Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “Do you mean to tell me life is just a string of these little transactions? With built-in obsolescence?”

  “I prefer to think of them as adventures,” he said a bit huffily. “It doesn’t preclude more, uh, high-minded things, Lydia. It’s simply a methodology. They have it in physics. Listen, could we continue this later? I only have ten minutes between patients and I’d like to wash up before the next one.”

  “I thought you only talked to them.”

  “A euphemism, sweetheart.”

  “All right. I’m sorry I bothered you. It just makes life sound so acquisitive. Like those kids who collect shells and string them together to make a necklace. If you have lots of adventures that’s a long necklace. If you die young all you’ve got is a bracelet.”

  “It’s easy to dismiss something you’re not familiar with. Oh, hi, Jerry,” he called. George runs an informal practice. “I’ll be with you in a minute. Good-bye, now,” he said in his bland public tone. I had become a disturbance in George’s field, and in Jerry’s. Jerry needed George’s undivided attention, George needed Jerry’s money. They were ready for their next adventures, so I hung up.

  I was one of those children who collect shells on the beach. I always hoped to make a beautiful necklace but I never did, because I didn’t know how to make holes in the shells without breaking them. We spent our summer vacations at the beach, my parents, my younger sister Evelyn, and I. My father had three weeks off from the insurance firm. Each twilight for three weeks, after a day on the beach, Evelyn and I emptied the pockets of our sweatshirts and piled our shells in two separate mounds. Evelyn was three years younger. She gathered shells of all sizes, some big enough for ashtrays, a few suitable for a necklace, the rest good for nothing, only beautiful. I sometimes made fun of her motley collection and she didn’t know how to defend herself, turned away and retreated into a shielded privacy, and I was instantly sorry. Except for one summer, when we lived, inexplicably, in near-perfect harmony.

  Back home I kept my shells in a bowl on my nighttable. It irked me to see them so useless, never to be linked into a design, through my own ignorance. Yet I never asked how the holes were made. I imagined it to be a delicate process, and even though my fingers were agile enough on the piano, I probably feared they would break the shells. I remained attached to them, though, and took them with me to the college dormitory, then to the apartment I shared for two years with Gabrielle, and then, when I married Victor, to our ramshackle flat with the cracking plaster on East Twenty-first Street, where once I found a roach in my hair and cut it all off. Victor liked the shells: he sometimes arranged them on the chipped porcelain table in the kitchen and drew them. He didn’t see them as a thwarted necklace. Some twelve years ago, during a massive housecleaning following the death of my father, I tossed out my childish shell collection. I wasn’t renouncing, metaphorically, the hope of making order and continuity out of random acquisitions. I think I was simply trying to show myself how much I could do without.

  My next adventure was coming up too. It was time to coach my twice-weekly chamber music trio of high school students. They were doing Haydn, who is hard to ruin and always a pleasure to hear, even with amateurs. Although I had been on the faculty of the venerable uptown music school for seven years, I still felt a secret thrill walking through its corridors and being greeted as if I belonged there; sitting around with other musicians and arguing over whether or not to modernize the repertory for advanced students, or what should the programs be for the spring concert series, or should we start an evening chamber music group for amateurs. This last was my private cause: I was sure lots of good pianists would jump at the chance to do chamber music with professional coaching. I was willing to organize it, but I needed to win over Irving Bloch, our sixty-five-year-old martinet of the strings. His standards were impossibly high and his pedagogic manner intimidating, but for those who could tolerate him he performed wonders. Naturally I didn’t tell anyone of my secret thrill, especially not Irving; part of the thrill was in appearing to take my position for granted, like a man.

  The trio gave me another sort of thrill; despite their wrong notes and occasional fumblings, this afternoon they captured the measured buoyancy of Haydn. Life was bountiful; I congratulated them and treated us all to hot chocolate in the cafeteria before the cold trip home, where I fried chicken and set Althea to peeling potatoes. I was about to call Nina when Vivian appeared.

  “I need to do an experiment to weigh air for science. How do you weigh air?”

