Disturbances in the Field (17 page)

G
ABRIELLE, AS A NEW
mother, is bewildered and seeks a way out of her bewilderment through the language she learned at school, a language that sounds out of place in the park among the baby carriages, where we sit in the shade. She says that having been an English major, breathing in stories day and night, encourages the dangerous tendency to think of your own life as a story. No, better still, a novel. Of course, she adds with a meaning glance at me, the tendency is not limited to English majors. It afflicts people with a certain organizing sensibility, people who expect that the structure of the universe will reflect the structure of the mind.

They used to call God Author of My Being, I say.

Ah, yes! But note,
nota bene
(she smiles at her own pedantry, her eyes momentarily alight behind the tinted aviator glasses, amber to match the copper of her newly cropped hair), how that author is distant and all-powerful. He’s got a whole library. I meant each person as the author of her own being.

(Nota bene,
she uses the feminine pronoun whenever she can, before it was popularly taken up, with the sweetly optimistic notion that a mountain can be removed grain by grain.)

Well, I guess we do act according to a script at times. It can’t be helped, I respond lazily, and rock the carriage for her with my foot.

I’m not talking about a script, Lydia. A script is dialogue spoken in a particular setting. And a play moves single-mindedly towards a denouement. But a novel, the sort of novel one could imagine one’s life to be, at any rate, appears to meander, with a ragbag of concerns. Also—as she talks she gazes up at the sky, shielding her eyes: will the weather stay fine for the baby?—also a novel has commentary; no matter how absent an author tries to be, it contains its own interpretation. A novel is an attempt at interpretation. Your life can’t be. That’s why the tendency is dangerous. You try to direct your life along the route of beginning, middle, and end, but actually life has a sprinkling of beginnings and middles and ends all the way through, not in the right order. This—she looks at the carriage containing Roger—is a beginning but it’s also an end of something. You try to see a cluster of major themes moving along, developing and elaborating, but actually in many lives the original themes die out or become sublimated (absently she flexes and points a foot, the way she used to do when she was training to be a dancer); new ones arise out of nowhere. Plus we never escape time, and real time is so dull and even, like a fox-trot. A novelist can treat it whimsically, make it fly back and forth or stand still. We never escape flukes, politics, weather. A novelist makes her own flukes when she needs them, and her own weather. It’s a matter of control, she says wistfully. She peers into the baby carriage, sprays a few drops of milk from the bottle onto the back of her hand. If I ever wrote a novel, she adds, I wouldn’t bother trying to hide the fact that I was in control. And rocks some more. Roger was conceived in foam—she and Don had volunteered to test a new brand in the interests of science, part of a research project at his hospital.

I am one of those people she meant. I saw myself as a character, growing and changing as they say characters must in order to seem real. I would have allowed for inevitable setbacks—no character evades those—but on the whole it was to have been a cheerful novel, comedy not tragedy. (Would anyone write herself a tragedy? Perhaps, but not me.) A lifetime of purposeful effort crowned by fitting rewards. The novel was imbued with that deepest and most treasured of middle-class notions: that life should, and would, reward good behavior.

School came to an end. For almost two years I shared an apartment in the West Nineties with Gabrielle. During most of the first year Victor was away in Europe looking at paintings—he had relaxed his rule about not using his parents’ money to make the trip. After he returned he would call me every couple of months. We would meet for dinner in chummy places where they let us sit for hours. One of our favorites was Simon’s, because it had an immense suit of armor in the entryway and in one of the metal hands rested a heap of chocolate-covered mints. Victor pointed out that we chose the same sorts of things to eat, as if that were proof of affinity. What we chose were bloody steaks and shrimp and pasta dishes in winy, garlicky sauces, bitter greens doused in vinegar, pecan pie without the whipped cream. Whipped cream was too insubstantial. We ate greedily and talked about our work. Sometimes he asked to see my hands. He said he was interested in what all that practicing did to hands. I spread them on the table, palms down. “They are changing,” he said. He examined the fingers, knuckles. “They look like hands that do something. Know something.”

“Let me see yours.”

His hands still had flecks of paint around the fingernails, and still looked older than he did. The lines were more pronounced; there were calluses and rough patches, and occasionally a small red diamond where the skin was scraped away and raw flesh exposed. He didn’t bother with Band-Aids.

