Fury (28 page)

Once a week I speak explicitly about my family to Alice, and once a day, usually over my morning coffee, I spend a tender hour on the phone with Eamon. With the former, I try to express all the feelings I'd held back as a kid, and with the latter, I aim to strike the right balance between my throat and my heart, between being supportive but also assertive.

Even though Alice still worries that I haven't addressed my parents directly or experienced my anger in what we've come to call a “visceral way,” I feel a little more at peace. There is more color in my face and the smallest trace of a skip in my step.

It's November, and I bear little resemblance to the deferential stoic who fled Brighton in a passive-aggressive huff. And still less to the feeling-stuffing depressive who'd literally been sick with rage in the month that followed, or to the austere academic who footnoted her way through her first weeks of therapy, or to the hurting, hurtful lunatic who once used her e-mail to vomit up all her displaced aggression. Where there used to be no one it was safe to express myself fully around, there are now two people in my life who really know me. And one tells me he'd known I was the one for him ever since that phone call in August when he'd spoken to me from St. James's Park.

Something in Alice's schoolgirl smile tells me she takes my progress with Eamon as something of a personal triumph. From doomed beginnings, she's helped us create a coupling based on truth, passion, and conscious thought.

My first hint that my anger is not fully diffused comes when Eamon visits in December.

For two weeks we fill my apartment with the sounds of music and confession and laughter. During the week we work side by side and come away with three songs and two chapters to show for it. On the weekend we go to a friend's holiday party in ill-fitting secondhand garb and nuzzle beneath a sprig of plastic mistletoe. We read the papers and eat sushi in bed with our fingers. We have one rather ridiculous but terribly heated fight over whether or not the term “housewife” is offensive. I insist the word places too much emphasis on the house instead of the family. To my ears, it sounds too much like “housekeeper.” But we weather the spat just fine and spend the rest of the visit holding mittened hands, curling in each other's arms atop a steep rock in Central Park, and mocking the ice-skaters who totter around Wollman Rink.

“We're really doing this, right?” I ask one night while we sit on my living room floor, exchanging early Christmas presents. “I mean, I'd like to really find a way to be a couple, in spite of past history and current geography.”

“We're doing this,” he says, pushing away the wrapping paper between us and pulling me in for a hug.

I'm feeling awfully accomplished, amazed by how much I've grown in the last four months, and how my transformation has transformed the people around me.

But a few days later the bubble that holds me, love-struck and cocksure, bursts a little when a rosy rash buds and breaks open on my rib cage. Eamon has it too, but to a far lesser degree, and while his clears up quickly, mine begins to twist up my back and sprawl down my arms, until I'm rasping and clawing myself like a dog with a case of red mange. I take an oatmeal bath. I guzzle Benadryl. I douse myself in hydrocortisone and Gold Bond medicated powders, but nothing that I find on a drugstore shelf seems to slow the bizarre outbreak's course.

I reach the height of agony on a Saturday afternoon, when my doctor's office is empty but for an on-call nurse.

The good woman runs through a series of screening questions by phone. Scratching myself like an animal, I respond in part. I tell her:
No, I haven't switched laundry detergents; I haven't recently traveled outside the U.S. nor have I been frolicking in the type of wild, wooded environment where I might've made contact with poison oak, ivy, sumac; yes, I've had the chicken pox before; no, my building isn't infested with bedbugs and, uh-uh, I don't use tanning beds.
I don't mention Eamon's brother, a doctor, who suggested we might be allergic to each other.

At the end of the interview she tells me the hives might be the result of a virus. She urges me to call back later and schedule an appointment if Monday morning still finds me inflamed.

Something about the word “inflamed” gets me thinking about something Alyssa once said. Back in her first attempts to explain homeopathy, she'd claimed: “The first place anger reveals itself is in the skin. A fear that anger will destroy the love in your life causes agitation and panic. The result is skin allergies. An angry rash is like the ‘check engine' light coming on in the dashboard of a car—it's your body's way of drawing your attention to what you're feeling.”

I then remember that one of the girlfriends I made in Brighton suffers from psoriasis. Once, when we were discussing the subject of my book over tea, she'd rubbed a silvery plaque on her arm and told me, “I've always thought it might come from some unresolved emotion, most likely anger.”

Perhaps I'm not as cured as I'd thought. Alice is always claiming fear of fury is my default mode. “In your family, anger wasn't safe,” she says. “You've gone your whole life operating under that assumption. You can't expect to change the pattern overnight; the most you can do is be aware of it.”

