Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “What an old bastard that guy was! Like something out of Dickens. We decided to take revenge. He had this big black cane, and when he left it in the office during lunchtime one of us would go in and saw off an eighth of an inch. Only every few days, though, so he wouldn’t notice. He had a funny look once in a while, but he never figured it out. It was terrific. He didn’t know why the world felt a little more askew each week.”

  “What a sweet boy you must have been,” Victor said.

  “No, I was, actually. He just brought out the worst in me.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He fell getting into the elevator and broke his ankle.”

  Mr. Dooley and his cane became a hypnagogic image, and I slept.

  “Lydie.” Nina nudged me. “Wake up. We’re in the city. We’ve decided we need a drink.”

  We were parked in front of a bar in the Village, not far from Nina’s apartment. Victor phoned to check on the children, and then we all settled in peacefully, for though we were sleepy and glum we were not yet inclined to part. George, never much of a drinker, which he attributed to his Judaic upbringing, asked the waiter for a glass of seltzer. “Not club soda. Seltzer. Do you have it?” He was in luck.

  “Comfort me with seltzer,” George said, “for I am sick of love.”

  “Tell us the seltzer story,” Nina urged. “We need it.”

  “Oh, I’ve told you a dozen times.” He took her hand and kissed it gallantly. “Aren’t you tired of it yet?”

  “No. Are we?” She looked around.

  We were not, so he told us once more how, when he was a small boy in the Bronx, every fourth Wednesday morning at seven-fifteen a seltzer man would ring the bell and he, being up and dressed for school, had the job of letting him in, giving back the box of empties and accepting the box of fulls, while his father and his two uncles puttered around, shaving, dressing, saying their morning prayers with a special mention of the Jews in Germany and Poland, and fixing breakfast. “He was a huge man with a huge belly, and he carried a long wooden box with ten bottles, two rows of five, on his right shoulder, plus two extras in his other hand. I thought it was marvelous, how he kept the box balanced up there with one hand. I thought he must be the strongest man in the world. And the bottles were so beautiful—blue and translucent, with blue bubbles inside, because they had been jiggling around on his shoulder all the way up in the elevator. They had chrome squirt tops. He carried it all the way down the hall to the kitchen, with me following him, and when he set it down on the floor he always let out a great groan and said, ‘Well, my lad, how many this time?’ It was always twelve, every month, but each time he said, ‘How many?’ and I said, ‘Twelve, please.’ My father had told me I must say please. Then he took a deep breath before he lifted the box of empties, and I followed him back down the hall. And then my uncle, the senior rabbi, would come to pay him at the door and make polite conversation—my uncle believed in treating every person he met with equal regard. But he never seemed to grasp that while he was chatting on about the weather, and the war, and the rationing—wasn’t it a good thing they didn’t ration seltzer?—and so forth, the seltzer man was carrying these ten heavy bottles in the wooden box on his shoulder, plus the two in his other hand. The seltzer man was very polite too, an Irishman, I think, and as soon as he could get a word in he would say, ‘Righto, well, I’d best be on my way.’ At supper they would always let me squirt the seltzer into the glasses, and when they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a seltzer man. Even now, I must say, I still have these fantasies …”

  The waiter brought the drinks and George drank his seltzer with zest. Don downed his martini very quickly. “Tell me something,” he said to George. “What is the difference between those people in Pinecrest and what you do? No offense, of course.”

  “Of course.” George, master of tolerance, smiled, the way Charlie Chaplin might smile at William Buckley. “The difference is that I don’t attempt to evade the human condition. Freud was right, you know. There is no remedy, there is only alleviation. The remedy is death.”

  “I didn’t know you were a Freudian,” I said.

  “Well, not in all the particulars, no. But fundamentally … Look, nowadays there are the saviors, and then there are the repairmen. Freud would have hung in with the repairmen, I’m sure. That way you keep some self-respect, professionally. I’m like the guy you call in to fix your washing machine. You know it’s going to break down eventually, but meanwhile you want to keep it running as best you can for as long as you can, get the worst kinks out so it can do its job. Saviors scare me. There are enough built-in dangers around.”

