The Light of Paris (19 page)

“I'm jealous. I always wanted brothers and sisters. Well, sisters, mostly. But I would have taken either.”

“They're pretty great. But there were times being an only child would have been great.”

“Ugh. Why do people with brothers and sisters always say that? Being an only child is boring. And lonely.”

“Being one of six has its own issues, trust me. Grass is always greener,” Henry said, and then looked up as Ava arrived at the table. She set a wide, shallow bowl in front of me with the promised dessert, and I could feel the rush of warm, chocolate-scented steam rise up toward me. It was beautiful, a perfect tiny cake with fluted edges and a dark pool of melted chocolate, a shade darker, in the center. The ice cream, flecked with specks of vanilla beans, sat off to the side, melting daintily around the edges of the cake.

“Oh. My. God. I just want to go face-first into this thing.”

“Exactly the compliment a chef likes to hear,” Henry said.

“And this is for you.” Ava put a large and impolitely full glass of red wine down in front of Henry.

“Bless you, my child,” he said, lifting the glass carefully to avoid spilling it, and taking a sip while she refilled my water.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“That's it. Thank you. As you were.”

She nodded and walked back toward the kitchen while I stared at the cake, mesmerized. Taking the first bite, I closed my eyes and moaned in pleasure. The cake was sweet, the center ever so slightly bitter, and together they melted luxuriously on my tongue.

“Good?” Henry asked, smiling behind his wine glass.

“Amazing. Has anyone ever said you should do this for a living?”

“Once or twice. But you can tell me again.”

I sighed, took another bite of cake, scooping up some of the ice cream on the tip of the spoon and swallowing, closing my eyes again to enjoy it. I was going to have a terrible sugar hangover the next day, and it was going to be worth every second. “You should do this for a living.”

“I'll think about it.”

Pausing between bites, I put the head of the spoon into the cake and looked up at Henry. He looked tired, like he'd been working since the crack of dawn, which he probably had. I'd never worked in a restaurant, but I had always thought it would be so exhausting—the physical back and forth, the bending and lifting, juggling orders, constantly making and remaking schedules, prioritizing and reprioritizing, remembering drink and dish instructions, birthday wishes, and special requests.

Because of that, I was an overly generous tipper. Phillip was a stingy one—“If they wanted to make good money, they should have stayed in school,” he would say, which I always found infuriating, as though it weren't a perfectly important and necessary occupation—who, after all, would bring him his Caesar salad if everyone went to law school?—and I had been known to sneak back to the table as we were leaving a restaurant under the guise of having forgotten a scarf or my gloves in order to give a larger tip.

“Am I keeping you from working?” I asked.

“Nah, it's nice to have a break. I like talking to you. You're funny. And you're interesting.”

I peered at him suspiciously, licking my spoon. “Me? I'm not interesting.”

“Sure you are. You're an artist, and you eat strawberries straight out of the garden for breakfast, and other than the art, you're so different from your mother you might as well be from different planets. I like being around interesting people. Keeps me creative.”

“Me too,” I said.

Henry sipped his wine, looking at me thoughtfully. I went back to the lava cake to avoid his gaze. “How long are you staying?”

“I don't know.” I didn't want to think about leaving, honestly. I wanted to be here, with Sharon and Cassandra and Wanee and their friends. I wanted to be with Henry, who had fed me dinner and now the best dessert I'd ever had, and who talked to me like I mattered. And I liked talking to him. He made me laugh, and he got my jokes. In most of my life, I felt as though I were following a script, like I couldn't say any of the things I wanted to say. I couldn't even say them to Phillip.

“I wish I could help,” he said.

“You have helped.” I had finished the dessert and was casting longing glances at the plate. “You gave me really amazing food in my hour of need.”

“They do have grocery stores in Magnolia now, you know,” Henry said. He put down his wine glass and leaned back in the chair, slipping his hands into his pockets and stretching his feet out to the side of the table.

“I hear. And also indoor plumbing. My, how things have changed since my day.” I pretended to flutter my eyelashes.

“You're welcome to eat every meal here, but as Sharon pointed out, we don't serve breakfast.”

“I could eat this for breakfast,” I said, pointing at the remnants of my lava cake.

“Fair enough. The Kitchen Gastropub, now open for lunch, dinner, Sunday brunch, and diabetic comas.”

“That's catchy.”

“Thank you. Doesn't your mother feed you anything?”

