Bastille Day, page 25
“We celebrate the Eucharist,” she said.
“What?”
“Communion,” Rob said, leaning across Brigid. “You used to call it the Lord’s Supper. You don’t have to receive it. You can just sit here.”
I saw Cam doing something that looked very much like setting a table, and then Clarice stepped up to the altar, turned to the congregation, looked out, I thought, directly at me, and announced, “Wherever you are in your journey of faith, you are welcome at this table.”
And I was decided.
“What do I do?” I asked Allison.
“Come with me,” she said. “You take the bread. You sip the wine.”
“Why?” I said. “What does it mean?”
She started an explanation, then shook her head as she saw that Clarice was preparing to speak. “It’s a gift for the brokenhearted,” she whispered.
She held up a finger as I started to ask. More explanation could come later.
Clarice began to sing. Chanting, I now know. “The Lord be with you,” she sang, and the congregation answered her.
Her voice carried, it soared, it echoed like that priest chanting in Saint-Sulpice.
It reminded me of the voices of the muezzin, calling from the minarets in Iraq.
I began to understand why people pray.
“Wow,” I said again.
I stood when Allison stood, knelt when she knelt.
I followed her down the aisle to the altar rail.
I held my hands out for the bread, which was actually more a stale cracker that crunched sadly in my mouth.
I sipped the wine, red, strong. It made me cough a little.
“Port,” Rob muttered on the way back to our seats. “Fortified wine. To kill germs and all that.” Vestry talk.
If I was expecting magic, then the bread and wine were not that. I was not transformed, different, a brand-new human without fear.
But something had happened. Something about kneeling alongside Allison, Rob, Brigid, the others. Something about Clarice’s voice as she told me, “Calvin, this is the Body of Christ, broken for you.” Something about the electric shock of her touch as she placed that tiny wafer on my palm and squeezed.
Something about getting to my feet, blinking, as though a flashbulb had gone off in front of my eyes.
I was still gathering, getting my mind around what we’d done, about how this vast room full of individuals had become something more, something larger and yet more connected, as Cam tidied up at the altar, as Clarice offered a blessing, as people around me crossed themselves, as the priests and choir processed to the back of the church.
Allison bowed as the cross was carried past, and reflexively, although I could not have told you why, I bowed with her.
“What just happened?” I asked, but Allison shushed me again as Father Cam stepped forward from the back of the nave.
“Alleluia, alleluia!” he shouted. “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”
“Thanks be to God,” was the response from those around me. “Alleluia, alleluia!”
And then we were done. People looked around at each other, some of them likewise seeming a bit dazed. We had walked into the Cathedral as hundreds of broken individuals. But for moments, there, it felt as though we were simply one. One community. One family, even.
That we had been seen and known and understood.
That there was only us.
Now, of course, the family was breaking up, like any family after Sunday dinner. We drifted out, singly or in groups. People began to walk through the black wrought-iron gate onto George V, turned left or right to the river or the Champs.
“Lunch?” Allison asked, turning to the three of us. “La Fontaine?”
“I’ve got to host the welcome coffee in the Dean’s Garden,” Rob said. “You kids go on without us.” He turned to Brigid, and they nodded some agreement. “Come for an apéro tonight?”
“Sure,” I said. “I would like that.”
“Yes,” Allison said. “And perhaps dinner after? I’ve got reservations at Excoffier.”
“Oh,” Brigid said. “Of course. Can you make it four?”
“Certainement,” Allison said. “Cal and I will drop by and make it so.”
Brigid embraced Allison, and then she took me by the arms, held me for a moment. “And how are you, Calvin?” she asked.
“People are going to have to stop asking me that,” I said.
“That bad?” Rob asked.
“You saw our broadcast last night,” I said. “Father Cam told us, ‘Live. Love. Form communities.’” I looked around at the four of us, broken people all, and yet I nodded. “That seems to be the thing to do.”
Nkwele was standing near the gate, and Allison and I shook his hand before we departed.
“Did you understand her sermon?” I asked Nkwele in Arabic.
He smiled at me and shook his head. “In my culture, things belong where they belong. I do not understand all this concern about boundaries.” But he looked over at Clarice shaking hands and embracing people as they exited. “But I did not come to listen to her sermon. I came to stand by her on this day. To say that, as I think she said, love is stronger than hate.”
“Salaam alaikum,” I told him.
“And peace be with you, little man,” he laughed.
“I am just not that little,” I complained as we walked out onto Avenue George V.
“Oh, do be quiet,” Allison said, putting a finger up to my lips and smiling to take the sting from it. “Not everything requires commentary.”
“Okay,” I said. “For you.” And she slipped her arm through mine as we walked off toward the Seine on that beautiful Sunday afternoon.
18.
Paris
July 14, 2017
I would not have believed any sort of happy ending possible on that Sunday a year ago when we walked out of the American Cathedral, even though, like the disciples, I was perhaps beginning to see the world in a new way. But as Allison and I walked down the avenue toward the river, my phone buzzed, and I knew somehow that it would be Nadia.
Certainement.
