The Light of Paris (20 page)

“Where have you been? Let's go somewhere you haven't gone before.”

“I've hardly been anywhere. Cafés, mostly. Le Dôme, Deux Magots. I went to the Ritz, but the bar was closed.”

Dorothy's eyes went wide, as though Margie had confessed something deeply scandalous. “You've hardly seen Paris at all!” she protested. “Come on. Let's get out of here. We have so much catching up to do.”

On the Boulevard du Montparnasse, the light had turned from the golden glow of the afternoon into the soft grays and lavenders of evening, the whitewashed buildings, untouched by Haussmann's strict hand, glowing softly. Dorothy practically skipped down the street, Margie following behind her. When they reached the door she had been looking for, Dorothy waited for Margie to catch up, and then pulled the handle hard, letting out a rush of noise, of laughter and the cheerful undercurrent of clinking glass, and they stepped inside. “This is the Dingo. Absolutely everyone goes here. Come on.”

She began to thread her way through the crowd, and Margie followed. People seemed to part to allow Dorothy to pass, while Margie felt as though she were struggling through mud, awkwardly pushing people aside while trying not to be rude. “
Pardon
,” she said, again and again, though she was fairly sure she was shoving her way through piles of Americans. “
Pardon
.” Finally she broke through the press of bodies and found Dorothy already sitting at a table, half on the lap of a young man who had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other and was therefore reduced (happily, Margie suspected) to nuzzling Dorothy's neck with his lips.

“Margie, Margie!” Dorothy called out as though Margie had been tragically lost and finally found, instead of having been bare seconds behind her the whole time. “Come sit with us. This is Arturo,” she said, pointing at the man who was too busy kissing her arm to do anything more than raise his eyebrows in greeting, “and Pierre and Lila and Mimi,” she introduced the others who sat around the table, two women and another man. One of the women was looking furiously at Dorothy, and Margie suspected there was a date going on, or at least there had been before Dorothy had arrived. No one offered Margie a chair.

“I'll stand,” Margie said. A girl from the Club passed behind her. What was her name? She felt guilty until the girl looked at her as though she had never seen Margie, despite their having sat at breakfast together
twice in the last week. Margie took a deep breath instead and looked away.

At some point, someone arrived with a tray full of drinks, and Margie took the one that was offered to her, though she hadn't ordered it and didn't know what it was. At the table, Dorothy and her beau continued to canoodle. The other man and the two girls got into a dramatic conversation, and Margie drank her drink and then stood there awkwardly with the empty glass in her hand, jostled each time someone passed behind her. It was hot inside and she really wished she had something to read. There was a man at the bar reading a book, despite the noise of the crowd around him, and she seriously considered stepping over behind him to read over his shoulder, but the book, she could see from the cover, was in French. In high school they had read
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
in the original French, and it had taken her a half hour to get through each painful page.

She was still looking longingly at the man's book when Dorothy sprang up from the table. “Come on! We're going to Zelli's.”

The group of them, along with two other people they somehow picked up along the way, left the bar and disappeared down into the darkness of the Métro. When they came up again, they were in Montmartre, the hills spreading up above them. Despite the hour, the streets were busy, cafés overflowing with people talking over a bottle of wine, sidewalks crowded as couples and groups headed to another party, some of them laughing and singing as though they were in a show.

Margie followed the group down the streets, until they stopped in front of a building with a crowd outside. There was an astonishing blur of languages, shouts and laughter and bursts of song in English, French, Russian, Portuguese, Italian. In contrast to the cafés in Montparnasse, where the artists had an air—and more often than that, an actuality—of studied scruffiness, the men here wore suits, were smartly turned out and fashionable. The women's dresses were stylish and new, and Margie felt
dowdy and lost. She thought longingly of the café the other night, of Sebastien's disheveled artist friends, their silly Surrealist sayings, the passionate argument over whether one of them had betrayed the movement by taking a portrait commission (Margie's opinion: no, as things like eating and having a place to live were important).

“Come on, Margie!” Dorothy called over her shoulder, and Margie rushed forward as the crowd parted for them, catching the end of their wake, and then they were inside.