“Ugh, it's a long story.” I wasn't about to spoil the mood and the sweetness on my tongue by launching into a long recounting of my mother's and Phillip's endless efforts to control what I ate, and my own chocolate-fueled rebellions. “It's just nice to eat something real.”

“My pleasure.”

“I should get going,” I said, reluctantly pushing myself away from the table. “Should I pay Ava?”

“Nope. It's on the house, remember? I invited you.”

“No, I couldn't! You have to work next door to my mother; the least I can do is pay for the hamburger.”

“Don't be silly. We're neighbors. I told you, it's on me. Come on, I'll walk you out. I'm going to stay and help them finish closing up.”

Before I could object again, he had crossed the room in three quick, long strides and was standing by the entry to the hallway. I left a tip on the table for Ava, picked up my things, and hurried after him. “The restaurant really looks amazing,” I said. The rest of the rooms were empty, and I could hear singing and laughter and the sounds of cleaning from the kitchen as we passed by. “You did an incredible job.”

“Thank you,” he said. “But it's not just me. A whole lot of people have worked their tails off to make it happen.” He held the front door open for me, and we stepped out onto the porch. Ava was wiping down the chairs and tables here, and I gave her a little wave.

“Well. Thank you for dinner. I owe you a favor, I guess.”

“Not necessary. And if you can't make it to the grocery store, I'll whip up a breakfast lava cake for you anytime you like.”

“It's a deal. It was a pleasure,” I said, and I stuck out my hand for him to shake.

He took it, closing his hand warmly over mine. “The pleasure was all mine, Madam Spencer,” he replied, sketching a slight bow.

I giggled and gave an awkward little wave, and managed to make it down the front steps without tripping. A burger with Henry wasn't exactly the same as wine with Surrealists at a Parisian café, but somehow I thought my grandmother might approve. Pausing on the sidewalk under an oak with a thick trunk obscuring the view of my mother's house, I let myself linger for a moment, the darkness making me feel as though I was hovering between two places, floating in space.

The thing was, though, my grandmother hadn't stayed in Paris. At some point she had given up and gone home, married Robert Walsh and become a mother instead of having affairs with delicious French men and writing stories in Paris, though I didn't know why. Was that what I was going to have to do? The thought made the air feel thick and I pushed my hands against my stomach as though I could force my breath through. The Kitchen wasn't a Parisian café, and my mother's basement wasn't a Parisian studio, but it felt closer to that kind of freedom than I had known in a long, long time, and I couldn't bear to imagine I would come so close only to have it disappear when I tried to close my hand around it.

In Margie's opinion, the Libe was really the most fantastic place to work. Her coworkers were fascinating: there was Miss Parsons, of course, who had been a nurse during the war and now practically ran the place. And then there was Dorothy, who had cleaned up the messy edges of Margie's haircut and told her she looked positively dishy, just like Zelda Fitzgerald, which had made Margie blush with pleasure. In her letters to her parents, Margie had made sure to mention that Dorothy's uncle was the president of Cornell and her father was a professor at Princeton, but she didn't mention how beautiful Dorothy was, or that she went out with a different man every night of the week, it seemed. Every time Margie saw her, she felt surprised anew that Dorothy spent her day here shelving books that had been passed around the hospitals and barracks and trenches during the war, and talking to Margie and the patrons, as though she weren't something rare and lovely and altogether different. There was Olav, a Russian prince who seemed to have lost his way and his fortune, and one of the board of directors, Mr. Alsop, who was always in meetings and terribly busy, and who called Margie “Mary,” which she decided was close enough.

Sometimes, when she was putting a book on the shelves, Margie imagined the people who had held it before. A handsome young soldier
who had died before his time. A war-weary general, looking for respite from the stress of his job in the pages of Zane Grey. A fierce-minded young nurse like Miss Parsons, who had joined the war effort because she wanted to contribute, and found herself exhausted and haunted by the things it had asked of her. Sometimes Margie put those imaginary people in scenarios together, the general and the young soldier facing off over a matter of honor, the nurse tending to the soldier before his death. And sometimes she just let them be, and she imagined all the times the book she held had told its story, and she put it on the shelf where it could fall into someone else's hands and tell it once more.

