Bastille Day, page 22
“Hmm,” I said.
“You know,” she said, her finger coming up to caress my cheek, “we’re not getting any younger.”
“I do know that,” I said. “I’ve got hair sprouting in places that hair is not supposed to appear.”
She laughed. I knew that was not the response she was hoping for. I was in my thirties, she was in her late twenties, and apparently somebody who had living parents was feeling some small pressure to get married.
But I didn’t love her.
I knew it then. I know it now. And love is so very hard at the very best of times, with the very best of people. So why on earth would you pretend?
My phone buzzed. It was Ahmed. He was in the office, wanted to know if I wanted to meet him on site.
“Yes,” I said, softly. “Meet me on the Tour Eiffel lawn.”
We could get some street footage from tourists, talk to people on the Debilly Footbridge, maybe, and then go to the Cathedral and get a short piece from Father Cam to wrap the segment.
A few pews ahead of me, an ancient woman was kneeling, her head on top of the pew in front of her as she prayed. I admired that, even though I couldn’t do it.
Faith. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps you going.
That, or doing a job.
Which was where I was headed now. As I walked, I thought about the questions I might ask.
I walked down past restaurants where James Baldwin used to eat, past the bar where Hemingway and Fitzgerald had drinks, past the hotel where Chagall lived and worked. My head was reeling a little, and not because of the whisky sour I had mostly finished.
The world was shifting beneath my feet, and I was wondering where it was going to deposit me when it was finished.
I found Ahmed on the lawn stretching southeast from the Eiffel Tower. Tourists were taking pictures with the tower in the background. For some reason, most of them wanted to be photographed jumping off the lawn, caught in midair with the tangible symbol of Paris behind them.
We talked to a few of them. I got more than a few blank looks. Some of the Americans didn’t realize that France had been attacked.
We talked to a Parisian woman who was walking a path along the Champ de Mars headed home. We stopped her after she crossed the Avenue Joseph Bouvard. She shrugged her shoulders when I told her what interested us, what we wanted to talk about, a beautiful and totally Gallic reaction. What can you do?
“These people,” she said. “They will not change our way of life. They can kill us. But they cannot change us.”
On the pedestrian bridge near the Eiffel we talked to some of the Algerians who were selling trinkets to tourists. While they first seemed a little upset to have their commerce interrupted, they responded warmly when we asked them about Nice.
“We Frenchmen will not be daunted,” said one of them, his hands karate chopping the air. “We will go on and live our lives. Shame on him! This monster. He makes us look bad, and he does not stand for us.”
I talked to an elegant British woman near the Diana Monument off the Avenue de New York. It’s actually the Flamme de la Liberté, the Flame of Liberty, a representation of our Statue of Liberty’s torch, but since Princess Diana was killed in the tunnel just underneath it has become an impromptu memorial to her.
“Well,” she said. “It is horrible, horrible indeed what happened.” Her face turned dark, and her stiff upper lip grew stiffer. “But we shall not give in to these miscreants. Here, in Britain, anywhere in the world. They are on the wrong side of history. We shall overcome.”
Which was a lovely, and I’m confident, unknowing echo of a song from the Civil Rights movement, and made me feel a little more assurance I was on the right track
Ahmed and I walked up Avenue George V to the American Cathedral to talk to Father Cameron. The black wrought-iron front gate was closed, so I called in, and in a minute or so he came out to admit us.
“Cal,” he said, reaching out a hand to shake. “How are you?”
I shook my head. Too soon to say.
“Father Cam,” I said. “This is Ahmed.”
Cam inclined his head. “Salaam Alaikum,” he said.
“Peace be upon you,” Ahmed returned.
“I’m putting together a story on living with this terror,” I said. “This grief. And I was wondering what your experience in the war—and what your tradition—might have to teach us about it.”
“Come back with me,” he said. “For the moment, there is no one in my office.”
We passed back through the Dean’s Garden, where an eternity past I had entertained the thought of tossing Nadia’s monumental engagement ring into these hydrangeas. We entered a limestone building on the left, through a wooden door, and then stepped straight back into Cam’s office.
He took a seat behind his desk. Ahmed set up the camera and I took a seat across from them. Since we were shooting with one camera, Ahmed would tape me asking the question, then Cam’s response, then my response to it. Artificial, yes, but, except in the movie Broadcast News, it works.
“I’m talking with Father Cameron Gaines,” I said, “who was a military chaplain in Iraq prior to coming to Paris to serve at the American Cathedral,” I said. “Father, what advice do you have for those wrestling with their feelings about this terrorist attack?”
He was golden.
“Thank you, Cal,” he said. “This is an important question, whether you’re a person of faith or a person of no faith. We all live under an illusion of safety that was violently ripped away from us in an instant. It was always an illusion, but now that illusion is gone, and we’re forced to reckon with it.”
“And how do we reckon with it?”
