so.
I am trying to explain that Chester and Margeeve were somewhat detached about Roxy’s plight and didn’t react withthe dismay she herself felt. I’m sure they also had a wish, conscious or unconscious, to see her back home in America where God intended Americans to be and where they always ended up, think of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gerald Murphy, and a whole lot of others who came to France but went home again.
Eventually of course when Roxy did call Dad and Margeeve to say that she and Charles-Henri were “having trouble,” they put on airs of suitable dismay and commiseration. But Roxy found their unsurprise galling, since she herself had not got over her surprise, would never get over it, that just when she had thought everything was perfect, it turned out not to be.
Roxy, not knowing how much I had discussed with Chester and Margeeve about her situation, was surprised too to get a call from Margeeve one day saying, “Roxy, don’t let Charles-Henri take the picture.”
“The picture?”
“Saint Ursula. In case he comes to move out his stuff, he shouldn’t get the idea it’s his.”
Roxy, who had expressly given it to him, was dumbfounded and puzzled. “He wouldn’t do that, it’s right here, in the apartment. You’ve never liked him, have you?”
9
There are good marriages, but no delightful ones.
—La Rochefoucauld
R OXY HAD CLUNG like an old reactionary to her view that their life had been perfect, but through chinks in her stories I began to see certain things that explained the trouble—from my outsider’s view of marriage nothing unusual, just the regular things. Her descriptions of past events would include the mention of “the weekend Charles-Henri was in Nice” and things of that sort, from which it seemed to me that Charles-Henri had too often been away painting or visiting family members. It seemed to me that Roxy had been left alone a lot with Gennie, and I knew her well enough to imagine the petulance in her tone when he came home. She hinted once that Charles-Henri had not wanted kids. Also, they had money problems, and Roxy, devoting herself relentlessly to poetry, would never do anything so obvious and useful as to get a job. Having kids is a good excuse not to earn money, I can see that; to mantle yourself in motherhood, especially in France, is to be very snug—motherhood a cloak under which to write, just as when we were younger she used to write by flashlight under the covers. And perhaps two artists always compete, for time to work and for theright to be the pampered one. Why must human relationships have these binary tensions built into them, the pretty versus the plain, the smart and the dumb, the child and the grownup?
On the other hand, to take Roxy’s part, it was selfish of Charles-Henri not to want a child. What did people do before they had these hard choices to make, when babies just arrived?
By September she had fallen into a quieter, even more depressed mood, but instead of focusing on her own problems, now it was the war in Bosnia that mesmerized her. French television and Euronews carried daily coverage of Slavs in headscarves weeping along roadsides, and ruins, and corpses in ditches. Roxy was especially fascinated with one recurrent image, one that had become for the television people a kind of emblem of the stupid war. She was captured by the Romeo and Juliet story that accompanied the grisly image, of a Serb boy and Muslim girl or vice versa, lovers, shot by one side or the other in a no-man’s-land as they tried to flee across a foreground of rubble and barbed wire, their bodies photographed lying there (in jeans and tennis shoes), and their families afraid to crawl out to get them.
“The hypocrisy of America, going to war to protect a bunch of Arabs who mutilate women, and then refusing to help these poor Bosnians,” Roxy would rave. “Letting the Serbs go on raping the women. Uncle Edgar is right, the cowardice of the French is
I am trying to explain that Chester and Margeeve were somewhat detached about Roxy’s plight and didn’t react withthe dismay she herself felt. I’m sure they also had a wish, conscious or unconscious, to see her back home in America where God intended Americans to be and where they always ended up, think of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gerald Murphy, and a whole lot of others who came to France but went home again.
Eventually of course when Roxy did call Dad and Margeeve to say that she and Charles-Henri were “having trouble,” they put on airs of suitable dismay and commiseration. But Roxy found their unsurprise galling, since she herself had not got over her surprise, would never get over it, that just when she had thought everything was perfect, it turned out not to be.
Roxy, not knowing how much I had discussed with Chester and Margeeve about her situation, was surprised too to get a call from Margeeve one day saying, “Roxy, don’t let Charles-Henri take the picture.”
“The picture?”
“Saint Ursula. In case he comes to move out his stuff, he shouldn’t get the idea it’s his.”
Roxy, who had expressly given it to him, was dumbfounded and puzzled. “He wouldn’t do that, it’s right here, in the apartment. You’ve never liked him, have you?”
9
There are good marriages, but no delightful ones.
—La Rochefoucauld
R OXY HAD CLUNG like an old reactionary to her view that their life had been perfect, but through chinks in her stories I began to see certain things that explained the trouble—from my outsider’s view of marriage nothing unusual, just the regular things. Her descriptions of past events would include the mention of “the weekend Charles-Henri was in Nice” and things of that sort, from which it seemed to me that Charles-Henri had too often been away painting or visiting family members. It seemed to me that Roxy had been left alone a lot with Gennie, and I knew her well enough to imagine the petulance in her tone when he came home. She hinted once that Charles-Henri had not wanted kids. Also, they had money problems, and Roxy, devoting herself relentlessly to poetry, would never do anything so obvious and useful as to get a job. Having kids is a good excuse not to earn money, I can see that; to mantle yourself in motherhood, especially in France, is to be very snug—motherhood a cloak under which to write, just as when we were younger she used to write by flashlight under the covers. And perhaps two artists always compete, for time to work and for theright to be the pampered one. Why must human relationships have these binary tensions built into them, the pretty versus the plain, the smart and the dumb, the child and the grownup?
On the other hand, to take Roxy’s part, it was selfish of Charles-Henri not to want a child. What did people do before they had these hard choices to make, when babies just arrived?
By September she had fallen into a quieter, even more depressed mood, but instead of focusing on her own problems, now it was the war in Bosnia that mesmerized her. French television and Euronews carried daily coverage of Slavs in headscarves weeping along roadsides, and ruins, and corpses in ditches. Roxy was especially fascinated with one recurrent image, one that had become for the television people a kind of emblem of the stupid war. She was captured by the Romeo and Juliet story that accompanied the grisly image, of a Serb boy and Muslim girl or vice versa, lovers, shot by one side or the other in a no-man’s-land as they tried to flee across a foreground of rubble and barbed wire, their bodies photographed lying there (in jeans and tennis shoes), and their families afraid to crawl out to get them.
“The hypocrisy of America, going to war to protect a bunch of Arabs who mutilate women, and then refusing to help these poor Bosnians,” Roxy would rave. “Letting the Serbs go on raping the women. Uncle Edgar is right, the cowardice of the French is
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