Disturbances in the Field (52 page)

“But the red,” he brought forth slowly, “are more colorful.”

Ah, an aesthete. A painter?

“The red it is then. Makes no difference to me. I have three chickens. Six legs. A chicken only has two legs, but the way they behave you’d think they expected them to have more. Everyone expects a leg. Did you ever notice? Especially Tom. It never fails. He grabs it. Well, I don’t want him to have a leg this time. Let him see he can’t always have exactly what he wants, like we owed it to him or something. Why should he always be the lucky one?”

He laughed aloud, one sharp “Ha,” quickly over. It was impossible to tell whether he laughed at the prospect of Tom’s not getting a leg, or in appreciation of her cunning, or in contempt of it, or at chicken dinners, parties, expectations in general. “You could buy an extra package of legs,” he said.

A crowd of boisterous teen-agers entered and stationed themselves between us so I couldn’t hear her response. I got off never to know what they were planning for dessert, though I was wildly curious. I was curious to know everything about them: what accidents or inevitabilities had brought them to such a pass. Whether Tom might be their grown child, and at what age he had started grabbing chicken legs. Could the other guests be their grown children too, maybe, safely traveled to adulthood, coming with wives and husbands and little ones? Oh, give them all legs! That’s what my mother would have said. What the hell, let them enjoy themselves. Buy as many extra legs as you need. For Tom, above all, because he wants them so badly.

I worked all through the summer, and I traveled day and night, accumulating distance. Luckily our local buses are nothing like the futuristic kind that killed them. No, the older city buses, especially in warm weather, are open and airy and sociable, intimating long living rooms with picture windows and posters on the walls, a motley collection of guests. The motion, in fits and starts, is reassuringly dinky. Up in my neighborhood, which is like a town unto itself, new arrivals often spot a familiar face and rush over, in the manner of people at a large informal party. I half-expect the driver to get up and serve cold drinks. Strangers strike up conversations and exchange personal data. Occasional arguments erupt, conflicts of race or generation, but once in a while it is old ladies fighting with zest over an empty seat. The spectators listen eagerly, sometimes take sides. Everyone is engaged, silent or vocal. I am not lonely. I am part of a rapidly changing community. I glean, like Ruth in an unfamiliar land. No more dreams of classical order and harmony. Observation, empirical evidence, are the thing. I want to learn how ordinary people lead ordinary lives, something I have forgotten.

It was hot. People wore as little as possible; the buses were display cases for skin of all ages and colors. The weather drew out those who stay indoors in harsher seasons, old people with death in their eyes, pregnant women, mortality ripening in their bellies like juicy melons, cripples, amputees, and countless of the harmlessly deranged. The ex-mental patients who live in the neighborhood took to the buses as I did, their fantasies in florid bloom under the nurturing sun. The woman I had seen unroll a cylinder of paper towels to make a pillow to cry on climbed aboard early one morning, in much better spirits now, wearing a short red dress and high-heeled shoes, her shaggily cropped hair three shades of yellow. Addressing the empty seat beside her, she offered a running critique of the movies playing in the revival houses along Broadway. “Now, take
Guys and Dolls.
They don’t make movies like that any more. What a cast! What a score! And that Marlon Brando! Sings, on top of everything else. Who ever suspected? There, my friend, is pure unadulterated what we used to call sex appeal. Believe me, he asks me to go to Havana overnight, I’d have my toothbrush packed in a second. I know a good thing when I see it and I saw it last night. And yet they say in real life he’s a bastard.
Tant pis.
” It was good to see her feeling better. Nor was there anything very crazy about what she had to say, either. It happened Nina and I had seen
Guys and Dolls
that week too and made similar comments afterwards, licking our ice cream cones and giggling like schoolgirls. Except the companion this woman giggled with was invisible.

She said her good-byes and made her exit. As I watched her strut into Dunkin’ Donuts I glimpsed from the window a much younger woman, a pretty woman wearing a businesslike dress and old blue sneakers, pushing an empty baby stroller briskly up Broadway. My heart began to race. Poor thing. Really crazy lady, this one. Her baby gone and still she pushes the empty stroller. There but for the grace of God ... Give thanks, Lydia.

