Free Le Divorce by Diane Johnson Page A

strangled with cameras, is always best avoided. After a month or so, I no longer got the religious shiver I got at first (though I am not religious), and so I usually walk on the other end to miss the people, but on this day I did walk on the near side, just outside the little fence that designates the forecourt, and I paused a second to meet the eyes of the angular stone apostles that line the facade.
    A beggar always stands right here, and it is always the same beggar (or “homeless person”). Dark-skinned, he appears to be an Indian or Pakistani, or Gypsy, and blind. Always there, his cup stretched out, leaning on a cane, wearing a hooded sweat-shirt, like someone in the Bible, his apparently unseeing eyes without pupils, as white as moons.
    I have always noticed him because, regarding the exit to Notre Dame Cathedral, I have thought, Is this not the pre-eminent, the reigning, begging place in Paris if not the world? Wouldn’t there be competition for this lucrative slot, with the whole world’s sinners guiltily stealing by him, traipsing in and out of the great building, feeling penitence? Is there a sociology of beggars, in which rank and seniority promote you to such precincts? Or are beggars like, say, pigeons, condemned to grow up where they hatch, indifferently assigned by fate to the pickings of barren, seedless alleys or abundant parks? This beggar, in any case, by whatever right or tolerance, has Notre Dame to himself.
    And, as I walked by and glanced up, and then inadvertently at him (for I hate his white eyes), he said, “Isabel.” This frightened me so much that I quickened my step and walked on toward the Hôtel de Ville, my fear and fascination growing,searching for explanation—coincidence, someone else speaking. This event has not yet been explained.
    I came into Roxy’s apartment quietly, thinking about what it could mean. Roxy was on the phone, speaking in English, therefore to an American friend or, as it proved, to someone in our family, either Chester or Margeeve. I heard her mention Roscoe, their cat, and Ralphie the dog. I wasn’t listening especially, until I heard my own name. Hearing your name cuts through thoughts like a bullet through a cloud.
    “She’s doing better,” Roxy was saying. “She’s had some dates. She has about ten odd jobs—but I think she’s trying to use them as a way of getting out of babysitting. And she still won’t say a word of French.”
    This was unfair, since I had babysat every single time I was asked, and I said bonjour almost promiscuously. As they went on talking, it became clear that they had been conspiring all along, discussing my doings, my progress, my state of mind. “Olivia Pace thinks highly of her, apparently she’s a real help,” Roxy was saying. “She walks my friend Ames’s dog, stuff like that. I think she’s doing fine.”
    Of course I should have seen it before. In their minds, I was the problem, not Roxy, I was the subject they’d been putting their heads together about. I hadn’t been sent to help Roxy, Roxy had been enlisted to look after me, the ne’er-do-well little sister with her aimless attitude to the future. I’m sure they were hoping I’d meet a nice European count, or maybe I’d become interested in teaching English as a Second Language. At worst, I’d learn to speak French. I was aghast. I felt a sort of angry and embarrassed flush in my cheeks, as if I’d found a bloodstain on the back of my dress and realized it had been there all afternoon.
    My character had always been a subject that could flare up into a quarrel between Chester and Margeeve, once dramatically at the dinner table—a rare quarrel, I should add, for Chester and Margeeve are solid, but Margeeve thinks I have been raised to be too indifferent to my future, which she says betrays Chester’s covert sexism. My brother Roger was steered toward the law since grade school, but my future would look after itself. “You never took Isabel seriously,