Read Online Le Divorce by Diane Johnson - Free Book Online

of course I understood not a word of.
    “What’s he saying?”
    “He’s talking about Bosnia,” said Roxy. “He’s very interested in Bosnia.” I listened. Even if you couldn’t understand it, what he was saying rang with indignation and authority.
    “What does he do?”
    “He’s a kind of warmonger. He used to be an engineer. Then he was in the Chamber of Deputies,” she said, drifting through the room.
    “But what does he say?”
    “He says France has betrayed the UN resolutions, its own promises, and the Helsinki treaty,” Roxy said.
    “What does he want?”
    “War,” said Roxy. “If it were up to Uncle Edgar, he’d have the French bombing Belgrade.”
    Of course we didn’t approve of war, Roxy and I. Children of a California professor, we had never even met anyone who had approved of the Vietnam war. Yet—it is hard to explain—I found it thrilling to think that someone connected to us was in a position to comment publicly on national policy, even in a bellicose way. In California, we just live in our backwater, far from councils of government, so that knowing Oncle Edgar brought us closer to French national policy than we could ever come to American, and this gave me a vicarious feeling of influence and involvement. (Once, in college, I did go to hear the congressman from Santa Barbara, a balding young man who smiled all the time and sweated. But I didn’t meet him, exactly.)
     
    From the first I had found Roxy’s state of mind unnerving, but I think it was only when I heard her talk of abortion pills that I took seriously her belief that her marriage was over. Before that it had been easy to see a gap between her emotions and the facts of her case; this was a marital tiff exaggerated bythe hormones of pregnancy or by the resentful fatigue of an overworked young mother. I knew Roxy well enough to know she was impulsive and in some views spoiled. (It was part of the lore of our family that Margeeve’s girls were spoiled, while Roger and I were little soldiers, and there is some truth in this.) But Roxy’s storms were really her nature, not products of maternal indulgence. She had impossible ideals of conduct, and she had thought that knights and princes existed and that Charles-Henri was one of the latter. And now she knew otherwise, and was acting as if all were decided, divorce, life over—it was as if she were relieved to get through the biggest crisis of her life so lightly and quickly. But I could see she had trouble saying the actual, fateful words: Charles-Henri has left me.
    I tried to stiffen her myself, and I tried to think how to tell our parents. Finally, one day when Roxy was out, I called them. They heard my report of Roxy’s troubles without surprise, and Margeeve even said, “I knew something like that would happen,” exactly as Roxy had predicted. They evidently had believed something like this would happen. Their own lives, their divorces, the lives and divorces of people they knew, had taught them not only to expect marital troubles for their offspring but to believe them inevitable, and even a positive good, leading to eventual happiness with a predestined mate you would not have been ready for the first time around. This had been their experience. My father with Roger’s and my difficult mother, and Margeeve with her irascible, practically criminal, alcoholic husband, Roxy’s and Judith’s father—both had become tempered and wise from these bad experiences and, from the time they met, got along with each other as God had intended couples to do. We four children were therefore more the products not of broken homes but of a happy one, and if the psychologists were right, that should predispose us to happy marriages in turn. Thus did certain facts of social nature—divorce—dispute with the home-healing benefits of our nurture, a contradiction that was resolved if you accepted the first divorce as a boon. It is only if you view divorce as catastrophe that it is