Disturbances in the Field (13 page)

It was Esther’s turn to recite her memorized stanzas in class. She was flushed and jittery as she walked to the front, but that was not unusual. She hadn’t spoken more than two lines when I began to pay closer attention. I watched Professor Mansfield to see what he would do. He sat at his desk with his customary wys and wel ytaught expression, spinning his swivel chair gently from side to side. His glasses were pushed up and resting on a receding hairline, his fingers raised in a little church steeple, softly tapping, as Esther recited:

Whan that Grisilde’s doghter was ytaken She silently devysed hire a planne

For to revenge swich deed she wold not slaken Though Walter bynne a markys and a manne. Whil in hir veynes the fury swifte yranne, To Walter’s chambre stoleth shee by nighte, And whispred, “Yor dere wyf namoore I highte.”

Up reysed she hir axe as up he sterte

And cleved she his manhood righte in tweyne.

“Ye be nat fitte to lyve, withouten herte,”

Said she, whil Walter clutch’d himself in peyne.

“Next comes your nekke; the blood will flow like reyne!

Me liketh not to soffre as ye heste.

Yor kyngdom now is myne!” She axed his breste.

When the applause died down, Professor Mansfield rose to the occasion. Genial, Chaucerian, he praised Esther’s near-faultless iambic pentameter and Middle English delivery. He asked to see her verses and she went and fetched a ragged notebook page. She was awesome standing in front of the class, thin this week, her hair pulled back and lashed into a long ponytail, two splotches of pink on her broad cheekbones—the stance of a martyr to conscience facing the gallows.

Professor Mansfield inspected her paper and put a few errors in spelling and diction on the board for the edification of us all. Writing Chaucerian verse was a fine way to understand the poet; he recommended it. He also recommended a dictionary and handbook of Middle English usage, of which he was one of the four compilers. However, we must try to understand the spirit as well as the letter. The spirit of Chaucer was not vindictive.

“And now the two stanzas you memorized, if you would, Miss Brickman.” She wouldn’t, couldn’t, having stayed awake for two nights preparing her revenge. He marked her down as unprepared. Esther’s mouth opened in shock but she did not protest.

After class she was surrounded. A genius! And she had never let on! Wasn’t he a bastard to mark her unprepared! She shrugged that off. As the girls drifted away the boys approached in a phalanx, at the center their evident spokesman, who looked a bit older, with a clever, bearded face. George.

“That was a wonderful addition to a moral tale,” began George. “Deeply affecting. But poor Walter. After all, he was only a personification of higher powers.”

“Oh yeah?” said Esther curtly and breathlessly. Her chest rose and fell, she was pale now, and her eyes were like emeralds. “Tough luck, then.”

So we laughed together, and they induced us to cross to the other side of Broadway, to a retreat called the Lion’s Den, where they entertained us with coffee and doughnuts and the brand of wit Columbia men were known for—sharp and supercilious. Great names wafted through the air like badminton birdies. They were mostly seniors, with a year of Contemporary Civilization, CC, behind them—every great book since the world began. A man who has taken CC at Columbia, rumor had it, is, like Odysseus, never at a loss. We kept up as best we could. Our initiatory course, The Individual and Society, had been gossipy, personal, feminine. But we knew our Greeks, and we relied on pure mother wit.

“Don’t blame it all on Chaucer,” said Ray Fielding. “Griselda started in Boccaccio.”

“And then she turns up in Petrarch,” said another.

“Evidently,” remarked Esther, “she had a certain appeal for all the fellows.”

I watched Victor Rowe. In his light eyes was the most critical expression I had ever seen. Anybody who scanned the world that way, I thought, must be the most clever, the most supercilious. And if he knew how striking he was, it would be so much the worse. He was tall and rangy and moved with the coordinated, weird grace of a giraffe. His hair was straight and sandy, his forehead high, and his eyes bluish-ivory and liquidy. Did they weep with disdain?

“The only profitable way to read Griselda,” he said, “is as comedy. Chaucer’s answer to medieval soap opera. Or a takeoff on Job.” His tone was not at all disdainful, only detached in a way I found intimidating.

“Female version,” I said. “He ranted to heaven and she keeps her mouth shut.”

“Yes,” said Victor, “but they both get it all back in the end. That’s why it’s comedy.”

