Men were so rare these days: Margie had read a newspaper story asserting that after the war, young women in Europe had only a one-in-ten chance of getting married, which she thought was probably exaggerated but nonetheless dreadfully sad, especially those who had offered their bodies as comfort for soldiers on leave and, when the soldier had been killed in action, been left with a squalling, hungry memory they would raise alone. But the Surrealists were all men, the core of artists Sebastien knew, and Margie, who had so often been sequestered among women, felt gloriously feminine and desired. She had never been much of a dancer, and had never even tried to shimmy or do the Toddle before, but the floor was so tightly packed it didn’t matter. She slid along on her toes, René gripping her hands, bumping into everyone else on the floor who was bumping right back, and when she was sweaty and breathless, they ran over to the tables and Georges poured her a glass of champagne, and then one of the other artists took her hand and swept her onto the floor for a slow dance, until the band exploded again and the floor erupted as though it were shaking, and they did the entire thing all over again.
Margie, who would have sworn her idea of a good time was staying at home with a book, far from exactly this sort of noise and crowd, was exhilarated. They danced for hours until she felt dizzy from the excitement and the champagne and the lack of sleep. People came and went along the table, and she ran into Dorothy dancing in the center of the dance floor and the two of them Charlestoned for a moment until their partners pulled them back and Dorothy gave Margie a huge wink over her man’s shoulder and Margie, to her own surprise, winked right back. Just think, on the ship on the way over, she had been too shy, too scared, to go into the ball, and here she was, dancing as though it came naturally.
She had always thought she wasn’t the sort of girl men wanted to dance with. She had always thought she was lesser somehow, that she would never have the things other girls had. But maybe the problem hadn’t been her. Maybe it hadn’t ever been her. Maybe it had been the place, and her mother’s unforgiving expectations, and the way everything expected of her was tight and ill-fitting, and had never allowed her to breathe properly, never allowed her to see anything properly, not even herself.
When it began to grow light outside and the crowd had thinned, people stumbling out into the pale early morning, the waiters arrived with breakfast, fruit and croissants and pots of yogurt. Margie ate some berries, but her stomach was too light to hold anything, so she found Dorothy and the two of them went home, Margie floating the whole way. It hadn’t been her at all. She hadn’t been the one who was wrong, who didn’t fit. She had been this girl all along. It had been the place that was wrong. And now, here, in Paris, she could see herself clearly. She could see who she had been meant to be, now that Paris was hers.
seventeen
MADELEINE
1999
“Go through and pack up whatever you want,” my mother had told me. When I had gone to her with each piece to ask for permission, she waved me away. “It’s fine,” she said each time. “It’s fine.”
“Don’t you want some of these things?”
She shook her head. “There’s more than enough.”
And really, there was. My mother and grandmother had both been only children, so they had inherited all the family flotsam and jetsam. I supposed I should have been grateful I wasn’t going to be expected to take everything with me, as they had. Instead, I chose the things I had loved as a child. I packed boxes of hand-painted china, so thin you could see your fingers behind it if you held it up to the light, boxes of silver, monogrammed and tarnished and entirely impractical for anything. I wrapped photographs and paintings without wondering where they might find a place to rest in the modern wasteland of my condo. I rolled up my favorite carpet and moved my father’s chair out of the sitting room. I piled my treasures in the dining room until I realized I was rapidly running out of space.
“What are you going to do with all this stuff, anyway?” I asked the crowded room. The furniture stared back at me, silent and stoic. It was okay. I knew the answer, even if I wasn’t willing to admit it. I was furnishing my house. Not the condo I lived in with Phillip. Some mythical, imaginary place, like my old apartment in Magnolia. A home decorated with furniture and rugs worn to a comfortable shabbiness, warmed by the memories of people who had lived there before. Rooms where the decorations held stories and histories, and where I could leave a teacup on the coffee table or a book on the sofa without its looking like a violation.
When Phillip and I had moved into the condo, I had donated all my books to the library. He said they ruined the look of the shelves, the gorgeous, wall-to-wall shelves in the living room that clearly called out for rows and rows of books and instead held the oddest objets d’art: a silver sphere woven out of twigs with a tendency to shed spray-painted bark onto the carpet, empty vases covered in mirrored glass, so every time you touched them you left fingerprints as though you were creating a crime scene, a pair of white papier-maché masks I found so disturbing I had finally turned them to face the wall, a sculpture made of menacingly twisted railroad spikes, and a set of metal leaves that looked as though they had been plucked from a forest near Chernobyl. Despite his faith in my artistic knowledge, whenever I complained about them, Phillip insisted the decorator had known what she was doing.
I would have rather looked at a shelf full of books.