The Light of Paris(76)
When she opened the door, she was startled to find Sebastien standing there as though he had been waiting. He had changed as well, was wearing a sweater and a dry pair of pants, his hair brushed back from his forehead. Self-consciously, Margie put her own hand to her hair, which was, she could feel, beginning to curl wildly as it dried. “Let me take your things,” Sebastien said, reaching for them, and Margie almost handed them over and then remembered her underthings and yanked the bundle back.
“I’ll hang them,” she said, and Sebastien simply shrugged.
“The toilet is just there.” He nodded to the door behind him. “I have turned on the radiator. If you want to hang your clothes, they will dry.”
She hung her clothes, and when she emerged, he had built a fire in the fireplace and moved the sofa toward the hearth. He was sitting in the center of it, leaning forward. When Margie padded into the room, he shifted to one side and patted the place next to him. “Come sit by the fire. I’ve made chocolat chaud.”
Margie sat and gratefully took the cup he handed her, full of steaming hot chocolate, so thick and sweet it was like drinking a melted chocolate bar. The sugar and the heat from the fire made her feel sleepy, and she drew her feet up beneath her and curled into the cushions and sighed happily. “Thank you for inviting me in. And for the clothes.”
“Of course.”
“So do your friends know you’re this rich?” Margie asked again, sipping at her chocolate.
Sebastien sighed exaggeratedly, and then looked over at her in the firelight and saw she was teasing him. “They do not. They know I can afford to pay the bill at cafés sometimes when they are short, but I let them believe it is because I sold a painting at the gallery. When some of them are struggling so much, it seems impolite to speak of it. And of course it would draw a line between us, if they knew. They might treat me differently. Money changes everything. Isn’t that what they say in America?”
“It is,” Margie said sadly. She thought of Mr. Chapman and his awkward proposal, about the hushed conversations between her mother and her aunt about her dowry versus Evelyn’s. “Well, you hardly need so large a dowry with Evelyn,” her mother had said to her aunt, and though Margie had known that was mostly meant to soothe her Aunt Edith, who acted richer than she actually was, it was nonetheless a slight to Margie, and it had made her feel even plainer and dowdier and more hopeless. She thought of how happy she was in Paris on only her tiny salary plus a little from her savings, how much happier than she had ever been at home, where there had been new dresses every season and invitations to the most important homes in Washington and Baltimore and New York, but she also thought of the way she felt now, safe inside an apartment with window glass solid enough to make the thunderous sound of the rain sound like nothing more than a gentle tapping, with a fireplace large enough to warm the whole room, with comfortable furniture and carpets thick as new grass, and she knew while it was exciting to think about throwing away material comforts in search of a romantic asceticism, money could be very nice indeed.
“And what does your family think of your being here?” She had finished the cup of chocolate, and reluctantly, she set it down on the table, half wanting to ask for more but knowing it was so rich she would never be able to drink it. She loved this about France, about how food was made to be more than sustenance, everything she ate was an experience, from the crème br?lée she had eaten at a restaurant when she had first arrived, to the simplest loaves of fresh bread. She often bought a demi-baguette from the corner boulangerie on her way home, and a bit of Brie from the cheesemonger, and if she hurried up to her room quickly enough, the bread would still be steaming when she broke it open, bits of crust falling onto her desk, so warm it would soften the cheese as she pressed them together, eating in pure, hedonistic pleasure.
Pushing his hand back through his hair, Sebastien squinted into the fire. “They think it is a phase. They believe when I have painted for a while, I will be content when I go back to Bordeaux and join the family business. My mother says I can paint the landscape there—it is beautiful enough that I would never have to see anything else.”
Margie’s eyes widened, thinking of the gift Sebastien had for seeing stories and telling them through his paintings. He could capture in square inches of canvas what it took her pages and pages to put onto paper. And then she tried to imagine how many stories were in a landscape, in a vineyard, in the climbing vines and the earth and the burst of ripe grapes. No matter how many, it would not be the same as the unending flow of humanity and its triumphs and tragedies as presented in a city. She tried to imagine Sebastien, who seemed to know everyone in Paris, and who, even if he didn’t actually know them, had never met a stranger, living in the countryside. It seemed as unnatural as the expectations her parents had for her.
“That’s so unfair,” she said softly, not sure whether she was speaking of Sebastien or herself.
“And yet it is fair,” Sebastien said. He had been staring thoughtfully into the fire. After the rush of the night, being out on the streets and then caught in the rain, Margie’s sleepiness was beginning to catch up with her, and she saw a heaviness falling into his eyes as well. “They have always taken care of me. And when I told them I want to live in Paris, to study and to paint, they agreed. They said I could have five years here, before I go back and join them in business.”