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.
She lowered her head into his lap and wept, and he stroked her hair and murmured to her in French, and she didn’t even try to understand. It was all ending, all falling apart, and she felt herself sliding down the endless precipice toward the life she did not want, had never wanted, and everything she grabbed at on the way down in a desperate attempt to stop herself came away in her hands.
twenty-three
MADELEINE
1999
I had never thought Phillip would come for me. I had been doing my best to push him out of my mind. I knew that wasn’t a mature way to deal with problems, nor an especially effective one: no matter how much I pretended he didn’t exist, he stubbornly insisted on doing so.
When he arrived, I was up in the attic, shifting around the last of the boxes, covered in dust and dirt and the funk of forty thousand years, trying again and again to forget the feeling of Henry’s body against mine, our kiss, the way he smelled, the way he felt. It didn’t belong to me, and I didn’t deserve it.
My mother was sitting downstairs in the parlor, reading the newspaper, so when the doorbell rang, she was closer, and I ignored it, until I heard the sound of talking in the foyer, filtered up two staircases.
Is it terrible to admit I didn’t even recognize my husband’s voice? I only heard my mother talking to a man and with a little wisp of happy hope I crushed as soon as it came to life, I thought it might be Henry (although I should have known it wasn’t; my mother sounded far too pleased to see him). I lifted a box onto my hip and carried it downstairs, and there was Phillip, standing there holding my mother’s hands and smiling that perfect smile at her, and I nearly dropped the box, my face flushing hot with guilt.
I had been making such an effort to put him out of my mind that the fact of him seemed completely foreign; to me, he looked less like the man I had promised, in front of God and pretty much all of Magnolia society, to love and cherish for the rest of my days only to betray him with a moonlit night and a kiss, and more like a stranger. A handsome and well-dressed stranger, but a stranger nonetheless. I didn’t want to face him, I didn’t want to talk to him. I felt like waving at him and going back to wrestling with the boxes. Later I might paint. At the library I’d found a book of old photos of Paris, and I wanted to try painting them, wanted to capture the light my grandmother had been so in love with. Frankly, what I really wanted to do was drop everything and actually go to Paris, but that didn’t seem particularly practical.