Fury (13 page)

Even I have to acknowledge just how wispy and New Aged I am becoming. My success with homeopathy has made me reconsider chakrology too. Mortifying to admit, but I am sitting outside because a chakrologist once told me fresh air could take away a person's “reserved, aloof, and distrusting energy” by opening a person's heart chakra, which was where the body stores unconditional love. (My research has moved on to the Zen-centric. Please be assured, though, this story doesn't end in an ashram. A woman with my degree of pent-up anger could never be as placid as a lotus flower.)

All rumbling stomach and heart, I carefully dial the umpteen digits in the Lark's international number. The world teeters on its axis as the line rings once, twice, three times before I recognize the befuddled and instantly lovable “Hello?”

The Lark tells me he's in London for the day. And though I assure him I can just as easily call him back tomorrow, he insists that I hold the line while he finds a quiet corner of the street. A smile lights my face as I imagine him moving through the crowd in his small, concentrated way—agile legs pumping, cigarette askew in his mouth, his blond lashes made bright by the sun, his mood always deepened or boosted by that city. I hear him approaching traffic, waiting to cross a street, humming absently.

“All right,” he says. “That's much better. I'm in St. James's Park. And I've found a bench.”

“First things first,” I say. “Are you smoking a cigarette?”

“No, not yet.”

“Good. Don't light one until I say it's okay. I've decided that cigarettes are one of those things that pull us out of the moment. And I'd really like us both to be fully here during this talk. So, no cigarettes. Swear?”

“Yes,” he agrees with a laugh. “No smoking. I promise.”

“Oh, one more thing. Will you close your eyes and put your hand on your heart?”

I'm prepared to explain. I have a little bit prepared about how I want us to focus on the beaten-down organ underneath our fingers.

The heart
, I imagine myself saying,
is the one valuable we are so careful with we let our shoulders tense up and roll over it in an ugly, self-protected posture.
But, as it turns out, I didn't have to go on.

“Okay,” the Lark says trustingly.

“Okay? You mean, your hand's on your heart?”

“Yes, it's there.”

Homeopathy seems like magic indeed. For the first time ever, I'm making demands of the Lark and he's responding in part. The moment feels confessional, and for a few minutes we sit together, secreted from the world, like two children hunched under a tablecloth fort.

I take a deep breath and begin. “The women you've known in the past . . .”

“Yes?” His voice is quiet.

“They bullied you.”

“Yes.”

“They belittled you.”

“Yes.”

“They betrayed you.”

“Yes.” This last yes comes out the softest, and I hear his breath catch against his teeth. I feel love for him like a small bubble rising to the surface.

Very gently, I say, “That's the past, honey. Do you hear me? It's over. It's finished. You've gotta tap into it, feel it, and then let it go. Because I'm not like those women. And that past has no bearing on our present. You know what I think? I think you were still fighting with them that night. Can you see that? You were arguing with the ghosts of girlfriends past, and I was arguing with my book.”

I'm really circling It—the big Insight—with this final part. I am gleaning. The truth is, I hadn't been fighting with my book; I'd been fighting against my anger. I'd been desperate to avoid it, and then equally eager to chalk up my avoidance to my gender, my nationality, any generalization that sounded plausible enough and took the focus off of me.

When I ask him why he's never confided in me about his past relationships before, I hear him wipe his nose with the back of his hand. “I don't know,” he says, in a voice that inches closer. “I thought that was a subject you were supposed to avoid. Doesn't it just lead to jealousy?”

“I guess sometimes,” I say, and feel his surge of attention. “But it also leads to the bond you said your brothers have with their wives. It leads to the ‘flame.' You never get to that unless you trust enough to share even the most misshapen, monstrous parts of yourself. The parts you long ago decided should never see the cold light of day.”

What I am getting at is a level of trust that Virginia Satir describes best. Love, she said, best flourishes in an atmosphere “where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible.” Before the Lark and I can be so accepting of each other, we have to acknowledge the parts of ourselves that we are still rejecting.

We talk for an hour, while the sun rises (on my end) and begins its decline (on his), and he tells me how the conversation just melts him. That's the word he uses, “melts.” He says he's honed his defenses for years, living by what he calls a “Jack Daniels code,” shaping himself to fit the mold of the pro musician who doesn't need anyone or anything besides work, the road, music. “We still have a geographical problem,” he says. I'm American. He's British. We come from different sides of the Atlantic. If I move to Brighton permanently, then what happens? He's constantly away on tour. He's afraid a schedule like that will ruin my life.

We wonder aloud if we've ever been fully present with one another. We talk about how often we've been preoccupied with our pasts or distracted by anxieties about a future together. And it simply isn't true that we'd gotten along better in letters than we do in the flesh; perhaps we've just trusted ourselves more in writing. In Brighton, for whatever reason, we'd begun to tread lightly around one another—to say what we should, to do what we ought. But love isn't about peacekeeping. It doesn't mean agreeing on everything. And wouldn't that be as dull as a dust bunny? No, love has to be about supporting and, at the same time, challenging each other. And it really seems like we can figure this out. I mean, even morons can love each other from an unguarded place. We are intelligent people in many capacities. We're just emotional idiots.

But we are back to our original problem. I am on one side of the Atlantic and he is on the other. But we decide that won't stop us. When his voice chokes with sniffles, I finally consent: Okay, yes, he can light a cigarette. We make plans to talk again tomorrow, and the next day, and however long it takes to work out our kinks, resolve the problem of geography, and talk through our fears and reservations.

