Disturbances in the Field (2 page)

“Poor Vivie. She’s so lovely, she should never have to be unhappy.”

The old Volvo slid scarily onto Broadway. I dropped George at his combined apartment and office on West Eighty-third Street where, he told me, he would shortly be seeing a man who had terrible problems with his father. The father, a renowned neurologist, snubbed his son’s achievements in real estate, which drove the son to bigger and better deals, verging on illegality. “I’m very good on fathers,” he said.

“What’s her name? The biofeedback woman.”

“Elinor.”

“Elinor. Romantic. Have fun.”

He kissed my cheek and climbed off over the piles of snow. “Give my love to Vivie,” he called. “Tell her there’ll be snow next year too.” As I pulled away I almost skidded into a waiting taxi—there was a treacherous film of ice everywhere.

A few days later I telephoned him. “George, hi, it’s me. I’ve been thinking. What is the field, exactly?”

“I’m sorry, I’m with someone. Can I call you back in half an hour?” I knew that tone: no proper names, no endearments, nothing in the voice to hint at relationship or emotion. Nothing to cause gratuitous disturbance in a patient’s field.

“I’ll have a student then. Can you call around two-thirty?”

A far cry from our college years, when we could knock on doors at any time; friends were instantly available when needed. Nina, Gabrielle, Esther, and I would lay aside books or plans at the slightest provocation. Now we live under the dominion of daily calendars—we have discovered it is the way to get things done. In twenty years we have become the ones who move the world along. The graduation speeches predicted this would come to pass, and so it has. And yet, in our overheated dormitory rooms, when we took up the ancient philosophers’ debate over the active versus the contemplative life, there was hardly a contest: “‘If reason is divine in comparison with man,’” Nina read aloud with approval, “‘the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. ...We must ... strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.’” God’s activity is contemplation, and God is surely the most blessed being. Therefore, “‘those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are most truly happy.’” To question reason’s divinity did not occur to us, but then it did not occur to Aristotle either. No, with the laser light of thought, we would pierce the skin of the world to get at the nucleus.

And now we strain every nerve not “to live in accordance with the best thing in us” but simply to live. Telephone calls are disturbances. Gabrielle, who welcomed interruption when she was a housewife, has become editor of an arts magazine. She is serene at last and her right eyelid has stopped twitching; her actions impinge visibly upon the world—her magazine is on every downtown newsstand. Her husband Don treats her with deference because she brings in steady money. Her children respect her because she goes to an office daily, where they can visit occasionally after school and receive the red-carpet treatment. But she is often too busy to come to the phone, and is guarded by a gruff-voiced male secretary who makes me give my phone number, as if Gaby didn’t know it after all this time.

Nina, who is frequently out teaching chemistry or in her lab, or stealing precious hours with her married, civil rights lawyer lover, has a machine on which her voice, low and pleasing, an excellent thing in woman, recalls Muriel the fine cigar on the radio of my childhood: “Why don’t you pick me up and smoke me sometime?” I can’t help laughing into the machine, thinking of how discreet Nina really is. “This is Lydia,” I murmur. “I too am very sorry you’re not able to take my call ...”

And Victor. Victor is the worst. In his studio downtown he takes the phone off the hook when he needs absolute concentration. The world, presumably what he is painting, must not disturb, so that he can better envision it. I or any of our children could perish and he would not hear of it for hours.

George called back promptly at two-thirty. “I’m sorry I couldn’t talk. I was very involved. This guy is going to get himself investigated by the Housing and Development Agency if he doesn’t watch his step. He’s really acting out.”

“Acting out? Does that happen in the field also?”

“Lydia, don’t you even know what acting out is? I mean, where have you been?”

“I do know what it is.” My voice had the injured tone Phil affects when Victor and I suggest he spend more time studying. “I mean, I think I know.”

He cleared his throat pedantically. “Field theory is an approach, a way of thinking. Acting out is a label for a certain kind of excessive behavior—when you mistake your fantasies for reality.”

“All right. But what is this field? I keep seeing a meadow. Peasants dancing.”

“Well, you might say the field is the general area of physical and emotional operation of all the people in the situation.”

