The Light of Paris

She promised herself she would remember it all, hold on to every moment. But as soon as she set one satin-slippered foot on the stairs, it became nothing more than a lovely blur. She stored away memories of everything she could—the plush carpet beneath her shoes, Robert’s hand under hers, the fall of her dress around her knees when she executed her curtsy, graceful and slow as a dancer’s plié. The sparkle of champagne on her tongue, and Robert standing beside her, stiff and formal in his white tie, and the kiss her father dropped on her forehead as they waltzed, and the sight of all the debutantes with their escorts, swirling around the enormous dance floor like flowers, like snowdrops, like everything beautiful and bright and enchanted.

When the night was coming to an end, when the tables had been cleared and most of the fathers had left to smoke in the billiard room and the mothers were fluttering around the ballroom, chatting or passing gossip, or sitting at the tables, listening to the orchestra and remembering their own debuts in a more elegant time, a time when there was not so much sadness, when so many young men had not been lost and so many young women were not so bold and strange and unsatisfied, Emily Harrison came to fetch Margie and Grace. They had been standing alone at the edge of the empty dance floor, sighing happily at the music. “Come upstairs,” Emily Harrison said. “There’s a party.”

“This is a party,” Margie said, confused. She realized, with a little surprise, that she was somewhat drunk, and with even more surprise, that she rather liked it.

Emily Harrison rolled her eyes. “Not like this. A real party. One of the Europeans has a suite upstairs. Everyone else is gone, didn’t you notice? Come on.” Margie looked around to see the three of them were the only debutantes left in the ballroom. The rest of the girls had disappeared, as had their escorts. They were, in fact, the youngest women in the room by a good twenty years.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Grace demurred, and Emily Harrison huffed impatiently.

“Of course not. Perfect Grace. What about you?” she asked, turning toward Margie, who took a surprised step back. A real party? She didn’t know what that meant, but she was sure she’d never been to anything Emily Harrison, who had a tendency to wildness, would have called a real party. But the night was magic and she didn’t want it to end. Why shouldn’t she go?

“I have to tell my parents,” Margie said. “They’ll be leaving soon.”

“Tell them you’re coming home with me. Hurry up already.”

Margie found her mother sitting at a table with Anne’s and Grace’s mothers, their heads bent so close together it looked as though they were eating from a single plate. When Margie approached, they separated slowly, their conversation holding them together like sticky toffee. “Your tiara’s crooked again,” her mother said. She was wearing a gown of heavy blue velvet that made her eyes burn like sapphires.

Pushing a careless hand up toward her tiara, which didn’t feel crooked in the slightest, Margie told her mother she and some of the other girls were going to Emily Harrison’s, and she might stay the night there, if that was all right.

It was the biggest lie she had ever told, and she thought, for a moment, as her mother looked piercingly at her, that she had been found out, until her mother’s gaze flicked back to Mrs. Dulaney and Mrs. Scott, who hadn’t bothered to stop talking for one moment, and she waved Margie off, telling her not to ruin her gown, for goodness’ sake, to get Emily Harrison’s maid to take care of it and not to forget to pick up the fur she had borrowed from her mother and left at the coat check. Margie promised all these things, and her mother let her go.

Could it have been so simple all along? No wonder girls like Anne and Elsie and Emily Harrison were so wild. How easy it was to slip out from under someone’s thumb, if the conditions were right.

The girls left Grace swaying contentedly by herself by the dance floor, like a lily of the valley in a breeze. They took the elevator to the top floor and swished down the hall to a suite whose door was propped open slightly, letting out the sound of music. As Emily Harrison put her hand on the doorknob, there was a shout and a burst of raucous male laughter, and Margie jumped back slightly. She felt a little less drunk now, away from the orchestra and the sparkle of the ballroom, and a little more scared, but Emily Harrison simply hissed at her to come on.

Inside, Margie stood by the door, both terrified and fascinated. Someone put a glass of champagne in her hand and she drank it quickly, the pleasant light-headedness she had felt before rising up again.

