Disturbances in the Field (18 page)

After we studied the menu intently he reached out for my hand and this time completed the gesture, clasped it with fingers interlocking. We sat that way for a time. The food was brought but we ignored it for once. I was aware of the entire surface where his hand touched mine—the heel, the warm hollow of the palm, the press of the fingers—and from that clasp, as though it were captured in one of those optical toys that multiply and ramify a segment of space into a world of spaces, I could imagine the whole surface of his body and how it would be. Like finding the other half, as in the myth I loved in the
Symposium.
I didn’t want the other half just yet. There was something equally tantalizing about being incomplete.

He looked at me in that piercing way that made me lower my eyes, but I didn’t withdraw my hand. “So come back with me. Bring your piano and your toothbrush. It’s about time, isn’t it?”

“I’ve got to figure so many things out. I’m in limbo. About work, I mean, what to do next.”

“I’m talking about love and you’re talking about work. You can work all you want.”

“If I just had a firm footing ... I’d get distracted.”

“That’s ridiculous. You weren’t distracted back when ... you know.”

“That was different. You’re different. It would be the end of something, I know.”

“Yes, the end of this stupid—” But he disciplined his temper, let go of my hand and smiled. “Do it the hard way, okay.”

“I’m afraid of making a mistake.”

“
I
would not be a mistake.”

Oh, the arrogance of him. I thought love had to shake a person like an earthquake, but I was quite calm. A friend was another self, too easy, too comfortable. Slip right into it.

He gave a raffish tilt of the chin and dug into his saltimbocca. “You’ve lost all your nerve. It’s a pity.” Cutting, but I thought he was wrong. I thought it took nerve not to give in.

Lately Gabrielle had a strange, almost indifferent air about her dancing. The head of the company at the studio had told her that in a year or so, if she kept on, she might get to do small bits in performances. I was elated—real life!—but she was cool. She had a distraction. Don was a resident in orthopedics, and on his free weekends he took Gabrielle to dinner and the theatre. Formal dates, I teased. She told me, after the first date, that he had lived in a fraternity house at Amherst. “A frat house! Really, Gaby.” She smiled as if I were a child who had missed the point entirely, and murmured that it wasn’t important. Don was tall, though not as tall as Victor, and competent-looking; his smooth longish blue-eyed face had an ingenuous charm, glowing as if recently splashed with aftershave. He was nothing like his ingenuous face; he was sharp and even sardonic, though well-meaning. A pragmatist, a man who would go far, operating with brains and efficiency within defined boundaries. Even as a resident he had the assured, paternalistic manner of full-fledged doctors. I had to admit he was attractive, but, “Smooth and ordinary,” I said when she asked. I never repeated it because the dates continued week after week.

When she was not quite ready, I, like the mother, made conversation with him in the living room. “And how is your music going, Lydia?” He crossed his impeccably trousered legs and leaned back on the couch, arm stretched across its upper rim, face fresh and expectant. Questions like that made me want to kill—how unlike Victor, who wished to see what was happening to my hands. But for Gabrielle’s sake I said it was going well and asked politely how his orthopedics was going, and if he found that facetious I thought it no more than he deserved. When she entered the room he rose to his feet, a graceful unfolding, and radiated adoration.

They were all slipping into it. Esther had married Ralph, purveyor of the ocean, soon after college. Nina was engaged to a fellow graduate student at Princeton. And Evelyn! Towards the end of her junior year abroad, six weeks before she was expected home, came that letter announcing her wedding in June. We must come. Rene would send us the tickets and we would stay at his house. My mother phoned me from Hartford. My father was not accepting any tickets from a Swiss banker. “What do you think we should do, Lydia?” Since I had finished college she had taken to asking me for advice as if, with the degree, I knew something she didn’t.

“We’ll go,” I said firmly. “But Daddy’s right. We’ll pay for our own tickets.”

And so I spent a swift, baffled week in Alpine greenery, among oak furniture, leatherbound books, and
objets d’art.
Evelyn! My nighttime companion! Would she whisper secrets to him in bed at night? He was in his middle thirties, ruddy, exquisitely dressed and mannered, but I could not picture him appreciating the secrets of a girl like Evelyn.

