Disturbances in the Field (6 page)

Nina took the single armchair, rust-colored. She fit in it best, neatly combed and neatly dressed in tweed skirts and nylon stockings that she didn’t remove till bedtime. She always looked impeccably like a lady. Her oval face, with its straight, clean features, was never shiny; her dark hair never escaped its pins. Everything about her face and body was fine and understated, so that later, when she deliberately cultivated glamor, it was like adorning a neutral base. I didn’t room with Nina, so I never saw her in morning disarray. But even in the required swimming course she remained herself, tall, slender, and composed in the regulation tank suit which made the rest of us anonymous. Our lockers were adjacent; as she undressed she folded away every light and clean undergarment. She never complained about menstruation, as everyone else in swimming sooner or later did; there was never a sign of it; she was unspotted and strove to believe the world was likewise. The years to come would unravel her beliefs and blot her purity, but leave her ladyhood intact.

Earth, water, air, fire, Professor Boles told us the first day of The History of Philosophy 101. The story began simply. The second week they were all three out with flu. I was delegated to take good notes and report back without fail, as if the course were a serialized detective story. I went to the sickroom around midnight, fixed them tea and handed around the notes. Esther and Nina huddled under blankets, Nina in a bathrobe for once.

“She’s still wearing that gray tweed suit but she changed the blouse. And her hair wasn’t so wild today, and she had lipstick on. Maybe she was going out to lunch. The best thing she said isn’t even in the notes. You know how she tosses out these little gems? It’s not really philosophy, I guess. Thales, the one who said everything was water, also figured out how to measure the height of a pyramid. If you were ancient Greeks and had to measure the height of a pyramid, what would you do?” Silence. I crossed the room and paused a moment, for suspense. “He waited until that time of day when a man’s shadow became equal to his height. Then he measured the shadow of the pyramid.”

They didn’t seem very interested.

“Actually,” said Nina, “he could have measured a man’s shadow at any time of day and then applied whatever proportion he found to the pyramid.”

“God, she’s so smart,” said Esther despairingly from her bed. It was true, Nina was extremely smart. I certainly would not have thought of that. Did Thales? And yet it did not have the same poetic Tightness.

“For some reason,” I said, “that little story fills me with wonder. Why is that?”

“Because,” said Gabrielle. She was lying on the floor groaning with muscle aches but flexing and pointing her feet so as not to waste time. “Because it’s based simply on the measure of a man. Or it could be a woman just as easily. From the size and scope of one human body you can discover immense secrets of the universe. That’s what you like, Lydia. Your pride likes it.” Gaby had an odd and rare feature—one blue eye and one green eye. Most of the time there was only a shade of difference, but at moments of strong emotion or insight they flared up, each gleaming its own color. I used to stare, and then I got used to it.

Earth, water, air, fire. The way up and the way down. I remember all about Heraclitus though I haven’t much memory for ideas. I do have an ear for sound. I remember Nina’s and Esther’s voices playing counterpoint, a canon of repetition in shifting keys. Nina’s was clear and subdued, with a narrow range that dipped lower when she got irritated—one of the few visible signs. She also blinked when she was disturbed, and smiled. Esther’s voice was deeper and coarser, with an alluring crack in it, like some magisterial old woman who has smoked all her life. And Esther’s voice had amazing degrees of expression; it could travel from its natural deep tone right up the scale through a series of querulous, astonished, indignant, and facetious notes, and she hit every one of them, every night.

Nina: “Wisdom consists in speaking and acting the truth, giving heed to the nature of things.” That’s what Heraclitus says.

Esther: Big deal. So what else is new?

Nina: Now, the basic principle of reality is change. One element slides into another. Earth, water, air, fire. Fire starts in the sun, then becomes smoke, vapors, clouds, mist, rain, earth, rock. A gradual hardening. That’s “the way down.” Do you see?

Esther: The way down. Righto.

Nina: Then you have the way up. It goes in the opposite direction, a melting instead of a hardening. Rock, earth, dew, mist, rain, clouds, vapors, smoke, fire.

Esther: Rock, paper, scissors. Scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock breaks scissors.

