“Well, finish up,” I say in a hard low voice. “Do you mind finishing what you started? It wasn’t quite finished.”
He gets back to work. “Yeah, but listen, baby, not so loud this time.” He has become Humphrey Bogart, lisping nasally out of the side of his mouth, to make us laugh. This time I keep my eyes as well as legs wide open and my heart closed—I keep a hand flat on my chest, holding it down—so there is no fire and no shattering glass and no hurtling through the snowy night, only wet furious pangs, nothing but biochemistry going about its business. I’m quiet, too. I’m experienced—four kids, always a sleeping baby in the house—I know how to keep quiet. I also know these bodies very well; if we stop at a certain instant and he gets inside me fast I can prolong it, make it seem endless. Oh, I know this system like a machine. So does Victor. At the right moment we bustle around efficiently. It works. But I’m not finished with him yet. The nights are long, I’ll milk him dry. After a while there is a slight scuffle—he wants me on top now, but I decline the honor. We are a living contradiction to the sexual politics of our age: here nobody wants to be on top; here each one wants to be smothered. He wins, naturally, with a fifty-pound advantage—a gracious, grinning winner, gasping, “You’ll have your way another time, kiddo.” Finally he falls back exhausted, spreading his arms like a crucifixion. “Lydia, enough already. I’m a middle-aged man.”
Yes, and you’re screwing another woman besides. You have to husband your resources. We both have a drink of bourbon, straight, and he tells me he sees what I mean about doing it without the soul. My soul, in particular, was not in it. He says it uncritically, simply as an observation.
“So what? You got what you wanted, didn’t you? You wanted to see me let go. You wanted to see me need you. Use you.”
“Yes,” he says. “Plus I saw the fire too. I know all about it. But I didn’t stop.”
“Oh. Is that the lesson? To walk right through the fire? No, thanks.” To rescue them, yes, like Steffie. But now, what for?
Our bodies are coated with sweat and sticky patches. We lie in a close embrace on his side, sticking together, and tonight we will sleep well.
This land of ours, coarsened by blight, cannot endure. It’s only a matter of time.
A Day in the Life, or Taking It
THE PEOPLE IN MY building are afraid to look me in the face. They murmur hello, uncertain whether to smile any more; their diffident half-smiles wobble on and off like failing light bulbs. Should they talk as usual about the mailman’s erratic hours, the recent rash of burglaries on our block, the state of the plumbing? Is someone in my position still concerned with such things? They needn’t be afraid. There is no danger that my face will crumple. I wear make-up, the expensive kind that looks like young skin; my face is masked as in a Greek play, and I do the usual—say hello in the lobby, hold the elevator door open for my elders and for mothers with strollers. I am “taking it”; to the point that Victor’s frustration has spilled over the dam of his endurance.
Not all of them. An ancient Greek woman lives on the floor below mine, her face a brown web of wrinkles pierced by sparkly blue eyes. She speaks only Greek but manages to keep up with local events nonetheless. When we meet in the elevator she mutters strange syllables, shaking her head from side to side, the bright eyes moist. Can she be muttering wisdom from her ancestors, the great philosophers—“Bear and forbear”? Once she caught my hand and squeezed it for the eight-floor descent. My hand, greedy. Was she trying to recall to me Epictetus’ story about greedy hands? “See children thrusting their hands into a narrow-necked jar, and striving to pull out the nuts and figs it contains: if they fill the hand, they cannot pull it out again, and then they fall to tears.—‘Let go a few of them, and then you can draw out the rest!’—You, too, let your desire go! covet not many things, and you will obtain.” At last she released the hand; I held the door open for her, and outside, walked in the opposite direction.
And three floors down lives a large and splendid minister who became famous opposing the Vietnam war and now runs a disarmament program at his large and splendid church. Victor used to stop and talk to him on the street, and we attended his rallies. I am afraid, when I meet this imposing man whose energy radiates to fill the elevator so that I want to cower in a corner—I am afraid he may say something infinitely wise from Ecclesiastes or Job, and I stand aloof. But he has never said a consoling or a wise word. He alone greets me as before; looks me in the face; mentions the weather, the noisy punk rock party that kept us all up half the night; holds the elevator door not with pity but with old-fashioned chivalry.