“George, really.”

“Okay, okay. It’s not a place or anything static. It’s the sum total of the organisms and the environment—no, rather the organisms in the environment, as a unit. The field is everything that made the people what they are, that affects their needs and responses at the moment.”

“But what about accidents? Say the mother is on her way to the crying infant but she trips over a roller skate her older kid left in the hall and breaks her leg. Is the roller skate part of the field?”

“Sure. Everything that happens happens in the field. The field is constantly being created and altered. Look, imagine experience as a succession of needs and fulfillments, or nonfulfillments, as the case may be. Ideally, once a need is satisfied it recedes to the background. Say you come home hungry, cold, and tired—you’ll take care of one thing at a time depending on which is most urgent. Now beyond merely physical needs—one adventure gets completed and you’re ready for the next. New needs arise, the whole thing repeats itself. Unless, you see, there’s a disturbance you can’t get past. A particular need is not satisfied. You can’t move on. You get stuck.”

“Do you mean to tell me life is just a string of these little transactions? With built-in obsolescence?”

“I prefer to think of them as adventures,” he said a bit huffily. “It doesn’t preclude more, uh, high-minded things, Lydia. It’s simply a methodology. They have it in physics. Listen, could we continue this later? I only have ten minutes between patients and I’d like to wash up before the next one.”

“I thought you only talked to them.”

“A euphemism, sweetheart.”

“All right. I’m sorry I bothered you. It just makes life sound so acquisitive. Like those kids who collect shells and string them together to make a necklace. If you have lots of adventures that’s a long necklace. If you die young all you’ve got is a bracelet.”

“It’s easy to dismiss something you’re not familiar with. Oh, hi, Jerry,” he called. George runs an informal practice. “I’ll be with you in a minute. Good-bye, now,” he said in his bland public tone. I had become a disturbance in George’s field, and in Jerry’s. Jerry needed George’s undivided attention, George needed Jerry’s money. They were ready for their next adventures, so I hung up.

I was one of those children who collect shells on the beach. I always hoped to make a beautiful necklace but I never did, because I didn’t know how to make holes in the shells without breaking them. We spent our summer vacations at the beach, my parents, my younger sister Evelyn, and I. My father had three weeks off from the insurance firm. Each twilight for three weeks, after a day on the beach, Evelyn and I emptied the pockets of our sweatshirts and piled our shells in two separate mounds. Evelyn was three years younger. She gathered shells of all sizes, some big enough for ashtrays, a few suitable for a necklace, the rest good for nothing, only beautiful. I sometimes made fun of her motley collection and she didn’t know how to defend herself, turned away and retreated into a shielded privacy, and I was instantly sorry. Except for one summer, when we lived, inexplicably, in near-perfect harmony.

Back home I kept my shells in a bowl on my nighttable. It irked me to see them so useless, never to be linked into a design, through my own ignorance. Yet I never asked how the holes were made. I imagined it to be a delicate process, and even though my fingers were agile enough on the piano, I probably feared they would break the shells. I remained attached to them, though, and took them with me to the college dormitory, then to the apartment I shared for two years with Gabrielle, and then, when I married Victor, to our ramshackle flat with the cracking plaster on East Twenty-first Street, where once I found a roach in my hair and cut it all off. Victor liked the shells: he sometimes arranged them on the chipped porcelain table in the kitchen and drew them. He didn’t see them as a thwarted necklace. Some twelve years ago, during a massive housecleaning following the death of my father, I tossed out my childish shell collection. I wasn’t renouncing, metaphorically, the hope of making order and continuity out of random acquisitions. I think I was simply trying to show myself how much I could do without.

My next adventure was coming up too. It was time to coach my twice-weekly chamber music trio of high school students. They were doing Haydn, who is hard to ruin and always a pleasure to hear, even with amateurs. Although I had been on the faculty of the venerable uptown music school for seven years, I still felt a secret thrill walking through its corridors and being greeted as if I belonged there; sitting around with other musicians and arguing over whether or not to modernize the repertory for advanced students, or what should the programs be for the spring concert series, or should we start an evening chamber music group for amateurs. This last was my private cause: I was sure lots of good pianists would jump at the chance to do chamber music with professional coaching. I was willing to organize it, but I needed to win over Irving Bloch, our sixty-five-year-old martinet of the strings. His standards were impossibly high and his pedagogic manner intimidating, but for those who could tolerate him he performed wonders. Naturally I didn’t tell anyone of my secret thrill, especially not Irving; part of the thrill was in appearing to take my position for granted, like a man.

