Chapter 21
It’ll Be Like in Frozen
I look up at him. “Is the book why you were on the floor?”
“No,” he says. “It was just in my mailbox when I got home.”
“So why?”
He sighs and kisses my forehead, then disentangles himself from me and stands up. “Let’s get off the floor.”
I follow him to the living room with the book, which I place reverently on the coffee table, and sit at my end of the couch.
He sinks into his end of the couch with a vocalized sigh, and runs both hands through his hair. Then he takes off his glasses to rub his hands over his face. He puts his glasses back on and looks at me, smiling a lopsided, halfway version of that smile that melts me inside.
“You created a beautiful thing this afternoon,” he begins.
“Thanks!” I smile. “My technique was pretty wobbly, but I feel like the kids and I really nailed the performance side.”
He nods. “And that’s why I was on the floor.”
I nod, understanding. “Feels? All the Feels, right in the Feels?” I bump my fist against my chest.
“If that means moved beyond language, yes.”
“Yay,” I say. I clap my hands a few times and fold them over my heart. I snuggle into my end of the couch and tangle my legs with his.
“Nothing about it was an act,” he says. “It was ... really you, really saying good-bye, and those two siblings, really singing to each other.”
I bite my lips between my teeth and smile. He got it, 100 percent. I knew he would.
He continues, and I listen. “ ‘Really you’ is an extraordinary thing by itself. I think you’re not aware of your transparency, of your ... hm. The clarity and openness of your heart. That on its own was lovely and moving. But it was the mother at the piano, accompanying her children, that struck me particularly. The warmth and tenderness of her having arranged this music, practiced with her son and daughter, and then playing with them as they sang. It was an act of such obvious affection, such love.”
He’s silent for a long moment, so I say, “Yeah, their mom is totally great,” to fill the silence, but it’s a pretty banal comment in contrast with what he seems to be experiencing over there on his end of the couch.
“It—look, this is difficult for me to ... I don’t talk about these things, not with anyone, and I’m only saying it now because ...”
“Because you’re letting me have you,” I say.
He meets my eyes. “Yes. So if you’re not interested or don’t particularly care, just say so and I’ll shut up, okay?”
“Okay,” I say, then add, “but I’m interested.”
Haltingly, he says, “I found myself thinking about my mum and what it was like for her when I was that boy’s age. I was off at school by then, of course. I left her with two young children and my father. You’ve probably put it together that my father was ...” He stops and clears his throat against a constriction.
“You said he was an abusive asshole.”
“Mh. He’s quite cruel, in fact. And I left my mother alone with him, pretty much from the time I was nine or ten. I wanted my own escape more than I wanted to protect my mother. And so I abandoned her.”
I tilt my head. “You feel like you should’ve protected her from him?”
He nods, his face tense against his grief.
“When you were, like, ten?”
“It’s not rational, I know that. But the fact is, I left her there and forgot about home as much as I could for the next”—he pauses to clear his throat—“decade or so.”
“Have you told her this?”
He shakes his head. “No point. She’d only feel guilty.”
“Have you told anyone?”
He takes a deep breath before he says, “I’ve told you.” He smiles at me fully then, the warm, open smile that melts me.
And this is the moment. This is when I recognize that this warm feeling of being at home, of being humble and proud at the same time, of opening my heart wide and letting this man in, of wanting to wrap him up inside me, of wanting to be wrapped up in him, this feeling has a name: love.
The recognition bubbles through me like champagne fizz, makes me buoyant with joy.
I’m in love!
I’ve never been in love before!
This is what being in love is like!
As I think this, he’s saying, “Maybe the transparency I’m practicing with you left me vulnerable to this sort of, well, let’s face it: self-indulgent self-pity. I’ll be over it soon; I just need an hour or so to move through it. What do you want to do about dinner?”
I climb over to his side of the couch and straddle him, my hands on his shoulders. “Charles?”
