“I think that’s mayonnaise,” Louise said, sneaking up behind me and cracking a chocolate croissant in half. “What’s French for mayonnaise?”
“Mayonnaise. ”
“Then what’s marshmallow?”
“Presumably marshmalleaux.”
Any word over ten letters in English is the same word in French. Fact.
“What is all this, anyway?” I said, gesturing with the jar. It was the same way I would gesture with it in a drunken stupor two nights hence, causing it to slip from my hand, fall straight out the window and onto the street, smashing into a carnage of goop and glass. Which, to our credit, the French pigeons were also at a loss to identify.
“This is the le beauty of le sublet,” she cried. “Cooking!”
Louise, a key-carrying subletter, had gone on a supermarché sweep. She opened a plastic container of creamed fish and spread it over her second cliché-stuffed pastry.
“Are you pregnant?”
“What?”
“Le knocked up. Are you?”
“No.” She laughed and explained her subletting enchantment. “I just like bringing groceries back to a house. With a house, even when you’ve powered down for the day, you’re still in a kind of cultural-immersion program.”
Who was I to argue? Without even trying to take in Paris, I had already slept in someone else’s low bed. I had touched their funny toilet paper, opened their medicine cabinet, banged on their faucets like a monkey, and then maneuvered their low-hanging showerhead, mumbling, What is this, Thailand? until I resigned myself to defeat and squatted to bathe, also like a monkey.
THE ONE THING I WAS MOST DETERMINED TO SEE IN Paris I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find again. It wasn’t mobile like a boat on the Seine or perishable like a macaroon but a public fountain rooted to the ground. The problem was that I had embellished this particular fountain in my head, applied such importance to it that the contextual scenery had all but faded away. I had held the image of it like a pearl ring, loosely pronged and unscratched. It was a peaceful place—overgrown, quaint, and stone, with cigarette butts crushed into the dirt around it. But that didn’t exactly narrow it down.
But then Louise began talking about the Luxembourg Gardens. A place, I pointedly explained, where I wanted my ashes scattered one day.
“You should know this,” I said, as we walked through the front gates, “so in case I die tomorrow, it’s on you to pipe up.”
I felt destined for it the way teenagers feel destined for inanimate objects and public spaces. The walls of this museum know I’m special. No one understands me but this coffee mug. I also had a fantasy about my descendants—grown, sophisticated, lovely descendants—easing their jetpacks onto the garden grounds on their way to colonize Uranus, commenting on the striking difference between this decrepit fountain crafted from earth matter and their all-white space cars made of microelectric essence. Upon seeing my final resting place, they would be reminded of their humanity and the connective thread between my ashes and the freeze-dried meat pies they ate for breakfast.
This, as it turns out, was a bust. The fountain is not quaint. Nor is its existence much of a mystery, given the fact that it is the fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens, measuring 8.9 million meters tall by 9.8 million meters wide and ladled with statues of historical figures and saints and curls of concrete. It had started to rain. We snapped open our shared umbrella and stood at the base. Tourists took photographs and consulted their guidebooks to confirm what they were seeing.
“Wow,” Louise offered. “Think much of yourself?”
“I don’t remember it being this ... grand.”
“I see gargoyles.”
“It was more modest the last time.”
The fountain was, as most fountains are, symbolic of something else. This one was symbolic of a larger problem I seemed to be having with Paris. My brain had misfiled the entire city, and instead of remembering it from small to big, like a stuffed animal that seems huge when you’re a child and stuffed animal—sized when it’s being sold at a tag sale, I remembered it from big to small. Paris ran backward. If I thought a monument or a creperie was two streets away, it was two miles away. If I thought a street looked familiar, I was wrong.
Louise read the history-explaining plaque.
“Are you even allowed to have your ashes scattered in a public fountain?”
“It’s a body of water.”
“It’s practically stagnant,” she said, pointing to the low-pressure streams meekly pouring from the Bastille-era plumbing.
“Shouldn’t you just get buried, anyway? I thought Jews didn’t believe in cremation.”