I had to get off the bus and sit down in an air-conditioned coffee shop. Time stopped; I felt sick. Because the young woman, as I well knew, as any local habitué would know, had just left her baby at the day care center around the corner and was no doubt rushing home to deposit the stroller, change her shoes, and get to the office. A case of Ockham’s razor, pure and simple. Esther, who said she observed the world from the windows of buses, found disappointment at the hands of nasty men. Perhaps you only learn what you already know.

But I drink a Coke and recover, and the summer moves along. One day scorches into the next; I stay alone and manage. I appropriate a room at the school and practice there. Preparing for the faculty concert series in the fall, for the “Trout” concert at Lincoln Center, the tour in November, I am virtually never home. That is one way of learning to live alone. I don’t neglect myself “healthwise,” as Don warned. My ankle is too irksome for running in the park, as George suggested, but I swim in the midtown health club where my neighbor Sam is a lifeguard. Under his boyish, awed gaze I swim so many laps that when I return home I am too bemused to feel very keenly how empty it is. And I sleep well in the empty apartment, but rarely in the big bed he left me. Only when the heat is intense—since that privileged bed comes with benefit of air-conditioner. Now and then I meet friends in public places. Lots of movies. No more reunions. I don’t shop or cook. Burger King, Pizza Parade, Aram’s Falafel, Blimpie, Sabrett’s frankfurter stands—like a teen-ager or a bag lady, I have become a connoisseur of junk food. No masochism trip, this: I was never a gourmet—it all tastes fine to me. So long as it fills. How are you? Nina and Gaby ask. Are you looking after yourself? and I say, just fine. The children are fine too. Phil writes short uninformative letters weekly. I am pleased to find him literate—he has never shown me his school papers. He says he is bored and has not yet saved anyone from drowning. He’s saving his money, though. He doesn’t mention his father. My chum Althea phones collect from East Hampton. “How’re you doing, Mom?” How’re you
doing,
with a special lilting inflection, holdover from going out with Darryl. I hope she remembers the calculus he taught her as well. “I’m doing fine, dear. How are
you
doing?” She gives excited rundowns of famous names spied half-naked in the surf, and quotes in amazement the cost of summer rentals. “I’d love to have a house on the beach someday. Do you think I’ll ever be able to afford it?” “Sure. There are plenty of cheaper beaches.” She is brief. Clambakes on moonstruck sands call to her. Bronzed lifeguards. Althea, don’t forget, birth control is the thing! I restrain myself, say it only twice. The second time she is understandably miffed.

My new chamber music group is going fine too. Twenty-odd amateur pianists and string players from five boroughs want to learn to play ensemble music under the guidance of Irving and me. Irving is behaving himself and coaching the strings brilliantly. He keeps his mouth shut about the pianists, thank goodness, for I have admitted a few who really aren’t ready for the exigencies of classical trios—young housewives with babies, so eager for an evening’s distraction, and my heart goes out to them. We meet Tuesday evenings at the Y across town, and naturally I go by bus.

The two spectacled women across the aisle are what my mother used to call “settled” and I never was. A bit younger than I, late thirties, plump, pastel polyester and sensible shoes types. Nothing more ordinary. How I crave the ordinary, all the more since I cannot seem to find it. Everything I glean seems to have a warp in it. I want to penetrate the ordinary, master it, like a rapist. I listen to these prospects with criminal intent.

“And how are the little curies?”

“Oh dear. Oh dear. There’s something wrong with both of them. The little one had so much trouble with a disc, she just lies in the playpen all day. And the big one just had a lump removed from her breast three days ago. I’m waiting for the biopsy.”

“Tsk, tsk. How old are they again?”

“Nine and seven.”

Nine and seven! Lump in the breast? Lies in the playpen all day? What hath God wrought this time? Yet the mother sounds so cheerful, speaks up so loud and clear. Inner resources. A moral exemplar.

“And how old is yours?”

“Mine is just five. Still in the prime of life.”

“To tell the truth I’m more worried about the little one. She doesn’t even stir when I come into the room any more. I’m taking her to the vet tomorrow.”

I got off and walked the rest of the way, in a hot dusk that became a hotter night. The group broke up late and I was grateful for living’s offer of a lift home. He pulls up in front of my building and sighs mournfully, as he has done often since his wife’s death. She was a few years older than he, close to seventy.

