How Not To Fall (5 page)

Margaret was right. I can't take his sexy throat with me. But I have a feeling medical school will be a lot better if I can take his understanding and patience with me.

 

I spend the next week incorporating the literature on trauma and stress response into my thesis. Never have I been so grateful for my dance classes. It has always been true for me that in the studio, everything else disappears. As a teacher, I find it easy to let go of my academic work and focus on my students. I know I'm doing a good job when the tension in their shoulders and faces eases, when their bodies are resonating, freed, at least for now, from whatever troubles them outside their time in the studio with me, and they're completely focused.

And I've learned that the best way to make that happen in a ballet class is to kick. Their. Asses.

On Tuesday we do
grands battements
at the barre to Lady Gaga's “Born This Way” (“Hips square, my friends!”) and then do
échappés
in the center to Katy Perry's “Roar,” with me clapping on the downbeat and shouting at the top of my lungs, “SPRINGS! IN-YOURHEELS! SPINE! STRAIGHT! THEFLOOR! ISON-FIRE!” I correct a couple of students, sticking one of my fingers in their belly buttons and another at the base of their spines while they bounce in front of me and I mouth the lyrics.

It's one of the most beautiful sounds on Earth, the rasping, desperate gasps of a dozen tweens, their sweaty palms on their knees as they pant for air in the silence after I turn the music off after
échappés
.

“Feels good, huh?” I say with a grin.

They groan.

I laugh evilly and then begin, “Adagio, fifth position . . . and prepare.”

There is no ass-kicking like an adagio ass-kicking. I walk out that Tuesday night feeling like I've burned away a demon.

I haven't hung out with Charles since Burritos and Trauma Night, as Margaret is calling it. Mostly I've been in the lab or at the library. When he sees me in the lab, he says hi, but it feels a little like he's keeping his distance.

But by Friday my thesis is done.

It's done! . . . At least, this draft is done.

I e-mail it to Dr. Smith, and then I text Charles:

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Douglas: not a loquacious texter.

 

“I wanted to say,” I begin on the car ride to the rock gym, “that I don't fucking hate you.”

“Hm? Oh, that. No, I didn't think you did,” he says, eyes on the road.

“And I wanted to say,” I continue, “that I'm really grateful for all your help.”

“All part of the service,” he says.

“Rock climbing isn't part of the service,” I say. “Sitting with me until I'm done crying definitely isn't part of the service.”

He's silent until we park in the gravel lot at the gym. He looks at his hands on the steering wheel and says, “My last year as an undergraduate was hard. It's rewarding for me to offer you the kind of support I would have liked for myself.”

“What made your senior year hard?” It's impossible not to ask.

“Oh, the usual storm and strife,” he sighs, dismissing the question. “Come on, we'll climb some rocks.”

We go in and gear up and start to climb. We don't talk much, except about climbing. He teaches me some techniques, shows me how routes are mapped with colored tape on the wall, explains how they're rated for difficulty. I don't feel ready to start measuring my ability on rated routes, and he doesn't push me today. He teaches me to “hang from my bones.” He says, “Let your skeleton do the work, Coffey. Your muscles will last longer.” My muscles, in fact, crap out much sooner this time than they did last time, and I barely get through four climbs before I collapse onto the mats in gasping agony.

“You're trying to climb with your arms and hands. Climb with your feet and legs, and you'll last all day,” he tells me.

“Dude, I don't know what that means,” I say through heaving breaths.

“Never mind,” he says. “We'll work on it next time.”

Next time.

When he drives me home, he parks in a spot near my door, turns off the engine, and sits back in his seat.

And we just sit there.

And it's awesome.

It's awesome to be physically exhausted while you sit in silence with someone who gets it, and you don't have to explain that all you want and need is to be quiet and still together. To smell the faint warmth and spice of his skin, to hear him breathing, to watch his chest move lightly with each breath. To imagine—it can only be imagination—that the tension in his forearm has nothing to do with climbing, and everything to do with him wanting to reach out and hold your hand. To be enclosed in a warm dry car as the rain begins to fall, first in scattered specks on the windshield, and then more steadily.

“Starting to rain,” he says. “Better get inside.”

I nod and put my hand on the door.

He stops me. “Tuesday? We'll practice your defense?”

“Yup,” I say, my hand still on the door.

“Are you ready for it?”

“Not yet. I've got time this weekend.”

He nods. “Better get inside,” he says again, but again as I turn to open the door, he stops me. “Annie.”

I turn my face toward him but don't look up.

He says, “Er.”

And then I raise my eyes to his. And it's right there between us, as tangible as the gearshift. The Thing. The rain is growing louder around us, outside the car, and it feels like I'm nearer to him than I have ever been in my life, cloistered together in here. Charles swallows, and I want to put my lips on his throat. I want it so badly, I can barely remember to breathe.

He breaks the moment, tearing his gaze from me and staring instead at the steering wheel. “See you Tuesday,” he says.

I get out of the car and run inside before I get soaked.

I
t'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.”