Thursday morning, mid-May, going out after practicing for three hours, I find my neighbor from across the hall at the elevator. “Patricia! I haven’t seen you in ages. Where’ve you been?”
“Hi, Lydia.” She looks past me, embarrassment compounded by her baby carriage. She wishes she could tuck it in a pocket, make it disappear. Oh Lord, she is thinking, it’s so damn obvious—the enormous shiny black kind with high wheels and a canvas hood, from which a row of colored plastic rings hangs to amuse the baby, Bobby, whose head lolls on a blue satin pillow with an eyelet ruffle. Patricia’s disapproving parents bought the carriage. They also help pay for the apartment she lives in with Sam, her husband, a lifeguard at a midtown health club. The sweet-natured Patricia is twenty years old and five feet tall, with long smooth light brown hair and placid eyes, a capable girl whose stance toward life is sanguine and accepting. She wears drab old army pants, a green army jacket, old sneakers. She met Sam in high school and at sixteen was pregnant. The baby was Samantha, now in the nursery school Vivian and Alan went to. Patricia helps out there two mornings a week, as I once did. She never got to finish high school and before long was pregnant again—not handy with birth control, she mumbled to me, and residually Catholic besides. I used to feel sorry for her, but soon realized she likes having the children, she is happy with Sam, happy to have her own apartment and no longer live cramped in her parents’ furnished basement in Port Washington. When she first moved in two years ago she called me Mrs. Rowe, but I told her I was not as old as all that, she could call me Lydia. Sam could never stop calling me Mrs. Rowe. Occasionally Althea would babysit, but since the accident Patricia has not asked. The new baby is about five months old.
“How’s he doing?”
She arranges the blankets as if to conceal him. “He’s fine,” in a thin voice. She fusses in her canvas bag, finds a tissue, wipes Bobby’s nose.
We enter the elevator together. “Come on, Patricia, you can’t avoid me forever.”
“It’s only—I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Just talk like before.”
She sniffs and blows her nose with the same tissue she used on Bobby. “How are Althea and Phil?”
“All right.”
“And Mr. Rowe?”
Victor. I haven’t seen Victor in several days.
“Fine. Listen, you can still drop him off if you need to. Really. He was never any trouble.”
During our freezing, snowy winter, Patricia now and then parked the infant with me while she “dashed out” to pick up Samantha or run errands. He could sleep while music played: while the repatriated Henrietta Frye and I worked on a four-handed Debussy suite; through the Beethoven G major trio with my old woodwind friends, a flute and a penetrating bassoon; with Rosalie and Jasper and me stopping and starting our way through the “Archduke.” Such a remarkable sleeper—I worried that he might be deaf or brain-damaged. “Nonsense,” said Rosalie. “He’s just a placid baby.” While Jasper tuned we would stare into the carriage nostalgically, Rosalie and I, wishing we could pick him up just for the feel of it. But we knew from experience you never wake a sleeping baby.
“I didn’t think I should leave him,” says Patricia, maneuvering the carriage out of the elevator. “It didn’t seem right. But if you really mean it.”
“Sure, I know what it’s like.” The doorman bows his head in awe as I
approach, and hands me the mail with a sorry, balletic extension of the arm. “Thanks, Carlos. I’ll see you around, Patricia. I’ve got to rush to a lesson.”
The first of two students, a brand-new one of about twenty, talented but sloppily trained, wants to talk at length about the Chopin Ballade I have him working on: the emotions—melancholy, passionate, nostalgic, etc. I interrupt and tell him to forget all that until he has gotten every detail of the timing and phrasing and dynamics with perfect accuracy. Then he can talk to me about emotion, if it is still necessary. He stares as though I am something monstrous, but he will come round in time, when he hears the results. The other is a prodigy of twelve who plays her Beethoven Rondo with astonishing technical skill. She sounds like a music box. She has to be reminded that music is more than timing and phrasing and dynamics executed with perfect accuracy. When I mention a sense of narrative, the unfolding of a passage from here to there like a journey, she blinks in bewilderment. She too will come round, but it will take longer.
On my way out I hear mistimed snatches of a Schubert sonata mingled with shouting, and as I move closer the voice is unmistakable: Irving Bloch again, martinet of the strings, in the East European accent which grows thicker when he loses his temper. Passing the room, I cannot resist peering in the back door.