I was spoiling for a fight and hadn’t the heart to fight with Evelyn, who was sublimely inscrutable. In the ladies’ room of the airport in Geneva, going home, I said to my mother, “What do you think he has, a gold-studded prick?” I would have been pleased had my mother threatened to wash out my mouth with the soap she was about to squirt into her hand. But she tilted her head sideways, pursed her lips, and shrugged, lifting her free palm eloquently to the ceiling as though I had expressed her thoughts to perfection. It was a new vision of my mother.

On the plane, while my father slept in the window seat, I thought I might try for another. “What do you think of this, Mom? Listen. It’s about wanting things.” I read her my quote from Schopenhauer. “‘The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one; both are illusions. ... No attained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification; it is like alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive today that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow.’”

This time she looked as though she would have liked to wash out my mouth. And then she sighed—she had a wonderful, encompassing sigh for the mystery of it all—and patted my hand. “They have some very nice magazines to read if you’re so desperate. All you have to do is ask the stewardess.”

Two months later Gabrielle married Don, as I had known she would the minute I said “Smooth and ordinary” and saw her eyes bright blue and green with hurt.

I drank too much champagne at their wedding dinner at a French restaurant in an East Sixties brownstone. It was the sort of restaurant that had no sign outside denoting its existence and no prices on the calligraphic menu, but did have a silver medallion hanging from a heavy chain around the neck of the wine waiter. Gaby seemed very much at home in such surroundings; the more I drank, the more there grew in me a subversive notion that those four years in the dormitory and two years in the apartment, she had been an impostor. Maybe Evelyn was an impostor too.

Victor was not. Back in the empty apartment I phoned him, first at home, then at the bar.

“Hi. This is a surprise. I didn’t even know you had the number.”

“I know how to use a phone book. What are you doing there on a Saturday night?”

“Filling in for someone whose wife is having a baby. Watching a movie about the
Titanic.
”

“I called to ask if you want to come over. If you can desert the ship.”

“Is something the matter?”

“Does something have to be the matter for you to come over?”

“Of course not. But for you to invite me. I get off at midnight.”

“I’ll wait.”

I knew I ought to drink coffee or take a cold shower, but I sat on the living room couch in a stupor. In my head blossomed images of the wedding—Esther holding hands with Ralph, Nina and her fiance from Princeton clinking glasses, Gaby’s dress, ivory with seed pearls. The images floated around, divagatory and surreal. Hypnagogic, Esther told me later when she was in social work school, is the word for that lush phantasmal quality of our thoughts on the verge of sleep. I moved in and out, listening for the doorbell.

He was dressed in an old denim shirt and tan chino pants, as he used to dress in college. I stared. The clothes made him younger. The intervening years might never have been. Kids again, and he was flirting with that rare lanky grace, one of a kind.

“Are you planning to ask me in, or don’t you recognize me?”

I moved aside. “I’m sorry. Come in.” It was so easy.

He put his arm around me. “What’s the matter? You’re all pale. And you’re thinner. We haven’t had dinner for a while.”

“It’s nothing. I’m a little drunk. I’ll make some coffee. Is instant okay?”

“Sure.” He followed me into the kitchen and watched my very slow and careful movements. “Why are you all dressed up? And you cut your hair. It makes you look like a boy.”

I shrugged. I couldn’t fix the coffee and converse at the same time. We stood waiting for the water to boil. “Hey, do you know I can play the harmonica? Since I last saw you.” He pulled one out of his pocket and played snatches of songs: “Camptown Races.” “This Land Is Your Land.” “Auld Lang Syne.” And the theme I loved from the “Trout.”

“That’s terrific. All by ear?”

“Yes. I remembered the ‘Trout.’ Are you touched this time? You’re supposed to be.”

“Well, I’m surprised.”

“Come on, Lydia, after midnight on a breezy August night when you’re drunk, you’re allowed to be sentimental. I won’t tell anyone.”

“I am touched.” I kissed him lightly. I swayed, and we laughed because it was so clearly not passion making me sway.

“I’d better pour it,” he said.

We drank it on the couch. “Listen, I don’t mind saying I’m touched. The reason I didn’t want to say it is I wanted to say what I had to say first. So you wouldn’t think it was because of anything you said. It’s on my own. Do you follow me?”

