The Light of Paris (18 page)

“
Oui!
” Sebastien said, and he looked so pleased by her tiny feat of translation she was almost embarrassed, and made an immediate vow to work more on her French. She would spend her lunch hours reading
Le Temps
, the newspaper, with her dictionary by her side, and eavesdrop as much as possible in cafés. “They are opening a center for Surrealism, and René is creating these cards they will spread all over Paris, inviting people to come into the center and share their dreams.”

“We believe,” René said, leaning forward again and stroking his mustache with his thumb and forefinger—he was speaking French, and Margie braced herself, but he spoke slowly, thoughtfully, giving her time to catch up, “that dreams are the only place where the mind is truly honest. In our dreams we can find all our unexpressed desires, and our collective wisdom.”

“I see?” Margie said, imagining René, who was handsome but still had the soft cheeks of a boy, sitting attentively at a desk with a pen and ledger, while people sat across from him, relating their dreams, “. . . and then there was this giant flying mouse with the face of my husband, except it wasn't my husband's face, but I know it was him, you see . . .” But she didn't know why this would be useful. She could barely understand her own dreams; she had no idea why anyone else would be interested in them.

“
Écoutez
,
écoutez
,” one of the men sitting next to René said, abruptly sitting forward as though he had simply been observing and had suddenly decided to join the conversation. Margie thought Sebastien might have called him Georges. His hair fell forward into his face like Sebastien's, though this seemed to be more from a general lack of combing than from any stylistic decision, and he wore a monocle, as though he were one of Margie's disapproving great-uncles. She suspected he might
not need the monocle, that he simply thought it made him look smarter, though Margie thought it only made him look nearsighted. “
Le Surréalisme, c'est l'écriture niée
,” he said, holding his hands out in front of him as though laying each word in place.

“Ahhh,” his companions sighed, and applauded for him. Sebastien nodded, leaning back and lifting his glass of wine. Everything he did was so smooth, his long fingers and long limbs graceful as a dancer.

“
C'est vrai
,
c'est vrai
,” René said sadly—it's true, it's true—as though his friend had just pronounced the wisdom of the ages.

“What does
niée
mean?” Margie whispered to Sebastien.

“It is something not permitted. Denied?” he asked.

Surrealism is writing denied? Now they were really making no sense at all. Margie felt as though she were in the library again, poring over that Gertrude Stein piece and wanting to weep for a good love story. Georges and René had bent their heads together again over the notebook and were fashioning some other impenetrable sentence. She supposed it was a clever idea. Handing out these business cards would definitely make people wonder what on earth they meant, but she doubted people would seek out the office in particular to inquire. Then again, people did all sorts of silly things to pass the time. And while part of her felt as though she should be ashamed of herself in comparison to their limitless imaginations, another part of her saw how much they were the same. The Surrealists were dreamers, just like she was.

“How is your English so good?” she asked Sebastien, instead of pursuing the meaning of another Surrealist proclamation.

“My father is English. And of course I studied it in school. And now look how helpful it is—I can talk to American girls all the time!” He laughed, this rich, inviting sound that made Margie want to curl up inside him, if only to be so close to such happiness. The Russian women at the end of the table looked annoyed by the noise, and she was half tempted to stick her tongue out at them. She didn't want people who
thought happiness was something to be sneered at polluting the party. Because here she was. Sitting in a café in Paris with bobbed hair, drinking wine with actual artists, talking about Surrealism, with a good-looking man by her side. If only Evelyn could see her now. If only Lucinda from Abbott Academy who had said she was too quiet, a dud, could see her now. If only her mother . . . well, she'd prefer her mother not see her now, she wouldn't understand, but still.

“Do you always talk to American girls?”

“There are so many of you,” Sebastien said. “You are difficult to avoid.” She could tell he was teasing, the little light in his eyes, the way his eyebrow was raised ever so slightly. And he was right, after all—they were everywhere. Even if she ignored the fact that she lived at the Club and worked at an American library, she heard American accents around her all the time; drawling their way through transactions at shops and cafés, chatting as they walked down streets, the inimitable casual loudness that marked her people.

