Disturbances in the Field Read online

  Esther was surprised by the question. “I don’t know that anything special happened to her. That was how she was. I never really thought much about why.” She shrugged and lit another sample cigarette. “Her sister was like that, her mother, maybe I’ll get that way too. Maybe it’s in the genes.”

  It was Nina’s and Esther’s room we gathered in because my roommate had to go to bed at eleven-thirty; she claimed her brain cells could not function on fewer than eight hours of sleep. Until eleven-thirty she sat hunched over her desk in her flowered flannel pajamas with feet, like Dr. Denton’s, winding her lank brown hair around her fingers and squinting over thick biology textbooks whose colorful diagrams of inner organs were unsettling. Particularly unsettling was the female sexual and reproductive system, viewed in profile section. To me it was a woman bisected vertically. I have seen that profile many times since, in gynecologists’ offices and in those booklets that explain sex and menstruation to little girls, and still it appears so remote from what some writer called felt life.

  My roommate, who came from Denver, ate bananas while she studied. In her open, easy accents, she told me the virtues of potassium. Like me, Melanie was always hungry and always slim. She let the peels pile up on her desk, so that the studious evenings unwound in a sensuous banana aroma, like incense. Mornings brought the bittersweet smell of rot. To offset the banana peels I ate oranges, the large, thick-skinned kind. Orange peels left out overnight do not stink. But sometimes I ate the peels as well. The fleshy white part kept some of the sweetness of the pulp; the closer I got to the outside, the more tart. I loved the bumpy texture but I took very small bites because of the acid. Melanie never thought this slow, luxurious nibbling at the rinds was at all peculiar. She also never seemed to mind my turning on the light in the middle of the night, if I chanced to awaken and panic at the dark.

  We were not together in the room very much: for hours every day I used a piano practice room on campus, while she peered into a microscope. Weekends I went to free concerts or lay on my bed reading, eating oranges and an occasional banana; she was out with her boyfriend. Each May we chose to room together again. After graduation we said good-bye warmly, embracing through our identical commencement robes. I think it was the only time we touched. She still sends me Christmas cards from Maryland, where she is a professor of gastroenterology at Johns Hopkins. From Melanie I learned about coexistence, and since then, when Victor and I have had bad spells, thwarting each other’s groping efforts at contact, I have suggested that we try simply to coexist till things improve. I envision us like Melanie and me, for four years sleeping, eating fruit, working, dressing and undressing, demanding little, feeling the mild good will which Aristotle says does not involve intensity or desire yet is a kind of inactive friendship: the parties wish each other well but would not go out of their way to do anything for each other. Victor has no interest in coexistence, though. Victor wants all or nothing.

  Gabrielle’s roommate was quite a different matter. An anachronism, years ahead of her time, Steffie Baum slept guiltlessly with the boys across the street. She even stayed out overnight. Apparently a network of Columbia students rented some cheap apartments nearby for their rendezvous, and worked out careful schedules, but I knew nothing yet of the details. Steffie was a small, curvy girl with a pretty face and large, unapologetic blue eyes that could hold a steady gaze longer than anyone else’s; Steffie was never the one to avert her eyes first. Her other impressive feature was her hair, satiny and long enough to sit on. She changed its arrangement each day as if to demonstrate her infinite variety: loose and flowing, a tight bun, two braids resting on her bosom. Whatever the hairdo, she moved through the dormitory halls and in and out of the shower with an enviable easy languor. We assumed this easy languor came from the carnal knowledge we lacked. We may have mixed up cause and effect.

  (Technically I didn’t lack it. There had been a boy in high school who pushed his way through once, quickly, in the dark. He offered me a challenge and I accepted, to show I was afraid of nothing, at fifteen. But in spirit I was still virginal. I hadn’t felt much except shock at my own daring.)

