How Not To Fall (4 page)

“Got it.” I'm still dangling between the two ropes, holding on for dear life—my own and his.

“Okay, let's try again,” he says, and he gets back on the wall—
how did he do that?
—and climbs enough to let me down to the floor and put a little slack in the top rope.

“Right. Ready?” he says. “Sit down in the harness.”

I do, and the top rope tightens between us, almost pulling him off the wall. “Shit,” he calls. “Not yet.”

“Oh my god, sorry!” If I had a hand that wasn't occupied with preventing Charles from a thirty-foot free fall, I would facepalm.

“My fault, I was unclear.” (It
so
wasn't his fault.) “When I say, ‘Take,' keep the rope locked down and sit down in the harness.”

“Okay. Ready when you are.” Rope locked. Knees bent. Anchor rope as taut as I can get it.

“Okay. Take.”

As he lets go, I sit, and he only goes down a couple of feet before the rope catches him. And both my feet are still on the floor. My heart is beating just as fast as when I was at the top.

“Well done,” he says. “Now when I say, ‘Lower,' you say, ‘Lowering,' and just gradually let out the rope. Ready?”

“Yes.”

“Lower.”

“Lowering.” I feed the rope out, keeping the pressure as steady as I can, though the nylon is burning against my already sensitive palms. It's a little jerky, and I slip once, but he makes it down in one piece. When his feet touch the ground, I am elated. Dr. Charles Douglas put his life in my hands, and I did not kill him.

“This is fun,” I say.

“It is fun. Want to climb another wall?”

 

We each go about five times. By the end of that, my palms are red and throbbing, and my arms feel like they've been turned to rubber and then set on fire. I think this might also describe the smell emanating from my sweaty, disgusting armpits. About midway through, I took off my T-shirt—a pink one that reads
NICE WORLD—LET'S MAKE IT WEIRDER
that my mom got me when I graduated from high school—because it was literally soaked through, like somebody threw a bucket of warm water at my back.

So I'm there in yoga pants, a sports bra, and a climbing harness, looking . . . well. I want to tell you I look powerful and sexy, like those women in commercials for exercise equipment, where sweat beads on their toned, tanned abs as if they've just been Rain-Xed, but actually I look and feel like cooked spaghetti, pale and soggy.

I'm lying on my back on the thick mats that cover the entire floor of the climbing gym, trying to persuade more blood to flow into my throbbing arms. I tell Charles, “I had this gym teacher in middle school—”

“Middle school is how old?”

“I was, like, twelve?”

“Ah. Okay.”

“This guy was a meathead. And one day we're all trying to do pull-ups, right, and a buncha twelve-year-old girls, we're not going to be able to do many. But I couldn't do
any,
not even one. And this meathead gets right in my face”—I put a hand over my face, to show where he stood—“and he yells,
‘Upper-body strength, Coffey!'
And all I remember is this huge, red, bulging face. It was like my lack of ability to do a pull-up actually made him
angry
. Why would it make him angry?”

Charles hands me a paper cup of water from the fountain and sits down next to me on the mat. He says, “I don't know.”

“I can do the biceps kind of pull-ups now, but I still can't do the front ones. And it's those front ones you need for this, huh?” I lean on my elbow and sip the water.

“You don't need them, but they help,” he says. “The biceps kind is a chin-up.”

“Oh. Those are the ones I can do. Chin-ups. I can't do any pull-ups.” I turn my face to him. “Can you do any pull-ups?”

“I can,” he says, and I don't think I'm imagining the smugness.

So I say, “How many?”

He gets up and walks over to the emergency exit door, over which is mounted a horizontal slab with a variety of grips molded into it. Charles jumps up and grabs it, and he starts doing pull-ups. Oh, this is hilarious and adorable. He's showing off. When he gets to ten, I start counting out loud. At fifteen, he's slowing down. He drags himself painfully through the twentieth, and then lets himself drop down to the floor. He walks back over the mats and sinks down next to me, breathing heavily and grinning. He lies back with his arms over his head, hands curled. There are veins standing out on his forearms. Dude. I know he was showing off, but it fucking worked.

