The Light of Paris (21 page)

Numb, I climbed the stairs and walked down the hall to my bedroom, where I sat on the bed, bringing my knees up to my chest, curling in on myself like a pill bug.

What I had said to my mother I hadn't said to anyone, not even to myself. Phillip and I shouldn't be married anymore. Should never have gotten married. Phillip had been right—we should get a divorce.

I felt myself starting to cry again, and pushed the tears back down. My grandmother's journals were stacked by my bed, and to distract myself, I picked up the one I had been reading.

I blamed Phillip for my decision to stop painting, but I had let it happen. I just had nothing to say. My ideas, my emotions had dried up, the flood of ideas that used to rush through me now a still, shallow lake. But as I turned the pages of my grandmother's notebooks, sat with her in the cloistered, oppressive parlor of her parents' house, walked the streets of Paris with her, both alone and terrified and thrilled to be on her own, I felt something inside me shifting, felt the emotions that had frozen inside me with each successive winter thawing.

I often looked at the women around me and wondered if any of them had dreams. Of course they did—it wasn't fair of me to continue to assume they didn't just because of how they looked on the outside. It's so easy for those dreams to get run over by other people's ideas about what we should do, or to be eroded, little by little, by the day-to-day drudgery of living, or to lose heart when faced with the long, hopeless struggle between where we are and who we want to be. But I didn't want to succumb. I wanted to not go gentle into that good night, I wanted to sound my barbaric yawp, I wanted to live deliberately. And I wanted to know why my grandmother, after all she had done in Paris, hadn't.

“I heard you had a good time at Zelli's,” Sebastien said. He had been waiting outside the Libe, leaning on the wall across the street, below the high fence guarding the president's residence. When Margie appeared, he crushed his cigarette under his toe and sauntered toward her.

“News travels fast,” Margie said. She pretended she wasn't pleased to see him, continuing to slide on her coat, smoothing down her hair, then slipping on her hat.

“Paris is a small town.” She loved the way he said
Paris
, with precisely the right rush over the
r
and the gentle softening of the end—
Paree
, not
Pear-is
. She loved the way he said everything, really. He had a slow drawl, so different from the rush of the Parisian accent, and Margie imagined if he were American, he might be from Georgia, all peach trees and slow-moving air. “Did you have a good time?”

Unable to keep a smile from her face, Margie grinned. “I did. I'd never thought I would enjoy going to a nightclub, but I danced all night long. It was absolutely worth the awful blisters I have.”

Sebastien grinned back at her. Without discussing it, they had begun walking, turning away from the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and passing the other way, until they were in the park. The glass roof of the Grand Palais glowed ahead of them, as though it held fire inside. Moving into the
evening, Margie marveled at how the light changed, growing dimmer and softer as the hour grew later, the city inhaling its inhabitants back into their homes and then exhaling them onto the streets again for the evening, for strolls, or dinner at restaurants with tables filling the sidewalks so people had to walk down the middle of the street for blocks at a time.

They walked without discussing their destination, talking about Zelli's, and the Libe, and Paris, and the future and the past, the city unfurling beneath their feet. They stopped on the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris, made of pale stone with bastions like Juliet's balcony, and they looked out over the water, the boats passing by, the people walking on the banks, some of them in a hurry to get home, others walking slowly, enjoying the water and the warmth of the fading sun on their faces. Crossing over to the Left Bank, they passed the Saint-Michel fountain, children dancing under its eager spray, behind them Notre-Dame laid out against the sky, the stained-glass windows glowing from the inside, and Margie thought Paris would never look so beautiful again. She had thought they might walk toward home, but Sebastien led her a different way, along some streets leading diagonally to a neighborhood close to her first hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

“Where are we going?” Margie asked as they tripped down a quiet, narrow street, the storefronts lined with art dealers and antique stores.

“I'd like to show you some of my paintings,” Sebastien said, with the slightest touch of shyness in his voice. It seemed so unlike him, and yet it made her like him all the more to know there was vulnerability in him after all. “Would you like to see them?”

“Of course,” Margie breathed. For so long, Margie had thought of art as something that happened only in secret, a night-blooming flower, and to be invited to see his work felt as intimate as a kiss.

