Disturbances in the Field (3 page)

When I hung up, Althea, faithful galley slave, said in her self-possessed manner, “What would you like me to do with these potatoes?”

“You can fry them or mash them. I’ll leave it up to you.”

Vivie was sitting at the table studying the palindromes Althea had written out, her long black hair (my color) in two bunches falling over her cheeks. I decided not to ask her to help with the salad. She did everything in such a dreamy way. Telepathic, she looked up at me. “Aren’t you going to eat with us?”

“I’ll eat later. I don’t have time.”

Her face clouded, but she allowed me to hug her passionately, the only one of the four who still did. There was a familiar clutch of guilt in my chest but I ignored it. Four nights a week I conversed with her about the foibles of the Greek gods, the nurturing habits of wolves, could chimps really be taught to speak and if so, was it speech as we know it. I promised to come in and kiss her good night when I returned.

“I hope Daddy can figure out how to weigh air.” Her parting shot.

“Is it okay if Darryl comes over? He’s going to help me with physics.” Althea brushed back her fair long hair, pushed up her sleeves, and edged the potatoes expertly into a saucepan. Neat and efficient; beneath the jeans and sweatshirt, voluptuous. Not shy about the boyfriend but aware of cleverly managing me.

“Sure. Thanks for the help. And watch out for that hair over the flame,” I kidded her. Months ago, Althea’s French teacher had invited her prize students to tea in a dim Victorian-style apartment lit by half a dozen candles in brass candlesticks.
“Attention aux cheveux!”
Mlle. Riviere cautioned, waving her waxy hands nervously. “You have the kind of hair that easily ignites!” Althea came home with an unusual fit of giddiness and a French accent. “Did you know I have the kind of hair that easily ignites?” Her brothers have adopted the joke. Phil lights matches and holds them perilously close. Alan brandishes scissors; he wants to send a sample to the
Guinness Book of World Records.
Vivian stares at her own wistfully and says, “Do I? Do I have the kind of hair that easily ignites?”

I kissed Althea’s cheek and went to see the boys. Rather, I wanted them to see me. My visibility was like money placed in the collection box at church, overtly to maintain a worthy institution, covertly to buy a share of safety and salvation. For outside I was an unregenerate sinner, impassioned by my work.

Phil was sprawled on his bed eating gorp and reading
Sports Illustrated.
He looked like a television-comedy version of the typical teen. In his room, the only soothing place to rest the eye was the wall opposite his bed, where he had hung four large posters, close-ups of each Beatle. Phil himself had something of the intelligent, defiantly insecure look of George Harrison, only he was not quite so dark or so gaunt. My efforts at small talk evoked mostly grunts. “I have to go out now.” “So I see.” “Althea is cooking, so would you help clean up, please?” A grunt of concession. I took a step forward, but no, he did not look as though he wished to be kissed good-bye.

In Alan’s room, on the small phonograph Victor got him for his birthday, the Beatles’
White Album
played: “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly ...” Alan, at his desk, glanced up, smiled gallantly, and sniffled. His nose was still running from the ski trip. I smiled back and rested my hands on his shoulders. Before him were problems with fractions of the most unwieldy kind. “All your life,” Paul McCartney sang, “You were only waiting for this moment to arise. You were only waiting for this moment to arise.” “Are you sure you can concentrate with that on?” “I can’t concentrate without it,” he said, tolerant and undefensive. We had this dialogue all the time. “That’s a pretty song,” I said. “Yes, but it’s not my favorite.” “What is your favorite?” “‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’” I nodded. Alan was suave beyond his years, and very deadpan. Sometimes it was hard to recognize a joke. At the door I changed my mind about interference. “You can’t subtract those until the denominators are the same.” He clapped his hand to his forehead, widened his eyes, and let out an exaggerated “Ah!” of discovery. He has acted in several Victorian melodramas at school. “Odds bodikins! Thanks, Mom.” “Don’t mention it.”

Downstairs in the lobby I met Victor lugging a twenty-four-inch TV set. The sight of him, as always, brought a flicker of elation. He looked good to me even in a blue down jacket which could make a well-shaped person shapeless, and a brown wool cap pulled over his ears. His cheeks were ruddy from the cold; flakes of snow glistened on his lashes and in his sporadic beard, where some gray hairs had lately shown. He kissed my cheek under the amused eye of the doorman, pretending to doze in a corner.

