The Light of Paris (14 page)

“A punishment? Is this a punishment?” He looked pleased at himself for having found the word.

“I suppose it is,” she said, and the thought made her blue. “My mother . . .” she began, unable to bring herself to finish. Margie's feelings about her mother were too complicated to explain.

A woman with a small child had arrived and was sitting on a bench outside the church. She had given the child a baguette, and he toddled around, alternately pursuing and pursued by the pigeons as he tossed crumbs in the air. At another table in the café, a man with a mustache sat, nursing a drink and writing in his own notebook, his meaty hands so large they nearly eclipsed the paper. Beside him were two French women, their heads bent together as though they were telling the most important of secrets. It was punishment to take her away from the sights she had not seen—
la tour Eiffel
!
Napoleon's tomb!—but it was punishment of a harsher sort to take her away from this, from the simple pleasures of Paris, from this place where she could sit alone in a café without anyone speculating on her virtue, where she could write for hours without being interrupted by her mother's criticisms, where she could watch the parade going by, this brave new world that had such people in't.

“Well,” she said, pulling herself out of her own sulk, “I've written my mother and told her Evelyn is gone. She'll write back and send me money to come home.” She left out the parts she didn't want to think about—her mother's fury, her own disappointment, the storm awaiting her when she got back to Washington. And, she thought, as she was pushing those thoughts to the back of her mind, her parents' anger wouldn't be the worst part of going home. It would be Mr. Chapman. Because this had been her chance at escape, and she had ruined it. And now she had no more excuses. Mr. Chapman waited at the other end of the journey like a thin-faced executioner. She wanted to drop her head on the table and weep.

Leaning forward, Sebastien lifted the envelope Margie had set aside, facedown. He looked at her questioningly, and she nodded. He lifted it between two fingers and read the address written in Margie's sloppy scrawl and then, as though it answered some question, nodded.

“And what if you do not go home?” he asked, turning the envelope slowly. She could hear the crinkle of the paper against his skin.

“Oh. I couldn't do that. It wouldn't be appropriate,” she started.

“You said this already.”

Flustered, Margie continued. “Well, Evelyn took most of our money. And I don't know anyone here. The hotel is already paid for one more week. After that I don't have anywhere to stay, and I don't have enough money to live on.”

With a sigh, Sebastien dropped the envelope, lit a cigarette, shook out the match with his hand and dropped it in an ashtray on the neighboring table. He exhaled, squinting at her through the smoke. “You could find work. And Paris is cheap for you. So many Americans are here because it costs them so little. You can live in Paris no problem.” He snapped his fingers again and she looked at his hands.

“Who are you?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious that she was sitting here, confessing her worries to a stranger, a handsome young man who would not have found anything in her worth looking at if she had been at home.

He grinned at her again, took a slow puff off the cigarette and let the smoke draw a lazy haze in the air before he replied. “
Je m'appelle
Sebastien.
”

“No, no. I know your name. But who are you? What do you do? Why are you talking to me?”

“Ah.” Sebastien tapped his cigarette end in the ashtray, rolling it around so the tobacco formed a pointed tip. “I am a painter, which I told you already. And I am talking to you because you look like you need someone to talk to.”

“Oh.” Margie deflated a little. Well, what had she thought? There might be about her something particularly appealing to French men? But would that be so wrong? Would it be so awful, once in her life, for someone to tell her she was beautiful? She had been told she was clever, even brilliant. But she wanted to be beautiful, wanted someone to say it. She thought she had been beautiful once, the night of her debut, that there had been some magic in her dress and in the night, blown in on the cold, cold air. But in the morning, the magic had gone, evaporated in the sunshine, and whatever beauty there had been had gone with it, and the only proof she had of it was the memory of Robert's kiss. “Well, thank you.”

Sebastien leaned back, lowering his eyes in thought, smoking silently. “I have a solution,” he said finally.

“For what?”

“For you, of course. You must stay in Paris. I know a place where all the American girls who come here live. You will live there too. We will tear up this letter and you will write to your mother and tell her you are staying.” He picked up the letter again and then let it fall from his fingers, as though it were as worthless as sand.

