Disturbances in the Field Read online

  I was in haste to live, and yet everything I did felt suspended in an ether of tentativity. All impalpable, all potential. I had no patience with process. I envisioned real life as a fixed point of arrival, Evelyn on top of the dune at last, waving her arms triumphantly like a semaphore: Here I am! I was beset by fits of irritation and I read gloomy writers to give my irritation the firm grounding it lacked. In my purse was a depressing little quote from Schopenhauer about endless striving and the impossibility of true satisfaction. When I was feeling most impatient I took it out and read it with a perverse spite. Gabrielle scolded me. She refused to listen to Schopenhauer and sent me out to free concerts. I came home exalted and inspired. Until the doubts began again. What exactly was I preparing for? How to go about it? I looked at middle-aged people with wonder. Completed, their entelechies all unfurled, they had no questions in their lives, only solid answers.

  Victor asked me, the second spring after I finished college, to come see his forty-five-dollar-a-month apartment on East Twenty-first Street. I hesitated, which amused him.

  “Leery of men’s apartments, Lydia? You spent half your junior year in that apartment.”

  “That was the year I was all mixed up. I’ve reformed.”

  “I know what it is. You’re afraid you’ll have to marry me, now that I’m poor.”

  “I thought I was supposed to like you better first.”

  “Oh, you like me well enough. Look, this isn’t a come and see my etchings kind of thing. You should know that by now. I really want to show you what I’m doing. I come and hear whenever you play, even if it’s Oklahoma in deepest Queens.”

  He was right. I went. The apartment was in a bleak neighborhood, not slummy but quietly desolate, and the name V. Rowe, neatly printed below the mailbox in the downstairs hall, was shorter and simpler than its neighbors. The large room where he worked was freshly painted white, but the rest of it—kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and hall—was the color of coffee with a few drops of cream. The kitchen contained one brown folding chair at a square table with a white porcelain top, the kind of table I remembered from my grandmother’s house, when I was a child and it was wartime. The linoleum on the floor, supposed to look like red bricks, was pockmarked and curling at the edges. Apart from the minimal amenities, he had done almost nothing in the way of decoration. I would have thought an artist needed more visual thrills. And except for that one large windowed room, the place seemed hung with gloom, a gloom not created by Victor—he was never a gloomy person—but left behind by dozens of cramped, wretched families. Or so it felt to me. He was oblivious to the legacy of gloom; he said the apartment did not depress him in the least. It was more space than he had ever called his own, and he possessed the only key. That was thrill enough.

  The small kitchen window faced another small kitchen window some five feet across a dingy airshaft. On that neighboring window was a tan curtain with a knotted fringe, between whose halves I could glimpse a table with a mottled top like the cover of a composition notebook. It held a potted geranium, a jar of Maxwell House instant coffee, a box of Rice Krispies, and a white flowered mug. Victor said an old woman lived there, and at eight sharp every morning she watered her geranium from a jelly glass. The window in the bedroom looked out over a half-empty parking lot, and his living room, or studio, windows faced a narrow concrete park where old Italian men in black jackets were playing a sober but joyful game of bocce. We stood at the open window—it was a warm twilight in April—and watched the balls bump into each other and roll about. Victor said he had figured out the rules of the game from watching so long.

  He offered me a beer but I reminded him that I hated beer, so he gave me ginger ale instead and showed me drawings. Dozens. No more abstract blobs pushing each other around. There were drawings of the old woman across the airshaft, frail and angular in a cotton housedress that hung loosely on her bones. Her fine hair was in a knot. He had drawn her watering her geranium, eating her bowl of Rice Krispies, wiping her table with a rag. There were drawings of the Italian men playing bocce. Their bald heads and the bocce balls were akin and offered up lovingly, like Cezanne fruits. There were drawings of the parking lot—empty, with one car, with five, with many, yet always looking faintly bereft. Some cars had dents in their fenders, a couple had flat tires. I understood then that he worked with what was at hand and made much of it. The drawings were respectful of the significance of each thing, not reverent. They were truthful and without pretension, except for one of the old woman wiping her table. That one’s sinuous lines seemed to romanticize penury in a way I didn’t care for. What I found beautiful was how he treated each object with equal attention. There was no hierarchy of priorities, no background sketched in or merely suggested. The folds of the dish towel hanging from the handle of the old woman’s refrigerator were drawn with as much care as the lines on her face. Except for the one, they were calmly celebratory, a triumph of attentiveness. I told him so. I said I liked them infinitely better than the blobs, and he smiled gratefully and kissed me lightly on the lips. I began to have one of my fantasies where we approached each other slowly, slowly, as in those movies, but he said he was starving, let’s go out and eat, there was a good Italian place on Eighteenth Street.

  After we studied the menu intently he reached out for my hand and this time completed the gesture, clasped it with fingers interlocking. We sat that way for a time. The food was brought but we ignored it for once. I was aware of the entire surface where his hand touched mine—the heel, the warm hollow of the palm, the press of the fingers—and from that clasp, as though it were captured in one of those optical toys that multiply and ramify a segment of space into a world of spaces, I could imagine the whole surface of his body and how it would be. Like finding the other half, as in the myth I loved in the Symposium. I didn’t want the other half just yet. There was something equally tantalizing about being incomplete.

