26

One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.

—La Rochefoucauld

THOUGH I WAS happy that night, my low spirits persisted. I had begun to mind that this was the longest I had ever been away from my family, perhaps I was actually missing them—hence this sadness and emptiness I was feeling more and more, filled only by Edgar—sex and dinner, the eternal compact by which he offered counsel and reassuring encouragement, he stroking my hair, I parting my legs.

Charles-Henri was coming now on Saturdays to pick up Gennie. He took her to the country, then would deliver her on Sunday to Chartres, where we would pick her up at lunch. Roxy managed never to see him on either day. I would get Gennie ready on Saturdays, he would be gone by the time we got to Chartres. Roxy had seen him only three times since the day he left: when he accidentally came to Sunday lunch on my first day at Chartres, and at the first meeting with the lawyer, and in the hospital. They did speak on the telephone, but in French, things to do with Gennie’s schedule. I could always tell by the tight bitterness of Roxy’s voice, a slight whine in it, that it was he.

I suppose I’ll have a baby someday, but for now it seems like a good way to bring down some man’s hate on you. You have done something to him, deprived him of some youthful happiness and autonomy. And of course he has done the same to you. I have noticed no one ever wants to give their babies back, but they aren’t so happy afterward, either, like Roxy.

I talked to Charles-Henri several times after our meeting in the Vues de Notre Dame, and he was pleasant, but distant. The drama of his life lay elsewhere for him now, you could tell, with Magda Tellman and his painting. He didn’t seem to care about details of the settlement, was leaving it all to Antoine and Maître Doisneau. I suppose that blithe spirits and an indifference to material reality are an irritation in a husband, but they were what was nice about Charles-Henri, and though I officially hated him for being so cruel to Roxy, I liked him actually, and half hoped he would be happy.

The French lawyers did not consider Stuart Barbee’s valuation of Saint Ursula reliable, and had agreed that each side should have an independent appraisal of Roxy and Charles-Henri’s property. I gathered that if the two appraisals did not agree, the court would look at them, but if they did, the divorce would go ahead with the understanding that the finances had been worked out.

The French appraisers came in mid-November, Antoine de Persand with them. Roxy refused to be there, so I had to let them in and hear their murmurs without understanding much of what they said. Antoine was friendly but didn’t translate what the experts were saying. To me, he said, “Isabel, ça va? This is a nasty business, isn’t it?”

“Très jolie, superbe,” said a mustached man of the chest of drawers. This was good, because if he put a high value on it, it could offset the painting; Roxy could just give up the Persand chest and keep the Walker painting. They looked at Roxy’s dishes, at the table and ordinary household objects like the television and rugs, including Roxy’s bedroom rug where I could discern, though they probably could not, the rusty tinges of rinsed-away blood. Several times they returned to the chest, pulled out the drawers, hunted for a signature.

“Ce n’est pas signée,” remarked one. I guessed that was bad, meant less valuable than if it had been.

Another man altogether came, from the Louvre, to look at the picture, and shook his head. “Ecole de La Tour. It is not of interest to us.” Hearing him say this, I felt aggrieved in spite of myself, at this denigration of our saint, and because this meant the sale could go ahead at auction. The Louvre did not want it, and so would not impede an export license, opening the way for buyers outside of France—Japanese, for instance, or American.

It was here, on the day the Louvre man came, that I have to admit I spoke up to Antoine, words just blaring out, surprising even me. “It’s so tacky, Charles-Henri taking Roxy’s picture. She doesn’t want anything of his, she wouldn’t take something from him that he’d had since he was little.”

Antoine was startled, and I judged (with satisfaction) annoyed or stung, and surprised. The Louvre man, a Monsieur Desmond, looked hurriedly away, staring at the picture with the rapt visual attention of a deaf person. I kept on.

“It’s not bad enough that he should dump her when she’s pregnant, he takes her property too. Also, you would think he would want his children to have the furniture and picture someday, not some stranger buying them. He’s just being a terrible shit, or he’s getting bad advice.”

“Charles-Henri has left this up to me,” Antoine said, slowly.

“You, then, are being a terrible shit,” I said.

I guess I was as surprised as Antoine that, not counting what Roxy and Charles-Henri might have said to each other, the first words of bitterness between our two families should have come from me, and after all this time. I know it sounds Californian if I say I believed we ought to let them know how we felt. How I felt. Until now they could even have thought we did not mind. Antoine was shamed into silence, I guess.

