How Not To Fall (22 page)

“You, Miss Annabelle Coffey, are remarkable,” he says. “No one could process today better than you are currently doing.”

“This is me doing it right?” I say. “I feel like a fuckup.”

“You are a marvel. I am so . . . Look, go and spend the night at Margaret's, and I'll come up there tomorrow afternoon to bring you home, okay?”

“Okay,” I say, pressing the phone close to my ear, my eyes closed. “I'll text you in the morning?”

“Okay.”

“I love you.” It just slips right out. I was trying not to say it, but the words are like a puppy squirming under a fence.

He's silent for a few long seconds. At last he says, “What would you prefer for me to say when you say that?”

“Um, anything that's true?”

“Even though the truth isn't your ideal?”

“The truth
is
my ideal. A shitty truth is better than a comfortable lie any day.”

“And that, my harpy, my dear termagant, is what makes you remarkable. Okay, let's try it. Say it again.”

“Say what again?”

“That you love me.”

“Um, I love you.”

I hear him inhale, and he says, “I know, Annie.” And then he adds, “How was that for you?”

“It kind of sucked.”

And he laughs. Real laughter, not bitter, not ironic. It's just funny to him that I both prefer the truth and feel like the truth sucks. I find I have a half smile on my face, listening to him. He says, “Better than a comfortable lie, though?”

I take a deep breath. “Should we try the comfortable lie?”

“You want to do that?”

“No.” In fact, my entire body is contracting with dread at the idea. “But it seems like the only way to test the hypothesis that an uncomfortable truth is better than a comfortable lie.”

“Okay. Go for it.”

“Okay.” I take another deep breath and say, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he answers blankly.

I feel a hard, sharp, stabbing pain in my chest that makes me gasp. I press my hand against my forehead. “Oh god, that sucks so much worse. Fuck. Ow.” I slip sideways down the wall and curl up on the floor.

“I'm sorry,” he whispers urgently. “Annie, I'm sorry. I wish it were true. I do. I wish I could. I think it must be one of the great failures of my life that I can't.”

“Don't ever do that again, not even if I ask you to,” I say.

“I won't. I won't ever lie to you, sweetheart, not even if you want me to. I'm sorry.”

W
ith a fancy bottle of wine and charmingly profuse apologies, Charles makes it up to Margaret and Reshma. He takes me back to Bloomington on Sunday afternoon and treats me like a princess, with dinner and reading to me in the tub—he joins me in the tub this time—and a long, slow-burning massage with oil that smells of citrus and something woody.

“Is this part of the Monster Deal?” I ask, my face half-muffled in a pillow.

“Merely the convenient meeting place of bottomless guilt and slavering lust.”

“Well, gimme some monster, baby.”

“Haven't you had enough to last you a while?”

I shift and snuggle deeper into the pillows. “I think you don't get that I
like
the monster. Have you not noticed that I enjoy being challenged and pushed?”

“Maybe I'm the one who's had enough for a few days, then. I'd rather be gentle,” he says, “if that's all right with you.”

It is. But it's heartbreaking. When he kisses me softly and slowly, as if kissing me is all he ever expects to do for the rest of his life, when he rests his hand on my forehead as he does it, when he moves inside me with the attentive, slow movements that notice every change in my arousal, every detail of my response, I feel more in love than I can contain. It brings tears to my eyes, and he kisses them away. And it feels like he loves me too, so that when I come, almost silently, his eyes watching mine and his lips touching mine, I whisper the words as low as I can, “I love you.” And then he closes his eyes, and my heart tears apart just a little.

He was right. I had no idea how hard it would be to accept him when he wasn't facing the monster. Not because I don't love him then, just as much. But because when it's him and the monster, it's like he's slaying dragons for me, fighting for me, trying to get to me through the walls and the monsters and everything that stops him from keeping his eyes open and saying it back to me.

I'm crying a little after I come, and I wrap my arms around his neck, to hold him close. “This is hard,” I say. And he tightens his arms around me, and it gets a little more difficult still.

 

We climb on Tuesday, as usual. What's great about climbing is that you forget everything else while you're doing it. It's like dancing that way.

Which is why it's only in the car on the way home from climbing that it occurs to me: this was the last time we'll climb together.

