Anger

by May Sarton

  “You want a confrontation. You have been trying to get me to answer your anger with anger. Very well. Your letter made me furious. I didn’t deserve it. For two years I’ve tried to love you, Anna, but you cannot behave like a rational human being. It’s gotten so I dread coming home. I dread to find you in a bad mood.”

  “I’ve had good reason to be depressed sometimes. You will never understand what it is to be as exposed as I am, to have to sit still under attacks in the newspapers, not able to defend myself.”

  “I think you are a little paranoid about reviews.”

  “Paranoid?” This word made Anna get out of bed and stand facing him, tears of rage pouring down her cheeks. “You beast! You prehistoric brute!”

  Ned threw the pillow onto the bed. “What you need is a psychiatrist, my dear. All these rages, all these tears seem to be close to psychotic.”

  “And what are your withdrawals, coldness, inability ever to say a loving word? Normal? You have the sympathetic nerve of a cobra!”

  “And you, I suppose, are a great human being, open and loving—why not? All your friends are sycophants, Anna.”

  “What?” Anna pushed past Ned and paced up and down in the big room. He followed her, picking Fonzi up and holding the little dog in his arms.

  “Don’t scream. It upsets Fonzi!”

  Anna sat down on the sofa, her head in her hands. Ned set the dog down and stood in the window looking out on the Common.

  “I’ll go to a psychiatrist if you will come with me,” Anna said, after a pause.

  “You think I need help, as they say? Come now!”

  “You don’t have the guts to do it.”

  “It would be an invasion of my privacy. If that is cowardice, not to want to unbutton everything secret and private to a perfect stranger, have it your way! I regard psychiatry as self-indulgence.”

  “Unless the person is mad like me?”

  “If a total lack of self-control is a kind of madness, yes. You might learn something about these angers that destroy anyone who comes anywhere near you. You might learn the virtue of restraint.”

  The last word was said so fiercely that Anna suddenly burst into laughter. In spite of Ned’s attacks in the last minutes, she felt a kind of relief, even exhilaration. She saw Ned’s look of amazement at her laughter.

  “Can’t you see that this fight, however painful it is, is a lot healthier than all the silences of the last months? At last you are letting your anger out.”

  “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” Ned flung himself down in his chair.

  “Yes, I did,” Anna said in a calm voice.

  “So you think you’ve won. And the next thing will be to get me to cry, I suppose.” He put his head in his hands, then after a moment he said, “I can’t see that bad behavior is ever good. You appear to enjoy being angry. It just makes me feel rotten, ashamed!” He lifted his head and looked at her, “And I hate you for making it happen, if you must know.”

  “But I love you for letting it happen.”

  “Love? In this context? Love? You don’t know what it means.”

  “What does it mean then?”

  “Restraint.”

  “I would say giving.” Again Anna was walking up and down thinking aloud, thinking with her whole body, “That’s the crux of it for me. Opening oneself, one’s deepest self to the stranger, growing out of the prehistoric era of blind passion into a human place, a million years down the road, toward some kind of communion. Love is not shutting out buried parts of the self. It is allowing them to exist, facing them with a lover.”

  “You’ve had enough of those, you ought to know.”

  “At least I gave to the people I loved. I didn’t hold back.” Ned had never shown any jealousy before about the past and when they were first in love they had each talked quite a lot about their experiences.

  “How could you—with so many?”

  “Don’t jeer,” she said coldly. “It really is not appropriate.”

  “Well, you were pretty promiscuous.”

  At this Anna got up and rushed at him, hitting him on the back with her fists. “I was never promiscuous, you filthy liar!”

  “Get away from me, Anna. Don’t touch me!” He turned and pushed her away quite roughly. “I find this violence sickening.”

  “It’s healthy!” she shouted. “You can’t stand anyone even your wife coming close to you!”

  “Hitting someone is not coming close, Anna.” Ned’s face was white.

  Anna flung herself down on the sofa and sat there hugging his pillow. Then, seeing Fonzi’s stricken look where he lay in his bed, she burst into tears.