  Weigh air? “I have no idea, sweetie. Althea, did you ever weigh air?”

  “In a lab. With water, balloons, tubes, all sorts of stuff.”

  “Ask Daddy when he comes home. He might know.”

  She looked at me gravely, assessing my ignorance. “How about a palindrome? Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes. So there. A palindrome is something that reads the same way back and forth. Anna. Level. Otto.”

  “Madam, I’m Adam,” said Althea.

  “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”

  “Wait, wait a minute,” cried Vivian. “You’re going too fast. Onion?”

  We laughed. “No no no, not onion.”

  “Onion,” Vivian repeated thoughtfully, playing with the potato peelings. “On-ion. Why not onion?”

  “Althea, my hands are all greasy. Write onion and show her.” Althea did. I turned a few pieces of chicken, wiped my hands, and dialed Nina’s number. Althea wrote in large block letters, “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.” She took each of Vivie’s forefingers and moved them from opposite ends of the phrase, towards each other, making them jiggle at each letter. Vivie was giggling.

  “This is Nina Dalton,” a voice said slowly, bemused. “I’m very sorry I’m not able—” Then the real voice of Nina, or the real Nina, cool and wide-awake, sounded over the recording. “Hello? Hello?”

  “Nina, it’s me.”

  “Hi. We have to let it run its course.” After the beep she said, “Sorry about that. I just got in. How are you, Lydia?”

  “Good. I have to dash to a rehearsal, but I wanted to ask you a quick question. Something George mentioned. In physics, do you have the field?”

  “The field? Of course. Magnetic, electrical. There are all kinds. Which one do you mean?”

  “None in particular. The Field. George says it’s a way of thinking, not a thing.”

  “Field theory. Well, that’s a pretty basic concept. Relativity. Einstein? Surely you’ve heard of him?”

  “The name does sound familiar.”

  “In field theory, instead of having matter sitting out in space like lumps, you concentrate on the way things interact. The relationships of matter and energy and time are what’s determinant. Nothing is static, everything is dependent on and defined by the movements of everything else. The field is not so much a place where all this happens but the conjunction, the interaction itself. As if the universe is recreating itself, moment by moment.”

  I turned over a few more pieces of sizzling chicken. “Is it like Heraclitus? Everything in flux?”

  “Well.” She had that kindly, enigmatic tone scientists use, suggesting complexities too vast to broach. “Broadly speaking, I guess you might say that.”

  “It sounds a lot better than the way George described it, but still it makes me edgy.”

  Nina laughed. “You don’t have to have a subjective reaction. Life goes on exactly the same with or without these notions.”

  “I’m never sure about that.”

  “Even Einstein was convinced of the harmony of the universe.”

  “Was he? That’s encouraging. Anyway, thanks. You sound tired. Are you okay?”

  “I’m all right, but Sam’s wife is in the hospital.”

  “Again?” Sam is the civil rights lawyer. His wife has diabetic comas periodically, and attendant complications. “Is it very bad?”

  “No.” Not bad enough, she might have said were she not Nina, brought up by stern midwestern P
resbyterian parents to tread the paths of righteousness. She is totally miscast in the role of other woman. She wishes Sam’s wife no harm; she merely thinks about her as little as possible. “Time-consuming. He needs a lot of solace, I get resentful. Same old thing. I won’t bore you with it.”

  When I hung up, Althea, faithful galley slave, said in her self-possessed manner, “What would you like me to do with these potatoes?”

  “You can fry them or mash them. I’ll leave it up to you.”

  Vivie was sitting at the table studying the palindromes Althea had written out, her long black hair (my color) in two bunches falling over her cheeks. I decided not to ask her to help with the salad. She did everything in such a dreamy way. Telepathic, she looked up at me. “Aren’t you going to eat with us?”

  “I’ll eat later. I don’t have time.”

  Her face clouded, but she allowed me to hug her passionately, the only one of the four who still did. There was a familiar clutch of guilt in my chest but I ignored it. Four nights a week I conversed with her about the foibles of the Greek gods, the nurturing habits of wolves, could chimps really be taught to speak and if so, was it speech as we know it. I promised to come in and kiss her good night when I returned.

