The Light of Paris (17 page)

Ever since I had arrived in Magnolia, the heaviness I carried around inside me like a stone had been lifting. It felt, for the first time in a very, very long time, like I was starting to know who I was, instead of who everyone else expected me to be.

Like my mother and me, Margie and her mother had never been close. And like my mother and me, Margie had always felt a thin thread of disappointment running through their interactions, a knowledge that Margie was not
enough
of anything for her mother's satisfaction. Not pretty enough or ladylike enough or obedient enough. And sometimes outright cruelty isn't necessary. Sometimes all it takes is a lifetime of disapproving glances, of disappointed sighs, of frustrated hopes.

So when she got her mother's reply to her announcement that she was staying in Paris, she couldn't even hope the news would be good.

Reading it, she was only grateful her mother wasn't able to deliver the scathing message in person. Despite her mother's perfect penmanship, Margie could see how hard the pen had been held to the paper, the depressions of the letters and tiny rips signs of the fury behind the words. Margie was disobedient and ungrateful. She was a child who didn't understand the value of security and family. She was unworthy of trust. Margie sat down on the bed in her room, her hands shaking as she read.

Margie didn't think she was being selfish. And she didn't understand her mother's anger. She was supporting herself, wasn't she? Not asking for anything from them. She threw herself back on the bed, draping her elbow over her eyes. “It's so unfair,” she said to herself, and she cried a
little. She should go home, she thought. Make it all go away. Smooth her mother's ruffled feathers.

“No,” she said aloud, sitting up again, wiping the tears from her eyes. The evening sun poured into her room through the windows. This was her adventure. This was her city. And she was here, weeping in this room with the beautiful warm light of Paris on her, while outside the city went on, all the people she had said she wanted to know, the writers and artists, at cafés drinking and talking, making the future happen. Outside, only a few steps down the Boulevard du Montparnasse, were three of the city's most famous cafés—Café du Dôme, Le Select, and La Coupole. Upon hearing Margie was living at the Club, Dorothy had told her those cafés might as well have been the center of the art scene in Paris, that people flitted between them, spreading conversation and ideas, and all of that was happening while Margie sat there, alone in her room, feeling sorry for herself. It seemed she had spent so much time locked away alone in her room, missing out on something.

Well, she wasn't going to sit there any longer, she decided. She changed out of her work clothes, hanging her skirt and her jacket carefully. She had only a few suitable outfits for the Libe, and no money to buy any more, so she was trying to be as neat with them as she could so as to keep everyone there from thinking she was the Little Match Girl.

Margie reached up to unclip her hair, letting it fall over her back. Her hair had always been a source of contention between her and her mother. It was like her father's—wavy and heavy—and had to be pressed into submission with hair tonic and a comb at regular intervals throughout the day. Her mother's hair was fine and silky and straight, and it fell cooperatively into any style her mother asked it to, though she rarely asked for anything other than the tidy Victorian knot she had been wearing for as long as Margie could remember. Margie's hair was too thick for regular combs, and the waves had their own ideas about how they wanted to curl and refused the assistance of curling tongs, and it
was too heavy to dress up without dozens of hairpins and the liberal application of hair wax. Margie herself had never mastered the talent of wrestling her own hair into submission, and Nellie only tried under duress. When Margie's mother attempted it herself, she would triumph through sheer force of will, at least for a while. And then halfway through dinner, the coif would begin to fail: wisps of curls popping out of the smooth waves her mother had designed, the weight of it slipping backward, as though it were sliding off her head, collapsing into a luxurious pool at the base of her neck.

And now, the weight of it seemed wrong, too much. That hair belonged to the old Margie Pearce, the one Evelyn had called “deadweight” and an “old maid,” the one whose only marriage prospects were men as old as her father, the one who lived in her parents' house while outside the world changed and other women had jobs and lives and fell in love. And suddenly Margie wished, wanted, fervently, to be rid of the hair as much as she wanted to be rid of that destiny.

The hotel had delivered her trunk, and Margie rummaged through it until she found a pair of scissors. They were on the small side and designed more for everyday sewing repairs than for cutting off six inches of heavy hair, but they would have to do. Facing herself in the mirror, she pulled her hair back into a ponytail with one hand and began to cut with the other. It was laborious, slow work, and she had to take a break a few times just to put her arms down, her shoulders aching from the awkward position, the scissors doing more gnawing than cutting. When she finished, she shook her head and it was done. She looked dumbly down at the switch of hair in her hand, the strands catching the light as she turned it back and forth, marveling at its size, and then up at herself in the mirror.

It wasn't the neatest of haircuts, she would have been the first to admit, but neither was it the worst. Freed from its own weight, her hair lifted up, curling loosely around her face. Her eyes looked wider and shinier, the curve of her cheeks more cherubic and less chubby. Shaking her head
again, letting a few loose, abandoned strands float down onto her shoulders, Margie wondered at the lightness of it, at the way it changed her face. She was going to have to get someone else to even out the back—a hairdresser, or one of the girls in the sun room, but it wasn't half bad. She looked, she thought, still staring at herself in the mirror, almost pretty.

The area immediately around the Club was full of houses and apartments and families, with shops scattered here and there on the ground floor, so when she left that evening, the sidewalks were relatively quiet. People had gone home already, were eating their evening meals with their families, centered around the fresh loaves of bread she saw so many people buying on her walk home from the Libe. Margie strode confidently up to the Boulevard du Montparnasse until she saw the fluttering awning of Café du Dôme. There, she hesitated. She had chatted with a few of the girls at the Club, but hadn't gotten to know any of them, really. Some of them might be here, at one of these cafés, but she wouldn't know them well enough to pull up a chair at a table. And while it was common for people to dine or drink or sit and write at cafés, sometimes for hours during the day, at night the place was much more convivial.

