Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “Okay, okay.” She wiped her eyes and turned to me. “What was the part about the emeralds?”

  “I’ll tell you another time. Come on, up! It’ll do you good.”

  Nina put on real clothes, and we trooped downstairs to the aging but still plucky white Triumph. We sped over the bridge, with the Watchtower, home of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, glaring at us severely, warning of imminent apocalypse, then through the broad, stolid avenues of Brooklyn, past old people in sturdy white laced shoes, taking the night air on plastic chairs set on narrow stretches of grass. Very soon the smell of ocean seasoned the air. On the boardwalk were other seekers after a breeze and a glimpse of infinity. We took off our shoes and went down to the sand, cool on the soles of our feet. The beach itself was nearly empty. Wire trash baskets loomed like animals in the night; here and there a bulbous lump shifted on the sand, couples rolling in blankets. We didn’t dance or frolic as we used to, but walked sedately to the water’s edge and stepped in almost up to our knees. The surf knocked against our legs. Far off, a yellow light from a ship at sea (how far, Thales?) cast a ray on the water like a mistaken sun, out of season. The water was warmish, having been heated all day, all week, all month; it was comforting to think that even the sea, under a planetary sway, was subject, like us, to small fluctuations of temperature. A few gulls swooped overhead, plummeted, skimmed the surface and shot upwards into a black sky full of stars promising more heat when the dark lifted. We walked along the water’s edge about a quarter of a mile, stopped as one and turned back, not speaking. We were cooled. The heat and the day and the facts of our lives drained from us, and we were creatures unspecified, abstracted from ourselves, poised at the rim of the sea.

  We sat down on the sand, not close together but together. I saw a shooting star. It went by so fast I had no time to tell the others. No, I wanted it all for myself, because it brought back to me the night Vivian was conceived, thirteen months ago, when there was also a shooting star.

  “Did you see it?” Victor had said. It was a weekend camping, our first weekend away alone in years. “Yes, I saw it. Ah, come here, Mr. Watson, I need you.” Our words came so slowly and lazily, everything else so fast. “First put the damn thing in, Lyd. Come on, baby,” he drawled, and I drawled back, “I can’t reach it, and I can’t get up. It’s too chilly out there. Look at all those cold stars. So cold. Yes, oh that.” “Lydie, I don’t want … Let’s just—” “One time out of so many. It can’t happen. Oh Victor. Love.” “Baby, move over, yes. Oh Jesus. It’s always … I could die in you. It would be all right.” “Stay still for just a minute. Can you? Oh that’s good.” “Listen, I’d better not. It’s too risky.” “Oh Victor, don’t, don’t. It doesn’t feel nice. Stay, please. Don’t go ’way.”

  Vivian was what we had. We thought of an abortion and we remembered that moment on the damp earth, when I had pleaded and he had been unable to leave me, and we couldn’t bring ourselves to deny the fire that was her source. It was as if we knew it would be Vivian, child of air and water, conceived lakeside, child of the elements, magical, careless, with glistening shy black lake eyes; as if we knew in advance her delights and would not miss having her for the world. The world well lost. We would manage somehow. Four of them! There was something seductive, wonderfully outrageous about it. A game, like playing poor. People thought us stupid, but were too discreet to say. Had they heard how it happened, they would have thought us stupider still.

  Gabrielle waited but the feeling did not pass. It wore her down like a disease; she got thin from it, and her blue eye and green eye both faded to gray. Yet she would do nothing but abide with it, speaking of it rarely, bearing it like a disease, not progressive and not terminal. In Don’s spiffy green Volkswagen bus we drove out to the country for picnics on warm Sunday afternoons, children bouncing around in the back, clamoring, How much longer? Sometimes she invited us for dinner and cooked fancy French food. There seemed little change between them. As ever, she was the gracious wife, receptive to his affection, but quieter. A weary kind of stillness settled on her movements. She glided around the table carrying dishes with almost no sound, deft, light, and self-absorbed, while he continued to dote, never letting on if he knew anything.

