Disturbances in the Field (45 page)

“No,” Gabrielle agreed. “Now we’re content just to live in it, without understanding.”

“Well, I understand plenty and I am not content.” Esther scrambled up and pushed frizzed curls off her forehead. She announced, “I’ve got to be off. I’ll just go wash my face and pee,” at which Gabrielle winced.

“You’ve barely arrived. At least stay and have dinner. I thought you’d spend the night—there’s room.”

“I wish I could, Lyd. But I’ve got to get back tonight. I promised to be in church early in the morning.”

“Church?”

“One of my clients is the lead singer in the choir in a Baptist church. She’s been asking me to come hear her for weeks now. I promised. I’ve always wanted to go to one of those rousing black churches where everyone gets all excited, but you can’t go as a spectator—it wouldn’t feel right. I finally got an invitation. Maybe I’ll have a religious experience, you never know.” She flounced off to the bathroom and returned with the scrubbed look of a child. Still pink-and-white-skinned, in her light ruffled clothes she might have been an illustration in a toddler’s book of nursery rhymes; she lacked only the broad straw hat with streamers. But the page was a trifle faded, a trifle smudged from being left out in damp weather. She had not combed her hair, either. Maybe her hairdo was the kind that couldn’t be combed: wild floppy curls. Maybe she just toweled it dry every morning and let it settle at random. For all its breeziness, it did not strike me as hair that would easily ignite. She twisted her skirt around till the zipper returned to the left side, then said her good-byes. Kisses and hugs. “If any of you are ever down in Washington ...”

At the door with me, alone, her face relaxed. “You don’t look so bad, Lydia, considering. How is Victor? I’m sorry I missed him.”

“He’s all right. Look, I’m sorry too, that this didn’t work out. I thought it would be a good idea, but I see I should have arranged for us to be alone. We still can, if you want to stay. Victor is—he’ll be out late.”

“I can’t. It’s true, about church and Mrs. Barker. Lydia, did I ever really thank you for the time you and Victor rescued me from Ralph and I slept on that mattress with all the baby toys around?”

“That was so long ago. You must have. What does it matter now?”

“I didn’t. I was so wrapped up in myself. Anyhow, thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Forget it.”

“Why are you limping?”

“I tripped over a skateboard and sprained my ankle.”

Esther clicked her tongue. “How’d you manage that?”

“When the police came to tell me, I fell. There was a skateboard in the hall.”

“Ah.” She nodded, as if this were an everyday occurrence.

“Yes. Well, thanks for all your letters.”

“You didn’t mind those little ... ?”

“No, I’ve always liked them.”

“Well, Lydia.” She sighed and hoisted her small overnight bag onto her shoulder. “Things happen. What’re you going to do?”

The words of my butcher! I had returned to my butcher yesterday, in fact, after three months. A man of elegant manners, unlike the fruit man, he had no questions, no recriminations. No nostalgic slices of bologna, either. A cordial greeting, a “What can I give you today?”

His daughter had given birth to an eight-pound boy.

“Okay, if you’re going, go. You’ll miss your train and church and all.”

She smiled shyly. “‘Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?’”

“Ecclesiastes?”

“Job.”

“Job! So, where?”

“Well, it doesn’t say explicitly. Then it wouldn’t be a great book.”

“How come you know all of that by heart?”

“Hah! I’ll tell you—all the time I was in SAVE, they had no books around except pamphlets on organic gardening and righteous cookbooks. They didn’t want to be inhibited by established thinking. Each person was supposed to reinvent the wheel, more or less. There was a Bible, though. I guess that wasn’t considered dangerous. After a while I got desperate for something to read, so I read it.”

“Nearly two years, Esther. How could you?”

“What’re you going to do?” she repeated. “I did it. It’s done. I can quote a lot of the Bible, though. I’ll see you, Lyd.”

“Thanks for coming.” I went back to the living room. I wanted a crowd of people there. I should have invited everyone I knew; a growing crowd, not a shrinking one. Gaby was telling Nina the plot of her next mystery; it involved a woman diplomat from an imaginary South Pacific republic, caught up in a whirl of crime and intrigue at the United Nations. I stood a bit apart, half-listening to this woman’s existential but also fairly droll bewilderment, so far from the land of her birth, the grass skirts, the sea, the tropical fruits ...

