The Light of Paris(74)

“You know, I know the owners,” Henry said. He was drinking coffee; I could smell it on his breath when he leaned in beside me to look at one of the photographs.

“Yeah, I met him the other day. Pete. He’s a nice guy.”

“No, I mean if you wanted to sell some of your art here. I could connect you.”

“Don’t be silly. I don’t have anything to sell. And no one would buy anything I painted anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“How do you know? You’ve never seen my paintings.”

Henry shrugged. “All right, so maybe they’re horrendous. You could still put them up here.”

“Sure,” I said, somewhat sarcastically, but as we walked back outside, sipping on our drinks, the glass door closing heavily behind us, the thought stuck with me. What would it be like to have my work out in public? I was out of practice, but it turned out I had been storing up a lot of ideas over the years, and there were a million things I wanted to paint—the light of all four seasons on Lake Michigan, the glitter of snow against a skyscraper’s glass, a cocktail party in which everyone was wearing elaborately feathered masks. This night—The Row alive with music and people and the promise of summer on everyone’s mind. If I painted everything I wanted to, I would get better. I could take classes. I could be an artist again. I could be myself again.

We walked back down the street, Henry introducing me to people we bumped into, ducking into stores and drinking tiny glasses of wine or sampling the food we were offered. By the time we made our way back to the start of The Row again, my stomach was full and I felt a little giddy from the wine.

Henry’s car was parked on the sidewalk outside my mother’s house, so we said good night there, his keys jingling loosely between his fingers. There was a moment there, before I turned to go, when Henry looked as though he might say something else, a question resting on his lips, but when I paused, he just said “Good night” again and stepped out into the street, looking both ways before he opened the car door and slid inside. The engine sprang to life, a contented purr on the quiet street, and he waved as he pulled away and I walked slowly toward the house, listening to the sound of him driving away until it was gone.

Upstairs, I went into the bathroom to wash my face and paused, looking at myself in the mirror—all of me. I had rolled up my sleeves, and there was a tiny smudge of chocolate in the corner of my mouth courtesy of the samples from the chocolatier toward the end of the block. My cheeks were flushed from the wine and the walk up the hill, and my hair looked wild and loose, the curls framing my face. I looked, I thought, happy. I looked free. I looked like someone I would want to know. I looked alive. I didn’t want to give that up.





twenty





MARGIE


   1924




One night after a late dinner, as Margie and Sebastien were winding their slow way through Montparnasse toward the Club, the sky that was fading into darkness turned stormy. A rumble of thunder came from the distance, and then the rain was upon them, with no more warning. It had hardly rained since Margie had arrived. The rain would dare not ruin the perfect beauty of Paris, the way the sunlight fell so golden on the buildings, the shabby hopefulness of the vendors outside the Métro. Even the beggars in Paris had a consummately French style, scarves knotted around their necks, their dirty hair artfully arranged, an insouciance about the way they asked for your spare change, as though they weren’t bothered one way or another whether you gave it to them, and then if you did (which Margie always did), they would half raise an eyebrow and nod in acknowledgment, and only occasionally would they say, in the most blasé way possible, “Merci.” Margie absolutely loved it.

The rain came first with Parisian languor, fat drops with large spaces between them, and then furiously, hurling itself down toward the ground until, in a moment, Margie knew they were going to be drenched. They hurried under the awning of a café that had already closed, squeezing in with the empty tables, chairs stacked on top of them. What had been a beautifully cool evening quickly turned bitter, and Margie began to shiver. Sebastien slipped off his jacket and put it over her shoulders, but it was wet too, and only served to make her colder. A few people ran past, shoulders hunched, newspapers held above their heads, water spraying up from their heels.

As they waited, the rain fell harder, its rhythm on the awning above their heads turning from enthusiastic to threatening. Turning to her, Sebastien said, “Come with me. I live close to here.”

Margie, who was cold and wet and miserable, didn’t think twice. Sebastien took her hand and they ran through the rain, and she soon went from damp to completely drenched. A bus went by, throwing up a sheet of water that splashed over them, shocking and icy, and Margie began to laugh. And then they were at a door and Sebastien fumbled for a key and opened it and they were inside a courtyard, the buildings rising up around them. Above their heads a lantern sputtered in the darkness, and she could see a beautiful garden being beaten by the rain, rose petals scattered onto the stones in the courtyard. “This way,” Sebastien said, and he opened the glass door to the building with another key.

Inside, the floor was perfect squares of creamy marble, and it held a quiet elegance Margie knew meant money. It was both familiar and unfamiliar—she had been surrounded by wealth her entire life, yet it had been months since she had been in a place like this. The ritziest building she had visited in Paris, not including Versailles or the Louvre, was the Libe, and its splendor had been all but swallowed by its new function and, to a larger extent, benign neglect. Surely Sebastien didn’t live here. He was an artist, wasn’t he? His shirts weren’t going threadbare at the collar like René’s, and he always seemed to have enough money for dinner and wine, but she had always thought he was flush from his new success, from the paintings he had sold.