Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “Well, not quite.”

  “‘To sin is to hold the Creator in contempt,’” Nina announced. “‘That is, to do by no means on his account what we believe we ought to do for him, or not to forsake on his account what we believe we ought to forsake.’”

  “Oh, honestly!” Gaby said. “He’s such a bore, so vain and petty, always fretting over whether he’s getting the proper respect. You’d think someone omnipotent would be above all that.”

  “No, that’s how you stay omnipotent. But in any case he’s really talking about self-respect. It’s internalized.”

  Ah. Now I knew why she had chosen sin and Abelard, like herself libertine and ascetic. A new lover, no doubt, maybe even less suitable than the Cuban TV repairman, the Canadian soccer player, the tap dancer attempting to stamp out his homosexuality. There were times I suspected she chose them only to shock her parents, but if so it was a Pyrrhic victory: she wouldn’t have dreamed of telling them.

  It was a student, she said. Not one of hers, thank God. Not even graduate. Undergraduate, and for Nina that distinction—that he was twenty-one rather than twenty-four—made it more lusciously sinful. Bright but not brilliant, she confessed ruefully, as though brilliance too might have been a mitigating factor. From Jamaica. “Jah-mai-cah,” with a musical lilt she had picked up to perfection. He visited late at night and left before dawn. She had a penchant for such arrangements. In the halls they were discreet. Oh yes, I could well imagine. She was incorrigible, and incorrigibly guilty. Guilty of what exactly? I always asked. If you like them, where’s the great harm? Self-betrayal, she said. Bad faith.

  “Abelard understands perfectly. He’s cleverer than God. God’s attitudes are awfully naive, if you think about it. Honor thy father and mother. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. They’re impossible to obey—they command emotions. At best, all we can do is behave ourselves. Covet thy neighbor’s wife if you must, but don’t sleep with her, would make more sense. Behave honorably to your father and mother, and take care of your resentments in private. Those are fine distinctions and his language blurs them. While Abelard says, ‘There are people who are wholly ashamed to be drawn into consent to lust or into a bad will and are forced out of the weakness of the flesh to want what they by no means want to want.’”

  “That’s bad faith.” Again Gaby didn’t look up from her sewing. “You want what you want to want.”

  “Oh no. There’s a crucial difference. I want to be a decent, straightforward Bosc pear like Lydia, but I find myself making the choices of a plum. That is, I wish I could want to be a pear, but I must want—Wait a minute. This is getting … What did I say?”

  “Philosophy!” Gabrielle smiled for the first time all evening. “Ce n ’est guere la philosophie, girls.”

  “Jejune! Jejune!” Nina and I chorused. In a flash, it conjured up Esther. Continent (Asia), geyser, ruby, peach, poppy, pumpkin. All the identities she had chosen in all our games. Gaby laid down her needle and clicked her tongue, and we brooded, growing cold with apprehension.

  Finally she folded the corduroy pants. We stood up and put on our shoes and began clearing away glasses. Will without consent, I thought. Henrietta Frye. Will with consent (the winner). George? Ah no, that was too superficial to be really sinful. No will but consent. Two babies. Those neat boxes nudged something in a corner of my mind. Yes! Win, Place, and Show. “Nina! It’s time for another one of our sinful outings. Before it gets too chilly. How is this Saturday?”

  “Saturday is fine. Gaby?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve told you before, I’m no gambler. I’d rather ride them.”

  Wickedness made me merry, leaving husband and two children and work for a day at the races. I had fifteen dollars tucked in the back pocket of my jeans, play money. It was clear and hot, more like June than early October, and Nina came around noon to fetch me in the white Triumph, top down. “I had a letter from Esther,” was her greeting. “She’s fine. The kibbutz isn’t anywhere near where the fighting was. She’s still picking fruit.” We sped off with eased minds.

  Nina had been introduced to the track by her Cuban TV repairman. The Spanish names of the jockeys slid familiarly off her tongue. When she dismissed the repairman she recruited me, wooing me with intricate analyses of odds, lineage, and track records. But I bet on the names and the bodies. When the horses trotted around the paddock beforehand to display flesh, stance, and gait, a wonderful tang of sexual exhibition spiced the air. I giggled like a teenager. Who cared about odds or past performances? I wanted to run my hands over those glossy bodies.

