The Light of Paris(72)

“Well, let’s get to know it,” Henry said. He took my hand to help me down a few crumbling steps to the street and I blushed at the heat of his skin, the reassuring comfort of his broad palm covering mine. When he let go, it felt like a loss. There was a twinge in my chest as I thought of Phillip, and I pushed it away. I didn’t want him in this moment.

We made our way down the center of the street, where the crowds were looser and more fluid. A group of girls slunk by, their youth dangerously beautiful, laughing and teasing each other in Spanish. A couple stood outside a pub with beers in their hands, chuffing out smoke as they laughed, and even the sharp smell of their cigarettes was romantic and comforting in the warm evening.

“So what were we talking about?” Henry asked as we stepped around a group of families in the middle of the street, plastic glasses of wine balanced in the cup holders of their strollers. “Oh, right. Art is impractical.”

“One summer I said I didn’t want to go to camp, I wanted to stay home and work on my painting, and my parents nearly went through the roof. And when they found out I was thinking about applying to art school instead of regular college—I never would have had the nerve to tell them; my college counselor spilled the beans—my father said he wasn’t spending a dime on some so-called ‘education’ at art school.”

“What did they want you to do?”

I looked up at the sky, which was the pleasantly indecisive mix of blue and gray and pink of a falling spring evening. “They just wanted me to get married. I don’t think they really cared whether I had a career or not. Women in my parents’ world . . . sometimes I wonder if they even know feminism is a thing. And they’re total hypocrites—they give money to the symphony, they go to events at the art museum. But my going to art school, somehow that would have been the worst thing ever.”

“I’m sorry,” Henry said, and it seemed like the right thing to say, so I smiled back at him. Despite the rest of his cleaned-up appearance, it looked like he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, and he rubbed his face with his thick fingers. He seemed about to say something else, until a couple he knew spotted him and came over to say hello. He introduced me, and we chatted for a few minutes before they split off again.

“Thanks for coming out tonight,” he said as we started walking again. “It’s nice to be away from the restaurant on a Friday night. Feels like I’m breaking a rule.”

“I’m pretty sure you are. But you said it’s going well, right? You’re going to be McDonald’s before you know it.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I only ever really wanted the one restaurant. And I wanted it not to fail. That’s an important caveat.”

“What did you do before?”

“This, basically. I mean, not running the place, but working in restaurants. I knew I wanted to be a chef since the first time my mother handed me pots and pans to bang together. Graduated high school, bam, right into culinary school. I’ve worked at restaurants all over town. Spent a few years at resorts in the Ozarks, too, which was pretty glamorous.”

“Even the name sounds glamorous. Ozark.”

“Ozark would be a great name for a kid,” Henry said, and he laughed, but my stomach twisted a little. I knew he was just joking, but that was a joke you made with someone you were dating. And we were definitely not dating. Even if I hadn’t been married, he wasn’t my type, and I was . . . well, like my grandmother, there had never been suitors lined up around the block.

“I envy that. Knowing what you want to do and then just doing it. I had no idea. Got a degree in marketing, which I really had absolutely no interest in, and had no idea what to do with when I graduated. I ended up working for the development office at my high school, which I guess is a kind of marketing, but I didn’t like it much either. I would have been better off going to dental school.”

“You would have been better off going to art school.”

“Sure,” I said, disbelieving. My parents had convinced me, I guess, because when I thought about it now, I wasn’t sure I saw the point. What would I have done with an art degree? Although, to be fair, the only thing I was doing of any value was volunteering at the Stabler Museum, and my marketing degree wasn’t much help there.

We were getting closer to the band, and the street was getting more crowded and the noise level was rising. We had to raise our voices to be heard, Henry leaning his head close to mine.

“I mean it. You say you had no idea what you wanted to do, but you did. You wanted to paint. Just because it was unacceptable to your family doesn’t mean you didn’t know what you wanted.”

“Yeah, well. If it was so important to me I would have done it anyway. At least for fun. I haven’t painted in years.”

“I’m not sure that’s the case. You got a pretty strong message it wasn’t a good use of your time.”

There was another little twist in my gut when I heard him rising to my defense, because he was standing up for me when he didn’t know the entire story. I wasn’t telling him everything. I wasn’t telling him marrying Phillip had been the culmination of a hundred decisions, that it had required my putting away everything that had mattered to the person I really was in order to become the person I had always been told I should want to be, and one of the things I had sacrificed was painting. And I wasn’t telling him because it would have required admitting it myself, and spoiling the illusion I had that this moment here, this time in Magnolia with him and Sharon and my easel in my mother’s basement, was my life, that I had never been lonely or sad, had never married a man who criticized me for gaining weight instead of feeding me chocolate lava cake, who took me to parties and fundraisers I didn’t want to go to with people I didn’t care about instead of to street fairs that made me feel alive.