  Holding me in bed, Victor whispered, “What is the matter? Is she not well?” “She’s well.” “What is it, then? Something between them?” “No, I think they’re all right.” “Someone else,” he said. It was terribly difficult not to respond; this murmuring was the core of our life. He nudged me. “Lyd? You up?” “I’m up.” “You can’t tell me?” I shook my head against him in the dark. He could feel it. “But Don. She still loves him. Doesn’t she?” “Oh yes,” I said. “Otherwise …” “What if that should happen to us?” “She’s good,” I said. “I wouldn’t be such a good girl.” “No,” he said, “I don’t imagine you would.” “I don’t see it happening. I don’t have the time. Move your elbow, Victor. My arm’s asleep.” He did, and began to caress me. “Come here again,” he whispered, and moved to pull me on him. “I’m tired. Can’t we just lie here and talk?” He stopped and simply held me. “I could not love anyone else,” he said. “Of course you could.” “Maybe. That Jasper, Lyd. Jasper looks at you … Greg never looked at you that way.” I moved off a bit. “Jesus, what is this, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’? First of all, Jasper is homosexual, Victor. If he looks at me it has to do with what we’re playing. There’s an intimate current in a chamber group. You have to keep checking out the others. You can sense what’s going on in them. Musically. It may be analogous to sex but it is not sex. Besides, Jasper is better than Greg. Maybe that’s why he looks more.” “Then why is Greg the one who got the job in the Philharmonic? And incidentally, Jasper is bisexual, not homosexual. Didn’t you ever notice?” “You know, Victor, with all your perception, sometimes you seem very ignorant.” “I suppose when I want to make love I get ignorant.” I moved back to him. “In that case you should insist.” “Ah, I don’t like to insist. All right. I insist. No, I’ll urge. Like this.” I laughed. “Not bad. You’re funny, Victor.” “That’s why you married me, right? For laughs.” “It’s after two, though. They’ll be up in a few hours.” “Quick, then. We’ll make it very quick this time. No fooling around. You can even count. You tell me how many, uh, thrusts you require, and I’ll deliver, like George’s seltzer man. You can be asleep in five minutes if you concentrate. Ready, Lydia? One.” “Stop horsing around. I couldn’t count past two.” “Two,” he said. “Shh.” He stopped and stroked my face. “Don’t ever fall in love with anyone else. Please.” “I won’t, I won’t …Oh!” I clasped him tighter, and when we parted I burrowed into his shoulder, almost asleep. “I’m glad you urged. Good night.” Hypnagogic pictures began, with music to match. I was almost gone. “Twelve,” he said in my ear. “Victor, how could you? How could I love someone who could do that?” “I’m just kidding. I made it up.” “Hah! I wonder.”

  Gabrielle saved her good grace for Don and their kids; with her friends she was moody. Unexpectedly, Esther turned up one evening, strengthened and impervious to whatever damage latitudinarianism could do. She said that the Gestalt wizard had transformed her, or rather, enabled her to transform herself.

  “She doesn’t operate on a Freudian model. She thinks the process is more like a Socratic dialogue.” Esther’s face was ruddy and radiant again, and her voice clear, not raspy—she had stopped smoking for the third time. Her hems were not hanging, she wore a bra, her hair had been recently washed. “It all has to do with figure and ground, the boundary where the organism meets the environment. That’s a dynamic relation. You’d be surprised—your boundaries are more fluid than you think. You operate in a field, and you keep changing according to how things in the field move in and out of you.”

  Nina brought us a bowl of grapes and Gaby, as she clutched a handful, said, “That’s all very well. But a women’s group might do more for people our age.”

  Esther gave a newly ironic smile. “Couldn’t you call us a
women’s group?”

  “No. If we were we’d do something practical. Instead of sitting here we could be learning to use a speculum, for example. Why shouldn’t a woman know what’s inside her?”

  “I’d rather know what’s inside my head,” Esther said, quite without irony this time, twining her fingers, feeling for the absent cigarette.

  “We don’t accomplish anything. We have a friendly feeling, that is all. Warmth does not get you unstuck.”

  “Gaby,” I said, “you want a women’s group, go find a women’s group. I like what you contemptuously call a friendly feeling. And a speculum—are you kidding? After four pregnancies I’m not looking for any gratuitous probing. Thanks anyway.”

