“The title? A Portrait of Cécile. Come, see this one too.” Stepping toward the painting beside it, he waved her over and Margie followed. He was clearly proud of his work, and she was glad she responded to it, glad she saw his talent. He was, surprisingly, her best friend in Paris, though her mother would have been scandalized that she regularly stepped out with a young man, just the two of them, but her mother wouldn’t have understood anything about this place, this life. Margie hardly understood it herself. If she had told her parents about Zelli’s, about the cafés and the Surrealists and the bars, they would have thought it wild. Depraved, even. And here it was all of an evening. The rules were different in Paris. The rules were different when you were free and the strange evening light of Paris worked its magic on you. Margie was different in Paris. She felt it, she saw it when she looked in the mirror or caught her own eye in a shop window as she passed. Her face looked different, her cheekbones higher, her eyes wider, her collarbone sharp and clean above the neckline of her dresses. And she felt lighter, as though whatever had tied her to the ground in America had been loosened.
“This one I call Summer Ball.” The canvas was wide, long, more than six feet on its side, Margie guessed, a panorama, a horizon, but instead of being filled with a landscape, there were a hundred figures as if at a dance. It was outside; Margie could see trees in the background, some well-behaved bushes, and a row of tables filled with people sitting together. She recognized the gold and the purple of a Paris summer evening. And miraculous as it was, every one of the people in the painting seemed to have his or her own story. Each pair of figures its own tableau. This one a couple who had just met, their bodies held apart, barely turning toward each other, beginning to open their secrets. This pair deeply in love, barely an inch of space between them, though there was plenty of room on the dance floor, eyes closed, cheek to cheek, as if no one else existed—Margie could almost see them swaying gently, more slowly than the music—for them the music didn’t matter at all. These two a couple married for many years and unhappy, these two a couple married for many years and still very much in love. A couple being forced into marriage, a couple with a great sadness, a couple with a delightful secret to keep. She couldn’t stop looking at the painting, from face to face, reading their stories. “It’s like a novel,” she said at last, her voice barely a breath.
“Do you think so?” Sebastien asked, and she could tell he was excited by it, glad she had seen the stories he had created.
“It is,” Margie said, and she pointed out the couples as she told him what she saw, the relationships and histories and futures represented so carefully with the strokes of his brush.
And then, much to her shock, Sebastien reached out and hugged her with a delighted glee. It was over in a moment, but Margie thought she might live in that moment forever. The scratch of the fabric of his jacket against her cheek, his arms around her, the slightest roughness of his skin against her forehead, and the smell of him, coffee and paint and something wild and comforting, like sun-warmed grass. “You have made me so happy. I have been working on this painting for a year. To tell so many stories in one painting—I thought it was too difficult, but I had to try it. You are a writer, this is simple for you. It is much harder for me to have so many ideas at once and then to make them clear in a painting. But you see it.”
“I see it,” Margie said, and she was blushing from his hug, and she wanted to be in his arms again, but she could see he was distracted by her compliment. She knew the feeling well—she had felt it herself when her stories had been chosen for her school’s literary magazines, or when her teachers had praised her work. She only envied him that his work was here, on display, in a gallery, while hers was still bound up in closed pages in her room. Someday, she thought. Someday all the things she had wanted so badly might actually be hers.
? ? ?
It became a habit, their walks home. She would leave at the end of the day and find Sebastien leaning against the president’s fence and smoking, and he would cross the street to join her. Sometimes they went through the Jardins des Champs-élysées, and sometimes they walked down the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, looking at the storefronts of couturiers on one side and the enormous mansions on the other, and sometimes they stopped in a café half the way home, by the Théatre du Chatelet and watched the people go by. And they talked. They talked so much Margie’s jaw would hurt at the end of the night, and if they sat in a café, her voice would go attractively rough from all the cigarette smoke in the air.