“How is your English so good?” she asked Sebastien, instead of pursuing the meaning of another Surrealist proclamation.
“My father is English. And of course I studied it in school. And now look how helpful it is—I can talk to American girls all the time!” He laughed, this rich, inviting sound that made Margie want to curl up inside him, if only to be so close to such happiness. The Russian women at the end of the table looked annoyed by the noise, and she was half tempted to stick her tongue out at them. She didn’t want people who thought happiness was something to be sneered at polluting the party. Because here she was. Sitting in a café in Paris with bobbed hair, drinking wine with actual artists, talking about Surrealism, with a good-looking man by her side. If only Evelyn could see her now. If only Lucinda from Abbott Academy who had said she was too quiet, a dud, could see her now. If only her mother . . . well, she’d prefer her mother not see her now, she wouldn’t understand, but still.
“Do you always talk to American girls?”
“There are so many of you,” Sebastien said. “You are difficult to avoid.” She could tell he was teasing, the little light in his eyes, the way his eyebrow was raised ever so slightly. And he was right, after all—they were everywhere. Even if she ignored the fact that she lived at the Club and worked at an American library, she heard American accents around her all the time; drawling their way through transactions at shops and cafés, chatting as they walked down streets, the inimitable casual loudness that marked her people.
“Why are so many Americans here now?” she asked him.
“Why are you here?”
Margie shrugged her shoulders, self-conscious. “Freedom, I suppose. It’s so far away from everything. And it’s, you know, Paris.”
“Well.” Sebastien spread his arms slightly, his wine glass tilting, as if to indicate the entirety of the city.
“I know. But we can’t all possibly have something to run from, can we? Some people must be happy just to stay where they are.”
“No, no. That is not human nature. We are all trying to escape something. Some people do it by moving to Paris. Some of us do it through our art.” He gestured here to the Surrealists, who had apparently come up with a cracking good joke and were laughing and clapping each other on the back over it. “Some of us do it through wine, or money. No matter how, we’re all trying to escape something.”
“Ourselves,” Margie said. She could see herself reflected in the plate-glass window of Le D?me, behind the Surrealists. Her hair was new, her hat was new, and there was a look in her eyes that felt new as well, a brightness she had never seen before. Had Paris made her someone different? Or was she the same old Margie, disguised with a new hat and a glass of wine in her hand, pretending to be someone she could never hope to be? “We are all trying to escape ourselves.”
fifteen
MADELEINE
1999
After painting until my fingers ached, I stood in the driveway, listening to the quiet of the neighborhood, the brush of wind through the trees, the shush of a car passing by on the street. Next door, I could see dinner was winding down; the parking lot was half deserted, the noise floating over the hedges emptier somehow. But they were definitely still open. And I was starving. And the fact that my patronizing Henry’s restaurant would upset my mother made the idea of dinner there even more appealing. Well, she had driven me to it. I hadn’t gone to the grocery store, so there was still nothing to eat in her house, and my strawberries-and-crackers diet book would sell exactly zero copies.