Ideas of Heaven Read online

  THE SAME GROUND

  I wasn’t really surprised when my older brother Yves wanted to be a priest. He had always been the most earnest of us, and our family had some history of sending its sons into the priesthood. My mother had a cousin at a church in Lyon, and two generations back there was a great-great-uncle with the Benedictines who survived the siege of Peking in 1900. So Yves probably thought of doing such a thing from the time he was quite young. Although none of the other boys in the family had any such ideas—we were not priest material. But he was, we all felt it.

  When he came back home to Dijon after his first semester in the seminary, I peered at him for signs of change—I wanted to see how much of him I had lost. He was still wearing his Yves-clothes and his Yves-cut hair, everything trim and nondescript. But I was eighteen and I thought he looked already somewhat sexless, somewhat lacking in dash and vitality. He had been a good soccer player, an agile boy with strong, square shoulders. I was sure that he was softer now, though he claimed not. How could he contemplate an entire life without a chance of ever sleeping with a woman? I had had a year of sporadic joys and could not go for an hour without thinking of them, much less imagine forgoing them forever. In those years I could not have asked my brother if he liked men, but I thought he did not.

  He seemed happy and even excited about his life at God-school, as the rest of us called it. He still joked with us, and we insulted each other as we always had, but our enthusiasms must have seemed pale and inessential to him. My sister Dominique’s engagement, my brother Raoul’s fervor for any movie with Belmondo in it, my crush on Karl Marx. We must have seemed like chattering children. Who would never quite grow up, as he already had. We could sort of tell he thought this.

  As it happened, his visit was the last time the family was all together. Dominique married Étienne (not her best idea), and I left to go study at the Sorbonne. All this was hard on my mother, especially the absence of Yves, who had of course been her nicest child and the most attentive to her. She said she could never quite understand how someone like Yves couldn’t find more time to visit his own family. She did not openly sulk, but we knew she felt ill-used.

  And we hardly saw him in the next few years, we faded out of his view. When I went to his ordination, I was uncomfortable—we all were—at the sight of him in his cassock. During the ceremony, I felt confused and at the same time quite moved, as if a dog in a spangled costume had suddenly spoken profound and beautiful words.

  In my life in Paris, I didn’t mention Yves very often, but I wouldn’t let anyone make jeering remarks about him, though I sometimes did myself. I was in my late twenties when I met Sylvie, and when we decided to have a wedding, it was clear that Yves should marry us. I had not been to Mass for years, but I closed my eyes when my brother placed the Host on my tongue, and I could hardly breathe from feeling all that I did.

  And he toasted us at the reception too—“all my wishes for the truest happiness”—and he joked with my mother. He was working then in a shelter for homeless men in Marseille. My friend Bernard said Yves alone was enough to give the clergy a good name, after all those centuries of their being corrupt fat-cats or child-tormenting fascists. And it was true that Yves had taken on none of the slick manners some priests have—there were no sonorous depths in his voice—no, he was simply there, without ornament or strain. More than one person at the wedding said he seemed enviable, really.

  It was less than a year after this that Yves left the priesthood. He sent us a letter to explain. “This decision has been a great anguish to me,” he wrote. “I don’t expect to cease mourning what I have given up. But I could not continue without hypocrisy and falsehood.” It was clearly a letter he had sent not only to us. He had fallen in love with one Marguerite LaPorte, formerly Sister Ursule, and they had both chosen to go back into the world, as man and wife.

  I should have been happy for him, but I was too startled at first. I had grown so used to thinking of him as someone beautifully suited to his calling. Now there was a scandal around him, a drama. I was perhaps more embarrassed than he was when he brought Marguerite to meet me and Sylvie in Paris. That bearded man was my brother—in a flannel shirt!—with his arm around a woman. She had a plain and lovely face, with pale eyes gleaming behind her spectacles, and thin brown hair cut short like a baby’s.

