Disturbances in the Field (47 page)

“You’re sure you’re not making this up, Lydia?”

“No. What would be the point of that?”

“Some of my patients do. They think their dreams are too shocking, or too dull, so they do a little creative editing. Not that it makes any difference. What they invent is just as useful as what they dream.”

“No escape, eh? Well, I’m not changing anything. I can see you don’t like my dream, George.”

“Baby, I love your dream. It’s almost too good to be true.”

“But I haven’t even gotten to the best part. When it’s about the size of a moderate rib roast I put it on the floor and get down on my knees—on that mucky subway floor, imagine!—and I take a cleaver, no, it was really more like an ax—I had it in my briefcase with some music—and I start to hack at the meat. The lights are very glaring. One or two people glance over, but with no real interest. I was hacking it into steaks—I’ve seen my butcher do it dozens of times. I always watch closely. I’m impressed by that kind of skill, how they manage not to chop their fingers off. I did a fine job, I must say. I hacked it up into about half a dozen steaks. That was all I had left from the original whole side of beef. Then I wrapped it in some brown paper and tucked it under my arm and got ready to go home. That’s it.”

George drank some wine and reached for another slice of pizza, his third.

“So what are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“But that I should be like that. It’s so brutal and violent, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But so was what prompted it. Here, you’d better have some before it’s all gone.”

We finished eating in silence. After the pizza and the wine I felt better. How infantile and selfish to make George break his date and stay with me. Needs conform to the available satisfactions, Gaby once said. Yes, I’d exaggerated mine, taken advantage of him. Probably all I had needed was another hour or two of company and some hot food. Everything seemed bearable now. The children—well, when I opened my eyes each morning I no longer felt a shock in my gut. And Victor? Women have died, but not for love. Maybe I’d never loved him all that much anyway. I’d never have made the kinds of sacrifices Gabrielle makes for Don. I didn’t quiver every time he entered a room. There had been times when his touch left me cold. There were even things I’d never liked about him. Bits of curling hair in the bathroom sink. Forgetfulness. The way he made love when he’d had too much to drink, in a fumbling, drowsy way. Leaving the phone off the hook in his studio—that capacity to shut us all out. How he put away his things so deliberately, as if to secure them against ... what? It was so unlike him to leave that book open, face down. If I had truly loved him would I have minded those things? Could it be I had never known real love at all? Almost forty-three years old and never known love! Ah, sad. Bad. “I think I’m a little drunk,” I said. “That Gaby makes a mean martini.”

“Don’t you dream about them?” he asked suddenly.

“Uh-uh.”

“You were never a good liar. Even I dream about them. I dream I take them to the zoo, to the beach. Once I even dreamed they were mine.”

“Yours?” I whispered.

“I lost them at sea. The three of us were crossing the Atlantic in an open boat, like some man I read about in the paper, who took his kids. Just as we were coming to the harbor—we could already see the Statue of Liberty—they somehow fell overboard. I threw them life preservers but they couldn’t reach them. And then—” He stopped. “This is the worst. I was afraid to jump in after them. I’m a lousy swimmer. I hated myself but I wouldn’t jump in to save them. Even after I woke up I was ashamed, as if you could be responsible for what you do in your dreams.”

“You knew even in the dream that they were not really yours. If they were yours you would have jumped, believe me. That bastard Victor certainly would have jumped.” In his dreams, awake, anywhere. What is he dreaming these days? Empty rooms, it was, weeks ago. Room after empty room, he told me in bed.

“Maybe I did know, but I think it was worse than that. I think I would not risk my life for anybody.”

“Well, you’re here now.”

“This is not much of a risk.” He gave a small laugh. “No, I’m not saying I’m not useful. I can listen to anything and stay calm. I’m a regular vault of secrets, and I do keep them. But sometimes I feel a little removed from things. Maybe it’s so many other people’s secrets, blocking the way.”

“I hate hearing you talk like this. It makes me feel bad.”

“You see,” and he laughed again, “you don’t have the tolerance for it. Well, so much for the pizza. You don’t want to go to bed, by any chance, do you?”

“Oh Jesus. Look, you know very well you could coax me and at some point I’d be susceptible. But I would really rather you didn’t.”

