Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “Esther seems to feel we should get to know each other better.”

  “You certainly don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

  “And I thought I was being indirect. …Oh good, I made you laugh.”

  “That’s not very difficult. I’m a sucker for silly jokes. At home they used to call me the giggler.”

  “I’ve always been curious about you, Lydia. Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “What?” I felt leery already.

  He pointed to the paper bag on the grass. “You just had one and a half hamburgers, a doughnut, and coffee. How can you eat so much and stay thin? It’s phenomenal. You know how Esther is always dieting.”

  “I burn it up. That’s what they told me when I had a metabolism test. You know that Shelley line, ‘I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed’? Gabrielle showed it to me. She says I fall upon the food of life, I burn.”

  He liked that one. This was a kind of performance too, like the simpler duets in the Chamber Music Society. I studied him, his body, and wondered what it might be like.

  “Esther says you can sing. I didn’t know. In Gilbert and Sullivan you just play. There are other things I would like to know, but … well, I don’t like to pry.” He looked around at the dry fountains, the concrete, the bare December trees.

  “I would tell you most things you would ask. I’m not mysterious, like Nina or Gabrielle.”

  “Oh, them!” George raised both hands as if fending something off. “They scare me. They would take ages.”

  “And you think you could know me in a flash?”

  “No, it’s only that you don’t offer so much resistance. You talk. The fact is—” He gave an earnest glance, or perhaps an imitation of an earnest glance. “I could use a person like you.”

  “Use? What for? Bluebeard?”

  “Oh, come on.” He reached out and touched my arm. “I only meant to hone my wits.”

  “Wit, or wits?”

  “Exactly. To make distinctions. Either. Both.” He paused and smiled. “I might have my uses too.”

  I tore strips from my cardboard coffee mug. “Oh yes, I remember you would do anything for a lady. But where are you going to get a horse?” I looked at my watch. “I have to go now. Telemann calls.”

  “Would you like to go to the movies Saturday night?”

  “Aren’t you still going with Esther?”

  “No. She won’t go.”

  “I see. Well, in that case … what movie?”

  When he kissed me the first time, after the movie, in one of those apartments rented for assignations, what I felt most was the beard and the mustache. In 1958 a beard was an affectation, not yet a political statement. George’s was chestnut-brown, small and well-trimmed. When the kiss was over I said it felt like kissing a rabbi. “No,” I amended, “more of a rabbi’s son. Or a rabbinical student. You make me feel I’m the one leading you into sin.”

  “My family are not Orthodox rabbis. They have no beards.”

  “So why, then?”

  “For distinction. I feel undistinguished.” In fact he was distinguished. The beard and the thick glasses with tortoiseshell rims gave his benign face a highly decorated look. George wore bright colors in a dim age. He was rococo, a bit of a dandy.

  “You mean you feel indistinguishable.”

  “Good girl.” He clapped me on the shoulder like a pal, then moved to kiss me again. I backed off.

  “I want to look around the place. Do you mind?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  The apartment had two bedrooms. In the other one were Victor’s painting things. Most guys came here to … relax, George explained, but Victor came to paint. Victor, he said, grinning, was … “Aesthetic, did you say?” “Ascetic,” he enunciated. It was a square, dusty room with no furniture, only a bare striped mattress on the floor, but it had large windows facing north and west. There were rolled canvases on the floor, a stained easel, jars and rags and the stinging smell of paint. Three stretched canvases, one with a gray shirt hanging over a corner, leaned against the west wall: abstract, blue and brown, dun-colored blotches that seemed to be jostling each other for more space. They were incommunicative paintings, the artist mumbling to himself, and I did not care for them. George said, “He’s trying things out. He’s very versatile. You would have liked what he did last year better. Melons and eggplants. Come.” He took my hand and pulled me towards the other bedroom, which was cleaner, and furnished in a neat, nondescript way. He sat down on the bed. I stood in the doorway. I was having a strange, disoriented sensation. I remembered being blindfolded and whirled around, years ago, at birthday parties.

  “I’m not sure why I agreed to come here.”

  He smiled. “Urgent curiosity.”

  “Is that it?”

  “I imagine, from what I know of you. You don’t like mysteries.”

  “Is that enough reason?”

  “Well.” He laughed again. “More reason than some people have, and less than others.”

  “I think I ought to feel … well, you know, something more.”

  “It’s not always easy, nine feet away. If you came a little closer, maybe …”

  George was a cheery epicure, while I undertook it in a spirit of quest, just like The History of Philosophy. Between us there was affection, but not any question of love—we wanted experience and excitement in safety. The caution of the age was deep in our bones. (Only later, as friends, did we come to love each other, without excitement.) We would meet in the apartment two or three times a week, never after curfew hours. I was no Steffie Baum. My daring was all within limits. I was careful also never to miss a session of the Chamber Music Society or cut my practice hours to be with George. I felt my dignity rested in such bargains, because with him I didn’t feel I had much dignity at all. Just pleasure and profound confusion.

