The Light of Paris (23 page)

“I envy that. Knowing what you want to do and then just doing it. I had no idea. Got a degree in marketing, which I really had absolutely no interest in, and had no idea what to do with when I graduated. I ended up working for the development office at my high school, which I guess is a kind of marketing, but I didn't like it much either. I would have been better off going to dental school.”

“You would have been better off going to art school.”

“Sure,” I said, disbelieving. My parents had convinced me, I guess, because when I thought about it now, I wasn't sure I saw the point. What would I have done with an art degree? Although, to be fair, the only thing I was doing of any value was volunteering at the Stabler Museum, and my marketing degree wasn't much help there.

We were getting closer to the band, and the street was getting more crowded and the noise level was rising. We had to raise our voices to be heard, Henry leaning his head close to mine.

“I mean it. You say you had no idea what you wanted to do, but you did. You wanted to paint. Just because it was unacceptable to your family doesn't mean you didn't know what you wanted.”

“Yeah, well. If it was so important to me I would have done it anyway. At least for fun. I haven't painted in years.”

“I'm not sure that's the case. You got a pretty strong message it wasn't a good use of your time.”

There was another little twist in my gut when I heard him rising to my defense, because he was standing up for me when he didn't know the entire story. I wasn't telling him everything. I wasn't telling him marrying Phillip had been the culmination of a hundred decisions, that it had required my putting away everything that had mattered to the person I really was in order to become the person I had always been told I should
want to be, and one of the things I had sacrificed was painting. And I wasn't telling him because it would have required admitting it myself, and spoiling the illusion I had that this moment here, this time in Magnolia with him and Sharon and my easel in my mother's basement, was my life, that I had never been lonely or sad, had never married a man who criticized me for gaining weight instead of feeding me chocolate lava cake, who took me to parties and fundraisers I didn't want to go to with people I didn't care about instead of to street fairs that made me feel alive.

“Remember how Sharon said I was in a band with Kevin?”

“Yes!” This thought filled me with an inappropriately large sense of glee, and I clapped my hands together. “What kind of music? What instrument did you play?”

“Drums,” Henry said, slapping out a quick rhythm in the air. “And I wouldn't call what we played music. It was mostly a lot of noise, but we categorized ourselves as hair metal.”

“Please tell me there are pictures of you with long hair.”

“You will never see them. I keep them locked up. Like the picture of Dorian Gray.”

“I don't think that portrait was hidden out of eighties hair shame.”

“But don't I look youthful?” He tossed his hair dramatically and I laughed out loud, surprised again at the sound of my own delight. “The point is I think about music sometimes, and how it was such a huge part of my existence, and how now I only think about it if I'm deciding what to play in the restaurant, or what to listen to on the way to work. And I don't think, ‘That part of my life is over.' I think, ‘That's not as big a part of my life right now.' So your painting, for a while, was ‘not right now,' and now it's time again.”

“Maybe,” I said. Maybe that was it—my life had only been on hold, waiting for me to pick it up again.

We began to walk again until we came to the other end of the street.
Outside the Thai restaurant, Wanee's children joyfully danced to the music. Next door was the knitting shop, and as advertised, I could see a group of women at the back of the store, sitting in a circle, talking and laughing, colorful suns of yarn in their laps. A group of people stood by the door, drinking wine and laughing, and a server with a tray of appetizers passed back and forth in front of the window.

Inside, it was hot and close, bodies pressed together looking at the art or just chatting in groups. Cassandra stopped by to give us a hug, and we looked at the art—wall hangings, quilted or woven, impossible combinations of texture and color. The fabric made the “do not touch” rule feel even harder, and my fingers itched when I looked at the quilted swirls, the feathery explosions of angora, the hidden glimmer of silvery thread. To keep my hands busy, I swiped more than my share of appetizers off the passing trays. My mouth was still full when Henry asked if I was ready to go. Tiny beads of sweat stood out at his hairline.

“Yeth,” I said around a mouthful of bruschetta.

