How Not To Fall by Emily Foster (22)

It’s still raining, so I accept the ride.

When he drops me at my front door, and before I get out of the car, I ask, “Did you pick a fight so I’d leave?”

He takes the question seriously, thinking before he says, “Not deliberately.”

“Okay. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

I spend the night alone. I consider calling my parents, but then I remember that less than a week ago I said I was on a balance beam and Charles wouldn’t let me fall, and I’m not yet ready to say I was wrong.

Margaret isn’t home—she’s in Indy with Reshma for the weekend, and when I text her, she doesn’t text back. Anyway, she’s not home, so I can sob as loud as I want.

It doesn’t help that it rains all night.

In the morning, I check my phone—no new texts, no missed calls. I check my e-mail—ah. The subject heading is mea maxima culpa, and the full text of the e-mail is this:

 

 

I copy and paste the number into Google Scholar and get:

 

Suomi, S. J., & Harlow, H. F. (1972). Depressive behavior in young monkeys subjected to vertical chamber confinement. Journal of comparative and physiological psychology, 80(1), 11.

 

I read the article.

Then, over the next twenty-four hours, I read the twenty-five articles that this article cites, followed by the thirty articles that cite this one. In short, in one day I develop a minor level of expertise on the effects of long-term isolation on primate attachment.

It is so.

Much.

Worse than the trauma research Charles pointed me to back in April.

Imagine being trapped at the bottom of a metal-walled well and trying and trying to get out and never being able to get out and never seeing anyone, just having food and water delivered without ever having contact with anyone.

Just try to imagine the despair of being trapped forever, hopeless and abandoned.

That’s what they did to the monkeys. They broke the monkeys—some of them permanently—for science. Harlow actually called the vertical chamber “the pit of despair.”

I go for two long runs, just to burn off the horror. I run through parks and neighborhoods, splashing through puddles left by the rain, which has mercifully dried out into a hot, sunny day. I blast Sondheim in my headphones as I run.

On Monday, after the second run, I reply to his e-mail this way:

 

Suomi, S. J., Delizio, R., & Harlow, H. F. (1976). Social rehabilitation of separation-induced depressive disorders in monkeys. The American Journal of Psychiatry.

He answers immediately:

 

 

I write back:

 

 

 

I’m standing at the open door when he arrives, and I watch him walk toward me, this beautiful man, this brilliant, tenderhearted person I’ve fallen in love with. It’s the stripy blue shirt today, crumpled from a day’s wear, the cuffs rolled halfway up his forearms.

The words are on my lips. I love you. But I hold on to them. That lesson I learned.

When he gets to my door, we look at each other, search each other’s eyes—search for what, I don’t know—and then simultaneously we open our arms and fold ourselves together. We stand there, holding each other, feeling each other breathe for I don’t know how long.

Charles is the first to speak. I feel the preparatory inhale, and then, without moving, he says, “I’m sorry, Annie.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“I never wanted to hurt you.”

“You didn’t.”

He shakes his head. I feel his lips against my scalp, feel his lungs expand and contract in an enormous sigh.

It’s me who pulls away first. “Let’s go in.”

He follows me through the kitchen and into the living room as I explain what I’ve been doing for the last day and a half. I wave him to the futon as I conclude, “So I’m pretty much caught up on the theoretical side of things, I think. You’re saying the eight-year-old monster’s been trapped in a pit of despair all this time?”

“That’s the short version.”

“Well,” I say when we’re sitting on far ends of the futon, “now not only am I not afraid of him, I want to rescue him.”

“That . . . Fuck.” He sits back and shakes his head. “I should have anticipated that.”

“What did you expect?”

He faces me, blinks. “I expected you to give up.”

I make a scoffing noise through my teeth. “Yeah, that’s something I’m good at.”

He grins at me. “What was I thinking?”

“I don’t know, but you weren’t thinking about me.”

“No,” he says quietly. “I suppose I assumed anyone would see it my way. And of course you don’t.”

“Of course I don’t,” I agree. “I see it as changeable, and you see it as permanent. And now I have evidence that my hypothesis is plausible.”

He rubs his fingertips against his eyebrow. “Suomi et al, 1976,” he says. “Forty-year-old research against my two decades’ experience living with it?”

“All that says is you’ve been doing it wrong.”

He lets out a “Ha!” half laughing and half, I think, offended.

“I don’t think you were doing it wrong on purpose, but you were a little kid, and no little kid in a fucked-up family is gonna fix their own broken heart! And by the time you got to be a grown-up and could really work on it, you were stuck in all these old patterns.”

“Oh god, you want to ‘fix’ me,” he says, sounding resigned. “Of course. What an idiot I am not to have seen that coming.”

Well now, I know enough about relationships to recognize that you can’t actually fix another person, and you should neither need nor want to, or else the relationship is just inherently dysfunctional.

