When she had finished, the woman behind the desk called for a girl to take Margie upstairs. Her guide turned out to be a somewhat swaggering girl named Helen, from Ohio, who took Margie through the Club’s narrow hallways and up to her room. The building was U-shaped, with a center courtyard where a half-dozen girls were sitting in the sun, a few of them reading, a few talking. In the corner was a spigot that might have been connected to a well at some point, the stone grown mossy and cracked from disuse, and at the back of the courtyard lay a rose garden, blooms opening, fat and fragrant, to the sun. Sebastien had said the Club (or more specifically, its eponymous girls) had somewhat of a reputation, and Margie was prepared for scandal around every corner, but nothing seemed amiss, which was slightly disappointing.
Helen led her up a hysterically pitched flight of stairs to the second floor, where there was a sun room above the foyer, as bright and clean as the floor below was dark and cool, and through a rabbit warren of hallways, then up more stairs to the third floor. It was quieter up here, and the air was still and hot despite the open dormers in the hall. As they walked, Helen rattled off a list of additional rules and instructions, which Margie was following with one ear while looking around every corner with the other, trying to memorize the building’s twists and turns. In her head, the drumbeat of her disobedience and the surety of her mother’s disapproval played on, but she felt no shame. The stairs didn’t make her feel anxious or tired. There was only the excitement of everything to come. She would be like those girls in the boardinghouse down the street from her parents’ house in Washington, walking out confidently every morning to her job, she would be like those writers she saw in the cafés, head bent down, scribbling furiously in her notebook, she would be like Sebastien or Evelyn, bold and unafraid.
Finally they arrived at a door, and Helen handed her a key with a flourish. “Your room.” They were at the end of the hall, and Margie opened the door tentatively to find a light-filled room, bright and swaying with dust in the sunbeams falling in through the two dormer windows. “Two windows,” Helen said. “Lucky.” She peered into the room and then shrugged. “See you around.”
Margie stepped inside, her hands held open beside her as though she were absorbing the air, letting this place fall into her. She opened the window facing the backs of the houses on the street behind the Club, looking down at laundry drying on the lines, a rabbit eating from a vegetable garden in the corner of a yard. As the air rushed in, she ran to the other window, pushing it open too, looking out into the courtyard, the girls below still lazing in the sun, the roses sending their sweetness up to Margie on the air.
Inside, the floors were a bright blond wood that made the room practically glow despite the scuffs and cracks from years of use; the white walls were freshly painted. A bed with a metal frame, a mattress, a pillow, and a stack of sheets on top, a dresser, a chair. That was it. And Margie, who had grown up in a home with so much wealth, stuffed with furniture and antiques and all the money anyone could have wanted, nearly wept at the simplicity of it. This room was hers, Paris was hers, this life was hers, at last, her life was hers.
? ? ?
The morning after she moved in, Margie approached the woman at the front desk about a job. The woman sized her up, finally producing a card with an address on it. “The American Library in Paris called yesterday. They’re looking for someone.”
Margie took the card with shaking fingers. A job at a library! In Paris! It was as though it had all been made for her. She put on the new French hat she had found after days of searching for something large enough—French women seemed to have tiny heads and somewhat less enthusiastic hair than Margie—and her best shoes, and headed off to 10 rue de l’élysée.
The library wasn’t a library like she had imagined, not like her library at home. Down a wide side street near the Jardins des Champs-élysées, she matched the address to a stately town house, wide and tall, with a huge, imposing front door and silent windows. Next door, a window washer stood on one of the balconies, and the glass he had left behind sparkled in the sun. The street was lined with similar houses, and it was so quiet Margie would have sworn no one lived there at all. Across the street, a high wall topped with a wrought-iron fence surrounded the élysée Palace, where the president lived, and a couple of gendarmes stepped down the street, looking askance at Margie as she hesitated on the sidewalk.