  Steffie was the sort who could do everything well and remain likable. She got excellent grades (a history major), though she cut classes to the legal limit. She sang in the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. She wrote for the school paper. The year she did theatre reviews she asked friends along on her pair of press seats. I got to see The Threepenny Opera and studied the musicians while Steffie took notes with a little pen that had a flashlight on top. She tried to organize a tutoring program for children in the slums bordering the college, and when her recruiting failed, since it was hardly an era of activism, she tutored on her own. And yet with all this, she managed to tiptoe down the corridors long after signing in for the night. In sneakers and ponytail she looked like a runaway child, a bag over her shoulder containing a toothbrush and comb, the next morning’s books, and a nightgown—she didn’t wear pajamas like the rest of us. Some boy had taught her how to unlock the door to the emergency exit with a pair of pliers so the bell wouldn’t ring. We shook our heads with worry. She was never caught, though, and for that we called her lucky.

  She might have been one of us, but we kept her just outside our inner circle. That world would claim us all too soon. We deferred it. It was not an era of voluptuousness, either; it was the late fifties, a quiescent time. Except when Steffie appeared mornings after, unchanged, efficient and alert in class, I felt a bit of a fool. I was always competitive, and the sight of her gave me a vague physical unrest.

  “Aha! So there is change after all! Everything is not so static. I knew it. I knew it,” Esther cried in triumph. It was nearing Thanksgiving and fittingly, we had reached the Pluralists: Empedocles, mystical poet, Professor Boles announced, as if he were about to enter from the wings. And Anaxagoras, prosaic man of science. Thank goodness they happened along—Parmenides had brought matters to a dead end with his fixed and eternal universe. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Nothing can come of nothing, she quoted. Speak again. And these two spoke, clearing a middle path. All was not constant change, they concurred. But nor was all immutable. Beneath the undeniable evidence of change was something enduring, something that abided. No power could take it all away. A vast relief eased through me as Professor Boles unraveled the plot, grinning like a master detective, her wild gray hair afloat.

  Back to the beginnings again: earth, water, air, fire. But not as simply as before. The four elements are the roots—and how we loved that word, roots; it gave us a sense of getting intimate with truth. Every mortal thing is made of the immortal elements in diverse combinations. An intricate dance, the four roots forever mingling and separating, cleaving and riving, world without end. And what propels this fantastic parade? Ah, Empedocles, what a romantic. Love and Strife. Love joins together, Strife axes apart. “And I shall tell you something more.” Oh yes, Empedocles, by all means speak again. “There is no birth in mortal things, and no end in ruinous death. There is only mingling and interchange of parts, and it is this that we call ‘nature.’”

  And as if this were not enough, Anaxagoras, prosaic man of science though he was, went him one better. Not Love and Strife, but Mind “took charge of the cosmic situation. … Mind set in order all that was to be, all that ever was but no longer is, and all that is now or ever will be.” That suited me fine. No death, and Mind in charge.

  Nina did not share my relief. “It’s not any ultimate truth. It’s only part of an ideological sequence, and naturally it gets a little more sophisticated as it goes along.” She paused to light her weekly cigarette. “All of this has been completely superseded by modern science, of course. It’s only of interest historically, and maybe poetically.”

  I wanted to protest but I didn’t know how. Nina was admittedly the smart one, and already she was stammering less.

  “I’m not so sure they’ve been superseded,” said Esther. “Look, Anaxagoras says there’s a little bit of everything in everything els
e. Black and white have the seeds of gray. Food has the seeds of the blood and bone it’s going to help make. That’s pretty clever. It’s not so different from your periodic table of ninety-two elements or however many there are. Everything starts from—”

  A neighboring door snapped brusquely shut. Loud, ponderous footsteps.

  “Oh-oh, the witching hour,” Esther moaned. “Honestly, we ought to make a scarecrow some night, just to make Mrs. Ramsey’s job more exciting. She hardly ever gets the thrill of discovery.”

