The Light of Paris (16 page)

“Do you know anything about the Libe?” Miss Parsons asked. Margie had assumed she was a Miss; there was no wedding ring on her finger, though she was a good ten years older than Margie. She was confident and pretty and efficient, and modern without being inappropriate, and Margie wanted to sit down and sigh for the longing of wanting to be like her.

“Not really,” Margie admitted. Should she? Libraries were glorious places that gave you all the books you ever could read. What else was there to know?

“
Atrum post bellum, ex libris lux
,” Miss Parsons said, as though it were an incantation. Margie, who had fallen asleep in Latin class more than she had stayed awake, wondered if it were. “Do you speak Latin?”

“I'm afraid not.” Margie mentally kicked herself for snoozing through Miss Tappan's lessons on declension. It was just that the grammar had been so exhausting, and she had never thought she would need it, not really.

Miss Parsons didn't seem to mind. “‘After the darkness of war, the light of books.' That's our motto. The American Library in Paris,” she said, settling a stack of papers in front of her and stamping them firmly as she spoke, “was founded in 1920 to house the one-point-three million volumes sent by the Library War Service for the U.S. troops in France. Our purposes are to memorialize the American Expeditionary Force in France, to promote understanding and knowledge of America, and to
provide an example of American library methods to the librarians of Europe.” Miss Parsons had delivered this entire speech without even looking at Margie, who had perched herself on the edge of one of the chairs in front of the desk, but here she interrupted her paperwork and looked up. “Do you know anything about library methods?” she asked, with rather more interest and hope than she had expressed in Margie's Latin skills.

Margie, who was more and more certain she was failing this interview—was it an interview?—miserably, shook her head. “I was an English major,” she said, and then, with genuine enthusiasm, “I really love books!” as though that might make up for her failings.

Miss Parsons only smiled kindly at her. “That's a good start. In any case, we've now got hundreds of members, and while it looks quiet at the moment, it rarely is. We're open twelve hours a day on weekdays and eight hours on Sundays, and just taking care of the people who come in to use the facilities can be a full-time job, let alone cataloging and managing the collection. Your position”—she said this so casually, as though Margie's hiring were a sure thing, and Margie's heart rose a little bit—“is a temporary one, funded by a grant from one of our more generous patrons. It's meant to be focused on some projects we have in the archives, but we're always short-handed, so you'd be doing all kinds of work. The archives, certainly, and working the circulation and reference desk”—she paused her stamping again to pat the desk at which she sat—“and doing whatever needs to be done. We're rather all hands on deck here.”

In her mind, Margie was already sitting behind that desk, stamping papers with the same practiced, efficient hand as Miss Parsons, offering the same confident, gentle smile to patrons, helping the man at the table in the one room locate some reference materials and recommending new novels to the two women reading in the other. She was discovering treasures in the archives, presenting them proudly to Miss Parsons, “Look, a first edition of Twain,” she might say, or “Do you suppose this
is a letter from Emily Dickinson?” She was walking confidently down the street toward the library in her new hat, and her clothes looked much more flattering in her mind than they ever had in reality.

“Is that all right, Margie?”

Margie blinked, pulling herself out of the fantasy in her mind. “I'm sorry, Miss Parsons, could you repeat the question?” she asked.

“Might I ask what you are doing in Paris?” Miss Parsons asked.

“Well, I was supposed to be over here with a cousin of mine, but she has decided to travel alone. And I couldn't bear to leave Paris after only a few days.” It sounded more than plausible, and Margie was half tempted to believe it herself. It had the unfortunate side effect of making Evelyn look better, but it also made Margie look less tragic. Miss Parsons put down her stamp and shuffled the papers into an orderly pile. Then she crossed her arms on the desk and leaned forward, looking at Margie more carefully now, taking in her old-fashioned hair underneath the new hat, her wide eyes and too-round cheeks, her dress, which had been sewn for her but, like all Margie's clothes, had turned out ill-fitting anyway. Finally, as though she had seen something that she approved of, Miss Parsons clapped her hands together lightly.

“And how does your family feel about your being here alone?” she asked.

Margie hesitated, only for a moment, yet long enough for Miss Parsons to nod slightly, as though confirming something in her mind. “They'd prefer I come home, but I just couldn't leave, Miss Parsons. I just got here! And there is so much to explore.”

“Well, please tell your parents when you write that I will anoint myself your official chaperone and make sure no harm comes to you.” She folded her hands as though her pronouncement had settled the matter. “Now, the salary is only five hundred francs a month, I know that's not much, but I presume your family will help support you?”

Margie swallowed hard. Five hundred francs would cover her room
and board at the Club, but she would have to be so very careful. Still, it was worth it. It might be romantic, even, living so close to the bone. “I'll get by,” she said.