By the entrance was a balcony overlooking the entire club, the dance floor already crowded. On the lower level was the altar of the stage, where a full orchestra was hurtling itself at popular songs, all the musicians so deep into the sound they were transported, the tendons on their fingers pulling music from their instruments, sweat standing out on their foreheads, half dancing themselves as they played. The floor was crowded, men in tuxedos and suits, women in dresses so filmy and silky they made Margie's more modest dress look heavy as a duvet, packed together on the floor. From above it looked like a jittering, bustling beehive. Here and there, waiters darted along the edges of the dancers, barely averting one disaster after another, trays of drinks held above their heads, which they delivered to one of the dozens of tables lining the floor and ducked under the balconies above. Champagne buckets gleamed on tables, where people leaned their heads close together to talk.

Looking everywhere, taking in the dizzy glamor, the elegance, the energy that bubbled and fizzed like a thousand popping champagne bottles, Margie felt as though she might go off like a cork herself. Outside, she had felt frumpy and plain, the same Margie Pearce who had plodded through so much of her life, who had been given a single night of magic at her debut and had thought she would never have another, but in here she felt part of something exciting and exotic, and its refracted magic fell on her, illuminating the beads on her dress, making her skin glow in the dim light.

“Well, well, if it isn't Sebastien's American girl,” a man's voice said in her ear, close and so intimate that Margie jumped back, her head narrowly missing clocking Georges in the face. He was cleaner than he had been the other night, wearing a tuxedo, even, his hair combed back instead of falling forward over his eyes. Alas, he was still sporting that silly monocle as though he might be asked to examine a document or a diamond before the night was through.

“Oh,
bonjour
,” she said, placing her hand over her heart to calm the beating. The noise and music buzzed around them, and she had to raise her voice to be heard, even as close as he was. His hand rested on her lower back.

“
Bonsoir
,” he corrected her with a smile. “What are you doing here, Sebastien's American girl?”

“I'm not . . .” Margie began to object to being called Sebastien's American girl, but when she stopped to think about it, she decided she actually liked it a little bit. “I'm Marguerite,” she said, reminding him, and feeling a little thrill of using her French name, which was so much fancier than boring old Margie.

“What are you doing here, Marguerite?” he asked. He guided her away from the balcony as more people pressed in behind them, greeting the owner, checking their coats. It seemed impossible that more people could fit into the club, yet they kept coming, slipping into the boxes upstairs, women sitting on men's laps by the table, the tiny spaces on the dance floor filling in, couples pressing tightly to one another, glad for the excuse, and above it all, the band was still playing, the screech of trumpets wailing and the dance floor jumping right along with them.

“I came with some friends,” Margie said, though as she looked around, she didn't see Dorothy or Arturo or any of the other people they had come in with, just an undifferentiated mass of celebration. She had grown to think how small a town Paris was, when she saw some of the same people again and again, the writers she saw at the Libe and then
writing or arguing over a bottle of wine at La Closerie des Lilas, the girls from the Club she saw flirting with young men in bar windows, but here Paris felt infinite, like she would never see it all or know it all or meet the people in it, which was neither strange nor terrifying, only joyful, as though she had been given a gift with no end.

“Come drink with us instead,” Georges said. They reached the stairs and he offered her his arm and they walked down.

The Surrealists and a handful of other artists she didn't recognize had taken over two tables in the back. Margie didn't even have time to sit, because René saw her arrive and rose, bent to kiss her hand, and whisked her onto the dance floor without offering a formal invitation or waiting for her reply.

Men were so rare these days: Margie had read a newspaper story asserting that after the war, young women in Europe had only a one-in-ten chance of getting married, which she thought was probably exaggerated but nonetheless dreadfully sad, especially those who had offered their bodies as comfort for soldiers on leave and, when the soldier had been killed in action, been left with a squalling, hungry memory they would raise alone. But the Surrealists were all men, the core of artists Sebastien knew, and Margie, who had so often been sequestered among women, felt gloriously feminine and desired. She had never been much of a dancer, and had never even tried to shimmy or do the Toddle before, but the floor was so tightly packed it didn't matter. She slid along on her toes, René gripping her hands, bumping into everyone else on the floor who was bumping right back, and when she was sweaty and breathless, they ran over to the tables and Georges poured her a glass of champagne, and then one of the other artists took her hand and swept her onto the floor for a slow dance, until the band exploded again and the floor erupted as though it were shaking, and they did the entire thing all over again.

