Falling Under
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Praise for Falling Under
“Falling Under is one of the most compelling debut novels I have read in a long time. It is gutsy, emotional, sexually charged and unremittingly intense. Younge-Ullman writes her guts out, hurtling forward, pedal to the floor. The result is a gripping story, crackling with energy.” The National Post
“Fierce, erotic and absolutely fearless, this riveting debut tunnels into the psyche of a young artist who is as self-destructive as she is talented. To transform her career and have any sort of shot at happiness, she must grapple with thorny secrets from her past and open herself up to the terror of love. Shocking and moving, Falling Under is as edgy as a razor blade and unlike anything you’ve ever read before.” NYT Bestselling author Caroline Leavitt for Dame Magazine
“Extreme, and extremely well done!” Kim Alexander for XM Radio Fiction Nation
“An astonishing debut novel reminiscent of Janet Fitch's White Oleander. Younge-Ullman has a talent for turning the shadows of life into a thing of beauty, almost poetry.” Curled Up With A Good Book
“Hard-hitting and explosive, with a raw energy that left me breathless.” GoodHousekeeping.com
“A story told with great feeling and compassionate attention to how a sensitive person can find herself alienated from everything she needs to feel whole.” Feast Magazine
“Part coming of age, part artistic exploration, part love story, Falling Under is a layered and assured debut.” Canadian Booksellers Magazine
“Falling Under tugged at my heart and settled in my bones down to the marrow.” The Rose & Thorn Literary Ezine
FALLING UNDER
A novel
Danielle Younge-Ullman
Copyright © 2011 by Danielle Younge-Ullman
Smashwords Edition
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Danielle Younge-Ullman.
This book is dedicated to Michael.
Table of Contents
Praise for Falling Under
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Acknowledgements
Author Information
Author Endorsements
Chapter 1
Ask Santa for a new bike, and you might get it.
But Daddy might leave on Christmas Day.
When you reach out to touch your shiny new bike, Mommy might start yelling at Daddy about how dare he spend their money on a new bike and how you’re only five and what do you need a new bike for anyway?
You play your invisible trick—the one where you pretend you are a small rock—and hope that no one will notice your heart thumping so loud and your ears burning and your eyes blinking again and again.
Daddy yells back at Mommy and soon they are yelling in each other’s faces.
You take your hand off the bike.
You wish, instead of asking for a bike, you’d asked Santa for no more yelling and no more breaking things and slamming of doors. You wish you’d asked for Daddy not to walk out the door and say he’s never coming back and stay away until Mommy calls and begs him to come home like she has four times already.
The yelling gets louder and the words get meaner and then it all stops. A blast of freezing air gets in when Daddy opens the front door. You shiver and the door slams shut with Daddy on the other side.
In the long silence before Mommy starts her crying and her kicking at the door, you think about what she said about the bike.
How come Dad and Mom had to pay Santa?
Oh.
It doesn’t matter what you asked Santa, you realize, because there is no Santa. There’s no Santa, and Daddy’s not coming back this time. Somehow you know it.
Chapter 2
When all else fails I go to Erik.
Tonight, all else has failed.
He answers the door, eyes bloodshot, unsurprised. And then the hitch in my breathing that comes, that always comes with Erik.
“Can’t sleep?” he says.
“No.”
He steps aside to let me in, shuts the door behind me, slides the bolts, and chains the locks.
“Drink?” he says.
I refuse, as always.
There is no bar, just a huddle of bottles on top of a giant, long-broken stereo speaker. He pours himself a Lagavulin, neat, as always.
“You painting?” he says.
“All day.”
“Good.”
“You breaking the law?”
“Not at the moment,” he says with the ghost of a smirk.
The couch is clear of its usual technological detritus. I follow him there, and sit.
I shouldn’t be here.
I should never have been here. But it was too late years ago, and now it doesn’t matter so much.
We try small talk but soon run out of easy things to say. Our ill beginnings surface quickly, so it’s really better not to converse.
“So,” he says.
“So.”
I feel his eyes on me. He knows if I’m here, I’ve done everything I can to still the storm inside, to put all the demons back into their boxes and seal the lids. But sometimes they won’t go. Sometimes my ears are full of screaming, and sometimes, like tonight, the voices are mine.
Erik has them too—demons, voices, nightmares seared on the soul—I knew it the first time I saw him. And sometimes, when there are large, dark spaces inside that you cannot escape, sometimes someone can meet you there, keep you company. Sometimes they can break you out.
I turn my head and let his eyes in. We search, and accept.