“Fantastic,” Miss Parsons said. “Working here is an opportunity to be part of something great. You said you like to read, don't you? You'll meet all the great American writers in Paris—Edith Wharton is one of our founding trustees, you know, and there are writers in and out of here all the time.”

Margie, who had read all of Edith Wharton's books with an eye both sympathetic and deeply envious, could have broken out into applause. “That's fine, Miss Parsons. When can I start?”

“How about tomorrow?” she asked. “Oh, here's Dorothy. You'll be working together.” A young woman, a few years older than Margie, had come down the stairs, and Miss Parsons waved her over. As frumpy as Margie had felt next to Miss Parsons, it was nothing compared to how she felt next to Dorothy, who was not only tall and slender and chicly dressed, but even more beautiful than Evelyn, though hopefully far less self-involved.

Miss Parsons introduced them and excused herself, hurrying up the stairs, and Dorothy sat down in Miss Parsons' place, leaning forward and resting her head gracefully on her hand. “So what brings you to the Libe?”

“I need a job,” Margie said, and then added hurriedly, in case she sounded too desperate, “and I love to read.”

“Me too!” Dorothy said, with a level of excitement usually reserved for discovering that what you had in common was an amusingly drinky relation, or a rare allergy, instead of a passion for books. “You'll love working here. We're run off our feet, but being able to get your mitts on any book you like is fabulous. Have you read anything good lately?”

Margie, sure this was a test, hesitated. She ought to name something serious, oughtn't she? Something to impress Dorothy, who probably read terribly complicated things and discussed them with terribly
complicated people. “
The Decline of the West
?” She'd seen her father reading it. It had come in two volumes and looked completely exhausting.

“Oh.” Dorothy sounded disappointed. “I'm afraid my tastes are a little more lowbrow. I've just finished
Flaming Youth
. I know, I'm so behind, but it's delicious. As scandalous as everyone says.”

“I loved
Flaming Youth
!” Margie exclaimed, rather too loudly for a library. She'd absolutely devoured the book from cover to cover in a single afternoon, hiding between the stacks of her library back home. It had seemed so unfair not to have anyone to talk about it with—her mother would have been shocked to find out Margie had read something about girls so fast and forward. She might have been shocked to know anyone would even write such a thing. And all the women Margie knew would only admit to reading instructive, improving books. Being able to talk to someone about the books she actually cared about, the stories she loved, filled Margie with a frothy giddiness that made her shake a little inside. She leaned forward. “Have you read
The Sheik
?”

Dorothy sighed dreamily. “I have. I saw the movie first, and was picturing Valentino the whole time. Though I'll admit, I never thought they'd have a happily ever after.”

“Why not?”

“They were so different. And she was so stubborn, at least at first. Personally, I wouldn't mind being kidnapped by a sheik and living out in the desert in the lap of luxury. So exotic. I might even trade Paris for it.”

“But they had to end up together,” Margie said, somewhat confused. “It was true love. And true love conquers all, doesn't it?”

Dorothy looked at her thoughtfully, as though she had said something deeply controversial. Finally, when Margie was about to start babbling to fill the awkward silence, Dorothy spoke. “I suppose it does.”

What had my grandmother done when her life hadn't suited her? When she saw the road ahead of her and realized she didn't want to be on it? She'd gone to Paris. And what was I doing? Lying in my childhood bed, eating a stash of stale Christmas candy I had found in a drawer downstairs, and avoiding my life.

I looked out the window of my bedroom, a dormer, like the ones my grandmother had in Paris, except hers had held a view of the Eiffel Tower and mine a view of the Hoopers' back yard. I was sitting on my bed, pillows stacked behind me, my knees drawn up to hold the notebook for easy reading. If I closed my eyes and inhaled, I could smell my mother's rose garden, and I could almost imagine it was the scent of the roses in the garden at the American Girls' Club, and I was my grandmother, seventy-five years ago, the thrill of adventure and freedom and youth beating in my chest.

Okay, so I wasn't going to go to Paris in the next few hours, but I had endangered my marriage in order to stay here. Was this really the best I could do?

Reading my grandmother's description of Sebastien's hands, I remembered the smudge of paint on Miss Pine's finger, and how, long ago, my own fingernails always had a thin U of paint around the cuticles, no matter how much I scrubbed. There was always paint somewhere on
me—a smudge of yellow gluing a lock of my hair together, a drop of blue below my eyes like an errant beauty mark, a stray stroke on my skin where I had let the brush fall as I stepped back to look at the canvas. It was as though art had claimed me, made me its own, and I would bear witness to that passion whether I wanted to or not.