“I'm glad you like my food,” Henry said as we stepped back out onto the street, the cool air rushing up to meet us as though we were long-lost friends.

I finished chewing and, ever the lady, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “I like food in general. Don't get a swelled head.”

“You'd never know it to look at you. You're too thin.”

Shocked, I barked out a sharp laugh, loud enough to make the people around us turn and look. I covered my mouth and lowered my voice. “I guess that's meant as a compliment, but if there is one thing I am not, it is too thin.”

“I'm sorry, I don't like to comment on women's bodies, but you look . . . hungry. I like to feed hungry people. And really, I like to watch anyone enjoying my food. You're welcome at The Kitchen anytime.”

“Well, thanks.” I resisted the urge to look at his eyes to make sure he didn't have a bad case of cataracts. I was used to either my mother's or
my husband's acting as a missile defense system around my weight. If I had dessert twice in one week, Phillip was likely to go DEFCON 1 on the state of my thighs. It didn't help that I was surrounded by women who seemed to have been poured into a precise mold, whereas I looked more like the one that had overflowed the mold and somehow been shipped out to the store anyway.

“Do you want to get a drink?” Henry asked. We had taken a few steps and were outside Java Good Day.

“Sure,” I said, and we stepped inside. Like most of the buildings on The Row, Java Good Day was in a renovated building, but it had survived the onslaught of modernization and the interior was exactly what a coffee shop should look like—battered wood floors, exposed brick walls, college radio playing, the last of the sun lying lazily across the tables. The smell of coffee brushed over my skin, wound itself into my hair, and I inhaled deeply. The coffee shop I'd gone to on The Row in high school hadn't been nearly this nice, and I was a little jealous of the kids who would get to come to this one. It was a much better place to wallow in adolescent angst.

“What do you want?” Henry asked.

“I'll have an Italian cream soda. Raspberry, if they have it.” What the hell. I was fairly sure I'd gained ten pounds already, I might as well go for the full spare tire.

“No coffee?”

“Ugh, no. I'd be up half the night.”

“Fair enough. I'll be right back.”

Henry went to get in line while I wandered to the back of the shop. If I were to leave my fabulous life behind to open a coffee shop, this is exactly what I would want it to be, I thought. There was a bookshelf full of books people had abandoned, a row of tables with chessboards laid in them. A handful of college students, looking charmingly young, lounged on a pair of leather armchairs and a huge, bulky sofa.

Along the walls were photographs and paintings, and when I looked closer, each bore a tiny card with the artist's name and the work's title, along with a price. I could see an empty space where one had, presumably, sold. Henry walked up and handed me my soda, the cream tainted a pale pink from the raspberry syrup. “Thank you.”

“You know, I know the owners,” Henry said. He was drinking coffee; I could smell it on his breath when he leaned in beside me to look at one of the photographs.

“Yeah, I met him the other day. Pete. He's a nice guy.”

“No, I mean if you wanted to sell some of your art here. I could connect you.”

“Don't be silly. I don't have anything to sell. And no one would buy anything I painted anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“How do
you
know? You've never seen my paintings.”

Henry shrugged. “All right, so maybe they're horrendous. You could still put them up here.”

“Sure,” I said, somewhat sarcastically, but as we walked back outside, sipping on our drinks, the glass door closing heavily behind us, the thought stuck with me. What would it be like to have my work out in public? I was out of practice, but it turned out I had been storing up a lot of ideas over the years, and there were a million things I wanted to paint—the light of all four seasons on Lake Michigan, the glitter of snow against a skyscraper's glass, a cocktail party in which everyone was wearing elaborately feathered masks. This night—The Row alive with music and people and the promise of summer on everyone's mind. If I painted everything I wanted to, I would get better. I could take classes. I could be an artist again. I could be myself again.

We walked back down the street, Henry introducing me to people we bumped into, ducking into stores and drinking tiny glasses of wine or sampling the food we were offered. By the time we made our way back
to the start of The Row again, my stomach was full and I felt a little giddy from the wine.

