Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “Poignant?” That was my word. “Tell me, I’m curious, do you know what poignant literally means?”

  “Of course. Piercing.”

  “Piercing, yes.” He was piercing too, for that brief moment. “Well, thank you.” I watched him pour more beer. “Your hand is shaking. What’s the matter?”

  “Do you think this is easy? I mean, to talk to you like this? Do you think I do it every day?”

  He shocked me. He didn’t raise and lower barriers or play safe. We were not alike in that. “Look, I have so much work to do—I can’t. … And George.”

  “I have work to do too. And George will always take care of himself.”

  “Stop, please. I don’t like being pushed. It doesn’t feel right. You’re … Okay, I see you’re different from what I thought. But still, this whole talk is your show, your script, isn’t it? My lines are very limited. Yes or no is all you leave for me to say. It’s not … It makes me feel like …”

  “I should have asked you if you wanted to go to the movies. It would have sounded better. I don’t know how to pursue girls, really. I don’t have time. Look, next time it can be your show. I’m democratic. I’d like to see what your show would be like, actually.”

  “I’ve got to go now. No, hold it. I’ll pay for my own coffee, thanks.”

  “Fine!” said Victor. “Give me—let’s see, two coffees—thirty cents. No, make it … forty-two and a half, with tip. Pay for the beer too, if you like. Do you want to pay for the beer?”

  “Oh, all right, go ahead and pay for it all.”

  He walked me back to the library, where we said good-bye.

  He interfered with the way I saw George. I thought I had no illusions about George, that I understood his charm and his usefulness. But the memory of Victor and his insistence hung over me, and in the silent clarity of late nights, as I practiced the oboe under the small bedside lamp with Melanie curled asleep, I saw that whether I liked him or not, Victor was emblematical of the world, dense and insistent and intractable. George, with all his cavalier sex, his beard, and his years in the army, gave off something dry and academic, like the odor of library stacks. Even the loving he had learned from books.

  “What is in there?” I asked him, lying in bed.

  “In where?” He was resting his head on my breast.

  “In here.”

  “Blood,” he said, “and gray matter.”

  “You know what I mean, George. You seem so apart. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking nothing. Can’t you just enjoy it?”

  “I don’t know what it is. I want to be somewhere else. Outside of me, I mean.”

  “Oh, Lyd,” he groaned. “You are so awfully adolescent. And as of last week you’re not even a teenager any more.”

  “What do you feel urgent about? There must be something.”

  “Nag, nag, nag.”

  I smiled. I was being unfair: my fingers drew designs on his belly as I asked. “Come on, tell me,” I teased, “what your real passion is for. You know what I mean … there’s God, Art, Revolution, Nature.”

  “If you must know, Cunts,” he said.

  A week before I was to perform the “Trout” a most unlikely event occurred. On an outing in the New Jersey Palisades with the Mountain Climbing Club, Henrietta Frye tripped and broke her wrist. The call imploring me to substitute in The Yeomen of the Guard left me faintly guilty, even though I had not envied Henrietta since the “Trout” auditions. I cut my Friday classes to practice the score. The Yeomen of the Guard was my favorite among the operettas because it ends sadly, a last-minute sadness casting into high relief the inanity of the rest. Our production played up the sadness for all it was worth. The purported hero, Colonel Fairfax, played by George, was a stiff, selfish nobleman, a “peacock popinjay,” who steals the girl from the true hero, the jester Jack Point, a man of the world. Ray Fielding was our jester, and miraculous: he gave Jack Point the verve and ambiguity of a Shakespearean fool—fey yet earthly, a sprite yet a man, obtuse and barbed in his wit, yet poignant, quite like the “Trout,” in his sorrow over lost love. Ray brought tears to my eyes even as I accompanied him, singing of the merryman whose soul was sad and whose glance was glum as he sighed for the love of a lady. George did very well as the peacock popinjay, very natural. He stood suitably pompous and triumphant with the girl nestled under his arm, while the jester, the artist, cast aside, fell to the ground in misery as the curtain came down. I worked up to the final chords wondering which of them was more real; with which would I find myself in the presence of real life? I didn’t think about love.