  We both liked her, how could we not? They went to live in Lille, where they worked at a center for teenage runaways, and in a year Marguerite gave birth to a boy, and she had a girl and another girl not very long after that, much to the delight of my mother. In the kitchen of our Paris apartment, Sylvie and I kept a photo of all of them walking in the rain, the baby girl in Yves’s arms wearing his yellow rain hat.

  Yves and his wife seemed utterly at ease as parents, unfazed by rowdiness, tickled by their kids’ obsessions, and charmed by any bits of childish eloquence. My brother Raoul said, “See how healthy he is now, you can see it, no more of that flabby cadaver look.” But any congratulations along these lines only caused Yves to shrug. I had read that there were married priests who still said the words of consecration at Mass, despite the rulings, and I asked Yves once if he ever imagined himself again at the altar, since, as these men said, he was ordained forever. He shook his head, more sadly than I could have expected, and said, “No, no. I knew. Every day I miss what I had. Every single day. But I can’t have it, can I?”

  I hadn’t seen how terrible it was for him. When I told Sylvie this, she said maybe he would feel better as time went on, although a number of years had already passed. I did not tell my family what he’d said; they were so pleased that Yves’s story had turned out to be a great romantic victory. Who knew what a romantic family I had? None of them would have understood his suffering, but later I thought that I did.

  NO ONE EVER thought I was like Yves, certainly I didn’t. I studied modern European history at the Sorbonne, and I was already out of school in 1968, loafing and working for a textbook publisher, when the student demonstrations broke into riots. Once I saw what was unfolding, I was in the streets too. I had long stopped being a Marxist, but I had, like the others, grown a purer scorn and a vaster ambition. I saw people clubbed on the back when we got boxed in on the Rue St. Jacques and the cops turned on us, lunging and hitting. We were all shouting, and my friend Bernard was bellowing howls of outrage—fury kept us from remembering to be afraid, which must be the secret of heroes.

  I only saw bits and pieces of the actions. I had a job I went to—until the one-day general strike; I did march through Paris for that. We were all delirious that the workers had joined us. Bernard was glowing like a coal. Already ten days of happiness, the graffiti on the walls of the Sorbonne said. Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.

  I suppose we had a month. I had a long argument with the editor I worked with, over whether the unions had sold out everyone by simply bargaining for higher pay. Only money! No replastering, the walls had said, the structure is rotten. I began with a biting rationality and escalated, in the face of the editor’s suave derision, to a rant against those who lived only to consume. “Only morons think the world is all things,” I said. He had me fired, a nice irony in his defense of the workers.

  It was the one time in my life I was fired for a principle, though all I really had was a contempt for unctuous compromise. I didn’t starve either. I kicked around, writing translations of English tech manuals and tutoring lycée students who were afraid of flunking their bacs. I lived on this for quite a few years. I met Sylvie at a bistro so cheap the frites tasted of old scorched fat. She was a frugal student, eating alone before working all night on her thesis—I could guess this even before I started a conversation by complaining about the potatoes. “We’re eating them anyway, aren’t we?” she said. She was quite friendly for a woman that pretty.

  “When potatoes first came to France,” I said, “they banned them in Burgundy because they thought eating too many caused leprosy.”

  “Do I look spotted?” she sa
id, holding out her arm.

  “Not you,” I said. I had a moment’s pause after I said this, because Sylvie was black or North African or mixed—I couldn’t quite tell and it was too soon to ask, but here we were, talking about her skin. She had smooth, sepia-toned arms. “Who do you think,” I said, “brought potatoes back from Peru the way Marco Polo brought pasta from China?”

  “Noodles were always everywhere. Nobody brought them,” she said.

  As it happened, Marco Polo was what she was writing about—he was her topic in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I was a telepathic bumbler.

  “He was sort of a liar, wasn’t he?” I said.

  “He was!” she said. “Once he was back in Venice, they called him Il Milione, the guy who told a million fibs. But he never budged. His famous line is, I have not told the half of what I saw. He said that on his deathbed, can you believe it?”