There can be no love here; we don’t want it and we don’t have it to give, especially not to each other. No love, but there is something else.
“Mara,” he says. A question, a command.
“Yes.”
We both stand.
I know the way to the bedroom, I know his mouth will taste like Scotch. I walk ahead and listen for his footsteps behind me. Just inside the door his arms wrap around my waist. He swivels me around and pulls me closer. I let him.
I come here because I know Erik will drag me to the edge. He will drag me there, push me over, and then leap after me, to a place beyond pain, beyond loss, beyond the things that haunt us in the empty spaces of the night.
When all else fails, I have this.
Chapter 3
Spring comes.
You want to ride your bike, but maybe if you don’t, then Daddy will come home and Mommy will get out of bed in the morn
ings and this time nobody will shout or throw hot cups of coffee at each other.
You walk to kindergarten and hope, every day, to come back to a house with both Mommy and Daddy in it.
Then Mommy notices you not riding the bike.
“We could have used that money,” she says. “We can’t just go buying bikes that we don’t ride. We’ll end up in the poor house.”
“Is that where Daddy went?”
“I told you not to mention his name.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
She will never understand why you’re not riding the bike, and if she did it would only make her cry, so the next day you get on it and ride down the block. As soon as you’re out of sight, you get off. You hope Daddy will understand that you had to ride it, just a little bit, and will still come back. He doesn’t.
In June, Grandma and Grandpa come to visit. You tell Grandma about Daddy being gone and Mommy sick and crying every day.
“I know, sweetheart,” Grandma says, and pats your shoulder. “But it will all be okay, you’ll see.”
You don’t think so. In case she doesn’t know, you tell her about Santa too.
Grandma looks at you, very serious, and tells you about God, who is like Santa, only without the presents and the red suit.
“He gives more important presents,” Grandma says, “like listening to your problems and helping you out when things are hard.”
You’re not sure about this, but you start talking to God sometimes. You ask Him to stop Mommy crying and eventually she does, only now she’s grumpy instead and has to go to work and comes home after your bedtime. You realize you liked it better before, because even if she was crying, at least she was home.
You also talk to God about Daddy coming back and you practice being small so you won’t bother him when he does. Grandma promised that God would answer your prayers, but when you turn six and Christmas comes again with no Daddy, you start to doubt.
Then one day in February, like a miracle, he’s back.
Only he smells funny and you have to visit him in an ugly place downtown. And he hardly ever smiles, and doesn’t talk, except to ask you why you don’t eat very much and why you’re such a quiet little thing. He doesn’t realize that you understand about money and you understand about mess and noise. You don’t need much and you can be very small and quiet. You hardly ride the bike and you’ve never asked Santa for anything else.
You sit next to him on his stinky couch every other weekend while he watches television and smokes cigarettes.
You’re not so sure you like the daddy God sent back and you’re not so sure you like the way He has been answering your prayers in general.
***
I leave Erik sprawled and vulnerable, and steal away into the pre-dawn light.
I’ve never liked seeing him asleep, never wanted to wake up with him, share breakfast, read the newspaper together or whatever it is that people do.
Erik and I are too intense, too different, and the things we have in common are the wrong things. We should never have spoken, never have touched, much less the rest of it.
On my way back across town I ask the taxi to stop so I can get myself a large black coffee.
At home, I stand under the shower and scrub him from my skin. I stay until I am pruny, but I will never be clean.
I am disgusting, pathetic, and weak. But what else is new? I wash my angst down the drain and turn the water off.
In the bedroom, I put on my customary uniform: pants, T-shirt, and cardigan, all black. Every item of clothing I own is black, navy or beige. Everything coordinates with everything else in my closet and each day I put on the next pair of pants in the row, the top T-shirt on the pile, and so on. Simple.
In the kitchen I make more coffee, force down a granola bar, and then walk out the kitchen door to my back-porch-turned-studio. I put on my smock, mix my colors, and sit down to work.
It’s 6 a.m. I start work every day at 6 a.m. If I haven’t slept because I was surfing the net, out late with Bernadette, or getting my brains fucked out by an emotionally damaged computer hacker, tough shit.
Up.
Showered.
Dressed.
Caffeinated.
Working.
Period.
The east-facing windows bring the morning light in threads. Later it will be so bright I will turn my easel backward.
I face the work before me and sigh. I would love to feel I am changing the world. I would love to think my work transfixed people, changed their perceptions of reality, moved them to tears, heroic action…any action.
