Falling Under

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  Since the excruciating family dinner, you’ve been trying to reconcile the Erik you’ve been fucking with the half-brother Lucas despises. Your heart and loyalty must be with Lucas, but the story of Erik’s childhood speaks to you. You know now why you were drawn to him. It wasn’t only his beauty, wasn’t just physical. Like you, he knows the extremity, of loss, of being lost. He knows what a scary place the world can be. This knowledge is something Lucas does not have, an awareness he is missing. Lucas believes the world is a good place and that people live happily ever after. You were hoping his belief would infect you, inspire you, and perhaps heal your pathetic, jaded soul.

  But instead, something in Erik called and you responded, proving your worst fears about yourself. You are doomed to selfishness, doomed to fail the ones you love, just like your parents. You are a faithless piece of shit who will never deserve to be loved. You have a sick feeling that when you go inside and ask the questions you need to ask, Erik might prove he is just as bad, possibly worse.

  You go up the stairs and knock on the door. He opens it a crack and peeks out. Seeing it’s you, he opens it wider, lets you in and shuts it quickly.

  “Did you know?” you ask, and look for an answer on his face.

  He lights a cigarette and gazes at you through narrowed eyes.

  “You shouldn’t have come.”

  ***

  “What question?” Erik says again.

  “You remember.”

  “Not really,” he says. “ Besides, you were the one cheating on Lucas, not me.”

  “I know that.”

  “There’s no absolution here, Mara. We have to just live with it.”

  “I know that too, but someday I’d like to think I might be happy. I’d like to believe that everything I touch isn’t going to turn to shit.”

  “Good luck,” he says and shrugs.

  “There must be something we can do.”

  “Besides fucking?” he says.

  “Yeah, besides that.”

  He sneers. “Oh, I get it. You want to talk about feelings and cry and all that shit.”

  “Well, I want to talk at least.”

  “Bad news: I don’t.” But he lowers himself onto a stool and hunches there.

  “Tough,” I say, and push on. “Let’s start with this: why did you have sex with me? In the beginning.”

  His eyes lift and meet mine. “I thought that was pretty obvious.” I can read his thoughts as if they’re my own, but I am not to be distracted or deterred.

  “Listen.” I lean forward. “Let’s just get this out of the way, because I’ve wondered all this time and I need to know.”

  “Fine. Get to it,” he snaps.

  “You and Lucas hated each other.”

  “Check.”

  “You came back years later and tried to make amends, he rejected you.”

  “Check.”

  “He was a spoiled brat who’d had a perfect life compared to yours and he had no empathy, no room in his heart for forgiveness...”

  “Where’re you going with this, Mara?”

  “And there he is, all golden and smug with his art and his trust fund and his precious girlfriend...”

  Erik stands. “I think you’d better shut up.”

  I stand too. “It wouldn’t be that hard, once you get that job at the school, to find out who she was, what class she was in, and then wave your big dick around and fasten your dark-soul eyes on her and somehow know, because you know him, that a part of her must be starving for someone just like you...”

  “You fucking bitch.” He seizes me by the arms.

  “I wouldn’t judge you, Erik,” I say.

  “Fuck you.”

  He pushes me back and my shoulders and head slam against the wall.

  I grit my teeth. “I just need to know.”

  He has me by the shoulders and he’s gripping so hard it hurts.

  I shove him away, he lands on the floor and I stand over him, shouting. “I need to know, Erik. You’re not the one who walked out of here and saw him standing there. You didn’t hear him calling me a whore and screaming that he was going to kill himself, that we’d be sorry...”

  My voice cracks as it all comes back; the shock of seeing Lucas in front of Erik’s building when I’d left him fast asleep in our bed, his voice when he said he knew what I’d been doing, who lived in the apartment behind me, the tendons on his neck pulsing as he raged, the sick, dizzy feeling in my belly. I was paralyzed, too terrified to speak. I stood shaking my head, gasping for breath, taking the cruel names because, after all, I deserved them. And then the words, those final words: “I’m going to fucking kill you, I’ll kill you both. Better yet, I’ll kill myself and then you’ll be sorry! Then you’ll understand what you’ve destroyed, you fucking slut!”

