Fury (41 page)

In the two weeks that follow I feel as raw as an oyster on a half shell. I recall it the way I remember early childhood memories: as snatches of images with little context. From today's vantage, I can't figure out what gives them their small, brilliant power. I can only remember with a kind of choppy chronology:

Lying on the bed in the guest bedroom in my future in-laws' house in the Cotswolds. Eamon is curled up beside me, my head on his shoulder and his legs entwined with mine, while a thunderstorm flashes silver through the window. “You've been so strong,” he says. “I can't believe how strong you've been. It's all right if you want to go to pieces now.”

Another night, I am standing on the seafront in Brighton, wearing a short, buttery dress that still bears the wrinkles of my suitcase. It's night. It's my birthday. My hair beats wildly against my face in the wind. I'm laughing for the first time in weeks as I tell Eamon about the way I'd come down to the pier to ride the Spinball Whizzer after our midnight argument. “It was a stupid fight,” he says. “That's all. Just a stupid fight.” In some ways it
was
just a fight (not the last word in our relationship, as I'd imagined in the morning that followed), but it was also the catalyst for what became a year of discovery.

Eamon's solo tour becomes our road trip for two. I go along, tracing our route in the
AA Road Atlas
, “PopMaster” playing on the radio in the background. I wade through the muddy expanses of outdoor music festivals. I work on my book in the graffitied dressing rooms of nightclubs. And every day, from the rolled-down window of our tenacious Ford, I watch the country reveal itself to me—accent by accent and city by village—like beautiful, green glass beads on a string.

It seems fitting that the idea of “home” is fluid during this emotional transition. Together, Eamon and I live like carnival geeks, or gypsies, or old-timey actors in a traveling theater troupe roving the countryside in a clapboard wagon. On the road, we're truly able to build our life together from scratch. There are no old behaviors, no bad habits. Neither of us has a favorite armchair, a fixed morning routine, or a designated side of the bed. Most nights we don't even
have
a bed. We make do with futons, couches, car seats, or bundles of bedsheets on a friend's living room floor.

It hardly matters that we don't have a permanent mailing address. If we have each other to confide in, we are home, and so home becomes the first sunny spring day in Glasgow, or the crypt room in London's Sir John Soane's Museum, where we duck inside to dodge an afternoon drizzle, or Old Wardour, the ruined castle in Wiltshire, where we stop the car to stretch our legs and rove the tragic, crumbling towers.

It's a lonely time too.

G. Stanley Hall once described “a well-poised lady, so sweet-tempered that everybody imposed on her.” One day, at the age of twenty-three, this woman “had her first ebullition of temper and went about to her college mates telling them plainly what she thought of them, and went home rested and happy, full of the peace that passeth understanding.” Although my situation resembles hers, I don't share this woman's contented serenity. I frequently cry in the beds of Travelodges, thinking about the weekend of my miscarriage. And the more I come to think of Eamon and my future in-laws as family, the more I'm aware of the unresolved problems in my natural-born one. I'm in contact with my father occasionally, my mother rarely, my sister not at all.

There's a point that summer when I attempt to reach my sister by e-mail:

 

I'd really like to make an effort to talk about these things. I know you're still upset, but because I hear this only via second and third sources, I have to piece together the hows and whys on my own. If I knew how things looked from your end, I might be better able to make it right. I really need you to try to articulate things. If you're pissed off at me, that's all right—just explain it to me. Conflict, I see now, is nothing to be scared of; it helps move stuff around. Please, let's talk or even fight this out if we have to so we can fully move on.

 

She doesn't write back for over a week, and, even then, all she has to say on the subject is: “Honestly, I really would rather not mention the whole thing again. I know you're hoping to talk everything out, but I would rather we just let it be.”

I let it be. Or rather, I let
her
be. Whenever I think of the e-mail, the Beatles song tumbles sarcastically through my head: “She wants me to let it be?” I tell Eamon. “Fine. Think of me as Paul Fucking McCartney.”

Another memory:

Eamon and I are weaving through a thatch-roofed village in Dorset, watching the hedgerows slide past the car's open window. We are taking in the rippling fields of cuckoo flower and bluebell, the sun-streaked forests of oak, the arched stone bridges, the streams lined with wood garlic flowering in snowy bursts. It's all preposterously picturesque. So beautiful it's almost harrowing. My eyes begin to fill and the scenery loses focus. These days, there's a limit to my happiness. There's a threshold that I cannot cross given the stony silence between me and my family.

In the same memory, I tell Eamon that I don't know if I have the nerve to write about my family, no matter how relevant it is to my book. “I know I can't speak about my anger honestly if I leave them out,” I say. Which is more uncomfortable? More impossible? Taking it all back? Can I return to a world in which I assume whatever form they require of me? In which I cast my personal feelings aside and say whatever I needed to say in order to be accepted as a Zailckas? Or is it a lesser agony to plow onward? Defend the small territory that I've bloodied myself for?

Can I ever imagine myself acknowledging—on paper, in a most undeniable way—that even though I was materially provided for as a kid, I hadn't always felt emotionally supported? How to say that love has always felt conditional? That for as long as I can remember I've felt like I've had to compromise my feelings, my fabric, my very human nature, in order to prevent my ties from being cut, the earth from rumbling, my family home from buckling and falling away?

Maybe it's not admitting these things to a reader that frightens me. Maybe what scares me is acknowledging them in print to myself.

I tell him I've painted (or more accurately,
written
) myself into a corner. Loneliness awaits me at either juncture. I can be crawling and agreeable, aware that my family welcomes only the phony, stony me, or I can be obstinate, which will most likely result in my being iced out altogether.

