Anger (7 page)

Ned stood there, his head bent, looking suddenly so at a loss, so forlorn that Anna impulsively leaned over and kissed him. “You are such a strange man,” she said then, “But I do love you—that's why you make me so angry, I suppose.”

“I just feel awful, sick,” he said. “Let's sit down.” On the sofa Ned leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Anna reached over and took his ice-cold hand into both of hers.

“I can't understand,” he said after a moment. “One minute you're in a fury and the next you are telling me you love me. I can't move that fast from one mood to another, Anna.”

“People in love are vulnerable, Ned, and easily hurt. And,” she went on very quietly, “people react differently to being hurt. I react with anger. You withdraw.”

“Mmmmmm.”

“But it's not fatal. It's just that we are very different.”

“Fire and ice,” Ned said and smiled for the first time.

“Maybe.” Then Anna met his eyes, “But you're not ice. You're fire, but it's under ice … it's locked in.” And indeed when she was lying down earlier that afternoon in the limbo between sleep and waking, when images float up from the subconscious, she had had a vision of Ned as a swimmer under water, but there was a thick layer of ice on the surface. It was a nightmarish vision. And she had pushed it aside and gotten up.

Now it came back. Anna looked at Ned with more love than she had perhaps ever felt before for a man. And she told herself that surely tenderness and true love would melt the ice and set the swimmer free. Her moment of anger had forced her to go deeper, to be with Ned in a new way. That was strange.

Part II

Chapter I

The scene on an October night two years later was tranquil. Ned was sitting with his feet up leafing through a French economist's analysis of the world recession. But although everything was still there was an air of expectancy about him, and when he heard the clock strike eleven, he got up, put another log on the fire, and stood for a moment surveying the large room like a critic. In the window a small table had been set up with a plate of cold chicken, salad, a basket of French bread, two champagne glasses, and two chairs. Within a half-hour Anna would be home after singing with the Boston Symphoney in Mahler's
Lied von der Erde
. For once Ned had not accompanied her. He had had to attend a dinner for a visiting director of a West German bank. Anna had not liked that at all, “For once, when I am singing in Boston, Ned, it's not fair.”

“I wanted to come. You must know that.”

“Two years ago you would have managed it somehow.” Her eyes were bright with tears. But after two years of marriage to this emotional woman, tears irritated Ned, and he had not even wished her luck as she swept out. Now, remembering that exit and dreading her return, he went into the bedroom and gathered Fonzi, their dachshund, up from his basket and brought him into the living room.

“I'll take you for a walk after she has her supper,” he promised, as Fonzi stood there, wagging his long tail with furious anticipation. “Later, Fonzi.” The biddable animal lay down on the hearth rug, his nose on his paws, one eye following Ned as he lit a cigarette and sat down again, but did not pick up his book. Instead he looked around the room measuring its discreet beauty and order against the disorder and chaos of the life he and his wife were living inside it.

The room was gray and oyster white, the carpeting thick velvety white, the walls pale gray to set off the two small Vuillard's on either side of the fireplace. Over the gray and white striped sofa opposite Ned had hung a Bonnard, the Mediterranean very blue seen over a terrace and the tops of trees. He never tired of looking at it. Anna and he had agreed from the start that this was to be their own atmosphere, not that of his mother's house, dark and cluttered with objets d'art and eighteenth-century English furniture, nor that of her mother's, for that matter, inhabited by heavy old Swedish furniture with some Italian pieces mixed in. How he had admired Anna's forthright refusal of various things his mother wanted to bestow! “It doesn't feel like me,” she had said more than once. “It's too grand, Mrs. Fraser.”

And to Ned she had apologized, “But we can't live her life, Ned. Even if she is hurt. I can't help that!”

“You're so fierce about it.”

“I'm fierce because it's so hard to be definite and not give in, can't you see?”

At that time everything that now irritated Ned had seemed rather wonderful, including Anna's blunt honesty.

