We left the old merchants’ quarters with a flat bottle of champagne and handfuls of meats and cheeses. The wind brought fishy air from the Saône down the corridor and broke up the reverberations of bistro laughter that waited like helpless dogs left at home for their owners to return at night. We wouldn’t see the sun until we reached the church at the top of the hill, but pretty pastel buildings, blackened as if by design from a century of soot, leaned over us like watchful aunts with a faint robin’s egg blue between the crowns of their heads.
We started up the cobbled, proud Rue du Boeuf and laughed that, back home, the name “Beef Street” would have the energy of a homoerotic fraternity hazing ritual, or else be a nickname Shia LaBeouf had for himself.
Before the main arterial we turned into a narrow stairway. The steps were small and covered in moss. Gazing upwards, our eyesight quit before the stairway did. But there in the distance was an old couple easing down each little step. First her, then him, with his hand gripping the one metal railing. It seemed they must have set out on the journey to Beef Street before dawn, and god knows when they’d return. Step by step they descended, and we reciprocated from a steep distance below and out of their eyesight.
We passed the bottle of flat champagne back and forth as we climbed. Each swill brought fertility back to our tongues, re-signaling the frequency at which we dined the day prior on meals of succulent tête de veau, escargots hot and effervescent in butter and garlic, grenouilles that we cracked like chicken wings and andouillettes of pork stomach in poppy mustard that Americans like us should not have ordered because we’re classless assholes. And, OK, we didn’t like it, but, yeah, we’re Americans so we gave it a go, and we did like the table liters of Beaujolais and Grand and Premier Crus, and the local minstrel strumming some punchy, anachronistic tune on a beat-up classical guitar. That frequency dipped into our souls on each sip of flat champagne, only to be gone again from our dry tongues after seconds on our climb to the church.
And what a church it was supposed to be. But that didn’t mean there was any reason to believe we’d delay our joyride to Nice that afternoon where we’d lay on hot grey coals along the salty Cote D’Azur just to climb the stairs and slog through the park and climb more stairs to the promenade overlooking the city and the front of the church. We’d had enough of church.
The Church; the Church that required natural family planning and marriage preparation classes on football nights during football season. We’d drive down to Denver on Thursday nights and Sunday mornings and post up for an hour or two at this bar outside the church school called Ernie’s. The first night, the Packers and Vikings were playing, and I had two glasses of some high-hopped red ale brewed nearby. What Father Deacon taught that night in the third grade classroom at the top of the stairs of the church school I don’t remember, but the next week we made sure to order more than two beers. By week three, one couple had dropped out because Father Deacon, a muscular, salt-and-pepper New Zealander with 80-some children, made one too many jokes about gender roles. Also by the third week, we started to see more couples join us at Ernie’s, and we tipped our glasses to our fallen tribesmen from atop our barstools of disengagement and generational superiority.
We passed the elderly couple on the stairs and exchanged pleasantries in French, and I thought as we continued to climb that his name probably wasn’t Father Deacon at all — those are just two Church words that I’d slurried together in a haze of Buffalo Trace and football pining as we sat in plastic seats meant for children.
“He made it,” Father Deacon said when we went up to thank him after the final marriage preparation class, one in which the group discussed the factuality of the story of Noah’s ark, learned about Woman being physically born of Man’s flesh and endured a red-faced talking-to about Internet porn.
What frequency, then, compelled our pregnant bellies and joyful, empty minds up to the top of the stairway on a Tuesday morning way after the fact to look at a church? We passed two local teens playing hooky with an old boom box and cracked wise about the goofy French graffiti on the wall of the stairway, images torn from the pages of worn-binding editions of eighth grade French class textbooks. We gave the final swigs of our champagne to the young Lyonnais and walked across the street into the park that sat at the distant foot of the church grounds.
The trail traversed, first in long, slow inclines, then quick, steep bursts as we climbed higher, like the flourish up through a piano’s octaves from low to high. Our backs were damp with sweat. We took a break at the crevasse of a low frequency turn and waited as two jolly groundskeepers drove down toward a graveyard. The trees crowded around us and gave us only a glimpse of the midmorning sun, a yolk over easy frying under the white of clouds.
