The Light of Paris (25 page)

“You know,” Henry said thoughtfully, stroking his beard, “it took me a long time to leave her. I didn't think I had a good enough reason. I thought we needed to be fighting all the time, throwing things, crying.”

“I'm pretty sure it does have to be that way if you want to get a divorce in my family. I need to have a good reason if I'm going to upset the country club register.”

“It is enough. Being unhappy is enough.”

“Is it? Happiness is so transitory. I could be happy today and unhappy tomorrow. And it's affected by so many things out of your control—the weather, the traffic, other people's behavior.”

Henry was shaking his head. “That's not what I mean. I'm not talking about good moods or bad moods. Sure, those blow over with the weather. But whether you are happy deep down, whether you wake up and have to summon up the energy just to get out of bed, or whether you feel like every day is an opportunity, that's different. That doesn't change because of a thunderstorm or someone cutting in front of you in line.”

“I guess,” I said, though I was strangely unwilling to concede the point. I had been sure for so long my unhappiness didn't matter, had held it underwater for so long in an effort to drown it, that my entire life seemed like a waste of time if it actually did matter in the end.

“Well, let me ask you this. Why did you marry him?”

“My parents wanted me to.” And then I paused. “And I was afraid no one else would want me.”

Henry's eyes went wide, but he said nothing.

“I was living alone. I had my own job. I supported myself. But I was
kind of a metaphorical burden. It was hard for my mother to tell her friends I was almost thirty and still single when all their daughters were married already, and having children, most of them. My failure to follow the plan made her look like a failure as a mother, and that was uncomfortable for her.”

“You sound so forgiving.”

“It's not her fault.” I shrugged. “She was raised with those expectations.”

Henry looked at me with those wide hazel eyes, serious and intense. “I think you're too hung up on what everyone else thinks, and you haven't given enough thought to what you think.”

“Let me ask you a question,” I said, bristling slightly. “Was it easy for you to leave your relationship? Did you wake up one day and decide it wasn't for you? Just walk out?”

“Of course not. I agonized for—well, frankly, for years. In hindsight I know I waited too long. I knew long before I let myself know, if that makes any sense.”

“So why are you rushing me?” I asked. “And besides, just because it was right for you doesn't mean it's right for me. Maybe Phillip and I are meant to be together. Maybe I need to stop being so self-absorbed and worrying about my feelings and pull myself up by my bootstraps and recommit.”

“It's possible,” Henry said. “Do you love him?” he asked.

I sighed, a long and slow exhalation into the night. “I don't know,” I said. It seemed disloyal to say I didn't. And how do you know if you love someone? Someone you've been with for that long? Phillip was just a fact of life.

“Did you ever?” he asked gently.

“Of course,” I said with a confidence I didn't feel. It was an unfair question to ask anyone who has become disenchanted with a relationship, who is angry or sad or broken, because of course they won't be able
to remember what it felt like when they were in love. Hindsight is 20/20, et cetera. I could see clearly that I had been attracted to Phillip, to the same things that attracted everyone to him—his charm and his chiseled features and his perfect hair and the way he had of offering the perfect toast for any occasion. And I knew I had felt relieved by his proposal, that part of my attraction had been gratitude, and that I had been in love with the idea of marriage and family and finally, for once, fitting in and doing what I was supposed to do rather than endlessly letting people down. But we had hardly known each other. I had loved the image he presented to me, but he had held me at arm's length, and our engagement had been short, and then, finally, when he had what he wanted, a woman with a social pedigree who would let him criticize her when he felt small and the money to rescue his family's business, and we had begun to live together and been unable to hide our true selves, I had come to realize I didn't love him, and most days I didn't even really like him, and to be brutally honest, he probably felt the same way.

That was all my fault, wasn't it? One more in a string of Madeleine-shaped failures. And why should I put my mother through that much humiliation at the Ladies Association over something as trivial as my own happiness? I thought of all the money—the money my father had given to Phillip to rescue the business, the money they had spent on the wedding. I thought of all the people who had come, all the gifts, the endless thank-you notes, all the people who would have to be told. All the people who would say, “I knew it wouldn't last,” who had looked at my plainness and Phillip's glow and raised an eyebrow, all those people who had seen the years before go by without my getting married and tutted and said of my mother, “That poor woman,” as though I had been living off their largesse instead of supporting myself.

