Suicide is less an act than a tale of the soul.
—M. Jouhandeau, Chroniques maritales
THE HOSPITAL BEGAN to talk about letting her go home on Tuesday, but they made me understand they were concerned about two issues, her ongoing psychiatric care and the high-risk pregnancy. In the case of her mental state, the doctors decided it was what they called a “crisis reaction” and would not likely recur. Apparently there are people who have a suicidal impulse once in their lives, when something happens they cannot stand. If they are standing on a bridge just then, they’ll likely succeed in killing themselves, but if they have no real means to do it, the impulse passes, and when their lives improve, they soldier on like everybody else. This is why suicide hot lines and so forth are for people with a one-time impulse, while nothing much can be done for the chronically depressed who long for death and save up pills. Or so the handsome doctor explained to me.
It would suffice for Roxy, they thought, to get her through the divorce and the remaining month of her pregnancy, which looked to be still threatened with preeclampsia which could even in part explain her behavior. With her physiology back to normal, the doctor predicted, and some counseling, someone to talk to—she must be lonesome, for she was an étrangère, after all, though her French was, he allowed, excellent—all would be well.
But when I saw they were going to release her, I was frightened anew. I would tell Edgar, I decided, and Mrs. Pace, either of whom might have a view about what I’d better do. Margeeve and Chester would be gone on their trip another week. Meantime I took Roxy some books from Mrs. Pace’s, and coped with Gennie over the weekend.
In the end, I told Mrs. Pace but not Edgar. Some family pride prevented me, some wish to protect Roxy from the faint possibility he would tell the rest of the Persands, or the fear that he, like my parents, would think I had been negligent about noticing Roxy’s state of mind. I called him to tell him I couldn’t meet him on Tuesday, but I just said Roxy was ill.
“Now that does astonish me,” Mrs. Pace said, when I had told her the story. “Roxeanne of all people, so resolutely adjusted and Francophile.”
“I know.”
“It was odd, the way she acted at my reading, crying out about the horrors of Bosnia. I thought at the time she’d had a little extra wine. She’s off balance. But it was obviously something she heard at the lawyer’s that threw her.”
“The coo duh grah,” I said, trying a French phrase.
“The last straw, you mean,” she said. “It is an entirely different thing. The coup de grâce—pronounce the c in grace, by the way—is not the same thing as the last straw, Isabel. Look it up. But what was it she found out from the lawyer?”
“Nothing new. I talked to her when she got home. They talked about the sale of Saint Ursula, her beloved painting. It has to be sold because it turns out to be worth something, and she can’t afford to pay Charles-Henri his half of its value.”
“She felt ready to die of bitterness.” Her sympathetic tone implied she herself had often been at the brink of suicide for reasons of rage and chagrin. Her view now was that I should stick close to Roxy until she delivered the baby, when her body and psychology would return to normal, and meantime she, Olivia, would pitch in with invitations and distractions.
On Tuesday night Roxy came home from the hospital. She lay on the sofa, and we watched L’Opinion on Canal Sept, just a head shot of Edgar himself for twenty minutes with the interviewer off camera, him telling about adventures in Africa and Mindanao, and his period under Giscard d’Estaing as a subminister of some fiscal department. I understood little of this, but I did understand what he was saying about Bosnia, since I had heard those views numerous times. It crossed my mind to wonder whether he would have had to cancel our Tuesday if I had not, for this program, or whether it was on tape.
“You have to hand it to Uncle Edgar,” Roxy said. “The rest of the Persands may be frivolous and lazy, but he really isn’t.”
“He’s not a Persand, he’s a Cosset,” I pointed out, realizing I should not appear to have thought about it.
“True, but they get their laziness and frivolity from Suzanne, and she is his sister. You tend to forget he has actually been a statesman. Unlike the rest of them he’s actually had a public career.”
But of course her mind wasn’t really on Edgar, or on me. She was dreamily holding Gennie on her knees with her cheek against the child’s hair.
“I love being pregnant again,” she said. “Iz, put your hand on my belly. I think the new little one needs to know other people want him. Charles-Henri used to do that, pat my belly and speak to Gennie, but now no one speaks to this little one.”
This seemed so off the wall, I fell into the mood I had been trying to stave off, of intensifying panic, and not knowing what to do, and wanting to be in the arms of the elderly gentleman I was watching on the TV, and mad at Roxy for being crazy—for grabbing all the craziness just now so that I had to be with her and be stuck with her secret and do the worrying about what would become of her, and of me. I put my hand on her belly, which felt like an overinflated basketball, hard and inorganic. I couldn’t feel a baby underneath but spoke to it anyhow, saying, “Not too much longer, little friend, better enjoy it where you are.”
