put another bottle of gin in the bathtub,” she said, smiling. “To which the answer is always yes.”
“Of course,” I said, laughing. “Just try to keep the circus animals away from it.”
Anne-Marie looked at me and grabbed my hand. “You’re very important to me, Marcelle. This last year and a half, the four of us practically living together, it’s been a dream. But you’re too smart to just have a life built around only love and joy. You need to know what is happening in the world. And to be involved. I also think it’s high time Khoi descend from his throne and realize that men like him, the collaborationists, are a large part of the problem.”
“I don’t think he’s that anymore,” I said. “But we will start talking about it more. Reading about it like you and Sinh do. I promise.”
I kept that promise.
In the haze of my new life, and rather enjoying my unofficial college education, I married Arnaud at the end of 1928, having pushed off the wedding as long as he would let me. In December, I formally moved in with him, making my trysts with Khoi, and my nights out with Sinh and Anne-Marie, much more difficult, but I still found a way. And the universe seemed to bless my illicit union by cooperating.
At the beginning of 1929, Arnaud had to travel to Burma for a year at the behest of the government, and I refused to go with him. There were no French women for me there, I reminded him, and I was scared of going somewhere so far-flung. Surprisingly, he believed me and sailed alone, while I sailed right back into Khoi’s apartment, and into his bed, with its view of the gray skies and the lazy river. On my first night without Arnaud, we mixed drinks in his bathroom, him fully clothed in the tub, while I sat on a small chair and tried to play the ukulele.
In the company of Khoi and his friends, I had started to become someone different from who I was when I was a single girl working in Paris, or newly engaged to Arnaud. I was someone I liked much better. I was less inhibited, more curious, wittier, and very much sexually alive. That was it. I finally felt fully alive.
We all were. There was a shared electricity between the four of us as long as we were together. And with Arnaud in Burma, Anne-Marie only in her second year at university, and Khoi and Sinh considering extending their studies to spend a few more years in France, it felt like we had time on our side.
I was feeling wrapped up in luck one cold day in March of ’29 as I walked home from the market on the Left Bank when I heard someone call my name. I turned around to see Sinh waving at me in his wool overcoat.
I hooked my bag of meat and vegetables onto my shoulder and rushed to him.
“Khoi told me you’d be here,” he said, greeting me. “I was looking for you.”
“Were you?” I said happily. I had, over the two and a half years I had known Sinh, spent most of my time with him in the company of others, so I felt a certain rush of delight to hear he’d been looking for me alone.
“I’m headed to the Musée Cernuschi near Parc Monceau and thought you might like to join me.”
“Yes, I would, of course,” I said, flattered. “It’s just that I went to buy tonight’s dinner, so I’m afraid I have meat in my bag.”
“Here,” he said, taking it off my shoulder. “I’ll run it up to the apartment. Wait on the bridge a moment.”
I watched him hurry across the Pont Saint-Michel and tried to picture the Musée Cernuschi. I didn’t want to admit that I had no idea what it was.
He returned empty-handed five minutes later and nodded toward the rue de Rivoli. “It’s at least an hour’s walk up. Shall we take a taxi?”
“Let’s walk a bit,” I said, starting across the bridge. “And when my feet give up, I will admit defeat.”
“Even a little before then is fine,” he said, following me east.
It wasn’t until we were crossing over the rue Royale that I admitted knowing nothing about our destination.
“And why would you?” said Sinh kindly. “It’s certainly not the Louvre. It’s a little museum, just one man’s collection, displayed in his former home. Quite a grand one, though. And it’s all art