“Is this a . . .” He snapped his fingers in the air and squinted at the sky, looking for the word. He really was terribly attractive, Margie thought, so attractive she forgot to question why he was sitting there talking to her. She had originally thought his hair was the color of burnt caramel, but as he moved his head in the sunlight, it lit up a dozen different colors—strands of corn silk, of strawberry blond, of deep chestnut—and his eyes blazed green, the lashes around them unfairly dark and thick. He had slim hands with long fingers, and when he moved them in the air when he spoke, she watched, transfixed, picturing herself capturing one of his hands and holding it against her face, just for a moment, just to feel how real he was.
“A punishment? Is this a punishment?” He looked pleased at himself for having found the word.
“I suppose it is,” she said, and the thought made her blue. “My mother . . .” she began, unable to bring herself to finish. Margie’s feelings about her mother were too complicated to explain.
A woman with a small child had arrived and was sitting on a bench outside the church. She had given the child a baguette, and he toddled around, alternately pursuing and pursued by the pigeons as he tossed crumbs in the air. At another table in the café, a man with a mustache sat, nursing a drink and writing in his own notebook, his meaty hands so large they nearly eclipsed the paper. Beside him were two French women, their heads bent together as though they were telling the most important of secrets. It was punishment to take her away from the sights she had not seen—la tour Eiffel! Napoleon’s tomb!—but it was punishment of a harsher sort to take her away from this, from the simple pleasures of Paris, from this place where she could sit alone in a café without anyone speculating on her virtue, where she could write for hours without being interrupted by her mother’s criticisms, where she could watch the parade going by, this brave new world that had such people in’t.
“Well,” she said, pulling herself out of her own sulk, “I’ve written my mother and told her Evelyn is gone. She’ll write back and send me money to come home.” She left out the parts she didn’t want to think about—her mother’s fury, her own disappointment, the storm awaiting her when she got back to Washington. And, she thought, as she was pushing those thoughts to the back of her mind, her parents’ anger wouldn’t be the worst part of going home. It would be Mr. Chapman. Because this had been her chance at escape, and she had ruined it. And now she had no more excuses. Mr. Chapman waited at the other end of the journey like a thin-faced executioner. She wanted to drop her head on the table and weep.
Leaning forward, Sebastien lifted the envelope Margie had set aside, facedown. He looked at her questioningly, and she nodded. He lifted it between two fingers and read the address written in Margie’s sloppy scrawl and then, as though it answered some question, nodded.
“And what if you do not go home?” he asked, turning the envelope slowly. She could hear the crinkle of the paper against his skin.
“Oh. I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be appropriate,” she started.
“You said this already.”
Flustered, Margie continued. “Well, Evelyn took most of our money. And I don’t know anyone here. The hotel is already paid for one more week. After that I don’t have anywhere to stay, and I don’t have enough money to live on.”
With a sigh, Sebastien dropped the envelope, lit a cigarette, shook out the match with his hand and dropped it in an ashtray on the neighboring table. He exhaled, squinting at her through the smoke. “You could find work. And Paris is cheap for you. So many Americans are here because it costs them so little. You can live in Paris no problem.” He snapped his fingers again and she looked at his hands.
“Who are you?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious that she was sitting here, confessing her worries to a stranger, a handsome young man who would not have found anything in her worth looking at if she had been at home.
He grinned at her again, took a slow puff off the cigarette and let the smoke draw a lazy haze in the air before he replied. “Je m’appelle Sebastien.”
“No, no. I know your name. But who are you? What do you do? Why are you talking to me?”
“Ah.” Sebastien tapped his cigarette end in the ashtray, rolling it around so the tobacco formed a pointed tip. “I am a painter, which I told you already. And I am talking to you because you look like you need someone to talk to.”
“Oh.” Margie deflated a little. Well, what had she thought? There might be about her something particularly appealing to French men? But would that be so wrong? Would it be so awful, once in her life, for someone to tell her she was beautiful? She had been told she was clever, even brilliant. But she wanted to be beautiful, wanted someone to say it. She thought she had been beautiful once, the night of her debut, that there had been some magic in her dress and in the night, blown in on the cold, cold air. But in the morning, the magic had gone, evaporated in the sunshine, and whatever beauty there had been had gone with it, and the only proof she had of it was the memory of Robert’s kiss. “Well, thank you.”
Sebastien leaned back, lowering his eyes in thought, smoking silently. “I have a solution,” he said finally.