Distressed Assets #9
It’s cold, the sudden realization.
Other people.
He could have—he could be—he could already be seeing other people.
Lili gets up. Tucks euros under her coffee saucer, pulls her tote onto her shoulder, heads back out.
It begins pouring, while she walks. A downpour, with these big fat raindrops that splatter on the cobblestones, rush of wind through the trees.
The few people that are out disappear fast off the street, heading into apartment buildings, ducking into cafés, running down the steps into the Métro.
The humid press of a summer storm bears down from the aggressive gray sky.
It becomes too much to continue through. After a moment huddled under the retracted awning of a closed restaurant, Lili glances
at the intimidating church across the empty square. Heavy doors open, worn limestone steps, a couple people shaking out umbrellas
before they go inside.
Sunday, Saint-Sulpice; it’s open.
Inside, it is cold, a soothingly empty chill that contrasts with the ponderous mugginess outside. Mass hasn’t started yet.
Lili tries to squeeze the water out from her hair as she steps over the threshold, so she doesn’t trail rain in.
Removed from the summer storm, dark space and intent silence swell. As her eyes adjust, the worn stone underfoot is soft like
water that has run for centuries; the scent of residual incense is heavy and fragrant in the chilled air. Flicker of lit candles,
dozens of side chapels, the glow of flames against old murals. Rows and rows of wooden chairs, maybe hundreds, are lined in
barren, regimented rows under the drift of these high arches. A few people sit in the astounding scale of this place.
Lili watches them, as she slowly walks through the darker arcades. These other churchgoers, the echoing tap of her step. Dim
alcoves, candles lit; euros dropped in alms boxes, wax, prayers. Thin tapers illuminate the loom of art: the face of the Virgin
Mary, oil paintings on the wall. Art that is ancient, art that remains felt and seen daily, even if it means little to her.
There’s intimacy, rather than performance, to the space. People come, people go: A man lights a candle in a side chapel, while
his small son looks up at the lofted ceilings, craning his neck; a young woman walks inside from the rain, a whoosh of fresh
air with her, and the click of her footfalls down the aisle, the quick cross over her chest, a reflex action with a glance
at the altar, before she finds a seat, settles.
Like a stone touched, a routine, a ritual.
Ablutions of faith, gestures seeking a meaning, and Lili wonders about that: the trust in something futile, at least to her.
Isn’t that what faith is? Trust in futility?
There’s a heartbeat here; the sense of something she stands outside of, is not privy to.
I spent a lot of time in churches.
Her breath catches. Other people: around her, between them.
He could be—could have already—
Breathe, Lili. Breathe.
She finds a chair, takes a seat. She tries to settle her chest, as she looks around. This place could feasibly hold nearly
thousands, likely has held hundreds of thousands in its centuries of standing here, sinking into earth.
At the front, a young man, a bit older than her, bows his head at the kneeling bench.
Lili stares, studies him. She attempts to find some story—understand what he’s asking for, what he’s on his knees for. What
weight makes him bow his head: something he hopes for, fervently; something he has done, confessed—and whether it’s a soothing
feeling, to ask for forgiveness like that, to want without expectation, past the sense of deserving? Because it’s foregone,
in most traditions: that we’re sinners, that we don’t deserve.
Faith has always felt like a contortion to her. A shoving of her mind into a limiting of belief rather than an expansion of
it. But she wants to understand it, has spent so much time studying religion—how generations have coped with the unknown,
with uncertainty, with worries about morality, goodness, value, worth—but has spent so little time in churches.
But maybe there’s nothing there. Maybe this kneeling man is happy, and maybe he is only giving thanks.
Lili looks away. She lets her head tip back, staring up at the soaring arches, the vaulted stone ceiling. Architecture that’s
intended to make you feel something grander, more mysterious, more powerful; even if it’s just incense, just chants, just
human voices reaching higher, for what’s unseen.
He’d said he spent time in churches: I wanted to feel small again, but not anonymous—not insignificant—
Removed from nature here, even more so than in New York, she feels like man has swallowed up everything.
She closes her eyes; quietly, softly. She tentatively lets a few thoughts come through.
Distant, she can hear the ocean.
A different coast, another continent. Black sand, wind, sun through fog.
Tries to hear the shell of herself, finally.
