Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “Gabrielle?” I pulled him by the hand towards my room. “You are nervous, aren’t you? No, she won’t walk in. Anyhow, I’ll close my door.”

  Victor looked around the bedroom. He had been over before, but never in my room. I knew how he liked to examine places at length. My room was brightly disorderly, a graduate student sort of room, with Madras curtains, a Cezanne landscape, a piano, all my college books still alive with the aura of having been recently read. “Victor, you can study the place later.”

  “You are in a hurry.” He put his arms around me. Every gesture he made was slow and attentive. His touch was less ardent than curious. It was wonderful, far better than I had allowed myself to imagine, but another feeling was even more powerful. He kissed me. “I’ve never seen you in this sort of hurry before.”

  “Because I’m going to pass out very soon.”

  “Lie down, then. What a seductress you turn out to be.” He lay down next to me.

  “I should tell you something.” I could hear my own slow voice drifting peculiarly above my body. “Gabrielle just got married.”

  “Really? To that doctor? … Oh yes, you mentioned something about it last time.”

  “Yes. That’s where I was all evening. That’s where I got drunk. It’s only fair to tell you.”

  “Fair?” He sounded puzzled. “Okay. I see.” He didn’t see yet, but I couldn’t explain any more. He unbuttoned the rest of the dress and took it off me. I shivered. “Chilly?”

  “Yes. Pull up the sheet. …Victor, I’m very sorry. I can’t stay awake, even for you.”

  I thought he might be angry—he certainly had a right to be—but he only smiled. Maybe he was glad of the delay. He folded the dress neatly over a chair, and the last glimpse I had, he was at the bookshelf, looking for something to read.

  It was pitch dark when I woke. I sensed someone there and got rigid with terror, then I remembered. “Victor?” I whispered. He touched my face. It was an unknown hour, and in the dark I felt I was seeing him. He was not the composed and bantering man I knew in daylight. I had never made love with someone who loved me. I found something out. I found out how a woman might be content to do nothing but tend her body and her surroundings—an extension of her body with a particular domestic appeal—content to wait in a vague mist of anticipation, for an hour of being made to feel like this. She could become a happy machine, greased and used and satisfied once a day, dormant and amorphous the remaining hours. Of course I couldn’t take this seriously. Only a ripple of atavism—but it left a faint wake.

  He turned on a lamp. “I want to see you. I could look at your face forever and never get bored.”

  “It’s not so beautiful.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. I mean all those very distinct lines and planes, all the declivities. It changes from moment to moment—there’s always something happening.”

  “Oh.” That was an artist’s eye, not a lover’s.

  “Don’t worry. I also like it in the regular way.”

  I looked at him too, naturally at his body—young women are insatiably curious about men’s bodies—but mostly at his face, which I had never seen so transparent since the day we first talked in that bar on Amsterdam Avenue near the unfinished cathedral, and I asked myself, could I face that face and body all the years to come, accept whatever unknown meannesses they hid, whatever seeds of unforeseeable change and drift, circumstance and accident, they might endure or provoke, and despite all, keep welcoming him home and in me? I thought I could. I didn’t know, still, if all that added up to love. I had loved the making love, but that was not it. Perhaps the brimming willingness I felt, the admiration, and the desire already returning, with an exponent of time, added up to love. There was no ready-made calculus for this. I was so rapt in thought I missed something he whispered.

  “I said, are you happy, Lydia?”

  “I have never been this happy.”

  He wanted to make love again but I said, “There’s something else I want to tell you, so my conscience is clear. So you won’t think I’ve played any tricks.”

  “You’re not pregnant?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Don’t give me any confessions, then. At least not right now. I don’t expect you’ve been a nun. Neither have I.”

  “What a cute nun you would make, Victor. No, it’s nothing like that. It’s that Gaby and Don are going to live in the apartment.”

  “This apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “So?”