I didn't want to endure that.

“Were you ashamed? Of the divorce, I mean,” I asked Henry in a small voice. That's what it was, the emotion behind everything. Shame.
Shame I had failed in this thing I had claimed I wanted, shame I had failed in this thing that mattered so much to the people around me, shame I had failed in something so public.

Henry lay back and looked up at the sky. It was a clear night, and stars speckled the darkness above us. I knew there were thousands, tens of thousands, millions more we couldn't see because of the light pollution, but it was still so much better than in the city, where the best I might be able to see were Orion's belt and the North Star, and I felt rudderless, like a lost sailor looking for direction under a cloudy sky.

“I was, a little. But more brokenhearted than ashamed. We'd been in love at one point, and it was so sad, that breaking apart of something that had once been beautiful. I knew it was the right thing to do, and it didn't make me question the decision, but I mourned it. It was something real, and I felt—I still feel, actually—a tenderness toward that relationship. At least the way it was when it was new.”

“I don't feel brokenhearted. I only feel ashamed,” I said. I lay back on the grass beside him. There was no funeral in my heart. If I mourned anything, it was the time I had spent with Phillip, the way I had buried myself in our marriage in order to be the person my mother needed me to be, to be the person Ashley Hathaway needed me to be, the person I had thought I had to be in order to belong.

Don't you still?
something inside me asked.

I turned my head, as though my thoughts were something unpleasant I could look away from, the honesty of my conscience too much to bear. My head rested on Henry's arm. He was wearing a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms hairy against my skin. I wanted to roll over and bury my face in his chest, breathe in the scent of him, feel his heart beating against my cheek, feel someone solid and strong and alive.

And, I realized with a jolt, I felt attracted to him. Alive and aware and even aroused. He felt real, felt solid and imperfect, and so close, and his eyes were on me, seeing me, knowing me. We talked and I was aware
of our lips moving in the darkness, aware of the smell of the flowers in my mother's garden and the vegetables in his, of the earth and the air and mostly of him, strong and solid beside me.

I bent my elbow and rested my head in my hand, looking down at him. His eyes were dark and unreadable, shining dimly in the starlight, but I felt as if something were pulling us together, and when he rolled onto his side, I felt his closeness in my entire body—an awareness of not only his eyes and his mouth but every inch of him.

I don't know who kissed whom first. I suppose it was me, but there was a point at which the kiss was inevitable, when we had moved so close together, the small space left between us filled with tension and heat and desire, it would have been impossible to draw apart again. Maybe it wasn't so much my initiative as a slow, magnetic pull, as though the earth's gravitational force wanted us together, and our lips met and we kissed, gently, softly. I had never kissed a man with a beard before, and it made the act of kissing him feel new and beautifully strange, unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. His lips were soft, his beard brushed lightly against my skin as we fell together, his arm around my waist, mine around his neck, the brush of his hair against my fingertips, the length of his body against mine. We kissed like that, and I felt a long-forgotten warmth inside me, as though I were a flower opening to the spring of him, and I wondered where this would go, whether we would make love here on the grass, under the stars, as though the night belonged only to us. Until when I moved my hand to his shirt, pulling the back up and spreading my fingers over the warmth of his skin, he pulled back and looked at me, his eyes searching mine in the darkness.

“No,” he said gently, and he pulled away. “No. Not like this.” He removed his hand from my waist and shifted backward, letting the night fall between us, cold and dark.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He rolled onto his back and blew a long breath out toward the stars. “Well, for starters, you're married.”

“Separated,” I said, my protest feeling weak even as I made it. Even if our separation had been something formal, it wasn't an actual condition. It was a liminal state. It was the state of someone too afraid to commit, to speak her mind. A punishing fist squeezed at my stomach.

“And even if you were divorced, it's too fresh. I don't want you to get hurt, but, to be selfish, I don't want to get hurt either. Your heart—I don't know where your heart is.” He spoke to the sky, as though the stars and the moon and the satellites drifting lonely through space, bleating out their lights like Morse code, could hear him.

