Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “Don’t listen to it. Just do it.”

  “Did you see Hephzibah’s obituary in the Times this winter?”

  “Yes! I certainly did!” Indignation. I can see her smacking her knee, tossing her black hair. “‘Sister of Violinist’! But what can you expect from the Times? Look, Lydia, I have another idea. I’ve told Jasper and he likes it. I want to try some ragtime. Joplin.”

  “I think that revival is about over. In one ear and out the other.”

  “That’s exactly why. Now it can be done seriously. It’s a tremendous sound, and they have some arranged for string quartets. I could get Carla and someone else. I have this new friend, a kid at WBAI. He’s always looking for something slightly bizarre. You’ll play the original and we’ll do the arrangements. Then he’ll interview us, we’ll talk about its great classical qualities, the problems of adapting for a quartet, et cetera, et cetera. And they record.”

  “I don’t think I’m in the mood for ragtime.”

  “Oh, mood, schmood. We’ll even do something from Treemonisha.”

  “Where are you going to dig up an arrangement of that?”

  “I’ll do the arrangements.”

  “Rosalie, that’s so much work.”

  “So? I have time. I have no babies pulling at my skirts. Oh, by the way, I saw Karl again last night.” The husband she had her fill of a year and a half ago and has been unable to stop talking about since. “We had another—you should pardon the expression—date.”

  “No kidding? What did you do on your date?”

  “We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, then we went back to his apartment.”

  “Ah! A very thorough date this time, sounds like. So, do you think he’s someone you’ll want to see again?”

  “He seems to have recovered from that spell of premature ejaculation, for one thing.”

  “Jeepers. To what do you attribute this miracle?”

  “Other women. I suppose he figured out if he could do it for strangers he could do it for me. He says it’s because his hostility has decreased, but of course he has to say something like that. Frankly, Lydia, the whole evening was … not bad. Not bad at all. I always did like the guy, you know.”

  Rosalie! After your hours of recrimination! He called your mode of living acting out! The neurotic artistic temperament! And then his insane working hours. Psychiatry his mistress. Preoccupied: you didn’t know whether you felt more alone with him or without him. Controlling: opened your mail. Occasionally forgot his children’s names. Once a raised kitchen knife. Lesser-grade evils: Cigars in bed. Couldn’t cut the nails on his right hand. Congenitally incapable of refilling an ice-cube tray. I know this man so well I could have been married to him myself. The brief times I met him he seemed pleasant enough.

  “I know exactly what you’re thinking. But after all, twenty-seven years. You become attached. Three children.”

  “They’re all off on their own. Remember?”

  “Well, we’ll see. I’m not rushing into anything. It was nice to be with someone who didn’t ask questions about what I like, for a change. I hate this new business of utilitarian discussions in bed, having to verbalize every little whim. How is Victor, speaking of … ?”

  “Oh, all right, I guess.”

  “And the kids?”

  “Phil’s okay. Althea’s away in Princeton till tomorrow. There’s some conference about Romance languages. She got special permission to go because of Middlebury.”

  “She’s impressive, your little Althea.”

  “Expressive, anyway. She does get around.”

  “That reminds me. We are going north sometime in November, you and Jasper and I, maybe a few others, I’m not sure. New Haven, Boston, some of the college towns around there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’ve been asked by some arts council. For two weeks. I’ll tell you the details tomorrow when we rehearse—they’re in my briefcase. Lyd, are you still there?”

  “I can go, I guess.”

  “Yes.” The dynamo stops for a moment. “Yes,” she says quietly, “you can easily go.”

  “It is strange, isn’t it, how things turn out?” I can feel her listening. She does everything so intensely. “All I do is pack up and go. The kids can manage now. I can’t think of a single excuse.”

  “Well, good. You’ll travel a lot, then. It’s what you always needed anyway. It’s why you didn’t—”

  “Oh, it’s too late for rich and famous, Rosalie. I don’t need that.”

  “You never know. Look, before I go there’s one more little thing.”

  “You’re so full of little things today. I gather this is supposed to be a therapeutic conversation?” She’s quiet again, and wounded. “I’m sorry, really. Don’t mind me. What is it?”

