The Light of Paris (31 page)

“I can't believe you never told me,” I said, and I was surprised by how bitter it sounded. I wasn't angry so much as . . . well, what was it? Disappointed? Maybe if she had told me the truth before, we might have been closer. Maybe keeping this secret from me was part of what had kept us apart.

“It never seemed to be the right time.”

“I guess there never is a right time for that news.” Except it had been the right time, finally. It had been the right time to know I wasn't a failure in a long line of feminine perfection. It had been the right time to know about my grandmother's dreams, and to see what giving them up would do to you, would do to your daughter, would do to your granddaughter. She wasn't wrong to have made the choice she had, but it would have been wrong for me to keep making it when I had nothing other than my own shame and fear at stake.

“Did she ever see him again?”

My mother shook her head, the light falling across her face, illuminating the lines on her skin. “I don't think she did.”

So no tearful, romantic reunion then. No train station rendezvous, no lost Parisian weekend. A few weeks ago, that might have deflated me, but I had learned something from my grandmother about romance and reality, and how they had to fit together.

“Are you sure this is what you want? Are you certain it's for the best?” she asked. To my surprise, there was no rebuke left in her tone. Only sadness.

“I don't want to be married to him.” I remembered Phillip's harsh words when I had told him I wanted a divorce, and a little shiver went up the back of my neck. It had been there all along, that sharpness. And if I hadn't brought it out by asking for a divorce, who knew when it might
have appeared. It was for the best. My mother might never understand, but it was.

“And what are you going to do now?”

I could have named a thousand things I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to put on a twinset and go to any meetings at Ashley Hathaway's house. I wasn't going to straighten my hair anymore or pretend I wasn't hungry. But what was I going to do? That was much harder.

I thought of my mother, of her endless charities and duties, of the organizations she supported and all the thousands of ways she had made herself matter in a culture that had devalued her because she was only a woman. I thought of how her mother had kept her at a distance because the memories were too much, and how unfair that was, and I thought of how my mother had kept me at a distance because she didn't know any different, and because she didn't want me to be unhappy, and how it had only made me unhappy anyway. And I thought of how my grandmother and I had both married men for reasons other than love—fear and duty and responsibility and loneliness, and how it had left both of us resigned and unhappy. I thought of my grandmother in Paris and how she described the light there, the way it fell, beautiful and terrible and romantic, and I thought of how little joy there can be in this world and how much I wished we should all grab it whenever it flew by, like the light of a shooting star.

I thought of my grandmother, and what she might have made of this buffet of choice I had before me, of the freedom seventy-five years of progress had given to me, as a woman, and I knew she wouldn't have been able to imagine it. I had a little bit of money, I had time, I had a passport. Really, there was only one thing to do.

“I think I'm going to Paris,” I said.

Dear Mother and Father,

I wish to thank you so very much for such a lovely wedding. Though I have been to so many, this was truly the most splendid of them all, despite how quickly it was organized. Robert and I feel lucky to have had such a sendoff into our new life together. Thank you so much for inviting such a large and impressive group of people to celebrate with us. I do hope you are pleased.

Robert and I expect to return to Washington on Tuesday, as he must be at the office on Wednesday, and we will be pleased to have you to dinner at the new house as soon as possible afterward. It will be such a pleasure having you nearby, and I only regret our many obligations will keep us from seeing each other as often as we might like.

Thank you so much for hosting such a beautiful wedding. I am sure Washington will be talking of it the entire season.

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Pearce Walsh

August, and the air lay wet and hot around us as we sat on the back porch of The Kitchen, the occasional quick wind more of an unpleasantly hot exhale than a relief. As was my habit lately, I had thrown my hair up into a messy knot, and the curls that sprang free pressed damply against my bare neck.

“Where are you sitting?” Sharon asked, attempting to insert a cranky toddler into a high chair at the end of the table. I had babysat the twins a few nights so Sharon and Kevin could go out, but I was embarrassed to say I still couldn't tell the boys apart. They were one gloriously sticky, flailing, kissable, undifferentiated mess. This one kept arching his back every time Sharon tried to slip his legs underneath the tray, so I leaned forward and tickled him, which made him collapse into giggles so she could catch him unawares and get him settled. “Thanks.”

“I'll sit over here,” I said, moving down to find an empty chair and plopping into it, setting my beer down on a napkin.

“I'll sit next to you. Kevin! Come feed your children.” Kevin loped over and kissed Sharon's forehead, taking the other squirming twin and sitting down with him in his lap. Sharon left him cutting avocado and chicken for the boys and collapsed into the chair beside mine. “I am pooped. Vacation cannot come soon enough.”

“When are you leaving?” Kevin's mother had a beach house on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and they were all going for a week. There was nothing like late summer in Magnolia to make you long for water and an ocean breeze.

“Next week. I am totally planning on leaving all child care to Grandma while I sit on the sand and read a book. And drink,” she said, reaching for my glass, which was sweating the napkin underneath it into wet shreds, and draining half of the beer in one long swallow. “God, this is so good.”

