The Light of Paris(51)

I don’t know how much time passed, only that the tape had auto-reversed to play the other side and then, when it had finished, started again, twice over. I sang as I worked, the lyrics as clear in my mind as if I had heard the songs only the day before, like muscle memory, an unforgettable pattern. I was sixteen again and spending Friday night down here alone, I was twenty-one and painting out my fear about the future, I was twelve and learning how to pour my heart onto paper, and I was thirty-four and tired and scared and I put all those things on the canvas in front of me.

“Madeleine? Are you down here?”

Startled, I yanked my brush away from the canvas, bumped into the stool where I had rested the palette, and knocked it onto the floor, where it clattered on the concrete, landing facedown. Of course.

“Yeah,” I called back, rescuing the palette from the floor. Well, I thought, looking down at the smears of paint on the concrete floor, it hadn’t been the first time. I walked over to the stairs, looking up at my mother.

“What are you doing down there? I’ve never heard such noise.”

“What, the music? I used to listen to this all the time.”

“Well, it’s terrible. What are you doing?”

“Painting,” I said, and a smile pulled across my face, uncontrollable.

“Oh, I forgot you left all those things down there. We should clear them out. Sharon wants the basement empty so it looks like there’s more storage.”

And there was the sum total of my mother’s interest in my painting. Had I expected anything different? My parents had always disapproved of my art. They had said art school was going to be a waste of time and money, because what would I do with that degree? Marry an artist? Become a painter? There were no artists in my parents’ circles. There were only practical, appropriate professions: doctors, teachers, lawyers, investment bankers. Oh, and wives.

So I had gone to college and gotten some quiet, dull degree, and I had wished I were one of the art students, walking across campus in paint-splattered clothes, tiny rocks of clay hardening in my hair. And after graduation I had gotten a quiet, dull job, but I had chosen an apartment with perfect light, where I spent hours alone, painting, as happy as I had ever been.

And then I had gotten married.

“Did you need something?” I asked.

“Yes, I just wanted to tell you I’m going to the library board meeting.”

“Godspeed,” I said, lifting my paintbrush to my forehead and sketching a salute.

After she closed the door, I walked slowly back over to the easel. It was getting dark, the sun disappearing outside, leaving the basement in shadow. In high school, I had ferreted out some old lamps and set them around my painting area, but when I tried to turn a couple of them on, the bulbs lit and then snapped off immediately, the sound of the filaments breaking sharp in the silence.

The thing was, I thought, giving up on the light and cleaning the brushes and my hands, going through the motions precisely as I had years ago, I didn’t want to get rid of anything—not the canvases or the easel or the old brushes. If anything, I wanted more. I wanted to find an art store and come home with a bouquet of fresh, bright oil paints, a fresh new sketch pad, an oversized Filbert brush to paint a hundred wide blue skies. I wanted to feel the way I had when I was painting all the time.

Ever since I had arrived in Magnolia, the heaviness I carried around inside me like a stone had been lifting. It felt, for the first time in a very, very long time, like I was starting to know who I was, instead of who everyone else expected me to be.





fourteen





MARGIE


   1924




Like my mother and me, Margie and her mother had never been close. And like my mother and me, Margie had always felt a thin thread of disappointment running through their interactions, a knowledge that Margie was not enough of anything for her mother’s satisfaction. Not pretty enough or ladylike enough or obedient enough. And sometimes outright cruelty isn’t necessary. Sometimes all it takes is a lifetime of disapproving glances, of disappointed sighs, of frustrated hopes.

So when she got her mother’s reply to her announcement that she was staying in Paris, she couldn’t even hope the news would be good.

Reading it, she was only grateful her mother wasn’t able to deliver the scathing message in person. Despite her mother’s perfect penmanship, Margie could see how hard the pen had been held to the paper, the depressions of the letters and tiny rips signs of the fury behind the words. Margie was disobedient and ungrateful. She was a child who didn’t understand the value of security and family. She was unworthy of trust. Margie sat down on the bed in her room, her hands shaking as she read.

Margie didn’t think she was being selfish. And she didn’t understand her mother’s anger. She was supporting herself, wasn’t she? Not asking for anything from them. She threw herself back on the bed, draping her elbow over her eyes. “It’s so unfair,” she said to herself, and she cried a little. She should go home, she thought. Make it all go away. Smooth her mother’s ruffled feathers.

“No,” she said aloud, sitting up again, wiping the tears from her eyes. The evening sun poured into her room through the windows. This was her adventure. This was her city. And she was here, weeping in this room with the beautiful warm light of Paris on her, while outside the city went on, all the people she had said she wanted to know, the writers and artists, at cafés drinking and talking, making the future happen. Outside, only a few steps down the Boulevard du Montparnasse, were three of the city’s most famous cafés—Café du D?me, Le Select, and La Coupole. Upon hearing Margie was living at the Club, Dorothy had told her those cafés might as well have been the center of the art scene in Paris, that people flitted between them, spreading conversation and ideas, and all of that was happening while Margie sat there, alone in her room, feeling sorry for herself. It seemed she had spent so much time locked away alone in her room, missing out on something.