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may the Lord of all life bless your families:
your husbands and wives,
your sons and daughters,
your brothers and sisters.
[the book of common prayer]
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We eat at another restaurant in the Latin Quarter just because it's close to the ferris wheel we rode earlier, swinging and dipping over the network of narrow roads leading to the Eiffel Tower.
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The restaurants have all kind of started to blend together in my head, the €10 menus and the free wine and the practiced politeness of the waiters. The cheap wine makes Jennie chatty, mostly about the political coup going on in Canada, and we spend the rest of the meal planning a road trip to Toronto.
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After dinner we decide to go to Sacre-Cour, even though it's late. There are few things I love more than people who suggest things because it's late.
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I also love those moments where you don't feel real, and this is one of those. You're moving your legs and you can feel them extending and you're aware of your arms brushing your sides but you're so amazed by life that you can see all sides of it, not just the side visible from the inside of you.
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My skirt is white and it's glowing and moving in the dark like a reflection of the moon in the water. Rising in front of us is the church, chillingly beautiful, part of it underlit, part sharp shadows. Behind us the city is spread out, bright but distant, as if all you have to do to enter a different dimension is climb a hundred stairs.
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People are sitting on the steps, smoking, playing music from battery-powered stereos. I can hear other music in the distance. Boys ask us to dance with them and Anne and Jennie acquiesce, dipping and turning under and above the lights, but I wave and smile, wanting the moment all to myself.
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A boy sits next to me. He says that his name is Adam, and that seems fitting. I tell him that his city is beautiful, and he shrugs and replies that he can't see it since he has always been here. But I am glad that you think so, he says, spreading his hands out and smiling.
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I do think so. I am not jealous of any boy who can't recognize beauty for its abundance. I've always thought in the back of my mind that the best possible thing was to be surrounded with everything that you love, but what he said makes me wonder.
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Maybe the point is having to wait for it, so you can love it all the more. Or maybe the same thing that allows people to see beauty where there is almost none allows them to see it where there is nothing else.
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Just then I'm content not to test the theory, just to see what I haven't seen before. Laugh on the steps of a cathedral older than the last seven generations of my family, see the lights of a far more ancient city spark and dim in the distance, feel the wine in my belly, the cold night on my eyelids. Call me Eve, I say to him in my head, and we watch the night.