Henry's car was parked on the sidewalk outside my mother's house, so we said good night there, his keys jingling loosely between his fingers. There was a moment there, before I turned to go, when Henry looked as though he might say something else, a question resting on his lips, but when I paused, he just said “Good night” again and stepped out into the street, looking both ways before he opened the car door and slid inside. The engine sprang to life, a contented purr on the quiet street, and he waved as he pulled away and I walked slowly toward the house, listening to the sound of him driving away until it was gone.

Upstairs, I went into the bathroom to wash my face and paused, looking at myself in the mirror—all of me. I had rolled up my sleeves, and there was a tiny smudge of chocolate in the corner of my mouth courtesy of the samples from the chocolatier toward the end of the block. My cheeks were flushed from the wine and the walk up the hill, and my hair looked wild and loose, the curls framing my face. I looked, I thought, happy. I looked free. I looked like someone I would want to know. I looked alive. I didn't want to give that up.

One night after a late dinner, as Margie and Sebastien were winding their slow way through Montparnasse toward the Club, the sky that was fading into darkness turned stormy. A rumble of thunder came from the distance, and then the rain was upon them, with no more warning. It had hardly rained since Margie had arrived. The rain would dare not ruin the perfect beauty of Paris, the way the sunlight fell so golden on the buildings, the shabby hopefulness of the vendors outside the Métro. Even the beggars in Paris had a consummately French style, scarves knotted around their necks, their dirty hair artfully arranged, an insouciance about the way they asked for your spare change, as though they weren't bothered one way or another whether you gave it to them, and then if you did (which Margie always did), they would half raise an eyebrow and nod in acknowledgment, and only occasionally would they say, in the most blasé way possible, “
Merci
.” Margie absolutely loved it.

The rain came first with Parisian languor, fat drops with large spaces between them, and then furiously, hurling itself down toward the ground until, in a moment, Margie knew they were going to be drenched. They hurried under the awning of a café that had already closed, squeezing in with the empty tables, chairs stacked on top of them. What had been a beautifully cool evening quickly turned bitter, and Margie began to
shiver. Sebastien slipped off his jacket and put it over her shoulders, but it was wet too, and only served to make her colder. A few people ran past, shoulders hunched, newspapers held above their heads, water spraying up from their heels.

As they waited, the rain fell harder, its rhythm on the awning above their heads turning from enthusiastic to threatening. Turning to her, Sebastien said, “Come with me. I live close to here.”

Margie, who was cold and wet and miserable, didn't think twice. Sebastien took her hand and they ran through the rain, and she soon went from damp to completely drenched. A bus went by, throwing up a sheet of water that splashed over them, shocking and icy, and Margie began to laugh. And then they were at a door and Sebastien fumbled for a key and opened it and they were inside a courtyard, the buildings rising up around them. Above their heads a lantern sputtered in the darkness, and she could see a beautiful garden being beaten by the rain, rose petals scattered onto the stones in the courtyard. “This way,” Sebastien said, and he opened the glass door to the building with another key.

Inside, the floor was perfect squares of creamy marble, and it held a quiet elegance Margie knew meant money. It was both familiar and unfamiliar—she had been surrounded by wealth her entire life, yet it had been months since she had been in a place like this. The ritziest building she had visited in Paris, not including Versailles or the Louvre, was the Libe, and its splendor had been all but swallowed by its new function and, to a larger extent, benign neglect. Surely Sebastien didn't live here. He was an artist, wasn't he? His shirts weren't going threadbare at the collar like René's, and he always seemed to have enough money for dinner and wine, but she had always thought he was flush from his new success, from the paintings he had sold.

Except, climbing the wide staircase that curved upstairs, the treads covered with plush, soft carpet that reminded her of the stairs in her parents' house, the banisters carved and gleaming with wood oil, she
knew he was not relying on his paintings alone. Sebastien was rich. She didn't know how, or why he kept it a secret, but he was.

