Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  The words of my butcher! I had returned to my butcher yesterday, in fact, after three months. A man of elegant manners, unlike the fruit man, he had no questions, no recriminations. No nostalgic slices of bologna, either. A cordial greeting, a “What can I give you today?”

  His daughter had given birth to an eight-pound boy.

  “Okay, if you’re going, go. You’ll miss your train and church and all.”

  She smiled shyly. “‘Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?’”

  “Ecclesiastes?”

  “Job.”

  “Job! So, where?”

  “Well, it doesn’t say explicitly. Then it wouldn’t be a great book.”

  “How come you know all of that by heart?”

  “Hah! I’ll tell you—all the time I was in SAVE, they had no books around except pamphlets on organic gardening and righteous cookbooks. They didn’t want to be inhibited by established thinking. Each person was supposed to reinvent the wheel, more or less. There was a Bible, though. I guess that wasn’t considered dangerous. After a while I got desperate for something to read, so I read it.”

  “Nearly two years, Esther. How could you?”

  “What’re you going to do?” she repeated. “I did it. It’s done. I can quote a lot of the Bible, though. I’ll see you, Lyd.”

  “Thanks for coming.” I went back to the living room. I wanted a crowd of people there. I should have invited everyone I knew; a growing crowd, not a shrinking one. Gaby was telling Nina the plot of her next mystery; it involved a woman diplomat from an imaginary South Pacific republic, caught up in a whirl of crime and intrigue at the United Nations. I stood a bit apart, half-listening to this woman’s existential but also fairly droll bewilderment, so far from the land of her birth, the grass skirts, the sea, the tropical fruits …

  “Lydia, the phone? Don’t you hear it?”

  “Oh!” I dashed to the kitchen. Althea, itinerant student. What a wonderful day ambling through Greenwich Village! A Fleetwood Mac record on sale for three dollars! A fantastic guitar player in Washington Square! Jugglers, acrobats! She’d even had a second hole pierced in each ear; Diane held her hand. The ear-piercing place was called The Primitive Urge. “How apt. Perhaps you can have your nose done next time.” “Oh Mother.” “I told you how I felt about two holes, Althea.” “I know. But remember, you also told me it was my body and I had to use my own judgment about what I did with it.” “You know very well I wasn’t referring to your ears.” She giggled. She wasn’t calling to discuss her ears, though. Would I mind if she slept over at Diane’s house on Roosevelt Island? An impromptu party. Everyone was meeting at the cable car, to swoop over together. I didn’t mind. What had I been doing all day? My friends were over. Oh good, Mom, so you’re not all alone. See you.

  Inside, Gaby was checking her watch. “Don should be here any minute to pick me up. We have this tedious doctors’ dinner. They’re honoring the new head of the hospital.”

  “He can at least stay for a drink, I hope. I could call George. Make it a party.”

  “I’ve got to go pretty soon also.” There was a slight stammer to Nina’s words. She paused and made an awkward gesture, fussing with a strap of her shoe. “Sam’s wife is in Philadelphia for the weekend.”

  “Ah, visiting the aged parents? Thank heaven for aged parents. A whole weekend. I thought you seemed distracted.”

  “Don’t be malicious, Lydia, please. It doesn’t suit you. Or me.”

  “Right, right. No allowances. Do not under any circumstances permit Lydia to be bitter out of self-pity. She might even get like Esther. Keep her to her high standards.” I went into the kitchen again. Sure, George said over the phone, he’d come right over—why didn’t I tell him before that I was holding a reunion?—but he couldn’t stay long. A date with a yoga teacher. A new one? Yes, a new one.

  I brought back another bottle of wine and handed it to Gaby with the corkscrew. She could open bottles like a man.

  “Esther always had a short attention span,” she said, screwing it between her knees. “It’s gotten even shorter.”

  Nina yawned and stretched one arm high, then the other, as Gaby used to do in the dorm at night. “Oh, why not be tolerant?”

