Chapter 12 July 1995 Lily Jacobsen—Program Manager #2
I waited for her to say, Maybe you could come next time, but she didn’t. Like a speaker at the library, she lectured giddily on her pet topic, Antoine; like an audience member, I listened, biding my time until the Q and A.
“Antoine sounds wonderful, but let’s talk about you,” I said. “What’s going on with you?”
She set down her fork. Her expression became stony. “The French don’t ask prying questions. They know when to hold their tongues.”
“Now you’re lecturing me on the French?”
“Me lecture you?” Mary Louise said. “That’s rich. You rarely let me get a word in.”
The waiter placed our desserts before us. Her cream puffs were drizzled with chocolate, my pie glistened with butter and sugar.
“Wait until you try it,” she said.
“I’ve had tarte tatin before.” Annoyance crept into my voice. We’d been in France the same amount of time; we’d eaten the same food.
“Not here. It’s the best.”
As a caramelized apple melted in my mouth, I stifled a groan of pleasure. “You’re right.”
“I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
“What?”
“You admitting I know something.”
“You know things,” I sputtered. “Lots of things.”
“Never as much as you.”
We finished the meal in silence. When the check came, I pulled out my wallet to pay my share, but she waved my hand away. Without even verifying the tab, she thrust a gold card at the waiter. Mary Louise had entered the next phase of life without me.
I thanked her for dinner as we made our way toward her apartment.
She and I used to love evening strolls together, exploring neighborhoods, peering through windows into other people’s lives.
Now, we passed blond Haussmannian buildings.
On the first floor, I spied a woman in a pink blouse opening a bottle of wine for three girlfriends.
I gestured at them. “Do you think they’re celebrating an engagement? Or a book deal?”
“Probably just having a chat.”
On the second floor, I glimpsed a man scowling at the mirror above his fireplace mantel.
“Did his girlfriend dump him, or is he having problems with co-workers?” I asked.
“You don’t have to accompany me home.”
I wanted to. “It’s on my way to the métro station.”
She shrugged. “Okay, then.”
Had she forgotten our walks? I pointed to the dusky sky. “Our favorite time of day.”
She nodded. L’heure bleue, the time between day and night, when the sky turned a dreamy shade of blue.
In front of Mary Louise’s building, the concierge had set out the trash. Five canvases were propped against the green bin. The one on top depicted a pastel Eiffel Tower, and I realized these were Mary Louise’s paintings. I was stunned. How could she discard her life’s work like it was garbage?
“Why would you throw these out?” I demanded.
“They’re puerile.”
Where’d she get that word? It wasn’t one of hers. Neither was “gusto” or “superb.” She didn’t talk like that. She didn’t think like that.
“They’re not childish,” I replied. “They’re evocative and original. No one else can do what you do!”
“You’re the only one who thinks so.”
In her petulant tone, I heard a world of hurt.
“That’s not true.” Trying to console her, I reached out to squeeze her shoulder, but she stepped away.
“No one here wants pictures of Paris.”
“Sell them to folks back home.”
“People there don’t pay for art. It would be self-indulgent.”
She had a point. In our small town, pleasure was foreign, even suspicious. No one there got massages or used aromatherapy. A vacation was a weeklong trip you took once a decade, not a yearly monthlong certainty, like for many French families.
“Sell your paintings to tourists here,” I argued.
“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” she shouted.
A Parisienne walking her corgi looked down her nose at us as she passed.
“The constant rejection is too hard,” Mary Louise continued in a whisper. “I can’t cope with it.”
“Just because the paintings haven’t sold yet doesn’t mean they won’t. Plenty of tourists want souvenirs. Let’s go to Montmartre.” I gestured north.
“Don’t be na?ve! Artists need to buy a permit to sell there.”
“Tomorrow morning. We’ll stand on a street corner and hawk your paintings—”
“Quit suffocating me!”
We used the word to describe our parents, our small town, our life before. It was the worst insult I could think of. All I’d ever done was to support her.
I crossed my arms to stop myself from shaking some sense into her. “Suffocating you?” Now I was the one shouting.
She shrugged. “Anyway, my paintings are just clutter.”
“Is that your opinion? Or Antoine’s?”
