The Light of Paris (26 page)

“What if we were to get married?” she asked, with a quick, wild hope, and then, “Oh,” when she saw his expression turn from surprise to something like sadness. “No, I didn't mean—” she said, and shifted away, as though she were going to stand.

“Stop, stop.” He pulled her back toward him. “It is not about my feelings for you. My feelings for you . . .” He paused, looked away, and she could see him swallow before he gazed at her again, and the green of his eyes, which she was so used to seeing sparkling with life, looked somber and dull. “You know how this works. My parents will have made arrangements for me to marry the daughter of a family with whom we are in business, but Margie, you must not let that happen to you. This is where you are meant to be. Here, in Paris. Writing.”

It took Margie a moment to hear him, really, over the sound of her own shame, and the surety of his rejection. But of course he was right. They had talked of their families, and she knew they came from similar backgrounds. Marrying him and living with his family in Bordeaux would give her exactly the life she had run from—she would be trapped by the same duties, the same formalities as her own mother. And she had seen what happened to the husbands of girls she knew—they became buried under their work, lost themselves to their own pressures. Who said Sebastien wouldn't lose everything that made him sparkle so brilliantly to the weight of duty, just like the rest of them?

And, if she were being honest, she didn't want to marry Sebastien.
They had never said they loved each other, never talked about the future longer than a few months out. He had made no promises to her, and she had made none to him. The romantic Margie who had danced at her debutante ball years ago would have been shocked by such a pragmatic relationship, could never have conceived of passion without a grand romance, but she wasn't that Margie anymore, in so many ways.

In fact, since her debut, each month that passed without a proposal had lifted her up. She had felt as though everything around her had been hazy and was now growing clearer. And then when she had come to Paris, she had thought,
Yes, this is why. This is where I am supposed to be.

What she knew of marriage did not fit with the way things were in Paris. Marriage was her father's staid gravity, her mother's fretful imprisonment. Marriage was rounds of required visits, of household management and parties that never seemed to be any fun. Paris was none of those things. It was bread and cheese for dinner in the Luxembourg Gardens, or a cheap plate at Rosalie's at ten o'clock at night. Paris was parties lasting until dawn, where you danced until you were breathless and drank until the world itself seemed to have become unmoored, the floor unsteady beneath your feet. Paris was sunrises and sunsets, was art and music and books and the people who made them, unstoppable around you. Paris was endless music and endless joy, and to get married, to change anything at all, would have ruined it.

Except it was being ruined anyway. It was all slipping away from her, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Sebastien was leaving, and she thought she would not be able to endure this city without him. Every time she walked by Les Deux Magots she would remember meeting him, and the food at L'Écurie would be tasteless as sawdust if he were not smiling at her across the table, and the tiny afterthoughts of streets would lose their magic, the miracle of stumbling down an alley along the wall of a church at midnight, only to look up and see the stained-glass windows glowing softly above like a benediction, the unexpected joy of
ending a late night of dancing by standing outside the window of a boulangerie in the pale morning light, faces pressed to the glass, inhaling the scent of the first baguettes of the day, and there would be no more joy in being lost. Sebastien had opened the city to her and she feared she didn't have the courage or the strength to live in it without him.

She lowered her head into his lap and wept, and he stroked her hair and murmured to her in French, and she didn't even try to understand. It was all ending, all falling apart, and she felt herself sliding down the endless precipice toward the life she did not want, had never wanted, and everything she grabbed at on the way down in a desperate attempt to stop herself came away in her hands.

I had never thought Phillip would come for me. I had been doing my best to push him out of my mind. I knew that wasn't a mature way to deal with problems, nor an especially effective one: no matter how much I pretended he didn't exist, he stubbornly insisted on doing so.

When he arrived, I was up in the attic, shifting around the last of the boxes, covered in dust and dirt and the funk of forty thousand years, trying again and again to forget the feeling of Henry's body against mine, our kiss, the way he smelled, the way he felt. It didn't belong to me, and I didn't deserve it.

My mother was sitting downstairs in the parlor, reading the newspaper, so when the doorbell rang, she was closer, and I ignored it, until I heard the sound of talking in the foyer, filtered up two staircases.

Is it terrible to admit I didn't even recognize my husband's voice? I only heard my mother talking to a man and with a little wisp of happy hope I crushed as soon as it came to life, I thought it might be Henry (although I should have known it wasn't; my mother sounded far too pleased to see him). I lifted a box onto my hip and carried it downstairs, and there was Phillip, standing there holding my mother's hands and smiling that perfect smile at her, and I nearly dropped the box, my face flushing hot with guilt.