Fonzi interrupted these thoughts by barking excitedly. How did he know? For it was some minutes before he heard Anna's key in the lock. She came in, flushed, her arms filled with roses, and went right past Ned to the kitchen to put them in water. Ned picked up three red ones that had fallen and followed her in a strange silence, for Anna had not uttered a word and neither had he.

“Here, you dropped these … some fellow's heart's blood, no doubt!” Ned laid them on the counter on top of the others.

“I've got to change first.” He helped her off with her coat. “Hang it up, will you?”

And she left him there, his arms filled with purple velvet and sable, stroking the fur absent-mindedly. Then he went to the hall closet and hung the coat up. Impossible to tell yet what her mood might be. But his own ancient Burberry hanging beside her coat gave him an idea. He slipped it on, took Fonzi's leash, and as the excited barks rang out, knocked on the bedroom door, “I'm taking Fonzi for a walk while you change, Anna.”

“All right,” her voice sounded quite cheerful. “That's a good idea.”

When he got back a half-hour later, Anna was waiting, stretched out on the sofa in a dressing gown. Fonzi ran to her, his tail nearly wagging itself off and she sat up and took him onto her lap. “Oh my Fonzi … I thought you'd never come back. I'm starving, Ned.”

“Well, let's eat. Everything's ready, as you see.”

“Kind of you,” she said, taking her place and snatching a piece of celery, devouring it, entirely absorbed in crunching it up.

“Well,” Ned asked, “how did it go?”

“You don't really want to know, do you?”

“As you please.”

For a second she met his eyes and wondered how to stop the spiral of irritation which they both knew was already starting to build up.

“I did well, Ned. I think I did, although that maddening man changed the tempo in the
Abschied
… slowed it down and me down, so twice I was nearly out of breath. I got the silence, though, at the end. There must have been thirty seconds of silence before the applause.”

“Bravo!”

“If you could only say that with some warmth!” The letdown from the heat of the concert hall, the standing ovation, the whole atmosphere she had come from, was impossible to convey to this man, her husband, who could say bravo in the tone one might use to tell a dog to lie down.

“You know I can't. I can't shout and wave my arms sitting opposite you at a table. What do you expect?”

This Anna chose to ignore. She was eating her cold chicken with gusto.

“You
are
hungry.”

“I've been running a marathon … you never have understood what a performance like this takes out of me.”

“Nor perhaps what the exhilaration is of holding an audience spellbound for an hour. My evening was, it must be granted, rather a different kettle of fish.”

“There was a lot of coughing and I wanted to kill them!”

Ned couldn't help smiling at the absurdity of it, the fury of Anna's feelings.

“I know I'm ridiculous,” as usual she felt put down, no longer able to hold on to her triumph, watching it taken from her as Ned always managed to do in one way or another. “I ought to be shot at dawn.”

“That is a slight exaggeration, my dear.”

“Why is it, Ned, that you can only use an endearment ironically?” Anna knew that she was asking for trouble but something in her wanted trouble, wanted anything that could bring her down from the high tension wire of the performance, get rid of the tension. She pushed her plate aside.

“Have some more chicken, Anna.”

“No thanks.”

“We forgot the champagne but there is dessert. Felicia made trifle … we can have some now.”

They went out companionably to the kitchen where Anna served the trifle and licked the spoon, and Ned, after a nerve-wracking struggle, got the champagne open. The cork flew up to the ceiling, just missing a porcelain duck on a high shelf.

“Wow, that was close!” she said, delighted. “Now give me a kiss.” His lips just brushed her cheek. “A butterfly could not do it more passionately,” she teased.

“I hope you notice it's the real McCoy …
Cordon Bleu.”

“Yes, I noticed. We are being extravagant.”

“It's not every day that Anna Lindstrom sings with the Boston Symphony.”

“It's not every mezzo-soprano who has a husband with influence.”

“Don't hold it against me.”

“Don't spoil it. Fonzi is waiting to lick the plates!”

