The Light of Paris(46)
“Yes?” the woman asked again impatiently.
“Yes, you see, I’m Margie, and I’m American, you see.” She offered a quick smile in case her nationality might buy her a little kindness. The woman continued to look at her with a grimly determined expression, as though Margie were merely an obstacle to be mowed over in pursuit of her work, which, truth be told, is exactly what she was. “Someone said I might be able to stay here?” There was a little squeak in her voice and she swallowed hard.
“We rent rooms, yes. You have an American passport?”
“Well, yes,” Margie said. “I’m American?”
Margie seemed to have spoken the magic words, because the woman began bustling about in her little office, picking up forms from various cubbyholes and bringing a notebook to the ledge that stood between her and Margie.
As she gathered her papers, the woman rattled off information about the Club’s accommodations (single or shared rooms, shared bathrooms), rules (no gentlemen or liquor in the rooms, no Marcel irons in the bathrooms), and costs.
Though she gulped when she heard the price for the only available room, a single on the third floor, Margie took a deep breath and nodded. However foolish it was, she was actually carrying all her remaining money with her. Her mother had warned her, regularly and loudly, before departure, of the insidiousness of pickpockets in Europe, but also of thieving chambermaids and usurious hotel owners. To Margie’s mother, Europe looked like one of those medieval maps, where the cartographer had filled in the unknown spaces with fear: Here be dragons. And as much as Margie didn’t want to believe her mother’s anxieties, she seemed to have absorbed them anyway, so every departure from her hotel room was fraught with decision: should she take her valuables with her and risk a pickpocket, or leave them to the mercies of a thieving chambermaid? In the end, she took them with her most days, taking comfort in the knowledge that the French didn’t even seem to have a word for pickpocket; they’d had to borrow it from English. With shaking hands, she opened her bag and pulled out her money, slowly counting out 125 francs, the price for the first week. It was quite a bargain, and yet it felt like the greatest extravagance she had ever experienced, especially when she looked at the anemic amount of money she had left. As the woman counted the money, Margie carefully filled out the card the woman had handed her. She was doing this. She was actually doing this.
When she had finished, the woman behind the desk called for a girl to take Margie upstairs. Her guide turned out to be a somewhat swaggering girl named Helen, from Ohio, who took Margie through the Club’s narrow hallways and up to her room. The building was U-shaped, with a center courtyard where a half-dozen girls were sitting in the sun, a few of them reading, a few talking. In the corner was a spigot that might have been connected to a well at some point, the stone grown mossy and cracked from disuse, and at the back of the courtyard lay a rose garden, blooms opening, fat and fragrant, to the sun. Sebastien had said the Club (or more specifically, its eponymous girls) had somewhat of a reputation, and Margie was prepared for scandal around every corner, but nothing seemed amiss, which was slightly disappointing.
Helen led her up a hysterically pitched flight of stairs to the second floor, where there was a sun room above the foyer, as bright and clean as the floor below was dark and cool, and through a rabbit warren of hallways, then up more stairs to the third floor. It was quieter up here, and the air was still and hot despite the open dormers in the hall. As they walked, Helen rattled off a list of additional rules and instructions, which Margie was following with one ear while looking around every corner with the other, trying to memorize the building’s twists and turns. In her head, the drumbeat of her disobedience and the surety of her mother’s disapproval played on, but she felt no shame. The stairs didn’t make her feel anxious or tired. There was only the excitement of everything to come. She would be like those girls in the boardinghouse down the street from her parents’ house in Washington, walking out confidently every morning to her job, she would be like those writers she saw in the cafés, head bent down, scribbling furiously in her notebook, she would be like Sebastien or Evelyn, bold and unafraid.
Finally they arrived at a door, and Helen handed her a key with a flourish. “Your room.” They were at the end of the hall, and Margie opened the door tentatively to find a light-filled room, bright and swaying with dust in the sunbeams falling in through the two dormer windows. “Two windows,” Helen said. “Lucky.” She peered into the room and then shrugged. “See you around.”
Margie stepped inside, her hands held open beside her as though she were absorbing the air, letting this place fall into her. She opened the window facing the backs of the houses on the street behind the Club, looking down at laundry drying on the lines, a rabbit eating from a vegetable garden in the corner of a yard. As the air rushed in, she ran to the other window, pushing it open too, looking out into the courtyard, the girls below still lazing in the sun, the roses sending their sweetness up to Margie on the air.
Inside, the floors were a bright blond wood that made the room practically glow despite the scuffs and cracks from years of use; the white walls were freshly painted. A bed with a metal frame, a mattress, a pillow, and a stack of sheets on top, a dresser, a chair. That was it. And Margie, who had grown up in a home with so much wealth, stuffed with furniture and antiques and all the money anyone could have wanted, nearly wept at the simplicity of it. This room was hers, Paris was hers, this life was hers, at last, her life was hers.