The Light of Paris (22 page)

“I see it,” Margie said, and she was blushing from his hug, and she wanted to be in his arms again, but she could see he was distracted by her compliment. She knew the feeling well—she had felt it herself when her stories had been chosen for her school's literary magazines, or when her teachers had praised her work. She only envied him that his work was here, on display, in a gallery, while hers was still bound up in closed
pages in her room. Someday, she thought. Someday all the things she had wanted so badly might actually be hers.

•   •   •

It became a habit, their walks home
. She would leave at the end of the day and find Sebastien leaning against the president's fence and smoking, and he would cross the street to join her. Sometimes they went through the Jardins des Champs-Élysées, and sometimes they walked down the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, looking at the storefronts of couturiers on one side and the enormous mansions on the other, and sometimes they stopped in a café half the way home, by the Théâtre du Châtelet and watched the people go by. And they talked. They talked so much Margie's jaw would hurt at the end of the night, and if they sat in a café, her voice would go attractively rough from all the cigarette smoke in the air.

Occasionally they were joined by Sebastien's artist friends, or by the Surrealists, who would be terribly serious until they had enough wine in them, at which point they would grow funny and wild, and always deeply passionate about their art. One of them cornered Margie one night and read her the entire list of the cards they had created for the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and he looked at her expectantly at the end of each one, as though he had told a particularly good joke and was waiting for her to laugh. Margie didn't have the heart to tell him that despite the great improvement in her French she still understood only half of what he was saying, so sometimes she simply nodded thoughtfully, and sometimes she smiled, and sometimes she laughed gaily, and sometimes just said, “Oooh,” as though he had said something particularly thought-provoking. Though she did this in a pattern having nothing to do with the content of the messages, even the ones she technically understood (though she never could have translated them and gotten their intentionally obscure meanings quickly enough), he seemed quite pleased, and when he had reached the end of the list, he bought her a glass of cognac
and proceeded to get very, very drunk and sing “California, Here I Come” with the other Surrealists, very, very badly.

And some nights they went dancing, and some nights they went to galleries to see other artists' paintings, people Sebastien knew or had heard of. Once, thrillingly, they saw a film some of Sebastien's friends had made at a remote château. The picture itself hadn't made any sense to Margie, and she suspected it didn't make any sense to anyone, but it had been terrific fun to see people she knew on a movie screen. Afterward she felt, even though she knew it was only a tiny art film, showing in a gallery with an enormous movie projector clacking away in the background, she might be stopped by people on the street as though she were walking with Buster Keaton or Clara Bow.

Later, they would gather at a café and talk, and she would listen to their thoughts and their passion and when Sebastien walked her home at the end of one of those nights, her head was spinning with ideas. Those conversations felt as though she were on a carousel and everything they were saying about art and truth and dreams and, sometimes, rather shockingly, sex, was lights and calliope music and the rise and fall of painted horses. She tried to keep up, though her French sometimes held her back, and sometimes it was only her own fear that she might say something the others thought was foolish, or even worse, obvious.

“You know more than you think,” Sebastien would say to her when he walked her home, the cafés and bars alive with lights and people and conversation. Margie wondered sometimes if Washington were like this at night, so full of activity and celebration, and it was just that she had missed it. There had been times when she had stayed up to the hours she kept in Paris, but it had always been in the company of a book, or of her own writing, never out with other people. “You should open your mouth and say it. You will be surprised.”

Margie wished it were that easy, but she had been editing her thoughts for so long, purposely keeping herself small and contained, she couldn't
imagine speaking out so easily. These men and women Sebastien knew, they were great artists. Some of them were already known, some of them would only be known years in the future, but they were artists. They were daring and experimental. They made things happen. And they knew so much. They could talk of Expressionism and Neoclassical Cubism and
Ulysses
and Gothic literature, and Margie resented all those years she had spent reading books with no one to talk to about them, stuck in schoolrooms and surrounded by girls who had worried only about who they would marry and whether they might be chosen for some society or where they would spend the summer, when she could have been with these people, living.

