The Light of Paris(40)

“Bonjour,” a man said, and Margie looked up to see the young man with the blond hair who had winked at her now standing in front of her table, his cup and saucer in his hand, his notebook tucked underneath his arm.

“Bonjour?” Margie replied. She had been practicing her French over the past few days, but it still felt graceless and uncomfortable on her tongue, and it sounded dreadfully American to her ears.

“May I sit with you?” he asked, in perfect English, turned into something more beautiful by his decidedly French accent. Before she could demur—she had thought it was unseemly enough initially for a young woman to be sitting at a café on her own, let alone to take company with a strange man—he was putting down his things and pulling out the other chair at the table, sitting down as though she had been waiting for him all along. “You are a writer?” he asked.

Margie looked down at her notebook and blushed, closed the cover to hide her messy scrawl and the messier emotions it exposed. “Not really. I would like to be a writer, but right now I am—well, I don’t know what I am. I’m just playing, I guess.”

“You look like a writer,” he said, fixing her with a sharp stare. “You are writing, oui?” His eyes were a brilliant green she had never seen before, at least not on a person. She had seen it on summer fields, in the sparkle of an emerald ring, but his eyes made the color elsewhere seem shoddy and false.

“Just writing doesn’t make you a writer. Not a real writer, like one who writes books or something.”

“Well, how do you think the writers who write books began?” he asked, gesturing at her notebook. “They wrote in cafés in Paris, like you.”

“Maybe,” Margie said doubtfully, but she had to suppress a little smile at the thought of someone thinking her a real writer.

“Not maybe. Definitely.” He broke into a wide smile. He had a full mouth and broad, white teeth. “Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked, despite clearly having already made himself at home. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches, though he made no move to smoke them, only putting them on the table as though he were settling in for a workday.

“No, it’s fine.”

“Are you American?” His accent twisted his vowels and made the consonants scrape against the roof of his mouth in a delicious way.

“Oui. Er, yes.” She coughed. Did she look so obviously American? She certainly didn’t think she looked Parisian. The Parisian women were delicate under their loose dresses, their ankles slender, their cheekbones high under cloche hats. They wore their coats slipping slightly off their shoulders, as though they were always arriving, about to sit down and stay for a while, or always ready to leave, heading off on another adventure. Margie felt solid and indelicate next to them and their easy elegance. Even the men had a certain panache to them; the young man talking to her had a scarf loosely knotted around his neck in a casual way she knew it would take hours to reproduce, and his hair fell impishly into his face, a caramel blond that set off his eyes.

“Everyone in Paris is American now. Except for me. I am French. Je m’appelle Sebastien. And you?”

“Margie,” she said, and then she caught herself, changed her mind, though she wasn’t sure why. “Margaret.”

“Marguerite,” he repeated, turning what she had always thought of as a dull, workaday name into something new and elegant. In French class at school, they had simply pronounced her nickname with an accent—Mar-ZHEE, which had sounded dull and leaden, as it did in English. But Marguerite. Marguerite was someone different. Marguerite wouldn’t be abandoned by anyone to go to a party—she would be invited to the party, would be the life of it. Marguerite would sit in cafés and flirt with strangers and maybe even drink wine and dance sometimes. With a sudden, swelling ache, Margie wanted to be Marguerite more than anything else.

Sebastien lifted his cup and clinked it against hers. “Enchanté,” he said, and he winked again.

Margie sipped at her coffee. Her secret was that she didn’t really like coffee, but she had learned to order it with cream instead of milk, and with extra sugar, which she dropped in until the coffee could no longer absorb it all and the last few sips left her with a pale, sweet sludge at the bottom of the cup, a deliciously wasteful extravagance after the war. “So are you a writer?” she asked.

“Non, non,” Sebastien scoffed. “Only Americans are writers.” He gave her a little wink and she couldn’t resist smiling back. She didn’t know why he had chosen to sit with her, but his good mood was infectious, and she was happy to have a little cheer around her. If she only had a week left in the city, she might as well spend her time enjoying things rather than moping around. “No, I am an artist. Frenchmen, we are painters.” He flipped his notebook open, showing her the sketches that covered the pages, sometimes only tiny pieces jumbled together on a single page—the Eiffel Tower rendered in crosshatches, a quickly sketched coffee cup, a woman’s ear, delicate as a seashell—and sometimes a drawing spreading across both pages, a bridge across the Seine viewed from the water, an explosion of flowers in a garden. He paged through rapidly, as though he were making a moving picture, and then closed the notebook when he came to the blank pages at the end. Margie wanted to take it from him, open it again, let its secrets unfold in front of her. She was a dreadful artist herself, capable mostly of childish stick figures and landscapes—square houses, stiffly symmetrical trees—and she envied people who could draw.