Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “You’re sure you’re okay, Lyd?” God, am I tired of hearing that. And trimmed with guilt, not a pretty sound. “I’ll come over if—”

  “No, I’m quite sure.”

  “So what about your summer? Tell me.”

  “Oh, it’s passed now. It was one of those moments. Nothing really. I guess I woke you, didn’t I?”

  “I’m sorry it happened this way.”

  “She has a right to answer her own phone. I should have thought first.”

  We say good night. The distance between us is awkward, weighty like a humid gray dawn, burdened with mutual remorse. Is this how separated couples talk long after, who’ve remained “friends”? Will he hold her close in bed now, or sit staring into the dark? Well, what difference can it make either way? I, for my part, am going to have something to eat. Either way, I’m starved. Either way, I will provide. Passing through the living room I notice that Phil and his friends have cleaned up, as promised. On the couch someone has left a copy of Endless Love. I fling open the door of the refrigerator and, I must say, I am dazzled. It is full of good things to eat, and they come from my very own providential hands: half a chicken steeped in soy sauce and wine, a lentil and sausage salad with fresh parsley and black olives, a casaba melon, six thick-skinned oranges, and more. I give it all a sly, intimate middle-of-the-night snicker, and like Gaby challenging her flesh in the dormitory mirror, like Rastignac to Paris, having buried his last naive tear, murmur, “A nous deux, maintenant.”

  Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? … The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

  ITALO CALVINO, If on a winter’s night a traveler

  Epilogue: The Middle of the Way

  THE CONCERT WAS A Sunday matinee. I went to bed dutifully early the night before, but at three o’clock I sat up in bed, wide awake. This happened often lately. I had come to enjoy the dislocated hours, time unaccountable and suspended. I would wander into the kitchen, turn on the radio very low (While the City Sleeps), and cook, thinking of nothing much, now and then murmuring in response to the cavalier patter of the disc jockey, whom I liked and felt I knew intimately. I cleaned up, checked to see that the oven was off, and was back asleep before dawn.

  Sunday rose crisp and clear, with a taste of change, of fall, in the air. The hall was filled. From backstage I couldn’t make out faces in the crowd yet I knew well enough who was there. Several who had heard me play the “Trout” twenty-three years ago, though not my mother or father, and not Evelyn. Jasper and I opened with a Poulenc sonata, spunky and wittily dissonant. It could even be comical in a couple of places if it was done right, with a certain panache. The classical repertory is not known for its wit, so it was a treat to hear the audience laugh aloud. Rosalie joined us for the Haydn trio, bedecked in her gypsy dress, a red rose pinned in her hair. She kept her mouth closed; only once, during the Andante, did I hear a low hum, but a keen glance from Jasper aborted it. The Haydn was a delight to perform, like a child’s ritualized game, forever fresh, forever the same. We lavished care on the details, the frills and trills and turns and elegant variations, and we whipped up a benign intoxication that spread through the audience. They streamed out happy, and I spent the intermission hunched in a corner smoking one Lucky Strike after another that I filched from Howard. “Since when did you become such a smoker?” he wanted to know. “Over the summer.” He had to light them—my hands were shaking. “Come, it’s time,” he said.

  There was no choice now. I had to do it—it was mine, work I had freely chosen. I walked onstage with the others and sat down and gave to our small and ephemeral Utopia all it required. I let go of the impediments and of the past so bitterly dear to me and gave the whole spectrum: the lyricism and the control; the exuberance and the briskness; the beauty that pierced; and the scent of a terrifying ambiguity throughout. In that dreaded fourth movement with the innocent fluid melody, a melody that made my insides coil, a melody to which I once pressed my hand over the face of a howling baby, I gave with a free hand, loaves and fishes. Jasper was right—I could collapse later. Don’t you dare angle after me; not yet! Plenty of time to die in! First this for my friends who have shown such forbearance. They were playing like souls exalted with the abundance of their own powers, showering gifts. So I too gave it everything that had happened to me, pure and simple. That was what the music, like a child, sweet but quite without mercy in its demands, seemed to be asking for.