The answer to every question in the Church’s natural family planning class was “Or birth control.” Can someone tell me how many days to wait for ovulation when the cervix is closed? Or birth control. What does it mean for fertility if the discharge is mucousy and thick? Or birth control. Do you want to get up at five every morning to chart your vaginal temperature before your body is awake to get an optimal reading? Or birth control. You want to come into this room with me, just some dude free on Sundays who holds no medical degree, and tell me about your medications, sexual history and subtleties about your reproductive system? That one, yes, actually. Surprisingly enough.
But that was all part of the process in order to get married in the Church. It was a perfectly fine proposition for us, who both grew up in Christian homes, if maybe one more than the other. And considering the CFO of the whole wedding operation had preferred the ceremony was in the Church, we were more than happy to oblige. We snarked and snickered our way through the classes and through the one-on-one meetings with the priest where I explained I didn’t really know what saints were and asked if the church had a softball team I could play on.
But we gladly sat on the altar of a stunning church at one of the oldest missions in California as a priest we’d barely met wrought fire and brimstone over our unsuspecting congregation, imploring them that the day was not about us. More people than we knew were with the Church took communion that day, even a bodacious friend who was the only one to take the wafer in his mouth, prompting the priest to ask him, “Are you Catholic?”
We laughed later that in between hell-raising sermons, the priest came over to give us oddly cute reminders to stay calm and enjoy the day. And we certainly enjoyed the ceremony of it all. But then we’d part ways with the Church like the crew on a film set and ride off to our lush European getaway and drink and eat out of our means.
Yet there we were back at the doorstep of the Church. From the top of the promenade, we leaned over the edge of the railing and took in the city. Soft reds and yellows were cut by the twin turquoise rivers, and off farther stood modern skyscrapers, then hills of Burgundy then a clementine sky, just about to break the wool away from the sun. There was no one else on the promenade and no wind nor sound. We embraced arms around backs and caught our breath.
The Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière is a monstrous, gaudy Disney castle that overlooks Lyon. It is pristinely white with green Church statues that rise from its towered peaks. Inside, too, the artwork is plushy, with period paintings of a quality that hasn’t yet gained the benefit of antiquity. It looks like a particularly tasteful cruise ship ballroom with the ceiling jacked and columns erected.
As we stood in the doorway, a group of schoolchildren left the church, and it was just us. We walked around the side and sat on a bench midway through the church, and then it was just me. The wind picked up to a whir, starting at a low vibration and picking up to a steady, high-pitched stream that rushed past the building. The bass dropped out of the church and in its stead was presence, like when you wake up in the middle of the night and think there’s a mouse running around the molding. I looked up and the sun finally broke through the clouds and shone through a small red triangle at the very corner of the gigantic stained-glass window that stood from floor to ceiling behind the altar. I shit you not, the bells started to ring. The light grew brighter and brighter, and I couldn’t look away. My wife said, “Your face is pink,” and I said, “Yours isn’t,” which was a stupid thing to say, but come on, was fucking Jesus Christ talking to me right then? After all that? Didn’t Jesus climb a mountain and become inundated with light and sound before his disciples, and didn’t that show the union of god and man? Did I learn that?
And just as soon as it started… well. The sun rose a degree higher and the light faded from my face, the highpitched wind reduced to a low murmur. The presence left, and I said, “Welp. Wanna go to Nice?”
At what point do we suspend our perceptions of reality to consider the plausibility of things we cannot prove? Rationally, I had endorphins pumping after a long climb, I’d been drunk for days, the stained glass window was probably built to have that light-concentrating effect, the bells rang on the hour and the church was on a cliff so of course it gets gusts of wind. But, the frequency was bone-rattling.
There’s a Hemingway short story called, “Hills Like White Elephants,” that features a man wondering why the people in a Spanish bus stop act more “reasonably” than the young woman he’s with as she decides whether to follow the man’s implied wishes to have an abortion. Reason is dumb there, and so I’m glad for the silly coincidence that locals, noting the similarities in appearance, call Notre-Dame de Fourvière “l’éléphant renfoncé,” or the upside-down elephant, because sometimes we just smile and feel the frequency.