In fact, Margie found herself writing more and more those days. When she was assigned to the circulation desk at the Libe, between busy spells she often dashed off a letter to her parents and then spent the rest of the time writing feverishly, trying desperately to record all the ideas in her head using the typewriter, which was so much faster than laboriously writing by hand. She wrote stories about people who met in cafés and fell in love, and she wrote stories about Americans who came to Paris, and she mined every inch of her own experience and what she saw and she composed. She felt like Mozart, hounded by the music, desperate to get it out.

The piece she returned to again and again was Sebastien's painting of the ball. She went back to the gallery on her own, finding it among the turning streets of the Quartier Latin, not even noticing how the city felt so navigable now, so much like home. She took her notebook and stood, mesmerized, and then began to record all the stories she could see—the lovers and the friends, the families and the enemies, and when she got home, she began to write the story.

She recorded it all: the lazy, heat-sodden Paris afternoon, the women's dresses growing damp with sweat, a few of the men bravely shrugging off their jackets, the sound of the music floating through the air, across the dance floor and out to the garden beyond.

And then, she wrote. She wrote the story of the couple meeting for the first time, the man asking the woman to dance, the way their bodies moved toward each other like an invitation, but the woman turned her head back away, blushing. She wrote about the way another man had come to the dance with only a few sous in his pocket, only enough for a single lemonade, and was terrified to think his girl might ask for something more expensive, but she saw the way his fingers moved on the lining of his pocket and suggested instead they buy one lemonade and share it.

She wrote the story of the couple whose inability to bear a child had fractured their marriage so irreparably, who were only there because the husband still loved his wife, loved her more for the trying, the endless months of tears and frustrations and blame, the doctors' painful cures and their families' ridiculous suggestions, and he had begged her to come with him, to go to this ball so they could simply dance and drink and laugh the way they used to—he had once thought her laugh was the most beautiful sound that had ever been, and he never heard it anymore, only heard her tears, which shattered him every time.

She wrote the story of the bartender who loved to dance, whose feet moved to the music as he poured drinks behind his counter, waltzing and foxtrotting along with the couples on the floor, and who, when the day was over, went home to the sixth floor of an old house, to an apartment that had only two rooms and a heating ring and was stifling in the summer and cool in the winter, but had the most glorious view of the Eiffel Tower, and he would pour some milk for his cat, and the cat would sit on the windowsill and drink it while he leaned on the windowsill and watched the world go by below and his restless feet continued to dance.

She wrote all these stories—of love lost and love found, of hearts broken and healed, of anger and sadness and loneliness, and joy and connection and hope. And as she did, the figures in Sebastien's paintings came alive in her mind, until the ball was real to her.

And when she gave those pages to him, presented them shyly, tied
together with a length of ribbon she had found hanging over a rosebush in the courtyard at the Club, he had taken them as though she had offered him a great gift. They lay in the grass in the Champ-de-Mars, the sun touching its gentle fingers to their skin, as Sebastien read every page, and Margie stared at the tip of the Eiffel Tower against a cloudless blue sky and wondered at the miracle her life had become. When he finished, his eyes shone with tears, and he had touched his fingertips to hers and said, “This. Exactly this,” and Margie knew no matter how many stories she wrote, she would never have a greater compliment.

Sometimes when Sebastien walked her home from the Libe, they would drift from the route and discover the most wonderful things. A carnival set up in the Tuileries, where Sebastien won her a toy and they rode the Ferris wheel and looked at the city spread out below them, and they went around and around until she couldn't tell the difference between the lights of the stars above them and the lights of the city below them; the way they both sparkled with such impossible magic.

Another night they found themselves in the Pigalle, up by Zelli's, and a prostitute asked Sebastien for a match, which he gave her, and they passed a few moments talking while Margie watched. She had never spoken to a prostitute before, had never even seen one as far as she could remember, and she looked greedily at the woman's seamy glamor—the stockings with the tears turned to the inside and the dress that had once been brilliant silk and was now greasy and dull, and the makeup on her face that hid the acne and the purple smudges under her eyes but also, Margie grew to understand as she looked at this woman silently, was a sort of armor that shielded who she was and let no one inside, and Margie thought that was the most beautiful and saddest thing she had ever seen.

