Disturbances in the Field (37 page)

“Haven’t you any feelings left?” he says into the dark.

“Apparently not.”

“You’re not going to bed with anyone?”

“Who would I be going to bed with? I’m right here, aren’t I?” This is a diversionary tactic. He wants to tell me about the woman on the shag rug. Well, there’s plenty of time. Take your time, Victor. The nights are long.

“I thought maybe George. You see him a lot.”

“Yes, I’m very fond of him. I find him entertaining. However, I don’t sleep with him.”

“I thought maybe you did.”

“You thought wrong. If ever I have a lover, I’ll let you know, if it’s so important to you. I’ll tell you all about it, blow by blow. But it seems unlikely at the moment.”

Victor sighs. “Don’t be so bitchy.”

“Well, it’s irritating when you ask like that.”

We lie there another half hour, holding hands. I could turn on the radio; they play chamber music all night on WNYC.
While the City Sleeps,
it’s called.

“What was it like, with George?”

This is an interesting question. Funny he has never asked before. But before, in our innocence, we were principled and discreet. I wouldn’t mind talking about it either. Maybe we could work ourselves up in the dark, Victor and I, like dizzied adolescents reporting back to their pals. Like Esther, on her trip to Coney Island with Ralph: He put his hand on my knee. He moved his hand up my leg. He put his tongue in my ear. He rubbed his, you know, thing against my stomach. And for such dazzling originality she went and married him.

I sit up in bed. Victor turns towards me, head propped on his hand. It is like telling a bedtime story in the dark. “I was very young and inexperienced, as you know. There was that boy in high school but ... He managed to find his way but that was about all. And George—well, you know George.
‘Purche porti la gonnella.
’ Anything in a skirt, that means. They sing it about Don Giovanni. So I was very impressed.”

“Yes?” he encourages.

“He was ... oh, how can I put it? Quite ... lively. He bounced around a lot.” Victor chuckles. He is beginning to enjoy himself. “He was all over the place. Oh yes, and he suggested I read the Marquis de Sade. Not that he had such bizarre tastes; I wouldn’t say he did anything especially weird, but I think he wanted me to get an idea of the range of possibilities.” I’m really playing to my public. Catering, Rosalie calls it. And this is only the opening. The exposition. “I did read it, in parts. But it was boring. Also, I could never figure out how many people were present or keep their positions straight—there were so many at once and they kept moving around from one to another. And then when they came, it was very peculiar—they got strangely articulate. Poetic. They would say things like, Oh, I’m coming, it’s like this, it’s like that ... very sort of rhapsodic imagery. Maybe it made more sense in French.” Victor is a fine audience, listening intently in the dark. Is he getting an erection, maybe? Can I do that with banal words? “But George was too serious. I don’t mean there was no humor. I mean ... purposeful. Oh, he was okay, but there was something basically wrong. For me, anyway.” Ah, I’m starting to fade, losing the concentration, diffusing into abstraction. I’m no pornographer.

“What do you mean, wrong? Did he come too fast?”

Men show such a lack of imagination. There are only two things they can readily think of that could be wrong with a man. Of course with a woman all sorts of things could be wrong. George was curious to know, vaginal or clitoral. I found it hard to make the distinction. He would look at me as if I were half-witted. Had it been ten years later he might have said I wasn’t in touch with my feelings.

I groan with sarcasm. “No. Well, sometimes. But that wasn’t it. You all do that sometimes.” From what vast experience do I sound so knowledgeable, I who have been such a faithful wife? Hearsay. “Anyhow, being George, he was glad to do it again if that happened. Or at least lend a hand. That wasn’t a major problem.”

“So what was?”

“His soul was not in it.”

“His soul?” Victor is astonished. “Is that what you said?”

“Yes, his soul. It was as if he had read too many manuals. He was too accomplished. It was like a showcase production.”

Victor clears his throat. I know what is coming. “Is my soul in it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, that’s a relief. But I’m not sure I can ... put my finger on what you’re referring to.”

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to put your finger on it.”

“Where would you say his soul was, then?”

“I would say ... his soul was extracted like juice from an orange. The juicer was his Freudian psychiatrist. George has been distilled. He has only a self left. Pulp. That is what makes him interesting. He is highly evolved and self-aware, but lacks a spiritual dimension.” This is the development section, swirling off with the theme.

“How about getting back to the facts, sweetheart?”

