Chapter 27
The Fundamental Unreliability of the Universe
It’s just a few blocks from the hotel. We stroll through the narrow park, and Charles reads each row of letters, bowed like shock-waves traveling away from the nearby college campus.
“Who are the names?” he asks, pointing at the markers. “Where are we?”
I try the French, pronouncing it sort of like it’s Spanish, since that’s all I know.
He looks at me, puzzled. “The nose for fourteen whats?”
“The nave for fourteen queens,” I say.
“Ah,” he says. “Nef pour quatorze reines.”
“Yes. What’s a nave?”
“It’s the part of a church where you sit. And who are the fourteen queens?”
“Most of them were students at the École Polytechnique, mostly right around my age. In 1989 a guy went on a shooting spree and killed them. Most of them were women who wanted to be engineers,” I say. “And they died for it.”
“Jesus,” Charles says.
We sit together on a park bench. I say, “I thought there might be something here that would help me understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Why people do horrible things?” I shrug. “The nature of evil, I guess? But what this shows me is how much people loved these women.”
Charles nods and says, “Fear. The nature of evil is fear.”
I look at him and nod too, as if I understand. “Everyone feels fear, though. Not everyone—”
“Hits his wife and tells her it’s her fault?”
I nod again, and consider what else it takes. Eventually I say, “It doesn’t seem to matter whether a person has money or an education or social status or anything. The world just seems to . . . break some people.”
“Though most people in the world don’t have any of those things, and nothing can break them.”
“So fear,” I conclude, “plus fragility.”
“Mh,” Charles says.
We sit together in the darkening evening, and I think about how hard I was on Charles the night we fought, how hard I pushed him, how he looked at me with fear in his face and then collapsed against the wall. I watch now as the breeze ruffles his hair delicately against his temple.
“What do you fear, my termagant?” Charles asks the grass.
I think carefully for a few minutes, discarding my earliest thoughts—I only fear what I’m not certain I could survive, and I’m pretty certain I can survive most things—before I say, “Two things, at least. I’m afraid of not living up to my potential.”
“Ah,” he says. “Alas, fearing something like that is the perfect way to create the thing itself. Trust me, I know.”
“And I’m afraid of hurting you,” I say, and he looks at me, stunned. “Also, heights,” I feel compelled to add, for full honesty. “What do you fear?”
He doesn’t answer at first. He looks everywhere but at me. He says, “I think people don’t fear heights. They fear the fall—and not even that. They fear the consequence of the fall.” Then he folds and unfolds his hands in his lap and finally says, “I fear I have already failed my most essential test.”
“Your mom,” I say, and he nods, still not looking at me.
“And I fear losing your respect.”
A month ago—a week ago—I might have said, Well, fearing something like that is the perfect way to create the thing itself, or offered a list of all the people who are fragile. To prove I’m smart. To make sure he sees the same thing I see. But I don’t need to prove anything with Charles. And I know he sees what I see. So I just lace my fingers between his.
I tilt my head against his shoulder and ask, “What made your senior year hard?”
“Mh?” He’s still looking at the grass.
“Back in April you said your senior year was hard. You alternated between data analysis and weeping.”
“Ah.” He clears his throat, opens his mouth, hesitates . . . and then says, “My mother came to visit me. She was depressed. Eventually I got it out of her that she had miscarried—again, though she thought I didn’t know about the first one. She was over forty, but she was twenty-two weeks along, and everything was fine. It was a girl. Mum was calling her Marianne.
“She didn’t tell me what my father did. I think he might have pushed her down the stairs or hit her and she fell down the stairs or . . . I don’t know. She told me she fell. She told me it was her fault. I knew better by then.” His hand is gripping and regrip-ping mine.
“What’s it like to miscarry that far along?”
“It’s like giving birth,” he says. “The heart had stopped beating. She went to hospital, and they induced labor. She wanted a funeral, but he—my father—wouldn’t let her. So she came to visit me instead.”
What do you say to a story like that? I’m sorry? That’s too bad? Wow, your father really is a total horror show? We just sit in silence together for a long time.
I sit up and begin, “I was nine . . . ,” This is a story I avoid telling, generally. No one in Indiana really understands, so why would a guy from England?
But then I realize: yes. I’ve found something I don’t share. So I’ll share it.
So I start again. “I was nine in 2001, and we lived in Greenwich Village, which is—”
“Oh my god,” Charles says. He gets it instantly.
“I was in school at the time. It was this amazing sunny day. Blue sky. We were doing fractions. We . . . My parents, I mean, they’re doctors, right? They came and got me from school and walked me back to the apartment, and by then everything was gray and the air was dusty, everything was covered in ash. The air tasted like ash and burning. I didn’t know what was going on. They left me with Miss Rocío, our housekeeper. She had brought her kids with her. They taught me the names of colors in Spanish. Mom and Dad didn’t get home until late, but they came to kiss me good night. They smelled like smoke. When it turned out there wasn’t that much need for doctors at the hospital, they just went right to ground zero, but . . . When they got home, they hugged me and kissed me and tried to answer my questions, but it’s just one of those things, you know, where there aren’t any answers.”