Paris at night was a different place. After dark, lovers were on every street corner: drinking wine by the Seine, strolling hand in hand, finding the dark and shaded spots of the city—under the blessing of a tree or
in the dark entrance to a building—to kiss. Sometimes there was so much passion between them it seemed as though Margie could see sparks coming from their skin when they touched, illuminating the bliss on their faces, and Margie had to avert her eyes because their heat was too much to bear. And sometimes it was dangerous, pickpockets lurking in their own dark spots, or drunks who were angry and lurching instead of happy and singing, looking for some way to vent the rage the wine had kindled in them. But mostly those people were looking for each other, criminals in search of easy marks, drunks hungry for a fight, and Sebastien would slip to the side of her closest to the danger, and take her elbow and they would walk by quickly, until whatever the threat had been disappeared and Paris was theirs again, theirs alone.

She did not write to her parents about the nights at Zelli's or the Dingo, and she did not write to them of Sebastien. On the one hand, she thought her mother might have been relieved to know there was a man interested in her at all, especially one so young and handsome. On the other, she would have hated that Sebastien was an artist, and hated even more the idea of them walking the streets together alone, Margie with her short hair and a dress she had borrowed from one of the girls at the Club, unchaperoned and alone in the city at night. How different her mother's world was from hers. How different our mothers' worlds are from all of ours. Margie wondered sometimes if her mother had ever been young, had ever been in love, had ever wanted to dance under the starlight with a young man, or if she had been born disapproving and hard. She didn't know why her mother clung so tightly to her rules. They certainly didn't seem to make her happy. And they hadn't made Margie especially happy either. Not happy like she was now. Not happy like Paris had made her.

I was carrying boxes up from the basement, covered in dust and cobwebs, when the doorbell rang. My mother had gone to dinner at Lydia Endicott's, where I presumed they were planning their path to global domination: today, the Garden Society, tomorrow, the world.

Passing the mirror by the front door, I noted my appearance: capri pants smudged with dirt, a T-shirt advertising the Spring Fling from my junior year in high school (I had not attended—how I'd gotten the T-shirt, I could only guess), my hair pulled up in a loose knot on top of my head. Yup, ready for prime time.

Mostly it had been people my mother or I had hired arriving at the door lately—painters, appraisers, charity pickups. This time it was Henry. He was surprisingly cleaned up—a black-and-white-checked button-down shirt with the sleeves casually rolled up, a pair of dark blue jeans that actually fit, and his hair, though it would never sacrifice its curl, had seen a comb at some point in the relatively recent past. “Wow,” I said, which was probably not the most tactful thing I could have said, but he didn't seem to mind. “You look nice.”

“Sometimes I clean up okay,” he said, and generously said nothing about my appearance, which was decidedly less nice. “Are you ready to go?”

“Umm . . . go where?”

“First Friday,” he said, as though we'd been talking about it only a moment before, when it had been days since anyone had mentioned it. To be honest, I hadn't really thought about it. Mostly I had been thinking about my mother, and whether I wanted to go home, and what I would do if I weren't married anymore. And painting. I was thinking a lot about painting, which was an excellent avoidance strategy.

“Oh. Right. Is that now?” I looked down at my clothes and touched my hair, which was in desperate need of a blowout.

“I can wait for you to change. But you're fine like you are.”

“Ha!” I said loudly. Henry only looked confused. Well. Maybe he really did think it was okay for me to be seen in public dressed that way, but I didn't, and my mother would have had an aneurysm. “You'd better come in,” I said as I stepped back, opening the door fully and holding my hand out like a butler. “Enter the lair.”

He started to step inside and then jumped back as though he had been shocked, and we both laughed. “Your mother isn't here, is she? Are you sure she didn't booby-trap the place in case I came by?”

“I'm pretty sure it's safe, but you might want to watch out for trip wires and buckets of water just in case.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

Upstairs, I took a quick sponge bath and changed into a clean pair of pants and a wrinkled denim shirt, and threw on a pearl necklace and earrings. My hair was beyond fixing, so I left it loose and curling. When I sprinted back downstairs, Henry was standing in the front room, looking into my mother's china cabinet.

“Hey, you look amazing,” he said when I appeared.

“Yeah, right.”

“Take a compliment.”

I didn't bother to explain that I hardly knew how. “Thanks. You digging my mother's china shepherdess collection?”

