Paris at night was a different place. After dark, lovers were on every street corner: drinking wine by the Seine, strolling hand in hand, finding the dark and shaded spots of the city—under the blessing of a tree or in the dark entrance to a building—to kiss. Sometimes there was so much passion between them it seemed as though Margie could see sparks coming from their skin when they touched, illuminating the bliss on their faces, and Margie had to avert her eyes because their heat was too much to bear. And sometimes it was dangerous, pickpockets lurking in their own dark spots, or drunks who were angry and lurching instead of happy and singing, looking for some way to vent the rage the wine had kindled in them. But mostly those people were looking for each other, criminals in search of easy marks, drunks hungry for a fight, and Sebastien would slip to the side of her closest to the danger, and take her elbow and they would walk by quickly, until whatever the threat had been disappeared and Paris was theirs again, theirs alone.
She did not write to her parents about the nights at Zelli’s or the Dingo, and she did not write to them of Sebastien. On the one hand, she thought her mother might have been relieved to know there was a man interested in her at all, especially one so young and handsome. On the other, she would have hated that Sebastien was an artist, and hated even more the idea of them walking the streets together alone, Margie with her short hair and a dress she had borrowed from one of the girls at the Club, unchaperoned and alone in the city at night. How different her mother’s world was from hers. How different our mothers’ worlds are from all of ours. Margie wondered sometimes if her mother had ever been young, had ever been in love, had ever wanted to dance under the starlight with a young man, or if she had been born disapproving and hard. She didn’t know why her mother clung so tightly to her rules. They certainly didn’t seem to make her happy. And they hadn’t made Margie especially happy either. Not happy like she was now. Not happy like Paris had made her.
nineteen
MADELEINE
1999
I was carrying boxes up from the basement, covered in dust and cobwebs, when the doorbell rang. My mother had gone to dinner at Lydia Endicott’s, where I presumed they were planning their path to global domination: today, the Garden Society, tomorrow, the world.
Passing the mirror by the front door, I noted my appearance: capri pants smudged with dirt, a T-shirt advertising the Spring Fling from my junior year in high school (I had not attended—how I’d gotten the T-shirt, I could only guess), my hair pulled up in a loose knot on top of my head. Yup, ready for prime time.
Mostly it had been people my mother or I had hired arriving at the door lately—painters, appraisers, charity pickups. This time it was Henry. He was surprisingly cleaned up—a black-and-white-checked button-down shirt with the sleeves casually rolled up, a pair of dark blue jeans that actually fit, and his hair, though it would never sacrifice its curl, had seen a comb at some point in the relatively recent past. “Wow,” I said, which was probably not the most tactful thing I could have said, but he didn’t seem to mind. “You look nice.”
“Sometimes I clean up okay,” he said, and generously said nothing about my appearance, which was decidedly less nice. “Are you ready to go?”
“Umm . . . go where?”
“First Friday,” he said, as though we’d been talking about it only a moment before, when it had been days since anyone had mentioned it. To be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it. Mostly I had been thinking about my mother, and whether I wanted to go home, and what I would do if I weren’t married anymore. And painting. I was thinking a lot about painting, which was an excellent avoidance strategy.
“Oh. Right. Is that now?” I looked down at my clothes and touched my hair, which was in desperate need of a blowout.
“I can wait for you to change. But you’re fine like you are.”
“Ha!” I said loudly. Henry only looked confused. Well. Maybe he really did think it was okay for me to be seen in public dressed that way, but I didn’t, and my mother would have had an aneurysm. “You’d better come in,” I said as I stepped back, opening the door fully and holding my hand out like a butler. “Enter the lair.”
He started to step inside and then jumped back as though he had been shocked, and we both laughed. “Your mother isn’t here, is she? Are you sure she didn’t booby-trap the place in case I came by?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s safe, but you might want to watch out for trip wires and buckets of water just in case.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
Upstairs, I took a quick sponge bath and changed into a clean pair of pants and a wrinkled denim shirt, and threw on a pearl necklace and earrings. My hair was beyond fixing, so I left it loose and curling. When I sprinted back downstairs, Henry was standing in the front room, looking into my mother’s china cabinet.
“Hey, you look amazing,” he said when I appeared.
“Yeah, right.”
“Take a compliment.”
I didn’t bother to explain that I hardly knew how. “Thanks. You digging my mother’s china shepherdess collection?”
“They’re not so bad. A lot of these are actually beautiful.”
“I loved them when I was little. That teacup in the back with the pink roses, if you look closely you’ll see where we had to glue the handle back on because I played tea party with it.”
“I knew you were a rebel.”
“Mad, bad, and dangerous to heirloom china. Are you ready to go?”
“Sure,” he said, and we headed out the door and into the night. I could hear the noise from the restaurant behind us, the crunch of cars arriving and leaving on the gravel.