“Pardon, mademoiselle.”
Margie opened her eyes to find herself standing in a doorway while a couple, attempting to pass by, stared at her curiously. She shook her head, breaking free of her daydream’s spiderweb strands, and stepped aside, offering a sheepish smile. Still, she kept looking for her prince as she moved through the rooms, her eyes dropping on one young man or another, picturing her hand in his as they strolled together, on his in a courtly dance, or resting on his face during a caress. She was awful, she knew; she should have been paying attention to the art, should have been improving herself, but her imagination always seemed to carry her away.
She walked home through the Tuileries, moving as though she were drifting, the afternoon sun falling across picnickers, strollers, young children carrying ice creams. Maybe this was why they called Paris the City of Love—its languid beauty gave her the feeling of endless summer, an eternal freedom, making love impossible to suppress. She smiled her way through the gardens, emerging to the rude insult of the traffic around the Place de la Concorde, buses and motorcars and horses and wagons all in chaos, and drifted her way dreamily back to the hotel.
It was late afternoon, and the light was strange and golden, a hint of violet in the sky and a stronger yellow where it fell across the endless rows of Haussmann buildings, their black balconies and windowsills spilling over with flowers, red and purple and blue and white. The people moved more slowly than in Washington or New York, strolling along the streets instead of hurrying, and everywhere were cafés and restaurants, people sitting at tables on the sidewalks, eating, or drinking coffee and smoking and talking. As she walked, she watched the crowds, the faces passing by, the people in the restaurants or at their own windows. The smell of food was overwhelming—mussels in butter and garlic sauce, their shells gaping open at the sky, warm bread, yeasty and steaming, the sharp snap of fresh green beans.
She felt, wandering through the city, as though she were a part of it already, as though it belonged to her now that she had seen it. When she didn’t actually have to speak to anyone, she rather liked the French wafting through the air around her, the snatches of conversation she heard as she passed by a café, the occasional sharp shout like an arrow—a mother calling out the window to a child, or a workman barking a warning. And being alone felt strange and new. Had she ever been alone this much before? Even when she locked herself away in her room, feeling very much like Emily Dickinson as she scribbled out her stories, she was not alone. She could hear her mother and the maid moving around the house, the clatter of dinner being prepared in the kitchen below, or, while she read at night, the murmur of her parents’ voices in the parlor. Here, too, she was surrounded by people, yet separate from them. She felt pleasantly anonymous, isolated by language and culture but mostly by choice, and she moved through the city streets as though she were held in a globe of glass. She ate an early dinner in a café, she drank a rich, red wine, she finished with crème br?lée, heedless of her waistline, and walked home to the hotel in a pleasant sugar haze.
Margie had lingered over dinner, and when she returned to the hotel, she could see Evelyn had come and gone already; the mess was slightly disturbed, and the air smelled of Evelyn’s perfumes and lotions, of lemon and rose and lavender. She might have gone to look for Evelyn, but where would she begin? The city was wide and busy, opening itself to the night, and her cousin could be anywhere. As the evening fell, the cafés came alive, the streets, which had gone quiet for a time, filled again. In the other buildings windows glittered in the fading light, blank faces hiding their secrets, and Evelyn could have been behind any one.