The Light of Paris(30)

seven





MADELEINE


   1999




My mother invited me to another luncheon the next day, but I refused to go. I couldn’t sit through another afternoon of pretending and watching everyone else pretend. I was still heartsick thinking about all of us in that room together, playing our parts, and I couldn’t bear to do it again.

After she left, I went down to The Row to find something to eat. At the end of my parents’ street, blocks of stores and restaurants housed in low, unassuming brick buildings extended in either direction. It was an older part of the city, and when I was younger, it danced on the knife edge of respectability: boutiques where my mother bought scarves alongside a head shop and the falafel restaurant where the college students hung out. In high school, I’d gone there all the time—to pretend to be tortured and drink coffee at the coffee shop, to look at the art books at the bookstore or hang around the poetry section, hoping to meet a teenage boy with a poetic soul (FYI, based on my extensive adolescent research, I’m pretty sure they don’t exist), to buy a cookie the size of my head and window shop my way along the street.

But I noticed, as I strolled down the sidewalk in search of food, that things had settled decisively in favor of upscale cool. The head shop had been replaced by a store selling locally made jewelry and art, and a microbrewery had pushed out the falafel (probably a fair exchange in the eyes of the college students). I found a new restaurant with a tiny patio surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, where I ordered eggs Benedict and coffee, and while I waited for it to come, I leaned back and closed my eyes and let the sun lie against my skin like a warm promise.

The day stretched out ahead of me, empty and open and free, and for once that space felt luxurious, instead of like time that needed to be filled.

What did I used to do, when I was single and lived on my own? It seemed like I was trying to remember a story I had once heard and barely recalled, the edges soft, the details inconsistent. Afternoons spent painting until the light faded and my eyes and fingers ached, evenings in the empty second-run cinema, my hands sticky with butter and salt from the popcorn. More than how I had spent each hour, I remembered the feeling—a giddy freedom, as though I were on an eternal summer vacation. I would look at the people around me and feel as though I were getting away with something, doing something wrong. Now I wondered why I had ever felt that way—it had been my life to do with what I wanted, after all.

“Well, well, slacking on the job, are we?” I started, my eyes flicking open. My face was growing hot from the sunlight, and there were spots in my vision where it had burned into my eyes. Blinking them away, I squinted until Sharon came into focus.

“Hi. I was just—my mother doesn’t keep any food in the house . . .” I was fairly sure she was joking, but I felt ashamed at having been caught here, like a cat in a sunbeam, when I should have been doing something responsible.

“Relax, relax. I’m kidding. Can I join you?” She was wearing a dress and a blazer, but before I could say anything, she eyed the black railing surrounding the restaurant’s patio, hopped up on it, and swung her legs over. A moment later she was settling herself into the empty chair across from mine, hanging her purse and jacket over the back, and looking around for the server.

I sat up from my lazily slumping position and rummaged around in my handbag until I found a pair of sunglasses that had probably been in there since the previous summer, judging by the level of smudging and scratching. My fingers brushed against my mobile phone, which was stubbornly silent. Phillip hadn’t forgiven me yet, I guessed. Or maybe he was just busy in New York. He was the one who had insisted we have cellular phones long before they became popular, and that we get the newest devices the moment they were released. Phillip always had to have the best of everything.

“What are you doing here? Do you live nearby?” I asked, a little too loudly, trying to force the thought of Phillip from my head.

“Me?” Sharon barked out a little laugh. She had the same voice she’d had in high school, rough and whiskey-edged. You could hear her laugh all the way across campus. “No, I couldn’t afford to live here unless I was stripping on the side. And that’s not likely to happen,” she said, gesturing at her body, which was short and comfortably solid. “I was actually just dropping off some fliers for another client. Betsy Lynn Chivers—do you know her? She and your mother are friends.”

I shuddered at the mention of Betsy Lynn Chivers, who dressed her dogs in outfits and carried them everywhere with her, but had shouted at me repeatedly when I was little for tracking dirt onto her carpet. “Unfortunately, I do know her. She gave me nightmares when I was a kid.”

“She gives me nightmares now,” Sharon said, and then interrupted herself to ask for coffee and an order of pancakes when the server came by. “But she’s rich and she wants me to sell her house, so, cheers!” She lifted her water glass to me in a toast and then drank.

“May it sell quickly and easily, then,” I said.

“No kidding. So what are you up to? Sorry for scaring the pants off you at the house the other day. I assumed your mother would have told you.”

“Yeah, well. My mother and I aren’t always the best communicators. Frankly, I don’t think she thought I’d care.”