The Light of Paris (10 page)

“It will be nice to be off the ship, won't it? It's feeling a bit claustrophobic.”

“Definitely,” Evelyn said. The thought seemed to cheer her, and she hopped out of bed and began to fold some dresses carelessly and put them in the trunk. “I can't wait to see Paris.”

“Me too!” Margie didn't even bother to hide her glee. She was a hopeless sap, and she knew it, but how could she be expected to hold back her anticipation? She was going to Europe. She was following in the footsteps of Edith Hull and May Sinclair, Gertrude Atherton and Edith Wharton, of all the writers she had loved and admired for so long.

Evelyn lifted a dress, shook it out, and dropped it in the trunk. “I had the loveliest night last night. We went to the Captain's Ball—did you go?”

Margie shot her a look, wondering if Evelyn were being purposefully mean, knowing Margie wouldn't have had anyone to go to the ball with, but Evelyn looked wide-eyed and open. “I only stopped by,” Margie said. She had walked by the ballroom after dinner and peered inside, where the evening was warming up, women luminous in their finest dresses, saved for the occasion, the orchestra playing softly, a few couples testing the dance floor. She had indeed longed to go in, to join the glittering party, to sit down at a table of those gay people and drink champagne, to take a dance with a man in a tuxedo. She had danced so much the year of her debut, and now she hardly danced at all. When she went to balls at home, she was often trapped at a table full of women older and sadder than her—true spinsters, or widows—and Margie had started taking a book and sneaking off in order to avoid that fate. But here, she didn't know anyone, and when she looked down at her dress, a beaded thing of eggplant and black crêpe georgette, it looked dull and drab and unworthy. If she went in, she would only stand by the wall and watch everyone else's good time. Instead, she had taken her notebook and gone to the conservatory, where a pianist played softly to the empty room, and she wrote a story about a girl on a ship who goes to a ball and meets a handsome man who dances with her all night, and when it was finished, she cried a few tears of resentful happiness and went to bed.

“Well, it was absolutely berries. Truly, Margie, you ought to have come. Now let's get off this ship and go to Paris. I'm dying to buy a new dress—I haven't had a thing to wear all week.”

By the time Evelyn finished her haphazard packing job and dressed, there was still a stream of people flooding from the ship. A porter hurried ahead with their luggage. At the post box, Margie dropped a letter to her mother, full of pleasant lies, to go on the ship's return journey. She had invented charming dinner conversations they hadn't had, described dances she hadn't attended, and people she hadn't met. And her mother said all her dreaming would never come in handy.

On the train, Evelyn chattered inanely and endlessly until Margie had to excuse herself to go to the dining car simply to get a break. She didn't know which was worse—worrying about the trouble Evelyn was sure to land herself in if Margie left her to her own devices in a strange city, or having to stay with her. A taxicab, directed by Margie's clumsy, thick-tongued French, took them to their hotel, Margie and Evelyn pressing their noses against the windows. “Look!” Margie said as they passed, “Notre-Dame! The Place de la Concorde! The Champs-Élysées!” She laid her hand flat against the window as though she could run her fingers over every inch of Paris, touch it the way Robert Walsh had touched her that night all those years ago.

At the thought, Margie pulled back as though she had been shocked. Evelyn's face was still pressed to the window, but Margie could see the younger girl's eyes were closed. She had fallen asleep there, leaning against the cool glass.

What had made her think of Robert, after all this time? She didn't want to think of him, not here, not now. She'd had that one night, one perfect night, and there was no point in spoiling it with reality. She wanted Europe to be about romance and joy, about newness and adventure. She wanted it to be different. She didn't want her happiness spoiled by being reminded of who she had been in America.

When they had settled in their room, the porter having carried their luggage upstairs with no small amount of grumbling and ill will, at the end Margie guiltily pressing into his hand what she would realize later
was an outrageously large tip (the money was so confusing), Evelyn began to go through her trunk, tossing things about until the room looked exactly as their stateroom had. She slipped out the door into the bathroom and emerged, somehow, despite the fact that the entirety of her sleep in the past twenty-four hours had been in the taxi on the way here, looking refreshed and lovely. Margie had changed her shoes and was consulting her Baedeker's
Paris and Its Environs
. It was already late afternoon, but certainly they could fit in a stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens or down to the Seine.

