by May Sarton
“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.
He appeared to be able to separate himself from himself, to become a sexual being to the exclusion of tenderness or even love. When she felt most herself, a whole person, fulfilled in an ecstacy of sensation where the soul and the flesh seemed absolutely one, in perfect accord, he, as Ned, simply was not there. And so she began to realize after months of what appeared to be happiness that she was not there either.
“I take you in,” she had whispered once, “but you never take me in.”
“Didn’t you come? I thought you did.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“What are you talking about?” The note of irritability always crept in, and at first she gave up and said,
“Never mind. Go to sleep, my darling.”
Then she lay awake listening to his deep breathing and wondering why she felt so lonely and even abject. So it did no good after all to try to remember … remembering simply brought her back into a knot of the unexpressed, the unshared, a knot of anger. Everything that Anna longed to hear, even a tone of voice, let alone loving words, she heard Ned say to Fonzi every day. Why couldn’t he say such things to her? Not only that. He didn’t really like her to utter her feelings towards him or even to show him, as once when after a wrangle she had taken his hand in hers and kissed it. “You’re abject,” Ned had said.
At the time she was still on her own wave of wanting to make peace. Only later when she remembered was she taken by a towering rage over nothing at all, which left Ned bewildered and furious. “I’m tired of your scenes,” he had said. And the worst was that she understood very well how irritating they were, and at the same time she could never make him understand why they were, that a storm which seemed to be about nothing at all, had been slowly building for days.
Why did two people of such different temperaments fall in love? Why had she married such a monster?
Anna turned over for the tenth time and tried to force herself to relax, but if she managed to let the tension go from her arm, it was there in her leg, then in her neck. She looked at her watch. It was only two A.M. And suddenly she was furious with that inert sleeping man who understood nothing and gave nothing. Unable to con
tain so much fury, she took him by the throat and shook him awake.
“For God’s sake, Anna, what’s the matter with you?” He pulled her hands down and held her by the wrists and then twisted himself into a sitting position and let her go. “Have you gone mad?”
“No.”
“It’s not safe here any more.”
“You are a monster,” she whispered. “I just couldn’t spend another night thinking and getting nowhere …”
“Thinking? Thinking leads you to try to strangle me in the middle of the night? What in hell is wrong with you, woman?”
“I’m tired of being controlled like some biddable dog, tired of feeling censored in everything I feel so I can never be spontaneous, never tell you what is happening to me, never feel free to be myself.”
“Now you’ve upset Fonzi,” Ned said vehemently. “Poor Fonzi,” for the little dog was panting and climbing all over them in a nervous attempt to stop the loud voices.
“Poor Fonzi has been happily asleep for hours. You are both just beasts!”
“Come on now,” Ned was furious, “it’s not Fonzi’s fault. I won’t take that, Anna. You had better behave.” He was sheltering Fonzi under his arm now.
“What a pity that I am not a dog,” Anna said.
Ned took his pillow and flung it to the floor.
“Why can’t you be loving? Why? Why? Why?”
“Don’t ask me to do what I can’t do,” Ned said coldly.
“But why can’t you?”
This time Ned was angry enough himself to answer, “Because I don’t feel like it!”
Tears poured down Anna’s cheeks.
“Now we have to have the whole gambit from a violent physical attack to hysterical weeping, I suppose!”
Anna reached out to touch his hand but Ned drew it away. “Have you no pity, no compassion?” she murmured, taking a Kleenex out to blow her nose.
“What about you? You suddenly attack me at 2 A.M., for no apparent reason. Then you ask for pity!”
“It’s hopeless,” Anna said. “Put Fonzi down at the end of the bed and let’s try to sleep.”
“So you’ve had your little scene and now you can sleep … I can’t.”
And with that Ned took his pillow and left the room with Fonzi under his arm. Anna, by now in the throes of self-questioning and remorse, followed him after a few minutes with a blanket. He was stretched out on the sofa with Fonzi lying on his stomach and made no remark when she covered him, making sure Fonzi could breathe.
Then she tiptoed out into the kitchen and warmed some milk. So I’ve had my little scene, she said to herself and the truth was that she did feel better. The tension had been broken. It was certainly not admirable on her part but she wondered what, if anything, could break Ned open so that he would consent to talk with her. For it always ended like this, with her in tears and he in a cold withdrawal. Never, never would she know what was really happening to him. All she knew was his contempt and even hatred of her “moods” as he called them. He was very good at diminishing even an outbreak such as this had been into a “mood,” something she herself manufactured and which had nothing whatever to do with him, was not in any way his responsibility. Possibly he did really believe he had married a mad person.
By five o’clock, as the wan light crept into the bedroom, Anna had fallen into troubled sleep, dreaming that she was lost in a strange country, following an endless path through encroaching ominous firs, without a coat and in sneakers, although there was thin snow on the ground and she was shivering with the cold. When she woke at nearly nine, Ned had left for the office. There was a note on the kitchen table, “Don’t forget we are dining with Paul and Hilda.”
Nothing could be worse. Paul, Ned’s brother, had a sovereign talent for putting people down. He was a little mad, Anna had decided, or simply so arrogant that it became a kind of madness and it was a total mystery why Hilda, a rather good painter, had married him. They lived on the North shore in a huge nineteenth-century mansard-roofed house. Paul had a small publishing house which did special editions, a losing proposition, but distinguished in its way. “For who cares these days about fine printing?” Ned had explained, and had warned her when they were first married, “Paul will try to get at you. And the only thing is not to pay attention. Ignore him. That’s the only way he can be handled.”
