The Light of Paris (28 page)

The city had thawed while I was gone. I could walk along the beach without my breath being taken away, my cheeks at the end pink from exertion and not the frosty weather. Spring had painted everything hopeful and green. Flowers appeared in people's window boxes as they brought their plants out from hibernation. College students hurried to class in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, their skin tender and raw against the air, as though they could bring summer weather by pretending it was already here. Women wore dresses with floral prints instead of the muted grays of winter, and the sky hovered, wide and blue, dotted with clouds, above us.

I told myself it was my best option to try to make things better with Phillip. But when it came down to it, I seemed unable to force myself into anything more than politeness, as though we were overly solicitous acquaintances who happened to be living together. I had become strangely modest, dressing in the bathroom, sleeping in heavy winter pajamas. The distance and alienation between us had not melted with the warmer weather.

Sometimes I watched him, eating dinner or cursing at a game on the television, and wondered who he was, who he
really
was. For a long time I had assumed I was the only one with a deeper heart I kept hidden, the only one with private wishes. But of course we all have secrets. If I had
not known that before, my grandmother's diaries had illuminated it for me. Imagine carrying the secret she had—her child belonged to a man other than her husband. I had a million questions I wanted to ask, and no one to ask them to. Why had Robert Walsh agreed to raise my mother as his own? Had my grandmother ever told Sebastien? Did my own mother know? I didn't know how to bring up the topic. What if she really didn't know? She'd said she hadn't read my grandmother's journals, and given their chilly relationship, I wasn't surprised. And I wasn't going to be the one to break the news to her.

I buried my questions and my confusion and the endless rounds of self-doubt in work. I doubled my hours at the Stabler Museum, working in the gift shop as well as leading tours. I went to committee meetings and when I caught myself doodling in the margins of my notes, I would force myself to raise my hand and volunteer for something, which was how I ended up on the registration committee for the library's annual fundraiser and responsible for finding speakers for the next three Women's Club meetings. At first I felt proud of those jobs, and I understood why my mother loved what she did. I had a purpose, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

While I surprised myself with my own efficiency, my own competence, all of those tasks didn't solve my problems. So I dug in harder, I laughed louder at Phillip's colleagues' jokes, and I pasted a smile on my face when I worked the registration desk at the Stabler auction, handing out name tags and bidding numbers with such aggressive cheer I think I scared a few people.

And none of it made me feel any better. I ate antacids like candy, lining up the empty containers in a kitchen cabinet where they stared at me accusatorily every time I went to get a plate.

I tried to remember a time when I had been wholly happy, outside of those few weeks in Magnolia. A time when I had felt connected to what I was doing, and was heartbroken to think of how few of those there
were. Volunteering at the Stabler. Living alone in Magnolia before I was married.

And before that, in school. I had painted sets and cut backdrops, watching something emerge from nothing, and then seeing the magic of theater transform it into something different altogether. I had made signs for Ashley's elections, lettering her name over and over again until I knew it better than my own. I had helped make the mosaic that spread its broken, glittering way across the school's front hall, pressing glass and tiny ceramic squares into plaster again and again until calluses formed on the tips of my fingers and my hands were sticky with mortar. I had helped lay out the art and literary magazine, bent carefully over the pages with a knife sharp as a scalpel to cut away the wayward edges, flipping through the order again, looking for the story it told. I had done things that felt like a part of me, not like wearing a Halloween mask that made it hot and hard to breathe underneath.

One afternoon, when the sun had shone high and bright in the sky long enough to warm the entire city, people carrying their coats instead of wearing them, turning their faces toward the sky as they walked, blinking into the light like moles, unsure and slightly fearful, as though they had never seen it before, I found myself wandering through a street full of warehouses in Bucktown, a questionable neighborhood teetering on trendy. In a clean window on the bottom floor of a wide, low, brick building was a sign reading:
Artist's Studio for Rent
.

I remembered Miss Pine's invitation to the painting class, and wondered if this was the same place. And something inside me made me stop, made me press my hand against the new glass doors and push my way inside.

Inside, the building was bright, the wood floors pale and scuffed, sunlight striking across them in wide, cheerful squares. The muffled sounds of a radio and voices floated down from upstairs, and the floors groaned gently as people moved somewhere in the building. Beyond the entrance,
which was being used as a gallery, the walls hung with photographs, was a long hallway of doors I presumed were studios. One of them was labeled
Office
, and when I knocked, a man poked his head out, keeping the door mostly closed as though he were afraid I might attack him.

“Yes?” he asked. I couldn't help thinking of the man at the gates to the Emerald City in
The Wizard of Oz
, and had to cover my mouth briefly to hide my smile.

“I saw the sign? About the studio for rent?” I had no idea why I was talking like a teenager, full of half questions and knock-kneed nervousness.

“Yeah. It's on the third floor. You want to look?”

“Sure.” Was he not wearing any pants, and that's why he'd only stick his head out?

He disappeared for a moment, closing the door fully, and then reappeared, thrusting his arm out and dropping a key into my hand. “Number 314. Stairs are that way.” He pointed to the opposite end of the hall. “Bring the key back when you're done.” And then he closed the door again, but not before I caught a solid view of a pair of khakis. Whatever his secret was, it wasn't pantslessness.