  “Excuse me.” Nina got up. “I’m going to stroll home. It’s been a long day, and I am still not saved.”

  “I’ll walk you. It’s dark.” George got up too. I always found this absurd pretense of discretion very touching. “Good night, good night.” Kisses and handshakes. Still full of energy, he took her firmly by the arm and led her away.

  “Off to consummate the marriage,” said Victor morosely. “That’s nice.”

  “It’s funny what weddings do to people,” Don said. “I mean even good weddings. I had a patient once, a young woman with a case of hysterical paralysis. She couldn’t move her legs, but there wasn’t anything organically wrong. It started a couple of days after her wedding. All she could tell me was that she had danced and danced till she was ready to drop. At first she thought it must be a charley horse.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I sent her to a shrink.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, eventually she walked. Everything worked out all right. She even became pregnant.”

  “Remember when Gaby broke her leg? That was pretty soon after you were married too.”

  Don looked at me keenly. “Gaby was thrown off a horse.”

  “I remember. But still. She had ridden all her life. It was only a few months before she was supposed to join the company.”

  “The horse was galloping, Lydia. It took the fence all wrong. It sometimes happens.”

  “Yes. But dancers break things all the time and then they go right back to dancing. You of all people know that; it’s half your practice.”

  “She had to stay off her feet a lot. She got pregnant.” He smiled with appreciation.

  “It’s not a laughing matter.” Foam, good Lord. But I held my tongue.

  “You know, Lydia, you wanted her to be a dancer more than she wanted it herself.”

  “Maybe. Maybe.” But he hadn’t known her in college. All those nights, all that flexing, pointing, arching, dreaming, the passion in it. Did she widen the space between her thighs to a hundred eighty degrees just to take him in? Sure, things changed, lives changed, and we all needed our children, if only to affirm the roots, seeds, growth, and flowering of the universe. But beneath that were supposed to abide earth, water, air, and fire, unchanging. Most especially fire, the wanting and the striving. What happened to douse hers?

  Don ordered his third martini; Victor and I got coffee. I suddenly felt obnoxious, spoiling for a fight as I had in the airport in Geneva after Evelyn retired to the mountains at twenty. “Why do you guys think they used to bind the feet of Chinese women?”

  “Wasn’t it supposed to make them more attractive?”

  “Discipline,” said Victor. “So they’d take small steps, literally and figuratively.”

  “Ah, Victor, you’re so poetic, my love, it’s beautiful. Did you learn that in CC? No, I’m sorry, you really are. All right, but in practical terms, they bound their feet so they wouldn’t run away. Ask any girl—she doesn’t have to be educated to know that. Ask Althea. You ask Cynthia, Don. Your patient was well-trained, that one who got paralyzed. These days we bind our own feet.” I got up and stalked to the bathroom. I glimpsed them looking after me, bewildered—poor guys: what did we do this time?

  When I came back they were laughing and horsing around, Don with the defiance of a man who has bee
n unjustly scolded and is getting good and drunk in return.

  “Sick as hell anemia,” he was saying. “You wouldn’t believe what people report that they have. Fireballs in the uterus. Jesus.”

  “What in the uterus?”

  “Just true medical tales again, Lydia,” said Victor. “Forget it, you wouldn’t approve.”

  Don put his head in his hands. He had stopped laughing. “Smiles of Gentle Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “Spinal meningitis. In Appalachia, when I was an intern. The mother said he had Smiles of Gentle Jesus.” He looked up; his face was drained of color. “I had to watch that kid die. I still remember his face from seventeen years ago.” He took another gulp of his drink and shuddered.

  “Don’t have any more, come on. This is no good. Have some coffee.” Victor pushed his cup over to Don, squeezed my leg under the table, then took my hand.

  “What a day. God, I wish Gabrielle would come home. I’m a mess alone. I can’t even match my socks. Well, no, of course I can. I mean, I just miss her. I haven’t seen my kids in three weeks either. I miss those sullen adolescent faces.”