Margie, who would have sworn her idea of a good time was staying at home with a book, far from exactly this sort of noise and crowd, was
exhilarated. They danced for hours until she felt dizzy from the excitement and the champagne and the lack of sleep. People came and went along the table, and she ran into Dorothy dancing in the center of the dance floor and the two of them Charlestoned for a moment until their partners pulled them back and Dorothy gave Margie a huge wink over her man's shoulder and Margie, to her own surprise, winked right back. Just think, on the ship on the way over, she had been too shy, too scared, to go into the ball, and here she was, dancing as though it came naturally.

She had always thought she wasn't the sort of girl men wanted to dance with. She had always thought she was lesser somehow, that she would never have the things other girls had. But maybe the problem hadn't been her. Maybe it hadn't ever been her. Maybe it had been the place, and her mother's unforgiving expectations, and the way everything expected of her was tight and ill-fitting, and had never allowed her to breathe properly, never allowed her to see anything properly, not even herself.

When it began to grow light outside and the crowd had thinned, people stumbling out into the pale early morning, the waiters arrived with breakfast, fruit and croissants and pots of yogurt. Margie ate some berries, but her stomach was too light to hold anything, so she found Dorothy and the two of them went home, Margie floating the whole way. It hadn't been her at all. She hadn't been the one who was wrong, who didn't fit. She had been this girl all along. It had been the place that was wrong. And now, here, in Paris, she could see herself clearly. She could see who she had been meant to be, now that Paris was hers.

“Go through and pack up whatever you want,” my mother had told me. When I had gone to her with each piece to ask for permission, she waved me away. “It's fine,” she said each time. “It's fine.”

“Don't you want some of these things?”

She shook her head. “There's more than enough.”

And really, there was. My mother and grandmother had both been only children, so they had inherited all the family flotsam and jetsam. I supposed I should have been grateful I wasn't going to be expected to take everything with me, as they had. Instead, I chose the things I had loved as a child. I packed boxes of hand-painted china, so thin you could see your fingers behind it if you held it up to the light, boxes of silver, monogrammed and tarnished and entirely impractical for anything. I wrapped photographs and paintings without wondering where they might find a place to rest in the modern wasteland of my condo. I rolled up my favorite carpet and moved my father's chair out of the sitting room. I piled my treasures in the dining room until I realized I was rapidly running out of space.

“What are you going to do with all this stuff, anyway?” I asked the crowded room. The furniture stared back at me, silent and stoic. It was okay. I knew the answer, even if I wasn't willing to admit it. I was furnishing
my house. Not the condo I lived in with Phillip. Some mythical, imaginary place, like my old apartment in Magnolia. A home decorated with furniture and rugs worn to a comfortable shabbiness, warmed by the memories of people who had lived there before. Rooms where the decorations held stories and histories, and where I could leave a teacup on the coffee table or a book on the sofa without its looking like a violation.

When Phillip and I had moved into the condo, I had donated all my books to the library. He said they ruined the look of the shelves, the gorgeous, wall-to-wall shelves in the living room that clearly called out for rows and rows of books and instead held the oddest objets d'art: a silver sphere woven out of twigs with a tendency to shed spray-painted bark onto the carpet, empty vases covered in mirrored glass, so every time you touched them you left fingerprints as though you were creating a crime scene, a pair of white papier-mâché masks I found so disturbing I had finally turned them to face the wall, a sculpture made of menacingly twisted railroad spikes, and a set of metal leaves that looked as though they had been plucked from a forest near Chernobyl. Despite his faith in my artistic knowledge, whenever I complained about them, Phillip insisted the decorator had known what she was doing.

I would have rather looked at a shelf full of books.

“You have to move these things,” my mother announced, sweeping into the dining room with the grandeur of a duchess arriving for dinner at Buckingham Palace.

“I'm realizing that.” I put my hands on two boxes and carefully—and clumsily—clambered out from between them. Pulling a chair out from the dining room table, I collapsed into it. I had been on my feet nearly nonstop, either painting or packing or carrying boxes up from the basement for my mother to sort through, and the exhaustion hit me, sudden and strong. Upstairs, a carpenter moved from room to room, fixing the molding, the comforting buzz of a saw and the intermittent thwack of a hammer punctuating my thoughts.