It might have, once. In the early years of art college, I painted to express the depths of my soul. I wanted to be Frida Kahlo, with maybe a little Jackson Pollock thrown in. I painted like it mattered, like I could create something unique. People who knew about these things thought I had a Future.
Now I paint to soothe. I paint to banish the very emotions I used to channel because somewhere during my final two years, I got jaded and stopped believing—in art, love, happily-ever-after...and mostly in myself. All those feelings became too much for me; they began to burn me up. And so, here I am—far from Frida, or any other kind of greatness.
But I make a living. I crank out circles and squares, colorful geometrics that people buy to match their furniture, shapes with a logic that quiets my mind. Someone might be kind enough to call my paintings “Zen” and they might be moved to change the position of their couch, but that’s all.
By 4 p.m. I have finished the piece. Sapphire circles intertwine with smaller yellow and purple circles, all floating above a forest of sharp, triangular shapes.
I look at it with the satisfaction that it’s finished, but no other feeling, no opinion on whether or not it’s “good.” Done is what it is. I’ll call Sal to pick it up, and never think about it again.
“Five done, and it’s only mid-October,” I say to Sal’s voice mail. “Whatever else, you’ve got to admit I’m fast!”
There’s a message from Bernadette saying she’s coming over at 5:30. She never asks, just informs me, but she’s one of my few links to the outside world, so I don’t mind. As it is, I have my groceries and my art supplies delivered and payment from Sal comes via direct deposit, so I can hole myself up for weeks if I so desire.
“Do you think you might be agoraphobic?” Bernadette asked me once.
I shrugged, looked away.
“Honestly, do you ever go out when I’m not with you?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Like when?”
“I don’t know. Like...when I run out of toothpaste. And I go to Dad’s sometimes.”
“That doesn’t count,” Bernadette said. “I’m talking about going out, on purpose, to do things. Social things.”
“I’m social enough.”
“Right.”
“Bee, I’m fine.”
“If you say so.”
Of course, she was right. Not that I’m agoraphobic, but something is wrong with me. Something is wrong and it’s not getting better.
A trip outside, to the world beyond my front door, is fraught with peril for me, especially if I’m alone.
First, I don’t like crowds. Too many colors, too many smells and noises, too much being jostled, poked, looked at. Too many potential lunatics who might be carrying knives, guns, anthrax, who might have little girls locked in their basements, or be carrying the next SARS or avian flu virus.
Whenever I leave the house by myself, my mind assaults me with images of disaster. I see myself falling into manholes, being crushed by a falling building, tripping on concrete stairs, tumbling down. I imagine the doors of vans opening as I walk by and stocking-capped thieves or kidnappers grabbing me, hauling me inside. The van is soundproof and they torture me with pins and matches and don’t even ask for ransom—not that anyone would pay it.
I have a car, but I hate driving it. I just know I could lose control and mow down someone’s cat or dog, or worse, their child. Or
I might crash into a telephone pole because the brakes have failed, have been cut. Arms broken, fingers mangled, lungs collapsed, death imminent.
And then there’s skin cancer, an expanding freckle caught too late, one week to live. Bug bites, malaria, smog, second-hand smoke, rabid raccoons, tainted beef.
And then, always, always, the tape plays where I step out in front of a car, a truck, the—
Oh, please not the streetcar.
Yes, the streetcar.
The streetcar going too fast, can’t stop in time, my legs frozen, body seized up, the thunk of metal on flesh, the trajectory of the body, airborne, the sickening sound of a skull cracked open, the smell of blood, the sight of it mixing with oil on the street, with hair, fragments of—
Stopstopstop!
But I see it all. I imagine it all, and know that it is possible. These things happen every day and they could happen to me. The proof is there, in my own life and on the news, which I probably shouldn’t watch.
I watch the news and read three newspapers online daily, and my fears expand outward, touching the people I love, tearing them away in senseless, violent tragedies while I stand, helpless, and watch.
It makes for a tense life.
I did look into agoraphobia. I called a hotline, spoke to a counselor. I agreed to join an agoraphobic support group she was starting, with fifteen others who had similar issues.
They offered to send someone to pick me up for the first meeting, but I declined. On a good day I can drive myself places, on a moderate-to-bad one I prefer a taxi.
I was the only one who showed up.
“I don’t think you’re agoraphobic,” the counselor said, and looked at the circle of empty chairs. “I guess there was a flaw in my plan.”
“Maybe. So, uh, what do you think is wrong with me?”
“An anxiety disorder of some kind,” she said. “But I’m not qualified to diagnose you. You should see a therapist.”