You Will Weep for Me with Such Violence

The crying fits came without warning. She would be sitting there, having a conversation or staring out into a space – he would often catch her doing that, staring off at some indeterminate point in the distance – when all of a sudden she would buckle over, bury her face into her hands and begin to tremble.

“Austin,” she said, during one particularly violent episode. “I need some space to… well, some space to breathe.”

They were in a restaurant – Mona’s, the only Italian option in Grand Prairie – and before them, their two glasses of wine sat untouched.

“I’m just sitting here,” he said.

“I know.”

“Did you want me to go get the car?”

For some reason, this question seemed to exacerbate her weeping, and she stood up and staggered toward the door. To catch her, he stood up too abruptly, knocking the closest leg of the table – the standard, white-tablecloth variety, adorned with faux candle and reservation plaque and vase of flowers – and in effect spilling not only his own glass but Laura’s as well. He threw his hands up helplessly.

“Ah, shit,” he said, turning just in time to see Laura pass through the vestibule. “Can I come back and – I’m sorry, I – can I pay for this in a second?”

Everyone was staring at him. The waiter, seeming to recognize the gravity of something, how the wailing he’d just heard was no normal wailing, nodded his assent even as Austin stumbled toward the exit.

“Laura!” he called when he got out to the street. “Laura! Where did you go?”

He knew she was partial to alleys, and it was in one, between Mona’s and the post office next door, that he found her slouched against a wall. As always her face was in her hands. She was shaking.

“Hey,” he put a hand on her shoulder, “this is a bad one, huh?”

She nodded, her back still turned to him.

“I’ll give you your space, but – I mean this, Laura – I don’t want you running off this time. If you understand that, can you give me some kind of verbal recognition?”

He regretted it as soon as he said it – he knew she did not like to talk during her paroxysms; the effort of talking, of putting more air into the world, seemed to make things worse – but in the moment, he wanted some assurance that he was getting through to her. That he was someone who inhabited the same reality she did.

“Laura,” he continued. “Did you hear me?”

He got a grunt. Through the tangles of black hair, he could see the mascara running down her face, the flesh of her eyelids as she squeezed them tightly together. Thinking back, he tried to pinpoint the first time he’d seen her cry like this, but it was difficult to do so. There was just crying and the spaces between crying and within these spaces brief episodes of violent passion.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going back to the car.”

Laura just stood there.

“Okay?”

Nothing.

“It’s happening.”

He’d not made it to the end of the alley, where the light of a streetlamp washed the ground in gold, before a sudden impulse to speak made him turn around. He advanced a few steps, stopped again and said, “You’re crying for someone in particular, aren’t you?”

It was something he’d never said before, something which had never even occurred to him. When he’d asked her in the past what was making her so upset, she would tell him that’s just how she was: sad, volatile, prone to insidious bursts of all-encompassing despair. That she could be weeping for one person specifically – someone who had hurt her so badly that, in effect, he’d imprinted himself permanently on her life – was something he’d perhaps made a decision to ignore.

“Well,” he continued. “Are you?”

This seemed to get her attention. She spun around, her left hand rising up to her face, and said, “What?”

“All of this,” Austin lifted his arms and waved them about, “It’s for someone in particular, isn’t it?”

“That’s not true.”

“It seems like it must be.”

Her next behavior surprised him. Advancing down the alleyway, she embraced him with both arms, burying her face into his shirt while at the same speaking, telling him it wasn’t true; he knew why she cried so often and with such force; it was not the result of some specific misdoing, but rather a vague and unquenchable sadness, something that lived inside her heart.

He nodded, comforting her, but still he didn’t believe it.

“You like that explanation,” said Laura, as though hearing his thoughts, “because it’s easy for you.”

“That’s not accurate.”

“I need you to believe me, Austin. That’s all I want. For you to believe me when I tell you something.”

It was difficult to do. Over the next few weeks, while he travelled back and forth from their second property in Lake Ouachita, applying a new paintjob to the façade of the house and supervising the remodeling of the kitchen, he could not stop thinking about it. He trusted Laura, he did, but he could not shake the feeling that she was lying. There had to be someone in particular who did something to her. It was hard for him to believe, given the size and intensity of her feelings, the evasiveness of her answers, that the truth could be something otherwise. After all, suspicions did not become convictions unless they had a good cause to do so. “Or wait,” he thought, “Did they?”

