by Rachel Kane
Is this PTSD? He wonders about that sometimes. He wonders whether he’s just too broken for an actual relationship. Like maybe it’s his problem now, it’s his fault people can’t get close to him. Not theirs.
It doesn’t matter what name you put on it, though. Whatever it is, whether it’s psychological or spiritual or just an instinct built out of a million bad experiences, it’s there.
“I don’t know what to say.” His voice is a strained whisper.
“Say you’ll accept it. Say it’s okay to give you something, Charlie.”
But Charlie’s shaking his head before Val even finishes. “No. No, I can’t.”
He knows what’s going to happen here. This is going to turn into a fight. It always turns into a fight. Has he even had an argument with Val before? No. Never. He doesn’t know what it will feel like.
The end of the world, probably.
“Is it because you got fired today? Is that why you feel bad?”
There’s a catch in Val’s voice when he says it. If Charlie didn’t know any better, he would’ve thought it sounded a little…guilty?
“Maybe? My life feels out of my control. I couldn’t stop Rumson. He was so damn creepy…and in the end, even though he never touched me again, he had the power, didn’t he? I was nothing to him, a bug that you flick away with your fingernail.”
“At least he’s out of your life, forever.”
“Is he, though? This is how it works, Val. There will be another Rumson, and another, and another. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, that they come after me like this.”
Val shakes his head slowly, seriously. “No, Charlie. I won’t let it happen.”
“You can’t protect me from it. Protection is the whole problem, isn’t it? Everyone sees me as this weak little boy, a plaything, a doll, but nobody sees me as a person.”
“I am really not good at these kinds of conversations,” Val says. “But I see you as a person. If someone was coming after my brother, wouldn’t I protect him?”
“I’m never going to be able to explain this to you, because you haven’t been through what I’ve been through. Nobody’s ever used you as a punching bag to work out their aggressions.”
Something changes in the room when he says that. He’s not sure he has put it quite so bluntly to Val before. Has he really talked to Val about anything? It feels like they’ve been having these deep conversations since day one, but has he told Val the deep dark secrets? Suddenly he can’t remember.
The atmosphere is like a strange, backwards world. The tree is the darkest, barest patch in the whole room, practically a shadow compared to the lights and decorations laid out on the floor.
“No one has ever done that, no,” said Val. “The boys back in school would pick on me, but my father’s money meant there were hard limits to what they would be allowed to do. As I grew up, people kept their distance from me. I was weird, they said. I had no friends, except my brother and my father. I’ve never been under threat, I suppose. Does that make a difference? Would I want to protect you less, if I’d been through the same things?”
Charlie feels that phrase like it’s made of heavy lead, instead of words: under threat. It presses down on him.
He knows what he has to do. His brother Taggart is just wrong. Charlie doesn’t need to learn to be harsh, he just needs to have space to run.
Like right now.
He needs to get away. The day has been too much for him, and as much as he wants to smooth things over with Val, he just can’t, not right now.
“I think I want to go home,” he says.
“It’s freezing outside. Stay here.”
“No, Val. I need to be in my own place.”
“Are you angry at me? About the bike?”
Why can’t you understand? Why can’t you just accept what I’m saying, without a lot of questions? Can’t you see that I’m hurting?
The urge to make it right is overwhelming. He has done it before, stopped fights in their tracks by being lovey-dovey, by putting his feelings aside. He has the skills. He could take Val to bed right now and make him forget about this conversation, the bike, everything.
It would just cost him a little bit more of his soul.
“I’m not angry,” he says. “I just need some time to myself.”
Val sighs then, a long, sad sound. He gets up from his spot next to Charlie and walks across the room. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought I could be normal. I thought I could do normal things. But I was wrong. I should have known I would mess this up somehow.”
“Val, it’s not about you, I promise.”
“It is, though. It’s my gifts that are causing you all this turmoil.”
“Look, let me think about the bike, okay, let me—”
“Not the bike, Charlie. Rumson.”
The room grows quiet. At the edges of Charlie’s vision, things are starting to go dark with panic, like each Christmas light twinkling out, one by one.
“What did you do, Val?”
“First, let me explain.”
“What did you do, Val?”
“I confronted Rumson. I told him to stay away from you!”
Ah, there it is. Charlie’s anger. He has been waiting for that. It’s always there, under the surface, covered over by his carefully cultivated tranquility, the easy-going nature he has worked so hard to achieve.
It’s like magma under the surface of the earth though. One crack, and molten hatred comes boiling out.
The anger brings clarity, a harsh coherence to the seeming chaos of the day. Everything falls into place, thanks to the anger. Everything makes sense.
“God damn it, Val! You got me fired!”
Val takes a step back. He hasn’t seen Charlie angry before, not like this. He doesn’t know what to do with anger.
“How was I supposed to know how he’d react?” Val says, a note of defensiveness in his voice. “He should have backed down!”
“You didn’t have to know how he would react, because all you had to do was not interfere!”
