Disturbances in the Field (59 page)

Authors: Lynne Sharon Schwartz

While we ate, Phil said he thought he needed a new mattress. His mattress had gotten soft. “But if it’s too expensive—”

“I can afford a mattress if you need one. I’ll go in later and take a look at it.” I paused. “You know, before we go out and buy one, though, you might try Alan’s. That was fairly new.” I paused again, but he was calmly drinking his Coke. “Would you mind?”

“Nah,” he said. “It’s just a mattress.” He gulped down some more. “Of course a lot depends on the shape of the body and the sleeping habits of the person.”

“What do you mean?”

“Each individual person sleeps in a certain way and makes their, like, imprint on the mattress. Now, with different people settling into different places, each mattress develops its own bumps and slumps in different areas. That’s why it’s not good to keep a mattress too long, because you slump into the same places. It’s bad for the bones.” He put down his fork as he expounded earnestly, but when he saw me starting to laugh, his eyes crinkled too. He was reminding me of Althea, delivering her instructive speeches. Also of Alan, the tongue-in-cheek orator. Of Vivian, who reveled in the obscure and the absurd. And of Victor. “I’m not kidding—you must have noticed, if you ever slept in other people’s beds, that the bumps and holes didn’t fit your body. Like in some beds you roll towards the center and in others towards the edge? You’re into someone else’s ... Come on, Mom, this is extremely serious stuff! Are you listening to me?”

I tried to stop giggling. “Yes, yes, I’m not missing a word.”

“That’s the reason hotel beds last much longer than regular beds, I mean beds in people’s houses. It’s a well-known fact. ’Cause the hotel beds get slept on by different people every night, so they don’t ever develop the same ... Hey, take it easy or you’ll choke and I’ll have to perform the Heimlich maneuver. What’s with you?”

“I’m just feeling punchy. How did you pick up this wonderful information?”

“I know a lot of things.” His eyes shot a triumphant gleam. “You think I don’t read enough, but you see? I bet I could tell you a lot that you don’t know.”

“If it’s all this funny I wish you would ... Wait, what is that noise?”

“What noise?”

“Shh.” It was a key in the lock. I heard the first tumbler flip. The second wouldn’t. How could he have forgotten?

“I’ll go see.” Phil got up.

I grabbed his arm. “No, it’s all right. The new lock. It’s one of two people. Just wait a second till I’m sure.”

“Oh.” His face was closed again. The pre-summer face, dulled eyes. “Who’s the other?”

“Never mind that.”

“Look, I better go see.” He seemed to have grown since yesterday, as he took huge strides towards the door. I followed, limping. Before he got there the bell rang and Victor called my name.

“Shit, man! At least you changed the lock.”

“I didn’t change it because of
him,
Phil!”

“No? I thought you did. I never believed that story about losing your keys.”

The bell rang again, long. I started for the door but Phil stood in front of me, blocking the way.

“You’re not really going to let that motherfucker in, are you? Just like that? Don’t you have any pride?”

“Don’t tell me about pride, kiddo.” Victor called again and pounded with the flat of his hand. “Not only am I going to let him in, but so are you. And be civil about it too.”

“You think so, huh?”

“Yes. Sooner or later. So make it sooner. Save yourself a lot of time and trouble.”

“Give me one reason—” His voice split, squeaked like a younger boy’s. “One reason why I should!” He put an arm up to shield his eyes.

“Lydia,” Victor shouted, “will you open this goddamn door since you never gave me the goddamn key!”

“Just one minute,” I called back. “No reason,” I said to Phil. “Some things don’t need a reason. You just do them.”

“Oh, Ma!” he wailed, and waved his hands helplessly through the air like a drunkard. Then he turned and slammed his body against the door, and as I watched him flail in misery I wanted to tell him so many things that rushed to me from time past, but they would mean nothing to him. Of that original fire descending in stages to smoke, vapor, cloud, mist, rain, earth, and finally rock—the way down. But then, oh, back again, the way up. The way up and the way down are one and the same, Heraclitus said, endless and, above all, reversible.

“Lydia!” Victor banged on the door. “If you don’t open it I’m going to crash it open.” He would, too. He had once before.

“Please
wait a minute!” I called. How to tell Phil that Victor was my brother and the companion of my youth? He would choose the unbearable handle of his injustice.

“Please, try to understand,” I whispered. Beneath the killing changes, I wanted to tell him, something abides, and if we don’t hang on to that we are doubly doomed.

Phil turned around. His face was twisted in pain and wet. He clasped his hands and shook them at me like someone thrusting a weapon, or like someone pleading. Then he ran to his room and slammed that door so hard the floor quaked.

Victor’s full weight hit the door, the lock rattled, I opened it.

He was ashen and in a sweat. “What was all that? What took you so long?”

“Your son. He’s bigger than I am.”

He tossed his jacket on a chair and gazed around at the room, and finally back at me. “It all looks the same.” Then he started down the hall.

I followed. Not yet, I was about to say. Leave him be for now. But he didn’t stop at Phil’s closed door. He stopped at Alan’s.

“Will you come in here with me?” he asked.

“What for?”

He opened the door and stepped inside, turned on the light, which was very bright, and we both blinked.

“Just come in.” He sat down at the desk where Alan had wrestled with intractable fractions and scrawled disobediently on the wood with Magic Markers.

“All right. But just for a minute.” I went in and sat on the edge of the bed.

“For a little while. Not forever.”

He spun the chair around, leaned back with his hands locked behind his head, and sat staring at the wall painted midnight blue, dotted with the constellations labeled in a clear, graceful hand. “I’m very tired,” was all he said.

I watched him, still strong despite everything. The longer I sat, the more I felt I could look at him forever. I was tired too, but I was thinking that at last I might be able to sleep through the night. I was thinking that a time would come, maybe months, maybe years, when my ankle would stop feeling out of joint like Mr. Dooley’s, the man whose supporting cane Don and his friends diminished bit by bit with a toothed saw. When I would be able to look at a chartered bus without feeling sick; when I could watch snow falling, when I could pass a class trip on the street, when I could see a magazine photo of skiers, without wanting to lie down and die. When all these ordinary things would resume their rightful proportions and places in a universe of ordinary things. The old bachelor Thales waited too, perhaps sipping wine with his friends in the marketplace, till that right moment when a person’s shadow grows to the person’s size, when the body and its image, its burden, its imprint on the land, come together in harmony, and at that perfect moment of equivalence, he could take the measure of anything in the universe.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following:

Excerpt from
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver, © 1981 Italo Calvino. Used by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.

Excerpt from
Obscure Destines
by Willa Cather, © 1930, 1932 Willa Cather. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Excerpt from
Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales
by Isak Dinesen, © 1977 University of Chicago Press. Used by permission of the Rungstedlund Foundation of Denmark and of the University of Chicago Press.

Excerpt from
Magic, Science and Religion
by Bronislaw Malinowski, © 1954 by Bronislaw Malinowski. Used by permission of Doubleday Publishing Company.

Excerpts from
The PreSocratics
by Philip Wheelwright, © 1966 Philip Wheelwright. Used by permission of the Odyssey Publishing Company.

Excerpt from
The Concept of Nature
by Alfred North Whitehead, © 1930 Alfred North Whitehead. Used by permission of University of Cambridge Press.

cover design by Kathleen Lynch

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