They alit at the second landing, Margie's dress heavy and wet, leaving a trail on the carpet, and Sebastien led her down the hall and opened a door at the end, turning on the light inside. “Come in, come in,” Sebastien said when Margie hesitated, dripping water where she stood. Then she stepped inside, and her eyes widened.

“You
are
rich,” she said as he closed the door behind her. She covered her mouth and laughed at the comparison, thinking of her tiny garret back at the Club, of struggling over the five hundred francs the Libe paid her, and he lived
here
.

Two easels stood by the window, where she imagined the light would be best, each holding a partially finished canvas, one of a Paris street, looking down, so it managed to contain both the famous Parisian rooftops and a street scene below, a market bursting with the rich colors of fresh fruits and vegetables, the awning of a café, a waiter standing to take an order from a man looking down at a menu, a couple crossing the street, a motorcar going one direction, a horse and cart heading the other way. Looking at the city from that perspective made it feel new and somehow secret, as though she were bearing witness to things she wouldn't see from the ground, an unfair glimpse into people's lives. As she had with his painting of the ball, she felt her fingers itching, a desire to dive into these people's stories: the weary set of the waiter's stance on his tired feet, the distance between the couple as they walked, a woman holding her hands close to her as she eyed a bin of bright strawberries, as though she might not be able to afford them but was only looking, avoiding temptation as she imagined the way the fruit would burst on her tongue and stain her fingers.

He had only just started the other canvas, the figure of a man standing by a window, sketched out, only the barest beginnings of color in the background, an unfamiliar blue sky. Between the easels stood a table full
of metal tubes of paint and brushes, the wood carelessly spotted with a dozen different colors, a palette drying nearby, a stool.

The rest of the apartment was luxurious. Framing the window were heavy velvet curtains, the nap smooth and clean and obviously new. The rug beneath her feet was even more plush than the one in the stairwell, an Oriental carpet strewn with vines and richly woven patterns, so deep she wobbled slightly as she stood on it.

The ceilings were high, with wide molding along the edges, and the furniture was fine as well. And beyond the living room in which they stood, the apartment stretched back to other rooms, the luxury of space in a city where Margie had grown so used to folding in on herself to keep from intruding on other people, on the tram, at cafés, even in the aisles of the bookshops on rue de l'Odéon, where one errant shoulder could bring a stack of books tumbling down.

“I am not rich.” He dropped his keys in a bowl on a table by the front door and stepped out of his shoes. “My family is rich. I am a poor artist.”

“Hmph,” Margie said. She had never stopped to think of the line between being rich and having one's family be rich. While her parents weren't technically supporting her now, she would never have been able to make it over to Europe without their largesse, and she knew when she went back—
if
she went back—they would support her again, and when they died, she would inherit what they had. Her father wouldn't leave her the business, but he would leave her more than enough to live on, and if she married, she would have her husband's money too. Yet none of it would really be hers. Which was why the five hundred francs she got from the Libe, paltry as it was, felt like a fortune—because it was hers and hers alone.

“Do your friends know?” she asked.

“
Vite
,
vite
,” he said, changing the subject. Quick, quick. “We must get into something warm or we will die of consumption.”

“I don't think that's how you get consumption,” Margie said, but her
dress was clinging unpleasantly to her and leaving a large wet spot on Sebastien's carpet, so she followed him down the hall. He went into a room at the end and she almost followed him and then realized it was his bedroom and stopped, embarrassed, until her natural curiosity got the better of her and she peered around the door to see a table, a few sketchbooks and charcoal scattered on its surface, and a chair set up by a pair of wide French doors she guessed led to a balcony. At the other end of the room was an unmade bed, the sheets thrown back, the form of his body still clear upon them, so she could imagine him sleeping there, his hair tousled on the pillow, his eyelashes casting shadows on his cheeks. She caught her breath and stepped back into the hallway, both excited and ashamed of her own imagination.

He rummaged around the chest of drawers and then emerged with a pile of clothes in his hands. “Here. Wear these.” He opened the door behind her to reveal another bedroom, a guest room, undisturbed and empty of personality. Taking the pile of clothes, she stepped inside and he closed the door behind her.

