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had come to see Roxy and tell her it had all been a mistake. I hoped this, but my hopes were useless. He kissed his mother in a perfunctory way, greeting the rest of us, and drove off immediately in his Range Rover. It was days before Roxy heard from him, her husband, the love of her life.
    In the train, riding back to Paris, Roxy burst into tears, like a person in a movie, and wailed into her scarf. We were surrounded by French families, whose children toddled in the aisles and stared at her.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s dumb, I know. It never occurredto me that he might turn up there today, it took me aback, I handled it so badly.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing,” was all she would say. I had the feeling that he had told her something. Then she said, in a bitter, concentrated tone, “He told me the one thing I can never forgive.” But she wouldn’t say what it was.

5
    I am too American myself, and lack juices.
    —Henry Adams
    E XCEPT FOR THIS problem of Roxy’s, Paris was kind of promising. Then, I had no premonitions, no glimpse of the future. Looking back, it must have been at about this same time—when Roxeanne’s troubles began, and when I arrived in Paris to help her—that our mother, Margeeve Walker back in Santa Barbara, got a letter from a Julia Manchevering, resident art historian at the Getty Museum.
    Santa Barbara is a city of mythological dimension in the minds of the French because of a soap opera called Santa Barbara , which airs on French television, dubbed in French, involving the lurid social complications usual in soap operas, among uniformly blond, rich Californians, set against scenes of sunny surf and Washingtonia palm and bougainvillea-bright patios. A place not Los Angeles, not northern, quasi-Spanish, old Californian, bland. I actually spent most of my childhood in the Midwest, where my father taught political science at a small college, but we moved to California when I was twelve when he married Margeeve. I loved our new home better.
    My father, now a professor at UC–Santa Barbara, andstepmother, with her odd name Margeeve, live in a California-style, that is to say modest forties bungalow in a valuable location on Miramar Avenue, with an ocean view and access to the beach, amid houses that are worth a lot more. Or I should say: our house, because of its situation, is worth a lot more than it’s really worth. Margeeve and Chester had the good fortune or vision to buy during one of the periodic declines in the value of real estate near the beach that follow a particularly destructive storm, and they were aided by a loan from an uncle of my father’s, William Eshrick, a Santa Barbara dealer in moldy European art—paintings dark and indistinct enough to look ancestral in the palatial haciendas of Montecito (a section of Santa Barbara lived in by those movie folk who think themselves too refined to live in L.A.). Tortured saints, especially Saint Sebastian, the one pierced by arrows, and heavily varnished landscapes are favored. Uncle William, now dead, had acquired a warehouse of indifferent Spanish and Italian examples of these gloomy subjects during the thirties, when more brilliant collectors were buying Impressionists and Expressionists, but he knew his market for art that was neither too distressingly religious nor too sentimental, and sufficiently crazed and cracked to look valuable. One of these was Roxy’s favorite painting, of Saint Ursula, the virgin martyr.
    Julia Manchevering was asking about one of Uncle William’s paintings (most of which had been sold at his death). In the course of writing a book about the iconography of Saint Ursula, she had been tracking the provenance of a certain painting, perhaps representing Saint Ursula, sold in the thirties by a dealer on the rue du Bac to, possibly, our uncle William Eshrick and still apparently in the inventory of his estate at the time of his death.
     
    Approximately 100 cm by 140 cm,