  “Actually it’s something I need from you. A favor. You know this all-day Bach thing I’m putting on at the Calliope Center? Well, Sandy Schuster had to leave town for a sick mother. So we are sort of without a harpsichordist. We have someone to do her thing in the evening, but there’s a three o’clock bit …”

  “Rosalie, I’m not a—”

  “Wait a second before you say no. It’s a Handel violin sonata, you don’t have a lot to do there, and a Brandenburg. The sixth.”

  “I’m not a harpsichordist.”

  “I’ve heard you plenty of times. At the school, at that church in the Village. You were fine.”

  “That wasn’t serious. Look, there must be a dozen decent harpsichordists around. Even one of the students.”

  “I’ve been looking, Lydia. The good ones are all busy or out of town or want more money, and the others … well. I need someone who can at least stay together.”

  “I won’t be able to do much more than that.”

  “I’ll bring the music tomorrow. You have a week.”

  “A week. Oh, terrific. I’ll have to practice there. I’m not taking any chances with the instrument.”

  “Fine. I’ll arrange everything. If you want to go at night I’ll even get you a key. And thanks. So listen, make up your mind about the ‘Trout,’ bring it along tomorrow, and also the Brahms and the Mendelssohn, and I’ll see you at two.”

  “I’m worn out just talking to you.”

  “Get a good night’s sleep, then. Say hello to Victor.” She whirls off; her voice hangs in the air another moment like the last descending dust of a tornado.

  The Electric Company is over. I carry the remaining bits of peel into the kitchen and pour Scotch over ice, then turn on the “Trout” again, to accompany my cooking. For my shopping spree is about to achieve Aristotelian entelechy—its potential becoming actualized. I no longer feel the obscure yet keen longing that in the morning made me plan this elaborate dinner … but I might as well. As I set out my purchases, the kitchen table takes on the cheery demeanor of a photo from Woman’s Day—fresh ripe this, plump succulent that. Where to begin? The Raw and the Cooked was a book Victor read and admired a few years ago, but I couldn’t get past the introduction. Surely this is not the way real cooks begin, a dozen colorful items waiting, mute and attentive, on the kitchen table? How did I ever manage to cook for six? Using sense memory, a redemptive faculty that lets me play pieces I haven’t done in years but whose patterns are stored in my fingers as in a data bank, I prepare the chicken and arrange it in a Pyrex pan. Cloves of garlic, pats of butter, wedges of lemon, sprigs of parsley. Vivian once recited to me the wealth of terms for animals in groups: flock of sheep, gaggle of geese, pack of wolves, pride of lions … She loved peculiar usages, also puns, anagrams, palindromes. (Onion. Onion? Why not onion? And how do you weigh air, anyhow?) Into the oven it goes; one sure thing on this changeable earth is that an hour and a quarter from now, at seven thirty-eight on a Thursday evening in mid-May, Lydia, eleven and a half weeks from the demise of her younger children, will have baked a lemon-butter chicken, Amen. Well done, Lydia. Turn the record over and have another drink.

  While I make saffron rice a
nd a salad with the cheap bitter lettuce, I pay close attention to the “Trout.” Yes, I could do that again. Not perhaps with the seemingly effortless buoyancy of Hephzibah Menuhin, but respectably. If I work at it, and shun the temptations of coloring books and educational TV. If Victor keeps his telephone voice out of my life. Tomorrow. Meanwhile, drink up. Tomorrow I’ll tell Rosalie that yes, I’ll do ragtime on WBAI, the gig in New England, even the harpsichord, though the last is definitely an error in professional judgment. Rosalie is trying too hard, but what the hell? Life is not all bad. Everyone’s got troubles. And Scotch is a fantastic thing—what it can do for you, that is. I set the table for two.

  At seven-fifteen, shortly before the feast is ready, Phil appears, wearing the same old corduroys but a spiffy plaid shirt. “I’m going to Burger King. I forgot to tell you. I’m meeting this girl—liana? The one who calls about the trig.” Like the neighbors, he avoids my eyes.

  Fortunately for him I am well into my third Scotch. “Uh, that’s very nice. You might have said something, though. I cooked this whole meal.”

