Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “There must be a right time to divorce too,” said Esther. “If I don’t do it soon, the right time will pass and then it won’t matter any more. I’ll accept this as my fate. We’ll get like those horrible middle-aged couples you see on buses, who stare straight ahead and look catatonic—you don’t even realize they’re together until they get off at the same stop. He nudges her or she pokes him. You know the ones I mean. You sit there trying to figure out what peculiar nasty things they must do to each other when they’re alone.”

  “My parents were like those couples on the bus,” said Nina, “except they would never nudge or poke each other. I’ll tell you what they do alone. They never quarrel out loud. But they have long spells of silence. A week. Three weeks. Even a month. The house is filled with that silence—and ours was a very small house, two floors with just the two bedrooms upstairs, so it really was filled—the way a house can be filled with a cooking smell. Cabbage, liver, something oppressive.” Nina reached over to get a small black lacquered box from a cabinet. She opened it and rolled herself a joint, which the rest of us declined, Esther with a shudder. Since Ralph had tried everything on the street, Esther loathed drugs; she knew the down side of each high as well as any emergency room orderly. Nina no longer smoked her one cigarette a week. She indulged every appetite, but with a careful, measured indulgence, as she must have measured out her chemicals in the lab, as Thales must have measured. Right now she was intrigued by the biochemical factors in neurological diseases that produce spells of wildness, like epilepsy or Tourette’s syndrome.

  “The silence in that house was so dense I used to imagine reaching out and grabbing a fistful. It would be like taffy and stick to everything it touched, and if you tried to pull it off it would keep on stretching.” It had taken her till now to outgrow the habit of silence. To us, Nina’s past was like a burnt book; this was a charred page snatched from the fire, and we listened as raptly as the three-year-olds at Story Hour.

  “Only on Sundays, for church, did they put on a show of togetherness. He would wear his best suit, navy pin stripe, and she would wear a fancy print dress, always print. There was one with green birds, I remember, that I especially hated; the birds had their beaks open and I could practically hear them squawking. She would walk into the church on his arm, with me trailing behind in a starched dress. I knew the minister was fooled, but I used to wonder whether God was fooled also. That was his house, they told us, where he dwelt, and I thought if he dwelt only there he would never know. But if he came into our house too … It bothered me that God might be fooled. They slept in twin beds. I assumed all couples slept in twin beds, till I saw my friend Kate’s parents’ bedroom. I was shocked. My imagination was shocked, I mean.” She paused for a moment and stared blankly. Seeing the beds, I thought, and the vast space between them.

  “I used to hear low whispers sometimes, from across the hall. I was born very late to them, you know. They were close to forty. I think after that my mother didn’t want to sleep with him any more. Maybe she never had wanted to—they never joked about how they met or how they came to marry, that sort of thing. I don’t know to this day. I have these fantasies—that she objected to … some of his, uh, requests. She had a rather legalistic mind, in fact she’d been a legal secretary for a while. I know how her mind worked. She would have wondered exactly how far conjugal rights extended.” I had to smile. Nina, whose appeal for me lay in contradiction, spoke of sex like a vestal virgin. “I’ll never know the truth. I imagine her as very dry, though. A very dry woman. Never even sweated. I mean, perspired. She would perspire, if at all.”

  She was finishing her joint, looking high and dreamy, starting to chuckle. She played with a fringe on her shirt, and her eyes were very large and ironic. “She had no bodily fluids, you see, just dust, or something powdery inside, seeping through her where the rest of us have liquid. You know how they say some babies just slip out, and you imagine all that slithery stuff they’re sliding through? It’s a nice thought, isn’t it, sliding out into the world, something like those twisty slides they have in motel swimming pools, that the kids pour water on to keep them wet. But I imagine myself being born by friction. Inching my way down those tight dry walls. Abrasive. Like peeling a tight dress up over your head. Actually I did peel her off. I was a breech baby.” She laughed. “They used to tell me I was lucky to come from such a good home, where I had everything I needed. And I did, more or less. It all depends on what you think you need. If that’s all you see around you, how do you know things could be otherwise?”

