Bastille Day, page 17
“Cal,” she said, “sometimes there are no perfect choices. Sometimes no matter what you decide, something is still lost. And in this matter, I have no perfect choice. No matter what I do, someone will be hurt. You, my family, myself. What matters, perhaps, is which choice will help the most people.”
I don’t know why I chose to be offended by that. It was noble. She was noble. But maybe because now I was doing the hard work of realizing that I really wanted her to choose me, was leaning hard into that choice for myself, I couldn’t see why she wouldn’t want that too.
Maybe because I couldn’t stand the thought that I might be the one who ended up getting hurt.
She saw it. “Please, Cal,” she said, touching my face. “Right now I just want to be here with you. A boy and a girl, oui? To talk to you. To touch you.” She turned my face toward her. I had been looking down at the table. “You’ve had a horrible day. What are you feeling?”
She reached for me, and God forgive me, I shifted away from her touch.
“Every time I open the door to my heart the tiniest crack,” I said, “something comes along and burns it to ashes.”
She sat up straight. “Don’t treat me like someone who has choices,” she said. “If our hearts were the only things—”
“You do have choices, Nadia,” I said. “We all make choices. We live and die with them.” I looked at the opposite wall, at a picture of Papa Hemingway kicking a can down a road in Idaho. He looked so full of life. But within weeks or months of that photo he had put a shotgun in his mouth.
Sometimes we choose oblivion. I don’t know why.
On that day that my father was buried in Killeen—when the pieces of my father were buried, I should say—a number of his soldiers got up to talk about him. People who had served with him for thirty years spoke of his humor and his courage. And when they were done, everyone turned to me, his son, to close out the festivities, to zip the bag shut.
And as you have seen, I did not know what I could say about the man who had been absent for so much of my life, about the man who had suffered the loss of his wife and lashed out in pain, about the man who had chosen danger and ultimately death over the son who survived.
I’m sure that my aunt and uncle were watching with some suspense. I was myself kindly interested in what I was going to end up saying, whether the better part of me or the most damaged part would show up.
“There are only pieces of my father in that coffin,” I ultimately said, standing at the graveside. It was a hot Texas morning late in July—although not as hot as Fallujah—and already I could feel the sweat breaking out on my brow. “I don’t mean to be offensive. It’s just the plain truth. And there are only pieces of my father here today. I’ve heard things about him I never knew before. And I knew him my whole life.”
I looked around at the mourners. Some of them met my gaze. Some looked at the ground. This wasn’t easy for any of us.
“My father was a man of slogans,” I said. “Words you could find on a t-shirt, maybe. But they were good words. Duty. Honor. Courage. Responsibility.” I paused, seeing that maybe my best self meant to show up after all. “And love. Not like I always understood it. He didn’t really display love, although I think in his own way he did love me. But it’s like they say in the Bible, no man has greater love than to offer his life for his friends. That love was exclusive. He could never love me the way he loved those he cared for most. Who cared for him. His real family. His boys. But he loved you with all his heart. I hope you know that.”
I sat down then. There was nothing more I could say. I didn’t know where I could go after that, but most likely it was to some place where I made an ass of myself, looked like an ingrate, clearly didn’t understand what it means to serve alongside those who have sworn to give their lives, if need be, for the rest of us.
All I did realize was this, something clicking shut in my brain: If you really love somebody, you don’t forsake them.
If you really love somebody, you don’t leave them alone and broken.
“My father died on Bastille Day nine years ago,” I said. “Did I tell you that?”
“Calvin,” she said. She wanted me to say more, but I was a long way away, behind a wall, and she looked at me, trying to figure out where I was, why.
“You seem so different, Cal,” she said quietly, reaching out to me again. I let her put a hand on my arm, felt her fingers caress my bicep. “What is happening? Talk to me.”
I wondered if my father had ever thought about this exchange consciously, his men for his son at home. And if so, why he had made that choice.
“For over a mile,” I said, looking down at my clenched fists, “a Muslim extremist drove a cargo truck down a crowded pedestrian byway in Nice, crushing women and old people and children in the name of Allah.” My teeth were also clenched. Perhaps my very heart was clenched. These words were not communication. They were intended to wound, and they found their mark.
“Surely,” she said, her hand falling from my arm, “you know this murdering bastard does not represent my faith.”
I did not—could not—look up. I had chosen. “This driver did not invoke the name of Bruce Springsteen as he drove. He did not call on Barack Obama or Hermione Granger.” There was an edge to my voice that I did not want there, but I did not see how to call it back, did not know why I had gone down this particular byway, did not even understand why I was so angry. For I was angry. Furious. Beyond control.
“‘God is great!’ witnesses reported him shouting as he plowed through the crowd. He clearly believed he was running down the innocent on behalf of Allah.”
Nadia brought her hand up to her face. I could not tell if she was angry or sad, but it was clear that she was powerfully affected. She shook her head, her face screened by her fingers.
She shook her head.
Frederick brought Nadia’s drink over, set it down, could see that something was happening at our table. He looked from me to her and back to me and backed warily away.
Nadia’s face was colored, and her fists now clenched too, but she still wanted to think the best of me, so she still tried to speak as to a rational being.