“I can't stay, Sebastien.” In her heart, she was already saying
au revoir
to all the things she might have done when she was here, watching the sun rise on the Pont des Arts over the Seine, walking the narrow back streets of the Left Bank, eating
pain au chocolat
whenever she wanted, drinking wine and writing in cafés, beside the artists and writers who had made Paris the place to be.

“You must! Leaving would be a waste. A waste!” He stubbed out his cigarette, leaned forward, looked into her eyes with his brilliant green ones, placed his hand on hers, soft, the fingernails edged with tiny moons of paint. She looked down at his hand on hers, the quiet pressure. “What is waiting for you in America that you must hurry back?”

What was waiting for her? Nothing. Nothing she wanted. Her parents' disappointment. Closed, stuffy parlors and embroidery. Ladies'
benevolent societies. Mr. Chapman. She looked past Sebastien's face, both serious and pleading at the same time, out the window again. The bell in the church tower was calling out the noon hour. The child had distributed the bread to the pigeons and was now sitting with his mother on the bench, insistently bending her ear about some issue of crucial small-child importance. Across the street, a vendor had arrived and was carefully hanging bits of fabric over the church's fence as though it were a display case, and a flower-seller was happily accosting people, thrusting bouquets at them as they alit from the Métro. She didn't want to leave this, didn't want to break the promise she had made to herself without even giving it a try. She didn't want to go home yet.

Her parents would be furious. And they would refuse to support her. She had—what, a few hundred francs? And then it would all be gone. But he had said Paris was cheap. And she could work, and her French would get better. She would be independent, like those girls in the boardinghouse. She'd have her own money, her own job, her own life, and there would be no one to criticize how she spent her time or what books she read or who she was.

Sebastien was still holding her hand, keeping her in place as though she were a rare and precious bird who might fly away. She thought of Mr. Chapman's dry, nervous hands, his chapped lips. She thought of everything she had yet to explore—the grand cathedral at Chartres, Versailles, the open-air markets.

Margie took a long breath, as though she were raising her arms in the air to dive into deep water. “All right,” she said. “Where is this place you say I should stay?”

When I dragged downstairs the morning after my argument with Phillip, my mother was already dressed (including full lipstick) and sitting in my father's office making phone calls. A yellow legal pad sat in front of her, covered with notes written in her perfect penmanship, and as I came in, she hung up the phone and made another note.

“You haven't brushed your hair,” she said, looking up at me.

“That was an actual life choice.” I'd woken up with it looking not half bad, and I'd been afraid to touch it. Of course it had gone into its natural curl, which my mother regarded as a failing on the same level of magnitude as, say, becoming a heroin addict, but I couldn't do anything about that.

My mother glanced back at me, looking as though she had stepped in something. I lifted my voice and changed the subject. “So what are you working on?” I asked, too loudly.

“Don't shout, I'm right here. I've been calling some appraisers.”

“Doesn't Sharon do that?”

“Not for the house, for the contents. I know you think everything in here is ancient and worthless, but much of it is quite valuable.”

“Wait, where did you get that idea? I don't think these things are worthless.”

“I've seen your house. It's very . . . modern.” She said the word as though even having it on her tongue disgusted her.

“That wasn't my choice! It was like that when we moved in. You remember my place here? Before Phillip and I got married? That wasn't modern.” I felt a pang of sadness when I remembered my apartment in Magnolia, where I had lived after college and before Phillip. I'd almost forgotten I'd once had a home that was wholly mine, and I felt the loss of it with a surprising ferocity.

It had been in one of the older buildings downtown, with gorgeous original parquet floors and French doors opening up on a balcony so charmingly tiny it was unusable. There were three bedrooms, one of which was a guest room no one ever used, one of which was mine, and the master, which I had repurposed as an art studio. My not using the master to sleep in had made my mother absolutely batty, which made me love it even more. My father had disapproved, had wanted to buy me a condo in a newer building, with a doorman and a business center and a more prestigious address. But all that had sounded so complicated, and I had wanted something of my own. And now I hated that I hadn't known how wonderful it was when I had it.

“Well, if you want anything, you need to let me know before the appraiser comes.”

There were a dozen things I would have loved to have—things I remembered from childhood, pieces my mother had told me the stories of—but where would I put them? I thought of the condo in Chicago, austere and elegant and cold, and shivered.

“Okay,” I said. Scarlett-like, I would think about it tomorrow. “Is that Sharon's list? What do we need to do next?”

