The Light of Paris(66)

Unable to keep a smile from her face, Margie grinned. “I did. I’d never thought I would enjoy going to a nightclub, but I danced all night long. It was absolutely worth the awful blisters I have.”

Sebastien grinned back at her. Without discussing it, they had begun walking, turning away from the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and passing the other way, until they were in the park. The glass roof of the Grand Palais glowed ahead of them, as though it held fire inside. Moving into the evening, Margie marveled at how the light changed, growing dimmer and softer as the hour grew later, the city inhaling its inhabitants back into their homes and then exhaling them onto the streets again for the evening, for strolls, or dinner at restaurants with tables filling the sidewalks so people had to walk down the middle of the street for blocks at a time.

They walked without discussing their destination, talking about Zelli’s, and the Libe, and Paris, and the future and the past, the city unfurling beneath their feet. They stopped on the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris, made of pale stone with bastions like Juliet’s balcony, and they looked out over the water, the boats passing by, the people walking on the banks, some of them in a hurry to get home, others walking slowly, enjoying the water and the warmth of the fading sun on their faces. Crossing over to the Left Bank, they passed the Saint-Michel fountain, children dancing under its eager spray, behind them Notre-Dame laid out against the sky, the stained-glass windows glowing from the inside, and Margie thought Paris would never look so beautiful again. She had thought they might walk toward home, but Sebastien led her a different way, along some streets leading diagonally to a neighborhood close to her first hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

“Where are we going?” Margie asked as they tripped down a quiet, narrow street, the storefronts lined with art dealers and antique stores.

“I’d like to show you some of my paintings,” Sebastien said, with the slightest touch of shyness in his voice. It seemed so unlike him, and yet it made her like him all the more to know there was vulnerability in him after all. “Would you like to see them?”

“Of course,” Margie breathed. For so long, Margie had thought of art as something that happened only in secret, a night-blooming flower, and to be invited to see his work felt as intimate as a kiss.

Sebastien stopped in front of a store, the window and door painted a radiant royal blue. Behind the main window was a sculpture, bathed in the soft light of early evening, the shape of a woman emerging from gray stone, her back arched in delicious pleasure, a cat stretching in the sunlight. Opening the door, Sebastien gestured for Margie to enter, and she stepped into the silence. He followed behind, the door closing quietly in his hands. Underneath their feet, the floors, wooden, scuffed, and ancient, squeaked in the stillness. “C’est moi,” Sebastien called to the empty air. “Sebastien.”

Someone responded from the back, a man’s voice, muffled so Margie couldn’t understand him. In any case, no one emerged.

“This gallery is very famous,” Sebastien explained. Do you know Impressionism?”

“No.” Margie shook her head, feeling ashamed. At home, she would have been considered well educated, even cultured. Here she was reminded again and again of all the things she did not know, of how much there was to learn, to know, to explore, to find.

“Come.” Sebastien reached out his hand, and Margie slipped hers into his. Touching him felt so different from dancing with the other artists at the club. His hand on hers made her stomach flip in a pleasant way, and she pushed down a girlish smile. He led her to another wall, the sun falling close enough to the painting to illuminate, though not to fade it. “Come closer,” he said, and they moved closer, close enough to breathe on the canvas. So near, the image was a soggy blur; the colors fading into one another as if the painting had been left out in the rain. Nevertheless, there was a warmth and a glow to it Margie found herself drawn to, the particular orange of a sunrise, a blue flowing like water.

“Do you see it?” he asked. Margie, somewhat ashamed, shook her head.

“I really don’t know much about painting,” she apologized, sure she was disappointing him.

Sebastien smiled. “This is the joy of art. You do not need to know it to embrace it. Step back with me.”

Together, they took three long steps back, and the picture came into focus. It was as though Margie had been looking at it through a rain-spattered window and it had suddenly become sunny and clear. The orange glow was now clearly a sunrise, the blue obviously water. What had looked like smudges and darkness up close now looked like boats caught in a morning mist. “I see it! I see it!” she said, caught up in childish delight, as though she had solved an unsolvable puzzle, and then she was ashamed again at her silliness. It was exactly the kind of thing Evelyn would have been embarrassed by, pretended she didn’t know Margie for. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I see the image now. The boats on the water.” She pointed as she spoke. “The sunrise. That’s why it’s so unclear, isn’t it? Because there’s morning fog.”

“Oui, oui,” Sebastien said, clearly not embarrassed by Margie’s outburst. “Painting is so much about the light. Come, here, see this one.”

He took her close to a painting, this one with tiny smudges of green and white and pink and purple, as though paint had been splattered and then smeared across the canvas. But when they stepped back, Margie saw it—in the foreground, a profusion of wildflowers, stretching back, a field of grasses and flowers and trees. “It’s amazing,” she breathed. “It hardly looks like anything, and then it becomes so clear. Look at them.” She pointed to a blur of darkness toward the back, so formless and yet so obviously two people standing amidst the greenery.