Disturbances in the Field (16 page)

“Will you hold it against me?”

“Probably.” I risked a smile.

“I’m never going to use a penny of their money, after college. I don’t believe in inherited wealth.” He waved to the waitress for another beer. His wave, it struck me, would have been equally at home in a downtown restaurant with waiters in starched, ruffled shirts and cummerbunds, as it was in this Upper West Side bar where the waitress wore an aqua uniform like a hospital orderly. “Besides, it wouldn’t be right to use their money for things they don’t believe in. They think it’s peculiar to be a painter. They’d rather someone else’s son did it, if it has to be done. I have it all worked out. I can work in a bar or something, nights. Would you like a person who worked in a bar better than a person from Park Avenue?” His eyes were teasing.

“That one hit home, I see.”

“Well, it was a switch. In the old days girls didn’t want to marry men who were poor. Well, would you?”

“What, marry you when you’re poor?”

He started to laugh. “Like me better poor. To begin with, anyhow.”

“I hardly know you. I’m not sure I would like you under any circumstances.”

“You might get to like me. It’s been known to happen.”

He had a terrific scriptwriter, I thought, smooth, much better than mine. “I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised at this. I remember you once said you didn’t like the vestiges of courtly love. It figures that you wouldn’t bother with any proprieties.”

“On the contrary. I imagine this is how the knights did it, more or less. Don’t you think? They certainly didn’t suggest going to the movies.”

“But you said the feelings were all instilled by custom.”

“So what? I didn’t say I was immune, did I? Anyhow, when you major in anthropology, it gets to you.” He poured his beer. “Look, why are you so bristly? I know I’m not very good at this. But am I being so presumptuous?”

“It reminds me of Walter and Griselda. You’ve chosen me in my humble surroundings. It never occurs to you that I might not care to go along. I might like things as they are.”

“That Walter and Griselda idea is baloney and you know it.” He said it quite serenely. “But suppose I did pick you out. Someone has to pick someone out, don’t they? Is it only that you didn’t do the picking? What do you find unacceptable about me?”

“This is absurd!” I put the coffee cup down sharply. Some splashed over the rim and I wiped it up with a napkin—Victor seemed so well-bred. “I mean the way you talk. What is unacceptable about you? Asking that question is what’s unacceptable. Your whole approach. You expect me to feel what you feel because you feel it. And on the spot! You’re distorting all the ordinary ways of ... of ...”

“Only by saying what I mean. And you’re enjoying it!” He tossed his head back in a swift movement, a blend of weariness and delight, a very private gesture. I watched the pulses in his throat. “Confess you’re enjoying it. Say something straight, Lydia. You haven’t said one straightforward thing since we sat down. Except that your father sells insurance.”

“Okay! The novelty and the flattery I enjoy. But against my better judgment.”

“Oh, the hell with your better judgment.” He leaned over the table towards me. “We’re alike, don’t you see? We’re the same. We could understand without saying a word. We seem unapproachable, but we could approach each other easily.”

“I am not in the least unapproachable. ... Why, do I seem that way?”

“Yes. Proud. Confident.”

“Me!” I forgot about sounding well-bred. “You’re the one who’s proud.
I
am an ordinary nice person.” Even I had to laugh at that.

“You are.’ But you have great potential for pride. Great hidden reserves. I don’t mean in the bad sense. Not haughty. I mean you’re not afraid to think very well of yourself, what you can do. It’s lovely. I love it in you.”

“Don’t, please. You’re embarrassing me terribly. ... Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

“I don’t know. I thought you were more subtle.”

“I guess I’m not.”

“No. But anyhow, the way you played the ‘Trout’ was subtle. I don’t know what Schubert had in mind, but ...”

“Tell me. Tell me anything about it, really, good or bad. I’m not sensitive. I just want to do it well.”

“I can’t tell you how to do it well,” he said softly. “I don’t know anything about it. But I loved the way you did it.” He reached out his hand as if to place it over mine, then drew back. “I loved what you kept back as much as what you put in. I know it was only a run-through and you’ll give more when you really do it. Still, the suggestion ... When I could look up again his face was transformed, transparent. It was hard to keep my eyes on him, as if I were seeing more nakedness than I should in a stranger. “You made it very poignant,” he said.

