Le Divorce (29 page)

O bizarre suite d’événements! Comment cela ’ est-il arrivé? Pourquoi ces choses et non pas d’autres?

—Beaumarchais,
Le Mariage de Figaro

L
IKE A BADLY
edited film, the montage of ensuing events was hard to follow, so rapidly and incoherently did it unfold, so badly did I understand the muttered French, the air of urgence and importance with which the men climbed out, and got back in the cars, unlocked and prepared their guns, spoke over their radios. We drove along the service road where Tellman had told me to take the Opel. Two other cars crawled slowly behind us, and two were waiting at the rear of a different landscape, trees fancifully pruned, delineating arrival in Fantasyland. The sugary, pointed pink and blue towers of the castle projected above the trees. Most of the visitors to Fantasyland had now donned yellow slickers with pictures of Mickey Mouse on them, bought from the souvenir store in expectation of the rain that had been threatening. A few drops fell. I didn’t see Margeeve or Gennie, or Tellman. “I think they are in the tower,” I told the gendarmes. “When I left, they were going there.”

“Does he still have the gun?”

“Gun? I didn’t see a gun,” I said. “
Je n’ai pas vu
—a gun.” What was the word?

I hoped he didn’t have one. I knew he was volatile. The fact of his craziness came over me in hindsight—his grip on my arm, the sweat on his forehead. And now he had Gennie. How had I gone off like that, with such docility, leaving her there? Margeeve, Suzanne, left with a crazy person. The gendarmes frowned, they were grim.

I began to understand the story from what they told each other. He was an American, he had tried to kill his wife but had not succeeded. She had managed to crawl to a neighbor, she had managed to tell them he was crazy and that he had a gun. She might die, was expected to die. Thus he was a murderer. They looked at me, as if watching for my reaction. Was I his girlfriend, in on the plot? American, they said. Gun-crazy, he had shot her, but she didn’t die. Not yet. “You are the
petite amie
?”

“Your boyfriend,” they said to me. “You are going to call out to him.” But they wouldn’t let me get out of the car. From there, I thought I saw Tellman’s malevolent eye looking out of the window of the tower, but it could have been a cardboard pirate too. The police surrounded the tower and herded the people in yellow slickers away, families and mothers with strollers, herded them toward Peter Pan’s Flight, saying that the Pirates were closed now, shooing them all away.

“Dumbo, Dumbo est ouvert!”
someone cried.
“Dumbo est ouvert!”
The tourists rushed off toward the Dumbo ride.

“He is American? He speaks English? Does he speak French? Do the ladies speak French?” One of the policemen asked me this, in heavily accented English. I explained again who they were. I didn’t even try to explain who he was: my sister’s former husband’s lover’s former husband. Had he really tried to kill Magda?

I told them about my mother, my sister’s mother-in-law, my three-year-old niece being in there, two other little kids. I wondered if they were scared, I wondered if they really were even in there, and whether he would hurt them. Even if he had hurt Magda, why would he hurt them?

Once I thought I heard a wailing far off that could be Gennie. I tried to be a blank, I tried not to think, but I also had to think what to do. I had to pee horribly. Maybe that is an
effect of fear. Fear plus a powerful and inappropriate ennui. It seemed we had been sitting there for hours. I almost wished something would happen but nothing did.

“Let me call to my mother,” I said.

“Allez-y,”
said the gendarme, pushing me out of the car. “Stand here, no closer, I am going to give you a microphone.”

They fussed with a large megaphone on a cord, then held it in front of me. When I cleared my voice, a great cough ricocheted among the towers of the Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant.

“Margeeve,” I called, my voice booming back at my ears. Nobody answered. Maybe she wasn’t in there.
“Encore,”
somebody said. I called again, but when no one answered they put me back in the car.

