The Light of Paris(83)

After Miss Parsons had dismissed her, Margie dragged herself back downstairs to the desk. The letter to her parents still sat, half typed, in the typewriter, and she pulled it out, folding it and putting it into her bag. She would finish it by hand later. The cheerful clack of the keys right now would be too much to bear. Her joyous journal entry, also half finished, seemed silly and inconsequential now. She would have to leave Paris. She would have to leave Sebastien. She calculated frantically the amount of money she still had. Oh, she shouldn’t have bought that new hat, she should have insisted she and Dorothy go to Rosalie’s for dinner instead of having tea at Rumpelmayer’s—it was far too dear.

Only what was the point of being in Paris if she hadn’t enjoyed herself? And she really had been so conservative. She had gone to the Opéra Comique twice, and to the Palais Garnier to see Parsifal only once, though she could have lingered in that incredible building for hours, would have been delighted to go every night just to stand in the Grand Foyer, to see the spectacle of the paintings and the carving and the gilt-edged furniture and the way it shone everywhere you looked. The opera was a necessity, wasn’t it? And other than that, she ate at the artists’ cafés, and Sebastien bought her dinner sometimes, and when she ate on her own she stuck to bread and cheese and once, because she couldn’t resist their perfection, a lovely carton of strawberries from the market on rue Mouffetard.

All the regretful accounting in the world couldn’t save her now.

She finished the day, apparently so sad even grumpy Miss Stein seemed concerned, and walked home. She would still have a few more weeks of work at the Libe, but that night it already felt like the last time, and she was prematurely nostalgic for the route she had grown to love, past the Place de la Concorde and the Gare d’Orsay, along the busy Boulevard Raspail and through the narrow alleys behind the churches and the shops, and then to the wide and welcoming quiet of Montparnasse, turning the corner by La Closerie des Lilas, impervious even to the rich smell of the lilacs that always reached out to her, welcoming her home.

Instead of turning down rue de Chevreuse to the Club, however, she kept walking until she came to Sebastien’s, waiting outside until someone came out the door, and then slipping into the courtyard as it closed. She nodded to the caretaker, who was trimming back the roses reaching so eagerly up the wall toward the sun, and he paused and waved back, his shears gleaming in the sunlight.

She buzzed up to Sebastien’s apartment and his voice came through the speaker, tinny and blurry. “Allo?” he asked, distracted.

“It’s Margie,” she said. She couldn’t even bring herself to use his name for her, couldn’t call herself Marguerite. She didn’t feel much like a Marguerite just then. She felt like Margie, plucked and deflated, brought down to earth.

He buzzed her up, and she rushed up the stairs, sure seeing him would bring her some relief. But when he opened the door, he looked even worse than she did. He looked, she realized with horror, like Miss Parsons had, right before she had told Margie they would have to let her go.

“Come in, come in.” He looked as though he had been painting; there was a streak of blue in his hair and he wore an old shirt with holes in the elbows and paint spattered over the buttons, but when she walked inside, mostly what she noticed was the trunk lying open in the middle of the floor, and the stack of paintings against the wall.

“What’s going on?” she asked. She was still so much in shock over Miss Parsons’ news she couldn’t imagine anything worse, and still, the hard rock of her stomach seemed to be falling lower.

“Please, sit down,” Sebastien said, taking her hands and leading her to the sofa. The same sofa where she had first kissed him, where, after they had made love for the first time on the floor, he had tenderly wrapped a blanket around them both, and they had lain together, their bodies warm, curled around each other as if they had been designed to do so, watching the fire until they fell asleep there.

Sitting, she could see down the hall to the bedroom, where another trunk had been opened, clothes laid along the edges. “Sebastien,” she said, and her voice was rising into what she could clearly identify as panic, “what’s going on?”

“Shh, shh,” he said, stroking her hands. “It is time. I am leaving Paris—I have to go home.”

“You are home!” Margie looked frantically around the apartment, as though she might have mistaken it for someplace else. No, these were the same rooms she had been in so many times. She knew the smell of it—the smell of him—paint and dust and the scent of the fire.

“Home to my family. I told you my time here was limited.”

“You can say no, can’t you? My parents tell me to come home all the time, but I don’t listen,” Margie said. She heard the futility of her own argument.

Sebastien was leaning forward, elbows resting on his thighs, head hanging low. He shook his head slowly and then looked at her. His eyes, his beautiful green eyes, the eyes she had fallen for the moment she had seen them for the first time, alive with the excitement and energy that was Sebastien, were dark and serious. “I cannot turn against my family. It is a duty.”

Margie threw her hands up and rose from the couch, pacing back and forth. “Duty. Responsibility. I’m sick of hearing those words. We’re young! Why should we have to settle down just because they did? Don’t you want to stay in Paris, Sebastien? Don’t you want to stay here and paint and see the Surrealists’ Bureau open and go to the Olympic Games with me? Don’t you want to paint? How can you turn your back on your art?”