Disturbances in the Field (54 page)

“Ah, I see. All or nothing.”

“That’s right.”

“You were the one who said no conditions.”

“I don’t see that as a condition. It’s how we lived before. Your way, in fact.”

“And if I moved back what would you do?”

“Look, this is idle talk. If you wanted to be with me you’d be with me.”

“I mean, how would you be?”

“Not on probation, Victor, I can tell you that much!”

No flash of anger ever alarmed him. He smiled in a bitter way. “But I have no key. Did you have the key made?”

“Oh Lord, I forgot. Honestly. It keeps slipping my mind.” We sat for a few moments, listening to the tinny sound of rain on the car.

“I happened to be in Simon’s the other day with a few people from the gallery. It looks exactly the same. They still have that suit of armor in the entrance, and the chocolate-covered mints. Do you know, for some reason we never went back there, after that time ...”

“Please don’t.” I remembered that dinner too, when I said let’s try again, all the stages I missed, we’ll do better this time, and he ordered a steak dripping blood. With it, all the perfumes of Arabia. We went home and had Alan. The memory hung there, enveloping us.

He took my hand. He kissed me. I didn’t move.

“You used to like when I kissed you.”

“I still do.”

“We don’t have to sit here in the car like teen-agers,” he said.

“You have a hell of a nerve.”

“Do I? It doesn’t feel easy asking as if we just met. You’re my wife.”

“Oh. I would not have known. So what does that mean, I’m your wife? Easy access?”

“Don’t play politics. You know exactly what I’m talking about. I planned to spend my life with you.”

“Yes. I remember when you staked your claim. You ordered beer for me without even asking if I liked it.”

“All right, I’m sorry about the beer, Lydia. Most people like beer. There’s a statute of limitations for even more serious crimes.”

“It’s not the beer. You expected me to feel what you felt, to want you the way you wanted me.
Because
you wanted me.”

“But you did,” he said innocently.

“So then how did all this happen? You wanted me but you left me. I know it happens every day, but I can’t fathom it. You still want me, but you’re somewhere else.”

“You make it sound so simple. Of course I want you. But it was so precious to you, your private tragedy, you couldn’t show it even to me. You made everything about us seem superficial. Fragile. Like fair-weather friends.”

“Well, maybe you were right to leave, then. Obviously we were fragile. Maybe we would have done even more terrible things to each other. I saw a couple on the bus last month who reminded me of us. I mean how we might become—they were older. Something awful must have happened to them along the way, too, and they had destroyed each other. Or maybe it wasn’t anything awful. Just the usual attrition. I don’t trust my judgment any more.”

“What do you mean? What were they like?”

“Just a couple planning a dinner party. Nothing out of the ordinary. Only the way they looked and spoke was chilling. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.”

“Tell me what they said.”

“What for?”

“Because. Because I like the way you remember every word verbatim and play it back. How do you do that?”

“It’s just the ear.” Clever Victor, courting my vanity. Last time he coaxed me into a story it was bedtime pornography—what was it like, with George? I wasn’t very good at that, but I could be good at this.

“Come on, Lyd. I was always your best audience.”

I fell. I told him how they looked, and repeated their talk about champagne, bean salad, and chicken legs. I started out in earnest but before long I was camping it up. “Oh, I left something out. With the bean salad, she asked him whether the red or the white beans should predominate.”

“Life is full of hard decisions.”

“It really wasn’t funny. It was eerie.” But I was smiling too, and I noticed my hand resting on his arm. I had done it unawares, out of habit. “Why should we be any different? Wait, I’ll give you a little test. Do you think red or white beans would be more effective in a salad?”

He assumed his deadpan, meditative air. “That would depend on what you aspired to effect.”

“Attractiveness. Appeal. Good taste.”

“Well, the white ones taste better but the red are prettier.”

“You see? That’s about what he said.”

“That doesn’t prove anything. Maybe he was a painter too.”

“This is all very cute, Victor. But the fact remains you’re spending your nights with someone else.”

“I sleep at the studio, usually.”

“Come on, that’s not the point, where you sleep. You know hell hath no fury and so forth.”

“I am the one scorned, Lyd.”