Nina (her voice getting lower and very calm): Do you want to learn this or not?

Gabrielle (from the floor, flexing and pointing, her book open between her spread legs): Leave her be. That’s her way of connecting. I do the same thing myself.

Nina: But you got ninety-two on the last quiz and she got sixty-two. The way up and the way down are going on eternally and at the same time, Esther, do you get it? There’s a rhythm in their opposition. The two main features of the way up and the way down are continuity and reversibility. She’ll definitely ask that next time. And the principle, remember, is change. “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.”

Esther: But is that true?

(That worried me too, silent in a corner with my book.
Everything
gives way?
Nothing
stays fixed?)

Nina: That’s not the point. Repeat to me, now, about the way up and the way down.

Esther: Continuity. Reversibility. Earth to water to air to fire and vice versa. Listen, I’m not dumb. I can remember. I want to know if it’s real.

Nina: First pass the test. Then you can worry about whether it’s real. That was very good. Also remember about strife. “All things come to pass through the compulsion of strife.” He means strife between the way up and the way down.

Esther (grabbing the book from her): “Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death of air, and earth in the death of water.” That is pretty grim. Everything lives through something else’s death? I don’t think I like that.

Nina (ever calm): It’s not a hostile sort of strife. It’s an objective description of a cycle. Nature is that process. But I do think he had a preference. I think he liked the way up better. He says, “A dry soul is wisest and best.”

Esther: You ought to know.

Nina was hurt. She was doing her best to save Esther from failure. Back home in Indiana, if Nina had failed a test she would have been sent to bed without her supper for a week. Back home in Indiana, her duty was to excel, to obey, and to agree. Independent inquiry was rude and criticism was morally suspect. She had attended Sunday school in starched dresses every Sunday of her childhood, and curtsied for visitors, and if they asked how she was, was expected to reply, “Fine and dandy, just like sugar candy.” By the age of four she was trained to pick up all her toys and put them away each evening, and then her mother would supervise her prayers, said aloud, kneeling alongside her bed. She became a math and science whiz kid; she could remember anything schematic. Admissions offices wooed her. Though we tried to take her in hand, Nina could not help behaving, the first couple of years, as though she were a house guest of the college, too well-bred to question any of her hostess’s offerings. And when she felt she had failed to meet anyone’s highest expectations, she developed a slight stammer, which gave me a pang in my heart. It still does, though she has long ceased to blink and to smile, and has even learned to leave her living room strewn for days at a stretch. It was when she discovered passion that the careful surface began to alter: her parents had never shown or alluded to sexual passion, and so she thought adults, having outgrown the vagaries of childhood, were guided by reason.

We sat up late, talking of how we ought to spend our lives. Gabrielle aspired to Martha Graham’s company. A few Saturday afternoons she had urged me downtown to see Martha Graham as a violent Greek heroine or a goddess, swathed in fabrics that possessed a life of their own. Gabrielle said that with enough work she could bridge the gap between flesh and spirit, and we all nodded admiringly. One night I saw her toss down her copy of
Pére Goriot
(in French!) and scrutinize her body in the full-length mirror on the closet door.
“A nous deux, maintenant!”
she muttered. She would master it by force of will. What was flesh, what was spirit, and what was the nature of the gap, if indeed there is one, she didn’t say, and no one thought to ask.

Nina wanted a happy home life: happy children, happy husband, happy happy. I found that sickening. “Talk about received ideas! If you’ve never seen the ocean you think a lake is the greatest thing there is. I mean, who knows, you might find more happiness being ... oh, a madam in a brothel. It might do you good.” I had just read
Mrs. Warren’s Profession.

“But why on earth would I want to be that?” she gasped.

“Especially with a degree from here,” Esther added.

“I would say that’s a puddle.” Gabrielle stood up to attempt a slow backbend. Her long fingers reached down for the rug behind her.

“The point is to make it new,” I snapped at them. I was reading Ezra Pound.