“Lydia, the phone? Don’t you hear it?”

“Oh!” I dashed to the kitchen. Althea, itinerant student. What a wonderful day ambling through Greenwich Village! A Fleetwood Mac record on sale for three dollars! A fantastic guitar player in Washington Square! Jugglers, acrobats! She’d even had a second hole pierced in each ear; Diane held her hand. The ear-piercing place was called The Primitive Urge. “How apt. Perhaps you can have your nose done next time.” “Oh Mother.” “I told you how I felt about two holes, Althea.” “I know. But remember, you also told me it was my body and I had to use my own judgment about what I did with it.” “You know very well I wasn’t referring to your ears.” She giggled. She wasn’t calling to discuss her ears, though. Would I mind if she slept over at Diane’s house on Roosevelt Island? An impromptu party. Everyone was meeting at the cable car, to swoop over together. I didn’t mind. What had I been doing all day? My friends were over. Oh good, Mom, so you’re not all alone. See you.

Inside, Gaby was checking her watch. “Don should be here any minute to pick me up. We have this tedious doctors’ dinner. They’re honoring the new head of the hospital.”

“He can at least stay for a drink, I hope. I could call George. Make it a party.”

“I’ve got to go pretty soon also.” There was a slight stammer to Nina’s words. She paused and made an awkward gesture, fussing with a strap of her shoe. “Sam’s wife is in Philadelphia for the weekend.”

“Ah, visiting the aged parents? Thank heaven for aged parents. A whole weekend. I thought you seemed distracted.”

“Don’t be malicious, Lydia, please. It doesn’t suit you. Or me.”

“Right, right. No allowances. Do not under any circumstances permit Lydia to be bitter out of self-pity. She might even get like Esther. Keep her to her high standards.” I went into the kitchen again. Sure, George said over the phone, he’d come right over—why didn’t I tell him before that I was holding a reunion?—but he couldn’t stay long. A date with a yoga teacher. A new one? Yes, a new one.

I brought back another bottle of wine and handed it to Gaby with the corkscrew. She could open bottles like a man.

“Esther always had a short attention span,” she said, screwing it between her knees. “It’s gotten even shorter.”

Nina yawned and stretched one arm high, then the other, as Gaby used to do in the dorm at night. “Oh, why not be tolerant?”

“I’m doing my best.” According to Gabrielle, though, Nina was far too tolerant. Years ago she had begun to distrust Nina, when it became apparent that their lives had somehow gotten switched. Gabrielle was to have been independent, lean, adventuresome, Nina the respectable wife and mother, maybe struggling to hold a job as well—for that too was respectable now. Gabrielle envies the independence; if Nina envies the husband and children she doesn’t let on. For all her affection, Gabrielle finds Nina suspect, like a dear friend who might have stolen something while your back was turned, or then again you might have misplaced it yourself. And also, Nina lies. She has to tell a certain number of lies because her lawyer lover, Sam, is not only married but a public figure. (Of course Sam lies too.) Gaby is quite aware that with someone as intricate as Nina, further variables of which we know nothing may necessitate further lies of which we know nothing. Scientists should not get in the habit of telling lies, Gaby believes. (Of lawyers she expects it.) It weakens their credibility, vitiates their work, becomes a habit of mind. I tell her that’s nonsense. Surely in the lab and the classroom Nina is perfectly honest. Perfect, maybe, Gaby replies; not honest. And I think how far we have come from Aristotle’s ideals of friendship. Friends pleasant and useful, but loved really for something else. A mutual love of character, which endures a lifetime as character itself endures.

“You didn’t even tell Esther about Victor,” Gaby said, the bottle neatly uncorked. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. It’s too boring.”

“Boring?”

“Not so much the facts, though they are boring enough. I mean one’s own emotions become boring. Don’t you find that? That’s the trouble with Esther—she runs in the same old track. Events keep changing, but we always react with the same apparatus, in the same way. It’s like cooks. You know how with certain cooks, no matter what they fix, it comes out tasting Chinese or garlicky or bland? I wish I could feel things the way someone else feels them, for a change. Maybe that’s why I don’t get bored with music. When you perform faithfully what someone else has composed, that’s really what you’re doing, taking on another sensibility.”

