How Not To Fall by Emily Foster (6)

It’s been raining for three days.

I walk the two miles to the lab under the giant, cheerful umbrella my parents sent me last year after I called them in tears to explain my certainty that I would never graduate from college because there was no way the precarious balance of events required to make that happen would ever actually work out; it was all going to fall to pieces and I would die alone.

And yes, I know that’s irrational. But sometimes—I don’t know if it has to do with the phase of the moon or what—sometimes the rain has a strange effect on my mood. It makes me worry that with each step, the earth might crumble under my feet and I’ll fall into a cavernous abyss, or that the tumbling cascade of events that make up my life will misfire in some small but momentous way, which sets off a chain of ruinous explosions around me, leaving me alone forever in a barren and desolate landscape.

I live at the edge of my abilities; I know that. I push hard against my own limits. And I’ve got a safety net as big as my parents’ hearts in case I fall, so I can take any risk, knowing that the worst possible consequence is a bruised ego. Most of the time, I trust the infrastructure of my life; I trust the universe to be a safe and loving place.

But what if it all . . . just . . . breaks into pieces?

My parents tell me it started when I was ten. I think I had just seen the movie Annie, and the combination of the name with the song “Tomorrow” . . . Apparently, I just have the kind of brain that wonders, How do you know the sun will come out tomorrow?

So I was worrying about this one rainy afternoon, crying at the apartment window—we had just moved to the Upper East Side, and I was watching the damp pedestrians in the park—and my mom came over and asked what was wrong.

I said, “Will the sun come back?”

“Of course it will,” she said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

She said, “Because it always comes back. That’s what the sun does.”

So I said, “But how do you know it will come back this time? How do you know?”

And then my dad came over and asked what was wrong, and Mom explained, and Dad said, “I really believe it will, but you know what I think? I think we should make a plan in case the sun doesn’t come out. How about that?”

So we sat in the apartment on that rainy afternoon, writing out a list of things we would do if it were never sunny again.

It turned out we would be okay.

However. I don’t know if you’ve ever walked in the rain in Indiana, but it is not like the rain in New York. In Indiana the rain pours down like someone is dumping out a bucket of mop water on you. It’s heavy and constant, and no umbrella on Earth can stand up to it. It is the perfect rain to make you wonder if the universe isn’t, in fact, a malignant and deliberately cruel place.

And it’s been raining like this for three days straight. It’s the fucking Apocalypse.

The umbrella my parents sent me makes a bubble over me, of alternating clear vinyl and pretty multicolor stripes. So I’m walking through the rain, looking at the wet springtime through rainbow stripes and worrying about the unstable chain of events that are about to unfold.

I’m rehearsing my thesis defense today, so that I can present my thesis defense next week, so that I can graduate the following week, so that I can start medical school, so that I can be a doctor, so that I can change the world.

Unless some tiny thing goes wrong and everything falls to pieces.

I mean, no fucking pressure, right?

By the time I get to the lab, I resemble nothing so much as a grumpy sewer rat. I’m wet and unhappy. I go into Charles’s office and say, “Hey, Charles,” and dump myself into the chair by his desk.

“Ah, young Coffey,” he says, not looking at me—he’s still finishing whatever he’s typing. And then when he does look my way, saying, “Thesis defense,” he stops, looking aghast at my state. “Do you not own an umbrella, Annie? Ought the lab to consider buying you one as a graduation present?”

“Dude, I had an umbrella! This is the level of wet I get with an umbrella in this godforsaken state.”

“Is there a towel somewhere you could use?”

“I’m fine. I’ll dry out in a few minutes.”

“You’ll catch your death, young lady.”

I give him a dirty look. “Dude, you’re a fucking doctor. You know that’s a myth.”

“One worries, nonetheless. Remember the world can’t be a better place because you’re in it unless—”

“Unless I am still actually in it. Yeah, thanks. That’s very nice of you. Can we get on with the whatsit, please?”