“That'll make the rest of today a challenge,” he says through his panting breath. He looks up at the ceiling and then puts his hands over his face and says, “God, what an idiot I am.”

“Who's Bridget?” I say.

“Hm?” he says, dropping his hands to the mat again.

“Who's Bridget? ‘Next time, brace yourself, Bridget.'”

“I ought not to have said that. It's a stupid, rather mean joke.” He pauses for a minute and then says to the ceiling, “What's foreplay to an Irishman?”

“Oh, I see. ‘Brace yourself, Bridget,'” I finish. “That's pretty funny.”

We lie there, staring at the ceiling for a few more minutes, until Charles says, “Right, young Coffey,” as he drags himself up from the floor. “Let's get out of here.”

He holds out a hand to me. I take it, very aware of his calloused fingers against my swollen, red palm, and between us we manage to get me to my feet. In the lobby, I return the rented harness and shoes while Charles packs up his stuff—he has his own shoes and harness and a chalk bag and all kinds of stuff.

I pull off my soggy socks, look at my mangled feet, and say, “Ah, memories.”

“Hm?”

“The bleeding blisters take me back to my innocent youth,” I tell him. “Pointe shoes.”

“You dance?” he asks.

I'm surprised by the question. “Wow, you really do know nothing about me.”

“That's what I was saying. Well, that explains why you climb so well for a novice. I'd have thought you were having me on, if you hadn't been so nervous about the height.”

“I climb well?” I can't help it. It's always exciting to hear I don't suck.

“Balance, flexibility, strength, coordination—yes, you climb very well for a beginner. Practice would allow you to build the motor patterns so you can climb efficiently, and you'd construct decision maps for choosing moves, which would make you faster.”

“And I can stand on my toes!” I add as I slide into the flip-flops I wore to the gym.

He smiles at me. “Yes. I can't do that.”

“But you can do pull-ups, which I'm sure more than makes up for it. Also, even without that you've got”—I stand on tiptoe in front of him and measure flat across the top of my head—“three inches on me.”

“But I can't put my knee in my ear. A skill worth coveting. Ready?”

We walk out to his car and head home.

“Well, young Coffey, what shall we do next? Coffee on Thursday?”

“I can't Thursday, I teach at the community center that night.”

“What do you teach?”

“Dance, dummy.”

“How should I know? You might have taught biology or maths or, for all I know, painting or poetry or Polish.”

“Just dance,” I say. “Ballet on Tuesdays, jazz on Thursdays, and this semester I rehearse on my own on Wednesdays too.”

“What are you rehearsing for?”

“Just the end-of-year recital. All the teachers do solos. It's no big deal, but, ya know, you can't just throw something together.”

“No,” he says. “
You
can't just throw something together. Well. What time are you finished Thursday?”

“Seven thirty.”

“How about I meet you there—on Grant Street, right?—and we can get some food and work for a couple of hours. You'd be working anyway, right? Me too. Might as well work together.”

“Sure.” I smile. In my head I'm already texting Margaret:
“WE MIGHT AS WELL WORK TOGETHER!!!” :-D

 

And when I get home, of course I dissect the whole adventure with Margaret.

“So he showed off,” she summarizes. “But mostly he was teachery.”

“Yes.”

“And on Friday he brought you food and said you were ‘his sort.'”

“Yes.”

“And you're having a study table on Thursday.”

“Yes.”

“Dude, he
likes
you.”

“I think so too! But there isn't anything.... Like you said, he built a wall.”

“Yeah, I don't mean he
likes you
likes you, I think he wants to, like, mentor you as you launch into the world.” She makes a launching gesture that looks to me kind of a lot like masturbation, and we both laugh.

