Before the Fall(115)
It had worked often enough that the behavior had calcified inside of him, and so when he saw Emma, when his heart jumped into his throat and he felt vulnerable and exposed, this is what he did. Turned up his nose. Insulted her weight. Then spent the rest of the night following her around like a puppy.
Peter Gaston had been happy to give Charlie the Vineyard flight, get a couple more days of R&R in London. They’d bonded Friday night, drinking until dawn in Soho, bouncing from bar to nightclub—vodka, rum, ecstasy, a little coke. Their next scheduled drug test wasn’t for two weeks, and Peter knew a guy who could get them clean piss. So they threw caution to the wind. Charlie was trying to get his courage up. Every time he looked at Emma, he felt like his heart was splitting in two. She was so beautiful. So sweet. And he’d f*cked it up so royally. Why had he said that to her before, about putting on a few pounds? Why did he have to be such an * all the time? When she came out of the bathroom in a towel, all he’d wanted to do was hold her, to kiss her eyelids the way she used to kiss his, to feel the pulse of her against him, to breathe her in. But instead he made some bullshit wisecrack.
He thought about the look on her face that night when he put his hands around her throat and squeezed. How the initial thrill of sexual experimentation turned first to shock, then horror. Did he really think she would like it? That she was that kind of girl? He had met them before, the tattooed kamikazes who liked to be punished for who they were, who liked the scrapes and bruises of reckless animal collision. But Emma wasn’t like that. You could see it in her eyes, the way she carried herself. She was normal, a civilian, unblemished by the trench warfare of a f*cked-up childhood. Which was what made her such a good choice for him, such a healthy move. She was the Madonna. Not the whore. A woman he could marry. A woman who could save him. So why had he done it? Why had he choked her? Except maybe to bring her down to his level. To let her know that the world she lived in wasn’t the safe, gilded theme park she thought it was.
He’d had some dark times after that night, after she left him and stopped answering his calls. Days he lay in bed from sunrise to sundown, filled with dread and loathing. He kept it together at work, riding the second chair through takeoffs and landings. Years of covering his weaknesses had taught him to pass, no matter how he felt inside. But there was an animal attraction inside him on those flights, a live wire sparking in his heart that wanted him to push the yoke nose-down, to roll the plane into oblivion. Sometimes it got so bad he had to fake a shit and hide out in the washroom, breathing through the blackness.
Emma. Like a unicorn, the mythic key to happiness.
He sat in that bar in London and watched her eyes, the corner of her mouth. He could feel her deliberately not looking at him, could feel the muscles in her back tensing whenever his voice got too loud at the bar, trading jokes with Gaston. She hated him, he thought, but isn’t hate just the thing we do to love when the pain becomes unbearable?
He could fix that, he thought, turn it back, explain the hate away with the right words, the right feelings. He would have one more drink and then he would go over. He would take her hand softly and ask her to come outside for a cigarette and they would talk. He could see every word in his head, every move, how first it would be just him. How he would lay it all out, the History of Charlie, and how she would have her arms folded across her chest in the beginning, defensive, but as he went deeper, as he told her about his father’s death, being raised by a single mom, and how somehow he ended up a ward of his uncle, how, unbeknownst to him, his uncle paved the way for Charlie to coast through life. But how it was never what he wanted. How all Charlie wanted was to be judged on his own merits, but how, as time went on, he got scared that his best wasn’t good enough. So he surrendered and let it happen. But that was all over now. Because Charlie Busch was ready to be his own man. And he wanted Emma to be his woman. And as he talked she would lower her arms. She would move closer. And in the end she would hold him tight and they would kiss.
He had another seven-and-seven, a beer back. And then, at some point when he was in the bathroom with Peter doing another line, Emma disappeared. He came out of the john wiping his nose and she was gone. Charlie made a beeline for the other girls, feeling jittery and spooked.
“Hey,” he said, “uh, so Emma, did she split?”
The girls laughed at him. They looked at him with their f*cking haughty model eyes, and barked their disdain.
“Sweetie,” said Chelsea, “do you really think you’re in the same league?”
“Just, f*cking, is she gone?”
“Whatever. She said she was tired. She went back to the flat.”
Charlie threw some cash on the bar, ran out onto the street. The booze and the drugs had him feeling turned around, which was why he walked ten blocks in the wrong direction before finally figuring it out. Fuck. Fuck. And by the time he got back to the apartment she was gone. Her stuff was gone.
She had vanished.
And the next day, when Peter groaned and said he had to get to New York for a job and that Emma would be on it, Charlie offered to take the gig. He lied and told Peter he would clear it with the company, but it wasn’t until he showed up at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey that anyone knew that Charlie was taking Peter’s place. And at that point it was too late to do anything.
Riding a jump seat in the cockpit of a 737 across the Atlantic, Charlie drank coffee after coffee, trying to sober up, to get his shit together. He’d startled Emma, showing up like that in London. He could see that now. He wanted to apologize, but she’d changed her phone number, had stopped responding to his emails. So what choice did he have? How else could he fix this, except to track her down once more, to plead his case, throw himself on her mercy?