  “Well, I wasn’t really sure. I mean, I just called. … I’ll eat it tomorrow, okay? I’ve got to go.”

  He is not here for my use, I so nobly told Althea. Very well. “Have a good time. Take your keys, I might be sleeping.”

  “I’ve got them. ’Bye.”

  Going out with a girl! The first time, as far as I know. Well, that is a fine thing for solitary Phil—I’m not too mad to be pleased. Only what shall I do with this dinner? Were I a reader of Cosmopolitan I would know how to invite a friend to drop over for an unexpected treat. Any angle! But I don’t have those kinds of friends, alas. I could call George or Nina, Rosalie, even Irving Bloch, thinner since his wife died. The splendid minister, to minister? Patricia and Sam, who don’t get out much—but no doubt they’ve eaten; they keep baby hours. How about Victor and the Montessori teacher? We could try being ultra-civilized.

  In truth there’s not a living soul I’d care to see right now except maybe Evelyn, but she is in Switzerland; most impractical. She was so fluid and calm and captivating, my sister, so like Vivian, the sort of person whose presence, for no evident reason, is a treasure like grace. I might entice her as I did when I was thirteen and she was ten and our parents went to the movies, leaving me money for an excursion to the corner store. “Evelyn.” I’d knock on her closed door. “I’ve got chocolate chip mint ice cream. I’ve got Yankee Doodles.” And she would come out and listen wide-eyed and serene to my chronicles of junior-high life. How we loved to eat and to laugh! I could call long distance, all the way to the Alps: “Evelyn. I’ve got lemon chicken. Saffron rice. Bitter herbs.” I can see her seated at my table, smiling and quietly vibrant, listening absorbed and radiant. It would be like having Vivie back.

  I eat it myself, listening, with the score spread out on the living room floor. And then I take the score to bed. I can hear it better without the music; the ensemble does not splinter apart quite so badly that way. Yet it’s hard to concentrate, all alone in the house at night. I’m not used to it. A skill you develop with practice, Nina once said of being alone. He bought this huge bed to make love with a sense of space. Ravish me at any angle. Far across the space, over on his nighttable, is the book he left half-read, open, face down: Malinowski’s Magic, Science and Religion, the book of myths. Why was he rereading that? He knew it—he studied anthropology in college. And why didn’t he take it with him—did he expect his evenings would be too sizzling for serious reading?

  All alone and still; something in the back of my mind stirs, shoves its way forward, and bursts out full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus, a fantasy: the Korean boy stands beside the bed with that shock of coarse black hair, those lowered dark eyes, wide cheekbones, perfect teeth. The big bony hands used to hauling crates of fruit, their fingers stretched from piling pyramids of honeydews, hang idly by his sides. He wears the coveted Adidas sneakers. He stands gawky and puzzled though he must be nineteen at least. Can he be so innocent? I beckon.

  He doesn’t seem to know even where to begin. Is he frightened, bashful, repelled?—I’m an older woman, old enough to be his mother. Will he cooperate? Ah, clay under my hands: I will shape him into a slavish lover. Do this. Do that. Do whatever pleases me. See how I move in mysterious ways. Let me ravish you at any angle. The boy awakens, begins to seek after his own desire. I am his Frankenstein and his landscape both. I found what made him work and he found his desire. No speech, only brute grunts. His face has become brutish too—the heavy lips hanging open and wet, the luminous eyes dulled, the hair in disarray. That fine intelligence has fled from his face, leaving a generic male. I have created a brute. So it was done to me; I pass it along. Our arms and legs coil and entwine. We paw and scrape at each other’s want like dogs at the site of a buried bone, and when we find it we gnaw till the marrow is all sucked out. And then he sleeps, flat on his back on Victor’s side, and his human identity returns: the lips soft and sensitive once more, smiling faintly. The fine intelligence too. Beneath his lids is rapid eye movement: he dreams, not of me. No urgency in his body now, no trace of it except for the slick wetness. Pleasure has made him weak as a worm, and as shiny too. Now he is at my mercy. But the myth of the castrating female is all wrong—an asinine projection. That’s not the place that’s done me harm. Let him keep his useful worm. Esther was so naive when she made Griselda do that to Walter. I would make the slice and draw the blood across the throat, and watch the face that can change so swiftly from human to brute to deceiver change its last, and bloody Victor’s pillow.

