Occasionally they were joined by Sebastien’s artist friends, or by the Surrealists, who would be terribly serious until they had enough wine in them, at which point they would grow funny and wild, and always deeply passionate about their art. One of them cornered Margie one night and read her the entire list of the cards they had created for the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and he looked at her expectantly at the end of each one, as though he had told a particularly good joke and was waiting for her to laugh. Margie didn’t have the heart to tell him that despite the great improvement in her French she still understood only half of what he was saying, so sometimes she simply nodded thoughtfully, and sometimes she smiled, and sometimes she laughed gaily, and sometimes just said, “Oooh,” as though he had said something particularly thought-provoking. Though she did this in a pattern having nothing to do with the content of the messages, even the ones she technically understood (though she never could have translated them and gotten their intentionally obscure meanings quickly enough), he seemed quite pleased, and when he had reached the end of the list, he bought her a glass of cognac and proceeded to get very, very drunk and sing “California, Here I Come” with the other Surrealists, very, very badly.
And some nights they went dancing, and some nights they went to galleries to see other artists’ paintings, people Sebastien knew or had heard of. Once, thrillingly, they saw a film some of Sebastien’s friends had made at a remote chateau. The picture itself hadn’t made any sense to Margie, and she suspected it didn’t make any sense to anyone, but it had been terrific fun to see people she knew on a movie screen. Afterward she felt, even though she knew it was only a tiny art film, showing in a gallery with an enormous movie projector clacking away in the background, she might be stopped by people on the street as though she were walking with Buster Keaton or Clara Bow.
Later, they would gather at a café and talk, and she would listen to their thoughts and their passion and when Sebastien walked her home at the end of one of those nights, her head was spinning with ideas. Those conversations felt as though she were on a carousel and everything they were saying about art and truth and dreams and, sometimes, rather shockingly, sex, was lights and calliope music and the rise and fall of painted horses. She tried to keep up, though her French sometimes held her back, and sometimes it was only her own fear that she might say something the others thought was foolish, or even worse, obvious.
“You know more than you think,” Sebastien would say to her when he walked her home, the cafés and bars alive with lights and people and conversation. Margie wondered sometimes if Washington were like this at night, so full of activity and celebration, and it was just that she had missed it. There had been times when she had stayed up to the hours she kept in Paris, but it had always been in the company of a book, or of her own writing, never out with other people. “You should open your mouth and say it. You will be surprised.”
Margie wished it were that easy, but she had been editing her thoughts for so long, purposely keeping herself small and contained, she couldn’t imagine speaking out so easily. These men and women Sebastien knew, they were great artists. Some of them were already known, some of them would only be known years in the future, but they were artists. They were daring and experimental. They made things happen. And they knew so much. They could talk of Expressionism and Neoclassical Cubism and Ulysses and Gothic literature, and Margie resented all those years she had spent reading books with no one to talk to about them, stuck in schoolrooms and surrounded by girls who had worried only about who they would marry and whether they might be chosen for some society or where they would spend the summer, when she could have been with these people, living.
In fact, Margie found herself writing more and more those days. When she was assigned to the circulation desk at the Libe, between busy spells she often dashed off a letter to her parents and then spent the rest of the time writing feverishly, trying desperately to record all the ideas in her head using the typewriter, which was so much faster than laboriously writing by hand. She wrote stories about people who met in cafés and fell in love, and she wrote stories about Americans who came to Paris, and she mined every inch of her own experience and what she saw and she composed. She felt like Mozart, hounded by the music, desperate to get it out.
The piece she returned to again and again was Sebastien’s painting of the ball. She went back to the gallery on her own, finding it among the turning streets of the Quartier Latin, not even noticing how the city felt so navigable now, so much like home. She took her notebook and stood, mesmerized, and then began to record all the stories she could see—the lovers and the friends, the families and the enemies, and when she got home, she began to write the story.
She recorded it all: the lazy, heat-sodden Paris afternoon, the women’s dresses growing damp with sweat, a few of the men bravely shrugging off their jackets, the sound of the music floating through the air, across the dance floor and out to the garden beyond.