“There was totally mentoring happening on his side, at the rock wall,” I say to my bowl of tuna and greens. “And on my side, it was mostly, ‘I want to bite into your ropy forearms and run my fingernails down your treasure trail.'”

“I don't know, that was just my imagination. He kept his shirt on the whole time.”

“Ah. That's a shame. But it reinforces the ‘mentor not fuck-buddy' hypothesis. I bet he's got amazing abs, and he totally could have taken off his shirt and shown them to you.”

“Well, I'll take what I can get.”

F
or the uninitiated, here's how a ninety-minute community center jazz class goes during the spring: thirty minutes of warm-ups, twenty minutes of floor work, and then forty minutes on the routine for the recital. I'm choreographing it to “Happy.” They love the song and their dance, but I'm pushing them hard. By seven thirty, my eighteen tweens are sweating heavily, their heads down, their hands on their hips as they gasp for air.

“If it feels hard, you're doing it right,” I tell them. “Get the heck outta here, and I'll see you all next week—Paul and Amy, see me please!” The students applaud dutifully, if desultorily, and limp, groaning, out of the classroom. Paul and Amy approach me.

Paul and Amy are twins. They're in both my jazz class and my ballet class, and they're helping me out with my solo in the recital. They're going to sing live, their mom accompanying on the piano. Their mom (a professor in the IU School of Music, so, ya know, no slouch) is arranging “No One Is Alone” from
Into the Woods
as a duet for her two children, special for this performance. It's a cheat on my part—I don't love putting on a show, and I'd rather share the stage with my students, plus who doesn't love a brother and sister singing together, right? And yesterday—two weeks after I chose the song—it was on that TV show
Glee
.

We'll be a hit.

I've been choreographing to a click track and the sheet music since I chose the song, and Professor Paul and Amy's Mom promised me a MIDI this week so I'd have something like music to rehearse with.

“Amy and Paul,” I say to them very seriously. “Do you have the MIDI file from your mother?”

“Oh! I forgot!” says Amy. “It's in my bag.”

“Run and get it, and you can watch my dance. Want to do that?”

They both nod ecstatically and run off together.

And then I notice Charles hovering at the studio door, looking uncomfortable. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I say, “be just a minute. The kids are bringing me a thing, and I told them I would—”

Amy and Paul race back in, barging past Charles. “Here you go, Miss Annie,” Amy pants. She holds her Android up to mine and transfers the file onto my phone. Kids these days.

“Cool! Let's see what we've got here.” I plug my phone into the speaker jack and hit play.

The MIDI is not the most musical thing you've ever heard; it's basically the worst karaoke track in the history of the universe, but it's way better than a click track and my imagination. I start marking steps, and then I notice my students starting to gather at the door—Amy and Paul clearly told them I was going to run through my solo, and they all want to see.

I pause the music. “Ladies, if you want to watch, come in and sit cross-legged in front of the mirror and be very quiet. Understood?”

They nod silently and shuffle in.

There are parents in the doorway now too. And Charles. Well, no pressure. “The whole thing isn't even choreographed yet,” I announce to the room generally, “but let's see what we've got so far. Call out when you see a step you recognize.”

I run through what I've got, walking through the parts I haven't figured out yet, while students call “Ballonné!” and “Pas de chat!” There are gasps and whispers of “Four!” when I get to the pirouette at the end, which I finish in arabesque—barely. I stick out my tongue and wrinkle my nose as I wobble on my left foot, trying to salvage the finish. I could also just make it a triple, or finish on both feet like any normal person would. But it's a song about balance, so.

When the song ends, I curtsey ironically, all the way to the floor, as the students give a polite smattering of applause, and then I shoo them out. “Amy and Paul, thank your mother for me!” I call after the twins. Finally I turn to Charles and say, “Welcome! This'll just take a sec.” And I start putting my stuff away. It's hot in here, with a little bit of sweaty tween stank.

“How long have you been dancing?” Charles asks.