“Poignant?” That was my word. “Tell me, I’m curious, do you know what poignant literally means?”

“Of course. Piercing.”

“Piercing, yes.” He was piercing too, for that brief moment. “Well, thank you.” I watched him pour more beer. “Your hand is shaking. What’s the matter?”

“Do you think this is easy? I mean, to talk to you like this? Do you think I do it every day?”

He shocked me. He didn’t raise and lower barriers or play safe. We were not alike in that. “Look, I have so much work to do—I can’t. ... And George.”

“I have work to do too. And George will always take care of himself.”

“Stop, please. I don’t like being pushed. It doesn’t feel right. You’re ... Okay, I see you’re different from what I thought. But still, this whole talk is your show, your script, isn’t it? My lines are very limited. Yes or no is all you leave for me to say. It’s not ... It makes me feel like ...”

“I should have asked you if you wanted to go to the movies. It would have sounded better. I don’t know how to pursue girls, really. I don’t have time. Look, next time it can be your show. I’m democratic. I’d like to see what your show would be like, actually.”

“I’ve got to go now. No, hold it. I’ll pay for my own coffee, thanks.”

“Fine!” said Victor. “Give me—let’s see, two coffees—thirty cents. No, make it ... forty-two and a half, with tip. Pay for the beer too, if you like. Do you want to pay for the beer?”

“Oh, all right, go ahead and pay for it all.”

He walked me back to the library, where we said good-bye.

He interfered with the way I saw George. I thought I had no illusions about George, that I understood his charm and his usefulness. But the memory of Victor and his insistence hung over me, and in the silent clarity of late nights, as I practiced the oboe under the small bedside lamp with Melanie curled asleep, I saw that whether I liked him or not, Victor was emblematical of the world, dense and insistent and intractable. George, with all his cavalier sex, his beard, and his years in the army, gave off something dry and academic, like the odor of library stacks. Even the loving he had learned from books.

“What is in there?” I asked him, lying in bed.

“In where?” He was resting his head on my breast.

“In
here.
”

“Blood,” he said, “and gray matter.”

“You know what I mean, George. You seem so apart. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking nothing. Can’t you just enjoy it?”

“I don’t know what it is. I want to be somewhere else. Outside of me, I mean.”

“Oh, Lyd,” he groaned. “You are so awfully adolescent. And as of last week you’re not even a teenager any more.”

“What do you feel urgent about? There must be something.”

“Nag, nag, nag.”

I smiled. I was being unfair: my fingers drew designs on his belly as I asked. “Come on, tell me,” I teased, “what your real passion is for. You know what I mean ... there’s God, Art, Revolution, Nature.”

“If you must know, Cunts,” he said.

A week before I was to perform the “Trout” a most unlikely event occurred. On an outing in the New Jersey Palisades with the Mountain Climbing Club, Henrietta Frye tripped and broke her wrist. The call imploring me to substitute in
The Yeomen of the Guard
left me faintly guilty, even though I had not envied Henrietta since the “Trout” auditions. I cut my Friday classes to practice the score.
The Yeomen of the Guard
was my favorite among the operettas because it ends sadly, a last-minute sadness casting into high relief the inanity of the rest. Our production played up the sadness for all it was worth. The purported hero, Colonel Fairfax, played by George, was a stiff, selfish nobleman, a “peacock popinjay,” who steals the girl from the true hero, the jester Jack Point, a man of the world. Ray Fielding was our jester, and miraculous: he gave Jack Point the verve and ambiguity of a Shakespearean fool—fey yet earthly, a sprite yet a man, obtuse and barbed in his wit, yet poignant, quite like the “Trout,” in his sorrow over lost love. Ray brought tears to my eyes even as I accompanied him, singing of the merryman whose soul was sad and whose glance was glum as he sighed for the love of a lady. George did very well as the peacock popinjay, very natural. He stood suitably pompous and triumphant with the girl nestled under his arm, while the jester, the artist, cast aside, fell to the ground in misery as the curtain came down. I worked up to the final chords wondering which of them was more real; with which would I find myself in the presence of real life? I didn’t think about love.

