Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “You did? Well, I’ve tried to talk to him about it, but you know Phil. He doesn’t like something, he removes himself.” Victor doesn’t pick up that tossed-down glove. His response is silence, this time opaque, a wall. “He got a summer job as a lifeguard in a Y camp upstate. I assume that’s okay with you?”

  “I don’t like all this secondhand information. I want to hear from him what’s happening.”

  A pity I’m not the vindictive type: time was when I got my information about Phil secondhand from you, baby. “I don’t like it any better than you do. Althea wants to work as a mother’s helper. Some rich people out in the Hamptons with two little kids.”

  “First I want to know who they are, everything.”

  “I’m sure she’ll tell you. When has Althea ever failed to give details?”

  “What about you? Do you have any plans?”

  Plans, you fucker. What do you think, Paris, Rome? Learning solitude is my plan. “Public transportation. And I’ve got lots of work. A lot of things are coming up in the fall.”

  “You’re not short of money, are you? I’ll make a deposit tomorrow.”

  “Why should I be short of money? I didn’t retire when you left. But since you mention it, it’s hard to balance the checkbook when I don’t know what checks you’re writing. I had to work on the last statement for an hour. Maybe we should have two accounts.”

  This sort of petty skirmish never interested Victor much. “I’m sorry. I’ll keep you informed. You haven’t even asked how I am.”

  “I can tell how you are. I’ve known you long enough.”

  “Tell me, then. We’ll see if you’re right.”

  “Victor, let’s not do this. Let’s just be civil.”

  “I don’t want your kind of civility. The checkbook! What nonsense. You know very well there’s a two thousand dollar credit line.”

  “Yes, but I don’t like getting those little slips saying they had to put money in the account. I feel like I’m being reprimanded by Big Brother.”

  “It’s not a reprimand. It comes out of a machine. I’ve told you a dozen times, they love to extend credit. That’s how capitalism works. Think of it as a pat on the shoulder—we’re good citizens.”

  “My father told me never to live on credit.”

  “Lydia, I am not going to talk about this kind of shit. What we need to talk about is them. We should sit down and go through every little detail we can remember. To try to understand. We are the only two people in the world who could do that together.”

  “I can do it alone.” I do. It is sweaty work.

  “Lydia.”

  Formidable man. Humbled and frustrated, he stands firm, like Phil. I did love him. Hearing his voice say my name like that—a bit hoarse; a cold, maybe—gives me a sexual pang in the midst of the fury. It feeds the fury. “I’ll leave the car keys on the kitchen table. Let’s not torture each other, okay? You left because it was too painful, so why are you creating more pain?” I hang up, and the fury and the sexual pang both subside. In a little while, through some obscure inner mechanism, he becomes distant, a man I once lived with, a sexy man who has suffered severe misfortune, now living with someone else.

  Well, and what of her? The facts lie disassembled like pieces of a model airplane kit, defying you to fit them into a coherent whole. She is fifty-one. She runs that Montessori nursery school downtown. She is from Oregon and is a widow, childless. Conservatively dressed. Knows something about painting. She doesn’t smoke and drinks only “a few drops” of wine (this from Althea). What does she think, then, when he swigs bourbon and rolls joints in the middle of the night? Maybe he doesn’t need to, with her. Maybe she rocks him in her fleshy arms, crooning to her little boy not to cry. Yes, I can see how consolation from strangers might be an exotic spice, very tasty. Also from Althea, she has bamboo shades in her living room, an avocado plant, a finch she lets out of its cage (where is the white shag rug?); she has bifocals and big breasts; she is “slightly chubby and has a lot of gray in her hair, but is still attractive.”

  “Why ‘but’?” I asked.

  “Well—” drawled Althea. “You know.”

  “I don’t know any such thing. You’re supposed to be the feminist, but you have all the typical prejudices. You should say, ‘She is slightly chubby and has gray in her hair, and is still attractive.’ You probably don’t need to say ‘still,’ either. Do you think girls with flat stomachs and dewy skin are the only people men could like? Do you think sexuality ends at forty, or thirty?”