One of the Southern girls sat on the sofa, a cigarette burning in one hand and what looked suspiciously like a tumbler of gin in the other. She had taken off the lace overlay of her dress—Margie could see it draped carelessly over the back of a nearby chair—and was sitting there only in the satin chemise, and Margie was certain she didn’t have anything on underneath it. A man sat on either side of her, one of them also smoking. Ash had fallen onto the cushions of the cream sofa between them.

In the corner, a phonograph played Al Jolson, and a few of the European girls (and, Margie was shocked to see, Elsie Mills) were dancing with their escorts, who had taken off their ties and tails. It wasn’t dancing of the sort she’d learned at cotillion; their bodies were pressed so close together Margie couldn’t have gotten a hand in between them. One of the men had dropped cigarette ash on the tallest European’s beautiful gown, but no one seemed to notice or care. Elsie and her escort, their eyes half closed, from attraction or liquor, moved more and more slowly, their heads drifting together, and then they began to kiss, at first gently, and then passionately. Margie stared—she had rarely seen anyone kiss, and certainly not with such hunger—and when she finally turned away, her face burned with shame and envy.

The air was hazy with smoke—in addition to the cigarette smokers, a group of escorts was playing cards and smoking cigars in a dining room off the front room. Emily Harrison had disappeared, and Margie felt immediately self-conscious and overheated, her corset pressing too tightly into her stomach. She walked quickly through the room to one of the side doors—This suite must take the whole floor, she thought—and opened it to find a couple engaged amorously on a bed. Slamming the door shut, she pressed her hand to her chest. Was this what everyone else had been doing while she and Grace were visiting and performing little plays together or reading on Friday nights? Had this been happening all around her and she had just never been invited until now? Or was this part of the new world that seemed to be trembling around them, ready to break open and swallow them all whole?

She didn’t belong here, she thought. But what could she do? She couldn’t leave now. Her mother thought she was spending the night at Emily Harrison’s, and she didn’t even have cab fare.

Taking another few steps away from the blur of the living room, Margie found herself in a hallway lined with rich damask wallpaper in cream and silver. Suddenly, one of the other doors opened, and her escort, Robert Walsh, emerged, straightening his vest, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, and she blushed. Margie had always had the worst habit of blushing anytime she was in the company of any boy—or now, man—near her age, especially if he was at all good-looking, which Robert Walsh definitely was. Hearing the sound of a commode flushing behind him, she burned even hotter. “Hey there, are you all right?” he asked. Unable to look at him, she nodded.

“Party rather too much for you, eh?” he asked, and then, accepting her apparently stunned look as a reply, took her by the elbow and steered her away from the living room. “Come on. Let’s get you a little fresh air.” He led her down the hall to the last door, which opened into an enormous, and blessedly uninhabited, bedroom. Guiding her inside, he closed the door behind them and walked over to a long wall, tugging aside a curtain to reveal a pair of French doors. Margie stepped outside gratefully when he opened them.

The air was icy against her skin, and Margie wished she had gotten her coat from the check after all. Her mother would be furious if she forgot it, especially after she had been reminded. She always complained that Margie was irresponsible and flighty and addle-minded, and most of the time, Margie had to admit, it was true. It was just so easy to get lost in her thoughts, or in a book, or in a story she was writing.

Breathing the air in deep, grateful gulps, Margie felt her heart slowing and the flush fading from her cheeks.

“Damn, it’s freezing out here,” Robert said mildly. He shook off his jacket and brought it over to Margie, settling it around her shoulders. She pulled it closer around herself, inhaling the smell of him on the fabric—soap and Brilliantine and unlit tobacco.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, when the air had done its job. She had begun to shiver, but she didn’t want to move just yet. The champagne giddiness had gone, replaced by a different pleasure. Above them, the stars were sharp and lustrous, and she liked the steady comfort of Robert beside her.

He was handsome in a careless way, and though he had been raised to be polite, there was something of a rake about him. He drove a sporty Monroe roadster and though he was older than she, almost twenty-five, he didn’t seem to be in any rush to settle down and get married, or even work for a living. She always heard him talking about one party or another, or a trip he had taken to Atlantic City, or Boston, or New York.