I sank back onto the grass beside him. “I don't know where it is either,” I said. Above me, the stars kept their silent watch, their glacial changes invisible to me.

I hadn't intended to kiss Henry. Hadn't admitted to myself until that night I was attracted to him. It had been the moment, the conversation, his easy smile, the way everything felt comfortable with him. Was this how it was supposed to be? I felt like I had been clenching every muscle in my body since I had met Phillip, and with Henry I felt like liquid. I felt smarter, sharper, more creative. More alive.

In the end, it didn't matter how much I liked him, or how I felt when I was with him, because he had turned me down. And I was married. What was I doing? Creating this whole fantasy life here, as though I could stay forever. I couldn't be a painter. I couldn't be friends with Sharon and Henry. Maybe that was why my grandmother had left Paris—because she knew it had to end. At some point you have to go back to reality. Nobody gets to live their dream.

Margie and Sebastien became those lovers she had seen on the streets so often, the kind her mother would have considered completely shameful. They walked hand in hand, and often he lifted hers to his mouth and dropped a gentle kiss on her fingers or the tender skin of her open palm. He bought a bottle of wine and they sat on the banks of the Seine at night, watching the slow movement of boats up and down the river, their lights shimmering onto the dark water until it was impossible to see where the stars ended and the lanterns began. In noisy bars and busy cafés, they sat with their foreheads touching, talking endlessly about art and writing and Paris and America and all the things they knew and could not know, and when their friends rose and announced it was time to move on, to Zelli's or the Jockey or La Coupole, they nodded and rose too, but instead of following the crowd, they would slip away from the group to return to Sebastien's apartment and make love and fall asleep in his bed until the sun woke them, naked and new, in the morning.

And everything was perfect, until it wasn't.

•   •   •

It started with the Libe.
Margie went into work one day and Miss Parsons, who was normally—frankly, oddly—cheerful, looked pale and worried.
“
Bonjour!
” Margie said happily, because she had started the day in Sebastien's arms, and what could be better than that? She hung her coat on the rack by the front door and put her bag and her hat in one of the cubbies behind the desk, preparing to take over Miss Parsons' position there.

Miss Parsons simply muttered a hello and then quickly looked away, gathering the papers she had been working on and scurrying upstairs to her office. They had been offering classes to French librarians, and for people who worked in libraries they were awfully noisy, always clomping back and forth between the two classrooms upstairs, but that day it was silent, and she heard the sound of Miss Parsons' quick, efficient steps on the floor above, the closing of her office door, and then nothing else.

Margie shrugged and sat down behind the desk, putting a piece of stationery from the Library War Service—there was reams of it, they'd be using it forever—in the typewriter and starting a letter to her parents, only to interrupt herself to write in her journal at great length about Sebastien. She considered using code, in case anyone else were ever to read it, but who would want to read her lovesick scribblings anyway? Miss Stein came in and asked for help in her usual curmudgeonly way. Margie hardly noticed, moving airily along the shelves, pulling volume after volume until at last the woman retreated, mollified. Margie answered two telephone calls and found the answers they were looking for (the height of the Eiffel Tower, 954 feet; the sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams). It felt as if nothing could disturb her happiness.

And when Miss Parsons called for Margie after lunch, asked her to come upstairs to her office, Margie was so happy she didn't even think something might be wrong.

“Margie, I have some bad news.”

“Oh?” Margie said. She was still smiling, Miss Parsons' serious demeanor having failed to immediately crack her good mood.

“The grant we applied for didn't come through. Well, it came through, but it wasn't as much as we were hoping.”

“Oh no,” Margie said, with the detached, polite disappointment of someone who has just heard bad news that in no way impacts them. “How much did they give?”

“We asked for fifty thousand dollars.” She stopped, hesitated. “They only gave us seven thousand.”

“Goodness. That is disappointing.”

“It is.” Miss Parsons ran her fingertips along the edge of her desk, then put her hands in her lap. “The thing is, Margie, one of the things we had earmarked that grant money for was your salary.”