  The place was constructed in levels, like an allegory, from the bright green turf up through sections of varicolored bleachers ascending heavenward. Across the turf, huge boards flashed the odds, green numbers that changed endlessly (by whim? necessity?), a Heraclitan vision of the abstract concept of change. Inside, behind glass windows, bespectacled men registered bets with comic sobriety, and out of their toy-like machines came tickets to chance, little cardboard tokens of risk. Everywhere were round-shouldered, unshaven, preoccupied men dressed in loose gabardine pants and light shirts with wide fluttery sleeves, and they gnawed their fingernails, scratched their bellies, and counted their money. Bills flashed—what a tempting display of hard cash!—but few pockets would be picked. The money was only the material sign of far more important business at hand. These men were committed to risk: romantics, existentialists, they would not stoop to cheating the game of its outcome. Nine times a day, for three minutes, their drabness got charged with life, as they were propelled through the stations of emotion like souls awaiting their fates on the Day of Judgment, voices ragged from imploring. And in the instant before the end, life’s longest moment, there was still time for a last-minute change, for irretrievable loss, or redemption. Then the great god Chance gave his verdict, to cheers and groans. The happy saved all streamed in one direction, tickets in hand, to claim their reward with the careless, cruel, glowing avidity of winners, while the others, downcast, glumly crushed their tickets underfoot, in no hurry at all. I had expected something fairly disreputable, and instead it was a Bosch painting, a human comedy.

  “There’s no rhyme or reason to this,” I said the first day she brought me. “It’s pure chance.”

  “They’ve found scientifically that nothing is really pure chance. Nature is slightly skewed, on a bias. Circles are not perfectly round. Lines are not perfectly straight.”

  “But how do you figure out where the bias is?” “Here? Well, you can’t, really. Not with the data at hand.” “So then it amounts to the same thing. Random.” “Theoretically,” she persisted, “if you had all the relevant facts you could work out a winning system. Like the Greek Atomists: if you understood where every atom was going and why, you could foresee everything. But then there wouldn’t be horse races. On the other hand there’s Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty. I guess that would have to enter into it.” She paused. “This is all lost on you, isn’t it?”

  I nodded cheerfully. But now I was an old hand. I bet on a ginger-colored horse named Fantaisie-Impromptu, whose parents were Chopin and Music of the Spheres; the jockey’s outfit was a flamingo color, with black triangles on the sleeves and black hoops on the trousers. The odds had risen to fifteen to one. Nina studied the racing form.

  “I don’t know, Lydia. What they say about Fantaisie-Impromptu is not inspiring. ‘Needs proof.’ ‘Has been idle.’ ‘Recently dull.’” She bet on an unimpressive brown horse called Nobly Built, won fourteen dollars, and brought me back a frankfurter for consolation. I bet on Princess Althea (how could I resist?), while with pencil in hand Nina pondered for fifteen minutes, bet on Captain Marvel, collected seventeen dollars and forty-eight cents, and returned carrying two strawberry ice-cream cones.

  “I’m hot,” she said. “Sometimes you just know that you’re hot. It comes in spurts. Then again you can get cold and stay cold for a long time. You might lose a lot trying, because no one likes to admit they’
ve gone cold. It’s like saying the gods have withdrawn their favor.” I listened respectfully. She licked her cone as she worked out her bets on the next three races, then leaned back, stretching her legs to the empty seat in front and turning her face up to the summery sun. She sighed contentedly, as after an arduous task.

  “If you’re hot, why do you have to do all that work?”

  “It’s like insurance. You can’t afford to get overconfident when you’re hot. The gods don’t like that.”

  “You mean you’ve got to be cool in order to stay hot?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Speaking of hot, how are things with your Jamaican student?”

  “It’s running the usual course. Oh, sorry.” She laughed. “I didn’t mean the awful pun.” She raised her large sunglasses to her forehead and looked at me wistfully. “Do you know what the usual course is?”