Visible signs of the coming holiday season had already replaced the back-to-school mood of early autumn. Gennie had a little caped coat and knitted hood, like the children in a book I’d had when I was little, I couldn’t remember which, but in it they chased hoops with sticks. The gray light and the gray stones of the Paris buildings gave a monochromatic gloom to the streets, but there was a corollary gaiety to the interiors, the lavish gilt and mirrors of the pâtisseries, the array of cakes and bonbons, glazed chestnuts, and chestnuts roasting in braziers at street corners, plucked off the coals by subdued men with asbestos bare fingers. All humanity wore thick coats. I continued to be troubled by my not suffering when Roxy was.
What made me feel most guilty was not the Capulet-Montague feature of my affair with Uncle Edgar, which was continuing even as relations with the Persands worsened (though our ostensible affection remained), nor was it sex itself. For some reason I felt especially guilty about the pleasure and interest I took in the restaurants we went to. This fascination grew in me in a way I felt could not be quite good, was perhaps a perversion, one I sensed Edgar and I encouraged in each other, a shared secret. Edgar first sensed it in me—an interest beyond the normal—when he realized I had read up on a certain restaurant and knew what the chef’s specialties were. This might of course be a good courtesan’s normal preparation, finding out what her lover likes and so on, but since he himself is interested in restaurants (but does not always indulge himself, in food), he was not unhappy to patronize ever new, distant and vaunted eating places, now with the excuse of pleasing me. This pursuit also had the merit of getting us out of the center of Paris and farther from the likelihood of him being seen.
Californians are interested in restaurants too, nothing odd about that. Why is it I feel within myself that my interest has exceeded what is quite nice? For instance, I found myself spending 180 hard-earned francs on a new guide to Paris restaurants when Roxy already had Gault et Millau and the Guide Michelin (last year’s) and I should have earmarked the money for relief for Sarajevo. No, there was nothing generically strange about a Californian liking restaurants, but I knew it would be easy for me to go over the top. Just as in bed, we extend the things we do, we go a little further, without discussion, to prolong or repeat the moment of pleasure (s’éclater).
The scar on Roxy’s left wrist was visible like a vivid bracelet or mark left by a torturer; that on the right was a pale white line. Both were covered by the long sleeves she kept pulled down. No one else would see them or know, but for me these traces were a continual reproach. I watched her, I stayed home much more now. We watched French television, which is as stupid as American television, is in fact American television, most of it, B cop shows and old bad movies.
After a while her bitterness and apathy seemed to lighten. She said it was her biology, the prospect of birth taking her over, with waves of warm nest-building hormones, placid as a cow. “My problems will all come back, I suppose,” she said, “but now I can’t be bothered to worry. It’s strange that I can work now. Usually a little anxiety makes you work better, it’s usually necessary, even, but too much wipes you out.”
She said she was working well, and she sold a poem to some Midwestern literary magazine, I think Michigan, or Ohio. I have to admit that with Roxy’s spirits seeming to lift, or not to descend further, mine sagged a little more, as they had done ever since her suicide attempt. It began to be cold in Paris, and I wasn’t used to cold. If it were California I’d be skiing, but this was day after day of rain and darkness, swallowing up the day earlier every afternoon, dark again by four, still dark at eight in the morning, as if you were north of the Arctic Circle. The lofty statues in the Place de la Concorde now loomed like black, menacing shapes wet with the constant rain. You had to remember to wear shoes and coats you didn’t mind getting wet. There was a day of beauty in late November when it snowed. I was coming across the Place de la Concorde on the 24 bus, at dusk just when the lanterns went on, and flakes of snow drifted down in this pinkish gray half-light, and it was so beautiful, tears sprang to my eyes. Then I realized they weren’t tears for beauty, they were just tears. It was I who was sad, just under the surface, where the sight of something fragile like a snowflake seemed unbearably to predict its loss.
And there was the business of the bon coup. It wasn’t something that would have bothered me ordinarily. I’m inured to what they think of Americans. Yves introduced me to a friend who smiled in a friendly way and said to Yves, “Elle, le bon coup américain?” The phrase stuck in my mind. Maybe it was meant as a compliment, but I didn’t take it as a compliment, too puritan for that. I hardly needed a dictionary, the meaning is more or less the same in all languages, something like “the great American piece of ass.”
