Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

Lee wants the waiter to ask her more questions—wants, so badly, to have an actual conversation, to make a friend—but just then the bell over the door chimes as a group of older men come in and the waiter goes over to show them to a table.

Lee sips her drink as slowly as she can to make it last. As the room gets more crowded, it occurs to her that the bistro is stodgy. All the patrons are years older than her. The men have thick gray mustaches like suit brushes above their lips; the women, while chic, have high buttoned collars and sensible shoes. But then a trio comes in: two men and a woman. At first Lee thinks they are actors because their outfits are so strange. The men wear gauchos and sashes tied at their waists, with white shirts and no jackets. They look almost like parodies of artists but they sit perfectly at ease and the waiter hardly glances at them when they order. The woman, too, is dressed strangely, in the Scheherazade style that was popular a few years back. Her hair is closely bobbed and gleams like polished walnut against her small head, and her lips are painted such a dark red they are almost the same shade as her hair.

Lee tries to listen to them without their noticing. They speak English with a hard northern bite to it, and though normally she wants nothing more than to put Poughkeepsie behind her, on this night the familiar tones of her hometown have the pleasure of sinking into a warm bath. They are talking about a man named Diaghilev, who is the head of the ballet and has diabetes and lives alone in a nearby hotel. The woman seems afraid of him, but Lee can’t discern why; she clearly isn’t a dancer—even seated it is obvious she is stocky, and her ankles look like saucisson stuffed into her T-strap shoes.

“If you’re going to listen, you should join us,” one of the men says, staring at the ceiling.

Lee sips her wine.

“Hey, Lorelei,” he says, swiveling in his chair and snapping his fingers at Lee. “If you’re going to listen to us, you better join us.”

When she realizes he is addressing her, Lee is so surprised she is almost tempted to decline their invitation, but this is the thing she has longed for—a way to be a part of a world just beyond her reach. For a moment she is scared to let it happen. But her waiter has overheard them, and comes over to carry her drink for her, so the choice is made and she moves over to their table.

Once she is settled, the man who invited her leans toward her. “I’m Jimmy,” he says, “and this is Antonio, and this is my sister, Poppy.”

He holds on to the word sister for a beat too long. Lee knows she is to understand that Poppy isn’t his sister, but she has no idea why he would say she is.

Poppy turns her shiny head and looks at Lee. “We were talking about Diaghilev, but I’m bored of that. I want to talk about a scandal. Do you know any scandals?” Poppy purses her lips and a line appears near her mouth like a delicate question mark.

Lee glances around, suddenly hot from all the wine and food. What does she have to say that would interest them? Her mind goes blank as paper, and the only things she can think of are the physical objects around them: the ceiling light swaying on its chain, the scuffed wood floor, the candle on the table with its small waterfall of wax.

“You’re a scandal,” Jimmy says to Poppy, reaching over and putting his hand on her knee. She ignores him, holding Lee’s gaze, the challenge of her question continuing until at last she looks away and it is over. She turns back to Jimmy and he begins talking again, and just like that the tension eases and Lee is folded into their group.

“We were at the Ballets Russes,” Jimmy offers.

“We had to leave,” Poppy says. Lee wonders if they were kicked out because of how they were dressed.

Jimmy balances on the back two legs of his chair. “Poppy here has a very refined sensibility. She can’t bear to see anyone suffer. The director has a reputation—a temper, let’s say—”

Poppy cuts him off. “The dancer looked puffy. She’d been crying, I could tell. And Goncharova’s set was all wrong.”

“I liked it. I better have, all the time I spent helping her paint it.” These are the first words Antonio has spoken. He doesn’t take his cigarette out of his mouth.

Lee turns to him. “Oh, you paint!”

“No.” Antonio takes a huge drag and then crushes his cigarette in the ashtray and lights another in a unified and graceful motion.

“Antonio does automatic drawings,” Jimmy says, and Lee nods as though she knows what he means. Antonio just sits there, so Jimmy continues. “Incredible work. He really gets to the dream state. Time like gears unhinged. Screwy stuff.”

“The opposite of you,” Poppy says, looking at Lee again, and for a moment Lee is shocked, until she realizes that Poppy is pointing to her camera, which she has set on the table and is surprised to find is doing what she hoped it would do: signal her new identity. Lee reaches out and runs her fingers across its case, still cold to the touch in the warm room.

“I’ve been doing illustration work for Vogue, ” Lee says, eager to offer up something that might seem intriguing. “They hired me when I moved here to sketch copies of the fashions at the Louvre.”

It is true, or was: for weeks Lee sat on her little folding stool in the Louvre’s east wing, copying the Renaissance objects they had on display. A lace cuff with a rose point pattern, a belt with a giant silver buckle. She sent her sketches to the magazine, care of Condé Nast, but when she did he told her that they couldn’t use them after all. We have a man in Rome now taking pictures, he wrote. Much faster, and such a good way to see all the details. Lee hasn’t been back to the museum since, and she hasn’t found a new job either.

“Fashion at the Louvre,” Jimmy drawls. “How bourgeois.”

Lee flushes, but before she can say anything, Antonio says, “Good light. I work there now and then.”

Lee thinks of the slanting shadows cast down from a bank of the museum’s windows, the silhouettes the statues threw onto the ground. “Yes,” she says, and when she catches Antonio’s eye he gives her a smile, warm and genuine. Jimmy twirls a finger in the air to call for more drinks, and Poppy shifts in her seat so that she’s facing Lee and starts to tell her a long, convoluted story about her childhood in Ohio, and just like that, Lee feels she has lifted a chisel to the wall of Paris and tapped the first crack into its surface.

Later. More wine. Poppy’s hand snakes along Jimmy’s thigh, the white tips of her manicure pale moons against his trousers. A warm flush that started in Lee’s stomach rises up to her neck, as if she is a carafe someone is slowly filling with hot tea. By the time the warm feeling reaches her chin, she is leaning back in her chair, her legs spread in an unladylike posture, laughing so hard at the things Jimmy is saying she forgets to hide her crooked front teeth with her hand. So when Poppy yawns, looks around at the restaurant, now half empty again, and says, “Let’s go somewhere—anywhere,” Lee is ready, doesn’t even care where they take her.

“Drosso’s,” Jimmy says with authority, standing and throwing a sheaf of bills on the table—how many Lee doesn’t know, but it seems to her a vast sum, more than enough to cover the cost of her meal—and then they are outside, and it is raining, so they pile into the back of a taxicab, pressed so close together that Lee can feel the stubble on Poppy’s exposed thigh as it pushes against her own. Antonio is wedged against her other side, staring out the window.

“Careful of your glass,” Jimmy says to Poppy, who has brought her wine into the cab and takes small sips each time they stop.