by May Sarton
“Dangerous statement. Someday you might want to get rid of me.”
“Maybe I made a mistake,” Ned sat up straight. Whatever was this about, Anna wondered. “I left Fonzi with a friend.”
“Who’s Fonzi?”
“My dog. He’s a dachshund. I’m sure I’ve told you about him.”
Anna took a sip of her drink. “Why didn’t you bring him?” At this question, Ned too swallowed a mouthful of Scotch, began to laugh, and choked on it. When he had recovered he said,
“Because he sleeps on the bed. And …” Ned hesitated, “he might be jealous.”
“Well, of course a bite in the night might be a little startling,” Anna responded very gravely. But it was too much and when she began to laugh she laughed till tears rolled down her cheeks and Ned was doubled over. “Oh Ned, you dear funny creature!”
“Sooner or later you’ll meet Fonzi. He’s really a very affectionate fellow,” he said when he could speak.
“I’m sure he is.”
“Tomorrow we’ll go for a walk along the beach …” But Anna was thinking tomorrow is an eternity away and …
Ned caught her withdrawal, let go her hand and took a swallow of his drink. “When you go away like that I feel left out. Look at me,” he commanded.
But Anna put her face in her hands.
“Come back,” he implored.
“I’ve not gone away. I’m just thinking … You’ve had time to imagine me for over a year, to imagine this. I haven’t. For me these past days have been an explosion that I wasn’t prepared for and haven’t had time to understand.” She lifted her head and examined him almost coldly. Did she really want to let him into her inmost self? But there was something in her that wanted to break open that closed, self-contained arrogant face, and again she couldn’t help running a finger along his cheek.
This time Ned turned, took her in his arms and kissed her fiercely, possessively, and would not let her go till they were both out of breath.
“Imagine that!” Ned said with droll matter-of-factness. Then he got up and pulled Anna to her feet. “Let’s go to bed.”
“Without any supper?”
“We’ll make love till we’re ravenous. Then we’ll eat.”
“Ned!” Anna said, but she was pulled along. She felt the tide rising beyond either their ability or wish to hold it back. And she knew almost coldly that they had to get it over, to find out where they were, who they were, together.
But that was not exactly what happened. For there in the big bed in Ned’s room, she experienced the jolting force of his need in darkness. His hard chest against her soft breasts hurt a little. Never had a man penetrated her so deeply, so that at one moment she gasped.
“I’m hurting you.”
“No, don’t go.”
“Oh Anna, Anna!” He held her gently then and rocked her back and forth still deeply inside her, till the last spasm came and went. Then he gave a deep sigh, “It’s good to let go.”
Anna was now living at such speed, hurtling among the stars, she felt, that her mind would not stop thinking, and at the same time she was wholly relaxed, one breast cupped in Ned’s hand. She was thinking with her whole body, still tingling, still wonderfully alive down to her toes. But at the same time she pondered the curious fact that this most intimate and personal of acts between human beings was, when fully consummated, actually quite impersonal. It was not Ned so much of whom she had been aware as of their being part together of a primal scene, of being as she put it as she lay there, united in some strange way with the universe itself rather than with each other. To go so far out with another person was a little frightening, now that she was coming back to the dark bedroom, alone. “Ned,” she whispered, and realized then that he was asleep.
How could he be asleep? It seemed astonishing, but she supposed that that “letting go” as he had put it, had given him in the end this bliss, perhaps, of unconsciousness. He did not, as she did, have to be aware, for the stronger the emotion involved, the greater her need to understand what exactly was happening. So she lay there wide awake, until Ned suddenly sat up.
“What time is it?”
“God knows, my darling. You’ve been asleep.”
“Well, we’d better get ourselves something to eat!”
“Put on the light, I want to see you.”
It seemed to Anna the most natural of requests but its effect on Ned was unexpected. “No,” he said, “I’m not ready,” and he disappeared into the bathroom. When he came out and turned on the light he was in pajamas and Anna instinctively pulled the sheet up to her chin.
“Get into a dressing gown or something and I’ll run down and start things … aren’t you ravenous?”
“Come here, you oafish character,” she commanded. And he stood there by the bed looking down at her with a rather quizzical expression.
“Ned, are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love me?”
“What do you think?”
And before she could answer he had turned away and run down the stairs. Was it possible that he couldn’t say it?
“What a splendid sight!” Ned said when she came down after a few moments in a bright red dressing gown ruffled at the throat. “The prima donna!”
“Hardly! Prima donnas do not eat supper at after nine in a bathrobe.”
“Is that a bathrobe?” he teased. “It looks like something meant for a chaise longue … Stretch out here by the fire and I’ll open the champagne … steak will only take a few minutes. Rare, I trust?”
“Medium rare.”
Anna felt she was floating, not quite touching the ground, a little unreal. She didn’t stretch out, she sat on the chaise looking at the fire, or rather the ashes of the fire, a few bits of the log still glowing. Then he was standing, his back to the fire, lifting a glass of champagne, “To us. To Anna Lindstrom … dare I say, Anna Lindstrom Fraser?”
Anna lifted her glass, “To us … but I can’t give up my name, Ned.”