  “I hope Daddy can figure out how to weigh air.” Her parting shot.

  “Is it okay if Darryl comes over? He’s going to help me with physics.” Althea brushed back her fair long hair, pushed up her sleeves, and edged the potatoes expertly into a saucepan. Neat and efficient; beneath the jeans and sweatshirt, voluptuous. Not shy about the boyfriend but aware of cleverly managing me.

  “Sure. Thanks for the help. And watch out for that hair over the flame,” I kidded her. Months ago, Althea’s French teacher had invited her prize students to tea in a dim Victorian-style apartment lit by half a dozen candles in brass candlesticks. “Attention aux cheveux!” Mlle. Riviere cautioned, waving her waxy hands nervously. “You have the kind of hair that easily ignites!” Althea came home with an unusual fit of giddiness and a French accent. “Did you know I have the kind of hair that easily ignites?” Her brothers have adopted the joke. Phil lights matches and holds them perilously close. Alan brandishes scissors; he wants to send a sample to the Guinness Book of World Records. Vivian stares at her own wistfully and says, “Do I? Do I have the kind of hair that easily ignites?”

  I kissed Althea’s cheek and went to see the boys. Rather, I wanted them to see me. My visibility was like money placed in the collection box at church, overtly to maintain a worthy institution, covertly to buy a share of safety and salvation. For outside I was an unregenerate sinner, impassioned by my work.

  Phil was sprawled on his bed eating gorp and reading Sports Illustrated. He looked like a television-comedy version of the typical teen. In his room, the only soothing place to rest the eye was the wall opposite his bed, where he had hung four large posters, close-ups of each Beatle. Phil himself had something of the intelligent, defiantly insecure look of George Harrison, only he was not quite so dark or so gaunt. My efforts at small talk evoked mostly grunts. “I have to go out now.” “So I see.” “Althea is cooking, so would you help clean up, please?” A grunt of concession. I took a step forward, but no, he did not look as though he wished to be kissed good-bye.

  In Alan’s room, on the small phonograph Victor got him for his birthday, the Beatles’ White Album played: “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly …” Alan, at his desk, glanced up, smiled gallantly, and sniffled. His nose was still running from the ski trip. I smiled back and rested my hands on his shoulders. Before him were problems with fractions of the most unwieldy kind. “All your life,” Paul McCartney sang, “You were only waiting for this moment to arise. You were only waiting for this moment to arise.” “Are you sure you can concentrate with that on?” “I can’t concentrate without it,” he said, tolerant and undefensive. We had this dialogue all the time. “That’s a pretty song,” I said. “Yes, but it’s not my favorite.” “What is your favorite?” “‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’” I nodded. Alan was suave beyond his years, and very deadpan. Sometimes it was hard to recognize a joke. At the door I changed my mind about interference. “You can’t subtract those until the denominators are the same.” He clapped his hand to his forehead, widened his eyes, and let out an exaggerated “Ah!” of discovery. He has acted in several Victorian melodramas at school. “Odds bodikins! Thanks, Mom.” “Don’t mention it.”

  Downstairs in the lobby I met Victor lugging a twenty-four-inch TV set. The sight of him, as always, brought a flicker of elation. He looked good to me even in a blue down jacket which could make a well-shaped person shapeless, and a brown wool cap pulled over his ears. His cheeks were ruddy from the cold; flakes of snow glistened on his lashes and in his sporadic beard, where some gray hairs had lately shown. He kissed my cheek under the amused eye of the doorman, pretending to doze in a corner.

  “So, how does it work?”

  “It was fine in the shop. The guy said if it doesn’t work here it’s because nothing works here unless it’s hooked up to the cable. We’re due north of the twin towers.”

