Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  I turned on the air-conditioner in the bedroom and took off all my clothes. I stretched out on the big bed, my side. “I didn’t change the phone number. The phone company did it.” I explained about Miss

  Fosdick and the technical reasons. “They called in May, right after you left. They said then that it would be in a few weeks, but as you see they didn’t get around to doing it till a couple of days ago.”

  “Why didn’t you protest?”

  “I tried. It was no use.”

  “It doesn’t feel right. I was used to that number.”

  “You’ll get used to this one too. Or so she said. How did you get it, anyway?”

  “When you dial the old number you get a funny click, and then a computer voice gives you the new number.”

  “Well, that’s something, at least. Then I won’t have to fill out all those postcards. They gave me about a hundred postcards to send people.”

  “Oh, were you planning to send me a postcard?”

  “Actually I forgot about it. I’ve been very busy and I don’t ever call here. I’d better let Althea know. She’ll get scared when she hears that voice.”

  “Did you have a key made for me yet?”

  “I keep forgetting. The kids are away, Victor. It’s only me. Is it so crucial that you have a key?” He paid half the rent, but he would never say that. Leave me for the pillowy embrace of a mother, yes, but never stoop to mention the rent.

  “Do I need to explain?” He turned ironic. “I get the distinct impression you’re shutting me out.”

  “I didn’t do either of these things on purpose, I’ve told you! Shutting you out! You’re the one who left. Don’t you remember?” Is she Circe? Does she cloud men’s minds?

  “Every word you’ve spoken to me in three months has been shutting me out.”

  “Well, what did you expect? You can’t be here and not here at the same time.”

  “You know I’d be back in a minute if—”

  “Don’t give me conditions!”

  “Conditions! When I was there, you were not. That’s why I’m not.”

  “This is getting too metaphysical for me, Victor. I’m only a piano player.”

  He was silent so long I thought the line had gone dead. “You are the most exasperating person I’ve ever known,” he said finally in a weary, tamped-down voice. It was like the voice of the shrunken man on the bus. “I sometimes wish I’d never started with you. But we did. We have unfinished business. I’m not through with you.”

  “No?” I asked quietly. The air in the room was more comfortable now. I raised my bare leg and did the exercise Don had shown me for my ankle. “I don’t want to play Walter and Griselda. What more do you think you can take away?”

  “Lydia!” The sound bruised my ear; I moved the phone a few inches off. “I didn’t take those children! Those were my children too! What is wrong with you?”

  I imagined he could see me, lying there all exposed. I pulled a sheet over me. “All right, I know. I know. I’m sorry. Only you started with her right before it happened. What’d you have to do that for?”

  “It had nothing to do with it! You said so yourself. It’s insane to think so. Primitive.”

  “I understand that. It just feels all connected. What I meant was your timing. If you hadn’t done it right then you wouldn’t have had such an easy place to go.”

  “That’s how it was. I can’t undo it. Look, we could try again, Lydia. We could try to—”

  “I don’t go for all this trying. It’s a lot of bullshit. This is how I am. Take it or leave it.”

  “You stubborn bitch. I would have gone anyway. I’m not afraid to be alone.”

  Ah, that was a low blow. I was a bitch, we both knew that, but he was supposed to be a gentleman. I hung up and fell asleep with all the lights on.

  The next day the mercury hit nearly a hundred degrees and clung there for a week, a waning, heavy August. I didn’t mind the heat; it was deadening. To avoid the phone I stayed out every evening, and twice when it rang at midnight I didn’t answer. It was the first week since he left that we hadn’t spoken. Tuesday I got on a half-empty bus to go to the chamber music group, followed by two bearded men in their forties, in need of showers, dressed in limp white shirts with short sleeves hanging loosely around their arms. Not very nice arms, flabby, pale, sparse hairs. Professors of philosophy, that was soon clear from their talk of fall courses and schedules, and they set me wondering where Professor Boles might be now, and was her hair still flying with enthusiasm for the pre-Socratics? Did she still linger on obsolete cosmologies with only poetic value to recommend them?