“Oh, let’s drop it. We sound like Althea and Darryl when they broke up. Look, you want to talk about them, right? Okay. There’s something I can’t for the life of me figure out.”

“What?” He shifted eagerly in his seat and reached for my hand, but I lit a cigarette. Even this small display frightened me. The dimensions it could take: my grief and his poured into one pit—we could drown in it together.

“That night, about a year and a half ago—it was winter—she had to make up an experiment to weigh air and I couldn’t think of one? I was going out to rehearse, do you remember? I told her to ask you.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, the question is, how do you weigh air? I always meant to ask.”

Victor smiled, not bitterly this time but with a terrible poignant sweetness. If that was what came over him when he summoned up his children, I wasn’t sure I could stand it. It was purer, more distilled than what came over me. “I told her to weigh a jar filled with sand—there’s not too much air between grains of sand. Then weigh the sand alone. The difference is the weight of the jar. Once you have that, you weigh the empty jar—filled with air, that is—and you can subtract and figure out the weight of the air. It’s very tiny. You take the measurements of the jar, and do some arithmetic. Weight per cubic inch.”

“How did you work that out?”

“I don’t know. I thought about it for a good while. It’s not very rigorous but it’s probably the best you can do without lab equipment, beakers and rubber tubing and water and all that. It’s a pretty stupid assignment to give a kid of that age to do at home, but you know those open classrooms.”

“And did she do it?”

“Yes. Alan had a jar of reddish sand that he took as a souvenir from Colorado on that trip, and we borrowed Patricia and Sam’s baby scale. They still had it from Samantha—this was before Bobby was born. It’s a balance scale. It was such a small weight we could hardly see it on the scale. Air is very light, you know.”

“Thanks. I just wanted to know.” I opened the car door. “Good night.”

“Hold it! Wait a second!” I ran towards the building. “Lydia,” he shouted out the window. “Come to the show! Remember, I’m inviting you.”

More than I was presently doing for him, was implicit. I raced to the dark apartment. Our pride, his mother had said, was insane. But it used to be for the world outside. Now we had turned it on each other like strobe lights that make you flinch in their glare.

I locked the door behind me with the relief of someone pursued. I couldn’t afford to talk of how Vivian learned to weigh air. She was airy herself, and her breath, which the Eastern religions say is spirit, was sweet. It was cooler now after the rain, and when it was cool I slept in Vivie’s bed. That was the saving grace about living alone. I could sleep in her bed. That was what got me through the summer nights. When the children came home I would smooth out the bed, erase all evidence of my body having lain there.

I stripped and fell onto her bed and listened as the remains of his voice faded. Talk to you. Be with you. Want you. Older snatches: Your face, Lydia, I could look at forever. ... I could die in you, it would be all right. Don’t ever fall in love with anyone else. Promise. You must never leave. Ah, that one was a joke. I shivered. My eyes throbbed, and a procession of colored streaks and blobs drifted by in the dark. I pulled the sheet around me and curled up against the wall like a mole, hiding from desire. The sheets smelled stale. I didn’t care. He complained that I cleared out their things too hastily, but he didn’t know I never took off the sheets. These are the sheets she slept on and they smell stale. Very soon I will have to remove them; they cannot stay here, rotting, forever.

If I really wanted him back perhaps I should have been more diplomatic? “Supportive?” Ah, no, I would stay alone forever rather than stylize my feelings to get him. No modern arts. No fashionable methods from the guidebooks on how to live. How to talk, how to listen, how to “communicate,” how to “share your feelings,” how to love—how to screw, that is: lying down, sitting, or standing, as it pleases you, my sweet, so long as I get mine. If I want him back it’s as we were. I want the distance and the closeness zipping in and out like a yo-yo string; I want the frankness and the inability to compromise, and the passion born of radical identity—at the root—like seeking like, twining us. I want that raw scraping at each other as diggers scrape at treasure lodes, to excavate the Victor in me, the Lydia in him, till we fall apart exhausted, sated but not finished. That dig is never done. No, no fresh start on wholesome premises for me. I am all grown up. If I can’t be my unregenerate self with him, I will manage without him.

