Disturbances in the Field (28 page)

Gabrielle saved her good grace for Don and their kids; with her friends she was moody. Unexpectedly, Esther turned up one evening, strengthened and impervious to whatever damage latitudinarianism could do. She said that the Gestalt wizard had transformed her, or rather, enabled her to transform herself.

“She doesn’t operate on a Freudian model. She thinks the process is more like a Socratic dialogue.” Esther’s face was ruddy and radiant again, and her voice clear, not raspy—she had stopped smoking for the third time. Her hems were not hanging, she wore a bra, her hair had been recently washed. “It all has to do with figure and ground, the boundary where the organism meets the environment. That’s a dynamic relation. You’d be surprised—your boundaries are more fluid than you think. You operate in a field, and you keep changing according to how things in the field move in and out of you.”

Nina brought us a bowl of grapes and Gaby, as she clutched a handful, said, “That’s all very well. But a women’s group might do more for people our age.”

Esther gave a newly ironic smile. “Couldn’t you call us a women’s group?”

“No. If we were we’d do something practical. Instead of sitting here we could be learning to use a speculum, for example. Why shouldn’t a woman know what’s inside her?”

“I’d rather know what’s inside my head,” Esther said, quite without irony this time, twining her fingers, feeling for the absent cigarette.

“We don’t accomplish anything. We have a friendly feeling, that is all. Warmth does not get you unstuck.”

“Gaby,” I said, “you want a women’s group, go find a women’s group. I
like
what you contemptuously call a friendly feeling. And a speculum—are you kidding? After four pregnancies I’m not looking for any gratuitous probing. Thanks anyway.”

“That’s pure ignorance speaking! You of all people should want to know—”

“Ignorance! I know it so well I could be a midwife! Oh, sleep with the man already, will you? Enough of this saintly shit. It’s pure self-indulgence. Give your consent. Do you think a women’s group would tell you any different?”

“What man?” Esther glanced warily around the room as if he might materialize, an intruder come through a window. Then she looked at each of us. “Oh, I see. I’ve really been out of touch.” Silence. “Silence makes me anxious. ... I recently learned that.”

“I’m sorry, Esther, go on,” said Gaby. “You were telling us about the Gestalt person.”

“Oh, never mind. Frankly, I don’t see any point in a false purity. ... He’s on your mind so you might as well ... Clearly Esther was not of the school of Abelard. Still siding with God: lust in the eye is as good as done.

“Yes? And then what? Have a secret life? Or give up everything? I don’t want to. I’m too entrenched. I can see it all. Notes in the office; surreptitious phone calls; I’d arrange to meet him when Don was away, or else I’d make up excuses, say I was here or there, with one of you, maybe—I’d have to drag my friends in. You’d lie for me, you’d feel contempt, he’d be humiliated. I’ve been through it a million times in my head. I don’t want that kind of life.”

What a talented projector. She could map the movements of Leucippus’ atoms to their inevitable destiny; life could be over, in abstraction, before it was even lived.

“But when you were with him,” Nina said. “That’s the part you’re leaving out. That part might give you ... oh ...”

Glory was the word she had used, with embarrassment, at the race track.

“No one seems to remember that I once made a promise. But let’s drop the subject. It’s my private life.”

“You didn’t promise to suffer,” said Esther. “Your first obligation is to take care of yourself. If Don doesn’t satisfy all your needs—”

“Oh, please!” Gabrielle cried. “Don’t give me that cant about needs! This is not a matter of need but of greed. He satisfies what you call my ‘needs.’ He gets it up, all too well. That is what you mean, isn’t it? Oh, if only it were that simple! Who knows what needs are? Needs conform to the available satisfactions.”

I often recalled that little epigram of Gaby’s, aimed at the narcissism of the age and as out of step as a Jesuit at a disco party. Three years later, in 1975, after a visit to India in the entourage of a swami, Esther married Clyde Powers of the SAVE community, child of rampant sophistry, nephew of Richard Nixon’s Doublespeak, and fifteenth cousin of Freud, though surely the master would have turned from him in disgust, as Shakespeare from Caliban. Clyde was available and Esther was in need.