The library had been an effort to manage the enormous number of volumes that had been collected by the Library War Service, once there was no longer a war. They collected three volumes of each book that had been sent out, but more boxes arrived each day, as though people were still sorting through the rubble and saying, “What's this here? More books? Better send them to Paris!” And it seemed some days even the boxes and boxes of unpacked books, to say nothing of all the ones on the shelves, would never be enough. The library had hundreds of members, and though it had been quiet the day Margie had first gone in, as Miss Parsons had predicted, she had never seen it that way since. The Libe was something of a social club for expatriates in the city, a place where they could shut out their differences for a while and luxuriate in their own language. There were writers, of course, some of whom frequented both Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company bookstore and the library. And there were academics, university students desperate for answers they could find without resorting to their
Petit Larousse
for awkward translations, and there were readers, the ones Margie liked best of all, who simply came in, hungry for book after book after book, who sometimes wanted to talk about what they had read, or ask for recommendations, and Margie, who had never had anyone to talk to about all the books she read, so many books she couldn't remember them all if she tried, was in heaven.

One Saturday it was only her and Dorothy together when they closed down for the night, and Dorothy said, “Hey, let's go have a little dinner, what do you say?”

Margie, who was dressed in a simple shirtwaist and skirt and a pair of stockings with a run in them (she'd tried to hide it by turning that part to the inside, but she felt it every time she walked), looked down at herself. “I'm not really dressed to go out, am I?” she asked.

“Neither am I.” But of course Dorothy looked gorgeous, wearing a fashionable green dress that set off her eyes and didn't show a speck of dirt, as though she hadn't been working with the same dusty old books as Margie all day. “But we can stop by your place if you'd like to change,” she offered, taking in Margie's stricken expression.

“That would be better,” Margie said. And though she usually walked home to save the carfare, she was too embarrassed to admit it to Dorothy. They took the tram, as Dorothy said the Métro was too slow for her, to the Club, and Dorothy waited in the courtyard, smoking and talking with some of the girls there as though she'd known them for years, while Margie changed into her good blue crêpe de chine dress.

She picked Dorothy up from the courtyard and they headed down the street to Rosalie's. Everyone talked about Rosalie's, a tiny restaurant in the basement of a corner building only a few blocks from the Club, but Margie had never been, and when they arrived, she was torn between being thrilled they had and wishing they hadn't. The place was filthy—the floor covered with undiscovered countries of spills, some of which sucked at her feet as they made their way between the tables. When they sat down, Dorothy, who looked so out of place in the dark and dirty room, like a firefly glowing in a dustbin, took a handkerchief from her bag and carefully wiped the previous diners' crumbs from the table.

Despite the grimy appearance, it was an exciting, lively place to be—the men next to her with paint splatters on their shirt cuffs, two of the Surrealists from the café having dinner with two other men, their heads
bent together conspiratorially, a gaggle of young girls in fashionable dresses, edged with shimmers of beads and tassels, making it seem as though they were endlessly in motion, laughing loud and wild in the corner. As was always the case in Paris, everyone here seemed to know everybody else, people coming in stopping to greet friends with shouts of pleasure, as though they hadn't seen each other in years, though Margie guessed, given how small Montparnasse—and Paris in general—seemed to be, it might have been twenty-four hours at the most. There were long tables and benches, and when a newcomer decided to join his friends, everyone would shuffle agreeably to one side or another, the shape and form of the groups shifting, expanding and contracting, the pulse of the evening like a giant beating heart.

The menu was written on a chalkboard on the wall, dinner for two francs, which was ridiculously cheap, even for Paris, and was delivered by Rosalie herself, a short, stout woman with heavily accented French. The food was achingly good, and when they finished, Margie felt like she had been part of the real Paris again, and, more important, was almost full.

Ever since she had gotten to Paris, she had been hungry constantly. It was all the walking, she thought, much more than she was used to at home, where her mother insisted on taxicabs to carry them anywhere more than a few blocks in the city, due to her bad feet. And certainly it was the student portions on which she lived, trying to save money, eating what was cheap—bread her body ran through in moments, and inexpensive vegetable soup. She had walked by a café one day and seen a man dining on a sausage covered with mustard so spicy just the scent of it made her mouth water, and drinking a beer, and Margie, who didn't even like beer, had almost wept with desire. Her savings meant she could splash out on a meal here and there, but there was an asceticism to her diet she found attractive, the constant rumble in her stomach a metaphor for her appetite for the city and all she wanted to draw from it, and she preferred to leave herself slightly hungry.

“So,” Dorothy said, when they had finished dinner and were drinking the last of the cheap wine that had come with it. It was sweet and slightly vinegary, but Margie was thirsty and it left a pleasant blur in her head that she wanted to hang on to. It made her love everyone in the room, these strangers with their theatrical greetings, their intense conversations, the laughter exploding and then disappearing into the crush of bodies, even the room itself despite—or because of—its dungeon-like air. “What are you doing in Paris?”

