The Light of Paris (13 page)

“I'm not leaving her to do this on her own,” I said. I was still hiding behind my mother, who needed me there about as much as she needed a chocolate teapot, but it was all I had.

“You're so selfish. I need you at this dinner. We're supposed to be married, Madeleine. Remember that?”

“And you said we should get a divorce. Remember that?” I spat the last word.

“Don't be stupid,” he said, with an enormous, exhausted sigh, as though divorce hadn't been his idea in the first place, as though I were making it up. And I felt foolish for ever believing he would actually follow through. Saying we should get a divorce had been nothing but a way for him to win the fight, a reminder of how lucky I was and how easily he could take it all away. “You don't know how good you have it. Do you know how many women would be happy to be married to me?”

He said this as though he were the greatest prize anyone could have had, an end worthy of justifying the means. And, I thought guiltily, hadn't I thought of it the same way myself at the beginning? Hadn't that been what had encouraged me to push away all the warning signs, the glaring lights and bells worthy of a carnival midway, all of them shouting the same thing: “Don't do this!”

“I don't want to talk any more right now,” I said, and my voice was empty and tired. The fact that he would rather crush me, rather hold me to him cruelly than let me go, forced me to face everything I had refused to see about the man he was. And if he didn't see how wrong this all was, I didn't even know how to begin to go about explaining it to him.

“Well, that's great. Because I don't want to talk to you anymore either, Madeleine,” he said icily, stretching my name into three precise syllables. I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it, wishing for a good old-fashioned rotary phone, where you could slam down the receiver satisfactorily. Instead, I shoved some of the flowers in the vase to the side and dropped the phone in the water and walked away, feeling both triumphant and terrified.

The morning after Evelyn's departure, Margie sat at Les Deux Magots, a pretty little café on a corner across the street from the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church. But Margie wasn't much in the mood for sightseeing. She had written a letter to her mother, a truthful one this time, reporting the situation with Evelyn and her own now tragic finances, and asking for advice. It would have been more appropriate to send a telegram, she knew. This was, after all, urgent. But she hoped the letter would delay things a little. The hotel was paid up for another week, and Margie had a little more money she had tucked away here and there in her luggage—not enough to live extravagantly, but enough for a few things—admission to a few of the less dear sites or museums, and her
café complet
here—a large cup of coffee with cream, and a roll with butter. Surely she could manage on such little food if it meant she could stay in Paris a little longer.

No one seemed to mind if you stayed in a café for ages, and so she was, sitting at a table outside, as the morning geared up like a rusty calliope. She had sealed the letter and, to wipe away the bitter taste of the envelope, was writing a story about a girl who became tragically ill on a trip to Europe and was forced to return home, which sounded much more romantic and less depressing than her own situation, even if the
end result were the same. At a table nearby sat a young man she was considering writing into the story as the French suitor of the tragically ill girl. He was unbelievably handsome, with long blond hair, though the fashion was for it to be short and slicked back, and strong bones in his face that made him look as though he had been chiseled. A pen and an open notebook lay on his table while he leaned back, fingers laced behind his neck, his head tilted up toward the sunshine. His eyes were closed and a light smile played on his face.

He opened his eyes and caught Margie looking at him. She started, horrified to have been caught, but before she looked away, he gave her a long, slow wink. Flushing a hot scarlet, Margie lowered her head to her writing again. No, she couldn't put him in her story. He might catch her at that, too.

It was such a pleasure, though, to see a young man like him, to see any of the young men in Paris, lively and healthy. The war had rendered men of a certain age glaring in their absence, left behind on fields in France, in Italy, in Germany, their presence now limited to the mothers still wearing black mourning crêpe. A group of young men who looked to be about her age passed by and then came into the café, and she wondered at the luck, the miracle of them, young and healthy and enthusiastic. They piled into the chairs around the table, and there seemed to be so many of them, so many limbs in motion, so much noise and bluster, she thought surely there wouldn't be enough room. But of course there was, and then there was a flurry again as they ordered and coffee was brought and they settled in with their cups and their cigarettes, some of them leaning forward, hands on the table, conversing vehemently, others leaning back, watching the people go by as she was, and it all felt so
right
, as if this had all been planned, them and the other young man and her, as if they had all been born just to be here in this moment.

