Disturbances in the Field Read online

  “Esther, someday you may set this place on fire. I worry when I get into bed and you’re still smoking in the dark. I can see the little orange circle flashing around.”

  “Sorry.” Esther leaned over to reach her ashtray and blew out the match; her breath sent up a black spray that drifted down to settle on the bedspread. “Oh well. Sorry again.” She tried to brush off the ashes but they smudged. “Anyhow, there is one thing I like about Descartes. Here. ‘To accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so … nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I would have no occasion to doubt it.’ In other words, don’t believe anything until you’ve proven it for yourself.”

  “Well … not exactly,” said Nina. “Not in science. It would be absurd to start from scratch every time you devised an experiment. Some things we take on faith, from past research.”

  “Nothing on faith! Nothing on faith! Isn’t that what it says right here? I don’t believe there’s an unconscious mind. I don’t believe there’s a God. I’m not even convinced there are little protons and electrons. Give me a microscope, let me see for myself.”

  “I’ll vouch for them,” said Nina. “Won’t you take my word for it?”

  “No. You believe what you’ve been told. Didn’t you believe in heaven and hell for the first fifteen years of your life?”

  “This sort of jejune discussion is not what Descartes had in mind,” Gabrielle said severely from the floor. “Not what he had in mind at all.”

  “Jejune?” said Esther with a lively flick of her curls. “Jejune? Is that French?”

  I also found the three Continental Rationalists disappointing, but I tucked in the right-hand corner of my mirror the sentence that most intrigued me: “The effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.” Spinoza. I didn’t really know what it meant, but I hoped that I would in time, and that it would be worth the wait.

  Gabrielle, in a royal blue leotard and tights, sat with the soles of her feet touching, her class notes in the parallelogram formed by her legs. She was eating Pecan Sandies. Every few moments her long bare arm would extend mechanically up towards the bag on the windowsill. She rarely indulged that way, only when she was getting her period and craved sweets, but it was the night before the final exam. I was replaying Professor Boles’s voice in my head; I heard tones and intervals, with words giving them boundaries and shape. The hard part was restoring meaning to the words. Nina’s and Esther’s duet was a distraction.

  “Entelechy, Esther?”

  She was smoking ravenously. “Entelechy. Each thing’s essence moves from its potential to realization. Aristotle.”

  “Very good. What are the four ways? Or she may call it the four causes of a phenomenon. With an example.”

  “Material, formal, efficient, final. The example in the book is a house. But a house is so unoriginal. If she asks that I’m going to use something else. A shoe.”

  “Why not start with the house?” Nina cajoled. She was eating too. She had even kicked off her black pumps, and sat curled in her chair, a box of Mallomars on her lap.

  “Such a conventional mind, Nina. It’s a pity. Material cause: bricks. Or mud, as the case may be. Ice, for an igloo. Formal cause: plans or blueprints. Efficient cause: labor. Tote that barge, lift that bale. Final cause: someone needs a place to live.”

  “Very good!” Nina’s eyes shone with pleasure. Her labor was paying off: Esther was being built. “Of course on the exam you’ll leave out the asides.”

  “But the asides are my essence. Give me a Mallomar, would you? I’m thin this week. Now I will tell you about a shoe. Just to show I can do it on my own. Material cause: leather. More likely plastic, these days. Formal cause: design for a shoe, I suppose. Efficient cause: same thing, labor. No! Elves! Final cause: The foot wants a covering. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. Shall I go on? I could do more complex things. A nervous breakdown. A painting by Picasso. An orgasm. Hey, would you like me to do an orgasm? I’ve read all about it.”

  “There really isn’t time,” said Nina coolly. She licked chocolate off each finger. “I think we’d better go on to his ideas about friendship.”

  Gabrielle suddenly moaned in agony. I thought she must have pulled a muscle. “Oh, this stuff makes me so sick,” she growled. She stood up in one spasm of motion, swishing her hair around, waving the sheaf of notes in her hand. Her voice spiraled; the mellow, sensible girl was left far behind. “Sick! A whole term of trash! I thought there’d be some connection with reality. But all this is nothing but classification. Three grades of faculties of the soul. Four kinds of law. Four cardinal virtues. Is that truth? It’s some kind of mumbo-jumbo numerology! Five proofs of the existence of God. Oh sure, first you decide what you want to believe, then you invent the reasoning.”