“Ah, men. Okay. When I came he used to watch me. My face, that is. It was embarrassing. He didn’t watch as part of the pleasure of it, you see. I wouldn’t have minded that. He seemed to be watching acutely because he was proud of what he had achieved. It made me feel like something you wind up with a key and then you watch it go.”

He reaches over the crack between us and puts a warm hand on my leg. “Lydia ...”

“Please. I can’t.”

He removes his hand. How easily deterred. He is not the man he was. The death of his children has taken the iron out of his spine. I can play with him like putty. I don’t like him this way. In the silence he hears it.

“If you don’t like me any more, you could do it with someone else. Do it, if you need to.”

Don’t tell me what I need, you fucker. I know what I need. But I say, “And whom would you suggest?”

“Jasper. Didn’t you ever sleep with Jasper?”

“God almighty, I never slept with anyone, Victor. Especially not Jasper. You know who I would like to sleep with? Marlon Brando. Harry Reasoner. John Lindsay. Julian Bond. Jon Voight. Ralph Nader. Humphrey Bogart. Rudolf Serkin. You see I’m not just a sucker for a pretty face. All of these people have—”

“Oh, cut it out, Lydia, will you?”

“Well, those are your rivals. You wanted to know. But they’re all unattainable. Particularly Humphrey Bogart. He is without a doubt unattainable. Those are the people you need to worry about. Not Jasper. Jasper should be the least of your worries.”

“You have turned into a real bitch,” Victor says quietly. “There is simply no way of reaching you.”

It is five and a half weeks that they are dead. He wants me to make love. He feels I have been ... what do they call it in the women’s magazines? Withholding sex. (How the phrase would make Rosalie screech, as she does at all moronic infelicities of language, “I love it! I love it!”) But I haven’t really refused until a moment ago; he has not suggested it, explicitly, at any rate. Waiting for me to volunteer to caress his guilt. Now that he has tired of waiting, I am supposed to be the string that quivers at the approach of the bow.

“Do you want to tell me about the one with the shag rug now?” I ask politely.

Victor switches up his bedside lamp, reaches into a drawer of the nighttable, and on a tissue spread on the blanket, rolls a joint. Then he dims the lamp. Lots of drinking and pot smoking for a man your age, Victor. I can’t say I approve. The sweet rough smell rises around us. “I met her in a bank.”

“In a bank!” I laugh.

“If you laugh at me I’ll kill you.” He sounds as if he means it.

“Okay, I won’t laugh.”

In the dark the lighted orange tip comes towards me. He is offering me the joint. I accept, take a couple of drags, and give it back. The smoke is in my eyes, my throat, my hair. Is this what burning hair smells like, perhaps? Hair that easily ignites?

“She’s the director of a Montessori nursery school near the studio. I used to see her in the bank a lot. Finally one day we spoke. I don’t remember how, we were on line together or something. It turned out she knew Tom’s latest wife. Tom’s wife’s kid goes to her school.” Tom shares Victor’s studio. His custom is to marry women with young children—he has never had any of his own. “We had coffee, she seemed interested in paintings, so I asked her up to see them, Tom’s too. She came, not that day but another.”

“What does she look like? Is she very attractive?”

“Not as attractive as you.” This line is delivered straight. No more sense of humor, kid? “She’s shorter, and a bit overweight.” I smirk secretly in the dark. “She dresses in a rather conservative way. Skirts and blouses, not jeans or anything too colorful or offbeat. You know the way I mean. Pre-sixties.” I stifle giggles, taking another drag, and another. I’m not used to smoking much grass—everything about this woman is turning out to be hugely funny. “She has an apartment in the East Sixties.”

With a white shag rug. “The East Sixties! Hm!” I pass him back his joint.

“Ordinary people live there too.”

“I thought mostly expensive call girls lived there.”

Victor keeps silent. He could burn me with the cigarette, but instead he passes me the shrunken butt and I inhale deeply. “I suppose she’s very young.”

“I think you’re getting the wrong impression. She’s fifty-one.”

“Fifty-one!” I can contain myself no longer. I burst out laughing, wild, rollicking laughter, and Victor grabs the butt from my fingers and punches my shoulder. I punch him back and we tussle for a moment, but halfheartedly; he is restraining himself, ever the gentleman, not even hurting me. Ah, this man is really shot to hell.

“An older woman.”

