Disturbances in the Field (41 page)

“You don’t know me at all, then. I’ll never forgive this.”

“Forgive? How does forgiveness come in? You want to be alone with it. It’s clear. You’ve done everything to get that except show me to the door. Forgive, Lyd?”

“You don’t want to coexist?”

“No. I want you. Or not at all.”

We had the bowl of gorp between us. He was picking out two or three pieces at a time and meditatively bringing them to his mouth, while I dug out handfuls, bent my head back and tossed them in. Me, sleek? “Do you love her too? Your friend?”

“Oh, at moments. Not really.” He sighed. “But I don’t pretend to.”

This was not Victor. These were two other people, strangers to us both. We were decent, I always thought. Not the sort who would split in a crisis, but the sort who would abide. The stranger I had become found this impossible to say. “Do you realize what a brute you sound like, Victor?”

“I would say you’re the one being brutal. But let’s not turn it into a competition. You remember Highet. He was so right.”

Together at Columbia we had attended the famous lectures on classical tragedy. Gilbert Highet in natty gray flannels and lustrous black shoes was thrillingly debonair, a triumph of civilized Western manhood, striding back and forth across the platform, fluent on the brutalities of Hecuba. In the world of Euripides, he said, the victims become as bad as or worse than their persecutors. Earnest yet forever debonair, he reminded us time and again that suffering is not ennobling but brutalizing.

I wrote a term paper about Euripides’
Suppliant Women
—Victor read it. Mothers of the seven heroes who died attacking Thebes, they supplicate for the return of their sons’ bodies so they can render the proper burial rites. They lament so incessantly that they lose all personal identity but that of grievers. Emblems of grief, they grieve therefore they are. Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of. “What need had I of children?” is their bitter cry. “Would that in death I might forget these griefs!” Well, of course. But what would Victor say if I went about the house swathed in black, intoning, “Alas, alas! Where is the labor spent on my children? Where the reward of childbirth ...? Nothing. He would take it, and be relieved, and hold me in his arms. That is precisely what he wants.

So why not give him what he wants? Our neighborhood shelters many ex-mental patients who walk the streets raving to invisible companions. In the park they perform strange and solitary antics. Last week a woman sitting on a bench slowly unwound an entire roll of paper towels, tearing off two sheets at a time. When she was done she made a fat pillow of them, put her face in it, and cried. Is it any wonder I’m afraid? The sound I would make is beyond imagining. The Greeks had their formal modes, their Necessity, their Destiny, their ritual responses. I have no speeches, no suit to plead, only this shapeless blob the size of the universe and choking as mud; it is all I can do to slog through it, coated in it; it does not wash off; it muddies the eyes; I cannot see Victor through it; I cannot make great poetry of it; I cannot make art of it as the Hopi Indians made of their toothache. It is formless and useless. “What need had I of children?” I used to think that when Althea and Phil were babies and wore me down to the bare nerves, in ignorant bitterness when I couldn’t tell griefs from simple gifts.

“Well, what about the kids? When are you planning to tell them?”

“I’ll call tomorrow night. Or the next night. As soon as I feel up to it. And I’ll be back on the weekend to see them. I’m twenty-five minutes away, Lydia. It’s not as if I’m deserting my children.”

As soon as he feels up to it! Why not as soon as he feels ready to “deal with” it? And he dared to be contemptuous at Esther’s wedding six years ago! He dared to say the fray reminded him of a Bosch painting. He whose patience stopped short at the fatuous, the trendy, the emotionally shoddy. Purist, who once wept tears of rage when a critic said his work was derivative. Listen to him now!

“I’m going to bed.” I got up to put the garbage out the back door.

“I’ll do that.”

“Oh, don’t be gallant, please, Victor. It’s my turn.”

“Have it your way.”

Out in the hall I bumped into his sister Lily’s TV as usual, and cursed. It never did work, even after he had it repaired last year for forty dollars. The fault of the twin towers, he said. Any other neighborhood. We tried to give it away, but everyone seeing the parallel lines and the snow said no, thanks. So there it has sat for over a year now, jammed in with the garbage cans and bikes and sleds, and whoever puts out the garbage bumps into it and curses. Vivian liked to say it tripped us because it resented its fate, back there with the garbage. I returned and said, “Maybe you’d like to take that damned TV with you?”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. You don’t have one in the studio. It would be nice to get rid of it.”

