Distressed Assets #4
“I thought—” She breaks off, an inhale; breathe, Lili, breathe. “I thought it’d be—easier, you know . . . if I left first—because he—he said—he said—”
Her throat contracts around a fresh rise of tears, the weight of absence growing heavier and heavier. Absence, something she’d always registered as lack, a thing to ignore, rather than a presence so profound it makes her struggle to
breath, as she tries to repeat what he said—what he said, words after a gala, green of the park—as she remembers, instead, unfamiliar skin against hers, another man inside of her.
Between her fingers, Lili grasps the duvet tighter, crying. “Oh, love,” Jackie whispers. She nestles her face into Lili’s
hair, holding her closer. Her own frame shakes with Lili’s sobs. “It’s okay, love, it’s okay . . . I’m here, it’ll be okay.”
Little words, kind uselessness.
Clutched against her chest, her phone is silent.
“. . . some tea?”
Lili blinks, waking. A familiar, feminine voice: Jackie. It’s morning.
“Sure,” she whispers. “Please.”
A quick press of lips to her hair. Leaning down over her, Jackie blocks out the sun for a moment. Her skin smells fresh and
showered, leaving a soft fragrance of her shampoo and outdoor air, as if she’s just gotten back from a run.
In the kitchen, the kettle clicks on. “Jasmine okay?” Jackie calls out. “Or do you want matcha, or something herbal, or anything—”
“Jasmine is okay,” Lili replies, sitting up in Jackie’s bed. Her body feels hollow. Under her nails, there’s still dirt from
her farm shift. She checks her phone.
No missed calls, no new messages.
“Hey.”
Lili glances up. Amina stands in the doorway, dressed like she’s also gone running. Her hair is in a high ponytail and her
cheeks are flushed and healthy. Lili wonders if it’s a sign of conversations between her friends; of how this thing she’s
done has started to live beyond her, outside the pain of her rib cage, and now exists in the world: a topic of discussion
without her—about her—an issue out of her hands.
“Hi,” Lili whispers. She draws her knees into her chest, holding herself a bit closer. Something tightens—like a flinch of
sadness, like a crumble of pity—in Amina’s expression. Lili looks away, staring out the window. She doesn’t want that, pity,
itchy and intolerable, but more than that: empathy. Care, concern—undeserved, by her. She wants to scratch her own skin off; she wants to keep sleeping.
Amina sits down beside her. “You’re coming with us,” she says, firm, determined. “To the South of France, with Jamie and me.
We’re flying out tonight, first to Paris. You need to get out of this city.”
And she just—she just doesn’t have the strength anymore to refuse to lean on people; to refuse to take what they say they
want to give her.
“Okay,” Lili whispers.
A small frown—disbelief—rears before Amina smooths it away, fast. “I know you don’t want to hear this bullshit,” she says,
a bit softer. “But it will be okay. At some point, somehow. It will get better.”
Lili nods, absently. Jackie comes in, handing her a mug of tea. Lili tries a small smile of thanks; Amina says she’ll pack
for her, and Jackie offers to help.
From her bedroom, she hears the roll of her small carry-on suitcase, shoved back into her closet earlier that summer, the
trip to Marin that never was, and the stilted pull of her dresser drawers. “It’ll be hot,” Amina says to Jackie. “She just
needs light things, some swimsuits. We’re staying near the sea—where’s her passport? Oh, and email her farm manager, yeah?
Tell her she has to take some time off. Say it’s an emergency.” In their bathroom, Jackie packs Lili’s toiletries, toothbrush,
hairbrush, what she’d brought back home on Saturday—
Through their open doors, she hears Amina on the phone with James: “Hey, can you go ahead and book that third set of tickets?”
Logistics, taken care of. The sense of tiptoes around her, accommodating her. That hollowness persists. Distance between her
skin that people touch and her inside of it.
You’re wrong, she thinks, recalling Amina’s words. It won’t get better.
It will just change.
Hours and miles stretch between them in the sky. Curled up in the plane seat, she stares out the window at the orange sunset,
darkening clouds. Her gaze is tired and soft.
Stale air in the cabin, flick of magazines, tap of nails on screens picking movies; the snick of plastic, airplane meals unwrapped,
hiss of ginger ale snapped open by flight attendants. The slant of late evening light moves across the cabin: glowing, luminous,
falling over the rows of seats, catching James’s blond hair. There are several different languages in the cabin, overheard.
Foreign newspapers, different passports. Oncoming tides of Europe, and she remembers, distantly—she’s never been.
“Want any food?” Amina asks, resting her hand on Lili’s knee. “Something to drink?”