  His sister Lily urged this used TV set on us last week, when we made our semiannual visit to Westchester. She led us into the wood-paneled den where it sat neglected on its wheeled metal stand. “Take it, please,” she breathed in a smoke-filled voice, bobbing her lacquered head up and down. “Believe me, you’d be doing me a favor.” Lily can seem to be breathing down your neck though she is four feet away. Like Victor she has forceful presence, and like their mother, Edith, she is well-polished, but the presence is suffocating and the polish sticky. “Let Vivie or Alan have one of their own. My family is so spoiled, they won’t look at black-and-white any more.” Lily’s munificence surprised me, but when we got the TV home the mystery was solved. All we could coax out of it were parallel lines and snow. “I thought so,” remarked Alan. But Victor, defending the family honor, said all it needed was a minor adjustment.

  “How much was the minor adjustment?” I asked.

  “Forty bucks.”

  “If it doesn’t work, it’s eleven seventy-five a month to hook it up to the cable. That’s a lot of money, considering they don’t watch that much.”

  “Well, we’ll see when I plug it in. It’s awfully slippery out there, Lyd. Maybe you should take the bus and I’ll pick you up.”

  “No, I’ll be careful.” I held the elevator door for him. “By the way, you’re going to be asked how to weigh air.”

  “Air?” His face, as it vanished upwards, was turning pensive. His children’s needs were serious business to Victor. Suddenly I felt guilty again—I could have asked Nina how to weigh air.

  It was impossible to go more than fifteen miles an hour along the curving, icy Drive. I thought about George’s illustrations of the mother and the crying infant. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that the child might be a disturbance in the mother’s field. When my infants cried, particularly the first two, my impulse was not to run and comfort them but to hide my head under a pillow, which I sometimes did. Of course most of the time I went to comfort them, but I didn’t run. Well, all that was beside the point; George idealized mothers. The point was the word “need.”

  I couldn’t see how any need worthy of the name was ever fulfilled once and for all. Everything from that infant’s first unanswered cry is unfinished business. New needs may arise daily, as George said, but we still must keep placating the ancient ones, like jugglers who set a dozen plates spinning, then dart up and down the line frantically keeping them all awhirl. Sure, the old needs can be temporarily quelled (what George airily termed “receding to the background”), but only to rise again, tyrannical. Alan says, after eating lasagna, “I don’t want to eat for a week,” but the next morning rises ravenous. Grownups feel the same way about sex; certainly George does, or did when we were intimate, more than twenty years ago. (Love, though, may be a luxury. At least I have seen people—my old frien
d Esther—live for long periods without it.)

  Needs are deceptive, too, the bark worse than the bite. When my father died and I painfully threw out the shell collection and other clutter, I saw that one could do without a lot and remain the same person, whole and intact. And yet there must come a point. … Supposing the stripper, after removing the G-string and the rosettes on her nipples, peeled off the patch of hair and the breasts themselves?

  I parked the car on 120th Street opposite Riverside Church and made my way through the snow humming the Beatles song I’d heard in Alan’s room. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life … It was one of those brilliant, glittery snows that ought to emit some glorious sound with each crystal falling to earth, something transcendent like a Bach cantata. I turned to watch it falling on Grant’s Tomb, that dumpy monument made grand at night by floodlights, in whose aura the snow drifted with a golden tinge. It was covering the layer of ice and the older, blackening snow, softening the silhouettes of cars and dampening the intermittent sound of crunching tires. I stuck out my tongue in a sudden craving for the cold, ran it across my lips and swallowed. Then I shivered. I had so much. Better to reason not the need. Adventures, shells on a string, were nothing: all that mattered was the essential impulse of the surf that swept them to shore for us avid collectors.

  I got into the building feeling high on snow. I brushed it from my coat, stamped it off my boots. Jasper, our trio’s violinist, was standing near the elevator. I felt like throwing my arms around somebody, but shy, angular Jasper, his face austere as a hermit’s, was definitely not the one. Even my exuberant greeting seemed to alarm him. He shrank into his narrow pea coat and gestured to me to precede him into the elevator. “Jasper,” I cried, “we really must do something grand and passionate next, something like Brahms or Shostakovitch.” He frowned and nodded, as at a zany stranger, and I became subdued. Those moments of spiritual plenitude, induced by extreme heat or cold, never last long anyway.