They sat down. Anna lifted her glass without lifting her eyes, took a swallow and put the glass down. “There's nothing like it, is there?” She was thinking that the only safe area now between her and Ned was food and drink. Almost anything else they might talk of—except Fonzi of course—had pain in it or had the capacity to make pain surface. And all too often the pain took the form of anger. She looked at him then, trying to read his closed face as he tasted the trifle.

“Tell me about your German banker.”

“It wouldn't interest you.”

At this she laughed. “How do you know if you never try? Give me the benefit of the doubt! What did he look like?”

“I really can't remember.” And it was possible, she thought, that this was the truth. The German banker was simply a counter in a game for Ned. “But he was extremely civil at any rate. The Germans are in a peculiar position because of our high interest rates. Also the dollar has not really rallied. They had everything to gain from a weak dollar in some ways, and in others, it is damaging because of trade.”

“It sounds like a maze. Don't you get terrified at times that it is a maze and you will all finally get lost trying to find the center?” But even as she spoke Anna knew that this kind of teasing simply bored Ned. “I know I am idiotic,” she said. “After all I never went to college.”

“You had better things to do.” It was a perfunctory response. He yawned then, “It's really been rather a long evening, Anna. Let's go to bed.”

“We never talk about anything real. What has happened to us?” Anna got up and took the dishes into the kitchen, followed by Fonzi who now gave a sharp bark of distress. “Oh Fonzi, my darling, I quite forgot you,” she said, setting the plate down for him to lick. “It's not every dog who eats off a Copenhagen plate!” And to Ned who had followed her with the glasses and the bottle, still half full, “Do you remember when we bought these?”

“I remember the salesman fell all over himself when he recognized you!”

“And how you hated that! Yes, of course you remember,” Anna said bitterly and on a rising inflection.

Ned winced visibly. “We're not going to have a scene,” he said coldly.

“No, why should we? There's nothing left to have a scene about.”

But Ned didn't answer for he had gone into the bathroom and closed the door. While he was brushing his teeth he wondered, too, what had happened but his instinct was not to probe. At the moment a good night's sleep was all he asked of life and to be left alone. He had never been able to understand Anna's insatiable need to talk things over, which meant savage attacks on him and all he represented. It seemed to him simply self-indulgence, the need to get at him, to force him to respond to her, if only with anger. These scenes left him disgusted with himself and with her. Tonight he would be adamant, he thought, as he got into his pajamas.

“Sorry if I kept you waiting,” he said, seeing Anna had stretched out on top of the bed and was lying there, her eyes wide open, clearly thinking or what she called thinking, which was, as far as he could see, usually on the contrary, feeling, and getting herself into a state of rage.

“You certainly take the longest time any human being ever took to brush your teeth.”

“Come Fonzi, let's get some sleep,” Ned said, picking the little dog up and settling him on his own blanket at the foot of the bed, before he got into bed himself and put out the light. Perhaps he could manage to be fast asleep when Anna came out of the bathroom. At least he could pretend to be.

Ned, Anna had often considered, could fall asleep by simply wishing to, as though closing a door, and she understood that falling asleep was his line of defense against her, part of the disciplined structure he imposed on himself and always had imposed no doubt, as a way of avoiding feeling anything too deeply. So when she had brushed her teeth and taken off her makeup she came back, not surprised to find him asleep.

She slipped in beside him, lay there, her arms crossed under her neck, her eyes wide open in the dark, so tense she could hardly breathe. Fonzi was snoring gently at the foot of the bed. Far down on the street a police siren screamed.

She tried to remember a time when they had been in accord, forced herself back to the days of illuminated self-discovery when her whole body had been alive down to her fingertips and the nights became brilliant journeys. It didn't matter so much then that their love-making took place in total silence on Ned's part, for she herself was such a complex of sensations, so awake and in touch with herself and with him, or so she imagined, that she took the silence as only a step in their journey together. But later when she wanted to talk, to come back to an articulate world she began to need reassurance. Had she alone experienced what she had experienced? Why couldn't Ned ever utter an endearment? After making love again and again he simply turned over and fell asleep.