  “How did you ever bear it?” Esther asked.

  “Well, you see I didn’t. I’m here.”

  “I guess I mean how do you bear it. Now.”

  Nina’s face took on the shielded, daytime look. She gave a chilly smile. “Just an old Stoic, I guess. ‘Everything has two handles, one by which it may be borne, the other—’”

  “I know, I know,” groaned Esther. “I’ve been in your kitchen. But some things don’t seem to have any handles at all. The best thing to do is let them drop.”

  Esther did leave Ralph, less than two months later. In the skirmish she lost the baby she had been carrying unawares, when she remarked that she didn’t love children in general but still she wanted to have them. Worn out, she went home to Chicago (“Are you happy?” asked her mother, senile or wicked or both. “Because if you’re happy, then I’m happy too”), and on her return, got religion. She read the Old Testament, and in envelopes from the shelter for disturbed children where she was working, sent me double-edged missives from Ecclesiastes. Pushing the stroller home from the supermarket with Althea toddling alongside, the groceries tucked under Phil’s feet and behind his back, I would arrive and find in the mailbox: “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. … Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?” Tears still came to me too easily—a vestige of my sickness—but I smiled as well. By works Esther did not mean grocery shopping. She had hated my giving up when Althea was born. I stuffed the envelope in my jeans pocket and for the hundredth time tried to figure out the best way to get children, stroller, and groceries up to the fourth floor without leaving any two items alone either upstairs or down, like the ferryman who has to carry a fox, a rooster, and a bag of corn across a river, the kind of riddle I had always found exasperating. Nina’s sort of riddle, Nina’s delight, and had I brought it up in the Philosophy Study Group she might have solved it for me. But it never occurred to me there, happily sipping wine.

  Upstairs, while Phil napped and Althea colored pictures of fairytale characters, I forced myself to work on Mozart trios, dreaming of the time, not too far off, when I might call Rosalie and say I was ready to come back. If they would have me. The next week there would arrive in Esther’s chubby handwriting: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.” It made me study my hands, and with some pleasure—they were once again looking like hands that possessed a skill. The grave reminded me of the Golden Age Club. Mrs. Kirchner and the Brahms waltzes for four hands. Was she still waiting? No, surely they had found someone else. Most likely I was too late for any of it, and besides, whatever I earned would go straight to a babysitter. Why bother? Much easier to rot. But the next week’s envelope scolded: “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.” So I pulled together my strength and late at night, while the children slept, I studied scores and drummed my fingers on the kitchen table.

  Esther’s religion did not get past the Philosophy Study Group unscrutinized. Nina wanted to hear the evidence for her sudden belief.

  “There is no evidence for any belief,” she replied. “Or else there’s evidence for all—it comes to the same thing. We believe what appeals to us, what we can use, whatever sat
isfies our fears of the unknown. Afterwards we worry about the evidence.” With religion and leaving Ralph, she had acquired a stillness of the body that made her seem demure, nearly cherubic, even though her once-rosy face was wan with anguish overcome. She spoke quietly, without the old urgency, and stroked the book resting on her lap. “William James says so. You ought to know—you’ve read everything. He says a set of beliefs is an emotional response to the world, not an intellectual one. That, let me see, truth exists insofar as we feel it to exist, insofar as it works for us.”

  “Works, did you say?” asked Gabrielle.

  “Works, yes. Don’t you remember all that from school? If you act according to a certain belief and your actions yield the desired results, the belief is valid.”

  “It’s so amoral, though. So very American.” Gabrielle, knitting a powder-blue afghan to lure Cynthia from crib to bed, yanked more wool from the skein and aimed the needle like a spear. “I can think of a lot of beliefs that worked just fine. How about Hitler’s idea of the master race? That was useful to a lot of people; it satisfied their fears; and it worked, Esther. Very efficiently.”

  “Only for a short time. They lost the war.”