  Her enchantment with him surprised me. Surely everyone had expected her to stay away from anything so Eurocentric. But I supposed her freedom was the point.

  “Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”

  I said I had meant to go further in history but hadn’t liked the confinement of being a student. “Oh, it’s prison, it’s terrible,” Sylvie said. But I could tell, as she spoke, that her own mental labor was a tonic to her—she loved to dig in, she loved to be reading so closely that the thirteenth century was under her eyelids. She was never not working.

  But she liked my loose and shambling style, as it turned out. She was impressed at how easily I got by, how little worrying I did. I don’t know why I was her emblem of successful insouciance. Lucky for me—it was sexier than just being nice.

  WINNING SYLVIE ALWAYS dazzled me. And we lived for three years in my tiny, cluttered apartment in the 7th arrondissement, getting by on very little money, until Sylvie found that she was pregnant. Her father had once warned her that she might as well be living with a street juggler or a blind beggar as with me, the loafer. Sylvie’s father was an insurance clerk from Meaux, a hearty man with tired blue eyes, and he had four daughters; I didn’t blame him for wanting them well provided for. Her mother, who was from Guadeloupe, had fed me many delicious dinners on Sundays but had never been very interested in knowing me. All the same, they made their peace with the idea of me when they had to.

  AND WE WERE very happy at our wedding. Sylvie in a dress like a column of light, me dazed and serious. The church in Meaux like a dark wooden ship, Yves’s voice at the Mass. And then Sylvie’s sisters moving through the reception, with their gold-dyed dreadlocks and their tightly combed chignons. My father leaned over to me, with his winey breath, and said, “Look at them. No girls could be lovelier. You know what? Soon the whole world will be like this.”

  “Not soon enough,” I said, but I had not expected this from him and I was glad to hear him say it. It was my mother who was stiff and melancholy, greeting guests behind a thin smile. As teenagers Raoul and I once told her that a slave from Martinique was among the ancestors of Colette, her favorite writer, and she had refused to believe us—“I was never told that.” “Dumas too,” Raoul said. “A Haitian grandmother.” My mother was doing her best now, she was trying as hard as she could (I thought, grimly). It was Yves who got her laughing and acting more amiable.

  Sylvie’s friends were teasing her about the hugely increased size of her breasts, a pleasant exaggeration on the friends’ part. Sylvie was willowy and slender, and her pregnancy was still pretty concealed—but the friends were so detailed in their language that Sylvie, a generally dignified person, burst into fits of giggles. “Look at her now. All silly. What have you done to her?” her mother said to me, patting my arm. “You boy.” When Sylvie and I left the reception, elated and drowsy, she kept calling me you boy.

  EVEN BEFORE THE wedding, I had registered to take the exam for a secondary teaching diploma. Why shouldn’t I teach the youth of the nation, how could it be any worse than the tutoring I already did? So I kept saying—though to pass the exam I had to remember all the tedious passages I had memorized under protest in my own fettered boyhood. My schooling had been hateful, my lycée run by cynical faculty who taunted the pupils into rote absorption and correct performance. Surely things had changed somewhat, yes? We spoke of my only having to do this until Sylvie had her degree and a university job, but I knew better even then.

  And there was some satisfaction in cramming for the sake of my burgeoning family. I had my heroic labors, my nights of rigorous study. There is a lot to be said for sacrifice, particularly in its early stages. Those were not unhappy evenings, when I made soup for Sylvie and we sat at our separate desks. Sylvie was grateful for what I was doing, though she had to be careful in her words of praise; I was prickly, and sensitive to condescension.

  When Marc was born, I was already teaching, and the students wrote words of congratulation on the chalkboard. Felicitations to me! I was teaching in the 13th arrondissement, which was just beginning to be an Asian enclave then, and one Chinese student gave me a potted tree in honor of a healthy boy. Right away Marc looked like Sylvie, with his pointed chin and his dandelion fuzz of hair—some nurses were surprised I was the father.

