Disturbances in the Field Read online

  Earth, water, air, fire. The way up and the way down. I remember all about Heraclitus though I haven’t much memory for ideas. I do have an ear for sound. I remember Nina’s and Esther’s voices playing counterpoint, a canon of repetition in shifting keys. Nina’s was clear and subdued, with a narrow range that dipped lower when she got irritated—one of the few visible signs. She also blinked when she was disturbed, and smiled. Esther’s voice was deeper and coarser, with an alluring crack in it, like some magisterial old woman who has smoked all her life. And Esther’s voice had amazing degrees of expression; it could travel from its natural deep tone right up the scale through a series of querulous, astonished, indignant, and facetious notes, and she hit every one of them, every night.

  Nina: “Wisdom consists in speaking and acting the truth, giving heed to the nature of things.” That’s what Heraclitus says.

  Esther: Big deal. So what else is new?

  Nina: Now, the basic principle of reality is change. One element slides into another. Earth, water, air, fire. Fire starts in the sun, then becomes smoke, vapors, clouds, mist, rain, earth, rock. A gradual hardening. That’s “the way down.” Do you see?

  Esther: The way down. Righto.

  Nina: Then you have the way up. It goes in the opposite direction, a melting instead of a hardening. Rock, earth, dew, mist, rain, clouds, vapors, smoke, fire.

  Esther: Rock, paper, scissors. Scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock breaks scissors.

  Nina (her voice getting lower and very calm): Do you want to learn this or not?

  Gabrielle (from the floor, flexing and pointing, her book open between her spread legs): Leave her be. That’s her way of connecting. I do the same thing myself.

  Nina: But you got ninety-two on the last quiz and she got sixty-two. The way up and the way down are going on eternally and at the same time, Esther, do you get it? There’s a rhythm in their opposition. The two main features of the way up and the way down are continuity and reversibility. She’ll definitely ask that next time. And the principle, remember, is change. “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.”

  Esther: But is that true?

  (That worried me too, silent in a corner with my book. Everything gives way? Nothing stays fixed?)

  Nina: That’s not the point. Repeat to me, now, about the way up and the way down.

  Esther: Continuity. Reversibility. Earth to water to air to fire and vice versa. Listen, I’m not dumb. I can remember. I want to know if it’s real.

  Nina: First pass the test. Then you can worry about whether it’s real. That was very good. Also remember about strife. “All things come to pass through the compulsion of strife.” He means strife between the way up and the way down.

  Esther (grabbing the book from her): “Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death of air, and earth in the death of water.” That is pretty grim. Everything lives through something else’s death? I don’t think I like that.

  Nina (ever calm): It’s not a hostile sort of strife. It’s an objective description of a cycle. Nature is that process. But I do think he had a preference. I think he liked the way up better. He says, “A dry soul is wisest and best.”

  Esther: You ought to know.

  Nina was hurt. She was doing her best to save Esther from failure. Back home in Indiana, if Nina had failed a test she would have been sent to bed without her supper for a week. Back home in Indiana, her duty was to excel, to obey, and to agree. Independent inquiry was rude and criticism was morally suspect. She had attended Sunday school in starched dresses every Sunday of her childhood, and curtsied for visitors, and if they asked how she was, was expected to reply, “Fine and dandy, just like sugar candy.” By the age of four she was trained to pick up all her toys and put them away each evening, and then her mother would supervise her prayers, said aloud, kneeling alongside her bed. She became a math and science whiz kid; she could remember anything schematic. Admissions offices wooed her. Though we tried to take her in hand, Nina could not help behaving, the first couple of years, as though she were a house guest of the college, too well-bred to question any of her hostess’s offerings. And when she felt she had failed to meet anyone’s highest expectations, she developed a slight stammer, which gave me a pang in my heart. It still does, though she has long ceased to blink and to smile, and has even learned to leave her living room strewn for days at a stretch. It was when she discovered passion that the careful surface began to alter: her parents had never shown or alluded to sexual passion, and so she thought adults, having outgrown the vagaries of childhood, were guided by reason.