I scoffed.
“What does this mean, ‘believe in’? Makes it sound like we’re living in caves and don’t think it exists. Like we’re all, ‘Oh, fire, what’s that? Is something burning? Man, this knish looks like a wheel, except I don’t have that reference because I don’t know what a wheeli is.’”
“So you know what I mean, then.”
I stared at the watery muck. “I want to get down and dirty with the pennies and the algae.”
The truth was, I knew it didn’t matter how my corporeal being was disposed of. Bury me, freeze me, deep-fry me like a Mars bar, send me to a giant corporate building with a giant corporate sign that reads SCIENCE. Nothing I did in this life would have any bearing on the path I took in the next one. I had sealed my fate ten years prior, during my first Parisian excursion. Sealed it and spat on it and locked it in, as if trapped behind a Parisian apartment door. I never did have much of a sense of direction, but I knew that when I died, I would not be going north.
MY FRIEND EMILY AND I WERE BACKPACKING AROUND Europe together in a lopsided horseshoe path that began in Spain and would end in Turkey. More than any other destination, both of us were eager to reach Paris. How could we not be?
a. Paris is awesome, and we could sense its awesomeness in advance.
b. Emily wanted to see Notre Dame before she died.
c. Somebody had misread the train schedule leaving Barcelona, thus resulting in an Alps-obscuring overnight train trip in which we woke up in Geneva, Switzerland, and proceeded to get into a massive fight at a train station café, which culminated in my saying something about overrated chocolate, looping my arms into my backpack, and storming out of said station to wander the streets of Geneva, thinking it would be less trouble to spend the rest of my life in a Swiss bus shelter than to sort out the next southbound train.
When I eventually returned, Emily was gone. I thought perhaps she had gone back to Spain. I wouldn’t have blamed her. The weather was more pleasant in Barcelona, as was our friendship. But when I reached the appropriate platform, there she was, chin in hand, sitting on her own overstuffed backpack as if it were a giant mushroom. I plopped down next to her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, which in retrospect was the right thing to say when you abandon someone in a foreign country with no sign of returning. But which I probably didn’t mean at the time. Fatigue had rendered me impervious to Switzerland’s neutrality vibes. Emily unstuck her hand, hung her head, and spoke to the platform.
“I tried to buy a bagel, but they won’t accept French francs. I offered them fifty francs for a bagel.”
“That’s just sad.”
“Isn’t it?” she said, looking up and smiling at me. “How can we have this much difficulty getting to Paris? What would happen to us in Bogotá?”
“We’d sell our bodies to the night in exchange for cocaine and corn on sticks.”
“That sounds nice.”
Since we arrived a day late, the beds in our hostel of choice had been filled by a pair of German lesbian equestrians. They were in town for a convention, though we couldn’t say if it was for Germans or lesbians or equestrians. Either way, we didn’t put up a fight. Instead, we wandered the streets, checking into the cheapest one-fifth-of-a-star hotel we could find. Located kind of near Les Halles, it was a hotel only in the sense that a lot of people wh
o didn’t live there slept there at night. Or, rather, during the day. Like raccoons.
Hygienic hostels and grimy hotels are a little like employees in a large corporation. When graduating from entry-level, there’s a gap of time in which you are no longer an assistant and thus stop receiving overtime. Your salary actually decreases. Your quality of life was better before the upgrade. Sitting in this “hotel” on a partially upholstered bench with wool protruding from the edges was like a demotion, with Emily and me doing twice the grunt work for half the perks.
“Do you think they have the Internet?” She straightened up.
“No, I don’t think they have the Internet.”
Meanwhile, the manager sat behind a bulletproof booth and dug through a drawer of keys. I think if he had escorted us anywhere but a lit hallway, we would have run.
“Look at that.” I tapped Emily on the arm and gestured toward a completely naked man down the hall. His puckered slabs of fat folded on top of one another as he bent down to feed two less judgmental cats.