“I don’t want to have to coax. I’m past that. I want someone who wants. ... Lydia, didn’t you ever notice that red ribbon on Althea’s crib?”

I didn’t answer for a while. “You did that?”

“Yes. When I was a kid everyone in our neighborhood did it. I had this urge. You never said a word, though.”

“How was I to know? It never crossed my mind. I thought it was one of our mothers but that they were embarrassed to admit it. They told me what it meant.”

“Did you mind?”

“No, only I was baffled. Well, why the hell did you stop? Why didn’t you do it for all of them?”

“You never mentioned it, so ... I just didn’t. I’m sorry. But you don’t really think—”

“Don’t be silly.” I drank some more, though my head felt perilously light. “I do dream. I dream ... not that I lost them but they lost me. I mean couldn’t find me. They were out together at ... well, somewhere. They come home, come up in the elevator, get to the door. They can’t get in because they’ve forgotten their keys.”

“You’re fading, baby. I can hardly hear you.”

“I can’t talk any louder. My head is spinning.”

He pushed aside the pizza box and came closer. We sat cross-legged, knee to knee. “Okay. They forgot their keys,” he prompted.

I spoke with my head down. “No, that’s not right. Wait a minute, let me think. No. It’s not that they forgot their keys. They have their keys. But they don’t fit any more. They’re the wrong ones.” I looked up. “I did change a lock on the front door, just two weeks ago, after this kid broke in. I gave him a TV and sent him off.”

“Wait, I’m mixed up. Is this part of the dream?”

“No, no, this is true. He came in through a window. What you would call a disturbance in the field. He wasn’t violent or anything. I gave him an old TV we never used and he left, and I thought that was that. He didn’t seem like a bad kid, really, but later when I was getting ready to go out I saw the little son of a bitch had swiped my keys from the kitchen table, so I had to have the lock changed. I told Althea and Phil that I lost them and it wasn’t safe to keep the same locks.”

“Did you call the police?”

“I didn’t feel like seeing any more cops.”

“Lydia!”

“Don’t look at me that way, please. You didn’t call the cops, did you, this afternoon when you saw all those things?”

“Oh, but that was—”

“Different? Yes, I know. Anyway, in the dream they come home and they still have the old keys. They ring the bell but no one answers. I’m not home.”

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know. Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m like a presence, not a real person. I’m watching the dream as though it’s a movie. I’m there but outside it. I see them sitting at the door and I want to tell them I’ll be home soon, not to worry, go across the hall to Patricia’s, but I can’t because ... because I’m not in the movie. I’m only watching, they wouldn’t hear me.”

My eyes were streaming, but so calmly, as at the movies. George wiped my face with his dirty napkin. “So what do they do then?”

“They just sit on the floor in the hallway and think they’ve been abandoned. I know how they feel because I can see inside them, even though it’s like a movie. It’s as if I’m making up the movie as it goes along. The worst part is that I can’t tell them I’ll be home soon. They sit there for hours and it gets dark and no one opens the door for them. Their legs are all cramped. I can feel it, as if I’m their legs. I mean, I’m them and it’s my legs. Oh, I can’t explain it.”

I stretched out on the bed, on my stomach. George stroked my back. I was shaking. “It doesn’t make any sense unless you know where they were coming from.”

“Well, where were they coming from?”

“Riverside Church. There was a disarmament rally, more like a religious festival, a pageant, I don’t know how to describe it. I had been there too. They didn’t lose me till after—we got separated somehow, in the crowd.” I sat up again and looked at him. He seemed mesmerized. His eyes were shining wet, but calm, and calming. I felt quieter inside. I wondered if he shed tears for his patients too. “We were all actually at this thing, George, a year or so ago. In real life. It was a spectacle, almost something medieval. Thousands of people in the church, and music and singing and speeches, and in the middle of it all, the Bread and Puppet Theatre marched down the center aisle with huge puppets on sticks dressed up as skeletons and the devastations of war. And then the minister went up to the front—he lives in this building, it so happens; I see him all the time. All around him, up on the platform, were enormous Mexican piñatas in different colors hanging from that great ceiling. When he spoke it was magic. He has a theatrical presence: his gestures and his voice turn everything into theatre. The air around him gets charged. Even in the elevator. He spread out his arms as if he was being crucified, and he said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.’ It was so rash—you know, he could have made an ass of himself, that’s what I thought at the time. But he didn’t. He was good. He said it right. He wanted all the children in the audience to come up to the front, he said, because they were the ones we had to preserve the world for. It was theirs. The future. He kept his arms stretched out, and children began to stream up from everywhere in the church. It was an amazing sight. He shook their hands and gave them big sticks to break the piñatas, and doves of peace came floating out. This I saw. In real life.”