  We sat up late, talking of how we ought to spend our lives. Gabrielle aspired to Martha Graham’s company. A few Saturday afternoons she had urged me downtown to see Martha Graham as a violent Greek heroine or a goddess, swathed in fabrics that possessed a life of their own. Gabrielle said that with enough work she could bridge the gap between flesh and spirit, and we all nodded admiringly. One night I saw her toss down her copy of Pére Goriot (in French!) and scrutinize her body in the full-length mirror on the closet door. “A nous deux, maintenant!” she muttered. She would master it by force of will. What was flesh, what was spirit, and what was the nature of the gap, if indeed there is one, she didn’t say, and no one thought to ask.

  Nina wanted a happy home life: happy children, happy husband, happy happy. I found that sickening. “Talk about received ideas! If you’ve never seen the ocean you think a lake is the greatest thing there is. I mean, who knows, you might find more happiness being … oh, a madam in a brothel. It might do you good.” I had just read Mrs. Warren’s Profession.

  “But why on earth would I want to be that?” she gasped.

  “Especially with a degree from here,” Esther added.

  “I would say that’s a puddle.” Gabrielle stood up to attempt a slow backbend. Her long fingers reached down for the rug behind her.

  “The point is to make it new,” I snapped at them. I was reading Ezra Pound.

  “That is true about the ocean, though.” Esther opened a box of Lorna Doones wistfully. “I remember the first time I ever saw the ocean, last year. And I had seen pretty big lakes. The Great Lakes, you know, are not exactly ponds. But still. It was at Coney Island. I met this guy Ralph at a freshman mixer. I didn’t like him that much and he was an inch shorter than I was, but I was lonesome. He came from New York and knew his way around. He had—”

  “Esther, we’re in the middle of something.” Gaby made it to the floor—a high arc, a strip of olive-skinned concave middle exposed between sweatshirt and tights. In a strained voice she asked, “Is this going to be another saga of masochism?”

  “No, no. I just must tell you. … It’s not all that irrelevant—we’re talking about what we want most. He had a car, and he asked me what I would most like to see in New York City, and I said, The ocean. He laughed when he heard I’d never seen it. He had a nice laugh, sort of a low chuckle. His face improved when he laughed. When he wasn’t laughing it was very square and bony. Anyhow, he said it was especially beautiful in the fall, and the water was still warm from summer—you could dip your feet in. So, he told me to meet him the next Sunday afternoon at Alma Mater and he would take me. I didn’t even know what Alma Mater was but I figured I’d find out by Sunday—I didn’t want to sound completely … you know. Well, Sunday came, and I waited at that goddamn statue for an hour. I was so furious I kicked it. It was cold, too, not one of those gorgeous fall days when you’d want to get your feet wet. After fifteen minutes I was ready to leave. I mean, who did he think he was? Then I thought maybe something happened and I ought to give him a chance. Can you believe that for forty-five minutes I stood there debating with myself, Should I stay or should I go? I do have some pride, but on the other hand I really wanted to see the ocean. Well. Just as I was about to leave, his little form trotted onto the horizon. What had happened was …”

  The ocean made it all worthwhil
e. Esther got her feet wet. They ate hot dogs, rode the carousel, seized the brass rings, shivered on the boardwalk, necked in the car. She caught a cold. He phoned several times but she refused him since she hadn’t liked him very much in the first place.

  “Did you know there’s a club, the Polar Bear Club, of people who swim all year round? While we were freezing on the beach this troop of people, mostly old, I mean middle-aged, forty, fifty, came running past us and raced into the water. They splashed around for a couple of minutes and then raced out. He told me it was the Polar Bear Club. Can you imagine? It couldn’t have been much more than forty-five degrees.”

  We talked about what we would change in the world, if we had the power. Stupidity, I said. And chaos. Her parents and her legs, said Esther. In general she would prefer to be a Modigliani rather than a Rubens. Nina said timidly that she would not keep Richard Nixon as Vice-President. There was something about his face she didn’t trust.

