The Light of Paris(82)

twenty-two





MARGIE


   1924




Margie and Sebastien became those lovers she had seen on the streets so often, the kind her mother would have considered completely shameful. They walked hand in hand, and often he lifted hers to his mouth and dropped a gentle kiss on her fingers or the tender skin of her open palm. He bought a bottle of wine and they sat on the banks of the Seine at night, watching the slow movement of boats up and down the river, their lights shimmering onto the dark water until it was impossible to see where the stars ended and the lanterns began. In noisy bars and busy cafés, they sat with their foreheads touching, talking endlessly about art and writing and Paris and America and all the things they knew and could not know, and when their friends rose and announced it was time to move on, to Zelli’s or the Jockey or La Coupole, they nodded and rose too, but instead of following the crowd, they would slip away from the group to return to Sebastien’s apartment and make love and fall asleep in his bed until the sun woke them, naked and new, in the morning.

And everything was perfect, until it wasn’t.

? ? ?

It started with the Libe. Margie went into work one day and Miss Parsons, who was normally—frankly, oddly—cheerful, looked pale and worried. “Bonjour!” Margie said happily, because she had started the day in Sebastien’s arms, and what could be better than that? She hung her coat on the rack by the front door and put her bag and her hat in one of the cubbies behind the desk, preparing to take over Miss Parsons’ position there.

Miss Parsons simply muttered a hello and then quickly looked away, gathering the papers she had been working on and scurrying upstairs to her office. They had been offering classes to French librarians, and for people who worked in libraries they were awfully noisy, always clomping back and forth between the two classrooms upstairs, but that day it was silent, and she heard the sound of Miss Parsons’ quick, efficient steps on the floor above, the closing of her office door, and then nothing else.

Margie shrugged and sat down behind the desk, putting a piece of stationery from the Library War Service—there was reams of it, they’d be using it forever—in the typewriter and starting a letter to her parents, only to interrupt herself to write in her journal at great length about Sebastien. She considered using code, in case anyone else were ever to read it, but who would want to read her lovesick scribblings anyway? Miss Stein came in and asked for help in her usual curmudgeonly way. Margie hardly noticed, moving airily along the shelves, pulling volume after volume until at last the woman retreated, mollified. Margie answered two telephone calls and found the answers they were looking for (the height of the Eiffel Tower, 954 feet; the sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams). It felt as if nothing could disturb her happiness.

And when Miss Parsons called for Margie after lunch, asked her to come upstairs to her office, Margie was so happy she didn’t even think something might be wrong.

“Margie, I have some bad news.”

“Oh?” Margie said. She was still smiling, Miss Parsons’ serious demeanor having failed to immediately crack her good mood.

“The grant we applied for didn’t come through. Well, it came through, but it wasn’t as much as we were hoping.”

“Oh no,” Margie said, with the detached, polite disappointment of someone who has just heard bad news that in no way impacts them. “How much did they give?”

“We asked for fifty thousand dollars.” She stopped, hesitated. “They only gave us seven thousand.”

“Goodness. That is disappointing.”

“It is.” Miss Parsons ran her fingertips along the edge of her desk, then put her hands in her lap. “The thing is, Margie, one of the things we had earmarked that grant money for was your salary.”

The smile finally faded from Margie’s face, and a slow, cracking chill spread from her feet up to her heart, like a river icing over in the winter. “What do you mean?”

Miss Parsons, to her credit, looked utterly heartbroken. “It means, Margie, I have to let you go. The Libe’s funding is so tight, and you’ve really been absolutely invaluable. It’s just . . . we simply can’t afford to keep you.”

“I thought there was a grant just for my position,” Margie said, as if Miss Parsons might have miscalculated.

“Yes, well.” Miss Parsons shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Things have been tight, and we’ve borrowed against it.”

“But I thought the library was doing so well. The classes for the French librarians, and the grant from the Carnegies and the membership is up quite a bit. I signed two people up myself yesterday. . . .”

Miss Parsons was shaking her head, looking at Margie with an expression somehow both guilty and sympathetic. “It’s much bigger, unfortunately. Our costs are so large and our support now that the war is over is so small. And if I could keep you on, Margie, I would. I would in a heartbeat. The way you’ve taken to Paris, the work you’ve done here, your attitude—you’re so helpful. We just can’t afford it now. I’ll give you a reference anywhere you want to go.”

“Sure,” Margie said dully. Over Miss Parsons’ shoulder she could see out the window into the yard behind the Libe, and beyond that the grand roof of one of the mansions along the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It glittered in the sunshine, winking at her cheerfully, mindless of her tragedy.