  “Lost the war? That’s a moot point. But anyway, how many people were gassed before the belief stopped working?” Gabrielle dug the knife blade into the cheese. She was angry, an anger that could hook itself to anything. She had put on weight, her beautiful hair had no shine, Don was doctoring for absurdly long hours yet rarely missed a night in bed—sometimes they couldn’t get to talk for days, she told me, but he was not too worn out for that. Oh no. He needed his fix so he could go on. She was helping to heal the sick, indirectly. The voracious love left her vacant, her energy tamped down. She was looking for part-time work, but though she could quote pages of Chaucer, the only thing the publishers wanted her to do was type.

  “Look,” Esther said softly, “I’m not going to persecute anybody. I’m just trying to live. I need the belief, the idea.” She gave in, took one of Nina’s cigarettes, and struck a match. “The idea is like a prophecy. James says the strength of your belief, the will to have the world be a certain way, can actually make things happen.” She had forgotten the match. I watched the flame creep closer to her fingers. “Take Schopenhauer. Say you accept that. Okay, so you think the world is basically—” Her hand jumped, she shook out the match and dropped it, and sucked her fingers. “Basically evil, all it has in store is misery, life is some kind of grotesque mistake.”

  “Lydia!” For a moment Gabrielle’s face was girlish again with the old light. “Remember when you carried around that horrible quote from Schopenhauer in your purse?”

  I closed my eyes. That was when we shared the apartment and knew the contents of each other’s purses. “Oh yes. Nothing gives lasting satisfaction. The desire is long, the demands are infinite, the satisfaction is short and scanty. It sounds like an adolescent boy jerking off, doesn’t it?”

  “You have just proven my point.” Esther grinned. “You don’t feel like believing that any more. Thank God. I remember you after Althea was born, and when you got pregnant again. Ugh, what a mess. But anyway, supposing you did, so completely that you finally committed suicide. Or you might just sit in a room staring at the walls like my mother, which is the coward’s form of suicide. You’ve made Schopenhauer come true, you see? On the other hand, say you accept the idea of a moral universe with a more or less benevolent God, and you live in a decent and optimistic way. Which is what you all do anyway. Chances are you’ll find the world will bear out the truth of that belief. The wish is father to the fact.”

  “Whose chances?” asked Gaby. “Blacks in South Africa? Jews in Germany? Or maybe Vietnamese?”

  “We’ll end this war in time,” said Esther. “You’ll see. There’ll be a moral victory, coming from the streets.”

  “A moral victory, sure, over how many bodies piled on the TV screen?” Gaby tossed aside her knitting and went to the bedroom to phone her babysitter.

  “So.” Nina stretched out languidly, the tiny mirrors on her shirt glinting. “Tell us what he’s like, this God of yours. Is he like the devil who visited Ivan Karamazov? Suit and tie? Or noble and sexy like the one on the Sistine ceiling? I’m assuming you haven’t seen any burning bushes.”

  “No. At least not yet,” Esther said sweetly, refusing the bait. She flicked her eyes over Nina. “He’s not elegant or well-dressed. Or she. I don’t know about sexy. More kind of … erratic. Like me.” She smiled, testing James’s theory on us. Would her world respond in kind to kindness, with charity for charity? She opened her book to a turned-down page and read: “‘In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is “noble,” that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.’”

  A cleaning woman! What I needed so badly but couldn’t afford.

  But I said nothing. For the force of her good will did indeed claim, engender, and elicit good will in turn, and we hectored her no more. Only when Esther went to the bathroom, Nina whispered, “Lo, we have witnessed the creation of God, ex nihilo.” “Ex need, you mean.”

  The next fall, 1967, Esther went off to pick fruit on a kibbutz in Israel. She was barely gone when the cease-fire was violated once more. The news reports carried tales of weapon caches, sporadic shootings, disrupted settlements.

  “What kind of lunatic would go to Israel at a time like this? We don’t even know what part of the country she’s in,” Gabrielle brooded in the Philosophy Study Group. “We ought to look it up on a map—she could have been killed. How would we ever find out?”

