Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “I never meant you had no character in that sense.”

  “I know. I was only kidding. But how do you explain so many in one day?”

  “It’s probably always happening,” Gaby said. “But the chances of seeing three—Nina would have to figure that out.”

  Don tapped ashes from his pipe. “Unless today is some secret thieves’ holiday. A counterpart of Labor Day or May Day.” He swallowed the last of his martini and stood up. “We’d better go.”

  “I hate to leave, Lydia, but …”

  “If we don’t show, Webster will have my head, sweetheart, not to mention my grant money. Think of all those hobbling children—”

  “Okay, okay, stop apologizing. Oh, your groceries, Gaby—in the refrigerator. Hold it, I’ll get them.” But when I got into the kitchen something happened. I hadn’t the will to move any more. I sat down and lowered my head to the table. Gaby came looking for me.

  “Lydia? Oh God. What is it?” She bent and put her arm around me.

  “It’s nothing. Only everyone’s going. This is the first night with no one …”

  “Where are the kids?”

  “Althea’s sleeping at a friend’s. That was her on the phone before. Phil’s in Boston at a rock concert. I won’t get through the night alone, I know it. As it is, it’s endless.”

  “You’ll get through. Look, I must go—he needs me there. But I’ll come back when it’s over. It won’t be that late—eleven.”

  “No!” I hadn’t meant to shout it. “It’s now! Everyone walking out the door!”

  “Call Victor. What do a couple of insane weeks matter? He’d be here in a minute, you know that. You do know where he is, don’t you?”

  “Sure I know where he is. He’s over in the East Sixties with some flabby old cunt.”

  “Lydia!”

  “Oh, pardon my language. I forgot you’re a purist.”

  “It’s not that. You told me once how you hated that word. You said you could never use it for anyone.”

  “I was mistaken. I see now it has its uses.”

  “Well, call him anyway.”

  “No.”

  “Give me the number, then. I’ll call.”

  “No.”

  George came in. “What’s the matter?”

  I was an idiot making this scene. I was certainly not imitating the better type of person. The better type of person would not cry uncontrollably in public over spending the night in an empty house. Gabrielle murmured to George and he groaned, a weary, drawn-out sound. “Go on. I’ll stay.”

  I stopped as abruptly as an infant lifted up out of its crib, and went to wash my face. At the door as they left, George kept his arm around my waist, holding me up. “You’ll be okay,” he whispered. “Take it easy.” Victor and I used to stand that way when guests left. “‘Bye. See you soon.” Definitely no Job’s comforters, those three pals. Job’s comforters hounded him, wouldn’t leave him alone, sat by his side day and night shredding logic. George’s hand slid down my hip. Make it an accident, I prayed as I closed the door and moved off.

  “So, what did you have in mind to do this evening?” he asked.

  “What I planned to do was listen to Esther. She’s as good as Saturday Night Live. I suppose I could work on the ‘Trout.’”

  “The least you can do is keep me company, kiddo. I’m here as your guest, not your babysitter.” He was grinning but I could tell he was irked. “I’ll play Monopoly if that’s all you’re up to. But first there are a few, uh, needs I have. I’ve got to make a phone call, for one thing.”

  “Oh God! The yoga teacher. I forgot all about her. I’m sorry. Honestly.” Go, I should have said right then. Go in peace. But I didn’t.

  “Also I could use a pizza. A Sunday Times. A nice place to sleep—later, that is.”

  I straightened up. “Very well. We can call for a pizza at once. Immediate gratification. The Timeses aren’t ready yet but at around ten we can go out to the corner and get one. So the gratification of that need will only be deferred a short while. It won’t fester unfulfilled, in the field. As far as sleep, you can have your pick. My bed alone could sleep an army. What do you like on your pizza?”

  “Not anchovies.”

  I ordered a pizza with green peppers and sausages, and then George called the yoga teacher and made his apologies. A sick friend. She must have offered to join him in his vigil. “Thanks, that’s sweet of you, but it wouldn’t work out. … Yes,” he said, “she is, but it’s not at all the way you think.” True, but how is it then, I wondered. How? They didn’t talk for very long.

