Le Divorce by Diane Johnson Page B

drip.”
    “Well, I wish you’d cheer up, Roxy. Fuck Charles-Henri. Go back to California. Get a boyfriend.”
    “Sure, four months pregnant.”
    “That will end.”
    “I know. I know I’ll get it together, but right now, I don’t actually care what happens, and I’m sick of thinking about it. Are you having any fun at all?”
    I was having some fun. I’d met some men. Conversations with men cannot, apparently, be avoided even should you want to. Men talk to us and we can’t stop them. But the type of man is somewhat in my control. For instance, if I wear my hair—it is black, long, and frizzy—down to the middle of my back, and stride along in jeans and hiking boots, certain kinds of men will speak to me. North African boys try to pick me up. Loose American Girl, goes their thinking; maybe she will. “Adventure?” they whisper in the metro. “If you don’t do things when you are young you will have a lifetime of regret,” explained a lonely young Moroccan.
    “Je ne regrette rien,” I say, laughing, for it is my most secure French phrase, from the old Edith Piaf tapes Roxy used to play. But they don’t understand the reference.
    If I do up my hair and wear my glasses, the men will be subtly more prosperous looking—smooth businessmen and visiting Germans. If I wear a scarf around my neck, I will be taken for a French girl. Scarf, no scarf, hair up or down. Thus, controlling my destiny, I made the acquaintance of two attractive men,a wiry economist named Michel Breaux (hair up) and a student, very black-turtleneck, Yves Dupain, whom I met in line at a movie (hair down). I would spend a free afternoon now and again going to the movies with Yves, or go to supper with Michel—and sometimes more, with either of them—afterward feeling a little guilty about Roxy, as though I were betraying her. I couldn’t bring myself to discuss love or sex with her. Perhaps I imagined these topics would unnerve her. I could imagine her standing before me, widening waistline and eyes in tears, a living illustration of the perils of sex and love.
    Making it with Yves the first time, I wondered if I would notice anything different about a French person in bed. What I was remembering was once, I think it was after Roxy and Charles-Henri were engaged, when Chester had said at dinner, “The French they are a funny race,” and he and Margeeve laughed and laughed, so that we demanded to know why, and finally Chester said: “The French they are a funny race / They fight with their feet and fuck with their face.”
    I remember that Roxy and I were sort of embarrassed and shocked, not by the rhyme but by Chester saying it, in front of us. Even as worldly as we both were, Roxy and I, we didn’t think Chester should be.
    “All the girls in France / Wear tissue paper pants. . . .” added Margeeve.
    “I see London, I see France, . . .” said Roxy.
    But with Yves and Michel nothing unusually French had happened, except that afterward Yves once had asked solicitously, “As-tu pris ton pied?” —which I understood, with my limited language skills, as “had I taken my foot?”
    I guess it means, was it fun? It was, and I was having enough fun generally—the occasional date with Yves or Michel, the occasional movie, the challenge of getting along here. Sometimes I felt as if I actually belonged in France. For instance, one night, as I was flipping the dial, looking for someone speaking slow French (my hope was that I could learn it as a child learns language, by soaking it up, though I knew in my heart this would not work and was a way of justifying not going to the class), I saw a familiar face, a large, white-haired old man in a suit,sitting with other men at a table, some sort of moderator speaking to them each in turn and now saying, “Et alors, M. Cosset?” and the large man began to speak in a familiar voice, and he was l’oncle Edgar, Charles-Henri’s uncle! He began a vigorous discourse, thunderous of brow, which