But now I could hardly remember the last time I had painted something. Though I could feel the weight of a brush in my hand, smell the slick, soapy scent of the paint, recall the ache in my muscles when I worked for hours, the strange feeling of time disappearing in a slow, slippery drawl as I slid into the picture, I couldn't remember the last time I had actually done it. My interest in art was charming to Phillip insofar as it made him look more cultured, but when we had first been married, I had mentioned making some space in the condo to paint, and he had refused. Phillip would have objected to the mess, the smell, the distraction. There was no place for my easel, my canvases, he had said.

But here, there was plenty of room.

I padded down the hallway barefoot. My mother was out in her garden, the contractors working up in the attic, and the house was quiet around me as I moved down the stairs, the memory of which ones squeaked coming back to me, as though I were a teenager again, insomnia-struck, sneaking down to the basement to paint. In my adolescent dreams, when I grew up I would have a light-filled studio, dazzling white, like my grandmother's room in Paris, full of air and light to illuminate my paintings, bring a brilliance to them that I never could in the basement of my parents' house. Somewhere along the way, that dream had disappeared.

How is it possible things that are so important to us when we are young somehow fade away? If you had asked me when I was in high school to give up painting, I would have laughed. It would have been like surrendering my heart. And yet I had given it up. There had been no grand ceremony, no renunciation, but it had happened nonetheless, in a
small, sad way, a gradual distancing, until one day you might have asked me to stop painting and I would have been struck by its absence. All these things we hold close when we are young, when our emotions roar so loudly the only way to make it through is to live in the voices of other people's hearts, in music loud enough to drown out the wail of our own confusion, in art painted on canvases large enough to capture the whirl of chaos inside us or small enough to fill with the infinite details that explain us, in dance, in poetry, in theater, in art, how do we lose them? Why?

But as I opened the door to the basement and the smell of it rushed up to meet me, filled with more memories than a thousand Parisian rose gardens, something cracked open inside me and I felt young and wild and aching again.

The stairs were the same: wooden and creaking under my weight, with black rubber treads on each step, rough against my bare feet. Nothing had changed in the basement for years; I wondered if my mother ever even came down here. There was a shed in the back for her gardening tools, and most anything valuable was kept in the attic, and all that was here was what had been here for as long as I could remember: two armchairs and a sofa, all in need of reupholstering, old wooden tennis rackets in frames, a croquet set, stacks of cardboard boxes that looked as though they had been packed for a move and then never been opened, now sagging under each other's weight.

And there, in the corner, between two windows that spread shafts of light across the floor like pathways, was my easel. This was where I had painted during high school and college, and when I had moved out, I had bought all new things and left these here. The walls were cinder block, and I had made an attempt to paint a mural on them at some point, which was barely visible now, faded in the damp. Leaning against those walls were a dozen canvases, a few blank, most of them painted. What had happened to the rest of my paintings, my drawings? I must have produced hundreds of them. I had a vague memory of bringing
some things down here for storage before I got married, but this couldn't be all of them. Had I simply thrown them away, confident there would always be more, I would always make more?

I flipped through the canvases against the wall. A still life, where I had clearly been trying to master the play of light and the prismatic translucence of a jug of water; a landscape, where I had taught myself perspective. Neither of them exactly good, neither total disasters either. An abstract painting in red and yellow, blocky stripes made with a wide, flat brush, trailing out like vapor toward the edges of the canvas as the paint had run out. I peered at that one for a while, trying to remember what I had wanted to capture. I had never been any good at abstract art, not even when I had learned to understand it, to read it.

Finally, two canvases I remembered, that worked—one, a painting of a corner of my parents' attic. A desk pushed against a window with an ancient typewriter set in the center of it, one of the keys permanently pressed down, a paper slipped over the roll, as though someone had only stepped away for a moment, mid-thought, and would return to finish what they were writing. Whatever I had been searching for in that jug of water I had found here; outside the clear glass of the window there was the colorful blur of my mother's garden, and the sunbeams fell across the floor, illuminating the dust in the air. A spill of photographs spread across the table like a hand of cards, a small box sat on its corner waiting to be opened. Even as I looked at it, I felt the urge to rush upstairs and explore the attic, to look for more of my grandmother's books, to find photos of her when she had been young and in Paris, before she had married my grandfather, to look for more notebooks to see if she had kept writing after she had gotten married, to find the person she had wanted to be underneath the person she had become.

Instead, I flipped to the last painting. It was a self-portrait, me in my debutante dress, sitting in a window seat at the country club, looking out into the night. Behind me, there was a full dance floor, a blur of tuxedos
and ball gowns. Ahead of me, there was only the silent night, and I was caught in between. It was a frank portrait, so honest I was surprised I had had the stomach to draw it, my hair beginning to fall and escape its tight and elegant updo, a fold of flesh on my side pressing out against the white silk, my face blank and plain in the dim light, away from the brilliance of the room behind me. I had titled it
Escape,
and as I looked at it, I felt a little hitch in my chest, the quiet threat of tears. I had failed that girl. I hadn't escaped at all. I'd had the chance for freedom, and instead I had run straight into the arms of the life I had known was not for me.