I am sitting in this police Renault at the opening of the service road. A young gendarme waits with me. I am rigid with unanswered questions: Are they waiting to know if I can be a help some way? Do they think I am involved? Why can’t I go up closer, where the others, men wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, have assembled? This is not per se terrifying, since the French police often dress that way for very casual riots along the Boulevard Saint Germain. But the air now is of a situation, of a crisis, of grave crime. Other men in ordinary suits arrive, I take them to be Americans, who stand unarmed and unprotected and shout up at the teeny mullioned fairy-tale windows: “Yo, Doug. Doug, it’s all right, man. Talk to these people.” I am sure I hear a distant wailing that could be Gennie.

The yellow slickers have drifted back from Dumbo and form an outer circle beyond the reach of the police. Dogs are brought. Two German shepherds. The crowd parts respectfully to let them and their handlers through. The dogs watch the tower too. Why?

“Yo, Doug, this isn’t the way, man. Come on out. No one will shoot.”

“Send out the little girl, Doug. You don’t need more trouble. And the women.”

And one of them said, “We’ve got the young woman, Doug.” Was that me?

Knots of French police conferred with new Americans in EuroDisney security cars. I looked at my watch: eleven in the morning.

Noon. One. At one-thirty, in acutest misery, I explained that I had to use the toilet. The young man got out of the car and came back with a policewoman. From this I figured that I was somehow in custody and not to go anywhere alone. I wasn’t worried, I was innocent of everything and had friends—did I not?—in high places. But it was odd and confers a queer sense of importance to be in custody. I could not see that any sign had been seen of Doug Tellman. There was much milling around. For some reason I wasn’t really scared about Margeeve and the others; it was too unlikely, too unbelievable, too like a fantasy drama enacted to suit the place. It was as if, when you are involved in a drama of the heart, real events have no significance.

The policewoman, with no more idea than I about where we would find the toilets, led me off toward a promising low building at the edge of the service road behind us. “Do you speak English?” I asked her.

“Very leetle,” she said.

“Do they really think they are in danger? My mother and Gennie? He has no reason to hurt them. He doesn’t even know them.” As I said this, it crossed my mind that it was Suzanne he might hurt, if he realized who she was, mother of his hated rival. She shrugged.

There were rest rooms. We took a pee, the policewoman too. It seemed unprofessional somehow.
“Comment tu t’appelles, toi?”
I asked her. These were the first words Yves had spoken to me, and a phrase I had mastered. I knew you could not ask Monsieur le Ministre in that familiar tone, but maybe a fellow woman? Even she looked a little startled, then amused.

“Je m’appelle Huguette, moi,”
she said.
“Toi?”
We walked back outside to the unchanged scene, through the crowd of yellow-slickered bystanders. An American said, “Hostage situation.”

“Moi, je suis Isabel.”

She led me toward the car. “Can’t I just stand here?” I
pleaded. But she made me get in again. Some sort of odd machine, looking like one of those machines that toss tennis balls, was being wheeled into place. Another hour passed. I didn’t know if they had any idea whether he was really in there, but they continued to focus on this tower of the Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant. We waited and sat, with nothing happening to clarify my situation. Eventually, to pass the time, I told Huguette the story of the flea market, the tureen photo, and the theft of Mrs. Pace’s tureen; to my surprise she wrote some of it down.

Eventually an older policeman came and put his head in the car. With him was one of the Americans in suits.

“What can you tell us, mademoiselle?” asked the American. It was the first time in these several hours that anyone had asked me what I might know about what was going on. I told them my story in English, the EuroDisney man translating for the brisk French gendarmes. I explained how Mr. Tellman had asked me to get his car, and then when I got it, how the police stopped me, the part they knew.

“He’s in there,” the Disney guy said. “He was spotted. Unknown whether anyone else is in there with him. He hasn’t made any demands, he hasn’t responded.”

“My mother and another woman and a bunch of kids are with him,” I said.

“Hostages, presumably.”

“Am I under arrest or anything?” I asked.

“Not for the moment. We will need to understand your role,” said the older gendarme, in perfect English.

“I don’t have a role,” I insisted. “Can’t you see that?”