“The fundamental unreliability of the universe,” Charles says quietly. “What will we do if the sun never comes out again.”
I look at him, taken aback. “Oh yeah. I didn’t . . . I guess that’s how it started.”
He sandwiches my hand between his two, and we sit, silent, as the sun begins to go down. And it dawns on me that it doesn’t matter if he can’t love me the way I need him to; I don’t love him because of the way he loves me. I love him because our inner worlds map onto each other. When he shows me more of himself, he is illuminating a new place inside me, and when I give him more of myself, I am showing him a hidden place inside himself.
It’s not about him giving me what I need no matter what. It’s about him being what I need, no matter what. Because he’s a mirror, and he shows me the version of myself I most want to be. And I think maybe I do the same for him.
And that’s what will hold us together, whatever comes next.
I shiver a little with the chill of the evening, and at last Charles looks at me. We stand up at the same time and walk back to the hotel slowly, our fingers laced together.
We make love that night, lost in the sensation of each other’s skin against our own, in the pleasure of two bodies brushing up against each other with affection and a celebration of life. In the dark, I feel like I can read his mind—read his heart—through the tension in his muscles, the flexion of his tendons and joints. So it’s no surprise to me at all when, in the quiet rest before sleep, he says brokenly into the darkness, “Annie.”
“Hm?”
“You’re not wrong.” And he kisses my hair.
“I love you too,” I say. And I kiss his mouth, and he kisses me back, brushing his palm over my forehead, over my cheek, over my hair.
Taxi, airport, plane, airport, car. Some people enjoy traveling; I’ve never been one of them. I’ve always hated flying, especially—though I’ve suddenly realized why that might be true. Duh. Planes.
Anyway, we have two more nights together.
And, because I’m a fucking idiot, we spend this one fighting.
“Some part of this has to be my fault!” I shout. I can hardly remember how the argument started, but blood is pounding in my ears, and I am desperate for Charles to criticize me, correct me, yell at me, anything. But he won’t. He sits at his end of the sofa, and he listens empathically and takes all the blame. I yell, “Just tell me what I’ve done wrong! If I could see my own mistakes, I wouldn’t need you to point them out to me!”
“You’ve done nothing wrong. I’m—”
“What, I’m perfect and you’re the fuckup? That is the most infuriating part about this! There has to be something I can do differently, some part of this I can change and control, instead of just accepting things the way they are!”
“Instead of accepting me the way I am,” he says with an edge of frustration—at last. He makes a frustrated sound and gets up, his hands on his head. With his back to me, he takes several deep breaths and then rubs his hands over his face.
I stand up and follow him. “You can’t make things better by accepting them the way they are,” I insist. I’m trembling with helpless frustration, my hands fisting and unfisting, my jaw clenched in fury.
“Well, you’re wrong about that,” he says, turning to face me.
“I’m not. You have to be dissatisfied, you have to work and fight and push.” I step forward. He steps back.
“You don’t.”
“Yes, you do! How can you say that? How can you just stand there?” I step forward again, gesturing at his relaxed posture, his calm face. He steps back and puts his hands into his pockets. I’m mortifyingly aware of the difference in our postures. I can hear my own breath, fast and shallow, and I can feel my eyebrows raised, my eyes wide and desperate. I feel the clock ticking, and it fills me with wild panic—and yet he’s acting like he’s coaching me through a little academic puzzle.
“Is criticizing you really how I show you I care?” he says.
“Yes!” I shriek. “Tell me what’s wrong so I can fix it!” I step forward.
He steps back and raises his eyebrows at me. Quietly and slowly, he says, “Then I tell you now you’re angrier than is helpful, and I’d like you to calm down a bit.”
“ ‘Calm down’?” I shout. “That’s how I can fix things? By caring less?” I step forward, my hands fisted so hard, my nails are digging impotently into my palms. There isn’t any time, and he won’t help me. How do I make him help me? He has to help me.
He steps back and looks at the floor. “That’s not what I said—”
“Yes, it is!”
And I shove him, once, hard, both hands on his shoulders.
Charles staggers backward two steps under the force of my push and holds his hands up by his shoulders. He isn’t looking at me. He’s breathing hard through his nose.
I clap my hands over my mouth, appalled at myself. “I’m sorry, Charles.”
“I know. It’s all right.”
“Oh my god.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just go.”
“Go?”
“Please, Annie.”