  And what we feared most. Our fears are touching, like old family photos of our grandparents as babies, swaddled in lace gowns and bonnets, overstuffed, innocent of life and death, and absurd: sexual frigidity, being locked in a closet with mice, mental stagnation, childbirth, failure, public humiliation. Today I would gladly suffer public humiliation if in return I could change the course of one specific afternoon. Any of the other things too. Even the mice.

  “I can’t believe it! I really can’t believe it!” Esther stomped through the room in her blue baby-doll pajamas, flapping her notebook around.

  She had the soft, pink-tinged skin of a strawberry blonde, and she was rosy with vexation. “First they say everything is in constant flux. The basic principle is change. ‘Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.’ Remember? So okay, I figure I’ll have to live with that. And now they say that nothing ever changes? Everything is fixed? Never began, never will end? An arrow can’t even hit its target? What kind of nonsense is that?”

  The Eleatic school, very uncharming. “What is unthinkable is untrue.” “Movement is impossible.” Parmenides and his henchman Zeno poured reason like molten lead into the veins and arteries of the universe, and the system stiffened into paralysis.

  “You’re not supposed to take it literally,” Gabrielle told her. “It’s just another phase. The other ones were poetic, these are intellectual. They’re trying to think clearly.”

  “But why would anyone want to think such things? Look, are you going to deny what you see with your own eyes? Can I or can I not walk across this room?” She demonstrated, stepping over Gaby.

  “Not in the abstract, you can’t,” Nina said. “Between one step and the next is an infinity of little steps. You can’t get through infinity.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you believe this garbage?”

  “Well, uh, I wouldn’t say I believe it in the sense you mean, no. But I do, uh, understand it,” Nina stammered. She could be imperious drilling Esther by rote. When it came to defending a position, she had to blink a lot. “It has to do with a kind of relentless thinking, Esther. Carrying something to the very end, like a clue in a mystery, even if you don’t like where it leads. It’s more honest that way. It seems to me, at least.” She cleared her throat and recrossed her legs.

  Esther stared out the window at the November rain; she was silenced, braiding the fringes of the beige curtains. She rarely carried any clue to the very end. “I’m cold,” she said finally. “Where’s my bathrobe?”

  “I put it in the wash. I was doing my own things and I thought you wouldn’t mind,” said Nina.

  “I don’t. Thanks. But it doesn’t help the fact that I’m cold. Unlike some people, my body temperature moves, hot to cold, cold to hot.”

  “Close the window, then, and wear mine.”

  A truly Christian gesture, seeing that Esther was such a slob. She had grown up with three generations of messy, uncommunicative family living under one creaking, leaking roof in Chicago. “You bourgeois types wouldn’t believe them!” she told us condescendingly, and we couldn’t. There were a senile maternal grandmother, an incontinent paternal grandfather, aunts and uncles who dropped in and out, besides her parents and three older brothers. Like a commune? Gaby suggested. No, no, not at all like a commune. No Brook Farm. No principles. Just a collection of people, barely a family. There were vague investments they shared; living under one roof made the money go farther.

  Esther’s people, as she called them, took their own meals at odd hours, nodded cursory greetings in the halls, and lived for the most part in pajamas. There were cats, her mother’s. “Her warmest feelings were reserved for the cats. She held them all the time. Me, never.” It was like a poorly run hotel, she said, no one minding the front desk. “And I. I was an afterthought. An accident, I mean. I’m sure they weren’t still doing it. He probably fell on her in his sleep, or something like that. I was a grown man’s wet dream.”

  Her father didn’t talk much to his children, but he would sometimes warn her brothers against the corruptions of capitalist success. (Not much danger of that, Esther noted with relish. One was in the army and one worked as a garage mechanic. The third built sculpture out of debris.) “My father was a leftist when he was young. An organizer.” A twinge of pride seeped through, like light through a slit in a curtain. “He got disgusted, I guess, in the thirties when the war came. He gave it up.” When, wearing her baby-doll pajamas, she ran into him in the kitchen at midnight, both in search of leftovers and surprising the water beetles into a frantic scurrying, he hardly gave her a glance. “But he shared the food. You’ve got to give the devil his due. Anything he found, he gave me half. Each according to his needs, you know.”