“No, I suppose you can’t.”
“I have to be Anna Lindstrom whatever happens.” There was a sharp edge in her voice, but she couldn’t help it. “We have to talk, Ned.”
“Do we? Don’t spoil it, Anna … let’s have our dinner in peace.”
“Without a word?”
“You know what I mean.”
Would Ned ever be able to talk about his feelings, would he ever open his heart to her, Anna wondered when they set out the next morning to walk the beach in a rather bleak fog?
“I feel like running,” Ned said, letting go of her hand after a few minutes of walking in step with her. And off he went, trim and sprightly on his elegant long legs, until he was just a lean shadow far down the beach. Anna was glad to be alone, to listen to the gentle roar of the waves, coming in at a slow tempo for the tide was ebbing, smelling the iodine of the seaweed scattered about, stooping to pick up a broken sand dollar and knowing that whatever the hazards, despite the huge temperamental rift that was becoming clear to her now, she would have to marry Ned. At some point reason ceases to operate. I’m in for it, she thought … marriage! And she had to laugh at herself for she felt, at the second of realizing that, like a porcupine with its quills rising.
And later that afternoon after Anna had taken a nap, they sat by the fire, drinking tea, she took the bull by the horns.
“I’m not quite sure what is happening to us, Ned. On one level everything is sort of overwhelming, but on another, I have no idea what you are feeling inside yourself. Do you want to back out maybe?
“Good heavens, Anna, whatever makes you ask that?” He sounded quite cross. “Maybe you’re the one who wants to back out. Maybe that’s what that question was really all about.”
“Please don’t shut yourself off, Ned.” Anna took a deep breath. “It’s just that we are such different people … I mean, words are very important to me. I need to say that I love you … and I do. But I also need to hear you say it. Do you realize
that all through last night you never said it?”
“But surely you must know that I do—after last night!”
“You never use an endearment. It seems so strange …”
“I can’t help it, Anna. With me such things go too deep for words, I guess.”
“I just don’t believe that!” Anna felt her quills rising. She was close to anger or to tears. “It’s mean and inhuman. It’s ungenerous.”
“Anything else?” Ned asked with heavy irony.
“I just don’t understand,” Anna said and got up and went to the window, looking out at the fading light and a chickadee busily pecking at the seeds in the hemlock.
“I’ve asked you to marry me … is that mean, inhuman, ungenerous?”
“I can’t see what’s making you so cross,” she said, still looking out, her back turned to him.
“It’s you who are cross, my dear. I appear to enrage you because I can’t and don’t want to sound like a greeting card.”
But this was too much and Anna whirled around and rushed at him. Ned, startled no doubt by this sudden eruption of violence, got to his feet and managed to grasp her hands before she could hit him.
“Let me go!” she said.
He let her go, but he was frozen with dismay, and looked it.
“I’m sorry, Ned,” Anna said coldly. “But I can’t take that sort of nasty cut without reacting violently and you might as well know it.”
“I think I’ll go for a walk,” he said, going out into the hall to find a coat.
“Oh Ned, please stay. We’ve got to talk.”
“It’s become too dangerous. I find physical assault repulsive.”
“Darling, I’m sorry …” she followed him into the hall and gently took his coat from him and hung it up. “Please …”
Ned stood there, his head bent, looking suddenly so at a loss, so forlorn that Anna impulsively leaned over and kissed him. “You are such a strange man,” she said then, “But I do love you—that’s why you make me so angry, I suppose.”
“I just feel awful, sick,” he said. “Let’s sit down.” On the sofa Ned leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Anna reached over and took his ice-cold hand into both of hers.
“I can’t understand,” he said after a moment. “One minute you’re in a fury and the next you are telling me you love me. I can’t move that fast from one mood to another, Anna.”
“People in love are vulnerable, Ned, and easily hurt. And,” she went on very quietly, “people react differently to being hurt. I react with anger. You withdraw.”
“Mmmmmm.”
“But it’s not fatal. It’s just that we are very different.”
“Fire and ice,” Ned said and smiled for the first time.
“Maybe.” Then Anna met his eyes, “But you’re not ice. You’re fire, but it’s under ice … it’s locked in.” And indeed when she was lying down earlier that afternoon in the limbo between sleep and waking, when images float up from the subconscious, she had had a vision of Ned as a swimmer under water, but there was a thick layer of ice on the surface. It was a nightmarish vision. And she had pushed it aside and gotten up.
Now it came back. Anna looked at Ned with more love than she had perhaps ever felt before for a man. And she told herself that surely tenderness and true love would melt the ice and set the swimmer free. Her moment of anger had forced her to go deeper, to be with Ned in a new way. That was strange.
Part II
Chapter I
The scene on an October night two years later was tranquil. Ned was sitting with his feet up leafing through a French economist’s analysis of the world recession. But although everything was still there was an air of expectancy about him, and when he heard the clock strike eleven, he got up, put another log on the fire, and stood for a moment surveying the large room like a critic. In the window a small table had been set up with a plate of cold chicken, salad, a basket of French bread, two champagne glasses, and two chairs. Within a half-hour Anna would be home after singing with the Boston Symphoney in Mahler’s Lied von der Erde. For once Ned had not accompanied her. He had had to attend a dinner for a visiting director of a West German bank. Anna had not liked that at all, “For once, when I am singing in Boston, Ned, it’s not fair.”
