The Light of Paris(56)

As we passed by the kitchen, the door swung open and Henry came out. Distracted by looking at the fresh paint and the photographs of someone’s abandoned ancestors on the wall, I walked right into him.

“Oof,” I said.

“Oof,” he said, and then in recognition, after we had bounced off each other like human pinballs, “Hey! How are you?”

“Hungry.”

“She’s kind of late for dinner,” the host said. It had taken him a half-dozen steps to realize I wasn’t following him, and he was already standing beyond the archway leading to the living room on one side and what had been the study on the other.

“Austin, we serve until eleven. People can eat whenever they want,” Henry said. He strode over and gently took the menu from the boy’s hands. “Would you please go back to the host stand and check to see if anyone’s waiting, and then finish bringing up the glasses?”

“Hey, okay!” Austin said, as though this were a brilliant idea, and trotted back past us toward the front of the house.

“I’m sorry about him. I had a couple of servers call in sick, so we’re a little short-handed. He’s actually a bar-back, and a good one, but as a host, he’s . . . problematic.”

“Give me a cheeseburger and all will be forgiven. I’ve been painting for hours.”

“You’ve got a little paint right here,” Henry said, tapping his thumb on his cheek and I reached up, embarrassed, to scrape it away with my fingernails. “Are you painting to get the house ready?”

“No, no. Painting like art.”

“You’re a painter, your mother’s a gardener. Art runs in the family, I guess,” he said, making a “Come on” wave with the menu. I was surprised—I’d never made the connection between my mother’s gardening and my painting, but hadn’t I learned about color from gladiolus and phlox, about repetition of form from ornamental cabbages, about texture from lamb’s ear and dill? Maybe I owed more to her than I thought.

Henry led me back into what had been the Schulers’ living room, now cozily filled with tables, most of them empty by now. In one corner, a couple leaned together, their conversation tense and low. Across from them, a table of four was finishing up their desserts, leaning back in their chairs in satisfaction. It looked like they had demolished something chocolate, and I restrained myself from grabbing the plate and licking it. Note to self: Buy some damn groceries. “How’s this?” We had arrived at a table in the corner of the back room.

“This is great, actually,” I said. Henry pulled out a chair and I slid into it.

“I’ll get a cheeseburger going for you pronto. Medium? You want a salad while you wait?”

“Please and thank you.”

He clicked his heels together like a butler and headed off toward the kitchen. A few minutes later, a waitress, a little wisp of a girl, pale and delicate in her all-black uniform, came by bearing a water glass and a salad. I had barely finished it when the burger arrived, and it was as amazing as it had smelled, so high I had to smash it down to get it into my mouth, a perfect balance of salt and crisp vegetables and a sweet-and-sour spread on the bun that puckered my tongue. I was fairly sure I could have eaten another one.

By the time I finished the burger, the room had emptied. I dragged the last of the French fries lazily through ketchup with one hand as I wiped off the other and used it to open my grandmother’s notebook, disappearing back into her story.

I had just finished reading my grandmother’s report on her evening with the Surrealists when Henry arrived. “Mind if I join you?” he asked, and then, without waiting for my answer, spread his hands on the table and slid into the chair opposite mine with an audible sigh of relief. “What a night. How was your dinner?”

Pulling myself out of the Jazz Age and into the present, I refocused, looking over at my plate, now entirely empty except for a few crumbs and the thin remnants of a pool of ketchup. “Horrible,” I said.

“Clearly. You want some dessert? There’s a really great apple cobbler with homemade vanilla ice cream, or a moist chocolate lava cake, with this fabulous chocolate sauce in the center that oozes all over the place when you put your spoon into it.”

In my head, my mother admonished me not to eat dessert, pointing out how easily I gained weight, and that it wasn’t appropriate to eat dessert in front of a man.

I told my mother I was having a tough time of it and a little chocolate would help.

My mother informed me that this was eating my feelings.

Yes, I agreed. Yes, it was.

“I want that chocolate thing, with the moist and the ooze,” I said.

Henry nodded. “An excellent choice. Ava,” he said, raising his hand to call over the waitress who had brought me the salad. “Would you please bring us a chocolate lava cake?”

“On it,” she said, and disappeared again.

“So what are you reading?”

I flipped back to the cover, as though to show him the title, but of course there was only the blank front of the notebook. “It’s interesting, actually. These are some of my grandmother’s journals. I’m reading about this trip she took to Paris in 1924.”

“Paris in 1924? Like, F. Scott Fitzgerald Paris? Hemingway Paris?”

“I don’t think she was hanging with Hemingway exactly. At least not that she’s mentioned. But she was definitely enjoying herself. Before, she was this quiet, bookish wallflower, and now she’s hanging out at cafés with artists and bobbing her hair.”