She paused, putting down her pen and flexing her fingers, pulling on them one at a time to make her knuckles pop. Her mother hated the
habit; she said it made Margie look like a baseball player, and wondered if she would take up smoking cigars next. Mentally, Margie stuck her tongue out at her mother, but she must have done it actually, too, because a woman sitting at a table nearby gave her a queer expression, and Margie sighed, clamping her tongue inside the prison of her teeth.

“
Bonjour
,” a man said, and Margie looked up to see the young man with the blond hair who had winked at her now standing in front of her table, his cup and saucer in his hand, his notebook tucked underneath his arm.

“
Bonjour?
” Margie replied. She had been practicing her French over the past few days, but it still felt graceless and uncomfortable on her tongue, and it sounded dreadfully American to her ears.

“May I sit with you?” he asked, in perfect English, turned into something more beautiful by his decidedly French accent. Before she could demur—she had thought it was unseemly enough initially for a young woman to be sitting at a café on her own, let alone to take company with a strange man—he was putting down his things and pulling out the other chair at the table, sitting down as though she had been waiting for him all along. “You are a writer?” he asked.

Margie looked down at her notebook and blushed, closed the cover to hide her messy scrawl and the messier emotions it exposed. “Not really. I would like to be a writer, but right now I am—well, I don't know what I am. I'm just playing, I guess.”

“You look like a writer,” he said, fixing her with a sharp stare. “You are writing,
oui?
” His eyes were a brilliant green she had never seen before, at least not on a person. She had seen it on summer fields, in the sparkle of an emerald ring, but his eyes made the color elsewhere seem shoddy and false.

“Just writing doesn't make you a writer. Not a real writer, like one who writes books or something.”

“Well, how do you think the writers who write books began?” he asked, gesturing at her notebook. “They wrote in cafés in Paris, like you.”

“Maybe,” Margie said doubtfully, but she had to suppress a little smile at the thought of someone thinking her a real writer.

“Not maybe. Definitely.” He broke into a wide smile. He had a full mouth and broad, white teeth. “Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked, despite clearly having already made himself at home. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches, though he made no move to smoke them, only putting them on the table as though he were settling in for a workday.

“No, it's fine.”

“Are you American?” His accent twisted his vowels and made the consonants scrape against the roof of his mouth in a delicious way.

“
Oui.
Er, yes.” She coughed. Did she look so obviously American? She certainly didn't think she looked Parisian. The Parisian women were delicate under their loose dresses, their ankles slender, their cheekbones high under cloche hats. They wore their coats slipping slightly off their shoulders, as though they were always arriving, about to sit down and stay for a while, or always ready to leave, heading off on another adventure. Margie felt solid and indelicate next to them and their easy elegance. Even the men had a certain panache to them; the young man talking to her had a scarf loosely knotted around his neck in a casual way she knew it would take hours to reproduce, and his hair fell impishly into his face, a caramel blond that set off his eyes.

“Everyone in Paris is American now. Except for me. I am French.
Je m'appelle Sebastien
. And you?”

“Margie,” she said, and then she caught herself, changed her mind, though she wasn't sure why. “Margaret.”

“
Marguerite
,” he repeated, turning what she had always thought of as a dull, workaday name into something new and elegant. In French
class at school, they had simply pronounced her nickname with an accent—
Mar-ZHEE
, which had sounded dull and leaden, as it did in English. But
Marguerite
. Marguerite was someone different. Marguerite wouldn't be abandoned by anyone to go to a party—she would be invited to the party, would be the life of it. Marguerite would sit in cafés and flirt with strangers and maybe even drink wine and dance sometimes. With a sudden, swelling ache, Margie wanted to be Marguerite more than anything else.

Sebastien lifted his cup and clinked it against hers. “
Enchanté
,” he said, and he winked again.

Margie sipped at her coffee. Her secret was that she didn't really like coffee, but she had learned to order it with cream instead of milk, and with extra sugar, which she dropped in until the coffee could no longer absorb it all and the last few sips left her with a pale, sweet sludge at the bottom of the cup, a deliciously wasteful extravagance after the war. “So are you a writer?” she asked.