  “I am sorry, George.”

  “It’s okay. You’re a much older friend. I’ve only seen her a couple of times.”

  “Still, she offers you something. I’m not offering much.”

  “No,” he agreed.

  The pizza arrived, and I locked the door after the delivery boy, feeling like a jailer. “Come in here. I’ve gotten to like eating in the bedroom. I’ll get us some wine.” We sat opposite each other on the huge bed, the box between us.

  “Do you hear from Victor?” he asked.

  “He called yesterday. He calls constantly. It’s like his voice is here. The Shadow.”

  “He called me too, the other day. He didn’t sound very good. He said—”

  “Please don’t tell me what he said, all right? I don’t want to know.”

  He carefully extricated a slice of pizza from the pie. “I’ve been meaning to mention, I heard you last week at that Baroque Marathon thing. I happened to pass by at the right moment. I didn’t know you played the harpsichord.”

  “You were there? I didn’t even see you. That’s nice. So what did you think?”

  “Sounded fine to me. I’m no judge.”

  I smiled. “You’re discreet. Competent but hardly inspired, is the best I’d say. The harpsichord is peculiar—the action feels totally different. Still, it was all right. Rosalie’s trying to keep me busy. She and Carla were terrific, I thought. Weren’t they?”

  “Yes. Rosalie is always amazing. Why isn’t she more famous?”

  “She had a late start. She’s not ambitious enough, either, in a commercial way, I mean. Listen, George. You want to be entertained? I can tell you a dream. I have the oddest dreams, since he left.”

  He tossed aside the crust. “That is what is called a busman’s holiday.”

  “You don’t have to analyze it. Just listen. I’d like to hear what it sounds like.”

  “Sweetheart, I’m a captive audience.”

  “Yes, you are, I guess. Well, I’m on this deserted subway platform at three in the morning, carrying a huge slab of raw meat in my arms. A whole side of beef.”

  George’s mouth, surrounded by pizza, beard, and mustache, crinkled into a broad smile.

  “If you’re going to laugh at me—”

  “Tough shit. You said not to analyze. You didn’t say not to laugh.”

  “All right. I keep peering down the track for these two headlights that look like big eyes coming at you in the dark, but for a long time nothing comes. Finally one does, and another and another, but none of them are my train. I’m getting very anxious. The only other people waiting are a few heavy men in work clothes, back from working the night shift somewhere. They see me standing there clutching my side of beef, and not one of them bats an eye. Like this is quite an ordinary sight. Finally the right train comes and I get on, dragging my meat along with me. It’s one of those old BMT cars. Remember, the kind with the pairs of straw seats all facing in different directions?”

  “Mm-hm.” He nodded.

  “When I first came to New York there were still a few of those left. So I sit down on a straw seat. The car is pretty empty—the workmen, a couple of elderly ladies, the ones who clean office buildings at night, in flowered dresses and oxford shoes and funny pillbox hats, and a pair of teenagers with that dazed sweaty look you get from necking too long at the movies. Nobody seems to notice me or my meat. But I notice someth
ing. The meat is smaller. It’s about three-quarters of what it was on the platform. And—this is very weird—after each stop it shrinks a little more, till it’s the size of, oh, maybe a ten-or twelve-pound rib roast.”

  “You’re sure you’re not making this up, Lydia?”

  “No. What would be the point of that?”

  “Some of my patients do. They think their dreams are too shocking, or too dull, so they do a little creative editing. Not that it makes any difference. What they invent is just as useful as what they dream.”

  “No escape, eh? Well, I’m not changing anything. I can see you don’t like my dream, George.”

  “Baby, I love your dream. It’s almost too good to be true.”

  “But I haven’t even gotten to the best part. When it’s about the size of a moderate rib roast I put it on the floor and get down on my knees—on that mucky subway floor, imagine!—and I take a cleaver, no, it was really more like an ax—I had it in my briefcase with some music—and I start to hack at the meat. The lights are very glaring. One or two people glance over, but with no real interest. I was hacking it into steaks—I’ve seen my butcher do it dozens of times. I always watch closely. I’m impressed by that kind of skill, how they manage not to chop their fingers off. I did a fine job, I must say. I hacked it up into about half a dozen steaks. That was all I had left from the original whole side of beef. Then I wrapped it in some brown paper and tucked it under my arm and got ready to go home. That’s it.”