He looks at me for a moment and then takes a deep breath and says, “Sure. Go for it.”

I pull out my laptop and load my slides and get started.

It goes very badly. From typos in the slides to leaving out an entire section of the literature review to not being able to answer even the fairly simple questions Charles asks, my presentation is one big fail after another.

Finally I throw myself backward in my chair and sigh. “Today is not my day.”

Charles leans back too and says, “You are not usually so underprepared.” Which is probably a more productive account of my difficulties. “But you know how to fix it.”

“Yes,” I say in disgust. “It’s all just stupid mistakes.”

“Not stupid,” he says. “Careless. It’s a crucial difference. You are never stupid, and you are rarely careless. What is wrong?”

I shift around uncomfortably in my chair. “It’s the rain,” I mutter.

“The rain?”

“Yes, the rain,” I repeat, as if he’s deaf. “It’s been fucking raining for three fucking days, and I can’t fucking take it!”

“The rain prevented you from—”

“I know, I’m nuts!” I interrupt him. I sullenly tell him the story of the rain, leaving out the part about Annie, and adding, “Of course, when I finally took a philosophy class, I realized it was a matter of induction versus deduction. But it’s not really about ‘how do you know?’; it’s about ‘what will we do if it doesn’t?’ What will we do, how will we live, if the rain never stops falling?” I pause, my frowning eyes on Charles’s little office window. Then I look at my hands and say, “Now that I’m a grown-up, obviously, I don’t literally worry that the sun won’t ever come out, but some days ... I suppose I’m saying I’m underprepared because my thesis defense felt pretty unimportant in the face of the fundamental unreliability of the universe.”

“The fundamental unreliability of the universe,” Charles repeats as I glance up at him. He scratches his head and looks at me. “Annie, there are days when I do not know what to do with you.”

All I want him to do with me is kiss me. He’s looking at me with a warm, open expression, and the collar of his shirt is lopsided. But I am a grumpy sewer rat who doesn’t trust the universe to catch her if she falls.

He oscillates a little in his desk chair, his hand in his hair, just looking at me in that warm way for a minute. Then he says, “I read your thesis this weekend. Diana forwarded it to me. It’s . . .” He pauses. “I was very proud. I hope that doesn’t sound condescending; I don’t mean it that way. I mean it’s work I’m proud to have been a part of, however small a part. Your defense will be a walkover—as long as you don’t let the unreliability of the universe interfere with your slides.”

He’s proud of me. I sigh, and my body relaxes. I hadn’t been aware of the tension until it left me.

“I’m gonna go home, take a nap, and start over,” I say.

“Good plan,” he says as I rise and move toward the door. He follows me. We stand in an awkward silence for a moment. His hands are in his pockets. He still has that warm, open look on his face.

“Sorry to waste your time,” I tell him and, impulsively, I straighten his collar.

“You never waste my time,” he says. He’s looking at me.

No, he’s gazing at me as I am gazing at him.

I am not a person with good sexual intuitions, but this is unmistakable. I have experienced what it’s like to gaze at him while he looks back at me in a completely neutral way. I have had the experience of seeing someone else gaze at me while I look away so they don’t get the wrong idea. This is neither of those. This is definitely him gazing at me while I gaze back at him. This is him definitely not looking away.

Our faces are less than a foot apart.

He’s going to kiss me. Oh god.

Kiss me. Please, oh god, kiss me.

Kiss me!

Fine. You know what? Sometimes a girl has to take things into her own hands. There’s less than ten inches between our mouths. I can cross ten inches.

I do it. I lean forward and rise up on my toes. I put my mouth on his.

It is not a world changer of a kiss. In about three seconds he pulls away.

“Annie,” he says, and it’s a warning.

“Sorry,” I say.

But no, wait. This was unmistakable. I look up at him, my eyebrows knit. “Can I just . . . I know today is not my day and the universe is an unreliable place, but can I get a reality check? I really could have sworn you wanted that too.”

