Disturbances in the Field (21 page)

“I think we’ve had a pretty full expression of the ongoing feelings here,” Derek said. “Is there anyone I missed, before I go on to the mutual vows?”

“Yeah, you missed me.” It was a pale, bedraggled young woman in baggy jeans, standing disconsolately on the outskirts of the circle, her arm around another woman. They might have been sisters.

“Why, Floral, certainly. Please go ahead.”

“Yeah, well, I’m glad of the chance to say what I feel on this occasion. I’m not sure why Clyde invited me—I never thought I’d see this place again after we split up—but as long as I’m here ... I sincerely wish Esther luck because you’re going to need it, Esther. Clyde is a person who is only into his own need to be told how terrific he is. Anyone who doesn’t do that, he gets rid of. Also, he can’t take the slightest criticism, like if you say he hung a picture crooked he thinks you’re hostile and trying to castrate him.” Floral’s voice was extremely low and hoarse. I couldn’t imagine her as a singer. She coughed as she spoke, a curt, stifled cough that barely interrupted the flow of words. “As far as a wife, forget it. What he really needs is a slave. I know he goes around saying I walked out on him, but it was the other way around. I was the one who wound up in the hospital on lithium, and if it hadn’t been for Susan I wouldn’t be standing here right now. And believe me, I’m not saying any of this out of jealousy or because I want him back, God forbid, but I wouldn’t mind getting back some of my records that he took, especially the Janis Joplin and the—”

“That’s enough! Shut the hell up!” Clyde shouted. “You’re as crazy as ever and you’re not going to mess up—”

“Don’t you tell me what I’m going to do! We’re not married any more, remember? I’ll talk as long as I damn—”

Clyde lunged through the crowd. Floral’s friend Susan tried to pull her away toward the parking lot but Floral shook her off and braced herself to receive Clyde. Some of the SAVE members caught him by the arms. He struggled to get free. Everybody was shouting. “Let him get it out!” “No, keep her back!” “Hold him!” “Get the fuck off of me!” “Violence is cathartic if you really get into it!” the man with the Walt Whitman beard roared. There was a bunch holding Floral back too. “Dumb dyke!” Clyde shouted at her. He got one arm free and swung at a man restraining him. Another man swung at Clyde and missed. Factions pushed and shoved; the wedding was a brawl. But it quickly dissipated. Susan pulled the reluctant Floral off in the direction of the parking lot, and the SAVE people broke ranks and smoothed down their cowboy outfits. The next moment their smiles were back in place, and they were patting and stroking each other to maximize the good feelings. I thought again of Empedocles, prophet of Love and Strife. “Now one prevails, now the other, each in its appointed turn, as change goes incessantly on its course. ... Interpenetrating one another they become men and tribes of beasts.” He called his time the Present Age of Strife, “a land without joy, where bloodshed and wrath and agents of doom are active; where plagues and corruption and floods roam in the darkness over the barren fields of Ate.” “‘I wept and mourned,’” Gaby had read to us years ago, “‘when I discovered myself in this unfamiliar land.’”

Derek was brief; the incident that had just occurred would be evaluated later, he said, at the evening meeting. As he pronounced Clyde and Esther man and wife the group took up an unmelodic chant whose syllables refused to congeal in my ear as words. It reminded me of the early computer music the professors at Columbia were experimenting with back in 1958. To this wail, Clyde took Esther in his arms for the customary kiss. He kissed her long and with a show of passion, forcing her to arch her back and neck the way Charles Boyer used to do to his heroines in the movies, a position I was sure must be hard on those muscles, delicate since the whiplash she suffered in the auto accident years ago when her first marriage broke up.

Nina was wrong about the bread—it was excellent.

“Do you have to go so soon?” Esther asked.

“Yes, we’d better. It’s a long drive. The sitter ... Come into the city for a weekend. We have more room now.”

“I’ll see when I can get away. Listen, I’m really glad you all came. I appreciate it. I know it’s not your kind of thing but ... It’s really okay. It’s going to be fine.”