“They're not so bad. A lot of these are actually beautiful.”

“I loved them when I was little. That teacup in the back with the pink roses, if you look closely you'll see where we had to glue the handle back on because I played tea party with it.”

“I knew you were a rebel.”

“Mad, bad, and dangerous to heirloom china. Are you ready to go?”

“Sure,” he said, and we headed out the door and into the night. I could hear the noise from the restaurant behind us, the crunch of cars arriving and leaving on the gravel.

“Is it okay that you're not at work?”

“Totally. I didn't leave Austin in charge this time,” he said, flashing me a grin. “Actually, things are finally pretty much running like clockwork. I hate saying that out loud. It's like an invitation to drop a piano on my head.”

“Why?” I ducked underneath the drooping arms of an unruly forsythia bush that was encroaching on the sidewalk. I could already hear the buzz and music from down on The Row. It was funny—I'd always avoided street festivals, fearing the noise and the crowds, but here I found myself almost dancing toward the sound, eager to be part of it. Eager to be part of something, someplace that wanted me.

“It's just such an unstable industry. Restaurants fail all the time, staff quit in the middle of a shift—it's notoriously difficult to find good help, if you'll forgive the expression.”

“Don't apologize. My mother says it all the time,” I laughed. “Anyway, you seem great to work for, so I'm sure they'll keep you around.”

“Well, thanks. It makes it much easier to have great employees if you're a good boss. Short answer: they'll be fine for a while. What about you? How goes the great moving adventure?”

“It's going. She finally had an appraiser and an antiques dealer over, so they're clearing some things out of the house. It's incredible how much stuff there is.”

“She's lived there for what, almost fifty years? That'll happen. My parents are still in the house I grew up in. We joke that when they die, we're just going to have to burn it down. It would be easier than cleaning it out.”

I pictured our condo in fifty years, when it would still feel empty. Phillip had an almost clinical intolerance for clutter, or anything he thought of as clutter. More than once I had left a book or some papers on a table only to come home and find he had recycled them as if they were trash. No matter how many times that place was redecorated, it would never be anything other than clean and bare.

“It's amazing the things we've been cleaning out. I told you I found all my grandmother's journals, which are amazing, and there's a trunk full of books that have to be from the Civil War. Plus, of course, my Leif Garrett record collection, so clearly, treasures from throughout the ages.”

“I sincerely hope the appraisers appreciate the value of those records.”

“They'll go for millions at Sotheby's, I'm sure. Along with my vast collection of art works.”

“Have you been painting again?” We reached a narrow point of the sidewalk, where a tree's roots had buckled the pavement, and he stepped back, letting me move ahead of him and then catching up a few steps later. It felt strange walking beside him—though he wasn't much taller than I was, he was broad and had a comforting presence. Phillip was a greyhound, all sleek lines and delicate bones. Henry was more like a bulldog, wide and solid and comforting.

“Yes. How can you tell? The rosy glow of artistic achievement?”

“Well, that and the paint in your hair.”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed, patting at my head, feeling for a stiff spot. For all my bathroom ministrations, I might as well have been a hobo, just wandered in off the streets. “Sorry. You're always catching me looking like a slob. I don't look at myself in the mirror a lot. Am I totally covered in it?” I checked my arms and saw a smudge that looked like I'd rubbed against some wet paint after I'd wiped my brush on my apron.

“No apologies necessary. I'm just going to pretend I'm hanging out with a famous artist.”

“Ah, I'm not an artist. I mean I was, years ago, I thought I would be. But I stopped.”

“Why?”

“That,” I said, whistling out a breath, “is the question of the day. I've been reading my grandmother's journals, you know? And she really wanted to be a writer, but her mother was dead set against it. And I don't know how much of that was the time, like women shouldn't be having careers in general, or how much of it was the arts in particular, or what, but I got that message too, that art was a waste of time. My parents were practical people.”

We had reached the edge of The Row, and we stopped on the slight hill above the street to look at the scene. At the far end, near Cassandra's shop, a band was playing, and there was a crowd gathered in the street. All along the sidewalks, people milled around, some of them standing in groups and talking, others ducking in and out of the stores and restaurants. The patio where Sharon and I had eaten breakfast was packed, people sitting at tables or leaning against the railing. Through the wide, plate-glass windows of the bookstore, I could see a woman standing at a microphone doing a reading, a group perching on folding chairs in front of her.

