Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “I think they’re admirable. They are what makes it a field. Otherwise it’s just a big black mass. It must be so cold, though. I wonder what makes them do it.”

  In less than five minutes they came racing out of the ocean towards the shelter under the boardwalk. As they passed us, water shook from them; I could see the goose bumps on their skin.

  “Esther married that jerk Ralph because he took her to see the ocean,” I said. “God only knows why she married the other one. Who ever has a sensible reason? If I hadn’t married Victor none of this would have happened.” You got married, I did not say aloud. You needed the apartment so I moved in with him. Holding me in his arms, after that first time, he offered to help me find a place but I said, No, now I want to live with you. Now? he said. As opposed to when? A half hour ago? “We set something in motion—I keep thinking that. Sometimes I wonder if I ever loved him. Or if I could have avoided it.”

  “Of course you loved him. You still do.”

  “They talk of falling in love, but there is a moment where it’s voluntary, where you consent to fall. I liked him. And then I let it loose. I slept with him so much I got to love him. I mean, I loved what he made me feel.”

  “Love does not bear such close analysis,” Gaby said.

  “I never did before. When you don’t have it is when you analyze it.” I stood up and walked towards the water, rolled up my pants and got my feet wet. Not as cold as I expected. “Want to swim?” I called back into the wind.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “It’s not bad. Come on.”

  “No.” But she came closer. “You’re not serious? What are you going to swim in, anyway?”

  “Oh, in my scanty little undies, I guess. Do you find that too appalling?”

  “You’ll catch cold.”

  I laughed and took off my clothes. Gaby seemed distressed as she glanced around the empty beach. I went in quickly, the way I used to as a child, letting the first one splash me and diving into the next. I swam fast to get warm, heading for the stretch beyond the breakers as I had done hundreds of times before. The salt smell was wonderfully strong. Soon I was warm, but I kept on swimming hard, careful to stay parallel to the shore. The water was warmer than the air—I kept my head under as much as I could. Once I looked up to wave to Gaby. She was walking along the edge in the same direction, her eyes fixed on me. She waved back and called to me to come out. But I felt I had barely begun, and I knew that from the shore swimmers always appear frighteningly farther off than they are. I kept on because I was loving it, the strenuous, Lethean pleasure of it, and because it would be so deadly cold when I finally did come out and remembered everything. When I next looked towards shore I saw her walking into the water. She was in over knee-deep, holding up her skirt and calling. I veered round and swam to her. It took only a moment.

  “What’s the matter? Why’d you come in?”

  She was shivering so hard her teeth chattered. “You were too far out.”

  “And you were going to save me?”

  “I panicked, watching you. I just suddenly panicked. Let’s get out. I’m freezing.” We ran out. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.” She rubbed her eyes as if to awaken.

  “Ah! Well, I do! Jesus Christ!” I shouted at her. “If someone wants to drown herself they swim out, that way.” I pointed. “Not in the direction of goddamn Queens!” I hopped around and shook the water off me. “I was doing just fine! I happen to be a model swimmer. It’s my only other talent. By the time you got out there I would have had to save you. Shit, we don’t even have a fucking towel. Who comes to the beach without a towel!”

  “What are you so angry for, Lydia? Can’t you understand I meant well?”

  “I’m angry because there I am endeavoring to persevere in my being and you think I’m a suicide! I’ll go when I’m good and ready. I’m not ready. And anyway, I wouldn’t leave you holding the bag. I haven’t lost all sense of decorum, after all.”

  “Thanks. I’m delighted to hear it.”

  “It’s lousy to be so misunderstood. When I really needed you two weeks ago, you had to go to a goddamn dinner, and now when I’m having a good time, you come to save me. Where the fuck are my clothes?”

  “About a mile in that direction,” she snapped.

  We started walking.

  “Oh, Gaby,” I said softly, “it’s more like a hundred yards.” In the car I turned the heat up high, and we sat for a while and warmed up. I told her I was very sorry for all I had just said, I did understand her gesture and would treasure it. Would she accept my apology? She answered, a bit distantly, that of course she would. Of course. She accepts everything, indiscriminately.