  I was taken with some essential flimsiness about him, in which the intelligence and charm were wrapped like jewels in tissue paper. He was taken with my combination of bold and bashful. Adorable. Adorable was a word I hated, I told him. It certainly did not describe me. “Not all of you, Lydia. Just that particular mix. That careful eagerness. Will you at least allow me my tastes?” “Your tastes! Your tastes are so catholic. If I allow you your tastes everything gets in.” “No, it’s that I want to get into everything. Could you come a little closer?” “You also make it sound so crude, and I don’t like it.” “No? I don’t see you struggling.”

  We were both thorough and methodical people. He had read widely on the subject—he liked literary erotica—and he was conscientious too. The certainty of the pleasure became more reliable. Fecundity increased; intensity, extent, all of the categories. But I was unsatisfied in my mind, just as in The History of Philosophy.

  “Nice as it is, this is not the answer,” I told him one evening, on his smooth sheets. He always brought clean sheets, in a briefcase; he said he didn’t know who might have been in the bed before us. He was a domestic creature, even dusted and swept occasionally.

  “What is the question?”

  “The answer to anything. It couldn’t be a religion, for example. It has no content. And it lasts so short a time.”

  “Some groups have made it a religion. There are cults …” He looked at me curiously. “How long does it last?”

  “What, you mean just the momentary … ?” I was still shy about the words.

  “No, no, I know how long that lasts. I mean after. The feeling. Aura. How far can it take you? How long can it keep you floating?”

  I was taken with that in him too. He pondered over obscure, intangible things. The floating. He was asking about Duration. “Oh, a pretty long time.”

  “How long is a pretty long time?”

  “Eighteen hours, maybe? I’ll feel it all evening and sleep in it and when I get up I might still have it. Then gradually it’ll slip away and I’ll feel alone again, wide awake.”

  George beamed. “That’s very nice to know, Lyd.”


  It was far nicer than he knew. The feeling I took away with me was a nimbus of warm air around my skin, weather I carried with me, a lush spring in January. I didn’t tell him how fine it felt—I was not yet so willing to give. I begrudged him the knowledge because I felt he had made my life bizarre. My friends had what girls our age were supposed to have: flirtatious phone calls in the dorm, leading to dates—movies, walks in the whitened park. Snowball fights. I was almost as bad—or as good—as Steffie, except Steffie didn’t think having a sexual life was bizarre. I could keep my eyes wide open in bed, but when I dressed I had to turn away. And when I tossed my book bag over my shoulder and became a college girl again, rushing off to make her curfew, the apartment felt like a sea of confusion I had to fight my way out of.

  “But even so,” I said, “even if I were part of a cult where you made love so often that the feeling never lapsed—still it wouldn’t work. Can you see spending a lifetime? It would be boring.”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe I bore you.”

  “You don’t bore me. Yet. I would like something sustaining and fixed, though. Like an idea. Do you believe in anything?”

  “What an embarrassing question. Do you know, that makes me feel the way questions about sex must have made our grandparents feel. No, I guess I don’t, really. You can’t ever get any notion to stand still. Every configuration changes the minute you fix it in your eye.”

  “That’s only the way things appear, though.”

  “The way things appear is the way they are.”

  “George. Four years of being a philosophy major and that’s all you’ve arrived at?”

  “I’m not alone. You remember Heraclitus?”

  “Yes indeedy. Fire.”

  “He had a disciple, Kratylus. Kratylus took very seriously what Heraclitus said about everything being in constant flux. When he was asked to explain his ideas he waved his hand in the air. His point was that a statement can’t even remain true for as long as it takes to say it.” George waved his hand in the air to demonstrate, a graceful, rueful wave; it came down ruefully on my breast.

  “But we can’t stay with that. The mind instinctively seeks more.”

  “It may seek, but that’s our problem, love. Yes, I know, the structure of the mind reflects the structure of the universe. But that’s the epitome of wishful thinking.”

  “You are nothing but a Sophist. Professor Boles would be scandalized if she knew I was with you.”

  “I’ll tell you something. I think they got a raw deal. They made Socrates nervous, so he gave them a bad name in the agora and nobody’s taken them seriously since. Yet what is so terrible about taking money for your teaching? And as far as teaching strategy rather than substance, well, it’s presumptuous, in a way, to try to teach anything but strategy. They were right about a lot of things. Change is the only stable element. You’re not the same person today that you were yesterday. You especially, kiddo. Six weeks ago you were an innocent.”

  “This”—I glanced down at our bodies—“doesn’t change my basic identity.”

  “What basic identity, my sweet? Show me where it is. I see everything else, but I don’t see that.”

  “There is something. There’s got to be. Something abides, you accumulate a self. By experience, even this, okay. And memory. You endure. The changes you’re talking about are on the surface.”

  “Memory is not a live thing.” He slid his hand along my leg.

  “Memory is the livest thing of all. Without it you’re nobody. An amnesiac. It’s too frightening.”

  “I’m nobody, who are you?” he whispered in my ear.

  “George, you are so … you’re a facade. There’s nothing to you. I mean, you won’t let there be.”

  He stopped moving his hands. His whole body seemed to wilt.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, sorry.”