Climbing is our first “last time.”

I feel doors starting to close.

And so, on the drive home, I start crying.

Again.

I put my hand over my mouth. And then I can't stop crying. When we get to his apartment, Charles parks and we sit there together.

He raises his eyebrows at me, empathetic but puzzled. “We have these few days. A week. I don't understand—we have these few days, and you're acting as if it's already over.”

“I know,” I sniff. “I'd stop if I could. I'd forget if I could. If I could live the next six days unaware that—” I'm choked by tears, and I just sit there, crying for a minute, without access to language for what I'm experiencing. But then I consider: if I could live the next six days unaware that they were The Last Six Days, would I appreciate them? Would I notice the glory of his skin next to mine if I weren't so acutely aware of how few times I would feel it? Would it, in fact, feel as glorious? And when I say,
glorious,
I mean
tragic
.

Charles's thoughts seem to have mirrored mine uncannily. He says, “I wonder if it isn't some kind of survival mechanism that people are almost completely oblivious to almost everything about their present experience, to the simultaneous profundity and meaninglessness. The way every moment is both a celebration and a lament.”

We sit for a moment in silence and then he gets out of the car and comes around to my side, opening my door.

“Come on,” he says gently. “Let's have it then. Let's go in and have an argument and get it behind us. Say all the things that need saying so we get past it.”

I follow him blankly into the building and up the elevator.

“I'm not wrong!” I burst as soon as he closes the apartment door.

“Not wrong about what?” he asks calmly.

“About The Love Thing. This Thing we have is A Love Thing.” I sniff and cross my arms, trying not to cry anymore.

He leans against the wall and says gently, “You're not wrong. The Thing is A Love Thing. And it's equally true that The Thing involves me, and I can't. It's not that I won't, it's that I can't. It's like . . . being able to touch your toes. For some people it comes automatically, some people can work up to it, and some people will never be able do it. Love Things come easily to you. There's never been a day in your life when you haven't been able to do it, spontaneously and without effort. But I haven't, not once in my life. I am not built that way. My body does not know how, and it does not know how to learn it.”

“You won't even try,” I say. I'm angry. I'm enraged. I'm actually trembling with rage. Because it's not. Fucking. Fair.

He says, very softly, “This is me trying.”

“You did this on
purpose,
” I snarl.

“No”—he shakes his head—“Annie. No.”

“You fucking lied to me. You said—” But I can't think of one lie. Why can't I think of any lies? I feel like I've been led blindfolded into a room, with the expectation that a surprise party waits for me but actually it's a room full of snakes. “You fucking lied to me.”

“You feel deceived,” he answers softly. “I know that. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be
sorry;
just be
honest
.”

“Honest about what?”

“About how you feel! About what you want!”

“I want to be your friend. I want to give you pleasure,” he says. “And most of what I feel is self-contempt and regret.”

He's not defending himself, and that only enrages me more, fuels my urge to lash out, to make him feel
something,
to
make
him react.

“Why can't you just get angry and yell? Why can't you fight back?”

“How would it help for me to yell?” he inquires.

“It would show me that you're a human being, that you give some kind of shit about me.”

“My yelling is what will tell you I give a shit.”

“Yes,” I insist.

He sighs and rubs his forehead, then stuffs his hands into his pockets. “I forgot. You want me to lose control. Losing control is how I prove your worth to you.”

“Losing control is how you prove you care more about
me
than you do about being in control, you selfish asshole.”

He looks at me then like a deer in headlights. Terror. That's what I see. He's terrified, petrified. Of me.

“I do care more—” But he stops. And then—worst of all—he slides down the wall into a crumpled heap on the floor.

“Charles.” I approach him and put my hand on his shoulder—and he flinches away from me.

“I'm sorry,” he says in a painfully soft voice. “Annie. I'm sorry. Please,” He puts his hand over his eyes, and I feel a cold flood of shame that I've caused him such pain.

I should back off and leave him alone.

I should apologize.

I should let it go, stop pushing him.

But instead I lie on the floor in front of him, so I can see his face, see the pain he doesn't want me to see, the tears he's working so hard to hold back, and I say, “What if I weren't leaving? I'm not staying—I'm definitely leaving—but hypothetically.”

