Fury (9 page)

Two days pass before I write back to the Lark. The delay is not an act of pride or willpower. Sickness is the only thing that keeps me from responding. For two god-awful days I vomit and shudder with migraines.

It's a condition that I've never before experienced and one I want to blame on healing aggravation. The Staph remedy seems to be inducing the same symptoms that one homeopathy Web site says it is often used to treat: sensations like “stupefying headache,” “bursting pain in eyeballs,” and, no joke, “brain feels squeezed.”

Alyssa tells me she'll talk to her mentor about my adverse reaction, but, in the meantime, she urges me not to give up on homeopathy altogether. To hear her tell it, Staph is inciting an affliction that is already there. It's unleashing some old energy that I carried around on my back like a hermit crab's shell. If I can ride this out and really experience the pain and discomfort, she says, I'll be wiser and healthier for it.

As for the Lark's e-mail, it left me with a peculiar mix of outrage and exhilaration.
He misses me
, I think with a pleased little whoop. That thought is followed by a stingier one. Namely:
Where does the Lark get off writing, sending text messages, checking in on me as though we're still involved? What entitles him to know how I am and what I'm doing? Why should I divulge everything to someone who offers nothing of himself?

These are the thoughts that I mean to express in reply, but in the end my e-mail goes through more revisions than a congressional bill. With every revision, I find myself cutting out more invectives. Just as often, I soften it to the consistency of something that's been mechanically chewed.
A Spike 3 disposition is seductive as a way of minimizing hostility.
My final draft is coquettish. My words stare back at me like contestants in a children's beauty pageant, too eager to wear the tacky garb I've dressed them in. They wink, twirl, sway their boyish hips.

I send the damning document anyway.
A Staph patient has a profound need to be liked.
There's no endearing way to put this. I just can't stand to be rejected again. I decide I'd rather be affected and vaguely needy than be honest, messy, and loathed.

I begin elfishly: “You infinite spazz, of course I'm glad to hear from you.” From there I move on to amorous admission: “I'd be lying if I said I wasn't suffering from a bit of phantom limb syndrome. Some part of me still wakes up every morning, expecting to find you just a yawn and a stretch-of-an-arm away.” Next, I stall. I stray to news about family, gossip about friends, and a brief update on my book-in-the-works (lying to say it's going well).

It isn't until the thirteenth paragraph that I finally let my aggression peek through. Even then, I'm vacillating and conflicted.

 

When it comes to—how do you put it? “Needling my heart”? You're not. Not in hearing from you, numb nut. I'm not even needled by the fact that you changed your mind about what we had going. To reiterate, the only thing that drew a little blood was the selfish (sorry) and weeniely way you went about telling me. Again, I am loath to call you a weenie, but you're older than any man I've ever dated before. And I haven't heard someone above the age of twenty sing the “I wanted to make you think I was an asshole” tune. Everyone else accounts for their emotions, acknowledges them, owns them and delivers them decently.

 

Such irony. Such hypocrisy. Today, I hold my thick head in my hands.

I start conjuring something called “the assertion of an ought.” That's a term I found in the writing of a professor named Joseph de Rivera, who heads a peace studies program. He said, “Whenever we are angry, we somehow believe that we can influence the object of our anger. We assume that the other person is responsible for his actions and ought to behave differently.”

I feel myself channeling what social psychologist Carol Tavris calls fury's “policing function.” In
Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion
, she writes, “Anger is a sign that someone has broken [one of our culture's unspoken rules]. It announces that someone is not behaving as (you think) she or he
ought
.”

Suddenly I'm not just an overreactive ex-girlfriend but a vigilante upholding the rules of common decency. I'm remembering the way Tavris talks about psychologist James Averill; he said, she writes, “that, for most of Western history, it has been up to individuals to see to it that their rights were respected and justice seen to; in the absence of a formal judiciary, anger operates as a personal one.” I've learned that in situations when a court trial would be melodramatic, fury helps restore fair treatment.

I begin to hit my stride in the next paragraph. I tell the Lark:

 

Any real—what were your exact words? “Pain you might have caused me”? Was in the things that you said, silly man. Not just the things you said about my book (may I gently remind you that you haven't read a page of it), but also in the ones you had to say about me: the part about being a waste of time, but nice to have on your arm, although on the whole not worth keeping around just to . . . It's not worth finishing. It would look even more ridiculous in print. I've more than accepted the fact that you didn't feel for me what I felt for you. No one who loved anyone, even in a platonic way, would have said things that were quite so injurious—things that cut straight for her most tender parts.

 

But the very moment my anger is visible through my prose, I go sprinting as if to cover it with a raincoat:

 

That's the last I'm going to mention this though. Because I do want to be your friend. And because I understand what a late-night conversation it was.

 

Now you see it:

 

I only mention it now because after that bit about needling me, I feel like I need to reiterate: anything you feel like you're withholding from me is not a cause for pining, not if it means enduring what I saw the other night.

 

Now you don't:

 

I'm glad work is going well for you though. And I really have actively wondered about you, vaguely worried about you, missed the sound of you, the weight of you, regretted so many things I never said.

 

The whole thing amounts to a 1,600-word rebuttal to a 150-word note. All evidence to the contrary, I maintain that I'm not angry. The most I can do is admit to feeling hurt.