  The next weekend I played the “Trout.” Backstage the string players looked unfamiliar dressed in their dark suits. They were tense as they wiped their palms and foreheads with big white handkerchiefs. I was excited and curious. I had the feel of every phrase stored in my fingers like gold in a vault; all I had to do was unlock and it would undulate out—I hoped. Everyone was there, Nina, Esther, and Gabrielle, Melanie and Steffie, George, Victor, Ray, and the other clever boys, as well as my parents and Evelyn, down from Hartford for the occasion. I thought of none of them. If I thought of anything at all besides the notes, it was of the lissome, iridescent qualities of skimming fishes. But mostly I listened to the others and let the stored phrases shed from me into the communal sound we made. It felt like molting. I remembered Professor Duffy telling me not to be afraid to come forth and claim my own during the solo parts, and though I was afraid, for there was such a bare lonesomeness about standing forth by myself, I did it. That was more than molting; it was revealing the naked nerves. I did it for the other four—it wouldn’t have been fair to hold back.

  It was good. I was satisfied in my mind as never before.

  We all went out for pizza to celebrate, three big tables pushed together in the smoky back room of the West End Bar. I hadn’t seen my parents in several months. I noticed they were beginning to go gray, my father in streaks at the temples, my mother in patches. Their bodies were beginning to soften, yet their eyes were as eager and beneficent as in those long-ago summers at the beach. They were paying special attention to George. I prayed that my father would not say anything to embarrass me, such as, My little Paderewski, which he was quite capable of doing, with all his beneficence.

  “And what are you studying?” he asked George.

  “Philosophy.”

  “Philosophy. Well, well. And what do you do with that when you graduate?”

  In his charmingly evasive answer, George managed to mention the family of rabbis, which he knew my parents would find impressive. No doubt they assessed him as a sociable, sensible young man despite the philosophy and the beard. I think they would have been surprised and vaguely distressed, though, to know I was sleeping with him. Esther took a fancy to my mother and got herself invited to Hartford for two weeks in June. Gabrielle focused on my father, for whom she summoned up the evanescent French accent. Nina, who was beginning to don glamor like a costume—black silk blouse and gold chains around her neck—was flanked by a few of the hopeful boys. Steffie and Ray were persuaded to do, a cappella, “I Have a Song to Sing, O!” from last week’s Yeomen, and afterwards Steffie politely excused herself—it was close to midnight and she had an appointment. Ray moved his chair closer to Evelyn’s. Evelyn said little but smiled gnomically. She wore her smooth fair hair back in a knot like a ballet dancer’s, though she did not dance. She used to fly down the dunes but lately she had grown languid; she took long, slow walks, my parents had told me. She said little, but I knew she was saving every perception for later dialogues with herself, or with flowers, or whomever she was telling her secrets to these days. Evelyn would know what George was right away. Laughing and eating pizza, I experimented; I tried to see him through her uncanny instincts. Yes, I had been right when, taking my bows after the “Trout,” exulting in that rare satisfaction of the mind, I decided to finish with him. Even though what George offered measured high on Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus.
The only category where it fell short was number six, Purity. The pleasure was not unalloyed—it was mixed with unease and self-doubt. I suspected other pleasures might yield more, and more purely: they were pleasures connected with working at music, with the density and tremulous candor Victor had shown, and with freedom from that dizzy levitation. They were connected, imprecisely, with the quote from Spinoza still tucked in a corner of my mirror, reminding me morning and evening that the effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is the actual essence of the thing itself, and causing me discomfort when I returned from my endeavors with George. Those other pleasures had to do, too, with my wish to grasp what abides beneath the daily ephemera; George was part of the ephemera. And also, in a totally impenetrable way, with Thales’ waiting, and waiting, to measure the pyramid by the measure of a man and the shadow he casts. But I had said friends for life and meant to keep my word. I would do without the rest. In the crowd of family and friends, all busy eating and looking each other over, Victor and I gave no hint of our strange talk in the bar on Amsterdam Avenue near the unfinished cathedral. For all I knew, we might never talk again, but he had had his effect. I was feeling a bit sad and cruel about George, stirred by the romance of my own cruelty as the very young can be. Till it struck me, watching him assist Ray in amiably trying to “draw out” Evelyn (hopeless task if she was unwilling), that George would not be devastated. Almost anyone clever and athletic enough would do. I surveyed the table, flushed with my success, and thought, I will give him Nina, cleverer than I, and virginal.