I know that.

I do.

But Charles is so amazing. Have you noticed how amazing he is? He’s smarter than smart, he’s kind and generous and thoughtful; he’s so beautiful, in body and spirit. He deserves for this monster thing to be healed. Even more, he deserves not to have had it broken in the first place, but I can’t go back and change that for him. All I can do is give him everything I have in the two weeks we have left. He has already given me so much. Surely, I can do something for him.

So I say, “I want to try, anyway.”

With his elbow on the back of the couch and his fist propped against his temple, he looks at me and says, “My termagant, I’d rather you simply take me as I am. Can you do that?”

I’m not an idiot. I know I should accept people as they are. And I do accept Charles—no, I fucking love him—as he is.

But I feel like he could be so much happier if he—

Fuck. Shit. I’m a liar. I mean I could be so much happier if he—

I want to throw myself into his arms and kiss him and tell him how much I love him, and I want the dam to break and for him to say he loves me too, for him to feel about me what I feel about him. I want to be to him what he is to me.

But he doesn’t love me. And he doesn’t want to love me. He’s asking me not to try to make him love me.

He doesn’t love me, and he doesn’t want to love me.

He said no. That’s it.

Which is fine.

I clap my hands over my mouth as I start crying.

“Oh, Annie,” Charles says. He moves closer to me, takes my free hand and holds it as I curl my knees up and press my forehead against them. He’s calm and still, full of compassion, as the grief moves through me.

The tide ebbs after a few painful minutes, and I sweep my heart clean with a few huge breaths. Then I get up and get a box of tissues. After I mop up my face and blow my nose, I sit close beside him. He puts his arm around me and pulls me closer, holds me against his chest, his knees crossed toward me, his lips on my hair.

“Ready to talk?” he says.

I nod.

“All right. Let’s get clear on what it is we disagree about.” His voice is soft and slow, like his teacher voice, but like a teacher reading a very serious bedtime story. “Your claim is that the monster can be safely freed from the pit of despair, thus healing my attachment mechanism. And you want me to do that.”

I nod again. “I guess, technically, I want to be able to do it for you, but I already know that’s impossible.”

“Right,” he says, nodding. “And my claim is that freeing the monster would result in very bad things and it wouldn’t help anyway, because it’s a permanent, irreparable break. And I want you to accept that.”

Nod. Sniff. “I do, but—”

He squeezes me and interrupts, “But me no buts.”

“But you what?”

“Acceptance means without condition.”

I make a frustrated noise and grip my hand onto his shirt—then I notice what I’ve done and let go, smoothing the fabric under my palm.

He continues, “In short, we have gotten ourselves into a terrible mess. And now we’re searching for a path through the next two weeks that involves the least possible suffering. So. What do we do, young Coffey? Should we simply not see each other?”

“No!” I say, horrified.

He kisses the top of my head. “I agree. That’s not the least suffering for either of us. So. What else?”

“I don’t know,” I sigh. “If we each wanted things we could control ourselves, that would be okay, but we both want things that the other person controls.”

“Mh-hm,” he says.

“So we should each do something that we can control.”

“Agreed.”

“And we should also each do something that helps the other person feel less shitty. I feel shitty. Don’t you feel shitty?”

“I do, yes.”

“Well . . . how about . . . What if I try to accept your thing—which is what you want—while you simultaneously try to change it—which is what I want? For two weeks?”

He laughs quietly and squeezes me again and says, “That is brilliant and hilarious. Annie, that’s—that is exactly the sort of—” He’s still chuckling when he puts his hand on the side of my face and pulls back enough to kiss me once on the lips. “Exactly the sort of perverse thinking”—he kisses me again—“that I adore about you.” And again, on the cheek. “Utterly logical.” On my eyebrow. “Makes no human sense.” On my temple. “But precise.” On my earlobe. “Pristine reasoning.” And then he scrapes his teeth on my earlobe and whispers to me, “You are astonishing, Miss Coffey.”

I move my mouth to his and kiss him as if I haven’t kissed him in years—wild, starving, desperate for more, now.

“Hang on, Annie,” he says eventually, trying to extricate himself from my arms and legs, which are twining around him. “We have to talk about—”

“I’m done with the talking part for now,” I say, my hands busy on his buckle.

“Okay,” he says, and he surrenders himself to me.

I open his pants, pull off my sweat pants, and straddle him, letting him guide me down onto him. He kisses me while I move on him, and he runs his hands over my body.

“Annie,” he grunts, and he turns us on the futon, lays me on my back without ever pulling out, and fucks me in the deep, steady rhythm, his pubic bone against my clit, that he knows will make me come.

And Margaret walks in.

I mean, of course she does, right?

She walks right back out again with a, “Whoa, sorry!” but we can hear her cackling laughter in the hallway.