“Henry, can you bring me another beer, please?” I called out across the porch. There were well over a dozen people there—Sharon and Kevin and the boys, Wanee and her family, Cassandra, Pete and Arthur, the owners of Java Good Day, and their daughter, Caitlin, Kira, my boss from the art supply store, and Henry and me. It was Monday night and The Kitchen was closed, the rooms strangely empty and echoing when I walked inside to go to the bathroom.

“You drank the whole thing already? You lush!” he called back, pulling a chilled glass out of the cooler behind the outside bar and slipping it under the tap, letting the caramel liquid pour out, a thin foam settling on the top. I had never liked beer, but Henry made a cream ale that tasted of vanilla and sugar and I couldn't get enough of it.

“No, Sharon stole mine,” I said, as he handed me the fresh glass, so cold it felt like it would burn my fingers. “Thank you.”

“You can have your own, you know,” he said to Sharon.

“It tastes so much better when it's stolen.” Sharon drained the rest and held the empty glass out to him. “More, please,” she said, and then let loose a monumental belch.

“Well, when you put it like that.” Henry took the glass and headed back to the bar.

“Charming,” I said. “Really. You do that at the Ladies Association lunches?”

“I save it just for you,” Sharon said sweetly. “Speaking of which, I haven't seen you there in a while.”

“I've been working. My landlord is a total nightmare if I'm late on rent,” I said, and Sharon punched me in the arm. My mother's house had sold days after it had gone on the market, and when it looked like I would be staying in Magnolia for a while, I had moved into the carriage house on Sharon and Kevin's property. It was tiny and the bathroom and closet doors banged into each other and the stove was the size of a toddler's play set and it had a terrible spider problem, and I loved it. There was only one large room, with an antique iron bed against one wall, the kitchen in one corner, and the living area, which I had filled with an easel and canvases and tables covered with brushes and tubes of paint and rags sprayed with color. Every morning when I woke up, the first thing I saw was a spill of sunlight across the painting I was working on, and I could smell the grass and the garden outside and hear the twins laughing, and it always made me smile.

“Well, you've been missed. Ellen O'Connor asked about you just the other day.”

“Oh yeah? How's she doing?”

Sharon shrugged. “I have no idea. I can't read those people.”

“Yeah, well, they don't want you to be able to.”

“I told her you were working at the art store and she said she might come by.”

“Really? That would be nice. She and I took art together in high school. She was good, actually. I wonder if she still draws.”

“I doubt she has time, what with all her playing maidservant to Ashley Hathaway.”

“Don't be mean,” I said mildly. I hadn't forgotten I had been equally mean about Ellen and Ashley and all the rest of them, but I also hadn't forgotten how difficult it was to be anything other than what everyone else expected you to be.

In the end, leaving hadn't been as painful as I had feared, or as easy as I might have wished. Phillip and I hadn't spoken since the night I had left—he communicated everything through his lawyer and I mostly agreed, because I wanted it to end, because I didn't care about the money and there wasn't anything else there that mattered to me, including him, and mostly what I thought about now was how sad it was I had ever agreed to live that way.

My mother had moved into her condo, and we had dinner together there once a week, because the one time she had been to the carriage house she had nearly broken into hives at the sight of the spiders and the dust. She was too much in the habit of criticizing and complaining to stop, so I had decided to get out of the habit of taking it personally. I could see my mother's words were my grandmother's legacy of disappointment, and the best I could do was to live in a way that would break the cycle. I hadn't been to the Ladies Association meetings, but I had signed up to work at the Collegiate Women's Society rummage sale, and the Garden Society fundraiser. Just because I didn't want to feel constrained by that world didn't mean I couldn't see all the good they did, and I wanted to be a part of that. On my terms.

But I spent most of my time working at Kira's store, where I was surrounded by the smell of wood and paint and the sharp, clean aroma of new paper, and I always tried extra hard to talk to the kids who came in, especially the teenagers, with their shaggy hair and sharp, defensive edges, their cash wadded up in their pockets, their fingertips dark with pencil lead. I wanted to grab their hands as they took their purchases and tell them, “Do this forever. If this makes you happy, do this forever. Do the thing that feeds your soul and don't let anyone else tell you that you are broken because of it.”

I never did. Instead, I sent them out the door with fresh charcoal and new watercolor sets and I waved and said, “Come back soon,” and hoped it would be enough of a benediction to carry them through.

“Dinner!” Wanee called, bouncing the screen door open and stepping out onto the porch, carrying a tray laden with food. Her husband followed with a similar tray, and then Henry and Pete, and everyone found their seats as we unloaded the serving dishes onto the table until it was so full there was hardly room for our plates, and we shuffled drinks and silverware and sacrificed our own elbow room for the sake of the meal. We had met at The Kitchen so we could eat outside—although, feeling the damp blanket of air on my arms, I wondered why—but Wanee had cooked. There were plates of fish cakes, fried golden-brown, and pyramids of summer rolls, sprigs of green Thai basil peeking out from the edges of the rice paper. In front of me was a platter of salad, cucumbers with frilled edges, fat red tomato slices from Henry's garden, translucent onion, sprinkled with crushed peanuts and marinating in a dressing that smelled both sharp and sweet. There were endive cups filled with chicken and carrots, and homemade noodles and curries, and Henry set pitchers of lemonade and ice water and sweet tea in the middle of the table, and the sight of so much plenty made me both overwhelmed and grateful.