  Her face glistened with sweat. She bolted through the room, a jagged path of bright blue, and flung open the window. A gust of air rushed in. With her wide, broad-shouldered stance, every bone and curve articulated in the leotard, hair blowing and head lifted high in indignation, she seemed at last the Martha Graham tragic heroine she longed to dance. Woman confronting the betrayal of the intellect. Her eyes were shadowed; I couldn’t see their colors.

  “That was wonderful.” I applauded. “Brava!”

  “I’m not fooling around, Lydia. We wasted so much time. Look, the so-called enlightened ones are no better.” She riffled through her notes. “Hume. Such an original mind, she told us. But the same old thing—seven different categories of relationships. Would you like to hear them?”

  “No!” Esther said. “And could you please stop running around the room? You’re making me dizzy.”

  “Oh, all right.” She dropped to the floor and breathed deeply. “Also those fallacies. They made up as many fallacies as truths.” She was calmer; we were still transfixed. “Fallacy of ambiguity, fallacy of equivocation,” she droned. “Fallacy of composition, fallacy of division—I can’t even remember all the fallacies.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “The fallacies are fun.”

  “Aha, speaking of fun—have you run across the Hedonistic Calculus, by any chance? Jeremy Bentham? I know it wasn’t in the course but I happened upon it. The Hedonistic Calculus helps you choose between competing but mutually exclusive pleasures.” She grabbed a book and leafed through. “I bet you didn’t know there were seven ways to measure your pleasure.”

  “Gaby, really. Talk about jejune.”

  “I didn’t make this up, Lydia. This is the product of a great mind. Number one. Intensity of the pleasure. Number two. Duration of the pleasure. Three. Certainty or uncertainty—that means how far the experience is guaranteed to deliver the pleasure.” Her lips moved tentatively in a gamine kind of smile. The Greek Fury was giving way to a Gallic wit. “Four. Propinquity or remoteness—how close the pleasure is, in space as well as time. Five. This is a good one. Fecundity. How likely is it that the pleasure will lead to subsequent pleasures of the same sort?” She had us laughing, in relief as much as amusement. The impending test was forgotten. “Six. Purity—the absence of any little bits of pain mixed in. And seven. Extent. How far can the pleasure be shared with others?”

  “Well,” said Esther. “We could go out and share a pizza, at least.”

  The next morning Professor Boles, looking melancholy in her old gray tweeds, asked us to trace the successive phases of pre-Socratic thought. I think she loved the Greeks and hated to see the semester over. Dutifully, sophomorically, I repeated vision after vision until I reached the mystical poet and the prosaic man of science, who reassured us that there is indeed movement (and with it possibility, and hope), and underneath, the eternal and the immutable. Something abides, I wrote to her in my blue book, like a personal letter, my heart in my pen. Those elemental roots—earth, water, air, fire. (“Good but too literal,” she commented in red pencil. B plus.)

  I was disappointed that ther
e was no question remotely connected with how Thales measured the height of the pyramid. Even though Nina was right—Thales could have measured a man’s shadow at any time of day and applied the shadow-man ratio to the pyramid—I found the appeal of the story lay in the waiting. I imagined him patient and serene, maybe eating cookies and talking to his friends, waiting for that ripe moment when an insubstantial shadow on the sand inches up to a human magnitude that can break down a pyramid’s recalcitrance. But it was a no-nonsense exam.

  “That was not really related to the course, Lydia,” said Gabrielle. “Only of biographical interest. Are you taking the next semester?”

  “Sure.” I remembered her outburst of the night before. I would take it warily, not expecting truth but simply watching the mind flex and point. (I could never hold on to that correct attitude, though. Not then and not later.) I would devote my better energies to music. Practice more, learn the oboe too, and venture across the street, where the Eastern European professors were playing with computers and electronic equipment.

  Naturally Nina was going to take the second semester. Esther also, to our surprise.