  Such a manic look in his eyes and underneath, such pain, such bitterness, so much hate coming at you as he starts to back away. You take a step towards him, your eyes begging him to stay, to listen, but he hisses and takes another step.

  “You’ll be sorry,” he says again.

  A scream in your head as you see it, and then his name from your lips, ripped from deep inside, a warning that comes a second too late, a second before the sound of flesh and bone colliding with metal, the screeching brakes, his body like a rag doll, twisted and flying...

  And finally everything goes still and there are only his eyes accusing, his body mangled and dead.

  I come back to the present. Erik is staring at me and I must have been speaking, must have been, because he is stricken, frozen in the moment with me.

  My face is covered in tears and I am hyperventilating.

  “Jesus,” Erik finally breathes.

  “You can do whatever you want to me,” I say in a voice so raw it doesn’t even sound like me. “But none of it will ever hurt as much as that hurts. And I deserve it. I deserve worse.”

  I see tears in Erik’s eyes and horror behind them. Erik missed the accusations but he heard the sound, heard my scream, ran outside and saw the same broken body, the same dead, eyes that I did. We are reliving it now, but of course neither of us ever really left the scene.

  “Like you said,” I whisper, “we can never run fast enough.”

  “No we can’t.”

  I kneel on the floor beside him.

  “I’m not trying to shift the blame, Erik. There’s no point. I would just like to know if there was even one honest thing in the whole mess...or if, on top of it all, I was such a fool as to let you play me.”

  His cheeks are wet with tears and he closes his eyes. “Fuck you for thinking I would.”

  Something in me loosens, dissolves and floats away, leaving a little more space for breath.

  “You didn’t know who I was,” I say, just to be sure.

  He opens his eyes and shakes his head.

  “Well, that’s something,” I say, and outside, out in the world, the new year arrives.

  Chapter 35

  Asleep on Erik’s couch, I dream of Lucas.

  He floats, like Ophelia, face up in a stream. He is staring at me. Staring at me with eyes that want something.

  I try to ask what it is, but my mouth will not open and my body will not move.

  Erik wakes me in the early morning and we climb out to the fire escape and shiver as we watch the sun rise.

  We both feel awful, but we take a walk because Erik has no food in his fridge.

  Last night was the first time I’ve ever stayed overnight.

  We buy coffee and muffins, inhale them in the shop, and talk about Lucas—the small things, the day-to-day memories, who he was to each of us, the bad and the good.

  Later, back on the couch, Erik talks about his mother and stepfather and how much they have aged since they lost their son. They have looked to him for answers and he hasn’t been able to give them any. They have looked to him to be two good sons and he has failed to be even one.

  “You could do better, couldn’t you?” I ask. “Now?”<
br />
  “Maybe.”

  Tears come and go. Memories come, are spoken aloud, and go.

  By nightfall I am still at Erik’s, feeling outside of time, somehow unable to leave. I leave a message for Bernadette, letting her know I’m alive.

  We lie back on Erik’s unmade bed. We’ve never talked much, he and I, but now, quietly, in fragments, in large chunks, in no particular order, we share our life stories. Sometimes we laugh. Always, we listen.

  “What about this guy?” Erik asks. “The boyfriend?”

  Hugo’s face looms up suddenly in my mind, his eyes gentle and laughing. I’m seized by the urge to leap off the bed and run to find him. I blink and the urge is gone.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I fell in love and he fell in love...but love isn’t always strong enough. And I threw him out of bed.”

  Erik laughs.

  “No, not like that. I freaked out in the middle of it and pushed him really hard. Not for fun, but because I didn’t want him to touch me. It was building for weeks, this feeling that it hurt to be touched. I tried to fake it and hoped it’d pass, but instead it got worse.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. Same thing happened with Lucas.”