She exhaled sharply. “It’s my opinion. I don’t want them anymore. They suck.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t think that.”
“Quit telling me what to think! I have a mind of my own.” She spoke in a low, fierce tone, the same one she’d used to defend me to my dad, to the principal, to my stepmother years ago. Mary Louise had always been on my side, and I was on hers, now and always. How could she not see that?
“I didn’t mean to tell you what to think. I just meant I love your work. And once they have the chance, other people will, too.” I moved to take the paintings.
“Don’t touch them.”
Her voice was so hard that I froze midstep.
“I never want to see them again.”
She regarded me in a way that made me afraid she’d add I never want to see you again.
I quickly thanked her for dinner again and took off.
When I rounded the corner, I listened for the jingle of her keys and the click of the door, then peeked past the black wrought-iron fence to see if she’d left the paintings.
They were still there. Between our argument and seeing her life’s work thrown out like junk, I felt queasy.
I wished I could curl up in a ball at home, but I needed to keep an eye out to ensure no one nabbed her work.
When the lights went out in Mary Louise’s apartment, I crept back and hugged the paintings to my chest like long-lost friends.
Negotiating the métro turnstiles was hard with the unwieldy canvases, but we all made it home safely.
I propped the paintings against the wall.
The l’heure bleue pastel of the Eiffel Tower with Mary Louise’s loopy signature in the bottom left-hand corner.
It was one of her first. The yellow sunrise Eiffel Tower she completed a year later; a hair from the brush was stuck in the foot of the tower.
Each morning, I’d touched it for good luck.
Her hydrangea-purple Cubist version, the signature just a scrawl, was the last of the series. How I’d missed them.
I was dumbfounded by Mary Louise’s transformation, her quitting her job without a word to me, and her decision to throw away her paintings. Then there was the assertion that I suffocated her. That was the hardest to swallow.
Sinking onto the futon, I wondered how she could say such a thing.
I thought she liked following my lead. All through junior high and high school, she sat behind me in class.
She didn’t know where to apply for college, so I helped her find art schools—granted, they were in Paris, but still, I’d helped.
After graduation, when she’d wanted to move back home, I insisted that real artists live in Paris. And so we stayed.
When I was a girl, Grandma Pearl had given me a plaque that read, “Some people call it ‘bossy,’ but I call it ‘leadership’!” I saw myself as a leader, but maybe I was just overbearing. Tonight was the angriest I’d ever seen Mary Louise. How long had this been simmering?
Looking back, from college graduation to now, events took on a different interpretation for me.
For example, she’d wanted to return to the States, but I’d stopped her.
I thought I’d pushed her in the right direction, encouraging her to focus on her art.
But if I was honest, I’d lacked the courage to stay in Paris on my own.
Mary Louise had remained in an expensive city and worked a secretarial job that she had no affinity for—for me.
And now, not only had she given up painting but she’d rejected it completely.
She’d declared her independence when she moved out. I’d assumed she wanted space to paint, but really, she’d needed space from me. There was a reason Mary Louise hadn’t come to the ALP—she hadn’t wanted to get sucked into my orbit once again.
I had acted like we were still kids, when I was the banker’s daughter and she grew up wearing her sister’s stained hand-me-downs. Finally, Mary Louise owned an elegant purse that belonged only to her. A real friend would have been happy for her.
She was my best friend. She was the best friend. She’d supported my dreams, she’d known—even if I hadn’t—that I’d needed her moral support to survive here. She’d put her plans on hold for me. I’d used Mary Louise as a crutch, and she’d bowed under the weight of my demands.
I’d screwed up, but had no idea how to make it right.
If Mary Louise even wanted me to. I pondered her paintings—the soft optimism of their colors, the bold confidence of the lines—and wished they could give me an answer.
Should I respect Mary Louise’s wishes—perhaps for the first time in our twenty-year friendship—and dispose of her paintings?
Or should I protect her art? What was selfish and what was selfless?
I wondered what Odile would do. At a crossroad in her relationship with Margaret, she’d fled Paris. She’d always regretted giving up and letting go.
“She told you to go,” I’d reminded Odile.
“Sometimes that’s when you should stay,” she replied.
I was ready to fight to keep Mary Louise in my life. But how, when she only seemed to crave time away from me?