  “I can understand your bitterness, Mother.”

  Oh God, the voice of the helping professions is heard in the land. “I am not being bitter about her. On the contrary. I’m defending her.”

  “Well, if you’re defending her,” Althea flared up, “it’s probably because you’re glad it’s her instead of some really young girl with a flat stomach. For your own pride.”

  Teenaged daughters are not kind. Vivie was, she did not cut to the quick, but she was only ten. I mean nine—her birthday wasn’t till April. No doubt she would have come to it too. Just as Althea will eventually temper justice with mercy.

  “That may be,” I conceded. (“That may be,” I read in an assertiveness-training book in the drugstore, is useful for dampening critics or weakening adversaries before pressing on with one’s own suit.) “But it so happens my stomach is quite flat. Look!” I stood up, sucked in my breath, and pulled at the waistband of Phil’s jeans to show her how much room I had.

  “Oh Mom! You’re a panic.”

  “I try to keep you amused.”

  “But it shows that you’re the one with prejudices.”

  I kept silent.

  “Also,” Althea went on, “she talks a lot but with long pauses in between sentences, and in the pauses she stares at you with these very searching green eyes. You’re not sure whether she’s done talking or not, or what she’s searching for.”

  “I’d rather not hear any more. I didn’t bring this up to begin with, remember?” I started clearing the table. Phil was eating with liana at Burger King.

  Althea smoothed plastic wrap over leftovers, attacking each spontaneous wrinkle. “I can do the dishes.”

  “No, tonight’s my turn. You do them often enough. You’re altogether too helpful and domestic. Go out, live a little. Have another hole made in your ears, I don’t know what.”

  “I’ll keep you company.” She shinnied up onto the washing machine, where she could keep an eye on me. “Mother, can I ask you a question?”

  “Yes. Talk loud, the water’s running.”

  “Does everyone have multiple orgasms all the time? … Can you hear me?”

  “Oh yes, I can hear you just fine. That’s loud enough.”

  “Well?”

  “No. I don’t know. Not all the time, I wouldn’t think. At least … Where did you hear that?”

  “In a book Diane loaned me. It says women have great unused potential. It sounds like everyone ought to be going around constantly … you know. I mean, what about from your personal experience?”

  “I can’t seem to recall. It feels like ages ago.”

  “Oh Mom, come on. You’re being evasive.”

  I looked up from my dishes. “Althea, are you trying to tell me something?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, well.” I kept scrubbing, but I made sure to smile at her. What’s done is done. “This is very interesting. Who … uh … that new one, Jeremy? Or is Darryl back on the scene?”

  “Jeremy. Darryl is going out with someone else.”

  “So. Well, well.”

  “Mother.” She laughed. “Is that all you can say, well, well? Are you so shocked?”

  “No. No, it’s okay. I’ll get used to it. I guess it had to happen sometime.”

  “It was long overdue.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “I think so.”

  “So how is it? Is it all right to ask?”

  “Oh, fine, fine,” she
said with labored cheeriness. “Except …”

  There followed a technical discussion. I was pleased to hear myself strike just the right note of reassurance: light, almost breezy, but meticulously informative. Inside, though, accompanying my wise, motherly cadenza, was the same simpleminded basso continuo: Well, well. Well, well—so little Althea with her childlike face is having the orgasms I am not (except in my sleep; do they count?). Am I the retired dowager, having passed down the scepter? Are there not enough to go around? (As a matter of fact, the American Psychoanalytic Association once devoted several hours at a national conference to whether female orgasms during sleep were pathological. No! I said in disbelief. You better believe it, George said. Male orgasms are never pathological.)

  “Listen, though,” I concluded, drying my hands on Phil’s pants. “All this talk about orgasms is all very well. But birth control is the thing. At your age that’s infinitely more important.”