We might as well also hear a cartoon brakes-squealing noise. And a sad trombone.

“Oh my god,” Charles groans.

“Woops,” I say, flushing with embarrassment, my arousal dissipating as fast as it came.

We separate. We reassemble our clothes, catching Margaret’s contagious laugh, which has been joined by Reshma’s. We hear them whooping in the kitchen.

“What do we do now?” Charles asks, pink and grinning against his will.

“We go in there and say hi,” I say. I drag him by the hand into the kitchen.

Margaret and Reshma burst into fresh peals of laughter when they see us. Tears are running down Margaret’s face. “Straight people sex is so weird,” she says in a strained, high voice. She waves her hands at us. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! It’s just such a”—she gasps—“such a surprise . . . to see Momma Duck’s ass.” She breaks down into helpless giggles again, her hands folded over her mouth.

Poor Charles is the color of a strawberry now. He puts a hand over his eyes and mutters, “Oh god, save me.”

I intervene. “Margaret, if you want Charles’s help moving on Saturday, you have to get over it and apologize for laughing at his ass.”

“Am I helping Margaret move on Saturday?”

I put a soothing hand on his arm. “Didn’t I ask yet? Yes, I’d like you to help us move Margaret to Indy on Saturday.” I turn and scowl at Margaret. “If she can get her shit together.”

“I’m sorry, Charles. I really am.” Margaret’s losing her battle against her grin, but at least she’s trying. “I didn’t mean to walk in on you guys, and I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just a shock. I’m sure you have a very nice ass.”

This is not really helping.

“Okay, close enough,” I sigh. “I’m taking him home. I’ll see you guys later.”

I shoo Charles to the front door, and we depart to the sounds of Reshma and Margaret making a genuine effort not to laugh anymore.

 

By the time we get back to his apartment . . . the mood is somehow broken.

So we make dinner—or Charles makes dinner, putting together some kind of tomato-y pasta thing and a salad, while I sit at the counter, watching him and drinking a glass of wine he’s decanted for me.

When all the salad vegetables are chopped and the sauce is simmering and the noodles are boiling, he stands on his side of the kitchen and says, “How now, Ophelia, what’s the matter?”

And so I sit back and say, “I have questions.”

“Ask them.”

“Well, first . . . you don’t seem broken.”

“No, I don’t,” he acknowledges. “The protective, deceptive gloss of privilege.”

I nod as if I understand that, and I ask, “Isn’t it bad for a psychiatrist to have avoidant attachment?”

“I find it’s an advantage.”

I nod as if I understand that, too. “Do your brother and sister have the same stuff? The same attachment stuff?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to know?”

He pauses, his mouth slightly open, until at last he says, “I don’t know.”

I nod and take a sip of wine. I recall, idly, the total bafflement I experienced in the face of my first organic chemistry class. This feels like that.

I did eventually understand o-chem. It all just clicked one day.

Presumably, this will all click eventually too.

But for now, I give up, with a sigh and a shrug.

“Other questions?” Charles asks.

I tilt my head at him and ask shyly, “Did you miss me yesterday?”

He steps toward me, takes my face in his hands, and looks into my eyes for a moment with that sweet, heartrending smile, and then kisses the corner of my eyebrow. He kisses the crook of my jaw. The bottom edge of my lip.

When he starts to pull away, I stand up.

“Charles,” I whisper, and I put my arms around his neck. I capture his mouth with mine and thrust my tongue into his mouth.

His hands go under my shirt, to my back. What we started on the futon ignites now inside me, and I clutch at him. He makes a deep, helpless sound and kisses me, hoisting me off my feet and pinning me against the wall with his hips. I wrap my legs around him and he grinds against me, right against my clitoris. My breath catches. He pushes himself against me harder and his tongue thrusts into my mouth and I rock my pelvis against him and my fingers are kneading the muscles of his back.

Right when his hands start pulling at my clothes, the noodles boil over.

He lets me slide, still panting, down the wall, and goes to rescue dinner.

So we eat on the couch, our plates in our laps, and I shovel food in huge mountains into my face. I’m actually starving—I barely ate for two days, went on two runs, and have had All The Feels. I hear Charles laugh quietly, and I look up to find him watching me.

“Watching you eat is almost as satisfying as watching you come,” he says.

Eventually I lean back, giving a groan of overstuffed satisfaction. Charles takes the dishes into the kitchen and I sit there, eyes closed, digesting and listening to him putting things away. For the first time in two days, I’ve begun to feel satisfied and calm.

When he comes back, he has Origin in his hands.

He clears his throat and says, “Er, you left this.” He sits, and he puts the book in the middle of the couch, between us.

I make a “get ye back” gesture at it. “Can we talk about it later?” I plead. “I’ve already had too many feelings today.”