Nevertheless, the painting, the bureau, the dining-room table and some engravings were taken off to Drouot, the auction house, by a commissaire-priseur. Now that there was no chance of Roxy keeping her picture, it was necessary to switch to hoping that everything would sell as well as possible so that there would be as much money as possible to split. Meanwhile Roger had had an idea that might perhaps work: He and I were to sue Roxy and Charles-Henri, who because they were not yet divorced could be sued as a couple, thus encumbering the picture with legal difficulties and enjoining a sale. Roxy was enthusiastic about this idea. It would be a weird situation, me living companionably with Roxy while suing her, and her egging it on.

In the meantime, Drouot would be putting Saint Ursula in a catalogue, and so on, to be sold with other pictures of its genre, when enough had been collected, at a date as yet unscheduled. With an agreement in place about splitting the proceeds of an auction, the divorce could proceed without waiting for the sale.

“Don’t sell these little bits of faience,” the commissaire-priseur had told Roxy, who was there when they came. “You won’t get much for them, and they’re awfully pretty,” he said. “You’d do better to keep them.”

“Tell that to my husband,” Roxy sniffed.

Drouot, the auction place, feeling that Saint Ursula would slot nicely into a sale already scheduled of northern French painting, which was to take place within the month, decided to prepare a brochure to be sent to those who had already received the finished catalogue. They expected Saint Ursula to sell well, and had stipulated a reserve of eighty thousand dollars. At that figure, Roxy knew she would never be able to buy out Charles-Henri. Roxy called Margeeve and Chester and pleaded with them for a loan of forty thousand, but of course they were just floored.

It was horrible, the gap left by the absent furniture when it was gone, the reproachful bareness, the articulate void telling of failure. I continued to sting and seethe as much or more than Roxy about the total injustice of them taking Saint Ursula. Her enhanced value introduced a new element of cupidity and greed into the normal rancor of divorce. This I could mention to Edgar, though I still had not told him about Roxy slitting her wrists.

“Women are too protected from the consequences of their actions,” he said. “It always shocks them when there are consequences.” Is this true? He meant, Roxy must have known that by taking a piece of property off to France, she was subjecting it to French law. But this doesn’t address the total wickedness of the Persands ignoring that it was in our family, that it belongs to more people than just Roxy, that it means a lot to us and nothing to them, and so on. I said all this. He shrugged. There is a Gallic shrug. There is a French attitude to laws about property.

“You make a moral argument about Bosnia but deny the force of a moral argument in the family.”

“What I say about Bosnia is a pragmatic argument from history,” he said. “We are not going to quarrel, you and I, chérie, about Roxeanne’s canapé and an ugly saint.”

“You’ll talk about sex but not about money,” I objected.

“Of course—I am French,” he said. “You Americans are always getting everything backward.”

 

Edgar would attend a meeting every couple of weeks or so, sometimes more often, gatherings held usually in a city hall or church hall, indistinguishable from the same beige, metal-chaired institutions in America. There were often roundtable discussions, four or five men from the area, Edgar, sometimes a woman, discussing issues of politics and public policy. Of course I didn’t understand most of what was said, but the themes began to clarify themselves. These were: the lessons of history, and the role of religious conviction. I gradually came to understand that Edgar was religious, at least officially, believed in God and the Catholic religion, in a not preoccupied but nonetheless sincere way.

At first I was shocked by this. In California, you wouldn’t go out with anyone openly religious, because someone who talks about God automatically comes across as a hypocrite. But there was also the French hypocrisy, if that is the word—or inconsistency is a better one—in believing in a religion and conducting this rather unconcerned adultery. I brought up this issue in a general way with Mrs. Pace, without mentioning Edgar and me.

“Well, their piety is more evolved,” said Mrs. Pace. “In America we have only two forms, as Matthew Arnold said: the bitter and the smug. In France, it appears, there is a third type, the worldly.”

“The genuine?” I wondered.

“I suppose they are all genuine. Bitterness is always genuine. And there is nothing so fervently genuine as the sense of being right. Smugness, autrement dit. Why not worldly but genuine?”

(Edgar himself, on this subject, quoted Molière:

 

God, it is true, doth some delights condemn,

But ’tis not hard to come to terms with Him.)