My mother fixed me with the precise tractor beam of her gaze, the same look that had caught me a hundred times over in my childhood, pinning me in place and pulling the truth from me. “Why do you keep saying ‘we'? What's going on? Is everything all right with Phillip?”

Oh, dear. That was such a very, very large question. There were so many things that were not all right with Phillip, and even more things
that were not all right with Phillip and me. And perhaps an even longer list of things that were not all right with me individually. But I had no interest in exploring those subjects with my mother. Or, more likely, at all.

“He's fine,” I said. And wasn't that true? Phillip was always fine. And Phillip would always be fine, because to Phillip, there was absolutely nothing wrong with him. Any problem, any difficulty, any flaw belonged to someone else. “I just want to make sure you're taken care of.”

She looked at me for another long moment, coolly appraising. “Is there something you want to talk to me about?” Leaning back in the chair, she put down her pen and crossed her arms on her chest. The chair squeaked and another rush of sadness came over me as I was reminded of my father's absence. I'd had a hundred conversations with him in his office, just like this. Him sitting in his chair behind his desk, leaning back so it squeaked, me sitting in one of the chairs across from him, as if I were one of his clients and not his daughter, though it had never felt that way.

Between my parents, my father had been the soft touch. He had always talked to me as if I were an adult, and when I had been in trouble, I'd always gone to him first, and we'd work out some solution, and then he'd offer me a piece of candy from the jar on his desk, walk me to the door, and send me back out to play.

I opened and closed my mouth a few times. “It's complicated.” I couldn't imagine saying to her that Phillip and I were miserable, that he had threatened to divorce me, and even though he had backpedaled, in the meantime I had become half convinced it was a good idea. I didn't know how she would respond. My mother and I had never been that honest with each other.

“Marriage is difficult, you know,” she said, and her voice was unusually sentimental. My mother would needle at me and pick at me and criticize my hair and make exhaustive lists of all the things I was doing wrong, but she was still my mother, which meant there was an eternal flame lit inside me in honor of the moments when she didn't see me as something broken
to fix. My heart lifted slightly. Maybe I could tell her. We could actually have this conversation, and she would help me figure it out.

“I know it's difficult.” But I imagined it was a lot easier when you married the right person in the first place.

“I'm sure you'll work things out,” she said, and the smile on her face went smooth and plastic, and the brief hope I'd held flickered and then died. There was going to be no Hollywood ending where we embraced each other and cried while an emotionally manipulative song played in the background. Things are never like that in real life. At least not in mine.

And maybe Phillip and I would work things out. Maybe I did belong there after all.

Because people in my family didn't get divorced. My parents' marriage hadn't been any great love story, but they had stuck it out together. I couldn't think of anyone who had gotten divorced. The apocryphal stories I had heard always involved some dramatic circumstance—a mistress, a secret bank account in the Cayman Islands, a gambling addiction, alcoholism. No one else gets to upend their entire life just because they are unhappy. Why should I?

Anyway, I didn't know where I would go if I left. It would be better, I thought, to stay with him, to have him leave the bathroom scale pointedly in the middle of the floor when I let myself slip, to continue to wear the disguise of the perfect society wife I had put on to impress him. It would be better than whatever lonely uncertainty lay out there.

After all, it had been my choice to marry him. It had been my choice even though my reasons weren't the best: because I was tired of being lonely, because I wanted to please my parents, because life looked like a gigantic game of musical chairs and I was sure the music would stop at any moment and everyone would see I didn't have a partner.

And, at least at the beginning, I had seen so many other advantages to marrying Phillip. For instance, I had always wanted a sister. So when
Phillip told me he had two sisters, I was absolutely over the moon. Here it was. Here was my family. Here were my sisters. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. Phillip's sisters were cool-weather versions of the women I knew in Magnolia, the same frozen hair, in black instead of blond, the same sleeveless shift dresses, in muted solid colors, not summer prints, and they knew I was not one of them.