She breathes in; she breathes out.
And it rushes in.
The immensity of her actions, the ever-rippling spread of her consequences; and the clink, the metallic weight of her keys in her hands, as she’d set them on his kitchen counter, and his grin, as he’d pulled her in close at the gala, kissing her temple, a moment, quick, entirely appropriate, but the sheer joy and want of him, and the thought—violence, this thought—of him with another person, a woman in her place; other people, feeling the weight of his body, knowing his hands on their skin, and she knows, she knows, how stupid it is to feel this panic, this shock, at the fresh thought of it, and how justified he would be in having slept with other people, after what she did.
But the idea of him with someone else, anyone else, makes her so nauseous her vision blurs.
Good, she tries to tell herself. You need to feel the weight of what you’ve done.
But she doesn’t want to—she doesn’t want to have done any of this.
And there are her thoughts, and these are her actions, and here are her feelings: and there is her, responsible for everything,
but feeling no power in that. And across the water, across the ocean, on another continent, in another city, is that man she
could have had—that she did have.
In the quiet, she tries to remember moments when they were breathless and alone together, hot skin, gasp of her exhale against
his mouth; how held by him, she’d broken, reaching her own pain—earlier moments, when she was younger, walking alone to black
sand beaches, carrying sadness that’s only shifted into different parts of her; such endless sadness, and somewhere on that
beach, a man, older than her, but when he was young, her own age, he had stood in churches, huge and empty, places of repentance
and forgiveness, in this same city.
Why does this exist, between their two bodies?
Religion—Christianity, Catholicism in particular—is fixated on the body. She’s studied how that fixation finds its way into
secular discourse, how moral cultures become social norms. Disciplining the body, denying it; the relief of communion, allowed
after confession—but also, too, a literal means of partaking in the body as absolution. Blood, flesh; savior, sacrament.
The idea of the body as a cleansing thing.
What is anyone ever looking for, in the bodies of others?
Space, silence; warmth, presence. Punishment, refuge.
To be grounded down in what we have done, the violence of our own choices, she thinks, our own failings; then to be offered more, beyond that.
The chance for pleasure and release. And this distinction, too—between carving out space for yourself in another person, a momentary place to breathe, a respite from the world; and instead, caring enough to carve out space in another’s body for them.
That’s how he did it, she thinks.
That’s how he held her.
Lili hears footsteps on flagstone, and the shake of an umbrella, outside voices hushing as they enter the church. She glances
over her shoulder; a handful more people arriving before Mass begins. It won’t be busy: August, torrential rain, and the first
service of the morning. The newcomers find seats, slip into confessional.
Very different takes on forgiveness, between the Protestants and Catholics. She knows the former intimately—months of thesis
writing, her graduate degree—and knows the latter mainly in contrast.
Where Protestants reject the sacrament, these so-called arrogant attempts to fetter God’s unlimited sovereignty, Catholics
have the core ritual of confession, its release; the ability to absolve oneself through the priest who listens. This concept
is central to Catholic faith: the idea of a journey through suffering, this agency—and responsibility—in where we go, what
decisions we make, and the outcomes they precipitate, that we live with. Not predestined but chosen.
In agency, there is chance for both sin, and forgiveness.
Lili watches as churchgoers slip into the confessional, emerge again.
Coins flipped: forgiveness, absolution. Agency; responsibility. Deserving; wanting. Faith; trust.
Is there an amount we need to suffer to make forgiveness tenable?
Because would she forgive him? If he had done this to her?
Would she take him back?
The thought of him, again, with other women: hair blond and red and brown, hair spread over his pillows, and never black.
Bodies in his sheets, and it hurts like digging into a wound in her stomach, reminiscent of the same pain she was seeking
out last night.
She wishes she had the choice.
And it’s selfish, and it feels dirty, and it feels small—like shame, flushed and heated: but she wants him to forgive her.
A whisper, thread of a thought.
But she does; she does. She wants it, so badly. The possibility of his forgiveness, the acceptance of her apology.
Lili breathes, as the church around her settles, Mass about to start; breathes with the weight of responsibility, hands holding
what she has done; breathes through the faintest hope of him.
I want your forgiveness, she thinks, as she stands, making to leave.
I am willing to ask for it.