  The college had lately adopted the progressive policy of allowing males—presumably the boys from across the street—to visit in the dormitory rooms till midnight Thursdays through Saturdays, provided the doors were kept ajar. This was an advance over the former policy of allowing males only in the small ground-floor rooms known as beau parlors and equipped with floral-upholstered sofas, provided, again, that the doors were kept ajar and all four feet remained on the floor. (Nothing specific about feet was enjoined in the new rule.) For enforcement, Mrs. Ramsey, a short squat woman, made the rounds at midnight in her tight black rayon uniform and black oxfords. Mrs. Ramsey was wasted on us: her face was so impassive that she might have policed on a much grander scale, in a sheikhdom, a sultanate. Fortunately for some, her heavy tread gave a few seconds’ notice. She granted a warning knock before flinging doors wide. I wondered if anything could jar that face—a naked male, maybe with an erection, maybe inserting it into willing flesh …

  “Hi there, Mrs. Ramsey,” Esther called brightly, springing from the bed. “Not a thing here to worry about! See?” She yanked open the door of the closet. One half was an orderly array of dark smooth clothes obediently on their hangers; the other a jumble of stripes, prints, peasant skirts swirling into each other, shoes heaped on the floor like abandoned auto parts, a green slicker painfully lopsided on a hook that pierced its shoulder, two enormous straw hats sliding from the top shelf. Esther dashed back to lift the bottom of the bedspread, inviting Mrs. Ramsey to have a peek, but the woman, unfazed, had turned to go. Maybe beneath her face she was contemptuous. Her toneless words trailed after her: “Please keep the noise down.” Esther leaned out the open door and called down the hall, “Cherchez l’homme!”

  “Listen, listen to this.” Gabrielle had been reading all the while. She would not object to such antics, nor would she take part. “Empedocles says some wonderful things. This is very a propos: ‘It is in the warm parts of the womb that males are born; which is the reason why men tend to be dark, hairy, and more rugged.’”

  “I guess that has been superseded by modern science,” I said, and Nina smiled faintly.

  “‘Abstain entirely from laurel leaves,’” Gabrielle read on. “Oh, and this one is very passionate: ‘Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands away from beans.’ I wonder why. Oh dear.” She sighed and fluffed out her long hair, just washed and drying at the open window.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “‘I wept and mourned when I discovered myself in this unfamiliar land.’”

  She looked up, her eyes filled with tears. She had been brought to this strange land as a child of five. Her parents were French, her father in the diplomatic corps. Could a small child really feel that kind of pain? Or could she summon tears for Empedocles?

  “That’s how I felt,” said Esther, “when I came to New York, even though I was glad to leave home. That’s why I went to see the ocean with a boy I didn’t even like and let him paw me. I was so lonesome. That’s why I got mono, or whatever that sickness was, and the only thing that kept me here was imagining the satisfaction on my mother’s face if I gave up and went home.”

  “So you’re glad you stayed?” asked Nina.

  Esther looked around at all of us. “Now? Sure! Sure I’m glad I stayed. I’m fine now.”

  We all went home for Thanksgiving, and on the first day back Nina tucked in the lower right-hand corner of her mirror, the place where some girls kept photographs of their boyfriends or families, a three-by-five card. On it, typed, were the questions that members of the sixth-century B.C. Pythagorean Brotherhood asked in their daily examinations of conscience: In what have I failed? What good have I done? What have I not done that I ought to have done?

  “What is that supposed to be, a mother substitute?” Esther demanded.

  Nina smiled. She rarely tried to justify herself.

  “You told us we took it too personally,” I reminded her.

  She smiled.

  We pointed out that the card was inconsistent in spirit with what was ranged on the dresser top just below it: Revlon Touch & Glow liquid make-up, Jean Nate spray cologne, Nivea cream, Cutex colorless nail polish, an ashtray with tortoiseshell barrettes for her mass of black hair, perpetually bridled, silver-handled hairbrush, five lipsticks. She accepted our teasing and said, “It may be best to stay in balance by keeping one foot in the real world and one foot in the ideal.”

  “And who said that?” Esther wanted to know.

  “No one.” She smiled in earnest this time. “I made it up.”