  And following her eyes, Ned shouted, “Now you have made Fonzi miserable! All you ever think about is your feelings—you are the most selfish person I’ve ever known!”

  “I have made him miserable!” Anna, hugging the pillow, rocked back and forth. “Ned,” she said quietly, “the only real emotion I have ever seen you express is anger. Are you aware that deep feeling, at least the only deep feeling you ever show is anger? Have you ever been honest enough with yourself to find out why that is? It isn’t normal, you know. Why can’t you show tenderness? Why can’t you ever express love? You’re sick.” And she laughed her theatrical laugh. “When are you going to develop to the point of giving up fur for skin, you stupid prehistoric animal?”

  “Ha,” Ned mimicked her laugh. “My God, what an actress you are! Can’t you ever stop acting, Anna, even in bed?”

  Anna looked up and suddenly threw the pillow at him with all the force she could muster sitting down. Ned caught it, looked as though he would throw it back, but instead laid it down carefully on the chair.

  “You wanted to throw it,” Anna said, laughing again, “Why couldn’t you? You couldn’t because you censor any natural impulse you may have. What you can’t understand is that what you call acting is simply doing what I feel, being whatever I am at the moment to the fullest possible extent.”

  “Maybe, but if everyone did exactly what he or she felt at any given moment, we would be in a state of perpetual war and society would have a complete breakdown. I can’t see that anarchy in personal relations or anywhere else is any solution.”

  “No, you can’t see very much or very far when it comes to loving, can you, Ned?”

  “I can see far enough to know that a scene like this is purely negative in its effect, Anna. That I can see with extreme clarity. The whole apartment is infected. You call that healthy! Good Christ!” He flung himself down in his chair.

  Anna closed her eyes. Where words had been crashing around, the silence was now even louder. Had they reached the end? Was there nothing possible now except to go in opposite directions as fast as they could go and lick their wounds?

  “When you were away I managed to get back to normal for three or four days,” Ned said calmly. “Then that letter came.”

  “It was a gift from my deepest self to yours,” Anna said. What was there to lose now? She would pack a bag in a little while and go to her mother’s.

  “Pearls before swine,” Ned smiled an ironic smile.

  “Do you think you could listen to me for a moment, stop being defensive for a moment?” Anna said gently. “Why is the only feeling you allow yourself anger? Please try to tell me, Ned. Then I’ll go to mother’s, if that’s what you want, and leave you to find your own peace. Please, Ned, try to tell me.”

  “Anything else is too dangerous.” Ned looked across at her and what Anna saw was so much pain that she dropped her eyes. She recognized the truth of what he had said, and she knew how hard it had been for him to go even that far with his own secretive self. But if there never had been trust, how could there have been love?

  “No love then,” she murmured, “no love, no love.”

  “Love, Anna, but not your kind.”

  “We’re married but we’re not kin.”

  “It would be incest if we were, wouldn’t it?”

  “At this point can
we do without cleverness? That, if you must know, is acting too. Evading. Hiding.”

  “Yes, Professor Lindstrom. I’m listening. What is the next lesson?”

  Anna was beyond being hurt or even angry. “Sometimes I feel so deprived because I can never give you my best gifts … I can’t even give you my love because you can’t take it. It is not acceptable. Can’t you see that that makes for desolation and despair?”

  “I don’t measure up.” Anna watched him rub his eyes, as though rubbing something away, and was silent.

  But, as he said nothing she finally said, “It’s not a question of measuring up, whatever that means.”

  “What is it a question of?”

  “Giving—giving just a little—”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you? It’s so strange,” and Anna heard her voice rising. “If we can’t understand each other … if we are poles apart …” she left it up in the air. “You show compassion for those abused women. You are really concerned about them, but you can’t see that you have hurt me terribly and I need your compassion, Ned, I need it. I need your love.” Ned stared at her, silent. “I can’t live in this cold air. I can’t sing when we are at odds.”

  “You did pretty well in Pittsburgh, nevertheless.”