Ironic, dark laugh. “Don't think for one second that if you hadn't been leaving, I would have gotten into this in the first place. It was safe because you were leaving.” Another quiet laugh and a shake of his head. “It was safe.”

Silence. I roll onto my back and look at the ceiling, wondering idly at the range of silences I've experienced in the last few weeks, from the warm, affectionate silence after we first had sex to this . . . this cold, acid silence.

“Is this what it was like with Melissa?” I ask, unable not to. “Both of you on the floor, crying?”

“No.” He sniffs. “I sulked, and she threw cushions at me.”

More silence. I stare at the ceiling.

“How's that acceptance working out for you then?” he inquires. I turn my face toward him and find he's resting his cheek on his fist, his elbow on his knee, watching me with a kind of exhausted, grim, red-eyed half smile.

“It's easy when we're climbing or having sex or eating,” I say. “It's hard when . . .” I pause, struggling to explain. “It's hard when my feelings get more intense and yours don't. Any feeling. Love, anger, anything.”

He nods.

I ask, “How's the monster thing?”

“It's easy when we're climbing or having sex or eating,” he agrees. “It's hard when you cry.”

“Is that what I should be doing differently? Should I not cry?”

“There's nothing you need to do differently—though I do have one request.”

“Yes. Anything.”

“The actual name-calling is not so helpful.”

I look at him aghast. “Did I call you names?”

He nods sadly, and his lower lip twitches as he says, “ ‘Selfish arsehole.'”

“I said that?”

He nods again.

“Oh my god, I don't think that about you. You're, like, the least selfish person I know. I was just mad. I didn't mean it. I—”

“I know that, Annie. But when you say it, I believe you.”

“Don't believe me! I'm a fucking idiot. I'm a mean, bullying bitch. I'm—”

He interrupts, “The name-calling rule applies as much to yourself as to me.”

“I suck so much at fighting!” I despair, and I flop my limbs melodramatically on the floor.

He laughs—a sweet, light, genuine laugh. “You haven't had much practice. Apparently, I can help with that.”

I turn my face to him. “Is there a book I can read about how to fight?”

He shrugs. “It's not that complicated. The main thing is to remember that you like the other person enough to care about what they've done or said.”

I
do not begin the day optimistically. We have ahead of us an hour-long drive to the airport, an hour of airport administrivia, four hours on the plane, and another ninety minutes of rigmarole on the other end before we're in our hotel. Eight hours in the constant, public company of the man I'm in love with, who is determinedly not in love with me.

But we weather it pretty well, considering. There is a helpful moment early in the day that helps set a mood of mutual patience. We're standing in the security line at the airport, and I'm reading the inside of my passport out of sheer desperation for something to occupy my brain.

“Good god, Coffey, was this the best you could do?” He's staring at my passport picture in mock horror.

“Okay, Mister Smartmouth, now you have to show me your passport picture, just to be fair.”

“Oh no!” he says as I grab for it, and he actually puts it behind his back! Like a child!

Well. His desire not to wrestle like fools in the airport security line is greater than mine, and so I win this particular struggle. But when I open his passport, I barely notice his photo.

“‘The holder is the Honourable Charles Douglas,'” I read. I look at him and grin. “The Honourable Charles.”

Charles looks chagrined. He snags his passport out of my hands and puts it in his pocket. He says, “The Duke of Devonshire—the Duke of bloody Devonshire, mind—has said in public, the whole system is an anachronism; just put the thing out of its misery. It's dead. And he's right. The whole thing is cold on the slab.”

“Isn't there a thing now from
Downton Abbey,
they're trying to let women inherit?”

“Pumping blood into a corpse,” he says dismissively. “Or I suppose it's more like a brain-dead patient on life support. Just taking up a bed that somebody else is waiting for, but the family can't let go. The worst part is, the patient is an abusive, destructive, self-aggrandizing arsehole of monumental proportions, and still the family insist on sustaining a heartbeat for as long as they can.”

We stand in silence for a few minutes before Charles quirks up the corner of his mouth and says, “The Duke of Devonshire also went to the same school as Bertie Wooster.” And then he giggles, a nearly silent, shoulder-shaking giggle that makes me laugh too.