  On warm days, atavistically, Esther might wear bedroom slippers to class if she could get them past Nina. It was Nina who reminded her diplomatically to get her shoes reheeled, to hang up her skirts so they didn’t crease, to buy new bras when the old ones lost their shape. Nina was uncomfortable seeing large breasts flop around. Perhaps she reminded her about taking showers too: whenever I met Esther ambling down the hall in her ancient green flannel robe, a wet towel slung over her shoulder, pinkish skin aglow and golden curls dripping, she would announce with a certain belligerent pride, “I just took a shower,” as if I couldn’t tell, or needed to know for the record.

  “I am a product of will over chaos,” she declared every so often. “How else do you think I got here?” Leafing through a Guide to American Colleges and Universities, she had liked the sound of the small women’s college abutting the great university, and she liked the distance between New York and Chicago. After a few bitter remarks about private education under capitalism, her father agreed to pay the bills, though he considered the venture pointless. “If you think you can find a better husband there than here, be my guest.”

  “That wasn’t so bad. That I could take. It was my mother who nearly did me in. ‘New York! My, my. Do you really think you can manage? I wonder who looks after you girls.’ Looks after! I don’t think she looked after me from the first morning she deposited me at kindergarten. ‘But if you feel you must, dear, I certainly wouldn’t stand in your way.’ Stand in my way! She wouldn’t stand, period. She was always lying down. Reclining, you know, on one of those old-fashioned chaises, sort of like Mme. de Stael awaiting her guests. She took naps on and off all day long and never bothered to comb her hair when she got up. She would powder her face, though. She was overpowdered. She had a powdery look, you know what I mean? Like you had an urge to sort of dust her off.” Esther could keep us laughing, but it was unwilling laughter. I hoped she was exaggerating. “‘Be sure to take good care of yourself out there, Essie. The change of air … You were such a delicate little thing when you were a baby.’ Nine pounds four ounces. Delicate! And she only nursed me for two weeks. Two goddamn weeks. She said I bit. She said I was born with teeth. ‘Remember, if you don’t like it you can always get on a plane and come back home.’ Home! Sure, so I could join her and we could rot together. Of course she wanted me hom
e—who else would do the shopping and cooking, such as it was.”

  “Esther, I didn’t know you could cook.”

  “Will over chaos.” She ripped open a sample pack of cigarettes. “I’d be happy never to see a pot again for the rest of my life. The kitchen positively reeked of cats, the garbage piled with all those open cans. I tried, believe me. But you can’t get rid of that smell. It’s an indestructible smell. No one else seemed to smell it except me—they were inured.” Nina shuddered. She loathed cats, like her mother before her. “Well, anyway, then she would turn back to her needlepoint. Discussion of my education is finished. She was always doing needlepoint: cats, horses, zebras—she hung them all over her bedroom. Her big excursions were going out to the needlepoint shop. She’d get all dressed, and powdered, naturally, and put on this dark green coat with little foxes’ tails hanging from the collar that made her look like something in those cases at the Museum of Natural History. She would come home all atwitter with a new piece of burlap or whatever the hell it is. Take a plane home! I would rather have died than gone home. Do you remember—well, I guess you wouldn’t; I hardly knew you all then, except Nina—that first semester I spent three weeks in the infirmary? Everyone thought I had mono, I had all the right symptoms. But I think I was having some kind of collapse. I wouldn’t let them call home. I threatened to hang myself if they did. But they made me compromise. I would call my mother and say I wasn’t feeling too well and just sort of chat, so Dr. Peters wouldn’t be in any trouble, I guess in case I died or something. Peters must have listened in on the extension, because after that she didn’t bother me any more about calling. She gave me pills.”

  “But why was your mother like that?” Gaby asked. “What happened to her?”