Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “No, go on. You always stop at the best parts.”

  “Yes. Well, I suppose Nancy hasn’t changed all that much. Still pure in word if not in deed. Nina was the name of someone in a novel, the kind I couldn’t bring into the house. I had to read it in the lending library, in snatches. She was a femme fatale. She had flaming red hair and breasts that were forever quivering.”

  I smiled. “In all these years you never even told me your name. Or that you were a femme fatale.”

  “Hardly. I’m just a repressed academic.” I must have looked doubtful. “What I mean is that I’ve repressed the cravings for the ordinary. I did it backwards. The ninth race is coming up, Lyd. We can do a triple.”

  We both bet on Slalom and Stately Minute for Win and Place, and I picked Dapper Dan for Show, a ruinous choice, Nina pointed out, since in the opinion of the handicappers, Dapper Dan was “hardly the one.” But the three jockeys wore purple, gold, and green—how glorious they could look together at the finish line. At the last minute Dapper Dan did zoom up from behind, but only to fourth place. Luckily for me, Nina was not a gloater. Suddenly, strange green patterns flashed on the boards, and the crowd held its breath. Chance was a foxy god: the horse in third place—Nina’s Old Curmudgeon—was disqualified for some breach of equine etiquette, and Dapper Dan was moved up. Forty-six dollars! I could buy Victor the print he wanted from his friend Tom’s show down in a Village loft.

  “You’re the one who’s hot now. I’ve transferred my heat. What on earth made you pick Dapper Dan?”

  “That’s my father’s name. And he’s dapper, too. Pin-striped suits, folded handkerchief in the jacket pocket. When I was a kid it made an impression. Also, when he and Evelyn and I watched prizefights on television Friday nights, he taught us always to root for the underdog. Nina, what are those people doing?”

  All around us, the sallow, unshaven men in baggy pants were bent over, swishing their hands through the racing tickets that papered the floor.

  “Looking for a winning ticket thrown away by mistake.”

  “Hey! Come on, we might pick up a few bucks.”

  “Oh Lydia, stop it. Get up! Really!”

  “Aha! That’s Nancy speaking. Okay, okay, I’ll be a lady. Even at the track.”

  We got back into the Triumph I so loved to ride in; when she speeded I tasted adventure on the wind, and an impossible freedom.

  Out on the highway she glanced over and read my mind. “Maybe I’ll run away someday. Would you care to come? We’ll take the car, and find two men who like to eat and drink and swim, and we’ll drive around stopping off in motels with pools, like in Lolita. We can follow the sun and the horses, and shoplift caviar from supermarkets, and chill our champagne in rivers. Just you and me and two fly-by-night men, if such exist.”

  “It’s a deal. Just give me a couple of days’ notice.” I didn’t want to spoil her mood or her fantasy; I found her delectable and tingling as lime ices, as well as gallant in her solitude. Why tell her I had never been further from running away? I was hot and running back into my life. Back to Victor, to my work, and to the children, whose infancy I had known only through a mist. What I wanted now was the adventure of being happy in the ordinary way. But I felt shy about telling her. Compared to what she had to tell, it sounded banal.

  It was not the moment, either, to tell her I was pregnant. No accident. I was stronger now, and I yearned for another chance, to prove I could do things right, like everyone else. A question of pride. Victor had been easily persuaded. He loved children, and as the embryonic Alan was later to do, loved landmark and ritualistic events in his life. He was beginning to sell paintings, teaching at Parsons, and tending bar rarely. I was earning some money by teaching too. We had moved uptown to a solid apartment building with an elevator that could hold groceries, stroller, and a whole troop of children. Things were so much easier; possibly I missed the eerie thrill of living on the edge.

  Through the fall and winter, as my belly grew, I sat at the piano and practiced. Rosalie kept watch like a warden and I was a model prisoner. I never missed a lesson or a rehearsal, and I did two concerts at Saint John the Divine, the unfinished cathedral, wrapped in her voluminous gypsy dresses. I kept on till the last moment, which came at the end of March. My mother, her broken arm in a sling, was summoned to stay with Althea and Phil. She turned on the TV to hear the President, while Victor hunted for the car keys. Victor’s ambivalence over so middle-class a concession as a used car took the form of misplacing the keys.

