One Moment In Time

One Moment In Time
A CWE#11 Story for MCarey

Rated Yellow Star

I cried at Voltaire’s grave.  I could feel Diana looking at me and still I could not stop.  It wasn’t until later that I realized she didn’t want me to.   

She reached out for me, took my hand and we just stood there, the two of us; Miss Diana Lynch and Mr. Martin Belden: so much alike, so completely different.  We’re the insecure ones, her and I; the drama queens, the attention seekers.  The similarity is a blessing and a curse.  We both want the same thing, but we run dangerously close to destroying the beauty we have created together in order to achieve it. Though the essence of our desires is analogous, I fear our intentions for its ultimate manifestation may be worlds apart.

Miss Diana Lynch and Mr. Martin Belden request the pleasure of your company at… probably nothing.  I battled the dream away.  I didn’t want to dream it; not then, not in the middle of this one real dream we had made together, not in Paris.  I have fought for her love for so long.  Even then, standing in the Pantheon with her hand in mine, after sleeping alone with her an ocean away from home, I was not sure if I had it.  

Maybe Dan’s right.  Maybe I try too hard.  “It is not enough to conquer;” one of the myriad Voltaire quotations I know by heart echoed throughout the chamber from somewhere beyond his grave, “one must learn to seduce.”   In the stillness of the burial vault, I could almost hear my idol snicker at me from inside his shiny sepulchre.  Despite their conflicting religious views, Voltaire and Dan would have been great friends.

The problem isn’t that I don’t know what to do; it’s that I don’t know how to do it.  Di makes it beyond obvious when she is presented with an eventuality she does not want, yet she is equally adroit at obviating, either intentionally or unintentionally, what it is she does want.  Of all the intrigues my intrepid sister has dragged me into over the years, Diana Lynch is by far my favorite mystery.  She is also the one most impossible to solve.  

            I took her to Notre Dame.  It is free and easy to go into the cathedral.  You walk in the front door, wander around and stay as long as you like.  Diana stayed much longer than I would have liked.  She loved it.  I, well, it was a church.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I have a problem with God; it’s just that I never seem to find him in a church.  I’ve run into the guy out in the woods, dancing though our laughter in the Crabapple Farm living room and in the sunset sinking behind the Hudson.  But anytime I’m in a church, I don’t see him; he doesn’t speak to me.  Maybe he’s too busy then, talking to the others.  

Watching her walk through that magnificent cathedral I was, to be totally honest, a little jealous.  She was so comfortable there, knew just what to do.  Touched the water, crossed herself, made little curtseys, she even stopped at one of the shrines, put some money in and lit a candle, whispered a prayer.  I just sort of trailed after her, afraid to touch anything.  

It is neither free nor easy to go up into the belfry and tour the rooftops.  There is also a line; a long, slow line that trails along the side of the cathedral and completely around the block.  The one saving grace is the delightful crepe stand just across the street.  The brilliant entrepreneur who opened that place must be the richest man in France.  He’s pretty much got us held captive there, intoxicated by the mouth-watering smell of fresh pastry, his charming little red awning flapping in the breeze, the large cooler of ice cold drinks taunting us as we stand motionless in the city summer sun.  Di held our place in line as I crossed the street in quest of refreshments.  Call me a sucker tourist, I don’t care.  It was lunchtime.  

Waiting for the food, we looked up from opposite sides of the street at the intricately carved gargoyles and intimidating Gothic spikes that speared up out of the roof of Notre Dame.  I watched the pigeons fluttering among the spires. They were eying the crepe stand for scraps, completely oblivious to the fact that they were standing atop the third most recognizable building in France and one of the world’s most revered cathedrals.  

The line had actually moved by the time I returned with our crepes.  I passed one to Di and had just leaned in to enjoy my first delicious bite of strawberry-Nutella filled goodness when it was revealed to me, in a gut-wrenching moment of ironic cruelty that it still hurts to talk about, that those birds were doing more up there than just standing and fluttering.

