Anger (16 page)

“I won't,” Anna said.

But back in the hotel she felt so empty and so alone that she simply lay down fully dressed on the bed. Ned, Ned, she tried to fill the emptiness with his name, but it didn't help. Finally she called her mother. “I was absolutely transported by the music, Mama. I've never done better. Everyone was wonderful.”

“You don't sound exactly happy,” Teresa said.

“No.”

“Well, you're having a reaction I expect. You'd better order some supper sent up and then get a good night's sleep.”

“I think I'll stay over one more day, go to the museum maybe. I think I need a day all by myself, without tension.”

“That's a good idea.”

“Maybe you could call Ned before eight-thirty tomorrow. Tell him I'll be home Tuesday and could we go out for dinner.”

“Why don't you call him yourself?”

“Oh, he'll be asleep now, and I might not be awake tomorrow morning. Tell him the concert was a triumph,” she added.

She did not tell her mother that she wanted Ned to read her letter before she saw him again. That had been the real reason, but nevertheless a day without obligations, a day of solitude, of not having to respond to anyone or ask anything of herself proved to be a good plan.

The papers came with her breakfast and the reviews were all right. There was a flattering mention in one of her duet with Sophie. “The two voices seemed to be in perfect harmony, neither dominating the other. Bach was well served.” A crumb, but at least not a poisoned crumb. Relieved, relaxed at last, Anna lay there, watching the sunlight make a broad band on the yellow wall, and for the first time in months thought about Ned without wincing and without anger. Perhaps she had fallen in love two years before, with that closed handsome face just because it was a foreign country to be discovered, to be made hers, a compelling mystery to come to understand … only she had not come to understand. And what had touched her at first, the loneliness of the man, his inability to relate, to give, later became what she hated and fought. “Oh Ned,” she murmured, “Ned …”

Had he also fallen in love with what he came to hate, that had grown to be simply irritation? Her exuberance, her quick changes from joy to grief, from laughter to rage? No, he had fallen in love with a performer not a woman at all. What had he imagined then? Capturing a singing bird and putting it in a cage? What had he
expected?
Damned if I know, Anna thought.

She wondered then if passionate love was always like this, whether all marriages became a frightful war where each partner was determined to change the other and, if the marriage lasted, simply came to accept the unacceptable, gave up. That was true of Paul and Hilda, she imagined. But perhaps they had stuck it out for the sake of the children …

Here Anna got out of bed. Children? A child? Last night she had for a moment envied Nancy, secure in her family, but that was once more to long for the normal, the acceptable, to be like everyone else, to feel justified. How could a childless woman feel justified?

“But I do when I sing!” Anna said aloud. “I do!” She looked at herself in the mirror as she pulled off her nightgown. That broad chest, the full breasts, the strong throat were all there for a purpose, to have the power to project a voice, to be the exact sound box that was needed. And she felt for a second exultant, rejoicing in a gift, in the flesh itself. Oh, why couldn't Ned make love seeing what he desired? Why always in the dark?

The thought forced her to get dressed and go out. By now he would have her letter. Pulling on her stockings, Anna was shaking. She felt the sweat on her upper lip, the signature of panic. What if I never went back? What if I ran away?

In the same instant she had an impulse to get on a plane and go back at once. No, Anna, she told herself. Take this day and use it well. Use it to achieve composure for once. But how did one do that? With everything in a whirl of questions without answers inside her? One did it if one could by taking refuge in art. I'll sing the
Kindertoten Lieder
at that concert next month, she thought, and during this day she would plan the program, a morning musicale at a club in Dallas. She would go back with her mind made up, with something accomplished, whatever Ned did in answer to her letter. She would go home as Anna Lindstrom not Anna Fraser.