  Transport

  HAPPY FAMILIES ARE NOT all alike; possibly, unhappy families are not all unhappy in different ways. Phil and Althea left for the summer. The next day, I began by studying the couple sitting opposite me on the downtown bus, some fifteen years older than Victor and I, in advanced middle age. The woman, a protruding-bone type, looked hollowed. She had strong wrists with long narrow hands, rather like mine, that clasped and unclasped jerkily. Her face was layered with make-up. Her stiff hair was artificially streaked, as though someone had emptied a bag of feathers over her head. She sat taut in the stifling heat, a bird of prey, while beside her sat her quarry: a smallish man who appeared to have recently shrunk, with waxen cheeks and wavy white hair that had a yellowish tinge. His face might have been mobile and expressive once, but it expressed nothing now except the most sullen indifference. Her face expressed much—irritation, scorn, most of all fear disguised as imperiousness. Words, in an unexpectedly rich and full voice, poured wetly from her red lips as from a pitcher.

  “I don’t know whether to have the wine or the champagne. If I have the wine I don’t know whether to have red or white. They say white goes better with chicken, but it’s not a hard and fast rule. I’ve served red with chicken and no one ever complained. I think I’ll get the red on the way home. More people like it. It goes down easier. Champagne is too good for them in the first place and secondly it’s expensive. Well, maybe in the long run not so expensive because they drink less of it. Still, it makes everything seem so elaborate. I don’t want it to seem over-elaborate. Besides, you can keep what’s left of the wine but you can’t save champagne.”

  She was glossy and animated, expensively dressed, but he was shabby, in loose dark pants and worn shoes. With effort he prepared to speak: breathed, swallowed, wet his lips with his tongue, raised his head but not in her direction. “Get the champagne.” An asphyxiated voice, an accusing weariness.

  “The champagne?”

  The champagne? I was surprised too, after such cogent reasons. He didn’t look like the sort who would want a party to seem over-elaborate.

  “Yes, the champagne. Why not?”

  “All right, all right. Champagne. If you say so.” The right side of her mouth stretched over in the direction of her ear, exposing the row of molars, then snapped back into place as if on a rubber band. Twice. Pause. A third time. A tic. She sighed and her chin rose bravely again. Again she poured from her pitcher, and I drank, enthralled. “I have two kinds of salad, the potato salad and the bean salad. I have the potatoes all boiled, I just have to chop in some onions and peppers and add the dressing. I’ve still got to do the bean. I could use some help with the bean.” Was there the faintest trace of coyness, supplication, desire in that imperious voice? Something sexual, a reminder of intimate times, when they had asked things of each other and received? He didn’t commit himself; a meager nod. “So what do you think, should I use more of the red beans or the white? I think the white taste better.” Tic.

  “But the red,” he brought forth slowly, “are more colorful.”

  Ah, an aesthete. A painter?

  “The red it is then. Makes no difference to me. I have three chickens. Six legs. A chicken only has two legs, but the way they behave you’d think they expected them to have more. Everyone expects a leg.
Did you ever notice? Especially Tom. It never fails. He grabs it. Well, I don’t want him to have a leg this time. Let him see he can’t always have exactly what he wants, like we owed it to him or something. Why should he always be the lucky one?”

  He laughed aloud, one sharp “Ha,” quickly over. It was impossible to tell whether he laughed at the prospect of Tom’s not getting a leg, or in appreciation of her cunning, or in contempt of it, or at chicken dinners, parties, expectations in general. “You could buy an extra package of legs,” he said.

  A crowd of boisterous teenagers entered and stationed themselves between us so I couldn’t hear her response. I got off never to know what they were planning for dessert, though I was wildly curious. I was curious to know everything about them: what accidents or inevitabilities had brought them to such a pass. Whether Tom might be their grown child, and at what age he had started grabbing chicken legs. Could the other guests be their grown children too, maybe, safely traveled to adulthood, coming with wives and husbands and little ones? Oh, give them all legs! That’s what my mother would have said. What the hell, let them enjoy themselves. Buy as many extra legs as you need. For Tom, above all, because he wants them so badly.