“Why are so many Americans here now?” she asked him.

“Why are you here?”

Margie shrugged her shoulders, self-conscious. “Freedom, I suppose. It's so far away from everything. And it's, you know, Paris.”

“Well.” Sebastien spread his arms slightly, his wine glass tilting, as if to indicate the entirety of the city.

“I know. But we can't all possibly have something to run from, can we? Some people must be happy just to stay where they are.”

“No, no. That is not human nature. We are all trying to escape something. Some people do it by moving to Paris. Some of us do it through our art.” He gestured here to the Surrealists, who had apparently come up with a cracking good joke and were laughing and clapping each other on the back over it. “Some of us do it through wine, or money. No matter how, we're all trying to escape something.”

“Ourselves,” Margie said. She could see herself reflected in the
plate-glass window of Le Dôme, behind the Surrealists. Her hair was new, her hat was new, and there was a look in her eyes that felt new as well, a brightness she had never seen before. Had Paris made her someone different? Or was she the same old Margie, disguised with a new hat and a glass of wine in her hand, pretending to be someone she could never hope to be? “We are all trying to escape ourselves.”

After painting until my fingers ached, I stood in the driveway, listening to the quiet of the neighborhood, the brush of wind through the trees, the shush of a car passing by on the street. Next door, I could see dinner was winding down; the parking lot was half deserted, the noise floating over the hedges emptier somehow. But they were definitely still open. And I was starving. And the fact that my patronizing Henry's restaurant would upset my mother made the idea of dinner there even more appealing. Well, she had driven me to it. I hadn't gone to the grocery store, so there was still nothing to eat in her house, and my strawberries-and-crackers diet book would sell exactly zero copies.

I went back inside and grabbed my purse and, after a moment's hesitation, one of my grandmother's notebooks. My father, a devoted bookworm, had carried
The Wall Street Journal
with him everywhere he went, and had more than once been nabbed by my mother hiding out at a party (and occasionally during the symphony) behind its pages. “Never be caught without something to read,” he had admonished me from the time I was a child. And so I toted books with me everywhere, especially places where I learned I might need a little distraction:
The Story of Ferdinand
to Christmas Eve services at church, Nancy Drew to the doctor's office, novels to cotillion teas, where I learned to hide the paperbacks carefully under the
edge of the tablecloth so I could read and pretend to be paying attention at the same time. That skill had served me well all through high school and at the Junior Ladies Association functions, where the other girls tried to imitate their mothers' bizarre fascination with committee meetings and I worked my way through Jane Austen, sneezing to cover up my snickering. For years, everyone thought I had a severe allergy problem.

Despite my mother's newfound romanticization of them as the apogee of neighbors, the Schulers hadn't taken great care of the house. For years, she had tutted over the wood in need of repainting, the yard that was never kept to her satisfaction, the brick front walk that could have used a good acquaintance with a mason. Now I could see, as I walked over the path by the new parking lot, that Henry had changed all that. The house had been repainted, the hedges and grass were neatly clipped, the bricks on the walk had been removed and replaced with smooth, even flagstones. A subtle sign hung above the front porch steps, painted in elegant script:
The Kitchen
. The front porch, now empty, was filled with small clusters of wicker furniture, where people could wait for a table. I opened the front door, which had been repainted an inviting red, and stepped inside.

“Whoa, are you here for dinner?” A young man stood behind the host desk, though I thought he might have felt more at home on a surfboard. His hair was gelled into crisp spikes and he had wide, round eyes that made him look as though life were handing him a series of unbelievable surprises.

“Erm, yes?” I said, unsure how to respond to such a greeting.

“It's kind of late,” he said doubtfully.

“I'm aware of that. Are you still serving dinner?”

“Yeah!” He brightened. “Would you like a table?”

“I would.”

“For two?” he asked, peering around me as though someone might be hiding behind me, ready to engage him in a game of peekaboo.

“No,” I said slowly, because I was beginning to guess that's the speed at which he best operated. “Just the one.”