  When we finished I didn’t move. I didn’t hear another sound—my ear was blank. The others bowed once, twice; they seemed far away. Jasper walked over to fetch me like a boy at an old-fashioned school dance. He held me by the arm and we took a bow together. Three times he walked me offstage and back as you lead a child—I remembered not to limp—and then he left me behind because he had to do the Brahms quartet. I could rest; my part was done.

  I found a small empty room back there and closed the door. In a moment there was a knock and Phil appeared.

  “Mom? Holy shit, what are you crying for? You were terrific! Even I liked it!” He leaned down and patted me on the shoulder as he had patted Bobby when he cried.

  “As good as the Rolling Stones?”

  “Well …” He tilted his head and his lips curved slyly. Phil was showing the early signs of a debonair manner, as well as a mustache. “Let’s just say it was very good. You’re going to be a mess for the party. Your eye stuff is dripping.”

  “I’ll fix it later. You don’t have to watch. Wait outside. If you stand right near the curtain you’ll see them at a good angle.”

  “Nah, I’ll wait here.”

  He did until Victor walked in, looking gangly, awkward, his large hands hanging loose as if he didn’t know where to put them. It seemed Victor was moving in the opposite direction from Phil, shedding the debonair. The three of us in one room again, and Phil got up to leave.

  “Please don’t go,” Victor said. But he went anyway.

  Victor sat down on an old couch, elbows on his knees, chin in his hands. “I’ve never heard you like that. All of you. It was … rare.”

  “Thanks. I know.”

  “I was right across the aisle from that guy from the Times. Even he clapped. You’re sitting there so still and your eyes are like lakes, Lydia. I can’t bear it.”

  “I thought it was what you wanted. I feel like I lost something out there. I feel naked. What is it, eight months? That’s almost as long as it takes to make one.”

  “Eight months less four days.” He took off his jacket and lay down on the couch. I hadn’t seen him lying down for a long time. He looked muscular yet defenseless.

  My eyes stopped their streaming. “It’s the moments that you feel a little better that are the worst. Do you know what I mean? Because you’re losing it.”

  “I know. But then it hits you again. Maybe each time with a trifle less force, I don’t know. You don’t really lose it.”

  “Cycles.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I could keep it full strength forever. It’s like a … like a coat.”

  “But look at you.” He smiled. “Some coat. And you’re not even in black. Don’t they wear black for classy concerts?”

  “Only in the orchestra. You ought to know that.” I was in red.

  “I forgot. It’s a nice dress.”

  “I feel very bare. I’m not used to it. … The idea that it really happened, Victor. I mean, that is the part—At the beginning I used to wake up in the morning and think maybe it was all a bad dream and everything would be the way it was before.”

  “I know.”

  “But what does it mean, that it happened?”

  “Nothing. It was an accident. That’s all there is to it. There’s nothing to think about it. We can only think about them. A lot.”

  We sat without speaking. These many months, our chill nights in bed, our brutal love and his going, my disjointed life—they seeme
d like a dream. The children were real. Sitting together quietly in a room was real. We heard a burst of applause for the Brahms.

  “Can I drive you home?”

  “I’m not going home. There’s a party at Carla’s. The violist. She’s right in the neighborhood.”

  We stood up and faced each other, Victor waiting for the invitation I could not give. Not after all the effort spent cajoling Phil: Come on, you’ll have fun, shake hands with famous people! Champagne! Give me a break, I need a handsome escort. If Victor came, Phil would not. Nor was I about to give it up. I wanted to be made much of. I had damn well earned it.

  “I’ll see you soon, then,” he said.

  “Soon? Kiss me good-bye, till soon,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you, I’m afraid to.”

  “Hah! You’re afraid to kiss me?”

  “You really want me to?”