  “Lydie, did you hear that?” my mother gasped.

  “What?” I was in the hall, tossing the old Trollope novels into the overnight case.

  “He said he’s not going to run again.”

  In a moment we were all in front of the television. “Shush,” Victor told Phil, and picked him up.

  It was true. He would not seek another term because of the public outcry against his waging of the war. Althea, on my mother’s lap, wanted to switch to Sesame Street. “Shh, darling, there’s no Sesame Street at night.”

  “They should be in bed, Mom.”

  “You should be in the hospital. Why are you both standing here?”

  “Shh, wait a minute,” said Victor.

  Johnson’s face had become human again. Those deep grooves were where our marching feet had tracked. He had felt it. We stood for five more minutes, mesmerized. I had another contraction and grabbed hold of a chair. “Victor, the keys!”

  “I never would have thought it.” He put Phil down and went to continue the search.

  The phone rang. It was Gabrielle. “Did you hear him?”

  “Yes! Isn’t it incredible?”

  “Maybe Esther was right about the moral victory. … What did she say, the wish was father to the fact?”

  “Yes, her William James phase.”

  “Lydia,” Victor called from the kitchen. “This is no time for one of those girlish chats.”

  “I have to go. I’m having the baby.”

  “I want to see the baby!” Phil whined.

  “Oh! Good luck!” said Gabrielle. “Or should I say break a leg?”

  “I’d much rather, believe me.” I hung up.

  Victor dashed in, jangling the keys. “Who put them on top of the refrigerator?”

  “Not me,” said Althea. “I can’t even reach.”

  He pulled on his coat. “Did he say anything about ending it?”

  “No. Would you two go already? The war will wait, I assure you.”

  “Okay, come, Lydie. Come along. Are you timing them? Keep track.” He nudged me out the door. “Good-bye, Althea. Good-bye, Flip. Good-bye, Francie, I’ll call you. Move, sweetheart. You don’t have all day.”

  And lo it came to pass, as Ecclesiastes might have put it, that Alan slid out like a child going down a wet slide, and I actually laughed, lying on the table, when the doctor held him up high like a coveted football in her large and gifted hands, shook her gray curls, and said, “If there’s another you might not make it to the hospital.” After the infected stitches I had found her, a painstaking lady, a woman who would take pains.

  The first day home I wheeled the white wicker bassinet (unberibboned) over to the piano and played Brahms and Rachmaninoff so he would get used to sleeping through the loudest, most urgent of sounds. Rosalie told me that trick and it worked. I did it for my survival, but I did it too for those little missives of Esther’s. I wanted to be worthy of that chubby, loving handwriting.

  It was a Pyrrhic victory for the moral force. The wish was not father to the fact, or not yet. The gestation was endless; four days after Johnson’s speech Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis, and the other, anonymous, bodies kept piling up on the TV screen.

  By 1971 Esther had been back from Israel for a year. The kibbutz was “fantastic,” but, well, she had had it with communal living. Now she “had” social work school, and was having psychotherapy, with a woman who was a Gestalt therapist, an anarchist, and a feminist. Her father’s d
aughter, Esther felt cozy in the company of people whose views could be encompassed by “ist” words. Ralph had been a Marxist as well as an addict.

  We all “had” something new. At the monthly magazine where three years ago, to her chagrin, she had begun as a typist, Gabrielle was an associate editor. They had recognized her brains and her durability. We were acquiring our lives, like the consumers Esther’s father scorned. Choosy shoppers, though, we paid dearly for our goods and we treated them well. Collectively we acquired children, skills, work, lovers, trips, experience—and we thought that these things constituted ourselves, and that without them we would no longer be who we were. As if they were barnacles lodged to the bottoms of ships. Or as if they were swallowed and assimilated. Or better still, implanted.