Eamon reaches his left hand across the gearshift to squeeze my fingers. When he glances at me, his look is deep, warm, sad, filled with love. “I want you to know you can write about me,” he says. “And when I've made you angry—you can write about that too. I don't mind. It's important to you.”

I feel awed by this gesture. Touched by the accuracy with which he sees straight through to the molten core of me. It doesn't make up for the essential loneliness of my revelation. But then, it shouldn't have to.

The time comes to move to Paris.

On an afternoon in late May, Eamon and I exit the Gare du Nord and stand, smoking and sweating, on the Boulevard de Strasbourg, taking in the scalloped red awnings of the tourist cafés, soaking up the pink flush of the afternoon light and listening to the traffic scream at the top of its lungs. We feel bullied by our suitcases. We are half deafened by the station's yak and blather. But, as we climb into a taxi, we are grinning too. Accordion music plays in our heads. We are quietly tickled when the pop-eyed driver calls us Monsieur and Madame
.

Our excitement mounts as we pass along rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, where we register
le petit
scooters, the carved wooden doors, the sapphire signs announcing the names of the boulevards. There are the
tabacs
, the
fleuristes
, the
boulangeries
! Dear God, so many
boulangeries
! Each beckoning like Henry Miller's bordellos. The windows: parading
pain polkas
like heavy, doughy
seins
and their pale gold
moules
like plump, naked haunches. Rolling down the windows, and sniffing the smell of cooling baguettes, it dawns on me how much the phrase “bread baking” sounds like “lovemaking.”

The city is electric. It's like New York, only less clenched and self-loathing. Paris seems like Manhattan's prettier, prouder, and sluttier older sister. It's more in love with its own voice and the curves of its own figure. It's New York if New York's pleasures weren't guilty.

We aren't staying in Paris proper. The cab keeps hurtling along the Avenue Jean Jaurès, past Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, through Pantin, until we arrive in a neighborhood of empty lots and industrial parks, where dogs bark behind barbed wire and morose
grandmères
drag shopping carts full of canned goods onto groaning city buses.

Dread flogs us as the cab pulls away, leaving us standing with our suitcases at the door of a quiet warehouse. “Is this home?” we whisper. “Is it safe? Was this a terrible mistake?” We exchange reassuring words. We ring the bell twice but there is no answer.

Just when our misgivings are turning into full-fledged panic, the lock clamors and the door swings open on Leon in all his bumbling, aging, beatniked glory. He's like a hip grizzly bear—and I wanted to hug him, even if he might bite.

As we're saying our
bonjours
, Leon wipes his hands on his barrel chest and claws his long, salt-and-pepper hair out of his face. He has dark, woolly eyebrows, full lips that end in a sarcastic curl, and glittering eyes that hint at younger days as a lothario. Some spill has occurred, soaking one corner of his black T-shirt. His jeans end at bare feet and hairy toes.

Leon's English, as he puts it, is “no good.” So in the time that we share his house, he'll speak primarily to Eamon, who has enough French in his arsenal to keep up with Leon's boisterous rants and profanities. (One of Leon's favorite speeches begins: “Americans are stupid the way the French are stupid, but the British? The British are the ass.”)

In the times when Leon is feeling loose and generous he'll try to include me with the aid of pantomime. A pinkie finger raised and wagged indicates espresso. A wet, razzing sound and a flick of his wrist means “It is shit,
phufft
, it's no good.” When Leon's drunk, he'll lock his eyes on mine and address me in aggressive, badgering French, as though he doesn't truly believe I don't understand him or thinks I might if only I really try. In three months, the only conversations we'll ever manage in English will be about Henry Miller. More than once, Leon will tell me: “To truly understand our village you must read
Quiet Days in Clichy
. The people here are like that.”

There is a lot of talk that summer about the differing natures of “the French,” “the English,” “the Belgian,” “the Dutch,” “the Chinese,” New Yorkers, Parisians, the people in the village. It's not that our landlords are nationalists. Just the opposite. They are as transient as Eamon and me, and they've filled their home with subletters in order to finance their love of travel.

I call it their “house,” but it's more like a compound: four small buildings huddled around a common outhouse and a small concrete courtyard, three of which they've converted from a factory, one of which used to be a church before they transformed it into a painting studio.

While we camp out in the main apartment, a Dutch girl named Marieke sublets a room on the far side of the courtyard. French Tibault sleeps in a loft above the reading nook and is often visited by Italian Riccarda. It seems like no coincidence that all of us have gravitated to this spot. Our village is Romainville—named for the Roma Gypsies who inhabited it—and we are accepted in the streets around town because we too are immigrants among outsiders.

Our landlady Anique is Belgian born, German raised, and French nationalized, and her side job as a flight attendant takes her to America weekly. She's a slight woman, a Dunhill smoker, a passionate speaker with a knack for languages, and the most generous woman this side of Mother Teresa.

Following a flight to the States, Anique's Lufthansa uniform is always washed and flapping on the clothesline on the terrace, and, for a few days, she wears an air of affable exhaustion—wandering the house in her bathrobe, chain-smoking through whatever cold she's picked up, hoarsely barking at Leon for forgetting something from the market. But as the week goes on, Anique gathers strength and becomes a whirlwind of sociability and artistic inspiration. It's not uncommon to see her still holding court among a group of poets, photographers, and painters at 3:00 A.M., singing along to Léo Ferré or crowing about something in French and then translating it into Italian or English for anyone who is listening from the other side of a language barrier.