Of boyfriends
The questions of nuclear isotopes were left aside for a fond recollection of her time spend with her family in Switzerland. Frances loved hiking just as much as she loved bathing. The mood shifted gradually, with Tristan absorbing information and leading her with simple, quiet questions until he eventually found the source of her uneasiness. Namely, her boyfriend’s behavior. She mentioned him, from time to time, whenever her deigned visiting her. Most of the time, she was the one who took the train – 3 hours or so – to see him on weekends.
— “So you left with him ?”
The pause told him he had breached a sensitive subject.
— “Yeah, Wednesday. I cried so much on the way that he had to take me back, and we stayed a night more with my parents. Like when I was little. I just wanted to stay in the mountains so badly, and spend time with them… anyway”
Shameful. Embarrassment oozed from her in waves, as if her emotional outburst called for contempt. Her hands were tightly woven together, her back too straight to be comfortable.
— “So you spend one more day with your family?”, he asked.
— “Yeah. We hiked up, then met to have a fondue with a view over the Mont Blanc. It was amazing, truly. My boyfriend wanted to get back then, so we drove home on Thursday evening.”
Frances was silent again, her knuckles white over the long skirt she wore. For a moment, the priest wondered if she only dressed like this to get in the church, out of respect ? For it was still 35 degrees outside. The prolonged pause caused him to ponder; something didn’t add up here. Frances had probably fought with her boyfriend over the week end.
— “So you had the week end for yourselves ?”, he prodded gently.
Her wide chocolate eyes turned to him, and Tristan’s heart lurched. Her gaze was sad, devoid of the light he so enjoyed in her usually sparkling orbs. Filled with rejection, and incomprehension. Begging him to tell her …
— “No. He left me there, stating he needed some time for himself”
Tristan frowned then; had he missed something in her recollection ?
— “I am not sure I understand.”
Frances lifted her chin, her cheeks ablaze with repressed anger this time as she struggled to keep her voice low.
— “You’re not the only one ! I didn’t either. I thought we would spend the week end together. Instead… he took me away from my family, only to drop me in an empty home and leave me there. I was so angry…”
Her pants suddenly caught in her throat, and she resumed her previous position, eyes set upon the statue before them.
— “Sorry, father Tristan, I shouldn’t burden you with…”
The priest’s fingers tickled, urging him to cover her hand with his to calm her down. But he would never touch her. Distance was key in his line of work. Neither too close, nor too far from his parishioners.
— “Nonsense. I was the one who asked. I see that his behavior hurt you greatly”
The knowledge that priests sometimes replaced psychologists had landed on his lap pretty early when he took over the church. People talked to him as they would use a professional. Understanding the need of a sympathetic ear, Tristan had read a few books to practice active listening. Today, Frances needed him to understand her relationship. Stating the plain truth – her heartache – allowed her to verbalise the issue.
— “If he had warned me… I would have stayed with my family. I even considered taking a train back to Switzerland, but I would have arrived on Friday and they were leaving the rental on Saturday. Plain stupid. I got to spend some time with my brother that lives on the other side of the world, but no… I had to throw it away for a man who didn’t want to spend time with me in the first place”
Tristan nodded twice, his intense gaze resting on the distraught woman by his side. Why did his chest tighten when he saw her eyes glisten with unshed tears ?
— “That young man had some progress to do when it comes to communication”
Frances snorted then, an unladylike, angry sound.
— “He’s not that young, you know”
He knew Frances to be twenty-two years old; she had told him herself. How old could her boyfriend possibly be ?
— “Humor me”, he whispered, his gaze fixed upon the virgin Marie.
Frances’ cocked her head aside, as if to tell him a secret.
— “He was born in 1977”
Tristan internally started, struggling to keep his composure. He, who was born but two years prior, felt so much older than the man she described. He felt positively outraged on behalf of Frances, and reined his anger quickly; it was not his place to judge.
— “Have you been able to discuss it with him ?”
— “I tried. He talked, and talked, as he tends to do, and in the end I didn’t know north from south anymore. I felt like a whining little girl that had no right to be angry”
The priest frowned then, gazing as Marie’s statue in hopes Jesus’s mother would give him a hint. Somehow, he wondered of Frances wasn’t dealing with a manipulator. Isolating her from her family only to leave her on the sidelines… With her earnest nature and will to believe the best of everyone, she could be an easy prey for such a man.
— “You need to trust yourself, Frances. What doesn’t feel right to you isn’t right, no matter how well explained they seem”
Her chestnut eyebrows scrunched together in an adorable expression.
— “But people always have different points of view, right ? When you listen to a wife rambling about her husband, and the husband rambling about the same wife, you can judge the two of them separately, only to realise you never had the full picture in the end”
There she was; she woman that always wanted to do the right thing, and refrain from judging without knowing all the facts. The truth was that she analysed people’s behavior like a math problem, but humans were much less logical than that. Emotions, for one, weren’t reined by any kind of sense. They reflected past hurts, and hopes, sometime entirely decorrelated from the initial situation.
— “That would be correct. But you must trust in your heart… On judgment day, we trust Jesus to judge with his heart, and not with his head.”
— “Yeah. Good luck to him”
The priest shook his head, amazed that she always managed to treat sacred figures with such casualness. It wasn’t disrespectful, per se, but she crushed the distance between sanctity and humanity too easily for his own comfort. A result of her anticlerical education.
— “Sarcasm will lead you nowhere, young lady”, he told her sternly.
Chastised, Frances let her eyes fall in her lap.
— “I know. It just keeps my wit sharp.”
Her tone was clipped, defensive.
— “And I fear I have taken much of your time”, she added, smoothing her skirt.
She had taken the amused rebuttal much too harshly and Tristan could only watch as she retreated in the recesses of her mind; she had spoken of her rejection, laying the wound at his feet, and his only response was to tell her down. He would have bashed in own head on the cobblestones, and rushed to soften the blow.
— “Not at all. It is always my pleasure”
She dismissed his attempt instantly.
— “Yeah. I have plenty of things to settle before class tomorrow, so I wish you a nice evening, father Tristan”
— “You are most welcome here, thank you for stopping by.”
The young woman gave him a tight smile as she rose, one that didn’t reach her eyes. Tristan followed her to the aisle.
— “Goodbye”, she breathed.
And she meant it so strongly that the priest’s breath caught.
— “God bless you, Frances”
The red braid danced away as she left the church, and Tristan couldn’t help but feel bereft. There was a strange pit in his stomach, a pang of regret as he let her go. Her emotions had shifted so swiftly, grabbing on a very subtle hint not to make fun of his sacred figures to feed her shame and sense of worthlessness. How had he managed to hurt her with such a little retort ? He knew Frances to be a sensitive woman, but she couldn’t possibly survive life, her teachers, and the rest of the world if she handled animosity this way… or perhaps, she wasn’t only so open with the others. Perhaps the blow had been harsh because his opinion meant a lot to her, because she had lowered her shields around him.
That idea send Tristan’s mind into a turmoil.
If she ever came back again, he would have to prod if her boyfriend wasn’t dangerous to her. A manipulator. The worst kind, especially since, most of the time, they didn’t even do it consciously.