  He looked at me in that piercing way that made me lower my eyes, but I didn’t withdraw my hand. “So come back with me. Bring your piano and your toothbrush. It’s about time, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve got to figure so many things out. I’m in limbo. About work, I mean, what to do next.”

  “I’m talking about love and you’re talking about work. You can work all you want.”

  “If I just had a firm footing … I’d get distracted.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You weren’t distracted back when … you know.”

  “That was different. You’re different. It would be the end of something, I know.”

  “Yes, the end of this stupid—” But he disciplined his temper, let go of my hand and smiled. “Do it the hard way, okay.”

  “I’m afraid of making a mistake.”

  “I would not be a mistake.”

  Oh, the arrogance of him. I thought love had to shake a person like an earthquake, but I was quite calm. A friend was another self, too easy, too comfortable. Slip right into it.

  He gave a raffish tilt of the chin and dug into his saltimbocca. “You’ve lost all your nerve. It’s a pity.” Cutting, but I thought he was wrong. I thought it took nerve not to give in.

  Lately Gabrielle had a strange, almost indifferent air about her dancing. The head of the company at the studio had told her that in a year or so, if she kept on, she might get to do small bits in performances. I was elated—real life!—but she was cool. She had a distraction. Don was a resident in orthopedics, and on his free weekends he took Gabrielle to dinner and the theatre. Formal dates, I teased. She told me, after the first date, that he had lived in a fraternity house at Amherst. “A frat house! Really, Gaby.” She smiled as if I were a child who had missed the point entirely, and murmured that it wasn’t important. Don was tall, though not as tall as Victor, and competent-looking; his smooth longish blue-eyed face had an ingenuous charm, glowing as if recently splashed with aftershave. He was nothing like his ingenuous face; he was sharp and even sardonic, though well-meaning. A pragmatist, a man who would go far, opera
ting with brains and efficiency within defined boundaries. Even as a resident he had the assured, paternalistic manner of full-fledged doctors. I had to admit he was attractive, but, “Smooth and ordinary,” I said when she asked. I never repeated it because the dates continued week after week.

  When she was not quite ready, I, like the mother, made conversation with him in the living room. “And how is your music going, Lydia?” He crossed his impeccably trousered legs and leaned back on the couch, arm stretched across its upper rim, face fresh and expectant. Questions like that made me want to kill—how unlike Victor, who wished to see what was happening to my hands. But for Gabrielle’s sake I said it was going well and asked politely how his orthopedics was going, and if he found that facetious I thought it no more than he deserved. When she entered the room he rose to his feet, a graceful unfolding, and radiated adoration.

  They were all slipping into it. Esther had married Ralph, purveyor of the ocean, soon after college. Nina was engaged to a fellow graduate student at Princeton. And Evelyn! Towards the end of her junior year abroad, six weeks before she was expected home, came that letter announcing her wedding in June. We must come. Rene would send us the tickets and we would stay at his house. My mother phoned me from Hartford. My father was not accepting any tickets from a Swiss banker. “What do you think we should do, Lydia?” Since I had finished college she had taken to asking me for advice as if, with the degree, I knew something she didn’t.

  “We’ll go,” I said firmly. “But Daddy’s right. We’ll pay for our own tickets.”

  And so I spent a swift, baffled week in Alpine greenery, among oak furniture, leatherbound books, and objets d’art. Evelyn! My nighttime companion! Would she whisper secrets to him in bed at night? He was in his middle thirties, ruddy, exquisitely dressed and mannered, but I could not picture him appreciating the secrets of a girl like Evelyn.

  I was spoiling for a fight and hadn’t the heart to fight with Evelyn, who was sublimely inscrutable. In the ladies’ room of the airport in Geneva, going home, I said to my mother, “What do you think he has, a gold-studded prick?” I would have been pleased had my mother threatened to wash out my mouth with the soap she was about to squirt into her hand. But she tilted her head sideways, pursed her lips, and shrugged, lifting her free palm eloquently to the ceiling as though I had expressed her thoughts to perfection. It was a new vision of my mother.

  On the plane, while my father slept in the window seat, I thought I might try for another. “What do you think of this, Mom? Listen. It’s about wanting things.” I read her my quote from Schopenhauer. “‘The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one; both are illusions. … No attained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification; it is like alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive today that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow.’”

  This time she looked as though she would have liked to wash out my mouth. And then she sighed—she had a wonderful, encompassing sigh for the mystery of it all—and patted my hand. “They have some very nice magazines to read if you’re so desperate. All you have to do is ask the stewardess.”

  Two months later Gabrielle married Don, as I had known she would the minute I said “Smooth and ordinary” and saw her eyes bright blue and green with hurt.

