The Light of Paris(59)

sixteen





MARGIE


   1924




In Margie’s opinion, the Libe was really the most fantastic place to work. Her coworkers were fascinating: there was Miss Parsons, of course, who had been a nurse during the war and now practically ran the place. And then there was Dorothy, who had cleaned up the messy edges of Margie’s haircut and told her she looked positively dishy, just like Zelda Fitzgerald, which had made Margie blush with pleasure. In her letters to her parents, Margie had made sure to mention that Dorothy’s uncle was the president of Cornell and her father was a professor at Princeton, but she didn’t mention how beautiful Dorothy was, or that she went out with a different man every night of the week, it seemed. Every time Margie saw her, she felt surprised anew that Dorothy spent her day here shelving books that had been passed around the hospitals and barracks and trenches during the war, and talking to Margie and the patrons, as though she weren’t something rare and lovely and altogether different. There was Olav, a Russian prince who seemed to have lost his way and his fortune, and one of the board of directors, Mr. Alsop, who was always in meetings and terribly busy, and who called Margie “Mary,” which she decided was close enough.

Sometimes, when she was putting a book on the shelves, Margie imagined the people who had held it before. A handsome young soldier who had died before his time. A war-weary general, looking for respite from the stress of his job in the pages of Zane Grey. A fierce-minded young nurse like Miss Parsons, who had joined the war effort because she wanted to contribute, and found herself exhausted and haunted by the things it had asked of her. Sometimes Margie put those imaginary people in scenarios together, the general and the young soldier facing off over a matter of honor, the nurse tending to the soldier before his death. And sometimes she just let them be, and she imagined all the times the book she held had told its story, and she put it on the shelf where it could fall into someone else’s hands and tell it once more.

The library had been an effort to manage the enormous number of volumes that had been collected by the Library War Service, once there was no longer a war. They collected three volumes of each book that had been sent out, but more boxes arrived each day, as though people were still sorting through the rubble and saying, “What’s this here? More books? Better send them to Paris!” And it seemed some days even the boxes and boxes of unpacked books, to say nothing of all the ones on the shelves, would never be enough. The library had hundreds of members, and though it had been quiet the day Margie had first gone in, as Miss Parsons had predicted, she had never seen it that way since. The Libe was something of a social club for expatriates in the city, a place where they could shut out their differences for a while and luxuriate in their own language. There were writers, of course, some of whom frequented both Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company bookstore and the library. And there were academics, university students desperate for answers they could find without resorting to their Petit Larousse for awkward translations, and there were readers, the ones Margie liked best of all, who simply came in, hungry for book after book after book, who sometimes wanted to talk about what they had read, or ask for recommendations, and Margie, who had never had anyone to talk to about all the books she read, so many books she couldn’t remember them all if she tried, was in heaven.

One Saturday it was only her and Dorothy together when they closed down for the night, and Dorothy said, “Hey, let’s go have a little dinner, what do you say?”

Margie, who was dressed in a simple shirtwaist and skirt and a pair of stockings with a run in them (she’d tried to hide it by turning that part to the inside, but she felt it every time she walked), looked down at herself. “I’m not really dressed to go out, am I?” she asked.

“Neither am I.” But of course Dorothy looked gorgeous, wearing a fashionable green dress that set off her eyes and didn’t show a speck of dirt, as though she hadn’t been working with the same dusty old books as Margie all day. “But we can stop by your place if you’d like to change,” she offered, taking in Margie’s stricken expression.

“That would be better,” Margie said. And though she usually walked home to save the carfare, she was too embarrassed to admit it to Dorothy. They took the tram, as Dorothy said the Métro was too slow for her, to the Club, and Dorothy waited in the courtyard, smoking and talking with some of the girls there as though she’d known them for years, while Margie changed into her good blue crêpe de chine dress.

She picked Dorothy up from the courtyard and they headed down the street to Rosalie’s. Everyone talked about Rosalie’s, a tiny restaurant in the basement of a corner building only a few blocks from the Club, but Margie had never been, and when they arrived, she was torn between being thrilled they had and wishing they hadn’t. The place was filthy—the floor covered with undiscovered countries of spills, some of which sucked at her feet as they made their way between the tables. When they sat down, Dorothy, who looked so out of place in the dark and dirty room, like a firefly glowing in a dustbin, took a handkerchief from her bag and carefully wiped the previous diners’ crumbs from the table.

Despite the grimy appearance, it was an exciting, lively place to be—the men next to her with paint splatters on their shirt cuffs, two of the Surrealists from the café having dinner with two other men, their heads bent together conspiratorially, a gaggle of young girls in fashionable dresses, edged with shimmers of beads and tassels, making it seem as though they were endlessly in motion, laughing loud and wild in the corner. As was always the case in Paris, everyone here seemed to know everybody else, people coming in stopping to greet friends with shouts of pleasure, as though they hadn’t seen each other in years, though Margie guessed, given how small Montparnasse—and Paris in general—seemed to be, it might have been twenty-four hours at the most. There were long tables and benches, and when a newcomer decided to join his friends, everyone would shuffle agreeably to one side or another, the shape and form of the groups shifting, expanding and contracting, the pulse of the evening like a giant beating heart.