“Mh.”
“Can I tell you something?”
“Sure.” He puts his hands on my wrists.
“You know this Thing we have? The Thing I wasn’t wrong about?”
“Yes, I am quite familiar with The Thing.” He’s looking at me with a lazy half smile and hooded eyes still clouded with pain.
“Well, I’ve had an amazing insight regarding the nature of The Thing.”
“Oh yes?”
“Oh yes! It turns out: it’s not just A Sex Thing; it’s actually A Love Thing. Somewhere in the middle of all this sex, I’ve fallen in love with you.” I say it joyfully, with a wide grin.
But the grin doesn’t last long.
I don’t know what word would describe the expression on Charles’s face. Shock? Sure. Appalled? Maybe. Horrified? Definitely nothing along the lines of joyful or loving. He takes his hands away from mine and looks from the door to the window, like he’s looking for an escape route. Then he takes off his glasses and rubs his hand over his face again.
There’s something cold doing somersaults in my stomach.
I climb off his lap and say, “Okay, wow, now it’s awkward. I thought this was good news.”
“Oh god, Annie.”
“ ‘Oh god’ what? What did I do? Did I screw up? What’s wrong?”
“We agreed—no broken hearts.”
“My heart isn’t broken.”
He just looks at me blankly.
But I’m not wrong: my heart isn’t broken. It doesn’t even hurt. It feels happier and healthier than ever before in my entire life.
I curl up at my end of the couch and say, “So I . . . I mean, no pressure or anything, I’m just asking for a clarification, but it’s sounding like you definitely don’t love me. Is that . . . Is that right? I mean, it’s cool if it is. I just want to know.”
“Jesus Christ, Annie,” he groans.
“Because I have to say it does actually seem like you kind of love me. I’m not sure I’d feel like I loved you if I didn’t also feel like you loved me.”
“Are you going to stay in Indiana?” he asks, clearly trying to be patient. “Not go to Boston?”
“No,” I say, crossing my arms.
“Do you expect me to leave and follow you?”
“No.”
“Then what is it you have in mind, exactly, as a nonheartbreak ending to our little liaison, if it’s ‘A Love Thing’?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think about that.”
“You didn’t think at all,” he mumbles. Then he adds, “Sorry. Rude. Sorry.”
“No, I didn’t think—I felt. I said it because I felt it. Because it’s true. Because I wanted to share it with you. I just . . . felt it and wanted to say it.” I pause and frown at him. “Did I ruin everything?”
He sighs hugely. “No, you didn’t ruin anything, Annie. It’s my fault. I should have known this was . . . I should have been more . . . Ah, fuck.” He wipes his hands down his face and up again, then grips his fists in his hair.
Well, fuck me. What did I think was going to happen? Did I expect him to say, “I love you too” and throw his arms around me and love me passionately for two weeks and then wave good-bye to me as I drove away? Did I think he’d decide he wanted the long-distance relationship with me that he didn’t want with Melissa, whom he was with for more than a year?
I didn’t think anything. I just felt it, so I put it on the fucking table.
Like bread.
Fuck.
“Everything is ruined, though. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know. It can’t be just sex now, can it.” A statement. Not a question. A shield.
“It was never just sex,” I say, stung. “You said it yourself. We’re friends, too.”
Charles sighs again, and I watch him deflate. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, Annie, we are friends. I hope we can stay friends after all this is over.”
“Well, then what else is there?” I insist, leaning forward. “Friendship, great sex . . . What else is there to love?” I’m still arguing with him, even though I can feel he has given up arguing with me. It feels like punching a half-inflated Bobo doll.
“There’s . . . Annie, there’s how you feel about a person, and then there’s the kind of relationship you can have with them. You don’t know me very well, and you don’t know anything at all about relationships—you’ve never had one. I have, and what I’ve learned is that I can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to, and it’s not that I wouldn’t prefer it if I could. It’s that I’m not built that way. Surely, that’s been—no, I suppose not.”