Passing down the hall, I peered through a door with a large glass window in it to see a classroom. This must have been the place. It was almost as I had pictured it—light and airy, easels and stools waiting, a raised platform at the far end where a teacher or a model could stand. Putting my hand against the window, I leaned in, my breath forming a hot circle on the glass. I pictured Miss Pine jingling her way through the room. I pictured myself sitting on the edge of a stool, my feet hooked under one of the bars, my brush moving over a canvas, filling in the emptiness with everything I saw and didn't see. There might be music as we painted, and bursts of conversation and laughter to punctuate the silence of creation, and I would feel a part of something in a way I never did no matter how many people surrounded me.

Finally, I pushed myself away and found the stairs. As I climbed, they clanged underneath my feet, the sound of music growing louder as I approached the second floor, and then fading again as I reached the third. It was warmer up here, the sun trapped by the windows deliciously greenhouse-hot, as though I were back in Magnolia. I heard people working as I walked to the far end of the hall—I passed the steady whir of a potter's wheel and the rich, sharp smell of wet clay, and through another door I heard someone humming along with a series of steady, slow taps I couldn't identify. And finally, I slipped the key into the lock of 314.

The warehouse had clearly been an open floor that had now been subdivided into these smaller studios, and this one was tiny—if I stood in the middle, I could have touched both walls with my arms. But the back wall was taken up by a wide, clean window, and though the light had faded, it would be bright and sunny in the mornings, and there was enough room for a table and a cabinet for supplies, and an easel or two. I imagined myself coming here early, closing the door to keep the blur and buzz of the city outside, sipping orange juice while I laid out brushes like a surgeon's tools, letting the light paint the canvas and show me where to draw. Virginia Woolf had said writers needed a room of their own, and maybe artists needed them too. Maybe everyone needs a room of one's own where there are no expectations, and no compromises, and you can be the person you know yourself to be.

The music coming muffled or tinny through the walls, the smell of clay and paint and charcoal, all that meant it was possible. All these people were making the things they wanted happen. I wasn't the only one. I didn't have to be afraid. My grandfather had been a painter, my grandmother, a writer. My creativity wasn't a fluke. It was my destiny.

•   •   •

By the time I got home,
I was late, I suppose, but we had never really had a dinner time. Phillip often ate at the office or out with clients, and I
pieced together meals from bits and pieces I found in the refrigerator—yogurt and two small pieces of steak left over from a dinner Phillip had gone to, and a handful of macadamia nuts and a pickle. Except apparently that night he had expected my arrival, had been planning, bringing things home from work, and he was angry at being delayed.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

I didn't want to tell him. He would not see my wanting to paint again as the compromise I needed to make to stay here, as the reward for enduring all the things I did not want to do. But I was done with lying. I had tried it his way, my mother's way, and it had never worked. I couldn't go on like this forever, not now that I knew there was the possibility of something more. “I was looking at an artist's studio.”

“An artist's studio?” He said this as though I had told him I had been hunting one-legged unicorns. “What for?” His confusion was understandable. I don't think he knew any women who had hobbies, other than shopping and complaining about their daughters-in-law. And the only hobbies any of the men he knew had were golf and infidelity. I was fairly sure he hadn't taken up either, but it was only a matter of time.

“You know. For making art.”

“Like painting?”

“Yes, painting. And drawing. And, I don't know, collage. Whatever I feel like.”

“Who's going to pay for that?” he asked sharply, and now I knew he was angry. He never questioned the way I spent money—probably because I hardly spent any. My joy began to fade and the room grew darker around me. Phillip paid the bills. If he didn't want to pay for it, he didn't have to, and who was I to object?
This is why women should have their own jobs, their own money
, I thought.
This is why I want my own. Like my grandmother had.

“I don't mind working,” I said quietly. “I wanted to work. You were the one who didn't want me to.” I could have argued a dozen things,
compared myself to the women I knew who shopped their boredom and their pain away. But this wasn't a financial reckoning. This wasn't about fair. This was about control.

He didn't respond. Instead, he looked around the kitchen and said, “I've been waiting. I'm starving. You should call if you're going to be late.”

“Wait, what are you talking about? Did we have plans? How am I late?”

He sighed in frustration, as though I were asking for clarification on some basic tenet of our relationship. “Past dinner time.”

“I'm sorry?” I wasn't entirely sure what I was apologizing for. I sat down on the arm of the sofa, as though I were only staying a moment.

“If you're not going to try, Madeleine, I don't know why I'm bothering.”

“Try what?” I asked. I was becoming genuinely confused. It was as though Phillip were having an entirely different conversation and not letting me in on it.

“This.” He lifted his hands in frustration. He was standing behind the island in the kitchen. A bottle of wine, a half-empty glass, the opener, and the cork were lined up beside him in a tidy row. Everything about Phillip was so neat. It was fascinating, in a way, as though he had been molded from plastic. When we were first married, I had watched him endlessly, wondering at the way his hair fell perfectly into place as soon as he brushed it and stayed that way the entire day, how his suit jackets remained unwrinkled, even at the insides of the elbows, and how he never seemed to spill anything when he ate, whereas my every encounter with food was a battle in which my clothing was likely to end up as collateral damage. “Us. This relationship. You can't go running off to—I don't know, move in with your mother or become a painter or whatever every time you have a bad day.”

“It's not just a bad day. It's every day.”