  “Nope.”

  “First there’s the sexual excitement part, which is like a colored cloud, a very loud color—cerise or fuchsia—surrounding the two of you so that you’re not aware of anything else. Very, very nice. Lethe. But that starts to fade, because it’s only a cloud, after all. It dissipates slowly, and you begin looking for other qualities—there’s some space to fill once the cloud is a little smaller, a little less opaque. You start to talk to the person more seriously, and inevitably you find the limitations, little fenced-off areas you can’t talk in, subjects you can’t pursue because the person simply has no interest there. Or is afraid to enter, for some reason. I assume he’s finding the same in me, too—I don’t mean to sound superior. After a while you find so many fenced-off, impossible areas that there’s only a very small space left for you to talk in. Too small. You talk around and around in this space like a prisoner pacing the courtyard of the jail—you know, so many steps this way, so many steps that way, till you reach the familiar stone wall. But at the same time you’ve gotten to like the person; you feel comfortable, affectionate, he’s a decent sort. You don’t quite want to get rid of him; that would be unkind. You feel a kind of … attachment, but not truly a friendship. What you’ve attached is your body. It’s odd. The person knows your body without knowing you. Of course in that first rush, in the cloud, you thought that the body was a … a standin for the whole self, and that in revealing your body and its ways, you were revealing who you are. But that’s an illusion. The body is only the body. So then slowly, from being someone who brought the essential into your life, moments, really, of … oh, what can I call it? I guess glory is not too strong a word although I must say it’s embarrassing. … Anyway, the person becomes a bit of a bore, sort of like an old relative you found intriguing as a child but not any more, somebody you’re still fond of and feel you ought to visit every so often, yet you’re not eager to. It feels like time taken away from your real pursuits. You’re ill at ease. If you stop there, though, it’s all right. You can still have good memories. But you don’t stop there, usually. You go on till the person becomes truly a bore, and even while you’re making love you’re faintly bored, bored and excited at the same time, if you can imagine that, Lydia, bored by your own excitement, which is so predictable and so inevitable. And naturally he begins to notice and to ask. You can lie or you can tell the truth—it doesn’t matter, because either way it deteriorates, until at the moments you’re feeling most excited you feel most disgusted with yourself. And even that can generate its own kind of excitement, a rather perverse excitement. But that kind is thin, and brief, and really not very pleasant, and in the end you’re worn out. It hardly seems worth the effort. You start to break dates, and then there is one time that’s the last time. It doesn’t have to be spoken, you both feel it. You have used the person up, and he has used you up. And you feel when he goes out the door that he’s taking away a big chunk of you and leaving nothing in return, and the sad part is that he probably feels the same way.”

  She lowered her sunglasses. We both leaned forward to watch the horseflesh being paraded along the track.

  “It doesn’t sound like love, in my experience.”

  “It’s not love. It’s more like a shadow of love. Seen from the cave.”

  “God, you make it sound awful.”

  “No. It’s interesting, or why would I do it? Lots of people do. Of course it has its price. It’s a bit eroding.”

  “I never understood why you didn’t marry that one in Princeton. You seemed happy with him.”

  “Yes, well, he was set on Colorado. I suppose I could have lived in Colorado if I tried. I think, really, that the right time had not yet come.”

  We laughed. “And if I ask you in ten years, you’ll say the right time has passed?”

  “Probably.”

  Post time was announced. She took off the glasses and got out her binoculars. As they rounded the bend we rose with the crowd. All around us men cheered and shouted. I was jumping up and down to spur my horse, Mood Indigo, who had started out ahead but soon slipped behind. Nina alone was still, more like a spectator at a ballet than at a horse race, chastely in white, blue scarf rippling on the breeze, lips slightly parted, nothing betraying excitement except a quivering muscle near her jaw. Mood Indigo ended in third place, but I had bet to win. Nina’s two horses, Social Butterfly and Prince Hal, trailed also. We sat down. She tore up her tickets, extended her hand with the exaggerated gesture of a lady offering it to be kissed, and let the pieces drift to the ground. “That was twenty bucks, dammit. This is no more scientific than a horse race. Ah, well. Do you remember what Gaby was saying about being in a straitjacket from being loved too much?”