“Ah, Lydia!” he shouts. “You appear like a miracle! Mrs. Rowe will show you how to do this together,” he says to the quaking pianist and violinist. “Together! Come, come, Lydia, come here to me.”
I smile at the two students and frown at Irving, but he insists—“Come!”—points to the place in the music, and raises the violin to his grizzly chin. The girl hurriedly gets up from the bench. Irving and I play the sixteen bars, allegro vivace. My hands seem yards away, my arms long ribbons from a wooden spool. But it sounds fine, not merely correct but rich with vivacity. The vivacity comes from the hands alone; they were well-educated, and they continue to transmit life and feeling, just as hair and fingernails grow for a while on a corpse. I imagine my hands could be lopped off and continue this way indefinitely, like the Red Shoes.
“There!” he shouts triumphantly to the pianist. “You see it can be done together! And hear the exuberance, the joie de vivre! That is how it should sound.”
While he rants on I show the girl the sixteenth notes she is playing as eighth notes and the two rests she is misreading. “And don’t mind Dr. Bloch. He’s that way with everyone except the strings. Count. Don’t be afraid to move your lips.”
“Thank you,” she whispers.
“Irving.” I take his arm and drag him to the door. Outside he is transformed, warm and paternal.
“So how is it going, my sweetheart? Everything all right?”
“Fine. Look, Irving, I know I shouldn’t interfere, but you can’t keep on doing this. It’s no way to teach. You don’t help them, you paralyze them.”
No one scolds Irving to his face. He has been here twenty-three years to my eight and has an unchallengeable manner. Moreover, his temper has been shorter since his wife died last year—but how long must we indulge him? He squints in surprise and ponders for a moment. “Yes, patience, patience. I do try, believe me, but the ear hurts, you know? I feel it like a pain—I cry out. You look a little pale, mein kind. You’re sure you’re all right?”
Again I shake my head at him. “Joie de vivre! At this stage, Irving? Really!”
“Ach, I’m sorry for that.”
“Not me! It’s them you should be apologizing to. Give them a little time. As it is, when I get them it’ll be days before their hands stop shaking.”
Chastised and shocked, he kisses me good-bye on the forehead.
“Oh, I’m still planning on that evening chamber group, starting next month. Are you going to do it with me?”
“A diplomat you’re not. First you yell at me, then you ask a favor? I said I’d do it, didn’t I? But maybe you want someone sweeter?” He grins flirtatiously. He knows he is the best.
“I want you. Let’s talk about it tomorrow, okay?” I am a little shocked too. Protocol no longer seems to matter; restraint doesn’t matter today.
Under massing clouds I limp down Broadway to the supermarket, where I consult my list like an ordinary woman. I used to shop at eccentric hours and save this precious solitary time for work. But I’ve decided on a day of self-indulgence. Anyhow, I have all the solitude I need. I buy butter and rice and saffron powder and a four-pound chicken, a chicken possibly not as good as the one I could get at the butcher’s, but I have been avoiding my butcher. We have a long and intimate relationship. Anybody privy to one’s choice of dinners for nine years becomes an intimate of sorts. Together we have been through the death of his father-in-law, his son’s acceptance at medical school, his daughter’s marriage, miscarriage, and more adherent pregnancy—she should be due any day now. When Althea became a vegetarian two years ago I told the butcher. He did not take it personally. “Well, children, what’re you going to do?” He shrugged. That is his sentence for all regrettable turns of events. It’s I who cannot look him in the face. The last time I did, nine weeks ago, he said how grieved he had been to hear the news. His white apron was spattered with blood and his hands looked raw. He is a slender, balding man with a long nose, a curving mobile mouth, and thick glasses. He told me feelingly that he remembered how many long years I had been a customer of his, how I used to come in holding them by the hand and they would play with the striped cat amidst the sawdust on the floor, and how he would give them each a slice of bologna. “You too, sometimes. You would take a slice, I remember. Maybe you’d like a slice now?”
“Thank you. Very good.”
“You were always a nice family. Well, what’re you going to do? Things happen. So, what can I give you today?”
I asked for three pounds of chuck for stew. At the time I was wondering also, well, what am I going to do? But I’ll go back someday soon. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. I don’t want him to think I’ve deserted him after so long for no good reason, or that I no longer appreciate his excellent meats. And I want to find out what kind of baby his daughter had.