“Of course it will,” said George. “Congratulations.” And he kissed her sweetly good-bye. I kissed her in bad faith. Nina offered Victor the front seat in the VW bus so he could see the countryside better—it was a soft amber and rose twilight. He and Don took off their jackets and ties and speculated, in a quiet, desultory way, about what kind of deal had been made when Ford pardoned Nixon. In back we were silent. After a while Nina rested her head on George’s shoulder and they held hands. So this would be another of their sporadic nights together. To cheer them up, as she once explained. Yet now that I thought of it, those nights were not always on depressing occasions; they were really rites of passage. They made love for weddings, births of children, the time Nina got tenure at NYU, Esther’s divorce, George’s setting up a private psychotherapeutic practice, the openings of Victor’s shows every few years, some of my concerts, a party for Gabrielle when the cast was removed from her broken leg. They prolonged the good feelings, smothered the bad ones. Something like SAVE. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but Don was telling Victor the story about Mr. Dooley. It seemed Mr. Dooley was the boss of a messenger service where Don worked with a bunch of kids the summer he was eighteen.

“What an old bastard that guy was! Like something out of Dickens. We decided to take revenge. He had this big black cane, and when he left it in the office during lunchtime one of us would go in and saw off an eighth of an inch. Only every few days, though, so he wouldn’t notice. He had a funny look once in a while, but he never figured it out. It was terrific. He didn’t know why the world felt a little more askew each week.”

“What a sweet boy you must have been,” Victor said.

“No, I was, actually. He just brought out the worst in me.”

“So what happened?”

“He fell getting into the elevator and broke his ankle.”

Mr. Dooley and his cane became a hypnagogic image, and I slept.

“Lydie.” Nina nudged me. “Wake up. We’re in the city. We’ve decided we need a drink.”

We were parked in front of a bar in the Village, not far from Nina’s apartment. Victor phoned to check on the children, and then we all settled in peacefully, for though we were sleepy and glum we were not yet inclined to part. George, never much of a drinker, which he attributed to his Judaic upbringing, asked the waiter for a glass of seltzer. “Not club soda. Seltzer. Do you have it?” He was in luck.

“Comfort me with seltzer,” George said, “for I am sick of love.”

“Tell us the seltzer story,” Nina urged. “We need it.”

“Oh, I’ve told you a dozen times.” He took her hand and kissed it gallantly. “Aren’t you tired of it yet?”

“No. Are we?” She looked around.

We were not, so he told us once more how, when he was a small boy in the Bronx, every fourth Wednesday morning at seven-fifteen a seltzer man would ring the bell and he, being up and dressed for school, had the job of letting him in, giving back the box of empties and accepting the box of fulls, while his father and his two uncles puttered around, shaving, dressing, saying their morning prayers with a special mention of the Jews in Germany and Poland, and fixing breakfast. “He was a huge man with a huge belly, and he carried a long wooden box with ten bottles, two rows of five, on his right shoulder, plus two extras in his other hand. I thought it was marvelous, how he kept the box balanced up there with one hand. I thought he must be the strongest man in the world. And the bottles were so beautiful—blue and translucent, with blue bubbles inside, because they had been jiggling around on his shoulder all the way up in the elevator. They had chrome squirt tops. He carried it all the way down the hall to the kitchen, with me following him, and when he set it down on the floor he always let out a great groan and said, ‘Well, my lad, how many this time?’ It was always twelve, every month, but each time he said, ‘How many?’ and I said, ‘Twelve, please.’ My father had told me I must say please. Then he took a deep breath before he lifted the box of empties, and I followed him back down the hall. And then my uncle, the senior rabbi, would come to pay him at the door and make polite conversation—my uncle believed in treating every person he met with equal regard. But he never seemed to grasp that while he was chatting on about the weather, and the war, and the rationing—wasn’t it a good thing they didn’t ration seltzer?—and so forth, the seltzer man was carrying these ten heavy bottles in the wooden box on his shoulder, plus the two in his other hand. The seltzer man was very polite too, an Irishman, I think, and as soon as he could get a word in he would say, ‘Righto, well, I’d best be on my way.’ At supper they would always let me squirt the seltzer into the glasses, and when they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a seltzer man. Even now, I must say, I still have these fantasies ...”

The waiter brought the drinks and George drank his seltzer with zest. Don downed his martini very quickly. “Tell me something,” he said to George. “What is the difference between those people in Pine-crest and what you do? No offense, of course.”