  “Enough. It’s time to take you home in your little green bus,” Victor said. “I’ll drive. We’ll get a cab from there.”

  “I’ll drive,” I said. “I’m sober and I’ve never driven a bus.”

  “Oh,” sighed Don, drinking some more. “Poor Esther. The crazy reasons we get married.”

  “You seemed quite sane, as I remember. You went about it very methodically, bringing her flowers, taking her to the theatre, all dressed up.”

  “It was lousy, being a resident then. Besides all the people crippled and dying, we had to work round the clock. We didn’t know enough to organize for better conditions. You remember what it was like. No one thought of protesting. They have it much easier now.” He swallowed the last of the martini. “We, on the other hand, longed for a little comfort. And she was oh so comfortable.” He winked lewdly.

  “In all these years we’ve never seen him like this,” I said to Victor. We laughed, holding hands and gazing at Don.

  He set down his empty glass sharply. “How did you two happen to get together?”

  “Us?” Victor turned to me with that raised eyebrow again. He was really overdoing it. “Oh, we got married because you and Gaby got married. Isn’t that right, Lyd?”

  Superstition

  WHEN ALTHEA WAS BORN, in 1963, my mother and Victor’s mother came over nearly every day to help, because I was sick and weak, my mind torpid from anesthesia. In the hospital a realization had crept up on me insidiously like a mouse in the dark, a mouse whose presence you suspect, yet who you hope will never appear. I was responsible for the survival of this creature. It was paralyzing. Who the creature was in relation to me, my body, was a riddle: no longer part of my flesh, yet if I accidentally pricked her with a pin my nerves jumped in harmony with hers. I had headaches and inexplicable spells of fever, and my stitches were infected. The infection was painful and lingering. I took it as symbolic—I had been torn and would never heal.

  My mother and Edith, who behaved in a saintly way, were in what they only half-jokingly called the prime of life, their middle fifties. My father had been promoted and transferred to the New York office of his insurance firm, and my mother loved the change. She became chummy with Edith. Afternoons, they went to matinees and movies, occasionally to lectures or panel discussions at worthy institutions. Victor said a peripheral benefit of our marriage was the bringing together of two such compatible women.

  My mother took on an elegance but I knew it was detachable, like a zip-out lining. I remembered her before she had had the leisure for elegance, before the prime of her life. I remembered her with metal clips in her hair, a frumpy apron tied round her waist, her hands sunk to the knuckles in raw chopped meat. I had seen her scale fish for dinner (the man in the store did not meet her standards), with newspaper spread on the kitchen table and scales spattering like hail from the quick strokes of her knife. I had seen her rub lemon juice on her hands to get rid of the fish smell, then patiently hook up the long-line bra that disciplined the flab around her middle. My mother’s new-found elegance was a triumph of pride against a backdrop of labor. But I had never seen Edith other than flawlessly mannered, dressed, coiffed, and accessorized, and so I was embarrassed by the shabby chaos Victor and I lived in. I needn’t have been. Edith wished to be neither intimate nor critical, simply useful. She ignored the paint rags and canvases, the piles of music and cartons of records in our living room, the only room large enough for storage. When I halfheartedly apologized, she hushed me gently; she understood we were young people and busy working. But if ever we wanted her cleaning lady for a day …

