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Philippe hurried to the Hôpital Saint-Joseph in the Fourteenth to see Dominic, an elderly parishioner who had suffered a heart attack. Philippe was anxious. Not only about Meredith. What could she be suffering this afternoon? But also about Dominic, who had been an encouraging friend for years. Also running through his mind was the broken record of his entire adult life: what about your sermon for Sunday? And the critique group was coming up.
Dominic was ill, cranky, and sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Philippe did his best to comfort him with the idea that some unseen but eternal purpose was being furthered by his illness and his attempt to suffer well.
Dominic whispered, “Pray for me,” and fell back against his pillow, his hair, his skin, and his lips gray. Philippe thought, what eternal purpose is being served by this illness, or by the craziness Meredith is in? I’m not sure I believe in God bringing good out of evil anymore. The evil is too evil.
He walked south toward Malakoff and home. Like the rest of Paris, the Fourteenth was a residential arrondissement, with apartment buildings that had shops at street level. He passed a pharmacy, a café, a boutique, a chocolatier, a patisserie. Then the same line-up of shops repeated itself. There were more pharmacies and patisseries per capita in France than any other nation. The French visited their two chemical treatment centers—wine shops made the third—as an antidote to reading entirely too much Sartre and Camus. Paris held no charm for him today. It was an endless string of the same things.
When a supremely self-assured man passed him on the sidewalk, walking with a swagger, looking down at everyone around him, Philippe found himself wondering if he’d been with a prostitute the night before—with Meredith. Give it up! he wanted to shout, to shake the man, all men, and make them stop creating the awful business. It was the willingness to do anything in order to meet one’s needs, that was the problem. For both men and women, he conceded. You can survive without sex! he wanted to shout to Paris, the city of lovers. Water, air, sleep, food, work. Friends. Those were the real necessities.
Exhausted with these obsessive inner wranglings, he climbed the steps to his own front door. Elodie was still at her job as a librarian, so he had the house to himself. He felt he barely had the strength to turn the tap to make some tea. The kettle whistled finally. With a mug of chamomile in one hand, he hauled himself up the stairs to Meredith’s room. He set the mug on the damaged surface of the dresser and sat on the bed.
He burst into loud prayer immediately.
“God, why? Why have you not answered my years of prayers for Meredith?”
He was silent for a moment, listening, arguing with God.
“And don’t you dare tell me about her ‘free will’! You’re all-powerful, you created the universe, you could change her mind if you put your own mind to it! Oh please, dear God, HELP! We’re falling apart. We can’t do this, down here.”
He slipped to his knees beside the bed, dropped his face into his hands, and wished he had the energy to cry.