Paul was the elder of the two brothers and it had occurred to Anna that Ned had developed his own talent for withdrawal out of self-defense. He had become a turtle to survive. But then why had he chosen to marry someone who was as open and violent as she was? What had the attraction been? He had, she sometimes thought, married a voice—for there had never been any doubt that he had fallen in love with the public person, with her power as a singer. How many times lately she had confronted him with just that. “Why do you think I can sing as I do? It’s not the voice of a meek lamb, is it? What did you expect? A competent hausfrau who would never raise her voice?”
His characteristic put-down had been, “You certainly do raise it, don’t you?”
Why couldn’t he ever understand that the voice was the audible sign of a temperament, of someone who had, through its schooling, learned to discipline violent conflict and anxiety, that her rage was part of why she had the power she had? That she was all of a piece and could not, as he could, compartmentalize herself? Was this simply being a woman? Did women have to make themselves whole to function at all? Whereas men could afford to compartmentalize and in fact survived because they did and could? Anna was tired of the endless male-female wrangles in the press, tired of feminism, although Ned’s behavior forced her into taking extreme positions in spite of herself. Nevertheless she was honest enough never to have attacked him with the trite “male chauvinist” phrase. Whatever his faults, Ned was generous where women were concerned. She had to grant that. He was naturally considerate, and from the start had helped her with housework, often cooked a meal himself, always helped her wash up. His lack of consideration had to do with his defensiveness where feelings were concerned.
The phone rang as she was having a second cup of coffee before taking Fonzi out. “Oh Mama,” she breathed, “was it all right?”
But after Teresa had praised her performance and congratulated her on the warm response, Anna knew something was being withheld. “What’s the matter, then? You sound strange. The Herald? No, I haven’t seen the papers. Ned must have taken it with him.” And Anna realized then that he had no doubt made off with it to spare her. “Read it to me.”
There was only a short paragraph about Anna Lindstrom, and it was mostly praise, but it ended by comparing her rendition and Kathleen Ferrier’s great performance of the Lied von der Erde, with Bruno Walter shortly before her death, and suggesting that Anna did not have the depth or the maturity for the final part. “She came close to what is needed here, but whether for technical reasons or a faulty interpretation, there seemed to be a curious lack of ease where there should have been release.”
“Damn,” Anna said, “Davis slowed the tempo so I had difficulty breathing … it wasn’t fair. He had never done that in rehearsal and I was taken by surprise.”
“The audience certainly did not feel as this critic did,” her mother quickly comforted. “Don’t pay attention, cara mia, the critic is just showing off. You know how they have to.”
“It’s all right, Mama. Don’t try.” Anna was stone cold under the blow and only wanted to get off the phone. Then she laughed, “We’re going to Paul’s for dinner, so it looks like a perfect day, all told.” They parted on an agreement to have lunch the next day.
“Just put that review out of your mind,” her mother adjured her.
“You know I can’t do that. Don’t ask the impossible, Mama.”
Anna’s first reaction had been to freeze. She did not cry, she was not angry. She had learned by now that the only way to handle a bad review was to swallow it like a glass of poison, let it work its way through her body, for the effect was at first pur
ely physical, visceral even. And she was only too aware of what she had been up against with Kathleen Ferrier’s ghost in the wings … She could not after all hope to match that performance with the cloud of emotion around it as everyone knew that Ferrier was dying of cancer when she sang the Lied von der Erde with Bruno Walter that last time!
Then she sat down in her wrapper and summoned her intelligence and her honesty. The critic had been right that something was missing in the last few minutes—and how could he have guessed what the conductor had done to her? The review must be accepted as a piece of bad luck. “It does not mean,” Anna told herself, “that I cannot do it better next time.”
Then on an impulse she went into the music room and took out the score, played her own accompaniment and forced herself to sing the final part as she could sing it. There alone in the apartment, she was for a half-hour so absorbed that she forgot everything in the sheer excitement and beauty she was creating for herself alone. So when the phone rang and her old friend Clara at the other end burst into a long crescendo of anger at and disappointment with the review Anna was able to say quite calmly, “A piece of bad luck, Clara—besides I really can’t be expected to win over that ghost, can I? And the critic didn’t know that Davis changed the tempo … oh well, it’s all in the game, I suppose.”
Clara congratulated her on her calm … she had no doubt expected wails and woe! But after the call Anna paced about. After all a million people were reading that she lacked maturity at this very moment! She flung on slacks and a sweater and a short coat. And Fonzi barked and barked with the joy of a walk, his tail nearly wagging itself off. Anna picked him up, kissed him, and off they went. Of course, she met a neighbor in the elevator who insisted on talking about the review, and that did not help at all, although he had been at the concert and was reassuring.
“You got an ovation,” he said. “I wouldn’t let the Herald spoil that for a moment.”
“The trouble is he was right,” Anna said and regretted it immediately. Why expose herself further, even to admitting her own failing? Ned would never do that himself or condone it. He had never in the two years since their marriage admitted that he could be wrong. And now here she was adding fuel to the fire.