  “Oh, I know all about that,” she retorted. “We did that in school. I know where to get everything. Would you believe, there was a girl in my class who thought you might get pregnant by swallowing it?” She giggled. “Good thing you can’t. I would have had Darryl’s. Would you mind black grandchildren?”

  “Althea! Coming from you, who were his close friend, that remark is in extremely poor taste.”

  For an instant she had Alan’s deadpan look, fraught with mischief. “I wouldn’t say it was such poor taste.”

  “Oh God!” I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “Why couldn’t I have had a daughter who was demure and reticent?”

  Her face suddenly changed; in the silence she seemed to age. “You did.” Then she put her head on my shoulder and cried, and said the bedroom felt so empty, there was no one to whisper to at night, she couldn’t get used to sleeping all by herself. After a while she lit a cigarette and coughed. I had to give her a glass of water. I remembered how I had stopped nursing her—cold turkey—years ago, because I imagined she was sucking the life out of me. Now I am older, confident; I could nurse a baby easily but it is too late; there is no one left. I gave her water.

  Slightly chubby, eh? Gray in her hair but still attractive. A finch? What am I to make of that? Nothing. It adds up to nothing.

  When I tell Gabrielle about this peculiar blank distance I have come to feel in regard to Victor—the abstract Victor—how I cannot even work up any jealousy worthy of the name, only a weak curiosity, an insubstantial nastiness, she says that is quite natural: I am still disoriented over the loss of the children. My psychic energies are diverted elsewhere; for the moment I have none to spare. She discourses like a researcher who has just discovered the cure for cancer (something so obvious as to have gone unnoticed). I listen with respectful interest. What she is doing is called, in current argot, being supportive. I shouldn’t knock it. It is well-intentioned and soothing, if you permit it to be.

  “Be patient with yourself, Lydia. After all, you can’t be expected to respond fully to more than one crisis at a time.”

  Who is expecting anything? That was not what I meant at all. We are having lunch in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. It is a breezy, sunless early June day. Despite the bleak chill of the weather there is a crowd. Somewhere in forests the foliage is lush and green, but past the stone wall opposite our table, the tops of bare branches on trees either dead or retarded splay out like fingers against a sky white as bone. All I expect at the moment is to eat my lasagna in peace. More and more I love to eat. I love every hot sensation on my tongue.

  “It’s the women who believed their lives were in perfect order who get hysterical. The ones who took all the comfort and security for granted and never examined anything, never went through any real changes. Look how Ellen Kimberly carried on when Frank left. For ten years that marriage was a lie. A TV commercial. Everyone knew it except her. In your case it’s very different. You had your hard times. And you do things, you have a life of your own. You never depended on Victor for every gratification. Very likely this numbness is a sign of strength. You’re keeping it at arm’s length for your own safety. You always had good instincts.”

  Yes, they do carry on, don’t they? They have one-night stands with strangers, they tell off old friends, adopt a more flamboyant style of dress, take up radical politics. Yet Rosalie did that sort of thing long before her separation; maybe that was why her husband Karl called it acting out.

  To Gabrielle’s speech I replied, as to Althea, “That may be.” She never used to bother to say the obvious, though. This reasonable, stylish analysis was never her style. Does it shake her security to see me shaken? Or do I drive her in desperation to clichés, as I did Victor?

  “Besides, Lydia, I would not be at all surprised if he came back, and sooner rather than later. You two were so close. Going off to this woman is not a matter of rejection, or finding someone preferable. It’s a way of coping with”—she lowered her lids for a moment and pushed on bravely—“the children’s death. But it’s a completely irrational act. A desperate act. He’ll realize that.”

