Beautiful World, Where Are You(36)

14


Dearest Eileen – your email about what happened with Simon brought joy to my withered heart. You deserve romance! And so I feel does he. Can I tell you something about him that I promised I would never tell you but now I’m breaking the promise because the moment is opportune? A few years ago, just after you moved in with Aidan, Simon came over to see me one afternoon for coffee. We chatted about this and that, it was all very normal, and then when he was leaving, he stopped at the doorway of your old room to look inside. It was emptied out already, the bed was stripped, and I remember there was a pale rectangle on the wall where you used to have your Margaret Clarke poster. In a sort of fake-cheerful voice Simon said, ‘You’ll miss her.’ And without thinking about it, I answered, ‘So will you.’ It didn’t really make any sense, because you were actually moving closer to Simon’s neighbourhood, but he didn’t seem surprised that I had said it. He just replied like, ‘Yes, obviously.’ We stood there at the door of your room for a few more seconds and then he laughed and said: ‘Please don’t tell her I said that.’ Of course you were with Aidan at the time, so I never did tell you.

And I can’t say I had always known, because I hadn’t. I knew you and Simon were very close, and I knew what had happened in Paris. But for some reason it had never occurred to me that he had been in love with you all along. I don’t think anyone knew.

Anyway, we never talked about it again. Do you think it’s terrible of me to tell you all this? I hope not. It wasn’t very clear from your message whether you think you’re going to keep seeing each other or not . . . What do you feel?

Yesterday afternoon – just after I got your email, in fact – Felix started to tell me about some things he had done in the past and later regretted. I suppose it was one of those

‘worst things I’ve ever done’ conversations – and actually, he has done some pretty bad

things. I won’t go into the details, but I can say some of it involved his relationships with women. I feel it’s not my place to judge him, because I can’t think why it should be, and because I’m occasionally wracked with guilt over horrible things I’ve done too.

My impulse was actually to forgive him, especially because he has apparently spent a long time feeling remorseful and blaming himself. But I had to recognise it wasn’t my place to do that either, since the actions he described may have impacted other people’s lives permanently and would never have any effect on me. I can’t step in as a disinterested third party and absolve him of his sins, just as he can’t absolve me of mine. So I suppose whatever I felt for him when he confessed these actions wasn’t really ‘forgiveness’, but something else. Maybe just that I trusted that his remorse was real and that he wouldn’t make the same mistakes over again. It made me think about people who have done bad things – what they are supposed to do with themselves, and what we as a society are supposed to do with them. At the moment, the cycle of insincere public apologies is probably making everyone suspicious of forgiveness. But what should people who have done terrible things in the past actually do?

Spontaneously advertise their own sins in order to pre-empt public exposure? Just try never to accomplish anything that might bring them increased scrutiny of any kind?

Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe the number of people who have done seriously bad things is not insignificant. I mean honestly, I think if every man who had ever behaved somewhat poorly in a sexual context dropped dead tomorrow, there would be like eleven men left alive. And it’s not only men! It’s women too, and children, everyone. I suppose what I mean is, what if it’s not only a small number of evil people who are out there, waiting for their bad deeds to be exposed? What if it’s all of us?

You mentioned in your email that you heard a reading at Mass about a woman pouring oil on the feet of Jesus. I might be mistaken, because there are a few similar Gospel stories, but I think the one you mean is the passage in Luke where Jesus has his feet anointed by a sinful woman. I’ve just read over it again in the little Douay-Rheims translation I brought with me to the hospital. You’re right, the story is bizarre, and even (as you put it) freakish. But isn’t it also a little bit interesting? The woman in the story really only has one distinguishing characteristic: the fact that she’s led a sinful life. Who knows what she’s supposed to have done? Maybe she was just a social outcast, essentially a marginalised innocent. But on the other hand, maybe she had actually done some bad things, the kind of things you or I would think of as seriously wrong. It’s at least possible, isn’t it? She may have killed her husband, or abused her children, or something like that. And having heard that Jesus was staying with Simon the Pharisee, she came to the house, and at the sight of Jesus, she started crying so profusely that she wet his feet with her tears. After that, she dried his feet with her hair and anointed them with perfumed oil. As you point out, it all seems quite absurd, even vaguely erotic – and indeed, Simon the Pharisee seems shocked and uncomfortable that Jesus would allow a sinful woman to touch him in such an intimate way. But Jesus, characteristically puzzling, simply says that all her many sins are forgiven, because she loves him so much. Could it be that easy? We just have to weep and prostrate ourselves and God forgives everything? But maybe it’s not easy at all – maybe to weep and prostrate ourselves with genuine sincerity is the hardest thing we could ever learn how to do. I feel certain I don’t understand how to do it. I have that resistance in me, that hard little kernel of something, which I fear would not let me prostrate myself before God even if I believed in him.