Chapter 8: Sara

Sara Miller had read that one could find romance in Paris. She had read it in a great many places. In Hemingway, obviously, though his Paris was full of men who drank too much and women who left them. In Colette, whose Paris was full of women who were worldly as she imagined herself to be. Even Cosmo had an article called “Ten Ways to Fall in Love in the City of Light,” which she had read four times then thrown out. Her mother did not approve of Cosmo.

In the movies: Leslie Caron dancing by the Seine with Gene Kelly. Or Audrey Hepburn mixing it up with Cary Grant.

In songs, which all spoke of April, or May, or springtime.

Her grandmother booked the trip—a graduation present for her and her sisters, three weeks in Paris—won’t that be marvelous for you girls —

The woman at the travel agency had assured her that July is lovely in Paris.

Sara had thought but not said: The songs don’t say anything about July in Paris.

She was twenty-one and had graduated from Vassar in May with a degree in English. Her professors had loved her thesis on the heroines of Charlotte Brontë. But at the same time said things like: you have a fine mind and are a pleasure to have in seminar and if you could only speak up more, Miss Miller.

People said she had nice eyes, but Sara knew that was what people said when they could not think of anything else. Her eyes were gray-green and large and serious, behind a pair of tortoiseshell glasses she had been wearing since the fourth grade.

Her hair was light brown and fine and unremarkable. She was five foot four and thin in a way that her mother called willowy and her sisters called flat. She dressed, according to her sister Libby, like a librarian.

In the spring of her senior year, there had been a boy named Douglas, a graduate student in chemistry, whom she had met in the library. Who, on a cold night in April, in his narrow room in a boarding house on Raymond Avenue, had taken her virginity. It was over before she had fully understood that it had begun. Afterward, he had thanked her. Then, a month later, he had got engaged to a girl from Poughkeepsie he’d been seeing the whole time.

That was not romance. But it had been something, a door opened to womanhood. And later when she thought about it, she thought, At least now I know what romance isn’t.

A month before the Paris trip, she had gone to the student health service and got a prescription for the Pill, and filled it. She put the little pink plastic dial in her toiletry bag and felt more daring than she had ever felt in her life. She had no plan. She simply did not want, if the magic came, to have to say no to it.

That was Sara. She believed in romance and packed for it like a Girl Scout.

Her sisters were the opposite, always had been.

Caroline was twenty-three and Libby was nineteen. They were beautiful: tall, blond, long-legged, tanned. When they walked into a room, every male head would turn. Both had been cheerleaders at Greenwich Country Day. Both had been Homecoming Queens. There were photographs of each of them in a tiara on the piano at home, along with a photograph of Sara at fourteen with her braces smile, winning the county spelling bee.

They loved her, Sara never doubted that, but they were simply unable to understand her, in the way that cats are unable to understand dogs.

Caroline had been engaged to a boy named Tad, and then disengaged from Tad, and was now, as far as Sara could tell, in Paris chiefly to recover from Tad by means of a young Italian she had met on the second night. Libby was between her sophomore and junior years at Sweet Briar and was in Paris chiefly to shop and party. All three of them were staying at a hotel on the Rue de Rivoli with a view of the Tuileries.

For the first two weeks, Sara had hardly seen them. They went to discothèques and shops and parties in the sixteenth given by friends they had met. They came home at four in the morning, shrieking with laughter in the corridor, and slept until noon.

Sara was not invited to the discothèques and would not have gone if she had been. Instead, every morning, she put her guidebook and her journal and a paperback into a canvas bag and went out alone and explored Paris.

She walked the Seine from the Pont Neuf to the Eiffel Tower and back. She walked the Marais and the Île Saint-Louis and all the way up the hill to Montmartre, where she sat on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur with the whole of Paris laid out below her.

She went to the Louvre three times and the Orangerie twice, and sat in the round white rooms with Monet’s water lilies.

She ate alone in cafés, which she had been afraid of doing and found to be fun in an odd way.

The romance had not come.

She told herself it didn’t matter. She told herself that Paris itself was the romance. She told herself she was having the best time of her life.

She almost believed it.

And then, on the second Monday, her sisters decided to go to brunch.

It was Libby’s idea. Libby had read something in the Herald Tribune.

“There’s a place on the Avenue Kléber,” she announced on Sunday morning, sitting up in bed with the newspaper and a cup of room-service coffee, her hair in rollers. “Some woman from Connecticut wrote a letter about it. Listen. ‘Charming old bistro near the Arc de Triomphe where the handsome young waiter will seat you at the very table where Hemingway wrote.’ Handsome young waiter.” She put the paper down. “Let’s go.”

“I was going to the Rodin Museum,” said Sara.

“You can go to the Rodin Museum anytime. Rodin’s dead. The waiter isn’t.” Libby threw back the covers. “Come on, Sary. We never see you. It’ll be fun. You can tell us about all the churches.”

So Sara went.

She wore her blue cotton dress with the white collar. She walked up the Avenue Kléber behind her sisters, who were in white trousers, silk blouses, scarves, and enormous sunglasses. They looked like movie stars from the Riviera.

Chez Lacombe had a green awning and gold letters on the glass and a terrace full of small marble tables under the plane trees. A plump, pretty, gray-haired Frenchwoman in a flowered dress met them at the door with a smile like a sunrise and seated them at a table on the pavement in the shade.

And then the waiter came.

The handsome young waiter was tall, wearing a white shirt, black trousers, and a long white apron. He was beautiful, not handsome but beautiful, in the way that a horse or a sailboat is beautiful, all long clean lines and easy motion. Dark brown hair fell over his forehead. A strong, square, open face. And eyes of such a clear, startling, cornflower blue that her sister Caroline, who had seen a great many handsome men, took off her sunglasses so as not to miss his face.

“Bonjour, Mesdemoiselles,” he said, and smiled.

Libby said, “Oh my God,” not quite under her breath.

Caroline said, “Well, hello there.”

Sara said nothing. She was looking at the menu. When she looked up again, a moment later, the waiter was looking at her.

Not at Caroline. Not at Libby. At her.

“You are Americans,” he said, his English awful. “From New York perhaps? No. From Connecticut. Yes? I can hear. It is in the teeth.”

Libby laughed. “How did you know?”

“I know Connecticut,” he said sadly. “I have been there. Once. It was very ... green. Very, how you say ... organized.” He sighed deeply. “I was not happy there.”

“Why not?” said Caroline, leaning forward on her elbows, so that her blouse fell open at the neck.

The waiter did not look. He continued to look at Sara.

“Ah,” he said. “It is a sad story. I do not tell it.” He hesitated. “But to you ... perhaps.”

He drew up a chair. He actually drew up a chair from the next table and sat down on it backward, with his long arms folded across the back. Sara noticed the plump Frenchwoman at the door make a small choked noise and disappear inside.