  I couldn’t risk another “That may be”; Gabrielle was not stupid. While she theorized I became fascinated by what she was doing to her food. She was once again on the Scarsdale diet, revivified by scandal. She is always on some diet—their names and ideologies change. But this diet was clearly more serious-minded than the others; the intellectual sophisticate’s diet, one that could exert a strong influence on an otherwise independent mind. At least Gabrielle seemed deeply committed. She had brought an extra, empty plate back from the cafeteria line. With a fork and spoon handled like surgical instruments, she took from the platter before her and placed bit by bit on the empty plate a scoop of coleslaw, three black olives, two slices of tomato, and several strips of Swiss cheese and ham cut julienne style. The only things left on her original plate were lettuce leaves, half a hard-boiled egg, and a radish. She then brought forth from her Channel 13 canvas bag a small can of Bumble Bee dark tuna, chunk style, packed in water, and a tiny can opener, which she wielded with the deftness of experience. She emptied the tuna onto the lettuce with a certain detachment, the way you dish out food for a pet, food that could have no possible connection with your own organs. Finally she sprinkled her meal with vinegar and raised her fork. I was overcome with compassion.

  “There’s no need to torture yourself like that. You’re not fat at all.”

  “I feel gross.”

  “You may feel gross but you aren’t. You have that feeling because you judge your body by a dancer’s standards. The average person does not have, or require, a body like a dancer’s.”

  “I can’t help it. I danced for so long. You can’t possibly know what it’s like to feel gross. You can eat all day long and burn it up. Don’t think it’s easy to eat with you, Lydia.”

  “Yes, I fall upon the food of life! I burn!” We burst out laughing. “Is that really such a bad line? ‘I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’? Or were we just naive to laugh at it?”

  “Well, I may be the wrong person to ask, since I’m not a Romantic. I don’t go in for those great swings from the depths of suffering to rebirth. It strikes me as rather manic.”

  “Okay, with that caveat, is it a bad line? In your opinion.”

  “Yes, it’s bad. It’s pure self-pity. And the image is ludicrous. He took himself so seriously that he lost the critical faculty.”

  “I see. Would it bother you very much if I ate your cheese and olives?”

  She gave me a wry look. “Go right ahead, what’s the difference?”

  “You have a very nice body,” I told her, being supportive as I reached for the plate. “It’s luxuriant. It connotes spiritual amplitude. Being a little rounded does not make you unattractive, you know.”

  “Oh yes?” Very French. “And how would you know?”

  I didn’t say how. The garden of the Museum of Modern Art is really an awful place to eat, crowded, noisy, overpriced, and especially prey to winds. The wind gets trapped
between the concrete and the glass, battening at people and statues alike. Those massive stone figures are more than invulnerable and indifferent; they seem hostile to the chatting lunch crowd. Water ripples black and forbidding in the neatly squared trough, while the sage Balzac regards all with a sublime, avid scrutiny, amassing data for another human comedy. Usually a couple of people with semi-familiar faces come over to remind us of where we have met before, and after exclaiming at this coincidence, move on. This had already happened to each of us today and might again. Nonetheless we were eating here because it is near Gaby’s office, and she likes to take quick looks at the paintings she has seen dozens of times before. In school she flexed her ankles and knees while she wrote her term papers; never a time-waster. Also, she chooses places lately that will distract me, get me “out of myself.”

  “Lydia, are you there?” She tapped my wrist—three rapid taps with the tips of her fingers. “You look like you’re drifting off somewhere.”

  “I was thinking about the way we always talk about ourselves. That weekend when Esther was over, for instance. We used to talk about real things. And now the more we know about real things, the less we say.”

  “Well, what real things would you like to talk about?”

  “I don’t know. The state of the world. The state of the subways. You sound so serene. Is your serenity for real? I’ve wondered for a long time. I can’t make you out any more.”

  “It’s real. I thought you didn’t want to talk about us, though. I got the impression I was boring you.” A muscle below her left (blue) eye twitched. Found wanting? Even at this late date she worried that if she were boring I might decide not to be her friend.

  “No, no. You’re not boring me. How silly. I meant the way we talk about ourselves. The worst things in our lives. Don’t tell me that’s what friends are for. I’d like to hear the good things. Remember Pascal? If all we can do to avoid the … the black hole is to seek diversion, if everything is ultimately diversion from—”

  “Distraction is more like it,” she corrected crisply.