  He shrinks and vanishes unharmed, once more a small furrow in the back of my mind. What puny revenge. I get up and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, in Phil’s gray corduroy pants and Althea’s green T-shirt. Even through this nondescript outfit the body shows itself trim and youngish—miracle, after all those pregnancies. But from the neck up, oh dear. Not at all sleek. Tomorrow will be different—such indulgence as today’s is killing. I put away the leftover dinner and take the garbage out to the back hall, where Lily’s TV trips me, resenting its fate, and I curse it as usual. In the shower I study my body clinically as Victor might have done—an object with bumps and planes and hollows. Clay, like the woman Evelyn and Mother and I shaped on the beach, where the waves rushed at her. The gentler ones merely eroded her, the most violent one tore off chunks, till at last I kicked at her remains with exultation, for she was only clay and had no feelings, and anyway, what use was half a woman?

  The next morning as I practiced the “Trout” in my small studio off the bedroom, a substantial shadow passed over the corner of my right eye. For two bars I ignored it, and then I went to look. A boy stood in the center of the bedroom. No product of my imagination, this one, but a real, short boy with a slight frame and a wan, wary face in which the eyes bulged unhealthily. We stared at each other for I don’t know how long. My knees didn’t turn to water. Concrete: a game of statues. His dark hair was greased back, and he wore a well-ironed red cotton shirt tucked neatly into his jeans and open halfway down an unimpressive chest; the short sleeves were rolled up, showing puerile biceps. The fire escape window was locked, but the other one, three feet away, was wide open. Stretching over from the ledge of the fire escape, he could have fallen into the rear alley. He fell instead into my life, and seemed even more stunned there than I. I breathed first. “What do you want?”

  I was bigger than he was, possibly stronger. He made no move to speak, but with rabbit twitches glanced to right and left: there was only the stillness of an empty apartment.

  “You really think it’s worth it, risking your life to steal something? Nine floors!” And how your mother would have grieved! Look how beautifully she ironed your shirt! Unless he didn’t have a mother, like George, or had one who didn’t give a damn.

  At last he ventured to look straight at me—crazy lady!—for an instant. His bulgy eyes grew larger with confusion. He was a year or two older than Phil, seventeen, ma
ybe, and like Phil had a volatile, uncommitted sulkiness around the mouth: I will not let you find me out. He took a breath and finally moved; reached in his back pocket and brought out a knife. The blade shot forth like a snake’s tongue.

  I folded my arms across my chest. “Oh for Chrissake, will you put that thing away? What could I do to you? And you don’t even look like you could use it.” He switched the blade back in but kept the knife in his fist.

  “Anyone else climb in with you?” He shook his head. “You can’t be all alone. This is not your line. They’re waiting down in back, right? Sent you up to see if you could get anything?”

  He nodded once, stiff as a doll. His face was gleaming with sweat and his red shirt was darkening under the arms.

  “Your first time, I bet. What’d you do, take gymnastics at school or something?”

  His shoulders jerked as he took a quick step back. Yes, kid, there’s not much I don’t know about you kids, I made a career of it. He was in a nightmare; I was his tormentor. Nothing anyone had taught him had prepared him for this. I knew precisely how he felt. He glanced over his shoulder at the open window, and when he turned to me again his eyes were filmed with panic.

  “No, you better not try getting out that way. Don’t push your luck. You’ll walk out the door. Listen, I have just the thing for you. Come along. I mean it. I’ll give you something your hot-shot friends will like.” I had him precede me through the hall to the kitchen and out to the rear landing where the garbage cans, bikes, sleds, and TV were piled. “Take this.” He stared, then his eyes darted as if I had some trick up my sleeve. “I’m not kidding. You’d be doing me a favor.”

  He put his knife away and lifted the TV tentatively. “No shit?” he asked.

  “I said take it. Yes, that’s right.” I led him back through the kitchen and to the front door. “Take the elevator to the basement, make a left, go past the boiler room to a blue door, and make sure to slam it shut behind you. If you meet anyone you can say the lady on the ninth floor gave it to you.”