“They don’t mind?” Margie asked. Was there some secret to managing one’s disapproving parents she hadn’t yet learned?
“Of course they mind.” Dorothy threw her head back and laughed gaily. One of the painters sitting by them glanced at the tender skin of Dorothy’s throat with a hot flash of desire that made Margie’s stomach flip. Imagine having someone look at you that way, she thought. Imagine having everyone look at you that way. “But what can they do? They can’t make me come home. I’ve got my inheritance and my salary at the Libe. Besides, there’s no one to marry at home. All the interesting men are in Paris anyway, don’t you think?”
“When do you think you’ll get married, then?” Margie asked. Because you had to get married eventually, didn’t you? For all her talk, she knew everyone did get married, even if it was to someone like Mr. Chapman, who was old and stodgy and didn’t love her any more than she loved him, which was not at all.
“Someday,” Dorothy said with a breezy wave. It was the tone of a woman who knew she would always have plenty of opportunities to get married, who might not stay young but would always be beautiful and rich and smart and funny and charming, while Margie was only a few of those things and, it seemed, the ones that didn’t really matter. “What about you?”
“I don’t know,” Margie said, trying to match Dorothy’s casual tone. She wasn’t about to confess to beautiful, confident Dorothy that her best odds of getting married were to a short, nervous business associate of her father’s who was nearly old enough to be her father himself.
“I’m not getting married unless I’m really in love. Like in an Ethel M. Dell novel. Have you read her books? So romantic!”
“Yes!” Margie said. “She’s one of my favorites.”
“I just adore a good love story.” Dorothy rested her elbow on the table despite its stickiness and put her head in her hand, her eyes gone soft and dreamy. “Don’t you?”
“I do,” Margie said, and as much as the two of them had chatted about the books they had read and loved or hated, saying this aloud still felt like a confession. “My mother always said they were silly. I mean, she thinks all novels are silly. If it’s not ‘edifying,’ it’s a waste of time to her. Love stories especially. I feel so wicked when I read them, like I should be reading something better.”
Dorothy shook her head so her curls bounced prettily. “What’s better than a love story?”
“You know what I mean. Not better as in more fun to read. Better as in more important.” Margie ran her fingers along the edge of the table until she encountered something sticky, and then withdrew her hands and put them in her lap.
“That’s what I mean too. What’s more important than love? What’s silly about Paris and Helen of Troy? Or Romeo and Juliet? Or Orpheus and Eurydice? Or Troilus and Cressida?”
“Nothing, I suppose,” Margie said. When Dorothy put it that way, it didn’t make any sense, the way she’d hidden what she was reading inside something weightier (and infinitely duller), the way she had read entire books in the dustiest, most ignored corner of the library to avoid taking them home and risking her mother’s judgment, the faint but persistent shade of shame she’d felt every time she’d written a love story of her own. What was the difference between the love stories she wrote and the ones Dorothy had named, other than the patina of age giving everything a brassy air of respectability? What was so wrong with stories about the greatest emotion any of us would ever know?
“So.” Dorothy widened her eyes and leaned forward again. “What shall we do tonight? Go to Harry’s? Or La Rotonde? Or maybe Zelli’s?”
“I don’t mind.” Margie shrugged. She had never been to any of those places. She had never even been in a nightclub. She had always thought they were dangerous, dark and smoky places, where people were drunk, drunker than you could get on wine at a café, or even in a bar.
“Where have you been? Let’s go somewhere you haven’t gone before.”
“I’ve hardly been anywhere. Cafés, mostly. Le D?me, Deux Magots. I went to the Ritz, but the bar was closed.”
Dorothy’s eyes went wide, as though Margie had confessed something deeply scandalous. “You’ve hardly seen Paris at all!” she protested. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. We have so much catching up to do.”