  Wedlock

  GABRIELLE, AS A NEW mother, is bewildered and seeks a way out of her bewilderment through the language she learned at school, a language that sounds out of place in the park among the baby carriages, where we sit in the shade. She says that having been an English major, breathing in stories day and night, encourages the dangerous tendency to think of your own life as a story. No, better still, a novel. Of course, she adds with a meaning glance at me, the tendency is not limited to English majors. It afflicts people with a certain organizing sensibility, people who expect that the structure of the universe will reflect the structure of the mind.

  They used to call God Author of My Being, I say.

  Ah, yes! But note, nota bene (she smiles at her own pedantry, her eyes momentarily alight behind the tinted aviator glasses, amber to match the copper of her newly cropped hair), how that author is distant and all-powerful. He’s got a whole library. I meant each person as the author of her own being.

  (Nota bene, she uses the feminine pronoun whenever she can, before it was popularly taken up, with the sweetly optimistic notion that a mountain can be removed grain by grain.)

  Well, I guess we do act according to a script at times. It can’t be helped, I respond lazily, and rock the carriage for her with my foot.

  I’m not talking about a script, Lydia. A script is dialogue spoken in a particular setting. And a play moves single-mindedly towards a denouement. But a novel, the sort of novel one could imagine one’s life to be, at any rate, appears to meander, with a ragbag of concerns. Also—as she talks she gazes up at the sky, shielding her eyes: will the weather stay fine for the baby?—also a novel has commentary; no matter how absent an author tries to be, it contains its own interpretation. A novel is an attempt at interpretation. Your life can’t be. That’s why the tendency is dangerous. You try to direct your life along the route of beginning, middle, and end, but actually life has a sprinkling of beginnings and middles and ends all the way through, not in the right order. This—she looks at the carriage containing Roger—is a beginning but it’s also an end of something. You try to see a cluster of major themes moving along, developing and elaborating, but actually in many lives the original themes die out or become sublimated (absently she flexes and points a foot, the way she used to do when she was training to be a dancer); new ones arise out of nowhere. Plus we never escape time, and real time is so dull and even, like a fox-trot. A novelist can treat it whimsically, make it fly back and forth or stand still. We never escape flukes, politics, weather. A novelist makes her own flukes when she needs them, and her own weather. It’s a matter of control, she says wistfully. She peers into the baby carriage, sprays a few drops of milk from the bottle onto the back of her hand. If I ever wrote a novel, she adds, I wouldn’t bother trying to hide the fact that I was in control. And rocks some more. Roger was conceived in foam—she and Don had volunteered to test a new brand in the interests of science, part of a research project at his hospital.

  I am one of those people she meant. I saw myself as a character, growing and changing as they say characters must in order to seem real. I would have allowed for inevitable setbacks—no character evades those—but on the whole it was to have been a cheerful novel, comedy not tragedy. (Would anyone write herself a tragedy? Perhaps, but not me.) A lifetime of purposeful effort crowned by fitting rewards. The novel was imbued with that deepest and most treasured of middle-class notions: that life should, and would, reward good behavior.

  School came to an end. For almost two years I shared an apartment in the West Nineties with Gabrielle. During most of the first year Victor was away in Europe looking at paintings—he had relaxed his rule about not using his parents’ money to make the trip. After he returned he would call me every couple of months. We would meet for dinner in chummy places where they let us sit for hours. One of our favorites was Simon’s, because it had an immense suit of armor in the entryway and in one of the metal hands rested a heap of chocolate-covered mints. Victor pointed out that we chose the same sorts of things to eat, as if that were proof of affinity. What we chose were bloody steaks and shrimp and pasta dishes in winy, garlicky sauces, bitter greens doused in vinegar, pecan pie without the whipped cream. Whipped cream was too insubstantial. We ate greedily and talked about our work. Sometimes he asked to see my hands. He said he was interested in what all that practicing did to hands. I spread them on the table, palms down. “They are changing,” he said. He examined the fingers, knuckles. “They look like hands that do something. Know something.”