“Barely. Come here and lie down.” He pulled me over to him, with my head in his lap. “I think it’s time I took advantage of you.” He started to unbutton my dress. “What a nice dress. This blue is right for you.”

“Wait.”

“Wait?” He laughed. “It’s the middle of the night, Lydia. You’ve obviously been out with some guy and got slightly looped and then you felt lonely. So you called me. Now what for, am I supposed to think? Okay, I’m not above that sort of thing.”

“That’s not the way it was at all. All wrong.” I sat up. “Do you still want to marry me?”

“Yes. But less and less as time goes by, frankly.”

“Oh God. Do you have to be so frank?”

“It’s still a lot.”

“All right. I say yes. I do. I mean, I will.”

“Just a second. Why all of a sudden?”

“I want to, that’s all.”

“You just broke up with someone. You got ditched.”

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t do it like that.”

“No? What if you change your mind when you sober up?”

“I won’t.”

“But you don’t love me.”

I looked at him. For one instant I felt sober. “I don’t know, I might. I will, anyway. I promise.”

“Ah, that doesn’t sound so hot to me.” He got up and walked around the room, running his finger nervously along surfaces. He might have been checking my housekeeping abilities. “Why should I, that way? I could get over you. I just haven’t tried.”

“Oh Christ, Victor! You pestered me all this time. Didn’t you think I was paying attention? So okay! But first go ahead and—what did you call it?—take advantage of me. I mean, we ought to see if it works, shouldn’t we?”

“If it works! Oh, you’re too much. Ought to? All of a sudden I ought to?”

“You wanted to a minute ago.”

“’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, baby. But the way you say it makes me nervous.”

“That’s two of us, then. Well, go ahead and drag me to the bedroom by my hair.”

“But you have no hair left.”

I touched my bare neck. “I forgot. By an arm, then.”

“What about Gabrielle? Is she going to walk in? Or is she out somewhere with that bone person?”

“Gabrielle?” I pulled him by the hand towards my room. “You are nervous, aren’t you? No, she won’t walk in. Anyhow, I’ll close my door.”

Victor looked around the bedroom. He had been over before, but never in my room. I knew how he liked to examine places at length. My room was brightly disorderly, a graduate student sort of room, with Madras curtains, a Cezanne landscape, a piano, all my college books still alive with the aura of having been recently read. “Victor, you can study the place later.”

“You are in a hurry.” He put his arms around me. Every gesture he made was slow and attentive. His touch was less ardent than curious. It was wonderful, far better than I had allowed myself to imagine, but another feeling was even more powerful. He kissed me. “I’ve never seen you in this sort of hurry before.”

“Because I’m going to pass out very soon.”

“Lie down, then. What a seductress you turn out to be.” He lay down next to me.

“I should tell you something.” I could hear my own slow voice drifting peculiarly above my body. “Gabrielle just got married.”

“Really? To that doctor? ... Oh yes, you mentioned something about it last time.”

“Yes. That’s where I was all evening. That’s where I got drunk. It’s only fair to tell you.”

“Fair?” He sounded puzzled. “Okay. I see.” He didn’t see yet, but I couldn’t explain any more. He unbuttoned the rest of the dress and took it off me. I shivered. “Chilly?”

“Yes. Pull up the sheet. ...Victor, I’m very sorry. I can’t stay awake, even for you.”

I thought he might be angry—he certainly had a right to be—but he only smiled. Maybe he was glad of the delay. He folded the dress neatly over a chair, and the last glimpse I had, he was at the bookshelf, looking for something to read.

It was pitch dark when I woke. I sensed someone there and got rigid with terror, then I remembered. “Victor?” I whispered. He touched my face. It was an unknown hour, and in the dark I felt I was seeing him. He was not the composed and bantering man I knew in daylight. I had never made love with someone who loved me. I found something out. I found out how a woman might be content to do nothing but tend her body and her surroundings—an extension of her body with a particular domestic appeal—content to wait in a vague mist of anticipation, for an hour of being made to feel like this. She could become a happy machine, greased and used and satisfied once a day, dormant and amorphous the remaining hours. Of course I couldn’t take this seriously. Only a ripple of atavism—but it left a faint wake.