I am a firm believer in not letting disgusting things be witnessed alone. Once, as I watched an old cockroach crawl across the back of my living room sofa, I called my squeamish roommate to tell her the precise measurements and trajectory of the roach. If I had to continue living in our apartment knowing where it had been, I was taking her down with me.
When we got to our room, I shut the sliding lock behind us, and Emily propped a desk chair beneath the doorknob, a move I was pretty sure both of us had seen only in fictional form. There was a dried bar of used soap and a child’s dirty sock on the windowsill. We took photos of each other in chalk-outline formation, pretending to be dead on the floor. We slept with our passports in our underwear—a double score for any would-be rapist! In a fit of hygiene control, I turned my shirt inside out and used it as a pillowcase, sleeping on what looked like a dismembered pregnant lady. And the next morning, in a spasm of realism regarding weeks of dirty laundry, I put the shirt right back on. We couldn’t let the room win.
It didn’t matter how many heroin addicts we found slumped in the communal bathroom or prostitutes running drunk through the halls. It didn’t matter how many Gauloises we had to smoke to mask the scent of armpits unwashed and dreams deferred. We were going to love Paris. This trip was our cultural vaccination. We’d see and do everything touristy we could so that one day we might come back as real adults and not have to go to a single museum or dead person’s mansion. It was like tapas vacation. On day one, Emily planned our first course: a whole day around cathedrals, culminating in her beloved Notre Dame. In pencil, she drew crosses on her map, most of which looked like X’s. Which made the map as a whole look like that serial-killer-trailing one on police bulletin boards. I had moved past the Geneva train debacle and was happy to cede control in the matter of churches. Best, I thought, to get God out of the way as quickly as possible.
It’s a strange concept, visiting a cathedral. A park is built expressly for visitors. So is a museum. Even the most avant-garde museums don’t hang the art on the walls as it’s being painted. But a cathedral has a whole other utilitarian life running parallel to the shrinelike patina of history. It’s like visiting a work in progress. And the more elaborate the work, the more one feels as if one is intruding.
Emily’s reaction to this was different from mine. Her experience seemed to be bolstered by the presence of real Parisians praying in pews. In one day, we had been to the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, Saint Pierre de Montmartre, and the stained-glass light show that was Sainte Chapelle. By the time we hit Notre Dame, Emily had completely detached from the secular world in which she was raised. Maybe it was the buttresses. Maybe it was the tiers of votive candles or the embalmed saints. But my companion, a Protestant by birth, decided she wanted to confess.
“Noooo.” I shook my head.
“Yessss.” She nodded hers.
This seemed like too sudden a leap, just as all of Catholicism always seemed like too sudden a leap, regardless of the board from which one dove. Because we had a Christmas tree, I was never one of those Jewish kids who felt cheated out of the pageantry of an awesome winter holiday. There is a very specific frustration that accompanies an irreparably tangled string of lights, and I am familiar with it. But the downside to this candy-cane familiarity was a heightened curiosity about Christianity in general and Catholicism in specific. So one winter I asked my mother to explain to me the difference between most Christian denominations and Catholics. Which she obliged over cherry frosted Pop-Tarts.
“Protestants, for example,” she said, cracking off a piece of Pop-Tart against a piece of Bounty, “believe that when they take the Eucharist, it’s the symbol of the body of Christ.”
I nodded. Symbolism was something I could get behind. The seder plate was an orgy of murderous analogies on a tray.
“Catholics, on the other hand, believe that they are literally taking in the blood and body of Christ.”
“So, the cracker turns into Christ when they eat it?”
I imagined the safari-themed sponge capsules we used to get from the toy store. It’s all neon-colored horse pills until you put them in the bathroom sink and boom: a hippo.
“Something like that,” she agreed, putting the bloody toaster pastry between her lips.
Thus began my awe and fascination with the Catholics. The Catholics had magical powers. And damn it if they didn’t know how to decorate. Christmas? Christmas was nothing. The first time I went to Easter services with a family friend, gilded eggs hung from the rafters. Women wore generously brimmed hats. They had the instincts to duck and weave the way civilians should but didn’t with umbrellas. At the end of the sermon, an old man to my right said, “Peace be with you,” and spontaneously hugged me.