We were not lovers. We played a peculiar game of advance and retreat, with infinitely small, guarded moves. He considered that he had made his major move over two years ago in that bar near the unfinished cathedral: he was still waiting for a straight answer. I hedged, while we both went out with unimportant people whom we never discussed. I had the premonition that our becoming lovers would be an act of closure, that this phase of my life, not a very happy phase but one of curiously suspended potential, would come to a swift end.

He was drawing and painting all day and working in a bar four nights a week, as he had promised or threatened to do, a bar in the East Thirties that served suburban commuters in business suits juicing up for the trip home from Grand Central, and later in the evening, local drinkers. On weekends he went to the galleries, and read, and cooked enormous soups that could last for a week. “And what do you put in the soup?” “Everything I can find. It is an immense, thick, and variegated soup.” He didn’t accept any more money from his parents. I thought that was foolish. “If my parents were rich and wanted to give me money so I could spend my time learning to paint, I would take it.”

“Have your parents offered you any money?”

“Well, yes, a little.”

“But you would rather dash around town with four jobs at once, accompany the dance classes and do the children’s theatre, et cetera, et cetera. So what’s the difference?”

“There is a difference. My parents don’t have that much to spare. And accompanying dance classes is not making drinks in a bar. I give them bits of Mozart sonatas. Prokofiev is very good for modern dance. I improvise. I’m a great improviser. So it’s not a waste of time.”

“I keep my eyes open. It’s not a waste of time either. It’s the same thing.” He poked a fork into the crust of his baklava. Despite the immense and variegated soups he was thinner than he had been in school, almost gaunt, and yet his face was becoming less abstracted. Less secretive too. It was clear now that what I had taken to be critical disdain was simply untiring vision, eyes taking apart the world. The impatience I had sensed around the mouth was simply the wish to see through solid objects into what Matisse, he told me later, called their signs. I enjoyed observing him. I felt close to him now, though still wary. I could imagine us continuing our indulgent dinners every two months, comparing notes on our progress, indefinitely. Although after two glasses of wine I might begin to imagine him leaning close to me, and closer, as in those excruciatingly slow erotic approaches in old movies. But I would stop myself like a child covering her eyes at the scariest, most exciting part. I liked living with Gabrielle and going out on and off with undemanding men I didn’t care much about. I told Victor how sometimes Gaby and I sat up at night and talked. He groaned. “Still schoolgirls. Don’t you think I can talk too?”

“Well, but I like the idea of the apartment, also. You’ve seen it. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Very nice,” he said mockingly. “Very, very nice.”

I was in haste to live, to arrive at life itself instead of preparing. But I needed money. I worked at Schirmer’s off Fifth Avenue four afternoons a week. The other clerks were young musicians too; we talked shop and gave each other leads on jobs, and during quiet spells sat in the listening booths with the new recordings. I got the accompanist work through Gabrielle, at the studio where she took classes every evening. Daytime she was a simultaneous translator at the UN, through her father’s connections. And I had what Victor called et cetera, et cetera: the Children’s Theatre, the Golden Age Club. I even played hymns in a Greenwich Village church Sunday mornings. Weekdays I got up at six and practiced in my nightgown for four hours, agonizing over whether or not to enter competitions as others were doing. I didn’t feel myself a soloist; I had never liked being alone in a large space. I was an ensemble player, the kind of musician who comes to fullest life in a group, and I was happiest in the trio I had formed with Greg Parnis and Rosalie: we played at community centers, weddings, fancy parties, for a hundred or so dollars an afternoon. Rosalie was always late and frazzled because of three young children, but when she sat down with her cello it was worth the wait. And Greg was enterprising—he hunted up the jobs.

I was in haste to live, and yet everything I did felt suspended in an ether of tentativity. All impalpable, all potential. I had no patience with process. I envisioned real life as a fixed point of arrival, Evelyn on top of the dune at last, waving her arms triumphantly like a semaphore: Here I am! I was beset by fits of irritation and I read gloomy writers to give my irritation the firm grounding it lacked. In my purse was a depressing little quote from Schopenhauer about endless striving and the impossibility of true satisfaction. When I was feeling most impatient I took it out and read it with a perverse spite. Gabrielle scolded me. She refused to listen to Schopenhauer and sent me out to free concerts. I came home exalted and inspired. Until the doubts began again. What exactly was I preparing for? How to go about it? I looked at middle-aged people with wonder. Completed, their entelechies all unfurled, they had no questions in their lives, only solid answers.