Stupid pigeons.  Stupid overhanging gargoyles.  Stupid laughing swarm of international tourists.  Stupid Victor Hugo for writing that damn novel that made everyone want to tour the Notre Dame belfry.  They do know the story is fiction, right?  Quasimodo and Esmeralda were not real people.  Then again, since Hugo wrote the novel to renew interest in Gothic architecture, I suppose he deserves the last laugh.

You know who didn’t deserve the last laugh?  The three German tourists in front of us in line who were apparently of the opinion that a starving and footsore American having his lunch defecated on en route to his mouth by a deranged Parisian pigeon was the highest form of comedy.  

Where do these avian terrorists get off, anyway?  I’m a Bob-White for goodness sake, practically an honorary bird.  Pooping on his food is no way to treat a brother, even if he is a foreigner.    

“This sort of thing would never happen to Dan,” I muttered out loud, after I managed to clean myself up as much as humanly possible without the aid of running water.  

Di curled an arm around my freshly Purell-ed neck.  “That thing that happened in our hotel shower last night,” she whispered seductively in my ear, “that didn’t happen to Dan either.”  

I gulped.  “Yeah, well, I think I’m going to need another shower.”  For at least one reason, two if she kept on talking like that.  

“That can be arranged,” she informed me, then proceeded to traipse unbidden across the street to replace my humiliatingly soiled crepe.  

Have I mentioned how much I love this woman?

It’s embarrassing to admit how much I look at Di.  I never knew how often until we got on top of that cathedral and almost fell off.  I remember the exact moment when I realized I had a problem; it was just as I had taken a third gargoyle to the spleen.  If I had a camera following me around, I bet it would show that a solid seventy-eight percent of the time, I’m doing nothing but checking out Di.  The rate would be higher except I do try not to straight up stare.  I used to do that a lot and she kept catching me.  Obviously, it made her uncomfortable.  So now my eyes flick back and forth between her and everything else, the street, the view, the church spires, the crepe stand, and then back to her.  People probably think I have some sort of an eye disorder.  I can’t help it.  She’s just so damned beautiful.  

I’ve also mastered the subtle art of looking at her sideways, through what de Maurier, and others probably, describe so poetically as ‘the tail of my eye’.  Diana and I read Rebecca together on the plane on the way over.  This was not planned.  I had packed a new book, a sci-fi adventure story I’d wanted to read for ages.  It disappeared not-so-very-mysteriously from my bag at the little going away party we had at the farm the night before we left.  

Dan took it.  I know he did.  I saw his eyes perk up when Di talked about the book over supper.  Dan and his classic chick lit.  I wonder which member of his ‘book club’ he was seducing when he read that one.  What a conniver.  He wanted me to read Rebecca with Di, so he stole my book.  I can’t prove it, of course.  He didn’t have anything noticeably concealed about his person when he left the house, but the man is a pro.  I’m glad he did it.  There is a lesson in that book that both Di and I need to learn.  

You don’t know how many times I’ve thanked my lucky stars that Dan’s on my side.  If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t have a chance.

“So, I thought next we could go to la Sainte-Chapelle.” Di said as we exited the Notre Dame rooftop tour.  “It’s right nearby and it has the most beautiful stained glass windows of any cathedral I’ve ever heard of.  I’d love to see them in person.  Are you up for it?”

Yay.  Another church.  I could barely contain my excitement.  All I wanted to do was go back to the hotel, take off my pigeon excrement covered clothes, find a place to safely burn them if possible, and take a long, hot, soapy shower, preferably one Diana would join me in half way through.  But all I said out loud was, “Of course!”  

You see?  You see how much I love this woman?

            I am the luckiest man alive.  

It’s hard to even believe this is real.  I’m walking down the Champs-Elysees in the world’s most beautiful city with the world’s most beautiful girl.  

We just spent forty-five minutes just staring at the Arc de Triomphe.  It felt like five.  The carvings: men, women, horses; they jump right out of the marble as if they were alive.  

Before that I took her to Angelina for hot chocolate.  I am not even kidding you; it is hot chocolate.  Not warm chocolate flavored water, not heated up chocolate milk.  I mean an entire cup full of melted chocolate which it is culturally appropriate to just drink.  Man, I love this city.  I love this girl.   