I stopped in front of the Chinese Embassy. Allison stopped beside me.
“Cal,” she said. “What?”
I held up a finger.
I took a deep breath.
I pulled out my phone.
From this moment on, my life would be different.
“My dear Calvin,” Nadia’s message said, “Ali and I leave Paris this afternoon. But I must thank you, now and forever. Whatever comes next, you handed me on to it. I will not forget.”
“Half a mo,” I said to Allison. God. I was British. “It’s her.”
“Nadia?”
I nodded. “The very same.”
“Oh my God,” she said, wrestling for the phone. I showed her the message. “What are you going to say?”
I considered half a dozen responses, typed a few words a dozen times, discarded each false start. I ran through formal, informal, angry, loving, regretful, cheery, despondent. It was too much. 144 characters couldn’t even begin to address what Nadia, what this week had meant. What they still meant. 144 characters was not enough, would never be enough.
Yet it was all we had.
So I went small, trusting her to read between the lines.
“As you handed me on,” I texted. “Please take care of yourself. And should you ever require help walking the dog…”
She was typing a reply. Dot dot dot. A smiley face came first. And then this:
“You will be the first to know.”
I nodded. That was how we had begun. I started to respond, but she was already ahead of me:
“I have decided that I will be like James Bond.”
It was hard to ask, but I had to know. “Broken?”
“No.” There was a pause, dots as she responded. “Brave.”
“Because,” I texted back, a catch in my throat as I typed, “that is where the bravery is.”
I thought perhaps that was it, the last word, but as usual, I was wrong.
“I love you, Calvin Jones. Pray for me, I beg you. Please do not forget me.”
Allison looked at me, stricken. And indeed, there were tears in my eyes now. But I was smiling as I typed an answer I could not have sent even a week previous:
“I will pray for you. You have my word. As I beg you will pray for me, dear one. Je t’aime, Nadia Al-Dosari. Je t’adore. Now. Forever. Adieu.”
I pressed Send. And that was it, I knew. The end.
The end of us.
And yet—
And yet.
“Oh, Cal,” Allison said, reading over my shoulder. “It’s—”
She couldn’t find a word that fit, that answered, that fixed anything. Because there wasn’t one, and she knew it, and I knew it, and I’m sure Nadia knew it, for my phone remained dark.
I slid it back in my pocket. We walked on to the river. I looked across at the Tour Eiffel, at the crowds around us, people from all over the planet united in the act of taking selfies.
I leaned over to look at the river. “That dock,” I said, indicating the stone wharf on the right, downriver, where the house boats were moored. “That’s where I pulled her out of the water. Where I see the homeless man taking a bath every morning when I run. I should ask his name. Find out if he’s hungry. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to do that.”
Allison leaned in close and embraced me, and I was glad for her. When we broke the hug, I put an arm around her shoulder and we started walking across the bridge.
“Let’s eat,” I said. We walked on to La Fontaine, where we had a lovely lunch. I asked her about her perfect match. She told me that she was looking for a woman who kept her hair short, who saw through the deceit of Vladimir Putin, and who loved macarons from Ladurée.
I told her I would keep my eyes open because I was pretty confident such a woman must exist.
And then I told her about a time shortly before my father shipped out to Iraq when I walked into the old family home in Killeen to find him sitting in the dark and listening to Frank Sinatra: “In the wee small hours of the morning, that’s the time you miss her most of all.”
“I think about her too,” I spoke up, surprising my father. “I miss her. All the time.”
He sat up, startled, as ashamed as though I’d caught him masturbating.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I had an interview with a colonel on base,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to surprise you. I’m sorry. I should have called ahead.”
“Oh,” he said. He reached to turn down the stereo. “It’s okay. I just didn’t know you were coming. That’s all.”
My father and I never talked easily with each other, nor did we that afternoon. I asked about the deployment coming up. He asked if it was true that I’d be heading over to Iraq, how the network envisioned what was coming, whether I was excited or nervous.
Then we sat for a long time in silence. I could feel the vacant spaces in that room, in that house, and I felt for my father, but I did not know what to say to him, what truthful words he could hear from me that he would not bat away like flies.
At last, he got to his feet, Sinatra still crooning quietly, sadly, in the background, “When Your Lover Has Gone,” and my father held out his hand. “I’m sure,” he said gruffly, “that you have places you need to be.”
And I could have told him no. That no one else was looking for me.
That this was actually the most important place that I could possibly be.
That I loved him, despite everything, and always would.
But I didn’t say any of those things.
I pushed myself to my feet, shook his hand, let it drop.
“I’ll see you, old man,” I told him. “Keep your head down.”
“And you,” he said.
We said goodbye.
“You miss them both,” Allison said when I finished, and I nodded, for of course I did, missed them and many more, and we toasted those we had loved and lost with the good Fontaine house red, and at the end of our lunch, we walked back out into the Paris sunshine.
We put that day behind us, and the next, and the next, and now, here we are.