I had been making such an effort to put him out of my mind that the fact of him seemed completely foreign; to me, he looked less like the man I had promised, in front of God and pretty much all of Magnolia society, to love and cherish for the rest of my days only to betray him with a moonlit night and a kiss, and more like a stranger. A handsome and well-dressed stranger, but a stranger nonetheless. I didn't want to face him, I didn't want to talk to him. I felt like waving at him and going back to wrestling with the boxes. Later I might paint. At the library I'd found a book of old photos of Paris, and I wanted to try painting them, wanted to capture the light my grandmother had been so in love with. Frankly, what I really wanted to do was drop everything and actually go to Paris, but that didn't seem particularly practical.

I suppose it would make a better story to say Phillip's and my reunion was like a movie, that tear-jerking music swelled in the background and we rushed into each other's arms (politely stepping around the table so we didn't knock over the flower arrangement), and all was forgiven, even the parts we would never talk about.

But it didn't feel like a romantic moment. It felt weighted with guilt and confusion and surprise and distance. So basically I stood there in the hallway, looking at my husband curiously, as though I were an anthropologist and he were a previously undiscovered tribe, until he asked, “Aren't you going to say hello?” and I pulled myself out of my twitching mind and walked over to him (bumping into the table on the way, though it turned out the flower arrangement was way too heavy to knock over) and gave him an awkward hug, and he bent to kiss me except I was already pulling away, thinking he wasn't the last person I had kissed, so he got the edge of my mouth, and if we had been actors in a romantic movie, we would have been fired.

In retrospect, “What are you doing here?” was probably not the most welcoming thing I could have said. It wasn't meant to be accusatory. I just honestly couldn't think of why he was there, and if there
was any edge to my voice, it was because it had been sharpened on my shame.

“I thought I'd come see how things are going here,” he said. And then, pointedly, “You haven't been returning my calls.”

I winced, thinking guiltily of the cell phone, which, as far as I knew, was still marinating in the water at the bottom of the vase, about two feet from us. “Sorry.”

“And of course I wanted to check on Simone,” he said, turning toward my mother and shooting her one of his patented dazzling smiles.

“Oh. Nice,” I said. And oddly, the thought that floated through my mind was one of relief.
Well
, went the logic somewhere deep in my lizard-brain,
at least he's not here to see you. That takes some of the pressure off.

But of course he was there to see me. I was the one who had married him, and here he was, charging in on his white horse to rescue me. Or, more likely, to rescue himself. That was more Phillip's style. He would never let me go, no matter how unhappy he was. It would make him look weak, or wrong, or out of control. No, he would rather maintain his image and keep me in check, even if it meant he would be stuck with me for the rest of his life.

“You're a mess. What have you been doing, cleaning the gutters?” he asked, his gaze skimming over my clothes. I looked down at my outfit, which was pretty much the same one I had been wearing when Henry had come to pick me up for First Friday, and brushed off my shirt a little.

“Moving boxes. It's dirty work,” I said, and my shoulders slumped as I felt myself moving back onto the familiar battlefield that was my relationship with Phillip. This was real life. I'd been on vacation, that's what it was. That's why everything had felt so easy and free. But you don't get to stay on vacation forever. At some point, you have to go back to work.

My mother cleared her throat, surprisingly awkwardly for her. “Shall we go into the parlor?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she led us regally into the front room. She and Phillip ended up sitting together
on the sofa while I took the chair opposite. It looked as though we were conducting an awkward job interview rather than having a family reunion. “The house looks lovely, Mother,” Phillip said.

“Thank you,” she preened, and I had to admit it did look good, especially without all the things we had sold, packed, or otherwise disposed of. Remembering the things I had packed away for myself, with the full knowledge there was no room in my home for them, made me feel guilty, and I rearranged my face so it wouldn't show.

“How are the preparations going for the move?” he asked, leaning slightly toward my mother and placing his hand on hers, as though she might need moral support through the difficulties of the conversation.

“It's going well. There's just so much to
do
,” my mother said. She made it sound as if she were organizing an invasion of Russia instead of moving house, which, frankly, people do literally every day, but my mother had always had a tendency for the dramatic, especially around men. Just call her Scarlett. I wouldn't have been a bit surprised if she had leaned back and laid her hand over her forehead in a swoon.

Phillip looked over at my mother with kind sympathy and patted her hand. He could be so charming when he wanted to be. When we had been dating, he was one of those men who always knew when to send flowers, who told you how nice you looked when he picked you up, whose dates were elaborate as scenes from a romantic movie. It had been nice, being treated that way.

“And how are you, Phillip? How is work? And your lovely mother?”

I snorted aloud and my mother shot me a withering glare. Mrs. Spencer and my mother, despite their essentially being two peas in a pod, loathed each other. The wedding weekend they had been inseparable, cooing over everything, bending their heads together as though they were sharing secrets, and then at the breakfast the morning after the wedding, when Mrs. Spencer had left early to go to the airport, my mother had whispered to me, “I thought she'd never leave.”

