The Guncle Abroad

Chapter Seven

The Sacré-Coeur Basilica was located at the summit of the butte Montmartre, the city’s highest natural point, and boasted the best views of Paris; it was the second most popular tourist attraction in France after the Eiffel Tower. As darkness fell, Patrick marched the kids up the two hundred and thirty-seven steps built to reach the entrance to the massive stone cathedral.

“Pick up your feet!” he cheerily instructed like a spirited tour guide waving a little flag to lead his group, but then after ten more steps griped, “Jiminy Christmas, you need to be a mountain goat to access this place.”

“I brought the wrong shoes,” Grant moaned.

“What’s the matter with your shoes?” Patrick pressed, glancing down at his nephew’s feet. Of the three of them, Grant was most consistently dressed for activity.

Despite being appropriately outfitted, both children were losing steam and making a meal of trudging up each step. “They’re too shoes-y.”

Patrick made a mental note to get his nephew shoes that were less shoes-y and therefore more to the kid’s liking, or were at the very least more comfortable for traipsing across France. His wallet was open for any purchase that reduced whining.

“What’s the deal with this place?” Maisie asked.

“You mean why are we climbing all the way up here?”

She nodded.

“For the best view in all of Paris!”

They were already tired, as Patrick had footslogged them through le Louvre that afternoon, which SayHi had translated merely as the Louvre, much to Maisie’s consternation. Grant made the most of their visit by counting breasts he saw in the art, torn whether to count them individually or as pairs. Patrick chose not to get involved as they breezed by some old favorites of his—the Venus de Milo, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting The Bolt, Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People—on their way to the Salle des états, which housed works of the Venetian masters, artists like Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Although visitors mostly had eyes for one: Leonardo da Vinci.

“What’s everyone looking at?” Grant had asked, surprised by the crowd’s sudden swelling.

Patrick pointed straight ahead and replied, “That’s the Mona Lisa.”

“That’s the Mona Lisa?” Maisie blurted, sounding both impressed and disappointed. And indeed, housed behind bulletproof glass and surrounded by so many people, she looked surprisingly dim.

Grant tilted his head and put his hand on his chin. “The world’s most famous painting?”

“That’s right.”

Maisie put her hands on her hips. “She’s supposed to be some mysterious beauty, right?”

“I don’t get it,” Grant dismissed, his enthusiasm clearly dampened. “It’s just her face.” Draped in fabric as she was, she didn’t even add to his running tally.

Patrick glanced down at his nephew. “Are you kidding? A person’s face says a lot about their looks.”

“Why is she so special?” Grant asked as they got in the queue to move closer. “Like, what’s the appeal?”

Patrick leaned in for a closer look. “No one really knows.”

“Oh, so she’s like you, then. Famous, but no one knows why.”

Museums were one thing, but even the Louvre couldn’t contain Paris itself; Patrick knew from experience that the way you fall in love with a place was to see it for the first time. Really see it. Both its beauty and its flaws. All of it. And there was no better vantage point to see Paris than Sacré-Coeur, except perhaps atop the Eiffel Tower. Even if being trapped in a wrought-iron tower with the worst tourists in France didn’t sound like an absolute nightmare to Patrick, he knew part of the sheer joy of Paris was seeing the tower as part of the city’s skyline, which you couldn’t very well do if you were deep inside of it.

A small cable car filled with people glided past as they continued their ascent. The car looked like a tiny spaceship and the people inside waved at them; a bit of the future skyrocketing past the hardships of the present. Grant’s imagination was immediately captured. “What’s that?”

“The funicular.”

Maisie stopped in her tracks. “Do you ever get tired of just making up words?”

Patrick ascended the step behind her and gave his niece a friendly nudge. “Never.”

With another fifty or so steps they reached the butte’s summit and they faced the Basilica with their arms on their hips to catch their collective breath. Patrick was surprised anew each time he found himself winded. Growing older, as they say, was not for the faint of heart. Fortunately the kids were distracted by the monument before them, spectacularly lit up at night, and not the least bit concerned with their uncle or his diminishing stamina. Which is exactly as it should be. Patrick looked at the immense structure in front of them and it gleamed white against the darkening sky. He’d read that it was built with the stone of Chateau-Landon, the same rock used to construct the Arc de Triomphe. When hit with rainwater, the stone’s natural coating secreted a white substance that hardened in the sun. In essence, the Basilica had a chemical peel every time it rained, keeping it eternally young. If it was possible to be jealous of a stone, Patrick in this moment was. Then, after he’d wiped his brow, he slowly spun Maisie and Grant around so that they faced all of Paris at dusk; it was, after all, his reason for bringing them here. Maisie gasped at the shimmering sea of lights that stretched out endlessly before them.

