Distressed Assets #12
But eventually, they always anchor, and there’s nothing left for her to do. Her friends go swimming, jumping off the boat,
laughing. Lili lies on the bow in the sun, drifting. Around them, it’s a vast haze of light and water, nestled in a cove,
thin waves breaking like thread against the rocky shore. Salt water dries on her skin. The sense of an open wound, infection
coming to the surface—no, not infection.
Just her.
Just her.
This can’t be healing.
This cannot be healing—
A loud splash, and James shouts as he and Amina race to the other end of the calanque.
Lili closes her eyes. If she starts crying in broad daylight, she will not stop; if she acknowledges, if she listens, if she
reaches, if she breathes, she will only find guilt; guilt, and responsibility, but no power. Instability, so intimate under her skin.
Economic instability and intervention: a crux of politics, an inflection point of belief.
When markets turn unstable, when do you intervene? High unpredictability, erratic price swings, correlation breakdown, exogenous
shocks. The Friedmanites would say, let the markets go where they will, and intervention is disastrous life support. It’s
exactly what Lili would argue against in classrooms, in essays, at undergrad parties. The blindness of neoclassical economics,
constantly insisting that markets will stabilize naturally, that state intervention is pointless—even harmful—that economic
violence is not their problem. Always a resounding yes from them to the question: Are markets self-correcting entities?
Now, though, she wants to believe it—that a stumble will right itself; that intervention is not needed; that it is possible
to recover from the worst mistakes; and that mistakes don’t alter the amount of happiness you could have, just change its
content, its texture, its quality, but not necessarily the people you would have had it with—
Another loud splash. “Jesus Christ,” Amina shrieks across the water, “do not grab my foot, Greene, I will fucking drown you!”
Regardless of one’s stance on intervention, one view is clear in modern economics—that markets do not return to previous highs,
they only move forward. To new lows, new heights; blind and forceful.
But still, she is looking back. Measuring her days in the stretch between past landmarks.
It’s been almost two weeks since he last called her.
She’s taken to leaving her phone in her room. It was dead when she checked that morning; Amina and James have been the ones
sending updates and photos to the group chat.
A few nights ago, she’d overheard Amina on the phone with Jackie. While Lili was swimming in the pool at dusk, she’d caught the faint sounds of it, one-sided conversation.
I don’t know. A sigh from upstairs, falling into the gardens below. She doesn’t want to talk, and I don’t want to push her . . . I mean, Jackie, do you really think? No, she seems—numb.
Numb. She wishes she was numb.
She wishes she was numb, and invisible; not able to cause any more harm.
Instead, under the fragile protective shell she’s trying to maintain, she feels vulnerable, exposed; a wound learning to live
with itself. Surrounded by salt water, the rush of open air and the sky above her, the oncoming evening, in a few hours, and
beyond that, the days and nights and days to come.
There’s vertigo in that.
A gleam flashes in her periphery: her bracelet. It catches the bounce of sunshine off the water. Something of hers he touched
once, the thin gold chain resting at the hollow of her wrist.
You look stunning, that simple, sudden compliment before the gala—and then, his confusion but with a smile. And you smell wonderful, brushing his lips against the sensitive skin of her inner wrist.
Under her bracelet now, she rubs a flake of skin. Her sunburn that will fade to a tan. Eventually, she’ll have a body he hasn’t
touched.
Almost two weeks. This is nearly the longest she’s gone without him, since before him.
It feels like yesterday. It feels like months ago.
The weight of his laughter, the sound of his voice: These things aren’t supposed to fade, this fast. And too—fumbled words
she might have said, in the gardens in Paris. Things she thought—she thought, for one stupid moment—that she’d be able to—that she had wanted to—
Ask for forgiveness, but more than that: to apologize.
To say, simply: I am sorry.
I am so incredibly fucking sorry.
Lili breathes. An inhale, exhale. Air filling her lungs, oxygen into her blood; biology that proceeds without her intention, indifferent days that will continue to run through her fingers. The miracle of living that feels like a burden, her body a thing she carries.
She shuts her eyes.
He is not here, and he is not hers.
At what point does loss become unfathomable?
At what point is grief indigestible?
They get an early dinner in town, in Cassis. Sun-sated, with their skin still warm from hours on the boat, they find a restaurant
near the harbor. Fresh fish, dining on the streets. Watching foot traffic, Lili taps her cigarette into the ashtray. Amina
frowns.