  George drank some wine and reached for another slice of pizza, his third.

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

  “But that I should be like that. It’s so brutal and violent, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But so was what prompted it. Here, you’d better have some before it’s all gone.”

  We finished eating in silence. After the pizza and the wine I felt better. How infantile and selfish to make George break his date and stay with me. Needs conform to the available satisfactions, Gaby once said. Yes, I’d exaggerated mine, taken advantage of him. Probably all I had needed was another hour or two of company and some hot food. Everything seemed bearable now. The children—well, when I opened my eyes each morning I no longer felt a shock in my gut. And Victor? Women have died, but not for love. Maybe I’d never loved him all that much anyway. I’d never have made the kinds of sacrifices Gabrielle makes for Don. I didn’t quiver every time he entered a room. There had been times when his touch left me cold. There were even things I’d never liked about him. Bits of curling hair in the bathroom sink. Forgetfulness. The way he made love when he’d had too much to drink, in a fumbling, drowsy way. Leaving the phone off the hook in his studio—that capacity to shut us all out. How he put away his things so deliberately, as if to secure them against … what? It was so unlike him to leave that book open, face down. If I had truly loved him would I have minded those things? Could it be I had never known real love at all? Almost forty-three years old and never known love! Ah, sad. Bad. “I think I’m a little drunk,” I said. “That Gaby makes a mean martini.”

  “Don’t you dream about them?” he asked suddenly.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “You were never a good liar. Even I dream about them. I dream I take them to the zoo, to the beach. Once I even dreamed they were mine.”

  “Yours?” I whispered.

  “I lost them at sea. The three of us were crossing the Atlantic in an open boat, like some man I read about in the paper, who took his kids. Just as we were coming to the harbor—we could already see the Statue of Liberty—they somehow fell overboard. I threw them life preservers but they couldn’t reach them. And then—” He stopped. “This is the worst. I was afraid to jump in after them. I’m a lousy swimmer. I hated myself but I wouldn’t jump in to save them. Even after I woke up I was ashamed, as if you could be responsible for what you do in your dreams.”

  “You knew even in the dream that they were not really yours. If they were yours you would have jumped, believe me. That bastard Victor certainly would have jumped.” In his dreams, awake, anywhere. What is he dreaming these days? Empty rooms, it was, weeks ago. Room after empty room, he told me in bed.

  “Maybe I did know, but I think it was worse than that. I think I would not risk my life for anybody.”

  “Well, you’re here now.”

  “This is not much of a risk.” He gave a small laugh. “No, I’m not saying I’m not useful. I can listen to anything and stay calm. I’m a regular vault of secrets, and I do keep them. But sometimes I feel a little removed from things. Maybe it’s so many other people’s secrets, blocking the way.”

  “I hate hearing you talk like this. It makes me feel bad.”

  “You see,” and he laughed again, “you don’t have the tolerance for it. Well, so much for the pizza. You don’t want to go to bed, by any chance, do you?”

  “Oh Jesus. Look, you know very well you could coax me and at some point I’d be susceptible. But I would really rather you didn’t.”

  “I don’t want to have to coax. I’m past that. I want someone who wants. … Lydia, didn’t you ever notice that red ribbon on Althea’s crib?”

  I didn’t answer for a while. “You did that?”

  “Yes. When I was a kid everyone in our neighborhood did it. I had this urge. You never said a word, though.”

  “How was I to know? It never crossed my mind. I thought it was one of our mothers but that they were embarrassed to admit it. They told me what it meant.”

  “Did you mind?”

  “No, only I was baffled. Well, why the hell did you stop? Why didn’t you do it for all of them?”