Her parents had selected him to be her escort, and his parents had probably agreed for him. Yet here they were now, alone, and he didn’t seem to want to be part of what was happening out in the party any more than she did. Could it be that he was like her, maybe a little shy, a little dreamy? Maybe he had been misunderstood all this time and all he needed was someone who would allow him to be himself, and he would see that in her and she would look up at him with dewy eyes, her heart pounding, and …

“No need to apologize,” Robert said. “Your teeth are chattering—you must be frozen. Are you feeling better? Should we go back inside?”

Startled, Margie nodded, and he gestured politely for her to go in first. He closed the doors behind them, but the chill remained in the air, so Robert strode over to the fireplace, taking the match holder from the mantel and lighting the fire that had been laid there. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward the sofa closest to the fireplace. She settled into the cushions, sliding out of his jacket as he brought over the coverlet from the bed and tucked her in, grinning and winking at her as though they shared a secret. Margie felt the heat in her face again.

“Thank you,” she said after a few moments, when she was warm again. “I don’t know what came over me.”

Robert shrugged. He sat down in an armchair by the fireplace, resting one foot on the opposite knee. He took the still-unlit cigar out of his mouth and set it in a large crystal ashtray on the tiny, spindly end table. “You’ve had quite an evening. And this party did go from amusing to outrageous rather quickly.”

Margie’s heart quickened again, thinking of Elsie and that man kissing passionately, of the couple in the bedroom, a flash of bare arms and legs entwined before she had closed the door. “I hear Europeans are scandalously free these days,” she said, trying to sound worldly, like she went to parties like this all the time, as he apparently did.

Instead of laughing at her, Robert simply nodded. “They are. But you can’t blame them. They’ve been through a lot. It’s a miracle there’s anyone left, isn’t it? Between the war and the ’flu?”

“Why didn’t you go?” Margie asked tentatively. “To the war?”

Instead of answering, he stared into the fire silently for a few moments. “Money,” he said finally, “has all sorts of privileges. My father bought my way out.”

“Oh.” The idea that he had avoided service on purpose made her feel embarrassed for him. She scrambled for a conciliatory remark. “Of course you’re important to the company. It’s right you should have stayed home, or who would take over the business from your father if you …” she trailed off, realizing she was about to suggest Robert’s tragic demise.

He didn’t seem to notice. He was still watching the fire, and then, abruptly, he pulled himself out of his trance and slipped a hearty smile back onto his face. “Quite right, quite right. Shall I get us a drink?” he asked, but didn’t wait for a reply. He pushed himself up from the chair and was out of the room before Margie could say anything.

It wasn’t until he was gone that she really took in that she was sitting alone in a bedroom with a man. She’d never been in such a circumstance before, hadn’t even countenanced the idea that it might happen before she was married. Was it terrible she didn’t feel it was so wrong?

She knew what she should do, of course. She should leave this party and all its shocking business behind and go downstairs and get her coat from the check before it closed and her mother’s fur went into whatever purgatorial limbo happened to coats in the coat check past closing time. The hotel doorman would get her a taxicab and she would say her address loudly and confidently, as if she traveled by herself in the middle of the night all the time, “3241 R Street,” and she’d go home and ring the bell and her father would pay the taxi and she could be safe in her own bed in an hour, her dress hanging on the wardrobe door and this night nothing more than a beautiful dream with a queer ending.

But she didn’t. She sat by the fire wrapped in the coverlet, and in a few moments Robert came back carrying a champagne bucket in one hand and a pair of glasses between his fingers. She heard a rush of music and conversation when the door opened, which stilled again when he closed it.

“I hope you like champagne. There’s gin, but that’s an acquired taste.” He put the champagne bucket on the end table and pulled out the bottle, sweating and chilled from its ice bath, and used a napkin to gently tug out the cork. It sprang free with a sharp pop, and Margie could hear the fizz as he poured her a glass.

“I do like champagne,” Margie said, although she felt sure she had been on a roller coaster of it all night and it was long past time for her to get off. Still, when he handed it to her, she took it, sipping at it gently, letting the bubbles pop against the roof of her mouth, savoring the sweetness on her tongue.