I was struck again by how much the neighborhood had changed. The stores were less gentrified, less concerned with who they should keep out and more with inviting people in. The people had changed too—they were younger, they came in endless colors and shapes and sizes, and their hair was wildly dyed or gloriously plain, and their clothes were vintage or didn't quite match, and they called to each other in languages I didn't recognize, and I felt like I was living again instead of locked in a compound that was struggling to keep out anyone who didn't matter, surrounded by people who looked more like themselves and less like everyone else. “This place has changed,” I said to Henry, and I could hear the breathless awe in my
voice. It was silly to be so caught up in a stupid street fair, I knew, and at the same time, it wasn't just a street fair. It was like sitting at breakfast the other day with Sharon, talking to Henry and Cassandra and all the other people who had come along, and realizing I thought there was nothing to surprise me about Magnolia, but I hadn't known it at all.

“It has. There's been a concerted effort to revitalize The Row. I got some great funding to help make The Kitchen happen because of it.”

“It just seems so strange, that this is the same neighborhood I grew up in. All these new stores, all these people I don't know. It's like an entirely new place.”

“Well, let's get to know it,” Henry said. He took my hand to help me down a few crumbling steps to the street and I blushed at the heat of his skin, the reassuring comfort of his broad palm covering mine. When he let go, it felt like a loss. There was a twinge in my chest as I thought of Phillip, and I pushed it away. I didn't want him in this moment.

We made our way down the center of the street, where the crowds were looser and more fluid. A group of girls slunk by, their youth dangerously beautiful, laughing and teasing each other in Spanish. A couple stood outside a pub with beers in their hands, chuffing out smoke as they laughed, and even the sharp smell of their cigarettes was romantic and comforting in the warm evening.

“So what were we talking about?” Henry asked as we stepped around a group of families in the middle of the street, plastic glasses of wine balanced in the cup holders of their strollers. “Oh, right. Art is impractical.”

“One summer I said I didn't want to go to camp, I wanted to stay home and work on my painting, and my parents nearly went through the roof. And when they found out I was thinking about applying to art school instead of regular college—I never would have had the nerve to tell them; my college counselor spilled the beans—my father said he wasn't spending a dime on some so-called ‘education' at art school.”

“What did they want you to do?”

I looked up at the sky, which was the pleasantly indecisive mix of blue and gray and pink of a falling spring evening. “They just wanted me to get married. I don't think they really cared whether I had a career or not. Women in my parents' world . . . sometimes I wonder if they even know feminism is a thing. And they're total hypocrites—they give money to the symphony, they go to events at the art museum. But my going to art school, somehow that would have been the worst thing ever.”

“I'm sorry,” Henry said, and it seemed like the right thing to say, so I smiled back at him. Despite the rest of his cleaned-up appearance, it looked like he hadn't shaved for a couple of days, and he rubbed his face with his thick fingers. He seemed about to say something else, until a couple he knew spotted him and came over to say hello. He introduced me, and we chatted for a few minutes before they split off again.

“Thanks for coming out tonight,” he said as we started walking again. “It's nice to be away from the restaurant on a Friday night. Feels like I'm breaking a rule.”

“I'm pretty sure you are. But you said it's going well, right? You're going to be McDonald's before you know it.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I only ever really wanted the one restaurant. And I wanted it not to fail. That's an important caveat.”

“What did you do before?”

“This, basically. I mean, not running the place, but working in restaurants. I knew I wanted to be a chef since the first time my mother handed me pots and pans to bang together. Graduated high school, bam, right into culinary school. I've worked at restaurants all over town. Spent a few years at resorts in the Ozarks, too, which was pretty glamorous.”

“Even the name sounds glamorous. Ozark.”

“Ozark would be a great name for a kid,” Henry said, and he laughed, but my stomach twisted a little. I knew he was just joking, but that was a joke you made with someone you were dating. And we were definitely
not dating. Even if I hadn't been married, he wasn't my type, and I was . . . well, like my grandmother, there had never been suitors lined up around the block.