“So, how does it work?”

“It was fine in the shop. The guy said if it doesn’t work here it’s because nothing works here unless it’s hooked up to the cable. We’re due north of the twin towers.”

His sister Lily urged this used TV set on us last week, when we made our semiannual visit to Westchester. She led us into the wood-paneled den where it sat neglected on its wheeled metal stand. “Take it, please,” she breathed in a smoke-filled voice, bobbing her lacquered head up and down. “Believe me, you’d be doing me a favor.” Lily can seem to be breathing down your neck though she is four feet away. Like Victor she has forceful presence, and like their mother, Edith, she is well-polished, but the presence is suffocating and the polish sticky. “Let Vivie or Alan have one of their own. My family is so spoiled, they won’t look at black-and-white any more.” Lily’s munificence surprised me, but when we got the TV home the mystery was solved. All we could coax out of it were parallel lines and snow. “I thought so,” remarked Alan. But Victor, defending the family honor, said all it needed was a minor adjustment.

“How much was the minor adjustment?” I asked.

“Forty bucks.”

“If it doesn’t work, it’s eleven seventy-five a month to hook it up to the cable. That’s a lot of money, considering they don’t watch that much.”

“Well, we’ll see when I plug it in. It’s awfully slippery out there, Lyd. Maybe you should take the bus and I’ll pick you up.”

“No, I’ll be careful.” I held the elevator door for him. “By the way, you’re going to be asked how to weigh air.”

“Air?” His face, as it vanished upwards, was turning pensive. His children’s needs were serious business to Victor. Suddenly I felt guilty again—I could have asked Nina how to weigh air.

It was impossible to go more than fifteen miles an hour along the curving, icy Drive. I thought about George’s illustrations of the mother and the crying infant. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that the child might be a disturbance in the mother’s field. When my infants cried, particularly the first two, my impulse was not to run and comfort them but to hide my head under a pillow, which I sometimes did. Of course most of the time I went to comfort them, but I didn’t run. Well, all that was beside the point; George idealized mothers. The point was the word “need.”

I couldn’t see how any need worthy of the name was ever fulfilled once and for all. Everything from that infant’s first unanswered cry is unfinished business. New needs may arise daily, as George said, but we still must keep placating the ancient ones, like jugglers who set a dozen plates spinning, then dart up and down the line frantically keeping them all awhirl. Sure, the old needs can be temporarily quelled (what George airily termed “receding to the background”), but only to rise again, tyrannical. Alan says, after eating lasagna, “I don’t want to eat for a week,” but the next morning rises ravenous. Grownups feel the same way about sex; certainly George does, or did when we were intimate, more than twenty years ago. (Love, though, may be a luxury. At least I have seen people—my old friend Esther—live for long periods without it.)

Needs are deceptive, too, the bark worse than the bite. When my father died and I painfully threw out the shell collection and other clutter, I saw that one could do without a lot and remain the same person, whole and intact. And yet there must come a point. ... Supposing the stripper, after removing the G-string and the rosettes on her nipples, peeled off the patch of hair and the breasts themselves?

I parked the car on 120th Street opposite Riverside Church and made my way through the snow humming the Beatles song I’d heard in Alan’s room. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life ... It was one of those brilliant, glittery snows that ought to emit some glorious sound with each crystal falling to earth, something transcendent like a Bach cantata. I turned to watch it falling on Grant’s Tomb, that dumpy monument made grand at night by floodlights, in whose aura the snow drifted with a golden tinge. It was covering the layer of ice and the older, blackening snow, softening the silhouettes of cars and dampening the intermittent sound of crunching tires. I stuck out my tongue in a sudden craving for the cold, ran it across my lips and swallowed. Then I shivered. I had so much. Better to reason not the need. Adventures, shells on a string, were nothing: all that mattered was the essential impulse of the surf that swept them to shore for us avid collectors.