“
Non
,
non
,” Sebastien scoffed. “Only Americans are writers.” He gave her a little wink and she couldn't resist smiling back. She didn't know why he had chosen to sit with her, but his good mood was infectious, and she was happy to have a little cheer around her. If she only had a week left in the city, she might as well spend her time enjoying things rather than moping around. “No, I am an artist. Frenchmen, we are painters.” He flipped his notebook open, showing her the sketches that covered the pages, sometimes only tiny pieces jumbled together on a single page—the Eiffel Tower rendered in crosshatches, a quickly sketched coffee cup, a woman's ear, delicate as a seashell—and sometimes a drawing spreading across both pages, a bridge across the Seine viewed from the water, an explosion of flowers in a garden. He paged through rapidly, as though he were making a moving picture, and then closed the notebook when he came to the blank pages at the end. Margie wanted to take it from him, open it again, let its secrets unfold in front of her. She was a
dreadful artist herself, capable mostly of childish stick figures and landscapes—square houses, stiffly symmetrical trees—and she envied people who could draw.

“Those are lovely,” she breathed.

Waving his hand as though he could dismiss the air that held the compliment, Sebastien took another sip of coffee. “Not so. They are only things I draw to remind me of what to paint later. Like making a note for a story,
oui?
”

“
Oui
,” Margie said, and this time she didn't correct herself, because Marguerite felt like someone who would say
oui
instead of yes, even if she was American.

“So what are you doing in Paris all alone?”

Margie sighed. “I was here with my cousin. I was supposed to be her chaperone.”

“Where is she?” Sebastien looked around. For once, Margie was grateful Evelyn wasn't there. If Sebastien saw her, it would be, “So long, Margie.” It had always been that way: when Evelyn was around, Margie might as well have been invisible—and not only to young men, but to waiters, or porters, or shop clerks. She'd actually had to snap her fingers in front of the face of the porter when they were getting off the ship, he had been so entranced. She had once seen a man walk into a lamp post on the street because he had been so busy watching Evelyn. It had sounded with a loud
bong
, and the poor fellow had seemed so surprised, and had looked at the lamp post with such personal offense that Margie had to smother a laugh in her hand.

“She met some friends on the ship when we came over, and now she's run off with them.”

“Run off?”

“You know. Left me to spend time with them.”

“I see.” Sebastien frowned, piecing the story together in his mind. His English was impeccable, but Margie wasn't sure how much of what she
said was clear. She had never thought so much about idioms, about the way they crept into your language and became untranslatable. She remembered, years ago in high school, missing a meeting with her French teacher, who had then accused Margie of putting a rabbit on her—“
Tu m'a posé un lapin!
” What a silly thing to say, Margie had thought, but in the end, was it any sillier than saying, “You stood me up!” What did that even mean?

“So she is gone, but you are still here.”

“
Oui
.”

Sebastien broke into another smile then, wide and disarming. “So this is better, then! Now you have all of Paris and none of her.” He spread his arms wide, as if to take in the entirety of the city and offer it to Margie.

“No, no,” Margie said. “I . . .” She tried to think of how to explain it. “You see, I was only here to be with her. I was meant to take care of her. And now I must go home.”

At this, Sebastien looked so horrified that Margie almost laughed aloud. “Leave Paris?” He spread his hand over his chest, as though Margie had wounded him. “You have just arrived!”

With a shrug, Margie tried to ignore the tug at her own heart. She knew. Oh, how she knew. For every word she had written to her mother, she had composed ten in her heart illuminating how unfair the whole thing was. “I know. But I can't stay here alone. It wouldn't be appropriate.”

“Is this a . . .” He snapped his fingers in the air and squinted at the sky, looking for the word. He really was terribly attractive, Margie thought, so attractive she forgot to question why he was sitting there talking to her. She had originally thought his hair was the color of burnt caramel, but as he moved his head in the sunlight, it lit up a dozen different colors—strands of corn silk, of strawberry blond, of deep chestnut—and his eyes blazed green, the lashes around them unfairly dark and thick. He had slim hands with long fingers, and when he moved them in the air when he spoke, she watched, transfixed, picturing herself
capturing one of his hands and holding it against her face, just for a moment, just to feel how real he was.