Sebastien stopped in front of a store, the window and door painted a radiant royal blue. Behind the main window was a sculpture, bathed in the soft light of early evening, the shape of a woman emerging from gray
stone, her back arched in delicious pleasure, a cat stretching in the sunlight. Opening the door, Sebastien gestured for Margie to enter, and she stepped into the silence. He followed behind, the door closing quietly in his hands. Underneath their feet, the floors, wooden, scuffed, and ancient, squeaked in the stillness. “
C'est moi,
” Sebastien called to the empty air. “
Sebastien.
”

Someone responded from the back, a man's voice, muffled so Margie couldn't understand him. In any case, no one emerged.

“This gallery is very famous,” Sebastien explained. Do you know Impressionism?”

“No.” Margie shook her head, feeling ashamed. At home, she would have been considered well educated, even cultured. Here she was reminded again and again of all the things she did not know, of how much there was to learn, to know, to explore, to find.

“Come.” Sebastien reached out his hand, and Margie slipped hers into his. Touching him felt so different from dancing with the other artists at the club. His hand on hers made her stomach flip in a pleasant way, and she pushed down a girlish smile. He led her to another wall, the sun falling close enough to the painting to illuminate, though not to fade it. “Come closer,” he said, and they moved closer, close enough to breathe on the canvas. So near, the image was a soggy blur; the colors fading into one another as if the painting had been left out in the rain. Nevertheless, there was a warmth and a glow to it Margie found herself drawn to, the particular orange of a sunrise, a blue flowing like water.

“Do you see it?” he asked. Margie, somewhat ashamed, shook her head.

“I really don't know much about painting,” she apologized, sure she was disappointing him.

Sebastien smiled. “This is the joy of art. You do not need to know it to embrace it. Step back with me.”

Together, they took three long steps back, and the picture came into
focus. It was as though Margie had been looking at it through a rain-spattered window and it had suddenly become sunny and clear. The orange glow was now clearly a sunrise, the blue obviously water. What had looked like smudges and darkness up close now looked like boats caught in a morning mist. “I see it! I see it!” she said, caught up in childish delight, as though she had solved an unsolvable puzzle, and then she was ashamed again at her silliness. It was exactly the kind of thing Evelyn would have been embarrassed by, pretended she didn't know Margie for. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I see the image now. The boats on the water.” She pointed as she spoke. “The sunrise. That's why it's so unclear, isn't it? Because there's morning fog.”

“
Oui
,
oui
,” Sebastien said, clearly not embarrassed by Margie's outburst. “Painting is so much about the light. Come, here, see this one.”

He took her close to a painting, this one with tiny smudges of green and white and pink and purple, as though paint had been splattered and then smeared across the canvas. But when they stepped back, Margie saw it—in the foreground, a profusion of wildflowers, stretching back, a field of grasses and flowers and trees. “It's amazing,” she breathed. “It hardly looks like anything, and then it becomes so clear. Look at them.” She pointed to a blur of darkness toward the back, so formless and yet so obviously two people standing amidst the greenery.

“Our eyes do much of the work.” He touched his face as he spoke, gesturing to his own eye, and Margie watched his movements, those impossibly long, slender fingers, the fine bones of his face. He was like a painting himself, all perfect lines and balanced symmetry, the warmth of his skin and the gold in his hair a perfect match for the light coming through the gallery's front window. “It is a miracle, yes? The Impressionists know precisely how to balance clarity and color so we will see something that is not clear at all.”

He walked her through the gallery, pointing at the paintings that had come between the Impressionists and his work, and though Margie
could not have named the progression of styles, she could see it happening from one painting to the next, images blurring and then refocusing, growing clear and then unclear again in new ways. Figures grew square and folded in on themselves as though they had been caught in a broken mirror, or stayed as clear as the lines of a portrait while turning nonsensical—landscapes filled with trees covered in human eyes, a woman's ball gown with a basket beneath it like a hot-air balloon, both familiar and unsettling.