She shakes her head. She’d taken one of Jackie’s Ambiens, swiped off her mom, and keeps waiting for it to kick in.
Leaning over her, Amina asks the flight attendant for hummus and pita chips, a salad. The exchange of a credit card, beep
of a chip reader, before Amina presses a fresh water bottle into Lili’s hand.
“Thanks,” she whispers.
As meal service rolls past, James looks at Lili. “Want to watch a movie?” he asks.
“Okay,” she replies. James hands her one of his earbuds.
He chooses some faint blur of a film. Foreign words, subtitles. Normally, she would have teased him—Jamie, who watches an arthouse film on a flight?—but then she sees, as the credits transition over the opening shots, how he’d chosen a film without anything like romance,
or levity, or lightness: something serious, war, distant countries, last year’s international Oscar buzz; moments of dark
comedy, wry humor, generational sadness.
Beside her, Amina flips through Numéro. Here, too, she would have usually made a joke, teasing her friend with affection: Did you stake out at Casa Magazines for that, Ami?
Instead, Lili half-watches the film, cradled between her friends, and says nothing. The fact that he knows now, that Michael
has almost certainly told him, settles over her in a lucid, gloomy way. She floats in it, unsettled, distant. Little hitches
of time, jumps of forgetting, dislocation; a lull absorbed in the film, before a shard of reality pokes through. She feels
disoriented, between the white noise of the plane engine, the sedate in-flight announcement ding, the hushed hum of the flight
crew.
The cabin lights start to dim. An artificial night, caught between time zones.
Lili closes her eyes.
Instability is a given in economics.
Lili understands that. She knows the methods by which central banks attempt to weather markets’ tendency towards instability;
she’s studied how governments and federal reserves plan—rigorously, continually—to prevent surprise, minimize upset, maintain
stability.
She did not plan this.
Lili rips open the plastic around the cigarette pack, discarding it in a trash bin as she steps out onto the street. It’s
early evening, and their rented apartment is on Rue du Perche. We’re right near the galleries, Amina said, when the taxi dropped them off in the Marais. You should go to some of the exhibits while I’m in meetings, see what’s on, yeah?
As soon as they arrived—lugging suitcases into the ancient, tiny elevator, airport sweat mingling with fragrant lilac in the
courtyard, confusion of time zones; throwing windows open to let in fresh air, soft heat of evening, confirming their dinner
reservation—Lili went downstairs to the tabac, a small shop beside the pharmacy. Using her fumbled childhood French, she’d
bought a pack of cigarettes. The tiny shop also sold stamps, lottery tickets, phone chargers; she’d got a small lighter, too.
Still nothing on her phone. A few concerned emails from Eileen after she didn’t show up to work yesterday, a low balance warning
from her bank after she insisted on paying for her own plane ticket. In the taxi, she responded to Jackie—Landed. Love you—and glanced at the count of unopened messages from him, growing stale and unmoving. No recent calls, no new voicemails.
Now, in the street, she lights a cigarette, taking a quick drag.
Above her, she hears the indistinct voices of her friends as they get ready for dinner.
Amina’s laugh drifts down. It’s beautiful, the apartment: high ceilings, herringbone floors.
A burst of fresh flowers greeted them in the hall, a welcome note from Amina’s parents in a florist’s anonymous handwriting.
Tired, disoriented—remnants of the Ambien—Lili glances down the street: Hausmannian residences, art galleries closing soon,
a corner restaurant filling up with neighborhood clientele. When she’d come downstairs, church bells had rung out, eight o’clock.
Evening, people in the streets, laughing. It’s hot, the humid air heavy. The city is packed before the August holidays. Summer,
a joyous thing.
Lili takes another fast drag, sharp inhale, from her cigarette.
Gitanes. She’d asked for Gitanes at the store.
Closer to him, further from him.
One night: She can get through one night here. She had attempted enthusiasm about their dinner plans, sneaking away for cigarettes
to get a handle on the protective numbness she’s trying to maintain. She so badly does not want to be a burden to her friends,
a dead weight they carry through these weeks of their vacation.
Lili flicks the last of her cigarette into the gutter, fishes her keys out of her tote. She tries to summon a bit of sunshine.
She tries to smile, loosen her posture, prepare to give her friends sweetness, some kindness of her that they more than deserve—
She stumbles, keys almost falling out of her grasp.
At the end of the street, there’s a man. Tall, with dark hair—familiar dark hair, just long enough to brush the collar of his linen shirt, broad shoulders, back to her, and he’s on the phone,
glancing down the street—
One of the residential doors opens, and a woman steps out: bright blond, a relaxed inhale of evening heat as the early light