  He closes his eyes for a moment, nods. “Ah.”

  “’Intimacy problems’ I suppose,” I say and wrinkle up my nose. “Seems to happen whenever I fall in love.”

  He nods.

  I turn sideways to look at him. “When I met you, I thought I was frigid. I was so relieved to be attracted to you because it meant I wasn’t. I loved Lucas, but wanting you brought me back. Brought my body back. But then, the better it was with you, the worse it got with him.”

  “What about when we stopped?”

  I shake my head.

  “That’s shitty.”

  I give him a sad smile.

  “I always think about after,” he says, and sits up. “After he died.”

  “What about it?”

  “Us,” he says. “That we still...I mean, how could we? Why did we?”

  “An exercise in despair? Or an exorcize of despair.”

  He gives a bleak laugh, gets up and walks into the main room. I follow.

  “You met me in my dark places,” I say. “Before and after. Only after, the dark was so much deeper and sometimes I couldn’t stand to be there alone. Maybe it was wrong, but I figured—”

  “That the price had been paid already?”

  “Yeah.”

  Erik stares at the floor and plays with an unlit cigarette. Watching him, studying his face, I see the resemblance to Lucas—the call of blood in the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, and I also see a different man from the one I knew a few days ago. He is no longer the wall I threw myself against, the hostile thing that I fought—defied—for so long. Instead he is fragile, is ripped open and raw. Like me.

  A tiny shift in his breathing tells me he wants to say something.

  “Aside from Lucas, do you think we could have been something?” he says. “Something…else?”

  “Maybe,” I say, and feel an ache spread from my chest to my throat.

  “So...”

  “Oh, Erik. We can talk about it. We can say ‘aside from Lucas,’ but there is no ‘aside from Lucas,’ you know?”

  “I know, but...” He looks away, swallows. “For a little while, could we be just us here?”

  “Don’t.”

  He gets up. “I think we could.” He stares at me, his dark eyes intense, naked. “I can’t help it, I still want you.”

  And there’s that fire, starting in me again.

  “Fuck it, we can.” He steps over to me, takes my elbow, and pulls me up to stand in front of him. My knees are wobbly.

  “Erik, I don’t think...”

  He puts his hands, ever so lightly, on my shoulders.

  “Listen,” he says. “You came here wanting to talk and we have. It’s been good. Maybe from here we’re both going to be...better. Maybe. But you’re still afraid and your body is all fucked up because, basically, you don’t feel safe.”

  I try to look away, but I can’t.

  “Nobody’s safe though, Mara. You realize that?”

  “I... I guess.”

  “So we’re not safe. Fuck it, I embrace that. I’m going to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “The truth.” He takes a deep breath and says, “I could have loved you.”

  The words hit me like a bomb going off inside. His hands are on my shoulders and I start to shake.

  He continues. “For you, maybe it was something else. It doesn’t matter anyway because we can’t go back—but I want you to know I could have. I would have loved you—that’s what I felt.”

  This truth, on top of all the rest, is so crazy sad I can’t even find words to respond with.

  “Don’t cry,” he says.

  “Sorry,” I croak.

  “And don’t be sorry.”

  His hands slide down my arms and then he lets go.

  We stand close.

  “Maybe, for today, it could be all right,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Just today. As if—not as if none of it happened but...”

  “I don’t want us to hurt each other, Erik. And I don’t want to pretend.”

  “I don’t mean pretend, exactly,” he says. “I mean, maybe we would just let ourselves be free to feel what we might have felt. And whatever we feel now.”

  I know what he means and I know what he wants, because I want it too. And yet I can’t seem to move or speak.

  “You’re still here, Mara. We’ve talked, we’ve gone through it all, but you’re still here. We’re not done.”

  He comes closer, puts his hands on the sides of my face.