As if reading her mind, a group of young men brushed past her, shouting in conversation as they did. One of them bumped squarely into her from behind, and she took a long step forward to keep from falling. “
Pardon
,
pardon
,” he said, stopping and turning to check on her, and then, “Marguerite?”

Margie, who had been looking at the sidewalk she had been fairly certain she was going to be pushed into, looked up into the startlingly green eyes of Sebastien. “Oh!” she said, and she blushed a little. Other girls, prettier girls, were used to good-looking men talking to them, she supposed, didn't go silly and red the way she did, weren't flustered and tongue-tied at the tiniest of attentions paid. “
Bonsoir.
”

“
Bonsoir
,” he replied. His friends had paused up ahead, and one of them called out to him in French, which, to her surprise, Margie understood.

“What are you doing there, eh? Leave the pretty girl alone.”

“Go on,” Sebastien called back. “I'll catch up with you.” And Margie felt as though a light had gone on above her, holding her in a comforting glow. She had understood everything they had said, through their accents, through the casual, informal words. It was a miracle.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him.

“I live not far away. That's how I knew about the Club,” Sebastien said. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here too.”

Sebastien grinned. “
Ah,
bien!
” he exclaimed. “You have taken a room at the Club. I knew you would stay. You are meant for Paris. Where are you going now? We are going to Le Dôme—would you like to join us? These are my friends. Some of the most brilliant artists in Paris today. You should meet them, if you are going to be a writer.”

If only he hadn't said that, Margie thought. The idea of her sitting at a table with brilliant artists was ridiculous. The idea of her being a writer was ridiculous. If only she hadn't told him. It had been the beautiful day, it had been the child with the bread and the pigeons in the square, the church bells and the flower vendors outside the Métro. Now he would expect her to act in some particular way, some way real writers acted. Not that she would have the faintest idea of what that was—she didn't know any real writers.

But wasn't this what she had wanted? The real Paris, the Paris they wrote about in magazines Margie had gotten hold of at the library at home and devoured, right there in the reading room, where her mother wouldn't be able to ask what sort of trash she was reading. The artists who were making this city the place to be, the place to run to after the sad endlessness of the war, or the simple drudgery of a heavy, empty existence.

Noting her hesitation, Sebastien reached down for her hand. “Come on, then,” he said.

Margie, who had held hands with men only in the context of dancing
at highly chaperoned affairs, looked down at it doubtfully, then slipped her fingers into his and followed him.

“Your hair looks pretty,” he said as they stood, waiting to cross the street.

Reaching up, Margie patted the curls emerging from under her hat, as though they might have been bruised. The feeling of them, light and soft underneath her fingers, reminded her of how she had looked in the mirror, shorn and bare and someone new and lovely, and she smiled as she said, “Thank you.”

“So Paris has turned you into a flapper?”

“Oh!” She laughed at the thought of herself as a flapper, lounging around the courtyard with the girls at the Club in one of those flimsy little dresses, a cigarette in one hand and a flask of gin in the other. “No, not a flapper. I just didn't want to have long hair anymore.” It was a good enough explanation.

“It suits you,” he said.

She blushed a little at the compliment. “Thank you.” They crossed the street to Le Dôme, Sebastien's hand still warm and solid around hers, and ducked under the awning where his friends were settling in, pushing tables and chairs together, absorbing people they knew from other tables into the group, taking off their jackets and hats, someone producing ashtrays and distributing glasses. As Margie and Sebastien joined them, a waiter appeared, bearing bottles of wine. Two of the men took the bottles from him and began pouring, and Sebastien pressed a glass into Margie's hand as they sat down.

“This is Marguerite.” He spoke in French, introducing her to those who were paying attention and pointing out and naming the others who were already distracted by their own conversations. She listened to the brief biographies he sketched of them, feeling anxious and envious, wondering how these men and women had done so much already. They
seemed to be so accomplished—ones who had exhibited at galleries or prominent shows, others who had studied with masters, and all of them doing something exciting, something brave and new, making space for themselves without waiting for an invitation.

A curious mix of people sat at the table, some Americans, some French, an Englishman, and two Russian girls. The blur of languages was ridiculous; the common tongues were French and English, but there were a dozen accents, and the Russians spoke in asides to each other, and at the end of the collection of tables a woman and a man were having an enthusiastic conversation in what sounded like Spanish. Their names were a blur, their faces complex and glamorous in a way Margie couldn't yet distinguish. One of the men was so blond his skin looked like parchment, his eyes a unique and intensely pale blue. One of the Russian women had cheekbones like knives, sharp slashes across her face, and arms so slender Margie could have encircled them with her fingers.

“Sebastien, Sebastien.” One of the men across the table, René, snapped his fingers at him. Three of them had their heads bent together over a notebook. “
Écoutez
,” he demanded. “
Si vous aimez l'amour, vous aimerez le Surréalisme.”
He spoke these words like a grand proclamation, and then collapsed back in his chair and took a large gulp of wine as though the act had exhausted him.

“
Bon
,
bon
,” Sebastien said, with a little applause, and then, in English to Margie, “Did you understand?”

“If you like love, you'll love Surrealism?” Margie asked. She had read articles about these art movements in Paris without entirely understanding them. They described things incomprehensible to her—Margie shared none of the Surrealists' anxiety about their art, none of their desperate need to make meaning of things by taking all the meaning from them. She had read a piece by a Surrealist writer that she hadn't understood at all; it just seemed like words strung together. Margie, who liked
stories about people who found the love she longed for herself, stories about people who were broken and then made themselves whole again, had read that and felt a strong desire to lie down.