 

My soul, just now, was gripped with these very afflictions of bitterness and a sense of being right. I had never felt more American. I had a fight with Yves about it. He had a strange view of American history. He saw it as all controlled by J. Edgar Hoover. “He had something on everyone in Washington, and they had to ask him if it was all right for Kennedy to run,” he explained. “He also picked Eisenhower. He was a homosexual, so he was paranoid. He was scared of Bobby Kennedy, though, so he had him executed.

“There are people here who want America to control France,” he said. “They want us to watch cartoons and they want to paint Disney things all over, and we’re all supposed to drink Coca.”

“No one makes you, you just do,” I objected. “I wouldn’t watch cartoons myself, how come you do?”

“You have an immunity to it, from growing up on it. Here it just sweeps through, like measles through the Amazon.” How weird to be culturally menaced by a Disney movie, I thought; I can think of more invidious things than that.

“The French are just cultural pushovers,” I said.

“Americans smile too much,” he said. “You smile too much.” After that I tried to cut down on smiles.

Early in December, about two weeks before Roxy’s due date, which was also the scheduled date of the Drouot sale, an irony that Roxy would call attention to, we got a call from Margeeve and Chester. They were making reservations and would be here in a week. Would we arrange a hotel and let them know the address, nothing too dumpy, but not too expensive either; Margeeve suggested the Deux Continents, remembered from a trip years ago.

Our emotions were mixed, Roxy’s and mine. Mine at least were mixed with pleasure at the prospect of seeing them (of them seeing me, with my new French phrases, nail polish, demure ballerina hairdo). Are we alone among American daughters in feeling fond of our parents? From my reading, I gather it to be the case. I felt pleasure and dread. I dreaded what they would say when they found out about Roxy’s illness (for this is how I had come to think of it), I dreaded their inevitable outrage at her situation, and the hell they would raise about losing the painting. I dreaded an escalation of emotions and conflict. I dreaded what they would say to me. I felt pleasure and dread; Roxy claimed to feel nothing but dread, mostly because of Roger.

They had added that Roger was coming, with Jane, removing any possibility that they saw this trip as a friendly, supportive visit. They were coming to make war, or at least legal trouble, or, as they probably saw it, justice. They would not leave their child to the vagaries of foreign law, or the antique institutions of male privilege.

“Does Gennie have her own passport? An American one, I mean?” Margeeve asked. “She should have that.” I considered this an ominous question. Perhaps they planned to kidnap Gennie?

Roxy and I had no need to say anything to each other, though I was aware of certain unsaid misapprehensions I let stand. For instance, I hadn’t told Roxy that I hadn’t told Margeeve and Chester about her suicide attempt. Perhaps she would be glad, but perhaps she wanted them to know, wanted someone in charge to know.

 

I don’t like to ask favors from people—it never turns out, and they always hate you afterward—but I had always felt Suzanne de Persand’s goodwill, and with Roxy’s new depression and the ominous arrival of Roger, I could see that the time had come to talk to her. I thought she might help. She liked me well enough. To Roxy her attitude was more complicated, ex-wife of her favorite son, foreigner, etc., even though, given all this, she had been resolutely supportive, no doubt with the aim above all of keeping in touch with Gennie and the new baby no matter what happened.

To me she had been genuinely friendly, and seemed to feel the difficulties of my situation, coming in on this family turmoil, not speaking French, no prospects in life, etc. Like Mrs. Pace she seemed to feel an urge to polish me up, though where Mrs. Pace would directly criticize my clothes or tell me my gloves were dirty, Suzanne employed the powers of praise and encouragement. (“Your hands are so pretty when you wear nail polish, Isabel,” or “How amazingly long your legs are in high-heeled shoes, Isabel.”) Yes, I had a pair of gloves now, and a pair of fuck-me shoes. On the day I went to see Suzanne, I was wearing all this gear, which I had worn to lunch with Mrs. Pace at a restaurant we had gone to (Pierre Traiteur, where I let her think I’d never been before. I’d ordered oeufs à la neige. Mrs. Pace said, “I think you’ll find they pronounce it euff à la neige, Isabel.”).

After lunch I picked up Gennie and took her to the Avenue Wagram for her weekly visit to her grandmother. This was my chance to explain to Suzanne about Roxy’s fragility. I told Suzanne that Roxy was taking the sale of the picture very hard, talked about how it was bad for her condition, and said that I thought the sale should be delayed. Or could I myself undertake a promise to pay for it, over a period of years? Or maybe the two families should get together when Margeeve and Chester got here (I did not mention Roger) and talk the whole matter over?

