The Light of Paris(5)

“I thought I might see you at the historical society board meeting today,” she said, and there was an odd scolding tone to her voice.

“Oh, on Fridays I read to orphans,” I said solemnly.

“Isn’t that nice? You’re always so community-minded.” Dimpy patted me on the hand. I tilted my head at her. How disconnected from reality was she? Life wasn’t a production of Annie. You couldn’t just go to an orphanage and corral unsuspecting children into storytime. But Dimpy was sailing along happily. “You missed the most ghastly argument,” she said, tossing her head back and regaling me with a story about the trauma of choosing a theme for the annual gala.

I nodded at whatever Dimpy was saying, watching Phillip glad-handing his way around the table. When he smiled, it was dazzling, and it reminded me of how charming he had been when we first met, how having his attention focused on me had felt rare and precious, had made me into someone else, someone who might have something beautiful and special inside her after all.

Over time, he had treated me less and less that way, focusing his charm on people from whom he still needed something, people who hadn’t already sworn to spend their lives with him. Now I could see his charisma was an act, something he turned on and off at will, but I could still recall the way it had felt to be held in the sunlight of his smile, and that only made being out of it colder.

Before Phillip, I had been biding my time until I got married, at which point I assumed my life would really begin. While the girls I had gone to school with found perfect husbands and had perfect babies, I went on blind dates my mother arranged for me with the sons and grandsons of women she knew from the country club. I never managed to retain their attention for more than a few dates (though, to be fair, they rarely retained mine for more than a few minutes). I had lived alone and worked in the alumni department of Magnolia Country Day, the same school I had attended, where I wrote fundraising appeals that managed to be gracefully desperate, and helped organize an endless parade of events even I didn’t want to go to. I painted, and I read, and the years went by, until I looked up and I was almost thirty and still no one had chosen me.

Phillip’s interest in me had come as a relief. Finally, I would not be the only single one at class reunions. Finally, my mother would be happy with me. Finally, I would have proof that someone thought I was beautiful, someone thought I was enough, someone thought I was worth marrying. I wore my engagement ring like a sigil to ward off everyone’s doubt and pity, most of all my own.

My mother, of course, had been thrilled with Phillip’s pedigree. His great-greats of some ordinal or another had made a fortune in real estate, and now the men of the family continued to make the money and the women spent it, an arrangement I found incredibly depressing for copious reasons. I found out after we were married that all was not as smooth as that—when Phillip’s father died, he had left the family’s real estate investment business in crisis, threatening the livelihood of miscellaneous cousins and brothers-in-law, and it was only through a lot of fist-clenchingly tough deals and a handful of patient investors, including my father, that the ship had been righted and everyone could go back to shopping in blissful ignorance.

Did I ask why he’d never married? Of course I did. I was almost thirty and single, so basically I might as well have been dead, and Phillip was thirty-five, which was not as problematic for a man, but was still old enough to raise some eyebrows. He told me he’d been engaged and she had broken his heart, and that he had never recovered. Until me, I guess.

But I knew why he had married me. It was because I was so eager to please, because he would be in control and I would not object when he told me what to wear or what I could eat or how I should spend my time. And it was because his family’s business was in trouble and my father might become an investor if Phillip could only get close enough, and how much closer can you get than to marry a man’s spinsterish daughter?

I know. I should have seen it coming. But I had been tired of Sunday night dinners at my parents’ house, tired of social events at which I was the only unmarried one, tired of the same job I had held since my college graduation, tied to the endless, thudding repetition of the academic year. And because I thought being married would change things. I thought it would make me someone special. I thought it would mean, at last, that I wasn’t wrong and ugly and broken.

So I put aside my misgivings and I married him. I married him and I had the wedding my mother had given up all hope of my having, and I moved to Chicago to be with him, and I told myself this was a sign, a sign that I might be something more than how people had seen me for my entire life. A sign that I might not be as beautiful as my mother wanted me to be, that I might never fit in as easily as everyone around me seemed to, but that someone thought I mattered.

And for a while, that had been enough. Enough for Phillip and me to convince ourselves we were in something that at least resembled love. But it didn’t feel that way now. It wasn’t enough anymore.

Around me, Dimpy and the other wives kept up a running chatter that I found myself unable to focus on. Most nights I would have suffered through the conversation, distracting myself with other things, but I felt unable to settle down, shifting in my chair, tugging at my dress. Meeting those kids and Miss Pine had reminded me of who I used to be, and now here I sat, squirming in a stylishly aggressive chair, tracing the steps of every tiny decision I had made that had led me away from her.