Although I haven't touched a remedy in months, I go to my medicine cabinet and remove a half-empty bottle of Staphysagria. It's little more than a last-ditch effort to quell the itching just enough to survive through the weekend, but two doses and two days later I don't need a doctor. Unbelievable as it seems, by Monday the rash has vanished to a chafed memory.

Maybe the remedy worked or maybe what I experience is just a placebo effect (even sugar pills occasionally “cure” ulcers). Either way, the flare-up draws my attention back to my feelings. It reminds me that although I'm finding ways to access my anger, I'm still a loaded gun, my chamber filled with years of pent-up rage. I fear for the next few weeks. Eamon is returning to England for a string of gigs, and without him around to remind me that anger can be a positive force for change, I worry repression might return and undo my work.

Before Eamon boards his train to the airport, he holds me tight amid the crush of Penn Station's rush-hour mob. There he says the words I would have walked five hundred sun-scorched miles to hear last August. “I love you,” he says, touching his forehead to mine. “I really do, Koren. I love you so deeply.”

I don't walk back to my apartment so much as fly. All of the ways in which I've tried to become better acquainted with my childhood and my emotions—especially sessions with Alice—have helped me accept love as important as Eamon's. Being gentle and loving with myself has brought me to a place where I can embrace him with that same integrity and compassion, where I can confide in him what I actually think and feel as opposed to shaping my mouth into the words I've decided I ought to say.

Our differences, when they arise, no longer seem like a looming threat so much as an opportunity to grow, explore, and know one another better. Though our ideals align, we will inevitably approach some things differently, seeing them through the lenses of our own individual memories and perspectives. But even conflict can bring depth and insight to our lives as individuals, as writers and as a pair. From the newspaper, I clip a nature article that says lovebirds sing both in harmony and discord; even their conflict drives a coordinated duet. For the first time in a long time I'm trusting, even hopeful.

For all my progress with Eamon, I remember that Virginia Satir thought that there will always be aspects of ourselves that we do not know—puzzles we'll spend our lives attempting to solve. Every so often, I chance upon a hint (an image, a sound bite) that clues me in to my childhood anger. But most days, those long-ago emotions are still difficult to access and unnerving to look at squarely.

I know the extent of that fury is hidden from me, but is it obvious to others? Was Seneca right? Does rage always show itself openly, whereas other emotions can be “concealed and cherished in secret”? Is it true that the greater fury is, “the more visibly it boils forth”?

In “On Anger,” the Stoic said every creature makes its anger known in some way: “[B]ulls toss their horns in the air and scatter the sand by pawing, lions roar, snakes puff up their necks when they are angry, and mad dogs have a sullen look.”

Yet every time I wonder whether I'm walking the streets with quivering lips, knit eyebrows, and a furious red flush, the world assures me otherwise. To the outside acquaintance I'm about as hard-edged as saltwater taffy. Hardly anyone guesses what brews beneath my sprightly, chirping surface. Whenever I divulge the topic of my book-in-the-works, my listener says something like: “It's hard to imagine a sweet girl like you has a drop of anger in you.” To which I always laugh and reply, “That's just because it's closeted and repressed.”

Eamon moves in on the twentieth of February—a date etched in memory also because it is the same day my niece, Riley, is born.

We decide to share my place on Twenty-second Street, at least until its lease expires in April and we can hound around for a new home together. It feels right. It feels like it was intended to be. Brighton's fight has been downgraded from “hemorrhage” to “hiccup,” and although we're not yet laughing about the events of the summer, we will be in time. Soon I'll be describing for Eamon the way I wept all over the Canadian immigration officer, and he'll be telling me that he'd taken his pent-up emotion to the stage of the Reading Festival, where he'd made an off-color remark about another performer who'd subsequently tried to punch him in the face. In some way, we're even grateful for the months of lost faith, rejection, and poor personal hygiene—time apart has made us more self-aware, more communicative, and more certain that we are for each other.

My family is not quite so convinced.

After a brief visit to my folks' house, I come to find out that my mother—who has never approved of any boyfriend, let alone one who seemingly drove me, weeping, across time zones—had sat Eamon down at one end of the kitchen table. There, she brushes her hair violently out of her face and gives him a speech of some fist shaking and thunder. She tells him she'd never liked him. She warned him that she was watching him. She alludes to “assassins.” (“I
know people
who could get rid of you.”) She threatens to “put a price on his bald head” if and when he hurts me again. (My mother's story speaks of a different version of events. According to her, she got in Eamon's face—so their noses were “literally just one inch apart”—and spoke sharply and quietly in her attempts to intimidate him. To hear her tell it, she also added: “Walk away from my daughter. Leave her now. She was a shell of a person after you hurt her last summer.”)