“My mother is well, thank you so much for asking. And work is busy. We're growing. We're going to have to move to some new offices soon or we'll all be sitting on top of each other.”

“Isn't that something,” my mother said with the same cheerful, if vague, lack of interest she'd always taken in my father's work. I couldn't blame her; whatever Phillip did involved the sort of inscrutable financial transactions that populate the pages of
The Wall Street Journal
and I understood it only vaguely. Amortization and deeds and all kinds of impenetrable abbreviations: REIT and GLA and TPTI. It wasn't that it was uninteresting . . . no, actually, it was uninteresting.

The conversation had ground to a screeching halt. “It's so nice of you to come,” my mother said. “Isn't it nice of him?”

“Yes . . .” I said cautiously. Her question felt like a trap. “How long are you staying?”

“Just a day. I've got to get back to the office. I figured I'd come and help you pack up. We've got tickets on the noon flight home tomorrow.”

The warmth that had been growing inside me froze. “But my mother . . .” I started.

She cut me off. “I can manage things around here.”

“There's still so much to do . . .” I said weakly.

“I'd hate to keep you from Phillip any longer.” The smile on my mother's face had steel underneath it. I was going.

“So it's settled, then,” he said, and I saw the unfriendly resolve in his eyes when he turned to smile at me, in triumph, not in warmth. As much as I didn't want the shame and discomfort of a divorce, my mother and Phillip wanted it even less. I heard the “lock” of wedlock clicking shut.

And what did it matter? Henry had turned me away. I could see only two vague images of what my life might look like without Phillip, and both were terrifyingly empty. Either it would look exactly like my life in Chicago, only with bonus ostracism, or it would be an unsure world in
which I would have to make my own way. I couldn't predict my future based on a couple of outings with Sharon and Henry, who had their own lives and were in no way bound to be my guides through anything. And Henry—well, Henry wasn't interested anyway. What was I even thinking? I had a husband and a life. A perfectly good life. A life a lot of people would have been terribly envious of. Just because it wasn't the right life for me didn't give me license to throw it away.

“Well. We should all go out to dinner tonight to celebrate. I mean, after Madeleine takes a shower, of course.” Phillip's eyes flicked over me again. I folded my arms, trying to disguise the bulge at my waist where the chocolate lava cake and strawberry jam and raspberry Italian sodas were making themselves known. “I saw there's a new restaurant next door—shall we try it?”

My mother looked as though Phillip had suggested we all have slugs for afternoon tea. “Never. We'll have dinner at the hotel when we drop off Madeleine's bags.”

“Not any good?” Phillip asked.

“It's excellent.” I didn't want to go there either, not with their critical eyes keeping me from eating what I wanted to eat, and definitely not with Phillip and Henry in the same room. I could hardly let them both occupy space in my head.

“It's been a nightmare ever since they moved in. Can you imagine having a restaurant as a neighbor? I haven't slept in months.”

“You're exaggerating,” I said, but I felt embarrassed defending the restaurant in front of Phillip. Putting my loyalties with Henry made me feel as though I had been cheating.

Had I been cheating? I mean yes, I had kissed him. It had only been a kiss, but maybe it had meant more than that, maybe it had been—no. I stopped myself. My husband was here now. And though I hadn't been thrilled to see him, I saw how it would be. His threat of divorce hadn't been real. His mother wouldn't stand for the scandal, he wouldn't stand
for the appearance of failure. We had existed in a peaceful détente up until now. Surely I could do it again.

Phillip left to go check into the hotel, and I told him I would pack while he was gone. I had a ticket. I was out of excuses. My mother didn't need me to stay, and I had no reason to. Henry and Sharon and everyone else in this city would go on just as they had, as if I had never come. I had made no difference in their lives. I had hardly made a difference in my own. And it would be the right thing to do. I had signed up for this, had married Phillip, had chosen to become the woman I was. What right did I have to back out now? Especially when I had nothing sure laid out in front of me?

When I was packing in my room, marveling at how after only a few weeks I had turned it back into a teenage lair, all crumpled food wrappers and dirty plates and clothes discarded on the floor, my mother knocked gently on the door. “May I come in?” she asked.

I flinched, bracing for the criticism about the state of my room, and then remembered I was an adult and didn't live here anymore and didn't have to put up with complaints about my messiness or questions about whether or not my homework was done. “Sure,” I said, sweeping a pile of dirty shirts off the chair. Instead of sitting, she stood in the doorway, hands folded neatly in front of her like a chorister. I balled up the shirts and stuffed them into my suitcase.

“Aren't you going to fold those?”

“They're dirty. I'm just going to wash them when I get home.” My purse was on the floor and I picked it up, rummaging through until I found a roll of antacid tablets and tossed four in my mouth, chewing grimly. My stomach felt as though someone had gripped it in a tight, bony fist.