“No, someone will want it someday. Leave it.”

The next night after dinner, I told the children he had gone. Initially I had lied—“Working late”—and then over coffee I changed my mind. Didn’t they deserve better than to be lied to? I watched Althea pour coffee and thought of how we had done for them, how we should do for them. Maybe it was a mistake even to let them drink coffee so young. But then we had often permitted things other parents didn’t: staying up very late, painting their rooms in outlandish ways, reading dirty books. ... Someday we’ll go too far, I used to worry; something will happen. ... The formative years are over, Victor said last summer when Althea blew her babysitting savings on a Berlitz course in Swedish, having seen five Ingmar Bergman movies; we must let them live their own way. Very well, and one of us must tell them the truth. Promptly.

“It may be just for a little while, maybe longer, I don’t know. It was too hard here. He has to pull himself together on his own. Don’t blame him, it’s as much my fault. He’ll call you later to tell you, and you’ll see him whenever you want to.”

Althea had a million questions. Like a Socratic dialogue, ever bifurcating and ramifying the issue. What do you mean, maybe a little while? Either he’s left or he hasn’t left. If he’s left, it’s either permanent or temporary. If it’s permanent ... She could not have known she was employing an ancient method called a tree of Porphyry—Professor Boles once diagrammed it for us. Phil grunted and got up to leave the table.

“Wait.” I grabbed his arm. “I know you’re shocked. But please, will you please not just grunt and leave, okay? It gets me very upset.”

“I have a lot of homework. I have a chemistry test tomorrow.” He turned away, tilting his jaw like Victor. In the adamant profile was a retraction of all the evenings they had spent talking together behind his closed door, one voice aggrieved, the other tempered with limitless, loving patience.

“Phil!”

“I could get a job or something after school. Can you manage by yourself?”

“It’s not like that! He’s not deserting you. Just sit down awhile, all right? Finish your coffee.”

“I’m finished.” He left the room.

“I always thought you two had a fairly good relationship,” Althea said. “I realize there’s been a lot of stress. But still, it would seem to me that at this point he’d want to keep the stable elements in his life.” She lit a cigarette, bending her head over the flame on the stove. Your hair! Watch the hair that easily ignites!

“I wish you wouldn’t smoke, Althea. This is the third night this week I’ve seen you smoking. Do you want to ruin your lungs?”

“I don’t have an addictive personality. I can smoke when I choose and not smoke when I choose. Don’t you do the same? Anyhow, this seems to me very illogical on his part. It’s probably related to a mid-life crisis, in addition to everything else—he’s at that age. But I would think that being so committed to his work, he wouldn’t feel the same lack of ...”

On and on, like a TV documentary. The unexamined life is not worth living, Victor believed, and yet he needn’t have toiled. Teen-aged children are only too glad to examine it for you. Finally I said, “I might as well tell you, since you say I should talk to you like a woman, you smoke and everything. ... He has a ... a lady friend.”

She started coughing, not a very proficient smoker. “You mean like a younger woman?”

“As a matter of fact, no. An older woman. Slightly older.”

A long pause. “A mother figure,” Althea said.

“Oh, come on. She’s not old enough to be his mother. I don’t know if he’ll mention that, but ... well, you’re not a baby any more.”

The hands of the self-possessed Althea began to shake. She prowled around the kitchen, puffing. “I don’t ... uh ... maybe I shouldn’t go away to college. I don’t want to leave you all alone.” For two years she had dreamed of going to Middlebury to study languages, an excellent choice—she has a verbal soul.

“Oh no! You’re going no matter what. Besides, he’s not exactly out of my life, you know. It doesn’t happen like that. And Phil is here.”

“Phil! What use is he? He hardly even speaks. Living with him you might just as well be alone.”

“He is not here for my use, and I don’t like hearing you talk that way about him. It’s not right.”

“It’s true, though.”

“It seems true on the surface. It’s not really true. But even if it were, does the truth, what you think is the truth, need to be blurted out all the time?”

“Yes.” We have discussed this before. She believes that any truth justifies its own utterance. Moreover, she claims it is her nature to speak the truth, like Cassandra. Woe to any who heed not. If I urge diplomacy in the exercise of her powers I am trying to stifle or change her personality, which is a crime. She will never change, she says proudly. She will be this way for life.