Nina and I told Gaby about the wedding, soon after her return from France. Again it was late summer, again hot, again we saw the open fire hydrant through Nina’s wide second-story window, and the perennial young mothers pushing fretful babies one last time around the playground. And for us, again the comfort of family without its blood resentments. Nina was the one who actually told, in her most arch manner. “In touch with himself, he boasted. But if all you touch is a void ...” I sat and drank. With my skirt pulled up for the cool air, I examined my legs for red and blue streaks of aging. I was thirty-seven, a good but not great pianist, locally known but unable to travel as frequently as I should. When the trio or my woodwind pals had a gig of more than a couple of days, they got someone to fill in, while I ground my teeth at night and muttered, like a prayer to rout frustration, Althea, Phil, Alan, Vivian, the world well lost. It worked, most of the time. But I had too much to do and was showing inevitable signs of wear—intimate little occurrences all over my body that I wished Victor could not see. Having studied me so long, drawn me and painted me as well as loved me, he could not help but see, though he was far too chivalrous to mention them out loud. A foolish worry, I was aware, but it sufficed in black moments—and Esther’s wedding had gotten me down.

“What’s the matter, Lyd?” Gaby said with the old gentleness. Her passion, and the bile it oozed, had finally passed, as she had trusted it would. “You haven’t spoken a word since we got here, except to ask for ice.”

“It seems such a waste. Our going to school together, our talking. And she goes and does that with her life. Even India—at least it was India. There is really nothing to discuss. Nothing ever changes. I have no more taste for argument for its own sake.”

“We never did engage in argument for its own sake. It was for our sake. Except maybe in school.”

“Yes, what a falling off was there. From the cosmic to the personal. Gossip.”

“Esther will pass through this like everything else,” Gaby said. “She’ll be the same, but the way she’ll be the same will change, and who knows, the next way may be better.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her, but her serenity was a pleasure to watch. She possessed the grace that comes with ripeness, with having become what one was meant to become and has accepted as fitting. In college she had been an arty American girl, member of a genus. With age she looked more European, or perhaps it was the month in France that had given her eyes their allusiveness and tinge of history, her wide mouth its ambiguous curve. She did not look young for her years as Nina and I did: her various renunciations, and the unlovely virtue with which she had sustained them, had toughened her skin and left narrow ravines of strain around the eyes. But she had followed her anachronistic lights, and the stubbornness of that journey showed in the earned repose of her face and the lines of her body. She no longer kept the taut readiness of a dancer. She looked smooth, almost sleek, and satisfied. At the magazine, where she was arts editor now, she had a reputation for being tough and shrewd. She played no favorites, was afraid of no one, and never grumbled about compromises with commercialism—that was part of the job and she knew it. The mobilities of her face were carefully monitored, and hinted at vast inner rooms of privacy, a secret life. The secret life was not erotic but verbal. She wrote mysteries under a pseudonym. They were cool and caustic and elegantly plotted; the characters who toed the line were rewarded in the end, Nina and I noted, while those who followed aberrant paths were punished. In real life she was tolerant and forbearing. Having denied herself, she could allow others their divergences. Smugness, maybe, but she never flaunted it. Her auburn hair was cut razor straight, reaching not quite to her shoulders, and had streaks of gray that made it more beautiful. Her two children not only were bilingual but had excellent manners in both tongues, more than I could say for mine. With Don she was the same, gracious and receptive at a slight distance, which was perhaps where he wanted her. He touched her a lot in public, on the arm, the shoulder, neutral places emblematic of the others. I don’t imagine she liked that but she gave no sign. I imagine she liked it all well enough in private. I think that after her love affair, her non-love affair, she was drawn to Don again, as sometimes happens, with a passion of her own, not merely a reactive one. I think she took the longings she had felt for the man, in their most elemental form, the hollowness and quickenings in the cavities of the body, and brought them to Don to have them allayed, and she knew exactly what she was doing and forgave herself. The forgiveness was what saved her, and gave her mouth and eyes that humane ambiguity. I think.

“It’s true, our interest has never been disinterested,” I said. “Maybe that’s why it didn’t do anything for Esther. We discussed everything for how we could use it. We foraged. We picked the prettiest flowers and out of them we made our soups.”

“Lydia has grown so facetious in her advancing age,” Nina said. “I don’t think you’re a kindly Bosc pear any more, Lyd. You’ll have to be something a little odd, like a fig, or endive.”

“Endive is good. A fig is too exotic. For that matter, Esther’s not much of a peach any more, either. More of a ... watermelon. She can still be a ruby, though. What about you, Gaby?”

“Topaz,” she replied instantaneously, and with perfect accuracy.

Nina said, “Emerald,” and we all laughed. Hot on the inside and cool on the outside.

“Emerald ... emerald. You were going to tell us something about emerald once, Lyd.”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”

“Well, what are you?”

