“Iz, you look great, honey, you look so French!” I didn’t ask what that meant.
We proceeded to Roxy’s apartment. Of course I had underestimated Margeeve; she didn’t hate Roxy’s peeling stairwell as much as I had, but exclaimed enthusiastically about its picturesque qualities and great antiquity.
“This is the
salon
,” Roxy said. “There was a bureau, you know, in the American sense. A chest, but it’s gone to be sold.”
“We know what a bureau is,” Margeeve said.
The empty place over the fireplace seemed to scream at me, but not at Margeeve and Chester. Now they found everything pretty and seemed amazed at seeing Roxy in this new light—Roxy the competent matron,
maîtresse de maison
, in her own realm. The only other time they had visited, Roxy and Charles-Henri were still living in his student apartment.
“Is Gennie at her play school? I hope you can keep her out one day. We want to take her to Disneyland.”
“How much time have you got, Roxy, what does the doctor say?” asked Chester, anxiously regarding Roxy’s swollen form.
“We’ve moved to the Hôtel Saint-Louis, on the Ile Saint-Louis, it’s a cute little place,” Margeeve said. “That’s why we weren’t at the Deux Continents.”
“I’ll make some coffee,” Roxy said, seeming happy to slip into this hostess role, seeming happy to have our parents there at last, seeming happy they could see her in her chosen place, even like this.
“Now start from the beginning,” Chester said, “bring us up to date on the legal things. Roger and Jane get here this afternoon.”
“Keep Roger out of it!” Roxy suddenly screamed. “I don’t want him. Please stop meddling in it, everything is fine.”
“Roxy!” cried Margeeve. “Remember it isn’t only your picture, it’s Chester’s, it’s Roger’s and Isabel’s, it isn’t for you to say. Roger should do what he can.”
“I don’t want you to meddle, just bug out,” she screamed.
So it hit the fan, and only twenty minutes after they got here. I supposed it was just as well that the acrimony should all come out then and there. Roxy cried and stormed, but we could see it would not prevent Roger’s arrival, and the inquiries at law, and a clash with the Persands, and all the other horrors as yet unenumerated. The chasm opened at our feet, then mercifully someone pulled a rug over it.
The rancor, that is, was glossed over quickly by the parents’ evident pleasure to be on vacation in Paris, their delight in Gennie, such a beautiful child, they said, beyond the ability of photos to show—had rotten Roxy taken any photos. We rode together on the 24 bus. “Walking back, we will cross the front of Notre Dame Cathedral,” Roxy told them happily, delighted with the role of Paris tour guide, recovering her composure.
With them there, I could feel myself regressing by the minute, me saying graceless things like “be careful of the pigeon shit.”
“I love it here,” Roxy said, on the bus. “It’s so civilized. And my children are French, of course. I’ll stay; but sometimes I miss California. But then I’m on the bus and I see an old building where d’Artagnan lived. There was really a d’Artagnan and his house is still there! Then I’m so thrilled I don’t care what happens to me here. I’ve loved d’Artagnan since I was eleven.”
“Look at those ridiculous hats,” said Margeeve of the round-hatted soldiers standing on the corner. “French history seems like a long series of ridiculous hats.”
“Who do we have like d’Artagnan, no one,” protested Roxy.
When Chester and Margeeve walked back to their hotel to change for dinner, Chester said, “Margeeve, I’m not looking at this as if it were my painting. You’re missing the whole point. I don’t care about this painting, I wouldn’t recognize the damn thing.”
We had organized their social schedule so tightly they resisted, assuring us they had things touristic and nostalgic they wanted to do, and by no means required us. All the same, there
was to be a dinner at Mrs. Pace’s, and Sunday lunch with the Persands, a reading at the Town Crier, a concert at the American church. Tonight we were all to go to dinner with Roger and Jane at their hotel.
