only seconds until several firemen were looking down at Roxy. When they noticed her belly they were galvanized. Enceinte. They began to shout at each other, and to cart her downstairs, not on a stretcher but lumpily by the arms and legs, her body like a large potato between, her hair raking through the mess of her own blood. Blood had now soaked through the scarves and stockings I had wrapped around the wounds.

They had a stretcher at the bottom of the stairs. Here they laid her and began to put better bandages on, and a mask over her mouth and nose with, I guess, oxygen. Some yellowish water in a bottle on a stand was attached to her. Events collapsed into each other, as in a film being run too fast. Relieved of the need to act, I became sick to my stomach, and my ears rang ominously, so that I had to sit down a few seconds on the curb and put my head between my knees until this passed. The skinny, vociferous Madame Florian, on the first floor, came storming out of the building, complaining, I assume about the blood on the stairs. Some time passed, maybe five minutes. I had got up now and was looking at Roxy. Her eyes were still closed, but I could see that she was breathing. They picked her up and loaded her into their ambulance, more like a van. I tried to climb in too, but they pushed me off and said, “Pas de place.” Stupefied, I watched as they drove off with my dying sister, I had no idea where.

Now I was enveloped by the scrum of passersby—two men in business suits, a child with a school satchel strapped to his back, a green-suited street worker who made me sit back down. The child stared at the blood drying on my dress and arms. Le sang. Then Madame Florian stood me up again and drew me inside, talking volubly, waving her arms. I saw she wanted me to change my dress. So fucking French, worrying about what to wear, I wildly thought. In the foyer drops of blood were smeared where we had stepped. I couldn’t think at all. Madame Florian marched me up the stairs, me having no volition. She held my hand like a child’s, and Roxy’s blood came off on her. Blood is unbelievably smeary and sticky, and it was everywhere. If my hand were wet with the blood of a stranger, I would worry about AIDS, but Madame Florian was above that.

“Hospital, I have to go to the hospital,” I was saying as she pushed me in at Roxy’s door. I rushed to the kitchen to clean my arms, and put the dress in the sink.

“Oui, oui, Salpetrière,” she said, watching me. I found something to wear from Roxy’s closet, and took my purse from the living room. Madame Florian came with me to the taxi rank and to my surprise got in with me, saying to the driver things of which I understood only “centre des urgences.” In the cab I could think again, over the fast noisy beating of my heart: Roxy tried to kill herself. Or has killed herself.

All this had occupied perhaps fifteen minutes, and the drive only a few minutes more, past the little zoo where I sometimes took Gennie. At the hospital, Madame Florian waved at the driver to stay and walked with me into the foyer, where she spoke on my behalf. I was the sister of Madame de Persand who had just come in? They replied, and I did not hear any words like morte or mourir.

Madame Florian shrugged away my mercis. “Restez là,” she said, “and they will talk to you.” They did, and I understood enough: Roxy was receiving a blood transfusion, she was alive, I should wait awhile, but she was probably not in danger. Madame Florian hovered, watched me, and moved slowly off.

So I had time, while watching, to try to understand. Roxy had tried to kill herself! Why had I not noticed that she was in such a desperate or deranged frame of mind? How could I have been so wrapped up in my own affairs not to have noticed something like that? I had had no idea.

I had had no idea. Strangely, I heard my own voice saying that aloud, as I was imagining in my mind that I was saying it to Margeeve and Chester. Toward Roxy I felt, or perhaps it was later I felt this, the fury you do feel toward someone who has put you through a scare, but for myself I felt the deepest chagrin and shame, and a sort of seasick disorientation, as if I would never again know whether I was right or wrong side up. How could I have been so happy and oblivious when Roxy was so miserable? A cry for help. A suicide attempt is a cry for help and I hadn’t helped.

These were the sorts of reproach and anguish that floated, drifted through my thoughts to avoid directly focusing on what if she died, which was so unthinkable and was what she had been trying for.

Had she? Had she really meant it or was this just a cry for help? Did she know I would come in and would find her? Thus did I try to belittle or explain away as histrionics what she had done. Then I would reverse myself. Or maybe she had counted on me not coming in and finding her—I couldn’t remember what I had said I was doing today. I didn’t even know if she was alive.

Also her baby. I remembered how months ago she had said to Suzanne maybe she shouldn’t go through with having the baby. These words now took on a different meaning.

Nurses and orderlies looked at me, relative of la suicidée. The nurses wore little veils like nuns. They approached me as they would a relative of someone in mortal anguish, or a sinner, with kindness and tact, with soft voices. Danger and death have the power to transcend language. I understood perfectly what they were telling me; Roxy was being prevented they hoped from going into shock. They were considering a caesarean section if certain changes appeared on the fetal monitor. The child was perfectly well. A baby lives longer than the mother, seizing the good of the last molecules of oxygen in the blood until it has no more hope either.