My mother was still standing with her hands on her hips, as though she expected me to magic the boxes away.

“I'll put them in the basement. I've cleared out half the stuff down there and once you look at what's left and decide what you want to keep, I'll call someone to haul the rest away.”

“You can't. Remember? Sharon says it has to look like there is a lot of storage space downstairs.”

“There is a lot of storage space downstairs.”

“Yes, but it has to
look
like it.”

Leaning forward, I pushed the chair at the head of the table out for her. “Have a seat, Mother. Take a load off.”

With a movement somehow both reluctant and grateful, she sank down into the chair as well, looking as happy to be off her feet as I was, though she most emphatically would never have referred to it as “taking a load off.” My mother was always in motion, on the phone or writing letters or rushing off to a meeting or a fundraiser or a function. I had never even thought my mother had the capacity to be tired or stressed, and yet here she was. Despite her makeup, I could see shadows under her eyes, and there was a slump to her shoulders that made her seem even smaller than she was.

“I shouldn't be sitting. There's so much to do,” she said. She folded and refolded her hands in her lap.

“There's less than yesterday,” I said. Above us, the carpenter's saw bit into a piece of wood. There was a clatter, then silence again.

“Did you need something?”

“We can't just talk?”

“Well,” my mother said, as though that were an answer.

I nodded over at one of my grandmother's notebooks, sitting on the edge of the table. “Grandmother wanted to be a writer. Did you know that?”

“Did she?” My mother's interest was polite.

“She had some stories and poems published, in high school and college. The literary magazines. I've read them. They're pretty good.”

“Where did you find those?”

“Up in the attic. You've never read them?”

“There's so much junk in the attic—who knows what's up there?”

“Did she write? I mean, do you remember her being a writer?”

My mother looked at me as though I were simple. “She didn't have time. She practically ran the Collegiate Women's Society in Washington, and she was on the boards of the symphony and the library, and they needed to entertain because of my father's work. If you're having senators and diplomats over for dinner, there's not a lot of time for scribbling.”

It broke my heart a little to hear my mother call my grandmother's writing “scribbling.” She sounded like my great-grandmother, Margie's mother. I thought about telling her what I had read, about Margie's trip to Paris, about her daydreams and her friendship with Sebastien, about her writing, but I kept my mouth shut. Telling Henry hadn't bothered me at all, but telling my mother seemed like a betrayal. I knew she wouldn't approve, and I wondered again how the woman in those journals had raised this woman, how the woman in those journals had become the Grandmother I knew, stiff and formal and reserved. She had been so happy in Paris—what had taken that from her? What had made her stop writing? What had changed?

“We could arrange to have these things shipped home to you,” my mother said, smoothly changing the subject. “Instead of taking them down to the basement just to bring them back up in a few days.”

The casual nature of the offer made me freeze, my stomach tensing. “What do you mean, a few days?”

“When you leave. You've been helpful, but don't you need to be getting back to Phillip?”

There was a pause, heavy and expectant, between us. We hadn't spoken about Phillip, or about me, or about anything serious, really, since our conversation the other day, and the idea of arguing with her made my chest feel tight. “I'm thinking about it,” I said. Though I wasn't,
really. It was odd how little I thought of him, how comfortable I felt without him.

“He called here, you know. He said you weren't answering your cellular phone.”

“I . . . lost it,” I said. I should have felt better that he was calling, but that part of my heart felt dark and shriveled and unforgiving. He wasn't reaching out. Not really. All he wanted, I suspected, was to berate me more, to put me back into the box I was breaking out of.

“Is there something you aren't telling me?” my mother asked. She was hesitant, and a momentary shard of hope rose inside me, as it had the other day when I had thought she might be opening to me. “Has Phillip—mistreated you in some way?”

I paused, equally hesitant. We were wandering the edge of undiscovered emotional territory—honesty. Reality. “No,” I sighed. He would never hurt me, not the way she was asking about, anyway. As small and mean as he could be, he had never raised a hand to me, and as far as I knew, he hadn't slept with anyone else.