As he processed this new information, a waitress walked by carrying a tray full of food, including a cheeseburger piled so high with fixings that it wore the top half of its bun like a jaunty beret. The smell of it exploded as she moved, the food held high in the air like an offering, and it smelled so rich and delicious I would have fallen to my knees and begged for it if it would have made a difference.

Fortunately, it wasn't necessary. “Follow me,” he said, picking up a menu and turning toward a side room.

I remembered the layout of the Schulers' house immediately—over there would have been the dining room, and we were passing through the hallway toward the back, where the living room had been. A bar, made of dark wood gone shiny from use, had been built in the front room, where there were a couple of small tables looking over the front porch, and as we passed by the staircase, a server came running down with an empty tray. Had the Schulers known, I wondered, what was going to happen to their house when they sold it? Or, like my mother, had they pictured another happy family taking over, another line of generations stretching into the future, raised between these walls, playing in the yard, family dinners on the back porch during summer as night fell and the fireflies gave chase around the grass? I wondered if anyone had told them the house had become The Kitchen. Antique photos marched along the walls, other people's lives now designated as decoration for ours.

As we passed by the kitchen, the door swung open and Henry came out. Distracted by looking at the fresh paint and the photographs of someone's abandoned ancestors on the wall, I walked right into him.

“Oof,” I said.

“Oof,” he said, and then in recognition, after we had bounced off each other like human pinballs, “Hey! How are you?”

“Hungry.”

“She's kind of late for dinner,” the host said. It had taken him a half-dozen steps to realize I wasn't following him, and he was already standing beyond the archway leading to the living room on one side and what had been the study on the other.

“Austin, we serve until eleven. People can eat whenever they want,” Henry said. He strode over and gently took the menu from the boy's hands. “Would you please go back to the host stand and check to see if anyone's waiting, and then finish bringing up the glasses?”

“Hey, okay!” Austin said, as though this were a brilliant idea, and trotted back past us toward the front of the house.

“I'm sorry about him. I had a couple of servers call in sick, so we're a little short-handed. He's actually a bar-back, and a good one, but as a host, he's . . . problematic.”

“Give me a cheeseburger and all will be forgiven. I've been painting for hours.”

“You've got a little paint right here,” Henry said, tapping his thumb on his cheek and I reached up, embarrassed, to scrape it away with my fingernails. “Are you painting to get the house ready?”

“No, no. Painting like art.”

“You're a painter, your mother's a gardener. Art runs in the family, I guess,” he said, making a “Come on” wave with the menu. I was surprised—I'd never made the connection between my mother's gardening and my painting, but hadn't I learned about color from gladiolus and phlox, about repetition of form from ornamental cabbages, about texture from lamb's ear and dill? Maybe I owed more to her than I thought.

Henry led me back into what had been the Schulers' living room, now cozily filled with tables, most of them empty by now. In one corner, a couple leaned together, their conversation tense and low. Across from them, a table of four was finishing up their desserts, leaning back in their chairs in satisfaction. It looked like they had demolished something chocolate, and I restrained myself from grabbing the plate and licking it.
Note to self: Buy some damn groceries. “How's this?” We had arrived at a table in the corner of the back room.

“This is great, actually,” I said. Henry pulled out a chair and I slid into it.

“I'll get a cheeseburger going for you pronto. Medium? You want a salad while you wait?”

“Please and thank you.”

He clicked his heels together like a butler and headed off toward the kitchen. A few minutes later, a waitress, a little wisp of a girl, pale and delicate in her all-black uniform, came by bearing a water glass and a salad. I had barely finished it when the burger arrived, and it was as amazing as it had smelled, so high I had to smash it down to get it into my mouth, a perfect balance of salt and crisp vegetables and a sweet-and-sour spread on the bun that puckered my tongue. I was fairly sure I could have eaten another one.

By the time I finished the burger, the room had emptied. I dragged the last of the French fries lazily through ketchup with one hand as I wiped off the other and used it to open my grandmother's notebook, disappearing back into her story.

