Constance and I went to Notre Dame.
We had been there before on our earlier visit, but to Constance, who studied the saints, Notre Dame was a living, breathing building that revealed secrets at every glance. She was systematic in her approach: we sat outside the building for a long time and let our eyes travel where they liked. She knew the history of the cathedral, of course: how it had been built commencing in 1163 and took more than a century to complete; how it had hosted hundreds of important political and religious events; how it perched on the ?le de la Cité; how the “Te Deum” was sung there at the end of both World Wars I and II. But that was all background to Constance.
She came to see Mary.
It was an obsession with her. Of all the saints, she loved Mary the most, and Notre Dame—Our Lady—contained thirty-seven statues of Mary. But Constance’s obsession within her obsession was the statue of Mary holding the Christ child in the trumeau of the Portal of the Virgin. The statue came originally from the Chapel of Saint Aignan in the ancient Cloister of the Canons, and it replaced the thirteenth-century Virgin knocked down in 1793.
“Here it is,” Constance told me when we finally entered the building and stood in front of it. She put her arm through mine, and her eyes began to tear as she described it. “This is the Altar of the Virgin. It’s been here since the twelfth century—the altar, but not always with the same statue. Regardez! It doesn’t look particularly momentous until you stop and consider it. See her? She is a young mother, Heather. That’s what I like about it. She is a young woman who has been asked to hold in her womb and arms the divine. What I admire about this statue is the ambivalence. You can see she is charmed by the child. See him? He is playing with a brooch on her cloak and not looking at her exactly, and her hip is out. I love women’s hips, especially when they’re poked out. See? Poked out to hold her child, who is the salvation of the world, and it all rests on a woman’s hip. But inside all that majesty is this small, timid woman and her beloved child. That’s why this statue kills me. I’ve read about it over and over, and now to see it … you know, there have been many transformations here in front of Our Lady. People have been converted in a single instant by one glance at her. I know, I know, I don’t believe much of it myself, but, Heather, I believe in the human need to believe, and this is the embodiment of that.”
I loved Constance. I loved her as much as anything in the world.
*
Jack took me to bed in the late afternoon and devoured me.
The balcony doors stood wide open, and the warm Paris sun heated the first foot or two of the room floor, and he put grapes between my lips and kissed me with them, and it was funny, and silly, and incredibly passionate. Our bodies moved perfectly. He was rough at times, as if he’d fallen through something to be with me, as if his body contained an element that was fish and DNA and seawater, and that had to be released, must be cast forward, and I thought of Mary—absurdly—and of the surprise of pregnancy, and the weight of the Christ child on her hip. It all mixed together, Jack’s splendid body, his mysterious absence earlier, the sun, the warmth of the day, the scent of Paris, dirty and choked as any city with exhaust and human activity, and I gave myself to him, pulled him deeper in me, opened myself to him and lost the line between us.
Afterward, I rested with my head on his shoulder. He tickled my back slowly, calmly with the stem of a violet he had purchased from a woman selling forget-me-nots for a soldiers’ fund. He drew little pictures on my back, and my breathing matched his.
I did nothing but stay against him, our bodies cooling together.
“How’s our sex?” he asked a little later. “Is it kind of spectacular or only okay?”
“Oh, you first on that one, buddy boy.”
“It’s a horrible question, isn’t it? If you say it’s great and the other person thinks it’s only so-so, then you’ve created a huge communication gulley. If you say it’s good but not great and the other person thinks it was terrific, then you’ve insulted your partner. It’s one of the great conundrums of modern living.”
“It’s like going to Phoenix.”
He pushed up a little and looked at me.
“It’s an old story in my family,” I explained. “A long time ago, my mother and father had a chance to go to Phoenix. They went and had a horrible time. The entire trip, my father thought my mother wanted to go, and my mother thought my father wanted to go. That’s called a trip to Phoenix in my family.”
“And the moral of that story is…?”
“You have to tell the truth to your partner.”
“I think you’re delicious in bed,” he said. “I love making love with you.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. For me, it’s only so-so.”
His hand slowed on my back. I turned my head so he couldn’t see me smiling.
“You’re a rat,” he said. “A horrible rat.”
“You turn me inside out, Jack. You ring all sorts of bells.”
“Good, I’m glad.”
“In a so-so sort of way.”
He tried to push me out of bed. I grabbed around his belly and held on. Then he pulled me on top of him—and I loved his strength, I loved how he could move me as he liked—and kissed me with everything. We kissed a long time with the balcony door open and the Paris light beginning to turn away for the night. Each told the other how sweetly we loved. The kisses became a chain, and we followed each link for fear of leaving anything to chance, anything to part us.
*
At sunset, Jack took me to plant a tree.
He could not have surprised me more. After leaving me for about an hour, he came to our room at the Hotel Trenton with a small ash tree wrapped in a burlap holder. The tree looked vigorous, but it was a sapling, a slender plant no taller than my knee.
He carried it out to the balcony and made me do a Lion King salutation. I held it up and introduced it to the plains of Africa—or Paris. It was lighthearted and fun. He sang the Lion King song and made me join in on “The Circle of Life.”
“So what is this about?” I asked, delighted. Already delighted.
He had two bottles of red wine, both of them without labels. It was like Jack to find wine from a private vendor. He made me hold the tree—he treated it like a baby—while he opened the first bottle. He pulled our two seats onto the balcony. It was a tight fit, but we both managed to have our legs out, at least.
“We drink to its health,” he said. “To the long life of a tree.”
“To its health,” I said, raising my glass.