month to the day from when I was due to leave Paris, I would spend foolishly and have a glass there. The restaurant was famous, and I wanted to tell the other teachers in the boardinghouse about places besides the usual cheap café in the Thirteenth where I dined nightly.
Victor came in a few minutes after I did, apparently with revelry on the brain. It was just two days before Bastille Day, so drinking and merriment had already begun. But unlike me, Victor did not walk in alone. He was with three rowdy friends, and they had quite obviously been guzzling wine, perhaps worse, for hours. They ordered enough food for ten men, sampled all of it, finished none of it, then smashed a bottle of Saint-Émilion Bordeaux onto the floor with the swing of an ill-placed elbow, causing a stream of blood-colored liquid to flood the polished parquet wood. The management wanted to drag them out by their shirtsleeves, but the men bought ten bottles of wine to apologize and proceeded to put one on every table in the room, much to the delight of the patrons. When the waiter began to open mine, an expensive Chablis, I shook my head, assuring him I had no need for it, but Victor leapt to my side.
“But you must take it,” he said, leaning down and kissing my hand. “I only bought all these to impress you.”
“What nonsense!” I said, laughing, suddenly quite glad that I’d worn my lowest-cut dress. “You bought all these to impress the proprietor, not me.” My boldness fueled by the two glasses of champagne I had already consumed, I added: “And to keep from being tossed out on the street.”
“Oh, did I?” he said, smiling in surprise. “You know what I think? I don’t think you’re French.” He paused to reconsider his phrasing. “I think you are not French. I don’t think … Wait. I don’t know what I think,” he concluded, sweat on his brow, his shirt askew.
“I’m American,” I admitted, “though my mother is Québécoise. So, you’re right, not French at all.” It was something that my accent, French Canadian tinged with the drawl of the American South, gave away to most sober Frenchmen within a few words.
“American! Then of course you can drink this,” he exclaimed. “There’s nothing to do in America but drink.”
“Actually, you can’t drink in America anymore. Not out in the open anyway. Not since Prohibition.”
“Which explains why a beautiful American like you came to France,” he said, motioning to the waiter to finish opening the bottle. “Who wants to drink alone? Not me. I want to drink with someone charming, like you. Good thing we’d never pass a foolish law like that here.”
“It is a foolish law,” I admitted. Everyone in southern Virginia had just carried on making their own alcohol anyway, as they’d always done. “But American or not, I can’t drink all this.”
“Yes, you can. If you have help.” He’d called over his friends, who all had the roguish yet polished look of rich young men with few cares in the world. After he’d persuaded me to have one glass, his light blue eyes gazing at me every time I spoke, he announced to his friends that we were abandoning them. He clasped my hand and pulled me along to the place de la Concorde, then through the Tuileries gardens, where my feet grew tired and dusty but my head, and my lips, were soon very much alive as he embraced me. I had kissed a few men before him, some handsome, but after kissing Victor Lesage, I forgot them all.
I did not sail back to America in August as planned. I resigned from the school where I taught French to children with strong New York accents, wrote to the boardinghouse to give my few things away, and married Victor four months later, to the horror of his mother. But even Agathe Michelin Lesage couldn’t put out the flame of our newlywed bliss. Lucie was born the following year and became our light.
But all that was far behind us now, feeling almost as far away as haunted, humid Virginia.
THREE
Jessie
September 2, 1933
I looked back at my reflection in the mirror and turned to either side. Trieu had put me in a sleeveless, tea-length white crepe dress, cut on the bias.
“Are you sure this is suitable for evening?” I asked. “It seems rather casual. The length, that is.” I looked down at my bare ankles. “All the women in