Fury (23 page)

Even if my phobias—fear of emoting, fear of mice, fear of selfexpression—weren't born out of that exact memory, it seemed likely they were born around that time in my youth. Before I'd even fully learned to talk, I'd learned to doubt my perception of the world. I suspected people would sneer at my emotions if I let on about them. If I asked for help, I worried they might hold it against me. I struggle to remember another time when I held my ground with that kind of conviction.

In the week that follows, I feel myself grow suspicious of the world. I'm unreasonably shaken. I flit around my apartment like a trapped black fly, distressed and disorganized even in my routine movements.

I begin to break things. Not purposely. The destruction is careless and accidental. In the kitchen, a water glass loses its footing. In the bathroom, a bottle of makeup slips from the medicine cabinet and streaks the tiles with an oily, flesh-colored sludge.

I screen phone calls and avoid the mail. I feel myself growing paranoid. I grow certain there's someone in my life who doles out injuries under the guise of gifts, who does not and cannot love me in the way I need to be loved, who seems to have no use for me if I'm not obliging them, absorbing their criticism without comment, stroking their ego, writing, striving, achieving. I suspect this person taught me that I couldn't be loved if I was sad, dependent, emotional, furious. They taught me to reveal only what is expected of me. They need my attention and admiration, the kind they never received from their own lunatic mother, and their strength, stability, and self-esteem seem to hinge on me behaving in a particular way.

Naturally, I assume that person is the Lark.

I had answered his call for advice—answered it with all the care and compassion in my oozing, unshuttered heart—and yet he hadn't so much as acknowledged the gesture with a response.

I decide the Lark never noticed or understood me, has never taken me seriously. Perhaps I was just the mirror in which he admired his image. This isn't true, not remotely. But in the absence of information the mind concocts its own stories. Once the idea is formed I feel rage open in the pit of my stomach and roar through me like a howl.

I sit down at my desk and return to my book. Specifically, the stilted, overworked account of the way I'd left Brighton. Now that I can admit I am angry with him, the story seems relevant. The pages that come out of me crackle like a fire I could warm myself by. Words come easily, swaggering, strutting, slitting their eyes, and snapping their forked tongues. How good it feels to call the Lark “tantrumic” even if it isn't fair.

Of God, I write:
If
“He” exists then He is surely a sociopath.

Then, just to be certain “sociopath” is the exact word that I mean, I go looking for a nuanced definition. Sociopaths are charming and spontaneous (these seem to fit) but also reckless and impulsive. They're manipulative; covetous; controlling; they appeal to our sympathy but themselves lack empathy; they have an “intense, predatory stare.”

In Martha Stout's
The Sociopath Next Door,
I am struck by a passage about the kinds of women who make great prey for sociopaths:

I read Stout's book all night, from cover to cover. I know I have felt both discounted and used, and in grasping for a convenient answer I carelessly finger the most obvious candidate. By sunup I've quit thinking about whether God is a sociopath. I've convinced myself that the Lark is.

I do this, in part, because I'm a latecomer to anger.
Once the Staphysagria's old, subconscious anger has been brought to the fore, it “attaches itself” to the present circumstances, generating seemingly endless resentment toward the one who rejected him.
I blame the Lark because, at least in my mangled mind, he is less threatening than the other available antagonists.

Like repression and depression, displacement is just another arrow in my quiver of defense mechanisms. At the heart of the reaction is a reality I'd been avoiding as long as I've lived. Deep down is a truth that I can't confront for fear it will level me, rob me of the ability to function even in what has become my sleepy, stupefied way.

I concoct this story about the Lark because it's less painful than admitting the things that have been unspeakable for most of my life: I often feel stifled and manipulated by my mother.

My rage is still curled, fistlike, around the Lark on the Thursday evening when his response finally arrives:

 

Yes—to uphold my conditions—let me know where you are with your book. Let me know what you're worried about—you always seem so unjustifiably worried about it. Thank you deeply for your advice, I couldn't have asked for more. I owe you. Send me pages and I'll try to help you through. Send me your worries, and I'll try to set you straight.

I march into my bedroom, wrest the cardboard box from under my bed, and upend the jumble of preposterous mementos, and letters, and small, thoughtful gifts the Lark had once tentatively given me.

There is, in the pile, one particular photo of my man reclining in his parents' garden a week before our fight: In it, he is handsome and distracted, pinching a cigarette, beetlelike, between his fingers, and he reads the
Sunday Telegraph
with cold intensity. Separating it from the others, I bring the photo to eye level and try to decide if the Lark has what could be described as sociopathic “shark eyes.” Are they “sadistic”? “Intense”? “Emotionless”? “Predatory”? “Unblinking”? “Feral”?