“It was a good idea, this little group,” he says, patting down his hair. “I wasn’t so sure at first.”

“I had a feeling they were out there. It’s not so easy to find people to play with if you’re not professional. And everyone loves it. We can keep it going in the fall. Get woodwinds and horns, make a real thing of it.”

“What an entrepreneur.”

I laugh. “Good night.”

“Good night, Lydia dear.” He kisses me on the cheek as usual, and God almighty, lingers an instant. Testing: will I turn my head? Well, I simply refuse to believe this. I move off. I will pretend it did not happen. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I am becoming one of those hungry women who see overtures everywhere.

“Thanks for the ride, Irving. See you Thursday.”

In the apartment the phone was ringing.

“What’s the idea of changing the goddamn phone number? What the hell are you up to? First the lock and now the phone. And I can never get you in. Where are you all the time?”

“Will you stop shouting, Victor? I just this second walked in. Hold on a minute.”

I turned on the air-conditioner in the bedroom and took off all my clothes. I stretched out on the big bed, my side. “I didn’t change the phone number. The phone company did it.” I explained about Miss

Fosdick and the technical reasons. “They called in May, right after you left. They said then that it would be in a few weeks, but as you see they didn’t get around to doing it till a couple of days ago.”

“Why didn’t you protest?”

“I tried. It was no use.”

“It doesn’t feel right. I was used to that number.”

“You’ll get used to this one too. Or so she said. How did you get it, anyway?”

“When you dial the old number you get a funny click, and then a computer voice gives you the new number.”

“Well, that’s something, at least. Then I won’t have to fill out all those postcards. They gave me about a hundred postcards to send people.”

“Oh, were you planning to send me a postcard?”

“Actually I forgot about it. I’ve been very busy and I don’t ever call here. I’d better let Althea know. She’ll get scared when she hears that voice.”

“Did you have a key made for me yet?”

“I keep forgetting. The kids are away, Victor. It’s only me. Is it so crucial that you have a key?” He paid half the rent, but he would never say that. Leave me for the pillowy embrace of a mother, yes, but never stoop to mention the rent.

“Do I need to explain?” He turned ironic. “I get the distinct impression you’re shutting me out.”

“I didn’t do either of these things on purpose, I’ve told you! Shutting you out! You’re the one who left. Don’t you remember?” Is she Circe? Does she cloud men’s minds?

“Every word you’ve spoken to me in three months has been shutting me out.”

“Well, what did you expect? You can’t be here and not here at the same time.”

“You know I’d be back in a minute if—”

“Don’t give me conditions!”

“Conditions! When I was there, you were not. That’s why I’m not.”

“This is getting too metaphysical for me, Victor. I’m only a piano player.”

He was silent so long I thought the line had gone dead. “You are the most exasperating person I’ve ever known,” he said finally in a weary, tamped-down voice. It was like the voice of the shrunken man on the bus. “I sometimes wish I’d never started with you. But we did. We have unfinished business. I’m not through with you.”

“No?” I asked quietly. The air in the room was more comfortable now. I raised my bare leg and did the exercise Don had shown me for my ankle. “I don’t want to play Walter and Griselda. What more do you think you can take away?”

“Lydia!” The sound bruised my ear; I moved the phone a few inches off. “I didn’t take those children! Those were my children too! What is wrong with you?”

I imagined he could see me, lying there all exposed. I pulled a sheet over me. “All right, I know. I know. I’m sorry. Only you started with her right before it happened. What’d you have to do that for?”

“It had nothing to do with it! You said so yourself. It’s insane to think so. Primitive.”

“I understand that. It just
feels
all connected. What I meant was your timing. If you hadn’t done it right then you wouldn’t have had such an easy place to go.”

“That’s how it was. I can’t undo it. Look, we could try again, Lydia. We could try to—”

“I don’t go for all this trying. It’s a lot of bullshit. This is how I am. Take it or leave it.”

“You stubborn bitch. I would have gone anyway. I’m not afraid to be alone.”

Ah, that was a low blow. I was a bitch, we both knew that, but he was supposed to be a gentleman. I hung up and fell asleep with all the lights on.