“Nine years older than you, Lydia. That’s not so old.”

“But this woman is a mother! Don’t you see it? You’ve gone to a mother, Victor.”

“No, I don’t think that’s it. ... Maybe. Actually she isn’t a mother. I mean she has no children. She was widowed very young and never remarried.”

“Ah, she must love it, then. Does she love it? Tell me how she loves it.”

He puts his hand on my throat, the source of the words. “Shut up and listen! The first two times, I did it ... the way men do these things. That was before. It didn’t mean much. I don’t know why, maybe to prove something, see what it would be like. Because I never—I was so goddamn attached to you. Somehow it ... And I liked her. Look, I did it, all right? For whatever reasons.”

He removes his hand and I breathe. “Only you should never have told me.”

“I know. And I wouldn’t have, except for ... It would have been over by now. I would have felt whatever regrets I had to feel on my own. But after that day, when you got like this ... The silhouette of his upper body looms, a dark shadow in the dark. “You’re not the same person,” he hisses at me. “I can’t tolerate the way you are. All during the days, it’s as if nothing happened, as if that snow never fell and the bus never crashed and your life wasn’t split open. You go around exactly the same as before, only at night you’re like this. You’re like a witch in a fairy tale. A woman by day and a witch by night. You do your work, you go to rehearsals and teach, you even go to concerts—”

“For God’s sake, I went to hear Rosalie at Lincoln Center, dammit. It was a great thing for her.”

“I don’t mean you shouldn’t have gone. Jesus, what do you think I am! I’m glad you went. I mean you have it to spare for Rosalie, but—What I mean is, you shop and run things, you’re so fucking efficient about everything! Where’s it all coming from? You’ve even got their closets almost all cleaned out and the stuff out of the house. Like they were never here. I liked seeing that stuff around. Why’d you have to get rid of it so fast, for Chrissake!”

“I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter, that’s not the point. You look terrific. You fix up your face every morning so no one can tell you’ve barely slept in over a month. Only I know it. You even bought new clothes, I noticed. Oh, you look fine. No one even comes near you, and they haven’t lost their children. You don’t cry, you don’t scream, you don’t need anyone, do you? You sent your friends away when they wanted to help you. You don’t need to touch me or anyone else. What are you doing, setting some kind of example? For who? Pretending you don’t care? Just a minor change? Oh God, even the kids are smarter than you are. They cry themselves to sleep. No, listen!” He pulls my hands from my ears. “They do! But you’re so damn perfect! So self-sufficient, it’s horrible. How do I live with someone so perfect, Lydia? Tell me. What could you possibly need me for?”

“When you wanted to marry me you thought I was perfect. For you, I mean. I thought you liked perfection.”

“That was different. This is no time to be perfect. I liked it better when you threatened to slit your wrists and didn’t comb your hair because you couldn’t cope with two babies. At least that was the truth.”

Oh, so you’d like to see that again, buddy? Sorry, no go. I’m playing to the last breath. The message of the
Titanic
was not lost on me. Never that again.

“You can cope with anything now, can’t you, Lyd? You just can’t fuck. That’s the only little problem you have. Otherwise you’re adjusting fine. But no one has to know about that, right? The world will never know. The world will see only the perfect—”

“Stop it!” This time I smack him hard, and he takes it. “All right, you’ve made your point. You’re right, you’ve justified yourself. Go to her. Tell me something, though. Don’t you work also? You go to the studio every day.”

“No. I don’t do any work. I look at the old paintings. But that’s all right. I’ll get back to it in time.”

Besides that, unlike me, he looks awful. The Greeks believed that land where blood has been spilled by violence suffers blight, from seepage. He is a land struck by blight. His face is hollowed and sallow, his hair grayer, lifeless. His clothes hang on him. He clears his throat a lot. He drinks. Once in a while, in the evening, he is a little vague from drinking, and the children, especially Phil, look at him with censure. He is kind to them, though, kind to everyone, considerate of feelings even as he trips over things and forgets things—to bring home milk, change a bulb, return phone calls, pay bills. Sometimes at dinner he will stop eating and stare, and his eyes will fill with tears. Phil leaves the table. Althea starts a bright conversation. After dinner he lies down on the living room floor on his stomach with
The New York Times
spread out before him, open to the same page for an hour. He rarely answers the telephone, and only after four rings. With the overweight nursery school teacher, maybe he comes to life.