I have learned to manage without him. Stripped. No man for the night, either. I had dinner with that friend of Don’s. I did it to please Gaby and Don; friends must be permitted to help. They gave me this amiable businessman in a many-pocketed suit, who confided over an expensive French dinner his two ongoing goals in life: to make lots of money and to please a woman beyond her wildest dreams. (“Take a woman to the moon” was the expression he used. It was no crude offer, merely part of the
curriculum vitae.
) I muttered something about getting and spending we lay waste our powers and he looked puzzled. What sort of commerce could I have with such a man? My babies gone, that is my business, the sweat for my daily bread. If Victor came back we would have to talk about them. He is so right. Only I fear catharsis may be overrated.

I have learned to manage, but oh yes, he can return when the time comes. When one of us has drunk enough gall. He used to say I tasted like salt and wine. I am still young; I would like to hear that again. (Not the moon; the earth will do.) He can return, this is where he lives. He was my brother, the companion of my youth, and by that handle it could be borne, not by the handle of his injustice, or mine. He can have me; I’m not afraid of that any more, and I never felt my body was something I needed to be stingy about. It doesn’t run out, like salt or wine. I don’t see how I can let him have my pain, though. That I am stingy about. It is my capital and I live off the interest. I don’t want to part with a drop. No one can taste that, or even find the place I hoard it.

But he will, sooner or later. He will hunt till he finds the place, and suck it out and swallow, and then I will be more in him than ever and he will like that, since he is not afraid of taking in what life lays at his doorstep.

I will have to listen, with whatever forbearance I can muster, to his love affair. For he is also not a man who can use people badly with impunity. And whom can he tell but me, the companion of his youth? It was a mistake, he will say. How could I have done it? She is a person too. And I will be understanding. Forgiving? No. Understanding, yes, not forgiving. Only don’t let him turn hangdog and contrite. It was his presumption I loved. His good-natured arrogance, the pleasure he took in his powers. His certainty that life must be good to him because he was worthy. God, he loved them so.

“I have indeed come to make an inventory,” said Giuseppino, “to round off your stock and collect it into a unity—as you say, a cellar. I am going to turn it into a story. That is what a second meeting does. It is the story’s touchstone, the last curve of the parenthesis, which joins up with the first curve and makes a unity of its contents.”

ISAK DINESEN
, “Second Meeting,”
Carnival

“W
ELL, WELL, LOOK WHO’S
here. What’s the matter, you got tired of eating garbage?” The fruit man’s eyes were troubled. He knew.

“Hi. Can I have a casaba melon, please, ripe?”

“Best melons in the world, right here.” He waved two under my nose. “You heard the latest?”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, you’re so fancy you don’t read the papers any more? They raided another kibbutz. Four children.” His index finger slid across his throat. “Like that. Two pregnant women.”

“Yes, I did read about it.”

“I suppose to you it’s just a little nothing?”

“On the contrary. ... I’ll take half a dozen of those big navel oranges, too.” I was passing by on my way to rehearse the “Trout.” I had delayed as long as I could, but it was late September, and Rosalie and Jasper were getting edgy, tired of my excuses.

The fruit man flicked open a paper bag. “Here, help yourself. Animals. That’s why they call them gorillas.”

Guerrillas,
I opened my mouth to say. Guerrillas is a totally different ... But I thought of Vivian. Her advice: Smile sweetly and keep your thoughts to yourself. If I could manage to live alone, then surely I could manage Mr. Zeitlowitz.

“You don’t got much to say for yourself today.”

“No. I just came for some fruit.”

“So tell me already, don’t leave me in suspense, how come you came back?”

To put off the “Trout.” Spur of the moment, thought I’d give you a treat! “Do I need an excuse? Maybe you’d rather I went elsewhere?”

“Ah! You see? I knew it. You’re still one of us. Only a Jew answers a question with a question.” With his back to me he muttered, “I was sorry to hear your misfortune. Terrible thing.”

“Mm.”

“I haven’t seen your husband around lately. So how is he getting along? Nice fellow.”

“Fine.”

“You want a bunch of grapes? For you, only a dollar nineteen a pound.” I shook my head, no. Suddenly his voice became a furtive whisper. “Now maybe you understand a little how it feels, huh?”