no great cathedral

beenthinking:

There was a bedroom in the apartment you rented for us as part of the surprise (“Now it’s like we really live here,” you said, which was perfect.)  A dark room in the back that looked out on a courtyard, behind heavy garnet curtains. But we preferred the living room. We folded down the futon and feathered the nest with two duvets and a set of pillows that matched the curtains and never stayed firm, pooling out around our smiling heads like tired breasts.  

Across from our bed there were floor-to-ceiling paned windows and in the morning, I would wake first. Would open my eyes to just a crust of sky rounding the massive cathedral that stood across a narrow pedestrian street. Gangly and too close, filling both windows like a giant, peeking in. 

We were always tired, except when we were supposed to be and then we were invincible. But morning came quietly, companionably, despite the time change, despite the too few hours we’d slept. I’d lie on my back in the pigeon grey light that fills a winter city uniformly, without angle or source. Examining 200 year old wooden ceiling beams, the charcoal nudes, the Louvre reproductions and wasting time. Just for the indulgence of it.   

There was never quite enough light in this home, lazily illuminated by tiny low energy bulbs on lamps long and skinny as insects. But there was always a surplus of baguettes and four kinds of cheese and sweet tangerines and wine I bought at the tiny market down the street for 2 euro a bottle. Marveling and grinning the whole way home at an economy that provides luxuries for necessity prices. 

The line at the catacombs was impossibly long the morning we went and we cursed the tourists and gave up. Thinking the bones have waited this long; they’ll keep. Took off walking miles and miles in the wrong direction and wrote off the Picasso museum for street food in the Latin Quarter instead. At the Bastille Marche, we took pictures of clusters of hyacinths and tulips and ranunculus, bound with twine and orderly as soldiers. Bought cheese so foul and sharp it burned our mouths like soap. Shared a steaming chicken leg while we walked, taking great greedy bites with meat stringing out from our teeth like life.   

We bought stupid matching white knit hats and agreed it was too meanly frigid to care that we looked stupid. At lunch, we shimmied and pushed into a restaurant bloated with birthday celebrants and foreigners and antique dealers and listened to old women sing Edith Piaf, swayed together over our rabbit and lamb chops and clapped with hands dusty with bakers flour and bread crumbs.

You imitated the French, mocking us and our lousy linguistics and made me laugh too loud. Everywhere we went, I needed to go to the bathroom and grew frantic in their fruitless pursuit. At the Louvre, I melted down. Wailed that I could not possibly bear another papal portrait. A 200th painting of the crucifixion, sooty and sad as the dark ages, fat and pompous or reverent with symbolism I no longer cared about. I genuflected before Winged Victory and the Venus De Milo, truly moved like a pedestrian. Declined the Perrier you ordered and felt for five minutes that I was too low brow for this city. For you. 

Every early evening, we came home for a rest. Walked up four flights, counting the stories as we wound up the spiral staircase that leaned inward, laughing when we tripped and stopping at the top to catch our breath.  You napped or read in the front room while I soaked in a French woman’s giant bathtub for hours. Until the chilly air leached all the heat from the water, and the heater failed to rally again and we finished our nightly bottle of champagne. Then, giggling, we bundled back up and tumbled off to dinner at 10 or 11. Drunk on this life we couldn’t possibly have designed. 

Off Saint Germaine, we twirled escargot in garlic butter and pushed heaps of steak tartare on to crusty bread. Fed each other coq au vin and mussels in cream sauce and fondue and quiche and lemon meringue.  

Every morning and afternoon, we walked it all off. We walked so many miles in the pale cold of this stone city that our legs ached at night and we slept as if we’d been released. Forgiven. 

One night, late — after we bickered in the morning and laughed in the afternoon and saw nothing on our itinerary and were impatient and annoyed with each other and then tender — you said let’s take a walk by the river on the way home. And this walk, this film strip of currents and lamp lights and silent boats and dog walkers and pipe smokers and errant sirens in the gloaming night streets from Notre Dame down to the gardens. This — over all the years and trips and seasons — is what I love best.   