“But I—”
“For god’s sake,” he says through his teeth, and then he puts his hands over his face. I see his fingers trembling.
So I go. I walk out the door, close it behind me, and sit in the hallway, my arms wrapped around my head.
I hear Charles moving. I hear water run through the pipes. Is he making coffee? No, it must be the shower. He’s taking a shower.
I sit there in the hall, ashamed, crying as quietly as I can manage. After about twenty minutes he texts me—my phone bleeps.
And then the door opens.
“Heard your phone out here,” Charles says. His hair is wet over his forehead, and he’s smiling a little. “Do you want to come in?”
I nod and rise and go in, and as soon as the door is closed, I throw my arms around his waist and burst into noisy tears and apologies. He puts his arms around me and tells me it’s all right, I’m all right, we’re all right, everything will be fine. It’s all nonsense. I will never be fine again.
“I love you so much,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“I hurt you.”
“I’m all right.”
“I pushed you.”
At this, he actually laughs, “My harpy, you’ve been pushing me since the day you kissed me.”
“I mean I physically pushed you!”
“I know what you mean, sweetheart, and it doesn’t matter.”
“How can it not matter?”
He steps back and holds my face in his hands. “Will you ever do it again, to me or anyone else?”
“Oh my god, no!”
“And that’s why it doesn’t matter.”
I put my arms around him again. “I love you. I’m sorry. I love you so much.”
“I know, Annie. It’s all right.”
“And I get the monster thing better now.”
He kisses the top of my head. And he starts laughing lightly.
I squeeze him. “How can you laugh?”
“It’s just so awful and ridiculous,” he says through a chuckle. “Here we are, with hardly any time together left, and we can’t even enjoy it for what it is, because we’re so wrapped up in what it’s not.”
“Why is that funny? It’s awful.”
“Oh, my termagant, my shrew.” He pulls away enough to put his hand on my cheek, and he smiles into my eyes. “It’s not genocide or famine or disease. It’s just the two of us, in a comfortable room, in our comfortable lives, with everything anyone could want except one tiny, immaterial thing. And all either of us is thinking about is the one thing we don’t have. That is fucking hilarious.”
He hugs me again, laughing still, and says, “Let’s go to bed, sweetheart.”
So we do.
The sex that night is amazing to me. He leads me by the hand to the bedroom, takes off our clothes methodically, and then lays me on the bed and kisses and caresses every inch of my body—every inch, the webbing of my fingers, the soft curve under my toes, the hidden, tender spot behind the top of my ear—and talks to me the whole time, telling me what I feel like, what he likes about my body. He doesn’t make me come; he doesn’t even try. He touches me almost worshipfully, and I’m left in a haze of pleasure.
Then he tells me I’m in charge, so I do the same to him, touching and kissing his beautiful body and talking to him, and I find I’ve made myself feel so in love with him, I can hardly stand it.
I shift gears, wrangle us so I’m on top. I grab his wrists and pin them above his head, thrust my tongue into his mouth. When I feel him smiling through the kiss, I stop.
“Can I try something?” I say.
“Anything,” he answers, grinning.
I sit up, turn around, and straddle him, facing his feet. I lean forward with one hand on his shin and I reach between my legs to position his cock.
“Brace yourself, Bridget,” I say, and he laughs out loud.
“Don’t laugh!” I say, laughing myself as I press down and he pushes into me. “Oh, that’s interesting. That is very interesting.” All my attention turns to the sensation of him inside me at this new angle. I can touch my clit as much as I want, exactly the way I want, this way. I move on him, one hand on my clit, one at his ankle, and ride him slowly.
“I really, really like this,” I say. I sit up to use both hands on my clit.
“That is magnificent,” he says, and I feel his hands on the backs of my thighs, on my ass. “You are magnificent.”
“I feel magnificent,” I say, eyes closed, all my attention focused on how it feels. I make myself come—a surprisingly solitary experience, considering his cock is inside me and his hands are on me. But it’s my hands on my clit and breasts. He can’t see my face; all he can see is how, when I come, my head tilts back.
As the pulsing fades, I lean back and lie over him, my back to his chest as I breathe in recovery. He wraps his arm around me. “You are spectacular,” he says into my ear, and he fucks me that way. He knits his fingers between mine and uses my hands to touch me, my breasts, my clit, my belly. When he’s using one hand to press steadily against my clit, he moves the other hand to wrap around my throat.
All the while, he’s murmuring into my ear, “You are so fucking amazing. I could never have enough of you. You’re the most beautiful woman, the sweetest, funniest, sexiest woman I’ll ever know. The way your body moves when you come, god, Annie. Touching you. Tasting you. I love the taste of you.”
And that, I think, is as close as I’ll ever get to hearing him say it.
I turn my head to kiss him, he grunts in pleasure, and I come again, thrusting against our entangled hands.