Paris is everything we dreamed it would be.

For a long time, a dream was all I thought it would ever be.  Since the day I turned fifteen, Diana had talked about this trip.  She gave me a book that year, a compilation of some of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions with actual photographs of the pages of his Codex Atlanticus.  It was just as I was beginning to discover what a genius he was, how he was so much more than just the guy who painted the Mona Lisa.  A chance comment from a teacher, a random history assignment, an available biography in the school library and next thing you know, I’m immersed.  He’s a painter, yes, and a sculptor, a mathematician, an engineer, an inventor, an architect, a botanist, a writer, a musician, a geologist and several other things even I can’t remember.  

I mentioned the assignment to Diana, rambling like an idiot about his art, his inventions, his multitudinous talent.  She had already known.   A thirteen year old expert on so many different things, ranging from European Renaissance art to early nineteenth century architecture wandering around like a lovely feather in our midst and we barely even noticed.  How were we to know? The only glimpses of her depth came when she spoke up to help solve a mystery, but even those were rare. Unless it was obviously necessary that she show she knew the difference between a seventeenth century French desk, a faithful reproduction and a downright fake, she would never say a word.  See what I mean?  We’re so similar.  The difference is when I know something, I go around telling everyone and anyone I can find who is willing to listen and sometimes even a few that aren't.

The day she gave me that book was the first time Diana told me she wanted to go to Paris.  “We can go together,” she said, “and see the Mona Lisa. I’m going to start saving up money, right this very minute, and the summer I graduate from college, we’ll go to Paris together.”

I started saving immediately, socking away all my birthday money. I consistently kept it up, just on the off chance that she was being serious.  She had already been saving, because, unbeknownst to me, she really had meant it.  This was right around the time I was starting to discover what a genius she was, too.  

Now, here we stand; her with her Architecture and Fine Arts degree, and me with my Bachelors in Environmental Engineering and my English Minor strolling down the streets of Paris heading for the Louvre, about to really go see the masterpiece of magnificence known as the Mona Lisa, the crown jewel of our mutual hero’s accomplishments.  Diana, like the painting, just as beautiful and mysterious as she has always been; me, still as insecure and as uncertain about the future.  

Yet there is something in the air here, here in this city of light.  I feel it in the breeze as we enter the Tuileries Gardens, something telling me that maybe the future isn’t what's important right now.  The same thing that told her yes, we should stop for an espresso and sip it while looking at the butterflies and laughing at our fellow tourists as they try to pronounce Tuileries.  

She sits down at a tiny table by the outdoor cafe.  I join her and she smiles.  “Tu et moi ici.  C’est une moment.”

 “Le moment est tout.”  I speak very little French.  The words came more from the garden than from me.  I think it’s interesting that the French word tout means both all and everything.  Why do Americans say ‘That’s all?’ when we’re disappointed with how much we get of something?  Why do we think everything is not enough?

“Pourquoi cherchons-nous pour plus?” Diana asks, in response to my comment.  

“Je ne sais pas.  Merci.”  I raise my tiny coffee as the waiter sets it down and shrug elaborately, then raised it in a toast.  “C’est la vie!”

Her face lights up and her eyes dance as she laughs with me.  She laughs so hard her sunglasses slide backward off the top of her head.  She has to reach back to untangle them from her hair, still laughing.  She raises her coffee then, too, meeting my salute and we clink our cups together.  

I really don’t know.  I don’t know a lot of things about her, about me, about us.  I don’t know what she wants to do when we get home.  I don’t know if she wants to marry me.  I don’t know if she wants to have my children.  I only know what I just learned, that not knowing the future shouldn’t preclude me from enjoying this moment.  This moment, on a bench in a Paris garden, with roses and butterflies and coffee and her, this moment is enough.  Violet-blue eyes dancing in the sun, her hair in the wind, one dark strand caught in her lips, drifting into her espresso as she laughingly pulls it away.  This moment is beautiful.  Why would I ever need another one?