  Those first sleepless months were too amazing for us to bear standing up. At home I was a crooning zombie walking Marc back and forth in the depths of the night in the hallways of our new apartment, or I was collapsed in bed, with the baby between us. At school I was hardly ever fully awake. Once I did start to fall asleep while I was listening to a student give a report—I got through it by making clownish wisecracks about my fatherhood.

  LATER, WHEN YVES had his children, we’d watch all of them chasing each other like squirrels in his narrow backyard, and he and I would glance at one another—we liked to see them a little wild. And each of us was astonished, I think, at his own shimmering domestic contentment. The priest and the goof-off—who would have thought we would end up here? Sylvie and Marguerite liked to sit out by the rock garden in deck chairs and listen to Duke Ellington tapes, while we rolled around in the dirt with the kids. “The dog fathers,” Sylvie said. It was all very jolly.

  WHEN YVES’S OLDEST boy, Luc, was celebrating his eighth birthday, we drove up to Lille one Saturday at the beginning of October. It was a long, rainy trek in our rattletrap car, but Sylvie had just been told she’d been hired for a job she wanted at the Université, and she was in high spirits. When we got to the party she cornered Marguerite at once to tell her everything. I got dragged by Marc to an awning in the backyard, under which a group of children was admiring a goat. The goat belonged to Marguerite’s sister Edmée, who had taken up organic goat farming and brought the nanny goat with her in a truck from Poitou, where she had a herd outside Surgeres. Yéyé, the goat, had a nice white face, with darkish splotches around her amber eyes and a dapper little forward-curling beard. Luc fed her carrots, and the others were allowed to pet her gently.

  Edmée was a small, winsome woman with a spiky haircut—she didn’t look to me like a farmer. She said she liked her work, though. “It’s just complicated enough to be interesting,” she said, “but there’s no stupid boss or meetings or sucking up to anybody.” I might have guessed this answer, but she made it convincing.

  “Is there culture in the land of the goats?” I said. “Leaping dance recitals? Tailbrush art?”

  “I go up to Paris quite often,” she said. “Goaty though I may be.”

  I thought then of the pheromone research I’d read about in the news, which claimed that women’s essential scent was fishy and men’s was goaty. Thinking of it made me want to sniff myself. Meanwhile Edmée was showing Marc the dugs Yéyé gave milk from.

  Later in the afternoon, one of the boys let the goat off her tether when no one was looking, and she went skipping off into the rain. I ran after her, out of family loyalty, and both Edmée and I ended up skidding down the rock garden in the mud. Scraped and wet, we got the creature back, but it took much tugging and hauling and slipping into the peony bushes. The kids lo
ved it. In the kitchen Edmée wiped the mud off my face with a wet dish-cloth. “See! You’re a goat too,” she said. It was an odd moment.

  AND SHE DID call me when she was in the city. I got a message at school, and I met her after work in a café. She looked up from the table, her face clearing at the sight of me, like any woman waiting for her date. Her date. I had time to think about what I was doing, but I did it anyway. “Thank you for coming,” she said. I laughed, rolling my eyes. We had some chitchat about why none of my students liked Mitterand anymore—we were just talking to be talking—and then we went to her friend’s apartment, while her friend was at work. I was so transfixed with arousal by this time that I had stopped worrying about anything, and Edmée was very simple and direct, but there was a tremulous undercurrent in her when I drew her against me.

  The friend’s bedroom was painted a pale, washy blue, to make it calm above what was really a very noisy street. When we first turned to each other on those white, white sheets, I felt that we were floating in a rush of sound. Then the noises faded out of my attention. Edmée was a slow and dreamy lover, and I tried to be careful with her, though I was lunatic with wanting. Even the subtler turns seemed to ravish her with feeling, and I wondered if she had not been with many men; she was close to thirty. But perhaps this was her only way of doing anything, this earnestness—she was so frank and transparent. Once I was actually inside her, I could not be slow, though she wept in passion (were those sobs?) long before we were near our finish. Or my finish, as it happened.