  “Don has a place up near P & S, but it’s two tiny rooms. It’s really not possible for them. They were going to try it, but this place would be ideal. Except Gaby didn’t want to put me out. She’s very noble about things like that. But I insisted. Otherwise they’d both have to move, and this is rent-controlled, and she was the one who first found it, and it’s so nice …”

  He was running a questioning finger back and forth over my lips. Over my words, as they spilled out.

  “So Lydia winds up homeless.”

  “Yes.”

  “I get it.”

  It was a while till he spoke. “Lydia, if what you would really like is for me to help you find an apartment and rent a U-Haul and move your stuff in, I’ll do that. You don’t have to sleep with me for that.”

  “No. Now I want to live with you.”

  “Now? As opposed to when? A half hour ago?”

  “Victor, I don’t know myself any more. Now, that’s all.”

  He rolled over onto his side with his head propped in his hand, and stared at me. I wanted to hide, or weep—there was such distrust in his eyes, but the same longing. I wanted to tell him that Gaby’s wedding, the baffled week in Switzerland, all my uncertainty and confusion, my impatience with waiting for life to happen, had nothing, nothing to do with my phoning him at the bar—for they didn’t seem to any more, now that I lay next to him. But I wanted also not to tell any lies; he never did.

  “You can move in anytime.”

  “Thank you.” I had to turn away. “The truth is, I don’t know how to be alone. I need to be part of something.”

  He took my hands away from my face. “Look at me. When you said before that you’d never been this happy, was that true, or was that also convenient?”

  “True.”

  “I have to take your word. What is your word worth?”

  “If I tell you, it’s still my word. Please.” I pulled him close to me. I was afraid. “Let’s not talk about it any more. It’s splitting hairs. Don’t you see how I feel about you here and now? Can’t you trust that?”

  “It’s not true that you don’t want to play tricks. You want to play them and then get credit for winning straight anyhow.”

  “But you won, Victor. You wanted me.” I sat on top of him and moved around till he was inside me. He didn’t help, just lay still. I had to say something to make him trust me again. It was crazy that I felt free enough to climb on top of him but not to honor him with the truth. If only I knew it. “That first conversation we had, in the bar. Remember I said it was your show and your script, and you said next time it could be mine? Remember?”

  He closed his eyes and nodded.

  “Well, so can’t we leave it at that?”

  It was a perilous moment, so close it was burdensome, so peeled we felt raw. So this was how it might be—we would scratch away each other’s surfaces. There wasn’t time to wonder if we wanted that, simply because it was impossible to stay still any longer. In the midst of it he stopped and pulled me down close to him. “But if you come to me this way, and I take it, then you must never leave, do you hear?” I nodded.

  And then there was a moment when I longed to say, I love you, but I held back. People say things at those moments and aren’t judged by them, everyone knows that—things like, You must never leave—but I felt this night could bear no more ambiguity. I would have to wait, for the luxury of saying that truth, till a moment when I was quite cool and he was quite sure of it anyway. That was th
e price.

  The Greek Atomist Leucippus believed that every event in nature is inevitable, a result of the movements of certain groups of atoms in conjunction with other groups of atoms, and could we but be privy to the laws governing those movements we could understand and trace the inevitability of everything. It seems to me now, though, that none of it was inevitable. We engineered it together, this conjunction, over a period of three years. It didn’t have to be, he would surely have gotten over me, while I consciously chose to fall in love when it suited me, which is not to say I fell any the less; none of what came later had to be, either. We engineered the whole thing: out of an abrasion of wills and desires and affinities, we ourselves set in motion the movement of atoms, and with each of the million not inevitable but careless choices we made we narrowed the path, moved the atoms closer to their point of collision. All this we did in love and ignorance, trying to write our lives as best we could. For I never stopped feeling we were entitled to a good life. Leucippus believed that “Nothing happens at random; whatever comes about is by rational necessity.” What necessity? Why? Why did our love necessitate what it finally did?

