Johnson - Le Divorce

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

Emerson

I suppose because I went to film school, I think of my story as a sort of film. In a film, this part would be under the credits, opening with an establishing shot from a high angle, perhaps the Eiffel Tower, panning tiny scenes far below of the foreign city, life as watched from the wrong end of a telescope. Closer up, the place is identified by cliches of Frenchnesspeople carrying long baguettes of bread, old men wearing berets, women walking poodles, buses, flower stalls, those Art Nouveau entrances to the metro that seem to beckon to a nether region of vice and art but actually lead to an efficient transportation system, this contradiction perhaps a clue to the French themselves.

Then, in a series of close shots we become aware that some of the people we are seeing are not French, that among all the Gallic bustle are many Americans. Far from their native land, their flavor changes ever so slightly as they absorb the new perfumes, just as the slightly toxic chemistry of Americans abroad erodes, just a little, the new place in which they find themselves.

Some closeups of individual Americans:

People hanging around American Express (one of them me, Isabel Walker, trying to get money from the Wall Machine).

Two young women in jeans drinking coffee at a cafe. They glare at a man smoking, get up and move to a table farther away, disgust on their blandly pretty California faces. (These are Roxy, my sister, and me, Isabel.)

A well-dressed couple with a camera, having a drink in the Ritz bar, reading maps, swaying with jet lag. These might also be Germans. Germans are the only nationality that can sometimes be mistaken for Americans, even quite close up.

An elegant man reading the Herald Tribune at a sidewalk cafe. He too might be mistaken for European until he carefully removes the butter from the toasted tartine he has ordered, exposed by his pathological American fear of cholesterol.

A handsome, rather stout woman in a mink coat buying oranges at a sidewalk fruit stall. She is speaking French but with a strong American accent. Her brilliant smile does not leave her face, though she is saying, I was disappointed, Monsieur Jadot, with the fraises.

Charles de Gaulle Airport. A sort of space-age place with people arriving via moving conveyor belts in long tubes, pulling out their blue American passports, irritated at being asked to submit to the ritual of identifying themselves. They know who they are.

In fact these are not generic Americans but some of the actual people in my story. The cast of characters. My sister Roxy and I are the two young women who move away from the smoker, the tourists in the Ritz bar are our parents, Chester and Margeeve Walker, newly arrived in Paris to support Roxy in her time of crisis. (Her French husband has left her, she is about to give birth, and we have at stake a large sum of money.) The man in the cafe removing butter from his toast is Ames Everett, one of my employers, but he might be any one of a number of American expatriates living in Paris, elegant and independent and detached, bearing some pentimento of past shame or failure like five oclock shadow along the jaw. The stout woman is the venerated American writer Olivia Pace. The people arriving at the airport are our brother, Roger; his wife, Jane; another lawyer from his firm; and the other lawyers wife.

There are, also, certain ghosts of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, James Jonesall of them here for something they could not find back home, possessed of an idea about culture and their intellectual heritage, conscious of a connection to Europe. Europe, repository of something they wish to know, and feel they are entitled by ancestry to know.

All of us are wearing the same expression every American wears here, of wonderment mixed with self-satisfaction at having cleverly removed ourselves from the quotidian discomforts and dangers of life in America while at the same time bravely exposing ourselves to the exigencies of foreign money, a difficult language, and curious food, for instance tripe or andouillette.

Everyone respectful of Roxys condition, and of her grief. Or disappointment might be a better word. Everyone respectful of her bravery in sustaining her great disappointment in life, a chagrin damour that lasts forever.