The smile finally faded from Margie's face, and a slow, cracking chill spread from her feet up to her heart, like a river icing over in the winter. “What do you mean?”

Miss Parsons, to her credit, looked utterly heartbroken. “It means, Margie, I have to let you go. The Libe's funding is so tight, and you've really been absolutely invaluable. It's just . . . we simply can't afford to keep you.”

“I thought there was a grant just for my position,” Margie said, as if Miss Parsons might have miscalculated.

“Yes, well.” Miss Parsons shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Things have been tight, and we've borrowed against it.”

“But I thought the library was doing so well. The classes for the French librarians, and the grant from the Carnegies and the membership is up quite a bit. I signed two people up myself yesterday. . . .”

Miss Parsons was shaking her head, looking at Margie with an expression somehow both guilty and sympathetic. “It's much bigger, unfortunately. Our costs are so large and our support now that the war is over is so small. And if I could keep you on, Margie, I would. I would in a heartbeat. The way you've taken to Paris, the work you've done here, your attitude—you're so helpful. We just can't afford it now. I'll give you a reference anywhere you want to go.”

“Sure,” Margie said dully. Over Miss Parsons' shoulder she could see
out the window into the yard behind the Libe, and beyond that the grand roof of one of the mansions along the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It glittered in the sunshine, winking at her cheerfully, mindless of her tragedy.

After Miss Parsons had dismissed her, Margie dragged herself back downstairs to the desk. The letter to her parents still sat, half typed, in the typewriter, and she pulled it out, folding it and putting it into her bag. She would finish it by hand later. The cheerful clack of the keys right now would be too much to bear. Her joyous journal entry, also half finished, seemed silly and inconsequential now. She would have to leave Paris. She would have to leave Sebastien. She calculated frantically the amount of money she still had. Oh, she shouldn't have bought that new hat, she should have insisted she and Dorothy go to Rosalie's for dinner instead of having tea at Rumpelmayer's—it was far too dear.

Only what was the point of being in Paris if she hadn't enjoyed herself? And she really had been so conservative. She had gone to the Opéra Comique twice, and to the Palais Garnier to see
Parsifal
only once, though she could have lingered in that incredible building for hours, would have been delighted to go every night just to stand in the Grand Foyer, to see the spectacle of the paintings and the carving and the gilt-edged furniture and the way it shone everywhere you looked. The opera was a necessity, wasn't it? And other than that, she ate at the artists' cafés, and Sebastien bought her dinner sometimes, and when she ate on her own she stuck to bread and cheese and once, because she couldn't resist their perfection, a lovely carton of strawberries from the market on rue Mouffetard.

All the regretful accounting in the world couldn't save her now.

She finished the day, apparently so sad even grumpy Miss Stein seemed concerned, and walked home. She would still have a few more weeks of work at the Libe, but that night it already felt like the last time, and she was prematurely nostalgic for the route she had grown to love, past the Place de la Concorde and the Gare d'Orsay, along the busy
Boulevard Raspail and through the narrow alleys behind the churches and the shops, and then to the wide and welcoming quiet of Montparnasse, turning the corner by La Closerie des Lilas, impervious even to the rich smell of the lilacs that always reached out to her, welcoming her home.

Instead of turning down rue de Chevreuse to the Club, however, she kept walking until she came to Sebastien's, waiting outside until someone came out the door, and then slipping into the courtyard as it closed. She nodded to the caretaker, who was trimming back the roses reaching so eagerly up the wall toward the sun, and he paused and waved back, his shears gleaming in the sunlight.

She buzzed up to Sebastien's apartment and his voice came through the speaker, tinny and blurry. “
Allo?
” he asked, distracted.

“It's Margie,” she said. She couldn't even bring herself to use his name for her, couldn't call herself Marguerite. She didn't feel much like a Marguerite just then. She felt like Margie, plucked and deflated, brought down to earth.

He buzzed her up, and she rushed up the stairs, sure seeing him would bring her some relief. But when he opened the door, he looked even worse than she did. He looked, she realized with horror, like Miss Parsons had, right before she had told Margie they would have to let her go.