  Esther was divorced after Ralph’s breakdown and her miscarriage, her auto accident, and her visit to her senescent mother who asked if, despite all, she was happy. “If you’re happy, then I’m happy too.” And then in 1975, in the lingering wake of a Vice-President turned out of office and a President forced to resign, when the country was led by a man who had trouble delivering complex sentences extemporaneously, who innocently embodied a triumvirate of confusion, optimism, and righteousness, she remarried. How we marry! Our grandparents were forced to marry for convenience; our parents married for love. In the therapeutic seventies again we married for convenience, psychic convenience, to “satisfy needs”—quite different from love since love, in the long run, is rarely convenient. Her new husband’s name was Clyde Powers.

  “Clyde Powers?” said Victor when I showed him the invitation that had arrived in that Saturday morning’s mail. Victor was not yet forty; those big bones and flat belly stood him in good stead. Even at moments when his intransigence pained me, I could still look at him with a primitive pleasure. “Clyde Powers? That doesn’t sound like anyone’s real name. Isn’t it the name of that fellow in An American Tragedy?”

  The invitation was a large glossy folded white card with a black-and-white photo of the nuptial pair covering the entire front. The smiles were beatific on faces pressed cheek to cheek and framed by halos of hair—Esther’s fair and frizzed, Clyde’s dark, long, and lank. Each head was crowned with a ring of daisies. Clyde looked some years younger than Esther, who was thirty-seven. His face was narrow, with small, avid, but unlit eyes. His lips were the only appealing feature—full and beautifully curved like a bow—but square little teeth spoiled the smile, and the wide gap in the upper row gave it a raunchy look. He was bare-chested except for a chain around his neck from which an obscure abstract pendant hung—it resembled the dove of peace but seemed to have excess wings, and it nestled amid copious hair. Esther was bare-chested too. You could see the beginning of the curve of breasts, but there, to my relief, the photograph was cropped. One daisy hovered fetchingly over her right eye. She looked luscious and hypnotized. Clyde’s stubby fingers clutched the flesh of her shoulder as if for balance.

  Victor opened the card and read aloud. “‘Esther Brickman and Clyde Powers. Holy Matrimony. June 8, 1975. Please come and share our feelings. SAVE Community, RFD No. 2, Pinecrest, New York.’ SAVE?” He looked at me across the kitchen table—not the white porcelain table at East Twenty-first Street; we had come uptown to space and bright rooms and colorful streets. “What is SAVE?”

  “Turn it over.”

  “‘SAVE. A self-help community of like-minded sharers united in Selfhood, Awareness and Acceptance, Vital Energies. Derek Holbrook and Clyde Powers, co-leaders.’”

  “Let me see that,” said Althea, raising her eyes from A Wrinkle in Time. Althea, sophisticated at nearly twelve, liked to pretend she was a third adult in the family, and often sat drinking coffee with us weekend mornings. “‘Selfhood, Awareness, Acceptance, Vital Energies.’ That should really be SAAVE. Like an ointment.”

  “Well, whatever it is,” I said to Victor, “we really must go.”

  “Save the date,” Althea chirped, making us both groan. Victor raised one eyebrow in the droll and skeptical gesture he knew would make me laugh—he looked like Vincent Price haunting a house, especially since he had a beard now, grown during a fit of depression over his work. No one had wanted it and a critic called it derivative. If life was barely worth living, he said, shaving was worthless. After a while he had a show, sold a few paintings, and the feeling passed. The beard remained, for vanity.

  We drove out to Pinecrest in Don’s green Volkswagen bus which had taken our two families on countless Sunday outings over the years, with cries of When will we be there? erupting from six kids in the back. This time Gabrielle was missing—away for a month in France, showing the children to aging relatives. Nina sat up front with Don, George in back with Victor and me. It was the sort of day believed perfect for a wedding, but our spirits were not balmy. Don steered with an indolent thumb at the bottom of the wheel. “Does anybody know what this person does for a living?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” Nina said in her lady professor’s voice. “Right now his work is running the community, or commune, I guess I should say. He used to be a rock singer with a group called The Ramrods, but apparently there was something wrong with their vibes. Spiritually, not musically. He’s also training to go out and run these, uh, self-evaluation gatherings, at which people save the good parts of their pasts and discard the bad parts, in order not to waste their vital energies brooding. That’s one reason it’s called SAVE, you see. Also, breathing properly is very important.” She breathed herself; it was more of a controlled sigh. “He was married before, to a singer too. His wife ran off with another woman, I think.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  She lowered her sunglasses and peered round at us from above them. “I spent a weekend there.” The lady professor pose was gone; a sly urbanity replaced it. Nina was protean.