  “I’m doing my best.” According to Gabrielle, though, Nina was far too tolerant. Years ago she had begun to distrust Nina, when it became apparent that their lives had somehow gotten switched. Gabrielle was to have been independent, lean, adventuresome, Nina the respectable wife and mother, maybe struggling to hold a job as well—for that too was respectable now. Gabrielle envies the independence; if Nina envies the husband and children she doesn’t let on. For all her affection, Gabrielle finds Nina suspect, like a dear friend who might have stolen something while your back was turned, or then again you might have misplaced it yourself. And also, Nina lies. She has to tell a certain number of lies because her lawyer lover, Sam, is not only married but a public figure. (Of course Sam lies too.) Gaby is quite aware that with someone as intricate as Nina, further variables of which we know nothing may necessitate further lies of which we know nothing. Scientists should not get in the habit of telling lies, Gaby believes. (Of lawyers she expects it.) It weakens their credibility, vitiates their work, becomes a habit of mind. I tell her that’s nonsense. Surely in the lab and the classroom Nina is perfectly honest. Perfect, maybe, Gaby replies; not honest. And I think how far we have come from Aristotle’s ideals of friendship. Friends pleasant and useful, but loved really for something else. A mutual love of character, which endures a lifetime as character itself endures.

  “You didn’t even tell Esther about Victor,” Gaby said, the bottle neatly uncorked. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It’s too boring.”

  “Boring?”

  “Not so much the facts, though they are boring enough. I mean one’s own emotions become boring. Don’t you find that? That’s the trouble with Esther—she runs in the same old track. Events keep changing, but we always react with the same apparatus, in the same way. It’s like cooks. You know how with certain cooks, no matter what they fix, it comes out tasting Chinese or garlicky or bland? I wish I could feel things the way someone else feels them, for a change. Maybe that’s why I don’t get bored with music. When you perform faithfully what someone else has composed, that’s really what you’re doing, taking on another sensibility.”

  “You’ve always wondered what endures, Lydia,” said Nina. “So there it is. A style of experiencing. You can’t escape it. Look at those ridiculous people at Esther’s wedding, trying to change the ways they felt life. You might just as well try to get a new body.”

  “But you,” Gaby said to her. “You’re almost a different person now. Where’s the continuity in you?”

  “Oh, I’ve arranged for different kinds of things to happen to me. That’s simply a matter of taste. But inside, what Lydia called the apparatus, the person to whom things happen, is the same. We all are.”

  The doorbell rang, and Don, looking slightly untrustworthy himself in his white three-piece suit, slightly like a professional gambler, bent to kiss my cheek. Of course Don was quite trustworthy, only showing off the results of a diet; he had recovered his youthful shape and flair, and moved with the grace of the young man who used to come and take Gaby out on Saturday nights twenty years ago. He moved in the illusion that he had recovered the actual youth as well as the trappings.

  “I’m going to have a look at that ankle,” he said as he followed me down the hall. “You’re still limping and I don’t like it.”

  “It’s nothing. It barely hurts. Only when it snows. I mean, rains.”

  “Hello, darling.” He kissed Gaby, and kissed Nina too.

  “Hello and good-bye,” Nina said. “I must run.”

  Yes, speed home in her white Triumph (a new one; the old had finally given out), shower, change, bedeck for Sam. Already as she gathered her purse, her jacket, her silk scarf, her newspaper, a bemused languidness was ta
king shape in her movements. Already she was feeling him. This love affair had not traversed the stages she had described to me at the race track. Through difficult, clandestine arrangements the fuchsia cloud had held for years; they found plenty to say without using each other up. But glory? Did he bring the world with him, and find it, this man who chose to sleep and shave and breakfast elsewhere? In the hall she said she was sorry to rush off. But clearly I had become an obstacle in the path of her need, just as Sam was an obstacle to mine, the pleasure of her company. We had become disturbances in that famous field of George’s, where mobs of people jostled for their daily bread and occasional caviar, where far across, farther than I could see, were good times, peace, relief of want. I made myself an obstacle at the door—she had to brush past me. It’s all right, dear. Go. I understand. Go get laid. But of course one couldn’t talk like that to Nina, even at the sharp edge of want.