“Guncle Love Language number three: ‘Don’t need no credit card to ride this train.’?” Patrick led them to a spot on the crowded steps to sit.

“This isn’t a train, it’s a staircase,” Maisie complained.

“Everything is so literal with you. I just mean that there’s nothing money can buy that beats life’s free joys with the people you care about. So, let’s sit here for a bit and take it all in.”

“The museum wasn’t free,” Maisie said, determined to fight him on everything.

“It was for you, as you’re under eighteen. And it would have been for me if I lived in the European Union, which perhaps I should.”

“Is this free for you?” Grant asked, and Patrick motioned for him to sit to quiet him. He then felt his own racing heart; all it had cost him was ten years off his life. He then sat between them on the steps.

Patrick was reminded of his early days in Hollywood, going up to the top of Mulholland Drive to get lost in the city’s lights. So many dreams he had, so many plans he’d made. He would take his late partner, Joe, and Sara, too, when she was in town, and they would park his car on a precarious dirt outcropping and look across a sea of diamonds, trying not to think about how steep the drop was below, or how many dreams the city had broken. It was a view he hoped to have for himself one day, and he did for a short time; when his sitcom The People Upstairs had been renewed for a second season and he understood the show would be a success, he bought a little house in Laurel Canyon for him and Joe.

“Do you ever get tired of this view?” Sara asked the first time she flew out to visit. They stood on the shallow deck that ran the length of the house and gave them the best canyon views.

Patrick bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself from bursting into a smile. He was proud of the life he’d built for himself. “Sometimes at night we sit out here and listen to the music that other people play as it echoes through the canyon. You just feel like a member of the Byrds or the Doors.”

“Mama Cass,” Sara said, playing along.

“Or any of Crosby or Stills or Nash or Young.” Patrick was not a religious person, but from a vantage point such as this he felt very small, and for the first time understood the idea that there was something much bigger than him. He then turned and faced the house, admiring his real favorite view—Joe in the kitchen. He was putting the finishing touches on a charcuterie board.

“Are you still mad?” Sara asked Patrick. Their friendship of late had been fraught. It was Greg who suggested she visit to see if it wouldn’t help their relationship mend.

Patrick hadn’t decided. He took her left hand to look one more time at the ring.

“Your brother’s on partnership track, thank you very much.” She held the stone up to the porch light, then screamed when a large insect buzzed by.

“No, I’m not mad,” Patrick came clean. He had just needed some distance to see things clearly.

“It’s the real deal, Patrick, I promise.” There was no denying that she was happy. “For ever and ever and ever. Until death do us part.”

“Okay,” Patrick said, urging her to calm down. “You’re on the verge of overselling it.”

“Can you blame me for being excited? We’re going to be sisters, Patrick.”

“You and Greg?” he asked, not following.

Sara shoved him against the railing, and just as he started to lose his balance, she grabbed him by the collar and kissed his cheek. “No, silly. You and me.”

It was the first moment it dawned on him that they would be family. And would have new entanglements that came with it.

“What do you think?” Patrick asked, encouraging the kids to share their reactions. The Eiffel Tower flashed a beam that cut through the night, circling like a warning from a lighthouse. Both kids were transfixed.

“It’s better than television,” Grant conceded, which was, from him, high praise.

“That’s because television is best for appearing on, not for looking at.”

But Grant seemed less interested in what lay in front of him than in what towered behind them. He looked over his shoulder and pointed up at the Basilica. “Is that a church?”

“It is,” Patrick said. Notre Dame was Paris’s most notable cathedral, but it was recovering still from a devastating fire, and the resulting construction and scaffolding made it, from certain vantage points, less awe-inspiring than it once was.

“It’s very white. Even in the dark.” Grant made circles with his fists and raised them to his eyes like binoculars. “Just like your teeth.”

“That’s because for thirty minutes a day, nuns come out and cover the whole building in Crest Whitestrips.”

“They do not. The whole thing? That would be too expensive.”

“Congregants give vouchers and coupons.”

The kid bent his head back so that he was looking at the church upside down. “Can we go inside?”

“We can try. It might be closed to the public for the night.” At least that much was true.

“What’s in there?”