“Come in, come in.” He looked as though he had been painting; there was a streak of blue in his hair and he wore an old shirt with holes in the elbows and paint spattered over the buttons, but when she walked inside, mostly what she noticed was the trunk lying open in the middle of the floor, and the stack of paintings against the wall.

“What's going on?” she asked. She was still so much in shock over Miss Parsons' news she couldn't imagine anything worse, and still, the hard rock of her stomach seemed to be falling lower.

“Please, sit down,” Sebastien said, taking her hands and leading her to the sofa. The same sofa where she had first kissed him, where, after
they had made love for the first time on the floor, he had tenderly wrapped a blanket around them both, and they had lain together, their bodies warm, curled around each other as if they had been designed to do so, watching the fire until they fell asleep there.

Sitting, she could see down the hall to the bedroom, where another trunk had been opened, clothes laid along the edges. “Sebastien,” she said, and her voice was rising into what she could clearly identify as panic, “what's going on?”

“Shh, shh,” he said, stroking her hands. “It is time. I am leaving Paris—I have to go home.”

“You are home!” Margie looked frantically around the apartment, as though she might have mistaken it for someplace else. No, these were the same rooms she had been in so many times. She knew the smell of it—the smell of him—paint and dust and the scent of the fire.

“Home to my family. I told you my time here was limited.”

“You can say no, can't you? My parents tell me to come home all the time, but I don't listen,” Margie said. She heard the futility of her own argument.

Sebastien was leaning forward, elbows resting on his thighs, head hanging low. He shook his head slowly and then looked at her. His eyes, his beautiful green eyes, the eyes she had fallen for the moment she had seen them for the first time, alive with the excitement and energy that was Sebastien, were dark and serious. “I cannot turn against my family. It is a duty.”

Margie threw her hands up and rose from the couch, pacing back and forth. “Duty. Responsibility. I'm sick of hearing those words. We're young! Why should we have to settle down just because they did? Don't you want to stay in Paris, Sebastien? Don't you want to stay here and paint and see the Surrealists' Bureau open and go to the Olympic Games with me? Don't you want to paint? How can you turn your back on your art?”

“It has nothing to do with what I want. It has to do with honoring my family and what they have given me. I have had my time—I have had more time than most people do. I had my time to play and now it is time to work.”

“You said we would spend Christmas together! You said we would go ice skating at the Petit Palais and see the lights on the Champs-Élysées. You promised!” Margie knelt in front of Sebastien, wrapped her hands around his, squeezing his fingers tightly, as if she could convince him, make him stay through the sheer force of her desire.

Gently, he lifted her hands to his mouth and kissed each of her fingers in turn. She loved the way he kissed her, the way he treated her, the way he cared for her. She would never find another man like this as long as she lived. He made her feel beautiful, cherished. Her. Sturdy, plain Margie Pearce. With him, she wasn't that same dull, solid girl. She was Marguerite, an American in Paris, and she spent her days with writers and diplomats, and her evenings with artists. She had been to Harry's New York Bar and the Casino, she had a lover—a lover who was a painter. She thought of all those girls at her debut, beautiful girls whose lives had seemed full of promise. Now all those beautiful girls were married, stuck on the same merry-go-round of parties and obligations as their mothers, and here she was, in Paris, kneeling at the feet of her French lover. But if he left, who would she be? Would she go back to being Margie Pearce again? She could think of nothing worse.

“Marguerite,” he said softly, and she wanted to weep at the sound of her name on his lips. It would never sound the same when someone else said it. And soon, there would be no one who called her Marguerite at all. She would run out of money and she would have to go home to Washington, and she would eventually be forced to marry one of the suitable men her parents presented to her, and they would call her “Margie” or “dear” with a flat, disinterested accent, instead of calling her “Marguerite” and “
mon coeur
” with the gentle curl of a French tongue.
She would not be a writer anymore, not a real writer; she would go to Temperance League meetings with her mother and her mother's friends and all their daughters who had been roped into the same cruel joke. And then the daughters would raise their own daughters and deliver them into the same cycle. She wouldn't have time to write; she wouldn't have space to dream, and this time in Paris would become nothing more than a memory, insubstantial as smoke, something she would recall, wondering if it had ever really happened at all.