“Do you like this one?” Sebastien asked. He stopped in front of a painting of a woman dressed for a party in a pink dress, the skirt falling into uneven, loose lines at the bottom, so you could almost see it fluttering. She wore a long rope of pearls and her hair was shingled fashionably close to her head. Though she wasn't looking at the artist, it was clear she was aware of being watched, and she was used to it. She wasn't quite beautiful; her nose was too strong and her eyes too wide, and she was broad-shouldered and turned in such a way that she took up nearly the entire frame. There were none of the mind-bending mirror-folds of some of the other paintings, where it looked more like the subject had been folded and refolded like paper, but neither were her angles entirely clear, and her edges were soft, as though she were in motion. A curious feeling of jealousy settled in Margie's chest.

“I do. She's beautiful. And the painting is almost . . . alive. It's like she knows I'm looking at her, but she doesn't want to look back.”

“This is mine,” Sebastien said proudly. “I am glad you like it.”

“This is yours?” Margie breathed, and she turned back to the painting, looking at it again, now less as a piece of art and more a link to its creator. She wondered what she could learn about Sebastien from this—who was the woman and what was their relationship that she refused to look at him? And how did he know her form so precisely, the shape of her under the dress, the way it fell on her body? Margie blushed to think of it, and then called herself silly—the woman was fully dressed, after all. And
she wasn't classically beautiful, maybe Sebastien saw something in her, maybe artists saw beauty differently, maybe he saw Margie differently.

“I love it. What do you call it?”

“The title?
A Portrait of Cécile
. Come, see this one too.” Stepping toward the painting beside it, he waved her over and Margie followed. He was clearly proud of his work, and she was glad she responded to it, glad she saw his talent. He was, surprisingly, her best friend in Paris, though her mother would have been scandalized that she regularly stepped out with a young man, just the two of them, but her mother wouldn't have understood anything about this place, this life. Margie hardly understood it herself. If she had told her parents about Zelli's, about the cafés and the Surrealists and the bars, they would have thought it wild. Depraved, even. And here it was all of an evening. The rules were different in Paris. The rules were different when you were free and the strange evening light of Paris worked its magic on you. Margie was different in Paris. She felt it, she saw it when she looked in the mirror or caught her own eye in a shop window as she passed. Her face looked different, her cheekbones higher, her eyes wider, her collarbone sharp and clean above the neckline of her dresses. And she felt lighter, as though whatever had tied her to the ground in America had been loosened.

“This one I call
Summer Ball
.” The canvas was wide, long, more than six feet on its side, Margie guessed, a panorama, a horizon, but instead of being filled with a landscape, there were a hundred figures as if at a dance. It was outside; Margie could see trees in the background, some well-behaved bushes, and a row of tables filled with people sitting together. She recognized the gold and the purple of a Paris summer evening. And miraculous as it was, every one of the people in the painting seemed to have his or her own story. Each pair of figures its own tableau. This one a couple who had just met, their bodies held apart, barely turning toward each other, beginning to open their secrets. This pair deeply in love, barely an inch of space between them, though there was plenty of
room on the dance floor, eyes closed, cheek to cheek, as if no one else existed—Margie could almost see them swaying gently, more slowly than the music—for them the music didn't matter at all. These two a couple married for many years and unhappy, these two a couple married for many years and still very much in love. A couple being forced into marriage, a couple with a great sadness, a couple with a delightful secret to keep. She couldn't stop looking at the painting, from face to face, reading their stories. “It's like a novel,” she said at last, her voice barely a breath.

“Do you think so?” Sebastien asked, and she could tell he was excited by it, glad she had seen the stories he had created.

“It is,” Margie said, and she pointed out the couples as she told him what she saw, the relationships and histories and futures represented so carefully with the strokes of his brush.

And then, much to her shock, Sebastien reached out and hugged her with a delighted glee. It was over in a moment, but Margie thought she might live in that moment forever. The scratch of the fabric of his jacket against her cheek, his arms around her, the slightest roughness of his skin against her forehead, and the smell of him, coffee and paint and something wild and comforting, like sun-warmed grass. “You have made me so happy. I have been working on this painting for a year. To tell so many stories in one painting—I thought it was too difficult, but I had to try it. You are a writer, this is simple for you. It is much harder for me to have so many ideas at once and then to make them clear in a painting. But you see it.”