He takes another step back and says, very quietly and carefully, “It is genuinely, seriously, unambiguously inappropriate for us to have any kind of physical relationship, Annie.”

“I know, but—”

“I could lose my job.”

Well, fuck me. I am the selfish bitch who never even considered what the consequences might be for him. I lower my chin guiltily, still looking at him, and say, “I’m sorry.”

He sighs, closes his eyes, and runs a hand through his hair.

“Look, you’re not wrong,” he says. He goes back to his desk then and sits down and gestures for me to sit down too—on the opposite side of the desk. “I’m saying this so you know it’s not your fault and you’re not imagining things. I did want to. And I’m your boss. Which makes it both not okay and my fault if anything happens. Does that make the remotest sense to you?”

“Not really,” I admit.

“Okay,” he says patiently, in teacher mode now. “Would you agree there is a power differential between us, that I control administrative access to something in which you have a vested interest?”

“I guess, technically, you could interfere with my thesis.”

“And your work hours and your publications. I manage all that stuff. And what if I made sex a condition for getting time sheets—”

“You would never do that.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. That’s what I’m saying.”

“But you’re—”

“Look, separate the people from the principle. This isn’t about my character or yours, it’s about the dynamics of the system. In principle, can you see why it’s important?”

I huff. “That any generic supervisor who controls access to degree—or money—related resources not have any sexual relationship with their supervisees?”

“Because there’s too much potential for the supervisees not to have full choice.”

“But I totally have full choice!”

“The principle, Annie.”

I huff again and roll my eyes. “Yes, in principle I see it’s important.”

“Why is it important?”

“Because the subordinate person might feel like they have to do things in order not to piss off the boss person, who could retaliate.”

“Thank you.”

There’s a pause while I struggle not to say what I’m about to say. But it has to come out.

“But I’m not wrong that there is totally A Thing here,” I say. “Between us.” I make a “between us” gesture with my index finger.

“You’re not wrong,” he concedes. “But we are going to ignore it, because there is nothing we can do that doesn’t risk your well-being, in principle, and my job, in fact.”

“What about after I graduate?” I don’t even say it. It just comes out, entirely of its own volition.

“Annie—”

“In principle,” I say, “once a supervisor no longer has any administrative power over the supervisee, isn’t it okay for them to do whatever the hell they want?” And then I just sort of lose it. “How is it fair that just because we know each other through school, we should never get to do anything about The Thing? How is that right? That can’t be right.”

“How did we get to this from the fundamental unreliability of the universe?” he asks, rubbing his eyes under his glasses.

“We have A Thing!” I say. “We’ve had A Thing for ages! I thought I was wrong, but I’m not wrong.”

“I give up,” he groans. “Look, why don’t we talk about it after you graduate?”

“You agree we have A Thing?”

“Yes. We have A Thing. Christ on a bike.” With his elbows on his desk, he rakes his hands into his hair and stares at his blotter.

“And you’ll talk about it after commencement, on the tenth?” As far as I’m concerned, he has opened a negotiation.

“Sure. Yes,” he tells his blotter.

“Classes end May second and I’ve got no finals, so really I won’t be a student after that. We could talk about it then, on the last day of classes, instead of waiting until after commencement.”

He looks up at me and throws himself back in his chair. “Annie—”

“Why not?”

“Saints defend me. Christ and all the apostles fucked up the arse by Moses, fine. All right. We’ll talk about it on the second. Now for the love of god, please get out of my office, you harpy.” He shoos me with one hand, from his trench behind his desk.

I rise, but I don’t leave. “What time on the second?”

He turns his eyes to the heavens and says, “What time do classes officially end?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, go and look it up. That’s what time we’ll talk.”

“Okay, then.” I’m smiling now, and when I go outside, the rain has stopped.

 

That night I text him:

 

About ten minutes later he replies:

 

 

I answer:

 

 

 

 

 

I turn off my phone and plug it in for the night, and decide to go to bed early. I get myself off to sleep with a fantasy about what will happen at five o’clock, Friday, May 2.