Fury (42 page)

It's Anique who first tunes me in to the differences between French and American expressions of anger. “You must get angry, Koren! You must! It is essential!” she says, as though my very life is hanging in the balance. “In France, if we are dissatisfied, we demonstrate! We are indignant! Maybe we are too quick to anger, but you Americans are too slow to it! You are dissatisfied in America, you blame yourselves instead of your government. You think the problem is yours alone. You become depressed! You become fat! You go
blaaah
.” Here, she makes a catatonic face. While Leon's favorite speech is about Britain being the asshole of Europe, Anique is always referencing what she calls the “zombie people” that she sees during her frequent trips to Detroit—people she feels have anesthetized themselves instead of standing up to the U.S. government. I never find any sociological evidence to back up Anique's claim, only passages from French writers like Chamfort, who said that “[w]e should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.”

Although Alice is gone from my life, I don't stop thinking about her concept of blueprints. It's nice to live so intimately among Anique and Leon. Privately, they help me expand my ideas about what marriage can look like. As a couple, they are the life of the party. They are spectacular at living. They seem spectacular at loving.

If the mood strikes them, Anique and Leon also can argue like cats in a bag. After a couple of bottles of the South African wine Leon buys in bulk at the neighborhood Lidl, it's not uncommon to hear doors slam, saucers smash against walls, or the phrase
va t'empaler encule
(“go fuck yourself ”) ring out across the night. Their anger doesn't scare them, so it doesn't scare us. I, for one, am incredibly grateful to see firsthand what Alice has so often tried to convince me of: It's possible for a man and a woman to disagree and still adore and respect each other. “Quarrels in France strengthen a love affair, in America they end it,” goes the quote from Ned Rorem, whose
Paris Diary
I devour during our months in Paris.

I realize how comfortable I've become with my emotions when I find out Anique thinks Eamon and I share the same kind of fire. “The two of you are just as crazy as we are!” Anique says one evening over dinner, giggling girlishly and grabbing my wrist.

A few nights earlier Eamon and I had had our most explosive fight since one year earlier in Brighton. It had begun with shattered glass. I'd make the mistake of closing—but not locking—a heavy window above our bathroom tub. (Our apartment was two blocks from the Canal de l'Ourcq and for weeks mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds had been making a slow family buffet of our faces.) Disastrously, the window's weight brought it crashing back open, where it shattered against the showerhead while Eamon was seated on the commode.

He'd been (rightfully) frightened. The shards were as long and sharp as kitchen knives, and everywhere. But, as soon as the danger passed, Eamon's fright erupted into outrage. He railed over my weeping apologies. He wouldn't let it go, not even after I swept up and accidentally cut myself on the glass. He wanted to know what was wrong with me. Did I not understand fucking physics? What kind of idiot did not understand that a window of that size could not simply
rest
in the frame?

When I'd cried that it was an accident, he'd said, “Big deal! Even accidents are somebody's fault! Aren't accidents still the result of
someone's
negligence? Isn't someone always clearly to blame?” When he wouldn't let up I'd finally started screaming about how he was a disdainful, snobby, audacious bully. I'd locked myself in the guest bedroom and hollered while he pounded on the door.

We'd kept the fight up for hours, until we collapsed in each other's arms in a state of teary exhaustion. The next morning, the incident was not too fresh to laugh about. We'd made eggs Benedict. We'd walked all the way to Jaurès—his arm around my waist and my head on his shoulder—and seen an English movie at the MK2.

I don't forget about healing aggravation. I am still learning how to be assertive—this, I figure, is the way around being aggressive—and I'm still not great at setting boundaries.

I think of the woman with the persistent fear of invasion, when I realize Anique and her friends come and go from our apartment at will. As the summer goes on, it's not uncommon to wake up on a Sunday morning and find a stranger sleeping in our downstairs guest room. Nor is it unusual for small objects—DVDs, juice glasses, paintings—to mysteriously disappear from our apartment and turn up in other parts of the house. Sometimes, I return from a trip into town to find an ashtray glutted with someone else's cigarettes and a carton of juice sitting out on the counter.

As the summer goes on, more intruders emerge. Of the creepycrawly variety: Not only do we have mosquitoes, but also spiders the size of the palm of my hand and one fat, aristocratic-looking rat. There are also strange men who smell of desperation or violence: a gangster, maybe, followed by a homeless psychotic, his hair sweaty and his face lined with dirt. They turn up at the front door, saying things not even Eamon can understand.
Pardon!
We shout at the ones who try to shoulder inside.
C'est
ma
maison!
(“This is
my
house!”) It's like the situation with the brokers is playing on. We usually slam the door, turn the lock, and watch from the roof as our uninvited guests walk reluctantly away. Privately I wonder if the universe is hell-bent on provoking me, as though training me to put my foot down.