“You don’t want to be out there? At the party?” she asked. Robert poured himself a drink and then, to her surprise, clinked his glass against hers as he sat down on the sofa, so close she could feel the warmth of him. Though she had touched him a dozen times that night—when he had walked her down the stairs, when they had danced, his hand against the small of her back—this felt blushingly intimate.

“Not tonight. Those girls are tiring. All they do is gossip and talk about dresses and marriage. I’d rather talk to you, Margie.”

“Thank you,” Margie said, dazzled by the compliment, small as it was.

“So did you enjoy the ball?”

“Very much so,” Margie said with a smile, and it all came back to her. The discomfort she had felt at the shock of the party had faded, the light-headedness from the alcohol was blurring into something quieter, a buoyant contentment, and when she stretched her feet out, she could see the roses marching down the front of her dress and the toes of her pretty satin slippers. And even if Robert were simply biding his time with her, she could pretend it was something else, and no one would ever have to know.

“When do you go back to school?”

“Not for ages and ages,” Margie said. She lifted her arms over her head and stretched. The fire and the champagne were making her toasty, and she let the coverlet slip down into her lap.

“I’m leaving for Europe right after the New Year.”

“Oh? Is it for work?”

“God, no,” Robert said, and took an enormous slug of his drink. “I am on a quest, Margie, to avoid that particular responsibility for as long as possible.”

“You don’t want to take over the business?”

“Not even a little bit. What about you? You aren’t in some God-awful rush to get married and start popping out children and turn into your mother, are you?”

“Goodness, no,” Margie said with a shudder, and took a large swig of her champagne in imitation of Robert, who laughed charmingly. “My mother is the last person I want to turn into.” And then, a little ashamed of herself for speaking ill of her mother aloud, she turned to him frantically. “You won’t tell her I said that, will you?”

He smiled, his teeth blindingly white, and gave her a slow, raffish wink. “Not as long as you promise not to tell my father I’d rather die than take over the helm of Walsh Shipping. Right now they’re so grateful I’m not pushing up poppies in Flanders Fields, they’re letting it lie, as long as I do little services like this and keep the family name clean. But eventually they’ll ask, Margie. Eventually they’ll demand it.” He was growing sadder and more morose as he talked. “We’re doomed, you know. Doomed to turn into our parents.”

“No!” Margie stood up, throwing off the coverlet and stamping her foot. “I won’t do it. I’m going to be different, you’ll see. I’m going to be a writer, and I’m going to live in Europe, and I’m never going to get married—I’m going to fall in love again and again, and no one can stop me.”

Robert looked up at her as though he were deciding something, and then he drained his own drink, stood up, and, to Margie’s complete surprise, slipped his arms around her as though they were going to begin a waltz. “Of course you are,” he said, and the sadness in his face was gone again, so far gone Margie wondered if she had only imagined his gloomy prophecies. “You’re going to live in Paris and drink champagne from a shoe and write books like no one has ever read before,” he said, and he swept her around the room as though they were back on the ballroom floor, guiding her expertly between the furniture without even seeming to look at it. Margie laughed, tilting her head back and watching the ceiling spin above her as they danced in the quiet room, the crackle of the fire and the pale thumps of the party outside their only music. “And I’m going to go to Italy and live as a marquis, and never, ever think about cargo or shipping or tariffs or any kind of freight at all.” Margie laughed again, and then he abruptly spun to a stop.

“Whoops!” She was still laughing, her eyes closed. When she opened them, Robert was looking at her intently, searching her face for something.

“Margie,” he said, low and quiet.

“Yes?”

He didn’t say anything; he simply pulled his hand from hers where their arms had been extended and slipped it around her waist, pulling her close, far closer than they had been on the dance floor, as close as the dancers had been in the living room of the suite, the roses of her gown crushed against his stiff white vest, and then, as though she had been doing it all her life and knew what was coming, her eyes fluttered closed as he kissed her.