In the Koreans’ fruit and vegetable store I buy garlic, mushrooms, lemons, the fixings for a salad including some very cheap and very bitter lettuce I have recently discovered and taken a fancy to, whose name I do not know and the Koreans cannot tell me since they speak hardly any English (they are learning Spanish first), as well as three huge, thick-skinned, costly oranges, the kind I have been eating since I was a child, whose tart rinds I munched slowly in the college dormitory to the benign indifference of Melanie, who piled up banana peels. Picking out my oranges, I notice, and not for the first time either, the son of the Korean couple who run the market. He is arranging lettuce. When he sees me looking he nods and lowers his intelligent eyes. Not from fear—the family is new here and doesn’t yet follow neighborhood gossip—but from shyness. A tall, lean, muscular boy of about nineteen, he wears tight jeans and a black turtleneck jersey through which I can watch his back and shoulder muscles straining to lift the crates of lettuce. He moves lightly, almost stealthily, in his silent Adidas sneakers, the kind Alan craved. He has large boyish hands and fine wrists. He has wonderful coarse black hair, perfect for the flowing styles of today; it hangs, clean and thick, over his forehead. I wonder if he blows it dry, if he is vain. His cheekbones are high and set wide apart, his eyes dark and magnificently soft, his lips large and soft too, his teeth perfect. What a beautiful boy. I tuck him away in the back of my mind.
I’m in the Koreans’ place rather than the Cubans’ grocery not merely because the fruits and vegetables here are better and cheaper, but also because I resolved a while ago no longer to subject myself to the political views of the Cuban store’s Jewish fruit man. The fruit man lost his entire family in a concentration camp in Poland. He barely escaped, clawing his way through the forests of Poland with the Germans at his heels. From his descriptions I envision Poland as a heavily wooded country. As he dropped McIntosh a
pples into a paper bag, he would tell me of his journey with a numbed but unyielding wrath, in a flat sneering voice that was a personal accusation and a threat. His face would go as gray as his smock. Imagine, forty years later—and here his voice would shrink to a whisper—he has to listen all day long to the anti-Semitic remarks of his Hispanic and black co-workers. They hate him but he pretends not to hear, what does he care? If I chatted with the black and Spanish clerks his eyes would brood over me, mocking and resentful. “So, what do you think about what happened to us now?” was a frequent greeting. “Us” means Israel. A raid on a kibbutz, children killed. Terrible, I groan. “Animals,” he sneers. “Why do you think they call them gorillas?” Yes, terrible. But that would not suffice. No other nation in the world has any moral probity. “We are the best people in the world.” “We” never hurt anyone, just mind our business, unlike local muggers. He waits for me to agree. My response is judged halfhearted; he says I understand nothing, nothing. Ever since the Republicans were turned out of office in 1976, he informs me, the Jews have had nothing but trouble. Is that true? Hastily I would try to recall recent history, but before I can get anywhere: Do I know—he shakes a finger while he weighs my bananas—who would be the best President for Israel? No, who? Nixon. Nixon? Oh, come on, Mr. Zeitlowitz. Sure! What would be so terrible? Doesn’t everyone cheat a little? Ah, they made such a fuss over that business. But when he was President things were good for Israel. But … but—I try not to splutter—but what about us? How about what would be good for us? (How about not even arguing with him?) If anything happens to that little country out there, he threatens, shaking the ringer in my face, where would those poor people go? I retreat from the finger. “I don’t want anything to happen to them. Did I say that? I wish them all the best.” “You just don’t have the feeling I do,” he accuses with a weak smile. I can’t deny that. Guilty! I did not claw my way through the forests of Poland. “So!” He spreads out his arms, a paper bag of fruit dangling from each hand. “We disagree! That’s that!” He gives me a sardonic, condescending smile: how stupid she is. Actually I should be flattered: it is the kind of smile reserved for intimates, landsman, whose loyalty can be taken for granted. He thinks he sees through me, and perhaps he does. “Okay, then, that’s that.” I too smile familiarly, and reach for the bags of fruit. “But if anything happens to Israel,” he snarls, shoving the bags at me with contempt, “it will be here just like in Nazi Germany.” He nods his head up and down ominously, twice. “You’ll see!”
Disturbances in the Field Page 31