Patrick wasn’t really certain. “Usual church things, I imagine. Stained glass windows. Pews. Candles. A crypt. An organ. A belfry.”

“For bats?” Grant’s eyes grew wide.

Patrick blinked. He’d been expecting pushback on “crypt.” “For bells. I read that this one houses the biggest bell in all of France.” Patrick didn’t know if that factoid was all that impressive or not; perhaps France was overall a small-belled country. “But, yes, I imagine also a shit ton of bats.”

“Livia goes to church,” Maisie said, breaking an uncharacteristic silence. “She wanted us to go with her, and Dad said if we went once we didn’t have to go again.”

“So what did you do?”

Maisie looked at him as if to say, We had no other choice. “We went once. It was the only way to shut her up.” It was the same humoring tactic they were taking with him.

Patrick was not one to go to bat for organized religion, but he also wanted to clear the kids’ own belfries of negative thoughts. “Lots of people go to church.”

“Not in Connecticut,” Maisie reminded him. “At least not a lot that we know.”

An egg-bald man glossy with sweat stopped right next to them, bent over, and placed his hands on his knees. He was breathing heavily as he charted a path through the crowd.

“Did you think about what you’re going to say to Dad?” Maisie asked.

“About what?”

“About Livia! Because I have some ideas.”

“Monsieur,” Patrick called out, ignoring his niece. He gestured to their spot on the steps and he and the kids vacated their seats so the man could sit down.

“Look,” Maisie continued, once they found an open spot to stand away from the crowd. “We can help you with this or not help you.”

“I choose not help me.”

“GUP!”

“You’re not going to do to me what you did to Livia, humor me and then get your way. I’m on to you! And I’m trying to teach you something important.”

Maisie gave him her best teenage We’ll see look, but Grant acquiesced; he pointed at the cathedral as they wandered in that general direction. “What else?”

“About Sacré-Coeur?” Patrick didn’t know how to top a crypt and a belfry of bats. He pulled out his phone and did a quick Google search. “There has been a continuous prayer happening inside the chapel since the year 1885.” He could see Grant working out the particulars of how such a thing might work, and knew his nephew well enough to know his vision included one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old monks, little more than skin and bones drowning in now-oversized vestments. “People take turns,” Patrick explained before that image could take hold. “In shifts, day and night.”

“Oh,” Grant said, disappointed.

“Can we take a turn?” Maisie asked.

“I thought you didn’t like church.”

“I don’t like Livia, that’s different. Besides, she’s not here.”

“Do you pray?” It was well established the kids weren’t regular churchgoers, but that didn’t mean they entirely dismissed religion.

Maisie chewed on her lip, like she was deciding whether or not to be honest. “Sometimes I talk to Mom.”

“I do, too,” Grant quickly confirmed, chewing on his lip, too.

“Stop copying me!” Maisie shoved her brother into her uncle, then scuffed her feet on the pavement. “I’m not really sure that’s praying.”

Patrick helped a dazed Grant find his footing, before extending an arm around her shoulder. “I’m not really sure that it isn’t.” He wasn’t the expert on such things, but Patrick thought the kids talking to their late mother, who was once very real, was far more practical and therapeutic than talking to a god that he felt adamantly was not. “But I don’t think we should risk breaking a chain that has been happening for a century and a half just to satisfy our impudent interest as day-trippers.” He had to imagine the system was fail-safe: perhaps that the church enlisted multiple people to pray at once just in case a nonbeliever infiltrated the ranks or a well-intentioned worshipper’s mind drifted toward inappropriate thoughts. It only made sense, he thought, like backing up a computer.

“Do you talk to Mom?”

Patrick bowed his head, before bending down to retie his shoelace and buy himself time to think. He used to talk to Sara, especially that first summer after she died, in part to ask for strength with the kids. But it had been a long time since it had even occurred to him to do so. But maybe that was a mistake. He could have found comfort in talking to her after his breakup with Emory, or now in helping her kids anew.

“GUP?” Maisie prompted, when he had been quiet too long.

“I replay conversations we had. Especially the funny ones. But that’s not quite the same thing. She called you two carnies once, and that made me laugh.”

“What’s a carny?” Grant asked.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I do think about your mom a lot, though. Especially at times like this.”

Maisie looked up at him earnestly. “How does that make you feel?”

How did it make him feel?More alone? Less alone? In the moment he wasn’t quite sure. “Feelings for adults are like treasures. And by that I mean we should bury them.” He put his arms around both kids so that it was clear he was kidding. Sort of. “Don’t you think if your mom was watching over us, her view would look something like this?”

