Free Le Divorce by Diane Johnson Page B

that is the truth, because she is agirl,” snapped Margeeve on this occasion. My father said, “I have always taken Isabel seriously,” with a kind of sigh, “but I have never understood her,” and I remember saying, “That’s for sure.”
    But I did understand, and they understood, that Roxy has a true literary talent and love for poetry, and would probably not be that great at anything else, plus being a poet allows you a lot of time to raise a family, teach a class, or (as I have noticed) flâner in the streets of Paris, which means mess around, with no guilty sense of being unoccupied. Lucky Roxy. And now she had a reason, her pregnancy, never to skip meals. From my point of view, her life should have been complete, except for the marital problem, which I continued to view as a temporary aberration.
    So I pretended I hadn’t overheard anything.
    “I saw Charles-Henri,” I said, when she had put down the phone. “I talked to him. I thought I should talk to him myself, maybe you were exaggerating things.”
    “He came in to Paris? How was he?” She was newly alert.
    “He says he’s fallen in love with someone. Did he tell you that?”
    She didn’t answer.
    “For me it was a big relief to hear that,” I said. “Oh, is that all, I thought.”
    “All? All?” A rush of hysteria in her voice.
    “Men get over that. People do. I always do.”
    “Yes, he’ll get over it, the way he got over me, but it won’t have never happened, it can’t be undone. Yes, he told me he had met the love of his life. There’s nothing you can say to that.” So she had known all along. This was the one thing she could not forgive.

10
    I was younger, and I cultivated the habit of keeping all my experiences and plans to myself, relying upon myself alone.
    —Adolphe
    I T SHOULDN ’ T HAVE surprised me that my parents were worried about my life plans. I admit I was baffled myself. I’d write a screenplay, I’d decided in film school. I’d direct. Perhaps I was meant to be an actress, or the girl who gets the coffee—this is what I was ending up as, after all. But of course Paris wasn’t “ending up” (I’d remind myself, lying in Roxy’s chambre de bonne ), this was a beginning, or, properly speaking, Time Out. But I hadn’t realized that our folks were worried about me, and it made me sort of mad to think that other people looking at me saw things that worried them and then didn’t tell me so that I could reassure them, or deal with their fears. I knew I would be all right, but they didn’t. Crazy people must feel this gap between themselves and others, and the terminally ill must feel it. It’s horrible to have people worry about you, and it’s insulting besides. Or am I politically incorrect to think so?
    Roxy was truly not so sure she would be all right. “Maybe I should get a divorce,” she began to say every day. I urged her at least to talk to Charles-Henri before taking such a step as that, and to talk to others. I was not sure how often they had actuallyspoken in the time since my arrival—it was now more than three months. But she continued to refuse. “What’s there to discuss? There’s no point in protracting things. Infidelity will just happen again. The pattern of an unfaithful French husband, I know it all from my reading of Colette, Balzac, Zola. Pretty soon he’d have not this woman but another, a mistress permanently installed in another street, perhaps even a child, children, or he would chase the au pair girls, they would get younger and more gullible as he got older and older, or waitresses at McDonald’s or the girl in the market. I can’t bear to think of seeing him go through all that. And he would despise me more and more each time.”
    Though she wouldn’t discuss it with him, she began to discuss it with other people, in my view a healthy development. The women of the Place Maubert, Tammy de Bretteville and Anne-Chantal Lartigue in particular, agreed with Roxy’s take on it. A