Margie sipped at her coffee. Her secret was that she didn’t really like coffee, but she had learned to order it with cream instead of milk, and with extra sugar, which she dropped in until the coffee could no longer absorb it all and the last few sips left her with a pale, sweet sludge at the bottom of the cup, a deliciously wasteful extravagance after the war. “So are you a writer?” she asked.
“Non, non,” Sebastien scoffed. “Only Americans are writers.” He gave her a little wink and she couldn’t resist smiling back. She didn’t know why he had chosen to sit with her, but his good mood was infectious, and she was happy to have a little cheer around her. If she only had a week left in the city, she might as well spend her time enjoying things rather than moping around. “No, I am an artist. Frenchmen, we are painters.” He flipped his notebook open, showing her the sketches that covered the pages, sometimes only tiny pieces jumbled together on a single page—the Eiffel Tower rendered in crosshatches, a quickly sketched coffee cup, a woman’s ear, delicate as a seashell—and sometimes a drawing spreading across both pages, a bridge across the Seine viewed from the water, an explosion of flowers in a garden. He paged through rapidly, as though he were making a moving picture, and then closed the notebook when he came to the blank pages at the end. Margie wanted to take it from him, open it again, let its secrets unfold in front of her. She was a dreadful artist herself, capable mostly of childish stick figures and landscapes—square houses, stiffly symmetrical trees—and she envied people who could draw.
“Those are lovely,” she breathed.
Waving his hand as though he could dismiss the air that held the compliment, Sebastien took another sip of coffee. “Not so. They are only things I draw to remind me of what to paint later. Like making a note for a story, oui?”
“Oui,” Margie said, and this time she didn’t correct herself, because Marguerite felt like someone who would say oui instead of yes, even if she was American.
“So what are you doing in Paris all alone?”
Margie sighed. “I was here with my cousin. I was supposed to be her chaperone.”
“Where is she?” Sebastien looked around. For once, Margie was grateful Evelyn wasn’t there. If Sebastien saw her, it would be, “So long, Margie.” It had always been that way: when Evelyn was around, Margie might as well have been invisible—and not only to young men, but to waiters, or porters, or shop clerks. She’d actually had to snap her fingers in front of the face of the porter when they were getting off the ship, he had been so entranced. She had once seen a man walk into a lamp post on the street because he had been so busy watching Evelyn. It had sounded with a loud bong, and the poor fellow had seemed so surprised, and had looked at the lamp post with such personal offense that Margie had to smother a laugh in her hand.
“She met some friends on the ship when we came over, and now she’s run off with them.”
“Run off?”
“You know. Left me to spend time with them.”
“I see.” Sebastien frowned, piecing the story together in his mind. His English was impeccable, but Margie wasn’t sure how much of what she said was clear. She had never thought so much about idioms, about the way they crept into your language and became untranslatable. She remembered, years ago in high school, missing a meeting with her French teacher, who had then accused Margie of putting a rabbit on her—“Tu m’a posé un lapin!” What a silly thing to say, Margie had thought, but in the end, was it any sillier than saying, “You stood me up!” What did that even mean?
“So she is gone, but you are still here.”
“Oui.”
Sebastien broke into another smile then, wide and disarming. “So this is better, then! Now you have all of Paris and none of her.” He spread his arms wide, as if to take in the entirety of the city and offer it to Margie.
“No, no,” Margie said. “I . . .” She tried to think of how to explain it. “You see, I was only here to be with her. I was meant to take care of her. And now I must go home.”
At this, Sebastien looked so horrified that Margie almost laughed aloud. “Leave Paris?” He spread his hand over his chest, as though Margie had wounded him. “You have just arrived!”
With a shrug, Margie tried to ignore the tug at her own heart. She knew. Oh, how she knew. For every word she had written to her mother, she had composed ten in her heart illuminating how unfair the whole thing was. “I know. But I can’t stay here alone. It wouldn’t be appropriate.”