Disturbances in the Field (26 page)

She lowered her sunglasses. We both leaned forward to watch the horseflesh being paraded along the track.

“It doesn’t sound like love, in my experience.”

“It’s not love. It’s more like a shadow of love. Seen from the cave.”

“God, you make it sound awful.”

“No. It’s interesting, or why would I do it? Lots of people do. Of course it has its price. It’s a bit eroding.”

“I never understood why you didn’t marry that one in Princeton. You seemed happy with him.”

“Yes, well, he was set on Colorado. I suppose I could have lived in Colorado if I tried. I think, really, that the right time had not yet come.”

We laughed. “And if I ask you in ten years, you’ll say the right time has passed?”

“Probably.”

Post time was announced. She took off the glasses and got out her binoculars. As they rounded the bend we rose with the crowd. All around us men cheered and shouted. I was jumping up and down to spur my horse, Mood Indigo, who had started out ahead but soon slipped behind. Nina alone was still, more like a spectator at a ballet than at a horse race, chastely in white, blue scarf rippling on the breeze, lips slightly parted, nothing betraying excitement except a quivering muscle near her jaw. Mood Indigo ended in third place, but I had bet to win. Nina’s two horses, Social Butterfly and Prince Hal, trailed also. We sat down. She tore up her tickets, extended her hand with the exaggerated gesture of a lady offering it to be kissed, and let the pieces drift to the ground. “That was twenty bucks, dammit. This is no more scientific than a horse race. Ah, well. Do you remember what Gaby was saying about being in a straitjacket from being loved too much?”

“Yes.”

“To me nothing could be too much. It’s never enough to let me rest content. I’m not talking about sex, you know that.”

“I know.”

“With the ones who really loved me, two maybe, I always found fault. I start measuring, to see how much. Never with the others. It’s a ridiculous kind of ... Ah!” She waved her hand in resignation. “They fall short, of course—they have to.”

“Short of what? What’s the standard?”

“What indeed? In Sunday school, when I was a kid, we’d have lessons on stories from the Bible. Lots of miracles. My favorites were the parts where Jesus healed the sick or made the lepers’ sores disappear. I once told that to the minister, and he smiled and said maybe I would like to be a nurse. That could be my way of following Jesus. I had no interest in being a nurse. He didn’t understand at all. I liked the idea of its being a miracle.”

“Ah, a faith healer.”

“Exactly.” She laughed. “I would have liked that—transform with a touch. Anyway, at the end of the lesson, after we sang a couple of hymns, we would all file out, and the teacher, who was skinny and his hair was so oiled your fingers felt greasy just looking at it, would say good-bye to each of us in turn. He patted each of us on the head and said, ‘Remember, Jesus loves you. Jesus loves you, Nancy Dalton.’ Oh, at first it made me feel wonderful, bathed in that vast love. But after a while it wasn’t any good. It was too vast and abstract—I couldn’t get my hands on it. It didn’t help in little daily things, to remember that love. There was a painting of Jesus on the wall, just the face. He was supposed to be smiling down on us. But if you took a good look at the smile, it wasn’t connected to us at all. It was very self-absorbed, as if he was amused by a private joke and we were excluded. It irritated me, and so did the teacher, because he said the same thing to every child. There were about twenty of us. I knew that in every town in the world some oily teacher must be saying that to some kid, and I thought, how can he love so many? He couldn’t even remember all the names. That wasn’t love, or it was love so diluted there was no kick left. You know I always drink everything straight. I didn’t want to be loved as part of a category. I wanted him to love me in particular. It’s terribly self-centered, I know. I want to be the world, for somebody. I know I’m not a world. But I want someone to find the world in me and never want to leave.”

“You would get bored even faster. Look at Gabrielle.”

“Possibly. Still, it’s the truth. Not a truth I’m especially proud of. It’s certainly not what I want to want.”

“Nancy?”

“I changed it when I came East to college. Nancy is so ... oh, simpering. I wanted to leave home that kid who curtsied and behaved herself in Sunday school and never let a boy put his hand under her blouse. Who wasn’t even used to being touched.” She gave me a wry smile. “That was a good idea you had that summer, to hand me George. He did a lot for me.”

“Hah! I can imagine.”

“More than that. He was the finishing touch. His mind was so unfettered.”

“Yes, that’s the trouble.”

“No, unfettered is fine. The trouble is something not there.”