He confronted her again a few nights later, this time on the telephone. Driving out to the local Quik Stop service station, as the new house did not yet have a phone line, he walked into the phonebooth and dialed her number, the glass cage around him covered in dust. Other than the gas station itself, there was not much around: a few grain silos, a radio tower, an abandoned refrigerator in the middle of a field.

On the third ring, she answered, and they exchanged pleasantries for a while – “Your mom’s good?”; “Yes”; “And the house?”; “Coming along” – before after an extended pause Austin just came out and said it, “Do you remember what we talked about the other night?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what I said?”

Here, another silence swelled. In the phonebooth he was all of a sudden swallowed in yellow light. He turned, pulling the phonecord with him, and saw an enormous tractor trailer pull in off the road.

“Hello?” he said.

The headlights passed. It was dark again.

“I’m here.”

“Do you remember what I said?”

Now, even though he couldn’t see her, he could feel her anger welling up through the phone. “Yes,” she told him. “Of course I remember. And I also remember – I’m not an idiot, Austin – what I told you in response, more than once, while I was fucking balling my eyes out in a fucking alley.”

She then repeated their entire conversation verbatim.

“Is that how you remember it?” she concluded. “Or am I missing something?”

The walls of the phonebooth were getting pretty foggy. He reached up and smoothed a circle in the glass. Of all the ways he could respond – “I hear you, and I can hear you getting upset”; “I need you to just tell me the name of the man for whom you are weeping” – he decided to try to explain the strange circumlocutions of his mind. He said, “That night, you asked me to believe you, and I do believe you, but there’s a part of me that just can’t shake this feeling – that feeling I asked you about – so it’s like I believe you and don’t believe you at the same time.” A pause. “I can’t control it.”

“So, what I’m hearing is, you think the violence of my weeping is because of some guy.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It’s not?”

“But yes.” He nodded. “That is what I think.”

She started to come back with some retort, but then her voice cracked, and there was a loud crash as she tumbled to the floor. He could hear the first sounds of an upcoming fit – the quick intakes of breath, the aborted words, the moaning that slowly increased in volume and intensity – before after a moment she was bone-deep in a paroxysm. He knew, through similar experiences over the phone, not to interrupt immediately, nor to try to console her through the usual platitudes. For a while he just listened. A couple of young boys on bicycles rode by the service station. He watched them. He focused his attention on the sound of her crying. Then, steadying himself with one hand on the glass, he lowered down onto his own knees, mimicking the position he knew she’d adopted.

“I’m here with you,” he said. “I’m on the ground.”

At this point, the trucker emerged from the gas station. He turned and saw Austin there in the phonebooth. He froze. Austin knew what he might be thinking – “Who is this child, genuflecting to his lover in a phonebooth on the floor?” – but he did not move, and the trucker, after staring at him for a moment, a look on his face of either puzzlement or recognition, swiveled about on his heels and walked back to his vehicle.

Once they were together again, Austin and Laura, they did not speak about this conversation nor the episode it contained. Austin did not bring up his suspicion, and Laura, unsurprisingly, did nothing to allay it. They fell back into their routine as though nothing had happened.

The next time he saw her crying, a few weeks later, she was alone on the back porch. They were the only house on their block, and it was very dark, save for the single ocher light which hung above her, so it seemed that she was floating in a void. At the sight of him she whimpered. As always, he was taken aback by the sheer violence of her weeping, but it struck him even more so now. Was there something he was not doing that he should be doing? What question had he not asked that, should he ask it, might open up a path to healing?

He walked out into the light and addressed her. “I am out on the porch,” he said. “I am just here to be with you.”

It was a practice he’d developed over the years. Instead of trying to be useful for her, bringing her water from the kitchen or offering words of reassurance, he just announced his presence and let her knew that he was listening. Laura never said so directly, but he knew it was a strategy she approved of.

Today, though, his intrusive thoughts got the better of him. He saw a series of images he could not dispel: a naked man in a dark room; Laura naked beneath him; the man, in a hushed voice (a voice, he admitted, which sounded oddly similar to his own), telling her she was condemned to cry for him. “You will weep for me with such violence,” he said, “that your whole body will tremble.”

They were so overwhelming, these images, that he had to sit down to steady himself. Beyond the edge of the railing there were fireflies passing in the night. A train called. He carefully considered his next words, knowing that any return to the subject would upset her, but as he did so she turned around and confronted him.