  “Yes.”

  “To me nothing could be too much. It’s never enough to let me rest content. I’m not talking about sex, you know that.”

  “I know.”

  “With the ones who really loved me, two maybe, I always found fault. I start measuring, to see how much. Never with the others. It’s a ridiculous kind of … Ah!” She waved her hand in resignation. “They fall short, of course—they have to.”

  “Short of what? What’s the standard?”

  “What indeed? In Sunday school, when I was a kid, we’d have lessons on stories from the Bible. Lots of miracles. My favorites were the parts where Jesus healed the sick or made the lepers’ sores disappear. I once told that to the minister, and he smiled and said maybe I would like to be a nurse. That could be my way of following Jesus. I had no interest in being a nurse. He didn’t understand at all. I liked the idea of its being a miracle.”

  “Ah, a faith healer.”

  “Exactly.” She laughed. “I would have liked that—transform with a touch. Anyway, at the end of the lesson, after we sang a couple of hymns, we would all file out, and the teacher, who was skinny and his hair was so oiled your fingers felt greasy just looking at it, would say good-bye to each of us in turn. He patted each of us on the head and said, ‘Remember, Jesus loves you. Jesus loves you, Nancy Dalton.’ Oh, at first it made me feel wonderful, bathed in that vast love. But after a while it wasn’t any good. It was too vast and abstract—I couldn’t get my hands on it. It didn’t help in little daily things, to remember that love. There was a painting of Jesus on the wall, just the face. He was supposed to be smiling down on us. But if you took a good look at the smile, it wasn’t connected to us at all. It was very self-absorbed, as if he was amused by a private joke and we were excluded. It irritated me, and so did the teacher, because he said the same thing to every child. There were about twenty of us. I knew that in every town in the world some oily teacher must be saying that to some kid, and I thought, how can he love so many? He couldn’t even remember all the names. That wasn’t love, or it was love so diluted there was no kick left. You know I always drink everything straight. I didn’t want to be loved as part of a category. I wanted him to love me in particular. It’s terribly self-centered, I know. I want to be the world, for somebody. I know I’m not a world. But I want someone to find the world in me and never want to leave.”

  “You would get bore
d even faster. Look at Gabrielle.”

  “Possibly. Still, it’s the truth. Not a truth I’m especially proud of. It’s certainly not what I want to want.”

  “Nancy?”

  “I changed it when I came East to college. Nancy is so … oh, simpering. I wanted to leave home that kid who curtsied and behaved herself in Sunday school and never let a boy put his hand under her blouse. Who wasn’t even used to being touched.” She gave me a wry smile. “That was a good idea you had that summer, to hand me George. He did a lot for me.”

  “Hah! I can imagine.”

  “More than that. He was the finishing touch. His mind was so unfettered.”

  “Yes, that’s the trouble.”

  “No, unfettered is fine. The trouble is something not there.”

  “Passion,” I said. Nina laughed and I blushed, a decade after the fact. “Well, that kind he has. I mean passion about life. Passion makes the fetters.”

  “He suffered a lot as a kid,” she said.

  “So did you. That’s no excuse.”

  “You’re hard on him, Lydia. For you the past is always present, isn’t it? And yet he did you no harm.” She was silent for a while. “I think the only time my mother touched me was to do my braids. She brushed them out morning and night and did them right up again, as if it was perilous to leave the hair unbraided. She brushed so hard, it was like a punishment. Yes, I’m sure it was a punishment.” She laughed again and tossed a stray lock off her forehead. “She made those braids so tight my scalp ached. That’s why I finally cut it off, my freshman year. It was a great moment, when I realized it was my hair and I could do what I liked with it. It was gradually dawning on me that the rest of me was mine too. Now I brush it with such affection, Lydia, you would laugh if you saw. I had a man once, who brushed my hair. He did it so well. He used to … Ah, this is all very silly. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”