The Light of Paris(84)
“It has nothing to do with what I want. It has to do with honoring my family and what they have given me. I have had my time—I have had more time than most people do. I had my time to play and now it is time to work.”
“You said we would spend Christmas together! You said we would go ice skating at the Petit Palais and see the lights on the Champs-élysées. You promised!” Margie knelt in front of Sebastien, wrapped her hands around his, squeezing his fingers tightly, as if she could convince him, make him stay through the sheer force of her desire.
Gently, he lifted her hands to his mouth and kissed each of her fingers in turn. She loved the way he kissed her, the way he treated her, the way he cared for her. She would never find another man like this as long as she lived. He made her feel beautiful, cherished. Her. Sturdy, plain Margie Pearce. With him, she wasn’t that same dull, solid girl. She was Marguerite, an American in Paris, and she spent her days with writers and diplomats, and her evenings with artists. She had been to Harry’s New York Bar and the Casino, she had a lover—a lover who was a painter. She thought of all those girls at her debut, beautiful girls whose lives had seemed full of promise. Now all those beautiful girls were married, stuck on the same merry-go-round of parties and obligations as their mothers, and here she was, in Paris, kneeling at the feet of her French lover. But if he left, who would she be? Would she go back to being Margie Pearce again? She could think of nothing worse.
“Marguerite,” he said softly, and she wanted to weep at the sound of her name on his lips. It would never sound the same when someone else said it. And soon, there would be no one who called her Marguerite at all. She would run out of money and she would have to go home to Washington, and she would eventually be forced to marry one of the suitable men her parents presented to her, and they would call her “Margie” or “dear” with a flat, disinterested accent, instead of calling her “Marguerite” and “mon coeur” with the gentle curl of a French tongue. She would not be a writer anymore, not a real writer; she would go to Temperance League meetings with her mother and her mother’s friends and all their daughters who had been roped into the same cruel joke. And then the daughters would raise their own daughters and deliver them into the same cycle. She wouldn’t have time to write; she wouldn’t have space to dream, and this time in Paris would become nothing more than a memory, insubstantial as smoke, something she would recall, wondering if it had ever really happened at all.
“What if we were to get married?” she asked, with a quick, wild hope, and then, “Oh,” when she saw his expression turn from surprise to something like sadness. “No, I didn’t mean—” she said, and shifted away, as though she were going to stand.
“Stop, stop.” He pulled her back toward him. “It is not about my feelings for you. My feelings for you . . .” He paused, looked away, and she could see him swallow before he gazed at her again, and the green of his eyes, which she was so used to seeing sparkling with life, looked somber and dull. “You know how this works. My parents will have made arrangements for me to marry the daughter of a family with whom we are in business, but Margie, you must not let that happen to you. This is where you are meant to be. Here, in Paris. Writing.”
It took Margie a moment to hear him, really, over the sound of her own shame, and the surety of his rejection. But of course he was right. They had talked of their families, and she knew they came from similar backgrounds. Marrying him and living with his family in Bordeaux would give her exactly the life she had run from—she would be trapped by the same duties, the same formalities as her own mother. And she had seen what happened to the husbands of girls she knew—they became buried under their work, lost themselves to their own pressures. Who said Sebastien wouldn’t lose everything that made him sparkle so brilliantly to the weight of duty, just like the rest of them?
And, if she were being honest, she didn’t want to marry Sebastien. They had never said they loved each other, never talked about the future longer than a few months out. He had made no promises to her, and she had made none to him. The romantic Margie who had danced at her debutante ball years ago would have been shocked by such a pragmatic relationship, could never have conceived of passion without a grand romance, but she wasn’t that Margie anymore, in so many ways.
In fact, since her debut, each month that passed without a proposal had lifted her up. She had felt as though everything around her had been hazy and was now growing clearer. And then when she had come to Paris, she had thought, Yes, this is why. This is where I am supposed to be.
What she knew of marriage did not fit with the way things were in Paris. Marriage was her father’s staid gravity, her mother’s fretful imprisonment. Marriage was rounds of required visits, of household management and parties that never seemed to be any fun. Paris was none of those things. It was bread and cheese for dinner in the Luxembourg Gardens, or a cheap plate at Rosalie’s at ten o’clock at night. Paris was parties lasting until dawn, where you danced until you were breathless and drank until the world itself seemed to have become unmoored, the floor unsteady beneath your feet. Paris was sunrises and sunsets, was art and music and books and the people who made them, unstoppable around you. Paris was endless music and endless joy, and to get married, to change anything at all, would have ruined it.
Except it was being ruined anyway. It was all slipping away from her, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Sebastien was leaving, and she thought she would not be able to endure this city without him. Every time she walked by Les Deux Magots she would remember meeting him, and the food at L’écurie would be tasteless as sawdust if he were not smiling at her across the table, and the tiny afterthoughts of streets would lose their magic, the miracle of stumbling down an alley along the wall of a church at midnight, only to look up and see the stained-glass windows glowing softly above like a benediction, the unexpected joy of ending a late night of dancing by standing outside the window of a boulangerie in the pale morning light, faces pressed to the glass, inhaling the scent of the first baguettes of the day, and there would be no more joy in being lost. Sebastien had opened the city to her and she feared she didn’t have the courage or the strength to live in it without him.