“Of course.” George, master of tolerance, smiled, the way Charlie Chaplin might smile at William Buckley. “The difference is that I don’t attempt to evade the human condition. Freud was right, you know. There is no remedy, there is only alleviation. The remedy is death.”

“I didn’t know you were a Freudian,” I said.

“Well, not in all the particulars, no. But fundamentally ... Look, nowadays there are the saviors, and then there are the repairmen. Freud would have hung in with the repairmen, I’m sure. That way you keep some self-respect, professionally. I’m like the guy you call in to fix your washing machine. You know it’s going to break down eventually, but meanwhile you want to keep it running as best you can for as long as you can, get the worst kinks out so it can do its job. Saviors scare me. There are enough built-in dangers around.”

“Excuse me.” Nina got up. “I’m going to stroll home. It’s been a long day, and I am still not saved.”

“I’ll walk you. It’s dark.” George got up too. I always found this absurd pretense of discretion very touching. “Good night, good night.” Kisses and handshakes. Still full of energy, he took her firmly by the arm and led her away.

“Off to consummate the marriage,” said Victor morosely. “That’s nice.”

“It’s funny what weddings do to people,” Don said. “I mean even good weddings. I had a patient once, a young woman with a case of hysterical paralysis. She couldn’t move her legs, but there wasn’t anything organically wrong. It started a couple of days after her wedding. All she could tell me was that she had danced and danced till she was ready to drop. At first she thought it must be a charley horse.”

“So what did you do?”

“I sent her to a shrink.”

“And?”

“Oh, eventually she walked. Everything worked out all right. She even became pregnant.”

“Remember when Gaby broke her leg? That was pretty soon after you were married too.”

Don looked at me keenly. “Gaby was thrown off a horse.”

“I remember. But still. She had ridden all her life. It was only a few months before she was supposed to join the company.”

“The horse was galloping, Lydia. It took the fence all wrong. It sometimes happens.”

“Yes. But dancers break things all the time and then they go right back to dancing. You of all people know that; it’s half your practice.”

“She had to stay off her feet a lot. She got pregnant.” He smiled with appreciation.

“It’s not a laughing matter.” Foam, good Lord. But I held my tongue.

“You know, Lydia, you wanted her to be a dancer more than she wanted it herself.”

“Maybe. Maybe.” But he hadn’t known her in college. All those nights, all that flexing, pointing, arching, dreaming, the passion in it. Did she widen the space between her thighs to a hundred eighty degrees just to take him in? Sure, things changed, lives changed, and we all needed our children, if only to affirm the roots, seeds, growth, and flowering of the universe. But beneath that were supposed to abide earth, water, air, and fire, unchanging. Most especially fire, the wanting and the striving. What happened to douse hers?

Don ordered his third martini; Victor and I got coffee. I suddenly felt obnoxious, spoiling for a fight as I had in the airport in Geneva after Evelyn retired to the mountains at twenty. “Why do you guys think they used to bind the feet of Chinese women?”

“Wasn’t it supposed to make them more attractive?”

“Discipline,” said Victor. “So they’d take small steps, literally and figuratively.”

“Ah, Victor, you’re so poetic, my love, it’s beautiful. Did you learn that in CC? No, I’m sorry, you really are. All right, but in practical terms, they bound their feet so they wouldn’t run away. Ask any girl—she doesn’t have to be educated to know that. Ask Althea. You ask Cynthia, Don. Your patient was well-trained, that one who got paralyzed. These days we bind our own feet.” I got up and stalked to the bathroom. I glimpsed them looking after me, bewildered—poor guys: what did we do this time?

When I came back they were laughing and horsing around, Don with the defiance of a man who has been unjustly scolded and is getting good and drunk in return.

“Sick as hell anemia,” he was saying. “You wouldn’t believe what people report that they have. Fireballs in the uterus. Jesus.”

“What
in the uterus?”

“Just true medical tales again, Lydia,” said Victor. “Forget it, you wouldn’t approve.”

Don put his head in his hands. He had stopped laughing. “Smiles of Gentle Jesus.”

“What?”

“Spinal meningitis. In Appalachia, when I was an intern. The mother said he had Smiles of Gentle Jesus.” He looked up; his face was drained of color. “I had to watch that kid die. I still remember his face from seventeen years ago.” He took another gulp of his drink and shuddered.