  “Please,” he says.

  “Please” coming from Erik, finishes me.

  “Yes,” I say and his arms are around me, his mouth is on mine and we are spinning through space.

  This time we are naked before we are naked. We are fierce and intense and hot, but for the first time, our eyes are honest. Every touch strips us, makes us raw. And what we have always taken from each other by force, we now offer up and then go deeper and find more.

  ***

  Later, Erik sets up a mini barbeque on the fire escape and makes burgers. Freezing January air whips in past him and I notice his nose is turning red.

  “You know, I never knew you ate,” I say.

  He glances over his shoulder and gives a wry smile. “Only on special occasions. Normally I live on weed, Scotch and sex.”

  “And candy bars, cyber food, hemp. Illegally obtained of course.”

  “Of course.”

  After dinner he pulls me onto his lap.

  “So, earlier...” he says: “Any heebie-jeebies? Any desire to punch me?”

  “You’d have known.”

  “Maybe not. None of the other guys noticed.”

  “It’s different with you, Erik.”

  “Let’s pretend it isn’t.” He strokes my hair and kisses me.

  “Oh, no, I...”

  “Maybe I can help. What if you think about…those bad feelings you get?”

  “Erik, I don’t want—”

  “And then what if I whisper sweet things in your ear and touch you...like this?”

  “On no...Oh shit...”

  Suddenly I am flinching, cringing, up against the old pain.

  If I am running ahead, slamming doors in his face and skidding around corners, Erik is chasing after, blasting through the doors, always catching up. I leap across chasms and find myself in the attic of my mind. I crash into all shapes and sizes of boxes. Images and memories leap out at me. Polaroids and diaries and ugly outfits. Drawings and voices and little sad, weird versions of me. Shorter, sadder me, angry me, hearing-her-parents-holler-at-each-other me, losing-her-virginity-with-no-love me, losing-Caleb me, kissing Bernadette, fucking strangers, laughing with Sal, missing Mom, saving Dad, clinging to Lucas, wanting, oh, wanting Erik… Drinking, smoki
ng, fucking, walking hand in hand with Hugo, dreaming of Lucas, painting, making love, making pizza, hiding, hiding, curling myself into the corner, making myself small so no one will yell or say mean things, so nothing bad will happen because I will not really be here, not being happy, not being whole because parts of me, if they were seen, someone would hurt them. People are not gentle enough and when you are small, sometimes they don’t see you and sometimes they might step on you and crush you, but sometimes if they don’t see you, they won’t know you are there in the back, in the corner, and then they will leave you there and close the door and you will be alone forever. And safe? No, still not safe.

  If you are touched wrong, if you are brought out and touched when you are not strong, when you do not have the dark of the attic corner, the walls at your back to save you…anyone who touches you can hurt you. Unless you don’t care about them and they don’t care about you and then even though you are not in the corner with walls to protect you, to hide some part of you, if you don’t care, then they can have the outside, they can have it because your walls are now inside, buried deeper. They do not have you because you are deep, low down. But love digs you out, pulls you out and up with your bare skin and soul open to the world, to the harsh everything. To where you can fail and they can fail—because disappointment is inevitable. Failure is inevitable, you have known it forever.

  But Erik...

  Erik is here in the attic with you. He has not dragged you out into the light, not quite, but he could. He has the love and also the touch that in combination are too much. But he is here and the truth is, the truth is he has already disappointed you and you have already failed him. Both of you have done the worst and so to be soul-naked and body-naked is okay.

  “You love me?” you gasp, as his hands grip you.

  “Yes,” he says. “I do.”

  With the softest words, and the gentlest touches, and the biggest naked soul, he gives everything.

  There is a storm in the attic. Memories fly, photos and shoes and specks of dust swirl. Boxes break apart, doors and windows rattle, edges and corners disappear. We drive ourselves together and whisper beautiful nonsense and hold on tight when the roof explodes and sends us burning into the sky.