  The first two weeks I was home from the hospital their visits often coincided. Together they would change into slacks carried in smart tote bags, tie scarves around their lightly lacquered hair, and vie courteously for the privilege of carting dirty laundry to the laundromat around the corner or peeling potatoes for our dinner. No more snacks grabbed at odd hours: they insisted we eat regular dinners, especially since I was nursing Althea. Together they lugged bags of healthy food from the supermarket on Twenty-third Street. And they sat amid the living room debris, on our Salvation Army overstuffed chairs, drinking coffee and reliving their own ordeals of childbirth, while I lay nearby on a mattress on the floor, reading and eavesdropping. I had been told to get as much rest as I could—besides the fevers and the stitches and the atrophy, I was slightly anemic. I was reading Trollope. Gaby, who knew about childbirth and had unerring taste, had brought me three novels in the hospital. “These should get you through two weeks,” she said, “and then you’ll be fine. If you need any more, he wrote about four dozen others, all very long.” I had a pile of things I ought to have been looking at—Brahms scores for our trio, a new biography of Haydn, the first act of an operetta one of my students at the Golden Age Club was composing. But only Trollope would do. The once-bright paisley cover on the mattress was stained and stiff in places, from love-making; I hoped the mothers could not infer that by looking. I wished they would take it to the laundromat along with the baby clothes, but hesitated to ask. I could not imagine ever flopping down on that mattress with Victor again, throwing our clothes blithely around the room, any more than I could imagine telling my own story of childbirth years from now, interspersed with chuckles. I was busy suppressing it.

  When they left, chatting their way down the dusty stairs, I leaned against the doorframe in my bathrobe, straining my ears for the last notes of their voices and feeling the panic approach. I kept it at bay by carefully mapping out the hours until their return, like a child left alone in a strange place. I could feed her and dress her well enough. If only nothing unexpected happened … Once I confessed this panic to my mother. She stroked my hair and squeezed my chilly hands. “Don’t worry,” she said firmly. “Every day you get stronger.” I burst into tears. I could cry at a touch. The tears were so ready and eager to spring; it disgusted me.

  Now and then I would stare at the piano and play a melody with one hand, barely pressing the keys, like a timid student. A few times I sat down, longing for the music, but with a perverse urge to fail. At the first infelicity I would cry, bitter, spiteful tears: I told you so. I knew the effort it would take to get rid of those infelicities, and how unequal I was to any effort. So I would crash my palms on the keys, which woke Althea. I picked her up and we cried together, flesh to flesh, each of us seeking comfort in the source of the tears.

  I tried to play records, but I was used to playing them very loud, to hear every detail, and this too woke Althea. I was furious and wanted to leave her crying in the wicker bassinet, but she might choke, burst her larynx, develop asthma, require psychoanalysis in later life. Always an extremist, and proud, I wouldn’t turn it down to capitulate to an infant. I turned it off instead. I picked her up angrily and let her suck me dry.

  Greg, the violinist in our trio, phoned one a
fternoon as I lay on the sex-stained paisley-covered mattress. My mother was sitting nearby with the baby in her arms. Greg said he had persuaded the community relations people to have us play at the fair.

  “What fair?”

  “You remember, Lydia. The fair at All Angels, in three weeks. They’re raising money for their nursery school, or sports program, I forget what. I told you and Rosalie about it weeks ago.”

  “I didn’t even think they had a piano. They probably think you’re a string quartet.”

  “They have a string quartet, for downstairs. Jeffrey Rice is doing that, with Emily and those other two from Juilliard. We’re going to be in the main part. They’ll bring in a piano. It’ll be terrific, Lyd. It’s a great place, and we can play anything we like for four hours. The Mendelssohn, if you want. The ‘Dumky.’ We can take breaks one at a time and do duets. We’ll do the ‘Spring’ Sonata, everyone likes that.

  You’ll be great, you’re a closet romantic. It’s a hundred fifty bucks, maybe more, depending on what they take in. And the exposure.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I can’t. I don’t feel well.”

  “It’s in three weeks! Are you nuts? In three weeks you’ll be fine. My wife’s been through it twice; believe me, I know. You’ll be dying to get out.”

  “No. I have to go now.”

  “Lydia, what’s the matter with you? We’ve been doing this for three and a half years and we’re just getting somewhere. In the spring we might play at Hunter—Rosalie met the guy who does the programming. Anyhow, where are we supposed to find someone at the last minute?”

  “It’s not the last minute. There are a million pianists around. I went to school with this girl Henrietta Frye. She’s better than I am, actually. I’ll give you her number.”