  “I said it, didn’t I? Do you want it in writing?”

  “You sound familiar. Have we met before?” He made an elaborate show of smoothing down his clothes, clearing his throat. “All right, baby, come over here and I’ll kiss you.”

  “Why can’t you come over here?”

  His eyes measured the six feet between us. His eyes, uncannily gifted, perspicacious, cool but immensely tolerant. The look I had misinterpreted years ago as coldly critical. “We could meet,” he said dryly, “at the apex of an isosceles triangle of which we are the points of the base.”

  “Oh God, Victor, it better be worth it.”

  We met near the door and he kissed me. “You were right to be scared. … Don’t, I can’t, I have to get to this party.”

  He stepped back. “Maybe Phil would like a lift home?”

  “Phil is coming with me.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  Phil and I recuperated from the party in our living room. He was sprawled on the floor with a pile of Sports Illustrateds from the phonograph the Rolling Stones once more clamored for satisfaction, followed by the Beatles’ White Album, about animals. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night,” they sang lightly, “Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. You were only waiting …” Phil had discovered since the summer that he could read magazines and hear his music in rooms other than his own, rooms which even contained me. I was stretched out on the couch doing the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. I had changed from my ripply red dress to a loose brown nondescript thing, a smock, you might say, as Griselda had worn when she was ejected from her marriage and palace with nothing, a smock she was allowed in place of the innocence she had brought to that marriage but could not carry away. I would be putting on my fancy concert dress again, just as she would her royal garments, but my children would not be miraculously restored to me by their father. Still, I felt content to be slowly doing the puzzle in Phil’s company. When it got worse again I would accept it; I couldn’t be too proud to accept the better as well.

  The phone interrupted. Happily I could reach it without moving from the spot. Nina congratulated me on the performance.

  “Where did you vanish to? I looked for you right after but I couldn’t find you.”

  “I was in hiding backstage. I wasn’t up to a crowd. I don’t mean you, but … Thanks for coming.”

  “It was a marvel. Every note. Like the last time, but so different. I’m sorry I never made it to the party but Sam is in awful shape. I had to sit and hold his hand. He’s fallen asleep now.”

  “How is she?” Sam’s wife was in the hospital again, in critical condition.

  “She’s not going to make it. I can tell from what he tells me. The complications are endless, like a chain reaction, and the kinds of drugs they would have to use to stop it would kill her. He’s totally wretched. I didn’t expect it would be this way. I feel pretty bad myself, strange as it seems.”

  Nina, so worldly, is so naive. “She’s his wife,” I said. I was doodling curlicues around the edge of the crossword puzzle. Vivian used to watch me sometimes as I doodled and talked on the phone. When I hung up she would say I couldn’t have been truly paying attention—I seemed so intent, the little designs were so thorough and symmetrical. She was too young for me to explain it. People don’t doodle till thirteen or fourteen, I’ve observed. Althea is a doodler.

  “Well, yes, she is his wife, but … It’s very odd, Lydia. Now that I know I can have him eventually, I’m not sure I want him. I keep brooding over all the negative points. Does that make any sense or is it purely neurotic?”

  “Neurotic.”

  “You sound very sure.”

  “I can’t help it. I am. You’ve had one of the longest illicit affairs on record and suddenly now … ? It’s simply guilt. This is a lousy stage of life to be alone, Nina.” Phil, on the floor, raised his head from the magazine; his body stiffened.

  “When isn’t it? I never told you about my visit to Esther last weekend, did I? Do you know Esther’s lost her job?”

  “No. How come?”

  “Budget cuts. This time it’s malign neglect. She’s working in a department store, men’s socks or something of that ilk. Not quite her vocation. Have you ever seen her apartment?”

  “No.”