I feel arguments rise up inside me: I think you are built that way! How do you know if you don’t try? What hasn’t worked with other people could work with me, because I’m . . . But I stop. What am I? Am I magical? Am I the girl who opens men’s hearts? No. I’m smart and I work hard, but are those the attributes of a woman men fall in love with? Hardly. I’m not pretty or alluring. I’m not a girl guys feel that way about.
I don’t say any of this out loud, but I give up too. I stop arguing. He said no, and that’s that. So I sink back on the sofa and say, “Okay.”
“Fuck, Annie,” he says, and he rakes his hands into his hair yet again, his eyes closed.
I bunch up my lips against the sting of tears, swallow, and when I get control of my voice, I say, “It’s okay. I get it. It’s no big deal.”
“You will insist that these things are no big deal, these enormous gifts you give me that I can’t possibly deserve. My inability to accept them graciously is proof only of my unworthiness, not of yours.”
“It would help . . .” I begin. I battle the stinging in my nose and eyes, and then try again. “It might help if I understood why. Like, if it’s about my lack of pretty or—”
“Sweetheart, it has nothing to do with you—”
I roll my eyes. “Oh god, seriously, you’re going to say, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’?”
“Annie,” he spits. And then he seems to talk to himself more than to me: “Right. Let you have me.” He sits, knees crossed, one elbow on the back of the couch and his palm over his eyes, as he says, “So, look. When I was six, I watched my father beat my mother with the butt of a rifle, while explaining to her why it was her fault he had to do it. And then later I listened to my mother repeat those reasons to me, explaining to me that it wasn’t my fault; it was her fault. For a while I thought she was trying to protect me from the reality of it, but now I know she believed him. She believes him.” He stops and looks out the window at the rain. “It’s taken me rather a long time to forgive her for that—and to forgive myself for blaming her, when it was no one’s fault but his.
“My father is a monster, as bad as men come,” he says, looking directly at me now. “And I have that monster inside me. And part—”
“What? No, you don’t. You would never do something like that.”
“When I was eight, I beat the shit out of another boy—he was smaller than me and he had no friends and I decided I could make myself feel bigger if I picked on him. I had all this rage and I just . . . I split his lip and broke his nose. After I knocked him down, I told him—” Charles stops and grimaces. “I’ve never told anyone this. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. Worse, maybe, than beating on him is what I said to him. I told him he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone it was me because I was a peer of the realm. Oh god, what a horrible, entitled little shit I was.” He rubs his palm against his forehead and adds, “Am.”
And then he continues, “Of course he did tell, and when my mother heard about it, the way she looked at me . . . It was how I saw her look at my father. Cowed. Afraid.”
“Afraid of a little boy?”
Charles nods. “So, in my eight-year-old wisdom, I shoved the monster into a deep well and locked him in, but I notice him quite regularly—he’s beating on the door right now as a matter of fact.” He stops, his jaw tight, and swallows twice. He says mildly, “I hate talking about it. I sound schizophrenic.”
“Duh, it’s a metaphor. I know you don’t think there’s a literal monster inside you.”
He gives a tiny, embarrassed laugh, his face splotchy with emotion. “Thanks,” he says.
“Well, I’m not afraid of your monster,” I say.
“You should be,” he says in a choked voice.
“Why? The monster is eight years old!”
And Charles laughs, surprise easing his tension. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he says. “That might be true.”
“Only one way to find out,” I declare.
I’m pretty sure what’s going to happen next is he’s going to free the monster, and therefore free himself from his fear of the monster, and it’ll be like in Frozen, where the answer—spoiler—is love, and everything spontaneously turns into springtime.
That is not what happens.
He says, “Anyway, I’m telling you this because the consequence is a broken attachment system. You’ve learned about attachment?”
“Um, a little . . . Kids and parents, stability, love, that stuff?”
