The Light of Paris(65)

“Madeleine, stop talking like that right now. Your poor father—what a horrible thing to imply.” My mother was flustered, which never happened. Maybe because we were having an honest conversation for once in our lives, because she was trapped here with me and couldn’t invent some excuse for hanging up the phone, a pile of correspondence she just had to deal with or remembering the roses needed deadheading or there was a committee meeting she was late to.

“I never would have married him if you hadn’t pressured me so hard.” I was pushing back tears, raw and ugly, and I wanted to hurt her, to break her perfect facade, to make her cry with me.

“I’m sorry, are you saying this is my fault?” my mother asked.

“You were the one who wanted me to get married! You were the one who was so embarrassed I wasn’t! I married him because I didn’t want to disappoint you anymore.”

“Don’t put your unhappiness on me, Madeleine,” my mother said, and the disdain in her voice only made me feel smaller and less worthy. “You were the one who accepted his proposal. You made the vows. I didn’t force you to do anything.”

She was right. And yet she wasn’t. I had spent so much time wishing someone would love me, and she had underscored that desire in a million ways, from every time she had told me I would never find a husband at art school to every date she had set me up on. And when she had met Phillip for the first time, before we got engaged, I could practically see the hunger in her eyes. She had wanted that for me so badly. The first time we had dinner together, she had dug her sharp elbow into my side repeatedly whenever I veered onto some unapproved conversational topic, and when Phillip had proposed, she almost collapsed in gratitude.

She was my mother. If she thought I was capable of withstanding the buffeting winds of her opinions, she was wrong.

“What is all this really about?” my mother asked. I suppose she was trying to be sympathetic, but there was too much between us for me to be able to accept it, and I was too angry and bitter to even really hear it.

“I just don’t think Phillip and I should be married anymore, that’s all.”

There was a pause. “I see.”

We sat there, the tick of the grandfather clock in the foyer echoing emptily, the floors above us squeaking as the carpenter moved back and forth.

Finally my mother stood up, placed her fingertips on the table like a CEO about to make an announcement of quarterly earnings. “I don’t know why you’re so determined to feel sorry for yourself, but I won’t be a part of it. Everyone has difficult times, Madeleine. But if you’re going to insist on wrapping yourself up in your own victimhood, I can’t stand to listen to it.” Turning, she walked out of the room and down the hall, and a moment later, I heard the firm sound of the door to my father’s office closing.

Numb, I climbed the stairs and walked down the hall to my bedroom, where I sat on the bed, bringing my knees up to my chest, curling in on myself like a pill bug.

What I had said to my mother I hadn’t said to anyone, not even to myself. Phillip and I shouldn’t be married anymore. Should never have gotten married. Phillip had been right—we should get a divorce.

I felt myself starting to cry again, and pushed the tears back down. My grandmother’s journals were stacked by my bed, and to distract myself, I picked up the one I had been reading.

I blamed Phillip for my decision to stop painting, but I had let it happen. I just had nothing to say. My ideas, my emotions had dried up, the flood of ideas that used to rush through me now a still, shallow lake. But as I turned the pages of my grandmother’s notebooks, sat with her in the cloistered, oppressive parlor of her parents’ house, walked the streets of Paris with her, both alone and terrified and thrilled to be on her own, I felt something inside me shifting, felt the emotions that had frozen inside me with each successive winter thawing.

I often looked at the women around me and wondered if any of them had dreams. Of course they did—it wasn’t fair of me to continue to assume they didn’t just because of how they looked on the outside. It’s so easy for those dreams to get run over by other people’s ideas about what we should do, or to be eroded, little by little, by the day-to-day drudgery of living, or to lose heart when faced with the long, hopeless struggle between where we are and who we want to be. But I didn’t want to succumb. I wanted to not go gentle into that good night, I wanted to sound my barbaric yawp, I wanted to live deliberately. And I wanted to know why my grandmother, after all she had done in Paris, hadn’t.





eighteen





MARGIE


   1924




“I heard you had a good time at Zelli’s,” Sebastien said. He had been waiting outside the Libe, leaning on the wall across the street, below the high fence guarding the president’s residence. When Margie appeared, he crushed his cigarette under his toe and sauntered toward her.

“News travels fast,” Margie said. She pretended she wasn’t pleased to see him, continuing to slide on her coat, smoothing down her hair, then slipping on her hat.

“Paris is a small town.” She loved the way he said Paris, with precisely the right rush over the r and the gentle softening of the end—Paree, not Pear-is. She loved the way he said everything, really. He had a slow drawl, so different from the rush of the Parisian accent, and Margie imagined if he were American, he might be from Georgia, all peach trees and slow-moving air. “Did you have a good time?”