Evelyn picked up her bag and her wrap. “I'm going downstairs to cable Mama that we've arrived,” she said. Margie sat in the room for a moment and then decided to follow her. She'd wait in the lobby while Evelyn sent her telegram, and then they could go out exploring. Her heart beat a little faster at the idea. She was eager to go, to step onto the streets where the heroes of the French Revolution had walked, to pass the cafés where the artists of Paris gathered, to squeeze every drop of joy out of this trip so when she was home again with her mother, sticking her needle into the tiny circumscribed round of an embroidery hoop and listening to the endless ticking of the clock counting off the stultifying hours, she would have an infinity of things to remember, to dream about, to write about.

But when she got down to the lobby, of course Evelyn wasn't sending a telegram. She was standing with the group from the ship, who had thrown themselves on a few of the sofas in the lobby's sitting area as though it were their own living room.

“Evelyn?” Margie asked, coming up behind her.

Evelyn whirled around, wide-eyed. The others in the group looked at Margie lazily, one of the girls pausing to whisper behind her hand to another, who giggled. Margie flushed, red and hot and pathetic, a low, sinking feeling in her chest.

“What are you doing?”

“We're going out,” Evelyn said, as though this had all been arranged, as though she and Margie had spoken about it only a few moments ago.

“But . . .” Margie began, and then realized she didn't know what to say.
But what, Margie? But you had some grand vision of how Evelyn was going to become a different person between the ship and here? You had imagined yourself to be a different person now that you were in Europe, someone Evelyn wouldn't insist on leaving behind at every possibility?
And then there was a sickening sadness as she realized it had been the plan all along. That was why Evelyn had asked the name of their hotel; not because she was in any way interested in the trip, but because she was telling her friends where to come get her.

“Really, Margie. You're absolutely hopeless,” Evelyn said. She turned back to her friends. “Let's go,” she said, and they rose sleepily, as though she had awoken them, and the men ambled and the girls glided toward the door, leaving Margie standing there alone in the lobby, her guide book in one hand and her bag in the other, with no plan and no idea what to do.

Outside, all of Paris waited for her, but Margie felt deflated and overwhelmed. She had failed, she had been rejected, and she had no idea what she was going to tell her mother. Finally, when one of the disagreeable porters cleared his throat at her until she moved out of the center of the lobby, she headed over to the front desk to send a telegram. Her pen hovered over the paper for a long, long time until she settled on something appropriately terse:
Arrived safely. M & E
.

My mother invited me to another luncheon the next day, but I refused to go. I couldn't sit through another afternoon of pretending and watching everyone else pretend. I was still heartsick thinking about all of us in that room together, playing our parts, and I couldn't bear to do it again.

After she left, I went down to The Row to find something to eat. At the end of my parents' street, blocks of stores and restaurants housed in low, unassuming brick buildings extended in either direction. It was an older part of the city, and when I was younger, it danced on the knife edge of respectability: boutiques where my mother bought scarves alongside a head shop and the falafel restaurant where the college students hung out. In high school, I'd gone there all the time—to pretend to be tortured and drink coffee at the coffee shop, to look at the art books at the bookstore or hang around the poetry section, hoping to meet a teenage boy with a poetic soul (FYI, based on my extensive adolescent research, I'm pretty sure they don't exist), to buy a cookie the size of my head and window shop my way along the street.

But I noticed, as I strolled down the sidewalk in search of food, that things had settled decisively in favor of upscale cool. The head shop had been replaced by a store selling locally made jewelry and art, and a microbrewery had pushed out the falafel (probably a fair exchange in
the eyes of the college students). I found a new restaurant with a tiny patio surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, where I ordered eggs Benedict and coffee, and while I waited for it to come, I leaned back and closed my eyes and let the sun lie against my skin like a warm promise.

The day stretched out ahead of me, empty and open and free, and for once that space felt luxurious, instead of like time that needed to be filled.

What did I used to do, when I was single and lived on my own? It seemed like I was trying to remember a story I had once heard and barely recalled, the edges soft, the details inconsistent. Afternoons spent painting until the light faded and my eyes and fingers ached, evenings in the empty second-run cinema, my hands sticky with butter and salt from the popcorn. More than how I had spent each hour, I remembered the feeling—a giddy freedom, as though I were on an eternal summer vacation. I would look at the people around me and feel as though I were getting away with something, doing something wrong. Now I wondered why I had ever felt that way—it had been my life to do with what I wanted, after all.

“Well, well, slacking on the job, are we?” I started, my eyes flicking open. My face was growing hot from the sunlight, and there were spots in my vision where it had burned into my eyes. Blinking them away, I squinted until Sharon came into focus.

