The heart has its reasons, that reason will never know.
—Pascal, Pensées
ONE MORE WORD about Roxy’s character, her nature, and mine. People say, have always said, she is too romantic, she is bound to be hurt. As for me, I am practical, I am analytical, and thus “strong,” or so they believe. This has often been confusing to them, for I am also the designated Pretty One, and so am assumed to be kind of dumb, and Roxy, though she is beautiful now, had a long adolescence of plainness and indifference to her looks, and preferred reading and writing to washing her hair, and so has secured the reputation of being smart. I suppose we are both intelligent, actually, but only Roxy gets credit for it.
At first I wondered if this was to be the time, in this crisis, that Roxy’s sentimentality, some defect of softness and illusion, would weigh against her. In the same spot, others (I) would leap from the lifeboat and swim strongly away, but she weakly drifts, confused, out to the fatal sea. It is true that she believed in Charles-Henri and he had hurt her, bewildered her, it was not what she expected, with the second baby due, its room ready, with a little chest for changing it, a blanket folded on top, strange garments ordained in the clinique instructions (belly bands?) readied, and a bright-colored mobile to suspend over its crib.
She had wanted her whole life to live in France. I never understood why. Some instinct, some non-fit, had caused her from childhood to disapprove of the land and city of her birth. The way children believe they are changelings and not the children of their parents, so she believed herself displaced, sprung from another race. Besides the painting of Saint Ursula in her bedroom, she had a photographic poster advertising some costume film, Jules le Grand, of the Place de la Concorde in lamplight, with horse-drawn carriages on a rainy pavement. A romantic, rather banal scene, taken perhaps by someone upstairs in the Meurice Hotel. She also had a little metal Eiffel Tower a junior-high-school friend had brought back from summer travels, symbol of cultural blandishments I the little sister didn’t understand at all.
It goes without saying that she had her junior year abroad, though not in Paris, in Aix-en-Provence. She loved it, though there were so many Americans there that she didn’t make much progress speaking French. All the same, she came home with a pleased, slightly secret look, as if she dared not share with us her new experiences of goose liver and escargots, and sex, which is what I imagined gave her this worldly, satisfied air; but it wasn’t sex, it was her new ability to distinguish between Gothic and Romanesque and to read Paris Match that pleased her. Now she couldn’t find food to suit her in Santa Barbara.
Roxy had met Charles-Henri while hiking with friends in the Pyrenees. He seemed the ideal Frenchman, thin, curly-haired, and fair, always with a sweater or cravat picturesquely knotted around his shoulders or neck, and that resolute insouciance they all have. They corresponded for two years after her return to California; then, when Roxy was in graduate school, he came to visit and charmed all of us—such a good tennis player, taller than a lot of them (as Margeeve observed), and with perfect English. At the time, none of us had ever met a French person. Thus did our dreams for Roxy collude with our general ignorance of the French to approve him uncritically. Yet we were not wrong, he is very, very nice, and not a bad painter, and has behaved, given his initial crime, very well, or if not well at least with a courteous detachment. It is this detachment Roxy finds hardest to bear. Behaved well given the fact that it was he who did the running off, with a married Czech sociologist (which is how we always refer to her, though that is a bit unfair in several ways).
This cultural disloyalty of Roxy’s—where did it come from? Nothing bad had happened to her in America. Why was she more charmed by the idea of Toussaint, for example, than of Halloween? Aren’t they the same? I don’t share her unqualified admiration for all things European. I see plenty that’s wrong. But that’s the curse of my nature. Even as a little girl, I lacked that endearing property of female credulousness.