  “I looked. It doesn’t seem to be near the fighting. But it’s hard to tell. It’s such a small country.”

  On Nina’s lap was Peter Abelard’s Ethics, her latest enthusiasm, a book about sin. Escape reading, I teased her. I had no time for obscure tracts. I was studying at Juilliard again, and working for Mrs. Rodriguez at the Golden Age Club, where my replacement was taking time off to have a baby. The aged faces, alas, were new; Mrs. Kirchner had not been able, after all, to wait for me to play the Brahms waltzes for four hands, and I suffered remorse.

  “Well, I managed to read it,” Gaby said, “waiting my turn at job interviews. Abelard says the Lord only tests the strong, Is Esther the strong?”

  “He was referring to temptation,” Nina corrected. “Tests with temptation, not outside danger. One of us is sure to get a letter any day.”

  Gabrielle frowned. “I must not be the strong. He never tests me.” She was pale, in a nondescript dress. She had brought along four pairs of Roger’s corduroy pants, and while Nina explained sin, for my benefit, Gaby hemmed, sipped wine, and hemmed.

  “There are two components needed for real sinning: will and consent. If you have the will but don’t consent to do the act, you haven’t sinned; that’s simply the human condition—we all have the will. And if you consent to the act without having the will, like committing murder in self-defense, that’s not sin either. Also—this part is rather nice—if you have neither the will nor the consent, there’s no particular virtue accruing. Because with no temptation there’s no moral strength.”

  “You know, I still get a funny feeling about Henrietta Frye. That time she broke her wrist hiking and I got to play for The Yeomen of the Guard. Remember? I wished it on her.”

  “But you wouldn’t have broken it for her, would you, sneaking into her room at night with a hammer?”

  “Certainly not. … I might have gotten caught.”

  Nina laughed. “I think you’re safe from hellfire, Lydia.”

  “She’s moving to California in November, so I’ll get my place back in the trio. It was perfect timing. And this time I didn’t wish it, I swear
. I had something else lined up, with a group of woodwinds.”

  They congratulated me. Gabrielle etched a cross in the air with her needle. “Go, child, and sin no more. But surely that’s not the worst secret wish on your conscience?”

  “Not the worst, no.” Gaby waited, needle poised over the pants. “I sometimes used to wish I didn’t have any children. So I could play more, and go on tour—it’s so important. If you can’t travel, you’re nowhere.” I waited in vain for the bolt of lightning from the ungentlemanly cleaning woman. No one showed any horror. Gabrielle began to sew again, Nina popped an olive into her mouth. “I don’t wish it any more. Consciously, anyway.”

  Nina said, “That doesn’t count. It’s not a real wish, just a passing fancy. Sorry, Lyd.”

  “I have wished much worse, because I really meant it. I have wished that at one of his many conferences Don would meet some beautiful woman doctor and become infatuated, so that I could be relieved of that endless devotion. Temporarily. It’s like a straitjacket, you know. But then, beautiful women doctors are relatively rare.” She didn’t stop sewing and didn’t look at us. “When someone loves you so unconditionally they don’t see you any more. It’s like you’ve ceased to exist—as a person changing in time, I mean. Who I am now is invisible. I only needed to exist at the very beginning, to start it.”

  “Esther’s little bureaucrat of a God is so terribly inefficient. That is exactly what I would like,” said Nina. “To be loved unconditionally.”

  “Yes, I can see that. Well, it’s a stupid thing to complain about, really. People are being killed in those jungles … Gabrielle rubbed an eye beneath her glasses and bit off a piece of thread, then turned to me and said curtly, “You don’t suffer from the same problem, I gather?”

  What could I say? No, he didn’t love me too much? I couldn’t tell it to anybody; I guarded it as Evelyn had guarded her secret life, confiding only in the sunflower. Since I had recovered and was working, Victor and I again sat up late at night in bed whispering in the dark, hypnagogic murmurs on the fine line of consciousness; we felt born from the same soil, our cells interchangeable, and our love had the heady tinge of incest. Even to say I love you was a semantic error, too great a separation.