  “That’s pure ignorance speaking! You of all people should want to know—”

  “Ignorance! I know it so well I could be a midwife! Oh, sleep with the man already, will you? Enough of this saintly shit. It’s pure self-indulgence. Give your consent. Do you think a women’s group would tell you any different?”

  “What man?” Esther glanced warily around the room as if he might materialize, an intruder come through a window. Then she looked at each of us. “Oh, I see. I’ve really been out of touch.” Silence. “Silence makes me anxious. … I recently learned that.”

  “I’m sorry, Esther, go on,” said Gaby. “You were telling us about the Gestalt person.”

  “Oh, never mind. Frankly, I don’t see any point in a false purity. … He’s on your mind so you might as well … Clearly Esther was not of the school of Abelard. Still siding with God: lust in the eye is as good as done.

  “Yes? And then what? Have a secret life? Or give up everything? I don’t want to. I’m too entrenched. I can see it all. Notes in the office; surreptitious phone calls; I’d arrange to meet him when Don was away, or else I’d make up excuses, say I was here or there, with one of you, maybe—I’d have to drag my friends in. You’d lie for me, you’d feel contempt, he’d be humiliated. I’ve been through it a million times in my head. I don’t want that kind of life.”

  What a talented projector. She could map the movements of Leucippus’ atoms to their inevitable destiny; life could be over, in abstraction, before it was even lived.

  “But when you were with him,” Nina said. “That’s the part you’re leaving out. That part might give you … oh …”

  Glory was the word she had used, with embarrassment, at the race track.

  “No one seems to remember that I once made a promise. But let’s drop the subject. It’s my private life.”

  “You didn’t promise to suffer,” said Esther. “Your first obligation is to take care of yourself. If Don doesn’t satisfy all your needs—”

  “Oh, please!” Gabrielle cried. “Don’t give me that cant about needs! This is not a matter of need but of greed. He satisfies what you call my ‘needs.’ He gets it up, all too well. That is what you mean, isn’t it? Oh, if only it were that simple! Who knows what needs are? Needs conform to the available satisfactions.”

  I often recalled that little epigram of Gaby’s, aimed at the narcissism of the age and as out of step as a Jesuit at a disco party. Three years later, in 1975, after a visit to India in the entourage of a swami, Esther married Clyde Powers of the SAVE community, child of rampant sophistry, nephew of Richard Nixon’s Doublespeak, and fifteenth cousin of Freud, though surely the master would have turned from him in disgust, as Shakespeare from Caliban. Clyde was available and Esther was in need.

  Nina and I told Gaby about the wedding, soon after her return from France. Again it was late summer, again hot, again we saw the open fire hydrant through Nina’s wide second-story window, and the perennial young mothers pushing fretful babies one last time around the playground. And for us, again the comfort of family without its blood resentments. Nina was the one who actually told, in her most arch manner. “In touch with himself, he boasted. But if all you touch is a void …” I sat and drank. With my skirt pulled up for the cool air, I examined my legs for red and blue streaks of aging. I was thirty-seven, a good but not great pianist, locally known but unable to travel as frequently as I should. When the trio or my woodwind pals had a gig of more than a couple of days, they got someone to fill in, while I ground my teeth at night and muttered, like a prayer to rout frustration, Althea, Phil, Alan, Vivian, the world well lost. It worked, most of the time. But I had too much to do and was showing inevitable signs of wear—intimate little occurrences all over my body that I wished Victor could not see. Having studied me so long, drawn me and painted me as well as loved me, he could not help but see, though he was far too chivalrous to mention them out loud. A foolish worry, I was aware, but it sufficed in black moments—and Esther’s wedding had gotten me down.

  “What’s the matter, Lyd?” Gaby said with the old gentleness. Her passion, and the bile it oozed, had finally passed, as she had trusted it would. “You haven’t spoken a word since we got here, except to ask for ice.”

  “It seems such a waste. Our going to school together, our talking. And she goes and does that with her life. Even India—at least it was India. There is really nothing to discuss. Nothing ever changes. I have no more taste for argument for its own sake.”