In my low mood I would think of the futility of my life as factotum, girl Friday—dog walker and half-time girlfriend (“mistress”) and bon coup. I hated the passivity of this life, that I wasn’t doing anything about the future. All of Edgar’s public harangues about responsibility having finally got my attention, I decided to take a cooking class, and to volunteer for some cause.
Roxy had figured out something to do about Bosnia. She threw herself into organizing, with some other American and some French women, a drive to send Tampax and lipstick to the women of Sarajevo. “Sometimes it’s little essentials that really make it possible to survive,” she said. “I was getting into such a state of solipsistic misery I was forgetting the people in the world with real problems.” In these words I heard the voice of Margeeve, who had said them verbatim over and over in our growing-up years. Roxy composed placards and leaflets, saw to the printing, and joined the corps of women who left them in bookstores and on walls. She spent hours on the phone talking to journalists and getting the announcement put in the papers. I suppose I thought it was slightly ridiculous at first, lipstick and tampons for a place where a mortar might kill you when you went out to pick them up. Eventually I saw that you’d get your period, bombs or not—if you were lucky and got your period. I suggested they send contraceptives instead, but they decided that was too controversial. The idea of the drive, finally, was that the women of France would be asked to buy extra quantities of these essential items and leave them at drop-off points in the streets and pharmacies; then Roxy and benefactor with trucks would come and pick them up.
In the end, I spent two hundred and fifty francs on Tampax and left it at the Monoprix. Tons of lipstick to relieve suffering were collected. The rest of my efforts were similarly lowly, like helping to put up chairs at Edgar’s meetings, if I got there early enough, in the distant city halls of Ivry or Villemoisson-sur-Orge.
I had various identities when Edgar presented me. At meetings, beforehand, in a city hall or church, “mon assistante, Mademoiselle Walker.” To someone who knew his family, “You know Mademoiselle Walker? Charles-Henri’s sister-in-law?” or “My nephew’s sister-in-law, from Santa Barbara, California.” I began to feel discontented with these identities, though I suppose I should have been pleased that he did not hide me. What was Mademoiselle Walker doing, really?
His meeting nights were not nights we would make love. He was usually caught up afterward with media people or concerned citizens or cronies who were like-minded, and he would be preoccupied in any case. I would go home alone, or hang around on the fringe to hear him say, “I object to the hypocrisy of our politicians, madame, trying to claim humanitarian heroism with a few ground troops while privately holding that nothing must affect our relations with Germany or the treaty of Maastricht. In any case, no one talks of the morality of the situation. Not in this country—all is cynicism disguised as pragmatism.” Not in my country, either, I guess.
Once Edgar came to Suzanne’s on Sunday. As usual I was assigned the duty of walking with the various children, today Frédéric’s children as well as Gennie and those of Antoine. Before lunch Edgar sat in the library talking to Suzanne. I could hear their companionable laughter as I got Gennie into her snow boots while the various wives supervised the lunch. No intimate glances passed between us at lunch.
Then, to the table, he said, “I have two extra opera tickets for Tuesday. Poupette is not coming up. What about you, Suzanne? Roxanne?”
(I knew by now that Edgar’s wife was named Amélie but was called Poupette and preferred staying in the country.)
Suzanne said, “No, no, merci, I have such a week.”
“The American girls, then. Roxeanne and Isabel.” Here he did turn and smile at me, a smile so perfect and avuncular I could almost not remember this was the man who so expertly caressed la foufounette.
“I’ll have to sit at the end of a row, though, no one can get by me.” Roxy laughed, patting her belly.
It crossed my mind to wonder how I would have felt if it had been Roxy and Suzanne to go with Edgar to the opera on Tuesday, his and my consecrated night. When I asked him about that later, regretting the jealous tone that crept into my voice, he said Suzanne was well known to hate opera.
I had never been to an opera, though Roxy had, in Paris. They had operas in California, in Los Angeles at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I had just never been taken to one. This was called Maria Stuarda, about Mary, Queen of Scots, a great heroine for the French, and was held at the Bastille, which is not the building the populace attacked at the time of the Revolution, since they did succeed in tearing that down; this is a sort of whale-shaped glass modern structure, a huge auditorium for operas and dance.