“I wanted to come. You must know that.”
“Two years ago you would have managed it somehow.” Her eyes were bright with tears. But after two years of marriage to this emotional woman, tears irritated Ned, and he had not even wished her luck as she swept out. Now, remembering that exit and dreading her return, he went into the bedroom and gathered Fonzi, their dachshund, up from his basket and brought him into the living room.
“I’ll take you for a walk after she has her supper,” he promised, as Fonzi stood there, wagging his long tail with furious anticipation. “Later, Fonzi.” The biddable animal lay down on the hearth rug, his nose on his paws, one eye following Ned as he lit a cigarette and sat down again, but did not pick up his book. Instead he looked around the room measuring its discreet beauty and order against the disorder and chaos of the life he and his wife were living inside it.
The room was gray and oyster white, the carpeting thick velvety white, the walls pale gray to set off the two small Vuillard’s on either side of the fireplace. Over the gray and white striped sofa opposite Ned had hung a Bonnard, the Mediterranean very blue seen over a terrace and the tops of trees. He never tired of looking at it. Anna and he had agreed from the start that this was to be their own atmosphere, not that of his mother’s house, dark and cluttered with objets d’art and eighteenth-century English furniture, nor that of her mother’s, for that matter, inhabited by heavy old Swedish furniture with some Italian pieces mixed in. How he had admired Anna’s forthright refusal of various things his mother wanted to bestow! “It doesn’t feel like me,” she had said more than once. “It’s too grand, Mrs. Fraser.”
And to Ned she had apologized, “But we can’t live her life, Ned. Even if she is hurt. I can’t help that!”
“You’re so fierce about it.”
“I’m fierce because it’s so hard to be definite and not give in, can’t you see?”
At that time everything that now irritated Ned had seemed rather wonderful, including Anna’s blunt honesty.
Fonzi interrupted these thoughts by barking excitedly. How did he know? For it was some minutes before he heard Anna’s key in the lock. She came in, flushed, her arms filled with roses, and went right past Ned to the kitchen to put them in water. Ned picked up three red ones that had fallen and followed her in a strange silence, for Anna had not uttered a word and neither had he.
“Here, you dropped these … some fellow’s heart’s blood, no doubt!” Ned laid them on the counter on top of the others.
“I’ve got to change first.” He helped her off with her coat. “Hang it up, will you?”
And she left him there, his arms filled with purple velvet and sable, stroking the fur absent-mindedly. Then he went to the hall closet and hung the coat up. Impossible to tell yet what her mood might be. But his own ancient Burberry hanging beside her coat gave him an idea. He slipped it on, took Fonzi’s leash, and as the excited barks rang out, knocked on the bedroom door, “I’m taking Fonzi for a walk while you change, Anna.”
“All right,” her voice sounded quite cheerful. “That’s a good idea.”
When he got back a half-hour later, Anna was waiting, stretched out on the sofa in a dressing gown. Fonzi ran to her, his tail nearly wagging itself off and she sat up and took him onto her lap. “Oh my Fonzi … I thought you’d never come back. I’m starving, Ned.”
“Well, let’s eat. Everything’s ready, as you see.”
“Kind of you,” she said, taking her place and snatching a piece of celery, devouring it, entirely absorbed in crunching it up.
“Well,” Ned asked, “how did it go?”
“You don’t really want to know, do you?”
“As you please.”
For a se
cond she met his eyes and wondered how to stop the spiral of irritation which they both knew was already starting to build up.
“I did well, Ned. I think I did, although that maddening man changed the tempo in the Abschied … slowed it down and me down, so twice I was nearly out of breath. I got the silence, though, at the end. There must have been thirty seconds of silence before the applause.”
“Bravo!”
“If you could only say that with some warmth!” The letdown from the heat of the concert hall, the standing ovation, the whole atmosphere she had come from, was impossible to convey to this man, her husband, who could say bravo in the tone one might use to tell a dog to lie down.
“You know I can’t. I can’t shout and wave my arms sitting opposite you at a table. What do you expect?”
This Anna chose to ignore. She was eating her cold chicken with gusto.
“You are hungry.”
“I’ve been running a marathon … you never have understood what a performance like this takes out of me.”
“Nor perhaps what the exhilaration is of holding an audience spellbound for an hour. My evening was, it must be granted, rather a different kettle of fish.”
“There was a lot of coughing and I wanted to kill them!”
Ned couldn’t help smiling at the absurdity of it, the fury of Anna’s feelings.
“I know I’m ridiculous,” as usual she felt put down, no longer able to hold on to her triumph, watching it taken from her as Ned always managed to do in one way or another. “I ought to be shot at dawn.”
“That is a slight exaggeration, my dear.”
“Why is it, Ned, that you can only use an endearment ironically?” Anna knew that she was asking for trouble but something in her wanted trouble, wanted anything that could bring her down from the high tension wire of the performance, get rid of the tension. She pushed her plate aside.
“Have some more chicken, Anna.”