I hang up the phone feeling honest and pure. I don't wholly know how to account for my pluck except to say that, for a brief window in time, my love overcame my fear. More agonizing than being rejected by the Lark again was envisioning a future without him. Maybe it was
tonglen
that first made me realize I missed all the virtues (and even faults) that were specific to him. Maybe it was all my reading that made me realize I'd been relating to the Lark the way I relate to my family. When we were in Brighton, our relationship had been what Virginia Satir calls a “closed system,” a system dominated by neurotic dependency, obedience, conformity, and guilt. But we might be capable of something more. Maybe an “open system.” A relationship where we can both honestly express a full range of hopes, fears, loves, angers, frustrations, and mistakes, and even appreciate each other for them.

In the wake of our conversation, the weight of all my past emotional failures—those times I played the stoic rather than exposed my fears, tolerated another of my mother's heart-on-sleeve lectures, or even listened in flushed-faced self-loathing while my ballet instructor took me aside and told me it was the mark of a weak character to let disappointment show on my face—lifts from my shoulders.
It is possible
, I think,
to emote without being rejected, to be honest and still be loved, to ask for what you want without seeking permission.
I walk back to the house with the phone in my swinging hand and my hair fluttering against the small of my back. My brain buzzes with endorphins. As I swing open my parents' screen door, every nook and knickknack looks new to me. The family photos that used to glare back from the walls re-create themselves moment by moment.

The buzz lasts through the night. I hold on to it through the dogs' barking and my dad's happy hour and my sister's latest phone-in crisis. But the next morning, when I call the Lark at our pre-agreed time, the person who answers is terse and unlike the confiding and tender man who just yesterday had been as wide open as a morning glory.

It shouldn't matter. It shouldn't prevent me from plunging into the conversation I've rung up to have. If anything, my deference to the unpredictable moods of others is the very habit I'm trying to break. I am confronted with my compulsive tendency to read people and size up what they expect of me. Here is my opportunity to keep my cool—not to censor myself based on the Lark's reactions nor let the quality of his voice determine what I ought to hold back. A cold bolt of fear pierces me down the center. I feel choked, liable to stammer, deeply embarrassed. Have I somehow gotten the entire thing wrong? What if the Lark has taken away something completely different from yesterday's conversation? What if, where I've been laying the groundwork for a new beginning, he thought we'd been saying a final and more reverent good-bye?

Again, I had taken the portable phone outside. The eleven o'clock sun is burning a hole in the sky and the afternoon is already too harsh and clammy. Fruit rots beneath the pear trees. Bees rape the rhododendrons. The world is already too sickly sweet with the smell of moist, fresh-cut grass.

There's silence on the Lark's end when I apologize for catching him at a bad time. “It's just . . .” I pace the brick walkway while I neurotically smooth the hair off of my sticky forehead. “It's just . . . I know we said yesterday that we were going to talk.”

His voice flies up in a flare of white-hot irritation. “I'm not sure I understand what you want to talk about.”

I couldn't be more stung if his hand had come through the receiver and smacked me across the mouth. Who
is
this callous ass, this childish, cow-hearted, posturing prick? And why is he rearing his head
now
, less than twenty-four hours after yesterday's communion? He's asking to be buried. He is begging for it. My heart begins pounding right along with my ears. The words that come to my mouth are nothing close to prudent or polite.

My hand shoots to my hip. My jaw is set. “You know,” I say, “I've listened to you talk about how you're not sure I really ‘see' you. But the truth is, I'm not sure that you, sir,
see
me. I'm not convinced you
listen
to a single word I say. So, fuck you. Really. Go on. Keep banging on about how I don't really get or appreciate you. Keep on writing about love in pop songs. The fact remains: You wouldn't recognize real love if it came up and bit your unmentionables. You don't take notice of
anything
! You don't consider
anyone
! I don't think you
see
anyone but
yourself
!”

With that, I hang up, trembling. A deep exhale rasps from my mouth. I've done it. I'm determined not to be swayed and not to feel sorry.

My subletters move out, and on Labor Day I go home to my apartment on Twenty-second Street, which looks solemn and clean-scrubbed but still smells strongly of someone else's perfume.

I'd complained of feeling displaced at my folks' house, but I am sorrier still to be home. I can't bring myself to slash open the mail, call friends, or hang my clothes in the closet. Even the crush and roar of the city—a sound I had pined for—does nothing to distract me from how little has changed in my absence. It is exactly as though Brighton has never happened. The sameness of it all only makes me feel crazy. Being home makes me feel as though I have no cause to feel miserable, as though I've never met the Lark to begin with and am hallucinating the slow, searing pain in my chest.

Still exploring homeopathy, I've switched to Natrum Muriaticum, which is a common remedy for grief and disappointed love. Internet research assures me that the remedy is nothing but common table salt. It's an obvious example of homeopathy's attempt to cure like with like. What do you take if you find yourself depressed? Sodium: the same substance found in your dribbling tears.

Homeopathy Web sites describe the Nat-Mur patient as someone deeply scarred, frozen in grief. She doesn't often accept help from others because she values her independence and “dislike[s] consolation or advice.” She thinks grief is “an irremovable part of [her] life.” Her past, she's decided, will “accompany [her] forever,” and if someone has hurt her deeply, she opts to “completely erase [that] person from [her] life.” I'm amazed by how specific the descriptions are and how much I can relate to them. Sparks dance in the Nat-Mur patient's line of vision. She has swollen eyelids, vertigo, sluggish speech, and a “deep crack in the middle of [her dry] lower lip.” She submits to exhaustion whenever she tries to read or write. As it is easier to cry about other people's grief than it is to cry about her own, she is moved by sad, beautiful music or melancholy movies. The Brighton pier flashes through my mind as I read, “The Nat-Mur patient is drawn to the seashore, where [she] feel[s] much better or much worse.”