  “Mais certainement,” she said. “I looked through the syllabus and the reading list. It says the world is all blind irrational striving. Someone’s will and idea. I mean, even the titles are terrific. Fear and Trembling? The Sickness unto Death? Believe me, I’m going to do just fine.” (She did. Professor Boles didn’t know what came over her. How the tables were turned! In the glow of early May sunshine Esther would try to explain to Nina what Sartre meant by bad faith, and what he meant when he said, “We were never more free than during the German occupation.” “How could they be?” Nina sat dulled with puzzlement. “Because they were close to the edge, stupid.” Esther was not a patient tutor. “Because they were close to death. Death,” she whispered hoarsely. “Everything they did had to be real. No time for fooling around. They had to resist, Nina. Make their lives mean something.”)

  Meanwhile we sat in the West End Bar sharing a bottle of wine to celebrate the end. Nina said, “I thought it was a pretty easy exam. Did everyone answer that question about Aristotle? I mean the little optional one.”

  We had all answered the optional question about Aristotle on friendship. We grinned at each other across the table, suddenly shy.

  “So what did we all say?” I asked.

  “What did you say, Lydia?” Gabrielle’s eyes shone blue and green, and she flashed her quizzical, wry look. At those moments I could swear she had the trace of an accent too, or maybe it was only an inflection of the voice. It still happens once in a while. The alien vowel, the sprung rhythm flickers by, almost between syllables, and vanishes.

  “I? All right. I said that there are three kinds of friendship. The first two kinds, friendship based on utility and friendship based on pleasure, are transient, and endure only as long as the friend continues to be useful and pleasant.” I was reciting Professor Boles’s words from memory. “But the third type, which is perfect friendship, is a friendship between equals, and founded in goodness. Each person wishes good for the other just as she would for herself; in fact Aristotle says ‘a friend is another self.’ The principal virtue of friendship is loving, and since it is a mutual love of character rather than of any passing quality such as pleasure or usefulness, it endures a lifetime as character itself endures. Which is not to say,” I concluded, and I poured wine slowly for all of us in turn, the way my father used to do at our Passover Seders with his teasing, maverick expression, “which is not to say that such friends cannot also be useful and pleasant, since whatever is enduringly good cannot be otherwise. I made it short, because after all, it was only worth five points out of the whole term’s work.”

  We drank to it.

  And then, slightly drunk, for we were young girls not used to wine, we danced our way back to the dormitory, prodding the reluctant Nina. It was the fire-bearer dance Gaby had choreographed the year before for the Prometheus myth—live torches flaming up Broadway in winter’s quick coming of dark.

  And then, years later, they tell us that there has never been any such thing as friendship among women, only rivalry, and that it is time to attempt Sisterhood. Sisterhood. The word has a grating sound. A friend is another self.

  Simple Gifts, 1980

  HERACLITUS WAS RIGHT. NO sooner is a position established than it erodes. The solid earth under our feet melts into water, evaporates into air, and is consumed in fire. I moved from one family to another. I saw the former family dissolve behind me and went on to the next with the doggedness of a peasant uprooted by a volcano, who insists on making his new home in the shadow of another active volcano.

