The Light of Paris(68)

And then, much to her shock, Sebastien reached out and hugged her with a delighted glee. It was over in a moment, but Margie thought she might live in that moment forever. The scratch of the fabric of his jacket against her cheek, his arms around her, the slightest roughness of his skin against her forehead, and the smell of him, coffee and paint and something wild and comforting, like sun-warmed grass. “You have made me so happy. I have been working on this painting for a year. To tell so many stories in one painting—I thought it was too difficult, but I had to try it. You are a writer, this is simple for you. It is much harder for me to have so many ideas at once and then to make them clear in a painting. But you see it.”

“I see it,” Margie said, and she was blushing from his hug, and she wanted to be in his arms again, but she could see he was distracted by her compliment. She knew the feeling well—she had felt it herself when her stories had been chosen for her school’s literary magazines, or when her teachers had praised her work. She only envied him that his work was here, on display, in a gallery, while hers was still bound up in closed pages in her room. Someday, she thought. Someday all the things she had wanted so badly might actually be hers.

? ? ?

It became a habit, their walks home. She would leave at the end of the day and find Sebastien leaning against the president’s fence and smoking, and he would cross the street to join her. Sometimes they went through the Jardins des Champs-élysées, and sometimes they walked down the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, looking at the storefronts of couturiers on one side and the enormous mansions on the other, and sometimes they stopped in a café half the way home, by the Théatre du Chatelet and watched the people go by. And they talked. They talked so much Margie’s jaw would hurt at the end of the night, and if they sat in a café, her voice would go attractively rough from all the cigarette smoke in the air.

Occasionally they were joined by Sebastien’s artist friends, or by the Surrealists, who would be terribly serious until they had enough wine in them, at which point they would grow funny and wild, and always deeply passionate about their art. One of them cornered Margie one night and read her the entire list of the cards they had created for the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and he looked at her expectantly at the end of each one, as though he had told a particularly good joke and was waiting for her to laugh. Margie didn’t have the heart to tell him that despite the great improvement in her French she still understood only half of what he was saying, so sometimes she simply nodded thoughtfully, and sometimes she smiled, and sometimes she laughed gaily, and sometimes just said, “Oooh,” as though he had said something particularly thought-provoking. Though she did this in a pattern having nothing to do with the content of the messages, even the ones she technically understood (though she never could have translated them and gotten their intentionally obscure meanings quickly enough), he seemed quite pleased, and when he had reached the end of the list, he bought her a glass of cognac and proceeded to get very, very drunk and sing “California, Here I Come” with the other Surrealists, very, very badly.

And some nights they went dancing, and some nights they went to galleries to see other artists’ paintings, people Sebastien knew or had heard of. Once, thrillingly, they saw a film some of Sebastien’s friends had made at a remote chateau. The picture itself hadn’t made any sense to Margie, and she suspected it didn’t make any sense to anyone, but it had been terrific fun to see people she knew on a movie screen. Afterward she felt, even though she knew it was only a tiny art film, showing in a gallery with an enormous movie projector clacking away in the background, she might be stopped by people on the street as though she were walking with Buster Keaton or Clara Bow.

Later, they would gather at a café and talk, and she would listen to their thoughts and their passion and when Sebastien walked her home at the end of one of those nights, her head was spinning with ideas. Those conversations felt as though she were on a carousel and everything they were saying about art and truth and dreams and, sometimes, rather shockingly, sex, was lights and calliope music and the rise and fall of painted horses. She tried to keep up, though her French sometimes held her back, and sometimes it was only her own fear that she might say something the others thought was foolish, or even worse, obvious.

“You know more than you think,” Sebastien would say to her when he walked her home, the cafés and bars alive with lights and people and conversation. Margie wondered sometimes if Washington were like this at night, so full of activity and celebration, and it was just that she had missed it. There had been times when she had stayed up to the hours she kept in Paris, but it had always been in the company of a book, or of her own writing, never out with other people. “You should open your mouth and say it. You will be surprised.”

Margie wished it were that easy, but she had been editing her thoughts for so long, purposely keeping herself small and contained, she couldn’t imagine speaking out so easily. These men and women Sebastien knew, they were great artists. Some of them were already known, some of them would only be known years in the future, but they were artists. They were daring and experimental. They made things happen. And they knew so much. They could talk of Expressionism and Neoclassical Cubism and Ulysses and Gothic literature, and Margie resented all those years she had spent reading books with no one to talk to about them, stuck in schoolrooms and surrounded by girls who had worried only about who they would marry and whether they might be chosen for some society or where they would spend the summer, when she could have been with these people, living.