Tout ce que vous avez est le moment.

Author's Notes:

This story is my contribution to CWE #11 - Mary’s Marvy Mart Month and is dedicated to the memory of MCarey, our beloved fellow Jixer, author and friend who was taken from us far too soon.   I can not claim to have known Mary well, but she was a presence on the boards, she had read and responded to some of my work and I enjoyed all of her writing.  Many times in the course of reading her stories I would find myself smiling, often downright laughing.  That’s what I’ll remember most about Mary, her humor.  The gift of laughter is one of the world’s most precious.  Mart has always represented laughter to me, and Mary’s Mart was quintessentially funny.  

The sadness and the suddenness of Mary's passing was a reminder to me that life is a series of moments and that we should be grateful for every one, the happy, the sad and the in-between because we really don’t know how many we’re going to get.  This story is an attempt to capture that idea.  It is neither a tale of woe nor is it a fairy tale.  Rather, it is a series of moments, a portion of a mysterious whole that life's moments offer us a glimpse of for a little while.  

MCarey’s stories and her interactions on the boards have provided us all with many wonderful moments.  While I am sad that she is gone, I am happy and grateful for each one of those moments. Though I fall far short of MCarey’s incomparable hilarity, I did try to incorporate some humor because I think she’d like it better that way.  

French translations:

Tu et moi ici.  C’est une moment. = You and me here.  This is a moment.

Le moment est tout.  = The moment is all/everything.

Pourquoi cherchons-nous pour plus? = Why do we search for more?

Je ne sais pas.  Merci…. C’est la vie!  = I don’t know.  Thanks…. That’s life!

Tout ce que vous avez est le moment. = All we ever have is the moment.  

Voltaire (1694-1778) was a French writer and philosopher known for his wit, his skepticism of the Catholic Church and his advocacy of freedom.  “It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.” is one of his well known quotations.

The Paris Pantheon is a secular mausoleum (formerly a church dedicated to St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris) that contains the remains of French citizens of distinction, including Voltaire. A rough translation of the text on his tomb is as follows: He combats the atheists and the fanatics. He inspires tolerance. He reclaims the rights of man from the servitude of feudalism.

Notre-Dame de Paris (Our Lady of Paris) is a Catholic cathedral in downtown Paris, completed in 1345 in French Gothic architecture.  

The characters Quasimodo and Esmeralda are from Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, written in 1829-1831.  

The crepe stand in the photo is directly across the street from the Notre-Dame belfry line.  I was there on my honeymoon and can fully attest from actual experience to the sacrilegious behavior of Notre Dame’s pigeons.  

Rebecca is an novel published in 1938 by Daphne du Maurier, a strong theme of which (in my interpretation at least) is to beware of your own insecurity as it has a tendency of blinding you to the truth.   

Sainte Chapelle (Holy Chapel) is a Gothic chapel located in Paris near Notre Dame, completed in the year 1248.  The chapel is gorgeous, known especially for its collection of original stained glass windows.  I highly recommend visiting this if you are ever in Paris, (I stopped in, pigeon soiled backside and all.)  A google image search will give you a good idea (of the chapel’s windows, not my pigeon soiled backside - I hope.)   

The Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile (Arch of Triumph of the Star) stands at the Western End of the Champs-Elysees in Paris to commemorate those who died in the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

Angelina is a tea room in Paris serving pastries and hot chocolate since 1903.  Drool worthy photos and information available on their website.  

        

Thanks:

To Kellykath for editing for me once again on short notice and in the middle of baseball season.  

To the CWE team at Jix for setting up this “Marvy” challenge, a perfectly-perfect tribute to an unforgettable Jixer.  

Disclaimer:

The characters Mart, Diana, Trixie and Dan are the property of Random House Publishing and were used without permission.  I am not making any money off the use of any of these.  The rest of the story is my own work.

Photo Credits:

All photos were taken by myself on my honeymoon in Paris in April 2009, which explains their mediocre quality and dubious composition.  Please ask for permission before reusing these stellar examples of modern photography.  

Date of Completion:

June 13, 2015