It seemed impossible someone else’s lips could be so soft, and she wondered at so many sensations at once, at the smell of him, the warmth of his body against hers, his hands firm and strong against her back, the quiet movements of his mouth and then his tongue, at first shocking and then, when she opened her lips, both natural and incredibly arousing. Her body rose to meet his, and when he moved his mouth from hers and trailed a line of kisses down her neck, breathing in the scent of her perfume and her skin, one hand moving up, his fingers playing dangerously at the edge of her neckline, she didn’t stop him, didn’t want to stop him, because the voice inside her telling her she shouldn’t, this wasn’t something a lady, a proper girl, did, that voice belonged to her mother and this night was hers and hers alone, to do with as she wished.

They kissed until her lips were swollen and the dizziness of the champagne had been exchanged for the dizziness of desire, and they lay down on the bed together and they didn’t stop kissing, and her hands were as bold on him as his were on her. They fell asleep together, their mouths close, hands claiming a confident intimacy, his body warming hers, her mind whirling with the fulfillment of all her romantic fantasies.

In the morning when she woke, the dream was over. He was gone, and she didn’t see Robert Walsh again for almost five years.

three

MADELEINE

1999

Phillip hadn’t stuck around to see how his threat had affected me. He had taken his drink and stalked off to the study. I stood in the kitchen, stunned, and then stumbled into the bedroom, grabbing for some antacids to calm my stomach.

His side of the bed had stayed empty while I tossed and turned, unable to get warm despite the extra blankets I had wrapped myself in.

Finally, I had drifted off to sleep in the gray gruel of morning, woke up groggy and disoriented. Padding across the condo, I quietly opened the door to the study, but Phillip was gone. His keys and wallet weren’t by the front door. It was a weekend, but maybe he had gone to the office. Maybe he had left just to avoid me.

I had to talk to him, had to apologize, had to make it right again. No matter how much I complained, when it came down to it, I couldn’t actually get divorced. I couldn’t. It would be an admission that I was a failure, unlovable, that I hadn’t been good enough for him after all. I would be buried by the shame. My mother would be humiliated. I couldn’t.

I dialed Phillip’s mobile number again and again. His office phone. Nothing.

What if he had really meant it? What if it really were over? I lifted my hand to my throat as if I could physically unstop the breath that had caught there.

And what would I do? If there were no more Phillip, who would I be? No one else would marry me. I’d have to leave the Stabler. I’d have to leave Chicago, leave the rows of art galleries in River North where I could stroll for hours and see a dozen pieces that changed everything. I’d have to go back to my hometown. Back to Magnolia, to my mother, to the Ladies Association and humid summers, to walk among my ruins and stew in my failures.

Magnolia. The fight had eclipsed my dread over my impending peacekeeping trip to see my mother, but in three hours, I was supposed to be on a plane. But I couldn’t go now, could I? I had to stay and make things right with Phillip. Except he clearly didn’t want to see me. Didn’t want to talk to me.

But maybe if I went, maybe if I went and left Phillip alone for a while, he’d calm down. I’d just been upset the night before, drunk on the foolish idea of painting again, trapped in a too-tight dress (Phillip had been right about the cookies, he was always right), irritated by Dimpy Stockton’s cheerful entitlement. And he’d calm down, just as I had. Phillip was endlessly mercurial, and horribly spoiled, and sometimes the best thing to do, I’d found, was to leave him to it. Eventually he got bored of his own drama and would emerge from it as though it had never happened. And I wouldn’t say a word of it to my mother. She and Phillip adored each other, and if she knew I had screwed this up …

Well. I wasn’t going to think about that. Because it was going to be fine. Pulling my suitcase out of my closet, I packed in silence. I’d be gone for a week and by the time I came back, everything would be fine. He’d have forgotten all about a divorce. I’d have forgotten the anger that had swollen inside me, the resentment at the way he treated me, the sick certainty I felt when he pushed at the issue of a baby. The weather would be warm in Magnolia. I could take shorts, sleeveless shirts, not that anyone wanted to see my bare, chubby arms. There would be so much pollen in the air I wouldn’t be able to breathe, and my mother and I would be at each other’s throats within twenty-four hours, but it wouldn’t be here. I took the nearly empty bottle of antacids and ground them into a fine powder against my tongue on the way to the airport, feeling the twist in my stomach as it pulled angrily against itself.