  He moved off so he could see me—without his glasses he was farsighted—and he flashed his wide, ingratiating smile. “You won’t have to remember me,” he said. “We’ll be friends for life. Won’t we?”

  “Sure. Friends for life. But what hypocrisy. You say it at a moment when you’re hating me. You don’t even want to touch me because I said that.”

  “I want to touch you. It was momentary.” He touched my face to prove it. Then he rolled over on his side, away from me. A moment later he rolled back, smiling again, and sang, “‘Prithee, pretty maiden—prithee tell me true (Hey, but I’m doleful, willow willow waly!), Have you e’er a lover a-dangling after you? Hey willow waly O.’” They were lyrics we heard three times a week at the Gilbert and Sullivan rehearsals, and we delighted in them. Everything about Gilbert and Sullivan was so gloriously inane—the best possible respite from our studies and our studious sex. “Come on, Lydie. Do it.”

  I gave him the response. “‘Gentle sir, although to marry I design (Hey, but he’s hopeful, willow willow waly!), As yet I do not know you, and so I must decline. Hey willow waly O!’” It made us laugh like kids, and forget for the moment that as a pair we were hopeless.

  At the end of January we all went to see Patience. Henrietta Frye, the wan slender pianist, having sustained no minor injury, I was free to sit in the audience with Nina and Esther and Gabrielle, with Victor and the other pleasant boys, watching George and Ray in the chorus of Dragoons. They hammed without stint and we cheered them on. But Steffie as Patience was a revelation. It was a comic role and she got her laughs, but she also managed to make the absurdity believable and tender. Her versatile hair shone in two thick plaits; she wore a blue and white checked, ruffled milkmaid’s dress, with a milk pail on her arm—a commonsensical maiden baffled by the bunch of heartsick aesthetes—and the image was perfectly credible. Steffie of the shady midnight escapes sang, with the utter sincerity that the inane role demanded, “‘Love that no wrong can cure, Love that is always new, That is the love that’s pure, That is the love that’s true!’” In the audience were the three junior high school students she tutored, along with their families, the only black faces present. I had had it all wrong—she was far more sensible than the rest of us. She gave herself fully to what claimed her feelings. As a matter of fact she had said no to George—he told me so himself. I felt a sudden twang in my gut, as if a spring had snapped. I wished I were like Steffie. I had been with George only a few hours earlier—quickly, for he had to get dressed and made up. Lying on top of me, he had joked that real opera singers weren’t allowed to do this before a performance; he hoped I appreciated the risk he was running. I kept the feel of him, and the nimbus of warm air. At the finale, as he embraced the lovesick maiden assigned to him, I felt his arm around my waist, and that ocean of confusion, salty, dark, fishy.

  I passed the rest of the winter dazed, by the love-making and by the music. I shuttled from one to the other, living for the feeling of levitation, like a junkie. Unlike a junkie I worked hard to get it—the same high in both, only one means was sanctioned and reputable. I lived high, ate hugely, and felt my insides burning it up, a revved engine. When I was alone I heard music and felt his body, and those live memories of sensation carried me through the routine drudgeries. I was isolated from my friends, with their approved snowball fights. I could never tell them how I had presented myself to George and that though I was free to walk out at any moment I didn’t feel free. I felt wet and waiting for the next time.

  “Something is wrong. You don’t look right”—Gaby, one night as we stood washing over adjacent sinks. “You’re not pregnant, for God’s sake, are you?” I brushed her off, hid my face in a towel. “Of course not. I wouldn’t be so stupid.”

  I did feel pregnant, though. I was gestating the “Trout” Quintet, practicing it hours every day. The auditions were in a few weeks. I took Schubert’s songs out of the library and brought them to the apartment—George could help. Faltering over the German, which we read only phonetically, we sang the one about the trout, which Schubert borrowed for his piercing fourth movement.

  “What does it
mean?” George asked. “It’s hard to sing without knowing the meaning.”

  “Oh, it’s totally asinine. A pretty fish gets caught, that’s all, and the person watching gets very worked up about it. But it’s peculiar, with that bouncy music, kind of tongue-in-cheek.”

  “Can’t we sing it in English? Let’s see the translation.”

  “No, the words don’t match the music too well.”

  He insisted, and so I read it to him, though it embarrassed me to be so captivated by a melody with these lyrics:

  The brook was sparkling brightly

  And dancing all about,

  And by me like an arrow,

  There flashed a lively trout.

  I stood upon the brook-bank

  And saw with joyous heart,

  The brook so gaily rippling,

  The fishes dash and dart.

  But soon there came an angler

  With rod and line and hook

  To catch the fish that swam there,

  So happy in the brook.

  As long, as now, the water,

  I thought, is bright and clear,

  The man can never catch him,

  The trout need never fear.

  But in the end the robber

  No more could wait.

  He made the water thick and muddy.

  The trout snapped up his bait.

  He twitched his rod and caught him,

  What pity, poor little trout, thought I,

  And sad at heart and grieving,

  I saw the victim die.

  “Well, there. I knew you’d think it was silly.”

  “It’s not silly. The death of a beautiful thing. Too young.”

  “It’s just a fish …”