Maisie was still for a long time before wriggling her way out from underneath Patrick’s arm. “She’s getting fuzzier and fuzzier. Mom. The further and further we get from her she seems less sharp.” Maisie’s eyes grew wet.

Patrick remembered telling them once that one day they would miss the acute pain of grief, the grief that meant their mother was still close. He had a hard time acknowledging that time was here, or understanding how five years had already passed. He watched as the city’s lights danced a bit of magic, hoping Paris itself might offer him the answer. “See how the lights twinkle?” Patrick pointed at the horizon. He held on tight to Grant, who he imagined felt even further from Sara; Maisie, after all, had nine years with her mother, while her brother only had six. “They’re not actually flickering, not really. The lights themselves are static. It’s all the things we cannot see between us and them that make them shimmer. Atmospheric densities, dust, moisture, humidity, that sort of thing. I’m not really the expert. But all the invisible things. Like your mom, she’s one of them now, too. When she starts to feel far away, I like to imagine she’s not as far away as we might think. She’s right here between us and the lights.”

For a moment they both seemed satisfied with his explanation. But then Maisie’s mouth wilted back into a frown. “That’s why we don’t like Livia. If she comes in here trying to replace Mom, she’s going to erase the rest of her, too.”

Patrick wondered if part of him didn’t feel the same way. That Livia had swept into their lives on a chaotic wind bent on clearing their cobwebs to make way for something new, not understanding that they found comfort in some of their gloom. At the very least she aimed to distract them from a past they were not ready to move on from. Patrick linked his arm with Maisie’s. “She can’t do that.”

Maisie turned to Patrick, newly seeing her uncle as an ally in this fight. “Because you won’t allow it?”

“No, I mean she can’t do that. It’s not moral outrage, she simply doesn’t have that power. You have a mother, and that’s the simple truth of it. No one can take her away.”

“KA-POW!” Grant said, raising a fist, one of those inexplicable things boys did.

It was natural that Livia would want to make space for herself in this family, but that didn’t have to mean it was nefarious or that it had the consequences they feared. “You know, most things we think of as good we find out eventually are bad. Ice cream. Cigarettes. Plastic straws, as it turns out, can go right up a turtle’s nose. But every once in a while, something that seems bad turns out to be good.”

“Like Livia?” Maisie stuck her index finger in her mouth, pretending to make herself vomit.

Patrick laughed. “Jeez, tough crowd.” He turned to Grant. “What about you, Grantelope? Think you could keep an open mind?”

Grant stomped his foot. “I asked you not to call me that, remember?”

Patrick honestly didn’t remember; kids grew fast and their preferences for things changed on a dime. “No, I don’t, I’m sorry.”

“I asked you like six times! I’m too old to be a Grantelope.” He anxiously started picking at the mole on his neck.

“Well, I’m sorry! I was diagnosed with auditory recency bias.”

Grant scrunched his face. “What’s that?”

“It means I only ever remember the last thing you say.”

“That’s not real.”

“That’s not real,” Patrick mimicked, proving he had at least heard that. “Yes it is, it’s very much real.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Maisie instructed.

“What happened to you two?” Patrick protested. “You used to think I was fun.”

Maisie gave him a pitying look. “We grew up.”

“Then grow back down! I’m not ready for you to be so adult.”

“Can we get more hot chocolate?” Grant asked perfectly on cue, and then immediately piggybacked his question with another. “Can we ride the funic— Whatever that thing is called?”

“The funicular? Sure, we can ride the funicular.”

“What about the hot chocolate?” Grant pressured.

Patrick pointed to his ear. “What about the hot chocolate?”

“Can we have some!” Grant implored, exasperated. It was getting late and he was exhausted from a full day in the wrong shoes and was quickly losing his patience.

“Oh, right. See? Auditory recency bias.” Patrick wiggled his ear like Carol Burnett, wondering if he could use this new condition to weasel out of the usual onslaught of questions. If so, he should have thought of it years ago. “Yes, we can get hot chocolate.” There was even a slight chill in the evening air that made a hot drink sound appealing. The finer things. He smiled to himself. For the first time he thought his plan might be working.

“Oh no,” Grant said, panic in his voice. He quickly compressed his neck with one hand.

“What?”

Grant held his other hand out, showing Patrick and Maisie what looked like a chocolate chip. “This mole came clean off.”