Read Online Anger by May Sarton - Free Book Online

talk.”
    â€œIt’s become too dangerous. I find physical assault repulsive.”
    â€œDarling, 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.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œPeople 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.”
    â€œMmmmmm.”
    â€œBut it’s not fatal. It’s just that we are very different.”
    â€œFire and ice,” Ned said and smiled for the first time.
    â€œMaybe.” 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.”
    â€œI wanted to come. You must know that.”
    â€œTwo 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.
    â€œI’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