  “Yes, because I was able to get through my own anger and pain to reach out to you, don’t you see?”

  “Reach out with a body blow? Come now, Anna.”

  “Oh, oh,” Anna groaned. She felt her face crumpling up into an ugly grimace. She felt ugly, rejected, an orphan with no shelter. Tears, cramped, miserable tears stung her eyes. Then she looked across at Ned and asked in a quiet voice, “Ned, do you love me? Do you need me?”

  There was a second’s pause before Ned answered miserably, “I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t know, why did you marry me? Why?”

  “Because I fell in love, Anna. But how could I know that I was marrying a fury? How could I possibly know?”

  “Only an emotionally stupid person could have imagined that Anna Lindstrom had no temperament, had the surface of a still pond. For a highly intelligent man, you are apparently retarded where feelings are concerned—you behave like a spoiled child who wants what he wants but on his terms, who won’t give or even try to understand!”

  “And you who think you know everything about feeling—I begin to hate the word!—can’t control yours. I have very little respect for lack of control. It is you who behave like a spoiled child, Anna!”

  “At least I am honest, honest with myself and with you.”

  “Does honesty have to scream, does honesty have to weep, does honesty mean hitting somebody in the back? Stop and think, Anna—if you are capable of thinking!”

  It shot through Anna’s consciousness that they were now behaving like two dogs, barking at each other and what they actually said did not matter. It was the fight itself that mattered. She did not reason it out, but she sensed it and suddenly barked very loudly at him, “Woof! Woof! Woof!” she barked.

  And Ned got up from his chair and barked back, “Woof! Woof! Woof yourself!”

  It was too much for Fonzi who rose from bed and ran from one to the other barking his short sharp barks of excitement and pleasure. And at that second, they broke out of the maze and began to laugh hysterically. Ned laughed so much that he got out of breath and had to sit down, and Anna on the sofa was wiping her eyes.

  “Oh Anna, you are marvelous!” was what he said when he had caught his breath.

  “At last,” she murmured, “at last.” A year’s tension and irritability had broken down and they were free of it … at least for now.

  “Come on, let’s go for a walk! Fonzi has had too much excitement and he must need to go out again …” and Ned went to the coatroom and came back with Anna’s purple velvet and sable cloak.

  “Darling, not that one! It’s my best!”

  “Why not your best? You have just given a superb performance—as a dog!” He was laughing at her now but there was no irony in it.

  “Very well, my idiot husband, I’ll wear it if it will make you happy! Just let me get into some slacks and a sweater.”

  A few minutes later they were walking slowly arm in arm across the Common and out onto Tremont Street, Fonzi’s feet twinkling along ahead. The cold air felt delicious, and every now and then they stopped to look up at the sky.

  “Too bad the lights are so bright … the stars must be wonderful in the country tonight.”

  “I can see Orion,” Ned answered, “over there back of the Ritz!”

  Anna longed to ask him whether he did not see now that anger let out was healthy, was better than contained irritability, but she told herself to be quiet. She had won this time, won by a fluke, and it was not the moment to rub it in. Besides she was tingling all over with the pleasure of feeling Ned’s arm in hers, of being with him. It had been such a lonely state of affairs for so very long.

  “Yes,” she said, “I see Orion.”

  It was after midnight when they were finally in bed, and Anna, giving Ned a smile, turned out the light.

  Chapter XI

  In the morning they ate a huge breakfast of bacon and eggs which Ned insisted on getting. Anna, while she dressed, could hear him whistling an air from Carmen … of all things! It was just as always, Ned handing her the middle section of the Times while he turned to the business section. It was just as always, no word of any importance said. They discussed the day ahead, Anna off to her lesson at ten, Ned to the office, and a getaway to the country after five. Anna would make lasagna and a salad, Ned would stop at the bakery on Charles Street on the way home and pick up bread there and wine. They could shop for a roast or something on Saturday, “and go to that fresh vegetable place if it’s still open.” It was just as always, but now these mundane matters had taken on a kind of sheen. There was an air of happiness, of intimacy about it all. And when Anna said, as Ned prepared to leave, his briefcase in his hand, “I do love you,” and Ned’s only response was “good” she kissed him and did not mind that even after last night he could not say more.