  I drank too much champagne at their wedding dinner at a French restaurant in an East Sixties brownstone. It was the sort of restaurant that had no sign outside denoting its existence and no prices on the calligraphic menu, but did have a silver medallion hanging from a heavy chain around the neck of the wine waiter. Gaby seemed very much at home in such surroundings; the more I drank, the more there grew in me a subversive notion that those four years in the dormitory and two years in the apartment, she had been an impostor. Maybe Evelyn was an impostor too.

  Victor was not. Back in the empty apartment I phoned him, first at home, then at the bar.

  “Hi. This is a surprise. I didn’t even know you had the number.”

  “I know how to use a phone book. What are you doing there on a Saturday night?”

  “Filling in for someone whose wife is having a baby. Watching a movie about the Titanic.”

  “I called to ask if you want to come over. If you can desert the ship.”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “Does something have to be the matter for you to come over?”

  “Of course not. But for you to invite me. I get off at midnight.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  I knew I ought to drink coffee or take a cold shower, but I sat on the living room couch in a stupor. In my head blossomed images of the wedding—Esther holding hands with Ralph, Nina and her fiance from Princeton clinking glasses, Gaby’s dress, ivory with seed pearls. The images floated around, divagatory and surreal. Hypnagogic, Esther told me later when she was in social work school, is the word for that lush phantasmal quality of our thoughts on the verge of sleep. I moved in and out, listening for the doorbell.

  He was dressed in an old denim shirt and tan chino pants, as he used to dress in college. I stared. The clothes made him younger. The intervening years might never have been. Kids again, and he was flirting with that rare lanky grace, one of a kind.

  “Are you planning to ask me in, or don’t you recognize me?”

  I moved aside. “I’m sorry. Come in.” It was so easy.

  He put his arm around me. “What’s the matter? You’re all pale. And you’re thinner. We haven’t had dinner for a while.”

  “It’s nothing. I’m a little drunk. I’ll make some coffee. Is instant okay?”

  “Sure.” He followed me into the kitchen and watched my very slow and careful movements. “Why are you all dressed up? And you cut your hair. It makes you look like a boy.”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t fix the coffee and converse at the same time. We stood waiting for the water to boil. “Hey, do you know I can play the harmonica? Since I last saw you.” He pulled one out of his pocket and played snatches of songs: “Camptown Races.” “This Land Is Your Land.” “Auld Lang Syne.” And the theme I loved from the “Trout.”

  “That’s terrific. All by ear?”

  “Yes. I remembered the ‘Trout.’ Are you touched this time? You’re supposed to be.”

  “Well, I’m surprised.”

  “Come on, Lydia, after midnight on a breezy August night when you’re drunk, you’re allowed to be sentimental. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “I am touched.” I kissed him lightly. I swayed, and we laughed because it was so clearly not passion making me sway.

  “I’d better pour it,” he said.

  We drank it on the couch. “Listen, I don’t mind saying I’m touched. The reason I didn’t want to say it is I wanted to say what I had to say first. So you wouldn’t think it was because of anything you said. It’s on my own. Do you follow me?”

  “Barely. Come here and lie down.” He pulled me over to him, with my head in his lap. “I think it’s time I took advantage of you.” He started to unbutton my dress. “What a nice dress. This blue is right for you.”

  “Wait.”

  “Wait?” He laughed. “It’s the middle of the night, Lydia. You’ve obviously been out with some guy and got slightly looped and then you felt lonely. So you called me. Now what for, am I supposed to think? Okay, I’m not above that sort of thing.”

  “That’s not the way it was at all. All wrong.” I sat up. “Do you still want to marry me?”

  “Yes. But less and less as time goes by, frankly.”

  “Oh God. Do you have to be so frank?”

  “It’s still a lot.”

  “All right. I say yes. I do. I mean, I will.”

  “Just a second. Why all of a sudden?”
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br />   “I want to, that’s all.”

  “You just broke up with someone. You got ditched.”

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t do it like that.”

  “No? What if you change your mind when you sober up?”

  “I won’t.”

  “But you don’t love me.”

  I looked at him. For one instant I felt sober. “I don’t know, I might. I will, anyway. I promise.”

  “Ah, that doesn’t sound so hot to me.” He got up and walked around the room, running his finger nervously along surfaces. He might have been checking my housekeeping abilities. “Why should I, that way? I could get over you. I just haven’t tried.”

  “Oh Christ, Victor! You pestered me all this time. Didn’t you think I was paying attention? So okay! But first go ahead and—what did you call it?—take advantage of me. I mean, we ought to see if it works, shouldn’t we?”

  “If it works! Oh, you’re too much. Ought to? All of a sudden I ought to?”

  “You wanted to a minute ago.”

  “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, baby. But the way you say it makes me nervous.”

  “That’s two of us, then. Well, go ahead and drag me to the bedroom by my hair.”

  “But you have no hair left.”

  I touched my bare neck. “I forgot. By an arm, then.”

  “What about Gabrielle? Is she going to walk in? Or is she out somewhere with that bone person?”