  My father, hearty all his life, died of a heart attack at fifty-nine, not on the broad stripe of beach he loved so well, but in his insurance office, in his suit. My mother spent a year in Arizona to be near a sister, a year in Switzerland to be near Evelyn, then came and settled in an apartment near us. She was tentative about visiting, anxious not to intrude, but needlessly, for we all loved her, and when she appeared, like a fairy godmother she cooked and ironed and helped with homework—my burdens were her pleasures. She died last year, a peace-loving woman who believed in doing good and not straining the brain over the fine points or ambiguities. Painlessly and unambiguously, her heart stopped and she was gone—no more of her chicken soup, the children’s shirts are creased. I try. Phil eats the soup, puts on the shirts, says Grandma did it better. I don’t mind, but Vivian is offended for me. “Mommy is an orphan now,” she tells Phil. “You shouldn’t say mean things to her.” “It’s okay, Vivie, I know I don’t iron as well as Grandma did.” She puts her arms around me, not quite nine years old, long thin arms. “Do you mind very much being an orphan?” “Well, sometimes.” “I don’t want you and Daddy to die. I would mind a lot.” I promise not to die till she’s much older, and I take the liberty of promising the same for Victor, who’s at his studio. “Even if they did, Viv,” says Phil, trying to smooth out his shirt by hand, “you’d probably only feel bad at first. Then you’d get used to it.” “Oh no! How could I get used to that?” “Phil, for the moment let’s just say we won’t die, okay?” He skulks out of the room with dissatisfied steps, heels down heavily in protest, so that his shoes are always down at heel. The second of four is an awkward position. His standards are severe. He is troubled by injustice, by white lies and compromises, troubled by the demands of teachers for neatness and coherence, troubled by his long gangly body, and by the contentment of others, which he calls complacency. His recent, man’s voice is gruff: perhaps he feels kind words would sound incongruous in so gruff a voice. He approves of his father, whom he resembles: I imagine Victor had that troubled intensity as a boy of fourteen and a half, but Victor also had his painting to absorb the excess. Phil regards me, however, as a frivolous character. Flighty. Airy. A luftmensch, as my father called people who had no life insurance. That is because I run the house in a haphazard manner and go out at odd hours to rehearse and do concerts. Phil likes to see me safely drab around the house in his old corduroy pants and no makeup. He looks askance when I dress up in scarves and earrings and colored tights, making up for the years of drabness he cannot remember. When I go twice a year to meet his teachers he says, “Don’t put feathers in your ears. Wear something normal.” “Come into my closet. Do you want to pick it out?” I shouldn’t. I’m the mother. Victor talks to him in his room sometimes, in the evenings. As I pass the closed door, Phil’s rumbling voice sounds aggrieved, while Victor’s better-tempered tones undulate in waves of limitless, loving patience. Then late at night in bed, Victor tells me what Phil has on his mind. I appreciate his telling me but I resent getting my information secondhand.

  “To think,” I have murmured to Victor in bed, “that this was a boy who actually baked apple pies. He started making his own lunch when he was ten! Vivie and Alan will never make their own lunch, I can tell. He was so nice,” I grumble. “Remember he used to creep into our bed because he was
afraid of the dark? He used to bring me bouquets of dandelions in the park. I didn’t have the heart to tell him they were a weed.” He was a ruddy, easygoing boy, a boy who could be trusted to take care of his younger brother and sister, a bit of a clown—his imitations of a pixilated neighbor talking to her basset hound were wickedly accurate—a boy who left quaintly spelled notes for me in odd places (the breadbox: “Please bye bread”), a boy who made amazing, Gaudi-like constructions out of pieces of metal and rubber that plumbers left behind—friends would save old washers and doorknobs and scraps of tubing for Phil. And his apple pies were splendid, only someone had to light the oven; he was afraid to strike a match.

  “All that was before puberty,” says Victor. “It will pass. Don’t fret. Would you scratch my back? No, lower. Higher. Left. Ah.”

  Still, I worry that he is lost to me. I have no skill with the taciturn. Althea’s adolescence is full of drama too, but above all, communicative. She likes to drag us through her every phase.

  “At least suggest that he wash his hair. Those boys with long hair don’t realize it has to be taken care of.”

  Beneath my anxiety is guilt. He was born during a bad time, his first few years spent under a cloud. I was the cloud. I had paralysis of the will, a casualty of a way of life. But I recovered and determined I would not get that way again. I do not want Phil to be a casualty, permanently shadowed though the cloud is gone.

  The family from the dormitory dissolved, after graduation, into good friends. I shared an apartment with Gaby until she married Don, who was becoming an orthopedic surgeon. I was bothered by her marriage; I found Don too proper. I wanted to see Gaby become a dancer, and how many proper doctors’ wives are dancers? But she made her choices. She got happy children, happy husband, happy happy—what Nina had wanted. Nina did not marry.

  Esther was married twice, briefly and disastrously. Once to the boy who made her wait so long for her first view of the ocean and told her about the Polar Bear Club. The first time he beat her up she moved into our dingy apartment in the East Twenties for three weeks, sleeping on a cot near Althea’s crib. The second time, the summer she was twenty-six and seven weeks pregnant, she lost the baby and Ralph was taken to the hospital to be detoxified. She also lost her job in the production department of a publishing house because she couldn’t concentrate. Driving back from visiting Ralph in the hospital, she hit a truck on the dark wet road. The truckdriver was unhurt, fortunately. Esther suffered whiplash and a shoulder injury, spit out a couple of teeth, and almost lost the sight in her left eye.