I conclude the letter with a plain-faced disclosure of grief:

 

Christ, as for the question of memories, I can't answer it right now. Not the fact that this ended, but the way in which it ended tarnished so many memories I would've liked to keep.

It feels good to evince some emotion, after a long month of keeping it to myself.

In Brighton, where I'd always secretly felt as though I'd intruded on the Lark's routine, I'd taken pains to stay deferential and agreeable. “If you prefer” became my catchall response. Along with more ingratiating slogans like: “Sure.” “Whatever you think.” “You don't have to go out of your way.” “I can find it on my own.” “I can go it alone.” “I'm a big girl.” “I'm flexible.” “I'm easy.” As the month passed, the effort involved in policing everything I thought I couldn't say had made me withdrawn in a manner that might've easily passed for someone snobbily disinterested or mute in a way that might have seemed as though I was giving the Lark the cold shoulder.

After I press the “send” button on my e-mail, I find myself imagining how the Lark might have felt in the face of that typical Zailckas aloofness: wresting conversation out of it; listening as his inquiries were returned with distracted, single words; feeling increasingly judged in the ensuing silence; feeling his resentments throb and rise like mercury in an old glass thermometer.

How strange
, I start to think,
that I could only express some anger once I was safely outside the confines of our relationship.

How
, I wonder,
did I come by the idea that relationships should be as peaceful as a Sunday school picnic?

Because I can't yet accept that my reluctance to fight with the Lark is a personal defect, I spend a day trying to figure out whether other Americans go to lengths to avoid anger in their romantic relationships, a conceit that Carol and Peter Stearns, the authors of
Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in American History
, say is left over from Victorian America. According to William Vernon Harris,
Anger
is the only book that attempts to chart American attitudes about anger over time.

In
Anger
, I learn that anger didn't rate high on a moralist's list of no-nos in colonial America. At that time, wrath still ranked among Christianity's seven deadly sins, but losing one's temper was small potatoes compared with so-called depravities like lust or pride. In a time when privacy was hard to come by—families were large, houses small, with few interior walls—anger helped create boundaries and eke out some personal space.

On the domestic front, newly married couples in colonial times weren't warned against raising their voices. Anger was only a predicament if it provoked violence, like when a husband or master went all Ike Turner on his servants or wife.

The Stearnses say there was even a Homeric appreciation for anger as it pertained to passion. In stories like William Alcott's
The Young Husband
, published in 1840, they found it wasn't out of the ordinary to hear a hotheaded husband described as “spirited and quick tempered, as great, lovinghearted men always are.”

I learn that the idea that love and anger shouldn't mingle first took hold during the Industrial Revolution. That was when Americans began to view home as a sanctuary from the noise, injury, and competition of the factory, and when family began to assume a role that Christopher Lasch called “a haven in a heartless world.” That was when the idea emerged that couples must curb their anger, lest it compromise their chance at cozy domesticity.

I read quotes from Frederick Saunders's 1874 book,
About Women, Love and Marriage
, and think there is something to the way he describes home as “not simply a place to live in” but as a “sacred enclosure—the hallowed retreat of the virtues and the affections.” I write notes to myself about how people began to accept home as a place akin to “innocence and Eden.”

When my reading in
Anger
brings me to the Victorian era, I recognize something of myself in the austere bastards, with their ideas about “companionate marriage.” It was the Victorians who first decided husbands and wives ought to be as loyal to one another as wounded war buddies, and that marriage should be the one place on earth where a person felt understood, encouraged, and psychically nourished. Just like me, the Victorians desperately wanted to believe that emotional openness was possible between two people, but—also like me—they were inclined to bury their heads in the sand when it came to confronting their rage.

The Victorians thought even one spat could cut true love off at the knees. In Orson Fowler's 1841 book,
Fowler on Matrimony
, the phrenologist suggested little more than “[a] single tart remark, or unkind tone of voice” could spell splitsville for a young couple. He went on to write, “[S]o extremely tender is the plant of connubial love, that small things embitter its fruits.”

Ladies' magazines of the time attached deadly consequences to fights between spouses. Erma Leland's story “The First Quarrel,” first published in
Peterson's Magazine
in 1875, describes a young wife whose nagging causes her husband to go out walking in the woods, where he is toppled by a falling pine and knocked into a coma. In Mary H. Paron's story “The Adopted Daughter,” a wife's anger at her husband causes her to literally burst a blood vessel: “It was the demon of an ill regulated temper that possessed her. . . . [T]he white foam gathered on her lip, the veins stood out rigid and swollen over her forehead. . . . [S]he strove to move forward, and fell headlong to the floor, the blood gushing from her nose and mouth.” In these stories, anger in marriage was literally a fatal mistake. It was not an emotion that might occasionally but innocuously surface between two people who shared everything from a bank account to a bed.

I grow a little squeamish when I realize how much time the Victorians devoted to a couple's “first quarrel,” which they described as an event of apocalyptic proportions. In his 1852 marriage manual
Bridal Greetings
, Reverend Daniel Wise said of a couple's first fight: “Let that be avoided, and that hateful demon, discord, will never find a place at the domestic hearth. Let it have its existence, no matter . . . how brief its duration, and the demon will feel himself invited and will take his place, an odious, but an abiding guest, at the fireside.” The author went on to caution wives, “Never quarrel . . . it is death to happiness.” And to give husbands advice that's still repeated today: “If you become angry with her . . . she will never forget it.”