  Nina had been promoted to associate professor, and she had a new lover. Freed from that unhappy pattern at last, she told me: he was much more appropriate. A lawyer. Civil rights. A Jewish lawyer, no less, a dozen years older than she, and married. “Appropriate? I can’t see what’s so appropriate.” “Lydia, you’re being parochial. You know what I mean. He’s someone I can talk to, for one thing.” “You wanted to be the world for somebody. How much of the world do you suppose you can be for him if he already has a wife?” “His wife is not my business. That’s his problem. I’ve got to think about me.” “I am thinking about you, Nina.” But she was in the fuchsia cloud, from which neither common sense nor the stringencies of Abelard could extricate her. Did she receive him at midnight in the harem outfits, Epictetus at her bedside and bangles on her wrists? I knew several Jewish lawyers in their mid-forties, politically liberal and sexy. Such men would love the harem outfits and the brainy, lapsed Sunday school student in them. But would not find the world there, nor bring it.

  It was 1971, the war was still going on, and the promise of the sixties was turning like aging milk. Disheartened, Nina said we must go back to the beginning, where the crucial questions were first and best articulated. Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus. But how could we? The Philosophy Study Group was meeting more sporadically than ever. Gabrielle and I zipped from home to work like frantic mechanical toys, Nina herself was deep in a study of the biochemical roots of schizophrenia, and Esther refused to come: it might interfere with her therapy. “Considering the depth of our inquiries,” Gaby commented, “I think her alarm is excessive.” But Esther was firm. Her therapist was teaching her, among other things, to say no.

  “Therapists are the sophists of the age,” Gabrielle said testily as we fell onto the purple pillows.

  Nina handed us gin and tonics in tall glasses. “Four ice cubes, Lydia.” She knew I loved ice.

  Outside, a heat wave was stifling the city. From the huge windows, in the seeping dusk, we could see young mothers in shorts and halters, their backs shiny with sweat, slowly pushing strollers one last time around the playground to calm the fretful babies. Someone had opened a fire hydrant, and little kids splashed in their underwear. Passers-by walked through the spray with peaked smiles. It was a New York August. Inside, Nina had the air-conditioner on full force. We pinned up our hair and sat with our loose summer dresses pulled high on our thighs.

  “Therapists”—Gaby spoke the word with contempt—“are the real sophists of the age. They travel around and give lectures—those marathons—just like Protagoras. They also take money for their teachings. In Greece the real philosophers didn’t condescend to take money.”

  “But they don’t claim to be philosophers.” I was thinking of George, who was really quite humble.

  “Don’t they? They teach skills for getting by, as Protagoras did. Only back then they called what they taught wisdom and virtue; we don’t even bother. Just a certain efficiency. Self-help. How-to. Truth is whatever works for you. The only difference I can see is that in Greece they manipulated words and emotions to succeed in politics, and here the action is all in the private arena. You know, ‘relationships.’ Being with people is a technique.”

  I remembered her great tirade in the dorm, when she raged through the room in her blue leotard, splendid in her indignation against philosophic bad faith. She no longer raged. It was too hot, for one thing, and she had grown subdued, earthbound. More out of sorts, it seemed, than truly indignant. Maybe she was getting her period. I scolded myself for such retrogressive thinking.

  She was smoking again too, French cigarettes. She tossed a still-burning match into an ashtray a foot away, as Esther used to do. It landed on the purple rug. Nina, once so quick to restore safety, sat unmoved while Gaby absently retrieved it and rubbed at the dark spot on the rug. “Look,” she went on, “Esther will always be Esther. She’ll always fumble around, and not because she doesn’t understand her own motives. I give her more credit than that. She understands fine. What she doesn’t understand is the world, what’s happening around her and to her. Protagoras says you can give the same food to a healthy man—well, let’s say woman—to a healthy woman or a sick woman. The healthy woman will say it’s good, the sick woman, bitter. Does that mean the sick woman is mistaken? Oh no, perceptions never lie. Only it’s better to be healthy, of course. So the job is to change the sick woman into a healthy woman, so that she can find the food good. How? By words. Now isn’t that exactly what a therapist does? But—the food is what happens to you in your life. And the point is, the food is good or rotten in itself. Everyone’s forgotten that. Let the world fall to ruins, we’ll just refine our coping techniques.”