There were hollows around his cheekbones, and a feeling of impatience around his mouth. His whole face was a study in planes and shadows, extra shadows because he needed a shave. He had clean white sneakers on, and red wool socks, and tiny flecks of paint studded his tan chino pants. His hands were flecked with paint too, especially the cuticles: large, hairy hands, strongly articulated. They looked older than he did.

We talked about courtly love, and Victor said the vestiges of courtly love were still with us. “Unfortunately. Knights and ladies, sacred virginity, tests of devotion. It’s all part of a structure to maintain the status quo. Falling in love. You don’t think falling in love is natural, do you? It’s a learned response. Every society in history had lust, sure, but not too many have had falling in love, the way we do.”

My pride was offended. I took it as a proclamation of invulnerability. I would have liked to appear invulnerable that way too.

George, on the other hand, loved the idea of courtly love. He was ready to do anything for a lady, he said, provided someone gave him a good horse, and a sharp sword, and a pretty coat of arms. The other boys all laughed, but I wasn’t sure why. They were pleasant boys behind the show of cleverness, and George was something more: not quite a boy, for one thing. He had been in the army before college, so was a few years older than the rest. George’s cleverness was ingratiating and inclusive. He liked to joke about his shortcomings: couldn’t master Latin case endings, couldn’t learn to dive, couldn’t have three drinks without falling asleep or throwing up. When our little party dispersed he drew Esther aside and asked her to go to a movie that evening.

Once we crossed Broadway all was changed. We made friends, we accepted the company of men. Esther’s stanzas inspired a spate of Griselda parodies, recited aloud and with hilarity in the Lion’s Den. Steffie Baum published them in the student paper in a special box near the editorials, one at a time for two weeks running. In Ray Fielding’s, Griselda chopped up her daughter herself rather than yield her to the sinister man. When Walter reveals that he meant merely to hide the child at his sister’s, it is too late. He rends his royal garments. In another, Griselda went mad in the manner of Ophelia, drifting through the palace in her smock, intoning lyrical non sequiturs in Middle English. But these evaded the point. The best, though I hated to admit it, was Victor’s. Five stanzas long—he must have labored for days. After the kidnapping of the children, Victor had Walter chop pieces off Griselda—her toes, one each day, then her fingers, hands, arms, legs. In a few weeks she is a stump. With each blow of the ax she repeats, “I am youre owene thyng; werketh after youre wille.” Victor asked me to have a beer in the West End Bar, but I was afraid my own cleverness wouldn’t fill an hour alone with him. I said I was busy.

I was. I spent hours working on Beethoven sonatas and the prescribed Haydn and Mozart trios. On my own I was practicing Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, which the Chamber Music Society would present at its spring concert. The auditions were not till April; I had begun preparing in September, trying to make it an inseparable part of me. I wanted to be chosen with a passion. The quintet entranced me, most of all the fourth movement, a theme and variations using the melody from Schubert’s song about a trout. Aside from its sophisticated pleasures, the melody pierces the heart, and the variations, like prisms, candid and relentless, flash the heart’s exposed facets. It may be nothing more magical than the symmetry of the intervals—a fourth up, third up, third down and fourth down, the unexpected fifth, and then the descending, syncopated scale, like someone skipping down a flight of steps. But that explanation sounds like Nina, decanting magic.

A pianist needs another instrument, and the only free time I had to learn the oboe was late at night. Music did not touch Melanie; play away, she said. So, many evenings I sat on my bed piping halting scales, while Melanie slept curled in her Dr. Dentons. We continued peacefully to coexist. And for comic relief I had joined the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, a suitably zany bunch that needed an extra accompanist for rehearsals. The regular accompanist, Henrietta Frye, was a slender senior with milky skin who resembled the lovesick maidens Gilbert and Sullivan immortalized. In fact she was a hiker and tennis player as well as an excellent pianist, better than I. Only if something happened to Henrietta Frye—not something awful, I hoped, but something minor and incapacitating, like spraining a finger on the courts—could I get to play for the performances,
Patience
in the winter and
The Yeomen of the Guard
in the spring. But I suppressed my visions. Henrietta was deserving and I was a bit superstitious, like my mother.