I pull on sweat pants and a T-shirt—this one has a cherry drawn into a grid of the value of pi to the twenty-five-hundredth decimal (another one from my mom)—over my leotard and tights and say, “Since I was three.” I shove my feet into my Chacos. “I kinda went the professional training route for a couple of years, but it wasn't for me.” I pull the bandana off my hair and allow the sweaty, curling mop to make its own decisions about how to behave. I look at him and smile. “Okay, ready.”

He's looking at me with his mouth open. “I had no idea.”

“It's not that related to school, I guess. That's sort of why I changed direction.” With my backpack on one shoulder, I lead him out of the studio. I wave and call bye to students, parents, and other teachers as I go. Once we're out, I turn to him and say, “Where to?”

“Do they know?” he says.

“Does who know what?”

“The students. The other teachers. Know that you . . . ‘kind of went the professional training route'?”

“Sure. Where're we going? I have a fuck ton of work
and
I'm starving.”

“What made you quit?”

“I didn't quit,” I say, my index finger in his face. “I changed direction.”

And he laughs. He laughs and starts walking down Grant Street. “Of course, what was I thinking? How about Laughing Planet?”

“Great.”

It's only a couple of blocks, but I walk as slowly as I can. Spring has finally come—late this year—and the air has that fresh, muddy smell from rain earlier today. I think the sun should never set before eight p.m. There should be a rule.

“Petrichor,” Charles says, walking beside me, his hands in his pockets and his satchel over his shoulder.

“Huh?”

“The word for that smell you've been inhaling as if it'll get you high. It's called petrichor. The stones release oils when they get wet, and that's what the smell is.”

I look at him, astonished. “That,” I say, “is my favorite fact ever.”

And then we eat burritos and work on our respective papers.

I don't want to bore you with the details of my research, but the ultra-short version is that I study arousal coherence in anger. There're three levels at which we experience emotions: physiology (like heart rate), involuntary behavior (like facial expressions), and experience (what you pay attention to when someone asks you how you're feeling). And sometimes they all line up (coherence), and sometimes they don't (noncoherence), and my project looks at how they do or don't line up when people experience anger.

To do this, we induce anger in research participants and then measure their heart rate, reflexes, pupil dilation, facial expressions, and we ask them how they feel. Got it so far?

And the thing Charles found in my data, which I failed to notice, is that there were some outliers that seemed to form a pattern of their own. And I've been spending all this time trying to figure out what the deal is with the outliers. My working hypothesis is that it has to do with our mood induction method. I think it might be producing inconsistent results.

And if you don't care about any of that, I won't be offended. There are days when I don't care either.

So while we're eating burritos and working, I'm running my hypothesis past Charles, and he nods eagerly. “I think you're on to something. May I suggest another approach that could dovetail well with that one?”

“Does it involve a lot more work? Because the clock is seriously ticking, dude.”

“A bit more—for the purposes of your thesis, it's probably only necessary to be able to say you've considered it and it might prove a valuable avenue to explore in the future.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Trauma,” he answers.

“Trauma?”

“Your outliers are all women. Women are disproportionately the targets of interpersonal violence, and this is not an otherwise at-risk group. I think a reasonable potential cause for the differences are different reptilian vagal responses that are characteristic of trauma survivors. You look troubled by this.”

“Um, yes, because I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Reptilian vagus. Trauma. Look it up.”

 

I do. I go to class on Friday, and then I go to the library. I spend Saturday at the library too. Then I spend Sunday at the lab. So the next time Charles sees me, it's Monday morning. He finds me in the ducklings' office, fast asleep on the couch, with my face pasted to the pages of
The Polyvagal Theory
. He wakes me with a hand on my shoulder and a soft, “Annie.”

As I rise to consciousness and he hands me a mug of shitty lab coffee, I tell him, “Dude, I fucking hate you.”

“Finding it hard going?” he says, sitting at the far end of the couch. He takes a sip of his coffee.