“I read that a third of his victims were Muslim.” She looked up at me, although I did not meet her eyes. “You yourself talked to a woman who witnessed the death of a Muslim woman and her child. There is nothing in the Blessed Koran about killing women and children. Calvin, this attacker was an animal.” I looked up now, and her eyes were blazing. “How dare you make these comparisons? He does not represent my faith. I reject this man, and any attempt to equate his acts with Islam. These are crimes against humanity. All of humanity.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, raising a finger. “This bad man doesn’t represent you.” I raised my thumb. “That bad man doesn’t represent you. But the bombs keep exploding, don’t they? The smoke keeps rising. People keep dying. Don’t they?”
I saw the white light, saw those I loved disappearing into it.
Nadia dropped her hand from her face. She looked at me, and she smiled, and her smile was not harsh, but sad. Like she had seen into the heart of something.
“I too wish things could be different, Calvin,” she said. “I wish I had bought that scooter from you. I wish we were riding together under the Golden Gate Bridge with no one but ourselves and our future to consider. I wish that I were marrying you tomorrow night. But maybe none of those things were ever possible.” She blinked rapidly, three or four times, shook her head, coming to her own realizations. “Life is the art of what is possible, and only that. Everything else is illusion.”
I too wished those things for us. I wished I had known Nadia when she was an undergrad first trying to figure out the world.
I wished I had offered her my mother’s one-third carat diamond ring as a tiny token of the love I bore her.
I wished I had offered her my heart before it was so badly mangled, before that door seemed again to be closed and padlocked.
“Yes,” I sighed. “Everything else is illusion.” I shifted slightly away from her so that we were no longer touching.
So, this was it. Whatever we had hoped, whatever we had imagined, this was the end of our story. And I was at fault as much as the circumstances. Nadia did not wish to be in this place, choosing between unforeseeable alternatives, but I was choosing to make that choice a simple one.
I was choosing to drive her away.
I lowered my head, and closed my eyes, and so it was that I did not see Nadia get up from her seat, did not see her as she made for the exit, although I heard her steps, slow, sad, heard the swinging door open and close, heard her weeping until I did not.
When I opened my eyes, she was gone.
I was sitting in the booth at Harry’s, college pennants over my head, a French family nearby, but I was alone.
Until Frederick stomped over to me, indicated Nadia’s hardlytroubled French 75 with an emphatic flick of his hand, and demanded, “What is wrong with you, Monsieur Cal?”
“Wrong with me? Frederick, I just came from a terrorist attack—”
“You just drove away a darling girl, a girl who loves you.” He smoothed down his white apron, which had gapped at his chest as he leaned over me, stopped and collected himself because I’m sure it is bad business for a bartender to yell at his customers. “Why are you so angry, Monsieur Cal? Who are you so angry at? Because I can assure you it is not Nadia. That girl has never done anything but desire your happiness.”
“Does she?” I said. “What if she marries this Ali? Where is my happiness then?”
He shook his head like a lion, mane flung everywhere. “Do you imagine I will be happy if she marries this rich Saudi? No! I will be heart-broke! But if she does, it will be because it is the right thing to do. The only thing she can do. She is a smart girl. A good girl. She must make the very best choice, for her, for her family, for the world. Can you not see this? Can you not see anything beyond your own desire? Your own pain?”
“Nice speech,” I said. I picked up Nadia’s glass, drained her French 75 in four big gulps, set it down with a clatter. “Can any of us?”
“You may imagine that you are angry at that girl,” he repeated, sitting down quietly across from me. “Or frightened by what her decision might mean for you. I understand that. But I am watching you. I am always watching. Your anger is deeper and so much longer lasting than this moment, than this attack. You are angry about something else, and Nadia is caught in the crossfire.” He looked at me inquisitively. “Crossfire, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “That is right. Crossfire. All of that is right.” I dropped my head onto the table with a thunk. It hurt. It should hurt. “Oh, sweet baby Jesus. What have I done?”
Frederick stood up, picked up Nadia’s glass, wiped the table under it, draped the towel back over his arm. “You have hurt the woman you love.”
“The woman we love,” I muttered, looking up at him accusingly.
He looked sideways at me, and I hung my aching head. I was better than that. He went on. “Perhaps neither of you have said the word, but you know I am right. And now you must correct it. You are not angry with her. You must apologize. You must fix what is broken.”
“I am a self-centered idiot,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And so. You must apologize.”
I pulled out my phone and started to text her, but I put it away. It was too late. This could not be fixed by a text, perhaps could not be fixed by anything I could possibly say.
“The check, please, Frederick,” I said.
“Oui, Monsieur Cal,” he said.
I slammed my fists against the table, alarming the French family who were now eating their French sandwiches.
“Oh, this life,” I said. Now my hands hurt.
Frederick looked at me, but he nodded sympathetically. “Oui, Monsieur Cal,” he said, and he passed over the bill.
13.
Paris
July 15, 2016
Friday
When you make a mistake as a journalist, you issue an apology and offer a correction. It’s important to set things rights, to remake yourself in the eyes of those watching as a person worthy of trust.
