[63] Fright and horror might overcome

[63] Fright and horror might overcome

After we met Emil … Sometimes we’re both too proud, okay, but we didn’t know that at the time. I can plead youth, a little, possibly – I wasn’t so young any more – but even so, it made me want to blush that I hadn’t seen everything because I hadn’t seen all of Emma. We’d been going so well by then. (Ninety-three days, Emma had told me the day before. Or was it eighty-three she said? Never mind.) Blame her family, I tell you. Sooner or later I was going to have to live with her history because she carried it inside her every minute and it weighed so much to her. You love a woman, you have to listen to her story no matter how inaccurate she is when she’s telling it, no matter how it comes out. As soon as we got back to her grandfather’s from the Griensteidl and she started screaming at me, I had remind myself that this wasn’t about me, that I hadn’t been around long enough for her to loathe me as much as she was suddenly telling me she did. But she had to stop before I could try to tell her that, which meant that first she had to want to stop. When a man gets angry, it’s anger, sure, the real thing, and it stops when the target crumbles. When a woman gets angry, it’s mostly fear, and you just have to wait for her to expel it all.

Sometimes, all right, you can feel what people are going to think even before they’re thinking it. I can plead youth, a little, maybe – but even so, it was terrifying to remember that I needed someone so much who still knew nothing about me. And he was going to have to know me, and then it would be over. Why didn’t I keep my mouth shut about myself when he met Emil? He was going to ask about the talking cure, the heroic medicine, the shock treatments, all of it. I could see it – he was going to rush back to our room with his head full of listed questions and make me start answering them: ‘So, this thing you called the talking cure – what does that mean, Emma?’ No, I wasn’t going to let him. So far I’d been able to show him what I wanted him to see, and now I was asking myself, ‘The bastard, wasn’t that enough?’ So I shut myself up until we got back to our room above the stable, and then I exploded in his face.

I was used to, okay, telling myself I’d never start to understand them till I lost count of them. You don’t know how wrong that is. No, Paul, I’m telling myself, if you want to start to understand women, stay faithful to the same one for a month or six, or five years or thirty. Long enough for that one to cycle through all her moods.

All right, so I’d been playing myself for a fool, telling myself I was safe from myself around him. This was the first moment since we met that I didn’t feel safe. He wants to talk about cycles? This was the old one that he’d helped me almost forget that summer. You feel bad, then you feel bad for feeling bad, then you feel worse for feeling worse, and you crumble as you descend, and the deeper into your own dust you tumble, the darker the bottom gets and the less significant you are. So I wasn’t very nice that day.

I can tell you what he didn’t do. He didn’t try to talk me into silence. He didn’t plead or console. He made a couple of honest tries at logic and when I screamed at him even louder, his face just fell into itself.

This wasn’t about me, okay. Logic isn’t my strong point (and doesn’t help much with her, anyway – only Emma’s logic helps Emma), but it was obvious, don’t you think? We go three months without ever arguing, and then she sees her brother, and right away, this. So I held on to my chair and kept telling myself that.

So he sat just in our chair in grandfather’s loft – we only had one chair – and listened while I called him names, and a beast, and an animal, and a disgusting and hateful man, and told him how much he sickened me – and he said nothing. Nothing. And I hated him even more. I made myself as ugly as he was. I accused and declared and named him. And then I had a good loud cry so he could watch, so he could see what he’d done to me, and then I waited for him to console me so that I could throw his words back in his face. When he didn’t try that, I threw back the words I could tell he was thinking. He just looked away.

‘You bastard! You monster! Look what you’ve done to me! You’ve ruined me forever!’

Run to grandfather now. Yes, he’ll understand, and I’ll have a good cry and tell him all about it. He would have heard it all from across the yard, so he’ll know what everything is about. I slam the door shut on my way out and take the stairs two at a time, and burst into his shop. And there, in another chair, at another table, he’s been waiting for me to come in, his face looking up at me, exposing his eyes, and the tears that are flowing. And I know from his look that this is my pain he’s feeling, and that he’s shedding the tears I wish I could stop. That he knew where they came from even if I still didn’t know.

He points to a chair beside him. When I sit he takes my hand. ‘Take a breath, Emma. Enough words.’ And squeezes my hand to the table until I stop struggling against it. And when I do, he says, ‘A nice mug of tea for us both, sure?’

When I go back upstairs, Paul hasn’t left his chair.

‘About the horse,’ he says. And he tells me everything – about the frolic, the scandal, the blackmail, the drunken night, the stockade, more scandal again, and the penury. He tells me everything he needs to, in a quiet, weary voice as if it’s the last story he’ll ever be forced to tell. This is for YOU, Emma.

‘Since then,’ he says, ‘it’s been over for me, according to them. I’ll be what I make, never more, and so far … so far, okay. People can do that when there’s no other way, and the world calls it punishment because it doesn’t know what a blessing it can be.

‘People make choices, and their choices change them, and that’s how they change the world for themselves and other people. That’s why you can’t let people take your choices from you. Don’t you let them, Emma. One choice is still always a choice. When you hear only one, the silent one is always, “Never make another.” When people refuse to make the choices when they’re due, they hand themselves over to the powers. I want to be what I know I can choose to be. I just don’t want to be alone. How about you? Do you want to be alone?’

Bastard, I think. How did he learn to talk like that? I wipe my tears, hide my face for the rest of the day, and wonder if I’ll ever look beautiful to him again. The word – we haven’t said it yet. It’s terrifying to love someone else. No wonder we haven’t said it. A guy with so much force in him, why isn’t he aiming it at me? Oh my, he’s the one, admit it, whether I like it or not. He’s the one who’s going love me, and my love for him is all he hopes in return.