“No. No, I don’t accept that. You can’t tell me about all these men causing you harm, and then not expect me to do something.”
“Getting me fired isn’t really doing something, Val.”
“You’re looking at it the wrong way. This is actually a good thing. You’re free, Charlie.”
Fight or flight. That’s the choice he was talking about with Taggart. And even though every instinct told him to get out right now, to run home to his bus and never come out, it was Val’s confidence, his self-assurance, that made Charlie stay and fight.
“That’s so fucking presumptuous. What does that even mean, free? I’m broke, Val! Do you know how much it costs, even to live as simply as I do?”
“You can stay here. I can help you. We can fix up your bus, we can—”
“Wait,” says Charlie. Now he’s the one backing up a step. “Was this part of your plan? Did you try to get me fired, so I’d suddenly be beholden to you?”
“What? No, that’s ridiculous, you’re being silly.”
“Am I? You were a fucking CEO, Val, surely you knew all the possibilities. You work out everything ahead of time, even the fucking Christmas ornaments!”
“I wish you would calm down and stop cursing. I don’t know how to talk to you when you’re like this.”
“I’m like this because you made a shitty decision!”
“You are over-reacting. Now look, while it was not part of my plan to have Rumson fire you, if you look on the bright side—”
“The bright side. I’m sure it looks like that for you, because you get to control everything. You want me to be totally dependent on you. Jobless, homeless, I’m the perfect fixer-upper for you, a little project while you figure out what you want to do with your life.”
Even as he says it, he knows it isn’t right, it isn’t quite true, but he can’t stop the words now, they’ve been stored up inside him all this time. Every man that ever hurt him had
caused more and more anger to build up behind that wall of tranquility. But now the wall is down, and he can’t help what’s happening.
“You can’t blame me for that, Charlie. Your life is a mess. Even more of a mess than mine! You can’t spend your days wandering from one low-paying job to the next. What kind of life is that? Don’t you see that I can offer you something better?”
“So that is what you think of me. The truth comes out. I’m a mess. Damn, Val. That’s great. That’s just great.”
“That’s not what I mean, Charlie, but if you would just calm down—”
“No, I get it. Trust me. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before. Everybody in my entire life says the same thing. Charlie’s lazy. He’s not motivated. He needs a good kick in the pants. A slap in the face. A shove down the stairs. It all comes down to the same fucking thing, over and over,” and now he’s having trouble talking, because his breath is coming out in heaving sobs, like a giant fist is squeezing his ribs.
“Please slow down,” Val said. “You have to slow down. I’m not good at talking like this. It’s not one of my skills.”
“No, you don’t get to hide behind that fucking excuse. You don’t know how the world works? Bullshit. You know exactly how it works. Men with power, men with money, they make the rules, and guys like me… Well. We either serve you, or we get out of the way.”
“Where are you going? Charlie, stay, at least let me—”
“No!” He’s almost to the door. “You will not do anything to me. For me, whatever! Don’t touch me!”
“But can we, will you—” Fumbling with words now, Val is wide-eyed, reaching for Charlie.
Charlie slams the door behind himself and rushes for the elevator, jabbing the button with his thumb.
He’s worried about Val coming after him, but Val’s door doesn’t open. He doesn’t pursue Charlie.
In some way, that’s even worse.
Don’t you care enough to chase me?
It’s a foolish fucking thought, and just goes to show how confused this night has made him.
He’s broke. No money for a cab.
Perfect. This is how it always works out, isn’t it? On his own, no resources, no way home. Like it’s engineered to put him in his place, every single fucking time.
The doorman looks concerned at Charlie’s appearance. “Do you need me to call someone?”
No. No. No.
He walks out into the cold night alone.
24
Val
We have a phrase in business called a burning platform. It’s when your company has to make a difficult decision in a hurry, take a step it normally would never have taken. You wouldn’t normally dive straight down into the frigid North Sea, but if you were an oil worker on a rig that had exploded and caught fire, then jumping into the water might seem like a good choice.
I’m not good with metaphors, but this one spoke to me. My life was burning, and so I leapt into the cold sea of a relationship, something I would never otherwise do.
Now I was freezing, drowning, because the choice between diving and burning didn’t leave any good options.
This sounds very well sorted-out, when I phrase it that way, but it covers up what really happened to me the night that Charlie left. The way I stood by the door, stunned, unable to figure out the right thing to do. Let him go, or rush after him? All I wanted to do was follow him, explain, use all the words and persuasion I could, to make sure he knew I’d done all this for him. Not to control him, but to fill his life with good things.
Some part of me understood, though, that the pursuit would look very different in his eyes. He wouldn’t see me as the caring man trying to help him. To him, I’d be another predator making the final lunge. And maybe I could have reached him, maybe I could have gotten him to come back in, but it wouldn’t have been him in that case. It would’ve been the shell of him.
Even that sounds more rational than it really was. The sense of sorrow I felt, being torn in two directions at once, my head pressed against the door.