Moreover, is he really on my side? I didn't realize it, but this is a question I ask of almost everybody.

I reread the message through the lens of defensiveness and built-up fear that I mistrust as my intuition. When I had confided in him in the past, had he used it against me? Part of the truth that I can't yet face is that other intimates often have. I'm sure my gut is saying to ignore his message and respond when pigs fly passenger jets. But my second response sounds more like Alice's cheeping, inspirational voice urging me to “be genuine,” “tell the truth,” and speak my dim mind.

I do. Two days later, with my teeth still gritted and my pulse firing like a Ford piston, I find myself seated at my laptop again. Convinced it is sane, I type:

 

Thanks for making the courtesy call. This may seem like an abrupt change of heart, but I guess you could say I started thinking about things in a new light since my last note. How glad I am that I could pony up whatever professional I've got in me, but when it comes to soliciting any morale from you, I guess you could say I opened my biggish browns. Not only don't I need your support, but I'm not convinced it's even possible. For you.

I guess the more I got to thinking about it, the less certain I was that you ever had my best interests at heart. I'm not convinced you ever had any of those: interests (in me, unless you were considering how I might add to or diminish from your experience, unless you were considering me, first, as a possession and, later, as a hindrance) or heart (for my rendering of “heart” is not the blipping organ, but rather a person's capacity to understand what the people around him are feeling).

I know this must seem like a 180-degree pirouette after recent appeals and apologies. But I got to asking myself, why I was so willing to believe that a man was capable of any real loyalty in the present or in the future, when the past proved so contrary? Why would I continue to entrust him with my livelihood—my book, my stories, my personal history—the things that mean most to me?

I don't know why, even after all that's happened, I've felt compelled to cling, like a raft at high seas, to the version of yourself that you sold me in the beginning in letters and, yes, spoken words too. Why have I wanted to preserve this story about the empathetic Lark, the sensitive artist, the man who tells me that he grieves sometimes, that he doubts, that he loves, that he takes triumph in other people's successes and feels concern when they're on the skids? I realize now how like lyrics those were. As often as I've heard legends of these things, this girl has never once seen them, not in action and not with her eyes. With her eyes, he's shown her only callousness, aggression, avoidance, deceptiveness and a kind of staunch self-serving.

I'm not sure which is worse, the month of July, which I spent fearing you, and backing down to you even in moments when facts were on my side, and giving you far more leeway than anybody deserves. Or the weeks and months that came afterward, when I've been so quick to hurt for you, or rescue you, or understand you, or try so desperately to lend you my support and see things from your skewed perspective.

How much nicer it would be if I had the opportunity to tell you all of this in my speaking voice. But I realize it's not me that's bound to written words. It's you. It has always been you, hiding behind language and substituting it in the moments where action and emotion ought to be. I'm not sure you're capable of acting any other way, but I think I am. I think I don't have to go to such super-human lengths to rationalize and tacitly accept it.

A sudden change, I know. But such is the nature of revelations.

I am aware that this message, following the bleeding-heart tone of my last, will probably make me look like a paranoid schizophrenic. I don't care. I imagine the electric-blue sunburst Hunter told me to envision in an effort to open my throat. Although I talked to Hunter only once, I still think often of his prescriptions. Closing my eyes, I picture a blue burst exploding before me with sickening power.

In the days after I write to the Lark, I feel wild and weightless. During the day, I work on my book, or mystify my neighbors by banging and clanging away at my kid-size drum kit.

The latter is my newest experiment in anger management, my attempt to channel my growing anger in a positive way. In G. Stanley Hall's 1915 speech, I'd found a passage about angry women excelling at musical instruments: “Girls often play the piano loudly, and some think best of all. One plays a particular piece to divert anger, viz., the ‘Devil's Sonata.'” I mostly play the Ramones and baby beats a drum teacher once taught me. Even then I am so out of practice that my “playing” sounds more like a dozen pots and pans falling down a flight of stairs.

At dusk, I bound down the sidewalks at full swing, letting the wind lick my hair and tug the tails of my coat. My expression is confident if not exactly happy. My thoughts are blissfully distorted. I feel free, a planet unto myself, no longer orbiting anyone, a feeling I'm certain will last forever. I still can't see that my anger is displaced—directed not at the person who actually provokes me but at someone I thought resembled her.

During my next session with Alice I describe the e-mail exchange. Idiotically, I expect her to be impressed by my progress.

“Wow,” she says, widening her eyes and blinking a few times in surprise. “You don't do that often. How did it feel?”

“Great,” I say. “It feels like tapping into my power.”

“So you're certain the Lark is your anger's home?”

“Yeah, sure.” I pause for a second to reconsider. “What exactly do you mean by its
home
? ”