  For once, we are safe, she thought as she took the breakfast dishes out to the kitchen, rinsed them, and put them in the dishwasher. But would it, could it last? Was this only a truce or was it, perhaps, after two years, a new beginning? Ned had yielded nothing, had not said a loving word in the night. Why didn’t she mind? She had woken up with him curled around her, his legs wound around hers, his hand folded around her breast. The sweetness of it! She told herself that if they could get through the weekend in this tender mood, then perhaps the new beginning would seem real.

  She called Teresa. “I think things are going to be better. We had an awful fight, the worst ever last night.”

  Teresa laughed.

  “I know it sounds crazy, Mama, but Ned had to let his anger out. It was poisoning him.”

  “I never cease to marvel at your idea of what is good—a terrible fight apparently is.”

  “It ended with laughter, Mama—that was what was good.” But Anna didn’t tell her mother that they had barked like dogs. It seemed now as secret as describing a sexual act might have been.

  “Well, bravo! At any rate you sound happy for a change.”

  “I’m dying to get to work on the Dallas concert. It is going to be a difficult program—Mahler, Fauré and Brahms. I’ve got to stretch my range a bit, but I think I can do it. Hard work for the next two weeks.”

  “Well, that’s your element. Good luck. And have a happy weekend—I presume you are off to the country?”

  “And what are you going to do?

  “Putter around the house, do some cooking. Susan and Elizabeth are coming for dinner on Sunday. I may go for a walk. It’s a beautiful day.”

  “Ciao, darling.”

  What would happen, Anna asked herself, if I became an easygoing, never angry, socially impeccable person with never a violent word or mood to shatter the amenities? Would Ned like that? I can’t be
lieve he would! But then would she like it if Ned screamed at her and burst into tears? She had to admit the answer was yes. Anger expressed had some life in it, whereas coldness and withdrawal shut life out. Ned was so afraid of violence, so outraged by anger because they threatened to crack him open. Anna felt very much alive when she was angry. It was a costly business though because afterward came remorse and, in relation to Ned, a sense of inferiority. That she could not deny. The world in general would be on his side, but was the world always right?

  It was clear to her in the brilliant sunlight of that morning that neither of them was going to change. What then? And why do people in love want to change each other? What is the war really all about? If we could only go deeper, only get to that, to talking about that!

  But she had seen something in Ned she had never seen until last night and that was the pain, the vulnerability when he said that showing feeling was too dangerous. She had for a second seen so much pain in his eyes that she had had to lower hers.

  It was time to walk Fonzi if she was not to be late for her lesson, but she simply had to find a passage in Rilke’s letters that she had marked some time ago … where was the book? She searched in the bookcases, with no luck, and finally went off with Fonzi, trying to remember exactly what it was—and then it was there. It sprang up before her as she had read it on the left side of a page, near the bottom, “Perhaps everything terrible in us is at its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.” Or was it, “deepest level”? Walking Fonzi in the jubilant autumn sunlight, past the flowing beds of chrysanthemums, and a jay screaming in a dogwood tree, Anna thought about this phrase that haunted her.

  “What is the terrible thing in me that needs help?” she wondered. “What is the terrible thing in Ned that keeps him separated out into compartments? Shall we ever know? Can love do it?”

  “Fonzi,” she asked aloud, “he said I was the most selfish person he had ever known? Can that be true?” Fonzi responded by barking and pulling her on.

  “Soon you can run free, my little dog! But try to take it easy now.” And the obedient Fonzi trotted along, his nose to the ground, telling her with an occasional growl or bark that a squirrel or a Great Dane perhaps had passed by. Fonzi’s soul appeared to be in his nose and his tongue. And where, she wondered, is ours? Perhaps where feeling and thinking come together. Well, Anna thought, I am certainly feeling alive this morning! Happiness like this was so rare and so poignant that she felt tears pricking her eyes.