  “You never mentioned it, so … I just didn’t. I’m sorry. But you don’t really think—”

  “Don’t be silly.” I drank some more, though my head felt perilously light. “I do dream. I dream … not that I lost them but they lost me. I mean couldn’t find me. They were out together at … well, somewhere. They come home, come up in the elevator, get to the door. They can’t get in because they’ve forgotten their keys.”

  “You’re fading, baby. I can hardly hear you.”

  “I can’t talk any louder. My head is spinning.”

  He pushed aside the pizza box and came closer. We sat cross-legged, knee to knee. “Okay. They forgot their keys,” he prompted.

  I spoke with my head down. “No, that’s not right. Wait a minute, let me think. No. It’s not that they forgot their keys. They have their keys. But they don’t fit any more. They’re the wrong ones.” I looked up. “I did change a lock on the front door, just two weeks ago, after this kid broke in. I gave him a TV and sent him off.”

  “Wait, I’m mixed up. Is this part of the dream?”

  “No, no, this is true. He came in through a window. What you would call a disturbance in the field. He wasn’t violent or anything. I gave him an old TV we never used and he left, and I thought that was that. He didn’t seem like a bad kid, really, but later when I was getting ready to go out I saw the little son of a bitch had swiped my keys from the kitchen table, so I had to have the lock changed. I told Althea and Phil that I lost them and it wasn’t safe to keep the same locks.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “I didn’t feel like seeing any more cops.”

  “Lydia!”

  “Don’t look at me that way, please. You didn’t call the cops, did you, this afternoon when you saw all those things?”

  “Oh, but that was—”

  “Different? Yes, I know. Anyway, in the dream they come home and they still have the old keys. They ring the bell but no one answers. I’m not home.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I don’t know. Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m like a presence, not a real person. I’m watching the dream as though it’s a movie. I’m there but outside it. I see them sitting at the door and I want to tell them I’ll be home soon, not to worry, go across the hall to Patricia’s, but I can’t because … because I�
�m not in the movie. I’m only watching, they wouldn’t hear me.”

  My eyes were streaming, but so calmly, as at the movies. George wiped my face with his dirty napkin. “So what do they do then?”

  “They just sit on the floor in the hallway and think they’ve been abandoned. I know how they feel because I can see inside them, even though it’s like a movie. It’s as if I’m making up the movie as it goes along. The worst part is that I can’t tell them I’ll be home soon. They sit there for hours and it gets dark and no one opens the door for them. Their legs are all cramped. I can feel it, as if I’m their legs. I mean, I’m them and it’s my legs. Oh, I can’t explain it.”

  I stretched out on the bed, on my stomach. George stroked my back. I was shaking. “It doesn’t make any sense unless you know where they were coming from.”

  “Well, where were they coming from?”

  “Riverside Church. There was a disarmament rally, more like a religious festival, a pageant, I don’t know how to describe it. I had been there too. They didn’t lose me till after—we got separated somehow, in the crowd.” I sat up again and looked at him. He seemed mesmerized. His eyes were shining wet, but calm, and calming. I felt quieter inside. I wondered if he shed tears for his patients too. “We were all actually at this thing, George, a year or so ago. In real life. It was a spectacle, almost something medieval. Thousands of people in the church, and music and singing and speeches, and in the middle of it all, the Bread and Puppet Theatre marched down the center aisle with huge puppets on sticks dressed up as skeletons and the devastations of war. And then the minister went up to the front—he lives in this building, it so happens; I see him all the time. All around him, up on the platform, were enormous Mexican piñatas in different colors hanging from that great ceiling. When he spoke it was magic. He has a theatrical presence: his gestures and his voice turn everything into theatre. The air around him gets charged. Even in the elevator. He spread out his arms as if he was being crucified, and he said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.’ It was so rash—you know, he could have made an ass of himself, that’s what I thought at the time. But he didn’t. He was good. He said it right. He wanted all the children in the audience to come up to the front, he said, because they were the ones we had to preserve the world for. It was theirs. The future. He kept his arms stretched out, and children began to stream up from everywhere in the church. It was an amazing sight. He shook their hands and gave them big sticks to break the piñatas, and doves of peace came floating out. This I saw. In real life.”