“You of all people should understand. You’re close to his age. You know the kinds of things he’s going through. Besides—” My eyes measured the large empty kitchen.

“It’s precisely because I do know. Why does he have to repress it all? He should learn to express his needs—then he might get some of them satisfied.” She grinned but quickly composed her face. “He also might be a little more sensitive to the needs of those around him.”

“Oh, stop sounding like a social worker. What he needs is a little patience from those around him.”

“He’s just acting out, Mother.”

“Acting out?” I smiled. “Who isn’t? Look at your father.”

“
I
am not.” She stubbed out the cigarette righteously. “I’m a reasonable person. I try to be governed by reason. I don’t see why other people can’t do the same.”

“I wish you luck. Now would you help me clear the table?”

“Sure.” Always willing and able. An oldest daughter, she sees responsibilities everywhere. And a true communal spirit, too—not one shirking cell in Althea. So when she speaks so ungenerously, I remind myself she is the most generous nature of them all, though she might not wish that particular distinction. Someday she may even allow herself some tolerance for human frailty, and then what an excellent person she will be.

“Will you look at that!” The sharp voice, the cutting consonants. “He left his plate, his glass, his dirty napkin, everything. Does he think we’re servants, to clean up after him? If I were you I would call him back and make him clean that up.”

“Oh, Althea, one plate more, what’s the difference? I’ll do it.”

“It’s the principle. No, get away from the sink. I’ll do the dishes.”

“Don’t you have homework?”

“It’s all right,” she said with impatience. “I’ll do them. You’ve done them the past two nights. Go on, go on, out. Practice. Read. Do something,” she ordered, so I obediently turned to go.

“Mom? Will he still come to my graduation?”

Should I go and put my arms around her or leave her dignity be? Leave her. “Of course he’ll come. What are you thinking of? We’ll come together.” I did go over after all. “Althea ...”

She shook her head, scrubbed the dish hard, and shuddered me off. “It’s all right. Go.”

Victor phoned every evening except that first, but Phil would not go to the phone. In two days, Saturday, when Victor comes over to see them, Phil is planning to be out, as I am. If he ever marries this Montessori teacher I shall appear at the wedding like the bad fairy, like Clyde’s ex-wife Floral, and when they ask if anyone knows any reason why this pair should not be joined in holy matrimony I will stand up and shout, Yes, yes, because he walked out on his two remaining children, grieving children, and waited thirty-six hours to explain. Never mind me—I would have left me too, believe me I wish I could have, I was intolerable—but those children, whose eyes have never been the same ... The formative years, I shall tell the assembled well-wishers, are never over.

I get up from the floor and replace the telephone (which I still imagine to contain the voice of Miss Fosdick, like those toy phones that speak when you lift the receiver), turn over the “Trout” recording, and curl back in my chair with the coloring book and Crayolas. I think I’ll do the knights gathering for their tournament. I can give the six horses all the glossy horsey colors I recall from my race-track days with Nina. As I hold Burnished Gold poised above the page, the delectable fourth movement of the “Trout” begins, the theme and variations using the melody from that silly song about the fish: the ascending fourth, then third; the descending third, then fourth—the way up and the way down, syncopated and then even, making audible the idea of the teasingly indecisive, the reversible, the ambiguous. The crooked and the straight in dialogue, and finally in truce. The late Hephzibah, here immortalized, enters with supreme self-possession, with a controlled sweetness that never droops into sentimentality but instead has lightness and subtlety. One instrument after the other plays in turn with this delicious theme. What was first stated so simply they twist and invert, embellish, tickle, unravel and ravel again; they virtually torture that single sweet and faintly melancholy theme. They are so dazzling that I am drawn in, lifted away, and unraveled myself; unknotted, allowing the variations to be played in me and through me. It is almost like before. I almost forget. Something demonic still wants me to color the horses. Become a dribbling idiot, let’s see how far into idiocy you can go. But I won’t. I strain to hang on to the theme. For the truth is, I’m not so young any more, I can’t afford to play games with coloring books. And I’m not ready to go yet, to forget these griefs in death; this organism insists on dying in its own time and in its own way, not when some chance angler throws down a trap. Which is to say, it insists on living. In any old way.