  “Good grief, you’ve become an absolutist,” said Nina.

  “Why should you care if she goes to a therapist? If it helps?”

  “No, you haven’t mastered the proper vocabulary, Lydia. You’re supposed to ask, why does it make me feel threatened.”

  I felt a chill in the Philosophy Study Group, beyond air-conditioning and ice cubes. I got up and walked around the room. Gabrielle stubbed out the cigarette and crossed her legs Indian fashion. Then, as if to show she could still do it, she arranged her legs and bare feet in the lotus position. She looked at us with a peculiar, needless defiance, her eyes blue and green, flamed by discontent.

  “Not just an absolutist. A Stoic.” Nina laughed as she rose and took our glasses. “I can see it in the way you sit.” She went into the small kitchen, and through the connecting window, as she fixed the drinks, peered out at us. “Bear and forbear,” she said with a jaunty tilt of her head. “Those Golden Sayings of Epictetus. Death, disaster, loss, all wonderful opportunities to prove your mettle. Bear whatever comes, and forbear from evil. Bear the pain and forbear from the pleasure. Charming, isn’t it?” Ice cubes crackled out of a tray, and in a moment she was back.

  I took the frosty glass. “It’s not all so priggish. Marcus Aurelius has that lovely part about the emeralds. Although he too—Gaby, don’t, what is it?” I reached over, but she shook her head.

  She was crying with her face in her hands. She waved us away, and in a moment was composed again. Not menstrual pangs. A man in her office. It was driving her mad. She had never felt this way before—with eyes averted. She hadn’t known it could be so bad. It. Her face darkened. She thought about him all the time. All the time. She banged a fist on her knee, still captive in the lotus position.

  “Well, what are you doing about it?” Nina asked. “You’ve got the will. What about the consent?”

  “I’m doing nothing. What can I do? Wait it out. It’s no good, but it’ll pass. The hard part is … I have to see him every day. It’s funny—I lie awake at night and think that with a few well-aimed words I could have him transferred. He’s in the Art Department. He could do the same thing for another magazine in the group. It would be a relief. But of course I would never do that. It’s wrong. I’d rather leave myself.”

  “After all the effort you’ve put in! You said in a couple of years you could be the arts editor.”

  “No, I’m not planning to leave. That wouldn’t be right either.”

  “Your vocabulary,” Nina remarked, “is somewhat limited
. Right. Wrong. Good. Bad.”

  She smiled. “Unthreatening, I guess. Look, I know I could push words around to make it all right. I mean, all right to have the affair, or all right not to. With words you can do anything. But they don’t change the truth of what’s happening.”

  “Yes,” said Nina. “It’s like that story about the student who wouldn’t pay Protagoras his fee.”

  “What story?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear a story at a moment like this. Go ahead, indulge yourself. Tell us all about him.”

  “No, no. Tell it. It’ll distract me.”

  “Okay. Protagoras taught the student how to be successful at argument, and they agreed that the student would pay his fee only if he won the first case he pleaded in court. Well, he kept delaying his first case, till Protagoras threatened to sue him; he pointed out that the student didn’t stand a chance: if Protagoras won, the student would have to pay by the judgment of the court, and if the student won he would have to pay according to the terms of their agreement. But the student—he must have been a pretty clever student—pointed out that Protagoras didn’t have a chance: if he, the student, won, he was freed of all debt by the court’s decree, and if Protagoras won, he was free and clear according to the terms of the agreement. There’s your typical sophist argument. You choose what you like and find words to justify it.”

  I was never good at riddles. I sat puzzling, while Gabrielle made an effort to smile. The next minute she was in tears again.

  “Oh, it’s really too hot to cry, Gaby,” Nina said. “It’s too hot even to talk. Let’s go to the beach, just for a look. The car’s right outside.”

  I was up and ready. Gabrielle looked at her watch. “I don’t know. … Don … the kids …”

  “Is it right? Is it wrong?” Nina mocked. “Shall we bear the heat, forbear from going to the beach? Or maybe we should forbear from denying ourselves the beach. Let’s sit and analyze it.”