The Light of Paris(39)

And shouldn’t I want to go back?

Because I knew now I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that at all.

“I’m not leaving her to do this on her own,” I said. I was still hiding behind my mother, who needed me there about as much as she needed a chocolate teapot, but it was all I had.

“You’re so selfish. I need you at this dinner. We’re supposed to be married, Madeleine. Remember that?”

“And you said we should get a divorce. Remember that?” I spat the last word.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said, with an enormous, exhausted sigh, as though divorce hadn’t been his idea in the first place, as though I were making it up. And I felt foolish for ever believing he would actually follow through. Saying we should get a divorce had been nothing but a way for him to win the fight, a reminder of how lucky I was and how easily he could take it all away. “You don’t know how good you have it. Do you know how many women would be happy to be married to me?”

He said this as though he were the greatest prize anyone could have had, an end worthy of justifying the means. And, I thought guiltily, hadn’t I thought of it the same way myself at the beginning? Hadn’t that been what had encouraged me to push away all the warning signs, the glaring lights and bells worthy of a carnival midway, all of them shouting the same thing: “Don’t do this!”

“I don’t want to talk any more right now,” I said, and my voice was empty and tired. The fact that he would rather crush me, rather hold me to him cruelly than let me go, forced me to face everything I had refused to see about the man he was. And if he didn’t see how wrong this all was, I didn’t even know how to begin to go about explaining it to him.

“Well, that’s great. Because I don’t want to talk to you anymore either, Madeleine,” he said icily, stretching my name into three precise syllables. I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it, wishing for a good old-fashioned rotary phone, where you could slam down the receiver satisfactorily. Instead, I shoved some of the flowers in the vase to the side and dropped the phone in the water and walked away, feeling both triumphant and terrified.





ten





MARGIE


   1924




The morning after Evelyn’s departure, Margie sat at Les Deux Magots, a pretty little café on a corner across the street from the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church. But Margie wasn’t much in the mood for sightseeing. She had written a letter to her mother, a truthful one this time, reporting the situation with Evelyn and her own now tragic finances, and asking for advice. It would have been more appropriate to send a telegram, she knew. This was, after all, urgent. But she hoped the letter would delay things a little. The hotel was paid up for another week, and Margie had a little more money she had tucked away here and there in her luggage—not enough to live extravagantly, but enough for a few things—admission to a few of the less dear sites or museums, and her café complet here—a large cup of coffee with cream, and a roll with butter. Surely she could manage on such little food if it meant she could stay in Paris a little longer.

No one seemed to mind if you stayed in a café for ages, and so she was, sitting at a table outside, as the morning geared up like a rusty calliope. She had sealed the letter and, to wipe away the bitter taste of the envelope, was writing a story about a girl who became tragically ill on a trip to Europe and was forced to return home, which sounded much more romantic and less depressing than her own situation, even if the end result were the same. At a table nearby sat a young man she was considering writing into the story as the French suitor of the tragically ill girl. He was unbelievably handsome, with long blond hair, though the fashion was for it to be short and slicked back, and strong bones in his face that made him look as though he had been chiseled. A pen and an open notebook lay on his table while he leaned back, fingers laced behind his neck, his head tilted up toward the sunshine. His eyes were closed and a light smile played on his face.

He opened his eyes and caught Margie looking at him. She started, horrified to have been caught, but before she looked away, he gave her a long, slow wink. Flushing a hot scarlet, Margie lowered her head to her writing again. No, she couldn’t put him in her story. He might catch her at that, too.

It was such a pleasure, though, to see a young man like him, to see any of the young men in Paris, lively and healthy. The war had rendered men of a certain age glaring in their absence, left behind on fields in France, in Italy, in Germany, their presence now limited to the mothers still wearing black mourning crêpe. A group of young men who looked to be about her age passed by and then came into the café, and she wondered at the luck, the miracle of them, young and healthy and enthusiastic. They piled into the chairs around the table, and there seemed to be so many of them, so many limbs in motion, so much noise and bluster, she thought surely there wouldn’t be enough room. But of course there was, and then there was a flurry again as they ordered and coffee was brought and they settled in with their cups and their cigarettes, some of them leaning forward, hands on the table, conversing vehemently, others leaning back, watching the people go by as she was, and it all felt so right, as if this had all been planned, them and the other young man and her, as if they had all been born just to be here in this moment.

She paused, putting down her pen and flexing her fingers, pulling on them one at a time to make her knuckles pop. Her mother hated the habit; she said it made Margie look like a baseball player, and wondered if she would take up smoking cigars next. Mentally, Margie stuck her tongue out at her mother, but she must have done it actually, too, because a woman sitting at a table nearby gave her a queer expression, and Margie sighed, clamping her tongue inside the prison of her teeth.