The Light of Paris(91)

Sometimes I watched him, eating dinner or cursing at a game on the television, and wondered who he was, who he really was. For a long time I had assumed I was the only one with a deeper heart I kept hidden, the only one with private wishes. But of course we all have secrets. If I had not known that before, my grandmother’s diaries had illuminated it for me. Imagine carrying the secret she had—her child belonged to a man other than her husband. I had a million questions I wanted to ask, and no one to ask them to. Why had Robert Walsh agreed to raise my mother as his own? Had my grandmother ever told Sebastien? Did my own mother know? I didn’t know how to bring up the topic. What if she really didn’t know? She’d said she hadn’t read my grandmother’s journals, and given their chilly relationship, I wasn’t surprised. And I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news to her.

I buried my questions and my confusion and the endless rounds of self-doubt in work. I doubled my hours at the Stabler Museum, working in the gift shop as well as leading tours. I went to committee meetings and when I caught myself doodling in the margins of my notes, I would force myself to raise my hand and volunteer for something, which was how I ended up on the registration committee for the library’s annual fundraiser and responsible for finding speakers for the next three Women’s Club meetings. At first I felt proud of those jobs, and I understood why my mother loved what she did. I had a purpose, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

While I surprised myself with my own efficiency, my own competence, all of those tasks didn’t solve my problems. So I dug in harder, I laughed louder at Phillip’s colleagues’ jokes, and I pasted a smile on my face when I worked the registration desk at the Stabler auction, handing out name tags and bidding numbers with such aggressive cheer I think I scared a few people.

And none of it made me feel any better. I ate antacids like candy, lining up the empty containers in a kitchen cabinet where they stared at me accusatorily every time I went to get a plate.

I tried to remember a time when I had been wholly happy, outside of those few weeks in Magnolia. A time when I had felt connected to what I was doing, and was heartbroken to think of how few of those there were. Volunteering at the Stabler. Living alone in Magnolia before I was married.

And before that, in school. I had painted sets and cut backdrops, watching something emerge from nothing, and then seeing the magic of theater transform it into something different altogether. I had made signs for Ashley’s elections, lettering her name over and over again until I knew it better than my own. I had helped make the mosaic that spread its broken, glittering way across the school’s front hall, pressing glass and tiny ceramic squares into plaster again and again until calluses formed on the tips of my fingers and my hands were sticky with mortar. I had helped lay out the art and literary magazine, bent carefully over the pages with a knife sharp as a scalpel to cut away the wayward edges, flipping through the order again, looking for the story it told. I had done things that felt like a part of me, not like wearing a Halloween mask that made it hot and hard to breathe underneath.

One afternoon, when the sun had shone high and bright in the sky long enough to warm the entire city, people carrying their coats instead of wearing them, turning their faces toward the sky as they walked, blinking into the light like moles, unsure and slightly fearful, as though they had never seen it before, I found myself wandering through a street full of warehouses in Bucktown, a questionable neighborhood teetering on trendy. In a clean window on the bottom floor of a wide, low, brick building was a sign reading: Artist’s Studio for Rent.

I remembered Miss Pine’s invitation to the painting class, and wondered if this was the same place. And something inside me made me stop, made me press my hand against the new glass doors and push my way inside.

Inside, the building was bright, the wood floors pale and scuffed, sunlight striking across them in wide, cheerful squares. The muffled sounds of a radio and voices floated down from upstairs, and the floors groaned gently as people moved somewhere in the building. Beyond the entrance, which was being used as a gallery, the walls hung with photographs, was a long hallway of doors I presumed were studios. One of them was labeled Office, and when I knocked, a man poked his head out, keeping the door mostly closed as though he were afraid I might attack him.

“Yes?” he asked. I couldn’t help thinking of the man at the gates to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, and had to cover my mouth briefly to hide my smile.

“I saw the sign? About the studio for rent?” I had no idea why I was talking like a teenager, full of half questions and knock-kneed nervousness.

“Yeah. It’s on the third floor. You want to look?”

“Sure.” Was he not wearing any pants, and that’s why he’d only stick his head out?

He disappeared for a moment, closing the door fully, and then reappeared, thrusting his arm out and dropping a key into my hand. “Number 314. Stairs are that way.” He pointed to the opposite end of the hall. “Bring the key back when you’re done.” And then he closed the door again, but not before I caught a solid view of a pair of khakis. Whatever his secret was, it wasn’t pantslessness.

Passing down the hall, I peered through a door with a large glass window in it to see a classroom. This must have been the place. It was almost as I had pictured it—light and airy, easels and stools waiting, a raised platform at the far end where a teacher or a model could stand. Putting my hand against the window, I leaned in, my breath forming a hot circle on the glass. I pictured Miss Pine jingling her way through the room. I pictured myself sitting on the edge of a stool, my feet hooked under one of the bars, my brush moving over a canvas, filling in the emptiness with everything I saw and didn’t see. There might be music as we painted, and bursts of conversation and laughter to punctuate the silence of creation, and I would feel a part of something in a way I never did no matter how many people surrounded me.