“Definitely,” he says, and I hear relief in his voice. “What shall we do instead?”

I sit up on the couch and look at him. “I want to take a shower, go to bed, find you there, have simple, undemanding sex with you, and then sleep for, like, ten hours.”

“Done,” he says. “Go.”

And that’s what we do.

Because Charles is there with whatever I need, no matter what.

Almost whatever I need.

Whatever I need that he has to give.

 

We’re lying together in the interval between sex and sleep. I’m watching the way the light of the streetlamp through the window shines and glints in the sparse, pale gold hair on his chest.

With my eyes on his chest, I say, “Do you still want me to have it? The book?”

“Yes. Annie, yes.”

I blink, genuinely puzzled. “I can’t figure out why. Is it a consolation prize?”

He says nothing until I look up at him. When I’m meeting his eyes, the inner corners of his eyebrows lift and he says, “It is an inadequate token of my appreciation for the generosity of your heart and mind,” in a voice so sincere and warm, it pours through me like hot chocolate when you come in from the snow.

“That sounds to me like you’ll miss me when I’m gone,” I whisper, fighting off the tears at the backs of my eyes.

“How should I respond to that? Would you like me to play the doting partner or the dominant lover or the casual fuck-buddy or . . . whatever it is I am?”

“Just be honest. No”—I correct myself—“be honest, and also keep the lid off the monster. That’s the deal.”

Dully, he says, “In the name of honesty only then do I say: I’ll be more relieved than I can express when you’re gone.”

I am breathless at this, like he punched me in the gut. “Ouch.”

“Still want me to be honest?” The corner of his lower lip twitches downward.

“Dude.”

It’s good, though. This single sentence—I’ll be relieved when you’re gone—shifts the puzzle pieces into place, and I see a pattern at last: He will let me have him, he will try to face the monster... until I leave. And when I leave, he can close himself back up. He can shove the monster back into the pit.

And until then, that twitch of his lower lip tells me, he will torture himself.

For me.

I move a little away from him to put my head on the pillow next to his. Lying nose to nose with him, I ask, “You’re gonna try the thing I want? The Monster Deal?”

He nods.

“Why?”

“Because you’d do it for me without thinking, without even trying. And because ...” He pauses, twiddling the sheet over my shoulder. “I know you’ll turn yourself inside out trying to practice the thing I want from you. The Acceptance Deal.”

I nod.

“I think you don’t know how hard it will be for you,” he says, looking earnestly into my eyes.

I open my mouth to protest—but then I stop. How hard do I think it will be?

I think it will be easy. I’ve got the easy side of this deal. He’s the one who has to face a monster. All I have to do is ... accept him, whether or not he faces the monster.

Even though I really, really want him to face the monster.

Even though I really, really believe that if he does that, he’ll love me.

And not only do I really, really want him to love me, I really, really want to be worth all that effort, to him.

So acceptance will be easy as long as he’s facing the monster.

But acceptance means without condition, without any “as long as.”

“I have no idea,” I admit. “But there aren’t many things I’ve tried to do, that I really wanted to do, that I couldn’t do eventually.” In fact, I can’t think of even one thing I really wanted to do that I haven’t succeeded at, eventually.

“Well.” He kisses my forehead and gets out of bed. He pulls the curtains closed and then returns to the bed, sitting on the side and holding my hand. “I want you to have the book, either way, but you don’t have to decide now.”

“Okay.”

“I have some work I need to finish tonight. Would you like me to stay here until you’re asleep?”

“Oh,” I say, only now realizing I had been assuming we’d be going to sleep together, realizing too how disappointed I am he hasn’t assumed the same thing. “Um. I thought—”

He clears his throat. “Again, honesty: Most of the nights you’ve spent here, I’ve stayed until you’ve fallen asleep, and then I’ve gone into the living room to work for a few hours.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t mean not to tell you. It just didn’t come up.”

I pout. “Like the family title.”

“And the elevator incident.”

“And that your specialty is psychiatry.”

“Psychosomatic medicine, if we’re being precise about it.”

“Shit, I don’t even know what that is. Who the hell are you?” I say, rolling to my back and throwing my arms out to my sides.

He lies down beside me on top of the covers and tucks me up next to him. He says, “ ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ Same as you. Look, can I give you a hint?”

“A hint?”

“A hint about the Acceptance Deal.”

“Okay.”

“When you’re finding it difficult, focus on the present. We have only these few days, only this one chance to share pleasure. Right now is what we have. Pay attention to what feels good right now, and let go of the past and the future.”

“See, that sounds pretty easy,” I sigh drowsily into his chest.

I feel his laugh more than I hear it. “I’m glad it sounds easy. I hope it is. Go to sleep, my harpy.”

He wraps his arms around me, and I feel I know exactly who he is, no matter what else I might still learn about him.