The next weekend I played the “Trout.” Backstage the string players looked unfamiliar dressed in their dark suits. They were tense as they wiped their palms and foreheads with big white handkerchiefs. I was excited and curious. I had the feel of every phrase stored in my fingers like gold in a vault; all I had to do was unlock and it would undulate out—I hoped. Everyone was there, Nina, Esther, and Gabrielle, Melanie and Steffie, George, Victor, Ray, and the other clever boys, as well as my parents and Evelyn, down from Hartford for the occasion. I thought of none of them. If I thought of anything at all besides the notes, it was of the lissome, iridescent qualities of skimming fishes. But mostly I listened to the others and let the stored phrases shed from me into the communal sound we made. It felt like molting. I remembered Professor Duffy telling me not to be afraid to come forth and claim my own during the solo parts, and though I was afraid, for there was such a bare lonesomeness about standing forth by myself, I did it. That was more than molting; it was revealing the naked nerves. I did it for the other four—it wouldn’t have been fair to hold back.

It was good. I was satisfied in my mind as never before.

We all went out for pizza to celebrate, three big tables pushed together in the smoky back room of the West End Bar. I hadn’t seen my parents in several months. I noticed they were beginning to go gray, my father in streaks at the temples, my mother in patches. Their bodies were beginning to soften, yet their eyes were as eager and beneficent as in those long-ago summers at the beach. They were paying special attention to George. I prayed that my father would not say anything to embarrass me, such as, My little Paderewski, which he was quite capable of doing, with all his beneficence.

“And what are you studying?” he asked George.

“Philosophy.”

“Philosophy. Well, well. And what do you do with that when you graduate?”

In his charmingly evasive answer, George managed to mention the family of rabbis, which he knew my parents would find impressive. No doubt they assessed him as a sociable, sensible young man despite the philosophy and the beard. I think they would have been surprised and vaguely distressed, though, to know I was sleeping with him. Esther took a fancy to my mother and got herself invited to Hartford for two weeks in June. Gabrielle focused on my father, for whom she summoned up the evanescent French accent. Nina, who was beginning to don glamor like a costume—black silk blouse and gold chains around her neck—was flanked by a few of the hopeful boys. Steffie and Ray were persuaded to do, a cappella, “I Have a Song to Sing, O!” from last week’s
Yeomen,
and afterwards Steffie politely excused herself—it was close to midnight and she had an appointment. Ray moved his chair closer to Evelyn’s. Evelyn said little but smiled gnomically. She wore her smooth fair hair back in a knot like a ballet dancer’s, though she did not dance. She used to fly down the dunes but lately she had grown languid; she took long, slow walks, my parents had told me. She said little, but I knew she was saving every perception for later dialogues with herself, or with flowers, or whomever she was telling her secrets to these days. Evelyn would know what George was right away. Laughing and eating pizza, I experimented; I tried to see him through her uncanny instincts. Yes, I had been right when, taking my bows after the “Trout,” exulting in that rare satisfaction of the mind, I decided to finish with him. Even though what George offered measured high on Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus. The only category where it fell short was number six, Purity. The pleasure was not unalloyed—it was mixed with unease and self-doubt. I suspected other pleasures might yield more, and more purely: they were pleasures connected with working at music, with the density and tremulous candor Victor had shown, and with freedom from that dizzy levitation. They were connected, imprecisely, with the quote from Spinoza still tucked in a corner of my mirror, reminding me morning and evening that the effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is the actual essence of the thing itself, and causing me discomfort when I returned from my endeavors with George. Those other pleasures had to do, too, with my wish to grasp what abides beneath the daily ephemera; George was part of the ephemera. And also, in a totally impenetrable way, with Thales’ waiting, and waiting, to measure the pyramid by the measure of a man and the shadow he casts. But I had said friends for life and meant to keep my word. I would do without the rest. In the crowd of family and friends, all busy eating and looking each other over, Victor and I gave no hint of our strange talk in the bar on Amsterdam Avenue near the unfinished cathedral. For all I knew, we might never talk again, but he had had his effect. I was feeling a bit sad and cruel about George, stirred by the romance of my own cruelty as the very young can be. Till it struck me, watching him assist Ray in amiably trying to “draw out” Evelyn (hopeless task if she was unwilling), that George would not be devastated. Almost anyone clever and athletic enough would do. I surveyed the table, flushed with my success, and thought, I will give him Nina, cleverer than I, and virginal.