Your allegiance is not to yourself, but to the truth.
It’s a good lesson for life, I thought, as I walked to the Metro station. Too often we are caught up in our way of seeing, so sure of our way of being that we don’t make room for the possible. The truth is what we make it, not what it is.
And today, the truth was that I was overwhelmed by hatred and destruction, and was placing the blame squarely on Islam, when Nadia and others were assuring me that the blame was on individual human beings who chose violence and death.
We didn’t blow up the whole WASP Christian populace when a white supremacist blew up a government building in OKC, did we?
Why was I doing this?
I walked down stairs and stairs, boarded a rattling Métropolitain train, stood at a pole, ignoring a panhandling busker singing Edith Piaf directly into my face.
I needed some perspective. Some wisdom. Who else would get what I was going through?
And then it came to me: Father Cameron.
Of course, part of me was appalled. A priest? Really?
But no, I thought.
When things go to shit, you ask: Where is the fucking chaplain?
I checked the stops quickly, got off at Concorde, gave the male Piaf a couple of euros on my way out. In some perverse way, he had helped me make a decision. I changed to the Yellow train, and got off at George V. When I came upstairs onto the Champs Elysees, I called the Cathedral, and actually got Father Cameron on the line.
“I didn’t think you’d be there,” I said, after greeting him, reminding him who I was.
“Friday is normally my Sabbath,” he admitted. “But this Sunday is the national Day of Mourning, and the Cathedral is going to be packed. We have a lot of prep to do.”
“I’m just back from Nice,” I told him. “Reporting on the attack. I’m—” I couldn’t say exactly what I was. But something about how I couldn’t say what I was let Cameron know all he needed to know. After a short silence, he spoke.
“Can you come by?”
“I’m five minutes out,” I told him.
“Great,” he said. “Good. I’ll meet you at the front gate and we’ll find a place to talk.”
I crossed the Champs, looking back up the hill to the Arc de Triomphe, to the people pausing in the middle of the street to take selfies with the Arc. On the corner, a line of people waiting to get into the Louis Vuitton flagship stretched down George V. The tower of the American Cathedral soared over the trees. I could scarcely believe I’d stood up there of my own free will. And of course, I hadn’t. It had taken the material intervention of Nadia to get me up there. It made me wonder what else she might be capable of helping me do.
Three blocks down I passed the Four Seasons, where Nadia was hidden on some upper floor, where another crowd lined the street waiting for someone famous to come out. Kardashians or J Lo. Bono, maybe. The American Cathedral was the next block down, and at the black wrought-iron gates Father Cameron waited—in another Hawaiian shirt, this one with a white clerical collar affixed.
He shook my hand, firmly. “Cal.”
“Father. Nice shirt.”
“I know. And call me Cam, if you can.” He pulled me in through the gates. An ancient woman sat behind the glass at the front desk, and when he waved at her, her face lit up like she had encountered Yves Montand or something. “Madame Le Clerc, Monsieur Jones.” I waved, and I did not score anything like that reaction. Cameron was an Episcopal rock star.
With an unobtrusive hand on my arm, he steered me to the right, past the Dean’s Garden, past the cloisters, into what turned out to be the church itself. “My office is packed,” he explained. “I think the nave is our best option. Allan, the organist, is practicing. I hope you don’t mind. He’s quite good. And a fucking mess. But there you go. That’s organists for you.”
We walked into the nave, and I saw the towering organ pipes above me to the right. Then I turned and saw all the way down to the altar. It was gorgeous. I felt immediately at peace, which was a strange thing to say about church, where I had rarely felt at peace in my life.
“It’s—” I shook my head. Again, I was struggling for words. State flags hung above, to either side: Arizona, Oklahoma, Rhode Island. The high altar on the far shore from us was golden, a painting of Christ on the cross flanked by two panels, and the ceiling was cross-vaulted and seemed almost out of sight. It was not the largest cathedral I’d ever seen, but it was exquisite.
“I know,” he said, watching me. “I get that feeling every time I walk in here. This church was consecrated in 1886. John B. Morgan—cousin of J. P. Morgan—was the rector who built this place. I’m sure that didn’t hurt with the fund-raising. George Edmund Street, maybe the greatest architect of the Gothic Revival style, designed it. My favorite bit is the chapel off to the left. The altarpiece is a triptych from the early fifteenth century by a painter called the Master of Roussillon. We don’t even know how much the painting is worth. It’s uninsurable.”
I snorted. “Is that a word? Uninsurable?”
“Of course it is. Like when we were in country, right?”
I smiled, nodded. “Exactly.” Aetna or whoever thought I was a goner from the moment I arrived, but they had to try and fix a figure to that risk.
The organist was playing something slow and haunting, but it didn’t keep us from hearing each other. “Fauré,” Cameron said after listening for a moment. “Probably an introit.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.
“Cal, you should come be with us Sunday,” he said. “It’d probably be good for you.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Not much of a churchgoer,” he intuited. He looked sharply at me, then directed me into a pew.
We took seats on the left side of the aisle, him just in front of me and turning to address me, me behind him and leaning in to make sure he could hear me.