  “Let me see yours.”

  His hands still had flecks of paint around the fingernails, and still looked older than he did. The lines were more pronounced; there were calluses and rough patches, and occasionally a small red diamond where the skin was scraped away and raw flesh exposed. He didn’t bother with Band-Aids.

  We were not lovers. We played a peculiar game of advance and retreat, with infinitely small, guarded moves. He considered that he had made his major move over two years ago in that bar near the unfinished cathedral: he was still waiting for a straight answer. I hedged, while we both went out with unimportant people whom we never discussed. I had the premonition that our becoming lovers would be an act of closure, that this phase of my life, not a very happy phase but one of curiously suspended potential, would come to a swift end.

  He was drawing and painting all day and working in a bar four nights a week, as he had promised or threatened to do, a bar in the East Thirties that served suburban commuters in business suits juicing up for the trip home from Grand Central, and later in the evening, local drinkers. On weekends he went to the galleries, and read, and cooked enormous soups that could last for a week. “And what do you put in the soup?” “Everything I can find. It is an immense, thick, and variegated soup.” He didn’t accept any more money from his parents. I thought that was foolish. “If my parents were rich and wanted to give me money so I could spend my time learning to paint, I would take it.”

  “Have your parents offered you any money?”

  “Well, yes, a little.”

  “But you would rather dash around town with four jobs at once, accompany the dance classes and do the children’s theatre, et cetera, et cetera. So what’s the difference?”

  “There is a difference. My parents don’t have that much to spare. And accompanying dance classes is not making drinks in a bar. I give them bits of Mozart sonatas. Prokofiev is very good
for modern dance. I improvise. I’m a great improviser. So it’s not a waste of time.”

  “I keep my eyes open. It’s not a waste of time either. It’s the same thing.” He poked a fork into the crust of his baklava. Despite the immense and variegated soups he was thinner than he had been in school, almost gaunt, and yet his face was becoming less abstracted. Less secretive too. It was clear now that what I had taken to be critical disdain was simply untiring vision, eyes taking apart the world. The impatience I had sensed around the mouth was simply the wish to see through solid objects into what Matisse, he told me later, called their signs. I enjoyed observing him. I felt close to him now, though still wary. I could imagine us continuing our indulgent dinners every two months, comparing notes on our progress, indefinitely. Although after two glasses of wine I might begin to imagine him leaning close to me, and closer, as in those excruciatingly slow erotic approaches in old movies. But I would stop myself like a child covering her eyes at the scariest, most exciting part. I liked living with Gabrielle and going out on and off with undemanding men I didn’t care much about. I told Victor how sometimes Gaby and I sat up at night and talked. He groaned. “Still schoolgirls. Don’t you think I can talk too?”

  “Well, but I like the idea of the apartment, also. You’ve seen it. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “Very nice,” he said mockingly. “Very, very nice.”

  I was in haste to live, to arrive at life itself instead of preparing. But I needed money. I worked at Schirmer’s off Fifth Avenue four afternoons a week. The other clerks were young musicians too; we talked shop and gave each other leads on jobs, and during quiet spells sat in the listening booths with the new recordings. I got the accompanist work through Gabrielle, at the studio where she took classes every evening. Daytime she was a simultaneous translator at the UN, through her father’s connections. And I had what Victor called et cetera, et cetera: the Children’s Theatre, the Golden Age Club. I even played hymns in a Greenwich Village church Sunday mornings. Weekdays I got up at six and practiced in my nightgown for four hours, agonizing over whether or not to enter competitions as others were doing. I didn’t feel myself a soloist; I had never liked being alone in a large space. I was an ensemble player, the kind of musician who comes to fullest life in a group, and I was happiest in the trio I had formed with Greg Parnis and Rosalie: we played at community centers, weddings, fancy parties, for a hundred or so dollars an afternoon. Rosalie was always late and frazzled because of three young children, but when she sat down with her cello it was worth the wait. And Greg was enterprising—he hunted up the jobs.