The trio gave me another sort of thrill; despite their wrong notes and occasional fumblings, this afternoon they captured the measured buoyancy of Haydn. Life was bountiful; I congratulated them and treated us all to hot chocolate in the cafeteria before the cold trip home, where I fried chicken and set Althea to peeling potatoes. I was about to call Nina when Vivian appeared.

“I need to do an experiment to weigh air for science. How do you weigh air?”

Weigh air? “I have no idea, sweetie. Althea, did you ever weigh air?”

“In a lab. With water, balloons, tubes, all sorts of stuff.”

“Ask Daddy when he comes home. He might know.”

She looked at me gravely, assessing my ignorance. “How about a palindrome? Do you know what that is?”

“Yes. So there. A palindrome is something that reads the same way back and forth. Anna. Level. Otto.”

“Madam, I’m Adam,” said Althea.

“Able was I ere I saw Elba.”

“Wait, wait a minute,” cried Vivian. “You’re going too fast. Onion?”

We laughed. “No no no, not onion.”

“Onion,” Vivian repeated thoughtfully, playing with the potato peelings. “On-ion. Why not onion?”

“Althea, my hands are all greasy. Write onion and show her.” Althea did. I turned a few pieces of chicken, wiped my hands, and dialed Nina’s number. Althea wrote in large block letters, “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.” She took each of Vivie’s forefingers and moved them from opposite ends of the phrase, towards each other, making them jiggle at each letter. Vivie was giggling.

“This is Nina Dalton,” a voice said slowly, bemused. “I’m very sorry I’m not able—” Then the real voice of Nina, or the real Nina, cool and wide-awake, sounded over the recording. “Hello? Hello?”

“Nina, it’s me.”

“Hi. We have to let it run its course.” After the beep she said, “Sorry about that. I just got in. How are you, Lydia?”

“Good. I have to dash to a rehearsal, but I wanted to ask you a quick question. Something George mentioned. In physics, do you have the field?”

“The field? Of course. Magnetic, electrical. There are all kinds. Which one do you mean?”

“None in particular. The Field. George says it’s a way of thinking, not a thing.”

“Field theory. Well, that’s a pretty basic concept. Relativity. Einstein? Surely you’ve heard of him?”

“The name does sound familiar.”

“In field theory, instead of having matter sitting out in space like lumps, you concentrate on the way things interact. The relationships of matter and energy and time are what’s determinant. Nothing is static, everything is dependent on and defined by the movements of everything else. The field is not so much a place where all this happens but the conjunction, the interaction itself. As if the universe is recreating itself, moment by moment.”

I turned over a few more pieces of sizzling chicken. “Is it like Heraclitus? Everything in flux?”

“Well.” She had that kindly, enigmatic tone scientists use, suggesting complexities too vast to broach. “Broadly speaking, I guess you might say that.”

“It sounds a lot better than the way George described it, but still it makes me edgy.”

Nina laughed. “You don’t have to have a subjective reaction. Life goes on exactly the same with or without these notions.”

“I’m never sure about that.”

“Even Einstein was convinced of the harmony of the universe.”

“Was he? That’s encouraging. Anyway, thanks. You sound tired. Are you okay?”

“I’m all right, but Sam’s wife is in the hospital.”

“Again?” Sam is the civil rights lawyer. His wife has diabetic comas periodically, and attendant complications. “Is it very bad?”

“No.” Not bad enough, she might have said were she not Nina, brought up by stern midwestern Presbyterian parents to tread the paths of righteousness. She is totally miscast in the role of other woman. She wishes Sam’s wife no harm; she merely thinks about her as little as possible. “Time-consuming. He needs a lot of solace, I get resentful. Same old thing. I won’t bore you with it.”