There the same effect of strangeness colored Roger and Jane even more highly than it had Margeeve and Chester, perhaps because they were more fixed in my mind as siblings, not grownups, and now were seen to be solemn, prosperous adults, comfortable in hotels, checked in at the George V, a fancy Californiate hotel on the Avenue George V—I say Californiate, for I still have to keep reminding myself that our hotels are copying them, not the other way around.
I wore my high heels and carried the Kelly. The walls of their room were upholstered in turquoise fabric stretched inside ornate frames, and the TV was hidden in an antiqued armoire. Roger and Jane looked worldly in this surrounding, and I suddenly realized my brother is a hotshot lawyer in a suitable dark suit. I saw that Roger must earn a lot of money.
We had drinks, Roxy insisting on Porto, which only someone French would drink before dinner and she was only doing to make an inconvenience and shock them that, as a
française,
she was not forbidden to drink alcohol during pregnancy. “Let me fill you in about the picture,” Roger said. “I spent the afternoon at the offices of Duncan, Cribbe and Crutcher, the firm representing us here. They had already filed a petition in the French court to enjoin the sale until the American court can rule on its status as marital property. The French court has not yet ruled. Then the French court will have to agree on the jurisdiction, but at least nothing can happen until then. Curious detail—DCC know the husband of the woman Charles-Henri is mixed up with.”
“Magda,” said Roxy.
“Something with EuroDisney, and apparently pissed off beyond belief, not inclined to give her a divorce, but that’s his problem, not ours.”
“You mean the sale isn’t going to happen? Next Friday?” Margeeve asked.
“It’s possible they’ll rule by then, with a stipulation
pending the outcome. Museums often take things under those conditions.”
“Museums?” we said, thunderstruck. This was the first mention of museums, after the dismissive attitude of the Louvre.
“It’s not impossible,” Roger said. “According to what I am told. That a museum might want this picture.” This news seemed especially to thrill Margeeve.
In the dining room, we studied the long and ornate menus.
“Is it okay to drink the tap water here?” asked Jane suddenly.
“Sure, of course, this isn’t Istanbul,” Roxy said, taking this personally, frowning.
“I’d just as soon not get an upset tummy. You’re probably used to it,” Jane snapped.
“Really, it’s okay.”
“Why is everyone drinking bottled water, then?” Jane insisted.
“They think it helps the kidneys or the stomach,” Roxy said. “It’s a health idea. A status thing.”
“Yes? Well, let’s have some bottled,” Jane said warily.
Looking at this family, my family, set off, to be sure, by their best clothes and the luxurious surrounding of the hotel dining room, they didn’t drive me as crazy as they usually did, except for Jane. It was as if the slightly imposing presence of the waiter, the gilded boiseries, the
forêt
of
verres
and
fourchettes
had gilded the family too with a kind of temporary cosmopolitan patina. Even Jane was looking less lady-shrink than usual, in that she usually dresses like Greer Garson as Madame Curie but was now wearing a short-skirted French dress, stockings, hair done, gold necklace—looking French, completely. We can’t be such total hick idiots if two of our number live in Paris, said our glances. I felt better about us all, though the others glared at me for pointing out that a
tourtière
was not a turtle. Of course they were saying to themselves, how would Isabel know? I didn’t point out—how could I—I’d probably been to more fancy French restaurants by now than the rest of them put together.
At the end, Roger, paying the bill, said, “The tip is included.”
“You leave something anyhow,” I said.
“No. That’s the whole point of having the tip included, I think it’s a very rational system,” Roger said.
“Maybe twenty francs,” Roxy agreed with me.
“Fuck it, fifteen percent has already been added,” Roger said.
“Maybe in a simple place, you add, Isabel, but here, when you’ve already paid a fortune for dinner . . .” said Margeeve.
“Nearly seven hundred dollars, if I may say so,” Roger said, his voice trembling a little.
“I have some tens.” Roxy scrambled in her purse and gave three
dix-franc
coins to me. I put them on the little plate with the bill. Roger’s jaw clenched, and Chester looked embarrassed. I knew Edgar would leave about a hundred francs in these circumstances, but who would listen to me?