“
Mais non
, Americans are totally inscrutable,” says Huguette to me. “Their smiles. They mask themselves with smiles. And they will not tell you their family name. ‘Just call me Marilyn,’ they say. It is very sinister.” But to me it was they, and the situation, that were inscrutable. For the first time, I began actually to worry.

In the fog of concern and interest, in the suspended space capsule of the police car, while I was left to wonder what would
happen, I thought of something Edgar once said: “You Americans imagine everything will work out for the best.” Is that true?

“I used to ask myself why you believe that,” he had said. “It is not the message of Protestantism, or of history either.” The French are very hung up about Protestantism. They imagine it forms a whole world view, whereas to me it doesn’t seem like anything. Who is right?

“Your founding fathers expressed a hope for the future and a commitment to preparing the conditions that would make possible the best outcomes. But somewhere along the way, hope was transubstantiated into belief incarnate. I believe you call it the Power of Positive Thinking,” he had said. “Of course French people have no such delusions that things will work out for the best.”

Would things work out for the best? Or would a maniac Disney lawyer harm my mother, Suzanne, and three little children? Since I was an American, I naturally believed he would harm them, exactly the opposite of what Edgar had said I would believe. All the hostage dramas I had seen on the evening news, every bit of footage of drive-by shooters and 7-Eleven busts, came to me, and they all turned out badly, with the miscreants and sometimes the hostages shot by police or burned alive. It was the French who seemed insouciant. Fascinated, cramped, and beginning to be wretched, it seemed to me that the French police were almost casual, almost unconcerned. They seemed prepared to camp under the windows of the tower forever.

Minutes, hours, slowed interminably. Eventually my mind drifted above the incoherent scene to the future, where a number of things became clear. I would go to Bosnia, or at least Zagreb. Why not? Either with Edgar or with a relief organization. I could drive a truck, I could be Edgar’s assistant, or secretary to a delegation, I could be a reporter, I could make documentary films. In this way doing something worthwhile to make things come out for the best. It seemed beautifully clear, and it eased my mind to have at least one thing beautifully clear. The projection was as actual as a memory, me detached from my family and what used to be my country in a no-man’s-land of turmoil and adventure which was beginning here, today, at EuroDisney. I would sleep
with Doctors without Borders, and Bosnian Muslim diplomats. I would take dictation and write up my observations. I would help those poor women in kerchiefs. I would find homes for the rape babies no one wants. Edgar was right about responsibility and courage, that they are the things you have to have. I hoped I would turn out to have them.

It was another forty-five minutes before anything noticeable happened. Without warning, something was tossed out the window and landed heavily at the feet of a police inspector. Experts approached it gingerly, dogs sniffed it. It was Margeeve’s purse. “It’s my mother’s purse!” I told the policewoman, Huguette, who had stayed with me in the car, and she quickly went off to tell the others. Now the somber men were looking inside it, and smirking at Margeeve’s hankie and roll of Clorets.

Inside the purse a note in Margeeve’s handwriting: “We’re coming out—don’t shoot.” The forces shouted the news down the ranks. The tourist crowd, a shifting population at the periphery of a cordoned-off area, heard and picked up the cry: the children are coming out. The women he was keeping to ensure his own safe passage somewhere. Where did they suggest? The experts exchanged looks of relief and satisfaction. One danger averted, the children unharmed, and a dialogue begun, always the finest of signs.

The sight of Margeeve’s purse made real to me her plight in a way I had not really been able to feel before. I could imagine her fingers being wrested from it, or her proffering it, suggesting he put the note inside. She is clear headed, I couldn’t imagine her going to pieces, she would be calm, Suzanne too, they would occupy themselves with the children. I was sure they were all right. Yet, were they?

“There is no course of action to suggest,” said the gendarme to the Disney representatives. “He must come out. We make him understand he will not be harmed. Make him understand he must send the women out.”

“He could go to Algeria, or Iraq,” someone said.