“Passion,” I said. Nina laughed and I blushed, a decade after the fact. “Well, that kind he has. I mean passion about life. Passion makes the fetters.”

“He suffered a lot as a kid,” she said.

“So did you. That’s no excuse.”

“You’re hard on him, Lydia. For you the past is always present, isn’t it? And yet he did you no harm.” She was silent for a while. “I think the only time my mother touched me was to do my braids. She brushed them out morning and night and did them right up again, as if it was perilous to leave the hair unbraided. She brushed so hard, it was like a punishment. Yes, I’m sure it
was
a punishment.” She laughed again and tossed a stray lock off her forehead. “She made those braids so tight my scalp ached. That’s why I finally cut it off, my freshman year. It was a great moment, when I realized it was my hair and I could do what I liked with it. It was gradually dawning on me that the rest of me was mine too. Now I brush it with such affection, Lydia, you would laugh if you saw. I had a man once, who brushed my hair. He did it so well. He used to ... Ah, this is all very silly. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

“No, go on. You always stop at the best parts.”

“Yes. Well, I suppose Nancy hasn’t changed all that much. Still pure in word if not in deed. Nina was the name of someone in a novel, the kind I couldn’t bring into the house. I had to read it in the lending library, in snatches. She was a
femme fatale.
She had flaming red hair and breasts that were forever quivering.”

I smiled. “In all these years you never even told me your name. Or that you were a
femme fatale.
”

“Hardly. I’m just a repressed academic.” I must have looked doubtful. “What I mean is that I’ve repressed the cravings for the ordinary. I did it backwards. The ninth race is coming up, Lyd. We can do a triple.”

We both bet on Slalom and Stately Minute for Win and Place, and I picked Dapper Dan for Show, a ruinous choice, Nina pointed out, since in the opinion of the handicappers, Dapper Dan was “hardly the one.” But the three jockeys wore purple, gold, and green—how glorious they could look together at the finish line. At the last minute Dapper Dan did zoom up from behind, but only to fourth place. Luckily for me, Nina was not a gloater. Suddenly, strange green patterns flashed on the boards, and the crowd held its breath. Chance was a foxy god: the horse in third place—Nina’s Old Curmudgeon—was disqualified for some breach of equine etiquette, and Dapper Dan was moved up. Forty-six dollars! I could buy Victor the print he wanted from his friend Tom’s show down in a Village loft.

“You’re the one who’s hot now. I’ve transferred my heat. What on earth made you pick Dapper Dan?”

“That’s my father’s name. And he’s dapper, too. Pin-striped suits, folded handkerchief in the jacket pocket. When I was a kid it made an impression. Also, when he and Evelyn and I watched prizefights on television Friday nights, he taught us always to root for the underdog. Nina, what are those people doing?”

All around us, the sallow, unshaven men in baggy pants were bent over, swishing their hands through the racing tickets that papered the floor.

“Looking for a winning ticket thrown away by mistake.”

“Hey! Come on, we might pick up a few bucks.”

“Oh Lydia, stop it. Get up! Really!”

“Aha! That’s Nancy speaking. Okay, okay, I’ll be a lady. Even at the track.”

We got back into the Triumph I so loved to ride in; when she speeded I tasted adventure on the wind, and an impossible freedom.

Out on the highway she glanced over and read my mind. “Maybe I’ll run away someday. Would you care to come? We’ll take the car, and find two men who like to eat and drink and swim, and we’ll drive around stopping off in motels with pools, like in
Lolita.
We can follow the sun and the horses, and shoplift caviar from supermarkets, and chill our champagne in rivers. Just you and me and two fly-by-night men, if such exist.”

“It’s a deal. Just give me a couple of days’ notice.” I didn’t want to spoil her mood or her fantasy; I found her delectable and tingling as lime ices, as well as gallant in her solitude. Why tell her I had never been further from running away? I was hot and running back into my life. Back to Victor, to my work, and to the children, whose infancy I had known only through a mist. What I wanted now was the adventure of being happy in the ordinary way. But I felt shy about telling her. Compared to what she had to tell, it sounded banal.

It was not the moment, either, to tell her I was pregnant. No accident. I was stronger now, and I yearned for another chance, to prove I could do things right, like everyone else. A question of pride. Victor had been easily persuaded. He loved children, and as the embryonic Alan was later to do, loved landmark and ritualistic events in his life. He was beginning to sell paintings, teaching at Parsons, and tending bar rarely. I was earning some money by teaching too. We had moved uptown to a solid apartment building with an elevator that could hold groceries, stroller, and a whole troop of children. Things were so much easier; possibly I missed the eerie thrill of living on the edge.