The sense that I had ruined a good thing.
According to my chart, you start with the Christmas lights, as they are heaviest. You string them from branch to branch, not so tightly as to draw the branches together, not so loose that they’ll droop and weigh things down.
He should have been here with me for this. He would know how to do it. I could have asked him to string them, then sat back and watched, his arms stretching forward. I would have watched the muscles of his neck, as he reached the highest branches.
You did this.
This is your fault.
You don’t deserve to be loved.
I thought that was probably true. Charlie had presented me with the simplest rule-set of all time: Don’t interfere, don’t try to control his life. And I couldn’t even follow that.
My whole life, I’ve known I was different from other people. Boys on their bicycles, boys swimming, playing chase and tag and football, I’d never understood what they were doing. I wanted to stay indoors. I wanted to look at numbers.
At the time it had just made sense. There were things I liked, and I didn’t care much if other people didn’t like them. It didn’t bother me, being separate from them.
As the years went on, it bothered me more. But what can you do about it? You can’t force yourself to be interested in things you’re not interested in. You can’t make yourself be normal. The boys in my world had moved on from football to women, bikes to helicopters and boats. None of it made sense. All I wanted was my charts, my organizing, my plans.
That’s what I told myself. I didn’t want a boyfriend or girlfriend, I didn’t want a life at all, I just wanted my things, my places, my plans.
A self-centered life, but it only works if you never get lonely. I could almost convince myself that I wasn’t. As long as I filled my hours with buying things, I could pretend that I didn’t need anyone in my life.
How was I supposed to do that now?
How could I tell myself that I didn’t need anyone, now that Charlie had proved otherwise?
This hurt so much, and I’m not used to things hurting, I don’t understand what to do with all the pain, the guilt, the knowledge I had messed everything up.
When the lights are on, you can start with the other ornaments. It is best if you put hooks on them first, and the most efficient way to do that is assembly-line fashion. Put all the hooks on, then bend them so they stay, and only then hang them on the tree.
I am nothing if not efficient. It took me hours to put all the hooks on, to twist them, to put each ornament on the tree in its proper, predetermined place.
Hours in which I tried not to think about Charlie, walking home in the cold rain.
It was difficult. I could put him out of my thoughts for a few seconds, but then everything would flood back in, the look of hurt on his face when I told him what I’d done.
I wished I could make it right, but everything I do just makes things worse.
There had been a debate about whether to put an angel or a star on top of the tree. I thought the angel looked too much like Charlie, blond, ethereal. So I went with the star. I had to stand on a chair to put it up.
Okay.
There is my first Christmas tree. The first one I’ve ever done on my own, in my own place, without having a professional do it for me.
I stared at it until the lights were blurry with tears, until the guilt was just too much, the sense of having misunderstood, the sense of having made a great mistake.
“I should have seen it coming,” I said.
“No,” Theo told me. “These things take practice. They really do. Relationships are hard.”
“Because there’s something wrong with me.”
“No, because they’re hard. Because people have conflicting goals, conflicting needs.”
I shivered in my jacket. The dawn was just breaking over the lake, and the dock glistened with a treacherously slippery sheen of ice. I stared at it
from a window of the house.
Yes, I’d run back home. Back to where I’d grown up. It didn’t matter that I’d only had a couple of hours of fitful sleep, nightmares about Charlie running away, running towards a cliff, and I was trying to save him, but each time, he’d slip just out of reach, and I’d wake up bathed in sweat.
I needed to be here. Theo was the one person with a chance of understanding how bad I felt.
“Do you remember when you left the company?” I asked. “How I asked you to stay, and told you I couldn’t run it without you?”
Theo nodded, sipping his coffee. “I remember.”
“After you left, I thought, surely I can do this myself. How hard can it be? But I failed. I didn’t have your charm, your people skills. I was lucky to be able to get out before the company was destroyed, before our fortune just evaporated. And now I feel like I’ve done it again. What’s wrong with me, Theo? Why can’t I do anything right?”
“C’mon now, you can’t think like that. There is nothing wrong with you.”
I scowled. “You don’t believe that. I have these gaps. These areas of life I can’t understand, no matter how hard I try.”
“What do you want me to tell you?” he said. “That you’re so flawed, nothing will ever go right for you? I could tell you that, but it wouldn’t be true. The fact is, there’s no CEO out there who can run a company without help. It can’t be done. That’s why there’s a CFO and a COO, a CTO and—”
“Yes, I know all the acronyms.”
“They exist because one person can’t do it all. Val, sure, you’ve never been like other people. But that doesn’t make you less than other people.”
“Other people understand how to keep relationships. They don’t sabotage them.”
Theo’s laugh was as loud as it was unexpected. “Dude, seriously, people sabotage their relationships all the time.”
I knew he was trying to help, but it only made me feel worse. If everyone did this, then what hope did I have? I’d never get it right.
“The answer is simple,” I said. “I’ll never do it again. You were right, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