“Community is essential,” he said. “I tell my parishioners, ‘We’re going to be here for each other. I’m going to be here with you, no matter what happens.’ This attack has brought up some really bad things for me, has shattered so much, that at this moment, I’m also really struggling with my faith and my belief in a good and loving God, and if you’re struggling with that right now, please believe that you are not alone. All I can say is that when I wonder where God was in the attack, I remember this: Christians believe that God lost a son on this planet to a violent and painful death, so my feelings of uncertainty, anger, bewilderment, all that, are somehow known to the God I worship and pray to. Frankly, most of my prayers and worship right now are simply asking God, what the hell? Where are you? Do you know what we’re going through down here?”
He shook his head. “But holy Scripture tells us that God does know, that God understands, that God is with us in the good times as well as the hard times. My faith insists that we believe that. But my heart is with everyone who is suffering right now, with all those who lost someone they loved in Nice, with all those who wonder how a loving God can stand by and let things like this happen.”
This was not news. We don’t air theology. But all the same, I asked. “You believe God doesn’t stand by and let things like this happen?”
Cam shook his majestic gray head. “I believe God accompanies us in everything that happens. That rather than create a world where he shelters us from the worst things, he created a world where he can walk alongside us through those things.”
I nodded. I would love to believe that. “So, practically, what should people in France do in response to these attacks?”
Cam nodded. “Don’t give up,” he said. “Live. Love. Form communities. The forces of evil have always attacked the forces of good. But our stories tell us that at the end of the day, they will not be successful. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to argue that the moral arc of the universe is long. But that it bends toward justice.” He nodded. That was a wrap.
“Thank you,” I said. I nodded to Ahmed, who nodded back. We had gotten what we wanted.
“Thanks,” Cam said. “Cal, I feel like this may be the most important work I’ve done since Iraq.”
“You may be right,” I said. Ahmed extended his hand, and Cam shook it. “I’ll see you soon.”
“Tomorrow? Come. We’re doing that service for the National Day of Mourning.”
“Ay, caramba,” I protested. “Don’t ask for more than a person can give.”
“You would be very welcome,” he said, shaking my hand and holding it for a second before he released. “You know that. And you, Ahmed.”
“Merci,” Ahmed said. He did a little salaam, nodded.
“I’m still working on the service tomorrow,” Cam said. “Can you find your way out?”
“Of course,” I said.
I love it when people turn me loose inside institutions. Ahmed and I exited the building, walked across the Dean’s Garden, and into what I guess they would call the cloister.
Which turned out to be a World War One memorial, where upon the walls were notations of every American unit that had fought in the war and their casualties at major battles: Cambrai, Château-Thierry, St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne. How many men each unit lost. And at the end of the hall, an angel commemorating these losses. It was stunning, really, the thousands and thousands of dead.
What kind of culture could allow this to happen? What kind of people would charge into certain death?
At the end of the cloister was a glass door and a button to open it. I pushed it gladly. Ahmed and I stepped out into the open space surrounded by stained glass and the ceiling high overhead. The woman at the volunteer desk waved at us and pressed some button that opened the iron gate.
And there, on the front steps, sat the dean of the cathedral, Clarice, a cigarette surreptitious in her hand.
“Ah, Calvin Jones,” she said, patting the stair next to her. I plopped down.
I introduced Ahmed, told her what we were doing there, and then took a pull from her cigarette when she passed it to me. I shook my head.
“It’s a horrible habit,” she said, taking another drag. “But somehow, it helps me think straight.”
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“I’m still working on my sermon for tomorrow,” she said. “God help us, the prescribed Gospel text is Mary and Martha. It seems an awful match. Petty. But I think I may have found a route into this tragedy, a way to speak about Nice.”
“Mary and Martha,” I said. They were two sisters, I recalled, their brother was Lazarus, they were dear friends of Jesus. “From what I remember, that seems very—domestic.”
“It does,” she said. “At first, I thought there was no way to get to what we needed. But I think I’ve found a way to crack it open into something that touches all of us. That’s all you ever hope for a sermon.”
“Well, I hope it goes well,” I told her, getting to my feet.
“Come and see if it does,” she said. She saw my face, my dismay, and smiled. “I know. You don’t want to be in church on Sunday. I’d guess that most of Paris doesn’t. But I’d also guess that tomorrow we’ll be full to overflowing, like the Sunday after 9/11 back when I was in Atlanta. People gather when tragedy strikes. And I want to offer them something.”
“I haven’t been to church in recent memory,” I said. “I don’t have a good history—”
“Balls,” Clarice said, scritching out the cigarette on the step. “You don’t have a history with us. Come. Listen. Decide for yourself if this is comfort or affliction.”
I took her offered hand. “Okay,” I said. “I can’t imagine how you’re going to find a way to make anyone feel better. Let alone me. But I would love it if you could.” Gulp. “So maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Ahmed and I stood on Charles V for a moment after Clarice went inside. “Do you have some thoughts?” I asked. “How to cut this?”
He nodded. “We got some good responses,” he said. “And then Father Cameron’s thoughts about how we move forward together.” He nodded. “As a community. That is—solid. Helpful.”
I agreed.
We recorded an intro and outro in front of the Cathedral where I identified myself and the network, said we were here on the day after the Bastille Day attacks, and I mostly got out of the way. It was good. We slapped five. And then Ahmed went off to edit this piece for 10 o’clock, and I wandered down Charles V toward the Pont de l’Alma Bridge, the place where my life changed, the place where I needed to see how—if—one could move forward after everything fell apart.