She said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Oh?” he said.

“Yes. I know what you’re thinking, well, because you aren’t the first guy who’s thought it.”

He was interested now. He leaned forward in his chair. “Alright,” he said. “What am I thinking then?”
Here there was a brief interlude of agonized sobs, the sounds of someone drowning in herself. “What you’re thinking is this: You want to hurt me.”

“Jesus, Laura, don’t–”

“Let me finish, please, and don’t do that thing – ‘Look, Laura’; ‘Listen, Laura’ – it’s like you’re my goddamn manager.”

He nodded. He knew better than to try to argue.

“You want to hurt me,” she continued, “because you want to be the one I cry over. You want to be the reason, capital ‘R,’ that I feel the way I do, but – and I’ve told you this a million times – there is no reason. You are going to do something, like, colossally stupid.”

It was the most she’d ever talked during one of her episodes. The fact of this – the sheer force of her words, the venom and desperation behind them – left him speechless for a moment. Then he said, “Really? You think I’m that shitty of a person?”

“Good people can still do shitty things.”

“You’re being stupid.”

“Huh?”

“You’re doing your deflection thing. Making this about me when it’s about you.”

“It is about you.”

“I’m done with this.” He stood up and started for the door.

“It is about you,” she repeated, “and I think you know it.” She paused here and clawed the hair from her eyes. “When you make the decision to hurt me – and don’t say ‘I won’t,’ because you will – just don’t delude yourself and say I didn’t call it.”

“Call it?”

“Yeah. Tell you what was gonna happen before it happened.” She stared at him. “Call it.”

Although he stormed off, leaving her on the porch staring at his back, the fight dragged on for what seemed like weeks. He would tell her he just wanted the truth, to know why she cried and how he could help, if “help” was something she truly wanted, and she would counter that there was no deep truth beyond what he already knew (“How many times do I have to tell you this?”), and the only reason he believed that a man was responsible for her crying was that, in truth, he wanted to be that man.

“I take it,” she said once when he didn’t respond, “that you know I’m right.”

“Whatever.”

“Perhaps you should come up with an argument,” she hissed, “if you want to argue.”

During all these fights, they never threw things at each other. They never yelled. So it came as a surprise to both of them, later that summer, as the heat climbed to almost unbearable heights, when Laura scratched him in the front seat of the Impala. They were on their way back from a restaurant – Morelos, the only Mexican option in Grand Prairie – when Laura broke into an episode. It was one of the bad ones. She kicked and thrashed and demanded to be let out (at this point, they were going about fifty through Black Crystal Forest), and when Austin tried to stop her from opening the door, she reached out and struck him.

There was a shallow gash, a few inches below his left eye, but it was the first time she had hurt him, the first time physical violence had taken place in their relationship, and it resulted in a long conversation where both of them wept and apologized and promised to do better.

“I can’t change who I am,” Laura had said.

“I know,” said Austin. “Neither can I.”

The months that followed were brisk and uneventful. Laura started taking piano lessons again with the old woman across the street, and Austin was at the lakehouse almost half the time, finishing up the renovations in the kitchen and bathroom. Fall arrived. The colors were new and beautiful. Per Laura’s request, when he was away, Austin would get up and call her before she went to work, and they would talk about things both huge and inconsequential: if they should get engaged, what composer she was learning, the habits of a neighbor on Meyer Street who they both thought was eccentric.

“He came out in his underwear again,” said Laura one morning.

“Jesus.” He said it like Hey-Zeus.

“For a septuagenarian, he actually has a decent body.”

They both laughed. Austin looked down at the floor, where his suitcase was. His smile faded.

“What is it?” asked Laura, as though intuiting his mood.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” He could hear her switch the phone from one ear to the other. “Baby, I’m not stupid, I know it when you’re sulking.”

He didn’t answer.

“So, anyway, don’t tell me, but… you said you’d be back by seven, right?”

He just sat there.

“Right?”
He stood and nodded and told her, “Yes, I’ll be back by seven,” and then after telling her goodbye he picked up his suitcase and walked to the door.

*****

Pryor Stroud is a writer from Arkansas who now resides in Los Angeles. He has a B.A. in Literature from Pomona College. His music journalism has appeared in Slant and PopMatters.