“It's not just that it's hard to understand—which it is! It's
hard,
man. I'm not dumb, and this is
hard
. But the part that really sucks is—” I'm suddenly choked by the tears that have been chasing me through the weekend, that forced me out of the library, out of the apartment, into the lab, where I could be alone.

Charles sits calmly and blows on his coffee, waiting.

I start again. “The part that really sucks is reading the stories from the women, you know?” I sniff and gasp through my tears. “And I don't have a clue what my research subjects brought into the room with them in their central nervous systems; we didn't even
ask
. For all I know they could have been hit by cars or sexually assaulted or experienced birth trauma or been targets of violence—I mean, is this what the world is like? Are people walking around with these scars on their nervous systems, and we can't even see them?”

“Yes,” he says.

“I mean, have you read this?!” I brandish my book at him.

“Yes,” he says.

“I mean, listen to this.” I flip the book to the page that knocked me out of the library on Saturday, and hold up one finger while I read. “ ‘For example, following the rape, sexual encounters, even with a desired partner, may elicit a vagal syncope. Or the raped women may become anxious about sexual encounters and physiologically mobilized via sympathetic excitation to escape.' I mean . . . both of those are
terrible
.” I look up and stare at him, my jaw dangling in horror.

He nods, and a corner of his bottom lip tugs downward, like an apology. “I know.”

“You know what I loved?” I yell, like it's his fault, though I know it isn't. “I
loved
my cadaver dissection lab! I loved seeing how all the parts of the machine work, what they look like on the inside! It
never
bothered me—it's how I knew for sure I should be a doctor! But you know what grosses me out? Nauseates me? The way living humans treat each other!”

I'm choked again, and I just sit there and let myself cry.

We sit together, silent apart from my tears, which fade at last into a couple of noisy sighs.

Then Charles gets up and walks to the door. He stands there, his hand on the doorknob.

“Going to med school then, young Coffey?” he asks gently.

I nod and sniff.

“Good,” he says. “Want the door open or closed?”

“Closed,” I say.

And he closes it behind him as he goes.

As I sit, staring at the closed door, I remember that for the whole first year, I could hardly make eye contact with him, much less cry in front of him. I couldn't even say his name. I called him Dr. Douglas. In return, he called me Miss Coffey. Until one day, I was in a shitty mood because it was raining—I love the rain, honestly I do, but there's just some days, you know? Anyway, I was all grumpy, and I complained, “Can't you just call me Annie like everyone else does?”

And he said, very calmly, “Can't you just call me Charles?”

Which is when it all changed between us—I thought, anyway. That was when I was like, Charles and I have A Thing.

I practiced saying his name on my walk to campus each morning. “Charles,” I'd mutter. “Charles. Charles.” It sounds nice in his accent—“Chahls”—but it's awkward in mine. And then I'd get to the lab and say, “Good morning, Charles,” and he'd look up from whatever he was doing and say, “Good morning, Annie,” and I'd feel totally sure we had A Thing. And then he'd ignore me for the rest of the day. But it was like . . . “ignoring me” ignoring me. Ignoring me because he knew I was there.

I don't even know anymore if we have A Thing—if we ever had A Thing, or if it was always in my head. But the last few weeks, ever since Veggie Burger Friends Night . . . I don't know. I feel like he really is my friend. It's like the wall he built dammed off a lot of awkward stuff that made me feel anxious, leaving only the friends we could have been all along if I hadn't been distracted by my crush. I can't even tell now if I still have that crush. I only know that the closer I get to the end of thesis writing, the more I feel like he's the person I want to celebrate that with, more even than with Margaret.

It doesn't feel the same. I don't feel giddy or nervous; I just feel happier when he's in the room. He understands something about what I'm going through that Margaret can't. He's the person I feel comfortable around. First I made a fool of myself in front of him, then he corrected a mistake I made, then I was terrified on the rock wall, then he saw me dance, then I bawled all over the place in front of him. And now I feel like I could do anything, and he'd just sit calmly beside me, drinking his coffee.