16.
Paris
July 16, 2016
Saturday
I said I was going to tell you the truth and only the truth, but it’s clear to me that I’ve failed in that goal over and over again. My father was not a saint. Neither was he the monster I’ve recently made him out to be. I’m trying to find a way to show him to you—to explain to you how he made me, in some way, what I’ve become. How a person can love and hate someone in equal measure. But it’s more complicated than I thought.
My father is more complicated than I thought.
Here’s what brought me to that. After I sent Ahmed off to edit our work, I walked down to have an aperitif at a table outside Le Campanella, a café on the Rue Saint-Dominique. I thought it was going to be a simple transaction: I give them twelve euros, they give me a Kir Royale. But it turned out they had music playing back inside the café, and I recognized it immediately: “When Your Lover Has Gone,” Sinatra, from his 1955 concept album In the Wee Small Hours, a whole disc full of hard sad music about living with a broken heart, if such a thing is even possible.
I am not, mind you, some hipster in skinny jeans ironically drawn to Sinatra. I imbibed him with my mother’s milk, listening to my mom and dad as they swayed and sometimes danced to him. In the back of my mind, yes, maybe I wondered “Why not the Beatles? Why not the Eagles? Why aren’t you getting it on to Marvin Gaye?” But we know what we know, and that music was the soundtrack of my childhood.
In the early days, when my mom was alive, it was the happy albums, say, the 1956 Songs for Swinging Lovers, “You Make Me Feel So Young,” and “Too Marvelous for Words,” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” I remember coming home at dark from playing baseball with David Marshall and the neighborhood kids, walking in through the back door, seeing my parents dancing and laughing in the kitchen, hearing Frank’s silken voice and perfect phrasing, watching them kiss, and offering my measured and thoughtful response: “Gross.”
And my mom and dad would break apart as though I’d caught them doing something shameful.
The only shame, of course, is mine, for taking away that thing they found joy in. I think my mom had precious few things that brought her joy. My father had fewer still.
I asked him one time, when we were together in Iraq, about listening to Sinatra, which even for him seemed dreadfully unhip.
“Those were my dad’s records,” he said, raising his hands. What can you do? “He loved Sinatra.”
I never asked him if he loved his father, if you could love someone who broke your heart.
Because I knew even then that you could, that sometimes it was the only option.
So I sat, and sipped, and ordered another Kir Royale, which was quickly becoming my drink of choice, and listened to Frank sing “Mood Indigo,” and “What’s New,” and then Ella dropped by to sing “Someone to Watch over Me,” and then it was Nat King Cole: “Gee it’s great after being out late, walking my baby back home.”
It was darker, although not yet full dark, and the waiters lit candles on the tables, and traffic on the street slowed, and people began to settle in around me to order not drinks but actual dinner, veal scallops and sea bass and salmon tartare, finished off with profiteroles and rice pudding and rum cake. And I just sat there seriously drinking by myself, which I had thought I had forgotten how to do, forgotten why I used to do it, and meanwhile my phone buzzed in my jacket pocket. I checked it to find messages from Jack and Kelly and Rob, messages that I ignored.
I ordered another Kir Royale, and yet another.
As I drank, I was thinking about that scene at the end of The Graduate where Benjamin Braddock gets on a pay phone and locates the church where his beloved is marrying another guy. I am a good journalist. In ten minutes, I think I could have found out where Nadia and Ali were staging their ceremony. And, like Ben, I am a strong cross-country runner. If it was inside the Paris city limits, I thought I could arrive in time to—
What? Bang my fists against a wall of glass at the back of the church?
No. More likely, to get my ass handed to me by Antonio or whoever was working security, because I was guessing that wherever Ali was, someone was always going to be working security.
And so I sat, and tried to drink that vision out of my head, because really all I could think about was Dustin Hoffman pounding his tiny fists against the thick glass, his face contorted with sorrow, shock, loss.
He looked like I felt, like I had run hard uphill, and to absolutely no effect.
As dusk approached, I pushed myself to my feet. I left a stack of euros on the table. Something compelled me to walk back north toward the river, and it wasn’t until I walked onto the Pont de l’Alma Bridge that I realized why I was out there.
Nadia was married, and she and her husband were going to be taking pictures on a Paris bridge during the Magic Hour, pictures for social media, for the family back home, before she, as she had once feared, disappeared into her burqa. I know she had said that she expected they would be on the Alexandre III bridge, the statues a gilded background to her Elie Saab gown. But I thought, what if?
What if she decided to come back to the Pont de l’Alma, to the place where she might have ended it all and didn’t?
What if she thought I might be standing there waiting for her?
What if?
I will confess to you that there was nothing particularly rational about any of this. I was intoxicated, schnockered, really, irredeemably polluted from a succession of Kir Royales, which should not punch so far above their weight, and yet clearly they do.
I stumbled out across the bridge, the sidewalk packed with people stopping to take pictures of the Eiffel Tower, and made my way to what I will always think of as Our Spot, the place where two people once jumped into a river, one after the other.
