Le Divorce

38

AT EURODISNEY, I knew nothing of any of this, for no one revealed it. I wanted to try to understand the strange day by myself, and so I decided, with Tellman’s complimentary pass, to try the food at the Disneyland Hotel. In the somewhat heavy-handed charm of the Victorian dining room, I ordered dinner and thought about things. It was a wide-ranging reverie about making love to Edgar in Zagreb, getting rich from Saint Ursula, and wondering what would happen if Magda Tellman died. If she died, I supposed Charles-Henri would come back to Roxy, and that would set me free.

Looking back, this seems rather callous, but I just wasn’t ready to go home to the others yet. Thus, eating blanquette de veau and drinking a half bottle of Côtes du Rhône at Disneyland, I missed the distressing scene when Suzanne and Margeeve brought Gennie back to the rue Maître Albert and learned from Anne-Chantal the news about Charles-Henri, only hearing it myself about ten when I came home. The police at EuroDisney had not known about the death at 12 rue Maître Albert.

When I got to the rue Maître Albert, Roxy’s lights were dark. I climbed the stairs to the garret without stopping. There was a note on my door to say they had all gone to the Avenue Wagram. This was puzzling, but not necessarily ominous. Perhaps, I thought, Suzanne had proposed dinner for her heroic band of erstwhile hostages. I went down to Roxy’s and called my parents’ hotel, though, to make sure they weren’t there, and they were not. Then I decided to telephone Edgar—it was he I wanted to talk to anyway, so I went back down to Roxy’s apartment and sat in the dark living room.

“Ah, Isabel, how are you?” he said.

“I’m okay. Has anyone told you about today?”

“Which part of the day? The Serbs have resumed shelling Sarajevo. My sister was held hostage for seven hours by a crazed American in the Disneyland theme park, then there is the small matter of the murder of my nephew.”

“Who?” I cried with sudden horror, seeing that it would be Charles-Henri, of course.

“Charles-Henri. Shot three times in the chest and left to die in the poubelles at Maître Albert.”

I don’t know what I said. It was clear enough. Tellman had killed Charles-Henri, and tried to kill Magda.

“At first, naturally,” continued Edgar, in the same dry, almost angry tone, “the police suspected Roxeanne. I spoke to the Commissaire. But the injured Magda had crawled from her cottage to the Spectorama warehouse by the motorway and found help. She told her story. Her husband had shot her.”

“My God,” I said, thinking, poor Roxy, poor Charles-Henri, how stupid. Tellman a murderer, he might have killed the children after all. I even thought, poor Magda, maybe Charles-Henri was the love of her life, does anyone care about poor Magda? Does anyone believe in love? I felt like crying, but it was all too strange for tears.

“Mon Dieu,” Edgar said. “What a world!” he cried in the bitterest tone. “The red and the black—who would have thought the black would so quickly supplant the red?”

I think he may have been talking about Bosnia. “May I come over?” For I wanted to be in his arms.

“Non, chérie, I am just going to the Avenue Wagram. Suzanne is very distraught. Your parents are there, I think.”

“I’ll see you there, then, I guess.”

I heard a noise and turned around in the dark living room, startled to find Roxy had been standing in the doorway of her bedroom.

“They’re over at Suzanne’s,” she said.

“Roxy, how horrible, I didn’t hear, I didn’t realize you were here. I just got here, I . . .” I began. “I’ll stay with you.”

“I made them go. I wanted to be alone,” she said. “They took Gennie over there. I’ve taken some sleeping stuff. Supposedly not harmful to fetuses. I’m going to sleep.”

“Roxy, my God,” I tried to say again, but of course there was nothing to say: sorrow, pity, shock. The way life can turn around in a minute, you never know. “It was the husband, that guy Tellman. . . .”

“I know, I heard. I think they thought it was me,” she said. Her voice was drugged, bemused and sad.

“You can’t be alone! I’ll stay here.”

“I’ll go to sleep in a minute. I couldn’t go with them. I made them go. Iz, there’s something—I feel as though I killed Charles-Henri. But I can’t ever tell them.” From her face, I saw that she did think that. Her eyes were the strange sleepless eyes of Lady Macbeth.

I didn’t know what idea had gotten into her drugged brain. Of course she hadn’t killed him; Roxy could not be blamed for this. Think of her unwavering loyalty to Charles-Henri, her resistance to divorce, the little pledge of his love so soon to be born—not even the Persands could blame her. I made her go back to bed. I felt tender toward her, and full of pity.

When she was lying down, she grabbed my arm and hissed at me, “I wish I was a hard-hearted, cold person like you, Isabel. You always have everything the way you want it. Maybe someday you’ll suffer too, but I doubt it. But I don’t hate you. I used to, I think, but . . .” Whereupon her eyelids fluttered closed, and she had drifted off into some kind of stoned sleep.

I was shocked, but part of me was not surprised she thought these things. I wondered if they were the bitter reflections of the sad moment or the secrets of her unconscious.

Of course I couldn’t leave her alone. I thought it was strange that the others had left her. I sat on the sofa in the dark, burning to go to Edgar.

It was only a few minutes before someone rang the doorbell.

“Ames,” he said, and I buzzed him in.

“How is she?” he asked, his usually smirky face transformed by love and concern. All at once I saw the nice side of Ames, like a mirror reflecting backward on a hundred other instants, things he had told me and guided me in. His excellent cooking and his responsible dog ownership and reputation for charity.

“I talked to her a half hour ago, and she told me she was alone. How could they have left her alone?”

“She probably made them. People don’t cross Roxy.”

“I’m staying with her. I came over to stay with her.”

“Could you, Ames?” I said. The limitations of my judgments about people became clearer all the time. “I’d like to go be with my mother and Suzanne. Did you hear about what happened to them?”

I had plenty of time on the metro to the Avenue Wagram (two changes) to wonder what Roxy had meant when she said she used to hate me, but I didn’t take it seriously and put it out of my mind. I was too stunned.

In Suzanne’s big Haussmannian apartment, Suzanne, her tear-stained face resolutely smiling, seated, surrounded by her eldest son, Frédéric, Antoine and Trudi, Charlotte and Bob, Chester and Margeeve, an unexplained man perhaps from the police, Roger and Jane, a doctor called Monsieur Quelquechose, Roxy’s lawyer Maître Bertram, and another man, talking to him, who could have been the Persands’ lawyer. And Edgar. I saw my father looking covertly at him as Edgar bent over Suzanne’s chair to talk to her. Altogether a scene of great animation. An atmosphere of resolution and courage, Gennie in bed already, a discussion with Jane of sleeping pills for Suzanne, Antoine trying to get Monsieur de Persand on the telephone somewhere in Poland, Paul-Louis and Marie-Odile huddled on cushions on the floor. Edgar turned to look at me when I came in, it seemed with a more acknowledged familiarity, or maybe I was imagining that.

Later, when I went into the kitchen to make tea, he came in. His voice was low.