By the entrance was a balcony overlooking the entire club, the dance floor already crowded. On the lower level was the altar of the stage, where a full orchestra was hurtling itself at popular songs, all the musicians so deep into the sound they were transported, the tendons on their fingers pulling music from their instruments, sweat standing out on their foreheads, half dancing themselves as they played. The floor was crowded, men in tuxedos and suits, women in dresses so filmy and silky they made Margie’s more modest dress look heavy as a duvet, packed together on the floor. From above it looked like a jittering, bustling beehive. Here and there, waiters darted along the edges of the dancers, barely averting one disaster after another, trays of drinks held above their heads, which they delivered to one of the dozens of tables lining the floor and ducked under the balconies above. Champagne buckets gleamed on tables, where people leaned their heads close together to talk.
Looking everywhere, taking in the dizzy glamor, the elegance, the energy that bubbled and fizzed like a thousand popping champagne bottles, Margie felt as though she might go off like a cork herself. Outside, she had felt frumpy and plain, the same Margie Pearce who had plodded through so much of her life, who had been given a single night of magic at her debut and had thought she would never have another, but in here she felt part of something exciting and exotic, and its refracted magic fell on her, illuminating the beads on her dress, making her skin glow in the dim light.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Sebastien’s American girl,” a man’s voice said in her ear, close and so intimate that Margie jumped back, her head narrowly missing clocking Georges in the face. He was cleaner than he had been the other night, wearing a tuxedo, even, his hair combed back instead of falling forward over his eyes. Alas, he was still sporting that silly monocle as though he might be asked to examine a document or a diamond before the night was through.
“Oh, bonjour,” she said, placing her hand over her heart to calm the beating. The noise and music buzzed around them, and she had to raise her voice to be heard, even as close as he was. His hand rested on her lower back.
“Bonsoir,” he corrected her with a smile. “What are you doing here, Sebastien’s American girl?”
“I’m not . . .” Margie began to object to being called Sebastien’s American girl, but when she stopped to think about it, she decided she actually liked it a little bit. “I’m Marguerite,” she said, reminding him, and feeling a little thrill of using her French name, which was so much fancier than boring old Margie.
“What are you doing here, Marguerite?” he asked. He guided her away from the balcony as more people pressed in behind them, greeting the owner, checking their coats. It seemed impossible that more people could fit into the club, yet they kept coming, slipping into the boxes upstairs, women sitting on men’s laps by the table, the tiny spaces on the dance floor filling in, couples pressing tightly to one another, glad for the excuse, and above it all, the band was still playing, the screech of trumpets wailing and the dance floor jumping right along with them.
“I came with some friends,” Margie said, though as she looked around, she didn’t see Dorothy or Arturo or any of the other people they had come in with, just an undifferentiated mass of celebration. She had grown to think how small a town Paris was, when she saw some of the same people again and again, the writers she saw at the Libe and then writing or arguing over a bottle of wine at La Closerie des Lilas, the girls from the Club she saw flirting with young men in bar windows, but here Paris felt infinite, like she would never see it all or know it all or meet the people in it, which was neither strange nor terrifying, only joyful, as though she had been given a gift with no end.
“Come drink with us instead,” Georges said. They reached the stairs and he offered her his arm and they walked down.
The Surrealists and a handful of other artists she didn’t recognize had taken over two tables in the back. Margie didn’t even have time to sit, because René saw her arrive and rose, bent to kiss her hand, and whisked her onto the dance floor without offering a formal invitation or waiting for her reply.