“Something blue. I can’t think of what it’s called.”

“Sapphire?”

“No, sapphire is too gaudy.”

Nina got up and fetched her huge Webster’s dictionary. She opened to the array of gems, a shiny thick page amid the dry definitions. We huddled around it. Each color was discrete and luminous.

“How wonderful. I’ve never seen this page. This is the one.” I pointed. “Lapis lazuli.”

“You would pick a rare one. Well, enough of childish things. I’ve got to go. I promised to pick up Cynthia by ten-thirty. She’s making posters to protest cooking classes. It appears the girls are going to strike.”

“But school’s out.”

“They’re getting their strategy set—it’s only a few weeks off. I think she eavesdrops when the women’s group meets at my place.”

“Oh, I meant to ask, did you ever learn to use a speculum?”

“Yes. We had someone come in to teach us.”

“And?”

“Interesting.” She smiled gnomically, a bit like Evelyn. I could see I had forfeited the right to details. “Want to share a cab, Lydia, or are you staying?”

“No, I’ll get one later. The air is too good to leave.” I remembered the many nights when a cab would have been out of the question, and with that sense of time and change came a premonition that the Philosophy Study Group was over. Friends forever, very likely, but no more half-purposeful fooling with ideas. We would never be true believers. Things had fallen off too far—fruits, gems. Not ideas, but the intangibles of identity.

At the door Gaby said, “Wait.” Perhaps she had the same intimation of closure. “It was from Epictetus. We were talking about bear and forbear. When I was ... you know.”

“Oh yes! That was years ago. It was Marcus Aurelius, but I can’t remember what any more.”

Nina went and knelt before a low shelf, stretched her arm directly to the book she wanted. What an efficient retrieval system! Perhaps her whole life was coded that way—given the topic and the year, could she lay her hands on anything? “Here. Find it.”

I found it. It made me suddenly very happy—one of those moments when the shards of life fit together like a prehistoric bowl, and the mind is flooded with contentment. “‘Whatever anyone does or says, I must be good, just as if the gold, or the emerald, or the purple, were always saying this, Whatever anyone does or says, I must be emerald and keep my color.’”

Gaby laughed, a laugh of concealment, not candor. “I’ve kept my color, all right.” Then she kissed us good night and was gone. We sat back on the pillows again. After a while I said, “So, Nina? How is it going with you?”

She leaned over, took the lacquered black box from the cabinet, and rolled a joint. She undid her hair and let it tumble down her back, smooth and thick. I thought of the man who used to brush it. She smiled slowly—it was almost seductive—and shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about love. I’m sick of love. He’s very much there, that’s all. And his wife is there too, and her diabetic comas. Let’s not talk about anything.” She passed me the joint. “What would you like to hear?”

“Wanda Landowska. Do you have any Scarlatti?”

She reached a hand out and found it immediately. We sat and smoked. The pungent smell was good accompaniment for the relentless, supple sound of the harpsichord. I could listen better than look. I studied Nina, wishing for Victor’s eyes. After all the years of the Philosophy Study Group I still wasn’t sure I understood how she saw the world. A scientist first, that I knew—her mind open to experiment, but her allegiance given only to evidence and proof. She had changed the least since college, except to become more talkative. The enormous change, the metamorphosis of Nancy into Nina, had taken place in school, right before my eyes, but I had been too inexperienced to know what I was seeing. I envisioned it now as a huge reconstruction project, where sometimes the shell of the old becomes the skeleton of the new; the dirty work is surrounded and hidden by makeshift wooden boards with tiny windows cut out to satisfy curious passers-by, but often the windows are too remote for the eyes of youngsters. Then it is unveiled, a suave modern building with a glassy facade, beautiful in its way but a trifle forbidding. She was wearing a loose and shiny black shirt with a gold chain given her by Sam, the civil rights lawyer. A noose. To his credit, though civil rights were no longer a glamorous or fashionable issue for whites, Sam persisted. For glamor, he had her. She sat with her knees drawn up. Listening? Or maybe working out some formula in her head. She narrowed her eyes, played with a bracelet, drew in the smoke so deeply I could see the muscles around her collarbone twitch. She had been home on three occasions in the sixteen years since college, and returned the first time looking frayed, and picked up a stranger in a bar. The only time, she told me. “I thought he might kill me and I didn’t even care. He was all right, though. I was lucky.” She didn’t go to see them again, but telephoned regularly, honoring her father and mother long-distance, sending money for a cataract operation, a new roof. The other two occasions were the funerals.