“You’ve been smoking a fair bit,” she comments.
Those cigarettes in your closet. Let’s share one.
Lili shrugs. “Not really. It’s the same pack.”
Later, Lili heads inside the restaurant to find the bathroom. As she glances across the dining room, a familiar face catches
her notice. In a mirror behind the bar, she sees a glimpse of her own reflection, and God, the sight of herself, unexpected,
caught by surprise.
Skin pale, despite the days of sun. Dark hair, tucked behind her ears, an open face: open with hurt, and fear, and tiredness—this
vulnerable brink in her gaze, so hesitant in this sadness she won’t let burst, fragility in this tension she’s holding, the
sense of tears held back, lips bitten raw. She looks so young.
I don’t want to hate myself, she thinks, looking away.
I so badly do not want to hate myself, but she only sees reasons, all around her.
The days continue. Long hours on the water, brightness in the sky. Lili lies beside Amina on the boat’s bow, while she sketches.
“That’s pretty,” Lili murmurs, face nestled against her arms.
“Thanks,” Amina says. She tilts her head to better examine her piece. It’s a quick sketch of the coast seen just beyond the
mouth of the inlet.
To the sounds of Amina sketching—pencil scratching over thick parchment, brush of fingers, smudging out a line—Lili lets herself
doze, with the motion of the sailboat, the waves.
She is tired.
She is so, so tired.
They continue visiting towns along the coast. These busy villages are old, beloved. Full of both awed tourists and relaxed
locals, the French on holiday. When they’re off the boat, James lends the two of them some of his light blue button-downs,
cotton gentle against sun-sore skin. Amina takes them to her favorite sorbet shop and hidden inlets. The comfort of warm stone,
rocks, underfoot. Beaches, salt water; what day of the week is it? Hill towns, lavender fields, fish markets, tiny churches
with masterpiece murals. Walking through these streets, Lili looks at all the people around her, passing by, and she still
sees him—moments of him in other men, in glimpses of overheard conversations. Confusing, and then heartbreaking, all over
again.
As they come into the Menton harbor one afternoon—“No, Jamie, we are not sneaking into Italy, this is close enough,” Amina
warns—waves roar against the shore. It’s mostly pebble beaches here, along the Riviera. Grating, the sound of these pebbles
that the waves draw back.
There was a Matthew Arnold poem Lili used to love in undergrad. Melancholy with scale, a sense of continental exhaustion,
precipitating twentieth-century war but somehow anticipating it; the poem’s lines were grounded in this detail of pebbles
drawn back by waves.
She has never felt particularly young. She’s always worried, instead, about time slipping by, always worried about things
leaving—but now, oh, she feels both so incredibly young and already exhausted.
Because she will be here, and she will feel all this, and then one day she won’t.
The exhaustion of all that’s to come, the blink of how fast it will be.
She wanders into the garden in the evening. Dinner is cooking—tomatoes simmering, greens chopped; she had overheard the soft
chatter of her friends, as she’d come down the stairs from showering. Glancing into the kitchen, she’d spied Jamie sitting
at the table, leafing through the day-old newspapers, Amina’s hand resting on his shoulder, soothingly running up and down,
as she spoke to him, tones low, warm, and simple with affection. As Lili watched, Amina had settled into his lap, commenting
on something on the newspaper page. His arms absently wrapped around her, and she’d rested her cheek against his hair. Lili
slipped away, unseen.
Barefoot in the grass, she skirts the pool.
There was a bottle of open wine set out on the dining terrace, clean glasses under the heavy pink shade of bougainvillea.
She’d poured herself a glass—red wine—and padded down the old, tiled steps, wandering away from the house.
Driftless, she heads towards the far side of the garden, near the orchards and the cliff’s edge.
Lili sets her glass of wine on the rough-hewn stone wall that marks the property line. It is a straight drop below. Its hip
height stature affords an easy view of the expansive bay, fishing ports and vineyards, deep blue waters dotted by the white
sails of boats. The beaches are thrumming, packed. People love this town. As Lili settles on the wall, she brushes against
the dense bush of jasmine growing, dislodging its sweet scent.
Her mother loved jasmine. It grew on her godmother’s house in Beirut, it grew outside their North Beach apartment in San Francisco.
Lili grasps a twine of its vine. She slides its thin stem between her nails, its delicate, tiny flowers almost juicy with
fragrance, petals soft and wet.
What does that word mean? A memory of her own childish voice, high, light, sweet.