The Light of Paris(29)
“Well, it was absolutely berries. Truly, Margie, you ought to have come. Now let’s get off this ship and go to Paris. I’m dying to buy a new dress—I haven’t had a thing to wear all week.”
By the time Evelyn finished her haphazard packing job and dressed, there was still a stream of people flooding from the ship. A porter hurried ahead with their luggage. At the post box, Margie dropped a letter to her mother, full of pleasant lies, to go on the ship’s return journey. She had invented charming dinner conversations they hadn’t had, described dances she hadn’t attended, and people she hadn’t met. And her mother said all her dreaming would never come in handy.
On the train, Evelyn chattered inanely and endlessly until Margie had to excuse herself to go to the dining car simply to get a break. She didn’t know which was worse—worrying about the trouble Evelyn was sure to land herself in if Margie left her to her own devices in a strange city, or having to stay with her. A taxicab, directed by Margie’s clumsy, thick-tongued French, took them to their hotel, Margie and Evelyn pressing their noses against the windows. “Look!” Margie said as they passed, “Notre-Dame! The Place de la Concorde! The Champs-élysées!” She laid her hand flat against the window as though she could run her fingers over every inch of Paris, touch it the way Robert Walsh had touched her that night all those years ago.
At the thought, Margie pulled back as though she had been shocked. Evelyn’s face was still pressed to the window, but Margie could see the younger girl’s eyes were closed. She had fallen asleep there, leaning against the cool glass.
What had made her think of Robert, after all this time? She didn’t want to think of him, not here, not now. She’d had that one night, one perfect night, and there was no point in spoiling it with reality. She wanted Europe to be about romance and joy, about newness and adventure. She wanted it to be different. She didn’t want her happiness spoiled by being reminded of who she had been in America.
When they had settled in their room, the porter having carried their luggage upstairs with no small amount of grumbling and ill will, at the end Margie guiltily pressing into his hand what she would realize later was an outrageously large tip (the money was so confusing), Evelyn began to go through her trunk, tossing things about until the room looked exactly as their stateroom had. She slipped out the door into the bathroom and emerged, somehow, despite the fact that the entirety of her sleep in the past twenty-four hours had been in the taxi on the way here, looking refreshed and lovely. Margie had changed her shoes and was consulting her Baedeker’s Paris and Its Environs. It was already late afternoon, but certainly they could fit in a stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens or down to the Seine.
Evelyn picked up her bag and her wrap. “I’m going downstairs to cable Mama that we’ve arrived,” she said. Margie sat in the room for a moment and then decided to follow her. She’d wait in the lobby while Evelyn sent her telegram, and then they could go out exploring. Her heart beat a little faster at the idea. She was eager to go, to step onto the streets where the heroes of the French Revolution had walked, to pass the cafés where the artists of Paris gathered, to squeeze every drop of joy out of this trip so when she was home again with her mother, sticking her needle into the tiny circumscribed round of an embroidery hoop and listening to the endless ticking of the clock counting off the stultifying hours, she would have an infinity of things to remember, to dream about, to write about.
But when she got down to the lobby, of course Evelyn wasn’t sending a telegram. She was standing with the group from the ship, who had thrown themselves on a few of the sofas in the lobby’s sitting area as though it were their own living room.
“Evelyn?” Margie asked, coming up behind her.
Evelyn whirled around, wide-eyed. The others in the group looked at Margie lazily, one of the girls pausing to whisper behind her hand to another, who giggled. Margie flushed, red and hot and pathetic, a low, sinking feeling in her chest.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re going out,” Evelyn said, as though this had all been arranged, as though she and Margie had spoken about it only a few moments ago.
“But . . .” Margie began, and then realized she didn’t know what to say. But what, Margie? But you had some grand vision of how Evelyn was going to become a different person between the ship and here? You had imagined yourself to be a different person now that you were in Europe, someone Evelyn wouldn’t insist on leaving behind at every possibility? And then there was a sickening sadness as she realized it had been the plan all along. That was why Evelyn had asked the name of their hotel; not because she was in any way interested in the trip, but because she was telling her friends where to come get her.
“Really, Margie. You’re absolutely hopeless,” Evelyn said. She turned back to her friends. “Let’s go,” she said, and they rose sleepily, as though she had awoken them, and the men ambled and the girls glided toward the door, leaving Margie standing there alone in the lobby, her guide book in one hand and her bag in the other, with no plan and no idea what to do.
Outside, all of Paris waited for her, but Margie felt deflated and overwhelmed. She had failed, she had been rejected, and she had no idea what she was going to tell her mother. Finally, when one of the disagreeable porters cleared his throat at her until she moved out of the center of the lobby, she headed over to the front desk to send a telegram. Her pen hovered over the paper for a long, long time until she settled on something appropriately terse: Arrived safely. M & E.