Victor asked me, the second spring after I finished college, to come see his forty-five-dollar-a-month apartment on East Twenty-first Street. I hesitated, which amused him.

“Leery of men’s apartments, Lydia? You spent half your junior year in that apartment.”

“That was the year I was all mixed up. I’ve reformed.”

“I know what it is. You’re afraid you’ll have to marry me, now that I’m poor.”

“I thought I was supposed to like you better first.”

“Oh, you like me well enough. Look, this isn’t a come and see my etchings kind of thing. You should know that by now. I really want to show you what I’m doing. I come and hear whenever you play, even if it’s
Oklahoma
in deepest Queens.”

He was right. I went. The apartment was in a bleak neighborhood, not slummy but quietly desolate, and the name V. Rowe, neatly printed below the mailbox in the downstairs hall, was shorter and simpler than its neighbors. The large room where he worked was freshly painted white, but the rest of it—kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and hall—was the color of coffee with a few drops of cream. The kitchen contained one brown folding chair at a square table with a white porcelain top, the kind of table I remembered from my grandmother’s house, when I was a child and it was wartime. The linoleum on the floor, supposed to look like red bricks, was pockmarked and curling at the edges. Apart from the minimal amenities, he had done almost nothing in the way of decoration. I would have thought an artist needed more visual thrills. And except for that one large windowed room, the place seemed hung with gloom, a gloom not created by Victor—he was never a gloomy person—but left behind by dozens of cramped, wretched families. Or so it felt to me. He was oblivious to the legacy of gloom; he said the apartment did not depress him in the least. It was more space than he had ever called his own, and he possessed the only key. That was thrill enough.

The small kitchen window faced another small kitchen window some five feet across a dingy airshaft. On that neighboring window was a tan curtain with a knotted fringe, between whose halves I could glimpse a table with a mottled top like the cover of a composition notebook. It held a potted geranium, a jar of Maxwell House instant coffee, a box of Rice Krispies, and a white flowered mug. Victor said an old woman lived there, and at eight sharp every morning she watered her geranium from a jelly glass. The window in the bedroom looked out over a half-empty parking lot, and his living room, or studio, windows faced a narrow concrete park where old Italian men in black jackets were playing a sober but joyful game of bocce. We stood at the open window—it was a warm twilight in April—and watched the balls bump into each other and roll about. Victor said he had figured out the rules of the game from watching so long.

He offered me a beer but I reminded him that I hated beer, so he gave me ginger ale instead and showed me drawings. Dozens. No more abstract blobs pushing each other around. There were drawings of the old woman across the airshaft, frail and angular in a cotton housedress that hung loosely on her bones. Her fine hair was in a knot. He had drawn her watering her geranium, eating her bowl of Rice Krispies, wiping her table with a rag. There were drawings of the Italian men playing bocce. Their bald heads and the bocce balls were akin and offered up lovingly, like Cezanne fruits. There were drawings of the parking lot—empty, with one car, with five, with many, yet always looking faintly bereft. Some cars had dents in their fenders, a couple had flat tires. I understood then that he worked with what was at hand and made much of it. The drawings were respectful of the significance of each thing, not reverent. They were truthful and without pretension, except for one of the old woman wiping her table. That one’s sinuous lines seemed to romanticize penury in a way I didn’t care for. What I found beautiful was how he treated each object with equal attention. There was no hierarchy of priorities, no background sketched in or merely suggested. The folds of the dish towel hanging from the handle of the old woman’s refrigerator were drawn with as much care as the lines on her face. Except for the one, they were calmly celebratory, a triumph of attentiveness. I told him so. I said I liked them infinitely better than the blobs, and he smiled gratefully and kissed me lightly on the lips. I began to have one of my fantasies where we approached each other slowly, slowly, as in those movies, but he said he was starving, let’s go out and eat, there was a good Italian place on Eighteenth Street.