looked to see if he had written a note. He had, unfolded, on a “From the Desk of” paper. It said “Mrs. Persand, Be aware that I’m never going to divorce Magda, if you want to plan accordingly.” Roxy never commented on this.
After Roxy had begun to talk more openly about getting a divorce, I went with her to a meeting of American women, where she thought she might get some helpful advice. From the first, it was clear that the agenda of their meeting was just tokick back and complain about the French, especially French mothers-in-law, with their insistence on Sunday lunch, their meddlesome helpfulness, their hostility to Americans and to daughters-in-law in general. Despite these agitations, it was restful, in a way, to be in a gathering of American women. No matter what one thinks of one’s compatriots, there is undeniably a rapport that cannot be explained. When you meet another American you exchange a glance of understanding. Who you are, your basic cultural assumptions, are known. If you were speaking French, you would tutoyer each other from the first. You wouldn’t necessarily like these other Americans, but even the ones you don’t like, you always like them better in France than you would like them if you were both back in America.
At the same time, Americans are critical of each other here. They are snobbish about each other’s French, for example, much meaner than a French person would be. They laugh at each other’s answering-machine pronunciation. The former French teachers are the worst. (Roxy spends hours in Grévisse’s Bon Usage . “Maybe I’ll just say ‘Laissez un message,’ ” she finally decides.)
The American women planned programs at which such things as French taxes and French divorce laws were discussed, and the names of helpful avocats were shared. From this group I had the strange impression that legal difficulties were universal for Americans here, that we were all prisoners of strange objectionable laws and stranger customs, the first of which was marriage itself.
“Whatever you do,” they said, “don’t leave the house. That makes you the guilty one. That way, they can get you for desertion—they have some other name for it. It happened to Tammy de Bretteville, and she was left without a dime, just because she went to Nice for the weekend. And she had paid for the apartment!”
“If you did get divorced, would you go back to America?” I asked Roxy on the way home.
“No, of course not,” she said vehemently. “Everything makes me happy here. Except, well, you know—the situation. But the buildings. The buses. I even love the pigeons with theirlittle red feet. My heart goes out to the spindly ones. Some pigeons don’t thrive as well as others. Sometimes I drop a piece of my croissant for them. I try to give it to the spindly ones before the fat ones see. But people stare at you so outraged. Did you know they have a sports club where they actually catch the pigeons? Tammy de Bretteville told me about it. Then they let them out, old fat street pigeons, and as they flutter lethargically up, the French shoot them for target practice. That’s their idea of sport. I was struck dumb when I heard this. It wasn’t even for reducing the population of pigeons, which you could possibly understand. It’s some deficiency in sensibility.”
She must be really depressed, I thought, to be raving on like this about pigeons. “It’s better than shooting people, like we do at home,” I pointed out.
Roxy had been talking of divorce, but when Charles-Henri wrote her a stiff little note saying that he would like a divorce, Roxy replied: “But I can’t divorce. I’m Catholic.” And there was no good saying, Roxy, don’t be like that, because she was like that. I didn’t try to argue. No divorce became Roxy’s policy as surely as divorce had been her policy last week. Suzanne, who had continued to think that the whole thing would blow over after the baby was born,
After Roxy had begun to talk more openly about getting a divorce, I went with her to a meeting of American women, where she thought she might get some helpful advice. From the first, it was clear that the agenda of their meeting was just tokick back and complain about the French, especially French mothers-in-law, with their insistence on Sunday lunch, their meddlesome helpfulness, their hostility to Americans and to daughters-in-law in general. Despite these agitations, it was restful, in a way, to be in a gathering of American women. No matter what one thinks of one’s compatriots, there is undeniably a rapport that cannot be explained. When you meet another American you exchange a glance of understanding. Who you are, your basic cultural assumptions, are known. If you were speaking French, you would tutoyer each other from the first. You wouldn’t necessarily like these other Americans, but even the ones you don’t like, you always like them better in France than you would like them if you were both back in America.
At the same time, Americans are critical of each other here. They are snobbish about each other’s French, for example, much meaner than a French person would be. They laugh at each other’s answering-machine pronunciation. The former French teachers are the worst. (Roxy spends hours in Grévisse’s Bon Usage . “Maybe I’ll just say ‘Laissez un message,’ ” she finally decides.)
The American women planned programs at which such things as French taxes and French divorce laws were discussed, and the names of helpful avocats were shared. From this group I had the strange impression that legal difficulties were universal for Americans here, that we were all prisoners of strange objectionable laws and stranger customs, the first of which was marriage itself.
“Whatever you do,” they said, “don’t leave the house. That makes you the guilty one. That way, they can get you for desertion—they have some other name for it. It happened to Tammy de Bretteville, and she was left without a dime, just because she went to Nice for the weekend. And she had paid for the apartment!”
“If you did get divorced, would you go back to America?” I asked Roxy on the way home.
“No, of course not,” she said vehemently. “Everything makes me happy here. Except, well, you know—the situation. But the buildings. The buses. I even love the pigeons with theirlittle red feet. My heart goes out to the spindly ones. Some pigeons don’t thrive as well as others. Sometimes I drop a piece of my croissant for them. I try to give it to the spindly ones before the fat ones see. But people stare at you so outraged. Did you know they have a sports club where they actually catch the pigeons? Tammy de Bretteville told me about it. Then they let them out, old fat street pigeons, and as they flutter lethargically up, the French shoot them for target practice. That’s their idea of sport. I was struck dumb when I heard this. It wasn’t even for reducing the population of pigeons, which you could possibly understand. It’s some deficiency in sensibility.”
She must be really depressed, I thought, to be raving on like this about pigeons. “It’s better than shooting people, like we do at home,” I pointed out.
Roxy had been talking of divorce, but when Charles-Henri wrote her a stiff little note saying that he would like a divorce, Roxy replied: “But I can’t divorce. I’m Catholic.” And there was no good saying, Roxy, don’t be like that, because she was like that. I didn’t try to argue. No divorce became Roxy’s policy as surely as divorce had been her policy last week. Suzanne, who had continued to think that the whole thing would blow over after the baby was born,
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