I don’t know who kissed whom first. I suppose it was me, but there was a point at which the kiss was inevitable, when we had moved so close together, the small space left between us filled with tension and heat and desire, it would have been impossible to draw apart again. Maybe it wasn’t so much my initiative as a slow, magnetic pull, as though the earth’s gravitational force wanted us together, and our lips met and we kissed, gently, softly. I had never kissed a man with a beard before, and it made the act of kissing him feel new and beautifully strange, unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. His lips were soft, his beard brushed lightly against my skin as we fell together, his arm around my waist, mine around his neck, the brush of his hair against my fingertips, the length of his body against mine. We kissed like that, and I felt a long-forgotten warmth inside me, as though I were a flower opening to the spring of him, and I wondered where this would go, whether we would make love here on the grass, under the stars, as though the night belonged only to us. Until when I moved my hand to his shirt, pulling the back up and spreading my fingers over the warmth of his skin, he pulled back and looked at me, his eyes searching mine in the darkness.
“No,” he said gently, and he pulled away. “No. Not like this.” He removed his hand from my waist and shifted backward, letting the night fall between us, cold and dark.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He rolled onto his back and blew a long breath out toward the stars. “Well, for starters, you’re married.”
“Separated,” I said, my protest feeling weak even as I made it. Even if our separation had been something formal, it wasn’t an actual condition. It was a liminal state. It was the state of someone too afraid to commit, to speak her mind. A punishing fist squeezed at my stomach.
“And even if you were divorced, it’s too fresh. I don’t want you to get hurt, but, to be selfish, I don’t want to get hurt either. Your heart—I don’t know where your heart is.” He spoke to the sky, as though the stars and the moon and the satellites drifting lonely through space, bleating out their lights like Morse code, could hear him.
I sank back onto the grass beside him. “I don’t know where it is either,” I said. Above me, the stars kept their silent watch, their glacial changes invisible to me.
I hadn’t intended to kiss Henry. Hadn’t admitted to myself until that night I was attracted to him. It had been the moment, the conversation, his easy smile, the way everything felt comfortable with him. Was this how it was supposed to be? I felt like I had been clenching every muscle in my body since I had met Phillip, and with Henry I felt like liquid. I felt smarter, sharper, more creative. More alive.
In the end, it didn’t matter how much I liked him, or how I felt when I was with him, because he had turned me down. And I was married. What was I doing? Creating this whole fantasy life here, as though I could stay forever. I couldn’t be a painter. I couldn’t be friends with Sharon and Henry. Maybe that was why my grandmother had left Paris—because she knew it had to end. At some point you have to go back to reality. Nobody gets to live their dream.
twenty-two
MARGIE
1924
Margie and Sebastien became those lovers she had seen on the streets so often, the kind her mother would have considered completely shameful. They walked hand in hand, and often he lifted hers to his mouth and dropped a gentle kiss on her fingers or the tender skin of her open palm. He bought a bottle of wine and they sat on the banks of the Seine at night, watching the slow movement of boats up and down the river, their lights shimmering onto the dark water until it was impossible to see where the stars ended and the lanterns began. In noisy bars and busy cafés, they sat with their foreheads touching, talking endlessly about art and writing and Paris and America and all the things they knew and could not know, and when their friends rose and announced it was time to move on, to Zelli’s or the Jockey or La Coupole, they nodded and rose too, but instead of following the crowd, they would slip away from the group to return to Sebastien’s apartment and make love and fall asleep in his bed until the sun woke them, naked and new, in the morning.
And everything was perfect, until it wasn’t.
? ? ?
It started with the Libe. Margie went into work one day and Miss Parsons, who was normally—frankly, oddly—cheerful, looked pale and worried. “Bonjour!” Margie said happily, because she had started the day in Sebastien’s arms, and what could be better than that? She hung her coat on the rack by the front door and put her bag and her hat in one of the cubbies behind the desk, preparing to take over Miss Parsons’ position there.
Miss Parsons simply muttered a hello and then quickly looked away, gathering the papers she had been working on and scurrying upstairs to her office. They had been offering classes to French librarians, and for people who worked in libraries they were awfully noisy, always clomping back and forth between the two classrooms upstairs, but that day it was silent, and she heard the sound of Miss Parsons’ quick, efficient steps on the floor above, the closing of her office door, and then nothing else.