  “I’m going to try to prove to my seminar in ontological problems that death is not as bad as we think. Not something to be so dreaded, I mean. Simply as a demonstration in logic.”

  “Oh yeah?” The other fellow blows his nose in a crumpled handkerchief and looks incredulous. “How do you propose to do that?”

  “Well.” He warms to his task, rubbing a palm against his knee. “First I’ll describe some real situation and get them to agree that it may be worse than dying. Physical torture, say. Concentration camps, shipwrecked with wild animals, whatever. They can think up their own—everyone has nightmares they’d rather die than live through. They’ll begin to see it relativistically, as an option among others. Rational acceptance is the first step.” His accents are so self-congratulatory, his eyes so glazed and recessive, focused on the inner void. He outlines a series of logical steps whereby death becomes quite tolerable, indeed preferable to much else. Aren’t the “negative” aspects of death—he calls them loss of consciousness, fear of the unknown, cessation of life, separation from loved ones—aspects we accept more or less readily in other situations: sleep, travel? (Except cessation of life. That we don’t accept so readily. But he skims over that one.) He has obviously not read Freud on the instinct of self-preservation: the organism will fight off all obstacles to its survival so that it can die in its own way, in its own time. Not Eros over Thanatos. Just a kind of dumb, stubborn endeavor to persevere in one’s being.

  The other philosopher has been listening with interest, nodding from time to time. His eyes and nose are red and runny, probably hayfever. I have been listening with interest too, yet neither has taken the slightest notice of me, which on top of their conversation is insult added to injury; after all, I am a reasonably attractive female of their generation, skimpily clad. “Nonetheless,” the allergic one says, “you’re going to find people hard to persuade.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes. You haven’t taken into account the limits of logic. It’s beyond logic. So how are things going with Tina?”

  The first one smiles evilly. “She’s gotten me to agree to go to a shrink for marriage counseling. I don’t think it can do any good but I figure, this way, when I leave, I won’t have to feel so guilty.”

  The friend probes the caving-in marriage. He tries to get the first philosopher to put aside logic and state his “feelings.” The two philosophers have been affected by the 1960’s and the women’s movement to the extent that they are aware of its having become socially chic to acknowledge and articulate feelings. They try, but their efforts are hapless. For one thing, the first philosopher doesn’t seem to know where his feelings are located. As his friend inquires, he looks around vaguely at his fingernails, his feet, his briefcase. “I only know the situation is completely untenable,” he concludes.

  Is it? Is it one of those many situations to which death is preferable? Have you thought of using it in your course? I bet I could logically demonstrate that even this untenable marriage is preferable to lots of other situations, but I too would be ignoring the limits of logic.

  I got off and walked past the Metropolitan Museum, open late. There on the steps, serenading the evening crowd with violin, viola, and oboe, were three students from the music school. They were doing Vivaldi, and not badly, given the heat and the country-fair atmosphere, with hawkers of food and cr
afts their competition, and some yards off a white-faced mime cavorting with a hoop. I bought an ice cream and sat down for a moment to listen. They were ebullient. They exuded what Irving was always growling about, joie de vivre. I must remember to tell him; he would be pleased. The listeners were happily ensnared, their faces softened in the fading light. It was very much music of the daylight, tossing up its last gallant strength like a shower of fireworks. Yes indeed. This was a situation to which death was definitely not preferable. The violinist caught my eye and winked. I waved—I could have kissed them all—and threw a few quarters into the waiting violin case before I went on.

