How Not To Fall (19 page)

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.

I
t'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.”