There was a bond among the three Spencer siblings that felt like a force field; whenever I tried to approach it, I was thrown back. They followed their mother's example in doting on Phillip to distraction, and there was a sibling connection that I, as an only child, would never understand; the three of them were best friends, so close it would have been impossible to separate them. At the engagement party with Phillip's family (there were two of everything except the wedding, which meant many, many presents and many, many thank-you notes), a sister clung to each of his arms, accepting the congratulations on my behalf, laughing with the relatives and friends I should have been meeting, basking in the warmth of the family I knew, with growing certainty, I would never fully be able to join. For my part, I spent the majority of that party, ostensibly held in my honor, hiding from Phillip's mother, drinking far too much red wine, and making sweet, sweet love to a garlicky plate of hummus. But I got to keep all the presents, so I guess I won?

After the wedding, when the photographer's proofs arrived, there was a whole series of Phillip and his sisters cuddled together in an armchair, laughing, a matched set of dark-haired beauty. Somehow, his sisters' dresses had remained perfectly unwrinkled. Personally, I had been so terrified of crushing my own dress that from the moment I had put it on, I had refused to sit down, and I had nearly fainted during the receiving line from keeping my knees locked for such a long time.

“When did you take these?” I asked him when we looked at the pictures, running my finger along the edge of the page, as though I could join them by touch.

Phillip leaned over and peered at the page. “In the groom's room. Before the ceremony.”

“Oh,” I said. At the moment Phillip and his sisters had taken this picture, I was standing silently in the bride's room, my dress stiff and uncomfortable, my hair pulled back too tightly, the combs of the tiara pressing against my scalp, my mother looking at me critically, the rest of the bridesmaids gathered in a corner drinking a bottle of champagne and laughing.

Phillip clearly had no problem playing his part. During the reception, he strutted around the room, circulating among the tables at dinner without me, accepting the congratulations and best wishes of people who adored him. I only knew half the people there, so after I made a few tentative forays to greet them, I retreated to the head table to eat my dinner alone. It would have been kind of him . . . well, why not say it as it was? He should have taken me with him. He should have introduced me to the people I didn't know, held me beside him as his wife. But that was not the way Phillip worked. Before the wedding, it had been all about my mother, who had planned the entire thing, right down to the personalized tulle bundles of Jordan almonds and the napkins that matched the bridesmaids' dresses. And then on the day itself, it was all about Phillip. I wondered how I had lost my place at my own wedding, feeling more and more kinship with the tiny plastic bride sitting on top of the wedding cake, nothing more than a part of the set dressing in The Phillip Show.

Every night on our honeymoon, I slipped into sleep and he went down to the hotel bar and drank until the stars faded, chatting with the patrons, accepting their congratulations on his own, again. I would wake and find him gone, the room empty except for the cold company of the moonlight, and I lay awake, staring into the silvery darkness until the door creaked open and he settled into bed beside me. I never said anything, and he never intimated he thought there was anything wrong with the arrangement. And there wasn't anyone I could ask. There are a hundred etiquette guides for weddings, and not a single one for marriage.

I had made an awful mistake. And the stupid thing was, I had known. Standing in the vestibule of the church outside the sanctuary, I had looked at the scene inside—that's what it had felt like, a scene. A red carpet ran down the center aisle from the altar to the door, lolling like an obscene and thirsty red tongue. Walking down the aisle, I had been uncomfortably aware of the audience.
Should I be smiling? Or should I be solemn? Should I look at Phillip? Or at the guests?

Looking at the photos, I had been horrified to see my own expression. There was not a single photo in which I looked happy. Instead, I stood, unsmiling, eyes wide and frozen. It was the expression of a woman who had done something terrible and had no idea how she might get out of it.

Phillip didn't notice. He was entranced by his own appearance. His bachelor weekend had been by the pools in Las Vegas, and he had been slightly, gorgeously tan for the wedding, sun-kissed and healthy. Already unforgivingly pale, I had been encouraged (and by encouraged, I mean forced) into a dress of pure, icy white that washed me out, turning me as frozen and blue as though I were winter itself, even though our wedding had been in June. Phillip didn't seem to notice. “Look at me,” he had crowed, turning page after page, while I grew more and more shocked and horrified by my appearance in each photo. “I look so tan. These are great pictures,” he said, running a finger along his own face in a portrait of both of our families.

I looked at him, the narcissistic man I had married, so in love with his own reflection he could not see me at all. Beside him in those pictures, I looked like a ghost, as though it was a mourning photograph taken long ago, a family gathered together around the body of a cold, dead bride.