It is some months after that week when I first arrived in Paris, when I began to uncover what lay in the shadows of the City of Light. I have moved on from my woeful family history, where we began this story, to the Pont de l’Alma Bridge, where I suppose it ends on another bright July afternoon, to this place I must return again and again until I understand my story, or at least can let it rest in that peace where stories go when they have served their purpose.
Not that there isn’t much to report, or that more hasn’t happened. In the year since I lived those events, Rob and Brigid have regained their true affection for each other, and have embarked on a second honeymoon that hasn’t quite ended. I see them once a week socially, but I am glad they are taking this time to cocoon and to move forward together.
I see Frederick weekly at Harry’s, if not more often. He’s become a valuable source for me, and I actually put him on the network payroll, which makes my drinks a business expense, I hope. He’s dating a Japanese woman who was somehow brave enough to step into the bar. He tells me she has a cute friend, also Japanese, who has seen me on the air and wants to meet me, but I am not ready for any such thing. Not yet.
Allison herself met a lovely woman from the Ukraine, Erika, who shares her contempt for Vladimir Putin and her love for macarons from Ladurée. Especially the bright green pistachio ones. Erika sometimes comes to church with Allison on Sundays, and I have heard Allison introduce her as her girlfriend, stop, blush, smile at Erika, leave it be.
And I cannot help but hear about Ali, Nadia’s Ali, although I am not Facebook stalking him or anything like. I just can’t help it, being a journalist and all. I know things. It turns out that Ali is one of the progressive Saudi leaders pushing to liberalize the kingdom. He was behind the plan to bring movie theaters back to Saudi Arabia, and I read that Ali is pushing for women’s rights to drive a car, as well as other shamefully liberated prospects.
I think that I may have misjudged him, as painful as that is to admit.
I think perhaps he might be a good husband for the woman I love.
But enough of that. The less I think about Ali, the better I sleep at night, and there is much to celebrate without losing sleep. For many of those I love, there has been some sort of a happy ending. Something good has grown out of these high weeds and dangerous seeds.
And as for me?
Well, what does a happy ending even mean? Does it mean getting what you wanted? Or does it mean getting what you needed, even if you lost some of the things you loved in the process?
When I began this story, I promised a tale that was complicated and difficult and beautiful, and I confess that I didn’t know if Paris was going to feel to me like a place I lost myself or found myself, could not know until I walked through this story alongside you.
Now I know.
Now I know the American Cathedral, and a little more about the Episcopal tradition, where I have learned the piece of liturgy about “those we love but see no more,” a line that could apply to my mother and my father, to Khalid and Elena, to Darla Trent and Kelly McNair even, for I loved even those as well as I could, which was not, frankly, very well.
It could apply to Nadia, who I loved more than I can say, and who I cannot yet think on without bruising my heart, although that phrase gives me comfort, reminds me that I am far from the first to love and lose.
I am apparently an Episcopalian now—“a Whiskeypalian,” my Uncle Jack grumbles, presumably rolling his eyes—but I assure him that this move has been good for me. I have found a community outside the newsroom or Harry’s Bar. We pray together. We work together. Rob and I cook breakfast for the homeless once a week. I curated a forum for the Cathedral recently on religious violence, gathered Jewish and Muslim and Christian leaders and guided them in conversation, and it was a thoughtful and surprisingly well-attended program, considering that many Parisians think bigotry against religions is the last acceptable prejudice.
I have come to believe that maybe there is something larger than myself and my little desires, something that resides in and beneath the river, in and behind the clouds, in and inside the faces of those I meet, and that Something must be a force of love and justice, for I have found that I need to believe in a force of love and justice if I’m not going to jump off a bridge and disappear forever into the depths.
This life can and will break your heart.
But now when I pray to that Something, I do not feel that my words are dropping into some bottomless pool. I feel that they are somehow being marked, even if my exact desires may not be met.
I feel that I am getting what I need rather than what I think I deserve.
For so long I could not pray. The only concept I had been given of prayer was that of a Coke machine. You put in your change and pressed a button and expected something to be delivered. And so often I got nothing. Or a Tab when I explicitly asked for a Sprite.
But that is not prayer, Father Cameron has told me. Prayer is not about whether you get what you want. It is about aligning my heart with the heart of the universe. He told me, “Bono says prayer is about getting on board with what God is doing instead of asking God to get on board with what you are doing.”
And you know me: I do love me some Bono.
So now, to my great surprise, I pray. For Nadia, of course, but also for my friends in Paris, and for the life of the world, and that the work I came here to do might have meaning. I pray so regularly that people might mistake me for a devout Muslim, which would be fine with me. I have met many Children of Mohammed who put my own infant faith to shame.
And now I know the Seine, which is the heart of this great city, and will ever be my beating heart, a place where I risked something big for something good, even though I did not get to keep it.
I walked beside the Seine hand in hand with someone I loved, I watched the moonlight flicker off its waves, I saw the Eiffel Tower reflected, and I still walk or run alongside it every day. Sometimes, although it is très expensive, I have an aperitif at a café on the river before going out to dinner, and while I keep one eye on the rainbow mob passing by, I keep the other on the river.