Whoever you may be, never discuss with another the interests of your own heart; the heart alone can plead its own cause and plumb the depths of its own wounds.
—Adolphe
“I
T IS
I, the renegade Charlotte,” said Charlotte de Persand Saxe over the telephone in tones of great gaiety, late Friday afternoon. Chester and Margeeve had gone with Roxy to the crèche, to be introduced as
responsables
authorized to pick up Gennie.
“Roxy isn’t here,” I said. “How are you? Are you in Paris?”
“I am calling
you
. I am here, on my way to Lyon. I thought maybe if you had time for a coffee? I thought, you could tell me the family news.”
This was surprising, since I would be the least informed of anyone in the family, the most unable to distinguish discord from lively discourse, say in discussions at the table. For instance, I still did not really understand how things stood with Charlotte and her husband Bob. What had been, surely, a sexual scandal—her “liaison,” as Suzanne had put it, with an Englishman—had now subsided to some mythology about “Charlotte’s job in London.” Bob appeared from time to time at Sunday lunch, and the children were often there. I had even stopped holding anything against Charlotte about the cat (Roxy had
not), because I assumed I had somehow missed the explanation. In a way, I was getting used to being slightly out of it, and it was restful, I suppose like being deaf, where the wits can wander in inner reflection.
We met in the Vues de Notre Dame. “It is difficult being in London,” she sighed, lighting another cigarette seconds after stubbing out the first, and pouting flirtatiously at the waiter. It seemed to me her hair was paler, and she had gained a pound or two. “The English have so little sense of
plaisir
, and it is so gray there. But the work is interesting. I miss the children, but they are coming on their holidays. How is your French getting along?”
She had heard that our parents had arrived. She had heard about developments concerning Saint Ursula. She too deplored Antoine’s interference, and she worried about Charles-Henri.
Then, abruptly, she said, her eyes on me, “My aunt is coming to lunch on Sunday.” At first I didn’t understand, and my blankness must have showed, for she leaned forward.
“My uncle Edgar’s wife, my aunt Amélie. The family is in an uproar, you know.”
Had she been sent to tell me that her family knew about me and Edgar? What was I supposed to do? Blood drained from my head, so that at first I blurted, “Do you think—do you think they’ll say anything to my parents?” It was just something to say. I didn’t care what they said to my parents, I couldn’t shock my parents. It was I who was shocked.
Here I had been thinking about her, and about Roxy and Charles-Henri. Now I had a sensation that was like the moment in the surf when you have been borne to shore, the wave behind you lifting and buoying you up, when all at once the sea withdraws, the sand beneath you changes direction, water sucks you back, scrapes you over the sharp backs of shells, the firm bottom is gone. At this moment, the rich warm tide of French life turned, or, to change the metaphor, like a film running backward, I suddenly saw a jumble of images, of foie gras and buses, musical concerts in medieval churches, the windows of chocolate shops like museums, lacy G-string bikinis—all these things
running backward pulling me back toward the beach-bunny movie that had been my life in the Santa Barbara reel.
All would be lost. The scenes I had been dreading—Margeeve and Chester finding out about how ill Roxy had been—were not the scenes I should have been dreading. My own life was to be ruined.
Was it Edgar I regretted? It seemed so, the man himself, whom I loved and who loved me as long as it didn’t get too disruptive and attract the scrutiny (amused? irate?) of his sister and wife and nieces and nephews. . . . Even in a panic I did not think, I did not make the mistake of thinking later, when I went over and over this conversation in my mind, that Edgar would fight for me or disrupt his life. No, I knew my place. I was a simple one-celled animal, the au pair girl, the junior player, without protection. I would be discarded. I knew that.
I hoped otherwise, of course.
“At first I thought, very strange, then I thought, not so strange,” Charlotte continued, lowering her voice still further. “My uncle has a bad reputation, you know. I suppose he is attractive, but very old, surely?”