“You’ve always wondered what endures, Lydia,” said Nina. “So there it is. A style of experiencing. You can’t escape it. Look at those ridiculous people at Esther’s wedding, trying to change the ways they felt life. You might just as well try to get a new body.”

“But you,” Gaby said to her. “You’re almost a different person now. Where’s the continuity in you?”

“Oh, I’ve arranged for different kinds of things to happen to me. That’s simply a matter of taste. But inside, what Lydia called the apparatus, the person to whom things happen, is the same. We all are.”

The doorbell rang, and Don, looking slightly untrustworthy himself in his white three-piece suit, slightly like a professional gambler, bent to kiss my cheek. Of course Don was quite trustworthy, only showing off the results of a diet; he had recovered his youthful shape and flair, and moved with the grace of the young man who used to come and take Gaby out on Saturday nights twenty years ago. He moved in the illusion that he had recovered the actual youth as well as the trappings.

“I’m going to have a look at that ankle,” he said as he followed me down the hall. “You’re still limping and I don’t like it.”

“It’s nothing. It barely hurts. Only when it snows. I mean, rains.”

“Hello, darling.” He kissed Gaby, and kissed Nina too.

“Hello and good-bye,” Nina said. “I must run.”

Yes, speed home in her white Triumph (a new one; the old had finally given out), shower, change, bedeck for Sam. Already as she gathered her purse, her jacket, her silk scarf, her newspaper, a bemused languidness was taking shape in her movements. Already she was feeling him. This love affair had not traversed the stages she had described to me at the race track. Through difficult, clandestine arrangements the fuchsia cloud had held for years; they found plenty to say without using each other up. But glory? Did he bring the world with him, and find it, this man who chose to sleep and shave and breakfast elsewhere? In the hall she said she was sorry to rush off. But clearly I had become an obstacle in the path of her need, just as Sam was an obstacle to mine, the pleasure of her company. We had become disturbances in that famous field of George’s, where mobs of people jostled for their daily bread and occasional caviar, where far across, farther than I could see, were good times, peace, relief of want. I made myself an obstacle at the door—she had to brush past me. It’s all right, dear. Go. I understand. Go get laid. But of course one couldn’t talk like that to Nina, even at the sharp edge of want.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” she said. I could see it. She would call from the white and purple bedroom, with Sam beside her. “Just a minute,” she would say to him. “I’ve got to call a friend.” No, he must know who I am. “I promised to call Lydia. Wait.” And as she speaks to me, kind and concerned, Sam will be teasing, stroking her here and there to distract her and make her laugh, make her brush him off with playful irritation so she can concentrate on me; at that moment Sam is less ardent than curious, one of those men whom sex truly interests, curious to learn exactly how far he can go, at what point Nina will be unable to keep up a rational conversation with her girlfriend. Ah, Sam! You don’t know the history. You’ll go far, and still she’ll talk to me, I’ll bet. She is after all a woman of formidable self-possession. You’ll have your fingers inching up the inside of a bare thigh, and she’ll talk to me. But briefly. She won’t linger on the phone. Nor would I. You’ll win soon enough, Sam. I waited with her till the elevator came.

While Gaby was in the kitchen mixing his martini, whose proportions only she could be trusted with, Don took off his white jacket to reveal a gold watch chain looped across his vest. My father neglected to tell me about vest pockets, even more secret places. Straddling a chair opposite me, he widened his eyes and attempted a leer. “Come now, my dear, let me have a feel of that luscious ankle.”

I laughed. “Don, the philanderer image is just not you.”

“No? Ah, what can I do? I try. Seriously now. Give me your foot.” I did. “These are ridiculous shoes. You should wear solid ugly shoes for a while.”

“Over my dead body.”

“You’re such a wonderful patient, Lydia.” He was feeling around the ankle, pressing with his thumbs. “Does this hurt? Does that hurt?” I answered no. “Why are you making faces, then? Look, I really wish you would cooperate. I want to see this get better, to make up for what I did to Mr. Dooley.”

“Who’s Mr. Dooley?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you that awful story? When I worked for the messenger service in Boston? Our mean old boss with the cane—we kept sawing bits off of it until he finally fell and broke his ankle.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. So I’m your means to redemption?”

Gabrielle came in carrying the potion and three glasses. “Well, how is it?”

“My ankle is something like a pathetic fallacy. It corresponds to the weather.”