Anna Lindstrom spent the morning at the art museum where by great good luck there was a show of French Impressionists from private collections. In the silence of the museum rooms, she was at first lonely and a little self-conscious, unable to concentrate, walked too rapidly from one painting to another, not involved beyond ticking off the painters, waiting for the moment when she could see and be absorbed. Finally she sat down on a low velvet couch and let everything subside. A bearded young man went past, clearly doing what she could not do, stopping before a Monet of haystacks at sunset, walking away from it, coming back. After he had gone on into the next room, Anna slipped into the state of grace she had waited for. She began to see that Monet painting, the astonishing crimson on one side of the haystack catching the setting sun, the strange light on the field surrounding it, light caught at an instant of change, and held there forever. A work of art that could happen like this for one pair of eyes after another forever. Anna sat there for a long moment in a prolonged state of vision, simply
seeing
. After that she walked through the next room, acutely aware of a Pissaro of a few houses along a country road, and finally again sat down to take in a large Cezanne still life. Why did the monumental white tablecloth and its blue fold at one corner create such sensational response? Finally she was delighted by a small Vuillard interior and decided that that was the one she would like to steal and take home to Ned. When they were first married Ned had taken her to the museum in Boston several times and they had played a game, separating for a half-hour or so, then leading each other to the painting they would like to steal and take home. Ned had often chosen Vuillard, of course she realized now because in those small records of bourgeois life in Paris, he felt at home. “It is intimacy,” he had said once. “How few painters have ever communicated that!” “Bonnard maybe,” she had suggested. “Oh yes, but in a far less subtle way.” In those days they had enjoyed arguing things out. Now any difference of opinion seemed like an assault. And perhaps was used as an assault.

Ned's shadow had followed her to the museum, and Anna left.

Chapter IX

Ned, feeling peaceful, was reading the paper with Fonzi at his feet. Just as well that Anna would not be home for another night, he thought. He would have a game of court tennis with Johnny and dine at the club. It felt like a reprieve. And just as Anna was thinking about the program for her concert, he was cogitating a rather radical change at the bank. The very high interest rates were becoming a real problem, but he had an idea about short-term investments and he was eager to talk it over with his colleagues. It was nearly nine and he intended to walk to the office, but first he would get the mail. How amazing to open the box and take out a fat envelope from the Pittsburgh hotel! He turned it over in his hands, then decided to go back to the apartment and read it before taking Fonzi for a short walk.

“Yes, Fonzi, in a minute,” he said, as the little dog barked and ran around the room in a frenzy of expectation. “Lie down,” Ned said firmly, as he slid a thin letter opener under the flap and neatly opened the letter, as though it were some sort of official document. He had had very few letters from Anna, and those few were usually full of exclamations and written in a large flowing hand. This one covered two pages on both sides and was written with care. “Oh dear,” he murmured, full of dread. “If only Anna would be silent,” he said to Fonzi. “Only three days and she has to write me a small essay, it would seem.”

At first what he read he had heard many times before … a defense of her anger. But when he came to what she said about love-making, Ned felt the blood rising to his head and his only need was to black out on it, not know that it had been said. He tore the letter into small pieces and threw it down the chute. There! “That's torn it, Fonzi,” he said. Never never would he expose himself again. He would pretend that he hadn't read the letter. He was so angry that all he could feel was a need for violence, for some wild offensive act. He paced up and down, while Fonzi followed him with frightened eyes. “Come on, we'll go for a walk. Don't cower like that. I'm not angry with you,” but the tone was angry and Fonzi followed him on the leash with his tail between his legs.

She had called him an angry man and she was damned right. People shouldn't ever talk about such things. It was … it was—Ned hunted for words as he walked fast, hardly waiting for Fonzi to do his business, he was so driven—invasion of privacy. Destructive. So that was what was going on in her head while she lay there, crying out in what he had presumed was ecstasy! How could he ever see her again? Sit across the table at breakfast from a woman who had stripped him down to the marrow? I didn't deserve this, Ned thought, filled with self-pity, and what's more I'm not going to take it lying down. Divorce? And have her tell a lawyer all about it? No, they would have to live along side by side in enmity forever. Whatever Ned did that day he did in a black fog. And the only release was a punishing game that evening which he lost because he went at it in a fury.