“Hi. I was just—my mother doesn't keep any food in the house . . .” I was fairly sure she was joking, but I felt ashamed at having been caught here, like a cat in a sunbeam, when I should have been doing something responsible.

“Relax, relax. I'm kidding. Can I join you?” She was wearing a dress and a blazer, but before I could say anything, she eyed the black railing surrounding the restaurant's patio, hopped up on it, and swung her legs over. A moment later she was settling herself into the empty chair across from mine, hanging her purse and jacket over the back, and looking around for the server.

I sat up from my lazily slumping position and rummaged around in
my handbag until I found a pair of sunglasses that had probably been in there since the previous summer, judging by the level of smudging and scratching. My fingers brushed against my mobile phone, which was stubbornly silent. Phillip hadn't forgiven me yet, I guessed. Or maybe he was just busy in New York. He was the one who had insisted we have cellular phones long before they became popular, and that we get the newest devices the moment they were released. Phillip always had to have the best of everything.

“What are you doing here? Do you live nearby?” I asked, a little too loudly, trying to force the thought of Phillip from my head.

“Me?” Sharon barked out a little laugh. She had the same voice she'd had in high school, rough and whiskey-edged. You could hear her laugh all the way across campus. “No, I couldn't afford to live here unless I was stripping on the side. And that's not likely to happen,” she said, gesturing at her body, which was short and comfortably solid. “I was actually just dropping off some fliers for another client. Betsy Lynn Chivers—do you know her? She and your mother are friends.”

I shuddered at the mention of Betsy Lynn Chivers, who dressed her dogs in outfits and carried them everywhere with her, but had shouted at me repeatedly when I was little for tracking dirt onto her carpet. “Unfortunately, I do know her. She gave me nightmares when I was a kid.”

“She gives me nightmares now,” Sharon said, and then interrupted herself to ask for coffee and an order of pancakes when the server came by. “But she's rich and she wants me to sell her house, so, cheers!” She lifted her water glass to me in a toast and then drank.

“May it sell quickly and easily, then,” I said.

“No kidding. So what are you up to? Sorry for scaring the pants off you at the house the other day. I assumed your mother would have told you.”

“Yeah, well. My mother and I aren't always the best communicators. Frankly, I don't think she thought I'd care.”

“And do you care?”

“Weirdly, I do. Stupid, right? I haven't lived in that house basically since I left for college.”

“Eh, people get weird about real estate. Don't take it personally, though. Your mom just wants to get out of there. It's a lot of house for her to manage.”

“And she's moving into an apartment building? I can't imagine it.”

“It's condos. And all the Garden Society dowagers move there.” Sharon's coffee arrived, and she took a stack of packets, shook them, and poured the entire pile into her coffee, rendering it ninety percent sweetener and ten percent liquid. “Betsy Lynn is moving there, too, and I am sure her neighbors are thrilled, because those dogs she has yap all the livelong day. Anyway, enough about her and her problems. I'm so glad you're in town.”

“Me too,” I said, surprised to find I actually meant it. My visits to my mother had always been plagued by her criticism and my desperate efforts to please her, but this time felt different. I felt like I had nothing to lose, like it was easier to shake off her complaints about my clothes, my hair, my weight, like it wasn't my problem. “What about you? Have you been here since high school?”

“Nah, I did a little bit of wandering. Followed Phish around for a couple of years, lived in San Francisco and made a lot of merry. Then I met my boyfriend when I was visiting back here and I decided to stay.”

Our food arrived and we settled ourselves under our napkins, shifted our plates around, made space for the accoutrements of breakfast while I pictured Sharon dancing in muddy fields, or walking along the streets of San Francisco, a little loose and free, like a flower child twenty years too late. “I have to say, I can picture you much more easily doing those things than I can seeing you living here. This place is so . . .” I struggled for a word to describe how I had felt at the luncheon the day before, the strange combination of shame for myself and mourning for all of us, and failed.

But Sharon knew what I meant, or seemed to. “Parts of it, sure. The
parts you and I grew up in. But it's not all like that. There are a million great shops and restaurants and amazing live music—my boyfriend's a musician, which is basically why I became a real estate agent. Someone's got to pay the bills, you know? He stays home with the kids.”

I nearly choked on my eggs. “You have kids?” I asked, wheezing as politely as I could as I took a sip of water to recover. On our senior retreat, I'd watched Sharon carve a bong out of an apple from the dining hall and then lead a group of girls straight past the chaperones' rooms to get high in the woods. And now that girl changed diapers and rocked babies to sleep.