  On the three mornings we had The History of Philosophy we would meet downstairs at a quarter to nine and walk over together. Nina began not appearing. “She was already gone when I woke up,” Esther reported. “That’s odd, isn’t it?” She would greet us in class, composed as ever, maybe a bit quieter than usual. Since Nina was not the kind you could interrogate, Gabrielle, the ever-resourceful, undertook some research. The Pythagorean Brotherhood, she learned, followed a moral and mystical regimen for purifying the soul and attaining wisdom. “‘They performed their morning walks alone and in places where there was appropriate solitude and quiet; for they considered it contrary to wisdom to enter into conversation with another person until they had rendered their own souls calm and their minds harmonious. It is turbulent behavior, they believed, to mingle with a crowd immediately on arising from sleep,’” she read to me. “Is that what we are, a crowd?” We were wounded.

  “She’s probably working on her memory, too. Listen to this. ‘To strengthen their memory the students began each day, on first waking up, by recollecting in order the actions and events of the day before; after that they tried to do the same for the preceding day, and so on backwards as far as they could go, taking care to make the order of recollection correspond with the order in which the events had actually occurred. For they believed that there is nothing more important for science, and for experience and wisdom, than the ability to remember.’”

  I tried it for three days and gave up. I could remember many things, but not in the order in which they occurred. They regrouped themselves in thematic patterns like music, as if memory were coaxing life to make more structural sense than it possibly could. “Do you really do it?” I asked Nina, alone. She nodded. “It helps keep things in order.” “I thought you had things in very good order.” “Oh no, Lydia. Inside is all turmoil.” Her face was troubled. Unblinking and unsmiling, it seemed to cover webs of complexity. But I couldn’t press her further. The others were about to join us; we were having a Chinese dinner on Broadway to celebrate Nina’s nineteenth birthday.

  The pre-Socratics were superseded. Only in poetry did they remain unsurpassed. Earth, water, air, and fire. The way up and the way down, eternal and reversible. Professor Boles confessed she had lingered too long under their spell; now we must move more swiftly. Past Plato and Aristotle and the medieval schoolmen. The weather grew cold as we progressed in a northwesterly direction to encounter three Continental Rationalists, three British Empiricists, and three German Idealists. Cunning minds indeed, to have arranged themselves in geographical triads.

  “I think, therefore I am?” It was just after Christmas vacation and Esther, fresh from the homestead in Chicago, was in a querulous mood.

  “I think, therefore I am? I don’t get it. It doesn’t sound authentic.”

  “But it’s as simple as can be!” Gabrielle exclaimed. “He wants to start from scratch. How do you know you’re there? Because someone
is asking that question.”

  “Yes,” said Esther, “I realize that much. But before I even ask the question—not that I personally would ever ask such a question, I have never had such high-class doubts. But all right, suppose I had. Before I would even hear that clever little voice asking that clever little question—God almighty, I feel, I touch, I smell, transitively, that is. I mean, thinking is a pretty advanced thing. If the guy wants to be primitive he’s got a long way to go, if you ask me. Throw me one of those cigarettes over there, would you, Lydia?”

  Among the chewed pencils, tangled beads, hairbrush crammed with shed gold hair, and crumpled paper on Esther’s dresser top, were half a dozen open sample packs of cigarettes. I reached over and picked up a miniature blue box with white and yellow trim, containing six cigarettes. “Hit Parades. Hit Parades are the absolute worst, Esther.” I tossed them over.

  “I know.” She shrugged. “But listen, they’re free.”

  We didn’t yet know about tar and nicotine. Once a week bland-faced young salesmen in business suits walked through the smoking section of the library offering free samples of atrocious new brands. Esther accepted them indiscriminately; when the young men pulled out their market-research questionnaires she responded that they were all terrible, but she would take another of each, thank you. She seemed always short of money, and practiced other small and arbitrary economies—denying herself a four-dollar scarf in winter, or a dollar movie at the Student Center. Her father provided a checking account, but she used it as little as possible. I imagine that self-denial made her feel closer to this father who barely acknowledged her existence and also warned her brothers against the corruptions of capitalism.

  She lit up a Hit Parade and tossed the match, still aflame, across her bed into the heavy, mud-colored ashtray she had made in high school and brought with her all the way from Chicago. She was proud of it. She said it was the only decent thing she had ever made with her own two hands besides sandwiches and stews.