  “A weekend? Then maybe you can tell me how to go, because I think we’re lost.”

  “I took a bus. My car was in the shop. Sorry.”

  “You never even told me,” I said. “How was it?”

  “It didn’t go terribly well. They told me I didn’t relate enough. I said I was only there for a weekend, but that didn’t seem to matter. Everybody watches everybody—do you remember Candid Camera? It’s bad to show hostility. No, maybe it’s good to show it, I forget, but in any case it’s a crucial issue. Also, to be concerned with politics is bad. I was trying to make conversation—I mentioned something about whether Ford could ever get elected on his own steam, and they said if we all worked on ourselves the state would take care of itself. It’s a farm. You’ll see, they milk cows and make butter and cheese. The cheese is not bad.” She took off the large sunglasses and turned to me with her special look of despair well under control. “I would say the cheese was the best part. The women bake bread but it seemed underdone to me. I don’t know, though—I’ve gotten used to ethnic bread in the Village.”

  “It was nothing like the Pythagorean Brotherhood, I gather?” Zestful spiritual communion. Mathematical studies. Now and then, the music of the spheres.

  “Nothing like it. I tried to take a walk in the morning but they asked me to stay and dish out granola.”

  Victor said, “It’s not going to be so funny when she phones in hysterics. I remember the last time.”

  “It is the easiest thing in the world to mock an experiment,” George said. “I think you’re all just jealous that this sort of thing came into vogue when you were too old to enjoy it.”

  “That’s not true!” They all laughed at my vehemence. Maybe George was right. I had spent the sixties dealing in diapers and pureed food, listening
with passion to the radio accounts of revolution at Columbia, longing to be on the barricades. No matter what the dispute, simply to be in it, to be with and together against. Those were my buildings being captured and countercaptured, and I was not much older than the rebels. But I had one kid in kindergarten and one in nursery school and a third growing inside. Rocks were flying. I stayed home. “I’m not too old,” I snapped at George.

  “I for one am not jealous.” Don let the bus steer itself for a few seconds while he tried to relight his pipe. “There’s no need to throw out the baby with the bath. I managed to run the antiwar program at the med school quite nicely without behaving like a gypsy.”

  “Modesty, Don, was never your strong point.”

  “Well, and what of it? I got the job done when no other teacher would risk it. Here.” He gave the pipe and matches to Nina. “Would you do this for me, please?”

  “Incidentally, Clyde Powers is not his real name,” Nina said with the pipe between her teeth. “His real name is Barry, or Barney, maybe, Weingrad.”

  Victor raised his eyebrow at me in the leering manner. “What did I tell you?”

  “Oh, all right. Did you try to talk her out of it?” I asked Nina.

  “Of course not. She seemed very happy. I didn’t think I had any right to interfere. Aren’t we a little old to tell each other whom to marry?” She lit the pipe and gave it to Don.

  “In the case of Esther, I don’t know. … I wonder if she’ll change her name too. Remember Esther was the only one of us with the patience to get through Being and Nothingness? To go from that to SAVE!”

  “It may be because of Being and Nothingness, not despite it.” Don smiled appreciatively, as he always did at his own jokes.

  “Bad faith. Remember how for a whole month she lectured us on bad faith? The forms bad faith may take are infinite. Denial of your own identity. Denial of the motives for your actions. Denial of your true situation in the—”

  “Oh shit, Lydia, I just missed what might have been our turnoff.” Don pulled over to the side and got out his map of New York State. “We are lost on our way to being saved. Hey, do you know, this must be skiing country. There are pictures of skiers all over the map. I bet in January this road is crammed with buses.”