  “We never did engage in argument for its own sake. It was for our sake. Except maybe in school.”

  “Yes, what a falling off was there. From the cosmic to the personal. Gossip.”

  “Esther will pass through this like everything else,” Gaby said. “She’ll be the same, but the way she’ll be the same will change, and who knows, the next way may be better.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed her, but her serenity was a pleasure to watch. She possessed the grace that comes with ripeness, with having become what one was meant to become and has accepted as fitting. In college she had been an arty American girl, member of a genus. With age she looked more European, or perhaps it was the month in France that had given her eyes their allusiveness and tinge of history, her wide mouth its ambiguous curve. She did not look young for her years as Nina and I did: her various renunciations, and the unlovely virtue with which she had sustained them, had toughened her skin and left narrow ravines of strain around the eyes. But she had followed her anachronistic lights, and the stubbornness of that journey showed in the earned repose of her face and the lines of her body. She no longer kept the taut readiness of a dancer. She looked smooth, almost sleek, and satisfied. At the magazine, where she was arts editor now, she had a reputation for being tough and shrewd. She played no favorites, was afraid of no one, and never grumbled about compromises with commercialism—that was part of the job and she knew it. The mobilities of her face were carefully monitored, and hinted at vast inner rooms of privacy, a secret life. The secret life was not erotic but verbal. She wrote mysteries under a pseudonym. They were cool and caustic and elegantly plotted; the characters who toed the line were rewarded in the end, Nina and I noted, while those who followed aberrant paths were punished. In real life she was tolerant and forbearing. Having denied herself, she could allow others their divergences. Smugness, maybe, but she never flaunted it. Her auburn hair was cut razor straight, reaching not quite to her shoulders, and had streaks of gray that made it more beautiful. Her two children not only were bilingual but had excellent manners in both tongues, more than I could say for mine. With Don she was the same, gracious and receptive at a slight distance, which was perhaps where he wanted her. He touched her a lot in public, on the arm, the shoulder, neutral places emblematic of the others. I don’t imagine she liked that but she gave no sign. I imagine she liked it all well enough in private. I think that after her love affair, her non-love affair, she was drawn to Don again, as sometimes happens, with a passion of her own, not merely a reactive one. I think she took the longings she had felt for the man, in their most elemental form, the hollowness and quickenings in the cavities of the body, and brought them to Don to have them allayed, and she knew exactly what she was doing and forgave herself. The forgiveness was what saved her, and gave her mouth an
d eyes that humane ambiguity. I think.

  “It’s true, our interest has never been disinterested,” I said. “Maybe that’s why it didn’t do anything for Esther. We discussed everything for how we could use it. We foraged. We picked the prettiest flowers and out of them we made our soups.”

  “Lydia has grown so facetious in her advancing age,” Nina said. “I don’t think you’re a kindly Bosc pear any more, Lyd. You’ll have to be something a little odd, like a fig, or endive.”

  “Endive is good. A fig is too exotic. For that matter, Esther’s not much of a peach any more, either. More of a … watermelon. She can still be a ruby, though. What about you, Gaby?”

  “Topaz,” she replied instantaneously, and with perfect accuracy.

  Nina said, “Emerald,” and we all laughed. Hot on the inside and cool on the outside.

  “Emerald … emerald. You were going to tell us something about emerald once, Lyd.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, what are you?”

  “Something blue. I can’t think of what it’s called.”

  “Sapphire?”

  “No, sapphire is too gaudy.”

  Nina got up and fetched her huge Webster’s dictionary. She opened to the array of gems, a shiny thick page amid the dry definitions. We huddled around it. Each color was discrete and luminous.

  “How wonderful. I’ve never seen this page. This is the one.” I pointed. “Lapis lazuli.”

  “You would pick a rare one. Well, enough of childish things. I’ve got to go. I promised to pick up Cynthia by ten-thirty. She’s making posters to protest cooking classes. It appears the girls are going to strike.”

  “But school’s out.”

  “They’re getting their strategy set—it’s only a few weeks off. I think she eavesdrops when the women’s group meets at my place.”