“Yes, that stuff,” he says with a grim smile. “I can only go so far before the thing simply shuts down. I didn’t notice until I was at university and in a relationship and I just . . . didn’t fall in love with her. I had an idea how I was supposed to feel, and I acted as if I felt it—sometimes I even believed I felt it—but she could have walked away at any time in our two years together, and it would scarcely have bothered me.”
“Huh,” I say. “You preemptively broke your own heart.”
He pauses and looks at me, wearing a sad, crooked grin. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he says for the second time, I note.
“But you don’t—”
He shakes his head. “You can’t understand—and I’m glad. Growing up with George and Frances, how could you?”
“I do understand. You’re saying the only way for you to fall in love is to become friends with your monster.”
He looks at me, looks at the floor, is silent for a full minute, and then he says, “Jesus, Annie.”
“Is that a yes?” I am proud of myself for sitting there in silence for a whole minute while he thought about stuff, but I am getting impatient now. I feel like we’re closing in on the answer, and I’m ready to wrap this up.
He doesn’t answer; he just looks at me, a frown on his lips and a ghost of that heart-tugging smile in his eyes.
“Yes?” I prompt again, testy now.
“Yes,” he whispers.
And so I pounce: “Well, then maybe this is the time to choose a different way of dealing with the monster.”
“It’s not about choosing, Annie,” he sighs. “It just doesn’t happen. The mechanism is broken and irreparable.”
“There’s no such thing as irreparable,” I say.
Charles rolls his eyes with a smile. “Americans. Isn’t their endless optimism charming.”
“You can change anything you want to change,” I say earnestly.
He looks at me blankly for a moment—and then laughs. A simple laugh of genuine amusement. He pinches the bridge of his nose, eyes closed, and laughs like I’ve just made a joke. Which pisses me off.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“I’m sorry, Annie. I’m not laughing at you. It’s just—do you suppose I’ve concluded that this is a perfectly satisfactory state of affairs and decided not to change? Or that it didn’t occur to me? Or that I haven’t tried?”
“Yes, I do!” I say, which isn’t literally true, but I’m annoyed he’s not taking me seriously when I’m working so hard to solve this. “I think you kind of like your little story about the poor little rich boy with a mean dad, who almost became an asshole, so he broke himself in half. It means now you get to be all distant and not risk anything.”
“You don’t mean that,” he says quietly.
“I do!”
His jaw tightens. “Then grow up.”
I feel like he’s just slapped me.
He sees the look on my face and makes a noise, half growl, half shout, and puts his hands in his hair—which is sticking straight up from his head by now; he’d look adorable if he weren’t acting like such a douche—and closes his eyes. “Sorry. That was a dickish thing to say.”
“Are we done here?” I storm. “With this fight? I feel done.”
“Sure.”
I get to my feet. “I’m going home.”
He leans back on the couch, sighing heavily, and says, “I don’t blame you. Need a lift?”
“Why would I want you to give me a ride? We’re fighting.”
“What does one have to do with the other?” he asks.
I stare at him dumbly.
“You’re a friend, no less because you’re angry with me, and if you don’t want to bike home in the rain, I’m not going to refuse to drive you just because we’re in the middle of an argument. I’m fucked up, but I’m not a complete arsehole.”
See, that’s him. The man I love and the reason I love him. He’s there with what I need. No matter what.
I throw myself back down on the couch, pouting, and say, “When I was walking back from the recital, I thought we were gonna have amazing, fun sexytimes because I was all wet, and instead there’s this book”—I gesture at Origin on the coffee table—“and then there’re my feelings”—I wave my hand up and down in the vicinity of my heart—“and there’s your monster”—I gesture toward him—“and . . . what the hell, basically.”
“What the hell, indeed.” And he chuckles.
“I don’t see how you can laugh!”
“Practice,” he says gently from his end of the couch, and he gives me the soft, warm smile that strips me bare.