A curious mix of people sat at the table, some Americans, some French, an Englishman, and two Russian girls. The blur of languages was ridiculous; the common tongues were French and English, but there were a dozen accents, and the Russians spoke in asides to each other, and at the end of the collection of tables a woman and a man were having an enthusiastic conversation in what sounded like Spanish. Their names were a blur, their faces complex and glamorous in a way Margie couldn’t yet distinguish. One of the men was so blond his skin looked like parchment, his eyes a unique and intensely pale blue. One of the Russian women had cheekbones like knives, sharp slashes across her face, and arms so slender Margie could have encircled them with her fingers.
“Sebastien, Sebastien.” One of the men across the table, René, snapped his fingers at him. Three of them had their heads bent together over a notebook. “écoutez,” he demanded. “Si vous aimez l’amour, vous aimerez le Surréalisme.” He spoke these words like a grand proclamation, and then collapsed back in his chair and took a large gulp of wine as though the act had exhausted him.
“Bon, bon,” Sebastien said, with a little applause, and then, in English to Margie, “Did you understand?”
“If you like love, you’ll love Surrealism?” Margie asked. She had read articles about these art movements in Paris without entirely understanding them. They described things incomprehensible to her—Margie shared none of the Surrealists’ anxiety about their art, none of their desperate need to make meaning of things by taking all the meaning from them. She had read a piece by a Surrealist writer that she hadn’t understood at all; it just seemed like words strung together. Margie, who liked stories about people who found the love she longed for herself, stories about people who were broken and then made themselves whole again, had read that and felt a strong desire to lie down.
“Oui!” Sebastien said, and he looked so pleased by her tiny feat of translation she was almost embarrassed, and made an immediate vow to work more on her French. She would spend her lunch hours reading Le Temps, the newspaper, with her dictionary by her side, and eavesdrop as much as possible in cafés. “They are opening a center for Surrealism, and René is creating these cards they will spread all over Paris, inviting people to come into the center and share their dreams.”
“We believe,” René said, leaning forward again and stroking his mustache with his thumb and forefinger—he was speaking French, and Margie braced herself, but he spoke slowly, thoughtfully, giving her time to catch up, “that dreams are the only place where the mind is truly honest. In our dreams we can find all our unexpressed desires, and our collective wisdom.”
“I see?” Margie said, imagining René, who was handsome but still had the soft cheeks of a boy, sitting attentively at a desk with a pen and ledger, while people sat across from him, relating their dreams, “. . . and then there was this giant flying mouse with the face of my husband, except it wasn’t my husband’s face, but I know it was him, you see . . .” But she didn’t know why this would be useful. She could barely understand her own dreams; she had no idea why anyone else would be interested in them.
“écoutez, écoutez,” one of the men sitting next to René said, abruptly sitting forward as though he had simply been observing and had suddenly decided to join the conversation. Margie thought Sebastien might have called him Georges. His hair fell forward into his face like Sebastien’s, though this seemed to be more from a general lack of combing than from any stylistic decision, and he wore a monocle, as though he were one of Margie’s disapproving great-uncles. She suspected he might not need the monocle, that he simply thought it made him look smarter, though Margie thought it only made him look nearsighted. “Le Surréalisme, c’est l’écriture niée,” he said, holding his hands out in front of him as though laying each word in place.
“Ahhh,” his companions sighed, and applauded for him. Sebastien nodded, leaning back and lifting his glass of wine. Everything he did was so smooth, his long fingers and long limbs graceful as a dancer.
“C’est vrai, c’est vrai,” René said sadly—it’s true, it’s true—as though his friend had just pronounced the wisdom of the ages.
“What does niée mean?” Margie whispered to Sebastien.
“It is something not permitted. Denied?” he asked.
Surrealism is writing denied? Now they were really making no sense at all. Margie felt as though she were in the library again, poring over that Gertrude Stein piece and wanting to weep for a good love story. Georges and René had bent their heads together again over the notebook and were fashioning some other impenetrable sentence. She supposed it was a clever idea. Handing out these business cards would definitely make people wonder what on earth they meant, but she doubted people would seek out the office in particular to inquire. Then again, people did all sorts of silly things to pass the time. And while part of her felt as though she should be ashamed of herself in comparison to their limitless imaginations, another part of her saw how much they were the same. The Surrealists were dreamers, just like she was.