“Hey,” Johnny said after they had showered and were having a coke at the bar. “The joker's wild today … what got into you anyway? You were out for blood!”

“Not your blood, Johnny!”

“You scared me.”

“Did I?” Ned laughed, but it came out more like a sob. “Not enough to keep you from winning anyway. And I wanted to win.”

“Whatever it was that made you so mad, you played a fierce, fast game, old boy. I tell you,” Johnny wiped his glasses and put them on again, “you were pretty formidable.”

“But you won.” Ned knew it was childish to mind as much as he did, but he did mind.

“It seemed as though you wanted to beat the wall down! I mean … beyond the game … your ball went wild. That's what scared the shit out of me.”

Ned shook his head as though to shake obsession off. “Well,” he said after swallowing half the glass of coke. “It just goes to show that anger may rev up the motor but then overcharges it, I guess. You can't win that way.”

Ned blinked and looked at Johnny for the first time, that plain open face, sandy hair, not a mean thought in the old boy with whom he had played football at Exeter, and smiled a sheepish smile. Exhaustion had crept in now.

“You were awfully mad at something—that's for sure.”

They had known each other for years. Ned liked being with Johnny because Johnny was so easygoing, easy with himself, one of the few men Ned ever saw who was not ridden by ambition. He had done reasonably well as a corporation lawyer in his father's firm, had married happily and had three children, a pair of twins and an older daughter.

“Don't you ever get mad at anything, Johnny? Don't you ever want to break down a wall?”

“Of course I do. I don't know what this is all about, Ned, but I'm kind of glad you can get that het up. You're such a controlled person, you know, it makes you more human. Sally says I have a terrible temper, if you must know.”

“Really? I thought you two were like a Philippina in an almond, two in one.

“We are, I guess. But that doesn't mean we never fight.”

“Doesn't it?”

“Come on, Ned, you weren't born yesterday. There's some anger in any close relationship. Sometimes I think that's healthy. It clears the air, Hey, don't look at me as though I were crazy! I mean it.”

Ned twisted the glass round and round on the counter as though it were a mathematical equation. “I was brought up to regard anger as a sin, for which one paid a very high price afterward in guilt. I hate it. For me anger is a poison. I can't see it as healthy whatever you say, Johnny.”

“O.K., then maybe you worked out some of the poison today.”

Ned shook his head and was silent. He just couldn't talk to anybody about Anna. Not even good old Johnny who, he was quite aware, had opened the door for him to do so.

“See you next week, Johnny. I'd better be getting along. Fonzi will be waiting for his walk.”

“Anna not home?”

“Oh, she's in Pittsburgh …”

“Well, so long, old boy. Good luck!”

After Johnny left, Ned sat on for a few minutes, too tired suddenly to move. Anger “healthy”? He felt sick.

Chapter X

Anna got home early in the afternoon, to be welcomed by an ecstatic Fonzi and an otherwise silent and empty apartment. She had half hoped that Ned might have left a note for her, a welcome home, or even perhaps an answer to her letter, but she found nothing to acknowledge her existence. There were no flowers, she noted, wishing she had brought the pink roses from the hotel. Well, that at least could be remedied. She changed into comfortable clothes and went out into the bright October afternoon with Fonzi, walked down Charles Street to the florist on the corner and chose twelve enormous African daisies in every shade of deep rose, orange, yellow, and red, then added in a few sprays of eucalyptus. In her mood of expectation and dread, they gave a note of triumph, a kind of homage even to Ned—yes, homage, she thought, rather surprised at the word she had conjured up. She was terribly anxious now to see him, to run a finger along his stern mouth, to tell him that after all she was still very much in love. For her something had been solved, at least temporarily, by saying what she felt in the letter. Having said it, it was no longer a poison, the anger inside her. She could lay it all aside.

And in this mood she read the mail, finding in it two letters from Pittsburgh, one from the woman who had sent the flowers. “You are quite marvelous,” it said, “I wonder whether you know how transcendant you are, how your singing does more than fill our ears with beauty, but lifts us up beyond petty cares into what life is really all about.”