  I worked all through the summer, and I traveled day and night, accumulating distance. Luckily our local buses are nothing like the futuristic kind that killed them. No, the older city buses, especially in warm weather, are open and airy and sociable, intimating long living rooms with picture windows and posters on the walls, a motley collection of guests. The motion, in fits and starts, is reassuringly dinky. Up in my neighborhood, which is like a town unto itself, new arrivals often spot a familiar face and rush over, in the manner of people at a large informal party. I half-expect the driver to get up and serve cold drinks. Strangers strike up conversations and exchange personal data. Occasional arguments erupt, conflicts of race or generation, but once in a while it is old ladies fighting with zest over an empty seat. The spectators listen eagerly, sometimes take sides. Everyone is engaged, silent or vocal. I am not lonely. I am part of a rapidly changing community. I glean, like Ruth in an unfamiliar land. No more dreams of classical order and harmony. Observation, empirical evidence, are the thing. I want to learn how ordinary people lead ordinary lives, something I have forgotten.

  It was hot. People wore as little as possible; the buses were display cases for skin of all ages and colors. The weather drew out those who stay indoors in harsher seasons, old people with death in their eyes, pregnant women, mortality ripening in their bellies like juicy melons, cripples, amputees, and countless of the harmlessly deranged. The ex-mental patients who live in the neighborhood took to the buses as I did, their fantasies in florid bloom under the nurturing sun. The woman I had seen unroll a cylinder of paper towels to make a pillow to cry on climbed aboard early one morning, in much better spirits now, wearing a short red dress and high-heeled shoes, her shaggily cropped hair three shades of yellow. Addressing the empty seat beside her, she offered a running critique of the movies playing in the revival houses along Broadway. “Now, take Guys and Dolls. They don’t make movies like that any more. What a cast! What a score! And that Marlon Brando! Sings, on top of everything else. Who ever suspected? There, my friend, is pure unadulterated what we used to call sex appeal. Believe me, he asks me to go to Havana overnight, I’d have my toothbrush packed in a second. I know a good thing when I see it and I saw it last night. And yet they say in real life he’s a bastard. Tant pis.” It was good to see her feeling better. Nor was there anything very crazy about what she had to say, either. It happened Nina and I had seen Guys and Dolls that week too and made similar comments afterwards, licking our ice cream cones and giggling like schoolgirls. Except the companion this woman giggled with was invisible.

  She said her good-byes and made her exit. As I watched her strut into Dunkin’ Donuts I glimpsed from the window a much younger woman, a pretty woman wearing a businesslike dress and old blue sneakers, pushing an empty baby stroller briskly up Broadway. My heart began to race. Poor thing. Really crazy lady, this one. Her baby gone and still she pushes the empty stroller. There but for the grace of God … Give thanks, Lydia.

  I had to get off the bus and sit down in an air-conditioned coffee shop. Time stopped; I felt sick. Because the young woman, as I well knew, as any local habitué would know, had just left her baby at the day care center around the corner and was no doubt rushing home to deposit the stroller, change her shoes, and get to the office. A case of Ockham’s razor, pure and simple. Esther, who said she observed the world from the windows of buses, found disappointment at the hands of nasty men. Perhaps you only learn what you already know.