  “I’ll call you in the morning,” she said. I could see it. She would call from the white and purple bedroom, with Sam beside her. “Just a minute,” she would say to him. “I’ve got to call a friend.” No, he must know who I am. “I promised to call Lydia. Wait.” And as she speaks to me, kind and concerned, Sam will be teasing, stroking her here and there to distract her and make her laugh, make her brush him off with playful irritation so she can concentrate on me; at that moment Sam is less ardent than curious, one of those men whom sex truly interests, curious to learn exactly how far he can go, at what point Nina will be unable to keep up a rational conversation with her girlfriend. Ah, Sam! You don’t know the history. You’ll go far, and still she’ll talk to me, I’ll bet. She is after all a woman of formidable self-possession. You’ll have your fingers inching up the inside of a bare thigh, and she’ll talk to me. But briefly. She won’t linger on the phone. Nor would I. You’ll win soon enough, Sam. I waited with her till the elevator came.

  While Gaby was in the kitchen mixing his martini, whose proportions only she could be trusted with, Don took off his white jacket to reveal a gold watch chain looped across his vest. My father neglected to tell me about vest pockets, even more secret places. Straddling a chair opposite me, he widened his eyes and attempted a leer. “Come now, my dear, let me have a feel of that luscious ankle.”

  I laughed. “Don, the philanderer image is just not you.”

  “No? Ah, what can I do? I try. Seriously now. Give me your foot.” I did. “These are ridiculous shoes. You should wear solid ugly shoes for a while.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “You’re such a wonderful patient, Lydia.” He was feeling around the ankle, pressing with his thumbs. “Does this hurt? Does that hurt?” I answered no. “Why are you making faces, then? Look, I really wish you would cooperate. I want to see this get better, to make up for what I did to Mr. Dooley.”

  “Who’s Mr. Dooley?”

  “Didn’t I ever tell you that awful story? When I worked for the messenger service in Boston? Our mean old boss with the cane—we kept sawing bits off of it until he finally fell and broke his ankle.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember. So I’m your means to redemption?”

  Gabrielle came in carrying the potion and three glasses. “Well, how is it?”

  “My ankle is something like a pathetic fallacy. It corresponds to the weather.”

  “Weather?” said Don. “But look out the window. Today is a gorgeous spring day.”

  It was indeed. With no effort, though, I could see the snow. Two young policemen had come to the door that early evening, one black and one white, one tall and one short, their dark slickers dripping onto my doormat. They had their hats in their hands, and snowflakes glistened and melted in the black cop’s thick Afro. They were solemn and nervous—I should have sensed it. But I was curt. I had been in the middle of a Bach toccata, and was sure they had come about the latest burglary, our building’s third in two months. Hadn’t I told the fellow who interrupted two days ago? I never heard anything—there was always music going. The white one said they’d come in regard to my children. Still curt, several beats behind, my ear lodged in a run of the toccata: My children? Some mistake. Big ones right here, little ones safely out of the city for the day. When the black cop leaned forward to say, “Please, ma’am, listen a moment,” I drew back. At his next words, that word “bus,” I crumpled like someone whose bones have suddenly disintegrated. Alan’s yellow skateboard skidded down the hall to escape the news, and I with it.

  It hurt but I hardly noticed. It didn’t swell up till days later. Leaving the cemetery, Althea wanted to know why I was limping. No one else remarked. I was leaning on Victor’s arm and listing like the Titanic in the film; to be expected. Only Althea knew sorrow would not make me list, but stand straighter. She stood very straight herself, like a child being measured. Thales could have calculated the height of the pyramid by the accuracy of her shadow.

  Mornings I would wake at four or five, having slept briefly after our late-night talks and silences; for a moment I would know only the dark and the configuration of bodies and blankets. Then, oh yes. That pit. That ravine they fell in, now in me, snow-covered. And the ankle would hurt, a dull local throb, like a buzz, an insistent fly that you’ve given up shooing, that you tolerate. It was a minor sprain which should have disappeared quickly, but I kept on limping, reluctant to allow it full weight, and when it rains—for it no longer snows, the snowy season is past, the globe tilts farther every day from the time when they lived, carrying me farther from them every day, if only I could stop its revolving—when it rains, I get a twinge like a siren circling the ankle. It’s not a bad pain; it soon settles into the dull throb, and with it I remember the slickers dripping onto the doormat, the melting flakes in the cop’s Afro, the feel of bone collapsing in the damp air. I remember rainy nights in the dormitory when the four of us sat around eating cookies and smoking horrid sample cigarettes, backward girls, not yet dreaming of love, far less of loving children and losing them, but giggling over novels in which weather too blatantly expresses the emotional states of the characters; a pathetic fallacy.