It was thrilling. Edgar and the other men there wore le smoking. It was not the first time I had seen a group of men in evening dress. Proms in high school, for instance; but there the rented suits had looked sort of inappropriately old on boys you saw every day in jeans, their tuxes making them very handsome (I thought at the time) but skinny and sort of geeky too. I was unprepared for the grandeur of grown-up men in evening clothes—jowls, odor of cigar, their portliness, their burliness expressive of their powers, their very presence, their solemn dressed-up attendance at a musical occasion, expressive of their regard for culture and their considerable disposable wealth. Edgar named people we saw: there a socialist presidential candidate, there the current minister of culture, and his predecessor, there a famous dress designer, there the director of the Bastille. It was aphrodisiac to me. Some people (Roxy) are excited by history. For me it was this immediacy of power, this richness not of money but of significance, of opulent testimony to politics. My spine warmed along its length, the music made my throat catch. I even loved the consorts of the famous men, women trim in their pouffy Lacroix lamé dresses, their hair a uniform blond. I am dark, dark. I thought the most beautiful woman there was Roxy, rosy and radiant in a gray silk Mother Hubbard, the only thing she had big enough to wear over her belly. Every man looked at her, I thought envying the man that had got her like that. Perhaps if they didn’t know, they thought it was Edgar. She leaned on his arm on the steps.
“Mes nièces américaines,” he said to Monsieur le Directeur du Cabinet of the Ministry of Culture. “Madame de Persand, Mademoiselle Walker.”
“Américaines, bravo,” said le Directeur to us. “Mes hommages, madame,” making to kiss Roxy’s hand. She looked happy.
If I let myself really think about Roxy, my stomach would still roil with fear at how close she had come, at how she had wanted death, at how this meant I could never again understand her. Irremediable strangeness had come down between Roxy and me, or rather between me and every other human being, for I saw I couldn’t know them, nor they me, and we were all alone, just as Jean-Paul Sartre seemed to be saying in a book of his I was struggling to read, La Nausée, about a man for whom thinking about anything makes him sick.
Edgar shook his head and said, “Read Voltaire, my child, or the maxims of La Rochefoucauld.”
Between the acts something really amazing happened, which would not seem to have any significance except to me, an ordinary civil transaction, a conversation, polite and urbane. I mean—the Directeur of the Ministry of Culture talked to me!
“The mise en scène reminds one of Piranesi,” Roxy said. Edgar was saying that Marie, Queen of Scots, was surely one of the silliest women in history, he hoped not because of her sojourn in France.
“Are you surprised to find the subtitles in English as well as in French, mademoiselle?” asked the Directeur of me. A well-built, youngish, balding man with a Frenchman’s long eyelashes. “What the previous Ministre de la Culture must think of that I cannot imagine,” he went on, lowering his voice and indicating a man standing near. “He is the great architect of linguistic purity in France, the great crusader against English.”
“He has an expression of pain,” I agreed, for the former culture minister had assumed at that instant a look as if he had sat on a pin.
“You must visit the old Palais Garnier while you are here,” my minister said. “We still all love it the best. Still in use for dance, if you care for dance, and soon to be a home to opera again.”
This conversation was remarkable in at least three ways. I felt a flush rise from the neckline of my rather low dress, of surprise, momentary insecurity, and pleasure. One, it meant I had given responses in French convincing enough to make him suppose I could be talked to. Two, Edgar’s friends did not usually speak, beyond bonjour, mademoiselle, to someone so young and assistant-like, meaning I must appear more grown-up, more equal tonight. Three, it was supposed I would have an opinion on the opera, therefore I must be wearing a plausible expression of sentience. I did have an opinion, though I did not deliver it. (I loved, loved, loved the opera.) It was enough to be included in the conversation without any airs of remarkable condescension from Monsieur le Directeur. This was an important psychological moment for me, maybe the first in which I knew I would get along in life. The Directeur went on saying things of this idle sort, an attentive man to a woman, an under-minister of the government of France, in the entracte, at the Opera, in Paris, to Isabel Walker of Santa Barbara—to me!
As we took our seats again, Edgar touched my elbow with an air of practiced possession. I am sure it was involuntary, this proprietary gesture, this brief impulse to claim and steer me, and he quickly withdrew his hand. Probably no one noticed. Did Roxy notice? I didn’t think so. In her happiness—an evening at the opera, ministers, men, enjoying the perquisites of being a de Persand—she had never looked so radiant. You felt that her infant must be benefiting in the womb from some improved condition of her blood, and even, if they can really hear in utero, from the music of Donizetti, confirming human genius and the exuberant promise of life.