“Sure. Twin boys. They're almost two. Kevin is home with them during the day while I'm working.” She paused between bites and shot me a wicked grin. “You're surprised? I don't strike you as the maternal type?”

“Well . . . not really. I mean, I didn't really know you well in high school, but . . .”

“Ah, don't worry about it. Most of the rumors weren't true, but the sentiment behind them was. Honestly, I was glad to have the reputation I did. Kept me an arm's distance from being caught up in the perfect circle. I don't know how you survived it.”

“The perfect circle? What do you mean?”

“You know. Ashley, Ellen, Audrey, Emma, you. All those bitches with their perfect hair and their Add-A-Pearl necklaces. Not that you're a bitch. I never understood what you were doing with them anyway.”

“No idea. I have never had perfect hair, and I was always losing my Add-A-Pearl necklace. I don't know why they let me hang around with them. Probably I just made them feel better about themselves.” I felt a little shudder of shame saying it, as though I had been hiding the truth from myself for years. Apparently, my life's purpose was to cling desperately to people who thought they were too good for me, because I believed it too.

Sharon snorted. “It should have been the other way around. I remember your paintings from the Senior Art Show—they were amazing. Are you still an artist?”

“Not really,” I said. “No. I mean, I wasn't ever an artist. I was just playing around.” I had told Miss Pine the same thing, but it sounded different this time. Those were my parents' words, not mine. I hadn't been playing around. My creativity had mattered to me.

“That's too bad. You were good,” she said. “Anyway, I always suspected you were cool, despite the necklace and the company you kept. Glad to know I wasn't wrong.”

Pulled out of my art-soaked memories, I blinked slowly at Sharon. She had thought I was cool? She, who wore a leather jacket and Doc Martens with her uniform, who had driven her date to prom on a motorcycle, who left campus during lunch (very much against the rules) to smoke (very very much against the rules) and eat pizza with the public school boys (very very very much against the rules)—she thought I was cool? Had she really been so wrong about me? Or had I been wrong about myself?

“So,” I asked, clearing my throat and changing the subject before the silence became awkwardly long, “what's it like working with my mother?”

Sharon carefully cut her pancakes, obviously considering how to respond. “Your mother is . . . intense.”

“If by intense you mean overly critical and negative, then yes. She is.”

“That must have been fun to grow up with.”

I gave a little half smile, but I couldn't summon a laugh. It had been hard to grow up with. It was hard to live with now. My mother had always been hard on me, especially about my art and my appearance. When she thought I was spending too much time in the art studio at school, she'd signed me up for Junior Ladies Association. My last year at Country Day, the Senior Art Show had been on display for three weeks, and she'd never managed to make it in, and when I'd asked, she'd said, in a tone that had made me want to weep, “Really, Madeleine, is it so important? They're just paintings.” She had monitored what I ate from the time I was six until I left for college, and had regularly informed me that I would never find
someone who would marry me if I didn't take better care of my hair/stop laughing so loudly/lose some weight.

But I couldn't stop trying to please her. It was unreasonable, I knew. I'd never be able to make her happy, I knew. But she was my
mother
. What else was I supposed to do? I kept hoping that one day we could have a conversation about something that mattered without her criticizing me, I kept hoping that one day she would give me a hug without silently judging how much weight I had gained or lost, I kept hoping that one day she would say, “I love you even though you are nothing like me.” Fool me a hundred times, shame on me, but she was my mother, and I knew I would keep hoping for a miracle between us until the day I died.

I couldn't explain all that to Sharon, though, so I just said, “It's complicated.”

“Heeeey, Sharon!” A woman stopped on the other side of the railing. She was walking an elderly dog who sniffed at my legs eagerly. I reached through the bars to pet it and it snuffled enthusiastically at my hand. I had always wanted a dog, or at least a cat, but Phillip hated shedding and I refused to get one of those creepy hairless breeds.

“Hey, what's up?” Sharon stood up and hugged the woman over the railing. They chatted as I petted the dog with one hand and ate with the other. “Madeleine, this is Cassandra. She owns the knitting store down the street. Have you seen it? It's new since you left.”

I gulped down a bite and patted my lips with my napkin in one hand as I reached out for Cassandra's hand with the other. She was tall, with long, brown braids streaked with bright purple, and a nose ring, lending her a glamor I far preferred to the stuffy elegance of the women at the Ladies Association.