  “You have it backwards,” Gabrielle said. “The term pathetic fallacy refers to the outside manifestation, to the weather and not to the person. Strictly speaking, your ankle is an objective correlative.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Once an English major,” said Don, “always …Well, Lyd, hopefully it will clear up. If not I’ll have to X-ray you again.”

  “Hopefully.” Gaby spoke with distaste, and the finest trace of an accent. “‘Hopefully’ is an adverb describing the way an action is carried out. The gladiators entered the arena hopefully. It is not a general term to convey the feelings of the speaker.”

  “I know that,” Don said. “But it’s passed into the language by now. It must fill some need. Don’t you think you’re waging a losing battle, love?” There was such a silken ease to him. Maybe she had foreseen it long ago—she did have an instinct for discerning potential. She told me once that she was trying patiently to draw the male supremacist teachings of the culture out of him, like sucking poison from a comrade’s snakebite. It was unlikely that she would ever succeed completely, and I was glad: he might lose just that wry chivalry which made him charming instead of dull. Treacherous though it was, I wanted a drop of the poison to remain.

  “We should still fight hopefully,” she said. “It’s wrong.”

  Don sighed with good cheer. “Try not to walk on it more than necessary, Lydia, and soak it in cold water. Don’t neglect yourself, healthwise, that is.”

  Gaby’s eyes flashed their two colors; her smile was immediate but grudging. “You use those words on purpose to irritate me.”

  “To aggravate you, do you mean?”

  “You two could work up a terrific floor show. I’ve never heard you like this before. What’s happened?”

  “We have mellowed with age.” Don reached over and took her hand. “Haven’t we? We have forgiven and forgotten everything, so it’s as if we just fell in love.
”

  “Hopefully,” said Gabrielle.

  Forgiven and forgotten what, I was starting to ask, but the doorbell rang. George’s warmth pervaded and changed the air. “It’s wonderful to see you,” I said, and I meant it. His shirt was half-open; a gold chain nestled in the hair on his chest. Still a dandy, and men’s affectations, alas, appear sillier than women’s. There clung to George the convivial, wistful aura of an organ grinder. He refused a martini—had to keep sober for his date tonight—but accepted a glass of wine with seltzer and a handful of cherries.

  “You just missed Nina,” Gaby told him.

  “No, I met her outside. Her car was parked right down the street. We talked for a few minutes.”

  “All this coming and going,” I said glumly. “It’s like one of those French plays, a new scene every time someone walks in or out.”

  “I had the strangest walk over here,” George said. “Twelve blocks crowded with incident. First, right on my corner I saw two little boys, around nine or ten, steal four apples from the fruit stand and run off. No one seemed to notice. Then a few blocks up Broadway I saw two teenaged girls steal some paperbacks from an outside rack. They tucked them under their sweatshirts. They didn’t even run. I was beginning to wonder if something was wrong with me—I didn’t have any urge to stop them or say anything. It wasn’t that I identified with the kids particularly. I just observed. I remembered you once said I had no character, Lydia, and maybe you were right. Well, anyhow, crossing Eighty-eighth Street I happened to glance west, and down the block was a guy reaching into a woman’s stroller. He pulled out her purse and ran. She yelled, the baby yelled. I started to run after him. It was automatic. I mean, I didn’t feel the character stir within me or anything of the sort. I chased him across West End Avenue and all the way over to the Drive, and then he dashed down a flight of steps into the park. When I got down there he had vanished. I was really disappointed—I wanted to catch him. I didn’t even go back to tell the woman. I just went on up the Drive. Maybe she thought I was in cahoots.”