The Light of Paris(49)

Margie, sure this was a test, hesitated. She ought to name something serious, oughtn’t she? Something to impress Dorothy, who probably read terribly complicated things and discussed them with terribly complicated people. “The Decline of the West?” She’d seen her father reading it. It had come in two volumes and looked completely exhausting.

“Oh.” Dorothy sounded disappointed. “I’m afraid my tastes are a little more lowbrow. I’ve just finished Flaming Youth. I know, I’m so behind, but it’s delicious. As scandalous as everyone says.”

“I loved Flaming Youth!” Margie exclaimed, rather too loudly for a library. She’d absolutely devoured the book from cover to cover in a single afternoon, hiding between the stacks of her library back home. It had seemed so unfair not to have anyone to talk about it with—her mother would have been shocked to find out Margie had read something about girls so fast and forward. She might have been shocked to know anyone would even write such a thing. And all the women Margie knew would only admit to reading instructive, improving books. Being able to talk to someone about the books she actually cared about, the stories she loved, filled Margie with a frothy giddiness that made her shake a little inside. She leaned forward. “Have you read The Sheik?”

Dorothy sighed dreamily. “I have. I saw the movie first, and was picturing Valentino the whole time. Though I’ll admit, I never thought they’d have a happily ever after.”

“Why not?”

“They were so different. And she was so stubborn, at least at first. Personally, I wouldn’t mind being kidnapped by a sheik and living out in the desert in the lap of luxury. So exotic. I might even trade Paris for it.”

“But they had to end up together,” Margie said, somewhat confused. “It was true love. And true love conquers all, doesn’t it?”

Dorothy looked at her thoughtfully, as though she had said something deeply controversial. Finally, when Margie was about to start babbling to fill the awkward silence, Dorothy spoke. “I suppose it does.”





thirteen





MADELEINE


   1999




What had my grandmother done when her life hadn’t suited her? When she saw the road ahead of her and realized she didn’t want to be on it? She’d gone to Paris. And what was I doing? Lying in my childhood bed, eating a stash of stale Christmas candy I had found in a drawer downstairs, and avoiding my life.

I looked out the window of my bedroom, a dormer, like the ones my grandmother had in Paris, except hers had held a view of the Eiffel Tower and mine a view of the Hoopers’ back yard. I was sitting on my bed, pillows stacked behind me, my knees drawn up to hold the notebook for easy reading. If I closed my eyes and inhaled, I could smell my mother’s rose garden, and I could almost imagine it was the scent of the roses in the garden at the American Girls’ Club, and I was my grandmother, seventy-five years ago, the thrill of adventure and freedom and youth beating in my chest.

Okay, so I wasn’t going to go to Paris in the next few hours, but I had endangered my marriage in order to stay here. Was this really the best I could do?

Reading my grandmother’s description of Sebastien’s hands, I remembered the smudge of paint on Miss Pine’s finger, and how, long ago, my own fingernails always had a thin U of paint around the cuticles, no matter how much I scrubbed. There was always paint somewhere on me—a smudge of yellow gluing a lock of my hair together, a drop of blue below my eyes like an errant beauty mark, a stray stroke on my skin where I had let the brush fall as I stepped back to look at the canvas. It was as though art had claimed me, made me its own, and I would bear witness to that passion whether I wanted to or not.

But now I could hardly remember the last time I had painted something. Though I could feel the weight of a brush in my hand, smell the slick, soapy scent of the paint, recall the ache in my muscles when I worked for hours, the strange feeling of time disappearing in a slow, slippery drawl as I slid into the picture, I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually done it. My interest in art was charming to Phillip insofar as it made him look more cultured, but when we had first been married, I had mentioned making some space in the condo to paint, and he had refused. Phillip would have objected to the mess, the smell, the distraction. There was no place for my easel, my canvases, he had said.

But here, there was plenty of room.

I padded down the hallway barefoot. My mother was out in her garden, the contractors working up in the attic, and the house was quiet around me as I moved down the stairs, the memory of which ones squeaked coming back to me, as though I were a teenager again, insomnia-struck, sneaking down to the basement to paint. In my adolescent dreams, when I grew up I would have a light-filled studio, dazzling white, like my grandmother’s room in Paris, full of air and light to illuminate my paintings, bring a brilliance to them that I never could in the basement of my parents’ house. Somewhere along the way, that dream had disappeared.

How is it possible things that are so important to us when we are young somehow fade away? If you had asked me when I was in high school to give up painting, I would have laughed. It would have been like surrendering my heart. And yet I had given it up. There had been no grand ceremony, no renunciation, but it had happened nonetheless, in a small, sad way, a gradual distancing, until one day you might have asked me to stop painting and I would have been struck by its absence. All these things we hold close when we are young, when our emotions roar so loudly the only way to make it through is to live in the voices of other people’s hearts, in music loud enough to drown out the wail of our own confusion, in art painted on canvases large enough to capture the whirl of chaos inside us or small enough to fill with the infinite details that explain us, in dance, in poetry, in theater, in art, how do we lose them? Why?