Scenes flashed before me. The elderly man and young woman in a restaurant. He is handsome, well tailored, slightly florid, distinguished silver hair, perhaps slightly stout, hands lightly raddled. He is known, people look toward him trying to remember where they have seen him. Young smiling woman with him, neat in dark suit, hair knotted like a ballerina’s on the nape of her neck. Long neck, good nose, good profile, ladylike. Expensive bag. Up close, they would be heard discussing Prokofiev. They have been to the ballet. People looking couldn’t know that she is wearing stockings instead of pantyhose, held up with frilly black ribbon garters, and blue lace underwear, the
artillerie de nuit
he will help her wriggle out of later, when he will kiss, caress
la foufoune
, she will kiss, caress
la bite
, they will pass a sweaty, satisfying hour, but they will not skip dessert now; he is having
salade d’agrumes
, she is having
clafoutis
.
Are they in love? No one would think anything of the kind in any case, from their airy laughter. Perhaps each has a different definition. The young woman believes him wise, witty, paternal,
worldly, cultivated, and a great lover. She believes he is the key to her future, though how this mechanism of fate might operate, she could not say. His power over her is not why she loves him. She usually dislikes people with power over her, even sexual power. She wants to be the one to have it. But he has sexual power too. It is not that she is passive, but that he has the ideas and dictates the rhythm. He is a sensualist and can teach that. She was always kind of grab-it-and-go, before. He has focus. For instance, when he focuses on the area of thigh between the top of the stocking and
la foufoune
itself, on that little crease at the top of the leg, it is as if he had never touched, kissed, admired that particular landscape before, never seen something so alluring.
Is he in love with her? She doesn’t know. He says it is a pleasure of his time of life to be attentive to the things he has always valued but not had the leisure to take slowly. These intense treats following upon
quenelles de brochet
,
sauce Nantua
and
nougatine glacée
,
coulis de framboise
, the music of Prokofiev, the thrilling bodies of the dancers, become inseparable, dance a kind of orgasm, dinner a forepleasure, the whole a kind of addiction. Did you have a good time in Paris, Isabel? Yes, I had a great, great time in Paris.
I realized I could still fail to understand the words “my aunt is coming to lunch.” I could stonewall this. But I wanted to tell Charlotte, I love him! Feeling the words rise to my teeth was for me almost the first time I had thought them even to myself. Charlotte’s perfume and cigarette smoke dizzied me. I might, right there, have cast myself on Charlotte and said, What shall I do? If I did that, I might have had one ally at least, though a weak one, Charlotte herself the flake in her family. But I didn’t have the presence of mind, all was blotted out with dread of that lunch on Sunday, and, as I say, with the sensation of horrified loss, like watching your diamond ring go down the sink and nothing to be done.
When, later, I thought about what we did, how we laughed, those dinners, those discussions of Joubert, I could see that our love had a tangible, precious history of its own, and was part of
his history too, like a piece of valuable family silver—and hope crept back.
But at this moment, with Charlotte, another part of me defiantly thought, Am I not a fighter? Isn’t that the American way? Am I just supposed to be terrified by Suzanne, and Edgar’s wife, and meekly go away? And at the same time I thought, I must be crazy, nothing has even happened yet, just calm down.
So I changed my tack. “I think Monsieur Cosset is a great man,” I admitted. “You know I go to a lot of his meetings? I hope no one thinks there’s anything wrong with that? I totally believe he is the only person doing anything about Bosnia. He thinks that France should intervene and so should the U.S. . . .”
This threw Charlotte a little, I could see her reviewing her English. What was I saying here? There was a silence.
“We haven’t met Madame Cosset, or maybe Roxy has,” I went on. “I do admire Monsieur Cosset your uncle.”
“She will be there on Sunday,” Charlotte repeated. “
Moi
, I go to Lyon, I am sorry not to meet your parents.”
In my mind I was screaming, “I love him. I will not give him up.” To Charlotte I said, “It’ll be nice to meet your aunt.”