She changed into what he had given her, a shirt of soft cotton, a pair of loose pants. Sebastien was slender and Margie was broad, so they nearly fit her, and she felt somewhat charming and boyish, like a real flapper. The fabric was so fine and soft it made every inch of her skin feel alive, and she blushed to be naked against Sebastien's clothes.

When she opened the door, she was startled to find Sebastien standing there as though he had been waiting. He had changed as well, was wearing a sweater and a dry pair of pants, his hair brushed back from his forehead. Self-consciously, Margie put her own hand to her hair, which was, she could feel, beginning to curl wildly as it dried. “Let me take your things,” Sebastien said, reaching for them, and Margie almost handed them over and then remembered her underthings and yanked the bundle back.

“I'll hang them,” she said, and Sebastien simply shrugged.

“The toilet is just there.” He nodded to the door behind him. “I have turned on the radiator. If you want to hang your clothes, they will dry.”

She hung her clothes, and when she emerged, he had built a fire in the fireplace and moved the sofa toward the hearth. He was sitting in the center of it, leaning forward. When Margie padded into the room, he shifted to one side and patted the place next to him. “Come sit by the fire. I've made
chocolat chaud.
”

Margie sat and gratefully took the cup he handed her, full of steaming hot chocolate, so thick and sweet it was like drinking a melted chocolate bar. The sugar and the heat from the fire made her feel sleepy, and she drew her feet up beneath her and curled into the cushions and sighed happily. “Thank you for inviting me in. And for the clothes.”

“Of course.”

“So do your friends know you're this rich?” Margie asked again, sipping at her chocolate.

Sebastien sighed exaggeratedly, and then looked over at her in the firelight and saw she was teasing him. “They do not. They know I can afford to pay the bill at cafés sometimes when they are short, but I let them believe it is because I sold a painting at the gallery. When some of them are struggling so much, it seems impolite to speak of it. And of course it would draw a line between us, if they knew. They might treat me differently. Money changes everything. Isn't that what they say in America?”

“It is,” Margie said sadly. She thought of Mr. Chapman and his awkward proposal, about the hushed conversations between her mother and her aunt about her dowry versus Evelyn's. “Well, you hardly need so large a dowry with Evelyn,” her mother had said to her aunt, and though Margie had known that was mostly meant to soothe her Aunt Edith, who acted richer than she actually was, it was nonetheless a slight to Margie, and it had made her feel even plainer and dowdier and more hopeless. She thought of how happy she was in Paris on only her tiny salary plus a little from her savings, how much happier than she had ever been at
home, where there had been new dresses every season and invitations to the most important homes in Washington and Baltimore and New York, but she also thought of the way she felt now, safe inside an apartment with window glass solid enough to make the thunderous sound of the rain sound like nothing more than a gentle tapping, with a fireplace large enough to warm the whole room, with comfortable furniture and carpets thick as new grass, and she knew while it was exciting to think about throwing away material comforts in search of a romantic asceticism, money could be very nice indeed.

“And what does your family think of your being here?” She had finished the cup of chocolate, and reluctantly, she set it down on the table, half wanting to ask for more but knowing it was so rich she would never be able to drink it. She loved this about France, about how food was made to be more than sustenance, everything she ate was an
experience
, from the crème brûlée she had eaten at a restaurant when she had first arrived, to the simplest loaves of fresh bread. She often bought a demi-baguette from the corner boulangerie on her way home, and a bit of Brie from the cheesemonger, and if she hurried up to her room quickly enough, the bread would still be steaming when she broke it open, bits of crust falling onto her desk, so warm it would soften the cheese as she pressed them together, eating in pure, hedonistic pleasure.

Pushing his hand back through his hair, Sebastien squinted into the fire. “They think it is a phase. They believe when I have painted for a while, I will be content when I go back to Bordeaux and join the family business. My mother says I can paint the landscape there—it is beautiful enough that I would never have to see anything else.”