“You and I should not become involved in these property issues, Isabel,” Suzanne said. “The sooner it is over with, the better. The lawyers will work it all out. I’m sure Roxeanne is upset, but it won’t affect her pregnancy.”

“I’m afraid my brother might get involved,” I insisted, wanting to add, you don’t know Roger. “My brother the lawyer. It just seems too bad to get everyone hysterical, I’ve never had the feeling that Charles-Henri would care if things were worked out some other way.”

Suzanne shrugged. “Poor Charles. He has a league of troubles. The husband of his petite amie is very unpleasant, you know, Roxeanne’s lawyers are very determined, and now there is your brother—alors. Dare we say these are the wages of sin?”

I longed to tell her the truth: Roxy wanted to die, that has to be thought of. But shame prevented me, and the fear I would be betraying my sister, and thus my family, by revealing the weakness, the great failure of nerve in Roxy. It was maybe even something that they could use against her, say to take Gennie away.

Suzanne had shown no interest in the legal arrangements between Charles-Henri and Roxy, but I suppose it should not have surprised me that financially prudent French people—Suzanne, even Edgar—would be reluctant to concede something that would lose them money—money for the French side, you could say. Then she said something else. What Suzanne said next opened up everything for me:

“It is a French picture, after all,” she said. As if pictures had nationalities! A French picture. I was shocked. I could see that a museum director might have to decide a picture’s nationality, in order to put it in one room or another, the Italian or the French room, the sixteenth- or the seventeenth-century room, according to the arbitrary systems of classification museums use. But Suzanne meant that Roxy had no claim to the picture that had scowled down from her girlhood on the gum wrappers and litter of barrettes on her dresser just because, some centuries ago, way before there was an America, the person who painted it had lived, maybe, in the same general region where people from whom Suzanne was descended had also lived, maybe. This terrible idea gave me a glimpse into the stupid Serbs, crazed Irishmen, all those moronic brutes in the Balkans, all those fanatic Arabs in their identical costumes, all deranged by this really limiting idea, the dismal, lazy-minded habit of nationality, and I saw that I would never understand it. Maybe I had some sort of crude New-World mentality that prevented me from seeing the charm of belonging to any nation at all. Moreover, in Suzanne’s eyes I might as well be a Japanese, carting off her Renoirs and Boulle cabinets to put in my paper house across the sea. (“I have heard the houses in California are made of wood!” Charlotte had once said to me, brightly exclaiming over this curiosity.)

Even Edgar was not above nationality, for though he deplored the divisions of Serb, Croat, and Muslim in the former Yugoslavia, it was to French patriotism or French self-interest he was appealing, in trying to get France to step in and break it up. Later, also, when we discussed the painting, he disagreed with me.

“If places were divested of the qualities that distinguish them, as expressed by the artifacts they produce, there would be no way of telling Dubrovnik from Detroit,” he said. So to him it did matter where something came from.

“Besides, Saint Ursula came from Austria or maybe Britain,” I said. I resolved then and there with Suzanne that even though I was American, a member of a nation, and thus couldn’t help but be afflicted by all those limitations other people saw as “American,” I was going to ditch the curse of nationality and not think of myself as anything at all.

Suzanne gave me another cup of tea, in her thin cups with little gold fleurs de lys around the rim. This was the moment when her eye fell upon my Kelly bag, which I had never taken to Chartres on Sundays. Sometimes you see someone see something, see the light of understanding, shock, ripple their lids. What she understood, or saw in the Kelly, I didn’t know, but I could tell that my handsome, caramel-colored handbag registered, and that more than raising a question like “What is Isabel doing with an expensive bag like that?” it seemed to explain something for her.

She tightened her mouth into a little precise smile, and when she told me goodbye, I thought her tone had become cold. She was patting the breast of her pretty navy suit as if she had had some shock and was trying to fan her heart. I supposed she must be thinking the purse must have come from a man, and I was not the nice jeune fille she had thought me. Well, that was true. I was used to people realizing that.

“How nice for you to see your parents after all these months,” said Suzanne tightly. “They arrive on Wednesday? You must bring them to lunch next Sunday, to Chartres.”