Through the fall and winter, as my belly grew, I sat at the piano and practiced. Rosalie kept watch like a warden and I was a model prisoner. I never missed a lesson or a rehearsal, and I did two concerts at Saint John the Divine, the unfinished cathedral, wrapped in her voluminous gypsy dresses. I kept on till the last moment, which came at the end of March. My mother, her broken arm in a sling, was summoned to stay with Althea and Phil. She turned on the TV to hear the President, while Victor hunted for the car keys. Victor’s ambivalence over so middle-class a concession as a used car took the form of misplacing the keys.

“Lydie, did you hear that?” my mother gasped.

“What?” I was in the hall, tossing the old Trollope novels into the overnight case.

“He said he’s not going to run again.”

In a moment we were all in front of the television. “Shush,” Victor told Phil, and picked him up.

It was true. He would not seek another term because of the public outcry against his waging of the war. Althea, on my mother’s lap, wanted to switch to
Sesame Street.
“Shh, darling, there’s no
Sesame Street
at night.”

“They should be in bed, Mom.”

“You should be in the hospital. Why are you both standing here?”

“Shh, wait a minute,” said Victor.

Johnson’s face had become human again. Those deep grooves were where our marching feet had tracked. He had felt it. We stood for five more minutes, mesmerized. I had another contraction and grabbed hold of a chair. “Victor, the keys!”

“I never would have thought it.” He put Phil down and went to continue the search.

The phone rang. It was Gabrielle. “Did you hear him?”

“Yes! Isn’t it incredible?”

“Maybe Esther was right about the moral victory. ... What did she say, the wish was father to the fact?”

“Yes, her William James phase.”

“Lydia,” Victor called from the kitchen. “This is no time for one of those girlish chats.”

“I have to go. I’m having the baby.”

“I want to see the baby!” Phil whined.

“Oh! Good luck!” said Gabrielle. “Or should I say break a leg?”

“I’d much rather, believe me.” I hung up.

Victor dashed in, jangling the keys. “Who put them on top of the refrigerator?”

“Not me,” said Althea. “I can’t even reach.”

He pulled on his coat. “Did he say anything about ending it?”

“No. Would you two go already? The war will wait, I assure you.”

“Okay, come, Lydie. Come along. Are you timing them? Keep track.” He nudged me out the door. “Good-bye, Althea. Good-bye, Flip. Good-bye, Francie, I’ll call you. Move, sweetheart. You don’t have all day.”

And lo it came to pass, as Ecclesiastes might have put it, that Alan slid out like a child going down a wet slide, and I actually laughed, lying on the table, when the doctor held him up high like a coveted football in her large and gifted hands, shook her gray curls, and said, “If there’s another you might not make it to the hospital.” After the infected stitches I had found her, a painstaking lady, a woman who would take pains.

The first day home I wheeled the white wicker bassinet (unberibboned) over to the piano and played Brahms and Rachmaninoff so he would get used to sleeping through the loudest, most urgent of sounds. Rosalie told me that trick and it worked. I did it for my survival, but I did it too for those little missives of Esther’s. I wanted to be worthy of that chubby, loving handwriting.

It was a Pyrrhic victory for the moral force. The wish was not father to the fact, or not yet. The gestation was endless; four days after Johnson’s speech Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis, and the other, anonymous, bodies kept piling up on the TV screen.

By 1971 Esther had been back from Israel for a year. The kibbutz was “fantastic,” but, well, she had had it with communal living. Now she “had” social work school, and was having psychotherapy, with a woman who was a Gestalt therapist, an anarchist, and a feminist. Her father’s daughter, Esther felt cozy in the company of people whose views could be encompassed by “ist” words. Ralph had been a Marxist as well as an addict.

We all “had” something new. At the monthly magazine where three years ago, to her chagrin, she had begun as a typist, Gabrielle was an associate editor. They had recognized her brains and her durability. We were acquiring our lives, like the consumers Esther’s father scorned. Choosy shoppers, though, we paid dearly for our goods and we treated them well. Collectively we acquired children, skills, work, lovers, trips, experience—and we thought that these things constituted ourselves, and that without them we would no longer be who we were. As if they were barnacles lodged to the bottoms of ships. Or as if they were swallowed and assimilated. Or better still, implanted.