“Did Vivie and Alan go up?”

“No. You know what they were like. They were too ... oh, self-conscious, and shy. A little too old, too. The kids who went up were younger. Phil, maybe, at six years old, could have done that. But in the dream ... I dreamed it all over, the entire spectacle. And you see, in the dream ... I see this man in the elevator all the time, George. It’s hard to talk to him. We used to be very friendly. He must think—”

“Well, in the dream?”

“I just can’t say it. It’s too absurd. Oh, all right. He stood up there pretending he was Jesus Christ again, and everyone was under his spell. He said, ‘Suffer the little children ...’ again, with his arms stretched out, and this time, in the dream, they went. They went! And then when they came home, they couldn’t get back in. They thought
I
abandoned
them,
but it was the other way around.
They
went and left me behind. It’s all wrong, don’t you see? It’s supposed to be the other way. I mean, even your mother—That was wrong, it shouldn’t be like that, but not, not so wrong as this.”

I bent my head and wept like never before. “Don’t make me tell you any more. I can’t. No, don’t hold me. Leave me be.” This is what you wanted, my love, and here I do it with someone else. Because to do it with you would be ... Because it was delight, the radiant side, that bound us, the sun rushing on the world, the future. Not this dark. Spoiled. All spoiled.

George cleared away the food, then came back and sat on the edge of the bed. I smelled cigar smoke. This damn crying, worse than the last time, drugged years ago.

“How will I ever stop?”

“People always do.”

“I’ll be crazy again.”

“No.”

I lay down with my face in the pillow. I must have fallen asleep as crying children do, torn with longing and helpless. A dreamless sleep, at last. I woke with him nudging my shoulder.

“Lydia,” he was saying softly. “It’s almost eleven. I must have a paper. I’ll be right back. Will you stay awake? or else give me your keys.”

“I’ll be awake. No, better take the keys. On the dresser.” I sat up. “Do you have to do the puzzle?”

“Yes.”

“Get two then. So do I.”

“Aha! And you thought you were falling apart. You see? It’s not so easy. You’re still not ready.”

“That’s all very well, you and Freud and your abstract theories. But what will I do tomorrow?” My butcher, philosopher: What’re you going to do?

“Tomorrow? Sunday. You’ll find, oh, inner resources.”

“Very funny. I mean
do,
specifically.” Fold my hands and eat my flesh?

“Straighten up the place a bit, it sure could use it. The kids will be back—cook something. Balance your checkbook. Walk in the park. Run, that’s even better.”

“Sounds like a thrilling day. Anyway, I can’t run with my ankle.”

“Well, work, then. Work on—what was it again?”

“The ‘Trout.’”

“Right. The ‘Trout.’”

“You don’t remember?”

“What?”

“I played it at school.” I hummed a bit of the fourth movement. “We sang it together. You were helping me. You told me I certainly wouldn’t die if I didn’t get picked to do it. That you don’t die of want.”

“Ah ... yes. No wonder I forgot. That was not my finest hour, was it?”

“No. You made your point, though. Wait, I’ll give you a dollar for the paper.”

“A dollar? You’re a laugh a minute, Lydia. Forget it. My treat.”

When he returned I was undressed and under the quilt. He tossed the papers onto the bed and began unbuttoning his shirt. “I trust you won’t mind. I’m not planning to sleep in my clothes. That would be asking too much.”

He sat up against the pillows on Victor’s side with the magazine section on his lap. On the cover was a photograph of Central American guerrillas training for battle; they looked like children. He leafed through till he got to the crossword puzzle.

“You’ll find a pencil in Victor’s nighttable. Top drawer.”

“Thank you.”

“Will you stay right there all night?”