Letting the paintings fall back against the wall, I walked over to a stool in the corner, where the paint-splattered boom box I had listened to all those hours when I painted was still sitting. I flipped it on and pressed Play on the tape deck, and music exploded out of the speakers in a jangle of guitars. At first I laughed, covered my mouth, as though I had unearthed a treasure, and then I wanted to cry, remembering how much these songs had meant to me, how I had spent hours painting to these tapes, not the music they played at school dances, or that the other girls listened to, but music that meant something to me, music that was dark and haunting and beautiful and made everything around me seem more intense, the moon brighter and the night darker and the hours elastic and full of promises they couldn't keep.

I picked up one of the blank canvases, peeled the plastic off it, ran my hand over the surface. It was smooth, the frame still straight, and I lifted it and set it on the easel, admiring its freshness, the emptiness of it. To me, this had always been the best part of starting a painting: the moment before I did anything, the moment before the paint went onto the canvas and began to shape it into something, the moment when the magic of it was all possible, the emotion in my heart and the image in my mind perfectly aligned, before I spoiled it all by actually touching my brush to the fabric.

Under the easel was the tackle box I had kept my paints in. Kneeling down, I began to pull out the tubes. Most of them were acrylic, half used and now dried up, fossils from another age. But at the bottom were three
tubes of oil paint, unopened, that still yielded when I pressed on them. I unscrewed the tops and squeezed until I had three small pools of paint on my palette, found some brushes in the utility sink and rinsed them until they were pliable again, and then I stood in front of the easel, looking at that blank canvas, letting an image form in my mind, and I began to paint.

I don't know how much time passed, only that the tape had auto-reversed to play the other side and then, when it had finished, started again, twice over. I sang as I worked, the lyrics as clear in my mind as if I had heard the songs only the day before, like muscle memory, an unforgettable pattern. I was sixteen again and spending Friday night down here alone, I was twenty-one and painting out my fear about the future, I was twelve and learning how to pour my heart onto paper, and I was thirty-four and tired and scared and I put all those things on the canvas in front of me.

“Madeleine? Are you down here?”

Startled, I yanked my brush away from the canvas, bumped into the stool where I had rested the palette, and knocked it onto the floor, where it clattered on the concrete, landing facedown. Of course.

“Yeah,” I called back, rescuing the palette from the floor. Well, I thought, looking down at the smears of paint on the concrete floor, it hadn't been the first time. I walked over to the stairs, looking up at my mother.

“What are you doing down there? I've never heard such noise.”

“What, the music? I used to listen to this all the time.”

“Well, it's terrible. What are you doing?”

“Painting,” I said, and a smile pulled across my face, uncontrollable.

“Oh, I forgot you left all those things down there. We should clear them out. Sharon wants the basement empty so it looks like there's more storage.”

And there was the sum total of my mother's interest in my painting. Had I expected anything different? My parents had always disapproved of my art. They had said art school was going to be a waste of time and money, because what would I do with that degree? Marry an artist?
Become a painter? There were no artists in my parents' circles. There were only practical, appropriate professions: doctors, teachers, lawyers, investment bankers. Oh, and wives.

So I had gone to college and gotten some quiet, dull degree, and I had wished I were one of the art students, walking across campus in paint-splattered clothes, tiny rocks of clay hardening in my hair. And after graduation I had gotten a quiet, dull job, but I had chosen an apartment with perfect light, where I spent hours alone, painting, as happy as I had ever been.

And then I had gotten married.

“Did you need something?” I asked.

“Yes, I just wanted to tell you I'm going to the library board meeting.”

“Godspeed,” I said, lifting my paintbrush to my forehead and sketching a salute.

After she closed the door, I walked slowly back over to the easel. It was getting dark, the sun disappearing outside, leaving the basement in shadow. In high school, I had ferreted out some old lamps and set them around my painting area, but when I tried to turn a couple of them on, the bulbs lit and then snapped off immediately, the sound of the filaments breaking sharp in the silence.

The thing was, I thought, giving up on the light and cleaning the brushes and my hands, going through the motions precisely as I had years ago, I didn't want to get rid of anything—not the canvases or the easel or the old brushes. If anything, I wanted more. I wanted to find an art store and come home with a bouquet of fresh, bright oil paints, a fresh new sketch pad, an oversized Filbert brush to paint a hundred wide blue skies. I wanted to feel the way I had when I was painting all the time.