  The heat was so heavy, with thick purplish clouds beginning to move in from the east, that only the most dedicated, the most in need of distraction, came to play chamber music. Our regular cellist was on vacation and a student was filling in. Irving’s violin was as mellow as ever, but his temper was menacing, like the weather. He said little, but his sighs at every breakdown or false start were sufficient. The less able pianists faltered, while the best of the lot, a conceited, mustached young doctor who solemnly removed his beeper at the opening of each session, swore at the cellist, who had trouble keeping up a prestissimo. I found myself soothing the one and rebuking the other like a nursery school teacher; it was ludicrous. The last to play was one of those young mothers not ready for ensemble work. She stopped and started a sprightly Mozart third movement half a dozen times. At the end Irving rested his violin on his lap with tangible relief.

  “Mozart is a wonder,” he announced to the group of ten. “The resiliency of genius. No matter how he is mangled, he cannot be totally destroyed.”

  The woman’s eyes filled with tears as she retreated. Even our young cellist Freddy’s eyes widened.

  “You did better than last week,” I told her firmly. Ah, supportive. “Everyone’s hot and tired tonight. What you need to do at home is count with a metronome. Now right here, for instance, where the others join you, you have to wait two whole measures after the chords before you pick up the theme. Listen.” I signaled to Irving and Freddy and we demonstrated. I had meant to do only a few bars. But a wonderful thing happened. The piece took off like a kite in a breeze; lyrical as well as sprightly, it lightened the night’s oppressive heat, living’s face lost its look of pain; the wound in his ear was healing. When we came to the first natural stopping place he raised an eyebrow, I nodded, and we went straight on. It was a moment of grace, too good to stop. Freddy grinned and kept up. The others settled back in their chairs. We were loose and hot and we indulged a bit, made it witty and a jot more tender perhaps than it should have been. There was a redemptive quality to our playing. The young woman had mangled it, and we were redeeming it. Everyone is redeemed tonight, Victor said at that Seder the April before last. Everyone, the wise son and the simple, the beyond simple, even the contrary. I had a fleeting vision of all thirteen of us at the table, sloshing wine and laughing, and it didn’t make me sad. It was like a distant photo preserved under glass. It made me play more willingly now, for this moment that would take its place among other graced moments. The piece was strenuous, and yet the pleasure I felt was easeful, as when I swam hard against the wind on that cold day in June. Midway I heard the click of the door and sensed heads turn. The custodian sometimes came around entreating us to close up shop; he could wait five minutes. Irving did a long and splendid run of sixteenth notes; I echoed him and felt like laughing out loud. It was the kind of performance we dream of, yet so often happens spontaneously, in small rooms before small groups, as this music was meant to be played. When we were done the students clapped and cheered and began meandering out. I turned. It was Victor who had entered in the middle, not the custodian. He stood at the back looking damp and hot in old jeans and sneakers, and thinner than when I last saw him, at Althea’s graduation. I braced myself for the fury but nothing came. I went over to Irving.

  “You’re incorrigible. Don’t do it if you can’t take amateurs. This is my group and I won’t have them intimidated.”

  “All right, all right. Don’t get so excited. Didn’t we do nice there? That was something, eh?” He patted my cheek. “Go, sweetheart, your husband’s waiting.”

  Victor came up to the front and we stared. There was no ordinary greeting, kiss or handshake, quite right for us. I was stunned, seeing him, and still wide open from the music.

  “It’s funny,” I said. “I just had a thought about you.”

  “What thought?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember any more.” I moved off to get my things. I didn’t even know how to speak to him. “What’d you come for, anyway?”

  “It’s pouring. I thought I could give you a lift home.”

  “You came all the way uptown to give me a lift?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car. Come.”

  On the main floor we found ourselves jammed in a tight crowd. A conceit had just ended.

  “What is a fugue?” a woman beside us asked her companion. “Is it a flat? Is that what it is?”

  “No,” the man said. “A fugue is … I think a sort of a shadow.”

  “You could tell them,” Victor whispered.

  “A shadow is not bad. It is something like a shadow.”