One night, Eamon reveals a bit of news. We are standing in the kitchen, frying up a whole trout from our village market for dinner (the fish vendor guts the critters but leaves on the heads, so we have to decapitate them while they stare back accusingly).

He says his sister-in-law is pregnant.

It's no real surprise—it's been well known that she and his brother have been planning for a third—but the announcement still hits me like a bludgeon. My heart sinks. If I'd been holding something, it would have slipped through my fingers. I'm overcome by a feeling of injustice, my knees shaking. I need to know how pregnant she is. When the baby is due. I work out that she'd been pregnant when I was, and it makes me feel even more humiliated, more antagonized, more personally
wronged
by the fact of our miscarriage. My eyes fill. I don't know where to direct my anger, but I'm furious.

Eamon catches me in a hug before the force of the feeling brings me to the floor. I sob audibly. I cry so hard my skeleton rattles. “I know,” Eamon says, rocking me. “I know. We'll have our time. Our time will come.”

Here, I am forced to make an unsavory confession. During my time in Paris, I've come to hate pregnant women with a strength and viciousness that frightens me. I find myself glaring at their full, porcine bellies whenever I sit in a seat opposite them on the metro. I feel myself actively loathing their peachy glows, their self-contented fatigue, their proud belly buttons pushing up through the fabric of their shirts.

Sometimes I catch myself actively wishing them ill. I curse them with stretch marks, hemorrhoids, and varicose veins. I pray they have back labor. I hope their breasts fall to their kneecaps. I hope their children grow up to be criminals.

I tell no one about this anger—it's shocking and antisocial—but when Eamon is away playing music festivals, I spend long nights on the Internet reading miscarriage message boards. There, thread after thread is devoted to green-eyed fury.

 

“My best friend is pregnant and I want to break every glass in my house.”

“Everyone expects me to pick up and move on. They keep saying ‘God knows best.' Screw them. Screw God. There is no bright side to this.”

“Yesterday was my due date and my husband actually asked me why I was upset. He doesn't understand me. He doesn't give a shit. I am completely alone.”

“I spent the night on the beach alone with misoprostol in my hand and a case of wine beside me. This has been the most traumatic experience of my life.”

 

These forums are filled with women subverting their anger too. They wonder aloud whether they've caused their own miscarriages. “Was it when I had an argument with my husband and was overwhelmed by stress?” I identify with these women the most. “My baby is dead,” they write. “I killed my baby.”

I secretly count myself among the women who hold themselves to blame. As I work on my book, I go back and review some homeopathy Web sites, looking up the ailments Staphysagria is purportedly used to treat. On one list, in between “cystitis” and “colic,” are the words “miscarriage due to anger.”

As my wedding nears, I grow panicked to the point of distraction. I can't sleep. I can't touch the baguettes Eamon spoons with canned tuna, homemade mayo, and sliced green olives. It's not that I'm nervous about committing my life to Eamon or planning our tiny picnic reception. I'm not even concerned about how I'm going to rally the translator or pick up the
croquembouche traditionnel
from a patisserie in Les Lilas. (The baker can't speak English. I can't speak French. We'd had to establish a bumbling common ground in rudimentary Spanish.)

I am terrified to see my parents for the first time since my miscarriage. They've agreed to come over for five days. During the first night, they will meet my in-laws. During the second, they will join us on our respective hen and stag nights. On the third day, they'll help us cook, decorate, and prepare for the wedding. Finally, there will be the ceremony, followed by a day to themselves in Paris, where they can walk hand in hand along the Seine and celebrate their wedding anniversary.

My sister isn't joining them. This causes me a considerable head full of steam. Her excuse (she didn't apply for Riley's passport) seems flimsy, preventable, and passive-aggressive. She's known for months that our wedding would be in Paris. Besides, doesn't the passport office offer expedited service?

I'm also hurt that she doesn't break the news to me herself. I have to hear it from my mother, who seems to be waiting, just
waiting
, for me to call it bullshit so she might use the opportunity to remind me that I'm hysterical and self-centered. During this time my family often hints that it was selfish of me to get married abroad. They have no patience for my reasons: Britain is Eamon's, America is mine, France belongs to both of us.

On the afternoon of their arrival, my father is sweating like a field hand. Mother is complaining of blisters. They are both ticked off that our apartment is so far from the closest metro station.

Eamon and I hug them tentatively, already feeling as though we've done something wrong. Maybe we should have met them at the airport after all? Even if it meant missing the deliveries of the white roses and crepe paper bells, the paper doilies and plastic champagne flutes, the paper luminaries to fill with tea candles and weigh down with kitty litter.