The night before, Henry and I had gone to see Kevin's band play at a club where the music was too loud and the beer was too bitter, but we had stayed out until the early morning anyway, and I had slept in and spent the afternoon painting until I had noticed the time and rushed over for dinner, the last to arrive. I was wearing a loose blue-and-white-checked shirt and cutoff jeans shorts and there was paint all over my bare legs, and no one seemed to care. Henry had kissed me on the cheek when I walked in, and said I looked beautiful, even though I had gained another ten pounds since I had moved back to Magnolia, and I smelled like linseed oil and newsprint.

“Can I sit here?” Henry asked, plopping down in the chair on the other side of me and running his hands through his hair so the curls stood charmingly on end. He looked, as he always did, both happy and exhausted by the blissful chaos of taking care of everyone around him.

“Please do,” I said, passing him the plate of summer rolls. I remembered my first impression of Henry when he had been working in his garden, how I had wanted to take a pair of hedge clippers to him, scrub the dirt off his face, put him in a pair of pants that fit. I didn't think any of those things now. I liked his messy, curly hair, and the half beard he ought to have shaved three days ago. I liked his faded band T-shirt and his jeans with the holes in the heels where he had stepped through them. I thought he looked comfortable, warm. I thought he looked like someplace I wanted to be.

When I had gone back to Phillip, I had done my best not to think of Henry. I had wanted to be sure I wasn't leaving Phillip for Henry, or because there was the possibility of Henry, if there were indeed the possibility of him. I wanted to have left Phillip because I never should have married him, and Henry only confused the issue, with his kindness, and the broadness of his hands, and the way his beard had tickled my face when he kissed me, with the way he could coax food from the ground and the way the people who worked for him looked at him with respect and pleasure instead of irritation or fear, and the way he brought people together just for the joy of it. In the end, I hadn't needed Henry as an excuse to leave, and when I had come back to Magnolia, it was as though we were starting over, as though Henry were, like everything in my life now, fresh and new and full of possibilities.

“Wanee, this is amazing, thank you,” I said, swallowing a bite of the summer roll, all crisp vegetables and soft rice noodles and the fresh, bright taste of the garden, and everyone else agreed around mouthfuls of food.

“You're welcome.”

“Typical, right? It's Wanee's and Henry's day off and they're feeding us,” Arthur said, winking at Henry.

“Hey, I am not feeding anyone. I am just getting you all drunk,” Henry said, raising his glass and taking a sip.

Everyone laughed, and Caitlin stood up in her chair and applauded,
and then grinned shyly and plopped back down when everyone laughed again.

“So when are you leaving, Madeleine?” Cassandra asked, spooning some red curry over rice onto her plate and then passing the bowl on to Kira.

“Two weeks,” I said. “I'll be gone for a month.”

“Ugh, you are so lucky. I wish I could just take off and go to Paris and paint for a month,” Pete said.

“You can't sit still long enough to draw a stick figure. You'd go crazy in a month,” Arthur said. “Ooof.” Caitlin had jumped from her chair into his lap, and he kissed her as she snuggled in.

“I think I could handle it if Paris were involved,” Pete said. “I mean, I'd struggle through somehow.”

“Well, don't be too jealous. I'm going to be completely broke when I come back,” I said.

“But you'll be rich in art,” Kira said dramatically, and everyone laughed again.

“Why Paris?” Wanee's husband, Pat, asked.

“My grandmother spent some time there. And, you know, it's Paris,” I said. I couldn't explain it all, how I had always felt I didn't belong in my family, but reading my grandmother's journals was like reading my own thoughts, and I wanted to connect to her, how I felt my grandmother had left something unfinished there and I had the chance to finish it for her, how going abroad by myself signified a bravery I had never even considered I might possess.

“Maybe you'll end up falling in love with it and never coming back,” Cassandra said.

“Hey, now. No fair trying to get rid of me. I just got here.”

“I'd like to propose a toast.” Henry leaned forward in his chair and raised his glass again. “To Paris.”

The others put down their forks and fumbled for their glasses, raising
them high. “To Paris,” we all repeated, and we clinked our glasses together and the sound rang out clear and cheerful in the softness of the evening. I looked at what lay around me—the food, and the kind and happy faces of the people I had grown to love, and the bloom of the trees and the garden, the promise of Paris and the rest of my future beyond me, unknowable but mine to own, and I thought,
This
. This life where I had the space to find the things that were important to me instead of the things I was forced to do. This life where I was surrounded by friends who believed in art and food and community and who believed, fiercely, in me. This life with the endless, terrifying, happiness of possibility before me, and the light of Paris guiding me home.