“George is okay, he’s very nice,” said Esther, “but he’s not right for me. Or me for him, either. Lots of times we just kind of miss each other. You know what I mean? Like paper airplanes. At home we used to try to make them crash but it’s hard, they’re so light.”

We were swimming in the college pool, nearly empty at five in the afternoon. Esther swam daily to stay thin, but she found it too boring alone. Nina and Gaby and I took turns. I swam laps to set a good example, but Esther mostly treaded water and talked.

“Too clever. Always has a ready word.” She swam a few lazy yards and returned. “He’d be much better for you, Lydia. Much more your type.”

I frowned and swam away.

“Oh, and there’s another thing,” she called after me. “All he cares about, mostly”—she dove underwater to tantalize me, and rising, shook droplets from her face—“is going to bed.”

“Aha! Well?”

“What do you mean, aha, well?”

“Esther, you know exactly what I mean.”

She giggled, floated on her back. “I did, once.”

“Just once?”

“Yes. He’s a little distressed about that, understandably. You remember Fecundity, in the Calculus?” Since Gaby’s outburst of last year, Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus had become a dormitory joke. Everyone knew it by heart. Intensity, Duration, Certainty or Uncertainty, Propinquity, Fecundity, Purity, and Extent, how far can the pleasure be shared with others? “It seems if you do it once it’s supposed to lead to the next time, and the next, ad infinitum. But frankly, I don’t like him
that
much. Oh, he was all right. He did quite well, actually.”

She was so blithe—I could hardly believe it. “How do you know? You have nothing to compare him to.”

“That’s true, but I could tell he put on a good show. Interesting. I just don’t have that feeling for him.”

“And what makes you think I would?” What did a good show consist of, anyway? Interesting? I swam four laps to seem indifferent, but she waited, paddling around.

“I know you, Lydia. You’re so restless. And you could fit him very easily, ha ha, into your busy schedule, I mean. He’s diverting. Like in Pascal. A
divertissement.
”

“You have to do at least six laps or else it’s a complete waste of time. Come on, Esther, your fat cells are multiplying.” I swam furiously to elude my fantasies, vivid now that they contained a specific person. Last week she had handed me the new loafers that squeezed her instep. And now this. A friend was another self indeed.

Early December, a still-mild day, a bunch of us were finishing a paper-bag lunch on the boys’ campus. One by one people straggled away until only Esther and George and I were left. I gathered up my debris. “Don’t rush off, Lyd,” she said. “You don’t have your quartet till three.” George told us how he had enlisted in the army to feel distinct from his father and uncles, who were all rabbis, but now he was a pacifist. “How could you ever think a uniform would confer distinction?” Esther asked. “And now I’ll leave you two to your own devices. I have an appointment with my French teacher. Good-bye!” George watched her run down the steps and across the campus till she was out of sight. Then, like a salesclerk shifting to a new customer, he turned his attention to me.

“Esther seems to feel we should get to know each other better.”

“You certainly don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

“And I thought I was being indirect. ...Oh good, I made you laugh.”

“That’s not very difficult. I’m a sucker for silly jokes. At home they used to call me the giggler.”

“I’ve always been curious about you, Lydia. Can I ask you a personal question?”

“What?” I felt leery already.

He pointed to the paper bag on the grass. “You just had one and a half hamburgers, a doughnut, and coffee. How can you eat so much and stay thin? It’s phenomenal. You know how Esther is always dieting.”

“I burn it up. That’s what they told me when I had a metabolism test. You know that Shelley line, ‘I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed’? Gabrielle showed it to me. She says I fall upon the food of life, I burn.”

He liked that one. This was a kind of performance too, like the simpler duets in the Chamber Music Society. I studied him, his body, and wondered what it might be like.

“Esther says you can sing. I didn’t know. In Gilbert and Sullivan you just play. There are other things I would like to know, but ... well, I don’t like to pry.” He looked around at the dry fountains, the concrete, the bare December trees.

“I would tell you most things you would ask. I’m not mysterious, like Nina or Gabrielle.”

“Oh, them!” George raised both hands as if fending something off. “They scare me. They would take ages.”

“And you think you could know me in a flash?”

“No, it’s only that you don’t offer so much resistance. You talk. The fact is—” He gave an earnest glance, or perhaps an imitation of an earnest glance. “I could use a person like you.”