  But I drink a Coke and recover, and the summer moves along. One day scorches into the next; I stay alone and manage. I appropriate a room at the school and practice there. Preparing for the faculty concert series in the fall, for the “Trout” concert at Lincoln Center, the tour in November, I am virtually never home. That is one way of learning to live alone. I don’t neglect myself “healthwise,” as Don warned. My ankle is too irksome for running in the park, as George suggested, but I swim in the midtown health club where my neighbor Sam is a lifeguard. Under his boyish, awed gaze I swim so many laps that when I return home I am too bemused to feel very keenly how empty it is. And I sleep well in the empty apartment, but rarely in the big bed he left me. Only when the heat is intense—since that privileged bed comes with benefit of air-conditioner. Now and then I meet friends in public places. Lots of movies. No more reunions. I don’t shop or cook. Burger King, Pizza Parade, Aram’s Falafel, Blimpie, Sabrett’s frankfurter stands—like a teenager or a bag lady, I have become a connoisseur of junk food. No masochism trip, this: I was never a gourmet—it all tastes fine to me. So long as it fills. How are you? Nina and Gaby ask. Are you looking after yourself? and I say, just fine. The children are fine too. Phil writes short uninformative letters weekly. I am pleased to find him literate—he has never shown me his school papers. He says he is bored and has not yet saved anyone from drowning. He’s saving his money, though. He doesn’t mention his father. My chum Althea phones collect from East Hampton. “How’re you doing, Mom?” How’re you doing, with a special lilting inflection, holdover from going out with Darryl. I hope she remembers the calculus he taught her as well. “I’m doing fine, dear. How are you doing?” She gives excited rundowns of famous names spied half-naked in the surf, and quotes in amazement the cost of summer rentals. “I’d love to have a house on the beach someday. Do you think I’ll ever be able to afford it?” “Sure. There are plenty of cheaper beaches.” She is brief. Clambakes on moonstruck sands call to her. Bronzed lifeguards. Althea, don’t forget, birth control is the thing! I restrain myself, say it only twice. The second time she is understandably miffed.

  My new chamber music group is going fine too. Twenty-odd amateur pianists and string players from five boroughs want to learn to play ensemble music under the guidance of Irving and me. Irving is behaving himself and coaching the strings brilliantly. He keeps his mouth shut about the pianists, thank goodness, for I have admitted a few who really aren’t ready for the exigencies of classical trios—young housewives with babies, so eager for an evening’s distraction, and my heart goes out to them. We meet Tuesday evenings at the Y across town, and naturally I go by bus.

  The two spectacled women across the aisle are what my mother used to call “settled” and I never was. A bit younger than I, late thirties, plump, pastel polyester and sensible shoes types. Nothing more ordinary. How I crave the ordinary, all the more since I cannot seem to find it. Everything I glean seems to have a warp in it. I want to penetrate the ordinary, master it, like a rapist. I listen to these prospects with criminal intent.

  “And how are the little curies?”

  “Oh dear. Oh dear. There’s something wrong with both of them. The little one had so much trouble with a disc, she just lies in the playpen all day. And the big one just had a lump removed from her breast three days ago. I’m waiting fo
r the biopsy.”

  “Tsk, tsk. How old are they again?”

  “Nine and seven.”

  Nine and seven! Lump in the breast? Lies in the playpen all day? What hath God wrought this time? Yet the mother sounds so cheerful, speaks up so loud and clear. Inner resources. A moral exemplar.

  “And how old is yours?”

  “Mine is just five. Still in the prime of life.”

  “To tell the truth I’m more worried about the little one. She doesn’t even stir when I come into the room any more. I’m taking her to the vet tomorrow.”

  I got off and walked the rest of the way, in a hot dusk that became a hotter night. The group broke up late and I was grateful for living’s offer of a lift home. He pulls up in front of my building and sighs mournfully, as he has done often since his wife’s death. She was a few years older than he, close to seventy.

  “It was a good idea, this little group,” he says, patting down his hair. “I wasn’t so sure at first.”

  “I had a feeling they were out there. It’s not so easy to find people to play with if you’re not professional. And everyone loves it. We can keep it going in the fall. Get woodwinds and horns, make a real thing of it.”

  “What an entrepreneur.”

  I laugh. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Lydia dear.” He kisses me on the cheek as usual, and God almighty, lingers an instant. Testing: will I turn my head? Well, I simply refuse to believe this. I move off. I will pretend it did not happen. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I am becoming one of those hungry women who see overtures everywhere.

  “Thanks for the ride, Irving. See you Thursday.”

  In the apartment the phone was ringing.

  “What’s the idea of changing the goddamn phone number? What the hell are you up to? First the lock and now the phone. And I can never get you in. Where are you all the time?”

  “Will you stop shouting, Victor? I just this second walked in. Hold on a minute.”