What I'm saying, I suppose, is that Charles is unpredictable, interesting to talk to, and forgiving of my crankiness, and that's pretty much the best traveling companion you can ask for. I'm reminded, as I watch him negotiate the fatiguing indignities of air travel, that long before I put any part of his body into any part of my body, I just
liked
this guy. I like him still.

And so I just let the rest of it go for now. We're going to Montreal. Montreal with Charles can only be better than Montreal on my own.

The hotel is at the upper end of beige hotels, comfortable, familiar, and anonymous. We could be in any city in North America—so I'm startled when Charles checks us in in French. We have separate rooms booked, on separate floors. This is a plan made back in February.

In the elevator Charles says, his eyes on the number panel, “Now then, young Coffey, what's your pleasure? Sleep separate? Sleep together? Your wish is my command.”

“My wish is to know what your pleasure is,” I say.

“You are,” he says, glancing at me.

The elevator dings at the twelfth floor, and the doors open. I look at him as I hit the close doors button. Of course I'm going to spend these nights with him. I'm in love with him. I'm going to put my body in his hands and receive everything I can from him, accept all he is willing to give, give all he is willing to accept.

The elevator continues to the fifteenth floor.

“Before, at the front desk?” I say. “Checking in in French?”

“Mh?”

“That was hot.”

Charles chuckles as the elevator doors open again. “If my adolescent self could have known that a woman like you would say something like that, I'd probably have studied harder.”

When we get to the room, we've barely put our stuff down when Charles grins at me and says, “Let's fuck in the shower and then go have dinner.”

“Okay!”

We do. Actually, we fuck in the hotel shower and on the giant hotel bed and on the woolly hotel carpet, and then we put on grown-up clothes and go down to the grown-up restaurant, both of us pink-cheeked and grinning with sex.

Eating in the fancy hotel restaurant with Charles is eye-opening. I walk into it, treating it like a joke, an awkward joke we'd have to fake our way through together. But he is not faking. I see it in the way the waiter talks to him—in French—and the way he orders. I see it, when our food arrives, in the way he uses a fork and knife. Have we ever eaten a fork-and-knife kind of meal together? Have I ever seen the way he keeps the fork upside down and in his left hand, index finger extended?

Have I ever noticed how people—strangers—respond to him? His quiet, deliberate command? He is always gentle, always calm, but always the one in control of an interaction. With the waiter, with the busser, with the woman back at the check-in desk. With me. They—we—all behave as he requires.

He's not doing it on purpose; it just happens.

I find myself self-conscious about my method of eating asparagus—a joke I didn't understand when I read it in
Right Ho, Jeeves,
but that resonates so deeply now that I stare helplessly at my plate, the asparagus arranged in unmanageably long stalks beside a piece of fish drowned in a buttery sauce that I now imagine staining the only dress I brought with me.

I watch him dexterously remove a bone from his fish with his fork and knife, and I say, “So . . . you're, like, really rich, right?”

“Hm?” He looks at me, startled by the question. “No, no, not—well, I mean, I suppose yes, by many standards.”

“Because of the title thing?”

He tips his hand side to side, so-so. “It's not strictly inherited wealth. My father is, predictably, a corrupt banker, so I was raised, you know, in the one percent, but I haven't taken any money from him for years. Most of my own money comes from the patent on the blood pump. Why do you ask?”

“You own a patent?”

“Well, me and a few other people.”

“So you're rich because
you're
rich, not because of your dad or the title thing.” I'm relieved by this. “See, I keep saying you're a genius.”

“No, honestly, I'm not. The title . . . God, you don't really want to hear the history of the British peerage.”

“Of course I do! Inherited wealth,” I say. “Go.”

He piles a little heap of food onto the back of his fork and takes a bite, chewing and thinking. Then he takes a drink of wine. He says, “Erm,” a few times.

And then he starts telling me how the system developed in an economy where land was power and wealth and the very survival of the people—land equals food equals survival. You fight for it and you pass it to your children—to your son, because it's the men who fight in wars and the women are, like the land, fertile property that you fight for. But when the economy shifted from agrarian to industrial, power and wealth shifted away from the land, so land was a liability rather than an asset.