“Maybe you're disconnected. That happens in a marriage sometimes . . . things get busy . . .” She trailed off, hopefully, and I realized she was waiting for me to jump in and agree, to put her at ease, to end this awkward conversation.

“Maybe,” was the best I could give her.

“Madeleine,” my mother began, then interrupted herself to reach over and pat my hand. Her fingers were slender and cool. “You can't just sit here and let it all fade away. Call him back at least. Talk to him. If there's no real problem between you, then you have to give it another chance.”

I leaned back in my chair, lifted my hands to the ceiling, then let them fall back in my lap. I could feel myself starting to cry, and I didn't want to cry. My mother never cried. My sorority sisters cried, but those were pretty, delicate tears, energetic enough to evoke sympathy, but not enough to cause mascara to run or redden their noses under their
foundation. When I cried, it was loud and messy and ugly, my eyes pink and swollen, my nose red and stuffy. I didn't want to cry in front of my mother for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that it made me so unlovely, and I already felt unlovable.

“You know why he married me, Mother. Did you really think it was going to last?”

“He married you because you were in love,” she said, with the strength of conviction of someone who refuses to see anything they don't want to.

I fast-blinked away the tears hovering at the edges of my eyes, blurring the dining room into a soft wash of green and blue, like a Monet painting. “Well, I may have loved him, but he didn't love me. I probably even knew it at the time, a little bit. Why was a man like Phillip going to marry someone like me? You thought that, Mother. I know you did. Everyone did. I know it's all anyone at the wedding was thinking about.” My self-pity was coming to a rapid boil, and I couldn't hold back the tears anymore, angrily wiping them away with my forearm. “He married me because I was malleable, because I'd let him walk all over me. And he does. He married me because I was pretending to be someone else, someone who would make him look good. He married me because he wanted Dad to invest in his company. He didn't marry me for me. He doesn't even like me. He doesn't even know me.”

“Madeleine, stop talking like that right now. Your poor father—what a horrible thing to imply.” My mother was flustered, which never happened. Maybe because we were having an honest conversation for once in our lives, because she was trapped here with me and couldn't invent some excuse for hanging up the phone, a pile of correspondence she just had to deal with or remembering the roses needed deadheading or there was a committee meeting she was late to.

“I never would have married him if you hadn't pressured me so hard.” I was pushing back tears, raw and ugly, and I wanted to hurt her, to break her perfect facade, to make her cry with me.

“I'm sorry, are you saying this is my fault?” my mother asked.

“You were the one who wanted me to get married! You were the one who was so embarrassed I wasn't! I married him because I didn't want to disappoint you anymore.”

“Don't put your unhappiness on me, Madeleine,” my mother said, and the disdain in her voice only made me feel smaller and less worthy. “You were the one who accepted his proposal. You made the vows. I didn't force you to do anything.”

She was right. And yet she wasn't. I had spent so much time wishing someone would love me, and she had underscored that desire in a million ways, from every time she had told me I would never find a husband at art school to every date she had set me up on. And when she had met Phillip for the first time, before we got engaged, I could practically see the hunger in her eyes. She had wanted that for me so badly. The first time we had dinner together, she had dug her sharp elbow into my side repeatedly whenever I veered onto some unapproved conversational topic, and when Phillip had proposed, she almost collapsed in gratitude.

She was my mother. If she thought I was capable of withstanding the buffeting winds of her opinions, she was wrong.

“What is all this really about?” my mother asked. I suppose she was trying to be sympathetic, but there was too much between us for me to be able to accept it, and I was too angry and bitter to even really hear it.

“I just don't think Phillip and I should be married anymore, that's all.”

There was a pause. “I see.”

We sat there, the tick of the grandfather clock in the foyer echoing emptily, the floors above us squeaking as the carpenter moved back and forth.

Finally my mother stood up, placed her fingertips on the table like a CEO about to make an announcement of quarterly earnings. “I don't know why you're so determined to feel sorry for yourself, but I won't be a part of it. Everyone has difficult times, Madeleine. But if you're going
to insist on wrapping yourself up in your own victimhood, I can't stand to listen to it.” Turning, she walked out of the room and down the hall, and a moment later, I heard the firm sound of the door to my father's office closing.