“That is true about the ocean, though.” Esther opened a box of Lorna Doones wistfully. “I remember the first time I ever saw the ocean, last year. And I had seen pretty big lakes. The Great Lakes, you know, are not exactly ponds. But still. It was at Coney Island. I met this guy Ralph at a freshman mixer. I didn’t like him that much and he was an inch shorter than I was, but I was lonesome. He came from New York and knew his way around. He had—”

“Esther, we’re in the middle of something.” Gaby made it to the floor—a high arc, a strip of olive-skinned concave middle exposed between sweatshirt and tights. In a strained voice she asked, “Is this going to be another saga of masochism?”

“No, no. I just must tell you. ... It’s not all that irrelevant—we’re talking about what we want most. He had a car, and he asked me what I would most like to see in New York City, and I said, The ocean. He laughed when he heard I’d never seen it. He had a nice laugh, sort of a low chuckle. His face improved when he laughed. When he wasn’t laughing it was very square and bony. Anyhow, he said it was especially beautiful in the fall, and the water was still warm from summer—you could dip your feet in. So, he told me to meet him the next Sunday afternoon at Alma Mater and he would take me. I didn’t even know what Alma Mater was but I figured I’d find out by Sunday—I didn’t want to sound completely ... you know. Well, Sunday came, and I waited at that goddamn statue for an hour. I was so furious I kicked it. It was cold, too, not one of those gorgeous fall days when you’d want to get your feet wet. After fifteen minutes I was ready to leave. I mean, who did he think he was? Then I thought maybe something happened and I ought to give him a chance. Can you believe that for forty-five minutes I stood there debating with myself, Should I stay or should I go? I do have some pride, but on the other hand I really wanted to see the ocean. Well. Just as I was about to leave, his little form trotted onto the horizon. What had happened was ...”

The ocean made it all worthwhile. Esther got her feet wet. They ate hot dogs, rode the carousel, seized the brass rings, shivered on the boardwalk, necked in the car. She caught a cold. He phoned several times but she refused him since she hadn’t liked him very much in the first place.

“Did you know there’s a club, the Polar Bear Club, of people who swim all year round? While we were freezing on the beach this troop of people, mostly old, I mean middle-aged, forty, fifty, came running past us and raced into the water. They splashed around for a couple of minutes and then raced out. He told me it was the Polar Bear Club. Can you imagine? It couldn’t have been much more than forty-five degrees.”

We talked about what we would change in the world, if we had the power. Stupidity, I said. And chaos. Her parents and her legs, said Esther. In general she would prefer to be a Modigliani rather than a Rubens. Nina said timidly that she would not keep Richard Nixon as Vice-President. There was something about his face she didn’t trust.

And what we feared most. Our fears are touching, like old family photos of our grandparents as babies, swaddled in lace gowns and bonnets, overstuffed, innocent of life and death, and absurd: sexual frigidity, being locked in a closet with mice, mental stagnation, childbirth, failure, public humiliation. Today I would gladly suffer public humiliation if in return I could change the course of one specific afternoon. Any of the other things too. Even the mice.

“I can’t believe it! I really can’t believe it!” Esther stomped through the room in her blue baby-doll pajamas, flapping her notebook around.

She had the soft, pink-tinged skin of a strawberry blonde, and she was rosy with vexation. “First they say everything is in constant flux. The basic principle is change. ‘Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.’ Remember? So okay, I figure I’ll have to live with that. And now they say that nothing ever changes? Everything is fixed? Never began, never will end? An arrow can’t even hit its target? What kind of nonsense is that?”

The Eleatic school, very uncharming. “What is unthinkable is untrue.” “Movement is impossible.” Parmenides and his henchman Zeno poured reason like molten lead into the veins and arteries of the universe, and the system stiffened into paralysis.

“You’re not supposed to take it literally,” Gabrielle told her. “It’s just another phase. The other ones were poetic, these are intellectual. They’re trying to think clearly.”

“But why would anyone want to think such things? Look, are you going to deny what you see with your own eyes? Can I or can I not walk across this room?” She demonstrated, stepping over Gaby.

“Not in the abstract, you can’t,” Nina said. “Between one step and the next is an infinity of little steps. You can’t get through infinity.”

“Are you trying to tell me you believe this garbage?”