  “At the moment she possesses three cats. Females, and they have Biblical names: Jezebel, Salome, and Vashti. The apartment is pervaded by essence of cat. A box in every room. Need I say more? You know how I feel about cats, Lydia. I get that from my mother, unfortunately. I once picked up a stray cat and held it on my lap and she immediately made me take my dress off and put it in the wash. Mothers are very powerful. Witness Esther’s—you do remember all those cat stories? Anyhow, aside from the cats, who had the good sense to avoid me, her only friend is an older woman who sings in the Baptist church. There wasn’t very much food in the house, except for cat food, that is. The stove is covered with antique grease. The bathroom—well, Sunday morning I couldn’t find a clean towel after I took a shower. I had to use my kimono, supplemented by tissues. That is no easy feat.”

  “I can’t believe it. The last time I saw her, that time she came up in May, things seemed to be going fairly well.”

  “Yes, well, not any more. We were out all weekend. We saw everything Washington has to offer. She was surprised that I’d turned so patriotic, but I couldn’t stay in the apartment. It was too depressing.

  “Did you make any suggestions?”

  “I suggested that she clean up, for a start. Look for a decent job. But I’m not very good at it. I don’t like to disapprove openly. I’d rather pretend everything is just fine. The milk for the coffee is sour, oh well, never mind. No clean sheets, never mind that either. But I do mind. You were right, way back then, about Clyde. I should have told her straight out what I thought of him, but I … it seemed so indelicate. And it was such a permissive time, too. Who could say what was right for anyone else? Now, of course, it seems so obvious, what she’s done. … You ought to talk to her, Lydia. You have a … a certain influence over her.”

  “I’m not going all the way to Washington to sleep with cats and dry myself with tissues. No, thanks.”

  “You could call her.”

  “I’ll see. I don’t know how much good it would do.”

  “She did it for you, didn’t she? Didn’t you tell me that when you were moping at home with the babies she used to send you little inspirational bits about getting back to work?”

  “Yes, that’s true.” I haven’t told her about the more recent inspirational bits: The fool foldeth his hands together and eateth his own flesh. Say not thou, what is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.

  “Did they do any good?”

  “Yes, but not in the way she intended. Not so much the messages themselves but the idea that it mattered to her …”

  “So there,” said Nina. “What’s the difference?”

  We arranged to have dinner together in a few days, and why not invite George to join
us? Perhaps he’d like to bring that yoga teacher I’d heard about? But Nina said no, didn’t he tell you? “That’s over. It seems she found him unreliable.”

  “George?”

  “Yes. But it’s all right. There’s a new one on the horizon. She teaches scuba diving. He says they have a lot in common.”

  “George can barely swim.”

  “Ours not to wonder why, Lydia.”

  I went back to my puzzle, envisioning Esther and Esther’s mother and the cats. As Nina delicately hinted, I could manage to be indelicate with very little effort. Nina’s parents treaded cautiously through language like soldiers in a mined field. My parents were simpler people who said things straight, and from them I learned the better part of what I know. Since there was no one else for the job I would call Esther. It was time I did something for someone else, though all I could give her was a piece of my mind. Esther, for God’s sake, do something about your slovenly life or you’ll wind up like … Tomorrow, I would say that, at the risk of sounding like a simpleton. I’ve sounded like worse.

  “The trouble with that kind of party,” Phil said lazily, rolling over onto his back, “—what is it, like a cocktail party?—is that there’s not enough to eat.”

  “Didn’t you get anything to eat? There were lots of things being passed around.”

  “Yeah, but they were so little. Everything was in miniature.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Five after ten.”

  “I guess we really should eat something, shouldn’t we? Okay, come in the kitchen. We’ll see what turns up.”

  Something always turned up these days, as if elves had been at work. But it was me, in the middle of the night, gliding around the kitchen like a somnambulist while the city slept. We found manicotti and a bowl of stringbeans sprinkled with dill. I hadn’t any clear memory of stuffing the manicotti or sprinkling the dill, but there was no other explanation. Phil set out two plates, two glasses, two forks. “Napkins would be nice,” I told him.