And when we got to the bridge with the locks you said let’s go up here a minute. And I cried just at the sight of it. So many thousands of hopeful steel promises glittering at midnight in the rusting cold wind off the Seine. Undeterred. 

You asked me to marry you right then and I jumped and jumped and smashed your head into my stomach and groups walked by and watched and laughed and cooed at my tears. 

Who ever would have thought we would be here? 

* * * * * * * * * * * 

For the next two days, I stared at my hands, transfixed and delighted and obsessed over removing the dark purple nail gel I’d been talked into trying back in LA. Because now it looks all wrong. And I fretted over who to tell and how — because who goes to Paris to get engaged? (“They’ll think we’re rich,” I moaned. “That we’re the one percent!” And you laughed. “They won’t know that our furniture is from Craigslist and garage sales. That we buy generic cereal and feel guilty when we eat out!…”) 

What I really worry, maybe, is that they’ll think I don’t deserve this. 

Or worse, of course..that our joy will mean anything opposite for anyone else. Because these times, these times of such good news to share, are not easy and ebullient for everyone in every season. I know those raw old days too well, when an engagement, a merging of houses, a good man secured by friends, was at least 51% heartbreaking (though I would never have admitted it). It’s nothing to do with begrudging the women you love anything or competition; it is merely that your compatriots’ advancement in love is also a brilliant, clamoring, subtitled reminder of what you expected and planned for and did not, in the end, end up with. And at least for me (for a while, once) little stung more than that.

On the metro, I watched graffiti blur past battered windows and designed secret puppet shows in my head. Figures at a tiny wedding in the mountains, in a crooked river valley that smells of sweet water, a million miles from convention. In cafes, we ate chocolate croissants and celebrated our new titles and I marveled at your magical abundant generosity, and still held my cringing heart.  

I am both dreamy and anxious.  

At a Dutch store that translates its product descriptions into French, redundantly useless to me, I bough acetone. Soaked both hands in a tiny rice bowl full of nail polish remover and stared out at the church. From the street below, we could hear packs of West African boys in lean black parkas taunting and guffawing while they worked.   

By now, you are used to the hesitation that frames and roots down through my happiness, which is so much of the reason I said Yes. So much of what I love about you is how you understand me, how the same mercurial wind blows in you. And how you build shelters for both of us with your ridiculous jokes, your easy way, your unshakable confidence, your faithful goodness. Your patience, your candor, your humility. How you have coaxed out this reposed, goofy version of me. This thing I did not think I was allowed to be.    

You held my hand in the Marais and in a metro car packed with weary commuters we squeezed past at the Champ de Mars / Tour Eiffel stop, like they knew we would and I thought how tired I was of disappointing the French.  You held my hand and waited in the dark for me to line up my millionth photograph, though it was so cold your cheeks grew tight in the wind and ached like drums. Though it was your birthday and we were hungry. 

You held my hand and told me complicated feet are ok, by which you mean it is ok to say yes, and be so ready for and happy in this. To grab it like a whale and permit it to carry me away — off toward the life we’ll map and the counties we’ll get lost in and the family we’ll build and the mistakes we’ll stumble through and the years we’ll burn down together, warmed by everything we have given up and everything we will get in return.  

It is ok to love this thing we have somehow, somehow been granted and still to be so much afraid of failing. To be so much still scared by the old things we thought that would be, and were not. The prized landscapes and portraits we have unpainted, or watched someone else unpaint before us. Floods of colors back to outlines to gray to blank. Erased and ruined canvasses. Promises decomposed and walked away from. 

It is ok, I know you are saying, to remember track records and the audience’s doubt, and hold hands and leap anyway. Legs kicking in determination and emerging surety as we fly. Not fall. 

By the time we head home, I have picked my nails completely clean of polish. And you smiled and did not tell me I am nuts and said, “You were right, this does look much better.” They are blank as a beach now and I can breathe deeper. Slower.  

I began to tell the people I love, from the buttressed safety of distance and email. And guess what? They are happy. They are happy and they think I deserve this good man, this good lucky life. Which is grace enough, hope enough, love enough, to make me cry.  

While you sleep in the window seat on the plane beside me, I listen to Agnes Obel and, despite all my best instincts to be otherwise, I am flying just above the moon.