Margie hesitated, unsure of how to answer. Dorothy leaned forward over the table, as though she were expecting some thrilling confession, and Margie hated to disappoint her. In the dim light, she practically glowed, and Margie had seen half the men in the place looking over at her. Dorothy, of course, ignored the attention, or worse, didn't seem to notice. That was always the way with beautiful girls. “I'm working at the Libe.”

Rolling her eyes, Dorothy pressed her hands flat on the table and leaned even closer, as though proximity could pull Margie's nonexistent secrets out of her. “I don't mean that. I mean why are you here to begin with? Why did you come?”

“I guess . . . I wanted an adventure?”

This answer seemed to satisfy Dorothy. She sat back up and slapped the table with her open palms, as if to say, “I knew it.”

“Me too,” she said. “I was going to go crazy at home. My parents want me to get married, but I wasn't ready to settle down. They said I could come over here for a year. It's been two already and I'm still not ready to leave.”

“They don't mind?” Margie asked. Was there some secret to managing one's disapproving parents she hadn't yet learned?

“Of course they mind.” Dorothy threw her head back and laughed gaily. One of the painters sitting by them glanced at the tender skin of Dorothy's throat with a hot flash of desire that made Margie's stomach flip. Imagine having someone look at you that way, she thought. Imagine
having
everyone
look at you that way. “But what can they do? They can't make me come home. I've got my inheritance and my salary at the Libe. Besides, there's no one to marry at home. All the interesting men are in Paris anyway, don't you think?”

“When do you think you'll get married, then?” Margie asked. Because you had to get married eventually, didn't you? For all her talk, she knew everyone did get married, even if it was to someone like Mr. Chapman, who was old and stodgy and didn't love her any more than she loved him, which was not at all.

“Someday,” Dorothy said with a breezy wave. It was the tone of a woman who knew she would always have plenty of opportunities to get married, who might not stay young but would always be beautiful and rich and smart and funny and charming, while Margie was only a few of those things and, it seemed, the ones that didn't really matter. “What about you?”

“I don't know,” Margie said, trying to match Dorothy's casual tone. She wasn't about to confess to beautiful, confident Dorothy that her best odds of getting married were to a short, nervous business associate of her father's who was nearly old enough to be her father himself.

“I'm not getting married unless I'm really in love. Like in an Ethel M. Dell novel. Have you read her books? So romantic!”

“Yes!” Margie said. “She's one of my favorites.”

“I just adore a good love story.” Dorothy rested her elbow on the table despite its stickiness and put her head in her hand, her eyes gone soft and dreamy. “Don't you?”

“I do,” Margie said, and as much as the two of them had chatted about the books they had read and loved or hated, saying this aloud still felt like a confession. “My mother always said they were silly. I mean, she thinks all novels are silly. If it's not ‘edifying,' it's a waste of time to her. Love stories especially. I feel so wicked when I read them, like I should be reading something better.”

Dorothy shook her head so her curls bounced prettily. “What's better than a love story?”

“You know what I mean. Not better as in more fun to read. Better as in more important.” Margie ran her fingers along the edge of the table until she encountered something sticky, and then withdrew her hands and put them in her lap.

“That's what I mean too. What's more important than love? What's silly about Paris and Helen of Troy? Or Romeo and Juliet? Or Orpheus and Eurydice? Or Troilus and Cressida?”

“Nothing, I suppose,” Margie said. When Dorothy put it that way, it didn't make any sense, the way she'd hidden what she was reading inside something weightier (and infinitely duller), the way she had read entire books in the dustiest, most ignored corner of the library to avoid taking them home and risking her mother's judgment, the faint but persistent shade of shame she'd felt every time she'd written a love story of her own. What was the difference between the love stories she wrote and the ones Dorothy had named, other than the patina of age giving everything a brassy air of respectability? What was so wrong with stories about the greatest emotion any of us would ever know?

“So.” Dorothy widened her eyes and leaned forward again. “What shall we do tonight? Go to Harry's? Or La Rotonde? Or maybe Zelli's?”

“I don't mind.” Margie shrugged. She had never been to any of those places. She had never even been in a nightclub. She had always thought they were dangerous, dark and smoky places, where people were drunk, drunker than you could get on wine at a café, or even in a bar.