I got into the building feeling high on snow. I brushed it from my coat, stamped it off my boots. Jasper, our trio’s violinist, was standing near the elevator. I felt like throwing my arms around somebody, but shy, angular Jasper, his face austere as a hermit’s, was definitely not the one. Even my exuberant greeting seemed to alarm him. He shrank into his narrow pea coat and gestured to me to precede him into the elevator. “Jasper,” I cried, “we really must do something grand and passionate next, something like Brahms or Shostakovitch.” He frowned and nodded, as at a zany stranger, and I became subdued. Those moments of spiritual plenitude, induced by extreme heat or cold, never last long anyway.

Rosalie, the cellist, early and tuning up, welcomed us with a wild wave of her bow. I could have thrown my arms around Rosalie—I had in the past, in appreciation—but the moment was gone. Appreciation: for nine years Rosalie’s rich talent and gypsyish air had flavored our West End Trio and kept us invigorated. An ample woman of about fifty with coarse dark hair, dark skin, and large, classically shaped features, Rosalie claims her maternal grandmother was an American Indian married to a Polish Jewish immigrant. How this could have come to pass I do not know. Rosalie is full of unlikely stories made credible by her vibrant narrations. Her deep voice billows through the air—I envision a wave bearing Rosalie’s voice aloft. She gestures with her bow for emphasis, so it is dangerous to get too close.

We were doing Mozart tonight, preparing for the spring Friday evening series. During her pauses in the music, Rosalie, as always, bit her lower lip and listened keenly, hugging the warm amber cello between her knees like a lover. When I first met Rosalie I worried that such a woman would lavish sentiment on every phrase, but she plays with nuances of restraint, with powerful understatement that can bring tears even to our eyes, Jasper’s and mine.

Mozart went well. We barely needed to talk—we three had been together so long. When we took a short break Jasper struggled out of his turtleneck sweater and left the room, as he frequently does during breaks. Jasper, a young thirty-five, enjoys playing with Rosalie—anyone would—and as he plays, the accumulated suppressed emotion of his private life, to me unknown, oozes deliciously into the music, to be drawn back in abruptly at the final note. But he is wary of her sensuality and her careening bow. Left alone, Rosalie and I lit up. Smoke makes Jasper cough. I went to peer out the window at the snow, while she hitched up her voluminous peasant skirt, rubbed an edge of the cello absently against her inner thigh, and continued the ramifying story of the demise of her marriage. She was recently separated from a psychiatrist who appeared unobjectionable in public.

“Everything I did, for fifteen years, he said it was acting out.”

“Acting out! Someone else just mentioned that to me. What exactly is acting out?” Of course I knew: outlandish behavior, based on distorted images of reality, but I wanted a fresh slant.

“Acting out,” said Rosalie bitterly, flicking ash from her small black cheroot, “is what the rest of us call living.”

Even in early youth, when the mind is so eager for the new and untried, while it is still a stranger to faltering and fear, we yet like to think that there are certain unalterable realities, somewhere at the bottom of things. These anchors may be ideas; but more often they are merely pictures, vivid memories, which in some unaccountable and very personal way give us courage.

WILLA CATHER
,
Obscure Destinies

H
APPY FAMILIES ARE NOT
all alike. I have belonged to three, now all families of the past, families no longer in existence, and they had little in common except for my membership.

The family my parents made was secure and practical and loving and staid. It sent my sister Evelyn and me off looking for excitement, in our diverging ways. During the steamy hot summers in Hartford we were restive. Late at night in bed we whispered about the exotic and cool places we wished we lived in: Norway, Alaska, the South Pole. And each morning as we watched my father set off uniformed and dapper in a business suit to peruse numbers and charts, we longed for our three weeks at the beach. We always had a good time at those rented houses, the same sort of good time every year, so that the summers run together in my mind, making one continuous summer, like a Platonic Idea from which any single beach vacation can draw its individual identity.

Except for the one summer, so idyllic that it stands apart with all the sensual detail of reality and none of the annoying abstraction of Plato. I don’t know why it was so perfect: some magic in the brown house itself, where we stayed, maybe, or some special concatenation of weather and internal chemistries. No rain. No toads in the garden. There must have been toads, but I have forgotten them. I did sometimes wake up at night terrified of the dark, but that was such a familiar panic, already a grudgingly admitted part of me, that it didn’t count.