Groping a statue seemed a little odd, but entire tour groups were doing it, so I did too. And voilà!
Micah spent 60 hours per week loading and delivering packages. He saved his weekends for me, showing up to nearly every date with flowers. A Bible college graduate, he often asked how things were between me and Jesus, how he could pray for me. He dreamed of paying off his student loans and building a home of his own.
That was his favorite word: home. I wanted to give him that.
I decorated his cinder block basement apartment at Christmas, constructing a faux fireplace out of painted cardboard and string lights. The following year, I spent nine months hand-sewing a quilt for him.
But whenever we tried to date, I was seized by a growing panic, a gut-level certainty that this wasn’t the life I wanted. The only way to shake it off was to take a break. During these intervals, I would first feel peace and relief, followed by loneliness, remorse and a fear that God had sent me my one chance at happiness — and I had turned him away. We’d get back together, try again. The cycle would repeat.
The night he finally told me no, enough is enough, he presented me with a brand-new MacBook Pro laptop. He said he believed in me and wanted to invest in my dreams, even if we couldn’t have a life together. A consolation laptop. My mother said it was the weirdest breakup she’d ever heard of.
We were both new to dating and didn’t know the usual script for breakups. But I knew what to do about a broken heart: Leave South Carolina and return to France. Years before, after another romantic rejection, I went to teach English in a program sponsored by the French government.
Now this program returned to my mind, first triggered by a spam email from a former French colleague’s hacked account, then by an ad on Facebook reminding me that I was still, at 29, barely within the age limit to do it again.
I no longer entertained a sense of romance about uprooting myself, but the feeling of being stuck outweighed my qualms. I applied, signed the contract, arranged my visa and made plans to move to Grenoble, an Alpine college town with an idyllic Google image internet presence.
I routed my trip through Paris and planned a several-day stopover at an Airbnb in the 20th arrondissement. Ashley, my last single friend, joined for this leg. Like me, Ashley was adrift. We were too young to be disenchanted but past the age of going off to find ourselves. We settled on being companionably lost.
We found ourselves wandering Père Lachaise cemetery on a sunny afternoon in early September.
“That grave looks familiar,” Ashley said, eying a raised crypt with a statue of a man lying prone along the length of it. “I think it’s famous.”
“Probably,” I said. Most things in Paris are.
As if on cue, a group of tourists shuffled past and gathered around the monument. Ashley typed the name of the grave’s occupant into the search engine on her phone and gave me a summary.
“Victor Noir. Pen name for Parisian journalist Yvan Salmon. Was shot by Napoleon Bonaparte III’s cousin, Pierre. Opposed French imperialism.”
“Ah,” I said. “You’re right then. Famous.” I turned to make my way along the row toward other notable figures, but Ashley kept reading.
“This says his grave is a big deal in Paris. The artist who created his statue in repose managed to sneak a prominent bulge into the crotch of the statue’s trousers. It’s a fertility symbol or something. Any woman who kisses Victor’s lips, rubs his bulge and shoes and places a flower in his top hat will have a baby or find a husband within a year. That’s what this says.”
Ashley and I peered over the shoulders of the tour group. The statue was indeed remarkably well-endowed and significantly shinier in certain areas than others, as though it received a brisk buffing on the regular. Buried in her phone again, Ashley laughed.
The women in the tour group approached the statue one by one. Lips, bulge, toes. Lips, bulge, toes. After they moved on to the next stop in their tour, we found ourselves alone with Monsieur Noir.
“Are you going to do it?” I asked.
Being a follower of Jesus comes with certain expectations of conduct and purity. But this was a statue, not to mention a cultural experience. Surely God could appreciate the comedy and spirit of the thing.
“Oh, heck yeah,” Ashley said.
And so, we shined the statue in turn and sent our request into the universe. Ashley gave him a confident polish, I an apologetic stroke.
Then we continued our tour. We visited the Fragonard perfume museum; saw Notre Dame just months before the fire; browsed Shakespeare and Company; and braved the questionable neighborhoods around the Tour Eiffel to witness it at night in its sparkling glory. Then it was time to go our separate ways.
I wish I could say that the French Alps healed me. That I basked in their beauty and found the spiritual rest and direction I was seeking.
But Grenoble frightened me. I heard stories of midday muggings where victims were pepper sprayed. Once, I saw two cars in a parking lot engulfed in flames. Another time, a rock shattered the bus window next to my face while I rode home from work, scattering glass fragments across the seat.
The unstable vertebrae in my back slipped regularly, half crippling me. This triggered my latent depression. Rather than hobnobbing with the other teaching assistants, I hid in my room. I missed my cat and my parents. I missed the man who loved me, his kind eyes and raspy laugh. Perhaps, I thought, God could still heal the rift between us. Victor Noir would seal the deal. I only had to hold on long enough to make it home.
Micah and I began to talk again via FaceTime. First monthly, then weekly. Leading up to my return, we imposed a three-day fast on ourselves, seeking wisdom. I nearly passed out in the Lisbon airport. It didn’t matter. We both got our answer, and that answer was no. We didn’t have a “why.” We just knew.
Weeks later, Ashley put on her tough love hat and enrolled me in a popular dating app. It was there, in late August, almost a year from our encounter with Victor in the graveyard, that I first saw Billy.
In one photo, he posed in a too-small karate outfit from his childhood. Laugh lines crinkled his temples, swept by dirty-blonde corn silk hair. In another, a fuzzy goat perched on the back of his broad shoulders while he planked over a yoga mat. The last picture was my favorite. He stood, hip cocked, squinting at the camera with a mischievous smirk, in front of the glass pyramid of the Louvre in Paris.
That one, said the nudge in my gut.
Billy kissed me on the first date. He was the oldest of three rowdy boys. Eagle Scout. Class clown. He hadn’t been to church since college.
On our third date, I tried to break up with him, but something stopped me. On our fourth date, he told me he loved me.
“What does that mean to you?” I asked. But within a few months I found myself returning the sentiment.
He went back to church with me, clutching my hand the whole service. For his birthday, I bought a star projector. We laid on his bedroom floor under the artificial heavens, airing our convictions and doubts. We conducted blindfolded Oreo taste-tests and tried our hand at acrylic pour painting.
Why was Billy, the charming renegade and prodigal son, the man I couldn’t live without, more than Micah? If I start delving into explanations, the possibilities fan out and multiply. My devotion is fallible, human, subject to a host of preferences and whims. What’s important now is that I love Billy, I have chosen Billy, and I will choose him daily until I run out of days in this life. We married this past February, two and a half years after we met.
I’m sorry to say that Victor Noir has yet to deliver for Ashley. Sometimes, when she bemoans yet another subpar suitor, we threaten to fly back to Paris and stomp on Victor’s bulge. Which frankly wouldn’t do anything to it — it’s solid bronze. But as funny and fanciful as our experience was that day, I kind of doubt that bulge did anything for us either.
Susanne Parker Loelius is a writer in Charlotte, N.C.
Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.
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