“Oh,” I whispered, and froze.
Eventually I gave in to this man’s embrace, leaning into his musk. I had watched him brace against his walker and receive Communion, and now I was encircled by the arms of a person who had eaten Jesus.
There was something admirable about this way of thinking, something attractive about the sure leap into the invisible. An unadulterated bag of crazy? Yes. But admirable. No matter what your own beliefs may be, the mental fortitude required to think that your saliva has Rumpelstiltskinesque powers is something to be respected. Which is why I didn’t want Emily fucking with it.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said, pointing at the palm of my hand and nodding toward a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Have you ever covered a flashlight with your fingers just to watch your blood light up? That’s how Emily looked at me—right through my skin and into my soul. Her eyes filled with hope.
In all likelihood, they were just irritated from the hotel sheets and watering because we misread the label on contact solution and bought mouthwash instead. But standing there in a cool stone corridor in Notre Dame, I knew we wouldn’t be leaving unless she confessed. The power of Christ compelled her.
Of course, confessing in Notre Dame is not quite the same thing as confessing in your standard red velvet phone booth to the Almighty. This sin-purging line was fifteen people deep and at least half an hour long. And what it led to was not a curtain but a très large and très see-through glass office between two of the ancient pillars. From the outside, you could make out the backs of sinners’ heads, bowing through a checklist of bad habits. It reminded me of the open cubicles of street-level bank branches in Manhattan, financial pet store windows. I am consistently impressed by their inhabitants’ ability to keep their attention focused on their clients and their staplers so neatly aligned with their tape dispensers. Perhaps priests were able to do the same with God, lay him out on the desk and staple him into each wayward soul. Also like a bank branch, we lined up between slack velvet ropes. Up front was a paper sign slid into a metal frame. It read FRENCH/ ENGLISH.
“Where do I start?” Emily was giddy with intimidation. I hadn’t thought of this—if you are nineteen and have never confessed,
do you begin with the cigarette inhaled before noon this morning or the time you stole a package of sparkly pipe cleaners from your second-grade art class and kept them in the bottom of your closet for two years, eventually throwing them out because you felt so guilty? Do you mention the lying, the drinking, the cheating, the gambling, the masturbation, the schadenfreude, the disrespecting of your parents, the disrespecting of other people’s parents, the doing of the drugs, the shoplifting of the gum, the coveting of worldly goods, the advantage-taking, the responsibility-foisting, the tone you use with food delivery people when you’re alone and they’re foreign, that time you had a hangnail on your toe so you stuck your foot in your mouth and you bit it off like a monkey? Or is that all kind of a given by now?
As we moved up the line, Emily kicking her giant backpack ahead of her, visitors solemnly but efficiently wove their way between the pews. They seemed disproportionately thrilled to be in a place that allowed flash photography. I feared for my friend’s soul. If the End of Days came and it turns out the Catholics were right, would her soul come out like a deformed baby because she confessed only once? Was that not like getting half a piercing? We inched forward, ineffectively attempting to speed time by closing the space between us and the buxom Brit in front of us. She glared back at me, judge-y and annoyed. I took a step back and looked away. There was tourism and there was religion. Since when was it a good idea to cross the streams?
“Hey.” Emily took me gently by the shoulder. “This is what churches are here for. To take people in and redeem them. It’s on the Statue of Liberty.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yes, it does. The Statue of Liberty was a gift ... from France.”
It was Emily’s turn. She stepped up, leaving me to fidget on the smooth stone floor. I looked around at the frozen pageantry of it all. My feet ached from traipsing from God’s house to God’s house all day. This man slept around more than George Washington. Similarly, one got the sense that God didn’t actually live in all of these places. Sainte Chapelle was breathtaking, but Sainte Chapelle was a piedà-terre. Notre Dame was home base.
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