I hope you're not snoring. I'm not. I could not be more fascinated. I'm sitting in a froufrou restaurant with a titled aristocrat (almost, anyway), and he's explaining what the hell happened between Jane Austen and
Downton Abbey
. I got a 5 on the Advanced Placement European History test four years ago, and yet I know nothing about this.

He says, “Anyway, if a family managed the transition well, they have their estates intact. The ones that didn't ... don't.”

“Does the Duke of Devonshire still have his family's stuff?”

He snorts a laugh. “Yes. He has their stuff.”

“And your family doesn't?”

“No, our lot didn't do brilliantly—at first it was just our own shortsighted ill management, and then we had a reasonable share of bad luck,” he says.

“Bad luck?”

“Well, not so much bad luck as bad wars. My great-grandfather was managing pretty well, but he was killed in the war—the First World War, when my grandfather was only an infant. Taxes and . . . it doesn't matter. Anyway, Hitler came along about the time my grandfather was old enough to take the reins. He had a bad time of it in the war, and when he came back, that was the end. He died in the 1950s of an accidental overdose of painkillers due to a war injury, goes the story, and that's true enough. My father paid the bulk of that price, in every sense. The estate was obliterated, nothing left by the time he inherited.”

“Wait, how old is your dad?”

Charles shrugs with a thoughtful moue. “Must be seventy or so? Three generations before him didn't see forty, so he didn't have any of us until he'd crossed that threshold.

“Anyway, it doesn't matter as much as you might think about losing the stuff. The title—and the social capital that goes with being born into that class—plus some brains and no moral compunctions at all, were more than enough for my father to leverage a new fortune out of an economy that was bleeding working-class jobs. You
can't
be interested in this.”

“Sure I am! Wouldn't you be interested to know my family's history?”

“Yes, I would. Tell me.” He takes a sip of wine.

“Oh.” That was a pretty fast change of subject. “Dude, I have no idea. All four of my grandparents were born in New York. I'm half Irish, half German. Both of my grandfathers were doctors. One grandmother was a nurse, the other was a teacher. That's all I know.”

“Crikey, really?”

“Really. It never even occurred to me to wonder, until now.”

“I cannot begin to imagine what that's like,” he says, bemused. By now the waiter has cleared the table, and we're sitting across from each other, a few scattered glasses and utensils between us.

Charles puts a hand over mine, on the table. “Anyway, where we started with this is that I'm not a genius at all, I was born with every cultural privilege you can have, and an appalling human being for a father, who pushed some school officials into letting me skip forms until I was three years younger than everyone around me. Without the money and the title, no one would have done what he wanted.”

“And then you'd just be starting your residency now?”

He nods. “I suppose that's true.”

“And then I wouldn't have met you.”

He gives me the warm, melting smile. “I suppose that's true too.”

“Well, for that, anyway, I'm grateful to your appalling human being of a father.”

“Come back to the room,” he says softly. And he holds my hand as we walk to the elevator. He holds it still as we're lifted up to the fifteenth floor.

I'm nervous before my talk on Friday, but once I've started, it's fine. It's just like my defense—easier, actually, because the questions at the end are really simple and obvious, not like the questions from Charles and Professor Smith.

And of course Charles is sitting at the back in case I get lost. But I don't.

He comes up to me afterward, at the front of the crowd who wants to talk and ask questions. “Shrew,” he says, and I know he means I did well. He toys briefly with the ends of my scarf—the same black scarf he blindfolded me with a few weeks ago—and smiles into my eyes. “Come up to the room after you're done here?”

My lips part and I nod.

When I let myself in half an hour later, he's sitting on the bed, reading, and a room service cart stands in the middle of the room.

“Hey,” he says, putting his article aside.

“Hey.”

“Good questions?”

“Yeah, good. One lady offered me a job.”

He smiles at this. “What did you say?”

“ ‘Thanks, but I have eight more years of school to do first.' ”

“Excellent answer,” he says. He gestures toward the cart. “Food.”

“Oh, thank god. Just let me shower first.”

“Mh.” He's already reading again.

After my shower, I don a hotel bathrobe, pick up two covered plates, and join Charles on the bed.

“Nearly finished,” he mumbles, still reading.

I lift a lid and find a pile of triangular sandwiches. I don't even care what kind. I pick one up, take a huge bite, then ask through the mouthful, “What are we doing tonight?”

“Mh.”