  He laughed and took my arm. The car, he said, was around the corner. He never carried an umbrella. We ran—I forgot about my ankle—and got soaked. Inside, I shook out my wet hair.

  “I’m sorry about the other night,” he said. “I really thought you had had the phone number changed. I didn’t mean all those things I said. I tried to call after that but you weren’t in.”

  “Is that why you came? To say you were sorry?”

  “Partly. I wanted to see you. See how you are. Our phone conversations are, uh, less than satisfying. And at the graduation there were seven hundred other people. You were marvelous in there just now. I’ve missed it.”

  “Yes, it was a great moment. Let’s get going. It’s late.” We drove a few blocks, then turned into the park. The smell of drenched leaves and grass filled the car. The silence was painful and I switched on the radio. Rain for several days was predicted. “Tropical hurricane Boris,” the announcer said, “has been downgraded to a tropical depression.”

  “Did I hear right?” Victor asked.

  “I think he said that tropical hurricane Boris has been downgraded to a tropical depression.”

  “I thought so. That is a poem, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, what? A haiku?”

  “Or Auden, maybe?”

  We looked at each other. Seven months ago we would have laughed, or touched. He switched off the radio. “That show in November is on after all. I’ll manage to get the stuff finished.” His hands were tight on the wheel and he was staring straight ahead.

  “That’s terrific. I’m glad you got back to it.”

  “Some of it is work I had from before. Some new.”

  “What’s the new?”

  He stopped for a light but still didn’t turn to me. We were in the middle of the dark park, alone. “Rooms. No people in them, but lots of windows, trapdoors, fire escapes. Odd things left lying around. There’re a few with staircases in funny places. They’re different from what I was doing before. You’ll see. Will you come?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on when in November. I’m going out of town with Rosalie and Jasper. I’m not sure of the dates.”

  “I’ve never put on a show without you.”

  “Well, you may have to. I’m certainly not going to be an adornment at your opening, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I’ll come if I can. I’d like to see them for my own sake.”

  He drove on without speaking.

  “All right, am I supposed to ask how you’re getting along, Victor? Is that what you want, what you’re waiting for? Is that what people do in these situations?”

  “I don’t know what people do. I wouldn’t even know how to answer.”

  “So l
ong as you don’t tell me anything about her.” No, don’t even mention her name. Although now that it appears you’ve had nearly enough of whatever she offers, I can grant that she has a name: “Dorothy.” I think of her that way, in quotes, someone I can’t quite believe in, can’t take seriously. She is not the issue. Any intelligent observer could safely conclude that in Dorothy’s carpeted field Victor’s needs are not satisfied, or are very likely oversatisfied—he never enjoyed being mothered. Dorothy will be a delayed casualty of the crash. How disaster spreads its net for victims.

  “I wasn’t about to. You know she’s not the issue.”

  “So much the worse for her. I gather she’ll be getting the short end one of these days?”

  “I’ve never used anyone badly like that before. I always had contempt for men who did. Esther’s men, you know. But meanwhile she’s …”

  “Happy,” I finished for him. “You always did that well.”

  “I meant I haven’t misled her. She knows what it’s all about. Do you think I’m a total bastard?”

  “I wouldn’t say total. You have mitigating circumstances.”

  He parked in front of our building. “Lydia, what I want is a few friendly moments. Would you give me that much?”

  “All right. I’ll make an effort.”

  “When exactly is Althea getting back?”

  “In a week. She had a great time. I think she was going out with a blond lifeguard.”

  “She leaves pretty soon after that. What is it, two weeks?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “I promised to drive her up.”

  “So I heard.”

  “She was planning to take a bus but I just couldn’t—Would you have let her take the bus?”

  “No. Not yet, anyway. If you hadn’t offered to drive her, I would.”

  “So will you come, Lyd?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “What’s the point? I can say good-bye at home. I’m not sentimental. And then there’s that long trip back.”

  “With me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I need to talk to you. Be with you.”