I had just finished reading my grandmother's report on her evening with the Surrealists when Henry arrived. “Mind if I join you?” he asked, and then, without waiting for my answer, spread his hands on the table and slid into the chair opposite mine with an audible sigh of relief. “What a night. How was your dinner?”

Pulling myself out of the Jazz Age and into the present, I refocused, looking over at my plate, now entirely empty except for a few crumbs and the thin remnants of a pool of ketchup. “Horrible,” I said.

“Clearly. You want some dessert? There's a really great apple cobbler with homemade vanilla ice cream, or a moist chocolate lava cake, with this fabulous chocolate sauce in the center that oozes all over the place when you put your spoon into it.”

In my head, my mother admonished me not to eat dessert, pointing out how easily I gained weight, and that it wasn't appropriate to eat dessert in front of a man.

I told my mother I was having a tough time of it and a little chocolate would help.

My mother informed me that this was eating my feelings.

Yes, I agreed. Yes, it was.

“I want that chocolate thing, with the moist and the ooze,” I said.

Henry nodded. “An excellent choice. Ava,” he said, raising his hand to call over the waitress who had brought me the salad. “Would you please bring us a chocolate lava cake?”

“On it,” she said, and disappeared again.

“So what are you reading?”

I flipped back to the cover, as though to show him the title, but of course there was only the blank front of the notebook. “It's interesting, actually. These are some of my grandmother's journals. I'm reading about this trip she took to Paris in 1924.”

“Paris in 1924? Like, F. Scott Fitzgerald Paris? Hemingway Paris?”

“I don't think she was hanging with Hemingway exactly. At least not that she's mentioned. But she was definitely enjoying herself. Before, she was this quiet, bookish wallflower, and now she's hanging out at cafés with artists and bobbing her hair.”

“Maybe she changed.”

“Maybe,” I said slowly, closing the notebook and running my finger along the edge, as if to seal the words inside. And then she must have changed again, because the grandmother I knew hadn't been like this at all. My grandmother had been like my mother—stiff and formal, judgmental and proper. What had happened to her? Why had she come back from Paris? And how had she turned from this fun-loving girl who drank with Surrealists and loved books and writing and couldn't bear committee meetings into . . . well, into my mother?

“It's been funny reading these, getting this look inside her. I mean, I'm sure she was different when she was younger. And these were her journals, so she was pretty unguarded. You don't get to see that kind of honesty often.”

“Or ever,” Henry said. “Does it make you feel guilty? Reading her private thoughts?”

“I guess I hadn't really thought about it. Now I do feel guilty. Thanks a lot.”

Henry laughed. “I don't think you have to. Is she still alive? Your grandmother?”

“Oh, no. She died when I was in junior high—I didn't really know her well.”

“So this is a way of connecting with her.”

“I guess. It is changing the way I think about her. It feels like a novel, reading it. Living in those times. Going to Paris, for heaven's sake. In 1924! Who does that?”

“Well, the aforementioned Hemingway, for one.” Leaning back, Henry clasped his fingers together behind his neck. His arms were broad, with wide tendons that flexed when he moved, and I had to pull my eyes away.

“Not Hemingway people. Real people.”

“She was lucky. I would love to have been in Paris then. I'd love to be in Paris now.”

“You and me both, my friend. Anyway, she's met this artist who sounds really charming.”

“Maybe she'll have a wild affair. That would be romantic.”

“I guess so. I don't know how that would work out—she married my grandfather in 1924, and my mother was born in 1925. So something happened.”

“1925, huh? You must have been a late baby.”

“I was. My mother was forty when I was born, which was crazy uncommon back then. My parents had given up on having kids and
then”—I shot my hands in the air and wiggled my fingers like a magician—“ta-da!”

“I was a surprise too,” Henry said. “At the opposite end. My parents were in high school. Ta-da!” He waved his hands back at me and I had to laugh.

“Still, you seem to have turned out all right.”

He shrugged. “They were lucky. They had a lot of support from their parents, and they happened to stay in love. I've got five younger siblings.”